The Middletown Nightmare

Valerie Smelser was twelve years old and living in a rented house on Route 11 in Middletown, Virginia, with her mother, Wanda Smelser, and Wanda’s partner, Norman Hoverter. The children were not enrolled in school and the family moved often. Valerie spent months in an unheated basement, chained by the door at night and sleeping in filth, and by January 1995 she weighed 51 pounds, about twenty below normal for her age.

On the night of January 22, 1995, Wanda and Hoverter reported her missing from a gas station restroom off Interstate 81 in Woodstock. Neighbors and investigators did not believe it. Valerie had died at the house after Hoverter beat her, and her body had been left in a wooded ravine in Clarke County near the Shenandoah River, where it was found the following Monday. An autopsy put her death down to a head injury, hypothermia, or both.

Both adults were charged with first-degree murder that January. Hoverter entered an Alford plea to murder and abduction in July 1995 and was sentenced to life in prison, plus a suspended ten-year term; the Virginia Court of Appeals rejected his attempt to withdraw the plea in November 1996. Wanda Smelser pleaded no contest to second-degree murder and abduction in August 1996 and was sentenced that October to 12 years. The plea spared Valerie’s older sister, Brittany, from having to testify.