Some bosses treat interns like crap–yelling at them, throwing stuff, or firing them in front of the whole company. But William F. Smithson went one step further than that.
Smithson worked for a company that manufactures sports scoreboards. An intern named Jason Kyle Shephard, who was working in the South Dakota office, was sent by the company on a business trip to Philadelphia. According to Philly.com:
Later that night, Shephard sat talking about girls and drinking Gatorade in the Delaware County home of a coworker. The 23-year-old had no way of knowing his drink had been spiked with the date-rape drug GHB, that there was a sex den in the basement, and that a third man was in the home.
Shephard never lived to see the Philadelphia sites.
On Sept. 19, 2006, Shephard failed to show up for work. Smithson, the manager of the Edgmont office of Daktronics, filed a missing person report. He told police that he and Shephard had dinner together the night before and that he had dropped the intern back at the Holiday Inn in West Whiteland Township, Chester County.
Daniel Hall, 31, of Virginia Beach, has told police Smithson called him that same day and asked him to come to his Tanguy Road home in Glen Mills. Hall has testified that when he arrived, Smithson was acting “weird” and said “something had happened.” Hall found the body of a young man in one of the upstairs bedrooms. He left for Virginia immediately and later called Norfolk police.
The Smithson trial has garnered so much media attention and public interest in Philadelphia that everyone connected to the case is under a gag order. I hope the reason the trial has attracted so much attention is because everybody realizes it is a terrible thing to kill an intern.