STANDARD TRANSMISSIONS
Echoes
By Rik Davie/The Scugog Standard

The sound of a gunshot is very little like the booming noises portrayed on television and in the movies. Not a boom, but a sharp ‘crack’!
_The sound a .22 calibre round makes is not unlike a hard slap of the hand on a table. Only someone familiar with the sound would have recognized it on a cold winter night in the village of Raglan in 1974.
_Yet, that sound would echo across the decades, ringing in the ears of the friends and the family of Beverly Smith who ... milliseconds after it ... lay dead on the kitchen floor of her small Raglan house, her dog and infant daughter the only witnesses to a crime that has yet to be solved.
_The Smith murder - that’s what the file on my desk says, simply ‘the Smith murder’ - was the first murder of the newly formed Region of Durham and remains its oldest unsolved homicide.
_I first ran across the case while covering the courts in Durham in the late 90s and it has stuck with me, as surely as it did with the various detectives who have ‘caught’ the case over the years.
_But for her child and dog, the young mother was at home alone, and was already dead when she was allegedly discovered by neighbours who were alerted by her husband - working nights at GM - that she had not answered his usual call home.
_In the following weeks, months and then decades, there was much speculation, rumour and accusations over the identity of her killer.
_It wasn’t until more than 30 years later that an arrest was made in the case. That milestone only led to more delays, denials, withdrawn and relaid charges and now, in 2012, finally, the prospect of a trial for the person accused in her slaying. And accused is the word because none of us ... the lowest to the most exalted ... stand guilty of any action until the Queen’s Court says so. Everything until then is simply an unproven theory.
_I’ll be in court this week to begin following what many hope will be the final justice for the pretty young woman with long blond hair and - judging by her picture on the wall of this newsroom - an infectious smile.
_Now, any of us who have covered the courts has one case that sticks with them, for whatever reason. The most interesting, the most gruesome, the most involved, the longest. _The one that stays in the back of your mind. I’ve written about this case since the late 90s and, for me, it is the one. There’s something about the mystery of it. The lack of apparent motive; the house where the crime occurred (it has never changed since that day); the twin sister of the victim who looms over all court dates and appearances like a ghostly image of how Beverly would have aged, had she been allowed.
_I have sat through news conferences and past court appearances and watched the family of Beverly Smith - the child, now a beautiful young woman, who surely would have made her mother very proud. Watched them, as they watch and wait for some closure; some end to the nightmare that began all those years ago.
_I have some pictures that are stuck up in any newsroom I have laboured in. Photos of the victims of the unsolved crimes I have covered. One by one, they come down, as diligent police work and the slowly grinding wheels of justice put rest to their final terror.
_Perhaps soon, for the sake of all those who knew Beverly Smith - for the blond girl with the infectious smile and for a few of us that just feel we knew her - that picture, too, can come down.
_And finally, the echo of that gunshot can fade away from the air where it has hung for so very long.