| | The Confession
The Speirs family placed a death notice in The Tooele Transcript-Bulletin, saying that their daughter had “passed away unexpectedly” and that she would be remembered for her “cute smile, talent of drawing” and her “love for Walter and their twins and her family and friends.”
Mr. Smith cried once when it came time to choose a coffin. Otherwise, he was unemotional during the funeral proceedings, which some of Ms. Speirs’s friends and relatives noted.
“He threw his corsage on the casket, turned around and walked away,” said Robert Walkenhorst, Ms. Speirs’s grandfather. “It made me so mad.”
Asked about his behavior that day, Mr. Smith said, “Not to be coarse, but I’ve been around a ton of death, and it doesn’t affect me anymore.”
After the funeral, Mr. Smith and the Speirses began, essentially, to co-parent the twins. In the process, they developed a relationship. “I think that’s where he started feeling guilty,” Mr. Speirs said.
The summer after Nicole Speirs’s death, Mr. Smith began dating Michelle Zeller, a sales manager for a film company who supplied the photo labs at local Wal-Marts. Ms. Zeller, 34, knew about Ms. Speirs’s death, which she saw as a tragic accident. By September, Mr. Smith and Ms. Zeller, who has a daughter, were engaged and living together.
“He seemed pretty together,” Ms. Zeller said, “but he has told me since that he was faking it.”
Mr. Smith felt incredibly nervous, he said, that he was starting a new life, with three children involved, and that he had not “worked through my issues,” as he put it. He decided to give the veterans’ health care system another try, and soon he was commuting to Salt Lake City weekly to see a counselor, Ms. Zeller said.
“He told me they were trying to get in his head and help him deal with what had happened in Iraq,” Ms. Zeller said. “When he came home, he’d be distant and go lie down for an hour or so. One time, in late November, he slept for like a day and a half straight, waking up pale and with tremors. He seemed to be getting worse.”
On Dec. 3, 2006, Mr. Smith left the house to buy drywall at a Home Depot and never returned. “I took a left instead of a right and ended up heading to the V.A.,” he said. He called Ms. Zeller, crying, and told her he could not endure the thoughts in his head.
When Mr. Smith arrived at the hospital, he told them that he was “homicidal and suicidal.” Soon he was speaking to a counselor.
“I told them that I had done it,” Mr. Smith said, referring to killing Ms. Speirs. “The first person thought I was blaming myself for something I didn’t do. Then my uncle arrived. I told him, and he said, ‘We need to call the police.’“
When the police arrived, Mr. Smith’s uncle told them that “Walter was essentially a good kid but that his tour in the Iraq war caused him some mental problems,” the police investigative report said.
After detectives advised him of his Miranda rights, Mr. Smith declared, “I am responsible for Nicole Speirs’s death.” It was an odd circumlocution. He declined further questioning until he obtained a lawyer.
Just before midnight, Mr. Smith’s father and uncle went to see the Speirses to tell them of Mr. Smith’s admission, which ultimately came as more of a relief than a shock. “They said Walter confessed because of us,” Mr. Speirs said. “I think he did care for us.”
At first Mr. Searle, the prosecutor, was cautious. “I didn’t want to just take his confession based on his history that we knew,” he said. Doubt was planted in part by something that Mr. Smith said to the police: “The biggest thing I want to get out of this is help.”
Further, when Matthew Jube, the lawyer hired by Walter Smith’s family, asked Mr. Smith what had happened, Mr. Smith asked him “which version” of events, the one that he had told the police or the one that he saw in his dreams. Mr. Jube began to think that Mr. Smith had given a false confession as a “cry for help,” motivated partly by guilt, both over his relationship with Ms. Speirs and about his killing of civilians in Iraq.
The prosecution had no evidence besides Mr. Smith’s confession. Although the Speirses agreed to allow their daughter’s body to be exhumed, the state medical examiner found nothing new, the prosecutor said.
‘What Is Justice?’
Mr. Smith’s lawyer sent a psychiatrist to see him a couple of times. During the second visit, the psychiatrist came away convinced that Mr. Smith had indeed killed Ms. Speirs, although he never offered any motive.
Asked during The Times’s interview why he had taken Ms. Speirs’s life, Mr. Smith said only: “I don’t feel she really had anything to do with it. Had it been someone else there at that time, it probably would have been them.”
Eventually, the prosecutor determined that Mr. Smith’s confession was valid. Then, the prosecutor said, “We fell back into, ‘What is justice?’ and ‘Justice needs to be done.’”
“It goes without saying that Utahans are, based on a religious perspective, very patriotic and loyal to their country,” Mr. Searle continued. “We looked at this case and said, ‘When he presents to a jury that he served his country like his country asked him to serve, and even his country admits, with his discharge and his disability pay, that he has severe psychological trauma’ — we felt there was a very good chance that the members of a jury would find him not guilty and basically punish the government for the position he’s in.”
“Washington, D.C., is 2,000 miles away,” he continued. “It wouldn’t matter to them. But to this community, it’s going to matter. We’ve got a mother of two that’s dead. Her family is affected. Her kids are affected. Walter’s affected.”
Further, Mr. Searle did not believe that Mr. Smith was guilty of murder. He felt that he was guilty of taking Ms. Speirs’s life intentionally “but acting under duress.”
“I can’t justify criminal activity,” he said. “But it would have been unjust to Walter and to society to throw out the circumstances that we as a society put him in.”
Mr. Searle and Mr. Jube negotiated an agreement under which Mr. Smith pleaded guilty to manslaughter, which, according to state guidelines, meant a sentence of one to 15 years.
During Mr. Smith’s sentencing hearing in October, Judge Mark S. Kouris of state District Court asked him if he had anything to say. Mr. Smith hemmed and hawed, mumbling that he had already addressed the judge in writing. In the packed courtroom, the insufficiency of his answer hung in the air like a gasp. Lifting his head, he forced himself to speak.
“I didn’t plan on doing what I did,” he said quietly. “I wish I could take it back, but I know I can’t. All I can say is I’m sorry. I’m not asking for leniency.”
The judge asked him to turn and address his victim’s parents directly.
“I’m sorry,” he said to them, his head falling down once more. “There’s nothing else I can say beside that.” His face crumpled, his voice cracked and his eyes watered. “I couldn’t ask for better people to raise my children,” the former marine continued, adding yet again, as his and her relatives wept, “I’m sorry.”
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