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Last March, the media devoted days to the tale of a young Atlanta woman who'd negotiated her way out of captivity at the hands of a fugitive murderer. It was a gripping story that was impossible to ignore. And with the moral-values hullabaloo of Election '04 still echoing nationwide, religious conservatives levitated the story to the realm of fable.

Ashley Smith, a 27-year-old widowed mother with a young daughter, had been taken hostage in her own apartment by Brian Nichols, an African-American man who had fled from an Atlanta courthouse where he'd just shot and killed four people, including a judge. Round-the-clock coverage focused on how, during her ordeal, Smith pulled out Rick Warren's mega-selling evangelical book, "The Purpose-Driven Life," and read to Nichols from a chapter called "Using What God Gave Me" to gain his empathy and trust. He eventually let her go, and she alerted the authorities, who arrested Nichols without incident.

"I think God gave this young lady a supernatural empathy and compassion for someone that most anybody else would have tried to kill," the Rev. H.B. London, a vice president for ministry at Focus on the Family, said back on March 16. "Every Christian organization in the country will want to tell her story."

"The power of family and faith was never more apparent in action than in [the] news story of Ashley Smith," Larry Jacobs, vice president of the Howard Center for Family, Religion & Society in Colorado, said in a press release then.

"The only thing that helped Ashley Smith get through an over-seven-hour ordeal where quadruple-murder suspect Brian Nichols held her hostage was her faith in God," announced Fox News.

Her faith wasn't the only thing, as it turns out. This week, with the release of her memoir, "Unlikely Angel," Smith admits that she earned Nichols' confidence by offering him a dip into her stash of crystal methamphetamine. Nichols, Smith says in the book, didn't know what "ice" was, or how to take it. "You don't have to smoke it," she recalls telling him. "You can hot rail it or snort it." She cut it up for him herself, using a plastic supermarket card and a $20 bill. Smith didn't tell police investigators, or the media, about the meth until months later.

Today, Smith says she kept the meth a secret from the cops not so much for fear of prosecution as for fear of her family's reaction -- they didn't know she was back on drugs at the time and had thought she was doing much better.

In March, the media reported that Smith had struggled with addiction for years prior to the hostage ordeal; according to her updated account, she refused to do drugs with Nichols that night. Offering meth to Nichols, she writes, was a gut reaction. He'd asked her for marijuana but she didn't have any. "I was trying to cooperate with him in every possible way and that just came out when he asked for a drug," Smith said in an interview. "I knew the way it had totally just made my mind go crazy, so yes, I was completely scared that's how he could react."

She admits she'd had experiences of psychosis while high on meth herself, causing her to hear voices and crash her car, leaving her body scarred.

# posted by the Editor on Sunday, October 02, 2005