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Hey everyone, welcome back to Binged. Before we get into it, thank you so much to everyone who went and left a review or if you're watching on YouTube, has participated in the comments. It means so much to me and I want to remind you that over on Instagram, we post pictures every week that have to do with the case, pictures of the victims, anything that I talk about. So if you ever want to tag along with those images, you can follow us over on Instagram at BingedPod.
So our last two episodes featured stories about children killing children. And this week and next week's episodes also involve children, but in these stories all of the children are innocent victims.
And the perpetrators are, well, the people they trusted the most. Today's case was one of the biggest crime stories of its time. And it all started in Union, South Carolina on October 25th, 1994. It was about nine o'clock in the evening. A woman named Shirley McLeod was reading the newspaper in the living room of her home when she heard something up on her front porch.
Now carefully, Shirley got up and looked onto the porch and saw a young woman crying. Please help me, the young woman begged. He's got my kids and he's got my car.
Shirley opened the front door and invited the hysterical young woman inside. A black man has got my kids and my car, the woman said. By this time, Shirley's husband, Rick, had heard the commotion and appeared in the living room. Call 911, Shirley told him. The woman was initially so upset she could hardly get a word out. But once she calmed down a little bit, Shirley asked her to tell her the story while they waited for the police to arrive.
The young woman explained that she had been driving with her two sons and was stopped at a red light at Monarch Mills when suddenly she explained, quote, a black man jumped into my car and told me to drive. She asked the man what he wanted, but he pointed a gun at her and told her to shut up and just drive or he'd kill her.
So she began driving at his direction, she explained, northeast of Union for about four miles. He then ordered her to make a right past the stop sign, she said, toward John D. Long Lake, which was just a few hundred yards from Shirley's house.
At that point, the woman explained the man told her to get out of the car and pushed her out into the middle of the road. "What about my kids?" The woman said she'd asked the man who shot back that he didn't have time. "Don't worry," she said the man told her, "I'm not going to hurt your kids." He then drove away with her kids in the car. The woman said that at that point, she just ran and ran until she found herself on Shirley McCloud's front porch.
At this point, Shirley asked the woman what her name was. She said her name was Susan, Susan Smith. And her sons, Michael, who was three, and Alexander, who was 14 months old, were still abducted.
While there, Susan asked to use the bathroom and then asked if she could call her mother, whom she was unable to reach. She then called her stepfather and her separated husband, David, who was working at the time at the Winn-Dixie supermarket. And shortly after, the Union County Sheriff, Howard Wells, had arrived at Shirley's house and the investigation for Susan's two sons began.
Sheriff Wells was familiar with Susan Smith. He was friends with her brother, Scotty, and his wife, Wendy. So this hit closer to home for Sheriff Wells than the average report. He had Susan go through her story, which he'd already heard from the 911 dispatcher. He asked her to describe what her sons were wearing. Michael, she said, had been wearing a white jogging suit while baby Alex was wearing red and white striped clothes.
It became clear to Sheriff Wells that his department's resources may be too limited for an investigation of the scale that this would require. This was basically a carjacking and a kidnapping. So he reached out to the head of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division for assistance with the investigation, or SLED as it's better known.
Union County Sheriff's deputies began an intensive full-scale search for Susan Smith's missing Mazda and her two sons. As the night wore on, Susan's family members began to gather at the McLeod's home, and by midnight, this couple wanted to go to sleep. I mean, I can't blame them. They were kind of dragged into this. They had nothing to do with any of it. They were just graciously allowing these people to convene at their house and use their facilities for this investigation. But
But they were pulled into this and they were entitled to move on with their lives and get some rest. So Sheriff Wells began directing everyone out, suggesting other places they might reconvene. Susan rode with her ex-husband to her mother's house. And on the way there, she let him know that Tom Findley, a man she'd had an affair with, might be showing up and hopefully he wouldn't become angry.
Now, David was somewhat stunned by this, that at a time when her two children were missing, allegedly kidnapped, she would appear more worried about upsetting her estranged husband than finding her kids.
Meanwhile, Sheriff Wells and SLED began coordinating to search John D. Long Lake with a dive team, underwater, and helicopter with heat sensors overhead. However, despite thoroughly searching the area of the lake and the surrounding Sumter National Forest, nothing turned up.
A police sketch artist sat down with Susan Smith and she provided a description of the alleged abductor and helped the artist create a sketch depicting a black male around age 40 wearing a dark knit cap, a dark shirt, jeans, and a plaid jacket.
The Adam Walsh Center then became involved in the search. Adam Walsh, whose story faithful binge listeners may remember we profiled earlier in the year, was a six-year-old boy who was abducted from a Sears store in 1981 and later found murdered. His father, John Walsh, probably needs no introduction, but he helped found the Adam Walsh Center, which helped search for and locate missing children.
So it was less than 24 hours later and already there was a massive search effort and the Adam Walsh Center had reached out to Susan Smith's family to offer their assistance. The center's executive director asked to speak with the missing boy's parents, Susan and David, and left a message for them to return her call, but they never did. Instead, Susan's stepfather, Bev Russell, reached out and invited them to come to his home.
Meanwhile, the Adam Walsh Center worked with SLED to obtain pictures of the two missing boys so they could start printing up flyers.
Susan and her estranged husband, David, at this time were staying at the home of Linda and Bev Russell, Susan's mother and stepfather. David's father and stepmother flew in from California and his aunt and uncle drove down from Michigan. So essentially the house was full of family and Susan was receiving a round the clock care support and attention.
It was on the afternoon of October 26th that two representatives from the Adam Walsh Center arrived at the home of Susan Smith's mother and stepfather. There was Margaret Frierson, the center's executive director, and her assistant, Charlotte Foster. Though they had wanted to speak with Susan and David alone, they ended up also meeting with Susan's mother, stepfather, and brother, Scotty.
Margaret gave the family some background on the center and the kind of services they could provide. They could, for example, act as a liaison between the family and the news media, which was already covering the alleged kidnapping. It's honestly pretty great work that this center is willing to do.
After about an hour, David and Susan left for the sheriff's office to interview with the police and Margaret followed. While speaking with investigators, it was agreed that making a televised plea for the safe return of the two young boys would be the logical next move. David seemed nervous. He'd never appeared on national TV before, but he was willing to do anything he needed to do to see that his sons were recovered safely and returned to their parents.
As the national news media outlets began showing up in town, David appeared alongside Susan on the steps of the Union County Sheriff's Department and gave the following statement. Quote,
Everywhere I look, I see their play toys and pictures. They are both wonderful children, and I can't imagine life without them. But after the statement, Susan was brought into the sheriff's office and questioned for the next six hours by investigators from both the Union County Sheriff's Office and from SLED.
It was something about Susan's story that was feeling slightly off, so they asked her to repeat it multiple times. And the following day, both David and Susan were brought back down again, read their Miranda rights, and subjected to polygraph tests.
Now, just as a reminder, I don't think polygraph tests are reliable measures of guilt or innocence. I've said it many times. Polygraphs, kind of like forensic odontology, you know, bite mark analysis, both fall under a category just north of junk science. Let's call it flawed science. But they still get used in investigations. So in this case, David Smith's polygraph showed no evidence of deception.
But Susan Smith's was inconclusive. And the problem question where the test showed Susan was maybe being deceptive was, do you know where your children are?
The investigators let her know that she did not pass the test. She told David that she didn't do well and she feared the police were beginning to doubt her story. A story that, by this time, was running in the news on a national scale. The story that this mom was carjacked by a black man who took her two sons.
The more Susan told her story, the more holes and inconsistencies the detectives kept noting. And every time they sat down with her, they had her submit to yet another polygraph.
Susan was asked by Agent David Caldwell, the director of the forensic science laboratory from SLED, to go over the whole day of October 25th for him, up to the time she first had contact with Sheriff Wells. She related that she had called her mom after she got home from work and asked if she could visit her at her house, but her mom told her she had plans that night and wouldn't be home. She said then she made dinner for her two sons, but they didn't like what she had made and refused to eat.
It was around this time that David called the house and spoke with her for a while. After the phone call, she said Michael, the three-year-old, told her he wanted to go to Walmart, which was inconsistent with a previous version of the story. And when she was asked about this detail, she admitted that it was she actually who suggested they go to Walmart.
She claimed during this interview that after going to Walmart, she drove to Foster Park and was there for a while but never got out of her car. She said she then returned to the Walmart parking lot because Alex had dropped his bottle on the floor of the car and the bright lights in the Walmart parking lot would make it easier to find it. After this, she said that she had planned to visit a guy named Mitch Sinclair who was engaged to be married to her best friend, Donna.
Mitch lived about half a mile north of the Monarch intersection where she stopped at a red light and waited, with no other cars in sight, for the light to change, and that was when she was suddenly carjacked while she was on her way to Mitch's house. But Agent Caldwell then informed her that the investigators had spoken to Mitch, who said he hadn't been expecting any visitors that night and in fact wasn't even home.
Caldwell then told Susan that none of the employees of the Walmart remembered seeing either her or her sons in the store that evening. Due to these inconsistencies, Susan then changed her story. And now she was telling the investigator that what she had actually been doing that night was driving around for literally hours with her sons strapped to their car seats. She explained that the reason she didn't tell them this earlier was she was afraid it would sound suspicious.
Each day, the investigators were growing more suspicious of Susan and her story. For example, she said she'd been stopped at a red light at the Monarch intersection, yet there were no cars coming. This traffic light at this particular intersection is programmed to stay green unless triggered by cars on the cross street. So why would it be red?
Meanwhile, police also continued interviewing David Smith, the father. And from David, they learned that Susan had been seeing other men. One of those men was named Tom Findley. Tom Findley, they learned, had broken off their relationship because of Susan's children only one week before the alleged carjacking and kidnappings.
Tom had written Susan a breakup letter, part of which read, Susan, I could really fall for you. You have some endearing qualities about you, and I think you are a terrific person. You will, without a doubt, make some lucky man a great wife. But unfortunately, it won't be me. Like I have told you before, there are some things about you that aren't suited for me. And yes, I'm speaking about your children.
Tom Findley was 27 years old and the son of the owner of Conso Products, which was the biggest company and the largest employer in the town of Union, which in fact employed Susan Smith as a secretary. Tom Findley was quite a catch, and in fact, he was considered the biggest catch in town. So to let that catch slip out of her fingers, as Susan perceived it, being rejected by him was devastating to her.
Agent Caldwell asked Susan, did this fact play any role or have any bearing on the disappearance of your children? Susan replied, no man would make me hurt my children. They were my life. Were.
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And each time she cried or appeared to cry, Agent Caldwell and the other investigators noticed there were no tears. She appeared to be acting. In fact, one of the polygraph examiners had written in his notes, quote, fake sounds of crying with no tears in her eyes. The forensic sketch artist who had drawn the sketch of the alleged kidnapper also had suspicions about Susan.
She was very vague when she first was asked to give a detailed description of the man, but once he began drawing the sketch, she began offering very specific feedback about minute details in the drawing, which tended to suggest she may have been fabricating at least some of what she was sharing. All of this made Agent Caldwell confident enough to up the ante.
"You said the children were fussy and refused to eat their dinner," he said to her. "Is that why you killed them?" Susan responded by banging her fists on the table and calling him a son of a B. "How can you think that?" she yelled before getting up and storming out of the interview. So at this point in the case, the FBI's behavioral sciences unit were asked to draw up a profile of a homicidal mother.
In the profile, they described this kind of killer as a woman in her 20s who wasn't well-educated, grew up poor, had physical and or sexual abuse in her past, was isolated and alienated from peers, had a history of depression and suicidal ideation, and had been rejected by a love interest around the time she committed murder. All of these fit Susan Smith, including the suicidal tendencies.
Susan Smith had attempted suicide several times. And from a forensic psychological standpoint, suicidal mothers who are also narcissistic and view their children as extensions of themselves rather than separate beings, those are mothers who are more likely to turn from suicidal into homicidal.
Four days after Michael and Alexander Smith went missing, a story appeared in the local newspaper, the Union Daily Times, laying out some of the discrepancies in Susan Smith's story. And for the first time, the public was aware that Susan herself was becoming the prime suspect in her son's disappearances.
This gave voice to suspicions a lot of people in town already had, but were afraid to put into words because it seemed like such an awful thing to suggest. And people in the black community were also suspicious about Susan's story. They didn't believe a black man would be able to drive around in a stolen car with two white children for long without being noticed.
Which, if she was making the whole thing up, is the kind of detail that may well not have occurred to Susan, who was young, white, and undereducated. But the national news media had yet to put any scrutiny on Smith.
Sheriff Wells made an appearance on both the Today Show and Larry King Live, revealing that of the more than 1,000 tips that had been phoned in, not one of them gave them anything promising. Meanwhile, a show called American Journal covered the Smith boys' disappearances, and the segment was reported on by a man named Mark Kloss, who himself was no stranger to tragedy.
Much in the way that John Walsh became a media personality and missing children advocate after the murder of his own son, Mark was the father of Polly Kloss, a 12-year-old girl who was kidnapped from her bedroom during a slumber party, raped and then murdered in 1993 by a man named Richard Allen Davis. Mark was a founding member of the Polly Kloss Foundation and the Mark Kloss Foundation for Children, which were very similar to the Adam Walsh Center.
and Mark wanted to fly out from the West Coast to South Carolina to help Susan Smith find her missing boys. So he asked his friend, Jeanne Boyton, a graphic artist whose sketch of Richard Allen Davis helped catch him, if she wanted to accompany him and help Susan create a more detailed drawing of the carjacker. They both took red-eye flights out to Union, and when they got there and arrived at the home of Susan's mother,
They were greeted and then turned away by a representative of the family who told them that Susan Smith had no interest in meeting them. Gianna especially was shocked by this. She had worked on over 7,000 cases and this kind of behavior didn't seem to fit with the typical aggrieved or worried parent of a missing child. Parents who would literally do anything to help find their missing children.
She later returned to the house a second time in more casual clothing, but was once again turned away by Susan's family. After nearly a week of failed attempts to talk to Susan Smith, Jeanne Boynton and Mark Klass gave up and flew back to California, both now convinced that Susan was involved in some way of her son's disappearances.
Kloss believed that the Smiths, because they were divorcing, were having a custody dispute and Susan was hiding the children. On Halloween morning, six days after the disappearances, what seemed like a possible break was phoned into the Union County Sheriff's Office. Police from Seattle, Washington had recovered a 14-month-old boy who had been abandoned by a man driving a car with South Carolina plates.
The description of this child matched Alexander Smith. However, only a short time later, it was confirmed that the child in Seattle had been identified and he was not Alex Smith. And what a crushing disappointment. But Sheriff Wells, Agent Caldwell, and the other investigators and FBI agents, none of them was surprised.
Because by this point, they were convinced of Susan Smith's involvement. Now, they just had to prove it and to find her children and her car. Where was her car? They continued searching the area around the lake, which was in walking distance from the McCloud's house where Susan appeared for help that first night. And they continued to polygraph Susan every day, hoping to eventually wear her down and get her to crack.
But they knew Susan Smith's would not be an easy confession. She had, up to this point, played her part unwaveringly, fully committed to the bit, as it were. By now, their investigation's focus had shifted to strategy, how to get Susan to confess. They began using the media coverage as a tool to increase the weight of the pressure on Susan.
They coordinated with the producers of America's Most Wanted, who taped a segment about the Smith case for their TV show. They had a group of preachers from the town hold a press conference to appeal to the carjackers' conscience. But the most complicated and impressive ruse they pulled off
was they created a fake newspaper with a fake news story about a young woman who murdered her children, but then only served a short sentence and after her release, married a rich doctor. They were going to then pass this newspaper article along to Susan with the hope that it would play on her warped sense of reality and make her expect less dire consequences and therefore less afraid of confessing.
Meanwhile, Susan and David Smith appeared on CBS this morning. It was more than a week after the alleged carjacking, and at this point, it was now widely understood that Susan was a suspect. She had been pressed by reporters to account for inconsistencies in her story, and it was beginning to take a toll on her.
The CBS This Morning interviewer asked Susan if she had anything to do with her son's disappearances, and she answered emphatically that she did not.
Whoever did this is a sick and emotionally unstable person, she said. David backed her up and insisted that he believed her 100%. Later that day, Susan was taken down to First Baptist Church for yet another interview, this time with Sheriff Wells. Sheriff Wells, who up to this point had assumed the good cop role in the interrogations and maintained a friendly rapport with Susan despite his suspicions,
was now confrontational in his approach. He told Susan that he knew she was lying about the black gunman who allegedly carjacked her. He pointed out the inconsistencies in her stories as well as the inconsistencies even in the revisions she made to her story to correct those first inconsistencies. Eventually during the interview, Susan asked the sheriff to pray with her and during that prayer, Sheriff Wells said,
Lord, we know that all things will be revealed to us in time. And then he looked at Susan and he said, Susan, it's time.
That's when her facade cracked. Susan lowered her head and began crying, but for real this time. Through real tears, she could hardly speak as she told the sheriff she was ashamed. So, so ashamed. She begged Sheriff Wells for his gun so she could end her life. You don't want to do that, he told her. You don't understand, she said. My children are not all right. Sheriff Wells asked Susan to elaborate. What did she mean?
This time, she told him the real story of what had happened to her sons, a story in which there would be no inconsistencies. She was driving her Mazda along Highway 49 that night.
She said she was distraught about Tom Finley's breakup from her. She felt alone and isolated and like a failure, a failure as a wife, a daughter, and a mother. She explained that she had planned to drop her sons at her mother's house, but she felt too despondent to even face her mother. She felt like she was beyond help. So she continued along the highway and followed the signs to John D. Long Lake, which she had never visited before.
But she was heading to the lake with the intent of committing suicide and taking her sons with her. She felt they would be better off in heaven than growing up without a mother. When she arrived at the lake, she drove out to the middle of the boat ramp and stopped the car. She said she sat quietly and listened to the sounds of her two sons snoring as they had already fallen asleep during the long, aimless drive that preceded her arrival at the lake.
She then put the car into neutral and it began to roll slowly down the boat ramp. But then she said she got cold feet and pulled the emergency brake, stopping the car. She released the brake and then pulled it again and repeated this two more times before eventually stepping out of the car. And as she stood there contemplating her life, her misery and her loneliness, she
She reached back into the car one last time and released the emergency brake, closing the driver's side door and then watching as the car, with her sons strapped in the back seat, asleep, rolled slowly down the boat ramp and into the water.
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the one with so many inconsistencies that suspicion fell on her almost immediately. Susan claimed she loved her sons very much. She didn't mean to harm them. She said she wanted to undo what had happened almost immediately after the car rolled into the lake, and she said she was sorry. At this point, Susan was directed to make a written statement and promptly placed under arrest.
The investigators never even had a chance to use that fake newspaper they so painstakingly created. Susan had confessed before they needed to. Divers were dispatched back to John D. Long Lake and six minutes into their second dive, they found the upside down Mazda at the bottom of the lake with the small hand of a child pressed against one of the windows.
That afternoon, nine days after Michael and Alexander Smith were killed, Sheriff Wells had a press conference to announce that Susan Smith had confessed to murdering her children and their bodies had been recovered from her sunken Mazda.
Across the United States, people were outraged. Outraged by the charades Susan had kept up, playing on the public's sympathies while also stoking racial divide by claiming a black man had carjacked her and taken her children. All the while, she had committed the most monstrous act imaginable, murdering her own young sons because they were baggage, perceived obstacles to her happiness.
It's worth noting that in Tom Finley's breakup letter to Susan, her kids weren't the sole reason he didn't see a future with her. It was also the differences between their upbringings and backgrounds and also the way she had behaved at a weekend hot tub party he had thrown. Susan had been seen kissing and groping with a married man, the husband of one of Susan's friends.
And if you want to catch a nice guy like me one day, Tom had written, you have to act like a nice girl and nice girls don't sleep with married men. Tom ended his letter with, I wanted to write you this letter because you are the one who is always making the effort for me and I wanted to return the friendship. Again, you will always have my friendship and your friendship is one that I will always look upon with sincere affection.
To me, it seems he had made it very clear to Susan that there could be no further romance with her and this enraged her and sent her into an emotional tailspin.
Susan and David finalized their divorce in May 1995 while Susan was in jail awaiting trial for murdering their children. The trial began on July 10th, 1995. Susan's defense ran with Susan's version of the story in which she claimed she had intended to commit suicide and her body, as they put it, just wheeled itself out of the car.
This is not a case about evil, they told the jury. This is a case about despair and sadness.
But the prosecution, who were seeking the death penalty, insisted that Susan had murdered her children in cold blood so she could start a new life with Tom Findley. And really, only Susan Smith knows the truth. It took only two and a half hours for the jury to convict Susan Smith. But they did ultimately spare her her life, opting not to sentence her to death, but rather to life in prison.
One person who disagreed with this sentence was Susan's now ex-husband, David. He wanted Susan to die for what she had done. He told the press in a state that he and his family were deeply disappointed she did not receive the death penalty. Susan was sent to the Camille Griffin Graham Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina, and while there in 2000, she had sex with two different prison guards.
Captain Alfred R. Rowe Jr. and Lieutenant Houston Cagle. And I didn't know this, but it totally makes sense. It's actually a crime if you're a prison guard and you have sexual contact with an inmate, even if it's consensual. You won't just lose your job if you're caught, but you can go to prison. At the time in the state of South Carolina, this was a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
Apparently that she'd been having sex with these guards was first discovered when she was treated by the prison physician for having a sexually transmitted disease. That's when she had to explain how she got it.
For obvious reasons, Susan Smith was one of the most hated people in the news cycle at the time, similar to Casey Anthony. A mother killing her own kids is unthinkable, especially to be rid of the burden and the baggage of having them. But Susan was especially vile in the way she tried to pin the crime on a member of the black community and the way she garnered the widespread sympathy of a public she had fooled.
But although she was sentenced to life in prison, her sentence did allow for the possibility of parole. And Susan Smith will first become eligible for parole next year, in 2024. Now that's it for this week. Join me again next Wednesday for another case not as widely covered as today's story, where a child's disappearance was reported by the very parent who may have been responsible. I'll see you then.