John Cowan hopes his daughter's killer will change and help other inmates.
By SUE CARLTON
© St. Petersburg Times, published April 16, 1999
TAMPA -- The father of one of two women murdered by Sam Smithers doesn't want to see him get the death penalty.
John Cowan's daughter, Christie, was one of two Hillsborough Avenue prostitutes Smithers was convicted of brutally beating and strangling before tossing their bodies into a pond in 1996.
A jury voted unanimously to recommend death for Smithers, 45, an electrician and former church deacon, for the murders of Cowan, 31, and Denise Roach, 24, though no sentencing date has been set.
In a letter to Hillsborough Circuit Judge William Fuente, who will decide Smithers' fate, Cowan said his daughter had long struggled with drug addiction but that he loved her and kept in touch with her from his Connecticut home.
He wrote of taking the medical examiner's report to the cemetery to read it and of tracing the chop wounds she suffered on his own head to know "exactly what Mr. Smithers did to my daughter."
"My hope for Mr. Smithers is that he will live long enough for the hate and rage to die out, and that sometime in his life he might do something that will change the life of a fellow prisoner for the better," he wrote.
Cowan appeared in court for a presentencing hearing Thursday, as did Smithers' wife of 23 years.
"If sometime in the future, Mr. Smithers comes to fully understand the horror of what he has done, and if he is truly and deeply sorry for it, and if he tries to make his remaining time on Earth count for something worthwhile -- inside the prison walls -- then I will feel some easing of this awful pain that seems to have no end," Cowan wrote.
"As long as he is alive, there is hope," he wrote.
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