A Father Recalls a Day Now Far From Ordinary
Nothing Seemed Amiss Before Montgomery Teens Disappeared, He Says

By Donna St. George
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 10, 2007

There is still no official ruling on when the two missing Rachels died.

But, preparing for his daughter's funeral today, Troy Crites said he is certain of the date -- not from police or any science exactly, but from every detail he has absorbed and what his gut tells him.

"There's no question in my mind they did it the 19th," he said.

Jan. 19, the first day they were gone.

Crites, father of one of the Montgomery County teens who were found Feb. 2 in an apparent double suicide, remembers that morning as ordinary. He recalled that his Rachel, Rachel Lacy Crites, 18, and her best friend, Rachel Samantha Smith, 16, had a sleepover at his home. They were getting up as he was leaving for work at a defense contracting firm in Virginia.

Everything had seemed normal, he said. Although his daughter had suffered from depression, she had seemed much improved in recent months.

She called him later, about 10:30 a.m. He said they talked every day by phone about when they would have dinner -- they almost always had dinner together -- and who would walk their black Labrador retrievers, Lina and Zowie.

His daughter mentioned heading to a movie in Georgetown with her friend.

"So what are we doing for the weekend?" he recalled asking her.

"I don't know," she said.

"We could go for a hike," he offered. "We could climb Old Rag . . . "

They agreed to figure it out in the morning.

But that moment never came.

Today, Troy Crites and other relatives and friends will remember the dark-haired teen -- who sang in the church choir and used to run cross-country at Wootton High School -- at a memorial Mass at St. Martin of Tours Catholic Church in Gaithersburg. She and her friend were found in a car in Loudoun County at the West Virginia line, dead, police suspect, from carbon monoxide poisoning.

But even as Crites plans to take his daughter's ashes to their resting place -- inside a granite cemetery bench in the shade of an oak -- he said he does not fully understand how the moment arrived, how two teenage girls chose to take their lives.

The girls had been friends for a couple of years but were especially close during the past year. Rachel Smith had been his daughter's "guardian angel," he said, and helped her pull through after a suicide attempt in March. She had been cutting herself and underwent treatment and medication, he said.

Recently, she had made plans for the future, he said, looking to become a nurse or to work with animals.

"That's why this seems so out of place," he said, his face appearing weary, in the three-story Gaithersburg townhouse he shared with the teenager. He said that even her psychiatrists were surprised by her death.

Yet, along with the promise of getting better, he said, was the weight of the past.

At the time of his daughter's suicide attempt, Crites said, he was separating from her stepmother after more than eight years, which was difficult for the teen. Rachel's birth mother, Kathryn Cornelius, had lived in Italy for most of Rachel's life -- writing, calling, visiting -- but living on another continent.

Everyone tried to come together to help, Crites said.

Two months later, Rachel received the Catholic sacraments of Communion and confirmation, a decision she had made for herself, her mother said in an interview yesterday. Two months after that, her mother treated her to a trip with her to Paris. Then there was a big family get-together in Florida.

The last time she talked to her daughter, Cornelius said, was five days before she disappeared. Her voice was upbeat during a two-hour conversation, she said, and "she was cuddly and sweet and talking about how she was going to sing the Mass."

The search for the missing Rachels started the next weekend -- and the longer they were gone, the greater the efforts.

It was Feb. 2 when Troy Crites was told his Subaru station wagon, which the girls had been driving, was discovered on rugged terrain beyond a remote utility trail.

Crites found the goodbye letter from his daughter not long after he realized she was missing. It was on the desk, in her diary, on a page dated Jan. 19. She wrote of Rachel Smith, referring to her by her widely used nickname, Pi, the mathematical term.

"Wherever I end up laying, whether buried or cremated, I want to stay with my true love, Pi, buried next to her," the letter said. "This is my choice. I'm sorry."

Some of this diary entry was made public the week the teens vanished, setting off a quiet public debate among friends and strangers about whether the Rachels had a romantic relationship that their families did not condone.

Crites said this is not so: "A. It doesn't make any difference. B. There's no real evidence at all. . . . They were just two teenagers who did everything together. Is that all that uncommon?"

Despite the wording of the letter, he said, "true love and sexuality are not the same things."

Rachel Smith was a junior at Wootton High School, and Rachel Crites had started attending classes at Montgomery College. But her father said his daughter was always " a little young for her age"; some days, he said, she returned to Wootton and sat through a class or two with her friend.

Both girls loved animals. Crites worked at PetSmart, and Smith worked at Potomac Kennels in Gaithersburg, where fellow employee Tracy Payne recalled her as responsible and in love with American Eskimo dogs.

Often, Rachel Crites drove her friend to work. Sometimes she stayed to play with the puppies, Payne said.

Rachel Smith "was so outgoing, and she never seemed like she had any problems," Payne said. "She was always smiling and always happy, and so was her friend."

Both families had supported the friendship. Rachel Crites once went with Rachel Smith on a family visit to New York, and Rachel Smith recently joined her friend and her mother, in from Italy, on a weeklong visit with relatives in Pennsylvania.

"I think Rachel and Pi had what they considered an undying friendship -- true friends forever," Cornelius said. "Pi had helped Rachel, and they had grown close."

Rachel Crites even got a tattoo of a little guardian angel, her father said.

He remembered that as the girls were heading back from Pennsylvania, they called him at home. It was New Year's Eve, and they asked if he would make dinner.

"What would you like?" Crites asked.

He said he heard the teens conferring.

"Can you do something around tater tots?" they asked.

For Troy Crites, the memory provides a touch of solace.

Marian Smith, Rachel Smith's mother, said that she and her family are waiting for answers about exactly when the girls died. But, she added, "our hearts go out to them, just as their hearts went out to us."

Troy Crites has decided that Jan. 19, 2007, will mark his daughter's resting place. It is the last day he heard her voice.