Susan Smith

THE CASE

The case gained worldwide attention shortly after it developed, because Smith initially reported to police, on October 25 , 1994 , that she had been Carjacked by an African-American man who drove away with her sons still in the car. Smith made tearful pleas on television for the rescue and return of her children. However, nine days later, following an intensive, heavily publicized investigation and nationwide search, Smith eventually confessed to letting her 1990 Mazda Protegé roll into nearby John D. Long Lake , drowning her children inside.

Many people across the United States and around the world, to whom she and her two "missing" sons had been the subject of an outpouring of sympathy, felt strongly betrayed. Their reaction to the betrayal was further aggravated by the fact that she had attempted to cast blame, falsely, upon an African-American man, making the case racially sensitive and bringing back memories of a recent Roxbury , Massachusetts , case involving a man known as Charles Stuart , who had shot his wife to death in their vehicle and concealed his guilt by making a false police report that a black man had done it, causing racial tensions in the metropolitan Boston area for sometime afterward. Additionally, her alleged motive for the deaths -- to dispose of her children so that she might have a relationship with a wealthy local man who had no interest in a "ready-made" family -- was met with widely held contempt and revulsion.

Smith pleaded ''not guilty'', despite her confessions, when her prosecutors refused to offer a Plea Bargain . Her ex-husband, David Smith, who had written a book about the marriage and about Susan Smith's killing of her sons, allowed her defense lawyers to use the book as evidence. {Link without Title}

She was spared the Death Penalty in a decision by her South Carolina jury, after her stepfather, prominent Union County Republican Party and Christian Coalition leader Beverly Russell , testified that he had sexually molested her when she was a teenager (until the intervention of the local Department of Social Services), and again in the months before the drowning of the two boys. Russell was never charged with a crime, despite the fact that he was accused in court of, and did not deny, the molestation and incestous sexual abuse of his teenaged stepdaughter. {Link without Title}

In 2003, a journalist from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania who was writing a story about Smith being held in general population at a South Carolina women's prison, a setting likely to endanger her because of her notoriety, concluded that the deaths of Michael and Alex Smith were the result of an accident, not murder. His conclusions were based on psychological analysis of Smith's behavior after the disappearance of the boys, ambiguities in her confession, and a laboratory report obtained under a Freedom Of Information Act request from South Carolina 's State Law Enforcement Division (SLED) indicating that Smith could not have rolled the car into the lake from the top of the boat ramp by releasing the Mazda's hand brake, because of a mechanical flaw in the car's braking system. The article claims that Smith fabricated her story about the "black carjacker" to cover up her role in the death.

CULTURAL REFERENCES

Indie musician Hayden's song "When This Is Over" (from the 1995 album "Everything I Long For") recalls the murders from the point of view of Michael Smith.

Rock and Roll band Blind Melon 's song "Car Seat (God's Presents)" from their 1995 album " Soup " is about the murder.

An Episode Of South Park in which Butters' mother tries to murder him, and blames "some Puerto Rican guy", parallels this case.

The first section of Cornelius Eady's ''Brutal Imagination'' (New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 2001) recounts the murders in poetic verse from the perspective of the imagined black kidnapper.

New York poet Lee Ann Brown's ''The Ballad of Susan Smith'' is a sung poem set to an old southern mountain hymn tune. It is in the grand tradition of topical mountain ballads about passion and murder.

Susan Smith's story inspired the 2006 film '' Freedomland ''.

SEE ALSO

Andrea Yates

REFERENCES

South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED); ''SLED Latent Print and Crime Scene Worksheet: Floatation Characteristics of 1990 Mazda Protege; May 24, 1995''

Information About

Susan Smith