Frank Lee Smith

The Crime

Just before midnight on April 14, 1985, Dorothy McGriff pulled into the driveway of her home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. From her car, she saw a man climbing out of a broken window. 

Inside, Ms. McGriff found her 8-year-old daughter, Shandra Whitehead, unconscious and covered in blood. The girl had been sexually assaulted and beaten. She died from her injuries a week later. An autopsy listed the cause of death as strangulation and repeated blows from a rock. 

The Investigation

Detectives Richard Scheff and Phillip Amabile of the Broward County Sheriff’s Office began questioning the girl’s family members and potential witnesses. They initially suspected that the victim knew the assailant because there were no signs of forced entry. However, when Detective Scheff asked Ms. McGriff about two of her cousins, Edwin McGriff and Eddie Lee Mosley, she asserted that no one in her family could have committed such a crime. 

Ms. McGriff did not get a good look at the man’s face, but she described him as a muscular Black man with a short afro and an orange shirt. A neighbor named Gerald Davis told police that he spotted a Black man with a beard and a plaid shirt in the area an hour before the crime. Around the time of the incident, Ms. McGriff’s friend, Chiquite Lowe, was driving past the house when she was approached by a man asking for money. She described him as 6 feet tall, muscular, with a droopy eye, wearing a sterling silver ring and a white shirt. From all of these accounts, the sheriff’s office assembled a composite sketch. 

Four days after her initial interview, Ms. Lowe reported to the police that the man she saw had returned to the neighborhood and just tried to sell her grandmother a television. When the detectives arrived, they spoke to another person who suggested that 37-year-old Frank Lee Smith resembled the composite sketch. 

Mr. Smith’s father had been killed by the police when he was a young child, and his mother had been raped and murdered. Mr. Smith suffered from two head injuries in his childhood and one as an adolescent. When he was 13 years old, he killed a boy during a fight. Five years later, he was convicted of murder in a robbery that went wrong. He was released from prison in 1981 and moved in with his aunt in Broward County.

On April 29, 1985, Mr. Smith was arrested for Shandra’s murder and interrogated by Detectives Scheff and Amabile. Their interrogation was not videotaped or recorded, and they took no notes. During the interrogation, Detective Scheff falsely told Mr. Smith that the victim’s brother had seen the attacker in the house. In response, according to Detective Scheff, Mr. Smith said, “No way that kid could have seen me, it was too dark … The lights were out.” Detective Scheff would later testify that he considered this a confession. 

Mr. Davis was shown a picture of Mr. Smith and then identified Mr. Smith in a live lineup. Ms. McGriff and Ms. Lowe each selected Mr. Smith from a photographic lineup. 

The Trial

In January 1986, Mr. Smith went to trial in Broward County Circuit Court. There was no physical or forensic evidence connecting Mr. Smith to the crime. 

The prosecution’s case relied on Mr. Smith’s purported confession and the identifications by Ms. McGriff, Mr. Davis, and Ms. Lowe. 

Ms. McGriff testified that as she drove up to her home at 11:30 p.m., she saw a man standing outside one of the windows. She identified Mr. Smith as the man she had seen. 

Mr. Davis testified that as he walked past the victim’s house, a man approached and asked if he had any drugs or wanted to have sex. He described the man as disheveled, with kinky, knotted hair and a sleepy eye. He also said he moved as if he was “knock-kneed.”

Mr. Davis explained that when the police showed him two photographic lineups, he picked out a photo from the second lineup that “looked like” the man he saw. He then viewed a live lineup that included Mr. Smith, but was “bothered” because Mr. Smith didn’t seem as tall as the man he had encountered. Mr. Davis testified that the police assured him that everyone in the lineup was at least 6 feet tall. 

That, however, was incorrect. Mr. Smith was 5 feet 9 inches tall. Nonetheless, Mr. Davis identified Mr. Smith as the man who approached him that night.

Ms. Lowe testified that as she drove past Shandra’s house, a man flagged her down and asked her for 50 cents. She had “looked dead at him” from a distance of 18 inches. She described the man as 6 feet tall, 190 pounds, with straggly hair and a sleepy eye. She identified Mr. Smith in court and said that she was certain about the droopy eye, although she was not sure if it was the right or left eye. 

Both Ms. Lowe and Mr. Davis testified that the man they saw was not wearing glasses. 

Detective Scheff testified about the investigation and said that he and the other detectives had eliminated other suspects. 

Mr. Smith, who was legally blind and wore thick glasses, did not testify.

On Jan. 31, 1986, the jury convicted Mr. Smith of first-degree murder and sexual assault. 

At his sentencing hearing, Mr. Smith said he was innocent. “I didn’t do it,” he said. “It really hurt me to be accused of something like this, when my mama was raped … and my mama was killed like that … How do you think I feel about a baby like that?”

The jury voted unanimously to impose the death penalty. On May 6, 1986, Judge Robert Tyson sentenced Mr. Smith to death, describing the crime as “outrageously wicked, brutal, and pitiless.”

The Exoneration

On Nov. 17, 1989, Mr. Smith’s defense team filed a state law petition for a writ of habeas corpus, asserting substantial errors in the guilt and sentencing phases of the trial. Separately, on Jan. 8, 1990, Mr. Smith moved for a stay of execution based on new evidence of innocence. 

A month earlier, Ms. Lowe had recanted her testimony and identification of Mr. Smith. In an affidavit, Ms. Lowe said, “While I was in the courtroom telling about what I saw, I knew that the man on trial was too thin to be the same man I saw on the street.” 

She continued to say that on Dec. 10, 1989, an investigator with Mr. Smith’s defense team showed her a picture of Ms. McGriff’s cousin Eddie Lee Mosley, and asked her whether he was the man she saw the night of the murder. “When I looked at the picture everything came back to me,” she said. “The man in the photo is without a doubt the man I saw. I know that he is not the same man who was on trial for the little girl’s murder. I am so sorry that the wrong man is in prison and sentenced to death. I had doubts in the courtroom, but I was under so much pressure. Also, the state attorney told me about how dangerous the man was and how he needed to be locked up forever.”

Mr. Mosley bore a strong resemblance to the man in the composite sketch. More importantly, since Mr. Smith’s conviction, he had been arrested on two cases involving rape and murder and was tied to nearly a dozen other violent sexual crimes between 1973 and 1987, according to the motion for a stay. 

The motion also stated that Mr. Smith’s attorney had been ineffective by failing to use the police records to challenge witnesses on their testimony. The police asserted to have eliminated other suspects, but nothing in the records reflected that, the motion said. Separately, the motion argued that Detective Scheff’s testimony about Mr. Smith’s purported confessional statement was contradicted by other reports suggesting Detective Scheff was not in the interrogation room when Mr. Smith made statements. 

The Florida Supreme Court denied the habeas petition, but granted a stay of execution and ordered an evidentiary hearing on Ms. Lowe’s affidavit.

The evidentiary hearing was held in March of 1990. Mr. Smith’s team argued that Mr. Mosley, who had an extensive criminal record involving sexual assaults, was the real attacker. 

Detective Scheff testified that Mr. Mosley had been in a photographic lineup that Ms. Lowe viewed, and she had not identified him. Conversely, Ms. Lowe testified that Mr. Mosley was not included in the lineup.

After the hearing, Judge Tyson affirmed Mr. Smith’s conviction. 

In January 1998, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that Judge Tyson had been involved in three improper conversations with Assistant State Attorney Paul Zacks, one of which led to the rewording of an order. Mr. Smith’s case was remanded for a new hearing. Separately, Mr. Smith’s lawyers sought an order to allow DNA testing. 

After a hearing in October 1998, Judge Mark Speiser denied the motion for DNA testing as well as the motion for a new hearing. He contended that Ms. Lowe’s recantation and identification of Mr. Mosley lacked credibility.

On Jan. 1, 2000, Mr. Smith went to the hospital, complaining of stomach pains. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died less than a month later on Jan. 30, at the age of 52.

In July 2000, Mr. Smith’s attorneys and the prosecution agreed to DNA testing. The evidence was sent to the FBI crime laboratory four months later. On Dec. 11, 2000, the lab reported that Mr. Smith was excluded as the source of evidence found at the crime scene. 

Four days later, the lab reported that the genetic material was consistent with Eddie Mosley’s DNA. 

On December 15, 2000, Mr. Smith’s convictions were vacated, and the charges were dismissed. 

In 2013, the Broward County Sheriff’s Office settled a lawsuit filed by Mr. Smith’s family for $340,000.