Byron David Smith: The Deer Hunter
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This episode includes discussion of murder. Listener discretion is advised. It was the afternoon of November 22nd, 2012, Thanksgiving Day, in Little Falls, Minnesota. It's a small city about 100 miles northwest of Minneapolis. Throughout town, families were gathered, celebrating the holidays together. However, Byron Smith was not with his family. The 64-year-old retired security specialist was sitting alone in his basement in the dark.

but soon he was about to play host to some uninvited guests. Smith heard an upstairs window shatter. Someone had broken into his house, but he didn't go up to see who it was or what was happening. He just sat in his armchair and waited, patiently, with a rifle. For 12 whole minutes, Smith listened to the sounds of footsteps shuffling above him and doorknobs rattling. And then he heard what he'd been waiting for, the footsteps coming down the stairs.

Through the darkness, Smith saw someone making their way down into his basement. He waited until he saw their hips. He aimed and fired twice. His target, a 17-year-old named Nicholas Brady, crumpled and fell down the stairs. Smith moved closer and fired another shot. And then he whispered, You're dead. Smith wrapped Brady's body in a tarp and dragged him into another room.

then returned to the basement, reloaded his rifle, and resumed his position, waiting for the next one. This is Vigilante, an original podcast from Podcast One. You're listening to a story told in one episode called Byron David Smith, the Deer Hunter. I'm Sarah James McLaughlin. In this episode, we'll hear about the double vigilante murders of Byron Smith and how the case collided with the personal life of the lead investigator, Deputy Jeremy Lubberts.

For this episode, we'll feature an interview with a man who knows the case and the town of Little Falls, Minnesota, inside and out. He's the author of the book Murder on Elm Street, Sergeant Investigator Jeremy Lubberts. Well, I worked for 28 years for the Morrison County Sheriff's Office. When I retired two years ago, I was the lead investigator, the sergeant investigator for my department.

So Little Falls, Minnesota, we're located right in the center of Minnesota between Brainerd and St. Cloud are the two biggest cities. Little Falls is also the childhood home of Charles Lindbergh.

We are a population of approximately 8,300 people, a smaller community. For the most part, it's a pretty quiet middle America area, but we still deal with major crimes. Unfortunately, we get our share of murder investigations, burglaries, sexual assaults, and just about every other major crime. And on Thanksgiving Day in 2012,

That list of crimes grew to include double homicide, but no one, including Lubberts, knew anything was off until the next day. While at home spending some downtime with his wife Chrissy and daughter Haley, he received a strange call.

My wife is an RN, a registered nurse, and she had the day off also. And we were both looking forward to three days off together because working with and for the public can be very demanding. We just needed a break. So we were sitting at home watching a movie. I had my daughter Haley with me and my phone rings, my cell phone rings. And I look and here's one of the, it's Deputy David Sherping calling me.

Now, right away, my wife gives me this dirty look because these interruptions to our family time is happening constantly. Lubitz was technically off the clock, but when the call came in, he had to answer. Deputy Sherping explained that he'd gotten a strange call from one of Byron Smith's neighbors. Smith had been calling around looking for a lawyer. There seemed to have been some kind of break-in at his home and something had gone sideways.

Sounds like he might be exaggerating things, but I got a gut feeling that, you know, there might be something to this case because, you know, it's just, I don't know, I just had this weird feeling that something, there might be something more to this. Lubitz immediately knew that it was his duty to go over to Byron Smith's place and figure out what happened.

And he also knew his wife wasn't going to like it. Of course, I tell my wife, Chrissy, and she's furious. It's like, you've got to be kidding me. Now, you know, I'm supposed to enjoy a day off together. We had plans. And now I got to leave. Liebert suited up in his sheriff's deputy uniform and headed into the station. And there he met up with deputies David Sherping and Rick Madison before heading over to investigate. They arrived to a strange scene.

Start walking up to the main entry door. And as I'm walking towards the main entry door, Byron comes out of his house with his hand raised above his head. And at least I assumed it was Byron because I never met him before. I never met Mr. Smith before. So as I'm walking up there, I ask him, I try to play this out as calm and collective as I can because I need to get information from this guy. Why? Because it's not common that somebody walks out of their house with their hand raised above their head. That's a red flag for me.

Lubberts had his guard up, but Smith seemed pretty calm as he invited the deputies in and explained that someone had broken into his home the previous day. And he said, he goes, I reported a burglary to your brother, Jamie, about a month ago back in October. This is a good place to mention that Deputy Lubberts also has a twin brother, Jamie Lubberts, who also is on the force.

And he goes, I had a bunch of items stolen from that. So I asked him, I said, was anything stolen during this burglary? And he said, no. And I said, OK. And so at this point, the way he's describing things, he's he's pretty calm about what he's telling me. And it just seems like this is going to end up being another burglary report.

made me feel definitely a little better, a little calmer. It's like, good, you know, this is looking like I can wrap this up within a fairly reasonable amount of time and get back home to my family. So as I'm talking with Byron, then he tells me, yeah, and there's something I need to show you in the basement. As we're walking down the stairs, what I see is, and he has, the walls are white, painted white, and I see a red speck, a red spot on the wall.

And to me, I kind of take a closer look as I'm walking down the stairs, and it looks like a speck of blood. Like, ooh, red flag there. It's like, what the heck? Well, as we're continuing to walk down the stairs, there's a rug at the bottom of the steps. And I see what looks like another spot of blood soaked into the carpet. I'm like, oh, no. This is not looking good. So we get to the bottom of the steps, and we're standing at the bottom of the steps on this rug.

And Byron tells me that, yeah, he starts telling me about the October burglary that happened. And one thing I'm noticing as I'm talking with him is there's a set of tennis shoes under his reading chair that he told me he was sitting in when the burglary happened. And the tennis shoes are a Nike type of skater, you know, skateboard type shoe.

not something common that an older person would wear. So kind of a mental note on that. I'm like, that was kind of weird. Well, and the reading chair that he told me he was sitting in was not a spot where typically somebody would sit and read. It was positioned between a couple of bookshelves. So the only view anybody would have of Byron is directly coming down the stairs.

So it was just, it was an odd placement. Another thing I noticed too, is he had bottles of water and energy bars sitting on the floor next to the chair. That indicated to me that he was in it for the long haul. He was planning on sitting in that chair for quite a while. And I also noticed the light bulbs in the ceiling down there had been removed.

It's just odd. Why would somebody remove the light bulbs from above where he was sitting? Unless you didn't want to be seen, especially at nighttime. If somebody would come down the stairs and turn the light switch on, you're not going to see somebody because there's no bulbs in there to light somebody up. So as I'm asking Byron to tell me what had happened, he then tells me that while I was sitting in my reading chair yesterday,

I heard the window break upstairs. And then just prior to that, I heard somebody walking outside along the deck. And I heard the footsteps going around the house. I heard somebody trying the doorknobs. And he's telling me, and I'm getting seriously stressed out. He hears the footsteps come to the top of the steps. And then he hears somebody walking down his steps, down towards where he was sitting in his reading chair.

And as he goes, as the footsteps are coming down the stairs, when I saw the hip area of the person I shot and I'm like, whoa, now I'm just baffled. I'm like, what? Because he made no indication or alluded to anything that he had shot somebody. He goes, I fired. And he fell to the bottom of the stairs and he's wounded. And he tells me, I want him dead. He goes, I took my rifle and I shot.

shot him until he was dead. I'm like, wow. Well, that's kind of explaining the blood that I saw on the rug at the bottom of the stairs now. I said, what happened after that? He goes, I took his body because he goes, I didn't want all this blood soaking into my carpet down here. So I had a tarp nearby. So I wrapped his body in a tarp and I drug him off to my back office work area.

"Whoa, what the heck? What a story." I'm like, "Holy crap." And then I said, "What happened after that?" He goes, "Well then," he goes, "the blood was just pounding in my ears." So I went back and I sat down in my reading chair, trying to calm down. He goes, "And as I'm sitting there, approximately 11 minutes passed, and I heard more footsteps upstairs."

These were the footsteps of Nicholas Brady's cousin, 18-year-old Haley Kiefer. She entered Smith's house, calling out her cousin's name. But there was no answer. And he tells me, they're ganging up on me. He goes, I hear the footsteps coming down the hallway. When it got to the top of the stairs, the person paused and then started walking down the stairs again. And again, when I saw the hip area, I fired.

He goes, "And she fell to the bottom of the stairs and she's laying there wounded." And I asked him, I said, "Did you by chance notice that either one of these kids, either one of these people have any weapons on them?" "No, I didn't see that. I didn't see any weapons." It didn't really matter to Smith that the two teenagers were unarmed. All that mattered was that they were breaking into his house, that they were trying to steal from him and he wasn't going to let it happen.

I said, okay. Then he tells me, she's looking up at me. She's looking at me and she started to laugh. I said, oh. He goes, I wanted her dead. He goes, I took my rifle, I pointed it at her and I pulled the trigger, but the gun jammed. There was a click and she started laughing at me. And he goes, I took my pistol that I had on my waist from the holster. I pointed it at her chest and I fired and I fired and I fired until she was dead.

And then I said, "What happened after that?" He goes, "I took her body and I drug her back by the bail party and I laid her body next to him." And mind you, it's over 24 hours now since this shooting had happened. And we received no report from him or anybody else on it until now. So I'm walking into this whole investigation just blindsided by all this. I said, "Well, you mentioned there were the two bodies." I said, "Can you show me where the bodies are?"

So right at the bottom of the steps, there's a doorway to our right. And he goes, they're through here. So I reach for the doorknob and he tells me the bodies are behind this door. My hands are shaking. I'm nervous. I'm like, what the heck am I going to find behind here? I open the door and my fears are confirmed. What I see is a young female walking.

laying on the floor next to a young male party. The female in particular, who was later identified to be Haley Kiefer, was wearing a sweatshirt, had the hood up over her head and drawn tight to her head so that all I could see was her face. Her face looked like it was frozen in time. It looked like she had extreme pain at the time of her death that remained frozen on her face.

And that was a mental note of mine that something I saw that I will never forget. And what I could see were multiple bullet holes in her body, obviously from when Byron told me that he had shot her. And then the boy was actually the only thing he was still under the tarp and

The only thing I could see from him was his shoes and his jeans that he was wearing, just his legs. So I grabbed the tarp and I pulled it back to take a look at the boy. And what I saw was very disturbing. He was shot in the head. His head had been damaged severely by, it looked like a rifle shot that he had taken.

So I could see his brains and pieces of skull and everything. It was a terrible sight to see. After discovering this and after what Byron had told me, I asked him to accompany me back away from that room, back towards the bottom of the steps. And then I told Byron, because of everything that you told me, because of everything that had happened, I said, Byron, I have no choice but to place you under arrest at this time.

Coming up, Deputy Lubberts interrogates Byron Smith and learns more disturbing details about this double homicide. Now, back to the story. On Black Friday of 2012, Deputy Jeremy Lubberts responded to a call that something strange had happened at the residence of Byron David Smith.

After he arrived on scene, he was shocked to discover that Smith had shot and killed two teenagers who had broken into his house. After discovering the bodies of 17-year-old Nicholas Brady and his cousin, 18-year-old Haley Kiefer, Lubitz placed Smith under arrest and brought him in for questioning. Lubitz had already heard the story from Smith, but he wanted to get everything on tape so it could be used as evidence on the trial that was sure to come.

Lubberts began the interrogation with the basics, the contacts leading up to the fatal incident. Smith claimed that people had been breaking into his house for several weeks and he had installed a system of surveillance cameras around his house and taken to carrying a loaded gun. In the beginning, when Smith was telling his story, it seemed like he had every right to defend himself after a series of break-ins. However, Lubberts found that Smith had reported only one previous burglary to police.

Yes, during the trial, Byron's attorney made it a point to try to point out that Byron's house had been burglarized many times and law enforcement wasn't able to do anything about it. Well, that is not true. And in fact, when I was investigating this case, Byron had only reported one burglary to our department the entire time. One.

But his attorney tried to make it sound like he had multiple, multiple burglaries he reported throughout the years and law enforcement wasn't doing a thing about it. Well, it's just not true. As Deputy Lubert pressed Smith on the details, it became more and more clear that what happened was far beyond a simple matter of self-defense.

Parts of Smith's story suggested that he really hadn't been ambushed in his home at all. In fact, it was him who had set up a trap and done the ambushing. So first there was his truck, which Smith had suspiciously moved away from his house. And he told me that on Thanksgiving day, he parked the truck at 1130 AM. He moved it and parked it down there because he wanted to, he was cleaning up his yard and that, and he,

he wanted it out of the way so that he also gave me some odd story that he parked it over there because they're not getting they're not getting burglarized over there i'm getting burglarized over here so i moved it out of the way out of sight feeling that it was safe like that made no sense

At all. Why would you park your truck away from your house a quarter mile away down on a dead end cul-de-sac? Nobody would normally do that. That indicated to me that he he was working to set up the scene, making to set up his house so that it looked like nobody was home. He was laying a trap is what he was doing.

There was more evidence suggesting that Smith had laid a trap. There was the fact that he was sitting in the dark, partially hidden with two loaded guns. And then there was the fact that he had water bottles and energy bars, which was an indication that he planned to lay in wait for an extended period of time. During trial, prosecutor Pete Orput likened Smith's setup to a deer hunter's.

Deputy Lubberts also compared Smith's actions to setting up a deer stand. He wrote, quote, Unquote.

Smith himself even compared the way he killed Haley Kiefer to the way he might hunt an animal. And she gave out the death twitch. First time I've ever seen it in a human, but it works the same in beaver and deer and whatever. Probably the most damning evidence against the self-defense argument was that Smith didn't stop shooting his victims once he had disabled them.

He kept shooting them until they were dead. Deputy Lubberts pressed Smith on this question. After he knew she wasn't a threat, why did he keep shooting Haley Kiefer? And thinking back on it, what happened was everybody has red buttons. Everybody has sore spots. And I've known since grade school that being ganged up on is a sore spot with me. I just couldn't think. I didn't think. I wasn't thinking. I was just, they're ganged. So I killed her too.

Smith gave another clue to the real reason he used deadly force. When the gun clicked, it fired. She laughed at me. It wasn't a very long laugh because she was already hurting. But, you know, there was this, okay, there's another red button I guess most people would have. You're trying to shoot somebody and they laugh at you. You go again. He wasn't defending himself or his home. He was pissed that a woman laughed at him. After she was on the tarp, she was still gasping.

And as much as I hate someone, I don't believe they deserve pain. So I gave her a clean shot under the chin, up into the cranium. I thought she was dead and it turned out she wasn't. So I did a good, clean finishing shot. I'm sorry, but that's not self-defense in my opinion. That's taking the law into your own hands and that's murder. On top of all of this evidence, there was still another piece that was pretty much the smoking gun.

Lubberts had found an audio recorder of the crime scene that had recorded the entire incident. It caught Smith taunting Brady and Kiefer and the sound of him wrapping their bodies in tarps that were conveniently nearby. And it caught even the sound of Smith rehearsing what he would say to his brother before the break-in even happened. It was blind luck that I found this Holy Grail piece of evidence for the case.

So between his interviews and between that I obtained from him and between this audio recording that we found, it was the best evidence that we've ever discovered in a case. It might have seemed like Deputy Lubberts was already well on his way to wrapping this case up, but this was just the beginning of a years-long ordeal.

And while Lubitz is working with the biggest case of his career, he has a family emergency. His wife Chrissy was hospitalized for severe gastrointestinal bleeding. So now Lubitz is torn between being on his wife's side and doing his duty to investigate. Lubitz wrote in his book, quote, I got a feeling that one day I'd lose my family because of this job, unquote.

On top of caring for his wife and continuing to investigate, Lubert's life would be further complicated by a strong contingent of people from his town and across the nation who had come out in support of Byron Smith and his right to defend his castle. Up next, we'll cover the community's response to Byron Smith's case as well as the outcome of his trial. Now, back to the story.

The case of Byron Smith fatally shooting two teenagers who broke into his house had stirred up intrigue and debate in Smith's hometown of Little Falls, Minnesota. As the national media picked up the sensational story, people across the country were taking sides about whether Smith was justified. One concept that was central to the case was the castle doctrine. Basically, it's a legal principle which allows homeowners to defend their homes or their castles with legal force.

Well, in the meantime, the news media catches wind of this and jumps all over the case. You know, the case goes national news. And they basically, the news media portrays the Castle Doctrine Law. Now, what the Castle Doctrine Law pretty much states is that people are the king of their castle, right? Generally speaking, there are four parts of a successful self-defense claim.

Number one, the defendant is not the aggressor. Number two, the defendant has an actual honest belief of imminent danger. Number three, a reasonable basis existed for this belief of danger. And number four, a reasonable means to retreat is not available. The Castle Doctrine basically negates the last part and says that a person doesn't have to retreat if they're threatened in their own home.

The idea behind this is that a person's home is their castle, the place where they're likely to be the most safe. So in a dangerous situation, they shouldn't have to leave, but, you know, be able to stand their ground. You have the right to protect yourself in your own home. You have the right to use lethal force, deadly force, to protect yourself in your own home. You are not obligated to have to retreat from your own home because people are the kings of their castle. Now,

In Minnesota, we do not have the Castle Doctrine Law. But what we do have is an adopted version of the Castle Doctrine Law. And Minnesota actually takes it a step further and says that any amount of force used must be reasonable. That's the additional step that Minnesota takes, which I love that. You know, it makes total sense. You know, if you're going to use lethal force against somebody, it better be reasonable. This is where things got...

Dicey for Smith's defense. Would a jury believe that his shooting two teenagers to death to stop a burglary was reasonable? The first shots to disable them? Okay, well, maybe, sure. But under Minnesota law, once the threat has been removed, the self-defense argument ceases to apply. As a Morrison County sheriff said in a press conference, quote, the law doesn't permit you to execute somebody once a threat is gone, unquote.

However, not everybody thought that this case was cut and dry. Particularly, gun rights advocates were up in arms because they felt Smith's arrest was in violation of this Castle Doctrine. Gun rights activists permit to carry holders were furious.

They were furious to the fact that I had arrested Mr. Smith and he's in jail and he's getting charged with two counts of first degree murder. They're mad because they felt that he had the right to protect himself in his own home and he should not have been arrested and on trial for this. Well, the problem is they don't know the whole story. Even people in my community, they don't know the whole story of everything that happened. That's later to come out. But right away, people are judgmental.

And you're never going to get around that because the trial took two years until it finally started. And I would have loved to have told people in my community, especially all these people that were upset with me and that why I did what I did on my part of it. But I couldn't. I had to keep everything secret.

Because I can't share that information. They would find out about it, of course, when I testify on the stand when it goes to trial. But up until that point, I can't say a word about it to anybody in the community. So the whole time I got to sit on all this knowledge for two years, knowing all this and them not knowing it and being mad at me.

But that is a huge burden that, you know, law enforcement officers, that's the burden we accept. It's just something we have to, it's a huge burden we take on in our career, in our lives. Half my community was upset with me and half felt that he was, you know, in the wrong and were grateful for the job I did. And then I had people throughout the nation that were hearing about this case because of the news media putting it out nationwide.

I was getting phone calls at my sheriff's office at work, people asking to talk to me. And then when I get on the phone with them, we're threatening me, blowing up at me, totally upset with me, and even threatening me with harm. It's part of the stress of the job. And it is very stressful when you're threatened. Anybody would be. But it's something I signed up for and something I had to deal with.

My wife, in the meantime, being an RN, was working at the St. Cloud Hospital. Friends of hers and people that know that we were married were people that felt that Byron was in the right. Well, she was getting harassed now. She was getting harassed from the community. The case is pending. The community even starts what's called the Byron Smith Coalition.

And what that was, was this was a group of people in Little Falls that would meet at the local VFW in town. And they were trying to collect as much money as they could for Mr. Smith's defense. So when their meetings would get done at the VFW, someone gave out our address to these people. Well, a lot of times we'd get a parade of cars past our house, driving slowly by and around our residences just to harass us.

Well, now, for me, I can deal with stuff like that. But my wife, she didn't sign up for this. She wasn't used to this. And it was totally freaking her out. She was very upset about the whole thing.

The stress of this investigation and the surrounding controversy put a strain on the Lubberts' marriage to the point that his wife, Chrissy, wanted to move out of town to get away from it. My wife gave me kind of an ultimatum. We either sell the house and move out of town to get away from this harassment, or I end up getting divorced. Well, I didn't want to get divorced. We were married for 10 years, and I had a beautiful nine-year-old daughter at the time. I didn't want to break up my family, and I loved my wife.

So I decided to put my house up for sale. The family moved three miles out of town. This was around April of 2014. In the meantime, a grand jury had indicted Smith for two counts of first-degree murder. Smith's trial was set to begin just as Luberts was moving out and starting a new life. During the trial, various recordings were played for the jury.

There was the surveillance footage from outside the house, the tapes of Smith confessing to Lubberts after the fact, and of course, the smoking gun, which was the audio recording of the actual shootings. I had to go and... I had to go to Lubberts.

Thank you.

The jury didn't take long to deliberate. On April 29th, 2014, after just over three hours, Smith was found guilty on both counts of first-degree murder. He was later sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. And Deputy Lubberts was relieved to have seen the case through to its conclusion. So I went, when the case was over, I went back home and I told my wife what had happened, the ultimate, the ultimate decision.

And it was at first, it was a relief for me. It's like, cause it was such a stressful case to have to deal with. And I had everybody in my community, everybody in the nation's eyes were on my department to make sure that everything was done right. And it's like the weight of the world was on my shoulders. And it finally got relieved after I heard when I was sitting in the courtroom and I heard the jury convict problem was, um,

the harassment never stopped. You would think it would after the final conviction of the case, but the harassment never did stop. It continued because the Byron Smith Coalition group continued on trying to raise money for his appeal.

Smith's legal team appealed his case all the way up to the Supreme Court, but his life sentence was ultimately affirmed. But still, this case kept a grip on Lubert's life, because even after the verdict was handed down, Lubert's continued to receive threatening phone calls from Smith's supporters. The harassment continued three months later after the conviction of Byron Smith. My wife came and told me that I can't take this anymore.

And he goes, I didn't sign up for this. I had no idea that being married to an investigator was going to be like this. She goes, I want a divorce. And I ended up getting divorced. So in the end, 17-year-old Nicholas Brady, 18-year-old Haley Kiefer lost their lives. Byron Smith lost his freedom, and I lost my family. That was the ultimate outcome to this case.

Thank you for tuning in to Vigilante. Among the many sources we use for our research, we found Murder on Elm Street by Jeremy Luberts extremely helpful. This episode was written by Nani Okwulagu and executive produced by Connor Powell. We'll be back in a few weeks with new stories about people taking justice into their own hands. Until next time.