John Eldon Smith (September 17, 1930 – December 15, 1983), who frequently went by the alias Anthony Isalldo Michetti, was an American man who was convicted of the murders of Ronald and Juanita Akins.

Afterwards, he joined the United States Army, where, after four years of service (including serving as a paratrooper) and after being awarded the Good Conduct Medal, he was honorably discharged.

An episode of "deep loneliness" led him to take a vacation in 1974 to North Miami Beach, Florida, where he met Rebecca Turpin.

[3] In 1956, shortly after graduating from high school, Rebecca Turpin married Joseph Ronald Akins, a technician and an engineer who worked for Southern Natural Gas.

In 1973, Akins accused his wife of trying to murder him, once by poison and another time by enlisting in her two eldest daughters' help to suffocate him with a pillow, leading to their divorce by the next year.

[9] When Rebecca realized that her daughters were the beneficiaries to Ronald Akins's life insurance policy, she decided to murder him in order to cash in on it.

[10] On the evening of August 31, 1974, Smith, alongside his wife Rebecca and one of Rebecca's former lovers, another former insurance salesman and a Fort Myers native[11] named John Maree,[12] lured 38-year-old Joseph Ronald Akins to a suburban subdivision under construction in Bibb County, Georgia, in Macon, under the guise of installing a television antenna.

During the guilt phase of the trial, the jury only deliberated for 25 minutes before determining that Smith was guilty of the murders of Ronald and Juanita Akins.

[14] Maree agreed to testify against Smith and Rebecca in exchange for a guilty plea to two counts of first-degree murder, after which he received two concurrent life sentences that came with the possibility of parole.

Rebecca won a retrial on those grounds, which took place after a change of venue to Gwinnett County, Georgia,[5] and was eventually re-sentenced to life imprisonment.

Jackson was joined by then-State Representative David Scott, the executive director of the Georgia branch of the American Civil Liberties Union Gene Guerrero, and the executive director of the Atlanta branch of the NAACP, Jondell Johnson, in calling for a 90-day stay for John Smith.

Smith was also scheduled to be executed alongside Alpha Otis O'Daniel Stephens, another Georgia death row inmate, but the U.S. Supreme Court granted Stephens a last-minute stay of execution by a 5–4 vote, while Smith, who had exhausted all of his court appeals by then, had his request denied by a 7–2 vote.

[22] The prison announced that Smith's time of death occurred at approximately 8:15 a.m.[23] Years after his execution, his final words would be purported to have been, "Well, the Lord is going to get another one.

"[24] In reality, contemporaneous sources state that Smith had no official final words and did not request any specific witnesses to attend his execution,[6] although reporters noted that he told the warden shortly before his execution, "My final statement will be delivered by Father Wise" (referring to then-prison chaplain Reverend Richard Wise) and that he also told guards as they were strapping him into the electric chair, "Hey, there ain't no point in pulling it so tight.

[5] In 2010, at the age of 71, Rebecca Machetti was paroled 36 years into her sentence and changed her surname to Lorusso to match that of her new common-law husband at the time.