On June 21, 2013, Rayne Perrywinkle was shopping at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida with her three young daughters. She could not afford to buy clothes for her children when a man came up to her with what looked like a kind offer. The stranger, who was later named as Donald James Smith, told her he had a $150 Walmart gift card and said he would help buy clothes for the family.
Rayne said yes to the offer and got into Smith’s white van with her daughters, including 8-year-old Cherish Perrywinkle. They got to a Walmart on Lem Turner Road around 8:00 p.m. and spent the next two hours shopping. According to what she said in court, Rayne felt safe with Smith at first. “He looked into my face and told me I was safe,” she told the court during the trial.
According to WikiPedia, around 10:30 p.m., Smith said he would buy the family cheeseburgers at the McDonald’s inside the store. He asked if Cherish could go with him. Rayne said yes, not knowing that would be the last time she would see her daughter alive. But security cameras showed Smith and Cherish walking out of the store instead of going to the restaurant. About 30 minutes later, Rayne knew something was wrong and called police to report her daughter missing.
What happened next shocked everyone
The next morning, Cherish’s body was found in a creek behind Highlands Baptist Church. The medical examiner said that she had been sexually attacked and strangled to death. Police quickly found Smith as the suspect and saw his van on Interstate 95 around 9:00 a.m. Officers arrested him after a short chase. Smith was soaking wet from the waist down when they took him in.
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— X Case Files (@XCaseFiles) August 6, 2025:
In this unsettling CCTV footage from a Jacksonville, Florida, Walmart, Donald James Smith is seen leading Cherish Perrywinkle away from her mother and siblings with an offer of a cheeseburger from the store’s McDonald’s. How did he gain a family’s trust in mere… pic.twitter.com/0KYAfLMnqU
Smith was a registered sex offender with a long criminal history of crimes against children. Police found out he had been let out of jail just three weeks before Cherish’s murder. His DNA was found on and inside the victim’s body, and many witnesses said they saw his van near where Cherish’s body was found. The shocking true crime case soon became one of Jacksonville’s biggest murder trials.
Donald James Smith was sentenced to death in May 2018 for the 2013 kidnapping, r*pe, and murder of 8-year-old Cherish Perrywinkle in Jacksonville, Florida. A registered s*x offender, Smith lured Cherish from a Walmart, s*xually assaulted her, and strangled her, with her body… pic.twitter.com/POYsRlbK7Z
— MorbidTruth (@MorbidTruth_) August 31, 2025
In February 2018, Smith’s trial started in Jacksonville. The jury heard emotional words from Rayne Perrywinkle and saw upsetting crime scene photos that made many jurors cry. The jury talked for only 19 minutes before finding Smith guilty of first-degree murder, kidnapping, and sexual battery. In May 2018, he was given the death sentence.The Florida Supreme Court kept Smith’s conviction and death sentence in April 2021. The U.S. Supreme Court later said no to hearing his appeal in January 2022. Smith is still on death row at Union Correctional Institution while his lawyers keep trying to fight his conviction through more appeals. The murderer keeps trying to use legal ways to challenge it, but the strong evidence against him has kept his conviction standing.
