True Crime Campfire - In Disguise: Serial Wife Emma Raine

Episode Date: February 12, 2021

In nature, there’s a phenomenon called disruptive coloration. It’s when an animal or insect is multicolored to match its environment—thereby camouflaging itself. It’s especially useful, as I��m sure you can imagine, for predators. For example, the orange and black on a tiger allows it to blend in with the scenery and lie in wait for prey. Humans haven’t evolved this nifty little trick, but some of us have mastered something pretty similar. If you’re a predatory human, you might decide to adopt a disguise to put potential victims at ease. A preacher’s wife, for example. Or a prominent, well dressed business owner. You might develop your people skills, so that anybody who visits your home will feel like royalty. And all the while, behind your smiling eyes, the predator is waiting to pounce. Sources:Investigation Discovery's "Deadly Secrets," Episode "The Truth Hurts"Oxygen's "Snapped," Episode "Emma Raine"BET's "Murder in the Thirst," Episode "Who Killed the Preacher?"Sun-Herald, Robin Fitzgerald: https://www.sunherald.com/news/local/crime/article110147657.htmlAP News, Kevin McGill: https://apnews.com/article/7651272f4d04427dbf3e8315a77c5b60Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. In nature, there's a phenomenon called disruptive coloration. It's when an animal or insect is multicolored to match its environment. thereby camouflaging itself. It's especially useful, as I'm sure you can imagine, for predators. For example, the orange and black on a tiger allows it to blend in with the long grass and lion wait for prey. Humans haven't evolved this nifty little trick, but some of us have mastered something pretty similar. If you're a predatory human, you might adopt a disguise to put potential victims at

a preacher's wife, for example, or a prominent, well-dressed business owner. You might develop your people skills so that anybody who visits your home will feel like royalty, and all the while, behind your smiling eyes, the predator is waiting to pounce. This is in disguise. Serial wife, Emma Raine. So, campers, we're in New Orleans, Louisiana, April 12, 2006. A 911 call came in around midnight from a woman named Emma Smith. Get here quick, my husband's been shot. First responders arrived to find 38-year-old Ernest Smith sprawled on his back in the foyer

of his and Emma's townhouse, a pool of blood spreading out underneath him, and more saturating his shirt. He'd been shot twice in the chest, and there was nothing they could do for him. He was already dead. Emma told the investigators that Ernest had been out in the Big Easy that night with one of his buds. She had a toothache, so after he left, she took some meds and went to bed. The next thing she knew, she said, she was waking up to a couple of popping sounds. She assumed it was a car backfiring and started to go back to sleep, but then she heard the front door open and Ernest yelled,

Baby, I've been shot! Somehow he'd managed to crawl into the house, bleeding badly. from the two wounds in his chest. He died before help could reach him. Emma said she'd cradled him in her arms as he passed. They'd been married for more than a decade. Investigators found two bullet casings on the ground outside the townhouse, but that was pretty much it. There were no signs of struggle. It seemed likely that the killer had been waiting to ambush Ernest in the driveway. The last person to see him alive, of course, was his friend Ronald, with whom he'd been out in the town earlier that night. Ronald said they'd been to biker night at one of their favorite bars.

Ernest's hobby lately was his brand new motorcycle, and he was all about making some friends to ride and talk bikes with. They'd had fun at the bar, Ronald said, and when they got back to Ernest's house, they sat in Ronald's car for about 20 minutes and chatted before Ernest decided to head inside. Ronald said he'd watched his friend walk up to the door. He wanted to make sure he was okay, since this wasn't the safest neighborhood in town. Once he saw him reach the door, he drove off. Everything seemed fine. You got to wait to see if your friend gets into the house, folks. My friends, by now, all know that if I drop them off,

I am not leaving their driveway until they are in the house, door shut, door lock. Absolutely. And I'll even sit out there for another minute or two just to make sure they don't come running out the front door screaming or something, you know, because we're true crime nerds. Mm-hmm. This is important stuff. A few minutes later, Ronald was driving down the highway toward home when he saw police cars,

lights and sirens blazing, racing back in the direction of the townhouse. He wondered what it was all about, of course, but he never dreamed it had anything to do with Ernest. When he found out about the murder, he was floored. He said he hadn't seen anyone lurking near the house or anything like that. I mean, not that he'd been looking. It broke Ronald's heart to think that this had happened right after he left, that he hadn't been there to protect his friend. And if Ernest's friends were gutted, imagine how his wife must be feeling. What a heartbreaking image, Emma cradling her dying husband as she waited desperately for help to arrive. Here was the thing, though.

Investigators at the scene couldn't help but notice that Emma didn't have a speck of blood on her clothes. Ernest was covered in blood. How could she have held him to her and not gotten soaked herself? And when Emma called Ernest's daughter Quentin to tell her the awful news, Quentin got the prickly feeling that something was off right away. Something about Emma's tone felt wrong. It felt like she was putting on a show. Kind of a cheesy pantomime of grief rather than the real thing.

And then there was the fact that Emma's story kept changing. We already know what she told the investigators. She'd gone to bed with a toothache, woke up to two pops, then Ernest yelling, babe, I've been shot. But to Quentin, she said Ernest had come home from his night out with Ronald, walked through the door just fine, and when she'd asked him to go outside and move his motorcycle, somebody had shot him in the driveway. Emma. Girl, why would you tell two drastically different stories like that?

Your story was fine. You had a witness saying he got to the doorway. What are you doing, you silly bitch? Anyway, let's say there were perhaps a few points of concern about the grieving widow. But there's a difference between suspecting something and being able to prove it. And the fact was, New Orleans was only about eight months post-Katrina at this point. and the city was a mess. Katrina basically turned New Orleans into an economic black hole,

which meant that crime increased exponentially. The police were swamped. They were basically just glorified crime scene texts at this point. They'd go to a crime scene, process it, and unless there was an eyewitness or somebody standing over the body with a smoking gun saying, yeah, it was me and I'd do it again too. The case went cold.

One officer said, it was the perfect place to commit murder and get away with it. Not great. Not very encouraging for Ernest's devastated family and friends. Ernest was a much-admired preacher about to take a job as a head pastor of a church in Atlanta. He and Emma had been pillars of their community for years, so his death had a huge ripple effect on the lives of the people around him.

He wasn't the kind of guy to have a lot of enemies. In fact, the investigators couldn't find a single one. at first. But let's put a pin in that for now and get a little background on Ernest and Emma. Ernest Smith hadn't had an easy life. When he was 10, his parents died, and he ended up being adopted by a family that he never, ever talked about later. But he didn't let it keep him down. He was one of those people whose default setting is optimism. Yeah, I'm one of those people. And the rest of my family, especially the male members of my family, are the total opposite. Like, we're yin and yang. I'm glass half full. They tend to be glass half empty. So you can

imagine Thanksgiving can get a little awkward sometimes. But it's, I think, a real blessing to have that kind of mindset. You know, when something knocks you ass over tea kettle, it helps you get back up again. Like a weble wobble. Fellow Gen Xers, remember weble wobbles? It was a toy. They wobble, but they don't fall down. See. I have the song stuck in my head now. Thank you. At least I didn't put that Chambawamba song in your head. Now it's in my head. Gee, thanks. Sorry.

Ernest was a magnetic person. I think we've mentioned that Maya Angelou quote before, people will forget what you say and they'll forget what you do, but they'll never forget the way you made them feel. Ernest made people feel good. After high school, he joined the National Guard. He got married and had his daughter Quentin. But that first marriage didn't work out.

After his divorce, Ernest got more involved in his church, and soon he realized he'd found his passion in life, preaching. He was a natural at it. He started his own church, and before long, a close-knit little community grew up around him. Behind the pulpit, Ernest was in his element. His daughter says he just lit up up there. Nobody could take their eyes off him. And it sounds like his messages were really positive, too, not the hellfire and brimstone stuff.

Ernest liked to lift people up. People would leave his church services feeling like they just got a shot of vitamin B-12 or something. Kind of buzzed and jazzed and happy. It was at his church that, at age 25, Ernest first met Emma. Like him, Emma had kind of a tough life. She'd grown up poor in Vicksburg, Mississippi, but she'd always had big dreams. Emma had her eye on a lavish future for herself. Even as a young girl, she fixated on the idea of having expensive stuff that most people couldn't afford to buy.

design her clothes, jewelry, fancy cars, big houses. It was her driving force in life chasing that stuff. Emma had the same kind of magnetism Ernest had. People were drawn to her. She was bright and friendly and fun to be around. Charismatic. I feel like as soon as we say that word, now you'll start getting nervous. Like, she was charismatic.

Oh, God, who's she going to murder? Here, here, let's even it out. Ernest was incredibly charismatic, too, what with all the preach in and sunshine and. This is true. Emma had a son and daughter from a previous relationship, and they were great kids. Ernest soon came to love them like his own. In 1995, he and Emma got married, and Emma ate up the status and attention that came from being the wife of a popular preacher.

She could work a room like a Hollywood star. When you were at her house, you got the red carpet treatment from the church's elegant, always perfectly turned out First Lady. Ernest wasn't a full-time pastor, though. He also drove a truck, and Emma ran a whole series of businesses. She worked as a tax accountant, she had a wig shop, and she got a real estate license. Between the two of them, they made a really nice living, and they were doing better and better all the time. Almost every year, they'd upgrade to a bigger, nicer house, and a nicer neighborhood. It was your basic suburban American fairy tale.

Pool in the backyard, nice furniture, nice schools for the kids, trips to Disneyland and or world, depending on preference. Everybody in the family was thriving. Until August 2005, Hurricane Katrina totally flattened new. Orleans in countless people's dreams along with it. And it uprooted Ernest and Emma completely. Their house and Emma's businesses were destroyed by the floods. But as we said earlier, Ernest was an eternal optimist and he wasn't going to let it keep them down. They moved to Arlington, Texas, and Ernest quickly found another truck driving gig. Emma's kids were grown by now, so it was just Ernest and Emma forging a head together. Ernest liked Texas, and he was making good money at his new job.

But Emma was restless. She fretted over her lost businesses back in the in Nalens. She wanted to fix him back up again. Couldn't stand to think of all her hard work going down with the floodwaters. So as soon as it was safe, she packed up and headed back, leaving Ernest by himself in Arlington. Oof. Red flag, y'all think? I kind of feel like it is. I mean, I'm sure there are lots of good reasons why married couples might have to live apart sometimes, but it's bound to take a toll, and it seems like Emma was awful quick to get the hell out of Dodge as fast as she could get. So, for me, it doesn't bode well campers. Anywho, before long, a new opportunity he popped up for Ernest. Basically, his dream job. He got an offer to be the main pastor at a church in

Atlanta, much bigger than his one in New Orleans had been. This one had a congregation 500 strong. So Ernest was just fizzing about it, telling everybody, and since he'd have to start planning and move to Atlanta pretty soon, he thought he'd better get down to Louisiana and reunite with Emma first. So he packed up his stuff and moved on, back to New Orleans, if only for a little while. Within a week of arriving at Emma's townhouse, Ernest Smith was dead. And the case was cooling off faster than Arnold Schwarzenegger in that one Batman movie we all try to pretend never happened. But our Miss Emma wasn't cooling off one bit. She didn't let any grass grow under her manolos before she moved on with her life.

Rumor had it that she'd scored a pretty hefty life insurance payout from Ernest's death. And soon, the people around her couldn't help but notice that she was spending an awful lot of time with a a young gent named James Raine. Like Ernest, James was one of those people who just kind of sparkle. He was handsome, funny, and gregarious, just like Emma. He was also a National Guardsman, and he'd done a stint in Iraq in the same unit as Ernest. They'd actually been pretty good friends. James' time in Iraq had changed him, his friends and family said. He was still bright and gregarious on his good days, but he had sort of a haunted vibe, too. He was always looking over his shoulder. I don't know whether he was ever diagnosed with PTSD or anything like that,

but it wouldn't be too surprising for a soldier coming home from the war in Iraq. Not at all. The war was one thing, but to James's brother, Enoch and his uncle William, it seemed like once he took up with Emma Smith, James changed even more. We've all seen this, right? We've all had a friend that started dating somebody new, and suddenly it seems like they've morphed into a totally different person. Oh yes. And more often than not, it's just hard to watch. Mm-hmm. I mean, in a way, they were a good match. Emma and James were both life of the party types. But once he started dating Emma, James suddenly acquired a fixation on money and stuff. He never cared a damn for it before. What had always mattered to him before was family. He, Enoch, and William had been the

three musketeers until Emma came along. Now there was all this weird tension between. them. Oh, man. Now, Emma had him wearing expensive jewelry, driving up in fancy cars, wearing designer clothes. It just didn't seem like him at all. When his brother Enoch would ask him, whoa, where'd all this come from? He'd just say, oh, Emma bought me that. Eh. Hmm. It made James's family uneasy, and so did Emma, for that matter. They couldn't put a finger on why exactly, but she made Enoch and William's skin crawl. Yeah, some people just have good radar, y'all. But James seemed to be writing high on his new lifestyle,

and in 2008, Enoch and William found out he'd gone and married her. Oh, my God. He hadn't said a word to anybody in the family until after it was done. Okay, red flag, red flag. Why are you skulking around to a justice of the peace and boxing out the people who love you, my dude? I don't like it. Yeah, neither did James' family.

But they tried to support James the best they could anyway, because it's what you do. James and Emma moved about an hour away to James's hometown of Poplarville, Mississippi. They quickly got a reputation as one of the town's most impressive black power couples. And Emma ate up the attention. She built a huge 4,600 square foot house on I shit you not, Emma Lane. Oh, my God. She named a street after herself campers.

Sure, like you do. No narcissistic tendencies there, right? Okay, so we rag on vanity plates, but a vanity street sign is a whole other level of narcissism. Not to mention, the house was unreal. Five bedrooms, a pool, $5,000 and $10,000 rugs scattered around, everything's state-of-the-art. One of those state-of-the-art things was the security system Emma had installed. Yeah, much more sophisticated than you'd think you'd need in a town like Poplarville. According to James's brother, Enoch, see, Emma and James had a little town.

tendency did not want to pay their bills. Hmm. As he told the investigation discovery show Deadly Secrets, there was a lot of robbing Peter to pay Paul. One afternoon, James and Emma came rolling up in one of their expensive cars as Enoch and William were getting ready to go out on a job. Enoch was a firefighter and William a mechanical technician, but on the side they ran a fencing business together. And now, as Emma lurked back in the car, James came running up to ask if Enoch would mind doing her just a little favor. No big deal, he said. Just, could he cash a $25,000 check for Emma through his business account? And Enoch was like, I'm sorry, this woman owns businesses all over town and she needs me to cash a check.

This had shady shenanigans written all over it, and Enoch wasn't having it. He sent James back to the boss lady with his tail between his legs. So what does this sound like to you, Katie? Was she just trying to straight up get Enoch to pay one of her bills, or was this some kind of money laundering? Oh, it was absolutely money laundering. I think so too. Based on what we know about Emma, she probably didn't want someone somewhere to know about that $25,000. Yeah. Fraudsters and cons like her always squirrel away money, like acorns in multiple places. And as if using James as her shifty little business minion wasn't bad enough, Emma seemed to get off on keeping him off balance in their relationship.

She loved entertaining. Hostess with the mostest, remember? So she and James had lots of huge, fancy parties at the new house. and Emma liked to make him jealous she'd take him aside and say that guy just touched me or you know that dude made a pass at me and James whose temper was liable to flash over anything these days would

lose his shit all over the guy while Emma just got her a bag of popcorn sat back and watched this to me is one of the creepiest things about her that she enjoyed pulling his strings like that yeah yeah like I'd be mortified if my husband went off on some duty sought it hit on me but Emma just could not get enough of it so my suspicion is that to her it was evidence of the kind of absolute devotion that she required of him.

To Emma, I'm pretty sure James was bought and paid for, and she expected to get her damn money's worth. You know, Emma, the measure of a man's love hasn't been, I'd beat the sweet finger-lick and flip out of some guy for you since, like, at least the 70s. Come on, grow the fuck up. But I guess that's a narcissist for you. It's always, what can you do for me? What kind of drama can I inject into our lives? Gross.

Yeah, if you're expecting. reaction to like you telling your partner, hey, that person just tried to hit on me, is anything other than nice, high five, I win, maybe pat on the butt? Like, you need therapy, full stop. But as far as Emma was concerned, she'd finally achieved the life she'd always dreamed of. She had money, status, a man who would clearly do anything for her, even piss off his own family. One time she hired Enoch and William to put up some fencing around the fabulous new house. So they came out, put it all up, sweated their asses off all afternoon doing it.

And just as they were finishing up, James came slinking out of the house looking all sheepish. And he said, Emma says she's not happy with the way y'all put up the fencing, and she's not going to pay for it. I'm sure that's not how I talk, but he's just so, like, slinky in this part. It just gross as me out.

The audacity of this just makes me want to spit. And Enoch, who's like this big redwood tree of a dude, was like, yeah, you go back in there and tell her, we put this thing in exactly how she told us, and she's going to pay us for it or we're going to take it down. Hell yes, Enoch. What kind of greedy-ass person jumps immediately to, I'm not paying you for that work instead of,

can you please fix it? Right. And maybe it's the millennial in me. But I would rather chew my own leg off than complain to a contractor or customer service person or waitress when my order or the work is wrong, like even when it's wrong, let alone say, I refuse to pay you for your labor outright. Like, I can't do it.

Yeah, I can do it. But only if it's deserved, and I'll still pay for it, for God's sakes, if they fix it. So, yeah, it's just she just straight up wanted to use them because she knew that they're James's family, and they thought, you know, she thought maybe she'd get away with it. So, okay, on October 21st, 2011, Emma was on a trip to Arkansas to visit one of her clients. James was home alone. Emma called the house that morning, but she couldn't reach him. so she called his mom and asked if she could go check on him. When James' mom got to the house, it was strangely quiet.

She let herself in, climbed the stairs to the main bedroom, and walked into a mother's worst nightmare. James was lying on the bed in a pool of blood with gunshot wounds to his head and torso. Her baby was dead. Enoch later said that he was home watching Mori Povich when his phone rang, and that's what his mother kept repeating. My baby's dead. My baby's dead.

Enoch, a firefighter who'd responded to hundreds of death scenes, reached the house right as the police got there. And the officers, who'd all worked scenes with him before, had to hold him back from running to James' bedside so he didn't deserve the crime scene. He was the worst day of his life. Hi, I'm Darren Marley. host of the Weird Darkness podcast. I want to talk about the most important tool in my

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doing. And the best part, Spreaker grows with you. Whether you're just starting out or running a full-blown podcast network, Spreeker's powerful tools scale effortlessly as your show grows. So if you're ready to podcast like a pro and get paid while doing it, check out spreeker.com. That's S-P-R-E-K-E-R dot com. When he'd gotten hold of himself enough to do it, Enoch called Emma and told her James had been murdered.

He later told investigation discovery, I got that kind of dry scream, like somebody who didn't really care. Fake, like everything else about Emma. She didn't even rush home. She mozied Mack a day or two later. By then, the investigators had discovered something interesting. That super-duper, fancy, expensive security system of hers? Well, the cameras, which should have caught the killer entering and leaving the house,

had been shut off at the time of the murder. The last image the cameras had caught? Emma, shutting off the system before she left for Arkansas. Smart. Yeah, I can see our girl's thinking. So you don't think that's going to look a scosh, suspicious, darling, that the one time those cameras are off, your boy happens to get murdered, and the last thing they see on that footage is your dumbass turning off the cameras? Girl. But see, there's that proenoid narcissist thinking again. Anything I do is going to

just turn out spectacular. All right, I'm sure there's a totally reasonable and believable explanation for why she turned the security cameras off, Whitney. Well, yeah. And it's that she wanted to have her husband murdered and she didn't want anybody see who did it. That's the reason. See, that's reasonable to her. It's reasonable to her. Exactly. So as James family grieved, the Mississippi investigators dug into the case, which they could tell was going to be a tough one from the start. There was no forced entry at the house and nothing seemed to have been stolen. So this wasn't a robbery gone bad. And, I mean, James was clearly shot while sleeping.

Why would a burglar do that anyway? This murder had all the signs of a personal motive. But after their initial round of inquiries, they hadn't come up with any real leads or suspects. But to James' brother, Enoch and Uncle William, there wasn't much doubt about who was behind James' murder. At James' funeral, Emma had shown up in a stylish little black dress. She'd walked up to James's mother, a woman still reeling from the death of the child she'd loved, and said,

I told James not to be talking about our business. Holy shit. And then, apparently, she walked up to James' casket, and I swear to God I'm not making this up, methodically touched every place where a bullet had hit. It was creepy as hell. It made everybody there just feel sick. And that wasn't all. See, one of the reasons why Emma made Enoch and William's skin crawl, was because they knew she and James had been having an affair for months before Ernest Spurter. One afternoon, they'd all been at a barbecue at Ernest and Emma's place. Ernest was busy with the grill and Enoch was kind of roaming around the property. When he suddenly came across James and Emma on the other side of the house, full on like grope in

and trying to suck each other's fillings out, make it out like the plane was going down. That's such a weird expression to me. Like, ooh, imminent death, sexy. If my plane was going down and somebody tried to make out with me, I think my reaction would probably be to, like, grab hold of them in mad terror and try to climb them like a tree while, you know, probably screaming a lot. Not very sexy, unless you're into that sort of thing, which I'm sure some of y'all weirdos are, and please do not email us about it, okay? Jesus. Please don't. I would have to pull like an internal sunshine of the spotless mind and permanently forget that this podcast existed, so I could remove the memory of such an email from my memory banks. But I think I'd be more likely to do that than what these two were doing with Emma's husband, like, feet away.

I mean, what were they thinking? It's just so audacious. And their whole family there wandering around and everything. It's almost like they wanted to get caught. Mm-hmm. As soon as she saw him standing there, Emma scuttled away like the sneaky little hermit crab she is with an irritating little smirk on her face. And after he recovered enough to scoop his lower jaw up off the ground, Enoch confronted his brother. Like, what in the hell do you think you're doing, man? You're kissing this man's wife in his own house? He told him, you need to stop this.

You're playing with death. But James didn't want to hear it. All he'd say is, she's a grown woman. I'm a grown man. We're going to do what we want. Ugh. So James and Emma's relationship didn't start after Ernest's death. It had been going on for some.

time. And what's more? Ernest knew about it. One afternoon, Enoch, William, and James had been hanging out fixing one of their cars. James was an amazing mechanic. While they were working on the car, James' cell phone rang. He walked a few yards away to take the call, and even from that distance, Enoch and William could hear the yelling. It was Ernest, screaming down the phone for James to leave his wife alone. And James was giving as good as he got. It was ugly. A literal screaming match. So obviously there was seriously bad blood between these two guys.

Eventually, Ernest laid down an ultimatum for Emma. Either we move back down to New Orleans and get you away from this guy, or we are done. Emma agreed. And that was the main impetus for her to move back to the Big Easy so soon after Katrina. Supposedly, to save her marriage to Ernest. But of course, within a week of Ernest moving down there to be with her, he was lying dead in a pool of blood, just like James Rain was now. Men just didn't seem to last long in Emma's company. Bad luck, I guess. Bless her heart. Enoch and William were deeply uneasy

about James's affair with Emma, and when Ernest was murdered, their first thought was James might be involved in this. So they invited him over the day after the murder and asked him straight out. And James said, no, of course he wasn't involved. How could they even think that? Enoch looked his kid brother in the eyes, and he believed him. Or at least, he told himself he did. But he didn't feel much better. Emma was bad news bears, and he knew it in his bones. Now here they all were again. Another murder. Enoch had lost the brother who meant the world to him. Uncle William, who'd always been more like an older brother to Enoch and James than an uncle, had lost him too. They'd tried to warn James away from that woman, but he hadn't listened. He'd been too dazzled by all the fancy

stuff. And Emma seems like the type who'd be good at love bombing, too. Maybe it had something to do with his time in Iraq. Maybe Emma was some weird maladaptive coping strategy for him. Whatever it was, he was gone now, and Enoch and William knew she was behind it. They were determined to prove it. And then, not long after James' murder, Enoch was home one night watching TV when his phone rang. The voice on the line was creepy, deep, like the speaker might be trying to disguise themselves. It said, go out and check your mailbox.

Got a little something for you. and in his mailbox was an envelope full of paperwork. As Enick paged through it, the meaning of what he was looking at hit him like a punch in the face. It was a copy of a life insurance policy for Ernest Smith, a big one, $800,000. In the beneficiary, his brother, James Rain. Okay, why in the name of Sweet Fly and Flip would a man put his wife's lover on his life insurance policy? Yeah, he wouldn't, I agree. Hell would freeze over first.

Enoch and William were quite sure of that. They remembered that screaming fight they'd overheard between Ernest and James. They didn't know who had delivered them this little piece of evidence, but it was the push they needed to start investigating James's murder on their own. And campers, we are obsessed with these two guys. And if they'd let us, we'd write the script for their buddy cop movie. Oh, hell yes. They decided they weren't going to let this awful bitch get away with murder.

So they did something about it. I need them to get a reality show. Oh, hell yes. It doesn't even have to be a true crime show. They could just do anything, and I would watch it. I would watch them compete in the Great British Bake Off. I feel like Inick would probably make just a mean cheesecake. You and your cheesecake.

Well, don't say it like that. Me and my cheesecake are very happy together, thank you very much. God. Okay, so Enoch and William got to it. I think they instinctively understood that they had something of an advantage over the local cops in that people who might not want to talk to police would have no trouble talking to them. But they did hit a snag.

They immediately realized that many people in this community were scared of Emma. Like a lot of them just refused to talk for fear of retaliation. So Ms. Life of the Party had apparently acquired herself a reputation in Poplarville. So they knew they were going to have an uphill battle to squeeze out the truth, and they decided to bring in some reinforcements.

In March of 2013, Enoch contacted Descinda Chambers, a New Orleans cold case detective with an impressive solve rate. He'd seen her on a true crime show that had covered Ernest Smith's still-unolved murder. Enoch told her he had information on Ernest's case, and that wasn't the only case he wanted to talk about. Desinda is one of my favorite detectives that we've discussed so far. Oh, definitely.

She has this very calming demeanor, and she's exactly the type of woman that I want investigating cold cases. Her ears perked up as Enoch talked about Emma and James, especially when he told her that James had now been murdered too. She convinced him to come to New Orleans and meet her, and he brought William along too. They spilled the whole story. The affair, the screaming fight between James and Ernest, and the life insurance policy that they were convinced was a fraud. Oh, and by the way, evidence would soon surface that Emma had slowly increased that life insurance policy in the months before Ernest's murder, bit by bit until she reached that 800,000 sweet spot. Oh, that's so creepy. They told her about Emma and James's rock star lifestyle. The huge house on Emma Lane and how

much James seemed to change after getting involved with her. And they told her, look, we don't have proof, but we think Emma's responsible for both these murders. She didn't do them herself, but she was behind them, pulling the strings. Detective Chambers was all in at this point. This was just what she'd been needing to revitalize Ernest's case. And now there was the second unsolved case to dig into, too. So as she got to work on her end, Enoch and William hit the streets of Poplarville again and kept grinding at the rumor mill. And finally, a named popped out. Terry Everett. According to some of their sources, Terry was the one who pulled the trigger in Ernest's death. This hit Enoch and William like a bolt of lightning.

They knew Terry, knew him well. As kids, Terry and James had been so close that when Terry's mom died and James' mom adopted him, it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. They already felt like brothers. The thought that he might have been the one to kill Ernest was poison. They had to know if it was true, so they met up with Terry and took a drive. And after a few minutes, they told him they thought Emma might have something to do with James's murder. At this, Terry burst into tears in the backseat, like hysterical

sobs. And after he finally calmed down enough to speak, Terry blurted out what Enoch and William had hoped against hope that they wouldn't have to hear. I killed Ernest. Emma and James got me to do it. Emma and James. Both of them. It was devastating. Terry said James had promised to pay him $10,000 for the murder, but it was as much about his loyalty to James as it was about the money, which Emma never even paid him, by the way. She gave him a couple of clunker cars instead. Hold up. She didn't pay her hitman? Okay, that's just dumb, Emma, dang. I mean, obviously, don't hire a hitman in the first place. We don't kill anybody at all, but especially don't hire a hitman because, as we've already established, there's only one real one left anyway,

and Jeff really isn't that good at it. But if you're going to, If you're going to hire a professional murderer, you're going to want to pay him for the job, because otherwise I would not expect to live long and prosper. Tip your waitresses and your hitmen, folks. But of course, that's the thing. That's probably one of the reasons why she wanted to use Terry Everett. Absolutely. Because he was loyal to James.

She probably figured she could stiff him on the bill, and he wouldn't do anything about it. And apparently, she was right. Just like the fence. God, I hate her freaking guts. Same. So poor Enoch and William were now in a position no family member ever wants to be in. Do they just drive Terry straight to the police station? No. Enok later told investigation discovery that he was in disbelief, thinking back to what Terry was like as a kid. He said, I look at him and I see that little kid face. Oh, God. That's so sad. So they decided to give Terry the chance to do the right thing on his own. They told him, you have to turn yourself in, and will help you in any way we can. Terry promised he would.

He seemed like he was feeling relieved to get it all off his chest, but then after that conversation, Terry kind of dropped off the map. Instead of turning himself in, he laid low. A year passed, and finally, Enoch decided he had to take matters into his own hands. They went to Detective Chambers, who set about verifying the story. Enick and William knew specifics about Ernest murder that they had no way of knowing unless they'd either been at the scene themselves or heard it from the killer. So that seemed to corroborate that Terry was the shooter. Terry's story was that he'd driven down to New Orleans that night at Emma's direction.

He'd waited in his car for Ernest to come home from Biker Night with Ronald. He said he sat and watched as Ernest and Ronald chatted for a while before Ronald drove away and as soon as Ernest was alone, he got out of his car and shot him twice in the chest. And on the way back to Mississippi, he threw the gun into Lake Pontchartrain. Detective Chambers also quickly confirmed that Emma and James had been having an affair. That's never hard, especially when you're dealing with a small church community where gossip is basically a competitive sport. Oh, yeah. Anyone who's ever belonged to a small church knows that nothing you do is ever private.

I went to a teensy little Christian university, and if you did something Friday night, by the time the cafeteria, opened at 10 on Saturday, everyone knew. Everybody'd seen your mugshot. In fact, there was a, like, admin who was having an affair with another admin in another apartment. And it was just an open secret. Everybody knew. Yep. So there's that little tidbit corroborated. And then she dug into Emma's phone records and found that our girl had actually called James before she called the police. Some more just unfriken-leavable amateur hour bullshit from this allegedly cunning serial wife. Good God, woman, you're bad at this. And when Detective Chambers looked into the insurance payout from Ernest's death,

she discovered that $400,000 of that money should have gone to Ernest's daughter Quintene. But Quentin hadn't received a dime. Emma had forged her signature and got all the money transferred to her and James. And Quentin later sued over this and won, by the way, so thank God for something. So basically, Detective Chambers unearthed a whole wave of evidence, enough to get an arrest warrant for Emma on charges of first-degree murder and solicitation of murder for earnest death, and a matching one for Terry Everett.

Ooh, double grab us. Very satisfying. So they arrested Terry first, and when the detectives got him into an interrogation room, the waterwork started up yet again. Detective Chambers later told investigation discovery, I spoke with him and he cried like a baby. I've never seen a man cry the way he cried.

But despite the tears, Terry kept his mouth shut. Descendant Chambers got the impression that he did want to get the murder off his chest, but he was just in such shock about being arrested that he couldn't speak. I don't know about all that. But I guess she was there and I wasn't, so she might be right. By the time they laid the grievous on Emma, she was living in Kansas City with yet another new husband-slash-future life insurance payout.

She'd married him just a year after James's murder, and he seemed to think the whole thing was just a travesty of justice. He was just totally devoted to Emma. That precious little baby angel could never hurt anybody. Just, oh, honey. Oh, you sweet pumpkin. You have no idea the bullet you just. dodged, man. She was going to have you on a slab, my guy, just like all the others.

Emma seemed a little bit fuzzy about the reason she'd been arrested. Am I here for again? You're like, uh, your husband? And I swear to God, y'all, Emma had the gut-dang nerve to say, which one? Oh my God, which one? Lord have mercy, this woman. Which, which husband? Or am I being tried to murder? God almighty. As they got ready for trial, the biggest obstacle, the prosecution had in their path was the lack of physical evidence in earnest case. The gun had ended up in Lang Pontchatrain, after all. And all they really had was a pair of shell casings, but no gun to match them with. They hoped they could get Terry Everett to flip on Emma, so they decided to try him first. If they could put him away, maybe they could get

Emma, too. Enoch Raine testified against his adopted brother, and he was so brave, y'all. He had to smear his own brother's name. That cannot be easy. I mean, ask yourself if you could do it. I think most of us probably could, but it would hurt like a punch in the kidney. So the jury found Terry guilty of second-degree murder, and the prosecutors offered him 40 years in lieu of life in prison if he'd testify against Emma. And the dipshit refused to do it. Why? Was he scared of her? what's she going to do to him in prison? Was it some kind of misplaced loyalty to James?

I have no idea. It's bizarre. It could have been, you know, that machismo snitches get stitches thing, too, I guess. But it was finally time for Emma's trial, and they called Terry to the stand. He flat out refused to testify. So in a neat little bit of legal wrangling, the prosecution was then able to show his refusal to answer on the record and impeach his previous statements to William and Enoch. That meant now their testimony couldn't be called hearsay because Terry had been given a chance to take the stand to himself and refused.

So once again, Enoch and Uncle William took the stand. And this time, there was no sadness. This was their chance finally to roast this bitch like she deserved to be roasted. and see some justice for earnest. And for James, too, even though this trial wasn't for him. And even though they knew he'd done an evil, stupid thing. He was still their brother. They were always going to love him.

It's weird, though. When you listen to Enoch and William in interviews, they seem to feel worse for Terry than they do for James. I guess maybe because he was so remorseful when he'd confessed to them that night, or maybe because they just couldn't stop thinking of him as that little kid they'd known years ago. Maybe it just because it sucks to see somebody you care about go to prison for the rest of their lives, even if you know they brought it on themselves. Their testimony, of course, was devastating for Emma.

And so was the fact that she'd involved her daughter in this mess, getting her to forge earnest signature to make James a beneficiary on his life insurance policy. Emma's daughter had already been charged with that fraud. Holy shit. Can you imagine dragging your kid into your murder plot? Gross. That little detail is one of the worst ones, I think. This woman was 100% about her own self-interest, just narcissists on a molecular level. Absolutely. And the fact that she'd ruined her own daughter's life for greed was a massive blow to Emma's defense. And the prosecution had one more little trick up their sleeve. Buckle up for this, campers. See, Emma had yet another. late husband in her rearview mirror. Before she ever met Ernest. Yep.

His name was Leroy Evans, and he died, I'm sure you'll be stunned to hear, under mysterious circumstances. First, he'd been in an accident in 1993, a hit and run, with no witnesses, allegedly. He survived, but became paraplegic.

Emma brought him home, took care of him for about a year until one night he choked on his feeding tube and died. Now, campers, come on. Suspicious as hell, right? Suspicious as hell. In fact, Leroy's family fully believed Emma was responsible, not only for murdering him, but for the accident that paralyzed him in the first place. They believe that was her first attempt on his life. And here's what we know. Emma was the last person to go into Leroy's

room before he died. And she'd collected a tidy life insurance payout after his death which she used to start her new life in New Orleans. Now can we prove she killed Leroy? Nope. And she's never been tried for it. Do we suspect the heck out of her? Uh, yeah. And clearly, so did the prosecutors at her trial for earnest murder. We have a woman who, over the span of 18 years, was married three times, one husband died under odd circumstances, and two were outright murdered, shot to death. So I guess she was married four times, but she was married to three men who died. I'm actually kind of surprised the judge allowed the prosecution to bring up Leroy's death, but there's an undeniable pattern here. And the jury obviously agreed, because they found Emma guilty of second-degree murder

in the death of Ernest Smith. She was sentenced to life without parole. It was a huge relief for our guys, Enoch and William, and I hope they have some peace about it now, especially since it wouldn't have happened without them. I mean, they are the heroes of the story, no doubt. Emma's fourth husband, by the way, insists she's innocent. Bless his little old heart.

I'm just glad he's safe, you know. Emma, of course appealed, arguing that the judge had let in hearsay evidence, but it was denied, thank God, because this bitch is right where she belongs. So, Camper's yet another. reminder, if we needed it, to look real hard at those people who are the life of the party but seem to care a little too much about the sparkly things in life, and not enough about stuff like paying the people who work for them and treating people with basic respect.

As Detective Descinda Chambers told investigation discovery, preacher's wife, business owner, of course she was in disguise. Indeed she was, and there are plenty more just like her. Stay frosty, campers. So that was a wild one, right, campers? You know we'll have another one. for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the True Crime Campfire. And as always,

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