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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From a strictly legal point of view, the case was open and shut. Chuck faced the rather mundane charge of “interference with child custody,” a third-degree felony, which required prosecutors to prove only that Chuck had violated a court’s custody orders by taking his children out of the state for at least seven days. But in opening arguments, Stanley Schneider, a tenacious Houston defense attorney who had been working for the Smiths for years, told the jury, “This case is about the love of a father, his fear for his children, and his desire to protect them.” He walked over and gently placed his hands on Chuck’s shoulders. Chuck’s eyes closed. In his dark suit, he looked as if he was praying.
Schneider’s strategy, obviously, was to try the old 1984 custody hearings all over again—to prove to the jury that Carolyn had been a pathetic mother and that Chuck was legally justified in kidnapping his own kids. Prosecutor Ed Porter objected vehemently. After years pursuing the Smiths, he wasn’t going to let Carolyn become the scapegoat. Pacing around like a mad ostrich, he told the jury that the only issue was whether Chuck—that “smooth-talking, fast-walking salesman”—had broken the law.
Briskly, Porter presented the facts. For his last witness, he called Carolyn Smith. To those who had not seen her since her days as a young mother, she looked like a different woman. At the age of 33, Carolyn’s skin had turned pale, the color of eggshells, and the lines had grown tight around her mouth. She came to the stand wearing a navy dress with a pink blouse, highlighted with a pink bow.
Porter refused to ask Carolyn any questions about the details of her marriage. He simply wanted to know if she had given Chuck permission to take her kids for seven years and four months. “No, I did not,” Carolyn said, her voice quavering. Chuck was watching his former wife intently, and for a moment she looked back. After all this time apart, after all the viciousness, they were still strangely intertwined, their fates linked forever in their children.
When Chuck took the stand, he wasted no time ripping into Carolyn, bringing up her past drug use and alleged neglect of the boys. Chuck took in great intakes of air and then blew out slowly. “I saw a woman killing herself in front of me, and she didn’t care,” he said, sobbing. “I saw my children dying, and she didn’t care.” He cried several more times during his testimony, especially when describing his feelings for his children: “I spoiled them with love! I gave them love every second of the day!”
If Chuck was expecting through his testimony to get a single sympathetic look from a juror, he failed. But Chuck was not the star witness. Into the courtroom, in shiny white tennis shoes, the bangs of his blond hair cut straight across his forehead, walked Charles Smith, age fourteen. Nothing else in the trial would come near the sheer dramatic power of this moment. Finally, after almost a decade of legal warfare, of adults showing their most fiendish natures, of lawyers ranting for the rights of children, a child would get to speak.
Charles was in the throes of puberty. He was gaining weight, he had blemishes on his face, and his voice squeaked. That day he had tried to get out of testifying in the courtroom, but Schneider had met with him and said, urgently, “Your dad needs you.” As Charles tentatively sat down in the witness chair, he gave a thumbs-up sign to Chuck.
In short, mostly one-sentence answers, Charles spoke first about his early years with Carolyn in Houston. She “screamed a lot at us,” he said. “She was real mad. She used to lock us in our room and yell a lot, I remember.” Charles then said he recalled her taking “a lot” of medicine. “We woke her up to feed us, and sometimes she became angry.”
Charles described his love for his father (“He’s helped me with my life, made my life better”) and how he wanted to go back with him to Mexico. And then Stanley Schneider asked Charles about his feelings for his mother. The young teenager did not hesitate.
“I don’t like her. I have no feeling for her, and I never will,” he said.
It was a stunning moment. Here was a boy exonerating his own kidnapping. The jurors were focused on Charles’s face as if nothing else existed in the courtroom.
“Did you have feelings for Carolyn before you left?” Schneider asked.
“No, not that I can remember,” Charles said.
In his final argument, Schneider said there should now be no question in anyone’s mind that the boys felt they were in eminent danger. But Ed Porter told the jury that Charles’s testimony was like a tape recording, that he had been subtly conditioned over the years to believe that his mother was evil.
Surprisingly, no matter what Charles said, the jurors took just 21 minutes to side with the state. What especially outraged the seven women on the jury, they later said, was the fact that Chuck never gave his boys a chance to know their own mother. Chuck was convicted and sentenced to seven and a half years in prison, approximately the same amount of time he had kept the boys.
Ed Porter and Carolyn Smith tearfully embraced, but to those watching from the fringe, it seemed like a hollow victory. Although both families in the fight said they were broke from the legal battles, their bank accounts and retirement incomes stripped, they pledged to press on. Within minutes after Chuck’s sentencing, Chick Smith held a press conference in the courtroom. “I am terrified of those boys being with that woman,” he said, his voice swelling with anger. Citing a highly publicized case in Florida in which a boy was given the right to divorce his parents, Stanley Schneider later hinted that Charles and Christopher would file a similar lawsuit and try to divorce Carolyn. Meanwhile, Carolyn’s lawyer, Randy Donato, had filed another lawsuit against the Smiths to try to obtain their home and assets.
After filing an appeal over his conviction, Chuck was released from jail on an appeals bond and allowed by the judge to return to Cuernavaca. There he remains, pacing his home, continuing to wage a moral crusade against Carolyn. “They are being guarded like prisoners in that house,” he tells me. “They are not permitted outside activities for fear that they would get on an airplane and leave.” To prove what kind of life they once had, Chuck drives me around the city, past Charles and Christopher’s school, where a group of schoolmates had recently taped a video telling the Smith boys how much they were missed.
IN THE MIDDLE OF A JULY AFTERNOON in Sugar Land, there is the sound of two bolts unlocking, and then the front door opens. “Come on in,” Carolyn Smith says to me. Charles comes out of his room, where he has been playing video games, and good naturedly offers a high-five greeting. Christopher, a good-looking kid who turned twelve that month, has just come in from Fame City, a nearby water park that he has nicknamed Babe City because of the girls who flock there. For a house allegedly in a state of siege, everything appears to be quite normal. The boys don’t seem angry at Carolyn’s presence. She watches them play basketball out in the driveway and then sits beside them at the kitchen table to have a soft drink. She giggles at the way her sons tease two small children who wander over from next door.
But when I come back for another visit to see the boys alone, another story emerges. “Oh, we’re not scared of Carolyn,” Charles tells me. “You know, she’s okay to joke around or play with. But we won’t do any of that lovey hugging and kissing stuff with her. Never! We’re just biding our time until we can leave.” Christopher nods his head in agreement, then looks around, already bored with the conversation.
While it cannot be said that her house is a prison environment, Carolyn has certainly cut off the boys’ access to their father. She does not allow them to read Chuck’s letters—she says the letters falsely bolster the boys’ hopes that they will soon return to Mexico—and she allows them to talk to Chuck only once a week on the telephone for 15 to 25 minutes. During the conversations, Carolyn stands next to the phone.
It hasn’t helped. A well-known Houston psychologist who worked with Carolyn and the boys for about six months tells me the boys “have such a positive picture of their father and have spent so many years exposed to an absent mother that there’s not much Carolyn can do. Even if she has won the legal battle, she is pretty much destined to lose the emotional one.” The pscyhologist pauses. “It’s heartbreaking to say this, but Carolyn can’t make those boys feel any closer to her. She’s put out all this effort and gotten nothing back. I think it has become emotionally very damaging to her—and to the boys—to live like this.”
Carolyn is acutely aware of what the psychologist has said. “He thinks it’s best that I just go ahead and send them back to Mexico,” she tells me as she walks me to my car at the end of one of my visits. She looks down her narrow sun-bleached street in Sugar Land, her eyes blinking rapidly behind her glasses. “After all these years, there were so many things I had hoped”—but she cannot finish her sentence. Carolyn Smith’s face finally crumples and tears slip down her cheeks.
A minute later, she regains her composure and heads back to the house, making sure to slide the double locks into place after she shuts her door.
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