In the early morning hours of July 28, 1981, David Evan Craig, a 22-year-old man, was working his shift as a cashier to make his way in the world. The son of a decorated U.S. Air Force veteran, David was a resident of Sandy Springs, South Carolina, working at the Phillips 66 gas station just off Interstate 85 in the city of Anderson. His life was one of quiet diligence, overshadowed by the service of his father, David "Dave" Eskew Craig, who had bravely served in both the Korean and Vietnam
Wars. The younger David’s path, however, was violently cut short in an act of senseless brutality that would take years to fully unravel.
At around 3:30 a.m., a customer named Henry Poore pulled into the gas station and heard a shout coming from inside the convenience store. When he went to investigate, he made a grim discovery. Behind the counter, he found David Craig lying on the floor, suffering from a gunshot wound. David was still conscious and able to tell the customer he had been shot, but he was in shock and could not provide any information about the person who had attacked him. Emergency services were called, but the young cashier did not survive his injuries.
The investigation into David’s murder continued for nearly two years without a suspect. The case broke in 1983 when detectives, looking into a local man named Andrew Lavern Smith for other crimes, discovered a gun law violation from November 1981. The weapon connected to Smith was a.22 caliber revolver, the same type used to kill David. Investigators performed ballistics tests on the revolver and confirmed that it was the weapon used in the gas station robbery and murder. On June 1, 1983, Andrew "Andy" Smith was arrested at his job in an Anderson restaurant and charged with the murder of David Evan Craig.
The arrest of Andy Smith revealed a far more sinister pattern of violence. Investigators soon linked him to a series of attacks along the I-85 corridor, earning him the moniker "The I-85 Killer." Smith was a serial killer responsible for at least four murders and one attempted murder between 1980 and 1983. His reign of terror included the abduction and assault of a convenience store clerk in 1980, whom he threw from an overpass, though she survived. His other known victims were killed by stabbing or shooting.
Although arrested for David Craig’s murder, prosecutors decided to first try Smith for the brutal 1983 stabbing deaths of an elderly couple in Pendleton, 86-year-old Christy Johnson and his 82-year-old wife, Corrie. Smith had confessed to killing the couple, who were his relatives and former landlords, because they refused to lend him their car. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for the Johnson murders in 1984. He was never brought to trial for the murder of David Craig.
After a series of appeals, which included having his death sentence overturned and then reinstated in a new trial, Andrew Lavern Smith’s legal challenges were exhausted. On December 18, 1998, he was executed by lethal injection at the Broad River Correctional Institution. His execution was the 500th to take place in the United States after the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976.
David Evan Craig was laid to rest, but his family’s pain endured. His father, a man who had received the Silver Star for his heroism in Vietnam, outlived his son by more than three decades, passing away in 2014. In the wake of her son's death, David's mother, Alice Craig, founded the Anderson chapter of The Compassionate Friends in 1984, a support group for families who have experienced the death of a child, channeling her grief into helping others navigate their own profound loss.
