Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother convicted of killing her two children by rolling her car into a lake in 1994 with the children strapped in their seats inside, will ask a parole board for her release Wednesday.
Smith, 53, is serving life sentence after a jury found her guilty of murder but decided not to sentence her to death. Under current state law, now that he has spent 30 years behind bars, he is entitled to a parole hearing every two years.
Smith will make his case for freedom before the seven-member parole board via video conference from prison. Then she will go offline and her ex-husband and the children’s father, as well as the prosecutor in her murder trial, will argue that she should remain incarcerated.
Smith killed 3-year-old Michael and 14-month-old Alex because a man she was having an affair with suggested the children were the reason they didn’t have a future together.prosecutors said.
According to the state Department of Probation, Parole and Pardon Services, the decision to grant parole requires a two-thirds vote of the board members present at the hearing. In South Carolina, parole is granted only in a 8% of cases and is less likely to be granted at the inmate’s first appearance before the board, in high-profile cases, or when prosecutors and victims’ families object.
Smith made international news in October 1994 when she said her car was stolen late at night near the town of Union and a man drove away with her children inside.
For nine days, Smith made numerous pleas, sometimes through tears, for Michael and Alex’s safe return.. All that time, the boys were in Smith’s car at the bottom of nearby Lake John D. Long, authorities said.
Investigators said Smith’s story it didn’t fit. Car thieves usually only want one vehicle, so investigators asked why Smith had been let out but not his children. The light where Smith said he had stopped when his car was stolen would only be red if there was another car waiting to cross, and Smith said there were no other cars nearby. Other details of the story didn’t make sense.
Smith eventually confessed to letting his car roll down a boat ramp and into the lake. A reenactment by investigators showed it took six minutes for the Mazda to sink below the surface, while cameras inside the vehicle showed water pouring through vents and rising steadily. The children’s bodies were found hanging upside down in their car seats, with a small hand pressed against a window.
Prosecutors said Smith was in a relationship with the wealthy son of the owner of the business where she worked. He broke off the relationship because she had two young children.
Smith’s lawyers said she She was remorseful, suffered a mental breakdown and intended to die with her children, but abandoned the car at the last moment..
The young mother’s 1995 trial became a national sensation and a landmark in the world of true crime, although it was not televised by a judge concerned about what the cameras were doing to the OJ Simpson murder trial, which was developing at the same time. Her lawyers worked to save her life, pointing out that Smith’s father had committed suicide and that her stepfather was having sexual relations with her along with the owner of the business where she worked.
From prison, Smith can make phone calls and respond to text messages, many of them from journalists and interested men. Those messages and phone calls were made public under South Carolina’s public records law, something Smith didn’t initially realize could happen. She said the invasion of her privacy upset her, along with the public revelation that she was juggling conversations about the future with several men.
Some men know why she is famous. Others are more shy. One told him that he was going to use the dates of his birthday and those of his dead children when he played the Powerball lottery. Others talked about their lives and sports. Many promised him a home abroad and a happy life.
Smith says in some of his messages that he still mourns the loss of his children.
“Today I am very sad and I just want to stay in bed. Today is my youngest son’s birthday, today he would have turned 30 years old. It’s hard to believe”Smith wrote in August 2023.
Smith also had sexual relations with guards and violated prison policies by giving contact information for friends, family and her ex-husband to a documentary producer who talked about paying her for her help, according to former prosecutor Tommy Pope.
“The jury believed she received a life sentence and that’s what she was meant to serve,” Pope said last month, shortly after the parole hearing was announced.
(with information from AP)
