Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 24, 1995 TAG: 9507240139
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: UNION, S.C. LENGTH: Medium
A politician's daughter, a philandering husband, a rich man's son, a lake, a lie: Susan Smith's trial for the murders of her young sons has had characters and plot threads to surpass the best fiction.
``This is better than the soap operas at home,'' said Josephine Davis, a 73-year-old woman who passed up her daily TV regimen to sit under a shade tree at the Union County courthouse and watch the comings and goings.
Residents still shake their heads in wonderment at so much intrigue in a town of just 10,000 people.
``You wouldn't think something like this could happen in Union,'' said Anna Harris, 25. ``It's like something you'd see on TV, but it's all real and it's all happening right here.''
Smith, 23, was convicted Saturday night of drowning her children, 3-year-old Michael and 14-month-old Alex. The death-penalty trial enters the sentencing phase today.
She wove a tale about a black carjacker who abducted her boys on a dark, deserted road on Oct. 25, 1994. But on Nov. 3, she admitted sending them and her car to the bottom of a lake.
It's not just soap opera, it's classic Southern literature, said Bill Ferris, director of the Center for The Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.
William Faulkner, who wrote novels like ``The Sound and the Fury'' dealing with intertwined lives in a small Southern town, definitely would have seen this as a classic example of what he wrote about, Ferris said.
``Trying to understand the psyche of someone who murders her two children is something Faulkner would have been drawn to,'' he said. ``Art is sometimes less interesting than life itself in the South.''
The connections between people in a small Southern town also add another layer of fascination to the story, said Juliaette Kerhulas, who sells books about Susan Smith at the town's only downtown newsstand.
``With a town like this, everybody is some kind of relation of everybody else or knows who's who,'' Kerhulas said.
One of the jurors who may have to decide life or death for Smith once baby-sat her stepsister and is the wife of the town's police chief. The sheriff who arrested her after she confessed, Howard Wells, is godfather to Smith's nieces and nephews.
A local reporter who wrote one of the first stories about the carjacker is related to a married man Smith told her boyfriend she wanted to have sex with. That ended the relationship with her boyfriend, Tom Findlay, who is also the son of Smith's boss. She later told him she had slept with his father and her stepfather as well.
``Rich people and their money. Humph,'' said Kerhulas. ``All I can say is that it'd make a hell of a movie.''
While not rich, Smith was the stepdaughter of the county Republican Party chairman and worked as a secretary for one of the most powerful men in town, J. Cary Findlay, owner of Conso Products Co., the town's largest plant.
Then came the breakup of Smith's marriage.
She and her husband, David, accused each other of adultery. They were divorced in May.
After their separation but before her arrest, Smith started dating Findlay. David Smith jealously warned Findlay to stay away from his estranged wife.
``He told me, `You better watch your back. I'm going to get you,''' Findlay testified. He said he started sleeping with a gun under his pillow.
Smith told investigators her ex-husband also threatened to reveal her sexual relationships with her boss and with her stepfather, Beverly Russell.
But Findlay and Smith still met at least once for a nude hot-tub party at his apartment behind his parents' mansion, a week before the boys drowned.
The case also unearthed other things in Smith's life: Her father committed suicide when she was 6, and her stepfather admitted in 1988 in Family Court to sexually molesting her when she was a teen-ager.
Russell said he was ``ashamed'' and had sought professional help. He has separated from his wife, Susan's mother, and resigned as county GOP chairman.
The Findlays have left town and are trying to sell their mansion.
Ferris called it ``a very Faulknerian story.''
``You would wish that it had been in a novel and hadn't really happened,'' Ferris said.
by CNB