Twenty years after she locked her toddler sons in a car and rolled them off into a lake to drown Susan Smith is protesting she’s not the evil murder everyone thinks she is.
In a letter to The State newspaper Smith responds to an article the paper published about her in 2014. Journalist Harrison Cahill had written to Susan in August of last year asking for comment about the story they were going to run about the 20th anniversary of the boys’ deaths but Susan says the letter never arrived in time for The State’s deadline.
“I imagine that was done on purpose,” Smith said. “I wanted to let you know that I would have most likely responded to your letter because I have (not) yet been able to speak on my behalf. It has been hard to listen to lie after lie and not be able to defend myself.”
The past Wednesday marked 20 years since the Union, South Carolina woman’s conviction, on July 22, 1995 and she is currently serving life in prison for killing Michael, 3 and 14-month-old Alex.
After initially telling police she carjacked by a “black man” at gunpoint who drove away with her kids inside Susan later confessed to drowning the children in John D. Long Lake.
Susan told police she let her car roll into the lake with her two children buckled into the backseat and jury later sentenced her to life.
But now, 43-year-old Smith has shared some of her thoughts on the night she killed her children.
“The only reason I lied is because I didn’t know how to tell the people who loved Michael and Alex that they would never see them again,” Smith said.
It was speculated that one of the motives for Susan murdering her children was due to an affair she was involved with – they kids were stopping her from moving on with her life. Susan denies killing her kids had anything to do with the affair.
“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.”
Nine days after reporting her children missing on October 25, 1994, Smith confessed to watching her 1990 Mazda Protégé sink, knowing her kids were inside.
“Something went very wrong that night. I was not myself,” Smith said. “I was a good mother and I loved my boys. … There was no motive as it was not even a planned event. I was not in my right mind.”
Susan told of how she planned to take her own life and leave a note confessing to the crime and in the letter to The State she pleaded for people not to perceive her as an evil person.
“Mr Cahill, I am not the monster society thinks I am,” she wrote. “I am far from it.”
Alex and Michael Smith who were murdered by their mother, Susan Smith.
According to Cahill he has since sent Susan letters since receiving her response in January but has not heard back from her.
Tommy Pope, the prosecutor who handled Smith’s trial, said what she wrote in the letter was typical of the way she always acted, reports WYFF News 4.
“She has always taken a self-centered focus over the years,” Pope told the outlet. “If you look at the letter it’s still more about her, not about Michael and Alex, not about the regrets of the crime.
It’s more about the way she’s perceived.”
