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Danny Smith

Danny Smith

Retired LA County Sheriff's homicide detective (21 years) and crime novelist, author of the Dickie Floyd and Rich Farris detective series, and frequent true crime podcast guest.

Sep 17, 2026

6:16
So yeah,
6:16
and that's and that's so that's kind of a typical thing.
6:19
It's, you know, the investigators don't have a lot of experience.
6:22
They can overlook things because they just don't they don't recognize what what they're looking at sometimes.
6:27
Right.
6:28
Now, the fact that they said they believed that she knew her killer, you know, my assumption without seeing any of the investigative reports is that, like you said, that there was no sign of a break-in or even a struggle per se.
6:44
The fact that the next-door neighbors were gone, it's a duplex, and yet the neighbors were gone.

15 MINS LATER

21:28
What is the difference between first-degree murder and felony murder? This may be a Michigan thing, but it seems, does that, why two murder charges?
31:07
So the emails also revealed Eugene's acute jealousy at Kathy's decision to date other men, and even more disturbing, they referenced at least one instance of physical violence between them when apparently Eugene had hit Kathy when she tried to intervene in an altercation between Eugene and his wife.
31:30
Yeah, I think trying to reconstruct the, the previous, uh, few weeks and/or couple months, we could see that there was a deterioration.
31:40
We could see that maybe two or three months prior, Kathy and Jimmy are dead set on continuing their normal relationship, and then there's an incident, and then you can see from correspondence that things are, are now starting to get out of control.
31:57
Th- Jimmy is losing this grasp that he's got or that he had on Kathy.
32:04
He's losing control of her.
32:05
She's now...
32:07
Where normally Kathy would stay home at night and, and talk on the phone with Jimmy, and now she's saying, "I'm going out.
33:23
Here's what detectives believed happened that fatal night.
9:40
Then the obvious question is, well, was she still somewhere inside that house or had something else happened to her? The one thing they did know is she was missing.
9:51
Now, if you're still standing at that bassinet, if you simply turn your head to the right, you'll see a small little cubby, a little area that is almost manmade.
10:01
It's made by positioning of two couches.
10:04
So you've got a couch and then another couch that's next to it.
10:07
But then there's a little open space kind of hidden in between those two couches.
10:13
And that's up against a wall.
10:14
And that's where you find two-year-old Samantha.

23 MINS LATER

32:57
And certainly here, when you're trying to get it down to the minute, whether it was before or after George had left, it didn't prove so easy for medical examiners to figure that out here.

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