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Murder trial's penalty phase continues
By SUE CARLTON © St. Petersburg Times, published January 24, 1999 TAMPA -- Nothing, Sharon Smithers Cole testified, nothing in her 23-year marriage could have prepared her for the day her mild-mannered husband was charged with murdering two prostitutes. "Not Sam," the elementary schoolteacher's aide said on the witness stand Saturday, shaking her head. "No way." Testimony continued into the weekend in the case of Sam Smithers, a former church deacon and electrician's helper found guilty last month of using a hoe and an ax when he beat and strangled two women in 1996. The jury that convicted him is expected to decide today whether to recommend life in prison or death in the electric chair in the deaths of Christy Cowan and Denise Roach. The bodies of the two Hillsborough Avenue prostitutes were found floating in a pond on some property where Smithers worked. During the penalty phase of the case, defense lawyers presented evidence of Smithers' bleak childhood, when relatives said he was regularly beaten through high school by his deeply religious mother. Others said he went on to become a likable, if somewhat peculiar, man. Mrs. Cole, who has since remarried but smiled at her ex-husband in the courtroom, told the jury she finally asked him how the man she knew could have carried out such crimes. "He said, "Sharon, it was like I was just standing back and watching somebody else do it,' " she told a jury Saturday. A defense psychiatrist said Smithers was suffering from extreme mental and emotional disturbance when he killed the women. But prosecutors are expected to argue that Smithers was deliberate in carrying out the murders, from picking up each woman to taking her to the secluded property where he was unlikely to be disturbed to cleaning the blood and hiding the bodies afterward. In an unusual bit of weekend scheduling, the jury will return to the courtroom today at 8:30 a.m. Hillsborough Judge William Fuente will make the ultimate decision on Smithers' sentence at a later date.
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