HOSTAGE'S MEMOIR REVEALS DRUG USE

Ashley Smith, who was held hostage in her apartment in March by the
man charged with murder in the Atlanta courthouse shootings, was
hailed as a hero after she disclosed how she had persuaded her captor
to surrender, partly by reading to him from the spiritual best-seller
"The Purpose Driven Life."

But in a memoir released this week, Smith also recounts that she gave
the kidnapper some of her supply of crystal methamphetamine during her
captivity and that she did not tell the police for some time afterward.

In the memoir, "Unlikely Angel: The Untold Story of the Atlanta Hostage
Hero," Smith recalls that Brian Nichols, who has been charged in the
death of three people shot at the Fulton County Courthouse and a fourth
killed elsewhere in Atlanta before her kidnapping, asked her whether
she had any marijuana. She answered no but said she did have some
"ice," or crystal meth.

Smith says that at the time, she was fighting an addiction to crystal
methamphetamine that had previously led her to spend time in a
psychiatric hospital and to lose custody of her 5-year-old daughter.

She says she last used crystal meth about 36 hours before being taken
hostage. When Nichols used it and invited her to do so, she refused,
she writes, and has not taken drugs since the episode.

"Suddenly, looking down at my drug pouch," she says, "I realized that
I would rather have died in my apartment than have done those drugs
with Brian Nichols. If the cops were going to bust in here and find me
dead, they were not going to find drugs in me when they did the
autopsy. I was not going to die tonight and stand before God, having
done a bunch of ice up my nose."

The book, written with Stacy Mattingly, is being published by William
Morrow and Zondervan, units of HarperCollins Publishers. Zondervan is
also the publisher of "The Purpose Driven Life."

Two weeks after the arrest of Nichols, Smith received $72,500 in
reward money from various law enforcement agencies, including the FBI
and the U.S. Marshals Service. Richard Kolko, a special agent at the
FBI, said in an interview Tuesday that the disclosure about Smith's
supply of crystal meth was unlikely to affect her reward.

"The woman did a brave act at a desperate time," Kolko said. "The FBI
has no reason or inclination to go back and retrieve the reward."