Drugged and Strangled, Husband Arrested MARRIED TO A MURDERDER?

PEOPLE CLOSE TO TIMOTHY SMITH HAD DOUBTS ABOUT THE MAN HE SHARED HIS LIFE WITH. NOW THEY WISH THEY HAD SAID SOMETHING 

- CORIN CESARIC

Friends and neighbors welcomed invitations to the intimate dinner parties and lavish annual New Year’s Eve bash thrown by Timothy Smith and Herb Swilley and set in the tropical decor of their home in Ocala, Fla. Yet even those closest to the pair—who were married in a purple-themed celebration in 2015—considered them to be something of an odd couple: Smith, 59, the executive director of a senior living center, was fun-loving and liked to entertain. “He was caring and quite flamboyant,” says Tammy Warner, a former colleague. On the other hand, Swilley, 55, a self-employed handyman, was sometimes boastful and aggressive. “He had to be the big man on campus,” says Warner, 56. “I always thought he was all talk.”

Not anymore. On March 25, Marion County Sheriff’s officers, performing a welfare check after Smith failed to show up for work, found his body inside an Ocala apartment that the couple reportedly maintained for sex dates with other people. Dressed in just a tank top and shoes, Smith had ligature marks on his neck and blunt trauma to his head and genitals, according to a probable-cause affidavit. Police say a toxicology test later determined that Smith had been dosed with 30 times the recommended amount of diphenhydramine, the active ingredient in Benadryl.