Reliving the pain, over and over
Imagine having a cut. A deep, painful cut in a particularly sensitive location.
Imagine that cut slowly healing, the wound scabbing over and the hurt gradually fading.
Then imagine someone walking up and tearing the scab away, leaving you to relive the pain and healing process all over again.
Now imagine that happening over and over again for the past 28 years.
If you can imagine that, maybe you can understand just a little what life has been like since 1980 for the families victimized by McHenry County serial killer Mark Alan Smith.
Smith, 59, is serving a 500-year prison term in the state's maximum-security Pontiac Correctional Center for the brutal 1970 murders of three Chicago-area women.
While one would think that means they locked him up and threw away the key, the reality is that every three years Smith gets to appear before a state panel seeking parole. And each time he does, it's like tearing open an old wound for his victims' loved ones.
"It's like they have to live through it all again," said Nichole Owens, criminal division chief for the McHenry County state's attorney's office. "It's heart-wrenching."
Owens, along with about 20 friends and family of Smith's victims, appeared before the Illinois Prisoner Review Board last week urging them to deny the former McHenry man's latest bid for an early release.
Among them was Betty Waldron Portenlanger, the sister of Smith's first Illinois victim, Jean Waldron Bianchi.
Bianchi, a 27-year-old mother of two, was kidnapped from a McHenry laundromat on Jan. 27, 1970, sexually assaulted, stabbed at least 17 times then left to drown under a bridge south of the city.
Exactly one month after Bianchi's slaying, Smith murdered Janice Bolyard, 23, in Des Plaines.
On May 27, 1970 - three months to the day after Bolyard's murder - Smith abducted 17-year-old McHenry High School student Jean Ann Lingenfelter, raped her, strangled her and dumped her body in McCollum Lake.
"Why does our system even give someone like this any kind of chance to start over?" her brother, Tom Lingenfelter, asked in a statement to the review board last week.
"As long as Mark Smith still breathes, my family will have to like this over and over," he added. "At the very least anyone can do is at least make his last breath be behind the walls that he is kept in today."
Besides the three Illinois murders, Smith also was convicted of killing a 20-year-old woman in Mountain Home, Ark. In 1969. He also confessed to killing eight young women in Germany while stationed there in the 1960s, though German authorities never prosecuted him for those crimes.
He detailed his killing spree in the book "Legally Sane" co-authored by his defense attorney, Harold McKenney.
Smith will get his turn before the prisoner review board next month when one of its members visits him in Pontiac. The full 15-member board is scheduled to vote on Smith's petition in August.
Although it's hard to imagine someone as vicious as Smith ever being set free, Louis Bianchi - no relation to Smith victim Jean Bianchi - said it is important for his office and the victims' families to make their objections heard every time he seeks parole.
"The crimes he committed were so vicious and the impact they had on the families still is devastating," he said. "These murders really offer a compelling reason to retain the death penalty in the state of Illinois."
Charles Keeshan covers law enforcement issues in McHenry County. To reach him, call (847) 608-2721 or e-mail ckeeshan@dailyherald.com.