Cathy Smith: The Rock Groupie Who Gave John Belushi His Fatal Speedball

Mar 5, 2025

7 min read

Updated: 1 day ago

Collage of Cathy Smith with a black and white portrait of her smoking, a colour inset photo and a smiling picture of her with curly hair

In June 1982 the National Enquirer ran a front page that's still talked about in Hollywood. Next to a big photo of John Belushi, the headline read "I Killed John Belushi". The woman quoted underneath was a 35-year-old Canadian called Cathy Smith, and the paper had paid her $15,000 for the story.

Most people only know her for that. But by the time she met Belushi, Smith had already spent two decades in the inner circles of rock music. She'd partied with The Band, been the reason Gordon Lightfoot wrote one of his biggest hits and sold drugs to the Rolling Stones. The confession put her in prison. Then she spent the rest of her life trying to take it back.

Quick Answers

Who was Cathy Smith? A Canadian backing singer and rock groupie, born in 1947, who was with John Belushi when he died of an overdose in 1982.
What did Cathy Smith do to John Belushi? She admitted injecting him with speedballs, a mix of heroin and cocaine, in the days before his death at the Chateau Marmont.
Did Cathy Smith go to prison? Yes. She pleaded no contest to involuntary manslaughter in 1986, was sentenced to three years and served 15 months.
Was Sundown written about Cathy Smith? Yes. Gordon Lightfoot wrote it about their jealous, stormy relationship in the early 1970s.
When did Cathy Smith die? In August 2020 in Maple Ridge, British Columbia, at the age of 73.

A Hamilton Teenager and The Hawks

Catherine Evelyn Smith was born on 25 April 1947 in Hamilton, Ontario. She was still a teenager in 1963 when she met Levon Helm, the Arkansas drummer in Ronnie Hawkins's backing band, the Hawks. A few years later Helm and his bandmates would back Bob Dylan, who'd famously shared a smoky hotel room with the Beatles in 1964, and then become The Band.

Smith partied with Helm, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel through the 1960s, and at one point she fell pregnant. Because more than one of them could have been the father, the child became known among the group as "The Band baby". Fans of The Band have long claimed she's somewhere in the background of their song The Weight, which Helm supposedly used to tease her with, though that's never been confirmed.

Cathy Smith with curly hair crouching on a ledge beside a highway, shielding her eyes from the sun — Cathy Smith in her younger days on the Toronto music scene.

She picked up work where she could as a backing singer, and IMDb even credits a Cathy Smith with a small part in Bo Widerberg's 1971 film Joe Hill. But her real talent was being around famous musicians.

Gordon Lightfoot and Sundown

In the early 1970s Smith started working for Gordon Lightfoot, who was then Canada's biggest folk star, and before long they were having an affair. He was still married. According to the Globe and Mail, their first date was at Winston's, a smart Toronto restaurant, where they toasted his breakthrough single If You Could Read My Mind.

The relationship lasted about three years and was never calm. Both of them cheated and the rows sometimes turned physical; Lightfoot broke her cheekbone during one fight. He later admitted he'd been crazy with jealousy.

That jealousy gave him his only US number one. In 1973 the couple were staying in a rented farmhouse north of Toronto. One night Smith went out partying with her friends and Lightfoot stayed at home watching the sun go down, convinced she was with someone else. That's the night he wrote Sundown, as he later told the story to the CBC. It went to the top of the charts in 1974.

Black and white photo of two people in hats sitting close together on a couch with artwork on the wall behind them

Despite everything, they never quite let each other go. Decades later she was photographed backstage at one of his concerts in Vancouver, and when she died Lightfoot told the press that "Cathy was a great lady".

Silverbag in Los Angeles

In 1978 Smith left Toronto for Los Angeles and moved up from folk singers to rock stars. She started using heroin around the same time. Before long she was known on the scene as "Cathy Silverbag", after the metallic purse she carried, which everybody understood was full of drugs.

According to Bob Woodward's book Wired, she supplied Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood during the late 1970s, when the two Stones were touring with their side project, the New Barbarians. It was the kind of excess the band had been famous for since their summer at Villa Nellcôte, and it was through Wood and Richards that she first met John Belushi.

Five Days at the Chateau Marmont

By early 1982 Belushi was 33, famous from Saturday Night Live, Animal House and The Blues Brothers, and in a bad way. He'd been battling a cocaine habit for years and only used heroin now and then. In the first days of March he called Smith and asked her to get him both.

She spent most of his last five days with him, much of it in his bungalow at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard. On the night of 4 March, Robin Williams and Robert De Niro both dropped in briefly. In Wired, Woodward says Williams was "creeped out" by Smith and left quickly.

Police officers wheel a covered stretcher through a crowd of photographers outside the Chateau Marmont in March 1982 — Belushi's body is taken from the Chateau Marmont on 5 March 1982.

Smith later said she'd injected Belushi with 11 speedballs over the course of that night. She left the bungalow on the morning of 5 March. Around midday his personal trainer, Bill Wallace, arrived for a workout and found him dead. You can read the hour-by-hour story in our piece on John Belushi's final hours at the Chateau Marmont.

At first the police treated it as an accidental overdose. Smith was questioned and released, and she went back to Canada.

"I Killed John Belushi"

That would probably have been the end of it if Smith hadn't needed money. In Toronto she sat down with two National Enquirer reporters, Tony Brenna and Larry Haley, for a series of taped interviews. On the tapes she said, "I killed John Belushi. I didn't mean to, but I was responsible for his death".

The story ran in June 1982 and the Los Angeles district attorney reopened the case. A grand jury was convened that September, and Robin Williams was among the witnesses called to testify. So was Nelson Lyon, a former Saturday Night Live writer who'd been with Belushi that week and was reportedly given immunity.

In March 1983 the grand jury indicted her for second-degree murder and 13 counts of administering a dangerous drug. Smith, who by then was claiming the Enquirer had misquoted her, surrendered to police in Toronto and spent the next three years fighting extradition.

Cathy Smith with curly hair wearing a green and black sweater, standing outside against a textured wall

A Plea Deal and a Prison Sentence

In June 1986 Smith finally went back to Los Angeles of her own accord. The murder charge was dropped. Instead she pleaded no contest to involuntary manslaughter and three counts of furnishing and administering drugs, a plea that, as one report at the time put it, was the criminal equivalent of guilty but conceded no guilt. Prosecutors said they'd agreed to the lesser charge because of recent appeal court rulings.

Her lawyers had argued all along that the final, fatal dose could have been injected by Belushi himself or by someone else, and Time reported that defence case in detail. It didn't save her. In September 1986 she was sentenced to three years, with the judge calling her the source of the poison that killed Belushi.

She served 15 months at the California Institution for Women, where she taught computer skills to other inmates, and was paroled in March 1988. The US then deported her back to Canada.

Wired, Chasing the Dragon and the Fight Over the Story

Two books about Belushi's death came out in 1984, and they told very different stories. Smith's memoir, Chasing the Dragon, was published while her case was still going on, and in it she tried to undo the Enquirer headline. She now said she hadn't killed Belushi and had only said it to the tabloid because she needed the money.

Bob Woodward's Wired went the other way. It leaned heavily on Smith's account and painted Belushi's final years as a drug-soaked mess, and his friends hated it. The row over the book has never really gone away, and Bill Murray, whose eulogy for Belushi was far more affectionate, has been among its fiercest critics. When Wired was turned into a film in 1989, Patti D'Arbanville played Smith. It flopped.

After Prison

Back in Canada, Smith worked for a time as a legal secretary in Toronto and gave talks to teenagers about the dangers of drugs. It didn't stick. In July 1991 she was arrested in Vancouver with two grams of heroin in her purse and given a fine and probation.

She spent her last years in Maple Ridge, British Columbia, in poor health and on oxygen. She died in August 2020, aged 73, with no cause of death made public. The Globe and Mail described her as a woman of mystery, and a friend who'd seen her with Lightfoot told Newser that she truly believed they'd been the love of each other's lives.

It's a strange legacy. Without Cathy Smith there'd be no Sundown, and the story of The Band would be missing one of its odder footnotes. But for most people she'll always be the woman on the front of the Enquirer, and nothing she wrote afterwards ever managed to change that.