On the night of October 25, 1994, Susan Smith stood on a boat ramp at John D. Long Lake in Union, South Carolina, and made a choice that would horrify the nation. She released the emergency brake on her burgundy Mazda Protégé and watched it roll into the dark water with her two sons still strapped in their car seats.

Three-year-old Michael and fourteen-month-old Alex drowned in that lake while their mother ran to a nearby house and told a lie that would captivate America for nine days. Susan claimed a Black man had carjacked her at gunpoint and driven away with her children. She wept on national television, clutched her estranged husband David's hand, and begged for the safe return of her boys. 

The whole country searched for a phantom kidnapper while Michael and Alex lay dead at the bottom of that lake, one hundred and twenty-two feet from shore.In this episode, we trace Susan Smith's troubled life from the beginning. Her father Harry Vaughan killed himself when she was just six years old, leaving wounds that never healed. Her stepfather Beverly Russell, a prominent Republican and Christian Coalition member, began molesting her when she was fifteen and continued a sexual relationship with her into adulthood. Susan attempted suicide at thirteen and again at seventeen.

She married David Smith at nineteen, already pregnant, and their marriage was plagued by mutual infidelity from the start.When Susan set her sights on Tom Findlay, the wealthy son of her boss at Conso Products, she believed he was her ticket to a better life.

But Tom sent her a Dear John letter just eight days before the murders, telling her that while she had many good qualities, he did not want children. In Susan's fractured mind, her boys became obstacles to the happiness she craved.

We examine the investigation that unraveled Susan's lies, from the traffic light that could not have turned red at an empty intersection to the polygraph that showed the highest level of deception when she was asked if she knew where her children were. We cover Sheriff Howard Wells obtaining her confession at a local church, the recovery of the boys' bodies with one small hand pressed against the car window, and the trial that exposed every dark corner of Susan's life. The jury convicted her in just two and a half hours but ultimately spared her from the death penalty. 

She was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after thirty years. Her time behind bars has been marked by affairs with prison guards, drug use, and self-mutilation. In November 2024, she faced her first parole hearing, where David Smith appeared wearing his sons' photograph and pleaded with the board to keep her locked up. They unanimously denied her release.

This is the story of Michael and Alex, two innocent boys who deserved so much better than the fate their mother chose for them. And it is a story that still haunts America more than thirty years later.

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