Lisa Ozbun was leaving work in October 1976 when an old brown sedan pulled up and blocked her path. A stranger leaped out, brandishing a knife.
“Don’t you try and scream,” the man snarled as he wrapped tape around her wrists, shoved her into the passenger seat, and drove off. “I’m going to take your damn money, and I’m going to stick a knife in you.”
The 33-year-old San Diego seamstress and mother-of-three resisted fiercely. She kicked the windshield until it shattered, lunged at the driver with her body, even tried to open the door of the moving car with one foot.
“It was like something on ‘Bionic Woman’,” she later told reporters.
Finally, Ozbun freed her hands and grabbed the steering wheel. The driver turned and plunged a knife deep into her belly, leaving its tip half an inch from her heart, before swerving and stopping on the side of the road.
Ozbun tumbled out in front of a crowd of witnesses, the knife still embedded in her gut, as the driver sped away.
She had no idea she had nearly been slain by a celebrity.
The man was Edgar Smith, then 42, an ex-convict who had spent much of the 1960s as America’s most famous resident of Death Row. Sentenced in 1957 for the murder of a New Jersey teenager, Smith’s literary talent had won him influential allies, including conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr.
With Buckley’s help, Smith proclaimed his innocence in a well-received memoir, “Brief Against Death,” and filed a string of legal appeals that won his release in 1971.
“Many public intellectuals at the time were getting involved with prisoners and with the cause of criminal justice,” crime writer Sarah Weinman told The Post. “Not only Buckley, but Norman Mailer and others were getting prison writings published.
“In this case, it went terribly wrong.”
In “Scoundrel” (Ecco), out Tuesday, Weinman explores how the sociopathic Smith manipulated and abused both the women he harmed and the naive do-gooders, like Buckley, who became his dupes.
Smith was 23 when 15-year-old Vickie Zielinski, a sophomore at Ramsey High School, was murdered. Married, with an infant daughter, Smith combed his hair like James Dean and ran around Bergen County like a bachelor. He had failed at a succession of low-level jobs and had a knack for sponging off pliant friends.
Vickie was a vivacious girl who knew Smith slightly. She spent the evening of March 4, 1957, doing homework at a friend’s house, leaving at 8:30 pm for the mile-long walk home.
She never made it. Police found Vickie’s body the next morning in a sandy, shallow quarry just two miles from her house.
The scene was gruesome. Chunks of the girl’s brain were splattered on the ground near her crushed skull. Two large rocks, one weighing 25 pounds, had clearly done the damage: both were drenched in blood. Several of Vickie’s teeth were broken, and her nose and jaw were shattered, the work of another, more slender weapon. Her torso was exposed, revealing a bite mark on one breast.
Police arrested Smith hours later. He had borrowed a friend’s car on the night of Vickie’s death — and returned it with stained upholstery. When the friend found strange marks on the baseball bat he kept in the car’s back seat, he called the cops.
The evidence against Smith was circumstantial, given the limits of forensic science at the time, but considerable. The pants he had worn that night were dotted with Type O blood — Vickie’s blood type, not Smith’s. More blood was found on Smith’s T-shirt.
Smith admitted to picking Vickie up on the night of her death as she walked home along Wyckoff Avenue, and even confessed to striking her. But he claimed not to remember what happened next.
It took the jury less than two hours to return a guilty verdict. On June 4, Smith was sentenced to death.
At Trenton State Prison, Smith began a campaign of judicial appeals that successfully staved off his execution.
“At the time, public opinion was moving away from capital punishment,” Weinman said. “The Supreme Court was in the process of issuing a number of decisions regarding police interrogations, such as requiring Miranda warnings. All of that was happening while Edgar was on death row.”
In 1962, a profile of Smith in a small New Jersey newspaper noted that the inmate was a fan of National Review (NR), Buckley’s weekly journal of conservative opinion. A staffer at the magazine sent the clipping to his boss. Buckley quickly wrote to Smith to offer a lifetime subscription.
“We were taken in, I suspect, in part by our unwillingness to believe that anyone who loved NR could be a savage killer,” Donald Coxe, a former NR staffer, told Weinman.
Over the next nine years, Buckley and Smith exchanged hundreds of letters that the prisoner embellished with literary flair. Buckley took Smith’s side in a sympathetic 1965 Esquire magazine exposé that brought national attention to his case. He raised money for Smith’s defense — and paid many of the legal bills out of his own pocket.
Smith, Buckley said, was blessed with “enormous gifts, great literary powers, and a great sense of human understanding.”
Buckley also hooked Smith up with Sophie Wilkins, an editor at Knopf who began her own correspondence with the prisoner. Wilkins saw raw talent in Smith’s writings and labored over his manuscript for years until it was published in 1968.
“This is not a murder story,” she wrote him in 1967, “but rather a demonstration of the incredible shoddiness, viciousness, brutality, savagery, stupidity of the machinery of so-called justice.”
By that time, she was sure Smith was innocent of Vickie’s murder – because he had manipulated her, too. To Buckley, Smith was an eager student of conservative thought; to Wilkins, 20 years his senior, he professed love. They traded reams of sexually explicit letters, sent through his lawyers to evade prison censors, that transformed her into his loyal champion. Although she visited him frequently in prison, they never consummated their affair.
After Smith took the 1971 plea deal that freed him from jail following 14 years on death row, he enjoyed two years of celebrity as the go-to expert on criminal-justice issues for everyone from Merv Griffin to Studs Terkel.
Casting Wilkins aside, he wrote two more books for another publisher: a second memoir, “Getting Out,” about his release from jail, and a novel, “A Reasonable Doubt” – a thinly disguised fictional rehash of Vickie’s murder.
But when the spotlight faded, Smith’s savagery returned. It culminated in his 1976 assault on Ozbun, which she miraculously survived.
After the attack, Smith fled on a 12-day cross-country journey to evade arrest. Holed up in a Las Vegas hotel, he phoned his old friend Buckley for help. Instead of wiring cash, Buckley called the FBI. Agents nabbed Smith within the hour.
“We were taken in, I suspect, in part by our unwillingness to believe that anyone who loved NR could be a savage killer.”
Donald Coxe, a former staffer at Buckley’s National Review.
Smith was convicted of attempted murder, kidnapping, attempted robbery and assault in San Diego County Court and sentenced to life in prison without parole. He was still behind bars when he died in 2017 at age 83. The daughter who had been an infant when Smith first went to jail told the state to cremate him and keep his ashes.
Buckley, who died in 2008, never spoke to Smith again. Privately, friends said, he was devastated that Ozbun had been harmed.
“He thought he had made a terrible mistake,” attorney Jack Carley, a friend of Buckley’s who had assisted Smith with legal research, told Weinman. “He was blaming himself for what had happened.”
In public, however, Buckley maintained that the fight to free Smith had been a righteous one.
“I believe now that [Smith] was guilty of the first crime,” Buckley acknowledged in his syndicated column in November 1976. But “this year and every year,” he added, innocent men are unjustly convicted.
“Edgar Smith has done quite enough damage in his lifetime without underwriting the doctrine that the verdict of a court is infallible.”
