13
On the day Susan Smith admitted to rolling her car into John D. Long Lake, her two boys trapped in their car seats, she began the morning by proclaiming defiantly on all three network morning shows that she had had nothing to do with the disappearance of her children.
She and David were up by five that day, getting ready for the invasion of television cameras into the living room of the Russell home. They sat together on the couch, holding hands.
Susan did most of the talking.
“I don’t think any parent could love my children more than I do, and I would never even think about doing anything that would harm them,” she said. “The truth has been told. I know what the truth is and I did not have anything to do with the abduction of my children.
“It’s painful to have the finger pointed at you when it’s your children. Whoever did this is a sick and emotionally unstable person. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to take our children.”
On CBS This Morning, anchor Harry Smith asked David if he believed Susan.
“I believe my wife totally,” David said softly.
Added Susan, “It hurts to know that I may be accused. I do not understand why they would do what they are doing. Our lives have been torn apart by this tragic event. I can’t express how much they are wanted back home.”
Shortly after the broadcast, a family member called the Union Daily Times, canceling an exclusive interview and photo shoot they’d promised reporter Anna Brown and photographer Tim Kimzey. Susan and David had had enough media pressure for the day. The couple, exhausted, retired to a back bedroom for a nap.
Susan’s friend from Conso, Toni Horne, dropped by briefly on her lunch hour. “They’ve just got to find my babies,” Susan told her. “They’ve got to bring my babies back.”
Around 12:30 P.M., Susan Smith left the Russell home. She told David she was going to drop off some letters. She did not tell him that Sheriff Wells had sent for her to take her to another safe house for yet another round of questioning by interrogators.
In the dining room of the Russell house, Margaret Frierson and Charlotte Foster were manning phones and discussing the possibility of arranging for Charles David Smith, David’s father, to speak on NBC’s Dateline show. They were also sorting through the dozens of requests the family and the Adam Walsh Center had received from strangers offering to put up reward money for the safe return of Michael and Alex Smith. Margaret had asked Sheriff Wells about setting up a reward, but he had asked her to wait.
“Not right now,” he told her. “At this point in the investigation, we don’t want to do it.”
For a few days, Margaret put off answering the requests, but by Thursday she felt she could no longer wait. Out of respect for the donors, she needed to respond to their generous offers.
Margaret planned to write an individual letter to each person who called or wrote in, explaining that they did not plan to set up a reward fund now, but might in the future. She would ask the donors to let them know in writing how much money they would be able to give.
A little past three P.M., Margaret and Charlotte explained the situation to David, Bev, and Linda. They told the family they would be working out of their Columbia office for the rest of the day.
The family said they understood, and thanked them for coming.
Just before they left, Margaret and Charlotte said good-bye to Doug and Susan Smith, David’s uncle and aunt. Doug Smith is Charles David Smith’s brother. They had all been staying at Susan and David’s Toney Road house since the children disappeared.
But with so little progress in the search for Michael and Alex Doug and Susan were preparing to return home to Michigan. They promised to fly back to South Carolina at a moment’s notice if there were any developments in the case.
The Russell house was filled, as usual. Susan’s brother Scotty Vaughan was there, but his wife, Wendy, was not. After a week’s leave of absence, she had finally gone back to work. Several women from Buffalo United Methodist Church had arrived in the afternoon, carrying trays of hot food for the family. Some of the local ministers were on their way to the Russells’. They planned to give the family a brief summary of their upcoming appeal to the carjacker.
By now, the family had seen that afternoon’s edition of the Union Daily Times. In an interview, Shirley McCloud had spoken out in defense of Susan, insisting that Susan’s panic the night of October 25 was genuine, and that she was thoroughly convinced that Susan Smith was telling the truth.
Shirley had tried to duck the interview but reporter Anna Brown had persisted. “Shirley, everybody’s been saying Susan said this or that, but you know what she said that night,” Anna had told her. “You could set the story straight for the people of Union.”
Shirley had given in. She had decided Anna was probably right. But she had made one request: she wanted to see the article before it ran. Anna agreed, faxing her an early version. Shirley read it over carefully, making a few minor changes. When she was satisfied she gave Anna the go-ahead.
Once again, Shirley McCloud faced the public and defended the young woman whose trembling face she’d held tenderly in her hands on that horrible night. It was, Shirley McCloud had ultimately decided, her responsibility to fight for Susan. As the days passed and no word of the little boys emerged, Shirley could not forget how frail and lost Susan had seemed that night, her body trembling as she sat hunched over on Shirley’s couch, sobbing with her head ducked practically between her knees. Others didn’t know, Shirley reasoned. They weren’t in the living room at nine o’clock that Tuesday. They didn’t see what Shirley saw.
And so the stalwart face of a trusting Shirley McCloud made the front page of the local newspaper the very day that Susan Smith broke down and said that everything had been a lie.
* * *
Investigators will not reveal what they said to Susan Smith on the afternoon of November 3, 1994, but it appears that their unremitting pressure, the media bombardment, and perhaps a touch of her own conscience had at last pushed Susan Smith over the edge. They also reportedly confronted her with all the inconsistencies in her story and told her they planned to go public with their suspicions. Then, Wells went in to talk privately to Susan. After so many hours of meetings and strategy sessions, even the investigators found themselves a bit surprised when Susan Smith at last admitted the terrible fate she had brought on her two young sons.
Susan had seemed much the same as she showed up for questioning that day. Dressed in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, she hadn’t appeared particularly agitated when the sheriff arranged for her to be picked up at the Russell home that afternoon. But something within her had clearly changed.
Within two hours Susan Smith began to tell Sheriff Howard Wells what happened on the night of October 25.
Susan Smith talked about the crushing isolation she felt as she drove her Mazda along the dark highway, consumed by the desire to end her life. She had left home that evening planning to drive around for a while and then take the boys to her mother’s house.
But the bad feelings inside her soul ached so much. No one, she felt, could help her, and nothing could be worse than how she felt at that very moment. Susan talked about how wrong her whole life seemed, and how she could not escape the torment she felt inside. She tallied the ills in her life, recalling events as far back as the abortion she’d had while she was in high school.
Susan told the investigators about Tom Findlay, how much she loved him, how badly it hurt that he didn’t love her back. She admitted to them that she had done something to him after he’d ended their relationship—something she believed was so awful she was convinced that he could never love her.
In her confession, Susan Smith maintained that she pulled off Highway 49 onto the dark, windy road that led to John D. Long Lake because she was ready to die. As for her children, Susan said that she believed they would be better off with her, with God, than left motherless and alone.
In her plan, it would be the three of them—Susan, Michael, and Alex. They would die together.
Susan told the investigators that she tried to end their lives that night. She put the car in neutral and let it roll down the boat ramp but then she stopped. She tried again, and again, she stopped.
She told them she got out of the car, overcome with grief, racked with pain. All the time, the babies slept so peacefully in the back seat, not a sound from either one of them.
Susan Smith avowed that she had reached the lowest point in her life. It was then that she reached into the car and released the emergency brake.
During her confession, Susan repeatedly told the authorities that she loved her sons, that she never meant for this to happen, and that she was so very, very sorry. After it had happened, she told them, she wanted so badly to take back what she’d done but she knew that wasn’t possible. And so she ran, screaming hysterically. When she wound up on the front porch of Shirley and Rick McCloud’s house, her alibi was already in the works.
Keeping the terrible secret these nine days had been torture, she insisted. Watching the pain her parents were suffering, the agony endured by David and his parents, cut her deeply. She said she was scared but admitted that she always knew that her story would eventually collapse, that the truth of what she did that night at the lake would inevitably emerge.
Now that it had, Susan Smith felt enormously relieved.
* * *
For Sheriff Howard Wells, Susan Smith’s confession confirmed what in his heart he’d already known—that she had indeed killed those precious boys. Yet as he listened to her talk, the brutality of her actions rendered him almost unable to speak.
For a moment, he was paralyzed by his horror of what Susan had done. But only for a moment. There was so much to do, not a moment to waste.
After nine days of nothing but theories, speculations, and questions, Sheriff Howard Wells had finally gotten some answers. Now, the next step was to confirm them.
* * *
Outside Susan’s earshot, Wells met with SLED Chief Robert Stewart and FBI Agent Jim Oppy. The men, their faces drawn with sadness after learning of the grim news, hunkered down to strategize their next, pivotal steps. They contrived a plan for confirming Susan’s story and then breaking the news to the family. They called the divers they would need to scour the bottom of John D. Long lake, the patrol units they would need to block off the road to the lake while they conducted their search. The family, they knew, would need to be told of Susan’s confession in person, but they didn’t want to deliver the sad news until they had made sure that the Mazda and the two Smith boys were indeed resting in those murky waters. And they knew the always-difficult task of informing a family about the death of a loved one would be complicated by the glare of the media. Reporters and camera crews would swarm to the crime scene as soon as word got out. The citizens of Union, anxious to know what was going on, would likely not be far behind.
* * *
Once their plan was in motion, Union County Sheriff Howard Wells left Susan in the custody of SLED agents and stepped outside into the sunshine. He got into his car and drove directly to the lake, traveling along Highway 49. It was, in essence, the same drive he’d made nine days before, when he responded to Rick McCloud Jr.’s frantic call.
He didn’t think about that now, about the irony of the words emitted from the radio that night.
Wells did not know what would happen over the next few hours. It had been nine long days since the lawman had taken on the toughest case of his career, a case that had catapulted him into a national spotlight. Now the end of the investigation was approaching, the worst finish he could have imagined.
Soon he would have almost all the answers to the questions that dogged him for so long. Except, of course, the most commanding one: Why?
He wondered if even Susan knew.
* * *
By the time Wells left the safe house, Susan had been handed a pen and a notebook and been asked to put her confession in writing. She filled two pages with her carefully crafted script, rounding off her letters with neat flourishes and drawing in little hearts whenever she wanted to use the word “heart”:
When I left my home on Tuesday, October 25, I was very emotionally distraught. I didn’t want to live anymore! I felt like things could never get any worse. When I left home, I was going to ride around a little while and then go to my mom’s.
As I rode and rode and rode, I felt even more anxiety coming upon me about not wanting to live. I felt I couldn’t be a good mom anymore, but I didn’t want my children to grow up without a mom. I felt I had to end our lives to protect us from any grief or harm.
I had never felt so lonely and so sad in my entire life. I was in love with someone very much, but he didn’t love me and never would. I had a very difficult time accepting that. But I had hurt him very much and I could see why he could never love me.
When I was at John D. Long Lake, I had never felt so scared and unsure as I did then. I wanted to end my life so bad and was in my car ready to go down that ramp into the water, and I did go part way, but I stopped. I went again and stopped. I then got out of the car and stood by the car a nervous wreck.
Why was I feeling this? Why was everything so bad in my life? I had no answers to these questions. I dropped to the lowest point when I allowed my children to go down that ramp into the water without me.
I took off running and screaming, “Oh God! Oh God, NO! What have I done? Why did you let this happen? I wanted to turn around so bad and go back, but I knew it was too late. I was an absolute mental case! I couldn’t believe what I had done.
I love my children with all my heart and that will never change. I have prayed to them for forgiveness and hope that they will find it in their heart to forgive me. I never meant to hurt them!! I am sorry for what has happened and I know that I need some help. I don’t think I will ever be able to forgive myself for what I have done.
My children, Michael and Alex, are with our Heavenly Father now, and I know that they will never be hurt again. As a mom, that means more than words can ever say.
I knew from day one, the truth would prevail, but I was so scared I didn’t know what to do. It was very tough emotionally to sit and watch my family hurt like they did. It was time to bring a peace of mind to everyone, including myself.
My children deserve to have the best, and now they will. I broke down on Thursday November 3, and told Sheriff Howard Wells the truth. It wasn’t easy, but after the truth was out, I felt like the world was lifted off my shoulders.
I know now that it is going to be a tough and long road ahead of me. At this very moment, I don’t feel I will be able to handle what’s coming, but I have prayed to God that he give me the strength to survive each day and to face those times and situations in my life that will be extremely painful. I have put my total faith in God, and He will take care of me.
Susan V. Smith
11/3/94
5:05 P.M.