Dave Smith, a stylish and often elegant writer who covered a number of high-profile stories for the Los Angeles Times – including the trial of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, and the hunt for the Zodiac killer, has died. He was 64.

Smith, who retired from The Times in the mid-1980s, was found dead in his Tucson, Ariz., home on Feb. 20. According to his friend and executor, John Flynn, the cause of death was a heart attack. He is survived by a brother, Jeff Smith, who also lives in Arizona.

Former colleagues of Smith called him one of the finest pure writers to ever work at The Times.

Smith came to The Times in 1968, when the paper began to experiment with more literary journalism, allowing some of its writers the luxury of months-long deadlines, ample space and license to write like novelists, with dialogue, narrative form and other devices not usual to daily journalism of the era.

One of the first stories was Smith’s piece on Benny Smith, a young man who walked calmly into a beauty parlor in Mesa, Ariz., on Nov. 12, 1966, ordered several women and two little girls to lie in a circle and then shot each of them. Two survived.

Smith’s piece was a psychological profile of the killer’s troubled, lonely youth, his sense of alienation and his motives for committing the mass killings, which then were still rare in American life.

Benny Smith was sentenced to death, but after a series of legal maneuvers and a retrial in which he pleaded guilty to all charges, he received a life prison sentence.

Born in Presque Isle, Maine, David Mortimer Smith grew up in Arizona, graduating from Tucson High School and the University of Arizona. While in college, Smith worked for the Tucson Daily Star, writing feature stories and film reviews.

After graduate work at the University of California, Los Angeles, he worked at the Culver City (Calif.) Evening Star-News and the Venice (Calif.) Vanguard before landing a job with Associated Press.

The Benny Smith story, which received a variety of prizes, demonstrated to top Times editors that there was a place in newspapers for literary writing.

From then on, Smith was assigned to a number of high-profile stories and become known for his work on mass murder cases, including the Zodiac killings.

He returned to the Tucson area after his retirement and lived a quiet life, collecting regional art and antiques and participating in some choral singing.