In June of 2013, 8-year-old Cherish Lily Perrywinkle was out shopping with her mom in Jacksonville, Florida when she was abducted by a man who had a criminal history of preying on children from as far back as the 1970s.
Cherish was born on December 24, 2004 & her mom, Rayne Perrywinkle called her daughter the best Christmas gift. She was a sweet, second grade student at Chaffee Trail Elementary School & an active member of the Paxon Revival Center Church. Cherish loved drawing pictures for hours at a time & later sharing them with those that she loved. She was always quick to smile, laugh & tell a joke & when she’d recently accomplished riding her bike without training wheels, something that made her extremely proud of herself.
Cherish was born into a chaotic environment to her mother, Rayne & her father, Billy Jerreau. The couple never married & went on to continuously battle over custody, a fight that didn’t end until 2010 when Rayne was awarded full custody of her three daughters.
The custody evaluator in the case argued that Rayne was unable to provide her children a stable living environment & feared for their safety in their mother’s custody.
In 2013, Cherish was living with her mom Rayne, her stepfather Aharon Shaun Pearson & her two younger sisters, 5-year-old Destiny & 3-year-old Nevaeh, who was Cherish’s half-sister as her father was Aharon. She & her mom were exceptionally close & loved watching movies together. Cherish often dressed up in Rayne’s clothes as she told her mom that she wanted to be just like her when she grew up.
On Friday, June 21, 2013, Rayne was busy getting Cherish ready for her trip since she was set to fly to California the following day to spend the summer with her father. She was getting her daughter’s clothes washed & packed, washing her hair & heading out to do a little shopping to buy Cherish new clothes.
At about 7:30 pm that evening, Rayne, Cherish, Destiny & Neveah walked to the Dollar General Store on Edgewood Avenue. Rayne didn’t have a car & didn’t drive, so she & the girls made the twenty minute walk with the double stroller to the store.
Money was tight & Rayne had budgeted $100 that had to cover the cost of clothes, household items & transportation to the airport the following morning so she knew she was going to have to choose her items carefully. As the four did their shopping, Rayne brought several items up to the cashier for a price check & had her heart set on a white dress with hearts printed on it for Cherish. When the cashier told her the price, she was forced to put it back, knowing it would put her over her budget. At this point in time, she was unaware that a man seemed to be monitoring her every move.
As Rayne was wrapping up her shopping at Dollar General, the cashier told her that a man had asked her if Rayne had to put clothing back. When she left the store, the man the cashier referred to was waiting outside.
Soon, the man approached the Perrywinkle family. He told Rayne that his name was Don & he had little ones of his own, so he could sympathize with her situation. He said that he was waiting for his wife & they had a $150 giftcard to Walmart & he offered to drive them over to the store & help with some of the purchases. The cashier later reported seeing the man speaking with Rayne in the parking lot for about 15-20 minutes.
Looking back, Rayne tearfully admits that she should have told the man no, but she desperately needed clothing for her girls, so she agreed. Don’s wife still hadn’t come around & he said she could just meet them at Walmart. During their conversation in the parking lot of Dollar General, the weather turned & it started to rain, so Rayne reluctantly agreed & they headed to Don’s van.
They loaded the stroller inside the Don’s white van that had carpet inside, the windows were covered with blinds. The drive to Walmart took about ten minutes & during that time, he told Rayne that he worked for Jacksonville’s Habitat for Humanity & said that his wife was from the Virgin Islands. When they arrived, Don said he would wait at the van for his wife while she went inside to shop with her three daughters.
They headed over to the clothing section & soon, Don joined them inside, still no sign of the wife he claimed to have. It was clear that the man wasn’t doing much shopping of his own, other than the rope he placed inside the shopping cart. His focus seemed to be specifically on Cherish & he interacted with the girl in the shoe section & offered to buy her new shoes. As Rayne looked at the shoes, she immediately saw that they were totally inappropriate for an 8-year-old little girl & she told Don no since they were women’s shoes with a heel. More disturbing, during the shopping trip, Don brought Cherish into the dressing room on two occasions.
As it was getting later, Walmart made an overhead announcement at 10:30 pm, indicating that it would be closing in thirty minutes. The group had yet to eat dinner so nearing 11 pm, Don offered to buy hamburgers from the McDonald’s that was inside the store. Rayne allowed Cherish to go with him & after about twenty minutes, she realized that they still weren’t back.
When Rayne went to investigate their whereabouts, she realized that not only was the McDonald’s already closed, but there was no sign of Don or Cherish. She later reflected that she agreed to let Cherish go with Don because the McDonald’s was inside the store & there were still many people milling about.
When Rayne called 911, utilizing a Walmart employee’s cell phone, she told the dispatcher that her daughter was missing & explained the circumstances that led to her disappearance. She indicated that she only agreed to go to Walmart with the man named Don because he told her he had a wife; she elaborated that she doesn’t take rides with strangers.
Rayne said that the man had white hair & dark eyebrows & she had a strange feeling about him when she first met him. She explained that she allowed Cherish to go with him to the dressing room twice while she was looking at shoes because she didn’t want Don to think she was an overprotective person. She told the dispatcher that she felt foolish for falling for the man, believing he might just be a genuinely helpful person. She wondered why, after spending two hours at Walmart, Don’s wife still hadn’t arrived. But by that time, the shopping cart was full of clothes & Rayne felt like it was too good to be true.
Rayne said that she had been searching for Cherish inside Walmart for about a half hour, but because the store was closing, there were no other shoppers inside. She admitted that she should have never allowed her daughter to walk off with the man. She realized that he was focusing too much attention on Cherish while they shopped & she mentioned that he wanted to buy her high-heeled shoes that were even too high for herself to wear. She told the dispatcher that he had been grooming Cherish & she hoped to God he wouldn’t rape or kill her. Rayne wept as she explained that she couldn’t remember what Cherish had been wearing that evening or the exact details of Don’s van, other than the fact it was white.
As officers arrived & began their investigation, they realized that Rayne & her girls had spent the evening with a man who was known to authorities, 56-year-old Donald James Smith. He was a registered sex offender with offenses as far back as the 1970s & had only been released from prison three weeks earlier.
As investigators reviewed Walmart’s surveillance video, they could see Don & Cherish, who wore an orange dress, walking toward the front of the store together & pausing at the closed McDonald’s. At 10:44 pm, they watched as they turned & walked out the front doors of the store & drove away in his 1998 white Dodge van. This image was the last time Cherish was ever seen alive.
Within six hours of the 911 call placed by Rayne, police put out an Amber Alert for Cherish.
The following morning, another 911 call came through & the caller indicated that they were aware of Cherish’s abduction. They were calling to report seeing a white van parked deep in the bushes behind a church. The van looked suspicious & then they heard about Cherish & realized that it could be linked to the abduction.
An additional 911 call came through & the caller said that they rented a room in Don’s mom’s house which is where Don lives as well. He told the dispatcher that it was only the day before that he helped Don remove two seats from his van & as he did, they chatted. Don told his friend Charlie that he had been out a couple of nights before, hanging out with people in the woods at a make-shift homeless camp. According to Charlie, Don specifically mentioned that it’s a location that the cops have never raided & it popped into his head, that maybe Don was hiding out in that location.
On the morning after Cherish’s abduction, Saturday, June 22, 2013, police were addressing an unrelated traffic accident when Don’s distinctive van just happened to drive by. When police pulled the van over on Interstate 95, they found Don behind the wheel, wearing the same clothes he’d worn the day before, the lower part of his body was soaking wet. The van held the items that Rayne purchased from Dollar General the evening before, but Cherish was nowhere to be seen. The double stroller that Rayne had placed in the van was also missing. He admitted that Cherish had gotten into his van at Walmart, but claimed she jumped out at a red light & ran away.
Meanwhile, police headed to the church that the 911 caller reported seeing the white van parked deep into the bushes. With the help of a canine dog, it was here that officers tragically found Cherish’s body in the marsh of Broward Creek behind the Highlands Baptist Church. She was lying on her left side, half underwater, covered & weighed down by a fallen tree, bricks & grass. She still wore the orange dress seen in the surveillance video, but it was pulled up to her chest & she was naked from there down. The innocent, young girl had been raped, sodomised, beaten & strangled to death. Blunt-force trauma wounds were found on her head & ligature marks were around her neck after she was strangled with what appeared to be a t-shirt. Based on the defensive wounds to her little body, it was clear that Cherish had fought for her life.
Don Smith was arrested & charged with kidnapping, sexual battery of a person under 12 & first-degree murder.
Area & national media outlets covered this case extensively & highlighted Smith’s prior sex crime convictions which occurred in 1977, 1992 & 2009. Hundreds attended Cherish’s funeral which was also locally televised. Cherish’s father, Billy Jarreau arrived in Jacksonville on June 26 & said that he was in shock & disbelief that his baby girl was gone & words cannot describe how he feels.
In 2015, as Smith’s case moved toward trial, his defense team filed a motion to change venue due to the widespread media coverage & the brutal nature of the case. Rather than changing the location of the venue, three hundred potential jurors were questioned about their knowledge of the case & an impartial jury was selected. Smith also filed a motion to prevent the State from showing Cherish’s autopsy photos. Because the chief medical examiner for Duval County, Dr. Valerie Rao, would testify, there was no need for photos to be shown.
The trial began in February 2018 & during the prosecution’s opening statements, they spoke of what happened that night at Walmart & said, every mother’s darkest nightmare became Rayne Perrywinkle’s reality. State Attorney Melissa Nelson went on to say, Cherish Perrywinkle was 8-years-old. She weighed 67#. Separated from her mother, from her little sisters, from all she knew what was safe in this world, she spent the last petrifying hours of her life with him.
When Dr. Rao testified, she indicated that she had been present at the creek where Cherish’s body was recovered. When discussing the extent of injury to the young girl’s throat & while viewing graphic photos from the autopsy, the expert witness who’d testified in hundreds of cases, began to choke up & requested a five minute break.
The defense counsel moved for a mistrial arguing that Dr. Rao’s testimony was prejudicial, but this motion was denied & after a ten minute recess, Dr. Rao continued her testimony without further issues. She discussed the fact that Cherish had been strangled in such a horrific manner that the blood vessels within her eyes, face & throat had burst. The jury was informed that Cherish had not died a quick & easy death & instead, she died a brutal & tortured death & according to Dr. Rao, it would have taken the 8-year-old about five minutes to die from strangulation.
As the details of Cherish’s violent death were listed to the horrified jury members, the defense urged jurors to focus on the law rather than emotion, retribution or revenge.
Not only did the jury watch the CCTV footage of Smith leaving Walmart with Cherish, but they also heard from a crime lab analyst who testified that the man’s DNA was found on & inside Cherish’s body. There was also the witness account who had seen Smith’s van in the location by the church where her body was ultimately located. Cherish’s body was submerged in water & when Smith was apprehended, he was soaking wet.
The jury was also able to hear jailhouse recordings of Smith during the second day of the trial. During a recorded phone call between Smith & his mother, he indicated that it was Cherish who had followed him from the store & willingly hopped in his van & blamed the young girl for her own death. Because of his prior convictions, he knew at that point that he was in trouble so according to Smith, he had no choice but to kill her. As he spoke of the sweet, young girl, he asked his mother, What’s her name again? During the conversation with his mother, it was also clear that he intended to try to use the insanity defense during his trial when he asked about getting a copy of the DSM-5, a guide to mental disorders, so he could practice feigning illness in court.
Later, when a group of girls toured the jail, Smith could be heard on tape commenting to a fellow inmate, I sure would like to meet those girls at the Walmart. He specified that girls ages 12 & 13 were his target. He disturbingly added that Cherish had a butt on her.. She had a lot for a white girl.
After a nineteen minute deliberation, the jury came back with a unanimous verdict, finding Smith guilty of kidnapping, sexual battery of a person under 12-years-old & first-degree murder. The jury unanimously recommended that Smith be sentenced to death.
Years after Smith’s conviction, a previous victim of Smith’s came forward to speak of her interaction with the man in 1992 when she was 13 & he was 36. As she walked along to a friend’s house, he pulled up in his van & asked if she knew Suzie. The stranger suddenly ordered her to get inside his van & she began to sprint in the direction of her friend’s house. As she came upon a playground, she hid inside the tube of a slide, praying the man hadn’t seen her climb in, terrified she would slip out of the tube & he would see her.
As she trembled in fear, she heard Smith call out, I know you are in there you little b**ch. I’m going to find you. It wasn’t until another day when the girl was leaving her home & she saw Smith lurking outside. She made eye contact with him & instantly felt that he was going to kill her. Her family managed to copy down his license plate number & reported him to the police. He pleaded guilty to attempted kidnapping & served six years in prison.
Smith filtered in & out of prison & a sex offender commitment program since the 1970s. At the time of Cherish’s murder, he had only been released for a few weeks after serving time for attempting to lure a child to a McDonald’s after posing as a child welfare case worker & asking the child sexually explicit questions over the phone.
During the weeks he was a free man, before he murdered Cherish, he went into Shands Hospital (now UF Health) & requested he be committed under a Baker Act after being on a crack cocaine bender for four days. He told the hospital staff member that he wanted to kill his drug dealer. The employee indicated that he was actually seeking a residential treatment program so he was turned away. It was only days later that Cherish was murdered. He claimed to have used crack in the Walmart bathroom before he lured the young girl from the store & he told a doctor that crack turns him into a monster.
Heather Holmes, a forensic psychologist, diagnosed Smith with an antisocial disorder, borderline personality disorder, clinical depression, severe cocaine disorder & pedophilia disorder. The jury was told by the defense that by age five, Smith was already showing signs of sexual awareness. By thirteen, he was participating in voyeurism & public masterbation.
Donald Smith, who is now 67, remains relentless in his efforts to avoid execution & in January 2024, he was back in court seeking post-conviction relief. He argues that the trial should have been moved from Duval County due to the publicity & jurors should not have been able to view the autopsy photos. Each argument has been rejected due to the overwhelming evidence of guilt. In 2023, Smith & his attorneys filed a 78 page motion to vacate his sentence on the premise of ineffective counsel, claiming his original trial attorneys mishandled the case.
In the weeks after Cherish was murdered, Rayne Perrywinkle’s two younger daughters were removed from her custody. In 2017, she spoke out & indicated that she’s struggled terribly since Cherish was murdered since people have blamed her for her daughter’s death. Because of her immense grief, she struggles to function & hold down a job. Destiny & Nevaeh have since been adopted by a relative in Australia.
It was clear that on the horrific night of June 21, 2013, Don Smith had preyed on the vulnerabilities of the struggling mother shopping with her three young daughters. Because Cherish had spent hours in Smith’s presence & rode to Walmart in his van, she had no hesitation in climbing back in with the promise of McDonald’s as he drove her to her death. The young girl had spent the previous hours in his company & as trusting young children do, she believed the man meant her no harm. Smith had been able to casually walk away with his victim, avoiding any concerning scene & fellow shoppers would have seen nothing more than what appeared to be a grandfather with his granddaughter.
The 911 call that Rayne placed shortly after her daughter’s disappearance highlights her intuition. From the beginning, something did not seem right during her first interactions with Smith. She pushed these instincts aside & hoped that Smith was a good samaritan who simply wanted to provide her assistance. His conversation & mention of a wife & a job with Habitat for Humanity slowly put her at ease, allowing her to push her concerns away, fearing being perceived as an overprotective mother. During the first moments of panic as she realized that McDonald’s was closed & Cherish & Smith were nowhere in sight, her mind immediately went to the worst case scenario. This is a case of a mom who was trying to do the best for her children & by accepting assistance from Donald Smith, Cherish sadly paid the ultimate price. But there is only one person to blame in this case & that person is Donald Smith.
References:
- Dignity Memorial: Cherish Lily Perrywinkle
- The Florida Times-Union: ‘Cherish did not die quickly, & she did not die easily,’ state attorney tells jurors
- First Coast News: Cherish Perrywinkle case: 911 calls & transcripts
- The Florida Times-Union: Stroller in Cherish Perrywinkle abduction/death key evidence
- Supreme Court of Florida: Donald James Smith v. State of Florida
- In the Supreme Court of Florida: Donald J Smith v. State of Florida. Death penalty direct appeal
- Chilling Crimes: Cherish Perrywinkle
- The Florida Times-Union: Past victim recounts horror of Donald Smith during penalty phase
- The Florida Times-Union: Donald Smith seeks relief in death sentence of 8-year-old Cherish Perrywinkle
- Ati: Inside the brutal murder of 8-year-old Cherish Perrywinkle at the hands of a convicted pedophile
- News 4 Jax: Cherish Perrywinkle: The case that shocked Jacksonville
