Shari Smith

Case background and investigation

Shari Faye Smith, 17, disappeared on the afternoon of Friday, May 31, 1985, from the end of the driveway of her family's home in Lexington County, South Carolina. According to the facts summarized by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Bell v. Evatt, she was taken at about 3:15 p.m. United Press International reported that she had stopped to check the mail, and other accounts say her car was found at the roadside near the mailbox.

In the days that followed, a man telephoned the Smith family several times. The appeals court wrote that the caller gave details only the abductor would know and eventually directed authorities to her body, which was recovered on June 5, 1985. Accounts of the case place the recovery site in neighboring Saluda County. The family also received a letter in Shari's handwriting headed "Last Will and Testament," which the court record says was intercepted in the mail.

Two weeks after the Smith abduction, on June 14, 1985, Debra May Helmick was taken from outside her home in Richland County. Most news accounts give her age as nine, while the federal appeals opinion describes her as ten. According to the court record, the caller told the Smith family where her body could be found as well.

Larry Gene Bell, an electrician, was arrested on June 27, 1985. The court record and news reports say investigators reached him through a tip and through a telephone number whose impression had been left on the paper of the letter; the number led to a couple for whom Bell had been house-sitting. In February 1986 a jury convicted Bell of kidnapping and murdering Shari Smith and recommended a death sentence, which the trial judge imposed. The South Carolina Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and sentence in 1987. Bell was also convicted and sentenced to death for the kidnapping and murder of Debra May Helmick.

Bell's mental state was raised repeatedly during the proceedings; UPI reported that he gave rambling testimony at trial and made bizarre claims during psychiatric evaluation. The courts nonetheless upheld his convictions, and on December 18, 1995, the Fourth Circuit affirmed the denial of federal habeas relief.

Bell was executed in South Carolina's electric chair on October 4, 1996, having chosen electrocution over lethal injection, according to UPI and execution records. In February 2025, Charlotte-Mecklenburg police in North Carolina announced that they had also identified Bell as responsible for the 1984 disappearance of Sandee Cornett, according to the Wikipedia summary of that department's statement. The Smith case was dramatized in a 1991 television film and has been covered in several documentary series.