From murderer to media darling...and back again

The problem with psychopaths is they're incredibly charming...until they go in for the kill. This is the story of Edgar Smith, a killer who managed to convince publisher/TV star political commentator William F. Buckley Jr., that he was completely innocent. Buckley took up his cause until the unthinkable happened.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
There's nothing like a person whose charm lights up a room,
unless they're a murderous psychopath. I'm Patty Steele. From murderer
to media darling and back again. That's next on the backstory.
The backstory is back. One of the most dangerous kinds

(00:20):
of criminal is the super intellectual and frequently charming psychopath.
They charm their victims and others, and because they don't
feel any guilt whatsoever, they don't look guilty, so it's
kind of easy to get sucked in, at least for
a while. Perfect examples include Charles Manson, who charmed his
followers into committing vicious murders for him, and Ted Bundy,

(00:44):
who would meet young college women joke around with them. Frequently,
he'd be wearing some kind of a sling on his
arm and he'd ask for help putting something in his car.
Then he'd crack him over the head with a tire
iron and stuff them in the back seat. Now here's
the thing. Sometimes these people are able to convince others,
including powerful people, to help them clear their name. That

(01:08):
was the case with Edgar Smith and famous writer and
TV political commentator William F. Buckley Junior. Back in nineteen
fifty seven, when Edgar was a twenty three year old
ex marine with a wife and a baby at home.
He borrows a friend's car to take a drive. It's
a cold winter evening in New Jersey, and he spots

(01:28):
fifteen year old Vicky Zelinsky, an honor student and cheerleader
at their local high school in Ramsay, New Jersey. She's
walking home from a friend's house. Edgar stops. He asks
her if she wants a ride, since she knew him
from around the neighborhood. She said sure, thank you. He
drives her then to an abandoned sand pit and parks

(01:49):
the car. She realizes what's happening and she tries to
get out, saying she'll walk home. He grabs her and
she struggles. Then she yells at him and slap as
He claimed he hit her back and then couldn't remember
what else happened. Turns out he had beaten her to
death with a large rock as well as a baseball bat.

(02:10):
The next morning, her parents found her mangled body. Meantime,
Edgar's friend called the police, saying Edgar had returned his car,
but it was covered in blood. Edgar was arrested, and
he led the police to the spot where he'd abandoned
his own bloodied clothes and Vicki's school books. Pretty straightforward, right,
Not so fast. Despite changing his story and even trying

(02:36):
to finger the friend who loaned him the car as
the killer, he was convicted and sent to death row,
but he continued to loudly claim he was totally innocent.
Don't forget. He was still saying he had no memory
of the murder. That's when he began to reach out
to William F. Buckley, who had a popular show on
TV called Firing Line. He was also the publisher of

(02:59):
a magazine car called National Review. Edgar had kind of
gotten interested in it in prison, and when he lost
access to it, that's when he started reaching out to
Bill Buckley. Gradually, Edgar managed to convince Buckley of his
innocence through fifteen hundred pages of letters over a nine
year period. He claimed his confession had been coerced by

(03:21):
the cops. Buckley took up Edgar's cause, as did another
journalist who believed in him, and Buckley got him a
team of high end lawyers to appeal his case. In
the meantime, in nineteen sixty eight, Edgar put out a
book called Brief Against Death through the publishing giant canop
It became a best seller thanks to Buckley promoting it

(03:42):
on his TV show. Other books followed. Edgar was actually
nominated as the first convicted murderer to join Pan America,
which supports authors who fight for human rights. He quickly
shot to stardom, and his publisher also pushed for a
retrial in the case. Finally, in nineteen seventy one, his

(04:02):
case was completely vacated because Edgar had never been read
his miranda rights when arrested, and a retrial was ordered,
but instead he took a plea deal that resulted in
a sentence of time served. William F. Buckley picked Edgar
up from prison in a stretch limo with a catered
steak dinner inside. They were driven straight to a TV

(04:24):
studio where they filmed two episodes of Buckley's hit show,
Firing Line. Edgar became a media darling, appearing on literally
hundreds of TV and radio shows, lecturing at colleges for
thousands of dollars, and writing many many articles. But the
good times didn't last for Edgar. Five years later, now forty,

(04:45):
un divorced, he married a nineteen year old girl. He
wrote several more books, but they all flopped and he
started drinking. One night, while out on a drive, he
sees a woman walking to a parking lot. He decides
to jumper a knife to her throat. He then pulls
her into his car, and when she tries to escape,
he stabs her twice with the knife plunged all the

(05:08):
way into the handle. He just missed her heart, but
she still managed to jump out of the car and
a witness came to help her. Edgar took off and
after two weeks on the lamb, he checked into a
hotel in Las Vegas under a false name, but then
he reached out to his old pal William Buckley for help.

(05:29):
Buckley kind of saw through him this time and called
the FBI in this case. During the sentencing, Edgar told
the court he deserved to reduce sentence due to his
lifelong battle with sex addiction, and to prove his case,
he finally confessed to the murder of fifteen year old Vicki,
blaming that murder on his sex addiction and hoping that

(05:52):
would get him sentenced to a mental hospital rather than
a penitentiary. A keep in mind they couldn't try him
on Vicki's murder again because that had already been settled. Well,
it doesn't matter because it didn't work, and he was
sentenced to life in prison, where he died in twenty seventeen.
Not long after that final case, William F. Buckley wrote

(06:13):
an article for Life magazine. He said he was sorry
he had allowed Edgar Smith to con him into believing
he hadn't murdered Vicky Zelenski. I'm Patty Steele. The Backstory

(06:35):
is a production of iHeartMedia and Steel Trap Productions. Our
producer is Doug Fraser. Our executive producer is Steve Goldstein
of Amplify Media. We're out with new episodes twice a week.
Thanks for listening to the Backstory, the pieces of history
you didn't know you needed to know.