Robert Benjamin Smith

You know, as much as some may say I am “obsessed” with true crime and I have to admit that at some level they may be right, I have never been so obsessed that I wanted to know what it was like to commit a crime or be “famous” as some who have committed horrendous crimes have later said. Such is the case of Robert Benjamin Smith.

Robert Smith's father was in the military and the family moved around quite often when he was young. The boy never had a lot of friends in school nor was he very athletic. This is often said of military children due to all of their moves to different places and schools. In 1963 when John F. Kennedy was assassinated the family lived in Baltimore and it was said that Robert begged his father to go to the funeral but it did not happen. It was said that later Robert's obsession with Kennedy manifested into an obsession with Lee Harvey Oswald. In 1965 Robert's father retired from the military and the family settled in Mesa Arizona where he would work on finishing high school.

The Summer of 1966 was an eventful one when it came to spree crimes. Richard Speck would murder eight nursing students in Chicago and after killing his wife and mother, Charles Whitman would climb the University of Texas tower in Austin Texas and open fire, killing eleven more and injuring more than thirty. Robert seemed to be obsessed with these crimes and the murderers. It would be said that these crimes would inspire him into doing what he did that next November.

On Saturday, November 12, 1966, Robert, who was a senior in high school, thought it would be the perfect day to make himself famous. He walked the 1.5 miles from his home to the Rose-Mar College of Beauty armed with a .22 caliber pistol. Robert believed it being a Saturday that there would be a lot of people inside, mainly women, having their hair done to prepare for the night. When he got there there were five women and two small children. Four of the women were beauty students working that morning, Glenda Carter, Mary Olsen, Carol Farmer and Bonita Sue Harris. Twenty-seven year old Joyce Sellers was inside to get her hair done and she had her two children with her, three year old Debbie and three month old, Tamara. When Robert entered the beauty school he fired a “warning shot” when he was seemingly ignored and then he ordered the women into a back room and to lie in a circle. The media would dub this the “Wheel of Death.” He open fire on all of the victims. Bonita Sue Harris would be shot twice, but much like one of Richard Speck's victims, she faked being dead and it served her well as she would be the only survivor of the adults. The only other survivor was three month old Tamara Sellers as her mother had laid atop the bodies of her children in an attempt to shield them from the bullets.

Robert would be considered to be the first “fame-seeking, copycat mass shooter” but he would surely not be the last. When the police arrived he did not even attempt to resist arrest. In fact he was quoted as saying “I wanted to get known, just wanted to get myself a name. I wanted people to know who I was.” He would later say that he was hoping to find forty or more people inside the beauty school.

Robert was first convicted on October 24, 1967 but he would later have his conviction overturned and a new trial was ordered. I found little on this other than information that said some testimony from the trial was considered to be “unreliable.” Robert was sentenced to death but that sentence would also become moot because in 1972 the United States Supreme Court would rule the death penalty unconstitutional. Reports seem do be a bit confusing as to whether Robert took a plea deal rather than face another jury. Regardless he was was given four life sentences for the murders and two, ninety-nine year sentences for the two counts of “assault with murder intent against the survivors of his spree. The Arizona Department of Corrections show his “admission date” as August 2, 1972 and he remains in prison to this day.