Town note
The Miami Indians were living in the area when European explorers arrived.
about 0:08:33The story
Lafayette, Indiana, sits in Tippecanoe County in the west central part of the state, about an hour from Indianapolis and two hours from Chicago. In 1982 it was a college town of roughly 40,000 people, and Purdue University dominated its life. The story begins with two couples whose lives overlapped in the town's small folk music scene.
Gerald Smith was thirty in 1982. He was a senior at Purdue, married to Shelley Smith, who was twenty-six, and they had a one-year-old daughter. Gerald delivered newspapers in the morning, getting up at about two o'clock and leaving the house at three, then coming home around half past eight to change and go to class. Shelley stayed at home with the baby. They were, by all accounts, a quiet and hardworking young family, and their apartment in Lafayette was a gathering place for poetry readings and informal music sessions.
She had been raised a Quaker in Plainfield, Indiana, was a graduate of Earlham College with a graduate degree from Indiana University, and had worked in the loan department of the Indiana State Library in downtown Indianapolis since 1979. She also volunteered two Saturdays a month at the Indianapolis Children's Museum. She had been divorced twice and had two teenage sons; the older one lived with her parents in Plainfield and the younger had moved to Albuquerque to live with his father. She was intelligent, well read, played the harp and the dulcimer, and was active in her church and in folk music groups.
In September 1981 she met Brian Thornton at the Eagle Creek rendezvous, a music festival. Thornton was a piano technician and musician who built harpsichords and played the flute. The two worked out tunes together, she on the dulcimer and he on the flute, and they became friends and then lovers.
In October 1981 she went with Thornton to an Egyptian display, where he read hieroglyphics to her. She told him afterwards that she believed she was ancient, not of this time, and had lived many lives. She told friends that Thornton had said his friends thought he was the god Pan, and she began to say that if Christ returned to earth he would be Thornton. By the spring of 1982 she was telling people that Thornton was Jesus Christ himself, and that his friends, including Shelley Smith, were holding him back from realising his Christlike potential.
In May 1982 she attended a Renaissance fair in Indianapolis where Thornton was booked to play the harpsichord. There, she said, an Egyptian-looking man wearing a great deal of jewellery seduced her. That same month she threw herself at Thornton's feet and kissed them, and he asked friends, including Shelley, to tell her he was not Jesus. She also wrote a will, saying she expected to be killed by Thornton because she was a sinner and he was Jesus.
That night she told him that he was Adam and she was Eve; he said he rebuffed her. The next day, 1 August, was her forty-fourth birthday. She spoke to Shelley Smith on the telephone and gave Thornton a book called A Prince Who Knew His Fate, inscribed to him in honour of her forty-fourth birthday in the present lifetime. Gerald Smith went to bed early because of his paper route, and the gathering broke up around two in the morning on 2 August. Gerald got up, spoke to the two women, and left for work at about three o'clock. He closed the door but did not lock it. Shelley went to bed.
She went into the downstairs bathroom, took off all her clothes, and then went to the kitchen for a paring knife. She found Shelley asleep on her back in the bedroom and stabbed her in the throat. When that failed she brought a large plate-glass mirror down on Shelley's neck like a guillotine; the mirror shattered without cutting. She left the head attached by a little skin and muscle. Shelley's body was found in the hallway, naked, on her stomach, with her head twisted round, a vine from a wandering Jew plant in her hair, pieces of broken mirror everywhere and an empty brown clay pot near her head. The couple's one-year-old daughter was in her room, untouched.
She called her son in Plainfield for seven minutes and her son in Albuquerque for fifty-three minutes, telling them she had killed the serpent and was waiting for Christ to come and chop it into twelve pieces. She left, noticed her hands were badly cut from the broken glass, and stopped at a nearby hospital to have the glass removed and her hands bandaged.
Gerald Smith came home at about half past eight and found his wife. He called 911 at 8.30 a.m. He told police he had returned from his paper route to find her; he described lifting a piece of mirror from what he thought was her chin and realising it lay on her back because her body was turned around. Police found four knives near the body, a scene with no sign of a struggle, and two books on the occult on a dresser. Five other knives were later found but could not be submitted as evidence because the Lafayette police failed to establish a proper chain of custody.
Thornton called the apartment while police were there and was asked to come in. In a recorded interview she said she was a forty-four-year-old mother and a Christian, but also 5,743 years old, the mother of the universe and an instrument of Yahweh. She said she had killed a snake, the devil's head snake, not a woman, and that Shelley had to die because she was preventing Thornton from realising he was Christ. She described taking Shelley by the hair, shouting Yahweh's kingdom come, sawing at the base of the neck, breaking a knife, fetching another, dropping the mirror and using a piece of it, and finally pulling at the head. She said she had failed her mission because she could not get the head off. A photograph of Shelley as she was found was in her belongings.
At a bail hearing the state asked for five million dollars and her lawyers asked for fifty-five thousand. The prosecution argued that she was a jealous woman in a love triangle who was crazy like a fox, and pointed out that she had described Shelley's eyes, nose and chest, which are not the attributes of a snake. Her defence argued that she believed she was killing a serpent and so did not knowingly kill a human being. Her son Seth testified that when she called him she said she had killed a woman and said nothing about a snake. Thornton testified, saying he was angry with her and would like to hurt her, that he had never told her he was Christ or an angel, and that he had crawled on the floor after sex but did not remember running around. The court-appointed psychiatrist, Larry Davis, called her very delusional, very disturbed and very psychotic, and said she had recognised a snake in Shelley's profile. She said she had been Eve, the Virgin Mary and other religious figures, and that she had been cut into twelve pieces before. She suddenly shouted, Jesus Christ, what have I done? Acquaintances described her hat, her dulcimer playing with a knitting needle, and her talk of Thornton being Jesus. Her former father-in-law, a Baptist pastor, called her a product of the hippie movement.
Prosecutors had asked for 110 years.
She refused psychotropic medication and her delusions persisted. A psychiatrist, Dr Payne, concluded that she had paranoid schizophrenia with the most complex delusional system he had seen, that she still believed she had done the right thing, and that she was a danger to herself and others. The court found her a substantial risk of danger to others and gravely disabled, and she was committed. The episode says she is probably still confined.