Susan Smith Biography

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Susan Smith (born September 26, 1971 as Susan Leigh Vaughan), of Union, South Carolina, was convicted July 22, 1995, of murdering her two sons, 3-year-old Michael Daniel Smith, born October 10, 1991, and 14-month-old Alexander Tyler Smith, born August 5, 1993, and later sentenced to life in prison.

She will be eligible for parole in 2025, after she has served a minimum of thirty years.

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 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, inflaming 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 prosecutors refused to offer a plea bargain. Her lawyers sought access to an advance copy of a book written by her ex-husband, David Smith, about the marriage and about Susan Smith's killing of her sons. Eventually David Smith struck an agreement allowing the lawyers to receive an advance copy of the book, which they could use to impeach him and for any other purpose relevant to her defense.Smith lawyers to get husband's book, The Herald-Journal (Spartanburg, SC), 14 July 1995.

She was spared the death penalty in a decision by her South Carolina jury, after her stepfather, Beverly Russell, a prominent Union County citizen, Republican Party and Christian Coalition leader, 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 sexual abuse of his teenaged stepdaughter.Head On with Bob Kincaid, WWNR 620AM (Beckley, WV), 3 January 2005.

While she has been in prison, two guards have been punished for having sex with SmithSecond prison guard arrested for sex with Susan Smith, Associated Press, 26 September 2000., and in 2003 she placed a personal ad at Writeaprisoner.com.Susan Smith ad, Writeaprisoner.com.

Cultural references

• The 1995 episode of Law & Order entitled "Angel" was based on the Susan Smith case. In the episode, a young mother blames a Puerto Rican man for the disappearance of her baby. The Smith case is referred to specifically in both the investigation and the eventual trial.
  

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

• Canadian singer-songwriter Hayden's "When This Is Over" (from Everything I Long For, 1995) and Blind Melon's "Car Seat" (from Soup, 1995) each describe the tragedy from the perspective of Michael Smith.Distant Replay column, Vue Weekly, 18 May 2006. Blind Melon's got the rind stuff, The Michigan Daily, 22 September 1995.
  

• 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.
  

• 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.
  

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

• The Susan Smith case is referred to in the third season opener of the sitcom Arrested Development. In the episode, Lucille Bluth, freshly off her antidepressants in a flashback, cheers upon hearing the news of Smith's action. At the end of the episode, Lucille accidentally lets her car roll into a lake with her son Buster sleeping inside.
  

See also

• Andrea Yates
  
• La Llorona
  

References

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

Footnotes

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