Moments after a parole board rejected Susan Smith’s bid for freedom on Wednesday, the dejected 53-year-old emotionally lashed out when she was returned to her prison cell.
“She was pissed,” said an onlooker at Leath Correctional Institution in Greenwood, South Carolina. “She was angry-crying. Waving her hands, very agitated. It looked like she threw a tantrum.”
Not that the convicted murderer got much sympathy from her fellow inmates. “The girls pretty much all think it’s funny,” says the onlooker. “She walks around here like she rules the roost. Guess what? You don’t. You’re just like everybody else.”
Added the source: “I don’t think she was thinking about her sons at all yesterday. She was clearly just thinking about herself.”
During Wednesday’s hearing, a tearful Smith apologized for drowning her two young sons in 1994 and said she wished she could take it back.
Attending the meeting remotely via Zoom, Smith told the board that she had lost touch with reality when she killed her sons, Alex and Michael, by strapping them in their car seats and letting them drown in a South Carolina lake in 1994.
“I am a Christian and I know that God has forgiven me,” Smith told the board, before begging the panel to “show the same kind of mercy.”
But, true to form, Smith still refused to take full responsibility for her actions, blaming others for the choices she made.
Her argument didn’t sway the seven-member South Carolina Board of Parole, which immediately voted to deny Smith’s request.
Smith was a 22-year-old mom when she became a household name for killing her sons, 3-year-old Michael and 14-month-old Alexander. In 1994, she let her car roll into John D. Long Lake in Union County, South Carolina, with her boys still strapped into their car seats.
Smith falsely told police that a black man had carjacked her and kidnapped the tots, leading to a manhunt in which authorities went door to door among local neighborhoods that were predominantly African American.
Smith and her then-husband, David Smith, appeared on national news every day, pleading for the boys’ safe return.
But nine days later, Smith finally confessed that there was no carjacker, and that she had drowned her sons in the lake.
She was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Her first parole hearing was on Wednesday.
Smith will now be able to apply for parole every two years — meaning the family of her murdered sons will have to show up to fight her request if they want to ensure she stays behind bars.
