Brenda Walker spent much of her life being deprived. After her parents divorced when she was young, her mother Leota cut her alcoholic ex, Don Smith, out of their lives because instead of pouring his efforts into being a father, he continued pouring drinks down his throat.

As she grew older, Brenda asked her mother questions about her father, but Leota never told her where he was. After her mother died in 1975, Brenda began searching for him.

Shortly after her own divorce in 1983, twenty-six-year-old Brenda found her fifty-five-year-old father had remarried and was joyous to learn that he had mostly sobered up, was also looking for her, and that he wanted to be a part of her and her children’s lives. Father and daughter spent much time together over the following four years until Don’s life ended in a brutal fashion.

On the afternoon of May 13, 1987, Don Smith telephoned his sister. It was the last his family heard from him. Two weeks later, he was found bludgeoned to death in rural Idaho, one-hundred-twenty miles southeast of Boise.

Brenda Walker spent the last thirty-seven years of her life not knowing who had taken her father’s life.

Brenda Walker And Don Smith

Daughter And Father

On May 11, Don began the eight-hundred-fifty-mile trip from his Hemet, California, home eighty-five miles east of Los Angeles to see Brenda and her children, Janelle, James, and Jessica, who lived in Blackfoot, Idaho, two-hundred fifty miles east of Boise.  Don’s wife Helen was planning to accompany him before becoming ill shortly before the scheduled departure.

After visiting Brenda, Don planned to travel the six-hundred-eighty miles to Vancouver, Washington, to visit his sister, Judy Bergman.  Shortly after he is believed to have departed Hemet, Don phoned Judy, saying he was delayed because the trailer he was towing was giving him trouble.

Other than his two dogs, Don was alone when he departed Hemet.

Grandpa Don With Jessica And James

On the following day, May 12, Don and a thin black man arrived at the Blackfoot State South Hospital where Brenda worked as a psychiatric nurse. Don stayed in the truck while his companion entered the hospital and asked for Brenda, who was off that day. When the man then asked for Brenda’s home address and phone number, the receptionist informed him such personal information could be given to relatives only.

At the man’s request, Brenda’s supervisor, John Slane, came outside to talk to Don. He found him slumped on the passenger side of the car, clearly drunk and apparently not coherent enough to remember where Brenda lived.

Don Is Drunk Again

Don told Slane he was Brenda’s father and asked for her address. Because Slane did not know Don, who presented no identification, he did not divulge the information, saying only that she was not working that day, and that he believed she was fishing with friends near Springfield. He directed them to the area, fifteen miles away.

The black man with Don appeared antsy and frustrated with the ordeal.

John Slane

Blackfoot State South Hospital Administrator

Slane was correct about where Brenda and her friends had gone, but the group had abandoned fishing in favor of a bar near the lake. As Brenda and her friends sat at the bar chatting and drinking, they noticed a black man enter the tavern and proceed to the restroom. None of them recognized him.

Shortly thereafter, a rumpled looking man made a scene as he stumbled into the bar and, in a boisterous tone, bellowed, “Has anybody here seen my daughter?” Brenda did not recognize him at first glance but then realized the obnoxious drunk was her father.

After talking with him for a couple of minutes and calming him down, Brenda went to the restroom. A sobbing Don proceeded to tell Brenda’s friends, whom he did not know, how much he loved and missed her and how he regretted not being with her when she was a child.

Shortly after Brenda returned to her friends, the black man exited the men’s room. Before he left the bar, Don asked him a question about the weather, but he did not answer. Brenda saw the man enter the driver’s side of her father’s truck and, like John Slane at the hospital, said the man appeared impatient and irritated. He sat in the truck while Brenda talked with her father, until he became belligerent and tried to pick fights with several customers. Disgusted, Brenda told her dad to get a motel room and to sober up before contacting her again. She and her friends then exited the bar.

After a few minutes of talking with her friends outside the bar, Brenda saw her father exit the establishment and open the camper to let the dogs out to run. She left without further speaking to him.

Brenda Is Embarrassed By Her Dad’s Drunkenness

The following day, May 13, Don called his sister from a Western Union in Park City, Utah, two-hundred-twenty miles south of Blackfoot, Idaho, asking her to wire him $250.  Judy said she could hear a man in the background trying to persuade him go to Denver, Colorado.

When Don picked up the money, he was with a man resembling the one seen with him in the Blackfoot, Idaho, bar the day before. This was the last sighting of Don Smith.

Don’s Last Call

Two weeks later, on May 27, a couple discovered a decomposed body lying in a ditch between Buhl and Miracle Hot Springs, Idaho. The body appeared to have been thrown over the guard rail and to have been there for approximately two weeks. No identification was found.

Outside the guardrail, from which police believed the man had been thrown, they found a sack containing a bottle of wine, and a sales slip dated May 14 from a Stinker Service Station in Heyburn, approximately forty miles from where the body was found. A clerk recalled a middle-aged man paying for the booze with a $50 bill.

Bludgeon marks on the back of the victim’s head indicated he had been killed by blunt force trauma. He remained a John Doe for two weeks until the Twin Falls’ County Sheriff’s Department learned of an abandoned truck found eleven days earlier after being involved in a hit-and-run accident seven-hundred miles away in Denver, Colorado.

Two trucks had collided in downtown Denver at 2:00 a.m. on May 16. The driver of one of the vehicles fled the scene on foot. Police arrived within minutes and issued an APB for the man but could not find him.

The abandoned 1984 Ford truck at the accident scene was registered to Don Smith of Hemet, California. In searching the vehicle, police found a room key from a local motel and a bloody jack handle. The room was registered to a Larry Monroe. Inside the room, police found a pair of pants and a sweatshirt, both covered in blood.

Fingerprints ultimately positively identified Don Smith as the John Doe found near Buhl, Idaho, two weeks earlier, and several clothing items found in the Denver motel were confirmed as his. Investigators do not believe he was ever in Denver.

Following the positive identification, the Stinker Service Station clerk in Heyburn, Idaho, was certain Don was the man who had purchased the alcohol two days before the accident. The clerk said no one was with him in the service station.

The John Doe Is Don Smith

Because Don often picked up hitchhikers, police believe he had done so with the man calling himself Larry Monroe somewhere between Jean, Nevada, near Las Vegas, and Blackfoot, Idaho. This man is believed to have murdered Don shortly after he picked up the money wired by Judy on May 13.

Authorities believe Don was bludgeoned to death with the jack handle from the rear of his truck when he let his dogs out for a run just outside of Buhl. A July 1987 The Times-News article, ten weeks after Don’s body was discovered, states the dogs had, at that point, not been found; I could not find anything stating if they were later located.

Don was in Blackfoot, Idaho, on May 12, but the last time he was seen was in Park City, Utah, the following day. He is believed to have been murdered shortly thereafter and it is strange that his body was found back in Idaho.

The trailer Don was towing when he left California and which he told Judy had broken down shortly after he began his trip was found abandoned in the parking lot of a Las Vegas casino, two-hundred-thirty miles from Don’s home. It produced no clues relating to his murder.

Last Seen In Utah

But Found Dead Back In Idaho

The man calling himself Larry Monroe has never been identified and is still sought for questioning in the murder of Don Smith. Witnesses recalled him being a light-skinned black, approximately six feet tall, and weighing around one-hundred-eighty pounds. He had a lean but muscular build.

The man was probably in his early thirties in 1987, meaning he would be in his mid-to-late sixties today. Investigators believe he may have once lived in Blackfoot, Idaho.

If you have any information on Larry Monroe’s real identity or any other information on the murder of Don Smith, please contact the Twin Falls County, Idaho, Sheriff’s Department at (208) 736-4040.

Composites Of “Larry Monroe”

On March 9, 1985, a body was found in the gully about a half-mile from where Don Smith’s body was discovered just over two years later. The victim, believed to be a male Hispanic farm worker, had been killed from multiple stab wounds. At the time of the discovery of Don Smith’s body in May 1987, the 1985 victim was unidentified. I could not find if his identity has since been determined.

Investigators do not believe the two murders are connected.

A Cold Case

Don Smith’s daughter, Brenda Walker, died on April 19, 2024, at age sixty-six.

Brenda Has Recently Passed Away

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/3850134/donald-edward-smith

SOURCES:

• Denver Post
• Twin Falls Times-News
• Idaho Statesman
• South Idaho Press
• Unsolved Mysteries