 Smith moved from Gloucester to Tewkesbury and then Ross-on-Wye, where he lived with a female partner. They had a son in 1990 and two more children in 1992, but Smith left the family and moved to Cardiff when the relationship became difficult. He then spent a year in Ireland lodging with a travelling family who took pity on him while he was hitchhiking in Athlone, County Westmeath, Ireland. He told them he was an English gypsy visiting Ireland, and they allowed him to live rent-free in a spare caravan, while he contributed a portion of his unemployment benefit towards food. They asked him to leave because they were uncomfortable about sexual remarks he had made to young female members of the family. He moved to Birmingham towards the end of 1999 and stayed briefly at the Trinity Centre, a hostel for the homeless in Digbeth, before moving to a property managed by a housing association in Braithwaite Road in the Sparkbrook district of Birmingham. He became well-known locally and was a regular patron of the Shamrock Cafe on Stratford Road and of the Rainbow pub in Digbeth, where he was employed on a casual basis as an odd-jobber and served as an unofficial taxi driver for drinkers.
