Chapter Seven
Susan was very upset at learning that Kathy was pregnant, her friends say, and she cried bitterly over Mark’s long stay in Connecticut during the winter of 1987. The news that Mark was about to be a father again had come just at the start of their love affair, at a time when Susan was fantasizing about asking Mark to leave his wife and marry her, during a period when Mark needed her to testify in the upcoming trial against Cat Eyes Lockhart.
Carmella vividly recalls Susan’s sobbing as she called Mark a cheapskate and Kathy a slut when she and Bo and Carmella stopped at a Wendy’s drive-thru to get a snack before their ride back home. Mark had told her he was going to be gone for two weeks, to stay with Kathy, Danielle, and the newborn child in Connecticut over the Christmas season. Susan had given him an expensive jogging suit that day, a Christmas gift it had taken her weeks to settle upon, but Mark had had nothing for her, not even a box of candy or a card to wish her a happy holiday.
“That woman’s pregnant again!” Susan had yelped as she gulped down Pepsi and fries in the Wendy’s lot.
“You crazy fool! He’s married! You’re just going to get in trouble,” Carmella told her.
“No. He loves me. He’s just stuck with her ’cause her parents are rich. He told me they were worth nine million dollars. Hey, Mel, do I look all right? My hair’s not messed up, is it?”
“What in the world do you see in him? He’s just using you,” Bo interrupted, angry at seeing his sister so upset. “I just don’t see what’s so great about him, Suzie. The guy looks like Barney Fife!”
“Well, you’re not so damn great-looking yourself, Bo! He’s leaving her anyway; he wants to be with me. He told me so just the other day.”
“Are you sure he’s going to leave that woman, Suzie?” Carmella asked.
“Well, we’ve been to a motel all day, and he’s talking about leaving her, but he’ll lose everything he’s got if he leaves her right now.”
“Well, if he loved you, he wouldn’t be going off with her for so long.”
“He does love me! But with that bitch pregnant again . . .” Susan burst into tears. “Oh, Mel, how can he do me that way? What am I gonna do?” she cried.
“Lord have mercy, Suzie, don’t you see that he’s using you? Just for a good time!”
“He told me he loved me. He said he was going to marry me, and now he’s changed his mind!”
“You’re crazy for talking to him, Suzie.”
“I’ll go to that woman and tell that slut that I’m pregnant too. I’ll tell her that my baby means something!”
“But you’re not pregnant, are you, Suzie?” Bo interrupted.
“No, but. . . well, I might be. Who knows? I might get pregnant any time. God, he’s so sexy!”
In mid 1988, Putnam had become adept at balancing his domestic life and his affair with Susan, keeping her hopeful that he would leave his wife while maintaining the appearance of being a family man. As long as he kept Susan Smith in his pocket, Putnam thought, he was sure to make a name for himself in the FBI. After all, here he was, a rookie agent, being credited with putting an end to a bank robbery problem that had plagued the area for almost a year. He’d captured Cat Eyes Lockhart, and now he was after MacArthur Lockhart.
With his career at stake, Mark made certain that Susan’s sexual needs were being met, and their affair heated up, Susan giving Shelby all the intimate details of their love life. Mark was spending nights with her at his house now, whenever Kathy was up north, and Susan bragged about his body, telling Shelby how sexy he looked walking around his house in skimpy jogging shorts and cut off T-shirts. She was just wild about him and even wore his clothes when she stayed over with him. She’d brought an olive green pair of his shorts home once.
Whenever Susan was alone with Shelby, she would perpetually dwell upon Mark’s bedroom practices, bragging about how well-equipped he was, claiming that he could have multiple orgasms and that the two of them had sex for hours on end. She said he liked her to be on top, that he liked oral sex, that he was a good kisser, that he was strong and could pick her up and put her into all kinds of different positions she had never even heard of before. In short, Susan described Mark as a superman in bed.
Early in the summer of 1988, Susan informed Putnam about the bank robbery that Mac Lockhart was planning. She also told people close to her that Mark wanted her to take a more active role in “setting up” the crime. Putnam, meanwhile, was figuring if he could successfully wrap up another bank robbery case, he would be able to persuade the FBI to relocate him.
At his bidding, Susan Smith was now pushing three men into pulling off a bank robbery in Phelps, Kentucky. In fact, on many occasions she took the youngest of the three, twenty-four-year-old Paul Frazier, over to the Peter Creek branch of the First National Bank of Pikeville in Phelps at about five-thirty in the morning. While he scouted out the escape route, she waited in her vehicle, parked inside the carwash next door. She offered to be the driver if Frazier needed one, and repeatedly told him that a bank robbery was “easy money.”
Susan’s prodding went on daily for a period of weeks before the first robbery attempt was actually pulled off. She especially had to work on young Frazier, who was leery of the venture. In the middle of June, Frazier, MacArthur Lockhart, and Pete Blankenship set out to rob the bank, but Frazier backed down and they headed back to Vulcan, where Susan was pacing the floor, knowing that Mark and the Kentucky State Police were waiting in one of the vacant lots near the Phelps bank.
Family members say Susan Smith was in on that unsuccessful caper, having been told by Mark Putnam to “get them to the bank, I don’t care how. Give them guns, give them whatever they need.” Susan was assured by Putnam that she would be removed from the scene once the robbery had started and law enforcement had arrived. Allegedly Putnam and the Kentucky State Police staked out the Phelps bank for three days, during which time Susan drove Frazier and the others there but couldn’t get them to pull off the job.
While all this was going on, Putnam was calling Susan at home constantly, and to keep Kenneth at bay, they devised a system. Whenever Kenneth answered the phone, Mark would hang up. Susan would then call him back from another location or she’d ask Kenneth to go to the store for her so she could have some privacy. Whenever Bo picked up the phone, he had instructions to answer yeah instead of hello if it was safe to ask for Susan.
Sometimes, when Putnam hung up on him, Kenneth turned to Susan and said, “It’s your boyfriend calling,” and Susan always denied it. Then she would wait until he was far enough down the road before she returned Mark’s call, Bo standing by the living-room window to watch for Kenneth while she wooed Putnam. The phone on the bar in Susan’s kitchen had a cord long enough to allow it to be carried all over the house, and there was another phone in her bedroom. Kenneth sometimes picked up that one, trying to listen in on her conversations.
“When Kenneth knew it was Putnam on the phone,” Bo remembers, “he would get right up beside her, trying to listen, and sometimes he hung the phone up on her.”
By now, Susan was refusing to have sex with Kenneth, and he was sure her brothers and sisters were lying to him, covering up her affair. Although he had no proof, Kenneth was determined to get revenge. Yet, despite the increasingly tense situation at home, Susan was spending more and more time in Pikeville.
It was during the planning stages of the Phelps bank robbery, that Kathy Daniels started making regular trips over to Pikeville with Bo and Susan. Sometimes the two young women went there by themselves; Susan was now driving a Dodge Diplomat, a beige car just like Mark’s which she purchased with part of her FBI-informant money. On these trips, Susan repeatedly told her new sister-in-law that she had no feeling left for Kenneth. She loved Mark, she said, and she knew Kenneth was “jealous as hell” over it but didn’t care. She’d insist that “Mark-ee-poo” would eventually marry her.
Kathy remembers Susan as always being in a big rush when she came over the Vulcan bridge to pick her up. She said they’d usually stop at a little place called First Choice Market, in a town called Kimper about midway between Freeburn and Pikeville, and Susan would call Mark from the pay phone there. There are no pay phones in Freeburn.
Kathy got a good look at Putnam once or twice, even though he did his best to hide himself from her, slouching down behind the steering wheel and wearing dark glasses.
“He didn’t want me to see his face, and Susan was afraid for me to see him,” Kathy stated. “I knew he was FBI. And he was good-looking.”
Kathy claims “Susan fell all over herself” to please Mark, trying to “talk proud, not like a hillbilly” whenever she got near him. When Kathy later became pregnant by Bo, she said Susan asked her to name the baby Mark if it was a boy, arguing and pleading with her sister-in-law and telling her what a perfect name Mark would be.
“I remember one time, we stopped at First Choice, so she could use the pay phone to call Mark. I gave her a quarter and she came back with a whole handful of quarters. It was like she’d hit the jackpot in Las Vegas, you know; the phone had given her all this change and she was laughing about it, and said she couldn’t wait to tell her Mark-ee-poo! But he wasn’t in when she’d called and had no idea we were on our way over there. I told her we should turn back, but Susan just couldn’t stay away from him.”
Since Susan had no appointment with Mark, she was nervous when she got to Pikeville on that particular day. Putnam still wasn’t in his office when she called again from a pay phone outside the courthouse and spoke to his partner, Ron Poole. Usually Kathy went shopping while Susan spent time with Mark, but it was late by the time they arrived that day and the stores in downtown Pikeville were closed, so Kathy went into the federal building with Susan to wait for Mark. Susan’s gun set off the metal detector as they walked through the front entranceway of the federal building and she just giggled, but Kathy was afraid they’d get into trouble.
“Don’t worry about it,” Susan assured her. “Mark knows I pack a gun!” After her initial upset, Kathy figured it must have been a regular occurrence, since no one ever came out and said anything to Susan.
“I saw a man in there and Susan said it was Ron Poole. I just sat by the stairs,” Kathy recalls. “After she got through talking with Ron, then she went into the marshal’s office. His name was Don [Don Lafferty]. He was an older guy. I heard her talking about Mark, how sexy he was, and then they started laughing, I didn’t ask about what.”
Susan never did see Mark on that occasion. It was a wasted trip, but she didn’t seem to mind. In fact, Kathy got the impression that she was happy just being around Mark’s co-workers, that she was trying to become a part of his office. Susan wanted her sister-in-law to believe that she was a necessary part of the FBI’s daily operations. She even lied to Kathy about working with Ron Poole on a drug-trafficking case.
Finally, on July 14, 1988, the Phelps bank robbery was pulled off. On that day Mac Lockhart, Pete Blankenship, and Paul Frazier entered the Peter Creek branch of the First National Bank of Pikeville, yelling and waving their firearms.
Lockhart, carrying a sawed-off shotgun, kept the employees at bay while the money was being taken out of the vault by Blankenship and Frazier. The three men got away in a yellow Oldsmobile Omega, later identified as a vehicle stolen from a parking lot in Freeburn. Almost immediately after the robbery occurred, the car was located by State Policemen. Three pairs of brown work gloves were found inside it. Police brought in search dogs and tracked the robbers from the car back to Vulcan, where they lost them because of diesel fuel on the railroad tracks. Putnam and Poole were both on the scene, questioning people in and around Freeburn, trying to locate the men. Susan was conducting her own search, asking people in Vulcan where Mac and the others went.
Pete Blankenship was soon found, hiding behind his house up on a mountain near the bank. A fifty-nine-year-old man with a sixth-grade education, he was holding a red bag containing thirty-two thousand, six hundred sixteen dollars, including some twenty-dollar bills that were part of the bait money. Once caught, Blankenship admitted to police that Paul Frazier and MacArthur Lockhart were the two who helped him rob the bank. He offered this information after being read his rights and was told that he would receive a lighter sentence if he “rolled over” on his partners. In return for his cooperation, he later was sentenced to three years of supervised release.
Lockhart and Frazier were subsequently arrested and charged with bank robbery, but neither admitted to committing the crime. Both men were later identified by an eyewitness who’d seen them in the yellow Oldsmobile, and both were recognizable on the bank’s videotape of the robbery.
Paul Frazier told his attorney, Larry Webster, that he’d guessed Susan Smith was an informant but he’d pulled the robbery off anyway. When asked why he would do such a thing, Frazier confessed that he was “kind of in love with Susan.” He said he would go to her house and give her information to try to win her affections. In exchange, Susan gave him drugs and one of her guns, a .38 Smith & Wesson.
Ronald Gene Poole, who had been a Special Agent in the FBI for eight and a half years, testified at the Phelps bank robbery trial, held in November, 1988, that three white men had entered the bank, wearing pantyhose over their heads and carrying pistols and sawed-off shotguns. Poole was able to recall the exact date and time the crime occurred. He also told the court that there were no customers in the bank, and no shots were fired during the robbery.
When it came time for the three men to be sentenced, the judge was hard on MacArthur Lockhart because he’d made no attempt to return any of his part of the stolen money, even though FBI agents had been told by “reliable sources” that he’d hidden his share and that members of Mac’s family had access to it.
Indeed, Susan was the FBI’s chief source. She’d told Mark that she’d gone on a shopping spree in Williamson, West Virginia, with Mac’s wife, Geraldine, soon after the heist. Geraldine had told her that Mac had hidden seven thousand dollars under a rug in their backyard, and Susan had even gotten someone to wade across the Tug River to try to recover the loot. That person, who was not identified, had been spotted by Mac’s children, however, and had turned back before getting near the property.
Before he was sentenced, Mac Lockhart told the judge he didn’t know what had happened to his share of the stolen money, but Ron Poole was on hand to testify that Lockhart was lying. Because Lockhart was considered the ring leader in the robbery and would not return any of the money taken, he was sentenced to serve a hundred and thirty months in federal prison.
Frazier’s attorney appeared before the judge and pleaded for mercy, citing the fact that Frazier had turned over nine thousand dollars of the stolen money to Special Agent Poole as a part of his plea bargain. Webster also stated that Frazier’s original role in the bank robbery had been to drive the getaway car, but at the last minute, Pete Blankenship had threatened to kill him if he didn’t go into the bank and help pick up the money. Webster further argued that there was no evidence that Frazier had carried a firearm of any kind during the robbery.
Because Frazier had no prior record and seemed to have been coerced by the other two men, his attorney asked the court to give him a lighter sentence to be served at an institution where he could receive vocational training. This being granted, Paul Frazier was sentenced to serve sixty-three months in federal prison.
With the three men behind bars, Susan Smith had again helped Putnam look like a hero. People familiar with the Phelps bank robbery have called it an instance of entrapment, chiefly in the case of Paul Frazier, who, they say, would not have gotten involved in a bank heist if it hadn’t been for Putnam’s drive to earn points with the FBI and Susan’s need to satisfy him. The FBI often conducts operations characterized as “sting” operations, in which a person is given the “opportunity” to commit a crime; however, entrapment hinges on the object’s predisposition to commit a crime. Since Frazier had no criminal record the predisposition issue is really in question. After all, it was Susan Smith, at the suggestion of Mark Putnam, who coaxed and guided Frazier, eventually getting him to drive Blankenship and Lockhart to the Peter Creek branch of the First National Bank of Pikeville in Phelps.
Since Kathy Putnam spent more and more time in Connecticut, Susan often insisted that Mark take her to his house. Susan was laying her life on the line, she reminded him, and he had to make it worthwhile. Putnam put up with her badgering and continued the affair, even though she had become a real nuisance by this time, constantly complaining that she didn’t get paid enough for her informant work, insisting on being at Mark’s side day and night, and calling him continually
Of course Mark played it cool. He never let Susan see that she was annoying him. In a few more months, he figured, the whole thing would be over. He would then have the transfer he had already applied for. Meanwhile Susan was completely unaware that Mark intended to leave the area. In fact, she thought she really had it made because it wasn’t sex in cheap motels or in his car at empty strip mines anymore. She was spending time in Mark’s home in Pikeville, one of the most beautiful places she had ever known.
Although Kathy was gone a good deal of the time, it appears that Mark’s neighbors and co-workers never suspected him of being unfaithful. In fact, Putnam had a number of women friends in the Pikeville area.
There was the schoolteacher from the neighboring town of Prestonsburg who’d been seen with him at local fast-food joints. This dark-haired woman later insisted that she and Mark were just friends, refusing to discuss their relationship further.
Then there was a local professional woman who, according to a motel employee and police interviews, Putnam had spent the night with in early June of 1989. Allegedly he had taken her to the same place he had taken Susan a number of times, the Goldenrod Motel.
Finally, there was the secretary to the Letcher County Commonwealth Attorney, Kathy Turner, whose ex-husband, a detective with the Kentucky State Police, had worked closely with Mark Putnam on a case involving an auto theft ring. Ms. Burner was reportedly going to Putnam’s house on Saturday mornings to do cleaning work, driving an hour in each direction; and police detectives at the Hazard Post, sixty-five miles from Pikeville, later admitted they were sure something was going on between them.
Still, even with three or four other women in the picture, and with all the rumors floating around about Putnam, most people refused to believe he was involved in extra-marital affairs. Much later, even after Putnam had admitted he’d had an affair with Smith, Burt Hatfield, who knew both parties, blamed Susan, claiming she was responsible for the involvement.
“Susan would have made the move, the come-on, not Mark,” Hatfield said. “I really think Mark would have tried to fight it off, but knowing Susan, she couldn’t stand a turn-down. She took it personally if anybody turned her down. She had to feel attractive. She wanted everybody to like her. She wanted everybody to think she was the sexiest thing that ever lived. You know, she always had the attitude that said everybody wants me, everybody wants in my pants. She wanted everyone to think she was one hot lady and she felt she had to prove that.”
Throughout his involvement with Susan Smith, Putnam often told Burt Hatfield that his marriage was great and that he loved his wife, who was a fine person. Sometimes he mentioned that he felt badly for his wife because she was having such a hard time adjusting to the area.
But off the record, Kathy Putnam later told a newswoman about one of Mark’s indiscretions. She said while he was in Florida on official business, he reunited with one of his college girlfriends. Kathy had been given Mark’s number by someone at the Pikeville FBI office, and when she dialed it, a woman answered before Mark got on the phone.
In the meantime, Susan dreamed about the day when she and Mark would be man and wife. He had all the qualities she was looking for in a husband, and she was spending more and more time at his home, while Kathy was hundreds of miles away. He even cooked the meals when she stayed at his house, serving them to her and satisfying her every need in a way she had never dreamed a man would. Certainly Kenneth had never treated her that way. Susan was positive it would be just a matter of time before Mark left Kathy and she became the new Mrs. Putnam.
She had even confided to her sister-in-law Nancy, Roy Smith’s wife, that she planned to leave Kenneth, telling her that she and Mark were going to run off together and start a family. By the fall of 1988, Susan was blatant about her love affair with Mark. She had gotten to the point where she didn’t care about Kenneth’s threats.
“When she started to go over there to Pikeville every day, in 1988, she’d come back up here and say 
I’m in love with him,’ ” Nancy recalls. “And she’d be saying she was pregnant all the time. This was a year or six months before she actually did get pregnant. Every month she thought she was pregnant, and she always threatened to tell Mark’s wife.”
I’m in love with him,’ ” Nancy recalls. “And she’d be saying she was pregnant all the time. This was a year or six months before she actually did get pregnant. Every month she thought she was pregnant, and she always threatened to tell Mark’s wife.”Nancy said Susan would use her telephone to call Mark about a bill or about money, and just after the Phelps bank robbery trial, she and her sister-in-law got into a big argument over the whole situation in front of the Pic Pac grocery store in Freeburn.
“You know, Suzie, you’ve sold yourself,” Nancy told her.
“I love him. I don’t love Kenneth anymore. Kenneth treats me bad! He’s hitting me in front of the kids.”
“Well, you don’t have to put up with that! You can go up there anytime and get your clothes and your kids and move out. But you just won’t stay away from that bastard FBI. You’re slutting yourself!”
“Hey, don’t you be calling me names! I’m doing things with Mark, working with him on a big drug deal right now!”
“You call that work? Going around ratting on everybody just so you can get some money for a car and clothes! You know, one of these days, someone is gonna kill you if you don’t watch out.”
“Oh, they can’t kill me! As long as I’m working with Mark I’ve got someone to protect me!”
“Well, someone ought to have your ass beat to death! You just think you’re so fucking smart, setting all these people up and selling drugs and not going to get caught. I don’t know who in the hell you think you are!”
“Nancy, you can just go to hell!”
“That’s right, just keep doing your dope and leaving your kids with nobody to watch ’em ’cause I’m not doing it for you anymore! Just keep on running off with that bastard over there in Pikeville and forget about everybody else.”
“Hey, don’t you start saying I don’t take care of my kids! I’m not giving up my kids! I love my babies!”
“Yeah? You’re not a good mother, but you are a damn liar, Suzie!”
Minutes later, Susan came out of the grocery store to find her car tires had been slashed. She was irate because Mark was expecting her the next day, and now she had no transportation. Beside herself because she had no way to get over to see Mark before his wife returned to Pikeville, Susan chased down Nancy in one of the stores and the two women had it out. Susan beat Nancy pretty badly before Burt Hatfield appeared on the scene. It took two men to get Susan into the cruiser, and even then she tried to kick and scratch her way out of the car.