Oct. 17, 1994: Tom Findley, son of the owner of the Cosno textile mill where Susan Smith was a secretary, writes a letter to Smith breaking off their affair. Findley said in the letter he didn’t want children.
Oct. 25, 1994: Smith straps 14-month-old Alex and 3-year-old Michael into her burgundy 1990 Mazda Protégé and uses the access ramp to John D. Long Lake to push the car into the water.
Oct. 25, 1994: Smith reports to local police that a black man carjacked her at gunpoint with her two small children in the back of her car.
Oct. 27, 1994: Smith was to come to the Union County Sheriff’s Office, in the county courthouse, to be interviewed by an FBI polygraph operator.
Nov. 2, 1994: Smith and her estranged husband, David, appear on national television, pleading for the safe return of their children.
Nov. 3, 1994: Smith confesses to police investigators at a local church to drowning Alex and Michael after she strapped them into the back seat of her car and pushed it into the lake.
Nov. 3, 1994: Department of Natural Resources divers recover Smith’s car from the lake, with the bodies of Michael and Alex inside.
Nov. 3, 1994: Union County Sheriff Howard Wells holds a press conference informing the nation that Smith was charged with two counts of murder in the drowning deaths of her children.
Nov. 6, 1994: Hundreds of mourners turn out for Michael and Alex’s wake and funeral. Their bodies were placed in the same casket.
Dec. 12, 1994: Smith is indicted on two charges of murder.
Jan. 16, 1995: 16th Circuit Solicitor Tommy Pope announces his decision to pursue the death penalty.
July 10, 1994: Jury selection begins. Nine men and three women are chosen, four black, eight white, all from Union County.
July 22, 1995: The jury finds Smith guilty on two counts of murder.
July 24, 1995: The penalty phase of the trial begins.
July 26, 1995: David Smith testifies against his ex-wife in heart-wrenching testimony.
July 28, 1995: Smith is sentenced to life in prison and is taken to prison.
Sept. 11, 2000: Smith is found guilty of sexual misconduct for engaging in sexual acts with two prison guards while incarcerated.
SOURCE: Disciplinary records from the S.C. Department of Corrections
WHERE ARE THEY NOW? Two lawyers have gone on to make headlines after the Susan Smith trial.
Judy Clarke: With attorney David Bruck, Clarke helped convince jurors that Smith was a fragile victim of sexual abuse who should not be executed. Clarke went on to spare the Unabomber from the death penalty, too, though Ted Kaczynski never forgave her for trying to make him look insane. More recently, she did not manage to save Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev from the death penalty. She also represented Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph and Jared Loughner, who tried to assassinate Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed six others.
Tommy Pope: Pope was the 16th Circuit solicitor and, as Smith's prosecutor, sought the death penalty. He is now an S.C. House representative who plans to run for governor.
SC Ping?
I was stationed in Germany when this evil wench killed her boys.
I called my dad the day the story first broke and asked him what the hack was going on. He told me he was sure that she killed them. As usual, my dad was correct.
Quite the resume. </sarc>
I’m not reading her letter. Anybody who kills a child is indeed a monster, especially if the killer is the very person who should protect them with her own life.
Yes, you are a monster. I hope you burn for what you've done.
Self defense!
Should she be put in the category as the racial hoaxers who pretend they are a victim? She and Charles Stuart, the Bostonian who shot his wife and said a black man did it.
Q: What's the difference between Charles Stuart and Larry Bird?
A: Larry jumps before he shoots.
Q: How do you make the new "Charles Stuart" drink?
A: Two shots, a bitter twist and a spash.
Q: What's the first thing Charles Stuart said when they pulled him out of the Mystic River?
A: A big black guy in a running suit pushed me!
I don't know if there are any Susan Smith jokes.
Sure that makes perfect sense. She was suicidal and planned to kill herself, but after watching her boys “accidentally” drown, she “snapped out of it”, and began lying and scheming to preserve her life and freedom.
I would have liked to see her strapped into a car that was driven into a lake on the day she was found guilty.
I’m an eye for an eye kind of gal.
Why hasn’t Smith met her maker yet?
All of the negative reaction.....there were two abortions...one 14 months after birth, one three years.....same babies, same humans....just a little later....two dead kids....just like 2 abortions at any stage.
Seems like that was just the other day ...
“The thing that hurts me the most is that people think I hurt my children in order to be with a man,” Smith said. “That is so far from the truth.”
Yet she fails to give any other reason for doing it, leaving us to speculate about it for ourselves. She says she “wasn’t in her right mind”, but even people who have mental breaks and do things like this can have logical motivations for what they are doing. It’s altogether possible that, subconsciously, that was exactly her motivation, and she still hasn’t admitted it to herself.
If the boys father had done this he would have been executed years ago.
One of the saddest news stories ever. Her little boys were calling for their mother as she killed them
The saddest story, though, was that little girl (I think it was in Texas), who, as her mother was torturing the poor little thing to death, kept crying out to her mother: “I love you, mommy!”
Now, I consider myself a pretty tough guy, as I’ve seen a lot of bad shit in my lifetime, and in my work, but, I tell you: I lost it when I heard that report. And I’m not ashamed to say it.
There’s the old story (maybe told about the Melendez brothers in California?) who killed their parents and threw themselves on the mercy of the court because they were orphans.
This woman sounds like she killed her children and wants sympathy because she’s been bereaved...