Parents Who Kill--Shocking True Stories of the World's Most Evil Parents (4 page)

C
hildfree organisations warn women not to have children if they aren’t prepared to end up as single parents: after all, even the most committed mother can lose her partner to death or divorce. Single mothers who find that they cannot cope tend to relinquish custody to the child’s father or to their own parents or, much more rarely, to the state.

But Susan Smith and Diane Downs rejected these options in favour of murdering their children and pretending that a stranger did it. This gave them the opportunity to reinvent themselves as free and single, something which their new boyfriends desired.

Both women had difficult childhoods which included sexual abuse: they were left with borderline personalities in which they swung from the emotional state of ‘motherhood is everything’ to wanting their offspring permanently out of the way.

Borderline personalities can put on a wonderful act, in this case acting out the role of the perfect mother, but deep down
they are completely self-absorbed and have very little to give to other adults, far less a needy child. They feel totally adrift as single parents and will do anything to attach themselves to a man and to keep him, even when he wants to leave. Chillingly, both Smith and Downs have expressed the desire to have further children – and, during a brief escape bid, Diane Downs did her utmost to become pregnant again.

Susan was born in 1971 in the small town of Union, Southern Carolina. Her mother was a teenage bride and housewife, her father a mill worker and volunteer fireman.

Susan was their third child but their first daughter and was very close to her father. He taught her how to speak and how to read. But the couple divorced shortly before her seventh birthday and, a month later, he put his shotgun to his temple and committed suicide. (As a teenager, Susan would form intense attachments to men whom she regarded as father figures. But, when they couldn’t fulfil her many unmet needs from childhood, she would angrily end the relationship and go in search of another male.)

When Susan was seven, her mother married a man from a wealthy family called Bev Russell who was very active in the Christian Coalition. Susan’s mother, Linda, was also religious, a stalwart at the local Methodist church. Outwardly they were a respectable family, but by 13 Susan was so unhappy that she took an overdose of aspirin. When she recovered, she threw herself back into her school activities, joining numerous after school and leisure clubs.

When she was 15, Bev started coming into her room and night and fondling her. Out of her depth, Susan would pretend to be asleep. At 16, she told her school counsellor and Bev admitted the offence. The family went for counselling but the
abuse wasn’t reported to the police. Susan continued to spend her evenings and weekends in frenetic activity as if by filling every waking moment she wouldn’t have time to think.

At 18, she started dating an older married man and was deliriously happy – but when he ended the affair, she took an overdose and spent several days in hospital. She again went into therapy.

At 19, Susan became pregnant by David Smith, a year her senior, who already had a fiancée. Susan was working as a checkout girl at the local supermarket and David was the assistant manager. The couple had a church wedding in March 1991 and their first son, Michael, arrived in October. Susan was a good mother though she worried constantly about money and was very jealous when David spoke to other women, sometimes hitting him and accusing him of cheating on her.

Two days after their first wedding anniversary, the couple split up but they later reconciled and created a second son, Alex. But, shortly after his birth in September 1993, they split up again. Susan no longer wanted David, but she hated to see anyone else with him and did everything that she could to break him and his girlfriend up. By now she was having full consensual sex with Bev, her stepfather, who was still married to her mother. She also had relationships with various other men in town.

In September 1994, Susan filed for divorce, though this was against David’s wishes. She took a secretarial job with a fabrics firm and began dating Tom Findlay, the boss’s son. She often left the children with friends whilst she went out to party, sometimes spending her evenings at a popular country and western club. But when Tom realised that she wanted a serious
relationship he admitted that he didn’t want to settle down with someone who already had children. He wrote her a very complimentary farewell letter, telling her that she’d ‘make some man a great wife.’ He could have played her along, but instead decided to be honest – yet he’d be left with feelings of guilt over what happened next. For, instead of finding someone who was happy to join a readymade family, Susan decided to get rid of her existing one. If she was single, Tom – who was affluent and attractive – would hopefully want her again…

On the evening of Tuesday 25 October 1994, a week after the break-up, she drove 14-month-old Alex and three-year-old Michael to John D Long Lake. Parking on the bank, she got out of the car, took off the handbrake and watched the vehicle roll into the water and eventually sink out of sight. Racing to a nearby house, she begged them to contact the police, saying that she’d been carjacked at nearby traffic lights by a black man, and that he’d made her drive into the country at gunpoint, whereupon he’d taken control of her Mazda and driven away with both of her sons.

Police – aided by hundreds of concerned local people – mounted a huge search of the area, and photographs of the boys and descriptions of what they were wearing were broadcast on national television. Susan and David (who had no reason to doubt his wife’s version of events) made a televised plea for their safe return. Susan said ‘I have prayed that whoever has them, that the Lord will let him realize that they are missed and loved more than any other children in this world.’ After further religious sentiments she added ‘I just feel in my heart that you’re okay.’

For nine days, Susan stuck to her story whilst her son’s corpses decomposed in John D Long Lake – divers had searched parts of the lake but it was an enormous stretch of water and they failed to find the Mazda. She slept a lot, though
she became upset when she had to take a lie detector test. David told her that, when they got the boys back, they would reconcile as a family and she replied that he and she could do so even if they didn’t get the boys back.

But the authorities were becoming increasingly aware that Susan’s story wasn’t adding up. She failed two polygraphs and, despite careful questioning, could give only the vaguest details of the supposed carjacker. Still she stuck to her story, telling reporters that ‘whoever did this is a sick and emotionally unstable person.’ After lots more religious rhetoric, she added that she had ‘put her faith in the Lord.’

Finally, Sheriff Howard Wells, who had been outwardly supportive, told her that her story didn’t add up. Why were three hours of her evening unaccounted for? Why was she allegedly driving to a friend’s house when she was carjacked, on a night when her friend was out? Why had no one else seen a black man acting suspiciously in this overwhelmingly-white community? He said that they were going to have to contact the media and tell them the truth.

At this stage, Susan broke down and asked if she could have his gun so that she could shoot herself. She confessed and showed detectives where the car had entered the water: they fished it, still containing the children strapped into their car seats, from the bottom of the lake. The toddlers’ faces were so bloated after nine days in the water that they had to have closed caskets and their distraught father was unable to kiss them goodbye. His mother, a Jehovah’s Witness, tried to console him by saying that he’d ‘see them again on Resurrection Day.’

Sheriff Wells also looked for a supernatural solution, saying on national television: ‘I think we need to continue to pray for these two children, and pray for this mother and this family.’

The public were incensed that Smith had blamed a black man for the carjacking, seeing this as act of racism. But Susan hadn’t previously been racist, and had briefly dated a black man during her teenage years, despite the fact that this was frowned upon in her racist neighbourhood.

As well as wrongly labelling her a racist, sectors of the media also said that she’d lied about being sexually abused as a teenager. They came to this conclusion as Susan had apparently retracted her claims of abuse. In reality, she was probably trying to spare her mother the shame of being married to an adulterer, for appearances were vitally important to Susan’s religious family.

Awaiting trial, the double killer spent her time reading the Bible in her cell in the Women’s Correctional Centre in Columbia. She wrote David a note saying that her life would be hell from now on and that no one cared a damn about her. He visited her and she said that, when she got out, she’d like to have further children with him. He was lost for words.

After much thought, he gave his support to a campaign to seek the death penalty for his wife. He explained this decision in a later book,
Beyond All Reason,
writing that Michael and Alex – not their mother – were the victims. ‘They are the ones who died awful, unspeakable, senseless deaths, suspended upside down in their car seats, as the water seeped into the Mazda and rose above their little heads.’

Six months after the murders, Susan Smith went to trial. The defence portrayed her as a victim of her unhappy childhood and cheating husband. David Smith was understandably enraged at being painted as the bad one – after all, he had been a loving parent to his sons.

Her stepfather, Bev Russell, took the stand and admitted
abusing her when she was 15 and continuing an incestuous relationship with her. He said that it had ended shortly before she drowned her sons. Looking at Susan, he said ‘My heart breaks for what I have done to you.’ The prosecution, determined not to paint Susan as a victim, got him to admit that the sex had been consensual though this didn’t make it right on account of her age and the fact that he was
in loco parentis
and married to her mother.

Susan’s attorneys alleged that she’d planned to die with her boys, but had jumped out of the car at the last minute. She’d told them that she’d had second thoughts but that the car had sunk immediately, before she had time to free them from their seats. This contradicted the prosecution’s recreation, showing that the car had skimmed along the water for some distance and floated due to an almost-empty fuel tank before sinking slowly to the bottom of the lake. The children had taken at least five minutes to die.

The judge said that the jury could go for the lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter if they preferred but they found her guilty of murder. She was sentenced to life, which effectively means that she won’t be eligible for parole for 30 years.

In Broad River Correctional Institute, Susan received numerous letters from religious practitioners who said that they were praying for her. She has remained deeply religious. She has also remained exceptionally needy, a woman who uses her sexuality to gain acceptance and a semblance of love.

In 2000, or earlier, she began an affair with a prison guard, a married man (his wife is a former prisoner) who had spent 13 years working as a corrections officer. The relationship came to light during a medical in September of that year, when Susan was found to have contracted a sexually-transmitted disease. Both she and the 50-year-old-guard admitted the relationship and he was promptly fired. Smith was told that
she could also face sanctions such as losing her much-coveted job in the prison library or forfeiting the time that she gets to spend in the prison grounds.

Christened Elizabeth Diane Fredrickson shortly after her birth in August 1955, Diane was always known by her middle name. Her mother was a teenage bride, her father, six years older, a strict disciplinarian. The couple, who were fundamentalist Baptists, went on to have another four children, who were raised on various Arizona farms. But when she was five, her father opted for a change of career and began to work his way up the ladder of the US Postal Service.

When Diane was 12, her mother began working nights and she was left with her father. She would later tell her husband that, during this period, her father began to sexually molest her, coming into her bedroom at night for a year. Eventually she became so insomniacal that her father took her to the doctor for sleeping tablets. Afterwards, he drove her into the desert to molest her but a Highway Patrol Man allegedly saw her crying, with her shirt unbuttoned, in the front seat. He approached the vehicle and asked the crying teenager what was happening and she said that she’d had an injection at the doctor and that’s why she was in tears. The officer took her father to one side and spoke sharply to him, and he never touched her inappropriately again.

The family continued to attend church three times a week, their social life also revolving around religious functions. Their home life was rigid and authoritarian and would perhaps explain Diane’s later hatred of – and determination not to follow – rules.

At 15, she fell in love with a boy called Steve Downs who was seven months her senior. After school, he joined the Navy and Diane went to Bible College where she studied to be a Christian missionary. She also taught at Sunday school. When Steve returned from his tour of duty, they married. She was only 18 and immature for her age.

Diane had too many emotional needs for a teenage boy to satisfy, and almost immediately she decided to have a baby so that she’d have someone of her own to love. Without telling Steve, she stopped taking her birth control pills and, nine months after the marriage, gave birth to their first daughter, Christie Ann.

But a baby can only take, and Diane soon tired of the role of caregiver. She joined the Air Force and was shipped to Texas, leaving Steve to care for their six-month-old child.