Susan Smith’s Letter Lacks Remorse, Prosecutor Says It’s ‘More About Her’ Than Dead Sons

Twenty years after she rolled her car into a South Carolina lake with her two small children strapped inside, Susan Smith is speaking out from prison.

And the man who prosecuted her, Tommy Pope — and still regrets not securing the death penalty as punishment for her crimes — isn’t surprised by its lack of remorse, he told local news station WYFF.

“She has always taken a self-centered focus over the years. If you look at the letter it’s still more about her, not about Michael and Alex, not about the regrets of the crime. It’s more about the way she’s perceived.”

Smith was convicted in 1995 for murdering her boys, Michael, 3, and Alex, 14 months. She was sentenced to life in prison, but Pope thinks Susan is speaking out now because she will soon be up for parole. But talking only about her, and her pleas to change her public image as a monster, is a mistake.

“I think that if we want to talk about the case again then we need to think about Michael and Alex and try to honor and remember the lives that were lost,” he said.

Smith wrote the letter at the request of the State newspaper, which reached out to her last year as part of an article about the 20th anniversary of the murders. After claiming that the letter was withheld from her “on purpose” until only a few months ago, Susan was more than happy to tell her side of the story.

“I have (not) yet been able to speak on my behalf. It has been hard to listen to lie after lie and not be able to defend myself,” she wrote.

Among those lies — that she killed her children because of her affair with a wealthy man, Tom Findley, who broke up with her via letter. Smith also claimed that she hadn’t planned to kill her children, but only herself, and thus, she had no motive.

Back on that fateful day, Susan told police a black man carjacked her and kidnapped her kids, NBC News reported. But nine days later, she confessed: she’d shoved the car into the lake while her children were strapped into their car seats. According to the State, she watched the car descend into the water.

The story about the carjacking was invented to cover up the truth — the boys were dead, ABC News added. If there was any plan at all, it was to write a suicide note and end her life. Smith insisted that she was a good mother.

“The thing that hurts me the most is that people think that I hurt my children in order to be with a man. That is so far from the truth. There was no motive as it was not even a planned event. I was not in my right mind… I didn’t want to hurt them.”

However, as Pope implied, Susan makes no apology, only explanation and an attempt to remedy her public image and convince the world that she isn’t a monster. The prosecutor said that Susan’s letter reflects behavior that she had displayed many times before. Smith even tried, in 2010, to argue that her ex-husband abused her when she appealed her case. Investigators found no evidence to support the claim.

As for the small community where Susan Smith’s crimes rocked the entire nation, there is little understanding or interest in what the prisoner has to say. The Union County Sheriff, David Taylor, spoke out about the letter to WYFF.

“Our department will be making no comment because she does not deserve any recognition of any kind. As long as it is rehashed we will never get beyond the tragedy.”

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