The Heartbreaking Case of Susan Smith and the Death of her Two Boys
A first-person account from the courthouse steps
I expected more anger or outrage from those gathered on the July-hot courthouse steps. At Susan Smith’s arraignment just months earlier, people on this same street screamed “Murderer!” One Black man’s voice bounced off the buildings with righteous force. Not today. Over the months, the story had unfolded the town’s dirty laundry, shaking loose embarrassments as bad as her lie.
Twenty-five years later, I still try to understand why the story looked so different up close.
Before that July in 1995, I’d spent plenty of time in South Carolina courtrooms as a lawyer but had never felt compelled to visit a headline murder trial. Something felt tawdry about attending this one. By July, the whole country had spent nine months in a tabloid stew about it. The lies and speculation grew wilder. If I saw it for myself, could I figure out the real story?
Crime Tourists
The scene outside Union County’s courthouse, with its soaring columns and bow-front porch, was somberly festive on the third day of testimony. Nothing looked like it did on television. Main Street was lined with square, white tents on stilts, each open on one side, all set in a row. Famous lawyers and newscasters in suits roasted under bright lights in the party tents above my head. One news crew after another.
On the morning news shows, they looked crisp and animated. Up close, everyone off-camera was slimy with sweat, wearing shorts, no bras. It was early yet but headed toward a 110-degree heat index.
A chain-link fence closed off the parking lot beside the courthouse. Bulky news cameras sat along the fence, waiting to be swung shoulder-height for a back-door money shot — a quick glimpse of the accused murderess. That day, she wore a calf-length going-to-church skirt, her head bowed, exiting a sedan, and climbing the side steps into the courthouse as she’d done every morning. A few quick seconds of visuals because without video, it’s not TV news.
Sweat ran in streams down the shiny black face of one cameraman. He and a burnt-red cameraman, both with knee-length shorts and muscular calves, answered questions from three sun-wrinkled, chain-smoking women. One woman scribbled on a scrap of paper as they got directions: to the graveyard, the traffic light, to the mill owner’s stone-and-brick Tudor Revival outside town — the “castle,” as the locals knew it.
“I told you that was it,” the scribbler said to her friends. “We came in that way.”
What must that house have looked like to a mill village secretary with two kids and a grocery clerk husband? Curious crime tourists naturally wanted to see it all for themselves, make their own judgments. But imagine thinking you might live in a place like that?
Everyone waiting on the courthouse steps had watched the story since October. On a cool fall night in 1994, a burgundy Mazda Protégé rolled down a boat ramp and onto the chill waters of a South Carolina fishing lake. The woman who’d released the parking brake watched it float off into the dark. She covered her mouth. She screamed. She went running up the road for help.
That’s what happened. But that’s not the story she told, not for nine days.
Southern Gothic
The version Susan Smith told was a Southern gothic nightmare come true on the evening news. She seduced us with a carjacking gone wrong — two little boys were missing along with their mom’s Mazda.
The story was scary. And easy to believe. We’ve heard the same story before and since — someone grabs a running car outside a convenience store and takes off.
But what carjacker keeps a car with two little boys in the back? Even if desperate for a car, wouldn’t you sit the kids out somewhere?
If we’d been listening closely, not so trusting, we would’ve caught other oddities. A big-city crime like carjacking doesn’t happen at a red light in Union, population 9800, where folks tend to recognize who doesn’t belong, even if they can’t call everybody by name. After all, if you need a car in a place like that, you ask your best friend or your cousin to loan you his. Unless you’re really desperate. Or crazy.
Her story carried another gut punch: she said a Black man stole her two little white babies.
In a state where a civil war started, we’re a bit sensitive; our history is filled with lynchings over allegations like that. Most of us, Blacks and whites, have lived and worked together, been friends, gone to school, looked for ways to heal over deep scars. Especially in small towns, we know each other. We winced. This couldn’t be good for anyone, especially when outside eyes would see this as evidence that the wounds hadn’t grown scars but were still scabs.
By trial time, she’d offered to plead guilty to drowning her babies, but bloodlust wanted to hear it all laid out in a courtroom parade of witnesses, demanded the possibility of a death sentence, the cleansing ritual of a trial. Far away from the sting of the case, the anger pulsed like primal drumbeats.
On the steps
On the broad white steps of the courthouse, a calm crowd waited for the doors to open. Despite the heat, nobody dropped coins into the drink machines tucked on the side porch. Once inside, nobody wanted to give up a hard-won seat for a bathroom break.
Some of the gathered — mostly women — chatted pleasantries with nothing more in common than sweating together in the summer sun. Some stood alone, arms crossed. Women flock to murder trials, especially when a woman is on trial. A prestigious British medical journal once took issue with “Feminine Pruriency” during a London poisoning trial in 1886.
Why the curious sisterhood? Why had I elected to join? I couldn’t say.
In the way of small towns, the locals might not know the people involved, but they knew of them. I eavesdropped on their sympathy for those caught in the fallout, measured with the same generosity that prompted the proverbial sharing of sugar with a neighbor. They weren’t friends with those caught in the story, but they knew where they’d come from; they knew, in that way of closeness where you don’t have space enough to get a good wind-up for casting the first stone.
A woman sat on the broad steps. She didn’t look like Union County, with her wild hair and a gauze skirt tenting her flared knees, a book in her lap. She deliberately lifted the book to turn the page: the just-published Nine Days in Union: The Search for Alex and Michael Smith.
“It’s on sale at the gift shop down the street,” one woman whispered to her friend. I made sure I picked up a copy before I left town.
A TV reporter began moving through those gathered on the steps, his microphone out like a divining rod. I stiffened. His cameraman trailed behind, his camera at the ready on his shoulder.
I bowed my head over the notebook in my hand. Fear comes to life. Please, God. I don’t want to be on the evening news.
The women around me had spent other mornings on these steps. With practiced choreography, they drew themselves into a tight circle, heads down, backs facing whatever angle the cameraman would try. Without a word, they made room for me, tighter than a prayer circle at church. I let out the breath I was holding, surprised and grateful. We stood hunkered and quiet like cows in a field during a storm, backs turned, heads down.
The camera passed like a shark trolling, straight for the woman with the book.
She sat straight-backed, the open book held up, the title easy to spot, the gray-tone cover photo of lake water, the inset photo of two smiling boys.
Over the top of the book, her face lit up when the reporter approached. The cameraman took aim.
Our circle loosened. Some mutterings, both at the intruder and the elected, but the body language was all relief. The reporter and his camera had found the one person most clearly “not from around here.” A person without an authentic Upstate mill town drawl. It had missed the people gathered who knew parts of the story and found instead the most willing.
This Southern gothic held complications full of race and violence, of topics, only whispered, like incest and suicide, of marginalized folk fighting for a good life set against the ordinariness of a textile town. The subtleties of such a story, represented in the fractals overheard on the courthouse steps and understood through the lens of small-town familiarity, didn’t break down into quick soundbites or superficial summaries, especially not when translated at a distance by those who couldn’t understand the language.
The talking heads in the elevated tents had the facts, but not the story.
The Case
From the beginning, this was a whiplash story. We were seduced by the nightmare she told us, but nothing would turn out to be what we first heard.
By the time the trial started in July 1995, few could’ve missed seeing the tabloid headlines and TV talk-shows. On October 25, 1994, their mother strapped Alex, age three, and Michael, fourteen months, in their car seats, rolled the car down the boat ramp into nearby John D. Long Lake, then ran screaming for help. For nine days, the media and local officials asked us to help find the Black man who carjacked her. She and her estranged husband David Smith made tearful television appeals. The nation hoped for the safe return of those now-familiar little boys.
Days later, Sheriff Howard Wells shocked us with a press conference: She’d confessed. She’d lied. For nine days. Right to our television sets.
In the eight months between her confession and her trial, we learned the things reporters routinely dig out: She was a secretary at a local mill, the world’s largest decorative trim manufacturer. Her husband worked in a grocery. The father who’d adored her had committed suicide. The stepfather, a bastion of the Christian Coalition, began sexually molesting her when she was fifteen. He’d even had sex with her in the months before the murders. Her husband ran around on her while they were married; they both had affairs. After their separation, she had a fling with the rich mill owner’s son — and allegedly with the millionaire mill owner himself. All having sex with this soft-faced young secretary?
In an earlier small-town South, the girl’s daddy and some of her kin would’ve had a painful prayer meeting with the bunch of them.
But that wasn’t going to happen here. The daddy who adored her was dead. His replacement was probably her first abuser.
The facts were shocking and hard to believe. The speculation was even worse. A tabloid told us she’d stood on the boat ramp and watched her oldest son struggle with his seat strap as the car filled with water. That would’ve been impossible to see. It’s dark out on any Carolina lake at 9:00 at night in late October. But the lie sounded real enough to hurt our hearts.
We wanted to know why a mother would do that, but we couldn’t always separate truth from more lies. Did she get rid of her kids because the short, balding rich guy had written her a Dear Jane letter saying, “If you want to marry a nice man like me ….” She’d seen him twice that night, trying to “get back together,” like she was living her own silly soap opera. Or had she intended yet another attempt at suicide, with them in the car, and then chickened out?
As I sweltered on the courthouse steps, nothing felt like the swirling headlines. It felt like a sunny, hot funeral — with a backdrop of elevated party tents and bright lights down the street. The voices on the steps were subdued and sympathetic, not hungry for vengeance. These people didn’t all know her personally, but they knew of her. And that mattered.
A trial-watcher in the crowd on the steps echoed my thoughts: a lot of other people should’ve been on trial with her. Other watchers nodded.
Inside the Courtroom
As soon as the courthouse doors opened, we climbed in a tidy line up the steps. People turned one way or another inside the dark-paneled, high-ceiling sanctuary. People wouldn’t wait in a line in the heat or nudge to get a pew for a church service.
I found an opening in the benches straight ahead. A bailiff opened his mouth as if about to greet me, then nodded.
A terrific seat three rows back from the well of the courtroom. Glancing around, I realized the notebook I carried had gotten me into the press section. I wasn’t about to admit the mistake and retreat to the civilian section — it was full and I would be left standing. Or get kicked out. I started scribbling.
I’d come on a liminal day — the unexpected end of the prosecution’s case after only two days. The sure-footed start of the defense. Defense lawyer wisdom says save your best stuff for the penalty phase, when the worst has been done and punishment may be tempered by mercy fresh to mind. David Bruck, a capital defense expert, couldn’t wait for that. He needed to explain Susan now, tie together the frayed ends of news reports and tabloid chatter into a forgivable story. But as translated by reporters and commentators, the defense’s notion she intended to kill herself along with her boys sounded ludicrous.
News accounts favored a simplistic soap storyline: she got rid of them so she could marry the rich mill owner’s son. He didn’t want her children. That made better paper-selling headlines than the ambiguous, confused, immature, depressed young woman who’d slammed her hand on the table and stormed out of an interrogation at the suggestion she’d killed her boys to get a man. Too close to home? Too far from imagination?
Differing Views
Those who knew her and the professionals who examined her consistently described her as a loving mother — with a substantive family history of suicide.
Trials are designed to present the many sides of a story, in often numbing detail. But trials can’t answer all our questions any more than headlines can. If the notion of suicide was ludicrous if she wanted to get rid of her kids and live another life, why were her wedding albums in her car? Had the photo albums been there for seven months, as a fellow office worker suggested? Susan had brought them to show a girl in the office who was planning her own wedding. Had they meant no more to her than that, that they’d ridden around in her jumbled car for months? Or did they mean a great deal? Had she carried them out to the car that evening, one more of her precious possessions? She also had Tom Findlay’s “Dear Susan” letter in there. The Gothic tale offered glints and facets to contemplate.
The day’s first testimony described pulling the car from the water. All very methodical. Wildlife divers hooked on the towing cables, after finding the car farther out in the lake than they’d expected. The winch pulled the car to water’s edge; the divers positioned the cables to flip the car over to sit on its wheels. They took pictures as it was pulled out; they stopped while the water drained, then pulled it to the top of the ramp.
Testimony explained how, with changes in daylight savings time, conditions, when the car was recovered at 7:00 p.m., would have been about the same as 9:00 on the night of October 25, the night they drowned.
Measured testimony about a horrific scene. The two little boys were still strapped inside, in their car seats.
As they showed the photos and described the removal of the car, Susan swung her leg so violently that, from behind, I watched her entire body shake.
The officers placed the children’s car seats in the back of a Suburban around 11:00 p.m. A Union County deputy sheriff and another officer drove straight to Charleston. The boys were not removed from the car seats until the autopsy. So methodical.
The defense attorney objected: the testimony about the impact of recovering the bodies on the officers was getting too specific. The prosecutor argued the scene had elicited a strong reaction even from seasoned law enforcement, that the jury had heard about Susan’s emotion and should be able to hear the flip side of the story.
The judge sustained the defense objection. The prosecution couldn’t let the officers tell how that night felt to them. As the testimony continued, the prosecution also couldn’t prevent officers from showing surprising sympathy for Susan.
It didn’t make the tabloids, but on the stand, FBI and SLED agents commented on witnessing her remorse.
Assessing Susan
On the stand, her brother shared a letter he’d written her. Their parents separated when Susan was two years old; her siblings were nine and ten, an important gap in age. “He missed you more than anybody,” her brother wrote. “He loved us all, but you were his heart. You gave him unconditional love and he needed that more than anything at that point in his life … I banged on the door. I knew what he was going to do and I was powerless to stop him.” Her brother was fifteen when their dad killed himself.
A professor of social work moved the testimony from an intimate close-up to a wide-angle lens. She was calm, precise, quiet, in contrast to the raspy, choked testimony of Susan’s brother.
What did she look for in assessing Susan? In a clinical tone, lacking the drawl of earlier witnesses, she explained: When evaluating problems in a mother-child relationship, such as abuse or neglect, she’s trained to look for hidden addictions, neglect, anger, bonding problems early in development. She wants to see if the mother doesn’t understand the child or claims that the “baby doesn’t like me.” Instead, at David’s and Susan’s house on Tony Road, she found a very child-friendly home.
When the professor asked anyone “Tell me about Susan,” she usually heard, “One of the sweetest people I’ve ever known.” Susan was very lucky in many ways, the professor said — she made friends easily, had family, friends, jobs. “In many ways, a very normal life,” she said. So very normal. This family hadn’t crawled out from under rocks. Maybe that was part of the shock.
The professor’s assessment also tallied the negatives: “She’s not a resilient person — very vulnerable.” Family history of depression (“extensive,” she called it); isolated by birth order (only girl, much younger than her siblings); family coping style focused on “dealing with it,” though she had her father’s “couldn’t deal with it” approach and inadequate social support for her problems.
She was hyper-reactive, afraid of being hurt, extremely dependent, emotionally immature with a distorted view of the world.
“Part of her is very damaged.”
How would she not be damaged? Something happens to girls who are sexually abused. They learn sex is a commodity, the only thing they have to trade, the only thing that gives them any value. Susan seemed a textbook case, again so ordinary and so tragic.
Behind the Scenes
Complex stories can only come into focus over time. Only as books and a documentary came out after the trial did the investigation get a tidiness impossible in the Q&A of a courtroom.
We had seen Sheriff Wells on the evening news, asking us to help find the man in the sketch or the missing Mazda. Sheriff Wells was no blustering cartoon Southern sheriff, afraid to let experts help break the case. He also wasn’t afraid to follow his instincts.
Sheriff Wells wasn’t as gullible as the rest of us. From the beginning, he’d had questions. He’d called in the FBI and SLED, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division. From the beginning, he’d run two investigations: one looking for her carjacker, one looking closer to home.
The sketch artist called in to capture on paper her carjacker was the first to sound suspicious. “Victims tend to start out with the details they know best, then they get more vague.” But Susan got more certain, her description more detailed the longer she talked. He found her flippant and light-hearted, a very unusual victim response, in his experience.
One of the state’s most experienced polygraph examiners finally broke her.
Agent Pete Logan stepped in after she’d called a state profiler a son-of-a-bitch and stormed out of an interview. The profiler had challenged her, bluntly asking if she’d killed her children. Not Agent Logan. He took his time. He didn’t want to lose her.
He started their first meeting by just talking for a couple of hours. He had no machine with him, didn’t hook her up to any wires. He brought only his remarkable patience. He listened. And watched.
She told him about her father’s suicide, but she omitted her stepfather’s sexual abuse.
On their next meeting, he hooked her up to his machine and asked the questions an experienced polygraph examiner would ask: her name, where she lived, easy questions to see how her truth-telling registered on his equipment. He dropped in hard questions: Did you kill Alex and Michael? Do you know where they are?
After the interview, he didn’t tell her the results were inconclusive or showed deception. After the interview, he drove out to the intersection where she said she’d stopped at the red light. She’d said there were no other cars there at the time. Logan saw that was impossible. The light was rigged to turn red only when another car stopped at the cross light and triggered it to change. Another car had to be there.
Or else she wasn’t stopped by the red light. If she wasn’t, her story made no sense. If she wasn’t stopped by the light long enough to be carjacked, what else was wrong with her story?
In their next meeting, he told her another car had to be there. She decided it was another intersection.
The investigators had made a strategic decision to question her in a church meeting room, quiet and removed from the jail. She’d been raised in the church. The surroundings would be familiar.
After three or four patient interviews, Agent Logan knew she would either break and confess or they would lose her, get nothing from her. He had to reach her.
He calmly pointed out the inconsistencies in her two locations. “It didn’t happen that way, did it?”
By the time Sheriff Wells joined them in the church room that day, she was on her knees, her head on the chair seat, bowed on her crossed arms. She was sobbing. The dam had burst.
How exhausting to conduct such an interrogation, to be immersed for hours or days, to swim in her head, so intently and for so long, looking for the key that unlocked the flood gates. Did the agent feel a sense of urgency? A fear that time was running out, that the boys might still be saved?
At a remove, where news reports reached but none of the relationships were real, rage bubbled around the story. Mothers’ claws came out and lashed as if their own babies were threatened. The rush of anger was hot: She should be killed! What kind of mother would do that?
In a documentary interview years later, Sheriff Wells looked freshly sad. He’d never lost sight of Michael and Alex. More than two little boys had been lost.
“We’re put here to protect children,” he said. Did he include Susan as a child who hadn’t been protected? Was that why some of the officers, testifying for the prosecution, gave testimony tinged with sympathy as they spoke of her deep remorse? The “greatest I’ve seen in 35 years,” said Agent Logan.
At the Lake
On my way home from the courthouse, I turned left at the sign for John D. Long Lake and pulled my car into the shade. Cicadas rattled in wiry grass near concrete picnic tables and small shelters.
After most murders, the victims are hard to see. They fade, time-bleached. In this case, for those who didn’t know those two living, breathing little boys, they smiled frozen in photos at a memorial erected beside the graveled boat ramp that ran into the lake.
A reporter gathering notes asked a woman, “Why did you come?”
“Just to see it for myself.”
Why do we come? It’s all so ordinary. That’s the quiet terror. How quickly horror could overtake any of us, how little separates us or protects us. The lake is smaller than it looked on TV. Bugs buzzed. Water rattled and slurped through a metal overflow pipe near the earthen dam.
A Black woman with a neat pageboy spoke to an older white woman: “You’ve got a nice town here.”
“You think so? Guess if you’ve spent your whole life here, you don’t much know.”
Twenty-five years later, TV trucks and national broadcasters still line Southern streets for big trials — most recently in Charleston, for two other racially tinged trials, one a cop who shot a fleeing man in the back and the other, a radicalized kid who walked into an iconic Charleston church and killed nine people who’d made room in their prayer circle for him.
Those cases, though tragic, are not really mysteries. But the fuzzy-haired girl who loved her children? The small-town veneer that covered startling abuse, the multiple explanations for the inexplicable? Those we still muse on.
As with any good Southern gothic, the story ends as it should, with sides hard to choose. Right and wrong morph and meld like heat haze off hot pavement, a mirage. Standing close on the courthouse steps and beside the lake, hearing the testimony and the comments, I understood why the jury took the death penalty off the table.
For me, the story was told on those steps, where the tragedy was tempered by compassion: her dad’s suicide and her attempts, the sexual abuse, the affairs which aren’t rare if one is “loved” inappropriately as a child, the sad deaths of the boys.
Those standing at a distance saw a less nuanced picture.
Did Susan set out to kill her children because she thought she could be a part of the millowner’s mansion? A neat, tantalizing soap opera storyline that appealed to an immature young woman — and to gullible tabloid readers? Or did she truly set out, as she confessed, to kill them all? Once the car headed down the ramp, she chickened out.
But it was too late. She had strapped the boys in their car seats, a mother’s reflexive last careful, protective act to keep them safe on an evening drive while she sorted through her own emotions. That’s a more complex plot, gothic in its essence, one told more easily on the sweltering steps or in a vintage courtroom than in a tabloid headline.
In the end, I still wonder about the wedding albums in the car, with her maternity clothes and Tom Findlay’s kiss-off letter. Everything a young woman in the small-town South was raised for: to be a wife and mother. The only dreams she ever had — but they hadn’t brought her a happily ever after.
We can interpret the story in too many ways.
What we see depends on how close we stand.
We believed her for a while — what she said happened scared us. In her coy simple-mindedness, she upended us all, for a time.
And she broke our hearts.
