True Crime Campfire - The Misfit: Serial Husband John Smith Pt 2 (FINALE)

Episode Date: October 9, 2026

In last week’s episode, we met John Smith, a lying, manipulative weirdo who almost certainly had killed his missing second wife, Fran. Towards the end of that episode, we learned that John had been married before, to a young woman named Janice Hartman—and that Janice, just like Fran, had gone missing, never to be seen again. We started that episode with a grim discovery six years after Janice’s disappearance—the skeleton of a young woman in a plywood box beside a country road in western Indiana, her legs cut off below the knees. This week, it all comes together. Ka'Chava: Go to https://kachava.com and use code CAMPFIRE for 15% off your first order.  Sources: Michael Fleeman, The Stranger in My Bed NBC's Dateline, S32E37, “Chameleon” https://www.supremecourt.ohio.gov/rod/docs/pdf/9/2002/2002-Ohio-4402.pdf https://legalclarity.org/betty-fran-smith-case-from-disappearance-to-dropped-charges https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2004/oct/03/handler-hailed-for-her-search-dogs-sent-to-prison Follow 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/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/truecrimecampfire/?hl=enEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 last week's episode, we met John Smith, a lying, manipulative weirdo who almost certainly had killed his missing second wife, Fran.

Toward the end of that episode, we learned that John had been married before to a young woman named Janice Hartman, and that Janice, just like Fran, had gone missing, never to be seen again. We started that episode with a grim discovery six years after Janice's disappearance, the skeleton of a young woman in a plywood box beside a country road in western Indiana, her legs cut off below the knees. This week, it all comes together. This is part two of The Misfit, the Crimes of John Smith. In March of 1992, Detective Michael Dansbury, of the West Windsor PD made a call.

West Windsor, New Jersey was where John Smith and his wife Fran had been living when Fran had gone missing. Thanks to some detective work by Fran's sister and daughter, Dansbury now knew that Fran not only wasn't John's first wife, she wasn't the first wife who had gone missing. In 1974, John's first wife, Janice Hartman, had disappeared in Ohio shortly after divorcing him. She was never seen again. So Danesbury called the Wayne County Sheriff's Office and spoke to a detective. detective named Brian Potts, who agreed to look through the files from the investigation 18 years earlier. Things didn't get off to a hugely promising start. Detective Dansbury had spoken with Janice Hartman's family, so the investigators knew that Janice's divorce from John had been

finalized three days before her disappearance, and that she was living with her dad in Doyle's town, about 15 miles from the trailer park in Worcester, where John Smith lived. John had filed a missing person's report, and an officer had gone to interview him, and that first report listed Janice as still being his wife and her address still in the trailer park. Her employment was listed as housewife. Janice was actually making a little money as a go-go dancer at a bar, dancing on tables and shiny, skimpy little outfits. It seemed that back in 1974, John already had no problem at all lying confidently to the police. He said Janice had still been wearing her wedding and engagement rings, as well as a jeweled wristwatch that John had given her.

She had bruises on her face and arms. The report described Janice's personality in ways that her friends and family would back up, bold, boisterous, friendly, smiles, jokes, and happy. According to John, on November 17th, he had been at the Sun Valley Bar with Janice and her friend Kathy. John had left, but from Kathy he'd learned that Janice had driven her home to Doylestown, and in the car with them had been a man possibly named John Richardson. In the morning, when John had woken up, he'd discovered that Janice's gray Mustang was parked outside his trailer. By his second interview, John had dropped the pretense that Janice was still living with him.

He said he'd assumed Janice had left the car there after driving to Worcester to file charges at the county courthouse against multiple very sketchy men. There was no indication in this particular report of what those charges related to, but there was the number for the appropriate file, which Detective Potts would get to a little less. later. So obviously this added another wrinkle. Janice had vanished right after divorcing John, but also right before filing charges against several people. John wasn't making himself any less suspicious. A week after Janice went missing, he packed up and moved back in with his grandparents in the little village of Seville, about 10 miles north of Worcester. The report also included the first indication that John and Janice's four-year marriage had been troubled. John said that three separate times Janice had just packed a bag and run off to Florida where her brother lived.

A week before her disappearance, Janice's doctor had prescribed her the barbiturate phenobarbital. The report said this was, quote, for her trying to get to sleep, she had been having problems. This was decades before HIPAA, so Janice's doctor told the cops he thought she had been very nervous and seemed to be very mixed up. Not much happened in the investigation for a few months until, pressured by Janice's his mom, detectives made a half-hearted attempt to move things along. They interviewed John's grandmother. They didn't make much effort to talk to John again, and got in touch with authorities in Florida to see if there was any sign of Janice down there,

which there was not. The report ended, investigation continues. But it did not. No more effort was made to find Janice Hartman, which Detective Potts found astonishing when he read the report on the charges she'd been about to file. On Saturday, November 9th, Janice had gone out to the Portage pub in Doyle's Town with a date, Leonard. Late at night, a guy asked if they wanted to come to a party at a house nearby. Just before 3 a.m., Janice and her date showed up at the party and got a couple of beers. Whether from conversation or just because somebody recognized her, Doylestown is not a big place, it came out that Janice was a go-go dancer, and one of the guys there asked her to dance for them.

Janice said she hadn't been paid to dance, so the guy said he'd pay her. Janice agreed to dance in the middle of the room. During the second song, someone asked her to take her top off. Janice took off her sweater because she'd been working earlier and had her go-go top on underneath. During the third song, one guy tried to grab her. Janice broke loose and told him to quit it. He threw her down, and as Janice struggled, he called her a bitch and tore off the rest of her clothes. Janice scrambled free and tried to crawl away on all fours, but two men grabbed her by the ankle.

and dragged her into the bedroom, where they threw her onto the waterbed. I think you can probably tell this already, but the next minute or so is going to be about sexual assault, so listen with discretion. One of them climbed on top and tried to rape her, but he couldn't because Janice kept struggling and need him in the balls. He started choking her and said, Bitches like you don't deserve to live. Four more men came into the bedroom. She was held down on the bed, one man holding each arm and leg, while the guy who had first tried to grab her on the dance floor sexually assaulted her with his hand.

Janice's date, Leonard, came in and tried to rape her, but couldn't because she kept squirming. Another guy tried, but also couldn't. Janice bit his thumb and got snacked in the face. She broke free at one point and ran for the window, which she smashed and screamed for help. She was thrown back onto the bed and hit some more times. The guy whose thumb she'd bitten came back in, carrying a shotgun. He pointed it at her and said, Narks always have an easy way out.

Someone in the living room shouted, God, don't kill her. And somebody else shoved the guy with a shotgun out of the room. Another man shooed everyone out of the bedroom, then came back and gave Janice her clothes. She got dressed and ran out, going straight to the police station. This is why Janice hadn't been sleeping

and had been nervous and mixed up. She was absolutely terrified, not only from the trauma of what happened, but because she was about to file charges on multiple violent scumbags. But before she could, she vanished. It's hard to think of more suspicious circumstances for a disappearance, but apparently not to the Wayne County Sheriff's Department of 1974,

who don't seem to have made any attempt at all to investigate the men who'd assaulted her. Jesus. Yeah. And as we've seen, they quickly gave up on investigating Janice's disappearance altogether. It's hard to come to any conclusion other than, this was good old boy small town Ohio. Janice was a party girl, and they didn't give a shit about her. her. Oh my God. I hope they all rot in hell.

Absolutely. Detective Potts reopened the case and Michael Dansbury drove up from New Jersey to help out along with another detective, Dave Mansou. Obviously, there are a ton of difficulties in reopening a case almost 20 years later, but they did their best, interviewing as many of the people involved as they could, or trying to interview them anyway. John's grandparents, Chester and Ethel, simply refused to answer any questions and told the cops to go away. His mom was no help either, showing what Detective Mansou described as a feeling of extreme indifference. They had more luck with John's younger brother, Michael. Michael shared John's red hair, but otherwise didn't have much in common with him. He was a regular blue-collar guy, a forklift operator without any of his brother's strangeness.

From Michael, the detectives got the bare outlines of the family dynamics. The boys had been mostly raised by their grandparents, who they were still close with. Their mom had married a successful real estate developer, so there was serious money in the family now. John saw more of it than Michael. He was their mom's favorite. Michael wasn't close to his mom and stepfamily, and he hadn't been closed with John for a long time either. When the detectives told him that John's wife was missing, Michael said that was a shame. He'd liked Sheila. Sheila, remember, was John's longtime girlfriend, who he kept seeing throughout his marriage to Fran. Michael had never even heard of Fran.

Before they could question Michael further, his grandmother burst in, as Detective Potts put it, like a tornado and yelled, Don't tell them anything. Wow. The interview was over, but John's family had done nothing to alleviate the investigator's suspicions. From other people, mainly Janice's friends and family, the detectives were able to build a picture of John Smith's life, which for the most part seemed normal. He was born in April of 1951 in the tiny Ohio town of Homerville, and three years later, his brother Michael, arrived. Soon after that, their mom, Grace, filed for divorce, and she and the boys moved to nearby Seville to stay with her parents. The boy's dad was apparently never a part of their lives after that. Their grandparents ran a little marathon gas station on Route 3, right next to their house, and after a couple of years, Grace bought a place just two doors down. Seville was a farming town and probably exactly what you'd picture if you think of small town Ohio.

Tree-lined, green streets, a cute tiny little downtown, everything moving real slow. The boy's grandfather, Chester, often just hung out and chatted with his buddies at the gas station for hours. He was well-liked in town, a volunteer fireman and member of the city council, a friendly guy, but also quiet and kind of secretive. His wife Ethel had more of a sharp edge and often fought. with her daughter. Chester took the boys hunting, watched sports with them. They sometimes called him dad, which is essentially what he was to them. In their generic all-American Midwestern town, the boys apparently had a generic all-American Midwestern childhood, riding bikes, playing ball, working on engines with their granddad. John grew up into a thin, pale kid with red hair

cut in a bowl. He wasn't exactly a ladies man in high school, not dating at all as far as anybody could remember, but he wasn't an outcast or anything. He ran track and won medals, he worked on cars and motorcycles, he had friends, just a normal high school kid. And like a normal high school kid, he had a crushing desire to be cool. When he was 16, he got a motorcycle and would race around the country roads. He got a leather jacket, too, and tried to look tough. Imagine Beaker from the Muppets dressing up as the Fonz and you're not going to be too far off. I'm sorry, that's nightmare fuel in it.

I take it back. Imagine that. Bleach it out of your brain. But it was high school, and sometimes in high school, all you need is the furniture. I think every school in the country has girls for whom a motorcycle and a leather jacket is enough to get their attention. And at a graduation party, John met a cute petite girl from Doyle's town named Janice Hartman. Janice was a bright, sweet-natured girl with a bit of a rough and tumble edge from growing up with two older brothers. When she was eight, Janice's mom got a call from a neighbor complaining that the neighbor's kid was getting beat up. Janice's mom assumed it was one of her boys, but nope, it was eight-year-old Janice, furious and

beaten the snot out of a boy years older than her, which reminds me of me at that age, because I broke a kid's nose one time because he kicked one of our cats, just threw an elbow and bam, I didn't even get in trouble for that either. My parents were like, oh, yes, we'll make sure to talk to her. And they were like, no, because that kid was the worst. You know, we're all cat people in our family. Her appearance split not long after Janice's sister was born when Janice was 10, and their mom took care of the family herself.

Things were always tight financially. Janice was a smart kid, getting good grades at school with a bunch of friends. She went to parties, but didn't really date seriously, and she had a rebellious streak. She liked guys with motorcycles. Years later, Janice's mom would be baffled by what had attracted Janice to John Smith. Beats a heck out of me, she said. I guess it was the motorcycle. It might have initially been the motorcycle, but John shifted between shyness and near-babbling enthusiasm about his big dreams.

He could seem both smarter and a lot kinder than he really was. Right, and pickings can be slim in small towns. If nothing else, John was different from all the corn-fed farm boys that mostly populated the high schools. Still, it was a relationship that would probably have flamed out fast, except that just a couple of months after they met, Janice's mom got a call from a friend who ran a local motel. Janice was there, the friend said, and she was married. She and John had run off to Detroit for a courthouse wedding

where they wouldn't have to wait as long for a license, then slunk back to Ohio. Oh, my God. Janice's mom called the motel and convinced them to come home and met John Smith, her new, son-in-law for the first time. She didn't like him, thought he was a bullshitter who wouldn't take care of Janice at all,

and she was absolutely right. The newlyweds moved to Columbus, where Janice managed a gas station, and John studied engineering at Ohio State. Things went downhill immediately. They fought a lot, often about money. Janice was working her fingers to the bone. She didn't begrudged John at the time he spent

studying, but he spent hours just driving around. If you have all that spare time, you get a job and help out. How dare you? I'm a dreamer. Yeah, okay, but someone's got to pay for the gas for you to drive around in your dream mobile. Within a few weeks of moving to Columbus, she was describing John to her family as an asshole. When they visited Doyle's town, Janice's older brother, Gary, tried to get to know John.

Gary had learned to play chess when he was in the army. He was a good player, and John thought he was a good player. They had a game, and when Gary called Checkmate, John threw the board against the wall, pieces flying everywhere, and marched to the front door calling out to Janice. We're leaving. When Janice came through and saw the chess pieces everywhere, she said to Gary, you must have won. It's like Mac from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. You got to nail the game board down before we start, because at some point I will try and flip it. John was physically abusive almost from the start of their marriage, which only got worse as time went on. Like many abusers, he occasionally felt guilty and tried to make things better between them,

one time going shopping with Janice's younger sister and picking out a jeweled wristwatch with the letter J set in emeralds. Then he'd lose his temper again. All right, I'm just going to admit it. I'm a sweet demon. I've never met a dessert I didn't like. And my favorite sweet of all is caramel. I think I could eat a rock if you put some caramel on it. and that sweet caramel-y goodness is even better when there's a little saltiness thrown in.

Just like life, right? That's why I'm so stoked about Kachava's new salted caramel flavor. It's like a cheat code for my health. I can get a little something salty sweet while supporting whole-body nutrition. I'm not always the best about getting my five a day, so Kachava's like a minor miracle for me. Just two scoops provides complete nutrition with protein, fiber, greens, and more. I just started it, but I already feel like my energy levels are up, and I'm excited to boost my immune system a little bit before winter. And if caramel's not your thing, no worries.

Kachava comes in a ton of great flavors, chocolate, vanilla, chai, coffee, cinnamon, French toast, and more. Try them all to find your favorites. Campers, we know y'all are already sweet. Now embrace your salty side. Go to kachava.com and use code campfire for 15% off your first order. That's Kachava, K-A-V-A-V-com, Code Campfire. A few years into their marriage, the previously carefree Janice was obviously depressed, often crying when she talked to her mom on the phone. In June of 1974, Janice told her mom that John had said, if you ever leave me, I'm going to kill you.

Take that shit so seriously, too. I read something not long ago. I believe it was by Dr. Laura Richardson, who's an expert on domestic violence in the UK. And I believe that's what it was. And she said, if your partner says that to you, they mean it. Most of the time, they are not blustering. Take that shit seriously.

Yeah. Nevertheless, the next month, Janice filed for divorce. And the month after that, she and John were legally separated. She moved back in with her mom, but her mom treated her more or less the same as Janice's 13-year-old sister. In bed by 11, no visitors that her mom didn't know. Janice moved into her dad's trailer home, close to her friend Kathy, who lived in the same trailer park.

Janice was 23, free from her asshole X for the first time in her adult life. She wanted to have some fun. She had a couple of favorite bars. She went on dates, and she got a gig as a go-go dancer and bought a secondhand Mustang. She was enjoying life and even got back on somewhat friendly terms with John. Yeah, but friendly was not the word for John's attitude to Janice. He dropped out of school and moved to a trailer in Worcester close to Doyle's town, and more often than not, when Janice would go ahead.

out drinking or dancing, John would show up. He was stalking her. On November 10th, Janice was attacked at the party we described earlier. On November 14th, her divorce to John was finalized, apparently amicably, using the same lawyer and dividing their assets with no argument. Three days after that, Janice vanished and was never seen alive again. John continued with his life without a care in the world. The next year, he became good friends with a woman named Sandy, and although they were soon living together, it seems like they were just friends with Sandy being kind of a normality mask for John. He knew he was weird and he had a new engineering executive job at an automotive company where he felt like he needed to appear normal and stable, so he had Sandy pretend to be his girlfriend, which is just about the weirdest thing it could have possibly done.

So good job. They even talked about getting married, so Sandy could be his pretend wife instead of just his pretend girlfriend. You know, just like everybody does, right? John told Sandy that Janice had started doing drugs and hanging out with a rough crowd, and they agreed to mutually end their marriage, none of which was true. He said Janice owed money to drug dealers, and one night he'd gotten an anonymous call to go to a remote location. There, he'd found Janice's dead body with semen on it. He said he'd taken off her wedding and engagement rings and fled. When Sandy asked why he hadn't called the cops, John.

said he thought he'd be killed if he did. Then he showed the rings to Sandy. Two decades later, in 1992, the detectives who heard this story from Sandy had no doubt that John was full of shit, as usual. In New Jersey, they asked him in for another interview to talk about Janus. It was a long, intense interview, 12 hours with three experienced detectives. John just sat there, cool as a cucumber with no lawyer, didn't eat anything, didn't drink anything, didn't go to the bathroom, didn't even take off his coat until nine hours in. As before, he lied easily and didn't care when he got caught out. Like, he said Janice's Mustang had been found on the side of a highway 100 miles away, and when a detective pointed out that the police report said it had been

parked right outside John's trailer, he just shrugged it up. He just didn't care. After 12 hours, the police were convinced they were talking to a double murderer, but they had nothing they could arrest him on. They let him walk. Imagine how frustrating. Oh my God, after 12 hours. And he's just sitting there like, okay, and then they have to let him go. Back home, John took a call from Sheila Sauter, his long-time girlfriend up in Connecticut. Unknown to John, Sheila had agreed to work with the police, good for her, and a couple of detectives were sitting with her as she made the call. And the cops in West Windsor recorded John's side of the conversation. There wasn't any big bombshell, but they did record a couple of statements that reinforced their suspicions of John.

For one, he told Sheila he'd had no idea that Janice had been missing until that day, when, in truth, he'd been the one who filed her missing persons report back when it first happened. And when Sheila said, everything is just falling to pieces because you're lying to everyone around you, John just calmly said, that's correct. He was lying to everyone. This guy, man. John soon quit his job in New Jersey where everyone thought he was a murderer and moved up to his house in Milford, Connecticut. Sheila had broken things off with him right after that phone call and moved out of the house.

In 1993, an embarrassed man came forward with a possible lead. The story of Fran's disappearance had made some waves in the news, and this guy had seen a picture of the Milford house in the newspaper. He recognized it, because the previous year he'd picked up a sex worker, and after the second year, he'd picked up a sex worker, and after the they'd finished their business, he offered to drive her home. The house he'd taken her to was John's place on the beach. The sex worker was already well known to Milford Police, and it didn't take long to track her down. Her name, get this shit, was Janice Miller, and she didn't just have the same name as John's first wife. The two looked similar enough that they could have been sisters. John had picked Janice Miller up in Bridgeport in the summer of 1992 after Sheila had moved out of the Milford house.

John brought Janice back there. The next night, he went out driving and found her again. This went on for a few nights until John went back to New Jersey. He was still mostly just coming up to Connecticut on weekends at this point. Soon, he asked Janice to move in, so they'd be together when he was in town. He would pay for whatever she needed. She hesitantly agreed. John creeped her out from the start, but she had a drug problem and found it hard to turn away any kind of steady income.

John probably thought he was paying Janice to sit quietly at home while he was in Jersey, but she didn't, of course. She brought other clients back to the house and spent time with her actual boyfriend there, too. John told Janice Miller that his first wife had been a drug addict just like her. One morning, he said, the FBI had come to the house and told him that his wife was a snitch and had been murdered by drug dealers. He never saw her body, which wasn't returned to him. Guess what her name was? He asked Janice. What? She said.

Janice, John said. Holy shit. Janice was scared, which was obviously what John wanted. John would yell at her for things she hadn't done and knew nothing about. I got the feeling he wasn't talking to me, she said later. He was talking to somebody else. He was confusing me with somebody else. Oh, my God.

That is freaking creepy. Ugh. He paid a woman to be the ghost in his house. my God, I know. Oh, it's so wrong. Janice only stayed the house for about a month before walking out on John. We got into an argument, she said. I threw a pumpkin at him. Good for her. I hope it was a heavy one. In fact, I hope it was one of those little ones that are like really hard and dense.

Yeah, that'd be even better. Like a baseball hitting him. Her boyfriend came and picked her up. As with everything else in the investigation into John, this was super creepy, but it was nothing they could arrest him on. Just like the investigation into Janice Hartman's disappearance almost 20 years earlier, the investigation around Fran was going cold. It would stay that way for years. And just a side note here, we don't know how extensive John's history with sex workers was,

but picking someone up and taking her back to your house doesn't seem like a rookie move. We know that when John was married to Fran in Florida, his weekend business trips were actually John's up to Connecticut to see his girls. friend. John also habitually worked long hours during the week. This is just speculation, but I'd be willing to bet a lot of those nights he went out driving and paid for sex before going home to his wife. Oh yeah, I think so too. John moved back to Ohio, moving in with his mom and stepdad. In 1994, his stepdad died, and John and his mom took over running his real estate business. Detectives estimated the business was worth $28 million. They kept John's brother Michael on the payroll as a handyman doing repair

work on the apartment complexes. It's not hard to see how some resentment would creep in there. No kidding. Good God. It was essentially coincidence that got the case moving again. Robert Hilland had started out as a patrolman with the West Windsor PD and worked there for eight years before hitting the law enforcement big time and becoming an agent with the FBI. Specifically, he joined the Cold Case Homicide Unit of the New York office. About six months after he'd started in 1998, Helen had to come back to West Windsor to testify in a case from his time there, and while visiting his former colleagues, he had a cup of coffee with Detective Michael Dansberry. On a shelf behind

Danesbury was a thick stack of binders, the collected paperwork of the investigation into John Smith. When Hilland asked about the case, Dansbury described it as dead in the water. He thought John Smith was going to get away with two murders. West Windsor had a population of about 20,000 people, and there were hard limits on how much money the police department could spend on a case. The FBI had far greater resources, but it was also a notoriously rigid bureaucracy. Agent Hilland had to convince his superiors before he'd be able to take on investigating John Smith, and it was a hard sell. The Cold Case Homicide Unit mainly focused on murders related to organized crime.

But Hillen convinced his bosses that catching John Smith was worth their time and got to work. After reviewing the investigation and conferring with the various police departments involved, Hilland realized they had one big problem right away. Nobody knew where John Smith was. He hadn't been seen in Ohio for a year, and previous experience with his family suggested they weren't going to talk. It wasn't easy to find him because of his name, John Smith, being the second most common masculine name in the country,

just a little behind the name of John's brother, Michael Smith. I just thought it was fake. I completely expected when I was reading about this case to find out that that was a fake name. Nope. He's just the pumpkin's. spice latte of John Smith, just basic as hell. He's literally the beige man. He is, except for the bright red bulk of hair. But yeah, definitely. The FBI and the Wayne County Sheriff's Department

combed laboriously through documents and databases along with Sherry and Deanna, Fran's sister and daughter, who had quite consistently outperformed the authorities in chasing down valuable information. Between them, they located John. He was in Escondido, just north of San Diego, working at a place called La Forza Automobiles, which serviced and customized Italian sports cars. He was renting a room from a co-worker, and disturbingly for investigators, already had a new lady in his life, Diane Bertelin. Agent Hillen arranged a conference with everyone investigating the case. He had had FBI profilers take a look at John, and he told the other investigators, there was a chance they were not just looking at a double murderer, but a serial killer.

John traveled all across the country for work. He was skilled at building quick relationships with women, and he had a history of hiring sex workers. By the time he'd met Fran, John was kind of a goofball with a too big smile, but that was a disguise. The bad-tempered, violent abuser that Janice had known was the real guy. There could be missing persons and unsolved homicides out there that no one investigating John knew about at all. For the next few months, the FBI trailed John in Southern California, but they learned from interviewing people that John knew he was being watched. Given his history, this was probably a good thing for Diane Birdland, who had just become John's third wife. Of all the women in his life,

Diane was probably the least like him, open and honest to the point of bluntness, where John was reflexively secretive. She worked for a sheet metal company that did business with Laforza, and when a mutual friend introduced them, John kept hounding her for dates. Diane wasn't interested at first. I thought he was ugly, she said. Blunt indeed. But she gave in, which had more to do with the sports cars, John Grove, than his winning personality. It's the motorcycle all over again. When he asked me to marry him, I said, okay, why not? She told the San Diego Union Tribune, really, Diane? Okay, why not?

It's really just not what I would advise your approach to be when somebody asks you to marry him, whatever. It was a good way for me to get out of a situation where I was living paycheck to paycheck. Agent Hilland had an ambitious plan to interview everyone significant in the investigation again, all on the same day in May so that no one could warn John in advance. Hilland himself would interview John, along with his partner Mary Gallaghan. The profilers were confident that John would agree to be interviewed without an attorney. He'd sailed through previous police interviews and had enough of an ego to think he was invincible. He'd also be eager to learn what the FBI had on him.

Sure enough, when John showed up to work one morning, the agents stopped him and said they were investigating the disappearances of his two wives. They asked if he'd come to a room they'd reserved at the Holiday Inn and be interviewed, and John said, sure. This episode is brought to you by Vinted. So I moved recently, and while, of course, it was very exciting, it was also so overwhelming. Going through my closet and drawers and discovering clothes I hadn't worn in ages, part of moving is also decluttering, and I had mountains of clothes I really wasn't ever going to wear again. What I wish I'd known was that I could have decluttered and given those old clothes a new life with Vinted. Vinted is an app that makes it easy for everyday sellers, people like you and me,

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streaming queue. You're not just watching true crime. You're running the investigation from the comfort of your couch. Welcome to Murder, She Watched, the podcast where we recap, dissect, and slightly overanalyze some of the best and craziest true crime documentaries on our favorite streamers. Did the spouse do it? Why is the shady neighbor wearing leather gloves in July? Why did this guy agree to be interviewed in this documentary? We ask the tough questions that you're often just screaming at your TV. So every week, we break down the twists, red, hearings and absurd documentaries that have kept you up all night. It's high drama, cozy vibes, and absolute couch detective energy. Grab your throat blanket and hit subscribe. Search murder she

watched wherever you listen to podcasts and let's solve this thing together. Initially, the interview was the same as the previous ones John had experienced with him lying carelessly and then changing his story on the spot when he was called out on it. The agents deliberately went over old ground, knowing John would feel comfortable. He did seem comfortable, but it quickly became evident that this was just another one of his disguises. Hilland asked John if he told his girlfriend, that's correct when she'd asked if he was lying to everyone about Fran's disappearance.

John denied ever saying that, so Hillen played him the tape of him saying exactly that. Hillen said, John, when you told Sheila that you lied to police, what did you lie about? John shrugged and instead of answering, let out a high-pitched shriek like the whistle of a tea kettle. The agents didn't know what to make of that, neither do I, other than it looked like John was feeling the pressure. I'm sorry, he did what? Oh, he just let out a shriek like you do. No big deal. You already compared him to Beaker? Like, there is something about him that is distinctly Muppet-like. It's his bug eyes, I think, and the shrieking.

The shrieking. He does have those big, like, heaven's gate cult, like big eyes. Yeah, you can see the entirety of his iris. That's what I mean by by the eyes. I'm not, yeah. Yeah, it's just, it's so creepy. They also used some cool profiler tactics to psych John out. They posted pictures and names on the wall of all the people they were interviewing that day.

and everyone in John's life, along with surveillance photos of John with Diane and San Diego. The idea was to make John feel that all the vast resources of the federal government were closing in on him, that he was already caught. Hillen said, John, your life is you know it is over. This is not the minor leagues.

This isn't West Windsor, Ohio. This is the FBI. Yeah. This was mostly bluster. With no body, investigators needed someone to talk, ideally John himself. Hilland and Gallaghan dialed out the pressure, asking him how he felt about his grandparents, who were both dead by now, having to live with his dark secrets.

His grandmother had died just three months earlier. The agents asked how John felt about her watching over John and listening to him lie. John almost broke, his face turning bright red and his voice shaking. He started crying. I'm tired of lying, John said. I don't want to lie anymore. Then don't, Helen said. My life is a nightmare, John Mown.

I'm tired of living this nightmare. I want the nightmare to end. Oh, my God. Hilland thought he had him, but he didn't. John said he had a headache, that he got migraines. He laid on the couch, crying and complaining about the pain, and curled up into a fetal position. After about 15 minutes of that, he said he felt pain radiating from his arms and chest,

a heart attack. The agents thought correctly he was faking it and said so, but John insisted the pain was real. There was really no choice. Imagine how a judge would react if a suspect was refused help and forced to continue an interview during an agonizing medical emergency. Imagine if John actually died. They'd beaten deep shit. So the agents called 911 and paramedics quickly arrived. They put John onto a gurney and hooked him up to an IV in a portable EKG machine.

As they wheeled him out of the hotel room, John looked across at Agent Hillen and winked. Hillen wanted to kill him. There was, of course, no indication that John had suffered any kind of cardiac event. Oh, you little rascals-looking motherfucker. That's what Letitia Stalk did, too, the woman who killed her stepson. She faked a cardiac event in the middle of her interrogation. Yeah, I think cops call it incarceritis. When you start to feel a medical event.

event happening when you're being arrested or interrogated. It's a, I think, appropriate. The interview with John was a bus, and it soon became apparent that all the other interviews across the country hadn't shaken loose anything important, at least not at first. The investigators had thought that John's brother, Michael, might be the one to give them what they needed. When he'd been interviewed years earlier, he seemed like the most normal level-headed person in John's family, the one most likely to have a normal human conscience. The detective who'd interviewed him back then, Dave Mansu, also thought Michael had been uncomfortably holding something back.

Now, Mansu interviewed Michael again for hours, along with FBI agent Bob Drew. Mansu went after Michael aggressively, being kind of a jerk while Agent Drew hung back, more sympathetic, seeming embarrassed by how Mansu was acting. I'm guessing they worked this out beforehand. Good cop, bad cop, is a clue.

cliche, but it's a genuine, effective interview technique. Still, Michael said he knew nothing at all about Janice's disappearance back in 1974, although both interviewers thought he was holding something back. Michael Smith had been plagued by nightmares for years. A couple of weeks after the interview, he had a long conversation with his wife about what he knew, and then he went to see a lawyer. The lawyer called the FBI, and soon he and Michael were flying to New York to speak with Agent Bob Drew, who Michael felt he could trust. In 1974, a couple of weeks after Janice's disappearance, John and Michael had both come home to their grandparents' house to watch the Ohio State Michigan football game, a family tradition the boys

always enjoyed because their uncle and granddad would get mad and throw things at the TV. It's hugely entertaining, right? In the middle of the game, Michael went to find John and see why he wasn't watching the game with everybody else. John was out in the garage, building a plywood box. When Michael asked what it was for, John said it was for. was for Janice's belongings, but it was a weird shape for that, long and thin and shallow. Why are you building such a shitbox, Michael said? Why don't you build it more like a chest?

John got mad and yelled at him. As John's younger brother, Michael knew all about John's quick temper, so he left him to it and went back in to watch the rest of the game. He came back out around 7 p.m. and saw John rolling up some of Janice's clothes and putting them around the edges of the box, leaving a big space in the middle. When Michael asked why he was doing that, John yelled again and Michael left him to it. The box stayed in the garage for years, first with boxes and garbage bags of Janice's clothes on top of it, then under a shelf of oil cans and funnels. By 1979, John and Michael's mom had moved into a big new house with her wealthy husband, and Michael and his wife moved into her old house, two doors down from his grandparents.

Michael was helping his stepdad build a new apartment complex just outside town and always came home for lunch. One day when he was at the table eating, his grandfather Chester hurried in. White is a sheet. There's something wrong. You got to come quick. There's something wrong, Chester said. Chester had rented half the garage out to a neighbor, Jack Bister. They'd been cleaning the place when they found the box John had made years earlier and curious, pried off the top a little way. As Michael came in, his grandfather was clearly shaken up, but Jack Bister was giggling. There's an old dead turtle in that box, he said, watch out, it'll bite you. Look at it, Chester said. Michael pried the top off all the way, then poked at the clothes inside with a stick. He found what

looked like human legs, cut off just below the knees, with some sparse flesh almost mummified around the bones. Higher up, he saw a face, also nearly mummified, but still recognizable as someone Michael knew well. Janice Hartman, his brother's wife, who had disappeared years ago, go. We've got to call the police, Michael told his grandfather. We can't call the police. It'll kill Ethel, Chester said. His wife had recently had a heart attack. Chester started crying and walked down the street. Michael went inside and saw his grandmother sitting at the kitchen table, barely able to breathe in her recovery from the heart attack. You can understand why someone acts or does not act without excusing it, you know? Michael really did think that learning John was a murderer might kill

his grandmother. So he nailed the box shut, put it back in the garage, and called John, telling him they'd found the box while they'd been cleaning up. John, you know, we moved the box, and we opened the box. John asked if they'd looked inside. Michael said, yes. I'll be right there, John said. He was working in Western Indiana, most of two states away from home, but raced back in his new black corvette. Michael got a 12-pack of beer and drank all of it as he waited for his brother to get there. The story John told Michael was, of course, nonsense. He said an FBI agent and a sheriff's deputy had drugged him, and when he woke up, he was in a warehouse lying on the floor next to Janice's dead body.

Okay. The two men laughed at him and said they were going to frame him for murder. They knocked him out again, and the next time he woke up, John was back in his trailer, Janice's body beside him again. It was nice of them to do a super villain. monologue and then knock him out again and then replace his body. I think that was really really smart. Yeah. He'd picked Janice up and ran out to his van, peeling out of there just before a police car arrived with its lights on. Well, that sounds legit. Michael just wanted the body

gone. This is my problem, John said. I'll take care of it. He stuffed the box in the back of his Corvette and told Michael he'd get rid of it somewhere in Indiana. Then he drove off. You know, I have to wonder if John took his family's inaction and apathy is validation. It's just something I keep thinking about that he was like, well, they didn't say anything, so I must be fine. It's a terrible thing to think. And I wonder if that was part of what haunted Michael all those years too. Yeah. In 1999, investigators hearing this story were, skeptical. They had no doubt

that John had killed Janice, but cutting her legs off and storing her in a box for five years and his grandfather's garage, then racing off into the night with the box in the back of his midnight black corvette. It all seemed a little too dramatically gothic. They had more ordinary suspic

namely that if John wanted to dispose of Janice's body in 1979, there was a lot of fresh concrete being poured for garages at the new Grace Lane apartments that his stepdad was building just outside of town. They enlisted the help of Sandra Anderson, and more specifically, her nine-year-old Doberman-German-German Shepard mix, Eagle, who was obsessed with human remains and had a nose bordering on the supernatural. Oh, what a good boy.

Mm-hmm. Eagle homed in on one garage. FBI technicians checked with ground penetrating radar, then, curious, let Eagle have a look. He flopped down on the same spot where the radar had shaped. shown anomaly. Technicians cut through the concrete floor and carefully dug down. About two feet down, they found most of one canine tooth and fragments of an incisor, both clearly human. They thought they'd found Janice's remains, but there was nothing else down there, just those fragments of teeth. FBI technicians were able to extract mitochondrial DNA from the teeth and compare it to a sample

taken from Janice's mother. They did not match. Investigators knew the teeth were weren't Franz, either, because she'd been alive when the concrete had been poured. But just to cover their bases, they checked that, too. No match. They hadn't found Janice, and now wondered if they had a third victim to look for. They would never find out who the teeth came from. Sometime later, Fran's sister and daughter, still doing more effective detective work than most of the professionals, tracked down a storage unit John had rented. Sandra Anderson, an eagle, were called in again, and this time found several small

charred fragments of a human skull. This was chilling, but while Eagle was unquestionably a very good boy, Sandra Anderson was not a very good girl. In 2002, a crime scene technician in Michigan saw her plant a bone on the ground that Eagle subsequently discovered. Subsequent investigation showed that she planted

evidence at multiple scenes, including fabric, and a sawblade stained with her own blood, and a whole human toe. She was never accused of planting evidence in the Smith case, but obviously this makes the provenance of those skull fragments extremely spish. She certainly didn't plant the teeth, which were buried under concrete. The focus of the investigation moved to Western Indiana, where John had been working, and where he told Michael he would dispose of Janice's body. John had moved there in 1977 to work for his friend Scott Mentier. Scott and his wife felt sorry for John, who was playing the awkward outcast by now,

and he was a frequent visitor to their house. It was clear that John, now 27, had a painfully obvious crush on their 18-year-old daughter, Kathy. They had a few awkward dates, and John impulsively gave her a belover wristwatch with the letter J picked out in Emeralds. This was the watch he'd bought for Janice when they were married, and which he'd told police she'd been wearing the last time he'd seen her.

In 1999, Kathy still had the watch, and she gave it to detectives. In 1979, John missed a day of work. This wasn't like him at all. Yeah, remember he was always too busy with work to do anything helpful for Fran and their marriage. Yeah. And when he got back, he spun one of his usual bullshit stories. He'd had to go back to Ohio because of a problem with one of the apartment buildings there, and coming back, he'd been speeding so fast that the police couldn't catch him. Eventually, the cops blocked off all of Interstate 80 with two semi-trucks just to catch him. The next day, the judge looked at the ticket and said it only should.

showed him doing 70, but the arresting officer said he was reading it wrong. John had been doing 170 instead. He'd had to spend the night in jail, and that was why he'd missed work. Such elaborate stories he comes up with. The truth was, this lined up with the call from Michael, telling him they'd found and opened the box with Janice's remains. That was why John had gone back to Ohio, and presumably he'd missed work trying to find somewhere to hide her body. He hadn't done a good job, just dumping the box in a drainage ditch where it would be found, the following spring. John's new wife, Diane, was not oblivious to the rumors about her husband, nor was her daughter's

summer. John told Diane that a box containing a dead goat had been dropped off at his grandparents' house in 1979, and John had dumped it by the side of the road somewhere, and now was being accused of murder. He told Summer that Michael claimed there was a dead girl, not a goat, in the box, but John had never looked inside. He'd just dumped it somewhere out in the country, trying to throw his brother into the bus, that's real nice.

Both the FBI and Fran's family were in frequent contact with Diane, trying to keep her safe. In December of 1999, just over a year after getting married, Diane filed for an annulment. She had summer move in with her and changed her phone number and the locks on the doors. It almost wasn't enough. When he got the papers, John raced over to the house and ran up the stairs. When he couldn't open the door, he tried to smash the front window, but couldn't. He kicked in the door instead and ran furious into the kitchen where Diane was calling the cops. When he saw Summer, John's anger washed away like a receding wave and he had his usual calm, friendly mask on.

So creepy. If Summer hadn't been there, I think John would have killed her mom, no question. A few days later, Diane and Summer were stopped at an intersection when John pulled up beside them. He called over, This is what my last wife tried to do to me. Diane raced away and filed a restraining order as soon as she could. In Ohio, Detective Brian Potts composed a letter that he would send to every law enforcement agency in Indiana, briefly describing Janice and her disappearance, and that John may have disposed of her remains in a plywood box he'd left by the side of the road, somewhere in Indiana in 1979.

In February of 2000, in the Newton County Sheriff's Department, Jerry Berman opened the mail. He was a detective now, but back to the time, but back, Back in 1980, he'd been a sheriff's deputy, one of the ones who had secured the scene when a plywood box holding a mutilated skeleton had been found by the road just north of Morocco. He read the letter three times, the hairs rising up on the back of his neck. Then he called Brian Potts and said, hey, I think I've got your girl. Potts listened as Berman described the case, waiting for the thing he'd deliberately left out of the letter. The body recovered in 1980, had her legs cut off just below the knees, just like her.

Like Michael Smith had said, it had to be Janice. It was Janice, as DNA comparison quickly confirmed. Her body, what was left of it, was exhumed and combined with the parts kept in evidence storage. The initial 1980 report had suggested Janice's legs had been cut off with a power tool, but new study showed each leg had been cut off with a hand saw, slowly and meticulously post-mortem. There was no other sign of violence on the skeleton, possible way to determine cause of death. It would never be clear why

John had cut off her legs. Maybe he'd just made the box too short, but then why hadn't he put the severed legs in there too? No one would ever know what he had done with him. Oh, my God. On October 3, 2000,

the old habeas gravis came down on John Smith as he showed up for work in Escondido. John didn't resist and waived extradition to Ohio. This trial was by no means a slam dunk. The prosecution had a body, but no way to know how Janice had actually died. John was charged with aggravated murder, but the jury determined there was insufficient evidence

that he'd acted with prior calculation and design. The circumstances of Janus' death were just too fuzzy. But they convicted John of murder, and he received a statutory sentence of 15 years to life. He's still in prison, with his next parole hearing in 2029, when he'll be 78 years old. I don't like his chances. Yeah, and y'all look at his most recent prison mugshot. Just go look at it. Fran's body was never found, but in 2019, a New Jersey grand jury indicted John for her murder. In 2022, a judge ruled that prosecutors couldn't present evidence from John's Ohio conviction.

The case was dead. The prosecutors offered to dismiss the case if John told them what he'd done with Fran's body. He said he'd wrapped her in a dark blanket and thrown her in his case. industrial dumpster. And he said he was being vague about the details because he'd suffered a head injury in prison. FBI agent Robert Hillen said John's account was unreliable and probably untrue. Fran's sister and daughter, Sherry and Deanna, described the deal as an insult and noted that saying he was helping authorities might help John at his next parole hearing. Yeah, good luck with that. I think they're going to take one look at the sack of shit and send him right back to his cell.

One of the interesting things about this case for me is the elusiveness of John Smith's motives. I mean, it's usually obvious, right? They want money or they're jealous because the spouse is cheating on them. Something you can put your finger on. I think the motive is more nebulous here, and it leads me to wonder, did he kill these women just because he liked killing? Because he knew he was losing him and wanted to assert some kind of terrible final control. Whatever his reasons, John will probably take them to his grave. In the meantime, I hope Fran can be found someday and brought home to the people who loved her so she can rest in peace once and for all. Now, before we go, don't forget about our true crime crews coming up. Crime Wave 2.0, February 8th through 12th, 2027 is coming up, like four months away.

If you want to come to the Bahamas with us and some of the biggest true crime and paranormal podcasts in the world, like unexplained, last podcast on the left, scared to death, and true crime garage, here's what you got to do. tickets are on sale now but they are like almost almost sold out so if you want to go make sure you get over to crime wave at c.com slash campfire and book your cabin ASAP you'll get a hundred dollars off plus a private meet and greet with us the great thing is you can pay for it all at once or set up a payment plan and pay it off over time so get on it y'all that's crimewave at c.com slash campfire 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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