The Murder of Dr. Joe Smith in Lancaster, S.C.

It was almost Halloween in October of 1979 when a Lancaster, South Carolina physician who also worked as an assistant county coroner failed to show up for work. His colleagues heard conflicting stories about where he was, and one business owner felt the need to alert the police. When the doctor was discovered murdered, the community hoped his killer would soon be caught. But it would take more than a year before an arrest was made, and it highlighted the dangers of mixing business with pleasure and just how deadly a love affair can turn.

Fifty-one-year-old Dr. Joe Smith was a fixture around the Lancaster, South Carolina community for many years. He had a practice as a general practitioner, worked as the jail physician for Chester County and the city, and the assistant coroner for Lancaster County.

He’d grown up in Anderson, where his father was employed by Swift and Company. After graduating from high school, he joined the military. After a tour of duty, he entered medical school.

A Notably Absent Physician

It was Bob Perry, the owner of Perry’s Pharmacy, which was located on York Street next to Smith’s office that first noticed something was wrong. He was used to seeing Smith in and out of the pharmacy multiple times a day.

Perry saw Smith early that Monday morning, but not the next day. He began inquiring at Smith’s office about his whereabouts on Tuesday. At first his staff thought Smith had gone to Anderson to help assist getting his mother into a nursing home, but then she called the office on Tuesday and said she hadn’t seen him. Perry went to the sheriff, and Parks decided to do a welfare check on his friend and colleague at his riverfront home south of Fort Lawn in Chester County, about five miles west of Lancaster. Joe was separated from his wife Betty at the time and lived alone.

There, around 7 p.m, Detective Jim Boswell, former Fort Lawn Police Chief Kenneth Eagle and Joe Smith’s son-in-law Daniel Bailey went to the home. They removed a windowpane from the kitchen door, unlocked the door, and went inside. There, they found Smith deceased in his bedroom, underneath a pile of clothes taken from his closet and an electric blanket, which was still turned on. He had been shot multiple times in the chest and the head with two .38-caliber pistols.

“I couldn’t help thinking about the hundreds of crime scenes and natural deaths that we had been together investigating and here I was investigating his death,” said Lancaster County Sheriff Nae Parks.

He described Smith as having the kind of analytical mind necessary for investigating death scenes and the contacts around the state to get answers quickly.

The preliminary autopsy report showed the wounds were not self inflicted. The presence of the electric blanket made it difficult to pinpoint the physician’s time of death. Investigators found no signs of forced entry in his one-story brick home.

To the general public, it appeared the case had stalled. News reports of what was happening during the investigation were non-existent for at least a year.

Two agents from the State Law Enforcement Division were assigned to Smith’s unsolved murder case in September of 1980. Laboratory tests determined Smith had been shot by two .38-caliber pistols, both of which he owned. One was found in his kitchen, and the other was recovered in the attic of the home by the doctor’s son, Joe Smith III, several days after the murder. Smith’s colleagues at the White Springs Memorial Hospital in Lancaster last saw him on the morning of October 29, 1979, when he helped to deliver a baby. A woman named Pearl Chandler, who said she worked as Smith’s receptionist and bookkeeper, told police she saw him later that day when she borrowed his car to go shopping in Rock Hill. Pearl said she returned his car later that day, but didn’t see him. She got into her own car and returned home.

“An Arrest Will Be Made”

A year after the murder, Chester County Sheriff Bobby Orr said the investigation was ongoing. In fact, he told the media that he was confident the crime would be solved, and an arrest would be made. That arrest was made more than six months later.

On May 22, 1981, a year and a half after Dr. Joe Smith Jr. his death in his home, police arrested 42-year-old Pearl Chandler, a nurse from Lancaster and charged her with the murder. This was the Pearl Chandler who said she’d borrowed Joe’s car during the time friends and colleagues noticed he was missing. They also charged her with several different forgery counts. In a strange twist, Pearl Chandler was the ex-wife of Richard Chandler, Senior, who was the Lancaster County coroner at the time of Joe’s death. She’d been separated from her husband when Joe was murdered, and had been in a relationship with Joe until the weeks prior.

Sheriff Orr said the warrant was issued based on an intensive investigation by the Chester and Lancaster sheriffs’ departments, the State Law Enforcement Division and the Bureau of Drug Control of the state Department of Health and Environmental Control.

The Bureau of Drug Control charged Pearl with two counts of obtaining drugs by forged prescriptions and one count of obtaining controlled substances by a forged prescription. SLED charged her with five counts of forging checks.

A circuit court judge set bond for Pearl at $10,000. She quickly posted the bond and was released.

Her trial began in late October of 1981 and lasted three days. The jury consisted of four men and eight women. The prosecution presented 62 pieces of evidence in Pearl Chandler’s trial and called 28 witnesses to testify.

A Woman Scorned?

Prosecutor John Justice told reporters his plan was to present Pearl Chandler’s motives for murder as “greed and scorn.” Bobby Orr said his office found several checks from Joe Smith’s account deposited in Pearl’s bank account and used to pay her bills several days after he was murdered. Marvin Dawson, a State Law Enforcement Division handwriting expert, told the jury that five checks and several prescriptions with Joe Smith’s signature had been forged by Pearl Chandler.

The case against Pearl was largely circumstantial. Here are a few details that came out during the trial:

Sheriff Orr said investigators found a blood-spattered yellow plastic cup containing remnants of vodka and cherries in the bathroom at Joe Smith’s house. Gwendolyn Parker, who also worked in Joe’s office, testified that Pearl often drank from a cup with clear liquid and cherries in it.

On October 15, 1979, Joe had fired Pearl from her receptionist/bookkeeper position and called police to help remove her from the office. He was murdered 14 days later. While Pearl was a receptionist at the time of Joe’s death, she went on to receive her training as a nurse in the year and a half prior to her arrest.

On October 29, 1979, Pearl Chandler made several calls to let people know Joe Smith would not be at work. At 10:20 a.m. Gwendolyn Parker’s mother said Pearl phoned her daughter at 8:30 a.m. saying the office was going to be closed for fumigation, and then called back an hour later to say Joe was going to Anderson.

In Joe Smith’s car parked in his driveway, investigators found his billfold and checkbook in a suitcase. The billfold was empty of money but contained his identification cards, and five checks were missing from the back of the checkbook.

Ballistics tests confirmed Joe Smith was killed with two of his own .38-caliber pistols.

The prosecution presented a letter she wrote to Joe Smith four days after he fired her as his receptionist. The letter had been kept in a safety deposit box at the Central Carolina Bank in Lancaster and was discovered in September of 1980. It discussed how she’d stolen money to pay for her son’s tuition and a ring she’d bought him worth $3,000. She said other women in Joe’s life had turned him against her.

Charleston pathologist Dr. Sandra Conradi told jurors Joe Smith was killed as he lay in bed clothed in a t-shirt. Four of the eight bullets that hit him were fired from close range. She found powder burns on his skin next to his sideburns. The first two bullets that hit him near the temple did extensive damage to his brain. She concluded that although the first two bullets likely would have caused his death, the six additional shots were fired into his body while his heart continued to pump.

Solicitor John Justice said he believed Pearl was humiliated after Joe fired her from his office and did not want him to break off their relationship. He surmised that after delivering the baby at Elliot White Springs Memorial Hospital in the early morning hours of October 29, 1979, he returned home and went to sleep. Pearl probably spent the night at the house, and decided to shoot him while he slept, perhaps after consuming too much alcohol and prescription medication.

Pearl did not testify on her own behalf and her attorneys did not offer a rebuttal after the prosecution’s closing arguments. The jury foreman, Paul Jones, said these two facts factored into their guilty verdict. Pearl and her defense team offered up no reason why she should be found innocent. They didn’t even call any witnesses of their own.

A Jury Decides Pearl Chandler’s Fate

Jones also said the jury had discussed whether there could have been more than one person firing the guns that killed Joe. Pearl’s defense attorneys mentioned a former employee of Joe’s or his brother-in-law could have been suspects. Members of the jury asked about the blood spatter on three walls of the bedroom at the crime scene.

On October 28, 1981, after two and a half hours, the jury returned a guilty verdict in the murder of Dr. Joe Smith. His widow, Betty, told the media the family was happy about the verdict. His son said, “We were uncertain how it was going to turn out. We kept our hopes up. We had talked it over and decided that no matter what, we would abide by the decision of the court. We didn’t want to start a long-term feud between the families or have feelings of revenge.”

This is an excerpt from Ep. 158 of the Missing in the Carolinas podcast. Listen to the full episode here.