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Now that Sheriff Wells and his team of investigators—SLED’s chief, Robert Stewart, SLED behavioral specialist David Caldwell, Pete Logan, a retired FBI agent, now an investigator for SLED, and Jim Oppy, Special Agent in Charge of South Carolina, had concluded that Susan Smith was lying about her children they faced a daunting task: proving it and uncovering the truth.

They continued to interview Susan daily and gradually began to suggest to her that while they wanted to believe her story, they couldn’t. Early on in the interrogations, one of the investigators flatly accused Susan of doing in her children.

Her reaction stunned the men. The docile, weeping girl who kept praying for “God to look after my babies,” suddenly turned angry, shouting at her accuser. Susan’s peppery comeback taught them two things: that Susan Smith was not just a sweet brokenhearted mother but also a strong-willed young woman—and that this hardened suspect would be tough to crack.

Her story about the carjacking had plenty of holes. The red light, the absence of cars at the intersection, her conflicting stories about where she was going that night and where she had been. And ultimately, that the burgundy Mazda never turned up.

“The problem was,” said one senior investigator, “it was nothing that could be proven. It just didn’t ring right. We knew she was lying about it.”

Because the investigators could not prudently ignore Susan’s possible culpability from the start, and because they felt that she had probably acted alone, the team had to consider that the car, and maybe the children, were somewhere within walking distance of the McCloud house.

“We kept going back, kept going back to within two miles of the McCloud place,” says an investigator. “We couldn’t understand why we didn’t find that car.”

From the start, the men carried out a meticulously planned interrogation campaign to gradually break down Susan Smith’s defenses and encourage her to confess. Every day’s movements were carefully scripted. There were no ad libbed entrances; no casual questions to Susan that had not been planned beforehand.

To some extent, Pete Logan and Sheriff Wells served as the “good” cops. Logan, a graying, grandfatherly type, spoke gently to Susan, yet shrewdly managed to manipulate her into trusting him at the same time.

The interrogators hoped to build on Susan’s trust in them to coax her into confessing. And they were careful never to push her too hard. If they did, they feared, she might become defensive and clam up, or worse yet, commit suicide. They knew of her past attempts at killing herself and they knew if she died, they might never find the children.

All still fervently hoped the boys would be found alive, but in their hearts, they knew that wish seemed less and less likely to come true.

The strongest tool against Susan’s steadfast claim that she, indeed, was a victim of a carjacker was psychology. Investigators met several times a day, often with technical experts like Caldwell, to consider the next move.

“The timing was everything: what we were going to do, when we were going to do it, who would be responsible,” an investigator said.

Investigators met with Susan at two different locations—so-called safe houses—away from the prying eyes of the media. Reporters kept trying to read their actions. It wouldn’t help if they began asking why investigators continued to question Susan. They moved the command post into a Union recreation center at one point, and then to another location later.

After the first confrontation with Susan right after she told the carjacking story failed to break her, Logan, fifty-nine, met daily with Susan, talking gently to her and asking her to go over and over the events of October 25. After each conversation, he would hook her up to the polygraph and test her. She routinely failed the most critical question: “Do you know where your children are?”

On more than one occasion, investigators felt sure Susan was about to break. She would stop her conversation, lay her head on her arms on the table and sit, silent and still.

“She showed a lot of characteristic traits of one who was about to break,” one of the investigators said.

But then, Susan would abruptly sit upright, and steadfastly repeat her story.

The behavioral specialists who analyzed Susan Smith began to put together a profile of a cool, cunning woman with a strong drive to succeed. Early on in the investigation, Tom Findlay had provided the investigators with a copy of the letter he had sent Susan, ending their relationship. He told them Susan had reacted vindictively to his rebuff, with a bitterness that surprised him. With this information, and their own firsthand knowledge of her angry outburst when confronted with their early suspicions, investigators began to put together a possible motive: that greed and ambition had pushed her to rid herself of her children.

It was SLED’s David Caldwell who designed a series of ploys for Pete Logan to use in the lengthy conversations he had with Susan Smith almost daily. Several of the ploys would be used over the course of the week-long interrogation as part of their efforts to pressure Susan into confessing.

One of the teams’ first ideas was to develop a no-holds-barred media blitz.

Of course, already Union was teeming with reporters. Satellite trucks choked Main Street and friends and family of Susan and David Smith were being inundated with requests for interviews. The tabloids, both print and television, offered money for information, and the story, it seemed, couldn’t get any more attention.

But while reporters from all over the country chased the story some of the coverage was being carefully crafted by the team of investigators.

On Tuesday night, November 1, exactly one week after Susan made her claims about the carjacker, Wells met with dozens of reporters in the parking lot of the courthouse. His timing seemed symbolic. His words were carefully chosen, impeccably planned. And no mistake about it, they were directed to one specific listener: Susan Smith.

“I don’t know that we’re any closer to finding the car,” he began. “I have nothing encouraging. We’re following old information that we’ve just not gotten to. I don’t think it’s developed into anything as of yet to be any more excited about than yesterday.”

He talked about the abductor—the man whose phone call he said he awaited. “I’m waiting right now, hopefully to hear from the abductors,” Wells told the group. “I will talk with him directly. I will go to where he is or I will go to where I can find the children. I’m open to suggestions right now, and I’m hoping he will call. This case has grown to such a degree that if this abductor has seen the amount of attention that has been placed on it, that he would be frightful of how to handle himself or what to do or even to move right now.

“We’re still taking it as we did at the beginning, as a random carjacking. We do not know why the subject was interested in this particular car or if it had any bearing whatsoever, why the abductor would be at this particular location or even if he was one of our own citizens or not. We are following different scenarios: if it was a single abductor, what would be necessary to keep us from finding the vehicle, and where he might be.

“We’ve looked at scenarios that would involve two abductors and we’ve looked at scenarios that would involve more than two abductors, trying to figure what their plan of action might have been, how far they were willing to go to secrete this vehicle or where they may be at this time.”

Sheriff Wells looked intently into the cameras. “It’s very easy to believe Susan Smith, that one person took her at gun point but it’s also reasonable to believe that maybe someone else also was involved, who was picked up later or someone else was waiting to be picked up or someone else assisted in hiding the car. When I say, ‘two or more people’ it does not mean anything different than what she said, that one took the car.

“I wish I could tell you right now that I had something that made me very confident and had taken some of the burden off of our hearts, but as of right now, I don’t have anything that gives me a great deal of relief. I can’t say that anything is very promising at this time.”

*   *   *

In the investigators’ plan to intensify the media spotlight and unnerve Susan Smith, one unwitting participant was none other than Shirley McCloud.

On the Tuesday that Sheriff Wells faced the press, Roger Gregory, the captain of the sheriff’s department, called Shirley McCloud. He told her that the sheriff had asked if she would be willing to be interviewed for a segment to be shown that weekend on the syndicated television show America’s Most Wanted. The program would highlight the carjacking case, and hopefully, bring in the tip they needed to find Susan Smith’s children.

Shirley was not pleased about the idea of telling her story on television, but she tried to hide her lack of enthusiasm. She told the captain she would do it.

The America’s Most Wanted people came that night, setting up a makeshift studio in the Mc-Cloud’s den. Shirley had asked the captain to be there for the taping, and he was. In fact, he, too, was interviewed on the show. Like Shirley, the captain said that he did not believe Susan Smith had done anything to her children.

If the investigators were so sure by then that Susan was lying to them, why tape a show insisting on her innocence?

It is likely that they were hoping that the more media attention given to the story of the missing children, the more pressure would be brought to bear on Susan and the more likely she would break down.

Their next step was appealing to the carjacker publicly. The investigators arranged for calls to go out to a handful of the city’s most influential ministers. They were all asked to gather on the steps of the courthouse on Thursday evening to make an emotional plea to the man who stole Susan Smith’s babies.

Rev. Long was invited, as was Rev. Cato. The Reverend A. J. Brackett came to represent St. Paul Baptist Church. In all, almost twenty clergyman were asked to meet at the steps of the courthouse. They all said they would be there.

During the second week of the search, SLED’s David Caldwell came up with the most elaborate ploy of all:

Investigators reportedly would use desktop publishing to print up what would appear to be an authentic newspaper story about a young mother who had killed her children, then served a short sentence, and had, on release, made a fine new life for herself by marrying a wealthy physician. A photograph of a policewoman Susan didn’t know would be used as an illustration of the woman. It was aimed at convincing Susan to confess and take her medicine in expectation of a good life to follow.

They never used the ruse. The America’s Most Wanted piece never aired. And the Union ministers who gathered that day in front of all the cameras at the courthouse but did not have an opportunity to appeal to the carjacker.

Because just after three P.M. on Thursday, November 3, Susan Vaughan Smith confessed to the murder of her two children.