BALTIMORE — The Maryland man who stabbed his wife to death in Baltimore and created an elaborate ruse that a pair of panhandlers in East Baltimore killed her was sentenced to life in prison Monday.
Jacquelyn Smith’s murder in December 2018 shocked the city: a 54-year-old electrical engineer at Aberdeen Proving Ground stabbed in her chest while driving through Baltimore in the middle of the night.
Then there was Keith Tyrone Smith’s cover-up: The tractor-trailer driver claimed he was taking Jacquelyn and his daughter, Valeria, home after celebrating Valeria’s birthday when Jacquelyn passed $10 out the window to a couple panhandling at the intersection of East Chase and Valley streets. He told police that panhandlers snatched Jacquelyn’s necklace, stole her wallet and stabbed her.
He repeated this tearful tale to homicide detectives and TV cameras. It bought him and Valeria enough time to almost reach the Mexican border. That’s around the time it all began to unravel.
Cellphone data placed Smith not at a desolate East Baltimore street corner but in the middle of Druid Hill Park when Jacquelyn was stabbed, one of the inconsistencies in Smith’s story investigators highlighted during his murder trial in December. A jury found him guilty of first-degree murder, determining he acted with premeditation in killing his wife.
Circuit Judge Jennifer Schiffer handed down the sentence for Smith, 55, lamenting the pain he caused his wife’s family and that he blamed her killing on “the most vulnerable people in society.”
”The crime for which the defendant was convicted was the reason the maximum sentence for murder was created,” Schiffer said.
In exchange for a lighter prison sentence, Valeria Smith agreed to plead guilty to acting as an accessory after the fact of her stepmother’s murder and testify against her father. She already has served almost three of the five years in prison Circuit Court Judge Melissa Phinn handed down in December. She has three years of supervised probation upon her release.
Valeria Smith, 31, was the prosecution’s key witness at trial; her testimony helped prosecutors expose her father’s elaborate cover-up and provided an eyewitness account of the killing.
Having gravely wounded his wife, Keith Smith made a distraught 911 call. He took her to the hospital but not in time for doctors to save her. He and Valeria ditched Jacquelyn’s wallet to support their story. He cried during an interview with homicide detectives, shed tears with his daughter while talking to reporters and demanded Baltimore outlaw panhandling.
Valeria recounted from the witness stand the story he told her to repeat, and described their race to reach Mexico.
As Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby pointed out after Smith’s conviction, Keith Smith was responsible for damage beyond the cherished life he took.
Smith, Mosby said, “manipulated the hearts and minds of our country.”
His fictitious story about knife-wielding panhandlers took advantage of Baltimore’s problems with street violence and panhandling, and stoked unfounded fears about people experiencing homelessness, leading to concerns the crime would provoke confrontations. The tale garnered national attention and outrage; Oprah Winfrey even commented on the tragedy.
Detectives’ suspicions grew as the story spread. Police would never find evidence of panhandlers on the street corner — no knife, no cardboard sign. Smith first told detectives he didn’t see the weapon, then said it was a kitchen knife. He said the woman’s coat was brown and then blue. Blood was spattered on the inside of the car window despite Smith claiming the window was down.
Investigators doubted anyone would beg for money on a little trafficked street corner rather than a busy thoroughfare. None of the surveillance cameras in the area of the supposed attack turned up footage of Smith’s car.
When detectives confronted Smith with evidence that Valeria’s cellphone traced to Druid Hill Park, he brought up a previously unmentioned detour on the way home.
After that interview, Smith moved to Florida and changed cellphones. He sent Valeria Smith a new phone through the mail.
Together, they made a break from Maryland for the Mexican border three months after Jacquelyn Smith’s murder. Texas state troopers arrested the father and daughter 20 minutes from the border, after about 1,770 miles on the run.
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