Author Spotlight
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People try to tell Greg they understand what he’s going through, but he says no one knows what it’s like until it’s happened to you. Since the murder of his daughter Kelsey in 2007, he has been coping with her loss. By becoming a teacher for students Kelsey’s age, giving seminars about youth and young adult safety and running for state representative, Greg can help prevent the harrowing experiences he went through from happening to others.
“You just don’t expect to bury your children,” Greg said. “It’s just something you never want to go through.”
Greg and his wife Missey leaned on each other during the months after the murder. In the beginning it was difficult, Missey said, because it seemed that every time she’d be up, Greg would be down. And vice-versa.
“We allow each other the space we need to be able to cope with it or to be able to heal,” Missey said. “Because we all deal with it differently.”
Both Greg and Missey agree that the murder of their daughter is not something they can quickly get over. But they know they have to go on with their life because they still have two children attending SM West and one of their two oldest daughters just gave them their first granddaughter. But no day is easy for Greg.
“We say we haven’t moved on, we just go on,” Greg said. “That’s probably a pretty good description of what it’s like. Every morning when I wake up I think, for a second, that everything’s great and then this thought comes smashing into my head that Kelsey’s not here anymore. I live with that every day. It’s a feeling I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.”
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It was June 2, 2007. Greg began making the family dinner while Kelsey was out buying an anniversary present for her boyfriend. The family rule was that if someone leaves the house, they have to tell another family member where they’re going. If they change locations they have to call or text someone and let them know where they were going next. So when 10, then 20, and then nearly 30 minutes had passed without hearing from Kelsey, the family grew worried.
“Kelsey was perfect on that,” Greg said. “She missed one time and when she did she got grounded and she never did it again.”
Calling all the surrounding police departments and hospitals was Greg’s next step. He was checking to see if her name was in their records or if anyone had come in contact with her. No one had heard from his daughter.
Greg’s parents, who live near the Target store she had been shopping at, went to the parking lot to check if they saw her car. They found her car, but Kelsey was not inside.
The family and police all arrived at the scene around the same time. No one was sure what exactly had happened to Kelsey.
“Originally, there wasn’t any evidence at all that indicated she had been kidnapped,” Greg said. “She was just missing, and we didn’t know under what circumstances.”
That night was full of providing statements, Greg said, and worrying about their 18-year-old daughter. Being in law enforcement at the time of Kelsey’s murder, Greg wished he could get in there and work on the case himself although he knew that was out of the question. He knew all the procedures that they were taking. When a child is missing, Greg says, it is standard for the police to suspect the parents at first. The Smiths gave their statements to police and were able to get themselves in the clear so police could search for whoever did this to their daughter.
Nearly 24 hours later, the police could finally tell on the surveillance video that this was a kidnapping, Greg said. That’s when the searching began. Siblings, friends, neighbors, even people who had never met Kelsey began showing up to help look for her. In the last two hours of searching they had nearly 600 people showing up every hour to help.
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June 6, 2007. It had been four days since Kelsey went missing. Four days of worrying. Four days of searching.
“I had been getting calls during the day from the police department,” Greg said, “asking various questions that I knew probably weren’t ‘good news’ questions. What color were her tennis shoes? What had she had to eat that day? Things that led me to believe they were talking about stomach content. Things that I’d rather not think about but it’d help identify her.”
Later that day Greg received a call from the detective supervisor from Overland Park saying he needed to stop by the house. Greg asked if this was going to be bad news. The supervisor simply said it wasn’t something he’s going to want to hear and he should get his family ready for it.
The family waited for the supervisor in their driveway. When he arrived, he told the family the bad news. Kelsey’s body had been laying in the woods near Long View Lake for the past four days.
“We were still in a daze probably for a month,” Greg said. “We just went through and did things that needed to be done.”
The searching was over but the Smiths still looked back on those four days of agony and stress know it could have been shortened.
The cell phone company would not release the coordinates of Kelsey’s cell phone, Greg said. If they would have known the area of her cell phone, it could have narrowed down the search area, helping find her sooner, Greg said. Once the company released the information, it took only 45 minutes to find her body.
“If they could have gotten that information to us faster, it wouldn’t have saved her life,” Greg said. “But she wouldn’t have had to lay out there for four days either.”
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Four days of agony for the Smiths have turned into ground breaking legislation for four states. The Kelsey Smith Act forces cell phone companies to release location information to the police if a person is missing. The Smiths were able to get the act passed in Kansas in 2009. Since then it has been passed in Nebraska, Minnesota, New Jersey and New Hampshire. North Dakota and Missouri have shown interest in this act and have begun the process of passing it. The Smiths hope both states will do just that within a year.
Greg is now running for State Representative for District 22. He says he’s always been outspoken about his thoughts in politics. With his experience from explaining the Kelsey Smith Act to countless committees, public speaking and public interaction aren’t something he gets anxious about.
After grieving the loss of his daughter Greg hopes he is able to make changes in Kansas laws to help keep others safe so no one has to go through what he and his family did. He thinks there are a lot more things we can do to make people’s quality of life better.
“Because we are hearing all these stories how now that the law’s been passed it’s saving other peoples lives, I kind of came to the realization that if you want to get anything done you’ve got to do it yourself,” Greg said.
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If Greg wins the election in November, he will have to get a long term sub while the State Representatives meet to cover for his career now – teaching. Before Kelsey’s murder, Greg had already started taking classes to get his teaching license. By now, Greg realizes that teaching has helped him get over the loss. By the end of 2007, Greg was student teaching at SM West.
“Being able to be in that environment and know how much fun she had while she was in high school and know that I was walking in the same places she’s been walking… I think that really did help me,” Greg said.
Teaching had always been in the plans for Greg, who is in his first year at East. He also thinks it is a better alternative for himself than law enforcement because he says he was getting older but the criminals were still young.
“I like it because I like working with kids,” Greg said. “To me Kelsey is forever 18. So being able to work with teenagers is kind of like being around Kelsey all the time.”
Sometimes it’s difficult for Greg to even walk the halls at school. Missey thinks the days when students are getting ready for school dances or preparing to march in band – the things Kelsey loved the most – are hard on Greg.
“If I’m in a tense situation or I’m worried about something, I find myself reaching down there and grabbing [my necklace],” Greg said. “It’s just rubbing my finger over Kelsey’s thumb print. You can actually feel the ridges so it’s just kind of a physical thing I can touch that actually was part of Kelsey at one time. That’s the connection.”
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