Above Suspicion

by Sharkey, Joe;

  People in Freeburn who remember Susan, including her family, all seem to have accepted the idea that she and Mark had a long, intense affair that lasted for two years and included torrid assignations in motels and even, as Susan bragged to friends, at the Putnams’ home in Pikeville during the time when Kathy traveled back to Connecticut for the birth of their second child.

  It certainly makes the story more cinematic to envision the sweaty young lovers, dashing lawman and perky mountain girl, tangled in the bedsheets. But I myself don’t buy it. I believe the truth is sadder than that. In his confession, and in subsequent conversations with me in prison in which I took him over key details again and again, looking for discrepancies that I never found, Mark consistently maintained that sex with Susan was quick and opportunistic, certainly not planned (he didn’t even have condoms), and that it had occurred over a period of months starting in December 1988, not years, as some accounts based entirely on local speculation insisted. These things supported his accounts: The unequal power relationship between the two, underpinned by his sense of status and propriety, if not morality; the Putnam home in Pikeville had nosy neighbors who were vigilant about neighborhood comings and goings; and Mark had no good reason that I could ascertain to lie about the sex after he admitted to killing her.

  “The times I had sex with her always took place in the car, and I never had sex with her at my house or at a motel,” he said in his confession statement on June 4, 1990—which he repeated to me on several occasions.

  In the winter of 2016 I learned that Phillip Noyce, the Australian director of films such as Salt, The Quiet American, and Clear and Present Danger, had agreed to adapt Above Suspicion as a movie. Phillip spent weeks driving around eastern Kentucky scouting locations, but he ruled out Pikeville and instead chose Harlan, a gloomy little town of 1,800 in the Kentucky coal-belt about eighty-five miles southwest of Pikeville.

  “Pikeville doesn’t look like Pikeville anymore,” he told me when I visited the Harlan location in July 2016 as filming was underway. Emilia Clarke (famous for playing Daenerys Targaryen, the “Mother of Dragons” in the hit HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones) was playing Susan Smith and Jack Huston (who played the title role in the 2016 remake of the biblical epic Ben-Hur) was cast as Mark Putnam. Sophie Lowe played Kathy Putnam.

  Revisiting the region for the first time since 1992, I was surprised by how right Phillip was. Pikeville today does not look much like the sleepy county seat I encountered in 1992. A new twenty-five-acre University of Pikeville campus and medical center sprawls down a hill overlooking downtown, across the street from two new hotels. Main Street and Courthouse Square have been spruced up with new facades and even outdoor stages. There’s a flashy new seven-thousand-seat concert and sports events arena called the Eastern Kentucky Expo Center, which opened in 2005. These expensive improvements were all part of an ambitious publicly financed plan to beautify Pikeville as a center for regional tourism in eastern Kentucky.

  Larry Webster, who has practiced law from his office near the courthouse for over a quarter century, chuckled and explained: “They put all these big buildings up and created an illusion of more prosperity than you will actually find here,” Webster said. “After that TV series on the Hatfield–McCoy feud created all this interest, people started roaring in here to see everything—but really there ain’t much to see. All we can do really is put up signs saying ‘This is where something happened.’”

  The producers and the director of the movie version of this book, to their great credit, were adamant about filming in eastern Kentucky, even though the remoteness of the region—it’s more than two hours from any significant urban center—added extra expense to the budget, not to mention major logistical burdens. The producers firmly believed that geography itself was a character in the book, and they affirmed the concept of “authenticity of place”—enough so to spend months with a movie crew encamped in a little town with so few amenities.

  Above Suspicion links three people, a young man who wanted affirmation in his long-sought job as an FBI agent and two women who emotionally orbited him, each impelled by her own conflicted desires, each tragically unaware that a terrible collision lay ahead. In a work necessarily restricted to fact-based journalism and what can be reasonably interpreted from those facts, Mark Putnam was a far easier character to draw than the two women. The challenge, for both book and movie, was to reflect what is increasingly known in literature, including the literature of cinema, as the “female gaze.”

  One afternoon during the filming of Above Suspicion, Emilia spoke passionately about her desire to bring Susan to life and capture the sad utility of her dreams. She told me she had read everything she could get her hands on about Susan. In fact, she had already worn out two copies of Above Suspicion—“They’re all dog-eared and I’ve scrawled all over them,” she said. On location, she devoured my background notes and lengthy transcripts from tapes of Kathy and Mark’s reflections on Susan compiled twenty-five years before.

  As we spoke, Emilia switched effortlessly between her native British accent and the eastern Kentucky “hillbilly” twang that she had been perfecting for months. When she did the final take, bathed in ethereal blue light as Phillip Noyce softly called “Action!” and repeated those last sad lines about the death of dreams, I realized that, in a way that written words alone did not adequately achieve, this young actress had worked magic and brought forth a vision that I recognized as Susan Smith.

  After the movie wrapped in mid-July I drove across the mountains to Pikeville, and then onto Route 23 north of town, toward the mountain where Susan’s body had lain in weeds and strip-mine debris for nearly a year until Mark’s confession. The Goldenrod Motel and Marlow’s are gone, and there are no coal trucks spewing black nuggets as they hurtle north. That’s because the boom and bust cycles of coal are over. In 2015, as cheap and less polluting fuels like natural gas won out, coal production in eastern Kentucky was at its lowest in eighty years. One after the other, the giant coal-producing companies have gone bankrupt, leaving behind devastated landscapes, poisoned streams, and billions of dollars in cleanup costs to be borne by taxpayers.

  The place where Susan lay is at the summit of a former strip mine. Two weathered park benches sag in the mud. The dirt bikes that Mark heard whizzing nearby when he laid Susan’s nude body in the ravine have given way to all-terrain vehicles and an equestrian center that attracts riders on trails lacing through reclaimed slopes. From the crest of the hill, the mountains of Appalachia are stacked like bread loaves on the horizon.

  The roads corkscrewing through the hills from here to Freeburn have not changed much since the days when Bert Hatfield taught Mark Putnam how to grit his teeth, take his foot off the brake, and drive like a hell-bound hillbilly. Treacherous turns leading to tiny hamlets with rusting cars parked outside trailers and an astonishing profusion of steepled saltbox churches with electric signs warning of a apocalyptic visions of a Rapture soon to come.

  At the end of such death-defying highways lie the isolated old coal-camp towns like Freeburn, population 399, sustained by government checks and social inertia, largely unchanged in the quarter century since I first came here.

  Bert Hatfield still presides over his small used-car lot beside the stubby bridge across the Tug to West Virginia. I talked to him in his office inside a cramped trailer, at a desk piled high with papers and files, with a police scanner to the side, though he said that he believes his days in law enforcement are numbered.

  “The drugs are worse than I ever saw before, and I thought I seen it all,” he said. In conjunction with law enforcement crackdowns on pain pills, as well as marijuana and cocaine, the chemical formula that concocts this social dysfunction and criminality has been altered, most graphically seen in a deadly new epidemic of cheap heroin tricked out with an opioid called fentanyl that boosts its potency by more than 50 percent.

  “I don’t even know these kids,�
�� Bert said. “I used to be able to say, listen, I know your father or your sister, but there’s a new element coming around now that doesn’t even think the same way. In law enforcement, you better be able to change with the times or get out, and I’m ready to get out.”

  As the local cop who first introduced Mark to Susan, a girl he grew up with in Freeburn, Bert still had strong feelings about her. “Susie had been my informant for years before I introduced Mark to her,” he said. “She gave me valuable information, and she did the same for Mark.”

  Was he aware of the sexual relationship that developed between the two?

  “Like everybody else, I heard talk, especially from what she was telling folks. But Mark and I spent a lot of hours together and I never saw that side of him, and he never mentioned anything like that to me. Toward the end, I did warn him about getting too involved with this girl, that she was running her mouth pretty bad. I did try to send some red flags up for him, but I think he took it personally, as me butting in. We drifted apart over that.”

  As so many others did, Bert blamed the FBI for lax supervision of a hard-charging, eager-to-succeed young agent who eventually got into a situation he could not control. “I think they threw him to the wolves,” he said.

  Across the river, seven miles up the road on the West Virginia side, lies Matewan, the coal town where Susan Daniels was born in 1961, the fifth of nine children of Sid and Tracy Daniels of Barrenshee Hollow in Freeburn, Kentucky.

  When Susan was a child, the two-block-long downtown in Matewan had shops, including Nenni’s Department Store, a tailor, and a cobbler. At Christmas and Easter, miners’ families from all over the Tug Valley would dress in their Sunday best, Susan’s among them, and flock to the festively decorated Nenni’s.

  But by the mid-1970s, Matewan was a faded town. It had been ripped apart by the Tug river floods, boom-and-bust cycles of coal, and the violent class struggles as the miners attempted to unionize. Young Susan knew she needed to get out, any way possible.

  On a breezy July afternoon in 2016, I wandered into Matewan’s somnambulant downtown. The streets were almost empty. I peered into the souvenir shop’s window to look at the display of Hatfield–McCoy tchotchkes. A wood-burned plaque was displayed prominently:

  HATFIELD–McCOY

  *FUED*

  1865–1890

  And yes, “feud” was misspelled.

  I walked down to the river, across from Main Street. After a 1977 flood wiped out most of the town, the Army Corps of Engineers had built a great concrete floodwall, decorated with scenes from the Battle of Matewan, that runs a quarter mile along the Tug. At the base of the steps to the river, mayflies swarmed around me. I parted my way through nettles and ferns and cattails to the riverbank to watch a boy, maybe thirteen years old, paddle by in a broken-down canoe with exposed and splintered slats. The boy waved and swirled downriver on the Tug’s fast northbound tumble down to the Ohio, the river access to the big cities of the Midwest.

  Where did that boy think he was going in a busted old canoe? Did he have a plan to return against that swift current? Or was he, like Susan, simply adrift on a stream?

  Finally, I realized, it was time for a journalist to put his notes away. History pointedly cleared its throat in forlorn little Matewan, where Susan Smith first had her notions, where ghosts now drifted in smoky tendrils on the lonesome holler of the wind.

  IMAGE GALLERY

  Mark Putnam as a child, with his father, Walter.

  Mark Punam in college, playing soccer.

  Mark Putnam at his graduation from the FBI academy.

  Kathy Putnam.

  Mark, Kathy, and Danielle Putnam, 1986.

  Pikeville, Kentucky.

  Main Street, Pikeville.

  Federal Courthouse; location of the FBI office in Pikeville.

  Susan Smith in her seventh grade yearbook.

  Susan Smith in grade school.

  Kenneth and Susan Smith.

  Barrenshee Hollow in Freeburn, where Susan grew up.

  Danielle, Mark, and Mark Jr. in Florida.

  A nightly ritual: Mark reading a bedtime story to Danielle and Mark Jr. in Florida.

  Mark, Mark Jr., and Danielle reading the newspaper in Florida.

  Ron Poole, 1991.

  Detective Richard Ray at the site where Susan’s body was found.

  Commonwealth Attorney John Paul Runyon.

  Retired FBI supervisor Jim Huggins, 2016.

  Sherriff’s Deputy Bert Hatfield at his car lot in Freeburn, 2016.

  The author on the set of the film adaptation with actor Emilia Clarke, who is playing Susan Smith, in 2016.

  About the Author

  Joe Sharkey was a weekly columnist for the New York Times for nineteen years. Previously, he was an assistant national editor at the Wall Street Journal and a reporter and columnist with the Philadelphia Inquirer. The author of four books of nonfiction and one novel, Sharkey is currently an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Arizona. He and his wife live in Tucson.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Copyright © 1993, 2017 by Joe Sharkey

  Cover design by Andy Ross

  978-1-5040-4173-7

  This edition published in 2017 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

  180 Maiden Lane

  New York, NY 10038

  www.openroadmedia.com

  JOE SHARKEY

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