3rd man arrested in Dean murder case

A man who has long been linked to the 2015 slaying of Samantha Dean and her unborn child was booked in the Bastrop County Jail on Tuesday after a grand jury indicted him for capital murder earlier this month.

Freddie Lee Smith, 33, was arrested on Sept. 11 in Harris County on the capital murder charge. He is being held without bail.

Smith is accused of taking part in a murder-for-hire scheme in which authorities believe VonTrey Clark, a former Austin police officer who was indicted in 2016 in connection to Dean's death, offered Smith and another man $5,000 to kill her. Witnesses said Clark hired Smith and Kevin Leo Watson to kill Dean because she was pregnant with her and Clark's child, Madeline, and she didn't want to end her pregnancy, according to court documents.

Dean, who was a Kyle Police Department crime victims counselor, was seven months pregnant when she was shot and killed, court documents show. Clark, who has a family with another woman, was arrested and charged with capital murder five months after authorities found Dean’s body with three fatal gunshot wounds behind a vacant office building in Bastrop County.

Watson was also arrested and indicted for capital murder in 2016. 

Watson and Smith were both connected to the case through cell phone records of burner phones that police say the pair used to coordinate the killing with Clark. Both lived in Harris County. 

Clark was fired from the Austin Police Department in 2016 after he left to Indonesia without permission to leave Travis County. His attorneys said at the time he was seeking medical attention for an undisclosed ailment. He was detained in Bali, Indonesia, and was flown back to Texas by FBI agents after he was charged with murder.

Bastrop County District Attorney Bryan Goertz on Wednesday declined to comment on Smith’s arrest or on why he was arrested three years after Clark and Watson, citing a gag order barring him from discussing the murder cases.

“The state is of the opinion that it’s virtually impossible to comment on Smith without talking about Watson and Clark,” Goertz said. “It’s the same fact pattern.”

Smith’s arraignment has not yet been set. Watson pleaded not guilty in 2016, then amended his plea to guilty earlier this month. Clark has plead not guilty; his trial is set for March.

The jury selection is slated to begin Feb. 4 at the Bastrop school district’s Center for the Performing Arts. The large venue is being used for the process because of the high number of jury summons that are likely to go out, county officials have said. No county courtroom has capacity to fit such a crowd, which officials have said could range in the hundreds.

The state is seeking the death penalty for Clark, court documents show.

Last year, Bastrop County District Judge Carson Campbell granted Clark’s defense attorneys' request to delay the trial by more than a year, citing voluminous discovery and cell phone data attorneys had to sort through.

Discovery turned up around 68,000 documents, a hard drive with five terabytes of data and DNA test results. Investigators also seized around 50 cell phones in the case and have said cell phone data will play a large role in the evidence presented at trial.