Lawyer Charged With Trying to Put Hit on Wife Allegedly Tampered With Witness

A Frankfort lawyer charged with trying to hire someone to kill his estranged wife allegedly tampered with a witness to the alleged crime.

The new case against Robert Gold-Smith was filed just weeks before the scheduled start of his murder solicitation trial. He faces a felony charge of communicating with or detaining a witness.

Before allegedly attempting to put a hit on his wife, Gold-Smith viciously beat her in a Will County Courthouse hallway in front of numerous witnesses, police said. According to a psychiatrist’s report, Gold-Smith, 53, said he “blacked out” during the November 2010 attack.

The couple had been in court together for their divorce case.

The murder-for-hire case stems from detectives reportedly catching Gold-Smith asking a fellow county jail inmate to kill his wife in October 2012. According to court papers, Gold-Smith discussed paying for the murder of his wife with at least five inmates during his time in jail.

No less than three of these inmates met with detectives and offered to wear a wire while talking to Gold-Smith about murdering his wife. At least one of them did just that, according to police reports, and donned a recording device to catch Gold-Smith’s statements.

The indictment against Gold-Smith identifies only one former fellow inmate as the target of his murder-for-hire overtures. That inmate, 52-year-old Brian McDaniel of Morris, was most recently jailed in June 2013 on a charge of retail theft.

The witness tampering case was filed Thursday. No details on the charges were available that afternoon.