Hearing set for suspect in theft of Faulkner letters

A former lawyer charged with stealing six William Faulkner letters from Southeast Missouri State University will face a preliminary hearing Friday at 4 p.m. in front of Associate Circuit Court Judge Gary Kamp.

Robert Hardin Smith, 43, of Jacksonville, Ark., was charged Nov. 19 with felony stealing. Investigators say he stole letters while visiting the university's Rare Book Room at Kent Library on Sept. 30 and sold them four days later to a Rowlett, Texas, manuscript dealer. The letters, valued at $25,000, were later recovered by law enforcement officials.

Smith surrendered to officers in Arkansas on Dec. 1. He was extradited Dec. 5 from Little Rock, Ark., to Cape Girardeau County and remains in jail in lieu of $25,000 bail. Assistant public defender Bryan Keller will represent him in court.

On Dec. 24, Prosecuting Attorney Morley Swingle amended the charges against the suspect to charge him as a prior and persistent offender. Smith, a former public defender, was convicted in 1996 of stealing historic manuscripts from the University of Kansas and the University of Arkansas. He served two years in an Arkansas prison before being paroled in 1999. He surrendered his law license in 1993 after being charged with forgery and writing insufficient checks.

The letters by Faulkner, a Southern writer who won the Nobel Prize for literature, are part of the Brodsky collection acquired by the university in 1989 from St. Louis collector Louis Daniel Brodsky. University officials learned of the theft after a collector reported seeing one of the letters for sale on eBay, an Internet auction site.