Diana Smith and Scott Jones

This episode explores the chilling unsolved murders of Diana Smith and Scott Jones. Diana, a promising theater set design graduate, and Scott, a former x-ray equipment salesperson turned landscape architecture student, had lives full of potential that were abruptly ended when their bodies were discovered in Scott’s apartment.

There are suspicious details surrounding the case, from the peculiar $12 check endorsed by Diana, to the elusive woman seen with her just days before the tragic incident. From the drug evidence to the theories surrounding a possible suicide pact and troubling past relationships, curiosity will be stoked in this bewildering true crime narrative.

Ackerberg, Peter. “Mystery of why couple died has investigators perplexed.” The Minneapolis Star. April 7, 1981.
Kimball, Joe. “Without funds for cold case unit, St. Paul police still working on unsolved murders.” Minnpost, Minnesota. December 9, 2011.
Klauda, Paul. “2 St. Paul deaths called suspicious by police.” Minneapolis Tribune. March 13, 1981.
Klauda, Paul. “St. Paul police seek woman in slayings.”
Janos, Adam. “Chloroform: How the 'Knockout Drug' Has Been Used to Murder Over the Last 30 Years.” www.aetv.com. March 12, 2018.
Lowe, Caroline. “Cold Case: Chloroform Murders.” CBS News, Minnesota. February 27, 2006.
Parsons, Jim. “Case of the chloroformed couple still a mystery to St. Paul police. Minneapolis Tribune. March 7, 1982.
“Deaths: Mystery a murder?” Associated Press. May 7, 1981.
“Examiner: Couple were poisoned.” Associated Press. May 28, 1981.
“Murder mystery still baffles St. Paul police.” Associated Press. May 8, 1982.
“Obituaries: Llewellyn Pearl Wilt Jones.” The News Journal. Wilmington, Delaware. March 21, 2012.
Minnesota Historical Society. www.mnhs.org

For images related to the cases, check out the Instagram.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello, I'm Julia and murder is bad. Before we get started, I just want to say thank you to everyone who is showing their support for the podcast. You guys have been very sweet on Instagram At murder is bad podcast and just thank you. It makes me feel good that you like what I'm doing. Alright well, without further ado, here's the case.

Speaker 1: 0:46

Diana Smith called her father around 9 50 pm On Saturday, march 7th 1981. She had called just to see how he was doing and by the end of the call they had actually decided to go to church together the next morning and maybe even grab brunch, if there was time. When Diana's father showed up, diana doesn't immediately come out, though. He knocks and waits for about 15 minutes before noticing that Diana's car isn't even there. He thinks he sees her boyfriend's car and and starts to wonder if there was a miscommunication. So he goes to their church and expects to see Diana there, but she's not there either. So Diana Jean Smith was born on June 29th 1957 to Jean and Frederick James Smith. Jean Smith was a poet and was actually named one of the top 100 poets in the International Library of Poetry. Frederick James Smith, who went by Jim, was a commercial artist and he was the original illustrator of the Marlboro Marlboro man. Marlboro Marlboro, that cigarette dude.

Speaker 1: 2:03

Diana graduated from Minnetonka High School in 1975 before attending the University of Minnesota and then transferring to Hamline University, which is located between Minneapolis and St Paul, minnesota. She graduated from a theater set design program in 1980 and continued to work in the theater department at Hamline while also working in the offices of a lumber company. At the start of 1981, just to set the scene as I like to do, peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, was caught and charged on suspicion of murdering 13 women. Ronald Reagan was inaugurated I'm not saying those things are connected, just given a general overview of 1981. And popular things included Dukes of Hazard, star Wars and Dolly Parton 925. Prince Charles also announced his engagement to Lady Diana, which made searching for anything related to Diana Smith a little more difficult because newspapers were obsessed with how Lady Di wanted to join the hunt. Anyways, in March of 1981, diana Smith had just returned from a National Theater Competition in Columbus, ohio, where she had won honors and at least 17 scholarship offers from universities around the country. She talked to her father about this on their phone call on March 7th. After not seeing Diana at church, jim Smith called her apartment but didn't receive an answer. He also called her boyfriend's duplex but didn't get an answer there either.

Speaker 1: 3:48

Diana's boyfriend was 29-year-old Douglas Scott Jones. He went by Scott from what I could gather, and he had recently enrolled in a landscape architecture program at the University of Minnesota. Scott had recently left a five-year stint as an x-ray equipment salesperson at DuPont. That was the same company his father worked at for 40 years. Scott was born on March 25, 1951, to Douglas and Llewellyn Jones near Chicago, illinois. The family moved to Wilmington, delaware, in 1968, and then Scott attended Lynchburg College in Virginia until graduating in 1975. He fell in love with the Minnesotan-Minnesotian outdoors during a trip and decided to move there. This is when he changed career paths to landscaping, because he really loved working outside. In addition to being an above-average student, scott also worked part-time in a chemistry lab.

Speaker 1: 4:52

Diana and Scott happened to meet randomly at a car wash at the end of the summer of 1980, and their romance was like a slow development. They were just hanging out and then sparks kind of started happening In a Minneapolis…. Why can I not speak today? In a Minneapolis Tribune article by Paul Clowda it was mentioned that they had enjoyed a champagne breakfast on Valentine's Day and that Diana had sketched a picture of a family in-house with Scott and had written Mrs Scott Jones. It was evident to both their families that they loved each other and were thinking about marriage.

Speaker 1: 5:33

So after Jim Smith was unable to reach his daughter by phone or at her apartment, he drove over to Scott's home, a duplex within walking distance to Diana's. When Jim arrived he noticed immediately that the lights were on, but when he knocked there was no answer. He spent the next couple days reaching out to friends and co-workers, as well as returning to both apartments. He talked to Diana Saturday and spent Sunday looking for her. On Monday Jim went back to the apartment with no answers. Then he goes to the theater department at Hamline University to look for Diana, but the staff says she hasn't been there for days.

Speaker 1: 6:17

On Tuesday Jim went back to Diana's in the morning and saw a police officer writing a ticket on what he was now sure was Scott's gold 1972 Chevrolet Impala. He let the police know whose car it was and that he was missing. He then asked Diana's landlord to unlock her apartment. When he went inside there was nothing out of place. He then went to Scott's, where he knocked over and over again, still with no answer. He spoke to Scott's neighbors but got no useful information. That's when he called police and filed a missing persons report for Diana, but remembered that the officer at the time did not seem to be too worried about it because they were both adults.

Speaker 1: 7:05

On Wednesday Jim went to Diana's and Hamline's theater and then to the police department. The police told Jim to meet them at Scott's. They were able to get into the duplex by prying a basement window open. Jim stayed on the first floor while the police went to the second where Scott's apartment was located. Thinking there might have been a gas leak. Jim shouted up to the police how are the parakeets? Because Scott had had two pet parakeets tweedledy and tweedled them After entering the apartment. The police answered fine, but Police had found the bodies of Diana Smith and Scott Jones lying on the floor of the apartment. Jim remembered that the police tried to be gentle when they told him what they'd found.

Speaker 1: 7:59

First reports said that Scott was found in the living room and Diana was found in the bedroom, both fully closed. Except for shoes that were placed by the couch, there were no signs of a struggle and the bedsheets, blanket and pillowcases were missing. Diana's mother, jean, had been in California visiting relatives and publishers. She flew in the day after her daughter's body had been discovered. Jean said we're just left with a lot of questions. She had a lot behind her and an awful lot of knowledge, and it's all gone. The police also arranged for Jim Smith to go under hypnosis to remember more of the last conversation he had with Diana. A spokesperson for the Ramsey County Medical Examiner told press that the couple could have been dead for up to four days, meaning the last person to talk to Diana would have been her father. The police had also found Diana's silver 1980s Honda Accord but didn't reveal the location initially. But we find out that had been found at a holiday in five miles away and there were just no sign of the keys and the personal belongings given to the parents. There was a note from Scott to Diana that read it looks like we both have exciting careers ahead of us. Congrats to you and good luck in the future. For exclamation points, all caps love Scott. Houses for both Diana and Scott were held the following week.

Speaker 1: 9:37

Now, in the following months, police and medical examiners made few strides in determining what happened to Diana and Scott. They knew the couple had attended a performance by the Minnesota Dance Theater at the College of St Catherine. On the same night Diana called her father, but there was no signs of forced entry or struggle, no blood, no drugs or alcohol in either of their systems and no wounds. Assistant medical examiner Michael McGee, who I will be calling Emmy McGee, said sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and think about what might have happened in that apartment. In a Minneapolis Star article, peter Ackerburt said they were just a couple named Smith and Jones. In May Emmy McGee revealed that they were pretty sure the cause of death was actually chloroform poisoning and this case is known as the chloroform murders. But I didn't want to call it that to spoil the tale and also I don't like it when it's like some splashy name and we don't actually say the victims names. Anyways, the urine samples from both Diana and Scott had to be sent to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, or MBOCA, and it took two months for the results to come back.

Speaker 1: 11:02

Chloroform is often seen in works of fiction as a quick way to knock people out via a doused rag, but in an article on AETVcom, forensic biologist Nathan Lentz said it actually requires careful dosing to achieve a simple depression of the central nervous system without affecting the autonomic functions like breathing. He also said that most chloroform-related deaths are the result of respiratory failure or fatal cardiac arrhythmia. By this time the public has seen multiple high-profile cases. Jennifer Clapper, samina and Mom and Kaylee Anthony were a few cases mentioned in that same A&E article which will be linked in the show notes. But back in 1981, there had only been six chloroform-related deaths in the five years prior to the murders of Diana Smith and Scott Jones.

Speaker 1: 12:02

There had been talk that it could have been some sort of suicide pact, but the finding of chloroform shut that theory down because of the amount that would be needed and the speed in which it would take effect. There were no other traces of chloroform in the apartment, which means whoever administered it also removed it from the apartment, which obviously couldn't have been Diana or Scott. Also, in May police started looking for a woman who may have had drinks with Diana. The same Saturday she last spoke to her father. Police received a $12 canceled check that had been endorsed by Diana from the restaurant Guadalajeris, which is a bar and grill that isn't afraid of wordplay. A waitress came forward and said she remembered serving Diana and another woman between 10 pm and 1 am. The waitress was then hypnotized to get a description of the woman who she had seen with Diana brown hair, with bangs, wearing a large diamond ring, a gap in her front teeth, and looked around 30 years old. They're just hypnotizing everybody, because why not? It was also noted that the couple's clothing had been rearranged. There was an electric clock cord that had been found in Diana's hand and it had stopped the clock at 10.12.

Speaker 1: 13:28

To have fallen the way he was found, police Chief Bill McCutcheon said the scene was there to give one impression and when we reconstructed the scene we reached the conclusion it was staged, someone was trying to mislead and whether there was a lack of evidence or something else, a movement in this mysterious case stopped being reported on. My theory that has no backing is that another murder in Minnesota was being focused on, that of 18-year-old Carly Jo Nyland. This also overlapped with the Weepy Voice killer murders, also in Minnesota. But whatever the reason, diana Smith and Scott Jones are not mentioned again until the one-year anniversary of their murders. At that time, police released a hefty amount of the information they had gathered to the press.

Speaker 1: 14:24

Some of the things that are learned is that Scott was found face down. Burns were actually found around the victim's mouths and nose, contributing to the theory that a chloroform rag was held over their airways and drugs had been found. But, like the rest of the scene, the drugs seemed staged as well. On the coffee table was a small scale, empty plastic bags, a water pipe and bits of marijuana. More marijuana had been found on the bookshelf, but it was obvious that the books had been rearranged before the drugs were placed there.

Speaker 1: 15:00

The marijuana of it all is just confusing to me. Marijuana does not make me think that this couple had a suicide pact or accidental overdoses. It doesn't lead me to any conclusions, really, and the police felt the same way, especially after talking to friends of Diana and Scott. Scott's friends mentioned that Scott rarely partook in any substances, including alcohol. The occasional beer or glass of wine was the most friends could say they saw him drinking A man Diana used to date did mention that she had quote fooled around with cocaine, but further investigation found no meaningful involvement in drugs. The few articles that came out also went into how Diana had been dating around and both families confirmed that Scott knew this and that it was not a problem. They just had that kind of relationship.

Speaker 1: 15:51

They also gave several psychological stress evaluations. There was actually a machine called the Psychological Stress Evaluator which recorded and measured micro-trimmers in a person's voice. Its validity actually ends up in the same pile as the polygraph, but in 81 they used it on a bunch of people. The crazy thing is that sometimes police would say this person showed stress, but taking the test can be stressful. And then when another person shows stress they're like oh, do you fail the test? That's suspicious. And they make it a footnote when their main suspect actually passes the stress test.

Speaker 1: 16:37

So shortly after Diana's and Scott's bodies were found, diana's parents actually turned over the name of a dental student Diana had dated. The police were particularly interested in this man because he would have access to chloroform as it was used as an anesthetic back then. They had also looked into an ex-girlfriend of Scott's that he had dated for two years before breaking up. Shortly before dating Diana and police also spoke to a theater associate that matched the description of the gap tooth woman seen with Diana on the night of March 7th. She said she didn't like Diana but that she hadn't gone out with her. That woman exhibited stress on the stress test, but the waitress couldn't ID her. So police were like mint, not you. And while police looked into these other people, they were most suspicious of the dental student Diana had dated. He had actually spoken to Diana on March 7th, which was the day last day anyone saw her alive, and he invited her to hang out with him and some friends, but she declined. Then, when police initially spoke to him after the murders, he said that he had no idea where Scott lived. But then he ended up calling the police back to say, oh, he'd actually been there and might've touched something so they might find his fingerprints. His story was that he and Diana had been driving around and Diana asked if he wanted to meet Scott. They stopped by Scott's apartment. He wasn't there, but they had been inside for a short period of time Creally, sus. But this guy also passed the stress test and his fingerprints weren't found in Scott's apartment. On top of all of that, a little after the year anniversary of Diana's and Scott's murders, the same dental student was arrested, charged and sent to prison for the kidnapping and rape of another ex-girlfriend. That was, according to a CBS News report by Caroline Lowe in 2006. At the end of the article, it mentioned that evidence from the apartment was being sent for new DNA analysis and that results should be back in a week. Except the next time Diana and Scott are mentioned are in 2011, and even then they just appear on a list of Minnesota cold cases that need more funds to investigate and process.

Speaker 1: 19:05

I also found an entry on Michelle McNamara's site True Crime Diaries using the Wayback Machine. It was in a section called In their Words, where Michelle would post emails sent to her about cases with a blurb about the case. A man named Chris Coben wrote to her about knowing Diana Smith Quote though there were no romantic sparks, I thought she was pretty and interesting. During the course of the evening, I remember she told me she was having trouble with someone a stalker type, and I remember she mentioned something medical, perhaps a teacher or fellow student. Chris went on to say that he told police, who told him that lined up with a suspect, but also they didn't seem that interested in the information. He then said that he had kept tabs on the case and remembered reading strange stuff about the suspect and the suspect's brother and quote, unquote, his subsequent conduct and they're falling out. That's it. That's everything on this case which still remains cold.

Speaker 1: 20:13

Diana Smith's friends described her as intelligent, well liked and very friendly. She had recently been selected to direct a spring production for Hamline University. She chose the ballad of little red writing hood and had been sketching up set designs for it. She would have been 66 years old. Scott Jones was described as quiet and friendly, the kind of guy you couldn't imagine having enemies Quote. He was a warm and outgoing person. Everyone was automatically drawn to Scott. He would have been 72 years old. ["the End of the World"]. Thank you for listening to Murder is Bad. If you're interested in seeing photos related to these cases, you can go to the Instagram at Murder is Bad podcast and if you like listening, make sure you subscribe and rate and review, please on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I really appreciate it. Take care of each other.

Speaker 2: 21:27

Bye ["The End of the World"]. ["the End of the World"].