On August 22, 1998, 16-year-old Tera Lynn Smith told her younger sister she was going for a quick jog and would be back in 20 minutes. Tera was grounded, had a shift at the family’s amusement center scheduled for 7:00 p.m., and had spent most of the afternoon running errands with her mother before being dropped home. Her sister Sierra, then 11, tried to stop her at the door. Tera waved her off and jogged up the road.
When Marilyn Smith phoned home from work an hour later and Sierra told her Tera had not returned, Marilyn drove every road she could think of in the dark. She found nothing. By the time the search widened to Tera’s friends, one name kept surfacing.
That name changed everything.
The Last Saturday
Tera Lynn Smith was born on January 6, 1982, the eldest of four children raised by Terry and Marilyn Smith in Redding, California. The Smiths ran the Oasis Fun Center, a miniature golf and games venue in nearby Shasta Lake, and Tera and her siblings all worked shifts there alongside their parents. She attended Central Valley High School, where she won the freshman arm wrestling championship and was later crowned homecoming queen. She kept journals and wrote poetry. She had taken up taekwondo, which she told her father appealed to her because of its connection to the earth and natural principles.
August 22 was the Saturday before the new school year began. Tera had spent the day with her mother, running errands across Redding, before Marilyn dropped her home and left for the Oasis. Tera was grounded. She was not supposed to leave the house alone. When Sierra watched her jog out of sight from the doorway on Tarcy Way, she assumed her older sister meant what she said. Twenty minutes. Home before their parents.
Tera never showed up to her 7:00 p.m. shift. She has not been seen since.
The Instructor’s Record
Among the friends Marilyn called that night, one name came back immediately. Tera had been involved in a secret romantic relationship with her taekwondo instructor, a 29-year-old married man named Charles Troy Zink. His wife and young son had no apparent knowledge of it. Neither did Tera’s family. Her sister Kyra told NBC’s Dateline that she had seen nothing unusual, describing the dynamic as what she assumed was a student who “idolized” a mentor. “I didn’t have a clue,” she said.
What Tera’s family did not know was what Zink’s record showed. In 1993, Zink had pleaded guilty to a spousal rape charge and spent a year in jail. He was, by the time he was teaching taekwondo in Redding and entering a secret relationship with a 16-year-old student, a convicted felon. He was also, as investigators would shortly discover, in possession of multiple firearms at his studio, in direct violation of his felony status. None of this surfaced until after Tera vanished.
Terry Smith drove to Zink’s home on the night of August 22. It was approximately 9:00 p.m. Zink’s wife answered the door. He was not there. He did not return home until 11:30 p.m.
Five Hours of Prayer
When investigators questioned Zink, he gave a single account of that evening and, after that initial interview, refused to speak with authorities again. He told police that Tera had phoned him at work on the afternoon of August 22 and asked him to meet her near her home at 6:30 p.m. He claimed she was standing at the end of her driveway when he arrived. She asked him for $2,000, he said. She would not explain what it was for. He claimed he refused, that she became angry, and that she then asked him for a ride. He said he dropped her at the intersection of Old Alturas Road and Old Oregon Trail, several miles from her home, so she could jog. He then claimed he drove to a nearby hilltop called Hang Glider Hill to pray.
He told police he stayed there for approximately five hours.
He returned home at 11:30 p.m. He offered no further explanation for the gap. Investigators noted it and moved on. Zink had a vehicle matching the description of a dark blue 1976 Ford pickup truck with mag wheels and a yellow tailgate, the same type of vehicle a witness reported seeing a girl matching Tera’s description inside on the night she vanished. On September 11, 1998, police visited Zink’s home and impounded the truck. That sighting remains unverified. It has never been established whether the truck or the woman inside it had any connection to Tera’s case.
What the Letters Said
In the days following Tera’s disappearance, Terry and Marilyn searched their daughter’s bedroom. What they found became the clearest window into what Tera had been carrying in the days before she vanished. In her journals and among her papers, she had written extensively about Zink. She had also drafted a letter addressed to him, never sent and still sitting in her room, that told him she knew she had made a mistake, that she never should have become involved with him, and that she wanted the relationship to end. “She tells him in the letter she knows she made a huge mistake, she never should have gotten involved with him,” Terry told People magazine. Based on the letter, the family concluded that Tera had been preparing to break off the relationship in person on the evening she disappeared, rather than mail or hand over the letter.
Zink acknowledged to investigators that he had also received a letter from Tera. His account of what it said was fundamentally different. He claimed the letter was about Tera leaving home, not about ending their relationship. The families’s reading and Zink’s reading of what Tera had written produced two entirely incompatible pictures of what August 22 was supposed to be.
Zink stopped cooperating with investigators after his initial interview. He has denied any involvement in Tera’s disappearance. He has never been named a suspect.
The Search and Zink’s Crimes
Search teams and volunteers scoured the area around Redding in the days after Tera vanished. The Sacramento River was searched. The Kazic Reservoir was examined. Cadaver dogs were deployed across the surrounding terrain. The FBI joined the investigation on August 25, three days after Tera disappeared. On August 26, Shasta County Secret Witness announced a $10,000 reward for any information leading to her whereabouts. Television segments aired nationally. Tips came in and were investigated. None produced a lead.
While the search for Tera continued, Zink’s conduct drew further attention from law enforcement on separate matters. In March 1999, he was arrested in Red Bluff after abandoning 10 cats at the roadside and then intentionally driving his van into a pedestrian who attempted to confront him as he fled. In June 1999, he was convicted of possession of a firearm as a convicted felon. When investigators searching his taekwondo studio during the Tera Smith investigation had climbed into the attic, they found four old sporting rifles and three shotguns. Zink maintained the weapons belonged to his father, who he said was renting the space. The jury did not agree. He was sentenced to four years in prison.
In 2001, Zink appealed the firearms conviction, arguing that the media coverage of Tera’s disappearance had made a fair trial impossible in Shasta County. The appeal was denied. Zink’s father, when contacted by the Redding Record Searchlight for the case’s ten-year anniversary, referred reporters to family attorney Jerrald Pickering II. Pickering did not return the call.
By 2008, the Secret Witness reward had grown to $20,000. Shasta County Sheriff’s Sergeant John Hubbard acknowledged that “hundreds and hundreds” of tips had been investigated since 1998. None had located Tera. A tip suggesting construction workers had found a shallow grave in Shingle Town was followed up and found to be a canvas tent and buried refuse. The reward has never been claimed.
Stone Cold
Zink eventually relocated from California to Arizona, where he began using his birth name, Charles. The Shasta County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that the investigation remained open as of August 2023, with Investigations Lieutenant Chris Edwards telling reporters that a cold case is an open case and that tips were still being received. No new evidence has been publicly disclosed.
In 2016, the disappearance of Sherri Papini rekindled attention on Tera’s case. Papini, a Redding woman who vanished during a jog near Old Oregon Trail, bore a physical resemblance to Tera and had attended the same high school. At the time of Papini’s disappearance, Shasta County Sheriff Tom Bosenko still kept a photograph of Tera on his desk. Papini was found alive 22 days later and eventually convicted of fabricating her abduction. She served 11 months in federal prison. The two cases were never linked.
Terry Smith spoke to Papini’s husband Keith in the days after Sherri vanished. “I didn’t have a lot of comfort to offer him,” Terry later told the Sacramento Bee. “I’m not real confident that anything’s going to come out of it, but how do you tell somebody five days after their wife’s gone missing that she’s probably gone for good?”
In 2022, NBC’s Dateline revisited the case in a full feature. In 2023, on the 25th anniversary of the disappearance, Terry and Marilyn drove to the intersection of Old Oregon Trail and Old Alturas Road, the place where Zink claimed he had last seen their daughter, and cleaned up the litter along the road. Tera, her father said, had been an adamant recycler. It was the best way they knew to honor her. “Twenty-five years is a long time to be without our daughter,” Marilyn told KRCR. “It never felt like we properly mourned or grieved her in some ways,” Terry added, “because for so many months we hoped she would come back.”
“It’s completely cold,” Marilyn said of the investigation. “Stone cold.”
Tera Lynn Smith was 16 years old. She had a work shift that night, a bedroom full of journals, and a letter she had never managed to send. She jogged out the front door on a Saturday evening in August 1998, promised her little sister she would be back in 20 minutes, and was never seen again.
She would be 43 years old today. No arrest has ever been made.
