Hide Article Text (OCR)
By EARL BIEDERMANThe chill of a fatal pre-Christmas nighttwo years ago temporarily filled a Reno courtroom Thursday, as Messiah slayings suspect Ed Smith laid hands once again on bis favorite .30-30.For 20 minutes he turned the old deer rifle this way and that, describing for rapt jurors the roles it played in the scrambled last few months and minutes of his freedom.To see him tell it, the lever-aetion Marlin was his closest friend.He buried its muzzle in his own belly Thursday in re-enactment of a March 1973 suicide attempt.He pointed it up under his chin in depiction of the suicidal pose he struck for his wife, Bonnie, in the seconds before he killed her — five days before Christmas.He aimed it down toward the floor where defense attorney Tom Brennan sprawled in the role of Paul Higaki.“He grabbed me by the leg,” the jail-bleached Smith told the court. “I went pow, double pow.”At that, a member of the audience gasped, the second time — and the second person — within a few minutes.Smith is accused of capital murder and two counts of first degree murder in the double slayings of his ex-wife and her new husbandDec. 20,1973.Hist. Atty. Larry Hicks rested the prosecution case before noon in the trial’s fourth day.Smith was the lirst defense witness.For 45 minutes before lunch he recounted the doom-laden events that occurred between his divorce in March and the killings in DecemberAs he told his tale, a silence settled over the courtroom. The nine-woman, three-man jury stared at Smith as though he were some macabre Uncle Remus, quietly spinning a commanding yarn of divorce and death.Smith described that fateful night outside the Pioneer Auditorium:“I went downtown and saw their car. I asked and people said they were having a Messiah thing. ..“Iparked my car and went inside and sat in front of Bonnie. I left when people started to get up and applaud.“I went outside and walked up and down. 1 wanted to see them coming so they could see me do it... see me kill myself... I’d told my wife I was going to give her a Christmas present, one she’d have to put in a pine box,... I wanted her to remember me.“They walked up and Paul put Bonnie in the front seat as 1 was walking up. Be went behind the car.‘T walked up and said, ’Hi, gal’ so she’d see me. Jf put the rifle under my chin.“As / did that I sorta blanked out A part of me wasn't there. It was up in the clouds.Smith said his mind 1 Wia left him. He said his “spirit” rocketed peacefully up through clouds and stars. He said he could look down from “way up there” and see himself standing below m a dark ph.His wife said, “ ‘Don’t do it, Ed.’“When that voice broke through I saw a flash in the pit down below and I went zeroing back in on myself. I passed the things going down that I’d passed going up.”He demonstrated for jurors how “when the voice broke through” the earth-bound Ed Smith dropped the rifle from his chin and fired without knowing it into his wife’s head.“Once I was back inside myself I saw Paul coming and saying he wasgomg to killme.“I took him at his word. I backed away and he kept coming. I shot as he came off the curb and went past me.“I still wanted to kill myself with my wife watching, but I didn’t know where she’d gone.“I walked over to Paul. I couldn’t see where he’d gone and that worried me. I walked over there and he grabbed my leg.“I looked down and just said ‘boom, boom.’ That second shot went where I wanted it. Sometimes I get lucky. I didn’t want to fool with him anymore. He said he was going to kill me. I didn’taskhim how he was going to do it. ”Smith said he then went back to the car, saw the passenger window blown out and his wife on the seat, looked in “and then I saw what had happened. I saw I couldn’t save her. I was pretty shook up.”Asked by Brennan why he didn’t kill himself then, Smith replied; “That's what I’m wondering now.”Smith also told of the days when his wife left him that spring. He steadfastly denied every assertion that he ever threatened her, his two sons, or the man who replaced him.He had an explanation for reports that his wife was deathly afraid of him in her last months:“She was psychic. I guess she just knew her own fate.”He said back in March he had figured, “If I can’t get along with this woman, 1 might as well wind it up.” He said she was “a wonderful woman, mother, worker. Everything a woman should be ”On March 15 she left their house in Raleigh Heights. He said she apparently told police he was planning suicide because a Reno officer came and collected all but one of his half-dozen rifles.After the policeman left, Smith recalled, he phoned his wife but failed to reach her. He said he then called his elder son, Ray, 24. He told Ray he was going to kill himself.He demonstrated for jurors how he sat in a chair, phone in one hand, the rifle’s tape-wrapped butt on the floor, its front sight in his belly.“Ray said I was getting what I deserved and that’s when I reached down and hammered the .30-30.” Smith said He said the blast threw him across theroom and he thought he’d missed until he found he couldn’t walk. He said he called the telephone operator and said he’d shothimself. He said the same policeman quickly re-appeared at the house and said, “Well, that didn’t take long, did it’”Weeks later, after recovering from the stomach wound. Smith said he was driving near Elko when it occurred to him that if he died in a car wreck his wife could “eolleet double.” He said he accelerated to 90 and drove into a bridge.“I walked away from it,” he told jurors, “as usual.”Hicks tried to catch Smith lying. He pointed out an accident report in which Smith told the highway patrol he hit the bridge doing 60-65.Smith said that was a lie. “T told them that because they said I’d have to pay for the bridge if it wasn’t an accident.”He toid of other occasions when he went looking for the .39-30, intent on suicide. Once, it was hidden by his wife.“Why,” asked Hicks, “if you wanted to kill yourself, didn’t you go out and get another gun'1”“I like that gun,” smiled Smith.Throughout the day he testified in an even, matter-of-fact voice, his demeanor punctuated only by a peculiar little nasal orguttural utterance with which he sprinkles his memories.That sound is described variously as “his giggle,’’ or “his laugh.” It seems at times like a small whirmey. For two years Smith always has used it when recounting things that seem embarrassing or painful to recall.Smith told of being discharged from the Nevada state hospital in Sparks the day before the killings He said he turned himself in on Dec 12 because he was suicidal and ieft on the 19th because hospital officials insisted on enforcing a parking policy.He said they insisted on putting his car in front of the hospital. “I told them if they put my car on the street, they put me on the street .. I didn’t want people to know I was in a nut house ”Smith and his rifleThis courtroom sketch by Gazette staff artist Kai Estridge shows Ed Smith holding his old deer rift while describing how he held it under his chin jus before he shot his ex-wife.
Newspaper Details
Nevada Evening Gazette
Reno, Nevada, US
Fri, Jan 23, 1976
Page 5
Full Page
Clipped by
Washoe C.
NV, USA 15 Feb 2021
Other Publications Near Reno, Nevada
Nevada State Journal
Reno Evening Gazette
Weekly Reno Gazette
Weekly Nevada State Journal
Reno Weekly Gazette and Stockman
