The Deck - Linda Smith (9 of Hearts, Idaho)

Episode Date: February 2, 2022

Our card this week is Linda Smith, the 9 of Hearts from Idaho. Linda Smith was asleep in her bed in Pocatello, Idaho when she awoke to a man in her bedroom. The man took her, carrying her out through the living room where her little brother Ben was sleeping, and into his van in the back alley. Ben, who was 9 at the time, tried to run after them but was shoved down. He hasn’t seen his sister since, and witnessing her abduction has haunted him for decades.If you have any information about the abduction and murder of Linda Smith, please contact the Idaho Cold Case Tip Line at 1-844-TIP-4040 or the Pocatello Police Department at 208-234-6100.To learn more about The Deck, visit www.thedeckpodcast.com. To apply for the Cold Case Playing Cards grant through Season of Justice, visit www.seasonofjustice.org

This series is something that's been a long time coming. An idea I've had for years, and over the last year at AudioChuck, we've been putting together the right team of people to make this show a reality. Those of you who are deep in the True Crime community might know about Cold Case playing card decks. Some law enforcement agencies have replaced the faces of traditional playing cards with images of missing and murdered people. Each card represents a victim who's gone without justice. The goal was to get these out to the public and into jails

and prisons, hoping that they might finally find their way into the hands of someone with answers. And now, it's time to bring these cases to a bigger audience, hoping each of these stories will finally hit the right ears. Our card this week is Linda Smith, the Nine of Hearts from Idaho. In 1981, in her hometown of Pocaitella, Idaho, 14-year-old Linda Smith was abducted from her family's home. Whoever took her, all those decades ago, snuck past her sleeping brother and into her bedroom, and to this day that person remains unidentified. To help tell us Linda's story, our team interviewed Linda's brother Ben

on the 40th anniversary of his sister's kidnapping. What he remembers about this gripping story will leave you shook. I'm Ashley Flowers and this is The Deck. It's obvious that the photo of Linda Smith on her playing card is her middle school picture from 1981. According to her younger brother Ben, it's exactly how she looked when she vanished from their home. In the picture, she's got a little smile across her face and is sort of looking off to the side.

You know, the typical middle school girl, I don't get my picture taken a lot posed. Her short, wavy brown hair is parted down the middle and underneath the photo are the words, homicide victim. This is how the Pocahtello Police Department categorizes Linda. And sadly, it has been that way for four decades. On the night of June 14, 1981, school was out for the summer, and Linda and her younger

siblings, 9-year-old Ben and 13-year-old Laurie, were having a typical Sunday evening. Linda, who was 14, was babysitting Ben at home while their mother, Noreen, was having a night out with some friends, and Laurie was spending the night at their grandparents' house, about 45 minutes north in the town of Basel, Idaho. According to Ben, he and Linda's evening at home that night was uneventful for the most part. The pair watched some TV together in the living room, then Ben dozed off. When he stirred awake, it was late, and the house was completely dark. Their mom still wasn't home yet, and when he looked over next to him, he didn't

see Linda. At that point, he figured his sister had just gone into her bedroom and fallen asleep too. But right as he was thinking that something happened that changed his family's life forever. Sometimes during the night I felt a bump against the recliner. I look up and there's this guy with Linda in his arms. And it takes me a few minutes to get fully awake by that time you got out of the house. For a split second, Ben thought he was dreaming, but quickly realized he wasn't. An actual stranger, a man Ben did not know

had Linda fighting for her life in his arms. She was kicking, struggling, and trying to scream. He had one arm around her mouth like this. And he had one around his wrist. arms. She was kicking, struggling, and trying to scream. Before Ben could even really process what was going on, the man with a death grip on Linda rushed toward the home's back door toward an alleyway. Ben says everything happened so fast he barely had time to get his little body out of the recliner and start running after his sister and her abductor. I chased him to the back of the house and tried to pull him away from her and I got pushed down into some, we had some weeds, not weeds, but bushes on the side of the house there

and I got pushed down into the bushes. Basically, I was told to get away where I was going to get heard. And by the time I got up out of the bushes, they had gotten into the vehicle and they had the way in New York. Ben says back in 1981, and in his nine-year-old mind, he couldn't really make sense of things. And he didn't have a good grasp on what time the abduction actually happened. But there was one detail he remembers without a doubt.

The van he saw, the strange man's stuff lended into, was black, and had flames down the side of it. As soon as the van took off, Ben says he immediately ran to a neighbor's house across the street to call 911, because at the time, the Smiths didn't have a phone in their home. In fact, the family was way more into CB radios than telephones, call 911 because at the time the Smiths didn't have a phone in their home. In fact, the family was way more into CB radios than telephones. Noreen, their mom, was really into the hobby. She was a member of the southeast Idaho CB radio club, and the whole family had their own

radio handles. Noreen was white angel, Laurie was dark angel, Ben was littlest angel, and Linda was teen angel. They jokingly called their house, the honky honky angel base. You're so red-negged, I'm funny. The reason Ben was so quick to go over to a neighbor's and call 911 after Linda's abduction was that he'd heard in school, if something bad happens, you always call 911. It's the golden rule we teach pretty much every kid. But Ben never imagined what would happen and how investigators would treat him after he dialed those famous three numbers. According to the Poca Tevo Police Department, when Ben placed the 911 call to report Linda's

abduction, it was just after two o'clock in the morning. By this time, Noreen was on her way home when she got a page on her car's CB radio. It was the police, and they were looking for white angel. Ben doesn't remember his mom going out all the time. He said she worked hard to provide for her three kids as a single mom. Their dad was never in the picture. Patrol officers responded to the Smith's house with less than enthusiastic attitudes that Ben's report of an abduction was, in fact, legit. Ben says the officer's initial response

to his panic was to calm him down and suggest that his sister likely voluntarily left with someone, or just ran away. He said when he protested against that theory, the police immediately accused him of making up the story about Linda being kidnapped. They suggested that Ben's nine-year-old imagination was getting the best of him, and that he was just covering up for Linda taking off on her own. They thought this, because some other reports had come into the department earlier that night

that indicated a party was going on in the neighborhood a few streets over. The police, according to Ben, suggested that, most likely, Linda would have wanted to sneak off to the party. They had two very inexperienced patrolmen investigating a possible kidnapping. They thought it was a runaway. They even went down through. There was a party going up on Clark Street, a few blocks away from where we were living, and they went there to go look for Linda.

Now, once they believed, I saw somebody take my sister. Benzett officers doubted him so much that by the time his mom arrived on scene, he even started to doubt himself. His mind kept racing over the scene he'd experienced inside the house and in the alley, and he questioned if it was real. Even when I told them what I witnessed that night, what I've seen and I was in shock, so I would forget things and then I would remember things. So of course that to them looked like it was lying.

So I was covering up for her. But Ben knew that what he saw was real. When it came to dealing with law enforcement, he never retracted his initial statement. What didn't help the situation was the fact that Ben had very little helpful information to give the police about the identity of the man who he said took Linda.

He had no idea who this man was. He'd never seen him before in his life. All he remembered was that for a split second, he was able to look into the guy's eyes, though he couldn't be descriptive about them. He knew that the man had a beard, and he described the suspect as wearing a hooded sweatshirt or jacket with the hood pulled up around his face. And there was a smell that he can still recall to this very day. And anymore, I honestly can't remember a whole lot of what I recognize

from that kind of the eyes and the smell of beer alcohol and body order sweat. Well, send me into a PTSD trigger that I mean, down the reasons police might have initially doubted Ben's story about Linda being kidnapped is the fact that she was independent enough to leave the Smith's house if she wanted to? She was clearly the eldest and most responsible of the three kids. I mean enough so that Noreen felt comfortable leaving her to watch over Ben that night. There was also the fact that back in 1981, Pocotello Idaho didn't have an extensive track record of violent crimes.

The city is located in southeast Idaho, about two and a half hours north of Salt Lake City, Utah. More than half the population is Mormon, and for the most part, Poca-Talo had had a fairly low crime rate over the years. Linda herself was a devout Mormon. Ben says she was shy and loved spending her time in the church, and with her school friends who also shared her same beliefs. Something else Linda was devoted to, though it was short-lived, was keeping a diary of

her life. Ben brought one of her journals with him to his interview for this episode. The pages are covered with Linda's writing about school, her friends, and boys she had crushes on at church. Her first journal entry was in October of 1979. She wrote, I went to church today and had a great time. I met the girls in my class

and they treated me pretty nice. In January 1981, Linda wrote, I woke up about nine and disco duck was on and about 9.30 my little brother woke up and we went roller skating. Wow, let's go duck. Oh my gosh, that's so funny. According to the diary, Linda made her last journal entry in late April of 1981,

less than two months before she was kidnapped. She wrote that she was looking forward to her 14th birthday. Every page after that date is blank, and 10 days before she was abducted, Linda turned 14. There's limited information out there about what exactly happened in the police investigation immediately after Linda was abducted on June 14, 1981. After talking with Ben on record and Laurie who didn't want to be recorded, it doesn't seem like police did a whole lot to find Linda in those initial 48 hours of her being gone. The Bocatello Police Department declined to participate in an interview with us for this episode, likely because Linda's case is still considered open and active.

But here's what we do know. In the days immediately after Linda was reported as being dragged from her home and stuffed into a van, police and many community members just kept thinking that wasn't the truth, and were hopeful she would just turn back up. Ben remembers people making up stories about having seen Linda in other towns. One person even said they saw her in Las Vegas, but later they admitted that was a lie. Ben says the family's church bishop also told police he thought based on everything he knew about the family, it

was more than likely that Linda probably ran away. One week after her abduction report was taken and no one except the family was really taking it seriously, the entire case changed in a major way. Clothing showed up and it belonged to Linda. A man found several pieces of young girls clothing scattered off a highway exit in Pocotello. At the time, the man didn't know what to make of the clothing and waited a day or so before he called police to tell detectives about what he'd found. When police did, finally get a hold of the clothing, officers asked the Smith family to confirm if any of the items belonged to Linda, and Noreen, her mother, positively ID the articles as belonging to her daughter.

What's bananas is that even then, when the cops had Linda's own mother saying, yes, this belonged to my daughter, Ben says police in Pocahtello still wouldn't call the case a kidnapping. The details are slim, but I guess whatever state the clothing was in didn't make it apparent to the police that something violent had happened to Linda. To them, it was just clothing on the side of a highway that her family said was hers. So for an entire year after the clothing was found, not a lot happened with the case. Until the start of summer in 1982, when tragic news came in. In May, three young girls were out playing your apocotello subdivision called Sagewood Hills when they came across several bones.

Now bones in the Idaho woods don't always cause concern right away because there are large animals like bears that roam that part of the country. But something about these bones really stood out. In the pile was the upper part of what looked like a human skull. The girls took the bones home and showed one of their mothers, and that woman called the police to report the find. Police quickly got out to the subdivision where the girls had been playing and conducted a more thorough search, and you probably guessed it. They found more remains scattered throughout the area. The medical examiner's best estimate was that the bones had been there for several months to a year. The teeth from the skull were compared to dental records of recent missing people from

Pocahtello, and eventually police announced that the partial skeleton belonged to Linda Smith. Officers also found human hairs and remnants of three pairs of pants with the remains. Whether or not any of those pants belong to Linda is unclear, and even Ben doesn't know that information. But I have to think that since some of Linda's clothing had already been found by the highway a few months earlier, the pants probably didn't belong to Linda. Anyway, according to reporting by the Idaho State Journal

at a press conference on the day police announced the bones were Linda's, the police department confirmed they believed foul play was likely involved, but no cause of death could be determined. The bone fragments and skull that were found were just too deteriorated. In the ground around several spots where remains were recovered, police said they found bullet casings, but the department made sure to note in a public statement that the wooded area was a popular place for target practice. There was no way that they could know for sure if any of those casings were relevant to

Linda's remains or a potential cause of death. On the day authorities held their press conference, Ben was just days away from turning 10 years old. He remembers coming home from school and learning the terrible news. His grandpa was waiting for him in his bedroom to tell him that police had finally found his big sister. I remember more about that night, and I remember more about the day that they found her remains. Then I can't remember before.

Finding Linda's remains was a big turning point in the case. Finally, the Pocotello police reclassified the case as a kidnapping and murder. But by then, it was sort of too little too late to process the crime scene or collect any evidence that might have been left behind by the suspect in the Smith's house. You see, shortly after Linda was taken, Noreen, Ben, and Laurie moved close to Noreen's parents in Basel, Idaho. They never went back to the Pocahtello house after that, and other people moved in. For Noreen and the kids, the memories of Linda in that house were just too painful, and

staying in Pocahtello became unbearable. So any chance that investigators were going to find something useful to the investigation in the old house, a year after Linda was kidnapped was low. Today, the house is still there, but it's empty. It hasn't changed much. The alley is still there, and so is the back door where the man dragged Linda from. One of our reporters, Emily, actually went there in person to get images for us, and

you can see those in the blog post for this episode on our website, thedeckpodcast.com. Before the abduction, Ben says the Smiths house was never locked. He says the Smiths had a sort of open door policy for family and neighborhood friends. Noreen was raising the kids as a single mother, and she was on welfare at the time. Ben says that his mom worked really hard to make ends meet, and that often meant that she wasn't around a lot. People were always coming and going from the Smith House and it wasn't unusual for adults to come and go and visit with the kids while Noreen was working. As he's grown older, Ben has come to believe the family's open-door policy may be how the

suspect got in that fateful night. After 40 years of always thinking about his sister's case, Ben doesn't think it was a complete stranger who took Linda. Whoever had taken my sister, I think they had been in the house before. Honestly, they knew where to go together. Honestly, that theory makes sense. Statistically, a true stranger abduction is very rare, especially if you're talking someone coming into the home. But those cases do happen. And while I agree with Ben and think her abductor had some familiarity with the family, you might disagree when you learn that Linda Smith was not the only young girl to be kidnapped and

killed in Southeast Idaho in the early 1980s. early 1980s. We had one of our investigators do a little digging to gather more information about the greater Pochotello area around the time of Linda Smith's abduction and murder. According to several Pochotello news outlets, Linda Smith's bones were actually one of three sets of remains found in Southeast Idaho during the span of just seven months in 1982. The other sets belonged to two young girls who went missing in the mid-1970s from other towns in the area several years before Linda.

There isn't a whole lot of information out there on those cases, but here's some general information we did find out. Disappearances of pre-teen girls from southeastern Idaho started happening in 1975 when 12-year-old Lynette Culver vanished after leaving Alameda, Jr. high in Pocatello. Three years later in 1978, 12-year-old Tina Anderson and 15-year-old Patricia Campbell went missing after attending a pioneer-day celebration at Alameda Park, just a mile from the school. Police later said the other two sets of remains found near Linda's belonged to Tina and Patricia.

Then, we know Linda Smith is abducted from her home and likely killed shortly after that in 1981 in Pocotello. The last girl to go missing was 14-year-old Cindy Bringhurst, who was abducted in 1983, while babysitting a two-year-old at their family home. In that case, Cindy vanished, and the baby she was watching was left unharmed, just like Ben. Cindy's body was found south of Pocotello

a month after she vanished. That's five cases of preteen or teenage girls in the span of eight years, who all vanished or were reported missing from similar areas in towns very close to one another in Southeast Idaho. Despite most of the girls having gone to the same junior high school in the same town, police have never been able to save the cases are connected. Even more bizarre is that in 1989 one of the most notorious serial killers in American history confessed to committing one of the polka telemurders. Just before he was executed, Ted Bundy told police he abducted the first girl, Lynette Culver,

near Alameda, Junior High School. He said he took her to a local hotel, drowned her in the bathtub, and threw her body in the nearby Snake River. According to reporting by the Idaho State Journal, former Idaho Attorney General Jim Jones said Bundy knew personal details about Lynette's life that only she would know. So, he believed Bundy's confession, but Lynette's body has never been found. As a lot of you probably know, Ted Bundy was proven to have committed several murders throughout the American West in the mid and late 70s. He was eventually arrested and locked up officially by 1978. So, because we know he was imprisoned by 1978,

Ted Bundy couldn't have killed Linda, Tina, Patricia, or Cindy. So the question becomes, did Pocahtello Idaho have more than one serial killer roaming the streets targeting young girls? I think the answer is probably yes. Our team tried for weeks to get in touch with the Polka Telepolice Department to figure out if all of these years later, detectives have made any connections between the cases,

but they were uncooperative. A public information officer told our investigator that he would ask a detective if he wanted to at least talk about Linda's case and where it stands now, but the department never called back. Ben said there's been a revolving door of detectives assigned to Linda's case. He can name at least six different detectives who've worked on it over the last 40 years. In 2007, he said the department took another look at the case, and that at the time, they

told him they had at least two people of interest, but nothing came of that information. And here we are and it's 2022 with nothing new. Ben's not sure who is working on leads today. He's still considered an open case, but it's cold, it's cold as hell, but they won't investigate anymore. Now that he's pushing 50 years old, Ben has tried to move on from the police accusing him of lying when he was a child. Over the decades, he's continued to cooperate with investigators and even gone back in a few times for interviews and to look through photo lineups. He says the one thing he'll never get over is the fact that his sister might still be

alive today. If only those two responding police officers in June 1981 had believed him when he said Linda was abducted. To this day, Ben struggles to remember exactly what Linda's face looks like, and he has a hard time remembering the sound of her voice. Time has faded so much of his memory. Different rumors circulated over the years about who killed Linda, and Ben says those are hard to listen to. For a while, the family sort of suspected an 18-year-old who'd taken a liking to Linda during her time working

a paper route. They thought he could have been involved. Apparently this guy would write Linda letters, but Linda never reciprocated the feelings, and as far as Ben knows, that man had never been to their house in 1981. Knowing the Smith home at that time, Ben thinks is critical. He's certain Linda's kidnapper knew his way around their house, and knew to park his van in the alleyway that led right up to the back door. There's no indication from our research material or discussions with Laurie or Ben that the mystery older guy who wrote letters to Linda was ever questioned by police, but then again law enforcement isn't an open book on this case. So who knows exactly who they spoke to or didn't. in an open book on this case, so who knows exactly who they spoke to or didn't. Ben says at one point the police suggested Noreen, their mother, might have known something

or been involved, but he's never believed that. What he said was, do I think my mom, as a possible, that my mom was lured away that night, so that my sister could be taken? What I heard was, do you think your mom's involved? The popular theory on this whole situation is they think that my mom might have known something about somebody and they killed my sister to shut my mama. Noreen died in 2000 and is buried right next to Linda

at a cemetery in Idaho Falls. Ben says she lived her life feeling guilty for not being home the night Linda was kidnapped, not because she had anything to do with what happened. It hasn't really resolved and we're still just waiting for something to happen and I think we're, I will go to our graves to wait for something to happen like my mom did. When I see or hear about a missing person, missing child, when it's even around a way, I'm hopeful that they get some sort of quick closer to whatever is going on in their lives.

Before her death, Noreen told local reporters at a news conference that she wasn't sure, even if she was home that night, that it would have mattered. She was quoted as saying that whoever snuck into the family's house was there to get Linda and they were going to do whatever it took. Ben says going all these years not knowing exactly how his sister died has been hard to bear. He hopes that whatever happened after she was shoved into that van and the alley was swift and painless. We tend to think of her death as the

date of her death has been that night. I mean, there's no way for sure to know, but we'd rather think of her not suffering. Ben says he'll always miss Linda, and he remembers her as a mama's girl. Growing up, if he or Lori wanted to stay the night of their grandparents' house, Linda always wanted to stay home with Noreen. A neighbor told the Idaho State Journal in 1982 that she remembered Linda as a polite quiet girl, and she often saw her and Noreen sitting in their front yard in lawn chairs,

chatting like girlfriends. Now, Noreen and Linda are resting right next to each other. In a spot where Ben and Lori can visit their gravesites. Seeing his sister's face on a deck of playing cards that gets passed out to inmates and in the community to hopefully generate new leads is encouraging to Ben. The fact that Linda was assigned to be the Nine of Hearts in the deck strikes him as especially meaningful. I looked at it and I'm like, oh, the Nine of Hearts, that's pretty cool. I was nine when it happened and I loved my sister. To see that, I involved.

Ben and his younger sister, Laurie, have both watched over the years as other cold cases in Idaho have been solved. He hopes one day he'll get to know what closure feels like before it's too late. I think it's more of now prevalent because I sit there and I want to all these other cases get solved.

And I'm happy for the families. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for the families. But I'm thinking all this time when's it going to be our turn? The men is still alive, I had to hard one, that's a difficult question. Accountability, honestly. If you did it, come forward. If you know who did it, come forward. Let us have a chance for our families. Give us a chance to have closer to. If you have any information about the abduction and murder of Linda Smith, please contact the Idaho Cold Case Tip Line at 1-844-TIP 4040 or the Pocotello Police Department at 208-234-6100.

The Deck is an audio-chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com. So, what do you think Chuck, do you approve? Aaaaah!