Mothers who kill: Susan Smith

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• published: 16 Feb 2017
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On October 15, 1994, Smith frantically phoned police and said she had been carjacked by a black man while stopped at a red light in Union City on Highway 49. He had forced her out of the car and took off in the vehicle, taking her two children who were seated in the back along with him. A massive manhunt ensued, and Smith tearfully pleaded for their return in numerous TV news appearances, crying out for her children and begging the alleged abductor to bring them home. All the while, authorities became increasingly skeptical of her story. Although she acted like a worried mother in front of cameras, Smith’s body language and mannerisms didn’t sit well with detectives. It didn’t help that she kept changing her story about the incident and what led up to the alleged carjacking and kidnapping. The biggest red flag was Smith’s contention that the alleged carjacking occurred at a red light behind the Monarch Mill Textile Plant, and that there were no other cars at the intersection. According to detectives, there was no way Smith would have been stuck at a red light on the particular intersection she named, as the red light was only activated if there was another car coming down the cross street. “We were able to show, at one point, that her story could not have happened at that intersection because she said nobody was there,” said Robert Stewart, former chief of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED). “In order for the light to be red, a car would have had to activate the pressure pad on the intersecting street to make her light red.” Union County Sheriff Howard Wells was also suspicious of Smith’s story, so much so that he admitted he fibbed a bit in order to get a confession. Nine days after her sons went missing, Wells informed Smith that Union County had surveillance cameras in the area where the alleged carjacking occurred, and that they knew the incident “couldn’t have happened as she said.” Wells wasn’t sure if the tactic would work, but once he told her he’d take the information to the media, Smith broke down and confessed to leaving her children strapped inside the back seat of her red Mazda Protégé, which she then let roll down a boat ramp and into Union City’s John D. Long Lake. Shortly after confessing, Smith gave both a written and oral statement to the police, detailing how she killed her children. The only reasoning she gave for the murders was that her children “were not alright.” Defense attorneys immediately painted a picture of a distraught, mentally ill and suicidal mother who was unlawfully coerced into giving a confession. Court records indicate that Smith’s father killed himself when she was just six-years-old. Her lawyers tried to use his suicide as a defense tactic, explaining that it led Smith into long-term depression, mental instability, and her own suicidal thoughts. During her trial, Smith’s stepfather, Beverly Russell, took the stand and testified that he molested Smith when she was a teen and had “consensual” sex with her as an adult. He admitted that he shared some of the guilt of what happened to Michael and Alex. He later testified that he would have never touched Smith had he known what she was capable of. “Had I known what the result of my sin would be, I would have mustered the strength to behave according to my responsibility,” Russell said. Regardless, the heinous and inhumane manner in which Smith murdered her young boys, coupled with evidence that indicated she was aware that her actions were wrong, convinced a South Carolina jury to convict her of two counts of murder. Smith was sentenced to serve 30 years to life in prison. Although prosecutors contended Smith killed her children because of the the “Dear John”-type breakup letter than her ex-boyfriend gave her, she has long maintained that the crime had nothing to do with a man. “The thing that hurts me the most is that people think that I hurt my children in order to be with a man,” Smith wrote in a letter to The State newspaper in 2015. “That is so far from the truth. … I was a good mother and I loved my boys. … Something went very wrong that night. I was not myself. There was no motive as it was not even a planned event. I was not in my right mind.”