Hostage’s Cool Compassion Disarmed Atlanta Fugitive

She trembled with fear before the armed man who was wanted in the shooting deaths of a judge and three others. But Ashley Smith kept her head, even when Brian Gene Nichols pushed into her home by sticking a gun in her ribs, and bound her with masking tape, an extension cord and a curtain.

“I didn’t want to die,” she said Sunday. “I didn’t want him to hurt anybody else.”

The 26-year-old woman, credited by police for bringing a massive search for Nichols to a nonviolent end Saturday, resurfaced a day later with a harrowing account of the 7 1/2 hours she spent as Nichols’ hostage in the apartment she had moved into only two days before in an Atlanta suburb.

Captor and captive talked, and he untied her, she recalled on CNN and in accounts posted on the website of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He looked at her family photos, she read to him from the Bible and “The Purpose-Driven Life,” and cooked him a breakfast of pancakes and eggs.

“ ‘Wow, real butter,’ ” Smith said Nichols told her.

Progressively, she gained the trust of the man who, at that time, was Georgia’s most-wanted fugitive, with a $60,000 reward on his head in connection with the slayings. “I really didn’t want him to hurt himself, or anyone else to hurt him,” she said.

Watching TV news about the carnage being blamed on him, and the multi-agency law enforcement operation mounted to capture him, she said Nichols told her: “ ‘I cannot believe that’s me on there.’

“He needed hope for his life,” Smith said. “He said, ‘Look at my eyes, I’m already dead.’ I said: ‘You’re not dead. You’re standing right in front of me. If you want to die, you can. It’s your choice.’ ”

Police and the FBI were scouring Georgia and nearby states for Nichols, 33, after he allegedly grabbed a sheriff’s deputy’s gun Friday morning at the Atlanta courthouse where he was being retried for rape, and fatally shot his judge, a court reporter and another deputy. He then fled, and according to police, shot dead an agent for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as the agent worked on his new home.

Nichols was arrested Saturday morning after Smith talked him into allowing her to leave her apartment in Duluth, 20 miles northeast of Atlanta. She said she phoned 911 right after getting into her car.

Gwinnett County police responded with a SWAT team.

Smith’s former captor, who described himself at first to her as “a soldier,” offered no resistance to police, and surrendered by waving a makeshift white flag. “If you don’t turn yourself in, lots more people are going to get hurt,” Smith said she told him. She said Nichols called her “an angel,” and said God had led him to her door so that she’d tell him he had hurt a lot of people.

She asked him, she said, if he believed in miracles. “You got out of that courthouse with police everywhere, and you don’t think that’s a miracle?” Smith said. “You don’t think you’re supposed to be sitting right here in front of me.... Your miracle could be that you need to be caught for this. If you go to prison, then you need to share the word of God with all the prisoners there.”

Wielding a gun, Nichols had forced his way into the apartment about 2 a.m. on Saturday, after Smith returned from buying cigarettes. She feared for her life, she said, and told the armed invader she had a 5-year-old daughter, who was not with her.

“My husband died four years ago, and I told [Nichols] that if he hurt me, my little girl wouldn’t have a mommy or a daddy, and she was expecting to see me the next morning and that if he didn’t let me go, she would be really upset,” Smith said.

About 6 or 6:30 a.m., she said, Nichols told her that he had to ditch the pickup he had taken from the slain federal agent, David G. Wilhelm. She followed Nichols in her car, she said, because if she had refused, she might have been killed or someone else might have been hurt. She then drove him back to her apartment.

At 9:30 a.m., Smith said, Nichols let her leave to see her daughter. He offered to hang curtains while she was gone.

“I know he was probably hoping deep down that I was going to come back,” Smith said, “but I think he knew what I had to do, that I had to turn him in.” Before she left, she said, he asked her to visit him in jail.

Nichols was being held by U.S. authorities in an undisclosed location on a federal charge of possessing a firearm while under indictment. Officials in the office of Fulton County Dist. Atty. Paul Howard said more serious charges in the shootings would be brought against Nichols within 30 days. An initial court appearance was expected sometime this week.

On a warm, sunny Sunday morning, with the dogwood trees in cottony bloom, a religious service was held in Decatur, outside Atlanta, for the shooting victims, and co-workers were invited to light candles in their memory. In addition to Wilhelm, those slain were Superior Court Judge Rowland Barnes, 64; court reporter Julie Ann Brandau, 43; and Fulton Sheriff’s Deputy Hoyt Teasley, 43.

Courthouse employees hugged each other and joined members at Covenant Ministries, a nondenominational Christian church, for a tearful service. “There is just a sadness all over the department,” said Wanaada Clark, a detention officer with the Fulton County Sheriff’s Department who attended before reporting for her shift at the county jail. “Everyone is still trying to cope with it.”

Co-workers also lighted a candle for Sheriff’s Deputy Cynthia Hall, 51, who was in critical condition and on a respirator at Grady Memorial Hospital. Although initial reports were that Nichols had allegedly shot her in the head after overpowering her and taking her gun at the courthouse, hospital officials said Sunday that it was now believed she either had been struck on the head with a gun or fell and hit her head.

For the tightly knit community of Customs agents, the loss of the 40-year-old Wilhelm, a highly regarded colleague, in an apparently random act of violence was an especially cruel blow.

Co-workers gathered outside the neat two-story home in Peachtree City, south of Atlanta, where the agent and his wife had been living until they could move into the home they were building in the Buckhead neighborhood of north Atlanta. It was inside that home that police said Wilhelm was slain late Friday.

In November, Wilhelm was promoted and transferred to the agency’s Atlanta office, where he supervised investigations on money laundering, drug and human smuggling, and customs violations.

“We’re upset,” said Joe Barringer, a fellow agent who came to console Wilhelm’s wife, Candee. “David was a great man.” The couple had no children.

A nearly 18-year veteran of federal law enforcement, Wilhelm, a native of Salisbury, N.C., had previously been assigned to Customs offices in the Carolinas and Virginia. In 2001, he was the recipient of the Blue Eagle Award, an honor given by the now defunct U.S. Customs Service, for a major drug bust that resulted in the seizure of about 2 tons of marijuana and $2.4 million.

“Dave’s real skill was in narcotics and money-laundering investigations,” said Kenneth Smith, Wilhelm’s superior in Atlanta. “His ability to take down criminal organizations from fragmented information he put together was just incredible.”

Wilhelm also had the reputation of being a leader and a team player. “The agents that worked for him were very inspired by him,” said Smith. “I was inspired by him to be a better boss.”

Todd Elmore, 40, who had been persuaded by Wilhelm to leave the Internal Revenue Service and join his agency, said of his longtime friend: “His passion in life was catching drug dealers, and building new homes.” Wilhelm had a general contractor’s license, Elmore said, and was laying tile in the bathroom of his new home on the night of his death.

“He didn’t play golf or watch sports on TV,” said Elmore. “He loved to build new houses.”