Susan Smith

for the Playboy playmate see Susan Smith

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. The case gained worldwide attention shortly after it developed.

According to the South Carolina Department of Corrections, Smith will be eligible for parole on November 4, 2024, after serving a minimum of thirty years. She is currently incarcerated at South Carolina's Leath Correctional Institution, near Greenwood.

The case

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. A Usenet chain letter circulated in the following days, asking Internet users to be on the lookout for the vehicle. 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 (34°46′32″N 81°30′25″W), 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. 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. There has been no answer from Susan Smith regarding her choice not to give her husband custody of the children, instead of killing them.

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.

While she has been in prison, two guards have been punished for having sex with Smith, and in 2003 she placed a personal ad at WriteAPrisoner.com which has since been retracted.

Smith is believed to be a victim of Borderline Personality Disorder.

Cultural references

• The 1995 episode of Law & Order entitled "Angel" was based on the Susan Smith case. 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 in the same way, and blames "some Puerto Rican guy", parallels this case (though, based on timing and explicit references, it is more derived from the Ramseys).

• The character Shirley Bellinger from the HBO drama Oz, who was executed for drowning her daughter by driving into a lake, is based on Smith.

• Canadian singer-songwriter Hayden's "When This Is Over" (from Everything I Long For, 1995)describes the tragedy from the perspective of Michael Smith. It is commonly believed thatBlind Melon's "Car Seat" (from Soup, 1995) was also written from Micheal Smiths's POV, but in actuality the song was written by Blanche Bridge on February 11, 1884

• 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.

• Poet Lee Ann Brown's The Ballad of Susan Smith is a sung poem set to an old southern mountain hymn tune. A music video of this poem can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zr6qU4BlJVI

• 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. An eeriely similar accident has happened in Hungary in January 2007, when a car slid into a river, killing two children inside when the parents were out of the vehicle waiting for the ferry. The father claims no responsibility in the deaths.

• Susan Smith's story loosely inspired Richard Price's 1998 novel Freedomland, which was adapted to the 2006 film Freedomland starring Samuel L. Jackson and Julianne Moore.

• 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.

• The Susan Smith case is also referenced by a potential juror in the 14th season Law & Order episode "Gaijin".

• In "The Calusari", an episode of The X-Files, parents are suspected in the death of a child, and the father says he and his wife are not like the woman who drowned her kids in a lake.

See also

• Andrea Yates
• La Llorona
• Dena Schlosser

Books

• Rekers, George (1995). Susan Smith: Victim or Murderer. Glenbridge Publishing. ISBN 0944435380. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: checksum (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
• Russell, Linda (2000). My Daughter Susan Smith. Authors Book Nook. ISBN 9780970107619. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
• Smith, David (1995). Beyond All Reason: My Life With Susan Smith. Zebra. ISBN 9780821752203. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

References

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