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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Carolyn says now she unconsciously turned to the medication to escape the torment of a bad marriage. That might be true, but her drug use undoubtedly took its toll on the children. Her neighbors started noticing how Charles and Chris would spend hours outside, playing by themselves. A few times the boys wandered over and asked to be fed. They looked dirty, improperly clothed. Their mother, the boys said, was asleep in the house.
How often Carolyn neglected the boys is, of course, in dispute. Carolyn says she never left the boys unattended for any significant period of time, while Smith family members allege she was so doped up that she couldn’t carry on a conversation or walk straight. In one court hearing, Chick Smith said Carolyn’s house “resembled a derelict hotel in downtown Houston. I have witnessed dog manure all over the floor that had been there obviously for hours, because it was hard. I have witnessed food left over from who knows when on the table.”
In order to watch over the boys, Chuck says he quit his job at the dealership to work near his home at his father’s ranch. Yet in April 1984 Chuck left home for a week-long horse show (leading some observers to suggest that Chuck must not have felt Carolyn’s problems were all that serious). Right after he left, Carolyn dropped the boys off with the ranch manager’s wife, went to her doctor’s office to get a shot of Demerol, and then drove home to sleep off its effects.
When the Smiths heard about what she had done, they exploded. Arriving back at the ranch manager’s home the next day, Carolyn was met by Pat and Kim. They said Chuck had been informed that the boys had been dumped at the ranch and that he had ordered them kept away from Carolyn until he returned. According to Carolyn, both Pat and Kim then told her, “You’ll never see your kids again.”
AND SO THE LINES WERE DRAWN for a modern-day custody war, one that would play out like a classic Greek tragedy, with all the characters eventually brought down by their own rage and need for revenge. In Texas, where court-ordered alimony is banned and community property issues are resolved mostly by accountants, the most vicious divorce fights are always waged over the children. And according to one lawyer involved in the Smith case, the battle for Charles and Christopher between these strikingly dissimilar families quickly became Houston’s equivalent of “the Hatfields and McCoys, possibly the Montagues and the Capulets.”
After her confrontation with Pat and Kim, Carolyn says she contacted the sheriff’s department, which told her there was little it could do in such a family matter. Using money given to her by her father, she then hired a prominent Houston divorce lawyer, Lindsey Short, and prepared to file for divorce. He gave her a quick piece of advice: Hire a private detective to find the kids. A judge, he said, will tend to look more favorably on a mother who walks into a divorce hearing with possession of her own children. About a week later, Kim pulled into a car wash with the two boys. Carolyn, her father, and a group of private investigators swept in from the rear. Someone snatched Christopher, and Kim and Carolyn both tugged at Charles. Kim claims she was pushed to the ground. According to Kim, one of the men shouted, “What do you think you are doing, bitch?”
It was a confusing, hysterical moment for the boys. Here they were with Auntie Kim, and suddenly Mommy was bundling them into another car. Crying with fright, they were raced toward Sugar Land, where they were eventually hidden in the home of an elderly widow friend of the Shaffers’.
Immediately the Smiths were after them. In a private helicopter, Chuck ordered his pilot to swoop down on the Shaffer’s Sugar Land home. Constables whom Chick knew from north Harris County went to look for the kids in Sugar Land. Chick also had $4,000 in cash delivered to the office of Clyde Wilson, the most prominent private eye in Houston, to secure his services in finding the boys.
No one could find them. For Carolyn, it was a pivotal moment in her life—this wallflower of a woman finally standing up to the Smiths. But for the Smiths, Carolyn had committed the ultimate act of betrayal, snatching away two boys—Smith boys!—that she did not deserve to have.
After Carolyn filed for divorce, a hearing was convened to decide temporary custody of the boys. In cold, even voices, Carolyn and Chuck took the stand to tell how terribly unfit the other was to raise children. After moving through a minefield of contradictory testimony, the judge gravely warned Carolyn to cut back her use of prescription drugs, but he still gave her temporary custody of the boys, pending the outcome of the final divorce trial; Chuck would be allowed weekend visitations. To most people in the courtroom, his decision was no surprise—most divorce court judges in 1984 favored maternal rather than paternal custody—but the Smith family was in shock. An executive from the dealership who was with the Smiths watched Shirley Shaffer triumphantly shake her fist at Chick as everyone filed out of the courtroom. “Uh-oh, that’s it,” the executive thought. “Chick will never stop now until he has won.”
Indeed, Chick told his associates at the dealership that he would spend every cent he had to keep the Shaffers from getting the children. He hired off-duty police officers to maintain round-the-clock surveillance on the Shaffers’ home, where Carolyn was staying with the boys. Chuck also was “near panicked,” according to one of his lawyers, about the safety of the children. When he arrived to pick up the kids for his weekend visitations, he brought along a paramedic to check for signs of physical abuse.
A month after the first custody hearing, the Smiths’ lawyers persuaded a second judge to convene a rare “emergency intervention” hearing to listen to testimony that the boys were being abused by Carolyn. This time, the attorneys portrayed the Shaffer family as a clan as deviant as William Faulkner’s Snopeses. Smith family members testified that they had seen dark bruises on the boys’ arms and legs and that Charles had received a black eye. On the witness stand, Carolyn claimed she had stopped taking prescription drugs, then confessed in the cross-examination that she had not stopped taking Triavil, an anti-depressant tranquilizer. According to sources, the judge literally fell asleep. Needless to say, he denied the emergency motion.
Later, because of docket overcrowding, a judge reset the final trial date for the divorce to January 1985, which played right into Carolyn’s attorney’s hands. Every good divorce attorney knows that the longer the children are kept with one parent before the trial, the less likely a judge will change custody arrangements. With this postponement, Carolyn would have time to settle down and cut back her use of prescription drugs. (In fact, court records show that her prescription orders and her headaches began to drop as soon as she separated from Chuck.)
Unfortunately for her, Chuck Smith had devised another plan. On September 21, 1984, Chuck picked up his sons for his previously arranged weekend visit. Charles and Christopher hugged Carolyn good-bye, and then, Carolyn remembers, Charles hugged her again. “Don’t worry, Mom,” he said. “We’ll be back.”
Carolyn had known the boys were anxious about something—they had recently been hinting about a secret their father had told them—and two days later, when they did not come home at the appointed time, Carolyn suspected what that secret really was. She made frantic phone calls to the Smiths, who said they didn’t know where Chuck was. A few days later, she filed a missing person’s report with the Sugar Land Police Department.
But it was too late. Chuck and the boys had first flown to Tampa. Then, using aliases to cover their tracks, they bought tickets for the next flight back to Houston, where Chuck had left a car in the airport parking lot. He says he drove himself and the boys to South Texas, where a man met them and took them across the Mexican border. After a few weeks, they flew to Rio de Janeiro, Spain, and London. For a year and a half they crisscrossed Europe, then returned to Mexico to make their new life in Cuernavaca, a city where few questions are asked of the rich Americans who come there to be left alone.
THERE WAS ONLY ONE TIME in those next seven years that Carolyn got close to her sons. In January 1985, on the very day that she was at the courthouse receiving the final divorce decree and obtaining full custody of the missing children, her private investigators illegally obtained Chick’s phone records and learned that he had been dialing a number to a lodge in Scotland.
The next day, Carolyn and an investigator were on a plane for England. To their dismay, six rows in front of them was Chick, accompanied by a Harris County deputy constable, apparently acting as his bodyguard. As it turned out, the lodge owner had informed the Smiths about a suspicious phone call from a woman pretending to be Chuck’s sister, Kim. Obviously, Carolyn had found them—and the race was on for the boys.
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