A California woman’s plan to fake her own kidnapping in 2016 has brought some renewed attention to the unsolved disappearance of 16-year-old Tera Smith, who vanished from a run nearly 26 years ago.
While Sherri Papini’s hoax kidnapping inspired a Hulu documentary series, “The Perfect Wife,” which premiered earlier this year and made national headlines, there has been little attention focused on Tera’s 1998 missing person case even though Papini and Tera attended the same high school in the 1990s.
Papini graduated in 2001. Tera, who did not live beyond her sophomore year, would have graduated in 2000.
It’s become a point of frustration for Tera’s family, who believe the man who abducted and killed their daughter has been walking freely for more than two decades, possibly victimizing others.
“It’s really frustrating to me because of the severity of what she did. She lied. She got some money she shouldn’t have. That’s what she did,” Marilyn Smith, Tera’s mother, told Fox News Digital. “And [authorities] spent so much money, so many resources on that and took a really long time. … They suspected from the very beginning that it could be a hoax because of her history. But it took four or five years for them to tell her they knew she was lying.”
The Smith family even had Papini and her husband at the time over for dinner after she was “found.” Marilyn said Papini put on a very convincing show to make it seem like she had survived something traumatic.
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“It really felt like a slap in the face in hindsight for her to come over and put on a big act for us when we really did lose our daughter,” Marilyn said.
Despite the odd connection between the two cases — if one can call it a connection — the Smith family is grateful for the renewed attention two documentaries about the Papini case have brought to their daughter’s unsolved disappearance.
“We do have hopes that there will be an arrest and that there will be a trial in the next couple of years. But we’ve been waiting 25 years,” Marilyn said.
On Aug. 22, 1998, Tera, who was grounded at the time, told her sister she was going out for a jog in the area near their rural Redding, California, home and would be back home in 20 minutes. But she never returned. The 16-year-old’s parents scoured the area that evening and in the days that followed, driving all the roads she may have been running on, but nothing turned up.
To this day, while Tera is believed dead, her remains have never been found.
Her parents aren’t sure what evidence from their daughter’s case remains and what has been lost over the years. Authorities have shared little information with the family over the last two decades, but they haven’t given up hope. In fact, they believe their daughter knew and trusted the man who they believe abducted and killed her.
Tera was a spiritual teenager who kept volumes of written journals since she was a child. She felt a deep connection with the earth and had taken up taekwondo lessons just months before her disappearance.
Tera’s parents believe her instructor, a man named Troy Zink who was in his late 20s and married with children at the time, groomed their daughter, sexually assaulted her and eventually killed her based on what they have read in her journal entries and evidence that has been uncovered over the years.
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“We just immediately knew he was involved,” Marilyn said.
Zink had apparently told police and the Smith family he saw Tera earlier that evening, when she arrived to his house and asked him to loan her money. When he told her he could not give her the money she wanted, she became upset and asked him for a ride home. He said he obliged, but when they began fighting in his truck, she demanded to be dropped off at the intersection of Oregon Trail and Old Alturas Road in Redding.
“There was a part of me that was wondering if she was pregnant. … We never really believed that Tera ran away — that she wanted to run away,” Marilyn said. She also believes Tera had told some of her friends she and Zink had a sexual relationship, and he did not want that information to become known to his family.
“She was 16, and he was 29. So, he knew the law. And he knew that if that got out, if he went to jail … he could lose his wife and his little boy. So, he had motive to silence her,” Marilyn said.
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Zink, who could not be reached for comment, also claimed that at the time of Tera’s disappearance, he was in a remote location in the mountains praying.
Smith’s family recently discovered that witnesses, however, saw Tera and Zink riding in the same truck the evening of Aug. 22. One witness even said he made eye contact with Tera through the passenger seat window as they drove past, and she mouthed, “Help me,” according to Marilyn.
“The police had a pretty good idea of where he took her along the Sacramento River. Between Keswick Dam and Shasta Dam was the area that was kind of focused on for the search. But then it just became a cold case,” Marilyn said.
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Zink was immediately considered a person of interest, but the only thing he was ever charged and convicted with related to Tera’s disappearance was possessing guns as a convicted felon. When police searched his property while looking into possible connections to Tera, they found guns he was not supposed to have.
He was sentenced to three years for the gun conviction in Shasta County, but nothing more came of the case.
He also had previous convictions for spousal rape and for raping his high school girlfriend when she broke up with him.
“They didn’t connect the dots,” Marilyn said of police at the time. “[T]his guy that’s working on it now … is saying, ‘You know, it looks like to me, like with all this … circumstantial evidence, there’s enough to arrest this guy and to have a case, and they don’t want to do a body lost case.’ But, at some point, you have to come to grips with the fact that there’s maybe not a body, right? And so I think … it’ll be up to the DA if they decide if they have enough to arrest and prosecute.”
