Murder of Cherish Perrywinkle

Cherish Lily Perrywinkle was born in Jacksonville, Florida on Christmas Eve of 2004 to Rayne Perrywinkle and Billy Jarreau, whose marriage ended in divorce and subsequent custody battles.[2]

On June 21, 2013 around 8 pm, Rayne, Cherish, and her two younger sisters went shopping when they first met Donald Smith at a Dollar General, where he offered to buy them clothes they could not afford with a $150 Walmart gift card. The Perrywinkles then got into his white van and went with him to Walmart, where they shopped for the next 2 hours. At 10:30 pm, Smith offered to get them cheeseburgers at the store’s McDonald's and convinced Cherish to go with him. However, surveillance footage shows that they walked out of the store instead, which was the last time Cherish was seen alive. About half an hour later, Rayne called the police to report that her daughter had been abducted and an amber alert was later issued.[3] The next morning Cherish’s body was found in a creek behind Highland’s Baptist Church. It is believed that Smith had bound her in the back of his van, where she was sexually assaulted and strangled to death.

Police immediately identified Smith as the abductor, with his van being one of the main focuses. Around 9 am the next day, officers saw his van on the interstate and cornered him before he surrendered and was promptly arrested. Smith was known to police as a local sex offender with a long criminal history including numerous offenses against minors. He had been released from jail only three weeks before Cherish’s murder.[4]

Smith’s trial began in February 2018. He was found guilty of first-degree murder and sexual battery and was sentenced to death in May 2018. The jurors were in tears after witnessing crime scene photos of the murder as the defense tried to suppress the images. Julie Schlax, the defense attorney, urged the jurors to focus on the law and not their raw emotions.[5][6]