Repost of a 2019 article that I never want forgotten when I’m gone. It is a difficult read, but please do it for me. Please read the linked articles as well, and know that if I die tonight, I’ll go knowing that it wasn’t all in vain, wasn’t useless and that maybe my life really mattered, if only for one brief moment when outrage gave me courage. And that maybe you could use whatever you find here to help others in pain.
This article also sheds light on why I hurt so much for women and children, why The Face In The Window will ever haunt me, from now to my meeting with God. We’re here for such a short time, some of us very short, and everything we do matters. Help others. Be encouraging and unfailingly gentle. Love freely, let compassion fill your heart. It opens you to pain, but the reward is far greater. If you can manage it, you’ll see.
This is one of my oldest posts, and one of the few oldies to still get hits on my Stat page. I hope others have been helped by it. I hope the change in me between then and now is visible, and encouraging. I’m not cured. There’s no such thing, but I have shed some of my bitterness as I’ve looked for God and a faith I thought lost forever. Thank you for caring, sharing and giving me a few moments of your life. You are loved.
WARNING: This article contains material of a disturbing nature and contains mature subject matter. It contains triggers for victims of abuse. Read with care.
OBITUARY
Accidentally, while hunting clues for a cold case murder, I ran across my father’s obituary. I didn’t want to see it.
Nice, isn’t it? Except I never heard once that he was a lawyer. In fact, there’s evidence that he never made it past 7th grade. He did work for B.F. Moffitt, who was successful in legal work with or against the then-feared Interstate Commerce Commission. Moffitt, by all accounts, was an honorable man. Ralph Smith wasn’t. And this obituary boils my blood.
It says, very simply, that he was a lawyer, later owned Comet Fast Freight in Glen Burnie, and he died at age 75 in Salisbury MD in 2002 after a lengthy illness. Fucking vanilla shit. It doesn’t mention that he was one of the worst sex offenders in state history. Not a word.
A decade earlier the same paper said something very different.
Following are several articles from after the trial. Read them, and I’ll tell you something really fucked up.
Jay Apperson was a fine writer and reporter. I knew he was the only spectator in the courtroom during the three-day trial of my parents. We later did things I don’t believe he understood, and that’s what you should expect from a story so horrible; how can he be blamed? But a month after the verdict, when the sentencing hearing came up, reporters from printed media, TV and Radio were there. I particularly remember watching CBS reporter Bruce Morton later on the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather. Mr. Morton was obviously unable to keep a bit of emotion out of his voice. When both Ralph and Betty Smith drew about 99 years apiece for their crimes, the state dropped the remaining cases brought against them for crimes against the rest of my siblings, who I won’t name. It wasn’t fair; they’d taken the time and invested emotionally in writing their police statements and being interviewed first by Detective Jill Klinger of the Sex Crimes Unit of the Anne Arundel County Police Department, then by Assistant State’s Attorney Cynthia Ferris. They got no closure.
But then, neither did I. The trial and my time on the stand was traumatic. And it forced me to feel emotions and speak out loud the unspeakable. It opened up every wound I’d buried. And to this day, those wounds bleed.
As for the 99-year sentences, that was a joke. The judge ordered the terms to be served concurrently; therefore the charges with the most time, 15 years, would be served. They would be eligible for parole in considerably less than that. But they didn’t get their first hearings past the Department of Parole and Probation. Betty Smith served ten years in Jessup Women’s Correctional Facility while Ralph Smith “Esquire” served around eleven. He was in ECI, Eastern Correctional Institution in Queen Anne, after which he wound up in Salisbury, most likely in a halfway house. He died there or in a hospital.
He left behind a shattered family, and all have had their personal struggles. Not being one to compare one person’s pain with that of another, I’ve learned to keep a perspective: all victims of rape, sexual assault, incest and child abuse are, by medical, anecdotal and empiric evidence, walking wounded. I have seen the evidence for myself. It fucks people up.
NEW YORK
One of my biggest regrets is going to New York and appearing on Phil Donahue’s show. Afterward, I thought it took some of the credibility away from our case. I know Jay Apperson thought so. While there, we were approached by Spectacor Films and offered money for the rights to make a film about us. It was a mistake I was too young and too damaged to understand (Spectacor’s portfolio consisted of feculent films like Amityville 3 or 4). When Mr. Apperson reported it, I thought we’d fucked up. We looked like greedy attention seekers. We were not. We hoped to help other people to stand up to their own abusers. I hoped also to show people in my past why I had been so weird, that it wasn’t my fault. That I was just a messed up kid.
I was happy that I abandoned the book. I was happy the movie contract expired without so much as a draft-script written. When the project was pitched, not a single sponsor would touch it. Too horrible, they said.
Decades later, no one remembers anything of us. We didn’t change a goddamn thing. How I’d dreamed we could. How bitter I was that the world moved on without me. As I grew ever more sick, I went through a divorce. I tried to kill myself. I went through jobs. Then my children died. My whole fucking life was a waste. As if I never mattered, never should have existed. God damn it.
I need no longer speak to my sister. She’s a goddamn Neocon saint whose relationship with the Lord is historic, unprecedented since the death of St. Paul of Tarsus. Piss on her. She judged me and told her friends lies about me. That’s a mistake; I heard about it and now I pretty much think of her as more fucking mental than I am. I didn’t deserve that bullshit. That bridge is burned forever now.
But I feel sorry for her. She’s missed the whole point. Forgotten it. Forgotten her own fucking words to the press. How we could finally be a family.
I don’t like the whitewashed obituary. The man didn’t deserve it.
You see from the articles that the case of the State of Maryland vs. Ralph and Betty Smith was a big deal. The grand jury said the reports read “like a horror story” and the State’s Attorneys office was cited as saying it was the worst case of child abuse they’d seen. The Honorable Judge Raymond Thieme, after it was over, was said to have entered his office, thrown his robe on the floor and stormed from the building. The source said she had never seen him do such a thing.
Sometimes, I think back on that. Even he needed closure, and probably wished he could forget the shit he had to hear.
Ralph Smith had moments when I looked in his eyes. He would take his glasses off, rub his eyes, and for just a second or two, I saw into the soul of a human being trapped in a diseased body. Did I see regret?
No.
Was it guilt?
No.
It was a broken heart.
Then the devil got into him again and the man was gone, replaced by a monster.
And he did not deserve that vanilla obituary.
“VINDICTIVENESS”
Defense attorney Thomas Morrow told reporters: “Even if the charges are true, I can’t understand that level of vindictiveness.”
Holy shit. What a crude thing to say. What a stupid thing to say.
Well it wasn’t vindictiveness at all. Perhaps some desire for vindication was there. But that’s not what started it. I started it.
I was motivated at first because a sister, long lost, called me out of the blue one day. She was in such obvious pain that I knew she couldn’t keep it inside anymore. Some of what happened to her happened to me at the same time. We were made by my parents to watch 8mm porn films, then do things together, and then we split up; my father and my sister alone in another room, my mother taking me into another. We both saw, did and knew things we both had to do, see or otherwise. When she called, she told me about the things I hadn’t witnessed. Things our father had done to her that were so evil, so horrible that I can’t describe even one of them here. As I listened, my heart was aching. Things people should never have to imagine, much less endure, were vividly pictured in my mind. Before the long call ended, I was full of rage. Goddamn it, they had to pay.
I had an immediate plan. I was going to go to Bart’s Sporting Goods on Ritchie Highway, buy a shotgun, drive to Pasadena, kick the door to their house of pain and evil open, and fill my parents with double aught buckshot. But I happened to spot a copy of the Gazette lying on the coffee table and I picked it up and read it. There had to be a reason I was so motivated. Because there was a story about kids from my neighborhood who grew up with us. They had gone through the same type of abuse. They waited until the youngest turned 18 years of age, then went to the police. Their father was arrested, tried and convicted.
I remembered those kids. One very little girl, the youngest as far as I know, a little girl whose face should have been lit up by an innocent smile, showing up at the bus stop with red, swollen, watery eyes. Tears flowing. Her body held in a position I knew caused by physical pain. I can’t get it out of my head; I’d known something was wrong. When I learned why she’d been like that, I regretted that with my own experience, I didn’t see it for what it was. I will always be sorry I didn’t know, couldn’t help, and they were right down the street all those years.
Maybe I didn’t have to commit murder and throw my life away in an act of revenge. Maybe, this family I’d known so little about had done something we could do. As if there was a hand guiding me to read that paper.
SAVING A NEPHEW
A few of us talked. My youngest brother, still living at home, dropped a bomb on me one day: a sister who had gotten divorced and had a toddler son had moved back home. If being a parent is hard, being a single one is really difficult. But that’s no excuse for what my brother told me she did.
It seemed that when the boy cried and wouldn’t go to sleep at night, she would get our father to beat him with his belt.
Goddamn, it’s hard to write this. I wish I didn’t have to. I wish it never happened. But it did.
Suddenly the imperative was to get the boy away from that. It wasn’t about payback. Justice. Revenge. The kid had to be saved before he was so traumatized that he became one of us.
I contacted the boy’s father, living in North Carolina at the time. I told him our story. What was happening to his son. And I said she had two weeks to get him the hell out of there, or something very bad was going to happen. According to my brother, the asshole did call her, but she convinced him that I was quote “full of shit”.
She had thrown down a gauntlet. When my youngest brother turned 18, he moved out. We went to the police and made statements, and that is why and how it all began. I have no remorse; once sentenced, my parents lost the house. They went to prison. The boy was as safe as we could make him. But I’ve never forgotten that my oldest sister was still a monster, and I’ve worried over the years that my nephew never got out of it unharmed.
AFTER
In 2015, I was outside smoking. A warm summer night. A neighbor had a window open. His daughter was screaming and her father yelled, “I’m your father and I can beat you whenever I want.”
Very uncharacteristically, shaking with rage, I finished my cigarette. I went inside and took two Ativan to calm down. I should have called the police. I didn’t.
The knocking on his door pissed him off. He’d been nice to me, always saying hello and smiling. But now I knew what he was. He was my father. Different shell, same demon.
He stepped out onto the porch. I leaned to whisper in his ear.
“I heard you. I know what you just did. The next time I hear it, I will kill you. She’s worth it. I’ll go to jail, but you’ll be sitting on Satan’s lap, you piece of shit.”
He turned. I wasn’t wearing my glasses. I looked right into his eyes. He knew I meant it.
It was a mistake. He moved his family out. I couldn’t help her; I’d probably made it worse.
I have the hope that he was so scared that he sought help. Or he changed.
I believe the hope to be unrealistic.
In the end I wonder what I’ve ever accomplished that was good. It all seems so useless, so futile.
The monsters don’t change.
They can’t. Ralph Smith died a monster. And everyone forgot what he really was. He got a lie for an obituary.
The world forgets.
And I…am an asshole.
Post-Update, Father’s Day, 2022.
The final verdict is in; Ralph Smith never practiced law.
He never finished college. When he was working for the motor truck association, he was a fucking clerk, typing tariffs and doing billing.
I have a cousin named Bonnie, and another named Terri, on Ancestry. Both are hostile toward me and one is responsible for making his ancestry profile make Superman seem like a milquetoast compared to my father. The motive: they’re from the south. Family can be serial killers, but they’d conceal it if they could. I’ve blocked all updates and emails from the site, and I’m never going back. Because fuck the Smith family. Inbred shit beyond the ability to accept truth or to tell it.
They’re all mad.POSTED IN THE BIOGRAPHY OF A DEMONASSISTANT STATE’S ATTORNEY CYNTHIA FERRISBALTIMORE SUNCOMET FAST FREIGHTDETECTIVE JILL KLINGER-ANNE ARUNDEL COUNTY POLICEJAY APPERSONJUDGE RAYMOND THIEMENORTH CAROLINA COLD CASE 1958-1960PHIL DONOHUERALPH AND BETTY SMITH TRIAL 1990RALPH L. SMITH 2002 OBITUARYSPECTACULAR FILMSSTATE OF MARYLAND VS. RALPH AND BETTY SMITH
Published by Michael Smith
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2 thoughts on “Ralph Leon Smith Died A Monster And Got A Whitewashed Obituary He Didn’t Deserve. His Victims Have To Live With That Final Insult”
Pel AbbottEDITMay he N.E.V.E.R. rest in peace, but instead get exactly what he deserves.Liked by youReply
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Memoirs of an American Asshole 