Ann Lesley Smith

Smith was born Ann Krohn and attended high school in Petaluma, California. In her 20s, while working as a dental hygienist in the Bay Area, Ms. Smith met John B. Huntington, a California railroad heir nearly 20 years her senior. During their marriage, which lasted from 1985 to 1989, she spent lavishly on clothes, rode horses and did charity work. Smith claimed that, after her marriage to Mr. Huntington, she had no place to live and had become suicidal because of a stingy prenuptial agreement. In 1999, she wed Michael Carabello, a former percussionist in the rock band Santana. The fact of that marriage, which lasted about a year, did not appear in the spate of reports published in the wake of her engagement to Mr. Murdoch. A graduate of Idaho State University, Smith been a runway model, songwriter and recording artist (she and her third husband Chester Smith recorded a 2005 CD, “Captured by Love”). Mr. Smith had been married to his first wife, Naomi Smith, for more than four decades. Together they had built his radio and television business into a mini-empire that included stations in California and Oregon. Mr. Smith died at age 78 in 2008.