Craig Melvin

They got married in 2003, but she was there with him during all of this, during the search, during the trial, they went on, they had a child together, Savannah, she's 24 now. But she, she spent a fair amount of time talking about, How, for a very long time, she could not pull him out of what had to be the darkest of days.

She talks about this period where he didn't really trust her, you know, because if this woman that he had known for all these years and had gotten married to, if she would do something so unspeakable. Someone he completely trusted. Correct. I really, there are a couple of times, he gets choked up, I get choked up.

What moved me the most, Mank, was he said to me, and it was one of those things where I don't know if he meant to say it, but after he said it, it stayed with me. He said one of the biggest problems now is 30 years later, he has a hard time remembering. The boys. And when he talked about it with his therapist early on, the therapist explained it away.

The mind, in an attempt to protect itself, will guard you from certain memories because that'll just, you know, prolong the trauma. And the therapist was basically like, you'll get the memories back. You'll get the memories back. And he said, Craig... The memories haven't come back. That saddened him to his soul.

And you could tell that of all of the things that he wishes he could change, I think he just wishes that he had more memories of the boys.

No. Pretty clearly. And that's the thing. You know, he points out every two years this could happen. Every two years she comes up for parole and she'll make her case every two years.

And he knows that. And that's why he told me, and his new wife, they'll be there every two years. You know, the parole board, by the way, parole board in South Carolina, you'd be hard pressed to find a more conservative parole board. Like, you don't, you commit a crime like this in South Carolina, you Good luck ever getting out. We sat down with her lawyer, David Brock.

And he's never talked about this. No, no. Yeah. No, he never has. And by the way, David Brock also, you know, represents the Charleston shirt shooter. I mean, he's spent a lot of his time representing... Extremely unpopular defendants. Yes, that was a very diplomatic way of saying what I was thinking, but yes. And he sees it as a duty. And I said, David, should she be pro? He said, well, yeah.

I said, well, has she been rehabilitated? And he maintains that she has. But his larger point was she's not going to get out of prison at 60 years old and go find two more kids to kill. He maintains that she's paid her debt for the murders and she doesn't pose a threat to society.

You know what? It didn't surprise anyone that I talked to, any of the legal experts. You know, the vote was unanimous. No, it did not. It didn't surprise.

Well, it was all-consuming, man. It was all-consuming in Columbia, South Carolina, where I'm from. WIS Television was the big station there, still is. And it was one of those stories for two weeks. Multiple stories, every newscast. And this little town, Union, South Carolina, where it happened, it was about an hour from where I grew up. Things like this didn't happen at Union. I mean, Union was...

It was like Mayberry, you know, everyone knew everybody, you know, half the towns related to the other half. I mean, that's just kinda, there's just small town, South Carolina. You know, I grew up a good Baptist boy. Even I remember on church on Sunday, you know, we were praying for these boys. We were praying for their safe return. Like it was just that there were ribbons that had gone up.

I can't remember the color, but I remember they had these ribbons all over cities and towns just remembering Michael and Alex. So yeah, it was top of mind for a long time.

Well, you know, my primary obligation remains to Dateline. This Dateline thing, this is correct.

None of that happened. You got the benefit of the doubt back then, certainly more often than not. You had this young white woman, and I hate even saying this now 30 years later, she didn't look like someone who might kill their children. She just didn't look the part. And so from jump, she immediately starts to garner respect.

Justifiable sympathy, you know, and so it triggers this this manhunt and you've got.

And that obviously helped tremendously. And then when they put out the pictures first and then the video of these little boys, it was really sort of the perfect storm. She would see the searches. She would see the helicopters in the air, the bloodhounds on the ground, all of these investigators, these volunteers. And she still kept it up. And it wasn't just the telling of the lie.

The telling of the lie, the initial lie, and then there were other lies, obviously, because when you lie once, you got to keep lying to cover up the lie. She did it for nine days. A good friend of mine is from Union, and we've talked about it many times since then. People didn't carjack in Union back in the 90s.

First of all, there were only two intersections, and you only had like, you know, 30 cars at So much of it didn't make sense. And granted, we're looking at it now through the lens of today. And we talked to two of the journalists who covered the story closely at the time. And they both brought it up separately. I asked them about regrets.

And they did say, looking back on it, they wish now that there had been more journalists asking tougher questions about... the story itself and not immediately giving, giving her a pass.

That's one of my favorite parts of the episode is the police start working together and they give her the polygraph. We know how it turns out. And then you've got Pete Logan. who, by the way, fun fact, worked on the Kennedy assassination back in the day. But Pete Logan is this renowned polygraph expert. They bring him in, and he decides to work with Sheriff Wells to extract this confession.

And it works beautifully. It really did. But to your point, though, Mang, you're right. I mean, this was before... We lived in a time of ubiquitous surveillance. There's no social media, no phone record, like there's no cell phone towers that we can check.

Yeah, I would agree with you. And it was interesting to me just hearing her voice on those tapes.

Funny you should bring that up. I put that question to Tommy Pope, who was the chief prosecutor in the case at the time. And Tommy said that of all the lies she told, that was one that stood out the most because when she showed up at the front door of that woman's house, she was knocking on the door. She was bone dry. If she had been in the water...

There would be some, even at that point, there would be some evidence that she was in the water. And for him, that made it even more appalling.

Oh, no question. No question. These letters have never been shared. And you get a unique insight into what she was thinking then, what she thinks now. And I know you find this to be true with a lot of killers. There is this... clear detachment from reality that still very much exists in the letters. And I found that strange. Right.

No, in part because of not wanting to give air to Susan Smith. No, in fact, this was the first time he talked about it on national television. I mean, he runs SLED now, South Carolina Law Enforcement Division. We actually talked to him during the Murdoch trial, which he had also not talked about before. But during this particular case, Chief Keel, he was in law school at the time.

but he was also an amateur pilot and he was part of the search team. So he would go to class. In fact, he talked about at one point, he skipped some class to go search for these two little boys or that black guy from the sketch. And this is for him as well. This is one of those stories that really has always stayed with him. And he was there at the parole hearing in November and,

Which he never does.

What do you remember about the emotions of members of law enforcement back then after we found out that you had an effect?

I think to the chief's point, like even these guys who had, you know, I mean, you've been at SLED for a while. You've seen a murder. You know, you've seen probably a double murder, car accidents. You've seen some stuff. But to see two little boys who were still, when they hoisted that car from John D. Long Lake, they were still strapped in. And they'd been strapped in for nine days. Yeah.

So you can only imagine what these officers saw. And by the way, and this is, I think, one of the other reasons that this case has resonated with so many for so long now, it wasn't just the killing of the children. It was the way that she did it.

As odd as that may sound.

Correct. And anyone who's had small children, You know, kids are 10 and 8 now, and I remember the car seat phase. And, I mean, the car seat is sacrosanct. You've got to make sure they're buckled in the car seat. You've got to have the car seat. You've got to make sure the car... You become obsessed with the car seat.

And to think that these two little boys, they get strapped in their car seats by their mother, and they die this slow... Death submerged in this lake that they, and I think that's for a lot of people. It's not, it's not even, it's not what she did. It's not why she did it. It's the way that she did it. It's even now, 30 years later, that's the part that I think pisses me off the most.

But, you know, David Smith, Mank, he is—and this is of the takeaways for me of the episode. I'd never met David before. Obviously, I knew who he was. And he doesn't do a lot of interviews at all. No. And he decided to sit down with us exclusively because he wanted to make sure.

that even though times have changed and the way we view abuse and depression, even though a lot of that has changed for us as a society, he did not want anyone using that lens to view what happened to his two boys in a sympathetic light back in 1994. So begrudgingly, he decided to make sure that we remembered what she did and what his boys were like. That had to be tough. It was.

And it's one of those things where, you know, you and I, you know, we've had some interviews that are hard and we've seen a lot. We've heard a lot. Quite frankly, we've probably become... a little desensitized to a lot, I did not fully appreciate the depth of his despair 30 years later. He talked about the two times that he nearly killed himself.

He talked about not being able to get out of bed for months and just going to work. And you don't really think about this part of it, but for a very long time, Anytime anyone saw him, he was on TV every day for a long time. Everyone knew how the guy looked. And so he would have these strangers, well-meaning strangers, who would come up to him at the grocery store, the bank.

I've been praying for you. I prayed for those boys. I prayed for Susan. And he had to leave town. He moved for a long time down to Florida just to get away from it.

And, you know, he said to me, I think it was off camera. It's not in the episode, but he said to me, he's like, when I die, in my obit, this will be included. It'll be the, the husband of the ex-husband. And that's, I mean, and think about, I mean, that's just a, you know, and, and, and his, his new wife, God bless her. You know, Tiffany has been there.

Why were they harassing you?

Why do you think people still care so much?

I was a teenager and I, like millions of other folks, for days on end, glued to the television, trying to figure out what happened to these little boys.

So you have your girlfriend at the time following your soon-to-be ex-wife. Right. The night that your boys go missing. Yes.

When you had heard that she had failed one of those polygraph tests, what did you chalk that up to?

This was some sort of mistake, obviously. They've got the wrong person.

That was it?

When most people think about Susan Smith, it's manipulative, it's conniving. Some have described her as pure evil.

You just maintain that it wasn't her affair with the wealthy boyfriend that led to the murders of Michael and Alex.

And when you heard that, did you think, oh, well, that might explain this or that might explain that? Or no?

You argued there was another reason that Susan snapped that night, this mounting fear that her private life was about to be exposed. What did she fear was going to come out?

Were you fairly confident that they would convict her?

How hard was that for you?

What do you remember about that experience?

When the decision was read that Susan would not be executed for the crimes, what was her reaction?

How does that change you, the way you parent?

Did you ever think, especially early on in the back and forth, that she might have... an agenda with you?

To those who would say Michael and Alex deserve more than 25, 30 years for the murders.

Every two years, you're going to have to deal with this. Yes. Have you made peace with that? Yes. How?

They can't let her out. You don't believe that Susan Smith is remotely remorseful?

Have you forgiven her?

It's been three decades now. Are the memories, are they still fresh or do they fade at some point?

But they're not there. What do you think that is? Do you think that perhaps that is to help you on some weird level?

Tell me about Alex.

What drew you two to each other?

Once the witness has testified, the judge turns to the jurors and say, do you have any questions? and they're good questions.

Would you have been better off had the state executed her?