Today, we’re going to be talking about a case that takes us to 1994 to Union in South Carolina where Susan Smith’s two young children who were three and 14 months old were abducted.
I don’t want to say too much about this case because I kind of just want to get into it and let it all unfold.
But what I will say about it is that this case got huge media attention and everyone everyone in the country in the community law enforcement Susan when this case first happened they were all devastated.
That devastation turned to confusion and then it turned to anger.
So, Susan Smith was born Susan Vaughn on the 26th of September in 1971 to parents Linda and Harry Vaughn.
She was born in the small town of Union in South Carolina and she grew up there alongside her two older brothers, Scotty and Michael.
And she had a really traumatic childhood. She just had a lot of traumatic events happening to her at a very young age.
Her parents had a very chaotic relationship, very tumultuous. They were fighting all of the time and she was really, really young as well, having to witness all of these fights at home.
They divorced when she was just 6 years old. And then even after they divorced, everything was still very chaotic.
They would still fight all of the time. And on more than one occasion, Harry told Linda that he was going to kill her and then he was going to kill himself.
On one occasion, he came to the house, burst into the house, and Linda’s mother was there.
So she witnessed this. All of the kids witnessed this. He came in and he started threatening to kill her, to take his own life, which he didn’t go through with at the time, but he was obviously terrorizing this family and he was, you know, traumatizing these children and Linda as well.
He did eventually go on to take his own life in January of 1978. So Susan just had a lot of awful events, a lot of awful things happening when she was very young.
Despite all of it, she was said to be a happy girl growing up and she did really well in school.
She got good grades. She attended Union High School where she belonged to several clubs.
She had a bunch of friends there. And one of her teachers recalled her being vivaceious and outgoing and said there was never a hint of any problem.
Following Harry’s death, Linda ended up getting remarried pretty soon after that happened to a man named Beverly Russell.
He was a local politician. He was a member of the Christian Coalition and he was also a business owner.
As Susan entered her teen years, Beverly began molesting her. And when she reported this to her school counselor, it got back to Linda and to Beverly.
And instead of her mom hearing this and supporting her, her mom actually got angry at her and blamed her for ruining the family’s reputation.
She was extremely embarrassed by people knowing about this or hearing about this, especially when she didn’t believe her daughter.
Or I guess maybe she did, but publicly she didn’t believe her daughter. She didn’t.
She didn’t show Susan any support and Beverly didn’t really receive any real meaningful consequences.
He went and had some counseling sessions. Uh lasted about a month and then he came back to the family home where Susan still lived.
So of course when he got home he began molesting Susan again because you know what did he have to lose at that point?
He didn’t receive any consequences and nobody stuck by her or did anything. And following his return, Susan attempted to take her own life several times.
From what I read, I don’t think she really wanted to end her own life.
I think she it it was more a cry for help because she just felt so alone and she felt so helpless in all of it because not even her own mom would stand up for her and prevent this from happening to her.
And it was a real betrayal and it caused an immeasurable amount of damage to Susan.
Eventually, she went and got a job at a place called Wind Dixie, which is a grocery store.
And it was around this time that she started kind of dating and seeing a few different men.
A local resident named Fred Delk said everybody shopped there and everyone saw her as a real attractive, friendly, outgoing woman.
She saw a few different guys during this period. One of which was her coworker that was married.
And she also, from what I read, had very tumultuous relationships. All of the relationships that she was in were very kind of chaotic.
But eventually she starts seeing a man named David Smith. He came to work at the grocery store as an assistant manager.
They start seeing each other and things escalated very quickly between them. They also just seem like a great match and they really seemed to be in love.
Not long after they got together, they found out that Susan was pregnant and they were both so excited.
They were over the moon. They got married on the 15th of March in 1991.
Later that year on the 10th of October, Susan gave birth to their son, Michael Daniel Smith.
By all accounts, they were very good parents at the start, but as time went on, there started to be a lot of issues that came up.
And a lot of these issues stemmed from infidelity. So, David was cheating and and seeing other people.
And then Susan was also cheating and seeing other men. And so, there was just a lot of jealousy and a lot of arguments that stemmed around this.
As I’m sure you can imagine, they separated a bunch of times. Then they would get back together.
They would break up, get back together. It was a very much an on again, offagain type of relationship.
In the middle of all this chaos, Susan finds out that she’s pregnant again. And both her and David are so happy.
They’re so over the moon once again. And they kind of see it as an opportunity to work things out, to repair their relationship so they could be a family and they could raise these children together.
They bought a house together. Susan gave birth to their second child, a son named Alex.
And they were both so excited. They were both so happy for this new journey they were taking.
And particularly Susan was so happy because to her it felt like she was finally getting some stability in her life which she never had really had.
Unfortunately, despite Susan and David’s best efforts to rekindle and repair the relationship, it just didn’t work out.
There was way too much jealousy involved that they couldn’t overcome. And so Susan did end up filing for divorce.
In 1993, she started a new job at a place manufacturing a manufacturing company called Conso Products.
And while she was there, she started having a sexual relationship with the boss’s 27-year-old son.
His name was Tom Finley. He was handsome. He was, you know, came from a wealthy family.
And so Susan very quickly became infatuated with him. It was a very casual relationship.
And, you know, they were going on dates and stuff. And the more they sort of saw each other.
Tom realized that Susan probably wasn’t the girl for him because she had children, he wasn’t really interested in having children, didn’t want children, and he just felt like they were not compatible long term.
While these two were seeing each other, unbeknownst Tom didn’t know that this was happening, but Susan started a sexual relationship with her stepfather Beverly again.
And there were some reports online that said this was consensual. But I just I do feel like it’s not really possible for this to be a consensual relationship considering he essentially groomed her and abused her from a young age.
So whether it’s consensual or not, it’s I really don’t think it’s can be considered consensual in my opinion.
Anyway, so while Tom was like, “This is not really going to work out long term.”
And he wasn’t really feeling like she was the one, Susan, on the other hand really felt like Tom was the one.
He was the man for her. She thought that the relationship was going really, really well.
So, in October of 1994, when he sent her a letter, which is crazy, a letter to break up with her, she was completely blindsided, completely devastated.
I mean, also, a letter to break up with someone is crazy work. It’s crazy work.
The letter read, “Dear Susan, you will make some man a good wife one day, but unfortunately it won’t be me.
We come from two different backgrounds. Susan, I could really fall for you, but like I told you, some things are not suited for me.
And yes, I’m talking about your children. I do not want children, and I don’t want the responsibility of your children either.”
So, not only did he send her a letter, but it was kind of a harsh letter.
I mean, there’s one way to break up with someone. I feel like that is not it.
And from what I read in my research, it seems like he honestly never really wanted to be with Susan.
He just kind of saw it as a bit of a casual fling. He maybe a bit of a booty call, you know, and so he was using her children as kind of a way out because he maybe thought that she was getting the wrong idea and getting a little bit attached.
Susan was not the type of woman to take this lying down. She was the type of woman that she was she was already concocting a plan to go and get her man back.
She goes and she confronts Tom in his office and she tells him that her David, her ex-husband, has been physically abusing her and beating her.
She says that she confides in him about the sexual abuse at the hands of her stepdad.
And then she goes on to tell him that she is sleeping with her stepdad.
She’s been sleeping with a bunch of other men. And she has also been sleeping with Tom’s dad, Carrie Finley.
I mean, I think she thought, you know, if I tell him this, it’s going to make him jealous.
I’m so desirable. I can get all these men. But it did not have that effect.
Tom was like, “What the hell, man?” He was like, “You live with my dad.
I mean, get out of here.” He wanted nothing to do with her. And so, after this attempt at getting him back didn’t work, she kind of becomes more and more unhinged and more desperate to win him back.
Now, fast forward to 25th of October, 1994. I mean, it’s not really a fast forward.
It’s pretty short time frame, but 25th of October, 1994, at around 9:00 p.m., she shows up in hysterics, banging on the door of this couple, Shirley and Rick Mloud.
She doesn’t know them. They’re just a random couple. She has shown up looking for help.
She tells Shirley and Rick that a black man has hijacked her car and has abducted her two children.
Like, her two children, Michael and Alex, were in the backseat of this car, who are three and 14 months old.
Yeah, there’s a lady that come up to our door and uh she some guy jumped into a red light with her car with her two kids in it and he took off and he she got out of the car here at our house.
They contact the police. The police show up shortly after and Susan tells them the whole story.
She said that she had been stopped at a red light in the intersection of Monarch Hills when an African-American man comes up to her car with a gun, gets inside, puts the gun on her, and tells her to drive.
So, obviously, she complies. She starts driving the car, and at his instruction, she drives for about 3 or 4 miles before he tells her to pull over.
He forces her to get out of the car or tells her to get out of the car with a gun in hand.
So, it essentially forces her. She is begging him to let her children out or let her get her children out of, you know, they’re still in the back seat.
And he tells her that there’s not enough time and he drives off with the children still in the back of the car.
So, in a panic, she just goes to the closest house she can find, which is the house of Shirley and Rick Mloud, and she starts begging for help.
Based on her description, the police did a sketch of the man that had abducted her two children.
She described him as a 40-year-old black man wearing a dark shirt, plaid jacket, jeans, and a dark knit cap.
It was kind of a vague description, but Susan was understandably very shaken up. She was still in shock and not to mention traumatized.
She had been threatened and her children had been abducted, so she was just a mess.
An investigation got underway right away and it was led by the Union County Sheriff’s Department, but it included local, state, and federal law enforcement.
It was a huge search for these two boys. They were also searching for the car because they had obviously a description and a number plate.
And they used helicopters, they used dogs, they had search teams, they used divers. They really used all of their resources to try and locate any piece of evidence to search for these boys.
There was even a phone line that was set up with countless tips from the public being called in to try and help with the investigation.
But none of the searches showed anything. Nobody found the car. The media was reporting on it.
So there was a lot of national attention which meant that people from all different states were also on the lookout for this car and for the person from the sketch for these two boys because they could have passed state lines.
All major news outlets even Oprah ran this story and spoke about this story. It was a huge media frenzy and both Susan and David fronted the media multiple times to basically plead the abductor to return their children.
Our lives have been torn apart by this tragic event. I want to say to my babies that your mama loves you so much and your daddy, these whole families love you so much.
Now, the police were doing everything they could in this investigation to try and locate Michael and Alex, but there was some really awful stuff that happened in this investigation as well.
So based on Susan’s description, which was a very, very loose description because she was, I guess, in shock when she gave it.
Based on this very loose description they had, they started going doortodoor in Union. And they detained about half a dozen black men just based on Susan’s loose description, which made a lot of the residents in the area.
I mean, it made a lot of people, but it made a lot of residents in the area very angry.
I mean, obviously, what was even the thought process here? One local resident said, “Susan Smith just played to the stereotype of blacks as criminals, and a lot of people around here fell for it.”
Race relations were already bad here. Now they’re going to be worse. Police were going to houses late at night, early in the morning, or whenever because the description that she gave could have fit a lot of people.
Everything going bad to get the black man. Despite the troubles the investigation was going through, the community really rallied around David and Susan just trying to show up for them in any way they could while they tried to navigate through this and tried to plead for their children back.
So the community organized search parties, they handed out flyers. They even held vigils as well.
I think that a large portion of the country did believe Susan’s story. You know, they saw her on TV.
They empathized with her. This woman that was this mother that was grieving for her two young children who were nowhere to be found that have been abducted.
She has no idea what’s happened to them, but there were some people, particularly those that were closer to the crime in Union that started to see some holes in her story.
Well, as soon as she said that an African-American man had taken off with her kids, I was a little sensitive thinking, h is that really true in union and knowing the landscape where people live.
I just don’t think that happened. Her demeanor it was awkward. There were no tears.
I mean, you know, you you you a a person just losing their kids. I mean, babies, mere babies.
And there was no tears or anything. And she was like he she was trying to force herself to cry.
And they also started to notice that the way she was acting seemed very ingenuine.
There were no real tears. It was very like she was putting on a performance.
You consider her a suspect at all? Is there anything that leads to believe that she might not be?
We don’t rule out anything at this time. David never once doubted Susan for a second.
This really they became united in the joint goal of trying to find their children.
So obviously as the investigation continues and the search for Michael and Alex continues, police also start looking into Susan’s story.
They want to make sure that she’s telling the truth. It was part of their due diligence, but at the same time, they were starting to see some things in her story that didn’t quite add up.
For example, if somebody had tried to carjack her and steal her car, there is no reason that they would pull off to the side of the road and let her out, but not let her two children out.
Typically, in a carjacking scenario, a thief wouldn’t want to steal a car that has children in the back.
Not only would it create a much bigger target on their back, but it would also make the punishment a lot higher when they were eventually caught or if they were eventually caught.
Like it’s really a big jump to go from carjacking someone’s car, which probably is not going to make national news to carjacking a car and abducting two children at the same time.
But maybe the most confusing part of her story is the fact that this was such a big case now.
It was so big in the media nationally. You know, Oprah was reporting on it and yet the car still still hadn’t been found.
There would obviously be so many people that had heard about this case, seen the description of the car and still nobody in the whole country had found this car.
And again, this wasn’t the only strange thing about her story. When she first spoke with police, she said there was no other cars at the intersection when she was carjacked.
But what police found out is that at this intersection, the lights stay green unless another car comes from the side road and it kind of triggers the lights to turn red.
So it doesn’t make any sense that she would be at a red light in this intersection if there were no other cars in the vicinity.
So both she and David sat polygraph test on the 27th of October. David passed with flying colors, but her tests came back inconclusive and she did multiple tests.
So as time went on, it became more and more clear that she was really hiding something.
There was more to this story and she was not telling the truth. Both she and David continued to do multiple pleas, multiple media appearances.
And on the 3rd of November, they had multiple TV appearances scheduled for that day.
During her interview with CBS this morning, she was asked, “Did you have any involvement in your children’s abduction, in your children’s disappearance?”
And Susan responded, “I did not have anything to do with the abduction of my children.
Whoever did this is a sick and emotionally unstable person.” Later that day, Susan was brought in for more questioning by the sheriff.
And this time, she provided a revised statement. This statement came after the sheriff told her that he knew she was lying.
He knew that the lights would only go red if there was another car in the area.
So, they knew that she was lying about that part of the story. They had also noticed other inconsistencies in her story.
And on top of that, he also told her that he had a bunch of officers that was stationed at that intersection working on a drug investigation and they didn’t see her there or anyone by the description of her abductor or her children’s abductor.
Susan’s response to this was asking the sheriff to pray with her. So he sat and he prayed with her and then he said, “Susan, it’s time.”
And then after this is when Susan gave a revised story of what really happened on the night of the 25th of October.
Susan told him that she fastened her two children, Michael and Alex, into the backseat of the car and started driving around.
She said at one point she pulled up to a bridge and thought about jumping off the bridge, but she thought in order to protect her children that they needed to die with her.
With the intention of ending her own life, she drove out with her kids in the back car, her two sons, to John D.
Long Lake. She put her car on the boat ramp there, put the car into neutral, and she just wanted to let it roll into the lake, and the three of them would drown to death in the car.
But before the car could enter the lake, she put it into handbrake. She pulled the handbrake and she did this twice just contemplating getting cold feet before eventually getting out of the car on the third time that she put it into neutral.
And she watched as her car went into the lake with her two sons strapped into the back seat.
And that is where 3-year-old Michael and 14-month-old Alex drowned to death. Somewhere between when the car went into the lake and when she knocked on the door of Rick and Shelley Mloud, she came up with the story to say that a black man had carjacked her and abducted her two sons.
Her story was completely based in racism, a stereotype or a story that she believed that people would believe at a glance.
Her brother Scotty apologized the day after she made this confession. On behalf of my family, we want to apologize to the black community.
After 9 days of searching and investigating and trying to locate these two young boys, the investigators finally had their answers.
Following her admission, Susan Smith was immediately arrested. And in a press conference, Sheriff Wells announced that she was going to be charged with two counts of murder.
Susan Smith has been arrested and will be charged with two counts of murder in connection with the deaths of her children, Michael three and Alexander 14 months.
When the truth came out, it was obviously incredibly shocking, incredibly disheartening. But I think the people in Union also felt really betrayed because they had really rallied around her, around this woman who they thought was a grieving mother who they thought had lost her two young children.
They saw this vulnerable woman who had had a traumatic upbringing and they supported her in every way that they could.
After her confession, Susan also provided the diving team and the police with the exact distance, I guess, that she believed the car had rolled out into that lake.
The car was discovered about 120 ft from the shoreline and divers went in and they were able to retrieve the bodies of three-year-old Michael and 14 months old Alex.
They were both found hanging upside down in the car. It was an extremely confronting scene for the divers to discover and for officers to see because it had also been 9 days.
So, the condition of the bodies was also really, really bad. Inside the car, they also found Susan’s wedding album, her wedding dress, and various other items that it seemed like she had put in there to try and kind of, I guess, walk away from by sending them into that lake.
They also found Tom Finley’s breakup letter, which they immediately knew was the motive for why she had done this.
A public funeral was held for Michael and Alex on the 6th of November, and the two of them were buried together in the same casket.
There were lines of visitors stretching outside of the building, and six rooms inside the funeral home were filled with flowers, stuffed toys, and balloons.
Pretty much the entire town attended these funerals, and the pictures are really heartbreaking. Susan’s trial began in July of 1995, and the town was completely overrun with media and spectacle.
To say this case was huge is an understatement. There was media from all over the country.
It was decided that no cameras were going to be allowed into the courtroom to try and prevent this case turning into an even bigger circus.
Susan Smith arrived at the courthouse under heavy security and hiding from everyone who came to see her.
The angry crowd of onlookers jeered. At the trial, Susan’s defense team tried to argue that the then 23-year-old, she was 23 at the time, wasn’t in her right mind when she let the car roll into the lake.
So they were framing this crime as a botched suicide attempt and that her mental state at the time is what contributed to her actions.
Earlier that year at her arraignment, her lawyers had told the judge that she wasn’t ready to put in a plea.
And so the judge ended up putting in a plea for her of not guilty.
So at the trial, the prosecution, which was led by a man named Thomas Pope, said that they were basically of the belief that she had done this in order to basically rid herself of her children so that she could be with Tom Finley, who had told her that she didn’t want children.
Honestly, even saying that aloud, it’s just it’s kind of unbelievable how unhinged that is.
The prosecution had Tom’s letter put into evidence to back up their theory. And it was suggested that she was of the belief that if she didn’t have her children, then he would want to be with her.
He she really thought that that was the only thing holding him back from being with her.
Not the fact that she was insane, not the fact that she slept with his dad and cheated on him a bunch of times.
It was the fact that she had children. The defense argued that Susan was an unstable, emotionally vulnerable woman with extremely poor judgment.
They claimed that the decision to jump out of the car as it was rolling down the ramp was an impulsive decision and that she had meant to take her own life alongside the lives of her two children.
Even though there wasn’t any physical evidence to support this, there wasn’t a single drop of water on her when she showed up to Rick and Shelley Mloud’s house claiming that there was a man that had carjacked her.
And if she had really decided not to take her own life, then you know, you would think as a mother she would go in and she would try and get her kids out of the car or something.
If she had really chickenened out and decided not to go through with it, there was no remorse other than she decided to jump out.
There was no remorse for the entire situation. The defense was really just trying to get as much sympathy for Susan as they could.
They shared all of the details of her troubled past, particularly stories from her childhood, including her father taking his own life and her stepfather molesting her.
Her stepfather, Beverly Russell, actually spoke at the trial as well and admitted to molesting Susan when she was 15.
He wrote her a letter after she was arrested which read, “I want to tell you how sorry I am for letting you down as a father.
Many believe my failure didn’t have anything to do with October 25th, but I believe it did.
I want you to know that you can’t take the blame for this whole tragedy.”
While they say they’re not blaming anybody, yet they’re looking pointing and looking for blame.
A psychiatrist hired by the defense named Seymour Hock testified at the trial, saying that he had diagnosed Susan with dependent personality disorder.
He said she constantly needs affection and becomes terrified that she will be left alone.
He described her as intermittently depressed, but not insane, mentally ill, or psychotic when she killed her two children.
He also noted that she had suicidal tendencies in the leadup to the killings and said, “I have a very strong opinion that the intent was suicide.”
On the night of the drownings, Hague said Smith drove around aimlessly. She almost wrecked her car and at one point stopped at a bridge with plans to jump.
Now, regarding her mental state, I think obviously Susan had some issues and she did have a traumatic past, but I don’t think there’s anything that can excuse what she did.
The prosecution argued that a lot of the issues that she was facing in her life at the time that she committed this crime were due to the fact that she was using her sexuality and using sex as some sort of bargaining chip.
In the 6 weeks leading up to the murders, Hick testified that she slept with four different men, which were Tom Finley, his dad Carrie, her stepfather Beverly, and also David, who she was going through divorce proceedings with at the time.
A social worker also testified at the trial that David had found the letter that Tom had wrote her and he confronted her.
When he confronted her, she did admit to sleeping with Tom’s father, Carrie. And as a result, David threatened her, saying that he was going to tell Carrie’s wife, basically, and expose them.
The social worker said that this caused Susan’s suicidal despair to kick in. Part of her defense was also that she was terrified that David would find out that she had started a relationship or started a sexual relationship with her stepfather Beverly in the year before Michael and Alex died.
During the trial, the prosecution played a demonstration which showed how long it would have taken for the car to roll into the water and then completely fill up with water.
And it took about 6 minutes. So that is 6 minutes in which she could have gone and done anything, attempted anything to save her children, but it was 6 minutes in which she did nothing.
David had been supporting her throughout this whole thing. But by the time the trial came around, he he didn’t support her anymore.
He completely switched to the other side, rightfully so. Once he found out everything that had happened and that he she killed their children, his sons.
So at the trial, he actually testified against her. He obviously wasn’t involved in the crime in any way, but his testimony was so valuable in providing an insight into the hurt that Susan had caused.
His testimony is really the closest thing that his children would ever unfortunately get to having a voice at this trial.
Prosecutors were seeking the death penalty for Susan in this case, and David told the jury during his testimony that he wanted her to get the death penalty.
The presiding judge on the case, however, instructed the jury that they were able to find her guilty of a less account of manslaughter, which would see her imprisoned for between three and 10 years.
In closing arguments, the prosecution said she used the emergency break handle like a gun and eliminated her toddlers so that she could have a chance at a life with Tom Finley.
And after 2 and 1/2 hours of deliberation, the jury returned and found her guilty of murdering her two children.
Obviously, this was kind of expected that she was going to be found guilty because how could she not be?
But now the big question was if she was going to receive the death penalty or not.
I felt personally that we can’t have a different standard for a middle class white female mother that we have for the carjacker for the same horror for the same crime.
Ultimately though, the jury decided not to proceed with the death penalty and to instead give her a life sentence.
It was actually controversial decision not to give her the death penalty. But the way the jury thought about it is that it would almost be an easy out to give her the death penalty.
It would be worse for her to have to live with the consequences of her actions and live with the fact that she killed her children and she could spend the rest of her life in prison thinking about that.
And I agree. I do not actually agree with the death penalty because I just think it’s the easy way out.
And a lot of people say that it’s cheaper than a life sentence. And that’s why they agree with the death penalty because you don’t want to pay all this money to just house some criminal, but the death penalty is actually more expensive than housing a criminal for the rest of their life.
And I really do sometimes think that the death penalty is kind of the easy way out.
After the verdict, David spoke outside of the courthouse. It was the most difficult thing I’ve had to do, I guess, since I buried Michael and Alex.
I didn’t enjoy it one bit. It hurt. Brought back some memories that I guess since the burial I have put to put aside.
So following her incarceration, her behavior in prison was less than exemplary to say the least.
In 2000, while she was getting treated for STDs, it came to the attention of officials that she had been having sexual relations with two of the guards.
These two guards were obviously fired and she was moved to a different prison. She has also been reprimanded for possession of contraban and drugs as well as providing information to a documentary filmmaker.
In 2010, she made an appeal for a new trial, but this was rejected. Then in 2014, she sent a letter to the state newspaper in South Carolina and said, “Something went very wrong that night.
I was not myself. I was a good mother and I loved my boys. There was no motive as it was not even a planned event.
I was not in my right mind. I’m not the monster society thinks I am.”
David Smith did later go on to get remarried and have two children, a son and a daughter.
He obviously had a really, really hard time dealing with what had happened and coming to terms with the loss of his two children and the fact that his ex-wife, the mother of his two children, was the cause of that and that’s something that he has had to live with that sadness and that’s something that will never leave him.
But at least he has a been able to make progress and start a family and find some happiness.
I also think that if there’s anyone that understands Susan motives, it has to be David Smith.
And this is what he had to say on the matter. I think she did it to be with her wealthy boyfriend.
Um he had he could I guess give her the lifestyle that she wanted. Susan is now 55 years old and she’s currently being held at Leaf Correctional Institution in Greenwood County, South Carolina.
As per South Carolina law at the time, Susan is eligible for a parole hearing every 2 years after serving 30 years.
And she was sentenced in December of 1995. So, she became eligible in November for parole in 2024.
And I would give anything if I could go back and change it. And I love Michael and Alice with all my heart.
God gives us free choice. And she made free choice that night to end her life.
This wasn’t a tragic mistake. Wasn’t something that she didn’t mean to do. She purposely meant to end their life.
Ultimately, to me, that’s only 15 years per child, her own children. It’s just not enough.
So, I’m asking that you please deny her parole today. She was denied for parole, but she is going to be eligible for another parole hearing later this year.
So, I’ll definitely be sure to keep you guys updated on how that goes. Additionally, I just wanted to add a little note on the end as well.
There was a psychiatrist named Michael Lamb and he said it seems to be a much more premeditated situation.
That type of premeditation assault on young children is much less common. It makes you think it was a woman with prior psychiatric problems in addition to stress.
Anyway, that is all for this case today, guys. I would love to hear your thoughts on this one.
Do you think that the sentencing was appropriate? Do you think that she deserved the death penalty?
Let me know your thoughts. I agree with the jury that I think the death sentence is leniency.
I think she deserves to live with that for the rest of her life. The knowledge that she did that, there was six whole minutes in which she could have gone in there and attempted to save her children.
She could have done anything, but instead for 6 minutes, she stood there, she watched them, and she did nothing.
And then she came up with some bogus, racist story to try and get away with her actions.
I understand that she had a very traumatic childhood. I do have sympathy for everything that she went through when she was a child, but to sit there and for 6 minutes watch your children drown to death.
And that’s just how long it took for the car to fill up. Who knows how how much longer it could have taken for her children to actually die and drown to death.
To be able to do something like that, that is really scary. That is really really scary.
But that is everything that I have for you guys today. That’s all from me.
Let me know your thoughts in the comments down below. And hopefully I will see you guys in my next video.
Bye guys.
