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But by the time this question was being asked, the sheriff was already suspicious. He’d noticed an absence of powder burns around the hole in Sidney’s forehead, which absolutely ruled out the suicide theory. He had already decided maybe Thomas ought to be questioned again. Thomas was — and when he confessed, a third layer of this awful onion was exposed:
THOMAS TOLD THE sheriff that the whole thing had come about because he had been having “an affair” with his oldest niece, Rhoda Ann, then 16. Rhoda Ann had, he said, “confessed the affair” to her mother, who had told Sydney about it when he came back from the gold fields. Her father, furious, had staged a confrontation. Rhoda Ann had refused to cooperate, so Sydney had started beating her; and Thomas, in defense of his incestuous “lover,” had murdered her father, after which he’d gone ahead and murdered Barbara too. Obviously, this left a few questions unanswered. The peculiar savagery with which Thomas attacked Barbara — slashing her face and hands before fatally stabbing her in the neck — argued for more personal feeling than he was admitting to. A modern reader can hardly fail to draw certain conclusions from Uncle Thomas’s story, especially in Oregon in the aftermath of the Neil Goldschmidt case. It’s clear that the “affair” was child molestation, started by Thomas after Sidney left for the gold fields and left the Smith women and children in his care. (Knowing this, it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that the reason for Thomas’s savagery in cutting up Barbara with the knife was that he had tried to make a move on her, and been rejected.) Then Sidney had returned, and learned what he’d done. Now both his victim’s parents knew what he’d done … and what he was. So he’d murdered both of them so that they could not expose him. Then, when he’d been exposed anyway, he’d tried to paint poor Rhoda Ann as a “scarlet woman,” a teen-age temptress who had seduced him. It’s hard to say from the newspapers’ accounts whether or not anyone bought this. It seems likely they did not. But, it would be nice to know what became of Rhoda Ann after all her family’s dirty laundry was aired in the newspaper and she was publicly accused of seducing her uncle.
REGARDLESS OF WHETHER people understood the true nature of the “affair,” there was widespread agreement that Uncle Thomas needed to die, and the outcome of the trial was never in doubt. A hanging was scheduled for May 10, 1866 — and on that very morning, the newspapers carried the word of Thomas Smith’s other brother, Calvin, who was still in the gold fields of Idaho. He had, apparently, committed suicide. Thomas was the only surviving Smith brother. That changed a little later that day, just 62 days after the double murder — still a record in Oregon history. That’s when, nattily dressed in frock coat and leather boots, Thomas Smith dropped through the gallows trap door into eternity. There is a postscript to this story, though. Sometime after the execution, the orphans were out playing on the Smith farm, and one of them found a leather bag with $25,000 in gold dust — obviously the proceeds from the gold prospecting trip that had taken Sidney away from his farm, his wife, and his daughter. In 1866, $25,000 was a tremendous fortune; but it’s surely safe to say that if Sidney could have turned back time, knowing what it would cost him to acquire it, he would have turned that money down.
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