Vincent Smothers wears death all over his body.
The self-professed hit man is tattooed on his arms, back, legs and chest — permanent reminders of friends and loved ones who died before him. The names, tombstones and dates of their deaths are impressively etched on his 6-foot-1 lanky frame. The most prominent RIP tattoo is dedicated to Keilea, his 15-year-old sister who died in 1998.
Smothers, 27, says he's no stranger to death. He told police that he stealthily freelanced seven slayings on Detroit's poverty-stricken east side from 2006 to the end of last year.
He said he mostly killed drug dealers who either owed a debt, stole the merchandise or had infringed on someone else's turf. But he also has confessed to killing two men who were targeted as federal informants and a Detroit police sergeant's wife.
"He's not a monster. He's a human," said Smothers' uncle, Simon Smothers. "If he did it, he has to pay for it. I still can't believe it, but they say he confessed. If he did it, I can't make any excuses for him."
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In his confession, Smothers told police that he wasn't remorseful until he killed the sergeant's wife.
The total take for seven hits: $60,000.
For the occasion, he donned suits, ties and sunglasses, and usually carried at least two guns — an AK47 and a .40-caliber pistol — for efficiency. He said he practiced shooting at a gun range between jobs.
After high school, Smothers told police he began stealing cars, dabbling in the drug world and robbing dope houses before graduating to contract killings in 2006 for one motivation: money.
He said he was paid between $5,000 and $15,000 by those who desperately needed an enemy to disappear.
By many accounts, Smothers is a soft-spoken and charming man with a handsome smile and a polished persona — certainly not a man who embodied a murder-for-hire existence.
Family members say he was traumatized after his sister, Keilea, was killed while caught in the cross fire of a neighborhood dispute involving a gunman and one of her other brothers. Smothers never sought counseling and remained forever saddened and scarred, they said. Over the years, his overwhelming grief may have turned into rage.
"I think he started to hate the world after Keilea was killed," his uncle said.
A double life
After his April 19 arrest, Smothers described to police the two lives he led: one with his wife and newborn daughter in a tidy townhouse complex in Shelby Township, where he would walk his beloved poodle and politely speak to neighbors; the other as a man who matter-of-factly detailed his deadly trail for police.
Smothers said he walked up to 47-year-old Rose Cobb as she sat in a vehicle in a CVS parking lot on the day after Christmas and delivered two to three fatal shots to her face and head as her husband, Sgt. David Cobb, shopped inside.
Smothers is expected to appear in 36th District Court on Monday for a preliminary examination in connection with three of the killings, including Rose Cobb's.
The Cobb case remained a whodunit until last month, when Smothers was arrested in front of his sleepy suburban townhouse and subsequently confessed to the killing. Police were led to Smothers by a suspect in an unrelated drug case who ran in circles similar to Smothers'.
Once in custody, Smothers told police that he was hired by David Cobb to kill his wife, in part because he was having an affair and in part because Cobb wanted his wife's life insurance money.
Cobb, 37, was arrested a day later at his east-side Detroit home, a mile from where his wife was killed. He was set free two days later after Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy said there was not enough evidence to charge him. Cobb remains free and said through his attorney that he never has met Smothers.
Smothers told police the Rose Cobb hit is the one that now causes him to lose sleep and see the faces of all his victims. His last killing, he said, was different.
"My stomach was in knots. I felt like she was innocent," he said in a confession seen by the Free Press. "After Cobb's wife, I could no longer have anything to do with murdering people."
His first kill
Smothers said his first kill occurred on Aug. 16, 2006, in front of a reputed drug house on Strasburg near Gratiot.
He was hired to kill two brothers, but only one was there at the time. Adrian Thornton, 27, was killed by gunshot wounds to the head, chest and legs. Another 28-year-old man suffered a gunshot wound to the left side of the head, but survived.
Weathered teddy bears mark the grassy spot across the street where Thornton collapsed on his back after running from the house.
But Smothers did not forget the other half of his assignment.
Waiting about five months to the day, Smothers said he returned to the Strasburg neighborhood on Jan. 17, 2007, to gun down Carl Thornton, 29. Neighbors said Smothers laid in wait in an abandoned house and ambushed Thornton and a 22-year-old woman, who was shot in the buttocks but survived. Neighbor Nancy Jenkins, 58, said she hit the floor and called 911 when the shooting started. She said she peeked out her window and saw Thornton lying facedown on his front porch, and a woman bleeding and crawling toward her house.
"They sounded like automatic cannons," Jenkins recalled of the gunshots.
Jenkins said she knew the Thornton brothers as neighbors — they spoke to her, and Carl Thornton even purchased perfumed oils from her.
She said she often encouraged them to clean up their lifestyles. She said residents of the drug-ridden, downtrodden neighborhood where she has lived for 20 years buzzed about the killings.
"I heard it was a hit — that they had stole something from a drug man," she said.
Earlier years
Smothers comes from a family of eight siblings. He grew up on Detroit's east side with a disciplinarian father who worked for Chrysler and became self-employed in construction after a workplace injury.
Smothers, a Kettering High School graduate, spoke lovingly to police about his dad, Willie Smothers, even as he recounted times when they were harshly punished for lying or smoking.
His uncle, Simon Smothers, 60, said he remembered the children intently working for their father on projects that ranged from roofing to auto repairs. They reminded him of a human assembly line, he said.
Willie Smothers died of cancer the day after Christmas in 1998, a little more than eight months after Smothers' sister suffered a fatal gunshot wound to the abdomen.
A key time
That time would prove to be pivotal in Smothers' life. Months later, he would experience his first recorded encounter with the law.
In June 1999, Smothers was caught in Madison Heights in a stolen car and operating a motor vehicle while his license was suspended. He was placed on 18 months of probation.
While working for a metal shop in Warren in January 2000, Smothers was arrested in Oak Park for driving a stolen car with an altered VIN number. Police found a 9mm pistol in the backseat.
He pleaded guilty to receiving and concealing stolen property, felony firearm possession and concealing or misrepresenting identification with intent to mislead police. He was sentenced to 334 days in jail. Because of various parole violations, Smothers floated in and out of jail until 2003.
Gerald Tabbs, who was married to Smothers' mother from 2000 until last year, said he did not know Smothers well. They had a distant stepfather-stepson relationship, but he was always polite — even when emotions ran high. Tabbs said some of his ex-wife's children thought that she had remarried too soon.
Smothers' mother, Mary Tabbs, 57, works as a home health care aide and lives in Harper Woods. She declined to comment for this article. "She's very defensive of the children. She's always been like that," Gerald Tabbs said.
Tabbs said Smothers once warned him to never hit his mother and helped move her from Tabbs' west-side home when the marriage ended.
Tabbs said he never abused his wife but said she spoke of prior abuse from her first husband.
Tabbs said three hulking Wayne County sheriff's deputies came to his door looking for Smothers in February, but he told them Smothers had never lived there and his mother no longer did.
Police, including federal agents, had been trying to locate and arrest Smothers for one of the incidents but were unaware of his connection to additional killings until he confessed.
"They told me it was something minor, but I knew it was something more than that," Tabbs said of the deputies.
Other confessed killings
Police say Smothers told them he was hired to kill Marshall White Jr., 56, and Johnny Marshall, 64, because they were believed to be federal informants. The men were found dead about noon May 24, 2007, at Jos. Campau and the I-94 eastbound service drive.
Police found the car with the hood up. White was shot in the head outside the car, and Marshall was in the passenger seat with a gunshot to the face.
A federal source who requested anonymity said the case is under investigation. Smothers has not been charged in those killings.
But he is charged with two counts of first-degree murder for the June 21, 2007, fatal shootings of Clarence Cherry, 34, and Gaudrielle Webster, 18. Cherry was struck 20 times in the head, abdomen, leg, arm and chest. Another woman, Karsia Rice, 18, survived the attack on Gravier, off Cadieux near Mack.
Smothers' accomplice, Lakari Berry, 27, was arrested shortly after the shootout and is serving life in prison with no chance of parole for the killings. Smothers confessed to police that he was the other shooter.
Webster and Rice were inside the east-side apartment when Berry and Smothers stormed in and demanded to know where the money was. Two children played on the living room floor while the women begged for their lives.
Rice recalled the horror in 36th District Court last year during a preliminary examination for Berry.
"He is still pointing the gun at me," Rice said in describing a tall man in a suit, tie and sunglasses. "At this time, I got the baby in my arm. ... He is still pointing the gun at us. He had locked the door already."
The men ransacked the apartment, seemingly searching for drugs and money, before dragging the women to a back bedroom, binding their hands and feet and covering their eyes with duct tape.
They then demanded that Webster call her boyfriend, Cherry, to the apartment. She feigned car trouble to lure him there.
Rice was shot in the head and went stumbling from the apartment as gunfire continued to erupt.
Smothers told police he fled to Kentucky to hide out after the shooting. Berry, who didn't flip on Smothers and is appealing his conviction, was quickly arrested after a witness identified his license plate.
"I don't know why I got shot," Rice testified during the July 17, 2007, exam. "Still to this day, I don't know why I am blind in my right eye."
Police found Cherry's body in the complex's courtyard with more than $3,000 in cash still in his pocket.
The final hit
Smothers was upset with his accomplice, Berry, after the shootings, because he did not want to harm women, he told police.
But it was the final hit that Smothers said sent him reeling.
Rose Cobb cried out that December night in the CVS parking lot as Smothers said he used a tire iron to smash the window of her Dodge Caravan. She tried climbing to the backseat, clutching her purse, he told police, as he opened fire, striking her several times in the head.
"She was screaming," he said. "No words. Just screaming."
He fled after failing to reach the purse, he said, thereby foiling his plan to make the killing look like an armed robbery.
"Prior to Cobb's wife, it wasn't as tough," Smothers told police when asked how it felt to be a hit man. "The rest were dope dealers."
Smothers said Rose Cobb's husband told him to wear gloves and supplied him with cut-off shirt sleeves to protect his arms from gunshot residue.
Smothers said David Cobb told him how to handle good-cop, bad-cop interrogation and ordered him to get rid of the gun.
When it came time to collect for the hit, Smothers told police that he only got $50 of the $10,000 they had agreed upon. Cobb promised he would pay the rest later to avoid suspicion, Smothers said.
Smothers told police that he met Cobb through Marzell Black, the 20-year-old son of Cobb's mistress. Smothers said Marzell Black set up the deal and drove the getaway car.
Black, who was promised $5,000 of the hit money, is charged with solicitation of murder and also faces a preliminary examination Monday.
Family life
Smothers' Shelby Township townhouse has two plastic chairs in front on a 4-by-6 concrete patio. There are two tiki torches, a small grill and a bag of charcoal. There's also a pink foldout chair for a small child and a pink cardboard sign in the shape of a baby rattle hanging from the screen door. It reads: "Baby Girl."
He was raising a newborn daughter with his wife, Cecily Smothers, and a 3-year-old girl that his wife had from a prior relationship when he was arrested.
"Whenever we see him on the news we say, 'Wow — it can't be,' " said Ron Flowers, a neighbor. "I would see him walking his dog. He was nice. Real polite. I waved to him. He waved back. His dog might get loose and run over to me. I'd pet the dog. He'd laugh and call the dog back."
Cecily Smothers declined to comment for this article.
Police say Vincent Smothers has been extremely cooperative and is concerned about the well-being of his family.
His attorney, Gabi Silver, said safety issues for his loved ones are obvious.
"I think he cares very, very much for her and the children," Silver said of his wife. "I think that's truly his main focus right now."
Silver declined to discuss details of the allegations against her client because she said she does not have a full picture of the case yet. She said he is pleasant to work with and described him as "a very mild-mannered, well-spoken guy."
Meanwhile, Smothers has told police he is prepared to take full responsibility for his actions.
"I knew at the time these crimes were committed they were wrong and that there would be a price to pay," he wrote as a final statement on his confession. "I can't bring them back but I hope this allows there (sic) families to know that someone is going to pay behind what happened to there loves (sic) ones."
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