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Hi, Opportunist fans. I'm Sarah James McLaughlin. You don't know me, but I am the host of Vigilante, a podcast about regular people who take justice into their own hands, for better or for worse. Opportunist will soon be returning with all new episodes. But before Opportunist returns, we would love for you to check out this episode of Vigilante about Byron Smith, a Minnesota man who set a trap in his own home and killed two teenagers after a string of burglaries. Smith claims self-defense, but
but also recorded himself killing the would-be robbers. So head on over to Vigilante to listen to other new episodes and enjoy this one as we all wait for opportunists to return. This episode includes discussion of murder. Listener discretion is advised. It was the afternoon of November 22nd, 2012, Thanksgiving Day, in Little Falls, Minnesota. It's a small city about 100 miles northwest of Minneapolis. Throughout town, families were gathered celebrating the holidays together.
However, Byron Smith was not with his family. The 64-year-old retired security specialist was sitting alone in his basement in the dark. But soon he was about to play host to some uninvited guests. Smith heard an upstairs window shatter. Someone had broken into his house. But he didn't go up to see who it was or what was happening. He just sat in his armchair and waited, patiently, with a rifle.
For 12 whole minutes, Smith listened to the sounds of footsteps shuffling above him and doorknobs rattling. And then, he heard what he'd been waiting for. The footsteps coming down the stairs. Through the darkness, Smith saw someone making their way down into his basement. He waited until he saw their hips. He aimed and fired twice. His target, a 17-year-old named Nicholas Brady, crumpled and fell down the stairs. Smith moved closer and fired another shot.
And then he whispered, "You're dead." Smith wrapped Brady's body in a tarp and dragged him into another room, then returned to the basement, reloaded his rifle, and resumed his position, waiting for the next one. This is "Vigilante," an original podcast from Podcast One. You're listening to a story told in one episode called "Byron David Smith: The Deer Hunter." I'm Sarah James McLaughlin.
In this episode, we'll hear about the double vigilante murders of Byron Smith and how the case collided with the personal life of the lead investigator, Deputy Jeremy Lubberts. For this episode, we'll feature an interview with a man who knows the case and the town of Little Falls, Minnesota, inside and out. He's the author of the book, Murder on Elm Street, Sergeant Investigator Jeremy Lubberts. Um, well, I, uh...
I worked for 28 years for the Morrison County Sheriff's Office. When I retired two years ago, I was the lead investigator, the sergeant investigator for my department. So Little Falls, Minnesota, we're located right in the center of Minnesota between Brainerd and St. Cloud are the two biggest cities. Little Falls is also the childhood home of Charles Lindbergh.
We are a population of approximately 8,300 people, a smaller community. For the most part, it's a pretty quiet middle America area, but we still deal with major crimes. Unfortunately, we get our share of murder investigations, burglaries, sexual assaults, and just about every other major crime. And on Thanksgiving Day in 2012,
That list of crimes grew to include double homicide, but no one, including Lubberts, knew anything was off until the next day. While at home spending some downtime with his wife, Chrissy, and daughter, Haley, he received a strange call. My wife is an RN, a registered nurse, and she had the day off also. And we were both looking forward to three days off together because working with and for the public can be very demanding. We just needed a break.
So we were sitting at home watching a movie. I had my daughter Haley with me and my phone rings, my cell phone rings. And I look and here it's one of the it's Deputy David Sherping calling me. Now, right away, my wife gives me this dirty look because these interruptions to our family time is happening constantly.
Lubitz was technically off the clock, but when the call came in, he had to answer. Deputy Sherping explained that he'd gotten a strange call from one of Byron Smith's neighbors. Smith had been calling around looking for a lawyer. There seemed to have been some kind of break-in at his home and something had gone sideways.
Sounds like he might be exaggerating things, but I got a gut feeling that, you know, there might be something to this case because, you know, it's just, I don't know, I just had this weird feeling that something, there might be something more to this. Lubitz immediately knew that it was his duty to go over to Byron Smith's place and figure out what happened.
And he also knew his wife wasn't going to like it. Of course, I tell my wife, Chrissy, and she's furious. It's like, you've got to be kidding me. Now, you know, I'm supposed to enjoy a day off together. We had plans. And now I got to leave. Liebert suited up in his sheriff's deputy uniform and headed into the station. And there he met up with deputies David Sherping and Rick Madison before heading over to investigate. They arrived to a strange scene.
Start walking up to the main entry door. And as I'm walking towards the main entry door, Byron comes out of his house with his hand raised above his head. And at least I assumed it was Byron because I never met him before. I never met Mr. Smith before. So as I'm walking up there, I ask him, I try to play this out as calm and collective as I can because I need to get information from this guy. Why? Because it's not common that somebody walks out of their house with their hand raised above their head. That's a red flag for me.
Lubberts had his guard up, but Smith seemed pretty calm as he invited the deputies in and explained that someone had broken into his home the previous day. And he said, he goes, I reported a burglary to your brother, Jamie, about a month ago back in October. This is a good place to mention that Deputy Lubberts also has a twin brother, Jamie Lubberts, who also is on the force.
And he goes, I had a bunch of items stolen from that. So I asked him, I said, was anything stolen during this burglary? And he said, no. And I said, OK. And so at this point, the way he's describing things, he's he's pretty calm about what he's telling me. And it just seems like this is going to end up being another burglary report.
made me feel uh definitely a little uh better a little calmer it's like good you know this is looking like I can uh wrap this up within a fairly reasonable amount of time and get back home to my family so as I'm talking with Byron that he tells me yeah and there's something I need to show you in the basement as we're walking down the stairs what I see is and he has the walls are white painted white and I see a red spec a red spot on the wall
And then to me, I kind of take a closer look as I'm walking down the stairs and it looks like a speck of blood. Ooh, red flag there. It's like, what the heck? Well, as we're continuing to walk down the stairs, there's a rug at the bottom of the steps. And I see what looks like another spot of blood soaked into the carpet. I'm like, oh no, this is not looking good. So we get to the bottom of the steps and we're standing at the bottom of the steps on this rug.
And Byron tells me that, yeah, he starts telling me about the October burglary that happened. And one thing I'm noticing as I'm talking with him is there's a set of tennis shoes under his reading chair that he told me he was sitting in when the burglary happened. And the tennis shoes are a Nike type of skater, you know, skateboard type shoe.
not something common that an older person would wear. So kind of a mental note on that. I'm like, that was kind of weird. Well, and the reading chair that he told me he was sitting in was not a spot where typically somebody would sit and read. It was positioned between a couple of bookshelves. So the only view anybody would have of Byron is directly coming down the stairs.
So it was just, it was an odd placement. Another thing I noticed too is he had bottles of water and energy bars sitting on the floor next to the chair. That indicated to me that he was in it for the long haul. He was planning on sitting in that chair for quite a while. And I also noticed the light bulbs in the ceiling down there had been removed.
It's just odd. Why would somebody remove the light bulbs from above where he was sitting? Unless you didn't want to be seen, especially at nighttime. If somebody would come down the stairs and turn the light switch on, you're not going to see somebody because there's no bulbs in there to light somebody up. So as I'm asking Byron to tell me what had happened, he then tells me that while I was sitting in my reading chair yesterday,
I heard the window break upstairs. And then just prior to that, I heard somebody walking outside along the deck. And I heard the footsteps going around the house. I heard somebody trying the doorknobs. And he's telling me, and I'm getting seriously stressed out. He hears the footsteps come to the top of the steps. And then he hears somebody walking down his steps, down towards where he was sitting in his reading chair.
And as he goes, as the footsteps are coming down the stairs, when I saw the hip area of the person I shot and I'm like, whoa, now I'm just baffled. I'm like, what? Because he made no indication or alluded to anything that he had shot somebody. He goes, I fired. And and he fell to the bottom of the stairs and he's wounded. And he tells me, I want him dead. He goes, I took my rifle and I shot.
shot him until he was dead. I'm like, wow. Well, that's kind of explaining the blood that I saw on the rug at the bottom of the stairs now. I said, what happened after that? He goes, I took his body because he goes, I didn't want all this blood soaking into my carpet down here. So I had a tarp nearby. So I wrapped his body in a tarp and I drug him off to my back office work area.
"Whoa, what the heck? What a story." I'm like, "Holy crap." And then I said, "What happened after that?" He goes, "Well then," he goes, "the blood was just pounding in my ears." So I went back and I sat down in my reading chair, trying to calm down. He goes, "And as I'm sitting there, approximately 11 minutes passed, and I heard more footsteps upstairs."
These were the footsteps of Nicholas Brady's cousin, 18-year-old Haley Kiefer. She entered Smith's house, calling out her cousin's name. But there was no answer. And he tells me, they're ganging up on me. He goes, I hear the footsteps coming down the hallway. When it got to the top of the stairs, the person paused and then started walking down the stairs again. And again, when I saw the hip area, I fired.
He goes, and she fell to the bottom of the stairs and she's laying there wounded. And I asked him, I said, did you by chance notice that either one of these kids, either one of these people have any weapons on them? No, I didn't see that. I didn't see any weapons. It didn't really matter to Smith that the two teenagers were unarmed. All that mattered was that they were breaking into his house, that they were trying to steal from him and he wasn't going to let it happen.
I said, okay. Then he tells me, she's looking up at me. She's looking at me and she started to laugh. I said, oh. He goes, I wanted her dead. He goes, I took my rifle, I pointed it at her and I pulled the trigger, but the gun jammed. There was a click and she started laughing at me. And he goes, I took my pistol that I had on my waist from the holster. I pointed it at her chest and I fired and I fired and I fired until she was dead.
And then I said, "What happened after that?" He goes, "I took her body and I drug her back by the bail party and I laid her body next to him." And mind you, it's over 24 hours now since this shooting had happened. And we received no report from him or anybody else on it until now. So I'm walking into this whole investigation just blindsided by all this. I said, "Well, you mentioned there were the two bodies." I said, "Can you show me where the bodies are?"
So right at the bottom of the steps, there's a doorway to our right. And he goes, they're through here. So I reach for the doorknob and he tells me the bodies are behind this door. My hands are shaking. I'm nervous. I'm like, what the heck am I going to find behind here? I open the door and my fears are confirmed. What I see is a young female walking.
laying on the floor next to a young male party. The female in particular, who was later identified to be Haley Kiefer, was wearing a sweatshirt, had the hood up over her head and drawn tight to her head so that all I could see was her face. Her face looked like it was frozen in time. It looked like she had extreme pain at the time of her death that remained frozen on her face.
And that was a mental note of mine that something I saw that I will never forget. And what I could see were multiple bullet holes in her body, obviously from when Byron told me that he had shot her. And then the boy was actually the only thing, he was still under the tarp.
And the only thing I could see from him was his shoes and his jeans that he was wearing, just his legs. So I grabbed the tarp and I pulled it back to take a look at the boy. And what I saw was very disturbing. He was shot in the head. His head had been damaged severely by, it looked like a rifle shot that he had taken.
So I could see his brains and pieces of skull and everything. It was a terrible sight to see. After discovering this and after what Byron had told me, I asked him to accompany me back away from that room, back towards the bottom of the steps. And then I told Byron, because of everything that you told me, because of everything that had happened, I said, Byron, I have no choice but to place you under arrest at this time.
Coming up, Deputy Lubberts interrogates Byron Smith and learns more disturbing details about this double homicide. On Black Friday of 2012, Deputy Jeremy Lubberts responded to a call that something strange had happened at the residence of Byron David Smith.
After he arrived on scene, he was shocked to discover that Smith had shot and killed two teenagers who had broken into his house. After discovering the bodies of 17-year-old Nicholas Brady and his cousin, 18-year-old Haley Kiefer, Lubitz placed Smith under arrest and brought him in for questioning. Lubitz had already heard the story from Smith, but he wanted to get everything on tape so it could be used as evidence on the trial that was sure to come.
Lubbers began the interrogation with the basics, the context leading up to the fatal incident.
