A Redmond man was found guilty of murder except for insanity following a two-day trial in the Deschutes County Circuit Court this week.

A judge found Alexander Mark Smith, 23, guilty Thursday in the death of 55-year-old Tina Klein-Lewis on May 31, 2022.

Klein-Lewis’ body was found by her boyfriend in a tractor bucket on property on Cloverdale Road near Sisters. She had a rope around her neck, and authorities determined she had been strangled to death.

Judge Alison Emerson sentenced Smith to life under the supervision of the Oregon Psychiatric Security Review Board.

He will be sent to the Oregon State Hospital, a public psychiatric institution, but the board can later determine if it’s safe to move him to another facility, such as a halfway house.

Most of the facts of the case were not disputed, but the trial still needed to occur to confirm Smith’s guilt and determine his sentence, given his severe mental health issues, Deputy District Attorney Matt Nelson told The Bulletin on Friday.

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Smith had been released from the Deschutes County jail at around 11:30 a.m. on May 31, just hours before the murder, prosecutors said. He received multiple rides across Deschutes County before eventually ending up in Cloverdale.

At around 8 p.m., Smith went to the Cloverdale Fire Department, asking for food, water and assistance, prosecutors said.

Soon after, Smith saw Klein-Lewis working in her hop field across the street. It’s unclear what happened next, but Klein-Lewis’ boyfriend later found her dead in a tractor bucket.

Smith was looking for a place to hide Klein-Lewis’s body, but left it in the tractor bucket and fled, Nelson said.

Firefighters who saw Smith leaving the scene called 911 and asked for a welfare check, but they didn’t know at the time Klein-Lewis was dead.

Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office deputies arrested Smith on June 3 after responding to a report on Jordan Road — about three miles from the crime scene — of a person needing help.

Authorities confirmed that the shoes Smith was wearing matched footprints found at the scene of the killing, and later determined that his DNA was under Klein-Lewis’ fingernails.

“It really is absolutely horrible,” Nelson told The Bulletin Friday.

Smith’s case has been drawn out for years because of his mental illness, and he’d previously been deemed unable to aid and assist in his own defense. Before, he was a straight-A student at Redmond High School, graduating in 2018, and was on his way toward completing college, Nelson said.

But Smith’s mental health began to plummet in recent years, Nelson said. And despite run-ins with authorities, he couldn’t be forced to receive mental health treatment at a hospital.

That’s because he didn’t meet the state’s criteria for a civil commitment, which requires that a person be an imminent threat to themselves or others, Nelson said.

“The system failed in a really catastrophic way,” Judge Emerson said in court.

Mental health professionals spoke during the trial about Smith’s struggles and concluded he was experiencing psychosis at the time of the murder. Smith told doctors after the murder that he had been hearing voices in his head, telling him to kill, prosecutors said in court.

Smith declined to speak in court.