'Whatever the case called for'....

By Pam Zubek
Colorado Springs INDEPENDENT
www.csindy.com

I can't remember the first time I met Lou Smit, because he was the kind of person that, once acquainted, you felt you'd known him forever.

Gentle, wise, diligent, Smit made his mark on our world by going about his business of capturing what he called "Tiga Gatas," a make-believe creature with a tiger's head and an alligator's tail. The creature had no way to excrete. It was vicious.

"Tiga Gatas" was the term he used to describe the worst of the worst, bad people, people like Robert Browne, who claimed to have murdered 48 individuals, including 13-year-old Heather Dawn Church, who was kidnapped from her Black Forest home in 1991. Smit helped solve that case in 1995, by using a single fingerprint on a screen at the Church home.

In a career spent almost entirely in this area, Smit served as a homicide investigator for the Colorado Springs Police Department, Fourth Judicial District Attorney's Office and the El Paso County Sheriff's Office. He died last week of colon cancer at 75.

After he moved to Pikes Peak Hospice in mid-July, his room was often filled with the voices of visitors. John Ramsey, father of slain 6-year-old JonBenét Ramsey, traveled from Michigan. Actor Kelsey Grammer called from New York and talked with Smit days before he died. Smit had helped solve the 1975 rape and murder of Grammer's sister Karen, and decades later, Grammer wanted to pay for any last-minute tests or treatment, no matter what the cost. ....continued

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