RICHMOND — A 54-year-old man has been charged with murdering a mother of four inside her home more than 30 years ago. 
 
 Sherill Smothers was charged in the death of Marsha Carter, a 25-year-old Richmond resident who was killed in December 1983. Five years after Carter’s death, Smothers was struck by a drunk driver, rendering him a quadriplegic, court records show. 
 
 Carter was likely stabbed to death in her Santa Clara Street home; an Oakland Tribune article from 1983 says she vanished in the middle of a Tuesday night, and that one of her children found a pool of blood in her bed the following morning. Her 1-year-old child was found unharmed but wide-eyed, underneath the bed, the Tribune article says. 
 
 About 10 days later, Carter’s body was found in the trunk of her 1975 Mercury Monarch, in the parking lot of a West Sacramento hotel. 
 
 Deputy district attorney Chris Walpole said new evidence surfaced connecting Smothers to the killing, but he would not say what kind. He said Richmond police recently started taking a look at old homicide cases and re-opened the investigation into Carter’s death. 
 
 “We don’t let murders slip through the cracks if we can,” Walpole said. “Richmond police were diligent, thorough, went back to old cases, and now we’re hoping this defendant can be held accountable for the murder of this young woman.” 
 
 Authorities would not discuss the suspected motive in the case but say Carter and Smothers knew one another. 
 
 Another Oakland Tribune article from 1983 says that Carter worked as a purchasing agent for a manufacturing firm, and that she’d been a member of a rock band. 
 
 Smothers has already been released from custody, having posted $1.03 million bail. Smothers was awarded more than $6 million in the 1990s after he was involved in a car crash and sued General Motors, records show. 
 
 According to court records, Smothers was driving a Corvette in 1988 when he was rear-ended by a drunk driver, causing the car to flip. He sued and was awarded a $6.1 million judgement that a court of appeals affirmed. 
 
 The murder charge carries an enhancement for the use of a knife, which could add years to Smothers’ sentence if he’s convicted. 
 
 The charges were filed after a grand jury hearing. Those hearings are typically conducted in secret. The charges were announced Friday. 

 The only possible witness to Marsha Carter’s murder couldn’t testify. He was too young to speak. 
 
 On the the morning of Dec. 7, 1983, 25-year-old Marsha Carter’s three oldest sons woke without their mother. The boys, ages 10, 9, and 7, entered the single mother’s room to find a pool of blood on the mattress and their 10-month-old brother cowering beneath the bed. There would be no sign of the young Richmond, California, mother for another 10 days until her body turned up some 70 miles away, in the trunk of her own car in Sacramento. Without a witness or even a suspect, the case faded away without a trace, just as Marsha Carter had that foggy December morning. 
 
 Then, nearly 33 years later, police announced their first suspect in the case. On Sept. 14, the cold case reignited with the arrest of 54-year-old Sherill Smothers, Carter’s one-time boyfriend whose own brush with death was once the subject of headlines. 
 
 Smothers is quadriplegic, his spinal cord badly damaged at the neck. He cannot move below the chest, his lawyer testified during a 1991 lawsuit against General Motors. In 1988, five years after Carter’s death, Smothers had been driving his Corvette with his wife and infant son when a drunk driver rear-ended them, sending the Corvette flying upside down off the road. Smothers’s baby was ejected from the window, an accident that may have saved the child’s life. The overturned car’s roof collapsed, crushing Smothers’s neck. 
 
 But at the time of Carter’s death, Smothers was abled-bodied and living near her in the Bay Area, public records show. 
 
 “They were in a dating relationship,” Lt. Felix Tan, a public information officer for the Richmond Police told The Daily Beast, declining to address what he considers Smothers’s motive. “The prosecutor doesn't want to share that at this time,” Tan said. 
 
 Public records show Smothers was married in June 1984, just six months after allegedly slaying his once-girlfriend. 
 
 When police arrested Smothers on murder charges on Sept. 14, they placed his bail at $1.03 million, a fraction of the $6.1 million in damages he won from his lawsuit against General Motors. Now Smothers is out on bail. But for the first time in 33 years, police say they are moving in on a suspect in Marsha Carter’s slaying. 
 
 Reached by phone, members of Smothers’s family declined to comment on his arrest. Richmond Police reopened the case in 2008, as part of an effort to clear old cold cases. They were working with a slaying that had stumped investigators even in its immediate aftermath. “POLICE FIND NO TRACE OF MISSING MOTHER OF 4,” an Oakland Tribune headline had read after the hunt for Carter’s body stretched into its third day. 
 
 At the time of the murder, Smothers had been 21 and working in the circulation department of the Tribune. He’d worked for the newspaper since he’d started delivering papers at age 12. 
 
 Carter was 25, and worked for a manufacturing firm, the Oakland Tribune reported in 1983. She was in a rock band. She drove a 1975 Mercury Monarch, the same car in which her body would be discovered on Dec. 17, 1983, parked outside a Sacramento hotel. She lived with her four sons on a street of short, neat houses between two south Richmond freeways. 
 
 When Carter went missing the morning of Dec. 7, her three oldest sons ran to one of the neighbors’ houses for help, police said Saturday. When the boys returned with a neighbor, they found their baby brother hiding under Carter’s bloody mattress, rattled but unharmed and unable to tell anyone what had happened. 
 
 Police would not find their mother’s body for another 10 days, or her alleged killer for 33 years. 
 
 A grand jury hearing, conducted in secret, moved to file murder charges against Smothers in August, police announced Saturday. These charges include a special provision for murder with a knife, which could could extend Smothers’s prison sentence if convicted, the East Bay Times reports. 
 
 “The department is extremely proud of our detectives’ amazing work,” Richmond Police said in their Saturday statement. “We hope that this arrest and indictment brings some relief and closure to Marsha Carter’s family.”
– For more than 30 years, the case of Marsha Carter's murder has been a cold one, with all leads turning up empty and the Bay Area case eventually fading out of the papers. That changed last month with the arrest of a Placer County man in connection with the death of the 25-year-old mom of four, the Richmond Standard reports. That man is 54-year-old Sherill Smothers, an ex-boyfriend who's now a quadriplegic after a drunk driver smashed into his car in 1988—five years after Carter's body was found in Sacramento in the trunk of her own car. The Daily Beast explains how on the morning of Dec. 7, 1983, three of Carter's sons (all 11 and under) went into her bedroom to find nothing but a bloody mattress; they ran out of a house to get a neighbor, and when they all came back, they also found the only witness to what had transpired: their almost toddler-aged brother, frightened but safe under the bed. Carter's body was found 10 days later, but with no compelling evidence and a witness too young to talk about what had happened, the case died out. The Standard notes, however, that Sgt. Stina Johanson wasn't ready to give up on the case, and she reopened it in 2008 and was eventually able to find enough to lead to Smothers' arrest. A rep for the Richmond Police is keeping mum on motive, noting only that Carter and Smothers "were in a dating relationship." Police believe Carter was stabbed to death, per the East Bay Times. A secret grand jury hearing in August resulted in a decision to file murder charges against Smothers. He was arrested Sept. 14 but is now out on $1 million bail; the Daily Beast notes that would've been a small part of the $6.1 million he won in his suit against GM for the accident that paralyzed him. (More than 40 years later, two arrests in the slayings of two teens.)