Emma Taylor Smith was beautiful girl of eighteen, with black hair and dark eyes. She was believed to be Spanish or a Creole from Louisiana but she was born and raised in Cleveland Ohio; both of her parents were mixed-race. Emma’s father had served two years in the State Penitentiary for burglary and larceny, and Emma herself had a brush with the law when at age thirteen, she accused an ex-policeman named Hoban of attempting a criminal assault on her.
She met Samuel Smith in 1883 when she was fifteen years old, working as a waitress at Miller’s restaurant in Cleveland, and the two were immediately attracted to each other. Smith made and sold enameled letters for fancy signs and appeared to be earning good wages, but Emma’s mother was against the relationship because Smith was eight years older than her daughter. Two weeks after Emma’s sixteenth birthday, Samuel Smith called at the house, ostensibly to take Emma to a dance, but while Mrs. Taylor was distracted, they loaded Emma’s trunk onto a wagon and eloped. A few days later Mrs. Tayler received a letter from Emma, mailed in Buffalo, New York, explaining that she and Samuel were married and it would be useless to look for them.
Samuel and Emma Smith then traveled to Chicago and while they moved quite often, they paid their bills and appeared to be a stable and loving couple. In November 1885, they were living in an apartment on West Monroe Street. The night of Saturday, November 23, the landlady heard an explosion come from their apartment and sent her husband up to investigate. Without opening the door, Samuel explained that he had been loading a shotgun that he kept for hunting and one of the shells accidentally exploded, but had done no damage. The landlord accepted the explanation then, but the next day, when no one answered his knocks he suspected trouble and forced open the door. He found the body of Emma Smith lying on floor with a pillow covering her face. He lifted the pillow to discover that the top of her head had been blown off. The murder weapon, Smith’s shotgun, was lying across the bed. Smith had changed out of his bloodstained clothes, washed his hands and left.