Haunted by the Past: The Forty Year Cold Case
Haunted by the Past: The Forty Year Cold Case
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| Read more about the case here. |
Some people don’t get a
fair shot at life. I met Donna Marie Smith a couple days after her twentieth birthday.
She was dead. That was in 1976. She had been murdered in her own home.
Looking back after all
these years, I never thought I would have further involvement in her case. I
was wrong.
Even though I retired as
Deputy Chief of the Tucson Police Department in 1983, I was jarred back in time
with a phone call in 2016. It was a call from Investigator Calvin Fuller from the
Pima County Attorney’s Office. As soon as he said his name, I knew exactly who
he was. He worked as an undercover narcotics officer when I was a Lieutenant with the Metropolitan Area Narcotics Squad.
I had to chuckle when I
heard his voice. “Lalee?” I asked. He was taken aback.
“How could you remember my
nickname?” he replied.
I laughed again. “Because
you were one-of-a-kind.”
That was when he caught
me off-guard. “Well, Chief. Two or three
things we need to discuss. First, I’m glad I found you after all these years.
And second, I’m glad I found you alive. Most of the people we’re looking for
are long dead, so I’m really glad we’re talking. But, here’s why I’m calling:
do you remember a murder you handled on E. Mossman Street in 1976?”
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| The house in Tucson where Donna Marie Smith was killed in 1976, and the trailer of a neighbor who saw Smith's boyfriend return home after the killing. Kristian Hernández | NYT Institute |
“Sure do,” I said. “It
was a single-story, flat-roofed house, aquamarine in color with white lattice
work around the carport. The boyfriend killed his girlfriend, but we never
found him.”
Lalee was surprised.
“Damn, you remember all that?”
“Some things you just don’t forget,” I replied.
“Okay,” he said. “We’re
sending you a subpoena. The Cold Case officers caught him in San Diego. It’s
been a long time since he committed that murder, but we’ve got him and the
trial date is set, so we need you to testify.”
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| David McCullough. See more on this case here. |
Of course, I testified. The
trial was held in Pima County Superior Court and David Allen McCullough was
convicted of first-degree murder.
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| Donna Marie Smith |
Now, so many years later,
I can look back on that sad day on E. Mossman Street. The victim was Donna
Marie Smith, a bright young woman from Sierra Vista, AZ. She had come to Tucson
to start a new life: get her education, work, and have a boyfriend. But, it was
there she made her fatal mistake. She and her friend lived together. His temper
was something she had yet to encounter but eventually did.
Her mother had come to
town with a cake for Donna’s twentieth birthday. When no one answered the door,
she and a neighbor crawled through a window and found her daughter dead, face
down, sprawled in the hallway and bathroom. She had been beaten with bricks,
and her throat and wrist were slashed.
My uniformed patrol
officers and I arrived and determined she had been dead several days. Her
boyfriend, McCullough, was nowhere to be found until that fateful day decades
later in San Diego.
Donna’s mom lived to
attend the trial and see her daughter’s murderer sentenced to life in prison. Donna
Marie Smith is buried at Ft. Huachuca, AZ.
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| Sector Lieutenant, Thomas J. Nichols, Tucson, AZ |
In 1976, I was a Sector
Lieutenant. My job that evening was to supervise the Patrol Officers in the
initial phase of the criminal investigation. We would collect evidence, take
photographs, fingerprints, and trace evidence, and then turn our work over to
detectives from Homicide. Fortunately, we did everything right. We had treated
the crime scene as a sterile area, not to be contaminated by excessive foot
traffic or inappropriate handling and marking of evidence.
In the end, we did
everything right. Justice was served, albeit many years later.
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