THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, December 19, 1995 TAG: 9512190258
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LAURA LAFAY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 77 lines
Thomas Smolka, a former Virginia Beach lawyer and developer convicted in 1993 of murdering his wife for insurance money, is scheduled to be freed from a Florida prison on Wednesday.
Smolka's release has been ordered by Florida's 5th District Court of Appeals. The same court ruled in August that Smolka was wrongfully convicted because the state did not present sufficient evidence of his guilt at his trial.
Betty Anne Smolka disappeared from the Ocala Radisson Inn on July 10, 1991, after her husband sent her to a pharmacy to buy lightbulbs. Police found her blood-splattered van the next day. Roller skaters discovered her body July 13. She had been shot twice in the chest.
Smolka, who was part-owner of the Ocala Radisson, was arrested four months later. He has been behind bars ever since. He was transferred from the Marion County Jail in Ocala to Florida's maximum-security prison in Starke after an Ocala jury found him guilty of murder in March 1993.
Barring intervention from the Florida Supreme Court, prison officials on Tuesday will drive Smolka back to the Marion County jail, where he will spend his last night in custody. Ocala Circuit Judge Jack Singbush - the same judge who presided over Smolka's conviction - is scheduled to release him formally after a 2 p.m. hearing Wednesday.
``I am happy and relieved for Tom that his long nightmare in the judicial system is finally coming to an end,'' Miguel de la O, one of Smolka's lawyers, said Monday.
``It has been especially difficult for him since to remain in prison since the court ruled in August that there wasn't enough evidence to prove he killed his wife.''
Betty Anne Smolka's father, Willis Stephenson, is not happy about the expected release of his former son-in-law.
``It doesn't make him any less guilty,'' Stephenson said Monday.
The case against Smolka was circumstantial.
No direct physical evidence was ever found to link him to the murder. Instead, the prosecution focused on his desperate financial situation and on the fact that he had insured his wife's life for $500,000.
Two months before the murder, the prosecutor told the jury, Smolka had spent all of the $2.3 million he had borrowed against a piece of bayfront property in Virginia Beach in 1988. He had used all of the equity in each of three pieces of land he owned. And he had gone through his last windfall: $126,000 in insurance money he got when his beach house burned down in 1990.
Smolka needed $28,000 every month to keep up with his mortgage and loan payments. By May of 1991, he was making those payments with credit cards. The Radisson was his last hope of any income, and an Indianapolis bank was threatening to foreclose on it.
Against this background, Smolka took out a second $250,000 insurance policy on his wife's life. He arranged for the money to go into a trust that would help the Radisson and protect it from creditors. Smolka would control the trust.
Betty Anne Smolka's new insurance policy was delivered to her husband on July 2, 1991. On July 3, Smolka made arrangements for her to fly to Florida from Norfolk. On July 8, he picked her up at a Florida airport. Days later, she was dead. ILLUSTRATION: File photos
THOMAS SMOLKA
The state did not have enough evidence to convict him of his wife's
death, a Florida appeals court said. Smolka has been behind bars
since November 1991.
BETTY ANNE SMOLKA
She disappeared in Ocala, Fla., on July 10, 1991, after going to a
drugstore. Her body was found three days later.
KEYWORDS: MURDER PRISON RELEASE by CNB