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.
“TELL ME SOMETHING,” CHUCK SMITH asks, fixing me with a Rasputin-like stare. “Would you let your kids suffer? Would you break the law to keep them safe?” His voice, usually as fervent as an evangelist’s, drops to a half-whisper. “Would you sacrifice everything for your own kids?”
I have come to Cuernavaca, Mexico, fifty miles southwest of Mexico City, to meet Houston’s most infamous father. In 1984, while divorcing his wife, Carolyn, Chuck Smith, then 26 years old, the scion of one of Houston’s wealthiest and most politically influential automobile dealers, kidnapped his own two sons—Charles, age 6, and Christopher, only 4—and vanished for more than seven years. Chuck testified that the boys tearfully begged him to take them away from their mother, who had become so addicted to prescription drugs that she slept through the day, forgetting to feed them, shaking them when they woke her. On occasion, Chuck said, she refused to allow them out of their room, forcing them to urinate in the closet. Fearing that the divorce courts would still not give him full custody, Chuck decided there was only one thing to do. “What self-respecting father,” he asks, his 250-pound body looming over me as he paces the room, “would leave his boys in that environment?”
Although family abductions, as the United States Department of Justice calls them, are not all that unusual—thousands happen each year during custody battles, with the kids usually brought back within weeks—Chuck Smith’s crime played out in Houston like a torrid soap opera. Depending on who you talked to, Chuck was either a noble hero or a villainous member of a vengeful family, willing to do anything to keep control of the boys. The slim, hazel-eyed Carolyn, the daughter of a middle-class Houston oil-field supply manager, was either a monster of a mother or a victim of monstrous lies.
Charles and Christopher, on the other hand, became something of a cause célèbre, their faces appearing on milk cartons, their kidnapping featured on a network television show. The Houston media detailed Carolyn’s futile efforts to find them—from her desperate flight to England to her tumultuous courtroom showdowns with Chuck’s family. Law enforcement agencies from both sides of the Atlantic—the FBI, Interpol, Scotland Yard—looked for Chuck. There were rare sightings of Chuck and the boys—in Scotland and Switzerland, then in Greece and Mexico. But over those seven years and four months, Carolyn never got a phone call from Chuck, not even a letter informing her that her children were alive. He always stayed a step ahead, slipping across borders, telling his boys to pack their little suitcases and get ready to move again because “Carolyn is catching up.”
Finally, last January, when the FBI closed in on Chuck and the boys in Cuernavaca, a lot of people thought the story had come to its logical end: Chuck would go to jail, and the boys would be returned to their mother. When thirteen-year-old Charles and eleven-year-old Christopher stepped off the airplane in Houston to meet Carolyn, however, they didn’t even recognize her. “It’s me, your mother,” she said, her body going weak. But they refused to call her Mom, and they would not let her hug them.
Obviously, this is no mere custody dispute. For many people who have followed the case, the struggle over the two blond-haired boys has turned into a dark parable about the world of adults—about the way they will destroy one another and even themselves, all for the love of children. Since his arrest, a tanned and handsome Chuck has told swarms of reporters that he will never stop fighting to keep Charles and Christopher from Carolyn, that he will prove his case, winning them back at some future date. “As God is my witness,” Chuck declares, “I will see that my boys get their wish to be with me.”
Meanwhile, at her small home in Sugar Land, a suburb of Houston, Carolyn Smith locks both bolts on the front door, worried that Chuck, or someone else from his family, might try again to steal the boys. “My children are now with me,” she says, “and I don’t care what Chuck Smith tries to do. He won’t have them back.”
WHEN TWO PEOPLE HEAD INTO A COURTROOM for a divorce fight, especially one involving the custody of children, you can be certain that no one is going to tell the whole truth. Both sides, highly aware of the answers that could turn the proceedings to their advantage, tend to present thick gumbos of claims and counterclaims. Some stories are dredged up from the past, others conveniently forgotten. Psychologists arrive with expert testimony. And, of course, there are the lawyers, masters of the language of blame, fueling such anger between the couple that compromise is rarely possible.
For nearly a decade, in one court setting after another, many people have been trying to find out what happened to the marriage of Chuck and Carolyn Smith. To this day, no one is sure who originally wronged whom. In thousands of pages of depositions and trial transcripts, there is hardly an anecdote about the marriage that both sides agree on. Any story Carolyn or one of her family members tells is contradicted, down to the tiniest of details, by Chuck or one of his family members—and vice versa. As one lawyer familiar with the case says, “It all comes down to which misinformation campaign you want to believe.”
Nor do court records reveal the reason why Carolyn and Chuck’s matrimonial squabbles turned, quite suddenly, into an obsessive, poisonous fight. To understand that, you have to go back to the summer of 1977, when a cute teenage girl walked into a Ford dealership in downtown Houston. All divorces begin with a love story, and the story of Chuck and Carolyn Smith’s romance was in many ways nothing but a foreshadowing of the tragedy to come.
In 1977 Carolyn Shaffer was eighteen, just graduated from high school, working as a secretary in her first full-time job. She was not a particularly sophisticated young woman. In high school, she was far from socially popular or academically outstanding—“I was more like a wallflower,” she would later say—and she had no plans to go to college. She was simply a product of the kind of unpretentious working-class family that populated the southwest Houston suburbs. Her father, Daniel Shaffer, started working in the Oklahoma oil fields when he was only eleven and had come to Houston during the great oil days of the mid-seventies. Broad-shouldered, with an unflinching stare and taciturn manner, Shaffer once made his family change churches in Sugar Land because he thought the people in the first church “were the type who stick their nose up at you.”
If the Shaffers were the salt of the earth, the Smiths were delighted to be the pepper. When Chuck’s father, Chick Smith, came to Houston in 1975, he was already a famous Florida auto dealer. Chick Smith Ford in Clearwater, near Tampa, was reputed to be the largest-volume retail dealer for Ford in the southeastern U.S. A jockey-size man with a kind of bantam rooster strut befitting his name, Chick was energetic and charming, an ingenious salesman who, according to one of his associates, “could meet you and within five minutes make you feel like you had known him all your life.”
Chick talked Ford executives into selling him a defunct dealership in downtown Houston with the promise that he could move it within three years. Chick could sense that a new boom was coming to Houston—but the new Texans, he said, were going to head north of the city, far from the tract-house neighborhoods of people like the Shaffers. By 1979 Chick had moved his dealership to the suburb of Spring, next to the Goodyear blimp base off Interstate 45. During promotions he gave away shotguns and cowboy boots, even trips to Las Vegas, to those who bought new cars. The silver-haired Chick was always at the dealership, wearing a black suit and dark tie and gold Texas-shaped cuff links. He inundated Houston with television commercials: Chick would sit on a stool and snap out prices and deals in an annoyingly enthusiastic voice. “Shop anywhere you want in the world, but check with Chick last,” he’d bark. By 1982 Chick Smith Ford was one of the Houston area’s top dealerships, selling an estimated 350 new cars a month, and Chick had become an influential north Houston businessman, a friend to judges, politicians, and law enforcement officials.
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