PAULDING COUNTY, Ohio — As Jerry Straley shuffled across his Paulding County property, an icy wind blew through the open fields that line County Road 87, causing tears to streak down his face.
“The body was right here,” he said, pointing to the base of a tree just off a faint path that runs through his property.
Without prompting, Straley, 82, dropped to the ground and recreated how he found Teresa Smith on June 16, 2007.
“Her hands were out and her head was down like this,” he said, kneeling, with his face on the ground and his hips up. “She was naked except for a halter top pulled up near her neck.”
An autopsy determined that Smith died from three bullet wounds – one at the base of her neck, two fired through the left side of her back. There was soot around the wounds, indicating that the killer or killers fired from close range, possibly even against her skin.
Straley has neighbors, but the closest are more than a half-mile away. No one thinks twice if a gunshot is heard in the countryside, where hunting and target practice are common pastimes.
There are no houses on the property, only an abandoned building previously used as a workshop. Investigators found no evidence that strangers had been in that building when they scoured the scene.
There was, however, evidence that a car had pulled off the road and tracks indicate the car likely spun its tires as it was leaving the property, according to reports in the police investigative case file. Authorities also believe that Teresa Smith was the victim of an execution and possible sexual assault.
But other than the identity of the killer, the biggest question that stumps investigators is why a woman from Richmond, Ind., was found dead more than 100 miles away on a property in western Ohio.
A troubled past
When Terry Smith talks, he leans in and delivers a story in a soothing and measured tone. The longtime truck driver is a natural storyteller.
The Smith family is large. He has two older sisters, two younger brothers and two younger, twin sisters – Teresa and Lisa.
“Mom would wait until late to do diapers and formula,” Smith said. “I’d be working, but I’d come in about 11 o’clock at night, and I’d get Teresa and Lisa and rock them so mom could get her work done.”
Most of the family has scattered today, but at one point it was close-knit.
“As a kid, people would call us clannish. You know, if you’d see one of us, you’d see all of us. As time went on…,” he said, his voice trailing off.
Asked if Teresa was to blame for the fracture, he said “Yeah, maybe.”
“After graduation, she just went totally wild," he said. "You couldn’t get around her. She didn’t come around the family. If we had a big supper or anything, she wasn’t there.”
At one point, Teresa Smith came to live with Terry Smith and he got her a job at a fast-food restaurant, but it didn’t last.
“There is no doubt that Teresa was living a rough life. She used and she was running with the wrong people,” Terry Smith said.
During a brief phone interview, Lisa Smith didn’t want to talk about her sister, but said she believed the last time she had seen her twin was when Lisa had been married, several years before Teresa’s death.
Opioids and pain pills were Teresa Smith’s drugs of choice and there were plenty of suppliers in the city of Richmond. Scan the internet, and there are dozens of articles on fentanyl, cocaine, and opioid busts in Richmond, the seat of Wayne County in eastern Indiana.
“Everybody in the family knew something like this was going to happen, but everyone in the family was praying that it wouldn’t,” Terry Smith said. “We were hoping she’d wake up and get out of that lifestyle.”
The early investigation
At a little after 2 p.m. on June 16, 2007, Straley showed up at the Paulding County Sheriff’s Office to report that he had found a body on his property.
“It was far enough off the road, with some high grass, so you couldn’t see it from the roadway,” said Chief Deputy Shane Dyson, who was the first officer at the scene.
“Finding a body is not a normal thing," he said. "That doesn’t happen here. Once we got there and identified that it actually was a victim who was deceased and a visible gunshot wound, we taped off the area and called our supervisors and coroner.”
Without any identification on her, it took several days to identify her, but eventually her fingerprints matched in a criminal database. For once, her troubled past became a blessing.
Once the 38-year-old was identified, a timeline began to take shape. A friend, David Gabbard, talked to investigators and said that he was partying and drinking vodka with Teresa Smith and another man on a porch in Richmond. He said a Black female who he didn’t recognize walked through the alley and motioned for Teresa to come talk with her. Gabbard said that Teresa Smith went to talk to her, leaving behind her purse, some clothing, and ID at the house. He said he never saw her again, but that an unknown black male later stopped by the house, asking for Teresa.
On the same day that investigators talked to Gabbard, they got a call from a member of the Wayne County drug task force. He said Teresa Smith was working for them as a drug informant. Gabbard also mentioned that Teresa Smith had been watching the news, saying that she was part of a sting involving a man known as “Sarge.”
Court documents detail an operation in which a man named Credell Henry sold Teresa Smith three pieces of cocaine in late March. The operation eventually led to the arrest of Henry, his wife, and another man. Henry’s street name was “Sarge,” and he previously lived in Defiance, according to police. In 2002, a police report said he was supplying drugs to the Paulding area.
On the same night that Teresa Smith’s body was found, the Ohio State Highway Patrol was involved in a high-speed chase with a stolen car in the Dayton area. Dayton is 45 miles east of Richmond. The passenger in the vehicle was arrested and questioned, saying he was so drunk that he couldn’t remember who was driving the vehicle. None of the fingerprints matched Teresa Smith or Credell Henry, but it was later determined that some fibers in the car were consistent with the halter top that Teresa Smith had been wearing.
Officials recovered DNA from under Teresa Smith’s fingernails, but the sample did not match Henry, the passenger or any other suspects in the case, according to police. As an informant, it is believed that Teresa Smith’s work was responsible for six or seven different arrests. She was not able to testify in any of those cases.
“Her death would have been beneficial to whoever was the target subject over there,” Dyson said.
Police do not know the identities of the woman who approached Teresa Smith or the driver of the vehicle who talked to Gabbard. Officials also do not know if that car is the same car involved in the chase with troopers.
“Cold cases are frustrating because you pretty much chased out all of your leads and you have no more breadcrumbs to go any further in one direction,” said Dyson, who will be retiring next month. “So now, it’s basically up to someone telling us something. I can tell you I get this case out at least once a year and just go back to see if I missed something. I’ll give younger deputies this case to take a look.”
As her brother and Dyson said, Teresa Smith was running around with bad people and living dangerously, but died a violent death.
“I don’t care what she did, who she was, and what she was doing,” Dyson said. “She didn’t deserve to be killed like that.”
A call for help
In March, 2023, the Paulding County Sheriff’s Office turned to the state Bureau of Criminal Investigation’s cold case unit.
“Paulding County Sheriff Jason Landers and his staff came up to BCI in Bowling Green," BCI Special Agent Christopher Hamberg said. "Along with our criminal intelligence unit and our lab, we went through the evidence and figured out what could be tested and re-tested,”
Officials are currently testing items, and Hamberg is optimistic that answers could be close at hand.
“We believe that not all of the suspects or witnesses in this case have been interviewed,” Hamberg said. “What I would say about this case is that it was personal and there was a lack of respect for Teresa as far as the condition that she was found and how she was killed.”
The site of the killing is unusual, but, according to Hamberg, may not be as surprising as it seems.
“Some of her associates that we were able to trace back had contacts in the Paulding, Putnam County, Defiance County areas, along with Fort Wayne.”
One of those associates, Credell Henry died in 2020. The last public witness to see her, David Gabbard, died in 2022.
Troubled, but not forgotten
When Terry Smith got word of how his little sister was killed, he was driving his truck.
“I called my dispatcher, and they made me park my truck. They wouldn’t let me drive,” he said. “It was just disbelief, you know.”
In the days after our interview, pictures began to flood in from Teresa Smith’s family. Most of them are from when she and Lisa were babies. One of the most recent ones was of her cap and gown at high school graduation.
Decades of her life, however, don’t exist in family albums. But memories of better times do occupy a special place in Terry Smith’s memories.
He tugged at his cap, rocked slightly in his chair and a smile spread across his face as he captured one of those memories.
“I remember her down on the farm. My dad always had a bunch of dogs and she’d always be running around with one. He’d give her several dogs to feed and give water, and she’d do it. But she was only 4 or 5 then,” he said. “She’d have a blast, a real blast.”
If you have any information on this case, contact Lt. Brion Hanenkratt at 419-399-3791. His email is bhanenkratt@pauldingohsheriff.com.
More from WTOL 11 Investigates: