| | A Call for Help
In the fall of 2004, Walter Smith and Nicole Speirs met on MySpace. On her page, Ms. Speirs — a Scorpio, Honda lover and Utah Career College graduate — said, “I have been described as a preppie, punk, ska8er, tomboy and car chick.”
Mr. Smith and Ms. Spiers went on a few dates. Mr. Smith also dated other women.
In November, Mr. Smith called the Pleasant Grove police asking for help. The officer who was dispatched to his house was the one who had intervened in his suicide attempt five months earlier. Mr. Smith advised the officer “that he was having thoughts of taking the life of his girlfriend while she was asleep,” Captain Cullimore said. “He asked to be transferred to the hospital, which he was.”
That girlfriend was not Ms. Speirs. Once again, Mr. Smith was released after a brief stay.
Mr. Smith said that he slept with Ms. Speirs once. To her parents’ dismay, Ms. Speirs, not quite 21, got pregnant. Mr. Smith accompanied her on her first visit to the obstetrician, where she learned that she was carrying twins, but then he grew doubtful that the babies were his, he said. They broke up. Ms. Spiers was heartbroken. Mr. Smith was not. “I totally forgot about her,” he said.
Mr. Smith then started seeing another woman. One night, he came home with duct tape and demanded that the woman accompany him to the basement, said Mr. Searle, the prosecutor. Once downstairs, Mr. Smith turned to the woman and implored her to get away from him quickly before he did her harm. She ran away. The couple broke up. In a further sign of his deterioration, Mr. Smith filed for bankruptcy and moved in with a marine buddy.
Meanwhile, Ms. Speirs gave birth to twins two months early, in May 2005. Ms. Speirs was a very happy young mother but, she would confess on her MySpace page, lonely.
About seven months after the twins were born, Mr. Smith “popped onto MySpace” to see if Ms. Speirs had posted any news after giving birth. And there were the twins, he said, smiling out at him like carbon copies of his own baby pictures.
When Mr. Smith reappeared in Ms. Speirs’s life, she was ecstatic, her relatives said. “She had a perma-grin,” her mother said. “She was smiling from ear to ear.”
They moved into an apartment together in Tooele. Both of them were working at Wal-Mart, she as a cashier at the Tooele store, he as the manager of the photo lab at the West Jordan store. They did not fight, according to their friends and families, and “he was not mean to her,” said Pauline Speirs, her mother.
Nicole Speirs wanted more from the relationship than Mr. Smith was giving her — more communication, more love, a commitment to marry.
In the post-midnight hours of March 25, 2006, the couple took a bath after making love. Ms. Speirs turned to rinse her hair under the faucet, and Mr. Smith pushed her head underwater and held it there until she died. Then he left her in the tub, dressed, fetched the twins, put them in their car seats and drove off, as planned, to a family reunion in Idaho.
From that point forward, disconnecting from his actions, he tried to convince himself that he had not taken Nicole Speirs’s life, he said. From Idaho, he called her cellphone and left a message saying that he would be returning earlier than planned. When he got home almost a day later he put the babies to bed and followed the sound of running water into the bathroom. He lifted Ms. Speirs’s body from the cold water, laid her on the bathroom floor, tried to perform CPR and covered her with a green towel. He then called 911, telling the dispatcher that he had found his girlfriend “cold and stiff” in a full tub and was trying to revive her. The dispatcher heard the tub draining.
When the authorities arrived, they saw no sign of foul play and, after interviewing Mr. Smith, suspected none, according to a police report written the next day. Mr. Smith had no record of arrests or even traffic violations, the police had never been called to their home and the neighbors reported no audible fighting through the thin walls. The body showed no visible indications of trauma. A plastic shower curtain, which could have been a lifeline for a drowning young woman, was undisturbed.
Mr. Smith called the Speirses. “He said, ‘Nicole’s dead.’ Just like that,” Mrs. Speirs said.
“The whole thing doesn’t seem real,” Mr. Speirs interjected. “It seems like a bad TV movie. But, anyway, we went over. The police were there. She had had root canal in January. There was a half bottle of pills. They went on the assumption that she had committed suicide.”
Based on that assumption evidence was not gathered as it might have been if homicide were suspected.
Utah’s chief medical examiner performed an autopsy and found no explanation for her death. The police, a small department in a small city with no homicide team and only a handful of murders in the last decade, effectively closed the case, classifying the death as “a drowning from unknown causes.”
“The police never asked me if I had done it,” Mr. Smith said. “No one came out and said, ‘Walter, did you do it?’ I don’t know what I would have done if they did.”
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