LOVE AND PAIN ARE ONE AND THE SAME
It was Sunday, April 22nd, 1973. Three days before Craig Smith’s 28th birthday. It had been four and a half years since he’d been attacked and brutalized in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Seven and a half years since he’d first met Chris Ducey and successfully auditioned for The Happeners. Almost ten years since he’d joined the Good Time Singers and the cast of The Andy Williams Show.
All of that lay behind him. The friends he’d known, the girls he’d loved, the musicians he’d played with, the singers who’d recorded his songs—all of them were gone from his life. They had fallen out of touch or wanted nothing to do with him. He was a pariah. A leper messiah. No friends, no prospects, and no obvious way forward.
“Tie a Yellow Ribbon ’Round the Old Oak Tree” was the number one record in the country that week. Richard Nixon was President, but the Watergate net was closing in on him. White House counsel John Dean had just named three of Nixon’s closest confidantes as co-conspirators, including his chief of staff H.R. Haldeman. On April 22nd Nixon called Haldeman from his vacation home in Key Biscayne, Florida, to discuss his chief of staff’s imminent resignation. “You’re doing the right thing,” Nixon told him. “That’s what I used to think when I killed some innocent children in Hanoi.”
In Los Angeles, toxic brown smog blanketed the Valley. April 22nd was Easter Sunday. Craig stopped by the family home to visit his mother. His father must have been at the Pump Room. Craig needed something from his mother—money. Songwriting royalties from the trust fund perhaps. They had a few drinks. They may have talked about his father’s recent appearance on television. The episode of This Is Your Life with Peggy Lee had aired the previous month on March 11th.
Suddenly the suburban calm of Woodbridge Street was interrupted by the sounds of loud screaming and glass breaking. Neighbors rushed outside to see what was happening. Through the kitchen window of the Smith residence they saw a young man throwing objects around the room. Someone called the police.
Police officers arrived on the scene soon afterwards and discovered 57-year-old Carole Smith lying on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood. Craig had fled the scene. The house had been ransacked, furniture was overturned, the floors were strewn with papers and broken glass. According to one report “all the glass in the dwelling had been broken.” When an officer attempted to question Mrs. Smith, she was only able to mumble a few words: “My son did it. Call my husband.” She later testified that she recalled Craig striking her with his hand before she lost consciousness.
She was transported to Riverside Hospital in North Hollywood where she remained for several days. Doctors reported that she suffered “multiple contusions and lacerations to the face and severe lacerations about the eyebrows, and possible contusion and fracture of facial bones and of the nose, cheekbone and eye socket. Numerous sutures were required to close lacerations over the eyes.”
While at the hospital police officers received a distraught call from Craig. “How is my mother? Is she going to be all right?” According to police he went on to say, “I was over there for Easter and we were drinking and I told her I wanted my money now, and she wouldn’t give it to me, so I beat her up. I thought I killed her—that’s why I called. I really didn’t mean to hurt her that bad.
“Things just got out of hand—you know how it is,” he added before hanging up the phone and fleeing the city.
A felony warrant was issued, and four days later Smith was arrested near Salinas in Monterey County. Two detectives from the North Hollywood Division flew up to Salinas where they picked him up and returned him to Los Angeles for arraignment. I spoke to one of those officers, Detective Addison Sorenson, in September 2014.
Now 78 years old, Sorensen retired from the LAPD in 1985. He doesn’t remember going to Salinas to collect a 28-year-old prisoner with a black widow spider tattooed on his forehead. But we talk for a while and he lays out how it would’ve gone down.
“When I was working the detective bureau I’d go all over the country picking up people that we had warrants for,” he tells me, “because what would happen was they’d get arrested somewhere else, and then they’d notify us that they had them in custody, and I’d get the authorization to fly up and get ’em back. I was doing that all the time. I’d always get to pick one guy to go with me, another detective. You’d pick the best ones to go with you because some of those people you’d go out there for were pretty seriously dangerous people.”
Detectives Addison Sorensen and Bill Terry would’ve taken a commercial flight out of LAX to get to Salinas, a task that required the correct paperwork. “They’d give me traveling instructions,” Sorensen continues, “because if you go on an airplane with a gun on you, you’ve gotta have those orders or you can’t get on that plane. In other words they’re saying that I’m an officer of the law and I’m going to pick up somebody. So I’m the first person to get on that plane at LAX. And then after that they let the crippled people on, then the Class A and then the back-seaters. When I get on that plane I get to meet the captain, the co-captain, every stewardess on that job—they’ll all know where me and my partner want to sit. It’s important for them to know that. That’s the way that works. Then, when we land on the ground there’s always a deputy sheriff waiting for us. Some of them had to drive 50 miles to get us; there were different situations like that. So he would take us back to his station where the person was in prison, locked up.”
Sorensen would then go into the cell and have a conversation with the prisoner. The tone of the conversation would vary depending on how dangerous he considered the suspect. As Craig was accused of a violent crime, he would’ve laid down the law pretty strongly to him. “There’s one thing you do when you pick up a guy who might be dangerous,” says Sorensen. “You go in the cell with him by yourself, nobody else around, and you tell him, ‘Try any shit with me, I’ll blow your fuckin’ brains out. I’ve got a felony warrant to get you back and if you try to escape I could shoot you.’ I mean, you don’t shoot them, but you put a little fear in them and then they mind themselves. I’d tell them, ‘When you walk, I’ll tell you where to walk.’ You gotta do that, ’cause some of them people are nuts! I’m a pretty big guy—I’m six foot two and back then I weighed 235. I worked out every other day in the gym at the station. I was solid muscle and strong. You’ve gotta be that way on that job. They take one look at me and they know that they’re gonna do what I’m gonna tell ’em. I never have had any problem taking any of them back, and I’ve hauled a lot of them back over the years.
“So I would tell him my little story and let him know, ‘Try anything foolish and you’ll regret it.’ You gotta say stuff like that, which may sound mean and cruel, but at the same time you’re going for a felon, because we didn’t chase after misdemeanors. So then I’d tell the guy, ‘We’re gonna pick you up tomorrow and we’re gonna be on the plane taking you back to Los Angeles.’ And then me and my partner would have to get a motel or some place and spend the night. The next morning we’d have our breakfast, go over and pick him up. The sheriff would drive us back to that airport and see that we got on that plane. They were very good about that. We’d do the same thing with people that we’d get; people that would come from different parts of the country to pick up our prisoners.”
The next morning Craig would have been handcuffed and driven to the airport. “He’d be handcuffed with his hands behind his back,” explains the retired cop. “We’d put the handcuffs on them in the front before we went on the plane, but we’d put their sweater or coat over that so people wouldn’t see the handcuffs. Then we’d put the person down in the seat. My partner would sit on one side and I would sit on the other. I always sat on that left side, the aisle side, and my partner always would sit on the right side. Then we had a way of using that seatbelt; we’d have the belt through his arms too and then around the back. He’s not going nowhere!”
Back in Los Angeles, on Tuesday, May 1st, Craig Vincent Smith—“also known as Kali Maitreya”—was arraigned before Municipal Judge Edward Davenport. He was facing two felony counts: assault with a deadly weapon with intent to commit murder, and assault by means of force likely to produce great bodily injury. The judge scheduled a preliminary hearing for the following week in Municipal Court in San Fernando. Bail was set at $10,000. It was not paid and Smith remained in custody in the Los Angeles County Jail. He was referred to the Superior Court’s psychiatric department to see if he was competent to stand trial.
Van Nuys News, May 20, 1973.
“Police said that Smith, who gave his occupation as being song writer, had had his name changed to ‘Kali Maitreya’ because of his Hindu religious beliefs,” reported the Van Nuys News. “Officers said they were unsure of a motive behind Smith’s alleged criminal behavior.” Later news reports noted that Smith had been student body president at Ulysses S. Grant High School and “had a history of LSD use.”
In the weeks following the assault, Hal Kant had become involved, presumably at Craig’s request, although a public defender may also have been appointed. Evidently this caused some problems behind the scenes. A handwritten notation on one of the court documents, dated May 10th, noted that Kant had been relieved at the request of the defendant, adding: “P.D. [presumably public defender] declared a conflict!!!” The three exclamation points suggest this conflict may have been of some magnitude. The cause of the conflict between the public defender and Hal Kant is not known, but another potential conflict of interest would also have come into play: Craig’s brother Chuck worked as an investigator for the public defender’s office in Van Nuys.
At a May 15th hearing in Municipal Court, Judge Harold Sinclair ruled that the ‘intent’ necessary to bind Smith over to Superior Court on the more serious “assault with intent to commit murder” charge had not been established. However, the charge was not amended or dropped, and the case moved forward.
Van Nuys News, August 16, 1973.
Bail remained set at $10,000 and another hearing was scheduled for Tuesday, May 29th, in Van Nuys. Smith appeared in court under the name Craig Vincent Kalimaitreya. A private attorney, David F. Grossmann, had now taken over as his defense counsel. His motion for a reduction of bail was denied, and another hearing was scheduled for the following week. On June 5th the defendant—who now gave his “true name” as Craig Vincent Smith—entered a plea of not guilty on both counts, and was scheduled to stand trial in Van Nuys Superior Court, Department M, on Wednesday, July 11th. A motion to release Smith on his own recognizance was denied, as was another attempt to have his bail reduced. Back to County Jail he went.
With the case now scheduled to go to trial, Deputy District Attorney Sterling E. Norris was assigned as prosecutor. At the July 11th hearing Judge Charles Hughes delayed the trial until August 15th, and the court appointed a psychiatrist, Dr. Albert J. Boner of Beverly Hills, to examine Craig and determine his mental condition. Boner consulted with Smith on July 26th, and was paid $75 by the court for his services. He was succeeded by another psychiatrist, Dr. Seymour W. Applebaum, of Pasadena, who was engaged by the defense.
Applebaum, 43, was an interesting character. He had established the Applebaum Psychiatric Medical Group in 1969, and staked out a position for himself as an expert on youth drug culture. Another of his interests was the religious and spiritual elements of psychotherapy. He must have found Craig to be a particularly compelling case. Perhaps he even bought into Craig’s Maitreya trip a little: “Patients in therapy demonstrate authentic mystical and transcendent experiences whether or not defined by themselves or others as traditionally religious,” he wrote in a paper published in 1985.
With Applebaum’s help, Smith’s attorney, Grossmann, was laying the groundwork for a change of plea to not guilty by reason insanity. Eventually though, they elected to employ a different strategy. At the August 15th hearing, Craig waived his right to a jury trial, withdrew his not guilty plea, and entered a new plea of no contest to the lesser charge of assault by means of force likely to produce great bodily injury (the Van Nuys News erroneously reported that it was “assault with a deadly weapon”). Sentencing was scheduled for September 7th. In the meantime, it was ordered that Dr. Applebaum or any member of his staff be allowed two additional visits to the County Jail “for the purpose of making a psychiatric examination of the defendant.” A few days later another court order was filed amending this to a total of four visits. Grossmann was now gambling on Applebaum’s psychiatric expertise to secure a lighter sentence for his client, ideally commitment to some kind of private psychiatric facility outside of the penal system.
A motion was filed in court on September 7th, and Judge Hughes made another ruling: “Defendant is ordered to be delivered to USC County Medical Center for a complete medical and Neurological examination looking for organic damage with metabolic and endocrine factors involved that cause violent behavior.” In other words: how serious was Craig’s mental condition and did it contribute to the sudden, violent attack on his mother? Three weeks later Craig had not yet been transported to the hospital so Judge Hughes repeated his ruling with the additional qualifier that “The Sheriff is ordered to notify the court of compliance of this order.” Motions from the defense delayed sentencing on three subsequent occasions during October.
Craig had spent more than two hundred days in custody before he finally appeared in Superior Court for sentencing on November 14th, 1973. According to a report in the Van Nuys News, at the sentencing hearing “the focal point for discussion was how and where the defendant, who had been a successful professional musician, could best obtain psychiatric care.”
Craig was represented in court by Daniel Kallen, who was standing in for David Grossmann that day, as he had on several other occasions. When I reached Kallen in 2014 he had no recollection of the case.
“At the sentencing last week,” the Van Nuys News reported, “a private attorney representing Smith, and Dr. S.W. Applebaum, a Pasadena psychiatrist who had been privately retained, urged that the defendant be treated for what they said was his ‘schizophrenic reaction, paranoid type’ mental illness at Altadena Manor. The attorney and psychiatrist indicated to Judge Hughes that the facility near Pasadena was ‘locked’ and had 10-foot-high walls.”
Although he had been retained by the defense, Applebaum’s testimony did not weigh too heavily in Craig’s favor—especially as reported by the newspaper: “Dr. Applebaum testified that he did not consider Smith to be a dangerous person ‘under normal circumstances,’ although he still harbored ‘ambivalent feelings towards his parents,’ which could, conceivably, result in an outburst of violence if Smith is not given proper treatments.”
Applebaum went on to add that “Alcohol and street drugs contributed to his violent outbursts.”
However, when it came time for the sentencing, Judge Hughes did not see Smith’s drug use as a mitigating factor. The defense’s arguments, and Applebaum’s “expert” testimony, didn’t appear to have impressed him in the slightest. There were no assurances under present law that the defendant could be kept locked up in private treatment facility such as the one suggested by the defense, he told the court. “He’d have a right to get out,” he explained, “and I can’t put him back on the street. He’s had a tremendous use of drugs.” He cited a report from the Probation Department stating that Smith had taken LSD more than 80 times.
The judge proceeded to hand down the harshest sentence possible, sending Craig to state prison at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville for the term prescribed by law. California’s severe open-ended sentencing laws at the time defined that sentence as six months to life. The judge further stated that he would have preferred to have had Smith committed to Atascadero State Hospital, a maximum-security facility, but because of a recent amendment in California’s mental health statute “that alternative has been taken away.” He recommended that Smith receive intensive medical and psychiatric treatment by the doctors at Vacaville.
“Valley Man Sentenced for Severe Beating of Mother” ran the November 25th headline in the Van Nuys News. Craig’s brother Chuck had been in court for the sentencing, and he was quoted at the conclusion of the article, listing some of his brother’s accomplishments. “The defendant had been senior class president in 1962 at Ulysses S. Grant High School, ‘and had been captain of the school’s gymnastics team and took second place in the all-city competition on the rings,’ according to Charles ‘Chuck’ Smith, 33, an investigator for the Public Defender’s office in Van Nuys and the defendant’s brother.
“Although the defendant had 26 scholarship offers, Charles Smith said, he decided to sing on the Andy Williams show for three years following graduation from high school then went into other musical endeavors.”
The article concluded on a cautionary note: “The defendant’s mental deterioration started ‘when he began taking dope and LSD in the mid-1960s,’ the brother commented.”
Craig Smith’s indeterminate sentence of six months to life was made possible by a provision in the California Penal Code, Section 1168, which allowed the court not to fix a precise term or duration of the period of imprisonment. Convicted offenders instead would be sentenced to a broad term, and then their case would be reviewed periodically by a parole board until it was determined they were sufficiently rehabilitated to be released back into the community. Therefore the date of Craig’s release, or indeed whether he would ever be released, would be decided by the court at some unspecified date in the future based on diagnostic information provided by the medical staff at the prison.
From the point of view of the prosecution, Penal Code 1168 provided a useful tool to keep criminals off the streets for as long as possible, particularly if there was a drug or mental health component to the case, as the Deputy District Attorney on Craig’s case explained to me when I spoke to him in 2014. Sterling E. Norris has no specific recollection of Craig Smith’s case. He prosecuted over a thousand trials over the course of his 32-year career with the District Attorney’s office, and, as he points out, this particular case never went before a jury; it was what they called “a calendar matter,” one of thousands of cases every year that were plea-bargained out, dismissed or otherwise settled without a full-blown trial. Norris kindly offered to read over all the court documents and other relevant paperwork I’d obtained, and give me his perspective on the case.
“This was one of the Vacaville crowd,” he tells me after looking over the case documents. “Around this time, the early ’70s, there were a lot of cases that involved drugs and many times we would try to get those sent to Vacaville. From our aspect the time in custody sometimes would be greater than if they put them in the [regular, non-medical] prison, because at that time second-degree murder was only five years in prison. That was kind of the whole true story of all these things. Basically we had the Vacaville strategy to see if we could keep these guys in prison as long as possible, ’cause they’d be right out, and usually what would happen would be they’d get right out and overdose.”
From the beginning, then, they had Smith’s case earmarked as a drug case, and one where “the Vacaville strategy” would work, especially given Craig’s mental health issues, and the defense’s decision to use that as grounds for a lesser sentence. “He was a substantial drug user,” observes Norris, “but he was not uncommon. It hit in the ’70s there just terrible. Obviously he’d had quite a downward spiral too, after being kind of a leader in high school and a good athlete and everything else. But it’s a very common scenario. I hate to tell you, but I had literally hundreds of mothers and wives crying on my shoulder and telling me, ‘I’d rather have him dead than have him back on this heroin and LSD.’ Of course the ’70s were really the worst time for all that. I tell you what really helped, though, was the stronger laws that came in later. It helped from our standpoint, from the criminal justice aspect. I think they started to get the idea that this stuff is dangerous. If you go out and do this stuff, you’re not Superman, this stuff affects you all. It’ll take you right down to the bottom of the world. That was a terrible time. A lot of them still haven’t learned today, but I still think it’s a lot better than the ’70s. It became so popular then, it was the thing to do.”
Norris was not impressed with the defense’s expert witness, Dr. Seymour Applebaum. “We had the psychiatrists and doctors that we had worked with and had faith in,” he explains. “Then there were the people that were out to sell themselves to some defense attorney. Seymour Applebaum—I remember him. It’s vague, it’s been so long, but what comes out right away was he’s not one we’d depend on. We had our psychiatrists that we had faith in, that when they said ‘the guy has mental problems’ we would be assured that that’s what it was and that that has to be factored in, but Applebaum I remember was kind of a bizarre guy—I may be wrong, it’s been so long, but I kind of got a recollection that he was not one that we’d rely on.”
Norris was correct about Applebaum not being the most reputable of expert witnesses. Only a year earlier, he’d been arraigned on charges of grand theft after allegedly submitting more than $4,000 in insurance claims to Medi-Cal for services which were not performed. The charges were later dismissed due to insufficient evidence, but the taint of dishonesty remained.
The defense’s strategy of wanting their client committed to a private medical facility was a common one at the time. “See, there were people like Applebaum that either had a facility or they had some interest in a facility, and they wanted the defendant to go to that particular facility. It was usually local, somewhere in the general Los Angeles area as opposed to some mental institution upstate or something. There’d be a little battle about whether he’s going to go to that facility. Sometimes [the defendant] would have money or the family would have money and they’d get the attorney, and then the attorney would get a psychiatrist coming out of a mental facility in the general L.A. area. I remember those. We had a number of them. Generally, from the D.A.’s standpoint, we’d be opposed to it, mainly out of custody. What we’d be fearful of is that he would go there and all of a sudden the guy would do something berserk and that would probably come back to haunt us in terms of agreeing to this physician. Generally we had a strong policy not to do that—and especially not to do it with somebody that we thought was seriously mentally ill. I mean at Vacaville and some of the other state facilities at least they had the custody and the medical staff to really take care of them—or at least take care of them better than some small facility that was being used by a lawyer or maybe a psychiatrist, too, to put patients there. We’d always have that battle, in some fashion.”
As Norris sees it, the California Medical Facility at Vacaville was the best possible place for Craig at the time. “He committed a serious crime,” he explains, “but under the law in the ’70s he wasn’t going to get much time. It’d be better to keep him out there [at Vacaville] where they’d try to work with him. Mainly they kept them in prison long enough out there that for some of them—not all of them, but some of them—it did some good. There was a belief that some of these psychiatric treatments and so forth would help. From our standpoint it was just one way of increasing the incarceration time to protect the public, and also for the individual, for him to recover.
“That’s about all I can say about this case,” he concludes. “I don’t have any recollection as to this individual guy. I don’t remember talking to the victim. Usually I would talk to the victims, in this case his mother. I don’t recall that, but I may have just forgotten; I had thousands of cases.”
As for Craig’s defense team: David F. Grossmann was disbarred in 1998 after violating trust accounting rules. He’d already previously been placed on probation in 1978 and had his law license suspended, after being convicted on a federal charge of possession of cocaine for sale. He died in 2009. Dr. Seymour Rosenbaum was still practicing psychiatry when he died in 2007 in Kew Gardens, New York. Daniel Kallen, who assisted Grossmann on Craig’s case and appeared at the sentencing hearing, runs his own law office on Ventura Boulevard in Encino. He has no recollection whatsoever of the case.