Word: smith
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Last Wednesday police called Smith in for questioning again. That same day a team searched her home, dusting for fingerprints, exploring a crawl space in the basement and removing several bags from the house. It was all finally too much: Smith broke down under questioning and told police where the boys' bodies could be found. Following her directions, divers returned to John D. Long Lake; around 4:15 on Thursday afternoon, they pulled Smith's car from the mud. "Even after she said it, I just couldn't believe the children would be there in the car, no way," says...
When she finally confessed, Smith reportedly explained to police how she had been overwhelmed by worries about "money, her failed marriage and a series of other romantic relationships in disarray." "Something had to be going on there," says Lewis Jeter III, the former special-education teacher at Union High School who supervised Susan in the Junior Civitan Club, which helped disabled kids. He remembers "a sweet, loving young lady" who seemed to adore children. "The woman that killed her children is not the same young woman I knew in high school," he insists. "Someone close to her should have noticed...
...along officials pursued the other track as well, the grim road most likely to lead police to missing kids. There were all sorts of ugly, irksome questions about Smith's story. No crimes had been reported in the area that night -- so why would a suspect be fleeing? If he needed a car to make a getaway, why take the kids? She said he had approached her at a stoplight, with no one else around; but that particular light required another auto approaching the intersection to turn it red. Above all, where was the damn...
Then there was Smith's behavior. What would be a "normal" reaction for a parent faced with the loss of her children? She might have found a natural ally in Marc Klaas, who since the kidnapping and murder of his daughter Polly Klass in October 1993 has devoted himself to helping parents in a similar plight. He flew to South Carolina with Jeanne Boylan, a cognitive artist with a background in psychology who has produced remarkably accurate suspect sketches in the Klaas case and many others. The sketch of the carjacker was so generic as to be useless, and Boylan...
...Smith's story began to crumble even before she failed the first of two lie- detector tests. Police continued to give her the benefit of the doubt, at least in public; extreme stress or medication could make the test results inconclusive, they noted. But some neighbors, too, began to wonder. Catherine Frost lives across the street from Smith's tidy little brick house. She heard about the crime on the police scanner she keeps in her bedroom. She supported Smith in the crisis, but the story nagged at her. "Ain't no carjacker going to put a lady...