The Meanest Divorce
He kidnapped their kids. She bankrupted his family. He hid out for seven years. She had him put in jail. A story of love turned to hate.
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After Chick opened his north Houston dealership, all three of his children—two sons and a daughter—moved from Florida to work for him. Investigators who have spent years following the Smith case marvel at the way the family has always stuck together, working in the same offices, living near each other, even going so far as to refuse to answer a prosecutor’s questions to protect one of their own. Asked why the Smiths would want to risk everything to keep control of Chuck’s two sons, friends and former business associates invariably refer to this feeling of family loyalty. They recall how Chick Smith passionately talked about his own childhood—how his father abandoned the family when Chick was only four and how Chick’s overworked mother, unable to keep a close eye on him, sent him to a military school. As an adult, Chick was obsessed with driving home the importance of family to his wife and children. “Chick,” says one former friend, “was not going to let the same thing happen to anyone in his family that once happened to him.”
No one worshipped Chick Smith more than his youngest son and namesake, Charles William Smith, Jr., known as Chuck. As a kid Chuck was famous for his cocky ways, brashly reminding other kids who his father was. He quit high school in his senior year, telling his father that he was ready to follow in his footsteps in the car business. Although Chuck had to start at the bottom, working in a small office with two other salesmen, there was no question that he was being groomed to run a dealership. Like his father, he wore dark suits and ties. He picked up Chick’s emphatic speaking style; it was difficult to distinguish the voices of Chick and Chuck over the telephone. He went through the salesman’s class, where he memorized the Chick Smith Ten Step Plan, a series of basic rules on how to greet a customer, make him feel at home, and persuade him to buy a car. At eighteen, Chuck was on the floor at Chick Smith Ford in Spring, selling cars.
“At that dealership,” Chuck says, “I succeeded above expectations in each and every department I worked in. I was the best salesman. I was the best manager. I was the best at anything I put my best effort into.” Other salesman considered Chuck such a pompous imitation of his father that they derisively nicknamed him “the Little Rooster.” But to an impressionable girl from Sugar Land looking to buy her first car, there was something thrilling about a young man her own age—the dealer’s son, no less!—putting his leg up on a fender and breezily rattling off a sales pitch. Carolyn Shaffer bought a silver-blue Mustang, and Chuck—impressed, he says, by Carolyn’s “long Texas legs”—asked her out for dinner. He took her to the revolving restaurant on top of the Hyatt in downtown Houston and, according to Carolyn, told her about his dad’s big home in Florida. It was love, glorious young love. That night, recalls Carolyn, they decided to get married.
Chuck remembers it differently. He says he didn’t decide to marry Carolyn until she told him, a few months after they had met, that she was pregnant. He felt trapped. He says that he overheard Carolyn’s mother, Shirley, telling her early in their courtship, “You handle this guy right and he’ll be your ticket to fame and fortune”—and that, as a result, Carolyn got pregnant in order to secure her way into his family.
Regardless of which version of their romance is correct, the fact is that Carolyn and Chuck came from two very distinct worlds. In March 1978 those worlds collided, as Chuck and Carolyn, both nineteen years old, got married. For the rehearsal dinner, Chick Smith rented a ballroom and hired a band at a hotel adjoining the Galleria. The Shaffers threw the wedding reception in a room at the little Sugar Land church where the ceremony was held. There, the Smiths were disgusted to find punch being served in plastic champagne glasses.
IF CHUCK AND CAROLYN SMITH were un-suited for one another, they initially didn’t have much time to notice. Two months after they were married, their first child, Charles, was born. Carolyn stayed home and took care of the baby. Chuck was always at work, six days a week, usually past ten o’clock at night, “wearing out more shoes,” he says, “than four other salesman combined.”
In 1980, around the time that Chuck was promoted over far more-experienced salesmen to the position of new-car manager, Carolyn gave birth to their second son, Christopher. They were still very young, but as a former executive at the dealership recalls, “To everyone who knew them, they seemed happy on the outside.” Often when he would close a big deal at the office, Chuck would buy Carolyn jewelry, once bringing home a diamond-embedded ring in the shape of an “S” (for Smith).
Carolyn, however, knew she was never part of the Smith inner circle. For one thing, the Smiths made no pretense about their dislike of the Shaffers. Chick met Daniel and Shirley Shaffer for the first time during the weekend of the wedding and scarcely saw them again. As attorneys for the Smith family would later make clear in custody hearings, the Shaffers were far from the perfect family. Carolyn’s sister, they alleged, went through a period during which she used illegal drugs and worked as a topless dancer, while one of Carolyn’s two brothers had undergone counseling for what he called a “psychological battering problem I had with my family.” Although Carolyn had no blemishes on her past, the Smiths were not very fond of her either. “They thought she was a dumb blond, an airhead,” says Jo Larsen, a friend of the Smith’s eldest son, Mark. Larsen remembers how, on family outings, no one would direct any conversation Carolyn’s way. “She was ignored, just like a little church mouse who would sit in the corner,” says Larsen. “It was obvious to me that they didn’t think she was good enough to be the mother of Smith children.”
But the family’s problems with Carolyn, Chuck says, had nothing to do with her personality. Almost to the day Charles was born, Carolyn began having headaches. As a result, he says, she ignored her responsibilities as a mother. Chuck insists that he had to feed Charles at night because Carolyn didn’t want to get out of bed. He did the laundry and prepared the boys’ meals in the mornings. “Let’s face it,” Chuck says. “Some people can’t handle the responsibilities of children. It drives them straight up the wall. I love children; I love them jumping on my back; I love them being my best friend. Carolyn wasn’t capable of giving hugs or kisses.”
Carolyn heatedly denies Chuck’s claims. She alleges that Chuck shook the kids when they were making too much noise and that he would shove or threaten her if she failed to meet his demands. But she does admit that she was having no success handling her headaches. “They felt like somebody had pounded me on the head with a hammer all night,” she says. As the years progressed, the headaches worsened. Sometimes, she says, they were so excruciatingly painful that she could not pick up around the house or prepare meals or chase after the boys. During such periods, she readily allowed Charles and Chris to stay with relatives—not with the Shaffers (Chuck wouldn’t permit it) but with Chuck’s mother, Pat, and Chuck’s sister, Kim. Sometimes, testimony later revealed, Pat and Kim would keep the boys for as long as two weeks a month. Carolyn could hardly complain about their treatment: The boys were given nice gifts and taken on trips to Florida. Nevertheless, she soon felt her in-laws were trying to control her sons, coming over unannounced to visit them, telling her what the boys should eat and when they should see a doctor.
From such small disputes are marriages ruined. By 1983, Chuck and Carolyn’s relationship had slid into that brutal world of bitterness and retribution. Nearly ten years later, it is amazing that the intensity of their arguments has not even begun to diminish. Carolyn, for example, still tells a story about Chuck’s pushing her against a wall in 1983 because he was angry at her for buying the wrong kind of bulb for the lamp in the bedroom ceiling fan. In a five-minute rebuttal, Chuck insists that he was assembling the ceiling fan from parts scattered on the floor, when Carolyn, woozy from a large dose of headache medication, staggered into the room. To save her from falling on one of the sharp fan parts, Chuck says, he had to grab her and hold her against the wall.
In the Houston media’s coverage of the Smith marriage, Carolyn is always portrayed more sympathetically, the helpless casualty of Chuck’s domineering ways. It is, in fact, difficult to find evidence to suggest that Chuck was a significantly better parent than Carolyn. For one thing, he was usually at the dealership, not at home, when the kids were awake. (In one legal deposition, Chuck had difficulty recalling any activities he did alone with his kids during all of 1983.) He also has admitted in court that he had an affair in early 1983 with a woman he met at a Bennigan’s.
But what is often overlooked is that Carolyn herself made a disastrous mistake, one that would call into question her own strength of character. Unable to cope with her headaches, she began taking more and more pills. She would plead for extra medication from various doctors, including one who told her that he suspected the headaches were not migraines but were psychosomatic. By March 1984, Carolyn had filled prescriptions for an astonishing 586 doses. There was no question about it: She was getting hooked.
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