A young man’s life was cut tragically short in the summer of 1982, a death that would remain a mystery for a year before being linked to a string of violent crimes along a major Southern highway. Nirad Jay Patel, a 22-year-old male resident of Spartanburg, South Carolina, was found killed on June 5, 1982. His body was discovered inside a room at the Southerner Hotel in the nearby city of Anderson. An investigation determined he had been stabbed to death, a brutal end to a life just beginning.
For his family and community, the sudden loss was a shock, and with no immediate suspects, the case was fraught with unanswered questions.
For eleven months, the investigation into who killed Nirad Patel yielded few leads, leaving a painful void for those who knew him. The crime seemed to be an isolated act of violence, but it was actually one piece of a dark and terrifying puzzle that was slowly taking shape in the region. The answer would not begin to emerge until the spring of the following year, when authorities would close in on a man responsible for a series of murders that had spread fear across the Upstate of South Carolina.
The breakthrough came with the arrest of Andrew Lavern Smith, a man who came to be known as "The I-85 Killer." On June 1, 1983, Smith was taken into custody for the murder of a gas station attendant. During questioning, his web of crimes began to unravel. He confessed to the stabbing death of Nirad Patel, providing investigators with the key to solving the year-old mystery. Two days after his arrest, Smith was formally charged with Nirad's murder. His confession connected him to a reign of terror that included at least four homicides and one attempted murder between 1980 and 1983.
Smith's other victims included David Evan Craig, a 22-year-old gas station cashier who was shot and killed in July 1981, and an elderly couple, 85-year-old Christy Johnson and his 80-year-old wife Corrie, who were stabbed to death in their Pendleton home in May 1983. Smith had grown up in Anderson, graduating from high school and receiving a certificate in auto body repair from a local technical college. His outward life gave no hint of the violence he was committing along the Interstate 85 corridor.
Ultimately, prosecutors decided to focus their efforts on the most recent and brutal of his confessed crimes. They chose to first try Smith for the murders of Christy and Corrie Johnson. In 1984, despite Smith recanting his initial confession and claiming it was fabricated by detectives, a jury found him guilty and sentenced him to death. Following this conviction and death sentence, the state decided not to proceed with a trial for the murder of Nirad Patel. Prosecutors stated they did not want to expend state funds on another trial when the maximum penalty had already been secured. Though Smith was never formally convicted for killing Nirad, the case was officially closed based on his confession and the other evidence against him.
After a series of appeals, which included being granted a second trial where he was once again convicted and sentenced to death, Andrew Lavern Smith's legal challenges came to an end. 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 death penalty was reinstated in 1976. While justice for Nirad Jay Patel did not come in the form of a specific conviction, the identification of his killer and the ultimate price Smith paid for his crimes brought a final, somber resolution to the case.
