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“Cold Justice” Helps Arrest Predator After 31 Years of Cindy Smith Murder
Larry Timmons spent the time terrorizing other women and children.
Three decades is a long time. Incidentally, this case is about as old as I am and only saw a breakthrough as recently as two years ago. The case was considered a cold case until the makers of the TV Show Cold Justice decided they were going to do something about it.
Cynthia Smith (Cindy) was a 31-year-old woman and a mother of two sons — Shawn and Jason, who were 8 and 4 years old at the time of her death in 1988.
Shawn was her son from a previous marriage, and she was now living with her second husband Louis Smith.
Her second marriage with Louis was also not going too well and they were in the process of getting a divorce.
However, before they could go through with a divorce, Cindy’s life would be unfortunately cut short when she’d be killed in a murder that would evade the police for over three decades.
The Murder and the Known Facts of the Case
It was July 28, 1988, when Cindy had gone down to a bar called the Checker’s Bar in the small town of Lawrence County, in Missouri. She had gone there with a couple of her friends and colleagues from her place of work.
Cindy was a responsible mother — so when she didn’t return home until very late in the night, people close to her including her husband Louis were worried and knew something was wrong. A missing person report was filed for Cindy, but there was no breakthrough until her body was found in the Dry Valley Cemetery around August 17, 1988.
The delay in finding her body had meant that the body had significantly decomposed in the summer sun. The skin on her head had come off the skull and the body was in barely any position for a proper autopsy.
This meant that the cause for death could not be ascertained at the time. There had been reports of gunshots heard around that area and a woman screaming on the same night that Cindy disappeared.
There was some evidence of blunt trauma on her skull that could have been from the butt of a gun but it wasn’t conclusive…
