John Eldon Smith was the first person Georgia executed in the modern era. In 1974, he murdered his wife's first husband and his second wife in Macon in a plot to collect life insurance. Smith was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania on September 17, 1930. His father had an itinerant job opening auto parts stores and so the family moved around frequently during his childhood. John was a normally adjusted child and often spent the summers staying with his grandparents on their farm in Pennsylvania; he sang in the choir at his church and gave no indication whatsoever of someone who would end his days in the electric chair. Despite attending four different high schools, he managed to graduate in 1948 near the top of his class and he worked summer jobs in a shoe store and as a volunteer firefighter. Smith's high school principal recommended him for a job with Insurance Company of North America and he enrolled in the company's training program.
Smith enlisted in the Army when the Korean War began, served as a paratrooper, and was honorably discharged in 1954. He resumed his insurance job, married his first wife Catherine Fitzgerald, and moved to Macon. They had one son and divorced in 1963, after a decade of marriage. The couple got married again two years later but divorced in a short time. Meanwhile, Smith's insurance career was progressing and it led him to move to New Jersey in 1973, where he served as vice president of a different insurance company. But he was depressed over the failure of his marriage and during a short vacation to Miami the following year met Rebecca Atkins.Rebecca, born as Rebecca Turpin, was nine years younger than Smith. A native of Athens, Georgia, she had gotten married in 1956, at age 17, and had three daughters with her husband Joe Akins, an engineer for Southern Natural Gas. They divorced in 1973 when Joe accused his wife of trying to bump him off and also enlisting her two older daughters to help. He remarried to a 28 year old schoolteacher named Juanita Knight. Rebecca then moved to North Miami Beach with her daughters where she ran into John Smith, and after a two month courtship got married July 1, 1974.
Shortly after they married, Smith began calling himself Anthony Isalldo Machetti, or Tony Machetti, and gave several reasons for it, one that his wife liked a name that sounded Mafia-like, another was that it sounded like "machete", which one would use to hack through brush while navigating the Florida swamps, and that it sounded memorable if he started his own insurance company. Rebecca changed her name to Rebecca Akins Smith Machetti. They had dreams of living a luxurious lifestyle in Miami with Smith funding it by being a hired hitman. They were married not yet two months when the proverbial shit hit the fan--Rebecca realized that her daughters were beneficiaries of her ex-husband's $53,000 life insurance policy.On August 31, Smith, Rebecca, and an ex-lover of his, Fort Myers native and insurance salesman John Maree, lured Joe Akins to a suburban subdivision under construction in Macon under the pretext of installing a TV antenna. Juanita accompanied him. When the victims got there, Smith and Maree ambushed them with a shotgun and blasted Ronald twice and Juanita once in their car, killing them. Rebecca was in Miami the whole time and did not accompany them. A private pilot overflying the area a few hours later spotted the bodies from his small plane.
Smith and Maree went back to North Miami Beach. Maree was offered a $1,000 payment for his help in the murders. Rebecca was suspected of involvement during the subsequent police investigation and the three were all arrested October 10 and charged with first degree murder and brought back to Georgia to stand trial. Maree testified for the prosecution and claimed that Smith alone had shot the victims and he just watched. He claimed they were originally going to beat Akins up and then inject him with poison but the plan was thwarted by Juanita tagging along. They had not managed to beat the victims hard enough to knock them out, so them had to shoot them with a 12 gauge shotgun. Maree said the whole thing was Rebecca's idea and she wanted revenge on her ex-husband for disagreements they'd had during their marriage. Also Maree added that Smith and Rebecca told him he'd better help them bump off Akins or else.Smith testified in his own defense and claimed he knew nothing of the murders. He maintained that he'd spent August 31 on the beach in Miami and he'd loaned Maree his driver's license and credit card with the assumption that the latter was going on a business trip. However, the jury only took three days to find Smith guilty of first degree murder. He was sentenced to death. Rebecca's trial the following February also ended in her being sentenced to death. Maree, in exchange for his testimony, received life with the possibility of parole.The state supreme court automatically reviewed and upheld Smith's conviction. Rebecca's attorneys appealed on the grounds that the jury pool at her trial had only two women in it; the Supreme Court had recently ruled that this violated the 6th Amendment. She was re-tried in Gwinnett County and this time sentenced to life. Smith's attorneys however were unsuccessful in getting his conviction overturned.
Despite a furious letter-writing blitz by Smith's friends, family, and business associates, including the claim that Smith was innocent and Rebecca was the real mastermind, that Maree was an unreliable witness, and that Georgia's justice system had not given Smith a fair trial because he wasn't a native Southerner, but none of this did any good. The Supreme Court voted 7-2 to not hear his appeals.The execution took place in Georgia's electric chair at the Diagnostic and Classification State Prison in Jackson on December 15, 1983. Smith was the first person the Peach State had executed in 19 years. John Maree served 13 years and was paroled. Rebecca was paroled in 2010 and lived out her life quietly in Athens until she passed away on September 14, 2020.
>>18401903ah bullshit, nobody cared that he was a Yankee. this wasn't 1860. he was sentenced to death because he murdered two people.
>>18401915The South just loves killing people, they were gonna sentence his old lady to death too but the Supreme Court nixed it.
>two Silent Generation fags who grew up in the gray flannel suit 50s and lived button-down postwar suburbia lives like they were supposed to>but now it's the 70s, the times have changed and loosened up>they have a midlife crisis and decide to LARP as the Mafia boss in that one popular 70s movie>two people die because of their retardationAnd that's what happened here.
>>18401901>The state supreme court automatically reviewed and upheld Smith's conviction. Rebecca's attorneys appealed on the grounds that the jury pool at her trial had only two women in it; the Supreme Court had recently ruled that this violated the 6th AmendmentOne of the dumbest court decisions ever.>derf you must have jury members of the same skin color/gender/sexual orientation as the defendant or it's not a fair trialAfter all, what would you make you think women jurors won't be even more likely to send a woman to the chair? They hate other women and want to knife them far more than a man ever could.
they were white, nobody cares. post a thread about a black perp if you want to have some discussion.
>>18401895she was nearly a contemporary of the great infamous Pat Allanson. go figure.
