Neighbors' respect for Topekan endures
By LEE HILL KAVANAUGH and LYNN FRANEY The Kansas City Star
³She trapped herself in something way bigger than herself.²
People across Topeka thought they knew Juanita L. Smith.
And they loved her.
Now they've found out they didn't really know Juanita L. Smith.
Yet they love her still.
The Juanita Smith they knew was a sweet elderly neighbor puttering among pink and purple petunias outside a white, sky-blue-shuttered cottage where she lived with a daughter, Shannon, and a black dog named Pookie.
A hip, soft-spoken 83-year-old who gave frank talks about sex to 11,000 children a year to prevent teen pregnancy.
And a former Navy nurse who moved audiences to tears with speeches about surviving the Bataan Death March in the Philippines as a Japanese prisoner of war during World War II.
But there was a lot people didn't know.
For the past few months, while Smith was telling people Shannon had moved out of town, the 39-year-old woman actually lay dead in a bedroom of Smith's house.
And Topeka Police Maj. John Sidwell said police aren't even sure Shannon Smith was Juanita Smith's daughter.
³Just about everything she's told us is not true,² he said.
And the Bataan Death March speeches?
Smith now says she made them all up.
The magnitude of her fabrications became public recently after the Topeka Capital-Journal published a profile of Smith. An editor resigned, and Smith apparently tried to commit suicide.
When police found her in a confused state in her home June 28, they also found Shannon Smith's body. They said she had probably been dead since March, although they won't know for a while yet what caused her to die.
But rather than being angry at being deceived or misled, neighbors and community members of the modest, self-effacing Smith, who once was named Kansas' Older Worker of the Year, say they feel one overwhelming emotion: compassion.
³I love her and I'm very sorry this has happened to her. I forgive her,² said Ann Fincham, a seventh- and eighth-grade science teacher at Robinson Middle School. Smith has visited Fincham's classes for 10 years, speaking about sex and the YWCA's abstinence-based program.
Former U.S. Rep. Bill Roy remembers her Bataan survivor speech before at least 125 people at a Topeka Rotary Club meeting last year as one of the best he'd ever heard.
Thousands of American and Filipino troops were taken prisoner by the Japanese in April 1942, and then marched up the Bataan peninsula. Survivors have told of beheadings and grisly bayonetings along the way, and the horror of making it through nearly a week of walking with little food and water.
Smith's talk was full of amazing detail.
She talked about living in a barracks of men, yet telling them her body was her own. She said her comrades later attended her wedding in California, and said they were happy to finally be able to kiss her after waiting such a long time to do so.
She said Japanese troops gave each prisoner of war just one large cup of water to last for a march of 60 miles.
³The story touched us all, especially those of us who remember World War II,² Roy said. He was so moved by her speech that he wrote a newspaper column about her.
³I feel very, very sorry for her. It's a tragic story,² Roy said. He said he conjectures that she may have started living that story in her mind, which made it real to her. ³It's just a sad, sad story. And an unusual one.²
Roy's newspaper column is how Paul Longhoffer, vice president for the Wichita Downtown Rotary Club, heard about her. He then invited Smith to talk to his group of about 300 Rotarians.
He was impressed by the details, too, saying she talked about telling the soldiers to gather grass along the way for its moisture.
³Give her her due,² Longhoffer said. ³She was a heck of a communicator. She knocks your socks off.²
She was bubbly, funny and charming, he said.
Longhoffer said he ³doesn't want to heap coals upon her head. She's got enough problems in her life. I didn't find her to be a vicious, negative person. I feel very sorry for her.²
Smith came to her teenage-pregnancy prevention work at the YWCA in Topeka after a career as a nursing professor.
In the mid-1970s she worked in Spokane, Wash., as a nursing professor at the Intercollegiate Center for Nursing Education. Thelma Cleveland was the acting dean.
Cleveland, now a professor emeritus at Washington State University, remembers Smith as a very popular teacher. Her students chose her as the most outstanding instructor several times, Cleveland said in a phone interview from her Washington home.
Smith was warm, outgoing, and extremely devoted to her fair, blondedaughter Shannon, who was in elementary school at the time, Cleveland said. She also said Shannon received a bone marrow transplant while the Smiths lived in Washington. She didn't remember Smith having any other children.
A city directory cited a Lowell H. Smith and a Juanita L. Smith as living in Spokane during the mid-1980s.
In the late 1980s, Juanita and Shannon Smith moved to Roanoke, Va. Smith worked as a nursing professor from 1988 to 1990 at the Jefferson College of Health Sciences, said college spokeswoman Diane Hailey.
James Barnes of Vinton, Va., said in a telephone interview from his home that he remembered renting a Roanoke apartment to Juanita and Shannon Smith. They were nice people and excellent renters because they were quiet and neat and paid on time, he said. Barnes was sad to see them move just a few months later.
Juanita Smith told him they had to leave because she had been downsized from the university, he said, and she apologized for breaking the lease.
In 1991, Smith moved to Topeka. While interviewing for the YWCA job, she told the Bataan Death March story. During three years as a prisoner of war, she would say, she repeatedly rebuffed propositions from Marines and returned home a virgin. If she could do it, she said, so could the teens.
That was the first time she told the story, she would later tell the Capital-Journal.
For now, Smith is being cared for at a Topeka hospital as authorities try to untangle her story.
At the end of last week, cars were still cruising down quiet Hillside Avenue, their occupants staring at the well-tended cottage where the gruesome discovery was made.
But her neighbors don't see Smith the same way strangers do.
Her grass will continue to be cut, her flowers watered. One neighbor is trying to take care of Pookie until Smith comes home.
Julie Reimer, who has known Smith for six years, wants her friend to know that she's forgiven her. Reimer said there were times she thought something was strange, such as the fact that although Smith talked about two older sons, there were no photos of them in her home.
³She wanted a powerful story about resisting men's advances and she found one,² said Reimer. ³She trapped herself in something way bigger than herself. She's welcomed back in the neighborhood, and I don't want her to ever doubt that.
³Just come back. I really, really want people to know the kind of person she is instead of thinking she's some creepy well, whatever people (think) from hearing this.
³Despite all of her lies, she's done a lot of good.²
©Kansas City Star"