Susan Smith Prayed, Confessed Sheriff Tells Court How Mother Admitted To Killing Two Boys

Minutes before Susan Smith confessed to drowning her children, she placed her hands in Sheriff Howard Wells’ hands and asked him to pray.

“I said there are heavy burdens on this family and on her and on law enforcement and asked the Lord to lead us through this,” Wells said Monday during a hearing where the judge ruled Smith’s confession could be admitted as evidence in her trial. “I also said in time all this would be revealed.”

Then Wells said he looked into Smith’s eyes, and said, “It’s time.”

That’s when Smith broke.

She dropped her head in her hands and started crying hard, the sheriff testified. She muttered, “I’m so ashamed, I’m so ashamed,” and asked Wells for his gun.

She wanted to kill herself, he said, so he asked gently, “Why would you want to do that?”

“You don’t understand,” she said, beginning to sob uncontrollably. “My children are not all right.”

Wells’ calm recounting of his emotional encounter with Smith on the afternoon of Nov. 3 provided a glimpse of what’s to come beginning today, when Smith’s capital murder trial begins in earnest.

Opening arguments by the prosecution and the defense will begin at 9:30 a.m.

Smith is charged with murder in the deaths of her sons, Michael, 3, and Alex, 14 months. On Oct. 25, she reported a black carjacker abducted them but later confessed to letting her car roll down the boat ramp at John D. Long Lake with the children inside.

An FBI agent testified Monday that Smith said she didn’t watch the car sink into the lake, but ran away quickly with her hands over her ears.

After testimony from six law enforcement officers who questioned Smith during the nine days her children were missing, Judge William Howard ruled all Smith’s statements to police could be admitted.

The judge ruled that her statements were freely given and she was not coerced into making them.

Smith’s attorney David Bruck said the testimony at the hearing showed the true Susan Smith.

Until now, he said, all the public knew about Smith’s confession was her written statement, which he called “spacy.”

Bruck’s co-counsel Judy Clarke - on leave from her job as chief federal defender in Spokane - asked the court to throw out the confession because Smith was interrogated continually and was lied to by Wells. Wells admitted he lied when he told Smith deputies had been staking out the intersection where she said her children were abducted.

Clarke also maintained that Wells tried to intimidate Smith by saying he was going to tell the press she lied about the carjacker

“He made the statement with the knowledge about what the press had done to Susan,” Clarke said. “It was kind of like, we’re going to throw you to the dogs.”

She also said the prayer and the close physical contact with the sheriff provoked the “complete emotional collapse” of Smith, who suffers from a mental illness.

But Assistant Solicitor Keith Giese argued that Smith was free to leave at any time, that Smith initiated the prayer and knew what she was doing.

The judge agreed.

“She was treated not just with respect but with compassion,” Howard said.

Investigators described in some detail each encounter they had with Smith, beginning the night of Oct. 25, when she ran to Rick and Shirley McCloud’s white ranch home near the entrance to the lake. Wells said there was some inconsistency in her statements that night - at first she said the carjacker had on a blue baseball cap and changed it to a knit hat - but Wells figured that was because she was upset.

Law enforcement officers became suspicious of her early the next morning, at about 3 a.m., when Roy Paschal of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division began to draw a composite of the carjacker. He testified Monday that usually victims remember specific details and then become more vague. Smith did the opposite. Plus, he said, the sketch took half the usual time.

The State Law Enforcement Division called in agent David Caldwell, an expert in human behavior, who saw Smith three times the day after she reported the children missing. He said she wouldn’t look at him and at times stood in the corner of the room. The last time he saw her that day, he accused her of killing her children. She left abruptly.

FBI agent David Espie said he had no doubt Smith was lying after he gave her a polygraph test Oct. 26. Polygraphs aren’t admissible in court, but were discussed during the hearing. Smith was given at least four polygraphs during the investigation.

“She was collapsed in her chair and was not appreciative of the FBI resources being brought in to help her find her children,” Espie said in explaining how her body language convinced him she was hiding something. “She would make sounds of crying, but there would be no water, no tears, nothing.”