We don’t know what she told them; perhaps only that they were going for a ride. We do know, according to what she told police last week, that she drove the blacktop roads of Union County, S.C., for nearly three hours, until long past dark. She was, she said, contemplating suicide. Smith told police, according to a law-enforcement source, that Michael and his brother, Alexander, 14 months, were asleep when she pulled up to the boat ramp just off Highway 49 at John D. Long Lake. She opened the door and stepped out onto the concrete-and-gravel ramp as the car began to roll down toward the dark waters. The little maroon Mazda, which within a couple of days would become the most sought-after car in America, floated for a few moments, then began to fill and sink. What happened next is in dispute. According to a police source, Smith told investigators that Michael, buckled into his car seat, woke up and began to struggle. ““He was struggling in absolute terror for his life,’’ the official told Newsweek, citing Smith’s conversations with police. Smith, standing at the water’s edge, watched and did nothing. But her lawyer, David Bruck, says, ““Susan nev-er saw any of that and she never told anyone that she did. That account is simply made up.’’ What is certain is that the car flipped onto its back and disappeared below the surface.
Once again the perversity of human nature has confounded our expectations. The yellow ribbons came out again, but they failed to work their magic; a town rallied for a lost child, only to see its efforts mocked by an even greater evil than it imagined. Perhaps Susan Smith thought that in a nation where a stranger can break into a suburban house and snatch a girl out of her bedroom, nobody would question her tale of a gun-wielding black man who ordered her out of her car and drove off, inexplicably, with her two sons in back. When the truth came out, we were spared our obligatory lesson about the awfulness of American society. But we confronted instead an even harder lesson about how much evil can lurk in even a mother’s heart – something we’ve known for 2,300 years, ever since ““Medea.''
Cops, naturally, know this best. In Susan Smith’s case, they suspected it almost from the very start. ““The story didn’t seem to check out,’’ one law-enforcement source says. ““It wasn’t a classic carjacking and it wasn’t a classic kidnapping.’’ Doubts grew when a statewide, later nationwide, search failed to turn up the suspect, the car or the children. ““Think about it,’’ said one law-enforcement official: ““A black man steals a car with two white babies in the back seat. He’s going to hang onto it? He might as well put a billboard on it, saying, “Shoot me, I’m the guy.’ He’s going to dump it in a mall parking lot or on the roadside.''
There were other problems with her story, Newsweek has learned. She claimed at first to have been on her way to visit a friend, Mitchell Sinclair, when the children disappeared, but Sinclair told police he hadn’t been expecting her. Then she said she’d been shopping at a Wal-Mart for most of the time between 6 p.m., when she left home, and around 9 p.m., when she showed up, sobbing, at a stranger’s house near the lake. But no one at the store remembered seeing her or the children. She said the carjacker had approached on foot at a deserted intersection, where she had stopped for a red light. But on the road she was traveling, the light stays green until traffic on the side road trips a signal, so the intersection should not have been deserted. The FBI and, later, state officials examined Smith under polygraph. The results were inconclusive, law-enforcement officials said, but the greatest apparent deception turned up on the question ““Do you know where the children are?’’ And finally, a couple of clever cops took a hard look at the composite drawing of the suspect. If you took off the stocking cap and narrowed his lips, they thought, he looked an awful lot like Smith’s estranged husband, David.
Once her deception was uncovered, some blacks were quick to see racism at work in her choice of scapegoat. The case evoked inevitable comparisons to the infamous 1989 murder of Carol Stuart, a pregnant Boston woman whose husband shot her to death in their car and blamed it on a black stickup man. ““It’s been clear in the black community for years that crimes have been committed by whites and blamed on blacks,’’ Carl Bell, president of the Community Mental Health Council of Chicago, told CNN. But unlike in Boston – where a black man was actually arrested by mistake – few blacks were singled out by the police in this case.
Bell said that as the police became skeptical of the mother’s story, they should have called off the search for the black stranger. But to do so would have been tantamount to labeling Smith a suspect, which Sheriff Howard Wells was reluctant to do. ““We’re trying to corroborate her story because not only is she the victim in this case, but the public is trying to make her a suspect,’’ Wells said, three days into what he called an ““impossible’’ investigation. He was walking a fine line, trying to keep Smith talking both to investigators and to the media – partly in hopes that publicity would turn up a new clue, but mostly hoping she might trip herself up in a contradiction. Investigators were also aware that Smith had been under psychiatric care and believe she had attempted suicide at least once before; they didn’t want to risk provoking her into another try. And, finally, what if the cops were wrong, and Smith had been telling the truth? As one official close to the case put it, ““The world wouldn’t have had to crucify us; we would have crucified ourselves.''
In retrospect, it is remarkable how many people Susan Smith did fool. This apparently includes David Smith, her husband of three years, who appeared with her on television and at a press conference last Thursday – just hours before she confessed – in a joint plea for the return of their children. (He is not a suspect in the case.) The transcript of her lachrymose performances should be required reading for juries. It demonstrates how easily even untrained people can lie when their own hides are at stake. Convincing details are important: the very day of the carjacking, she said, Michael had hugged her and told her he loved her, ““the first time he ever said that before I said “I love you’ first.’’ So are timely references to God: ““I know right here,’’ she said, touching her heart, ““what the truth is . . . the Lord and myself both know the truth. I did not have anything to do with the abduction of my children.''
And she fooled most of her neighbors as well. ““I saw the love that they had for these children,’’ next-door neighbor Alice Valentine told an interviewer just before the case broke, “”. . . and there would be no way that you would convince me that they had anything to do with what happened to these children.’’ The conventions of small-town life in the South place a premium on niceness, which turns out to be not very useful in predicting whether a person is capable of murder. ““I think everything happened just like Susie says it did, because her and David are nice people,’’ another neighbor agreed. ““They never showed any hostility, they were friendly and all.’’ In response to her pleas, hundreds of townspeople had helped search the miles of roads and woods of Union County; others did their part at the prayer vigils in the churches.
It should come as no surprise that love and support turned so quickly to hatred as news of Smith’s confession spread. The missing-child posters came down almost instantly; soon the yellow ribbons were being replaced by blue (for boys) and white (for innocence). ““The children were so innocent,’’ said N. G. Berrill, a forensic psychologist at John Jay College, ““and the mother’s plaintive cry so compelling.’’ At Smith’s bond hearing – which she waived – people turned out not merely to gawk but to jeer and shout invective, of which ““Murderer!’’ was one of the milder examples. Smith’s lawyer described her as ““heartbroken, just heartbroken,’’ but that didn’t seem to win her much sympathy. ““Baby-killing bitch!’’ shouted Helen Pike, who was holding her 3-year-old son Keith. Children like 3-year-old Megan Petty, who had planned to invite Michael and Alexander Smith to her birthday party, had a different reaction. ““Mommy,’’ she fretted to her mother, Rhonda, at a restaurant across town, ““you wouldn’t do me and Bubba’’ – her year-old brother – ““like that, would you?''
““No, baby, I would never do that,’’ her mother said.
““I just can’t imagine me going under that water, Mama, and trying to get my Bubba out of his car seat.''
Almost until that very moment, Smith was a fairly well-thought-of young woman of Union, a mill town and county seat of 10,000 about 25 miles southeast of Spartanburg. There was only one exceptional incident in her past, according to ac-quaintances – the suicide of her father, Harry Vaughan, who shot himself to death in 1978, when Susan was around 7. But her mother soon married again, to a man who owned a successful appliance store and is now prominent in local politics. The fam-ily was said to be happy (although we have already seen how little outsiders may know about these things) and Susan was a popular and successful student at Union High School – voted ““friendliest’’ senior of the class of 1989, ““the kind of student you want in your class,’’ according to principal Buddy Blackmon.
““She was perfect,’’ says a woman who gives her name just as ““Darlene.’’ ““You’ve got your bad girls at high school and you’ve got your good girls. She was your good girl.’’ She dressed well, in clothes that were considered on the preppy side (a denim miniskirt and pink polo shirt in one yearbook picture), and didn’t smoke or drink. But an early sign of possible problems came in her junior year, after she began seeing David Smith, a popular senior. They dated for a while, then broke up, and Susan took it badly. According to a friend, April Vinson, she stayed home from school for nearly a month. The rumor at school was that she had swallowed some pills in a suicide attempt.
But she and Smith got back together the following year, and in 1991 – with Susan around two months pregnant – they were married at Susan’s home church, Bogansville United Methodist. Susan was a cashier at the Winn-Dixie supermarket; David was assistant man-ager at the same store. Home was a tiny house that was owned by David’s great-grandmother. Two years later, after Alex was born, Susan left Winn-Dixie and went to work as a secretary for a local company – Conso, a maker of furniture tassels. Court papers showed she was making $17,000 a year – and David, still at Winn-Dixie, $21,700.
But there were strains in the marriage. Friends say that Susan suspected David of adultery and would sometimes show up unexpectedly at the Winn-Dixie, checking on his whereabouts; they allude to a possi-ble second suicide attempt. In August, she filed for divorce, and the papers had been progressing smoothly, according to her lawyer, Thomas White IV. David agreed to give her custody of the boys, and, White says, ““It was not a rancorous affair at all.’’ At some point, Susan be-gan a relationship with Tom Findlay, the son of Conso’s owner. It was Findlay who wrote her the by-now-famous letter breaking off their romance – for several reasons, he said, but in part because he wasn’t ready to assume the responsibilities of fatherhood.
Could this rebuff have pushed her to murder? Or suicide? According to her statements to police, when she parked at the top of the boat ramp she still hadn’t made up her mind whether to kill herself. We will probably hear a lot about her mental state over the next year. If what police say is true, Smith’s crime was monstrous in conception. But still more horrible is the realization that it was composed of a series of discrete actions, each leading to the fatal result. The question we are left with is not just why Susan Smith killed her children. It is how she could have strapped them so carefully into those car seats, for that last terrible ride.
