Ann Story Fox was born on November 12th, 1960, and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. The daughter of Carl Louis Fox Jr. and Marcia Mansfield Fox, she attended Presbyterian College in South Carolina and later earned a master’s degree from Converse College. She moved to Aiken, South Carolina in 1988 and spent the next two decades building a life in the community.
For approximately eighteen years, Ann worked at Kennedy Middle School, teaching children with special needs and participating in the school’s deaf-education program. She was also active outside the classroom, including with the Aiken Debutante Society and Cotillion Club.
Ann was a mother of three: a daughter and two sons. At the time of her death, she and her husband Wilson Smith were separated, and she was living in a rental house on Whitney Drive while the couple went through a divorce.
Her personal life may have been unsettled, but according to those who knew her professionally, Ann continued coming to work and caring for her students.
That was one reason her absence on April 25th, 2008 was so alarming. Ann, then forty-seven years old, failed to appear at Kennedy Middle School for work that morning, and as the hours passed without a telephone call or explanation, her friends became increasingly concerned. Fellow Kennedy Middle School teacher Sally Ferriter went to Ann’s Whitney Drive residence around lunchtime to see whether she was all right.
Ferriter later recalled approaching the back door while almost expecting to find herself unable to get inside. Instead, the door opened. She walked through the house and down the hallway toward Ann’s bedroom. There, according to Ferriter’s account, she found Ann lying on the floor and tried unsuccessfully to locate a pulse before contacting the police.
The Aiken County coroner publicly confirmed that Ann had been stabbed to death. Authorities were initially reluctant to reveal details about the number or location of the wounds. Ferriter, who had witnessed the scene, believed Ann had suffered repeated wounds around the neck, although that was her personal observation rather than an official autopsy finding.
The violence of the attack immediately became one of the case’s defining features. Yet there was another detail that may have been even more important to investigators: there were no signs of forced entry.
From relatively early in the investigation, authorities told reporters they did not believe the crime was the work of a serial killer. They also said the killer probably knew the victim.
Detectives began examining the people around Ann Fox Smith: relatives, friends, colleagues and others who knew her. The investigation unfolded at a particularly complicated point in her personal life. Ann and her husband were separated, and she was living away from the marital home while going through a divorce. Her obituary nevertheless listed Wilson Manning Smith Jr. as her husband at the time of her death.
Within months of the murder, investigators publicly confirmed that DNA evidence had been recovered and submitted for analysis. There was considerable hope that laboratory testing—and potentially comparison through federal databases—might identify Ann’s killer. But the anticipated breakthrough never came.
A later report on the investigation stated that hair recovered from the crime scene and sent to the FBI was ultimately determined to belong to Ann herself rather than her attacker. Numerous other items had also been submitted for forensic examination, but authorities did not publicly provide a complete inventory of what had been collected.
As the investigation continued without a solution, law enforcement sought behavioral assistance. A criminal profile prepared through the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, or SLED, offered one of the clearest public glimpses into what investigators believed had happened.
According to later accounts of the profile, the killer was likely someone very familiar with Ann, her daily routine and her residence: someone who understood when she would be alone. The attack did not appear to the profiler to be a burglary or sexual assault that had unexpectedly escalated. Instead, the perpetrator may have viewed Ann as an obstacle or threat that had to be removed.
The profile also suggested that the offender might remain dangerous; not necessarily to strangers, but potentially to people close to him whom he perceived as threatening. Investigators suggested that such a killer might also pay unusually close attention to news about the case, asking questions, discussing theories or attempting to learn what police knew.
One of the more intriguing details about the investigation did not become widely known until much later. In June 2026, WRDW examined an Aiken Public Safety incident report and reported that the most recent entry reflected investigative activity from 2014. According to that report, a witness told police he believed he had seen Ann Smith’s soon-to-be ex-husband leaving the area in a red Mazda Miata on the morning of the murder. Investigators followed the information, but the report says they determined the referenced Miata was in a repair shop and found no physical evidence inside the vehicle.
The case has occasionally resurfaced in the media over the years—at six months, eight years, ten years, fifteen years and now eighteen. But the central facts have remained remarkably unchanged. And despite years of interviews, testing and follow-up work, no one has been prosecuted for the killing of Ann Fox Smith.
Crime Immemorial 