by Rick Bragg
The investigators, led by a plain-spoken, quietly intelligent sheriff named Howard Wells, admitted that they had no leads. It was as if the two little boys had just winked out of existence with those vanishing tail-lights.
Then, I think it was on the 29th, we all began to suspect—reporters, searchers, even the people on their knees—that we were fools.
I never, ever call my momma from assignments like this, but I was back home in Atlanta on a Sunday when she called me. She had long since caught on to the kind of stories I was drawn to, or ordered to, and asked me if I had been “to that bad thing in South Carolina.” She asked me if I believed the momma had killed those babies, and I asked her why she asked me that. But before she could answer it, I suddenly knew.
“Momma,” I said, “if it was us, when we were little, and a man had shoved a gun in your face and told you to get out of the car without us, what would you have done?”
“I would be dead,” she said. “He would have had to have shot me.”
It was the truth of it, of course. The tragedy we had been spoon-fed by a twenty-three-year-old textile mill secretary would turn out to be an unspeakable act, one that made people as far away as New York City hug their children an extra time at night.
The night they disappeared, she dressed her children in neat clothes, drove to the lake and then parked her car on the steep boat ramp. She stepped out, released the hand brake, and let that car carry her children to their deaths by slow suffocation under the water. They were still strapped in their seats.
After nine days of lies, she told her story, sobbing, to the quiet country sheriff. She did not volunteer it. The sheriff had tricked her with a lie of his own, into confessing, and asked God to forgive him for it, because he was a thoroughly decent man.
As a journalist, of course, I dropped the ball. I should have raised the possibility of her involvement. I knew that in most cases like this, the parents are involved. A simple line about that would have, at least, raised the possibility of a hoax. I was dumb.
The horror of what she had done left us to wonder why. Maybe, as her lawyers said, she had killed them because she was so deeply depressed, because she had been sexually abused by her own stepfather, a corpulent leading Republican and devoutly religious man named Bev Russell, then used by every man she had ever gone to, searching for love. Her lawyers painted her crime as a failed murder-suicide, saying that, after that lifetime of sexual abuse and emotional abuse at the hands of her stepfather and other men, she wanted to die with her children. It sounded too much like daytime TV to me, and even as I tried to feel sorry for her—and I did feel disgust for the men who had used her so—I kept envisioning those children at the cold bottom of that lake.
The prosecution seemed to be dealing with a totally different woman. The children were dead because Susan Smith wanted to rid herself of an obstacle in her campaign for the affection of a rich man’s son she had dated, a man who did not want her ready-made family, the baggage that came with her. Union exists because of the textile mills, where men and women work for low wages in the deafening clatter and hum of the great machines. Susan, a brown-haired, not unlovely woman who was getting out of a bad marriage, worked for the mill’s owner in an office where the clatter of the machines could not reach, and went to hot tub parties with the mill owner’s son.
Nine days after the big lie, as the police cruisers and divers converged on the lake, the water looked almost black. Visibility was only about a foot when diver Steve Morrow floated up to the burgundy Mazda that lay upside down in the cold water. “I had to put my light against the window, and peered in,” he said. “I was able to see a small hand pressed against the glass.”
Inside the car with the bodies of her sons was a letter from the man she loved telling her that their relationship would never work, in part because of her children, in part because their worlds were just too different.
Someone should have told her how hard it is to fight your way from one side of the tracks to the other. Someone should have told her that just because they invite you into a dark room, that doesn’t mean they’ll take you to the dance.
Every day at precisely 12:25 P.M., the local radio station in Union has its litany of the dead. It is not a complicated or dramatic process. The radio announcer just reads the obituaries from the local paper out loud. People here say the program is very popular. It tells the town who has passed from their midst in a respectful and very concise manner. Every death gets a few seconds, and sometimes the whole list is a single name. It is a short program. It is a small town.
The murder of two innocents took death to a proportion this town had never experienced, robbed it of its dignity, and shattered custom like a swinging baseball bat against an heirloom vase. It was suddenly terrifying and sickening and, ultimately, shameful.
It required more than a monotone sendoff, spiked with static. It ushered in the world.
I was part of the zoo, too, just a little less obvious. I fit in. I knew the dialects. I had cotton mills in my blood, and some days I felt guilty, for spreading this story so far and wide.
No matter which Susan Smith you believed in, the murder trial of that young woman was like running barefoot through Johnson grass. No matter how detached any reporter was—and I had learned to be pretty detached by now, at least detached enough to keep my sanity—the evidence shocked and sickened. Some news magazines called it the story of the year, as she went on trial for her life.
To me, it was pure American gothic, showing the small-town, mill-town South in its worst possible light, and I hated that. I had met some nice people in Union, but their normal, decent voices would be drowned out by the awfulness, the selfishness, the horror of the testimony that unfolded over the next few months.
The worst day was the testimony of the lover who spurned her, Tom Findlay. Known in Union as “The Catch,” I had expected a handsome man, but in Union, good looks don’t feed the bulldog. He was a baldish, average-looking man from Mountain Brook, Alabama, an affluent Birmingham suburb where teenagers often get their driver’s license and their first BMW at the same time, and lived in an apartment in his father’s mansion, on an estate in the woods outside Union. He was the crown prince of a town of 10,000 people, most of them just one paycheck ahead of poverty.
Susan Smith’s husband had worked in the grocery store. How compelling, to be invited to the Big House.
But her love was wasted on the rich man’s son.
“Like I told you before, there are some things about you that aren’t suited for me, and yes, I mean your children,” he had written her in his letter, on October 17, just eight days before she drowned her sons. “With all the crazy, mixed-up things that take place in this world today, I just don’t have the desire to bring another life into it. And I don’t want to be responsible for anyone else’s children, either.”
It wasn’t just the children that kept them apart, the county prosecutor said of the twenty-eight-year-old man, Tom Findlay, and Susan Smith. He had also written that their backgrounds—he was a child of privilege, she a child of a mill worker who committed suicide when his wife left him—would never mesh.
“We are just two totally different people,” his letter said, “and eventually, those differences would cause us to break up.”
It sounded like high school stuff to me, but then I have never been a romantic.
At one point in his letter to Mrs. Smith, he wrote that he was disappointed in her for an affair she had had with a married man and for kissing a man during a hot tub party at Findlay’s home. “If you want to catch a nice guy like me,” he wrote her, “you have to be a nice girl.”
The prosecution introduced the letter and Mr. Findlay’s testimony in an effort to portray Mrs. Smith as so maliciously selfish that she was prepared to trade the lives of her children for a chance to reclaim him. And all the way through that day’s testimony, all I could think was, what a fool she was. I learned that even as her babies lay under the lake, she twice asked frie
nds to tell Findlay to call her.
I could have told her about the dance.
Her estranged husband wanted her dead. His hand vibrated so badly as he held the pictures of his two sons up to the jury that they were a just a blur of two little boys on the sand at Myrtle Beach. One network correspondent cried out loud.
He had been a much better father than a husband, and had gone to her house long after they had split up, and demanded sex from her, according to the testimony. But his grief was real.
“Michael didn’t like water on his face,” he said, between his sobs. “He would try to climb out of the bathtub” when water splashed onto his face. He would have to shield Michael’s face with his hand, when he rinsed his hair.
The defense, led by a smart man, David Bruck of Columbia, South Carolina, had a simple argument. She was not insane, only desperate for love. It drove her to a promiscuous love life, where men used her instead of loving her. I will never forget the day her stepfather came to court, the one who first molested her when she was fifteen, and how he joined hands with other family members in the courtroom, to pray for his stepdaughter. I guess he has asked God to forgive him.
The man who had caught her was Union County sheriff Howard Wells, a complicated man who collects guns but pops Supreme Court decisions off the top of his head. He did it with a simple lie. He told her he knew she was not telling the truth because his deputies were working drug surveillance at the crossroads where she said her children were stolen, the night of the alleged abduction.
“This could not have happened as you said,” he told her, sitting face to face with her in a small room in a church gymnasium, where they had gone to get away from reporters. There had been, in truth, no such deputies at the intersection. “I told her I would release it to the media” because her lie about a black carjacker was causing deep pain among blacks, and he said he owed it to the town to end the racial divisiveness it had caused.
She broke then. She asked him to pray with her, he said, and face to face, holding hands, they did. “I’m so ashamed,” she told him, and asked for his gun so that she could kill herself. But that might have just been Susan acting, too.
The jury couldn’t kill her, of course.
“This young woman is in a lake of fire,” said the lawyer, David Bruck. “That’s her punishment.”
It might have been different if it really had been a black carjacker. Then I’m pretty sure there would have been an execution. Carolina gives the condemned a choice. They choose the needle, or they can ride the lightning.
One of the four blacks among the jurors, John Dunn, said he did not resent Mrs. Smith for having chosen to blame a black man and in fact understood why she had done so. What better alibi to offer, Mr. Dunn said, then a lie that she knew people would believe?
Almost on cue, as the county court clerk read off the verdict that spared her life, a hard rain started to fall, washing away for a little while a summer heat wave that had lasted throughout this trial.
“Poetic justice,” said Andy Wallace, a state investigator, as he watched the rain run down the street.
One thing has always bothered me. If you believe her lawyers, if you believe the theory of a failed suicide, then it happened this way. She drove to the lake and parked her car on the boat ramp’s steep incline, pausing as she steeled herself for what she was about to do. She let go of the hand brake, reconsidered and pulled it up again, then let it go and—in some instinct for survival—hurled herself from the car.
Yet her clothes were not torn or dirtied. Her clothes were neat and clean when she walked to a nearby house to tell her lie.
The only possible way it could have happened is if she stood outside the car, leaned in to let go the hand brake, and jumped back, letting the car roll into the lake.
People in Union said it didn’t really matter. It was over, wasn’t it?
But it wasn’t really over. It never will be. The lake became a shrine, complete with monuments to the two boys. People came from all over the world to see it.
I had to go back to Union in September of 1996. The unthinkable had happened again, but this time an accident. This time the lake swallowed up a family of five and two other people who had come to see the monuments to Susan Smith’s sons. The new victims—four of them children, one an infant—were shining the headlights of their truck on the memorials when the truck somehow rolled into the water. The five people inside drowned, including those four children. Two adults who had been standing outside the truck drowned when they swam out to try to save the others. When rescue workers arrived at the lake late Saturday night, the body of a child floated on the surface. The next day, some said it was God, punishing the town for its leniency. I don’t think so. The tragedy was that anyone would want to see that place, that anyone would go.
I hated the Susan Smith story, for its hopelessness, and I guess maybe I hated it because a part of me understood her, the desire to be something else.
She will be eligible for parole in 2025. Her looks will be long gone then. She will have to live out the rest of her life as a mill worker’s daughter who killed her babies.
Who knows. Maybe some nut bag will come and rescue her in her old age, because of her celebrity. Some nut bag with money. And she will get to put on her party dress, after all.
37
Monsters
I understood nothing of the bombers who killed the innocents in Oklahoma City, who reduced the federal building to rubble and turned the day-care center, where the babies had slumbered in the windows, to a jumble of concrete chunks and broken toys. I wrote of it because they told me to, because I wanted to, but I do not like to think much about it now. I will not, for more than few a minutes at a time. I tried to give a short talk about it once, to other reporters, and while my mouth kept moving, I stumbled in my mind over the bloody rubber gloves tossed in the rain, and the smell of, what? Dust. And the faces of men and women who had seen something we should never have to look at.
You pour it all into your stories, as your fingers hover above the computer keyboard, but when you get up, when it is done, you block much of it out. You have to feel for the people you write about or the words don’t amount to much, but you learn to put it down.
I remember one night in Oklahoma City, a dinner with the other reporters, laughing a little, whistling past the graveyard as we coldheartedly discussed the stories we had written and still had to write. And all that time, at the neighboring table, sat a woman whose little girl had been killed in the blast. Later, her friends lashed out at us, and all I could say, sitting there, white-faced, was how sorry we were to be so insensitive. There was no way we could have known, of course, how close we were to someone who could never, ever block it out.
I walked away but something made me turn around and go back, to explain myself, to try to make her understand that every reporter at that table was sick at heart, too, of what they had seen. I guess she believed me. I hope she did.
I have never been ashamed of being a reporter. I have been afraid, and angry, and heartsick, but never ashamed. I lay awake a long, long time that night, sorry about what had happened, but not ashamed.
It goes way beyond the craft itself. That assignment, the story of the year, was in my eighteenth year as a reporter, in the role, the only one I have ever felt at peace with, of paid storyteller.
It had pulled me out of poverty, literally. It had shown me the world, and I did not mind that the world was so often on fire when I got there. It gave me an education, from books at Harvard, from a thousand stories where I was forced to understand something an hour before deadline. It gave me pride and money, but more pride. It saved me. It surely did. My mother gave me the boost up, and what I found, on the other side of that wall, was this.
Of course, she was still there, surrounded by those old sadnesses. Nothing seemed to change, on her side, except the calendar.
Houses burn in the country all the time. The wiring is often homemade, and over the years the boards d
ry out and wires short out, and then one night as you drive back from town you see a dull orange glow in the distance, and you wish, quite selfishly, that the flames have consumed someone else’s lifetime of hard work and dreams. House insurance is not a given, not here. The only insurance some have—is luck.
My grandmother’s little house had burned in the summer of 1993. That should have been enough bad luck. Two years later, my little brother’s house burned to the ground. I was in the Piedmont region of Virginia, as the flames licked up into the oaks, writing about floods. The volunteer fire department came fast, but much too late. My momma came, in terror.
Was he inside? she asked the fireman.
He said he could not say for sure. He did not think so, but he could not say for sure.
She was in agony, for hours. His truck was gone from the driveway, but that meant nothing. He was always breaking down on deserted roads and walking out. My brother Sam drove his Ford Bronco through the northern part of the county, searching for Mark, but found nothing. No one had seen him.
Finally, several hours later, my kinfolks found him safe.
My momma took days to stop shaking.
I finally made it home five days later. I told him I would help pay for his lumber, if he wanted to build it back. He started laying block for the foundation less than a month after the blaze, planning a smaller house this time.
Sometimes, things like that will shake people up enough to make them change. I have seen it happen with fires, with deaths, even surgery. My momma hoped it would be so with him. We do have some luck in this life, but not that much. Momma just stepped back on the treadmill of worry and hopelessness, and kept walking.
I had been selfish long enough. It was time, past time, to begin paying her back, in the only ways I knew how.
