A headline on the cover of The National Enquirer in June 1982 became the defining element of Cathy Smith’s life.
“‘I Killed John Belushi,’” it read, alongside a large photograph of Mr. Belushi, the boisterous comedian. Below the picture another headline added, “World Exclusive — Mystery Woman Confesses.”
The headline and accompanying article were the catalyst that ultimately landed Ms. Smith in jail.
Before the Enquirer article, the circumstances surrounding Mr. Belushi’s death the previous March, at 33, had remained murky, and it was simply labeled an accidental drug overdose.
Mr. Belushi, who became a television star on “Saturday Night Live” and a movie star in “National Lampoon’s Animal House” — and whose heavy drug use was later documented in Bob Woodward’s book “Wired” — went on a days-long drug binge in a bungalow of the Chateau Marmont Hotel in West Hollywood with Ms. Smith, who had been a fringe figure on the music scene first in Toronto and then Los Angeles.
Ms. Smith would admit to injecting Mr. Belushi with a combination of heroin and cocaine during her interview with The Enquirer, for which she was paid $15,000. The article resulted in a renewed investigation and, in 1983, her indictment by a grand jury in Los Angeles County on one count of second-degree murder and 13 counts of administering a dangerous drug.
Ms. Smith, one of pop culture’s most notorious footnotes, died on Aug. 16 in Maple Ridge, British Columbia. She was 73.
The British Columbia Coroners Service confirmed her death but said it had not yet determined a cause. The Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail reported that Ms. Smith had been in failing health for several years.
Before Mr. Belushi’s death, Ms. Smith occasionally sang backup on records and traveled in the hard-partying orbit of groups like the Band and the Rolling Stones. The Globe and Mail once described her as a “rock ’n’ roll courtesan to the likes of Levon Helm, Gordon Lightfoot, Keith Richards et al.”
At 17 she had a child, whom she gave up for adoption, and whose father she said was Mr. Helm, best known as the drummer and singer for the Band. (Mr. Helm, who died in 2012, did not acknowledge paternity.) In the 1970s she spent almost four years in a volatile relationship with Mr. Lightfoot, the Canadian singer-songwriter.
“It was one of those relationships you get a feeling of danger comes into the picture,” he said in “Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind,” a recent documentary by Martha Kehoe and Joan Tosoni.
Ms. Smith tried to escape that Enquirer headline.
“I didn’t kill John Belushi,” she wrote in “Chasing the Dragon,” a memoir published in 1984 while her case was still in progress. “I do suffer guilt, but it is the guilt that comes from not being aware of what was really going on.”
That explanation, though, never earned her much sympathy. Nor did her efforts to express remorse.
“It should have been me in the pine box, with a tag on my toe,” she said in a documentary made for CITY-TV of Toronto in the mid-1980s. “My name is Smith, who cares?”
Catherine Evelyn Smith was born on April 25, 1947, in Burlington, Ontario, on the western end of Lake Ontario. She dropped out of school at 16 and found her way to the Yorkville section of Toronto, which was then a magnet for bohemian musicians and literary figures. A 1982 article in Rolling Stone quoted Bernie Fiedler, owner of a folk club called the Riverboat Coffee House, as calling her “absolutely beautiful, one of the ladies who had everything a man always wanted but was afraid to confront.”
Mr. Lightfoot took up with her in the early 1970s. It was a tempestuous relationship. His song “Sundown,” a 1974 hit about a dark sort of possessiveness (“I can see her lookin’ fast in her faded jeans/She’s a hard-loving woman, got me feelin’ mean”), was inspired by her.
In 1978 Ms. Smith left Toronto for Los Angeles “to graduate from folk-music groupie to the more dangerous world of rock ’n’ roll,” as Rolling Stone put it. She sang backup for Hoyt Axton for a time, and also hung out with Keith Richards and other members of the Rolling Stones. And she began using hard drugs, and sometimes providing them.
The Enquirer said she was known as “Cathy Silverbag” because she carried a metallic purse filled with dope — or “poison,” as the judge who sentenced her in 1986 after she pleaded no contest to involuntary manslaughter and three drug counts called it. The judge, David A. Horowitz of Los Angeles Superior Court, said Mr. Belushi’s own recklessness did not absolve her.
“You were brought into the action with Mr. Belushi’s circle of friends because you were the connection, the source of that poison,” the judge said. “You knew how to use the needle.”
Ms. Smith was paroled after serving 15 months of a three-year sentence and deported back to Canada.
The Globe and Mail said that in prison Ms. Smith taught computer skills to fellow inmates. After her release, she stayed largely out of the public eye. The newspaper said she sometimes spoke to teenagers about the dangers of drug use but also continued to have substance abuse problems, citing a 1991 charge of heroin possession.
Information on Ms. Smith’s survivors was not available.
When Ms. Smith’s memoir came out in 1984, before she had been sentenced, Mark Breslin gave the book a harsh review in The Globe and Mail. But he also found a sadness in her account, underscored by the fact that, though the book contained various pictures of the famous and semifamous men she had been involved with, she appeared in just one of them.
“In all the rest, she is noticeably absent,” Mr. Breslin wrote. “The message is clear. Stars are forever blessed by the beat, while fans are expendable, ephemeral commodities best suited to holding the bag and taking the rap.”
