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Illinois Man Todd Smith Gets 59 Years In Prison For Wife’s Murder

By Jim Hagerty
Published on: 09:54 PST, Apr 6, 2017

An Illinois man will be nearly 110 years old if he is released from prison for killing his wife.

Todd Smith, 49, was sentenced to 59 years behind bars Tuesday, for beating 30-year-old Katrina Smith to death and dumping her body in a nearby river back in 2012.

Smith, of Rockford, Illinois, was found guilty in January of multiple counts of first-degree murder and concealing a homicide. Winnebago County Circuit Court Judge Fernando Engelsma sentenced him Tuesday, April 4, to 55 years in the Illinois Department of Corrections for murder, and five years on the concealment conviction.

“The fact is, Todd Smith, you killed her,” Engelsma said during sentencing.“You beat her on the head with a blunt instrument and put her in the river.” Engelsma said. “Your actions after the crime then, I find unfathomable.”

The blunt instrument was an aluminum Louisville Slugger softball bat the estranged couple kept in their home.

During trial, prosecutors told the jury that Todd beat Katrina about the head at least seven times Oct. 22, 2012. The couple had been separated, but Katrina had returned to their marital home to do laundry. There, she encountered a jealous Todd Smith, who would not accept that she had moved on, and had been seeing another man.

After beating her to death, Smith placed Katrina’s body into her Chevrolet Cruz, drove to the Rock River and dumped it into the water. Smith then drove to various places and discarded pieces of evidence including Katrina’s wallet, phone, and bloody paper towels.

Her car was found the next day a short distance from their home.

Todd Smith called police Oct. 23, 2012, and reported his wife missing. He said she left to go shopping the night before and never returned. Detectives then began finding inconsistencies in Smith’s statements. He also told investigators he and Katrina were happily married. However, when they asked Smith why his wife had been living in a nearby condominium, he said she was only house sitting.

Police also discovered that Katrina made an appointment with a divorce lawyer, yet Todd Smith maintained the couple was not having marital problems. He even gave teary statements to media, begging for her return, and organized community-wide searches for his missing wife.

Then came Nov. 9, 2012, the day an off-duty fireman found the body of a woman floating in the water next to a fallen tree. While fishing at the location a few days earlier, he spotted what appeared to be garbage bag in the water but it was too dark to see what was inside. He heard about the missing woman and returned to investigate whether the bag was linked to Katrina Smith. Investigators identified the remains using Katrina’s dental records. Police then had a body along with other mounting evidence against Todd Smith. He was arrested just before Thanksgiving 2012.

More than four years worth of continuances delayed the trial.

Detectives later discovered that for weeks before he killed her, Smith had been stalking his wife using an electronic tracking device he secretly placed in the undercarriage of her car. Although police never recovered the device, they found a magnetic clip for a tracker in his house, and a year’s worth of tracking logs on his laptop. One of the logs showed movement of a tracking device on Oct. 22, 2012. It showed the device moved from Katrina’s condominium, to the couple’s home and to the area where her car was found. From there, the tracker traveled in the opposite direction, stopping just feet from Todd Smith’s house. Authorities believed he placed the device in his pocket before returning home on foot.

Smith must serve 100 percent of his sentence.

[Featured Image by Winnebago County Jail]

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