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Susan Smith Cried On TV For 9 Days. One Detail Gave Her Away — Transcript

by The Tell Room · 3,157 words · 457 segments · language en · Watch on YouTube

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0:00She has been crying
0:00on national television
0:01for nine days.
0:03Watch her eyes.
0:04There are no tears.
0:06Here is the mother much of the country is watching tonight.
0:10I would like to say to whoever has my
0:12children, please bring them home to us where they belong.
0:16That is a mother, on national television,
0:20begging a kidnapper for the lives of her two little boys.
0:24Michael, who is three years old.
0:27And Alexander, who is fourteen months old.
0:31And while she says it to the cameras,
0:33her car, with both boys still inside,
0:37is already at the bottom of John D.
0:39Long Lake. There is no body on screen.
0:43There is no witness.
0:45There is no weapon.
0:46There is no dramatic interrogation tape,
0:49and there is no magic lie detector.
0:52There is only a story,
0:53told for nine days, and a single sentence from
0:57one sheriff that finally left that story nowhere to stand.
1:02Because here is the part almost everyone gets
1:05wrong about Susan Smith.
1:06The legend says a clever sheriff cracked a
1:09grieving mother and pulled a confession out of her.
1:12That is not what happened.
1:14What happened is that a lie was failing from
1:16the very first hour, in front of the only
1:18audience that mattered, the investigators sitting
1:21with her while
1:21the cameras rolled,
1:22and it took nine days for the gap between
1:25her story and the truth to grow so wide
1:28that the story simply could not stand up anymore.
1:31This was not a woman being broken.
1:34This was a performance running out of room.
1:37And the reason investigators still study this
1:40case is that you can watch the seams.
1:42You can see exactly where the mask does not
1:45quite fit, tell by tell, day by day.
1:49So watch the performance with me,
1:51and count the seams.
1:53A lie this big has to hold in a
1:55dozen places at once, and we are going to
1:57watch it come apart in five.
2:01Five seams. And then the one sentence that made the sixth
2:06one impossible.
2:07One thing before we go any further.
2:10Two small children died in this case,
2:13and we keep those details off screen,
2:15out of respect for them.
2:17What we are here to
2:18study is the performance,
2:19and the patient, honest way real investigators
2:23took it apart.
2:24So let us start where the country started,
2:27on a dark road in a small town,
2:29with a story that mobilized a nation.
2:32It is the evening of October twenty fifth,
2:36nineteen ninety four.
2:37Union, South Carolina.
2:39A town of about ten thousand people,
2:43the kind of place where everyone knows everyone.
2:47Susan Smith reports something that will lead
2:49the news for the next nine days.
2:52She says a man carjacked her.
2:54She says she was stopped at a red light
2:57at an intersection out by Monarch Mills,
2:59alone, late at night, when a Black man got
3:02into her car, pointed a gun at her,
3:05and told her to drive.
3:07She says he eventually ordered her out of the car.
3:10And then, she says, he drove away with her
3:14two sons still strapped into the back seat.
3:18Hold onto those two boys for a moment,
3:20because everything
3:21that matters here starts
3:22with them, not with her.
3:25Michael was three, a talker,
3:27a little boy who loved his grandmother.
3:30Alexander was barely more than a baby,
3:32still in the car seat,
3:34still learning words.
3:35And the entire reason this became a national
3:38story is the thing any decent person feels
3:42when they hear it, which is that nothing on
3:44earth is more sympathetic than a mother who
3:47has lost her children to a stranger.
3:49That sympathy is the single most important
3:52thing to understand about why this took nine
3:56days, because it cuts both ways.
3:58It is exactly what made the country open its heart.
4:02And it is exactly what made her story so
4:06hard to question out loud.
4:09You do not accuse a grieving mother.
4:11Every instinct in a decent person says comfort
4:15her, believe her, find the monster who did this.
4:19So that sympathy is the cover the lie hid behind.
4:23It made the whole country look outward,
4:26for a stranger, while the investigators quietly
4:29began to look at the story itself.
4:31And that is the room we are walking into.
4:35Now watch what the story does,
4:38because the first seam is in the story,
4:41before anyone has gathered a single piece of evidence.
4:44A carjacker, the story goes,
4:47gets into the car, takes the car,
4:51and drives off with two toddlers still in the back.
4:54Sit with that for one second the way a
4:56detective has to.
4:58A man stealing a car wants the car.
5:01He wants to be gone, fast,
5:03alone, with the thing he came for.
5:06Two small children in the back seat are not
5:09part of what he came for.
5:11They are the opposite of it.
5:13They are noise, and risk,
5:16and the single most heavily searched for kind
5:19of victim there is.
5:20The likeliest thing in the world is that a
5:23carjacker pushes the kids out with the mother,or
5:26never touches a car with kids in it at all.
5:28A version where he keeps the babies and lets
5:30the only witness go free is the least likely
5:33shape the story could take.
5:36That does not make her a liar.
5:38People in shock tell jumbled stories,
5:41and the truth is sometimes stranger than the lie.
5:45But it is the first place a trained investigator's
5:48eyes stop and stay.
5:50Seam one. The story serves the teller a little too well,
5:55because in her version,
5:57the children are gone,
5:59there is no body, no evidence,
6:01and a suspect who can never be found.
6:04Now the second seam, and this is the ugliest
6:07one, so we are going to be precise about
6:10it and we are not going to sensationalize it.
6:14The man she described was not just any stranger.
6:17She gave police a specific description.
6:19A Black man, around forty years old,
6:23wearing a plaid jacket,
6:25a dark shirt, jeans, and a dark knit cap.
6:29Police released a sketch.
6:31And here is what that description did in the real world.
6:35It sent officers across Union and across the
6:38region hunting for a man who did not exist.
6:41Black men were stopped.
6:43Black men were questioned.
6:45Innocent people were
6:46pulled into the search
6:47for a crime that had never happened,
6:49because of a description that had been built,
6:52not remembered.
6:53The lead prosecutor on this case,
6:56a man named Tommy Pope,
6:58said something years later that should sit
7:02with all of us.
7:03He said the description was so generic,
7:05and then he added, it is terrifying to think
7:09if she had really named somebody.
7:11Think about what that means as a tell.
7:14Of all the stories she could have invented,
7:17she reached for the one she was most confident
7:19the country would believe without a second
7:22thought, because that was the story she expected
7:24people to accept.
7:27That is not grief.
7:28Grief does not engineer a suspect.
7:33Seam two. The lie was not just false,
7:36it was strategic, and the strategy tells you
7:39there was a designer behind it.
7:41And still, you cannot arrest someone for a
7:44story that sounds wrong.
7:46So watch what the investigators actually do,
7:49because this is where the professionals and
7:51the public start to split.
7:53The public is watching the television.
7:56The investigators are watching her.
7:58A South Carolina law enforcement agent named
8:01Pete Logan sits with Susan Smith and talks
8:03with her, more than once,
8:05over those nine days, and she is given a polygraph.
8:10Now I need to be careful and honest with
8:12you here, because this is exactly the kind
8:15of case where the myth is more dramatic than the truth.
8:19The myth is that she failed a lie detector
8:22and that is what caught her.
8:25That is not what the record shows,
8:27and it is not how good investigators talk.
8:31A polygraph is not a magic truth machine.
8:35What the agents had was not a green light
8:37or a red light on a dial.
8:39What they had was days of sitting across from
8:42a woman and watching the way her account moved,
8:45the small things that did not line up.
8:48And the thing several of them noticed,
8:51the thing that became one of the most quoted
8:54observations in this entire case,
8:57was about her crying.
8:58An agent described it like this.
9:01She would make the sounds of crying,
9:03but there would be no water,
9:05no tears, nothing.
9:08Now here is where I have to stop you,
9:11because this is the exact place where true
9:13crime usually lies to you,
9:15and we are not going to.
9:17Tearless crying is not proof of guilt.
9:20Shock flattens the body.
9:22Innocent, devastated people have stood in front
9:25of cameras looking strangely calm,
9:27or strangely theatrical, or strangely flat,
9:31and been completely innocent.
9:33And decades of research on deception are humbling
9:36and consistent, that the way a person looks,
9:39calm or nervous, crying or dry eyed,
9:43is a famously unreliable guide to whether they are lying.
9:47So the no tears observation was never proof.
9:52It was a compass.
9:54And the compass was pointing at the one thing
9:56she could not act her way around.
9:59The record. Seam three was a place to look.
10:03Seams four and beyond are where the looking pays off.
10:08Because while the country
10:09argued about whether
10:10that poor mother was telling the truth,
10:12the investigators went and checked the one
10:14thing she could not perform her way around,
10:17which is the physical world.
10:19She had said she was stopped at a red
10:21light, at that intersection,
10:23late at night, with no other cars around,
10:26when the man got in.
10:28And someone who knew that intersection looked
10:31at that claim and saw a problem in it
10:33that has nothing to do with feelings.
10:37The traffic light at that spot did not just
10:39cycle on its own in the dead of night.
10:41It changed for cross traffic.
10:45Which means for her light to have turned red,
10:47stopping her therethe way she described,
10:50there should have been
10:51another vehicle present
10:52to trigger it.
10:53But she had said she was alone,
10:55no other cars, an empty road.
10:58The light and the story could not both be true.
11:02By itself, that is a small thing.
11:05Lights malfunction, memories blur,
11:08and you do not break a case on a traffic signal.
11:11But that is not what it was for.
11:14It was a crack in the one surface she
11:16could not repaint.
11:18Everything else, the tears,
11:20the fear, the description,
11:22she could perform and adjust and perform again.
11:26The intersection could not be performed.
11:30The road was just the road.
11:33Seam four. For the first time, her story was colliding
11:36with a fact that existed whether she cried or not.
11:39Now the fifth seam, and it is not about
11:43how she looked at all.
11:45For nine days, Susan Smith had to tell the
11:47same story over and over,
11:50to two completely different audiences,
11:52the cameras and the investigators.
11:54And a true account can be repeated forever,
11:58because it is only a memory being recalled.
12:01An invented one is different.
12:03An invented account has to be rebuilt every
12:06single time it is told,
12:07and every rebuild is a chance for a detail
12:10to shift, to contradict the last telling, to drift.
12:14The investigators were not watching one performance.
12:18They were watching the same story told again
12:21and again, comparing every version to the one before it.
12:25Seam five. The lie had to survive repetition,
12:30and repetition is exactly where invented stories come apart.
12:35And that is the situation on the morning of
12:37November third, nineteen ninety four.
12:40Five seams open.
12:42A story that serves the teller.
12:45A suspect built from an old prejudice.
12:48A grief that arrives as sound without water.
12:51A traffic light that will not agree with her.
12:54A story wearing thin from being told too many times.
12:58And a nation that still,
13:00overwhelmingly, believes her.
13:03The sheriff of Union County is a man named Howard Wells.
13:08And Wells understands something the loud version
13:11of this story always misses.
13:14He understands that he cannot win this in a
13:17shouting match.
13:18You do not break a grieving mother by accusing
13:21her, because if she is innocent you have committed
13:24a cruelty the whole country will hate you for,
13:27and if she is guilty, an accusation just tells
13:30her where your evidence is weak.
13:33So Wells does not accuse her.
13:35He does something quieter,
13:37and it is the move the entire case turns on.
13:40He tells her a lie.
13:42He tells her that the intersection where she
13:45said the carjacking happened,
13:47that exact spot, had been under police surveillance
13:50that night, part of an unrelated operation in the area.
13:54Which means, he tells her,
13:57that officers would have seen the carjacking happen.
14:00And they did not.
14:02Now feel the architecture of that,
14:04because it is the whole game.
14:06He has not raised his voice.
14:08He has not called her a liar.
14:11He has simply placed one more fact on the
14:13table, a fact she cannot perform her way around,
14:16and it is the same kind of fact as
14:19the traffic light, only this one is fatal.
14:22Because if that corner was being watched,
14:25then the man in the plaid jacket and the
14:27knit cap was never there.
14:30The car was never taken.
14:31And there is only one place those two little boys can be.
14:35He has closed the gap between her story and
14:39the record all the way to zero.
14:41There is no longer any room for the performance to stand in.
14:45The lie needed somewhere to exist,
14:48and he has just told her there is nowhere left.
14:51This is the sixth seam,
14:53and it is the one she cannot leave open,
14:56because it does not depend on how she cries
14:58or what she says.
15:00It depends on a world that either contained
15:03that crime or did not,
15:04and he has told her the world was watching.
15:08And this is the moment,
15:09after nine days, that the performance ends.
15:13Not with a scream.
15:16Not with a dramatic breakdown under a hot lamp,
15:18the way the movies would do it.
15:20What the people in that building described
15:23is much smaller, and much heavier.
15:26She does not argue the surveillance.
15:28She goes quiet.
15:30And then she asks the sheriff to pray with her.
15:33Wells, who has known this family,
15:35who has lived in this town, prays.
15:37And then he looks at her,
15:39and he says four words.
15:41It is time. And she drops her head.
15:45And the woman who has lied to a nation
15:47for nine days says, I am so ashamed.
15:50I am so ashamed.
15:52She asks the sheriff for his gun.
15:55He does not give it to her.
15:57There is no recording of this.
15:59I want to be accurate with you,
16:01because the accuracy is the whole point of
16:04what we do here.
16:05There is no dramatic interrogation tape rolling in this room.
16:09What there is, is a confession given to a
16:13sheriff, and then something she writes down
16:16in herown hand.
16:17In that written statement,
16:19she does not describe a kidnapper.
16:21She describes herself.
16:24She writes that when she left her home that
16:26Tuesday, October twenty fifth,
16:28she was, in her words,
16:31very emotionally distraught, that she did not
16:34want to live anymore.
16:35And she writes the line that tells you the
16:38truth had been sitting
16:39underneath the performance
16:40the whole time.
16:42She writes that she dropped to the lowest point
16:45when she allowed her children to go down the
16:47ramp into the water without her.
16:50That evening, divers go into John D.
16:52Long Lake. They find her car.
16:55And they find Michael and Alexander inside
16:58it, exactly where the confession said they would be.
17:02And here is something that complicates the
17:04easy version of this story,
17:06and I think you should sit with it.
17:09Investigators who were in that room said that
17:11once the performance was over,
17:13her remorse looked genuine,
17:15and an FBI agent would later testify to exactly that.
17:20That is the unsettling truth the legend leaves out.
17:23The same person can engineer a lie for nine
17:27days, and feel real shame the moment it ends.
17:30But the shame is not what closed this case.
17:33What closed this case is that her words finally
17:37led somewhere real, to a lake,
17:40to a car, to a truth that could be checked.
17:44Because that is the
17:44only reason a confession
17:46is worth anything at all.
17:48It can be tested against the world.
17:51Hers was tested, and the world confirmed it.
17:54In July of nineteen ninety five,
17:57Susan Smith was convicted of murdering her two sons.
18:00The jury declined to sentence her to death.
18:04She received two life sentences,
18:05to be served at the same time.
18:09Decades later, when she first became eligible,
18:13parole was denied.
18:15Now let us go back through the room one
18:17more time and name what we actually watched,
18:20because if you can see it here,
18:22you will see it everywhere.
18:24We did not catch her by how she cried.
18:27Hold onto that, because it is the part that
18:31protects the innocent.
18:32The tears, or the missing tears,
18:35were never the proof, and a world that convicts
18:39people on how they grieve convicts the wrong people.
18:43What we watched was a story being checked against
18:47reality, one surface at a time.
18:51The shape that served the teller.
18:54The suspect built from a prejudice because
18:56it was convenient.
18:57The grief that arrived as sound without water.
19:01The traffic light that would not lie for her.
19:04The story that wore thin from being told too many times.
19:08And finally, the one sentence that told her
19:10the world had been watching the exact spot
19:12where her story said the crime occurred.
19:15That is how a real lie comes apart.
19:18Not in a single dramatic gotcha,
19:21but in the slow, patient,
19:24unglamorous closing of the distance between
19:26what a person says and what the world can confirm.
19:30The performance can be perfect.
19:33It does not matter, because the performance
19:36is not what gets checked.
19:39The record is.
19:40There was a second room,
19:42in another case, where investigators ran almost
19:45this same playbook on a man who was just
19:48as composed, and just as sure he was the
19:51smartest person watching.
19:53He held his performance far longer than she did.
19:57We will walk into that room next.
20:00If this is the kind of breakdown you want
20:02more of, the patient kind,
20:04the kind that respects the victims and refuses
20:06to lie to you about what the evidence does
20:09and does not prove, then subscribe,
20:11and the next room is waiting.
20:13The voices in this video are reconstructed
20:16for study, and every quote we placed on screen
20:19is drawn from the public record,
20:21the court file, and contemporary reporting of the case.

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