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Sword and Scale contains adult themes and violence and is not intended for all audiences.
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Listener discretion is advised. The day that we went to Scholar's funeral, that was the last time I'd seen Cherish alive.
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Hello and welcome to Season 10, Episode 235 of Sword and Scale. A show that reveals that the worst monsters are real.
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I'd like to remind you that we're living in a world of bat shit crazy where a podcast that
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talks poorly about murderers and child molesters can be demonetized for wrong think and everybody
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He acts like that's just totally normal. Speaking of which, now's a great time to support the independent content creators that you enjoy.
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Head on over to sewardenscale.com slash plus to support us, for example, if you want to.
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Because it's the only thing that's keeping us here. Despite what you've heard on the internet, socialism doesn't work.
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Because nobody wants to work for free. Oh, my God. I'm sure you've probably heard of Little Rock, Arkansas.
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A former president with an affinity for cigars comes from there. But you've probably never heard of the little town of Risen, Arkansas,
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the seat of Cleveland County, approximately two counties below Little Rock. Small as it is, hosting only about 1,500 inhabitants,
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it is still considered to be part of the metropolitan area. This is probably because it's defined as a commuter town,
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meaning most people travel from Risen to the larger city for work. Historically, Risen was created as a result of a railroad being routed through Cleveland County.
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Citizens of the neighboring county didn't want trains, so the railway was rerouted through empty land that gave rise to, well, Risen.
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Early in its existence, it was primarily inhabited by sharecroppers and owners who relied on sales of cotton and lumber for its economic growth.
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Today, however, Ryzen isn't doing so well. The poverty level is statistically more than twice that of the national average.
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The people of Ryzen stick together. They fish, they go to church, they hunt, all together.
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But to get a hamburger, they have to travel at least 20 miles. Neither In-N-Out, Whataburger, or Five Guys are worth that drive.
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Fight me in the comments. But this is where Kristen lived and went to school. And the school was very small.
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The people there, they all pretty much knew each other. It was a very close-knit community.
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And this is where she met a girl named Cherish. When I met Cherish, I was 13, and Cherish was 16, almost 17, I'd say.
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Everybody pretty much knew everybody there. Cherish lived on Rogers Road in Woodlawn and that is how I met her. I had a friend,
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Raven, that lived on the same road and I would stay with her a lot whenever I was younger and
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they actually lived about three or four houses down from each other and Raven introduced me to
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Cherish, and that's how we become friends. We didn't become as close as we were until about
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two years after we met. Kristen recalled that her friend Cherish didn't live in a two-parent home,
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but lived with her grandmother and father while her brother lived with her mother in a nearby town.
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Cherish lived with her grandma and her dad to kind of help her grandma out around the house
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and just kind of, you know, to help as much as she could because Cherish was very family-oriented.
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She loved her family. She loved her friends. It was obvious that Cherish also loved her brother
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because she always carved out time to spend with him, even if it just meant going to their mother's house
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and hanging out with him for a couple of hours. Her mom, I believe she's worked as a CNA for a very long time.
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That's what she is doing now. and her grandma does the same kind of work. She works in a nursing home. Cherish did the same
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thing She worked in the nursing home with her grandma She assisted with the elderly She loved helping the elderly and she just had a very big heart for helping people Cherish would graduate from high school after Kristen because of the three
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age difference. Even though Cherish preferred to be outside doing things like fishing and hunting,
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she began helping her grandmother in a nursing home after graduation and expanded her caring
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touch beyond the nursing home. She also had a lady that she would go and sit with during the week
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that was not in a nursing home to kind of help her around the house because she was a widow
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and her kids didn't live in the state. So she would help her around the house to do laundry,
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cook, run errands for her, things like that. Kristen was still in school, but their friendship
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deepened. She and Cherish began seeing each other almost every day after school when Cherish visited
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a boyfriend who lived on the same road. Mostly they fished together, but they also had other hobbies.
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Cherish would bring Kristen along in her grandmother's car and do donuts in the mud,
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and they looked for just about any excuse to do anything outside. Anything outside, we were doing
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mainly fishing that was our main thing that we loved to do and we were pretty big partiers when
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we were younger uh cherish she knew how to have a good time and she could definitely get a crowd
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going she could light up the darkest room with her her laugh and her smile they were just so
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contagious and um we just we really clicked we we understood each other we had kind of gone through
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similar things in our past. And when we were together, we knew that we weren't being judged
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by one another. So it was just a very close and important friendship to me when we did get close.
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I mean, we were seeing each other basically every day. And if we didn't see each other every day,
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we did talk almost every day. Kristen anticipated the friendship would outlast any other.
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It was the kind of easy, comfortable relationship we all want from our friendships.
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The one rare friend that actually cares about you and shows it. But Kristen's life would forever be altered one chilly December evening in 2015.
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That evening was December 3rd, just two days before Cherish's birthday. After Cherish finished her work at a private residence, she texted Kristen, but then went home early to spend time with her grandma and make it an early night.
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She and her grandmother were going shopping for Cherish's birthday the next day.
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What did Cherish want for a gift, you might ask? Her and her grandma were going to go to Walmart to get a baby bedding set.
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It was a Finding Nemo bed set, and Cherish had had her eyes on it even before she was pregnant.
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When I was pregnant, she kept asking me to buy it. And so she decided for her birthday that that's what she wanted, and her grandma told her that she would take her to get it.
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Cherish was newly pregnant. She was ecstatic about it, and she wanted her best friend Kristen to go with her on this special occasion.
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Knowing she would see her the next day, Kristen declined. But according to Kristen, the next day rolled around and she didn't hear from her.
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At first, Kristen wasn't concerned until Cherish's grandma called asking if Cherish was with her.
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Of course, Kristen answered that she hadn't seen her. She and Cherish's grandmother tried to remain calm as they made numerous calls to no avail.
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eventually the two of them along with Cherish's mother began to panic and filed a police report
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so the night that she went missing all we knew all that I was told whenever her grandma called
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me was that her and Cherish were laying in bed that night and they were actually sleeping in
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the same bed Cherish wanted to sleep with their grandma that night and they were laying in bed
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and they were talking about the baby and her birthday. And she said that Cherish got a call,
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and she didn't know who it was, but she got a call and she said, Ma'am, I'm just going to step right outside and I'll be right back.
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I'll be right back. She didn't even put shoes on or a jacket because she didn't plan on leaving.
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She didn't plan on leaving her yard. Pregnant and barefoot, quite literally. Cherish decided to leave her yard that night for some reason.
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A cold December night when the temperature was in the low 30s. The night before her birthday.
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Why did she leave the comfort of her grandmother's home and go outside? The only possible explanation was that she left with someone that she knew.
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Cherish Albright was pregnant and would turn 22 years old just one day after she disappeared from her rural hometown in Risen Arkansas Her grandmother mother and best friend Kristen had pulled out all the stops in their search for her
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Everybody who loved Cherish was sent into anxiety and alarm, disbelieving Cherish would disappear on her own,
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and knowing she received a phone call just before going outside in her bare feet on December 4th, 2015.
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shortly after she vanished family and friends started to speculate about who would cause her
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to go outside in the cold after 10 p.m let alone leave the property so we didn't know who called
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her at first and her grandma said that she heard a truck pull up she didn't see what truck it was
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but she heard a truck pull up and then eventually the truck pulled off and all she kept telling me
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was I should have went and stopped her. I should have went and stopped her. You know, I should have
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done something. And I mean, she had her grandma blames herself so much. And I've tried and tried
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to tell her that, you know, it's not her fault that she could not have prevented this even if
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she wanted to. So we went about a little over two weeks before or almost two weeks before we finally
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found out what had happened. And, um, you know, we were all hoping for the best and
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Cherish's grandma actually was in a car wreck because she was out looking for her,
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for her granddaughter. She was looking for her baby girl and she was hit by a, um,
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a Tyson chicken truck. And so she was in the hospital. She ended up losing her vision,
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a lot of her vision because she hit so hard. And so she was just, I mean, she went through so much at that time.
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It was so heartbreaking. With no concrete evidence or clues, the rest of her family and friends still working with the police
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were bewildered and frustrated. All that grandma who was now confined to the hospital could remember
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is that Cherish received a call that night. And then a truck, a loud truck, pulled up to the residence.
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Almost immediately, Cherish was gone. What person in Cherish's circle owned a loud truck?
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Well, this is Arkansas. And in this part of Arkansas in particular, loud trucks can be heard almost everywhere.
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But they started with the obvious leads, like an ex-boyfriend. Kristen suddenly remembered potentially valuable information about someone Cherish had dated.
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According to Kristen, the relationship was fraught with emotional and verbal abuse,
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but there was never any physical abuse. She then remembered something that happened after they broke up.
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They had a very back-and-forth toxic relationship, you know, like mentally and just verbally,
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but not physically. Like they, they never got physical with each other is what she said to me,
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but they, they had dated for a long time, you know, and they broke up around the same time.
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Me and Cherish started becoming really good friends and he did threaten her a couple days
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before she went missing, but it was just because I guess she borrowed some money from him and she
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hadn't paid him back yet. And he was like, you know, if you don't give me my money, I'm going
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to hurt you or whatever, but he didn't mean it. He was just, I guess, trying to scare her into
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giving him the money. So, of course, this individual was brought in for questioning,
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even though Kristen maintained he really loved Cherish and would never harm her.
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The interrogation resulted in the rapid conclusion that this person was not the culprit,
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and the search continued. When detectives began digging into her past, another ex-boyfriend came to mind.
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But this boyfriend couldn't be part of Cherish's disappearance because he had also mysteriously disappeared.
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And get this, he'd been missing for more than a year from a town not far from Ryzen.
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What was going on in Arkansas? Obviously, this boyfriend wasn't able to be brought in for questioning, and although his remains were eventually found, the search for his killer is ongoing.
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Talk about a weird coincidence there. Now, a third young man who was romantically involved with Cherish rose to the surface.
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eyeballs singled him out after tongues began wagging and making claims in the small community
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someone was supposedly running around saying that they were going to make her disappear
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the claims were substantiated and now officers wanted to know why this young man would say such
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a thing it turned out that cherish had named him as the guy who got her pregnant and would be the
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biological father. She wasn't keeping this secret to herself, though. But the young man was. He had
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been trying to keep this relationship a secret for over a year. His name was Bradley Smith,
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but he went by his middle name, Hunter. When I met Hunter, it was around the same time frame that
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I had first met Cherish since they both lived on the same road. They lived probably about half a mile down the road from each other for a long time so they knew each other very well The first time I met Hunter he was actually in a fight in my friend Raven front yard He was fighting with another guy
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The impression that I got from him, just meeting him and not really knowing him,
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He seemed very arrogant and cocky. He acted kind of like he was better than everybody.
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And this was when he was younger. And it only got worse with age. The older he got, the more cocky he got.
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He had the attitude of he was better than everybody. That's the impression that I got.
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When Cherish started hanging out with him, I think it was because most of the people that she was hanging out with
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that was in Woodlawn had either moved or, you know, had started a family and they weren't,
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you know, partying and hanging out as much. And so they started hanging out and they hung out a lot.
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There were times that she would be at my house and he would be constantly blowing her phone up
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saying, hey, when are you coming home? What are you doing? Where are you at? Who are you with?
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but they weren't dating they weren't official they weren't anything but but friends and he was
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very possessive over her for some reason but at the same time he didn't want anybody to know that
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he was in contact with her and that he had a relationship with her although the sexual
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relationship they had was behind closed doors hunter did take cherish out to eat and do other
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activities with him but he made their friendship seem more casual than it was i think that he liked
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her a lot but he and i i don't want to say this because you know it makes me feel bad to even
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think that someone would would think this way about her but i think he was ashamed of her
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and I just don't understand why because she was a wonderful person and she deserved so much better.
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Hunter thought a lot of himself because Cherish didn't have the slimly impossible body
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of Miss Universe and her family didn't have money or anything else really to offer him.
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He convinced himself that he could do much better than a girl like Cherish. And now she was not only claiming
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to him and his friends that he was the father of her child, but she was also refusing to
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get an abortion like he wanted. He was the kind of guy that he cared more about how a woman looked on the outside than
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who she was as a person on the inside. And either way, she was gorgeous to me in and out.
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She was beautiful on the inside and out. If you knew her, you loved her. I mean, she never met a stranger. She would help anybody the best to her ability, even if she didn't know him.
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You know, she always did what she could for everybody. And he was just he he he took advantage of her.
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Hunter set out to dispel any rumor or notion that he was the baby's father, even going so far as to maintain he had seen a doctor and was sterile.
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Cherish didn't believe him and didn't care anyway She didn't need Hunter and she told him that
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But she was going to keep the baby 2015 wasn't a good year for this part of Arkansas
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Not only was Cherish missing and her ex-boyfriend was also missing But a third tragedy also befell this group of young people
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A close friend was killed in an accident and they all attended the funeral. Amongst the mourners was Hunter.
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He kept giving her these side eyes during the funeral and I told her, you know, just don't worry about it.
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What is he going to do here? It's, you know, it's packed. It's a funeral. Surely he has enough decency to not cause a scene at one of his childhood friend's funeral.
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And he didn't. He didn't cause a scene. But the day that we went to Scholar's funeral, that was the last time I'd seen Cherish alive.
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Among the attendees at the funeral were two other common friends, Jonathan Gunther and Josh Brown.
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Cherish's grandma, who was still hospitalized, remembered something about these two.
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They owned a loud truck They lived with Hunter unsupervised Even though Josh was only 15
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Hunter was babbling everywhere that He wasn't the father and he was going to make Cherish disappear
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At least that's what he told his own mother Who then told her friend Who then went to the police
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Notice that it wasn't Hunter's mother who took that information herself to the station.
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It was an uninvolved third party. She added that she had seen both Jonathan and Josh at the store together,
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acting suspiciously the day before Cherish's disappearance. These clues were enough for deputies to drive to the residence of Hunter's mother,
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where they found Josh and Jonathan burning debris. The officers quickly transported the boys to the station for questioning.
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Josh was accompanied by his mother since he was a minor, and the reveal was unusually easy, especially since Mommy was a minor.
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wanted to make sure her son wouldn't do any time. In the background of the interrogation, she vocalized to Josh,
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you better tell these detectives what you know so that you can save your butt. Not so that we can find Cherish, but selfishly, so she could save her son's ass.
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Of course, we know how that works. Detectives pressure the family The parents to get their kid to speak
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And it doesn't ever do them any good Lawyer up people So as you would expect 15 year old Josh listened to his mother
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And provided the answers to the burning questions Who did it? And where's the body?
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The search was conducted in a wooded area located approximately 1.2 miles southeast of Rogers Road.
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The deceased body, Cherish Albright, was found in a circular hole approximately 4 foot 10 inches deep.
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The body was that of an adult white female, heavyset, dressed in bluish gray, pullover, lightweight shirt, and a black jacket with the right arm in the sleeve.
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The body also had some lightweight short-legged pants that appeared to be pajama bottoms.
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The body was positioned in a semi-seated position, leaning on to its left side. The body was cold to the touch, and extremities were flexible, indicating that the body had come out of rigor.
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There was evidence of blunt force trauma to the head area. When attempting to move the body from the burial site, it was discovered there was a single crossbow arrow located in the lower left back, just above the hip area.
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Entry appeared to be at the back. On a frigid night in December of 2015, Cherish, with her baby alive inside of her, was mercilessly hunted down and thrown into a muddy hole where she lay for one week until she was found and the wheels of justice began turning.
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15-year-old Josh was interviewed more than once, claiming he wasn't forthright with what he knew because he was afraid of Hunter Smith and Jonathan Gunter.
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Hunter had told Josh he would hunt him down if he said anything. He finally caved and described the nightmare taking place on December 4th.
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This is what he said following his admission that he had overheard Hunter tell at least one person,
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I'm going to kill that bitch. The following narrative took place once Josh had arrived at the fields and woods where the murder was to be carried out.
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Jonathan and Hunter were already in position, waiting. This is a reenactment. She got out and I walked around the back of the truck and because I was peeing and then she went to the front of the truck and Hunter stepped out of the woods and started yelling at her and he shot her with a crossbow.
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and then he tried like you know mr gary i'm telling you the exact truth i was fixing to get
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in the truck and drive off and hunter he started yelling at me he said get on my knees hunter and
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gunther both walked up and gunther hit her first and then she fell over and was coughing and stuff
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and then got there, hit her again. Cherish was coughing and stuff because she was now spewing blood from her mouth.
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But that wasn't enough for Hunter. He needed to make sure she was dead because he didn't want that baby.
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And apparently, this was the only way to prevent it from being born. She ultimately died by taking a baseball bat
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to the back of the head after screaming out pleas for the lives of herself and her baby.
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Terrence was gone. They found her. It was below freezing outside and she left with no shoes on and no jacket.
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Who would do that? You know, she's pregnant and she's not going to put herself in danger.
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And the only reason that she even left that night is because she was tricked. They tricked her.
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and they did this by luring her with promises that hunter wanted to talk and work things out
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come on josh said get in the truck and i'll take you to him during questioning josh recalled that
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after cherish was ambushed and shot in the back with an arrow the other two took turns hitting her
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over the head with a baseball bat because hunter had already made it clear that if the arrow didn't
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kill her, they were to finish her off in this way. Josh was then threatened that if he ever told
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anyone, both Hunter and Gunther would hunt him down and kill him. Hunter made it clear that he
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did not want the baby under any circumstances. He made it clear that he was embarrassed by his
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relationship with Cherish, and he made it clear to more than a handful of people just
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what he was going to do about it as he solicited anyone and everyone to help him Between the time of the murder and the interrogations which Hunter refused by the way The other two boys were asked if Hunter mom knew anything The following was Gunther response
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Did she talk to you about this case when you got there? No, sir. Not really. She just kind of, she thought about, or she asked me if I thought that he really did it.
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She asked you that? And what did you tell him? I told her no because I didn't want her getting involved in it.
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Okay. But I'm sure she had her suspicions. Well, we can't go into that. But what actually happened when the police came?
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Where did Hunter go? Well, he was outside first. I want to say he was outside smoking weed with one of the guys.
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I played the drama. And then that was the last time I seen him. The answer to the specific question, where did Hunter go, was it crawled to the safety of his mommy where he could discuss the situation and lawyer up.
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Hunter was told by his mother that under no circumstances was he to talk to police without an attorney present.
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Some good advice, whether you're guilty or not. Let's talk about Hunter's mother a little bit.
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Yes, sir. You know her very well? I mean, I know she used to come in and out. Okay.
00:31:26
That was really good. Once Hunter found out that Cherish was pregnant, did you ever talk to his mother about any of that?
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Or were you present when she was talking about it? Well, she came in the house right after he had found out.
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She came in the house from work one day, and we was sitting around in the game room where the pool table is.
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And she had mentioned something about it because something about Cherish's grandma
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had been going to his sister's workplaces and telling her, telling him how's it feel to be an aunt or something like that.
00:32:05
And then I know Hunter said, excuse my language, but he said, I'm going to kill that bitch.
00:32:11
That's exactly what he said to his mama. Even though she tried to hide her knowledge of this murder under lock and key, just like she tried to hide her son, she not only told her friend that Cherish was pregnant, but that she was not happy about being a grandmother at the age of 39 because, you know, she did such a good job the first time around with Hunter.
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She didn't want to spoil it or, God forbid, put in any more work, in terms of parenting, that is.
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Worse yet, the Monday after Cherish went missing, she admitted to her friend that Hunter had made a statement that he could have done something to make her disappear.
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To which Mommy admonished Hunter, telling him to keep his mouth shut or he could end up in jail.
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For the mothers of Josh Brown and Jonathan Gunter, it was all about protecting babies.
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Their babies. No other babies, just theirs. and certainly not Cherish's. Josh's outright confession and Gunther's eventual admissions
00:33:21
were integral to solving this case, but other evidence included the burning of the baseball bat and clothing,
00:33:30
a shovel in the truck, and a crossbow at Hunter's home that matched the arrow found in Cherish's body.
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And finally, a deer stand and climber for the stand proved that the location of the killing was accurate, as confessed by Gunther.
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By the way, a deer stand is a perch that is placed up on a tree above the eyesight of deer for hunting.
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In this case, it wasn't used for deer, though. The land where the grave is at, where the hole stood and she was buried.
00:34:08
Yes, sir. You know how long is that land? I know his grandpa rented, I guess. Leases it for hunting rights?
00:34:15
Yes, sir. Okay. I let him, actually, he had a climber that broke, and I let him use mine,
00:34:21
and so he took me out there and showed me it was a poacher. What kind of crime stand was it that you loaned him?
00:34:29
It was a, my dad can tell you, it was a big man crime stand, I think that's what it's called.
00:34:37
Old man. Old man. That sounds more right. All right. Let me ask you this. if you saw that clown's thing, would you know it?
00:34:45
Yes, sir. How would you know it? Just the way it looks. My dad gave it to me. Can you tell me anything in particular, any scratches, any marks, anything about it?
00:34:55
The netting, I can tell by the netting on the seat. How's that? There's a couple of them ripped.
00:35:05
Where are they ripped? By the edges. By the edges. Yes, sir. any big scratches or you didn't put your name on it anywhere
00:35:15
or anything like that? No, sir. Okay. But you think he'd look at that stand and tell us if it's yours or not?
00:35:21
Oh, yeah. And you loaned it to Hunter. He put it in the woods. Do you know if he put it in that area where the girl was buried?
00:35:30
I'm pretty sure he moved it. Okay. You cold? Yes, sir. All right. Do this. I'm going to just leave the tape running.
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we're going to take a short break to turn that air down and we need to bring it standing
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don't you just love how ironic it is for the officer to ask the killer are you cold
00:35:53
we turn the air down cherish didn get the opportunity to escape the cold and return to the loving warmth of her grandmother house Her fate was decided for her as was the fate of her unborn child
00:36:10
After compiling all the evidence, it was clear that Hunter masterminded Cherish's demise and committed the shooting and beating that killed her.
00:36:20
now the only question that remained would be how many assailants would actually face murder charges
00:36:29
other than Hunter and would the suspect stand trial for one homicide or two The End
00:37:20
But the alleged father of the child was not so happy. In fact, he was determined to end the pregnancy by ending Cherish's life.
00:37:34
He vowed to hunt down and kill his accomplices if they ever snitched. Fortunately, the miner of the group, Josh, broke down and admitted his part in the butchery and bloodshed of Cherish's final hours
00:37:51
20-year-old Jonathan Gunter and 20-year-old Hunter Smith would be held without bond for capital murder, kidnapping, and abuse of a corpse
00:38:04
Josh Hunter was also charged with first-degree murder but was pled down because of his willingness to participate in the investigation
00:38:14
Oh, and an additional person was arrested for hindering arrest and apprehension and that would be Hunter's mommy
00:38:25
who hid her son and Jonathan while instructing them on how to abscond from the situation
00:38:32
Kristen had strong words for the mothers in this story. You know, but it didn't surprise me because she was always just a piece of shit, really, and so was Hunter's mom.
00:38:48
And she actually, she took it a little too far with her involvement. Now, don't get me wrong.
00:38:57
I'm a mother as well. You know, I have that same motherly love and that motherly instinct and I would do anything in the world for my son, but I would not help him hide after killing someone.
00:39:13
And not only did she help hide him and lied to the police, but she also was convincing him to do what he had to do to get rid of her.
00:39:24
This was evidenced by the confiscated text messages between Hunter and his mother.
00:39:31
In an effort to save her own son, the cold-blooded Hunter, she was 100% complicit in the cover-up.
00:39:40
Talk about bad parenting. Not only do you raise a psychopath, but you also try to protect him.
00:39:47
Finally got a confession out of one of them. Hunter had already took off. He was hiding at his family's deer camp that his mom took him to.
00:39:58
Now, initially, it was Jonathan and Hunter at his mom's house. They were hiding out there when the police showed up.
00:40:07
And because this was right after Josh had already confessed and they didn't know that.
00:40:15
So they had already went on Hunter's mom's property, whoever's name it was in. I believe she said that she had to sell her house that they were living in to pay for lawyer fees
00:40:25
and all of that and to keep herself out of jail. And his mom is basically, I'm just going to go out
00:40:33
and say she's a big piece of shit. And I hope that, you know, she, she gets hers very soon.
00:40:41
The only reason that she is not in jail right now is because she testified against her own son in
00:40:46
court because she's that big of a sleazeball. She's just a lying, narcissist bitch. And I think
00:40:53
that he got his narcissistic tendencies from her and the controllingness from her.
00:41:00
Kristen said she actually went to school with Jonathan Gunther and had one word for him,
00:41:07
weird. To be more specific, she said, very weird. She detailed that he didn't interact well with
00:41:14
others and was socially awkward and the one you would suspect as plotting the whole thing.
00:41:22
If you look at the picture of him that was used on the APB, he's smirking and wide-eyed.
00:41:30
He really does look like a sociopath. You know, I mean, it just shows you that you never really know who a person is, no matter
00:41:38
how long you've known them, no matter how nice they seem, you never know how evil someone
00:41:46
can truly be. And it's scary. Since this has happened it has made me so much more cautious that sometimes I almost like just it traumatizing really like I have PTSD and anxiety
00:42:05
from it just because if somebody can do that to her that she's known her whole life they used to
00:42:13
fish together when they were toddlers and diapers what I mean how could someone do that I mean it's
00:42:22
It just, it doesn't make sense. Jonathan and Josh were sentenced to life in prison as a result of plea deals,
00:42:32
while Hunter Smith was sentenced to death for capital murder. Hunter's mother served probation.
00:42:41
The trial took only one week, and the jurors needed less than five hours to reach a unanimous conclusion.
00:42:48
That is, until semantics became involved. The Supreme Court states that there's a question about the unborn child and the definition that falls into.
00:42:59
Now today I spoke with a Cleveland County clerk who says this ruling is unbelievable.
00:43:05
I'm not a fan that they overturned it. The Cleveland County Circuit Clerk, Jimmy Cummings, says he sat through the entire trial of the disturbing murder of pregnant 22-year-old Cherish Albright.
00:43:17
Brad Smith was sentenced to death after court documents show he shot Albright through the back with a crossbow and hit her in the back of the head with a wooden bat.
00:43:27
Then, with help, Smith buried her. Now, three years later, the Arkansas Supreme Court voted 5-2 that Smith be resentenced.
00:43:35
Justice Courtney Hudson noted the question at hand was whether the state legislature's law properly provided for the unborn child definition of person to be applied when an aggravating factor in capital murder sentencing is being considered.
00:43:49
I read why they overturned it. Obviously, I'm not a lawyer, but I'm disappointed. I'm very disappointed.
00:43:57
Cummings says this murder shook the community, and this sentence being overturned will be another shockwave through Cleveland County.
00:44:03
I think people are going to be very upset about it. An unborn child is not a person, according to the Arkansas Supreme Court.
00:44:13
Don't you just love government? Bunch of fucking ghouls. As you can imagine, Cherish's grandmother and mother were the most upset of anyone.
00:44:24
We reached out and spoke to her mom, Belinda, who made it clear that the memories are just too painful for her to discuss.
00:44:33
In 2015, though, she had a little something to say. She's a very sweet girl. She loved her brother, loved her family.
00:44:44
It's like a scene in a movie. You never think the police are going to pull up and tell you that, you know, your daughter has been found and murdered.
00:44:53
She naturally was also very distraught over the Supreme Court's ruling. Hunter was convicted of capital murder and was to pay for it with his life.
00:45:06
If you're unclear about what capital murder is exactly, here's a quick summary. Capital murder originated as a means of defining the types of homicide with some extenuating circumstances that make it especially heinous.
00:45:21
The term is only used in eight states, and interchangeable terms are aggravated murder and first-degree murder.
00:45:30
In any case, if the homicide is categorized by any of these terms, the death penalty is on the table.
00:45:38
Cherish's mother fought hard along with senators to get the definition of person
00:45:46
to include a fetus at any stage of the pregnancy when the mother is murdered. This is not to be confused with today's politics involving pro-choice versus pro-life,
00:45:58
but it's not completely unrelated either. You cannot take away someone's constitutional right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
00:46:08
unless you deperson them first with, you know, a definition. Oh, by the way, trigger warning.
00:46:18
In 2017, a jury found Brad Hunter Smith guilty of capital murder, but prosecutors pushed for a death sentence because he killed someone other than Albright,
00:46:28
the unborn child, and that got Arkansas Representative Joe Cloud's attention. Not only did he kill the woman in question, he also killed the baby.
00:46:39
Later, the Arkansas Supreme Court overturned that sentence because part of the law did not consider a fetus a, quote, person.
00:46:46
I wanted to make it extremely clear to the Arkansas Supreme Court that, yes, that definition of person in the criminal code applies also to aggravating circumstances.
00:47:00
In March, Cloud's bill passed, making it clear to the courts and everybody that an unborn child in any term of pregnancy is considered a human life.
00:47:10
In the future, then no other mother, grandmother, family member, friend will have to go through all that.
00:47:19
In 2004, President George W. signed a significant federal bill called the Unborn Victims of Violence Act.
00:47:27
Here's President Bush at the signing. I am pleased that you all could be here for the first bill signing ceremony of the year 2004.
00:47:38
The Unborn Victims of Violence Act provides that under federal law, any person who causes death or injury to a child in the womb shall be charged with a separate offense in addition to any charges relating to the mother.
00:47:56
as of today the Our nation will acknowledge the plain fact that crimes of violence against a pregnant woman often have two victims.
00:48:09
Therefore, in those cases, there are two offenses to be punished. The law should have applied to the case of Cherish, but the argument was specifically about a definition.
00:48:23
The same definition that is being quarreled about in 2022. what defines a person.
00:48:31
That is precisely the argument Cherish's mother was hoping to win in the case of her pregnant daughter's death
00:48:38
as it pertained to Arkansas state law. And she won, but only after Hunter's sentence was reduced from death to life without parole.
00:48:50
Rather than try the whole case again, Cherish's mom and family accepted the change.
00:48:58
Kristen says that to this day, she still has difficulty coping with what happened.
00:49:04
It has caused her to have PTSD. And she is a lot more aware of her surroundings and hesitant to let anyone into her life without knowing them.
00:49:17
But even then... I would give him the label of being a monster. because he had this planned for three or more days and he still went through with it he had time to
00:49:32
to think to himself maybe I shouldn't do this but instead he not only involved two other people
00:49:40
which how he got them to to be a part of it I have no idea I don't know if drugs were involved
00:49:50
or if they were just desperate for friendship that bad, to not only do that, get two other people
00:49:58
that have their whole lives ahead of them involved to sit here and scheme up a plan to not only kill someone but brutally kill someone that is pregnant
00:50:10
just because it's possibly your baby and you don't want anybody to know. And the fact that he thought that he was going to get away with it, he did.
00:50:22
He drove up and down that road knowing that she was buried in his backyard. hard knowing and drove up and down that road like nothing had happened because he was that cocky and
00:50:35
how can that not be a monster and I fully believe that if he was not caught if if Josh had not come
00:50:45
forward and finally told the police where her body was they would have never found her and he probably
00:50:52
would have done it again because he, I feel like he is that type of person that he would
00:50:59
have killed someone again. Except for his cockiness, Kristen says he seemed perfectly normal.
00:51:07
He had no criminal history. But that's exactly why he fits into our motto. The worst monsters are real.
00:51:18
It's also interesting that the killer's name in this episode is really Bradley Smith,
00:51:25
but everyone called him Hunter because he preferred it that way. Like a lot of people in Ryzen, he was a sportsman.
00:51:35
He liked his four-wheeler, his truck, and just being outside. He loved to hunt, and there's nothing wrong with that.
00:51:44
Unless you're hunting people. But when he discovered that Cherish might be pregnant, he enlisted his buddies to help him trap her, ambush her with a crossbow, and finally beat her to death,
00:52:00
before placing her on a trailer and riding away with her corpse The way he treated her another human being
00:52:12
the things that he did to her, you wouldn't do to a deer. Not without a clear conscience, anyway.
00:52:23
But if there's one silver lining in this horrible, horrible story of a young mother and her unborn baby
00:52:33
taken from this world for absolutely no reason other than shame. It's that Bradley Hunter Smith will never hunt again.
00:52:59
Thanks again for joining us. Head on over to swordenskill.com slash plus to join if you can.
00:53:09
We'll see you next time for everybody else. And until then, stay safe. Hey Mike and Rest of Sword and Scale.
00:53:42
I just finished plus episode 89. And you brought me to tears with that one. It's been a little over four years since my suicide attempt failed.
00:53:57
And if it had worked, I would have missed out on the love of my life. I wouldn't be married.
00:54:04
I wouldn have the most beautiful stepdaughter in the world I would never have met my nephew who was like the light of my life I wouldn be working towards becoming a police officer
00:54:19
And just the love that would have left a lot alive if I had, I don't want to say successfully, but that's the word that's coming to my mind,
00:54:30
successfully left this planet. There would have been so many lives that would have been changed forever.
00:54:41
And for anybody that's listening and struggling, just please remember you're not alone.
00:54:46
And you're so loved. And you're needed and necessary. Mike, thanks so much for the tears.
00:54:55
You suck shit. It's a very important message, though. at the same time. We truly are the best.
00:55:02
Short-time listener. Been all of the show. Big-time fan forever. Thanks so much for reaching us here in Phoenix, Arizona.
00:55:12
My name's Kylie. Can't wait to hear more. Can't wait to be a Plus member forever.
00:55:19
Rock on, my dude. I like that. Bye.