The police found her in the living room, partially hidden behind the Christmas tree. She had been shot in the top of the head. In the kitchen, Chris lay in a pool of blood, barely alive from a gunshot wound to the head. The room looked like a war zone—chairs overturned, the table shoved aside, blood on nearly every surface.
It was Thanksgiving morning when I got the call that Leslie was dead. I remember my wife hearing my reaction from across the house and running in to see what was wrong. I just said, “Leslie’s dead. ” You are never prepared for that kind of shock.
Leslie was a 45-year-old single mom who ran a fitness studio in Troy. She specialized in women’s self-defense and worked with abused women’s shelters. She was the daughter I never had, always smiling, always quick with a joke, always the first to lift someone up. After my wife passed away, she was the one who pulled me out of that black hole of grief.
She’d call and say, “A bunch of us girls are going to the Mexican restaurant. Why don’t you come out? ”
She was competent with firearms and had her own gun. But when she went on that date, she deliberately left it at home.
She didn’t want to make a bad first impression. Her past with Bobby Tarr was troubled. They had dated about a year earlier, and at first he seemed charming and supportive. But then he started doing things to make her doubt herself.
He stole $15,000 from her—money she was saving to buy a car—and used it to buy a motorcycle. She stayed with him longer than she should have, hoping to get her money back. After she broke up with him, he didn’t take it well. He became emotionally and verbally abusive.
Once, on a trip to Florida, he got angry and abandoned her and her kids in a hotel room with no transportation and limited money. He came back two days later. She was embarrassed about the relationship because she’d warn other women against men like him, and then ended up with one herself. She was trying to start over.
It was her first time using a dating app. She began chatting with Chris Smith, a 48-year-old divorced father who worked for a pool contracting company. They hit it off and arranged to meet at a bar near his house in Farmersville, about 65 miles away from her home. She thought being that far away would keep her safe.
They met at the Uptown Saloon and spent a few hours together. The date was going well, so they decided to head back to his house. They were making a frozen pizza when someone forced his way through the back door. Chris tried to hold the door shut and shoved a refrigerator in front of it.
A gunshot fired through the wood and hit him in the head. Leslie ran to the living room, trying to hide or get away. He caught up with her quickly. She was on her knees when he shot her through the top of her head.
We argued that at trial. That is not a moment of rage. That is a cold, calculated execution. The police quickly focused on Bobby.
He didn’t take the breakup well, and we knew of at least one instance where he showed up while Leslie was on a date with someone else. License plate readers on Interstate 55 caught his vehicle traveling north around the same time Leslie left work, and then coming back after the attack. When investigators interviewed Bobby, he appeared calm and collected. He never asked why they wanted to talk to him.
He claimed he was home all night watching a movie with his daughter. But his daughter told a very different story. She said he left at around 6:30, came back about half an hour later, said he needed to go back, and didn’t return until about 9:15. Later that night, he was crying and sobbing, saying he was lonely.
Around 2 a. m. , she found him doing laundry—the clothes he had worn that day. She said that was very unusual.
When they searched his property, they found nothing. Then, several days later, his brother contacted police to say that Bobby’s father had found something while cleaning up on the property. It was a firearm in a plastic bag, along with some magazines, ammunition, and a magazine holder. The strange thing was that investigators had already searched that area and found nothing.
The gun had Leslie’s DNA on it—a tiny spot of blood on the guide rod, right below the barrel. Robert Tarr’s fingerprints were on one of the plastic bags. We argued that he had wiped down the gun to clean it off. The DNA was in a place where it could only have gotten there if the gun was close enough to her when he fired.
His phone revealed even more. He had texted a friend, wondering why she would be in Farmersville, concluding it had to be a guy. He had searched for Chris’s name, put Chris’s address into his maps, and looked up things like: “Can police track me if I use a VPN? ” and “How do police track cell phones?
” His phone data showed it was turned off and back on at times consistent with the murder. Even after his arrest, Bobby wouldn’t stop. While awaiting trial, he was accused of hiring a fellow inmate to kill Chris Smith and the detectives on the case. He reportedly planned to sell some property and a motorcycle to pay the bounty.
The plan fell apart when the inmate he’d enlisted went straight to the Sheriff’s Department. In April 2024, two and a half years after Leslie was murdered, the case went to trial. When I testified, I made eye contact with him several times. There was no remorse in his eyes.
He stared at me the whole time. I think he’s sorry he got caught, but he doesn’t care what he did. His defense argued it wasn’t premeditated. But you don’t drive 65 miles with a gun in the middle of the night to have a conversation.
The jury took only a few hours to find him guilty. He was sentenced to 85 years—50 for the murder, 25 for the firearm enhancement, and 10 more for the attempted murder of Chris. To this day, he doesn’t admit what he did. Chris Smith was in a medically induced coma for two months.
He woke up with permanent brain damage and has no memory of ever meeting Leslie or of the night he was shot. Hundreds of people came to remember Leslie. The service had to be held in a big public facility, and there were still more than 600 people there. Some of the talks were powerful, some were funny—which spoke to who she was.
Even now, years later, it’s still raw. It’s still fresh. She spent her life teaching women how to protect themselves and still ended up a victim. That’s the part that sticks with you.
She would want her story to save just one more woman. So I’ll keep talking about her as long as it takes.
