A few days before Thanksgiving 2011, Sherri Smith picked up her daughter Shamiya Smith-Craig from a friend’s house so the teenager could grab an extra set of clothes.
Smith-Craig was on Thanksgiving break, and her return home was a brief one: she’d decided to extend the sleepover that weekend. Smith, 32, who’d just gotten back from visiting her boyfriend in Atlanta, didn’t seem to mind having the house to herself that night, her daughter recalled.
What the teen couldn’t know at the time was that her mother would be brutally murdered in their Fairfield, Alabama, home that night—and that she’d come to believe the murderer was already hiding out in their house that afternoon.
Shortly after 4:30 a.m. on Monday, Nov. 21, Fairfield Police found Smith dead in her bed with multiple gunshot and stab wounds. A decade later, the police have yet to name a suspect. But both Smith-Craig and Smith’s mother, Bette Smith-Chamblin, told The Daily Beast they believe the murderer had planned this attack in advance, perhaps even spending part of the weekend lying in wait inside Smith’s own home.
“It’s scary to think they might have been right there with us,” Smith-Craig told The Daily Beast. “It still bothers me and makes me uncomfortable.”
The day after Smith’s murder, investigators told AL.com that they had recovered forensic evidence from inside the house that they believed would help the investigation. They also said Smith most likely knew her killer.
“We discovered no evidence of a forced entry, nor did we detect articles being taken which are consistent with a burglary. Evidence is leading us to believe the assailant was known to the victim,” Leon Davis, then-chief of police in Fairfield, told the paper.
But police have never publicly identified a person of interest. And the forensic evidence they recovered did not turn out to be relevant to the investigation, Michael Erby, the lead detective on the case for close to a decade, told The Daily Beast.
Erby disputed that the case was “cold.” But given his retirement this summer, a decade after the incident, it’s fair to say the saga is an enduring mystery. “There are persons of interest,” the ex-cop said in an interview. “We just haven’t gotten enough to make an arrest.”
Erby declined to give any details about those persons of interest, or about the forensic evidence that police had collected. The Fairfield Police Department did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.
The ex-detective said he believes someone in Fairfield, a Birmingham, Alabama, suburb with about 11,000 residents, knows something that could finally bring closure to the case.
“Fairfield is a small town,” Erby added. “We’re looking for anybody who’s heard anything or any witness to anyone leaving the house at any time, any vehicles someone saw parked in the driveway. Any rumors that have been out, because there’s a little truth to any rumor. We’re looking for any information that will lead to another suspect or arrest.”
Smith-Craig and Smith-Chamblin agree that Smith likely knew her killer. In addition to the lack of forced entry, they both pointed to the sheer violence of the attack: Smith was shot and stabbed multiple times, according to Erby.
“It was overkill,” Smith-Chamblin told The Daily Beast. “And for me, that’s a crime of hate… With each stab, someone is saying, ‘I hate your ass.’”
Smith-Craig described her mom as vivacious and funny. Although she held down a straight-laced job as a financial associate at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, in the evenings, she loved to dress up and go out, often with the same group of friends she’d held onto since high school.
“She was the kind of person who loved to have fun, a people person. Everybody loved her,” Mario Phillips, her boyfriend at the time of her death, told The Daily Beast. “For one thing, she was beautiful, but her life—it hadn’t been easy. She had kids young, but she was a hard worker and she was doing things with her life.”
Smith-Chamblin, the slain woman’s mother, and Smith-Craig, the daughter, had gotten to know Phillips and liked him. But Phillips told The Daily Beast that others weren’t happy about their relationship, referring to, among other disgruntled parties, a woman who left harassing phone calls and physically attacked Smith, leaving her with a dislocated shoulder.
Still, Smith hid this turmoil from her children. When Smith-Craig asked her mom what happened to her arm, she simply told her daughter that she’d fallen and hurt herself.
“She was pretty much adamant about what she felt wasn’t her kids’ business. Lots of things we found out about after her death,” said Smith-Craig, who lived at the house with her mom and her younger brother, Micah.
One of those things, Smith-Craig said, were details about a break-in that happened at their house about four months before her death. Phillips said that like the murder, this burglary also had no sign of forced entry. Although Smith’s room had been torn apart, he told The Daily Beast, only one thing had been taken—the handgun she kept in a box in the top of her closet.
After the break-in, Phillips tried to convince Smith to change the locks, something she hadn’t done in years. Smith got an alarm system, but he said she never got around to changing the locks.
On the night of the murder, that alarm is what sent police to her house, after it was triggered at 4 a.m. Erby, the retired detective, told The Daily Beast that Smith’s killer likely triggered the alarm. But whether that person triggered it entering the house or leaving remains unclear.
What is clear, Smith-Craig said, is that if the killer needed a window of time when the alarm hadn’t been set to slip into their home unnoticed, that weekend was it.
On the Friday before Smith was killed, her daughter, Smith-Craig, asked her grandmother, Smith-Chamblin, to run her over to her mother’s house. Smith was on her way to Atlanta, and the teen needed to grab gear for that night’s basketball game.
But when Smith-Craig and her mom went back to the house hours before her death to get her clothes for the extended sleepover, her daughter recalled that the alarm didn’t beep when they’d opened the door. She’d forgotten to set it when she left on Friday.
“And my mom was mad,” Smith-Craig said.
Setting the alarm was an important part of her mom’s routine, Smith-Craig said. She said Smith also set it every night before she went to bed. Both her daughter and grandmother told The Daily Beast that over the years, they’ve theorized that someone may have entered the house that weekend, waited until Smith fell asleep to kill her, and then triggered the alarm when they left around 4 a.m.
But not triggering the alarm on the way in is one thing, Smith-Chamblin admitted. There were also no signs of forced entry. And she’s not certain who from Smith’s past or present had a key or would have been able to get one made.
“There’s nothing that adds up perfectly,” Smith-Chamblin said.
Still, she and Smith-Craig are frustrated that the mystery of Smith’s murder appears no closer to being solved than it was a decade ago.
According to Smith-Chamblin, after several months had passed without an arrest, the state Attorney General’s office took over the investigation. But, Erby said, a short time later, they sent the case back to investigators in Fairfield. “They determined we’d done all we could do,” Erby told The Daily Beast.
Although a summary of Smith’s case is still listed on the attorney general’s cold case site online, a representative for the office declined to comment, telling The Daily Beast that investigative files are not open for public review and that the office’s investigators do not do press interviews.
Those closest to Smith can’t shake the feeling that the investigation never went deep enough.
“The police did a terrible job, a terrible job all around,” Phillips, Smith’s boyfriend, told The Daily Beast.
“Even me, I don’t feel like they asked me enough questions,” he said, before adding, “But we’re in a small town, there’s not a lot of police resources, it’s a mostly Black community, and some things never get investigated as carefully as they should.”
While Erby insists the investigation has been thorough, he also told The Daily Beast that over the last decade, dwindling tax revenues have decimated his former department.
In 2019, the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department took over investigation and patrol duties for the local police force. Erby said that older investigations, however, were still being pursued by the police department. (The sheriff’s department did not return multiple requests for interviews.)
But just how active those pursuits are isn’t clear. Multiple voicemails left with the local police investigations department went unreturned, as did voicemails left for Fairfield Police Chief Nick Dyer. Erby said that since his retirement, the Fairfield Police Department was down to fewer than five officers.
Erby, who still sees Smith’s family out in Fairfield, understands their frustration.
“I know the family, so I tried to do everything,” he told The Daily Beast. “I wish we had an answer for them.”
Although investigators at the time appeared to rule out a break-in as motive, discussing the case recently, Erby said the possibility that Smith’s death was due to something as random as a botched robbery was still on the table.
“Since we never made an arrest, we don’t know who actually killed her,” Erby told The Daily Beast. “Everything is still a possibility.”
In the meantime, Erby said, police were still looking for any leads.
“We don’t have anything new to add to the case or investigative tips, so right now if there’s anything, some stranger could have been passing by and seen something, we want to know. Right now it’s just a prayer and a hope that somebody will come up with something.”
