Thirty years ago, Susan Smith shocked the world when she confessed to drowning in a South Carolina lake after reporting her two young sons had been abducted. Susan was convicted of murder and is serving a life sentence in prison with the possibility of parole, but her ex-husband is working to lock her away forever.
“I want an eye for an eye,” David Smith, the father of victims Michael, 3, and Alex, 14 months, told reporters. Dateline: Secrets Revealed on the March 4 episode. “But the jury saw it differently.”
David and Susan, a teenage sweethearts, married in 1992 and settled in the quiet town of Union to raise their two children. However, as David said date linethe marriage did not last, in part due to mutual infidelity.
‘I’m a terrible husband,’ David tells date line. “There was infidelity, but she also had infidelity.” The couple separated in 1994 and Susan began dating colleague Tom Findlay, while David began a relationship with his former colleague Tiffany Moss.
A parent’s worst nightmare
In October 1994, David and Susan divorced and experienced a fear that no parent should have to face: their child had been kidnapped—or so it seemed.
Susan told police she was stopped at a red light one night with her sons in the back seat when a man with a gun approached her car. Susan claims the man jumped into her car and ordered her to drive before forcing her out of the car and taking the children away.
Susan Smith is escorted from the Union County Courthouse
Police began searching for the suspect, whom Susan described as a tall black man wearing a knitted hat. As the case grabbed national media headlines, Susan and David made public pleas to their kidnappers.
Related: Ex-husband of South Carolina mother who murdered two young sons pleads ‘They can’t let her out’
Susan said in an interview: “I want to say to everyone who has my children…please take them home to where they belong.” television press conference. “Our lives have been torn apart by this tragic event. I can’t express how much we miss them home, how much we love them and how much we miss them.”
Exceed A nine-day manhunt for Michael and Alex, Susan’s account of the carjacking began to fall apart, and when authorities pressed her for inconsistencies, Susan admitted to fabricating the entire story and killing her children.
Susan told authorities she strapped the sleeping boys into their car seats and pushed her 1990 Mazda off the boat ramp and into John D. Long Lake. Hours after her confession, police found Susan’s car at the bottom of the lake with the children inside. Experts later testified in court that it took about six minutes for the car to sink.
exist November On December 3, 1994, Susan was arrested and charged with two counts of murder, but she pleaded not guilty.
According to David, when he asked Susan for an answer, she said only two words: “I’m sorry.”
murder or murder-suicide
Prosecutors sought the death penalty for Susan, arguing that the murder was premeditated and driven by an age-old motive: romantic love, pointing to a letter from Susan’s boyfriend in which he allegedly explained that he ended their relationship because he did not want children.
However, the defense called Michael and Alex’s deaths a failed murder-suicide, citing her past attempts and interviews with police. Special Agent Pete Logan interviewed date lineshe said it was believable when Susan told him she tried to kill herself that night by the lake but didn’t.
Susan’s lawyers claimed that Susan was depressed and suicidal after a traumatic childhood after being sexually abused by her stepfather, Beverly Russell. publicly acknowledgealthough criminal charges were never filed.
Susan’s defense said she felt particularly desperate because she feared David would discover she and Russell Michael and Alex began a sexual relationship a year before his death.
David insists he never suspected Susan was suicidal, telling date line“Nothing gives you the right to kill your child.”
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She felt safe living near the police, but the murderer was one of them
In court, David fantasizes about taking revenge on Susan.
“I used to sit there and look at the back of her head,” David told date line“and then considered killing her.”
On July 22, 1995, a jury found Susan guilty of two counts of murder and she was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.
David objects to the terms of Susan’s sentence, telling date line“She killed Michael and Alex on purpose. I couldn’t let her out.”
“I’m not a terrible person”
After Susan was imprisoned, David moved on with his life and married his girlfriend Tiffany Moss in 2003.
Meanwhile, in 2004, date line Producer Carol Gable wrote Susan a letter requesting an interview. Although the prison did not allow it, they began a pen pal relationship that lasted 20 years.
“I’m not a terrible person, Carol,” Susan reportedly wrote in a letter to Gable. date line. “I am a person who made a terrible decision. I grieve every day for my children.”
Susan wrote to Gable that she had attempted suicide three times in prison. “When they found me I found a large pool of blood,” Susan wrote in a letter. date line. “I wrote ‘Let me die.'”
In another letter, per date lineSusan told Gable she stopped her car from entering the lake several times, then jumped out and let it roll into the water.
“I have never seen a car fall into a lake,” Susan wrote. “When I reached the top of the mountain, I stopped and looked back, and all I could see was a dark lake. You would never have imagined that two little boys drowned in their mother’s hands like this.”
In November 2024, after serving 30 years in prison, Susan argued for her release at a parole hearing.
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Susan Smith on Dateline Season 33 Episode 15
“I want to say I’m very sorry,” Susan told the board through tears in the video. date line episode. “I know what I did was terrible and if I could go back and change it, I would give anything. I love Michael and Alex with all my heart.”
David wears a pin with a picture of Michael and Alex on it.
“God gave us free choice and she freely chose to end their lives,” he told the board in the video. “This was not a tragic mistake…she deliberately set out to end their lives.”
Susan’s barrister David Block said his client posed no danger to society and should be released.
“I don’t see how punishing her in jail year after year is going to help anybody,” Bullock told date line. “Michael and Alex will not be harmed or helped.”
Susan was denied parole but will be eligible for release every two years, with her next opportunity scheduled for November 2026.
David sees Susan’s potential freedom as an opportunity.
“This will give me another opportunity to stand up for Michael and Alex,” David told date line. “To protect them and to try to prevent the sympathy that she has been trying to elicit.”
For more true crime investigations, watch Dateline: Secrets Uncovered airing Wednesdays at 8/7c on Oxygen.