7

Every morning, before they left for work, Shirley and Rick McCloud stood by their den window, looking out at Highway 49. It had become their ritual ever since Susan Smith arrived at their door.

They’d stare out at the road and the trees by the turnoff to John D. Long Lake. And Shirley would say the same words, again and again.

“Where are those kids? Where are those kids?”

Her husband would put his arm around her. He had no answer.

On Thursday morning, two days after Susan’s story of the carjacking, Shirley woke before dawn and felt a growing sense of dread. The house was frigid, the winds outside blowing harder, stronger than they had since last winter.

She turned to her husband, near tears. “It’s so cold, Rick,” she said. “Oh, God, those kids. I hope whoever has got them is taking care of them. I hope they’re okay.”

*   *   *

A few miles away, the Russell household was teeming with activity. Susan and David had been staying with Bev and Linda Russell since the night of their sons’ disappearance. The three-bedroom house was always jammed with people. David’s father, Charles David Smith, and his wife, Susan, flew in from California. David’s uncle Doug and his wife arrived from Michigan. There were friends and cousins, ministers and neighbors. They slept on couches and in sleeping bags. Usually, the family slept in shifts, giving everyone a chance to get some rest.

When the house became too jammed, friends and family spilled into the screened-in porch off the den. In the evenings, when the reporters had left their posts in the driveway, the family gathered in the carport, greeting visitors as they came up the walk.

Church members and neighbors brought over enormous home-cooked meals to bolster the family as they kept up their vigil for the missing boys. Every day, Scotty Vaughan stopped in at a local restaurant and picked up a donated cooler of ice for sodas and juice.

The families of Susan and David Smith tried to comfort each other, offering a shoulder, an encouraging word, prayers. Every day, someone in the group would repeat the words that had become their mantra in the days since the disappearance: stay hopeful, stay positive, and pray.

Susan, it seemed, never spent a moment alone. Always, friends and family surrounded her. It was an odd change—the loneliness of her past was suddenly replaced by absolute love and support. Perhaps the horror of what she did was somehow muted in this atmosphere of sympathy and caring.

David, though, reacted differently, wanting more often to be alone. He would slip into a back bedroom at the Russell home and close the door. The families respected his privacy.

“You could tell when it got to him,” a friend said.

*   *   *

Two days after the alleged carjacking, Margaret Frierson and Charlotte Foster from the Adam Welsh Center arrived at the Russell house. Susan and David had been told the women had worked with other families to find their missing children, but they didn’t know what to expect.

There were so many people in the house, they retired to a back bedroom to talk alone. Ordinarily, the women prefer to speak primarily to the parents of the children, but because the family was so close, they agreed to meet with Susan, David, Bev, Linda, and Scotty Vaughan.

For forty minutes, Margaret told the group about the center and what it does to help the parents of missing children. She explained that she and Charlotte could be the family’s liaisons with the news media, arranging interviews and broadcasting pictures of the missing children and information about the crime. They would help arrange to have flyers printed up with photos of the boys and a police department sketch of the suspect, and would see that they were sent to missing-children centers throughout the nation. At those centers, volunteers would distribute the flyers, blanketing their areas with information about the crime. If a video of the children were available, the women said, they would help produce a public service announcement and arrange to have it broadcast on national and cable television. They could also field offers from people who wanted to set up rewards for information leading to the return of the children.

The family seemed overwhelmed by the women’s offer of assistance. Though Margaret and Charlotte had much more to talk to them about, Susan and David had to cut the conversation short.

They were needed at the sheriff’s office. Charlotte stayed behind at the Russell house, answering the phone, and Margaret followed the young Smith couple in her car. In the six years she had been executive director of the South Carolina Chapter of the Adam Walsh Center, Margaret had worked with most of the sheriffs in the state’s forty-six counties. But Wells was relatively new on the job in Union County, and there hadn’t before been a missing child case under his watch. Margaret knew it was important to advise the sheriff early on of the center’s capabilities. Every bit of help might lead to the safe return of Michael and Alex.

Outside Wells’s office, the throng of reporters and camera crews was thick. They had begun arriving the day before, and by Thursday, the motels in town were booked solid. Satellite trucks lined Main Street. As Wells questioned Susan in his office, Margaret and SLED’s Eddie Harris, a tall man with a neatly trimmed mustache, talked to David about making a plea for the safe return of the children on national television. Both Margaret and Harris believed that a nationally televised appeal could be instrumental in solving the boys’ disappearance. But they both made one thing clear: David needed to make his own decision on what he planned to say.

“You say what you’re comfortable with, don’t try to say something because we tell you to say it,” Margaret told him. “Speak from the heart.”

Margaret reassured him that he didn’t need to worry about fending off questions from the media. “You don’t have to answer any questions if you don’t want to,” she said.

David nodded and swallowed hard. He was a little nervous, but he felt ready. He knew it was important to reach the greatest number of people. He wanted his boys back so badly, he would do anything to help find them.

Margaret slipped outside and quickly counted the number of microphones and cameras. She figured it might help David to know what to expect.

Wearing a blue sweatshirt and jeans, a solemn-looking David Smith met with the press for the first time on the steps of the Union County Sheriff’s Department.

“To whoever has our boys, we ask that you please don’t hurt them and bring them back. We love them very much … I plead to the guy to please return our children to us safe and unharmed. Everywhere I look, I see their play toys and pictures. They are both wonderful children. I don’t know how else to put it. And I can’t imagine life without them.”

When he finished his appeal, David was escorted back inside the sheriff’s office and Eddie Harris turned to Margaret.

“I think they want to hear something from you,” he said.

Margaret hesitated for just a moment. She was acquainted with most of the local reporters and camera crews but she wasn’t used to such national exposure. Still, she knew how important it was to speak out and talk about the Adam Walsh Center and its functions. And she too took her place before the cameras.

It was the first step in what would become a massive media campaign to find the boys. Over the next twenty-four hours, Margaret Frierson and Charlotte Foster would work with WIS, a local Columbia NBC affiliate, to produce a thirty-second public-service announcement about the missing children. The evening before, Linda Russell had given them a video she had taken at little Alex’s first birthday party seven weeks earlier. On the tape, the boys played together and laughed. Susan was seen helping Alex unwrap his presents.

Margaret wrote the script and had a WIS staffer supply the voice-over. She made sure it was supplied to all of NBC’s stations and cable affiliates around the country. She sent photos and flyers in overnight mail packets to dozens of missing children centers, including the three other Adam Walsh groups and the Polly Klaas Foundation in Petaluma, California. She called paper companies to persuade them to donate paper to Union businessman Mike Stevens, the owner of Stevens Printing Company on Highway 176. The day after the boys disappeared, Stevens had put all his orders on hold and devoted his presses to printing up more than 50,000 flyers with pictures of the Smith boys at no cost to the town or the family.

The hours were arduous, the pressure intense. For the next week, Margaret and Charlotte were in Union every day, camped out at the dining room table in the Russell home. Charlotte often manned the phones, taking dozens of messages from well-wishers and reporters, while Margaret continued to spread word of the boys’ disappearance. It was exhausting work, but the two women were dedicated to their cause. They had to be. The lives of children were at stake.

*   *   *

Inside the office of Sheriff Howard Wells, the investigation was continuing at top speed. Early Thursday morning, Wells appeared on the Today show and later in the day, on Larry King Live. “We are going to look at everything and rule out nothing until we can do it with evidence,” he said, on Today. He told the nation that his office had received more than 1,000 calls but so far they had no strong leads to follow. “Very rarely do you have a crime and not have a crime scene to work,” he told the press. “I’ve been in law enforcement twenty years and I’ve never had a case where there is so little to work on.”

Meanwhile, divers divided their time between searching a canal in Lockhart and scouring the bottom of John D. Long Lake. They spent hours in the murky waters but found nothing. Experts had made a considerable error: they assumed that anyone trying to get rid of a car would drive it into the water fast. No one considered that the driver of the Mazda would let it simply roll from the edge of the banks. Although it would be easy to imagine that a car driven into a body of water at high speed would go out further than a car driven slowly, in reality, the opposite is true. The faster the car hits the water, the more waves it creates, stopping the forward momentum. A car driven fast into a lake would simply drop and sink right there at the edge. But the Mazda had simply rolled into the water, and, as a result, had drifted out much further than anyone anticipated, nearly 100 feet. While the divers searched the edges of the lake, the Mazda remained hidden from their view in the murky waters, the dreadful resting place for the bodies of Susan and David Smith’s children.

*   *   *

Two days after the alleged carjacking, investigators were presented with an important development in the mystery of what had happened to Michael and Alex Smith: both David and Susan Smith submitted to polygraph tests administered by the FBI. David’s test showed no signs that he knew anything about the disappearance of his sons. But Susan’s test proved inconclusive. One thing was certain: she showed the greatest level of deception when asked the question: “Do you know where your children are?”

The investigators did not hide the test results from Susan. Concerned, Susan told David that she thought she had not done well on the test. She wasn’t sure she’d failed, she told him, but she said she thought perhaps the police were beginning to doubt her story.

Susan didn’t have to ask David if he believed her. He did.

But Wells and the other agents were far more skeptical. Investigators confronted Susan with the discrepancies in her story. On Tuesday night, when she was near hysterics, she had told Wells about the red light, and how the black man jumped in the car. There had been no one around, Susan said. Not a single car on the road.

But the investigators knew differently. The light at the Monarch intersection is permanently green unless a car on the cross street triggers the signal to switch. If there had been no other cars around, the light would not have been red.

And there was another inconsistency. When asked where she had been heading when she was carjacked, Susan said she was on her way to visit Mitchell Sinclair, the fiancé of her best friend, Donna Garner. Mitchell lived less than a mile north of the Monarch intersection, in a rambling old house left to him by his grandmother.

But, Susan was told gently, investigators had spoken to Mitchell, and he hadn’t been expecting her. In fact, it was unlikely he had been expecting anyone. The house, investigators discovered, was a mess. Besides, that Tuesday at 9:00 P.M., Mitchell wasn’t even home.

Something else was nagging at the men interrogating Susan. Where was she in the hours before nine? Susan had the answer ready—she’d taken the children shopping at Wal-Mart. They’d strolled through the store for quite a while, actually.

But a short time later, that story collapsed. SLED agents told Susan that investigators had canvassed Wal-Mart, talking to many people who were working or shopping that night. No one remembered seeing her or her two little boys.

Susan thought a moment, and then responded. She wasn’t really at Wal-Mart, she explained. She’d actually just been driving for hours with the boys in the back seat. She hadn’t said anything earlier, she told them, because she was afraid it might sound suspicious.

The investigators listened with growing concerns. By now, Sheriff Wells was heading up the investigation searching for the car and the children and meeting daily with the SLED team. The interrogation of Susan Smith had been taken over by behavioral specialist David Caldwell and investigator Lansing “Pete” Logan, both seasoned SLED agents.

But Howard Wells knew he needed to continue a parallel investigation into Susan Smith. It was simply good police work. The summer before Susan Smith made headlines, Wells had gone to the FBI’s National Academy at Quantico, Virginia, earning fifteen college credits and finishing first in his class. He also attended the National Sheriffs Institute’s Executive Development Program. He was elected class president and finished at the top of the class.

Although at times it seemed the entire nation was searching for Michael and Alex Smith Wells’s investigation was proving frustrating. A Salisbury, North Carolina, convenience store was robbed by a black man in a car with South Carolina plates, but no children were seen in the car. By Friday morning, a Maryland fugitive had been arrested.

Later, about 200 people combed the Uwharrie National Forest in Rowan, Davidson, Stanly, and Montgomery counties in North Carolina after a deer hunter reported hearing a child’s cries. Nothing was found.

The sheriff’s instincts were sharp. But even as he continued to wade through tips and leads flowing through his office, Howard Wells suspected that the greatest source of information on the whereabouts of Michael and Alex Smith was the pretty young woman seated in his office.

As sure as Wells was that Susan had informations she wasn’t revealing, David Smith was certain his wife was the victim. He became annoyed that the sheriff’s department continuously asked Susan to meet with investigators. He couldn’t understand why they were wasting precious time talking to Susan. She’d said all she knew.

David couldn’t stop thinking about his boys. He kept replaying his last Sunday visit with Michael and Alex. He’d seen them for seven hours that day. They hadn’t gone anywhere, they’d just stayed in his apartment and played. He’d gotten some wooden blocks and he and Michael had stacked them higher and higher, and then Alex would toddle over and knock them down. How they laughed, his Alex and Michael.

When Susan had arrived to pick up the children, David had hugged and kissed his sons good-bye. At the last minute he had decided to walk them all down to Susan’s car.

That was the last time he saw them, as they drove away in the back seat of their mother’s Mazda Protege.