… someone got away with murder
My name is Keith Smith. I was abducted, beaten and raped by a stranger. It wasn’t a neighbor, a coach, a relative, a family friend or teacher. It was a recidivist pedophile predator who spent time in prison for previous sex crimes; an animal hunting for victims in the quiet, bucolic, suburban neighborhoods of Lincoln, Rhode Island.
I was able to identify the guy and the car he was driving. Although he was arrested that night and indicted a few months later, he never went to trial. His trial never took place because he was brutally beaten to death in Providence before his court date. 34 years later, no one has ever been charged with the crime.
In the time between the night of my assault and the night he was murdered, I lived in fear. I was afraid he was still around town. Afraid he was looking for me. Afraid he would track me down and kill me. The fear didn’t go away when he was murdered. Although he was no longer a threat, the simple life and innocence of a 14-year-old boy was gone forever. Carefree childhood thoughts replaced with the unrelenting realization that my world wasn’t a safe place. My peace shattered by a horrific criminal act of sexual violence.
Over the past 34 years, I’ve been haunted by horrible, recurring memories of what he did to me. He visits me in my sleep. There have been dreams–nightmares actually–dozens of them, sweat inducing, yelling-in-my-sleep nightmares filled with images and emotions as real as they were when it actually happened. It doesn’t get easier over time. Long dead, he still visits me, silently sneaking up from out of nowhere when I least expect it. From the grave, he sits by my side on the couch every time the evening news reports a child abduction or sex crime. I don’t watch America’s Most Wanted or Law and Order SVU, because the stories are a catalyst, triggering long suppressed emotions, feelings, memories, fear and horror. Real life horror stories rip painful suppressed memories out from where they hide, from that recessed place in my brain that stores dark, dangerous, horrible memories. It happened when William Bonin confessed to abducting, raping and murdering 14 boys in California; when Jesse Timmendequas raped and murdered Megan Kanka in New Jersey; when Ben Ownby, missing for four days, and Shawn Hornbeck, missing for four years, were recovered in Missouri.
Despite what happened that night and the constant reminders that continue to haunt me years later, I wouldn’t change what happened. The animal that attacked me was a serial predator, a violent pedophile trolling my neighborhood in Lincoln, Rhode Island looking for young boys. He beat me, raped me, and I stayed alive. I lived to see him arrested, indicted and murdered. It might not have turned out this way if he had grabbed one of my friends or another kid from my neighborhood. Perhaps he’d still be alive. Perhaps there would be dozens of more victims and perhaps he would have progressed to the point of silencing his victims by murdering them.
Out of fear, shame and guilt, I’ve been silent for over three decades, sharing with very few people the story of what happened to me. No more. The silence has to end. The fear, the shame, the guilt have to go. It’s time to stop keeping this secret from the people closest to me, people I care about, people I love, my long-time friends and my family. It’s time to speak out to raise public awareness of male sexual assault, to let other victims know that they’re not alone and to help victims of rape and violent crime understand that the emotion, fear and memories that may still haunt them are not uncommon to those of us who have shared a similar experience. For those who suffer in silence, I hope my story brings some comfort, strength, peace and hope.
Men in My Town is the story of my abduction, beating and rape and the unsolved brutal murder of the man who attacked me. Read Men in My Town by Keith Smith. Available now at Amazon.com
Email the author at MenInMyTown@aol.com
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A special note of thanks to Violence Unsilenced, the voice of survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault.
Men in My Town profiled in the Fall Issue of Providence College Magazine
Keith Smith’s Men in My Town is profiled in the Fall Issue of Providence College Magazine 
The story of the abduction, beating and rape of a teenage boy from Lincoln, Rhode Island, followed by the unsolved brutal murder of his assailant in Providence, is now a moving novel written by the man who survived this vicious attack.
In Graduates’ Literary Work Hits the Bookshelf we get an inside look at Keith Smith’s recently released bio-novel, Men in My Town. In Men in My Town, Smith tells the shocking but compelling story of the abduction, beating, and rape of a teenage boy, followed by the unsolved murder of his assailant. Making the narrative even more gripping is that the protagonist and victim was Smith himself. “I wrote the story to raise awareness of male sexual assault, to let other victims know that they’re not alone and to help victims of rape and violent crime understand that the emotion, fear and memories that may still haunt them are not uncommon to those of us who have shared a similar experience,” he said. “For those who suffer in silence, I hope my story brings some comfort, strength, peace, and hope.”
Men in My Town by Keith Smith. Available now at Amazon.com in Trade Paperback and Kindle.
Email the author at MenInMyTown@aol.com
A Conversation with Keith Smith, Author of Men in My Town
Q: Keith, I understand you’ve recently finished writing a book. Tell us about it.
A: The book is titled, Men in My Town. It’s a suspense novel based on the true story of the abduction, beating and sexual assault of a 14-year-old boy in Lincoln, Rhode Island in 1974 and the brutal unsolved murder of his attacker in Providence in 1975.
Q: What can you tell us without spoiling the plot for those who haven’t yet read the book?
A: The story focuses on the young boy’s relationship with a few men in his town, men who are close to the boy and his family, men who watch over him, men that protect him after he’s been assaulted. They’re good men with the capacity to do bad things. It’s a story that causes the reader to revisit their position on the question, “Does the end ever justify the means?” and vividly juxtaposes the good and evil that can exist simultaneously in every man.
Q: Why did you write Men in My Town?
A: There are a number of reasons. First, it’s a good story worth telling. It’s a gripping suspense novel with a storyline that includes characters based on real people, real places and real events. It’s a glimpse into the street hustle hiding in the peaceful suburbs of Providence, Rhode Island in the 1970’s, complete with gamblers, bookies, car thieves, petty criminals, organized crime, hard-working honest men and a murderer or two. Secondly, Men In My Town is my personal story. I am the 14-year-old boy in the story and only a few people, very few people, know what really happened to me on that cold winter night in 1974. I wrote Men in My Town to stop keeping this secret from the people closest to me, people I care about, people I love, my long-time friends and my family. And finally, I wrote the story to raise awareness of male sexual assault, to let other victims know that they’re not alone and to help victims of rape and violent crime understand that the emotion, fear and memories that may still haunt them are not uncommon to those of us who have shared a similar experience.
Q: Why did you wait 35 years to tell this story?
A: I’ve been silent because of shame and guilt. I was ashamed that a man sexually assaulted me. My guilt was based on wanting to protect my protectors, to eliminate the possibility that someday, someone would get arrested and perhaps go to jail for killing the guy for what he did to me. I’ve been fighting these thoughts, these feelings, these emotions, for decades and I’m finally able to properly deal with these things. I now realize that I shouldn’t feel ashamed or guilty because I’m not responsible for what my attacker did to me… and I’m not responsible for what others may have done to him.
Q: What makes Men in My Town unique?
A: It’s unique because it’s the only fact-based suspense novel that I’m aware of that deals with the subject of male sexual assault and the unsolved murder of the pedophile rapist. It’s unique because there aren’t many novels set in Rhode Island and this is the first novel ever set in the Town of Lincoln. Men in My Town is unique in that it helps people understand that violent crimes against children can occur anywhere, even in bucolic, beautiful, sleepy little suburban towns like Lincoln, Rhode Island.
Q: Are there other works, either books or movies, that you think are similar to Men in My Town?
A: Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River comes to mind. Mystic River opens with the abduction and sexual assault of a young boy from a tight knit, working class suburb of Boston. It deals with pedophilia, murder, secrets, average guys, cops and criminals. Michael Corrente’s movie Federal Hill, set in Providence, deals with relationships between close friends, organized crime and what I refer to as ‘street hustle.’ If you’re familiar with either Mystic River or Federal Hill, you may see similar themes in Men in My Town.
Q: How long did it take you to write this book?
A: The story has been with me since 1974 so I can actually say it took me 35 years to write this book. The actual writing, putting pen to paper, hammering out the story, revising drafts, took about 6 months; working with editors, literary agents and publishers took the project out to a full year.
Q: How did you write Men in My Town? What was your process?
A: I wrote this story inside out. I didn’t start by writing chapter one, page one. Instead, I listed the events that I wanted to write about, the places I wanted readers to visit, the characters I wanted readers to meet and the emotion I wanted readers to feel. I wrote sections one at a time capturing the events, places, characters and emotion, then pieced them together in a sequence that made the story whole, like a quilt.
Q: I understand you left Rhode Island in 1982. What do you miss about Rhode Island?
A: I grew up in the 60’s and 70’s in the Fairlawn section in the south end of Lincoln, 4 miles north of Providence. Everyone on my block knew my brothers, my sisters, my mom, my dad and me. People went to baseball games at the field in the fall, skated on the pond in the winter and lined up on Smithfield Avenue to watch the Memorial Day parade in the spring. There was a wonderful sense of community, security, peace. People sat on their porches and knew their neighbors. Neighbors watched out for one another, took care of each other. I miss that. I also miss coffee milk, clear chowda, clam cakes, great Italian food on Federal Hill and the beaches from Narragansett to Watch Hill.
Q: Well we’re glad you’re back in Rhode Island, at least for today. Keith, how do we get a copy of Men in My Town?
A: Men in My Town is available now on Amazon.com. You can pick up a copy of Men in My Town at all public libraries in Rhode Island and public libraries in Mercer County, New Jersey. If your local library doesn’t have a copy in their collection, they’ll typically order one after they receive a few requests, so please visit your local library and ask them to stock a copy or two. Signed copies are available. Just email your request to MenInMyTown@aol.com
Q: Thanks for being with us tonight.
A: It was my pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity to talk about Men in My Town.
Men in My Town by Keith Smith.
Available now at Amazon.com
Email the author at MenInMyTown@aol.com
RAINN Speakers Bureau to Participate in Post-Play Discussion at Planet Connections Theatre Festival in NYC
Keith Smith and Janelle Kuroiwa, members of the RAINN Speakers Bureau, will be participating in a post-play discussion of Hound on June 17 at 6 p.m. For information on RAINN please visit the Rape, Abuse, Incest National Network on the web at http://www.rainn.org
Hound, written by John Patrick Bray and directed by Rachel Klein, is on stage at the Planet Connections Theatre Festival, 440 Lafayette Street, NYC June 17th through the 25th. For more information on Hound and the Planet Connections Theatre Festival, please visit http://www.planetconnectionsfestivity.com/
The story of the abduction, beating and rape of a teenage boy, followed by the unsolved brutal murder of his assailant, is now a moving novel written by the man who survived this vicious attack. Men in My Town by Keith Smith. Available now at Amazon.com.
Email the author at MenInMyTown@aol.com
BookReview.com rates Men in My Town, “Very Good.” Cites novel as “Compelling storytelling… a rare, reassuring tale of vigilante justice.”
In 1974, a young man was abducted and raped by a total stranger. Using his wits, the boy is able to make identifying markings on his attacker’s car, and he memorizes the license plate, enabling the police to identify and arrest the man. One year later, the boy’s attacker is found brutally beaten and murdered, yet his murder is never solved. “Men in My Town” is based on the author’s own experiences, and blends together the author’s own account of the events that occurred, and fictional speculation of what may have happened to his attacker.
Compelling storytelling in the opening chapters draw in the reader and keeps the reader interested through the concluding chapters. Author Keith Smith describes the residents of Lincoln and their relationships to each other in elaborate detail to show how this network of men may have banded together to track down the attacker and arrange his murder. The interesting cast includes a bookie, gamblers, lawyers, and a tailor, all who may have played some role in the plan. The author also traces the attacker’s steps both before and after the rape, leading up to his murder, following him even through other attacks on young men. While the story often feels disjointed, one can imagine the difficulty involved in Smith revisiting the attack and trying to get inside the thoughts of his attacker.
“Men in My Town” tells a rare, reassuring tale of vigilante justice. While the authorities failed the author as a young man, pushing back the rapist’s trial gradually for over a year, the men of Lincoln stepped in to provide necessary resolution and relief.
Men in My Town by Keith Smith.
Available now at Amazon.com.
Email the author at MenInMyTown@aol.com
Men in My Town is Now Available in Rhode Island’s Public Libraries
Men in My Town is in inventory at the Lincoln Public Library, 145 Old River Road (next to the High School) and available statewide to over 50 libraries participating in the Ocean State Libraries Book Loan System. Stop by your public library today to check out your copy of Men in My Town.
The story of the abduction, beating and rape of a teenage boy from Lincoln, Rhode Island, followed by the unsolved brutal murder of his assailant in Providence, is now a moving novel written by the man who survived this vicious attack.
Men in My Town by Keith Smith. Available now at Amazon.com
Email the author at MenInMyTown@aol.com
Sex Abuse Victim Finds Solace in Written Word
Monday, May 25, 2009
BY MICHELE ANGERMILLER
EAST WINDSOR — March 1, 1974, was like any other day for Keith Smith.
The then 14-year-old boy attended a hockey team meeting at his coach’s barbershop in Lincoln, R.I., after school. Around 6 p.m., Smith headed home, but made a decision that forever altered his life.
“I decided to hitchhike,” he said. “A car pulled up to me, opened the door, and I got in.” What happened next is every parent’s nightmare — Smith was beaten and raped by a serial pedophile — a 29-year-old man who had been arrested, jailed and released many times before the abduction.
“It is the real story of a 14-year-old kid who was assaulted by a man not familiar to the victim,” said Smith, who now resides in East Windsor with his wife and two daughters. “He was a stranger. I did not know him.”
Smith, who until January was employed as a vice-president at Merrill Lynch, recounts the details of that horrible night in his new novel, “Men in My Town.” It is the story of Smith’s ordeal and the subsequent events that remain a mystery to this day.
According to Smith, his assailant was never convicted of the crime because he was found brutally beaten to death in the streets of Rhode Island one year later. “Men in My Town” is Smith’s catharsis. It is also a fictionalized composite of the characters he grew up with and an imagining of who may have killed the predator.
“The book has a few different angles,” Smith said. “The man who attacked me owned an adult book store, and went to prison for distributing pornography. So maybe the mob killed him. Maybe he had ties to organized crime.”
Another theory in the book is that he was killed for what happened to Smith, although the boy kept the ordeal a secret for 35 years.
Photo by Butch Adams / The Times
Smith retells the events of that night as if it happened yesterday. His voice shakes with the memory as he tells his cautionary tale of what happens when you get into the wrong car, in his case a purple AMC Gremlin.
“I asked him if he could drop me off at a business called ‘Hartley’s Pork Pies,’ and he drove right past it,” he said. “I then told him to pull over at the Fairlawn Lincoln fire station, and he drove right past that. I knew I was in trouble.”
The driver remained silent for an eighth of a mile before he slowed down to make a right hand turn. Smith’s plan was to open the door and roll out of the car, but the man had it rigged so the car door wouldn’t unlock.
“When the door didn’t open, he pounded me on the side of my face with his fist,” he said. “I was trapped in the car.”
Smith then made a conscious effort to memorize the license plate number written on the inspection sticker, which was located on the passenger side of the car windshield. He scratched the inside of the door with his fingernails so investigators would have evidence he was in the vehicle.
“I kept thinking, ‘if I live through the night, I will make him pay,’” he said.
After the attack, Smith was let out of the car. He found a broken cement block on the ground and hurled it at the man’s car as he drove away, smashing the entire rear window.
Smith ran, cowering under parked cars in fear that the stranger would come back to harm him. Eventually, he made it home. His father, Albert, and his brother, Brian, immediately knew something was wrong. After he told them everything, he was brought to the police station.
When the suspect, who Smith calls “Ronald Kohl” — not his real name — in his book, was arrested, the boy was asked to identify the man in a photo lineup. Smith was asked to testify at the indictment that summer, and a trial date was set. “Kohl” was released on bail.
Then nothing happened. A year went by, and no trial. One week before the trial date, in August, 1975, “Kohl” was found beaten to death in the streets of Providence, and left out in the open to rot.
Smith’s book explores the still unsolved crime of the man who assaulted him. The release of the book on March 16 broke the silence he kept for 35 years about what happened that night.
“Why write the book?” he said. “It is based on real characters and real events that happened in my neighborhood. It is also about the men in my town. Some were gamblers; some were car thieves, or organized crime guys. A lot of them were regular hardworking guys.”
“Some people say to me the men in my town were bad men,” he said. “I say they were good men with the capacity to do bad things.”
The seeds of the novel were planted two years ago, when Smith started writing notes to himself as a way of preparing himself to tell his two daughters, aged 15 and 20, what happened. He kept writing, and completed the tome in December, 2008.
“People ask me how long it took to write the book, and I tell them 35 years,” he said.
Smith went to a few agents and publishers, and decided to self-publish with the Amazon.com “BookSurge” program. He says about 400 copies have sold through Amazon.com. The book is available by “print on demand,” which Smith says is a very “green way to publish.” “You order your book, they print up one copy and mail it to the customer,” he said.
Writing the book has been therapeutic for Smith, who now serves as a trustee of a nonprofit organization called PEI – Kids in Lawrence, helping young victims deal with trauma.
Already Smith has received letters from other victims who found his book online.
“I have gotten e-mails from around the world,” he said. “I heard from a woman that lives in an American Indian tribe in Northern Michigan, on the Canadian border. She told me there is an epidemic with boys being assaulted on Indian reservations, and she is using my book to help teenage boys be comfortable with confiding in an adult if it happens to them.”
Does Smith believe his attacker got the proper comeuppance?
“My neighborhood was safer because he was no longer around,” he said. “That animal that grabbed me was trolling my neighborhood looking for kids.”
Smith says now that his secret is published he is sleeping better at night. His nightmares, long triggered by news stories on television, are less frequent.
“What I want other victims to know is that they shouldn’t feel ashamed, guilty, or responsible,” he said. “I wasn’t responsible for what that guy did to me and I wasn’t responsible for what other people did to that guy.”
“Men in My Town,” published by BookSurge, is available for $14.99 on Amazon.com and as an “e-book” download for Kindle. It also can be ordered on Target.com. It is also available in the Mercer County Library System and on the shelves of Chicklet Books, an independent bookstore in Princeton.
Email the author at MenInMyTown@aol.com
Men in My Town is now available in Mercer County Public Libraries
Men in My Town is now available in all nine branches of the Mercer County New Jersey Public Library System.
The story of the abduction, beating, and rape of a teenage boy in Lincoln, Rhode Island, followed by the unsolved brutal murder of his assailant in Providence, is now a moving novel written by the man who survived this vicious attack.
Men in My Town by Keith Smith. Available online at www.amazon.com and on the shelves of Chicklet Books in the Princeton Shopping Center, 301 N. Harrison Street in Princeton, NJ (609) 279-2121.
Email the author at MenInMyTown@aol.com
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