David Smith sits on a brown couch in his living room, cradling a framed photo of his two young sons. He dabs his eyes with his fingers and abruptly excuses himself to go to the bathroom, emerging minutes later with his face flushed and streaked with tears.
Smith struggles to imagine that his sons would be in their 30s now. In his mind, they’re still the toddlers in the photograph – Michael with his bowl cut, Alex with his round cheeks – tinkering with miniature monster trucks and watching “Mrs. Doubtfire” together on the couch.
“People ask me, ‘How old would they be today?’ I don’t know. I can’t process that, because to me, they’ll always be 3 (years) and 14 months,” he says, his voice trailing off as his wife, Tiffany Smith, rubs his back.
That’s how old the boys were in October 1994, when his then-wife, Susan Smith , claimed a Black man carjacked her while she was stopped at a traffic light in nearby Union and fled with the children in the back seat.
The case sparked a manhunt and gripped the nation. For nine days, David Smith sat beside his wife at news conferences, their fingers intertwined as she repeated her story and they pleaded for their sons’ safe return.
The framed photo in David Smith’s hands was splashed across front pages and television screens as people across the region searched for the boys, set up vigils and posted missing-person flyers — unaware of the horrible truth.
In early November, confronted with inconsistencies in her story, Susan Smith confessed to drowning the boys. She told police she strapped them into their car seats, put her burgundy Mazda sedan in neutral and let it roll into John D. Long Lake in Union County, South Carolina.
Convicted of two counts of murder, Susan Smith has spent the past three decades in a South Carolina prison, serving a sentence of 30 years to life.
David Smith says he still finds it hard to understand why she killed their children.
“They didn’t do anything wrong,” he says. “They weren’t even old enough to be held accountable in God’s eyes for making mistakes.”
His former wife is set to appear Thursday before the South Carolina Board of Paroles and Pardons in Columbia, where he will fight her release — just like he did at her first parole hearing two years ago.
“I want them to look at it … through my eyes,” he says. “It’s important for me to remind the parole board that it may be 32 years, but for me it’s still like yesterday. Thirty-two years hasn’t changed the heartache.”
He pauses, sniffling. His voice drops to a whisper .
“It’s been hard, hard,” he says. “If I have a choice, I’d want her to stay in prison until she dies.”
In this corner of upstate South Carolina, the boys’ deaths still stir emotions.
Bring up Susan Smith’s name on the street, and people are quick to condemn her. One woman, visibly exasperated, walked away as soon as a reporter mentioned her name. Nobody wanted to be identified.
In Union, a former textile town where old brick storefronts line a quiet Main Street, some residents are weary of seeing their hometown defined by her crime.
At a local coffee shop, not far from the traffic stop where Susan Smith claimed the boys were kidnapped, one man put it bluntly: “Why should we only be known for that one bad thing?”
A few miles away, John D. Long Lake stretches out vast and empty. A gray stone memorial near the park entrance reads: “Dedicated to the loving memory of Michael and Alex Smith, whose precious lives touched the hearts of all.”
Brown leaves lay scattered at the base of the stone along with brightly colored toy trucks, a box of crayons and stuffed animals left by mourners. Some teddy bears are still soggy from the rain. Others have faded in the sun.
David Smith says he’d never been to the lake before his sons were killed. After his wife confessed, he went there with a baseball cap pulled over his face to avoid reporters who’d swarmed the area. He doesn’t go much anymore.
For Smith, it’s a painful reminder of where his sons’ lives ended. At her 1995 murder trial, prosecutors argued that Susan Smith drowned her children after a man she was having an affair with ended their relationship because he did not want children.
Michael’s tiny hand was pressed against the glass when investigators found the car upside down at the bottom of the lake. Her wedding dress and photo album were also inside.
The Smiths were separated at the time. Although Susan Smith confessed to rolling the car into the lake, her attorneys described the crime as a botched murder-suicide, saying she initially intended to be in the car with her children. Investigators ran tests and determined the car stayed afloat on the surface of the lake for about six minutes.
“I never have felt any remorse from her. She has never even said, ‘I’m sorry,’” David Smith says.
From the boys’ disappearance on October 25 until Susan Smith’s confession on November 3, investigators hunted for a man who did not exist.
In the beginning, sheriff’s deputies believed her story. They worked with her to create a composite sketch and sent out nationwide alerts about the man she claimed had carjacked her in Union, some five miles from the lake.
As the search for the missing boys intensified, her false accusation cast suspicion on Black residents and strained race relations in the town, says Chief Deputy Scott Coffer of the Union County Sheriff’s Office.
But investigators started noticing inconsistencies in Susan Smith’s story and gave her a lie detector test, which she failed. They examined the facts more closely, and the traffic light detail didn’t add up.
Susan Smith told investigators she was alone on the road and had stopped for a red light when the boys were abducted. But the intersection’s traffic light was programmed to stay green in the direction she was headed unless there was a car on the cross street, Coffer says. Armed with that and other inconsistencies in her story, investigators successfully pressured her into a confession.
David Smith was at his wife’s parents’ house when a breaking news alert flashed across the television screen saying that his wife had confessed to killing their sons.
He stared at the television in disbelief. He recalls bolting out of the back door and running into the woods, as if he could escape what he’d just heard.
By the time a sheriff’s helicopter landed in a field near his in-laws’ home to share the devastating news, he already knew.
“I didn’t know what was going on. I had believed her,” he says now. “I found out she killed our children on live TV.”
David Smith has since remarried and has two more children, Savannah, 25, and Nicolas, 22. When Savannah was born, the fear of losing another child followed him into the delivery room.
His wife, Tiffany Smith, recalls overhearing him speak to their newborn daughter as he held her for the first time. He promised to take care of her and protect her forever, she says.
In their living room, a brown shelf holds memories from both chapters of his life. Photos of Savannah and Nicolas show different stages of their lives, from babies to teens to young adults. Photos of Michael and Alex sit nearby.
David Smith was 23 when his sons died. He’s now 56, and little details about them are beginning to fade from memory, he says. But he still remembers how fiercely Michael, whom he called “Mike Mike,” adored his baby brother. “He’s my brudder and I love ‘em,” he’d tell his dad.
The boys were buried together in a white casket with gold trim at a cemetery by the Bogansville United Methodist Church, the same church where their parents were married. “He’s my brudder and I love ’em” is inscribed on their gravestone.
Some days, Smith wonders whether his fading memories spare him some of the pain of knowing what he lost.
“Psychiatrists through the years would tell me that those kinds of memories would come back, in time,” he says. “They said it was like my defense mechanism. It wouldn’t let me remember, because it was too painful.”
Tommy A. Thomas, who represented Susan Smith at her 2024 parole hearing and will again this month, declined to comment when reached by CNN. At the last hearing, he argued that Smith had struggled with mental health issues since childhood and suffered postpartum depression after the birth of her second child but had not undergone treatment because of the stigma at the time.
At the hearing, Susan Smith testified via video from prison in her own defense.
“I know what I did was horrible,” she told the parole board , fighting back tears. “And I would give anything if I could go back and change it. And I loved Michael and Alex with all my heart.”
Board members questioned her about disciplinary violations in prison. “I made a lot of dumb choices,” she said. “I’ve learned from those mistakes.”
The board unanimously rejected her request for release.
For years, David Smith has struggled with the pain of losing his sons.
During her trial, he says, he found himself calculating the distance between him and his ex-wife in the courtroom and how quickly he could tackle her before deputies intervened.
In the days after his sons’ death, he says he contemplated suicide several times. Then he watched “The Shawshank Redemption,” which was released a few weeks before his sons died. The line, “Get busy living, or get busy dying,” delivered by Tim Robbins’ character in the movie, stayed with him.
Smith says he realized he needed to decide what to do with the life he still had. Over the years, he has made peace with the fact that his name will forever be tied to his sons’ deaths.
People who’ve also lost children sometimes stop him to share their stories. They tell him he inspires them to keep going. He finds it hard to think of himself that way.
“I’m just a man who buried his kids,” he says.
Over the years, he says, he’s learned to forgive his ex-wife, but he will never forget. He’s surprised that she’s still alive.
“I really didn’t think she would make it 30 years. I don’t want to sound … vindictive, but I really thought, in my heart, that they would do jailhouse justice.”
When he stands before the parole board to argue that she should remain in prison, his wife, Tiffany Smith, their daughter and other relatives will be beside him, like they were two years ago.
“Michael and Alex lost their lives. They didn’t get the chance to go out and have a life, learn how to ride a bicycle, graduate high school have families of their own, so why should she get another chance to get out and do things?” Tiffany Smith says. “Just because we have forgiven her in our hearts doesn’t necessarily mean we’ve forgotten.”
Scott Coffer, the Union County sheriff’s chief deputy, also plans to attend the hearing and speak against Susan Smith’s parole. “A denial at one hearing does not guarantee the same outcome at the next,” he says.
David Smith hasn’t spoken to his ex-wife since her conviction. The last time they talked, about a month after her arrest, he says he asked her why she killed their boys.
“I don’t know,” he says she told him.
It’s unlikely he’ll face her in person at the parole hearing. In South Carolina, inmates communicate with the parole board by video from prison. Smith is at the Leath Correctional Institution near Greenwood.
The possibility of her going free haunts him, David Smith says.
“The thought of me running into her at a convenience store or at a grocery store … I don’t know what I will do if she gets out, how I’ll react,” he says.
Until then, he intends to be at every parole hearing. Pinned to his lapel will be a small photograph of Michael and Alex — the same one that he holds in his hands, the one that appeared on front pages across the country.
Back then, he carried the picture hoping someone would bring them home. Now, he carries it to make sure they’re not forgotten.
