Jeffrey K. Smith
Gene Joe Stringer, a vicious sociopath, raped and brutally murdered an eleven-year-old little girl. Shortly afterwards, he was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Sam Mitchell, as a forensic psychiatrist, testified in the trial, refuting the defense attorney’s claim that the man was insane at the time of the murders. Stringer was ultimately executed by lethal injection. Within a week of his execution, key players in Stringer’s trial begin to meet violent deaths. Intrigued by this bizarre turn of events, Sam works in conjunction with state and local law enforcement officials who desperately try to track down the unknown killer, who appears to be seeking revenge for the execution. The story takes a strange twist, when it appears the murderous rampage is the work of someone who is the exact double of the recently executed inmate. As Sam and his colleagues draw nearer to the killer, Sam finds himself a target of the mysterious murderer.
Jeffrey Smith is an author and a physician. He is a native of Enterprise, Alabama, and a graduate of the University of Alabama. A Phantom Killer represents his third published work of fiction, following on the heels of Sudden Despair, and Two Down, Two To Go, all of which tell the story of Sam Mitchell, a semi-retired forensic psychiatrist. Doctor Smith resides in Greenville, South Carolina where he lives with his wife Anne and their two sons Andy and Ben. The author may be contacted by email at
JKSMD1960@aol.com.
By now, Sam was convinced that there was nobody left in the house, unless they were hiding in the closets. A quick check of each room revealed that all of the closets were empty. He walked back out into the den and glanced out the back window at Lake Jewel. To his surprise, there was a small flat-bottomed boat in the middle of the cove, and it was slowly heading back towards the main body of the lake. Although occasional fishermen found their way back into this cove, boat traffic was a rarity, and Sam was intrigued as to whom this might be. Could it be the intruder?
Grabbing his binoculars from the coffee table in the den, Sam unlocked the door to the back porch and walked out onto the screened deck area. He quickly trained the binoculars on the person in the boat. It’s a man, that’s for certain, and he’s using an electric trolling motor, which explains his slow pace. When the man turned slightly to one side, Sam became convinced he saw the notebook that was missing from his study, sitting on the rear bench seat of the shiny aluminum boat, just to the right of the pilot. Just then, the man turned fully around, as if to judge how far he was away from opposite shoreline.
While Sam only caught a brief look at the man’s face, it was enough to chill his blood.
