Word: susane
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Susan Smith knew what a kidnapper should look like. He should be a remorseless stranger with a gun. But the essential part of the picture -- the touch she must have counted on to arouse the primal sympathies of her neighbors and to cut short any doubts -- was his race. The suspect had to be a black man. Better still, a black man in a knit cap, a bit of hip-hop wardrobe that can be as menacing in some minds as a buccaneer's eye patch. Wasn't that everyone's most familiar image of the murderous criminal...
...culture are increasingly willing to exploit these shadows. When George Bush's 1988 campaign needed a name and a face for the bogeyman, it came up with Willie Horton. Some black rappers have turned the stereotype to their own profit, striking "gangsta" poses -- in black knit caps. Susan Smith didn't have to use much imagination. She just had to reach for the available nightmares...
...Susan Smith's invention of a black culprit didn't work as well as she had hoped. Her own not-quite-right account of the kidnapping, and perhaps memories of the Stuart case, kept people from rejecting the possibility that the distraught mother was a suspect herself. And though she may not have thought about or cared how her self-serving concoctions would affect race relations around Union, South Carolina, the worst was avoided. Despite the police sketch of a black suspect that papered the area, feelings never boiled over and authorities weren't goaded into harassing the black community...
After a weeklong national alert and a frantic series of fruitless tips and searches set off by Susan Smith's vivid accounts, the hunt for the carjacking kidnapper of 3-year-old Michael and 14-month-old Alexander ended in Union County, South Carolina, the place where the tragedy began. Authorities accused Smith of murdering the children after police found her car with the boys inside at the bottom of a local lake. The arrest shocked the community and appeared to confirm some of the worst infanticidal suspicions of early doubters of Smith's tale...
South Carolina's Susan Smith tugged at the nation...