KIMBERLY SMITH Part 1 of 5: Bad Wrong

0:00You may have heard of the sex cult NXIVM and the famous actress who went to prison for her involvement, Alison Mack. But she's never told her side of the story, until now. People assume that I'm like this pervert. My name is Natalie Robamed, and in my new podcast, I talk to Alison to try to understand how she went from TV actor to cult member, and what she thinks of it all now. How do you feel about having been involved in bringing sexual trauma to other people? I mean, I don't even know how to answer that question. Alison, after NXIVM from CBC's Uncover, is available now, wherever you get your podcasts.

0:33This podcast contains disturbing content. Please take care while listening. Even if you've never been there, you've probably still heard of Daytona Beach, Florida, a popular destination for rowdy spring breakers and diehard NASCAR fans. Not to be confused with South Daytona, a much sleepier, lesser known little beach town just a few miles down the coast. It is just a tucked away little town, and it has a lot of retirees there. There's just not a lot of vandalism. There's not a lot of theft. If you're Nicole Luca, a local reporter, you might even say South Daytona is kind of boring. And it's certainly not known for violent crime.

1:17But the summer of 2010 was different. Nicole was a beat reporter in Volusia County when she heard about an elderly woman named Goldie Mae Robinson who'd just been reported missing. It was like, well, there's an elderly woman missing. This happens a lot in Florida, to be honest, because of all of the elderly we have in Florida, and especially in that Volusia County area. Goldie was 78 years old at the time. In Florida, when an elderly person goes missing, it's called a silver alert. And silver alerts are not uncommon in South Daytona due to the fact that it's an attractive location for retirees.

1:56But it quickly became clear that Goldie Robinson had not accidentally wandered off. She was truly missing. Goldie was in good health. She'd lived in the same mobile home park for 37 years. She owned a single wide trailer with a screened-in porch. She kept a pristine flower garden out front and proudly flew an American flag. She was generous with the grapefruits that grew on a tree outside her home. She was always a lot of fun. She was very personable. She was a very hard worker. And she was a good role model to look up to. She is the type of a person that would just give you the shirt off her back if you needed it.

2:42And then one day in August of 2010, Goldie vanished. And what followed was a police investigation that took so many twists and turns that by the end, the police report was over 1 ,000 pages long. The investigation into Goldie Robinson's disappearance revealed that her life was intricately intertwined with her neighbor, friend, and caretaker, Kimberly Smith, or Kim. Unsurprisingly, Kim was one of the first people approached about Goldie's disappearance. Surely someone as close to Goldie as she was would have some helpful information about where Goldie might have gone. But that wasn't the case. There was so many lies with so many different characters.

3:26I mean, it's hard for us to keep up with it all, all the details at times. There's just so, so many. The search for Goldie Robinson would expand into a much darker and more complicated investigation. This was no ordinary silver alert, and Kim Smith was no ordinary neighbor.

3:52From Cast Media, this is The Opportunist. This is Season 8, Episode 1. Kimberly Smith, Bad Wrong. I'm Hannah Smith.

4:22Goldie Mae Bartram was born on August 23, 1932, in Anstead, West Virginia. She married Fred Wesley Roberts in 1951. And just a year later, they had their first son, Freddie Joe Roberts. This is Freddie, except these days he goes by Fred. She's a good old country girl. She knows how to cook. She knows how to make you feel great. She's just a good old country girl. And that's the best way I can describe her. Fred grew up in Baltimore. In 1966, Goldie and her husband had another son, Brian. As a child, Brian had severe asthma. My mother and my father took a trip to Florida, and he'd done so well in Florida that at that point she decided to move down there for his health.

5:19In 1973, Goldie and seven-year-old Brian moved into Daytona Twin Oaks Mobile Home Park in South Daytona, Florida. By this point, Fred was 21 years old. He decided to stay in Baltimore with his father. Goldie settled into her life in Florida. She and Fred's father stayed married at first, but they eventually divorced. Goldie seemed happy. She loved the beach. She loved Daytona. She loved the weather more than anything, I guess. The weather is what really kept her there. Goldie got involved in a local church and got to know her neighbors. She worked at Denny's for years and then as a ticket taker at the local movie theater.

6:04Her two sisters also moved to South Daytona and into the same mobile home park as Goldie, Twin Oaks. And the years went by. Goldie found love again. In 1983, she married a man named Lester Robinson. This is Stacia, Fred's daughter and Goldie's granddaughter. Stacia grew up in Baltimore, but visited her grandmother Goldie every summer as a kid. The two had a very close relationship. She was a firecracker. She was tons of fun and hilarious. Sometimes I would forget that she was my grandmother almost because she just it just felt so friendly and so natural to have conversations with her about anything that I needed to have conversations with her about.

6:49But she was always tons of fun. She was always up for anything. Let's go to the movies. Let's go shopping. Let's go to the beach. She loved the beach. That was probably one of her favorite places to go. Stacia served in the military, which eventually took her to Alaska. But even then, she and Goldie spoke on the phone multiple times a week. We talk so regular. The joke is, is because she was in Daytona and I was in Alaska, is that she would always call me at 3 a.m. My time. She never could get the times right. I told her to write it in her calendar. When it's this time on your clock, that's when you can call me kind of thing.

7:29It was just kind of a joke we had. By 2010, Goldie Robinson was 78 years old. Her son Brian had moved out of state, and her husband Lester and both of her sisters had passed away years before. For the first time in decades, Goldie found herself with no family close by. Fred sometimes worried about his mother living on her own so far away, but he said she was bright and strong. He visited Florida a few times a year to see her and to attend Daytona Bike Week, a motorcycle rally. Fred and Goldie had a loving relationship, but she could be hot-headed. They'd fight sometimes, but they'd always make up.

8:15She was a strong woman. She had her own opinions of what I should do, what my brother should do. It wasn't always my point of view, nor my brother's point of view. She just loved us both. And we did have disputes. There's no question about it. But they never got too far. Fred's friend Dave Lawson stayed with Goldie several times during Bike Week. And Dave told me, Goldie was a woman you didn't want to disappoint. When we stayed with her, and she says, I don't care what you boys do, but be here at 5 o 'clock for dinner. No matter what we were doing, we would be there at 5 o 'clock. I wasn't getting my butt booked for not being there for dinner.

9:04This was Goldie, loving and generous, opinionated and stubborn, a good cook and a great conversationalist. She and Fred spoke multiple times a week, Fred in Baltimore and Goldie in South Daytona. That is until May of 2010, just three months before Goldie was reported missing.

9:27Fred and Goldie got into a massive fight. It started with a cell phone. Fred sent his mother a cell phone that she could use to call friends and family out of state. It was so much cheaper to make long-distance calls than using her landline. And Fred managed the account for his mother. But in May of 2010, Goldie lost the cell phone. Then she found it. Then she lost it again. I said, have you looked everywhere in your jacket? She said, I cannot find it. Okay. I said, well, just keep looking for it. And that was pretty much the end of the call. And I told my wife we had a discussion. I said, well, you know, I'm going to turn it off.

10:08So I did. I turned it off. And it probably wasn't a week later that I got this horrible phone call from my mother. Goldie had found her cell phone and was upset to find out that the cell service had been turned off on the phone. And I won't repeat some of the language she used. When she got mad, she was pretty vocal. And she didn't care what she said to who it was. She called me and blessed me out. She was furious. The phone was turned off. And I'd done it. Well, yeah, I'd done it because I didn't know where it was at. And she, lack of a better word, she went through the ceiling.

11:01Fred said he turned the cell phone service back on, but it was too late. Goldie was mad. And I called her back a couple times after that. And it rang and rang and rang and rang. and she wouldn't pick up. She knew it was me calling, and I knew she was home, and she would never pick up. Fred told me, if you didn't know Goldie, it might not make sense why she was so upset about this. Even to him, it was a little unreasonable, at least blown out of proportion. But whether or not he understood why his mother was mad, he knew from past experiences that it might be a while before she got over it. Goldie could hold a grudge.

11:48If you knew mom the way I knew her, you know, okay, this is going to blow over in a couple months. It's going to take a couple months because that's the way she was with her sisters. She would get mad at her sisters and not talk to them for six months, seven months, even a year sometimes, and they'd live right across the street. So this wasn't, I didn't, it didn't throw no red flags up. Fred buckled up for what he knew would be months of cold shouldering from Goldie. And when he reflects on it now, it looks so different. He wishes he would have just driven down to South Daytona and made things right with her.

12:31But at the time, there was so much he didn't know. He knew Goldie was mad at him, but he felt confident that she just needed a little time and space and that eventually it would blow over. May of 2010 turned into June. Goldie still wasn't taking his calls. Then one day, Fred tried his mother's cell phone one more time, and this time his call was answered, but oddly not by Goldie. Instead, by a woman who identified herself as Yaya. She said, your mom's still mad at you. She does not want to talk to you, and that's pretty much it, she says. But I'm kind of looking after her. I'm taking her to the store.

13:17I'm taking her to Walmart. I'm doing a few things around here, trying to keep up the place a little bit. Of course, my mom didn't need no help. Fred told me his mother was capable of taking care of herself. She didn't really need a caretaker and she certainly didn't like being patronized or being treated like she was helpless. But it was nice to know that she had some company. Yaya told Fred she was in her early 40s and lived in the trailer across the street from Goldie at Twin Oaks. She seemed to know a lot about Goldie's life, where Goldie liked to shop, her favorite pastimes, where she got her hair done, and what doctor's appointment she had on which days of the week.

14:02And Fred thought, well, great. But this woman had become friend with her, And I'm thinking, OK, well, I'm a thousand miles away. She won't talk to me. So what better? She's got this friend looking after her, taking her to the store. And she called me. We had many, many, many conversations, hours sometimes, about mom and what she was doing and this, that, and the other. Goldie and her granddaughter, Stacia, had still been in regular communication. Stacia knew that her dad, Fred, and Goldie were in the middle of a tiff, but that didn't concern her. Stacia and Goldie talked on the phone every week, multiple times a week.

14:50Until July of 2010, when Goldie stopped calling. It just went silent. She stopped communicating. She wouldn't pick up the phone. She would never call me. Every time I'd call her, it would just ring and ring and ring.

15:12Subscribe to Cast Plus to listen ad-free with bonus episodes at castmedia.com slash castplus. You can follow, rate, and review The Opportunist on Apple Podcasts. It really does make a difference. So thank you.

15:36When Stacia couldn't get a hold of Goldie for days on end, she grew concerned. She called her dad, Fred. To her surprise, Fred told her not to worry because he'd been speaking with Goldie's neighbor, a woman named Yaya. She's personable. She's kind. She cares about mom. She knows a lot about her, which kind of put him at ease. She didn't feel like a stranger. She didn't sound like a stranger. She knew things, especially like with her health. She didn't have really any crazy health conditions that we had to be concerned about. But, you know, she was older. So it was just kind of nice to hear that I'm taking her to the doctor and she had a good checkup and I'm going to get her blood work done.

16:23And oh, by the way, I'm a nurse. And he felt comfortable with her. extremely comfortable with her, had conversations with her on and off for months. Fred spoke with Yaya on the phone multiple times per week. He liked that she was a nurse and that she could keep him updated on what Goldie was up to. He grew to trust her more and more. But even with her dad's reassurance, taking Yaya's word for it didn't sit right with Stacia. She started to think that something was really wrong. It was so unusual for Goldie to stop speaking with her just out of the blue like that. But the only person communicating with Yaya was her dad, Fred.

17:04Finally, Stacia said she wanted to speak with Yaya herself. He said, yeah, yeah. She said that you can give her a call, but she's getting ready to go out of town. So, you know, it's going to be a couple of weeks, but I'll let you know.

17:23Yaya was oddly difficult to reach. Every time they were supposed to talk, Yaya had something come up that got in the way. She was out of town or had an unexpected appointment or had to reschedule. Instead, Stacia continued to get updates from her father, Fred, who got updates from Yaya. She took mom to the movies or she took mom shopping and you know how she loves to go to Sam's Club and look at, you know, go down the... Like, she just knew specific Goldie things. But then, in August of 2010, even Fred stopped hearing from Yaya. I called Yaya. Nobody answered. Went to her voicemail. Uh-huh. Okay.

18:06The next day, I called her. Went to her voicemail. Hmm. Okay, this went on for about a week. I hadn't talked to Yaya. She hadn't called me either. I thought, what the heck is going on down there? So I remember we were talking and he said, I can't get over with nobody. I don't know what's going on.

18:32So again, it was kind of like, well, we'll just wait and see. She's a nurse. Maybe she's got something going on. At that point, there were very few people in the park that we could pick up the phone and call. We didn't have their phone number. They had moved away. So that's when he called John, his friend that lives down there in South Daytona, and asked him to go over and check on her and see what was going on. John Kyler worked with Fred for years in Baltimore and eventually found himself living in Holly Hill, Florida, about 10 minutes from South Daytona. Here's John. Fred had called me and asked me to go check on his mother.

19:16John told Fred he was planning on getting ice cream that evening, so he would just stop by Goldie's trailer and see if she wanted to join. When I spoke with John, he was sitting in his living room with his wife, Lisa. They are both friends with Fred, and they both went to check on Goldie that day. So we all rode over there to take her out, and that's when I noticed that things weren't right over her home. She was a very neat woman. She kept everything a certain way. And when we went over there, everything was in disarray. Her porch was locked, which was never locked and everything. Her porch was locked.

19:53And that's why they seen clothes all over the porch, which was something Goldie didn't do. And did it seem like they were her clothes or someone else's clothes? Someone else's clothes, truck boxes, you know, parts and stuff. And like I said, she didn't have a truck. What were you thinking might be going on? I was thinking something wasn't right. It was something wrong, very wrong. And that's why I told him, I said, we need to call Fred and let him know we stayed there. And then he had us call the police. He called me back. He said, Fred, something's wrong. Something is bad wrong. I said, what do you mean?

20:33He says, your mom's flower gardens are overgrown. There's weeds everywhere. there. Goldie's car was not in the driveway. Her flower garden looked like it had been neglected for months, and there were random items strewn across the yard and porch. John Kyler tried the door. And he said, I can't get into the house. He called the police. And the police come, and the police told John, this is hearsay, not firsthand information, John. The policeman said that there was really nothing to worry about because in Florida, if somebody has died in the trailer, the windows are covered with flies. Okay. So that kind of helped me out a little bit.

21:23Fred was relieved that his mother was not lying dead in her trailer, but it did not explain the highly unusual state of her home. Whose clothes were on the porch? Why wasn't Yaya returning his calls. And most pressing, where was his mother, Goldie? Fred hung up the phone, packed a suitcase, and drove his truck the 13 hours from Baltimore to South Daytona. And he said, I'm packing my stuff and I'm going to Daytona. So I said, okay. So he drove through the night. Again, luckily I was in Alaska. So I stayed up with him on the phone the entire ride, almost kind of just sitting there reeling about what is happening.

22:12Is this true? It's just all kind of coming, flashing in front of you like something's not right. And I left here about five o 'clock, five o 'clock Sunday evening. And I was down there about six o 'clock Monday morning. And that's, for lack of a better word again, that's when all hell broke loose. As soon as Fred arrived in South Daytona, he tried to get into his mother's trailer. He had his own set of keys. See, Fred's name was also on the deed for the trailer, since he actually co-owned the house with his mother. But when he tried to turn the key and the lock on her front door, nothing happened.

22:57At some point, the locks had been changed. This was another frustrating and perplexing roadblock. Fred called the police, and because he was co-owner, they helped him break into the home. But as he stepped into Goldie's trailer, another unsettling feeling washed over him. Everything that my mother owned was gone. Absolutely everything. She had a wall of shelves where she kept her TV. The TV was gone, and her Fabergé eggs, everything that she had collected over the years, was gone. Goldie was a big collector. She had all kinds of baubles and trinkets, some of which were worth money. She was really into Fabergé eggs.

23:47And typically, she had all of her collectibles neatly displayed in her living room. Now, they were gone. I went back to her bedroom, and there was nothing in the bedroom except toys. And her closet was full of stuffed animals. And I just, you could have punched me in the gut, and it wouldn't have hurt any worse. Something, it's bad wrong. It's bad, bad wrong. Fred filed a missing persons report with the Daytona Police Department on August 22, 2010. If there was any hope that this was all some big misunderstanding, that Goldie would show up any moment and laugh at what a big deal was being made over nothing, that hope was shrinking by the moment.

24:45The state of Goldie's trailer alone, all of her missing possessions, the trash and disarray, the overgrown flower beds sent Fred into a panic. He called his daughter, Stacia. And I actually was on my way to work, and he called me, and he was screaming at the top of his lungs. We can't find her. They can't find her. They can't find her. And then I was probably on a plane four or five hours later heading to Daytona. Stacia arrived in South Daytona and stayed with Fred, providing any information she could to the police. The tricky part about this missing person's case was that both Fred and Stacia were not 100 % sure when Goldie went missing.

25:30For over a month, all communication had gone through Yaya, who was also nowhere to be found. My poor dad is standing in the street like, where's my mother and where's Yaya? Everybody was looking at him like, there's no Yaya. There's no Yaya. Most of the neighbors knew who Goldie was. She'd lived at Twin Oaks Mobile Home Park for almost 37 years at that point. They also knew that a woman lived across the street from Goldie, and they often saw the two of them together. But none of the neighbors had seen either of them lately. And then I want to say the police went over and maybe found out, I guess, okay, Yaya's name is Kim and she's in jail.

26:11We didn't know her as Kim. We knew her as Yaya. Yaya was a fake name. The person Fred had been speaking with on the phone multiple times a week for over a month was actually a woman named Kimberly Smith, or Kim. She did live in the trailer across the street from his mother, Goldie, and when the police went to knock on her door, her boyfriend answered. He was a tall, broad-shouldered, lumbering man in his early 30s named David Enos. He told the police that Kim was not home and she wasn't going to be back for a while because she was in jail.

27:11Kimberly Smith previously served a prison sentence for fraud and identity theft, and she was in violation of her parole. On August 10th, she was arrested by the Volusia County Sheriff's Office for an outstanding warrant in Orange County, Florida. The reason that Fred could not get a hold of Kim for the past two weeks was because she'd been in jail. Fred and Stacia were faced with the reality that Goldie was missing, and the one person who might know where she is had lied about her name and had a criminal past. That was certainly not encouraging. While the police conducted their investigation, Fred and Stacia had to do something, anything they could to help.