COMBES, Texas _ In this little truck-stop town in the Rio Grande Valley, Keith Smith steered his rental car into a gas station to refuel. He and his adult daughter had traveled 1,770 miles away from Maryland _ trying, police say, to outrun murder charges in Baltimore that authorities here had been alerted to shortly before the unsuspecting pair arrived.
Mexico lay just 20 minutes ahead. They were almost there. They just needed some gas.
No one appeared to notice as Smith got out at pump No. 2 to refill the silver Camry with out-of-state plates.
No one but a Texas state trooper who was on the lookout for just such a car.
With the tank filled, Smith began to drive out of the station and toward the border. But, lights flashing, the trooper pulled right up behind the Camry until it stopped. The officer got out, pointed his gun and ordered Smith to step out of his vehicle.
Smith emerged from the driver's side, hands raised. The trooper ordered him to lie face down. Out stepped Valeria Smith, barefoot and wearing a shower cap over bleached blond hair. She, too, lay face down on the lot as a Combes officer arrived to help.
The pair was cuffed and seated in patrol cars as police searched and towed the Camry. A cat with them in the car was taken to a shelter as the two were driven off to the county jail.
The March 3 arrests, captured on surveillance camera, represented a rapid conclusion to a hushed police manhunt. The news shocked Maryland and the nation even more than the tragic tale the father and daughter tearfully told in December about how Smith's wife, Jacquelyn, had been stabbed to death through a car window after giving money to a panhandler.
Baltimore police now say the story was a cover for what they allege is the truth: that Keith, 52, and Valeria Smith, 28, conspired to kill the 54-year-old engineer from Aberdeen. The two have been charged with first-degree murder and will remain in the Texas jail until they are returned to Maryland on March 20.
"It just amazes me," said Patrick Quill, the Combes police chief. "They drove how far from Maryland? It was very, very lucky."
For Jacquelyn Smith and her family, the arrests only compound the ongoing tragedy of the gruesome final moments that police say were orchestrated by the man she had shared her life with for six years. Face down and cuffed on the South Texas pavement, Keith Smith arrived at a destination that once seemed quite likely _ until he met Jacquelyn.
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