From last week’s case of a bizarre murder-for-hire, we turn our attention this week to a missing persons case. As heartbreaking as homicide is, an unsolved disappearance, with its lack of closure, can sometimes be worse. Such was the case of Tera Smith, a California teen who vanished over two decades ago.
Tera Smith
In 1998, Tera Lynn Smith was a 16-year-old high school student from Redding, California. She made good grades and had a lot of friends. She worked at the Oasis Fun Center, the business near their home that her parents owned and ran. In all respects, she was a typical teenager. But, like many teens, Tera also had a rebellious streak.
Tera Lynn Smith (Shasta County Sheriff’s Office)
August 22, 1998 was the last Saturday before the school year started. Tera was due to work at the Oasis Fun Center at 7:00 p.m. Sometime that evening, but before she was due at work, Tera decided to go for a jog. Her sister, Sierra, admonished her, since the girls weren’t supposed to leave the house alone. Tera replied that she’d be back before her parents got home. Sierra watched as Tera jogged out of sight.
Tera Smith, Missing Person
The normally reliable Tera failed to show up for her scheduled shift at the fun center. Her parents were initially unconcerned but, when she hadn’t shown up by 9:00 p.m., they called police. What investigators found was disturbing.
Tera was due at the Smith’s Oasis Fun Center when she disappeared (Google Maps)
The last person known to see Tera alive was 29-year-old Charles “Troy” Zink. Zink was Tera’s Tae Kwon Do instructor. But her family found letters and journal entries that strongly suggested she and Zink had a sexual relationship. Zink denied this, although he admitted seeing Tera that August day. He said Tera called and they met near her home at 6:30 p.m. According to his story, she wanted to borrow $2,000 and he refused. At her request, he dropped her off at the intersection of Old Oregon Trail and Old Alturas Road. He then drove to Hang Glider Hill, where he claims he “prayed” until 11:30.
When police dug into Zink’s background, they found he pleaded guilty to rape seven years before Tera disappeared. Searching his home, they found several guns and arrested him for violating his parole. However, they didn’t find any evidence to connect him to Tera’s disappearance.
Charles “Troy” Zink at the time of the disappearance (Hard Copy)
Epilogue
It’s been more than twenty years since Tera Smith disappeared. If she’s alive, she would be 40 years old. Her family, however, believes she is dead. There has been no trace of Tera since that early autumn day in 1998.
The family suspects Troy Zink is more involved in the case than he admitted, which Zink denies. Police have found no evidence linking him to the disappearance. Nor have they found anything to indicate that a crime was committed. Probably, though, Tera Lynn Smith died the day she disappeared.
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Our past two cases have been about killer nurses Kristen Gilbert and Charles Cullen. This week we go to Texas. Everything is big in Texas and even the murder cases seem larger than life. Our case involves successful businessman Frank Howard (not to be confused with the former baseball player). Howard concocted a scheme to hire East Texas gangsters to murder his wife. One of them eventually shot Nancy Howard but she survived.
Frank Howard and Nancy Shore Howard
Born John Franklin Howard, Frank married Nancy Shore in 1983. They settled in Carrollton, Texas, north and slightly west of Dallas and near Lewisville Lake. Together they raised three children.
Frank and Nancy Howard in happier times
From the outside, the Howards seemed like a normal suburban couple. Frank coached his kids’ soccer teams and went to their musical theater performances. The couple sang in the church choir and hosted Bible study for youth groups in their home. Frank was a successful businessman with his own accounting firm and Nancy was a stay-at-home mom.
The Howards’ apparently idyllic life began to dissipate as their children grew up and left home. Frank started devoting more time to his work. He took on a new client, Colleyville businessman Richard Raley, who’d made millions as a defense contractor. He told his wife that this new business would require more travel. Nancy found herself at home with little to do. In most cases, this wouldn’t be much of a problem, but trouble was brewing.
Frank Howard Meets Suzanne Leontieff
It was the weekend of July 25, 2009. Frank was in Lake Tahoe on business and Nancy was on a mission trip to Africa with her youngest daughter, Brianna. At a casino named Harvey’s, Frank met a woman at one of the tables. She was Suzanne Leontieff, a dental hygienist. Suzanne was in her early fifties but had blonde hair, a youthful face, and a perky demeanor. She was in Lake Tahoe to watch her daughters compete in a softball tournament.
Suzanne and Frank met for dinner. Suzanne was married, too, but had separated from her husband and working toward a divorce. The next weekend, Frank invited Suzanne to meet him in Reno. She did.
Suzanne Leontieff (MSNBC/Dateline)
Over the next three years, Frank and Suzanne saw each other often. Sometimes he met her in California, while others he flew her to Dallas. Then there were expensive trips to the Bahamas and prime sporting events. Frank also bought a condo in Lake Tahoe and Suzanne a house in Santa Cruz. When Suzanne’s divorce came through, she lost her health insurance. So, Frank put her on the payroll of Raley’s company (by now he was Chief Financial Officer).
An Attempted Murder
On Saturday, August 18, 2012, Nancy went to the First Baptist Church in Carrollton for a women’s tea. She didn’t know it, but someone followed her into the parking lot. That evening, she went back to the church for the baptism of a family friend. When she left the parking lot at about 7:30, it was raining. A silver Nissan trailed her out of the lot.
On her way home, Nancy stopped at a Taco Bueno and picked up a steak fajita dinner at the drive-through. From there, she drove home, a two-story brick house on Bluebonnet Way. In the garage, she got out of the car with her purse and the Taco Bueno bag in her hands. Someone grabbed her from behind, put a gun to her head, and demanded her purse.
The Howards’ house on Bluebonnet Way in Carrollton, TX
Startled, Nancy turned around. The intruder, a man in his twenties demanded her purse again. Confused, she handed him the Taco Bueno bag instead. Seeing the man becoming angry, she shoved the purse at him with both hands. He backed up a step, pointed the gun at her face, and fired. He then fled, leaving the bag of food on the rain-soaked driveway and Nancy bleeding in the garage.
A Bizarre Plot
Frank was in Reno with Suzanne when he got the news that Nancy had been shot. He broke down crying and Suzanne had to help him walk. Since there were no more flights to Dallas from Reno that day, Suzanne drove Frank four hours to San Jose where he caught a flight home.
But while he may have shed tears, investigators soon learned that Frank was not exactly the grieving husband. Far from it. Frank, it turns out, had been paying money to East Texas gangsters for years to kill his wife. Somehow, Frank managed to connect with a shady character named Billie Earl Johnson. Calling himself “John,” Frank gave Johnson an envelope with $60,000 cash and a picture of Nancy, telling him to “make it look like an accident.”
Billie Earl Johnson (L) and his nephew, Dustin Hiroms (R). Hiroms shot Nancy Howard in her own garage on August 18, 2012.
Johnson and his cadre of relatives and associates strung “John” along for months on end, extracting more and more money from him. But there were always excuses. Either something slowed them down, they were too wasted, or they were in jail. Nancy lived on. Johnson estimated they squeezed over $2 million out of “John.”
All this would have been funny if Johnson’s stepson, Dustin Taylor Hiroms hadn’t tried to carry out the plot. He’s the one that accosted and shot Nancy.
Frank Howard Goes on Trial
Nancy Howard survived the attack, although she lost her left eye. She divorced Frank and went back to using her birth name, Shore.
John Francis “Frank” Howard
Frank Howard went on trial in August 2012. All three Howard children testified for their father and sat behind him when they were in court. Nancy testified for the prosecution. The defense claimed Frank had been blackmailed and attacked the credibility of the prosecution witnesses. They did have a point: the East Texas crew had an astonishing number of arrests and convictions. However, the jury took only two hours to return a guilty verdict.
At the sentencing hearing, Frank’s former boss, Richard Raley, testified. He told the jury that Frank had embezzled over $30 million from him over a three-year period. He used the money to finance his affair with Suzanne Leontieff and to pay his meth-addled hitmen. And apparently, according to a later lawsuit, he donated over $200,000 of it to the First Baptist Church! He received a life sentence with no possibility for parole until after 30 years.
Epilogue
Today (April 2022) Frank Howard is 62 years old. He spends his time at the James V. Allred Unit of the Texas prison system near Wichita Falls, Texas.
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Last week, we met Kristen Gilbert, a nurse at a Massachusetts V.A. hospital who killed four patients, perhaps more. This week, we examine the case of Charles Cullen, another nurse with a penchant for homicide. Cullen confessed to killing up to 40 patients in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but the number could be much, much higher. Authorities have confirmed 29 deaths he’s responsible for.
Charles Cullen
Charles Cullen was born February 22, 1960, the youngest of eight children, in West Orange, New Jersey. His father, a bus driver, died when Charles was only seven months old. His mother died in a car accident in December 1977 when Charles was a senior in high school. He was upset with the hospital for not immediately telling him of her death and not returning her body to him. This capped a childhood that Charles himself described as “miserable,” during which he made several suicide attempts.
Charles Edmund Cullen
Cullen dropped out of high school and joined the US Navy. He passed the rigorous psychological examinations required for submarine crews and served on the submarine USS Woodrow Wilson. Although he rose to the rank of petty officer, second class, Cullen never fit in well with the rest of the crew. The Navy reassigned him to the supply ship USS Canopus, a lower-stress job. After a suicide attempt, the Navy sent him to a naval psychiatric hospital. Ultimately, Cullen received a medical discharge.
A New Career for Charles Cullen
Now out of the navy, Cullen enrolled in the Mountainside Hospital School of Nursing in Montclair, New Jersey. Apparently, this was a better fit for his class elected him its president. He graduated in 1986 and went to work in the burn unit at St. Barnabas Medical Center in Livingston, New Jersey.
St. Barnabas Medical Center, Livingston, New Jersey
During this time, Cullen met and married Adrianne Baum and they had a daughter, Shauna. All was not well, however, because Adrienne became increasingly concerned about his disturbed behavior and abuse of the family dogs.
Cullen’s time at St. Barnabas was not smooth sailing, either. He later confessed to committing his first murder there on June 11, 1988 by administering an overdose of intravenous medication. After the hospital began investigating contaminated IV bags, he left St. Barnabas. The investigation concluded that Cullen was most likely responsible for the contaminated bags.
One month after he left St. Barnabas, Cullen hired on as a nurse at Warren Hospital in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. There he murdered three elderly women patients with an overdose of digoxin, a heart medication. Before she died, the last victim reported that a “sneaky male nurse” had injected her as she slept. Unfortunately, her family and the hospital dismissed her claims as unfounded. Nineteen-ninety-three was also the year Cullen and his wife split after a contentious divorce.
Cullen’s Bizarre Behavior
In March 1993, Cullen broke into a coworker’s home while she and her young boy were asleep. He didn’t wake them, but this was the beginning of him stalking women. Before long, some of the stalking victims reported Cullen to police. He pleaded guilty to trespassing and received a year of probation. The next day, he attempted suicide again. He took two months off and received treatment for depression, but he attempted suicide two more times that year.
Suicidal or not, the killing didn’t stop. A 91-year-old cancer patient reported that Cullen, who wasn’t her assigned nurse, came into her room and gave her an injection. She died the next day, and her son insisted her death was not natural. The hospital polygraphed Cullen and several other nurses but they all passed, and the investigation went nowhere.
St. Luke’s Medical Center, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania
Despite Cullen’s mental instability and the suspicious number of deaths that seemed to follow him, he was always able to find work. At the time, there was a critical shortage of nurses nationwide. Also, hospitals feared liability if they took action against him. So, Charles Cullen was able to keep on working—and killing. His resume included Hunterdon Medical Center in Flemington, New Jersey; Morristown Memorial Medical Center; Liberty Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Allentown, Pennsylvania; Eason Hospital in Easton, Pennsylvania; Lehigh Valley Hospital in Allentown; St. Luke’s Medical Center in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; and Somerset Medical Center in Somerville, New Jersey.
Cullen’s Killing Spree Comes to an End
In October 2003, a patient at Somerset died of low blood sugar. The hospital alerted the New Jersey State Police. That patient was Cullen’s final victim. Somerset fired him on October 31, 2003, ostensibly for lying on his job application.
Somerset Medical Center, Somerville, New Jersey (Wikipedia/Ekem)
One of Cullen’s coworkers, nurse Amy Loughren, became concerned about the drugs he accessed and links to his patients’ deaths. She contacted police. Authorities convinced her to wear a wire and visit him after hours. Those conversations produced enough evidence for an arrest. On December 12, 2003, police arrested Cullen at a restaurant. Charged with one murder and one attempted murder, he soon confessed to killing as many as 40 patients over his 16-year career as a nurse.
Nurse Amy Loughren helped gather evidence against Cullen
In April 2006, Charles Cullen pleaded guilty before Judge Paul W. Armstrong to killing 13 patients while employed at Somerset. He also pleaded guilty to attempting to kill two others. As part of the plea deal, authorities would not seek the death penalty if Cullen cooperated in their investigations. In May, he pleaded guilty to killing three more patients in New Jersey. Then in November 2004, he pleaded guilty to six murders and three attempted murders in Pennsylvania. In the latter hearing, he kept heckling the judge, which resulted in the court ordering him gagged and restrained.
Charles Cullen in court
On March 2, 2006, Judge Armstrong sentenced Cullen to eleven consecutive life sentences. On March 10, Lehigh County President Judge William H. Platt sentenced handed down six additional life sentences.
Epilogue
As of April 2022, Charles Cullen spends his time at the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton. He will be theoretically eligible for parole on June 10, 2388. Practically speaking, he will die in prison.
The New Jersey State Prison at Second and Federal Streets, Trenton
You can read more about the twisted career of Charles Cullen in The Angel of Death by Roger Harrington.
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From last week’s “Death House Landlady” in California, Dorothea Puente, this week’s case is across the continent in Massachusetts. In the early 1990s, registered nurse Kristen Gilbert murdered at least four patients at a Veterans Administration hospital. Authorities suspect there were many more.
Kristen Gilbert
Kirsten Gilbert was born Kristen Heather Strickland in Fall River, Massachusetts (home of the infamous Lizzie Borden). Her home life growing up was remarkable only for its normalcy; her dad worked, and her mother was a homemaker. Although Kristen was a gifted student, she had a darker side. Friends said she could be manipulative and tended to lie a lot.
Kristen Strickland in the Bridgewater State College yearbook
As a student at Bridgewater State College (now Bridgewater State University) in 1984, Kristen suffered several psychiatric episodes. In these episodes, she made violent threats against herself and others. College officials ordered her into psychiatric treatment. After that, she transferred to Mount Wachusett Community College, graduating from there with a nursing diploma in 1988. She became a registered nurse and, later in 1988, married Glenn Gilbert.
Kristen Gilbert at the V.A. Hospital
In 1989, the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Northampton, Massachusetts hired Kristen as a nurse. Other nurses noticed a high number of deaths when Kristen worked but failed to conclude there was anything was improper. Instead, they jokingly called her “The Angel of Death” which, in hindsight, seems insensitive and inappropriate.
Kristen Gilbert
The hospital assigned Kristen to the night shift. It was then that she began an extramarital affair with James Perrault. Perrault was a Gulf War veteran and a security guard at the hospital. As the affair flourished, her marriage to Glenn Gilbert collapsed. Several incidents occurred where it seemed, to Glenn anyway, that Kristen was trying to poison him.
Meanwhile, Kristen continued to be at the center of a statistically unlikely number of deaths at the hospital. By February 1996, the apparent coincidences became too much for some nurses. They reported concerns about an increasing number of cardiac deaths at the hospital and a corresponding decrease in the supply of epinephrine. An investigation followed.
Trouble Brewing for Kristen Gilbert
Kristen left the V.A. hospital in 1996. That fall, she checked herself into psychiatric hospitals seven times, staying a few days each time. During one of those stays, she allegedly confessed some of her murders to Perrault. After her release from the psychiatric hospital, she learned Perrault was cooperating with authorities. Bizarrely, she called in a bomb threat to the hospital hoping to derail the investigation.
Kristen Gilbert booking photo
In January 1998, Kristen found herself on trial for calling in the bomb threat to VAMC Northampton. She was convicted in April of that year and served fifteen months in prison.
Kristen Gilbert on Trial for Murder
Kristen Gilbert went on trial in November 2000 for the murders of four patients and the attempted murder of two others. Prosecutors speculated she killed the patients so she could impress her then-boyfriend, Perrault, with her nursing skills. Other staff observed both engaging in inappropriate behavior during some of the emergencies. Perrault testified against Kristen, telling the jury about her telephoned confessions during one of her hospital stays.
Julia Hudon and Christine Duquette, mother and sister of victim Henry Hudon
In March 2001, the jury returned six guilty verdicts: three for first-degree murder, one for second-degree murder, and two for attempted murder. Now they would have to decide Kristen’s fate. Although Massachusetts abolished the death penalty in 1984, Kristen’s crimes occurred on federal property. This meant the jury could sentence her to death under federal law. Death by lethal injection would have been ironic since Kristen killed her victims by injecting them with epinephrin, causing fatal heart attacks.
Murder victim Edward Skwira
After deliberating for two days, the jury could not unanimously agree on the death penalty. A judge later sentenced her to four consecutive terms of life imprisonment with no chance for parole, plus twenty years. The family of victim Henry Hudon had hoped for the death penalty. Nancy Cutting, widow of victim Kenneth Cutting was content to see her “sit in jail.”
Nancy and Jeff Cutting, wife and son of victim Kenneth Cutting
Epilogue
Kristen Gilbert’s known victims were veterans Stanley Jagodowski, 66; Henry Hudon, 35; Kenneth Cutting, 41; and Edward Skwira, 69.
Kristen dropped her appeal for a new trial after learning that prosecutors could seek the death penalty in a retrial. She currently (2022) resides in the Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas.
Kristen Gilbert is currently at Federal Medical Center Carswell in Forth Worth, Texas (Federal Bureau of Prisons)
You can read more about Kristen Gilbert’s case in Perfect Poison by M. William Phelps.
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The Old Crime is New Again newsletter is a monthly email that takes a look at true crime in the news. In it, I cover topics that do not appeared in the blog, plus occasionally something extra. You won’t want to miss this. Sign up for the newsletter today.
