Talking Dateline: Return to the Lake

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Speaker 4 Hi, everybody. It's Josh Mankiewicz, and we're talking Dateline today with Craig Melvin.

Speaker 4 Hi, Craig. Josh, how are you, Mank? Good, and congratulations on that

Speaker 4 new non-dateline job that you have.

Speaker 4 I see you trying to fit in around your dateline responsibility. Well, you know, my primary obligation remains to dateline.
This dateline thing, this, this,

Speaker 4 this is correct. Yeah.
So

Speaker 4 this episode is called Return to the Lake, and it is about a horrifying case that everybody of a certain age, that being me,

Speaker 4 will remember. It's from 1994.
It's the story of Susan Smith, who murdered her two young children. Now,

Speaker 4 for this episode, Craig spoke with her ex-husband, David, in a very rare, very revealing interview about how this case, this loss, how it impacted him, and how he is fighting to keep the woman that he once loved behind bars.

Speaker 4 Now, if you have not listened to this episode yet, it is the episode right below this one on the list of podcasts that you just chose from.

Speaker 4 So you can go there and you can listen to it and come back here, or you can go to Peacock and stream it. Now, when you come back, Craig and I will talk about the episode.

Speaker 4 Craig also has an extra clip that he wants to play for us from the chief of SLED, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, Mark Keel. And then later, we're going to be joined by a special guest.

Speaker 4 And that is Dateline producer Carol Gable, who exchanged letters with Susan Smith for 20 years.

Speaker 4 And she's going to talk about that and also answer some of your questions about the broadcast from social media. So stick around for that.
And now let's talk Dateline.

Speaker 4 You were a small child when this happened. I know that.
It's not a small child. No, you were like, you saw this, I'm thinking through the bars of your crap.
No, I was 15. I was 15.

Speaker 4 all right because i was i think 65 then and

Speaker 4 uh i remember i remember this story i was actually um not only was i a tv reporter at this at this stage i was not working i had not come to dateline yet and i was working for a show that had stopped producing episodes and we were all just kind of getting paid waiting for them to figure out what they were going to do next which turned out to be nothing so i had a lot of time to watch coverage of this and i did i remember watching a lot of it well it was all consuming man it was all consuming consuming in Columbia, South Carolina, where I'm from.

Speaker 4 WIS television was the

Speaker 4 big station there still is.

Speaker 4 And it was one of those stories for two weeks.

Speaker 4 Multiple stories, every newscast. And this little town, Union, South Carolina, where it happened, it was about an hour from where I grew up.

Speaker 4 Things like this didn't happen to Union. I mean, Union was, it was like Mayberry.
You know, everyone knew everybody.

Speaker 4 You know, half the towns related to the other half i mean that's just kind of there's just small town south carolina you know i grew up a good baptist good baptist boy um even in 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 it was top of mind for a long time And I'm presuming that even when the TV wasn't on, everybody was talking about it.

Speaker 4 It's all anybody could talk about. You know, the detail of her story, I remembered this when I saw it in your broadcast.
The guy jumps in the car, supposedly, and says, you know, he's got a gun.

Speaker 4 And he's like, just drive. And she said, and the boys were crying.
And I remember thinking like, man, they must have been terrified. Like they could tell something was wrong.

Speaker 4 They knew how frightened she was.

Speaker 4 That was the moment where I thought, oh, my God, how awful that must be. And of course, all made up.
None of that happened. You got the benefit of the doubt back then, certainly more often than not.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And so from jump, she immediately starts to garner. justifiable sympathy, you know, and so it triggers this manhunt.

Speaker 4 And you've got...

Speaker 4 Well, I mean, she sold this really well it wasn't like she was refusing to talk to anybody or wouldn't speak afterwards i mean correct she absolutely played her part and that obviously helped tremendously and then when they put out the pictures first and then the video of of these little boys it was really sort of the 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.

Speaker 4 And she still kept it up. And it wasn't just the telling of the lie.

Speaker 4 The telling of the lie, the initial lie, and then there were other lies, obviously, because when you lie once, you got to just, you got to keep lying to cover up the lie. She did it for nine days.

Speaker 4 A good friend of mine is from Union, and we've talked about it many times since then.

Speaker 4 People didn't carjack in Union back in the 90s. First of all,

Speaker 4 there are only two intersections and you only had like, you know, 30 cars. So much of it didn't make sense.
And granted, we're looking at it now through the lens of today.

Speaker 4 And we talked to two of the journalists who covered the story closely at the time, and they both brought it up separately.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 the story itself and not immediately

Speaker 4 giving her a pass. Yeah.
I mean, mean, I don't want to say it was a simpler or more innocent time, but it may have been a less suspicious time because

Speaker 4 without social media and the internet, the impulse was to believe her story. She's telling the truth.
Yep. And people did believe it.
And then clearly, I mean,

Speaker 4 at some point, law enforcement starts doing what I think was a pretty good job, like figuring out like her story about the stoplight couldn't have been true.

Speaker 4 That's pretty good good police work in a time when there weren't cameras at every intersection.

Speaker 4 That's one of my favorite parts of the episode is the police start working together and they give her the polyograph. We know how it turns out.

Speaker 4 And then you got Pete Logan, who, by the way, fun fact worked on the Kennedy assassination

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 it works beautifully.

Speaker 4 To your point, though, Mang, you're right. I mean, this was before

Speaker 4 we lived in a time of ubiquitous surveillance.

Speaker 4 There are no social media, no phone records. Like, there's no cell phone towers that we can check.
You can't track her, nothing.

Speaker 4 No, no, old school. Right.
I mean, today that story wouldn't stand up because of technology. Back then, you know, you told it and you sold it.
And she did.

Speaker 4 You guys got some conversations,

Speaker 4 some audio from those conversations. Now, those have not been played before, and they're chilling, I thought.

Speaker 5 Hey, how you doing? You doing okay?

Speaker 5 How are you doing, man? Well, that's good. I'm concerned about you.
Just want to know how you were doing. Well, I appreciate you coming.
That makes a lot.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I would agree with you. And it was interesting to me just hearing.

Speaker 4 Just hearing her voice on those tapes. Yeah.

Speaker 4 So, you know, Susan Smith initially said, I mean, after she eventually told the truth, she first said that she sort of tried to drown herself along with her sons. Anybody believe that?

Speaker 4 Funny you should bring that up.

Speaker 4 I put that question to Tommy Pope, who was the chief prosecutor in the case at the time.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 If she had been in the water,

Speaker 4 there would be

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 You know, over the years, Carol Gable, our producer, sort of kept in touch with Susan Smith and wrote her all these letters, I think, knowing that this story was going to come back one day.

Speaker 4 And you included some of those. Is Susan Smith still selling a story, you think? Oh, no question.

Speaker 4 No question. These letters have never been shared, and you get a unique insight into what she was thinking then, what she thinks now.

Speaker 4 And I know you find this to be true with a lot of killers. There is this

Speaker 4 clear detachment from reality

Speaker 4 that still very much exists in the letters. And I found that strange.
Right.

Speaker 4 When we come back, we will have an extra clip from the interview with the chief of SLED, Mark Keel, who remembers where he was when Susan Smith confessed to killing her two sons.

Speaker 6 Some stories never make national headlines, but stories from small towns and coastal communities deserve recognition, too.

Speaker 6 I'm Kylie Lowe, host of Dark Down East, a true crime podcast that gives voice to victims through investigative journalism and powerful storytelling.

Speaker 6 Set in my home state of Maine and the greater New England area, it's my goal to dig through the archives to bring the stories of the people at the heart of these cases to light.

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Speaker 4 You know, when I saw Mark Keel in your episode, I realized that I had interviewed him before. I immediately recognized him and his name.

Speaker 4 And I have been racking my brain unsuccessfully, as it turns out, to try to remember what story it was that I interviewed him for. I can't remember.

Speaker 4 Now,

Speaker 4 he has not really talked about this case. No, in part because of like not wanting to give air to Susan Smith.

Speaker 4 No, in fact, this is the first time he talked about it on national television. I mean, he runs SLED now, South Carolina Law Enforcement Division.

Speaker 4 We actually talked to him during the Murdoch trial, which

Speaker 4 he had also not talked about before.

Speaker 4 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 to go search for these two little boys or uh that black guy from the sketch and and this is for him as well this is one of those stories that really has always stayed with him and

Speaker 4 he was there at the parole hearing in November, which he never, which he never does.

Speaker 4 That's full circle for him. I mean, he went from being like part-time and a pilot, and now he's running SLED, and he's still on this story.
Yep. Yep.

Speaker 4 We have a little bit more of Craig's interview with the chief of SLED, Mark Keel, and he remembers very well what was going on back then and in the days after.

Speaker 4 Let's listen to that. What do you remember about the emotions of members of law enforcement back then after we found out that you had infected?

Speaker 8 It was very emotional. And I can remember seeing our agents and other law enforcement personnel as well, but specifically some of our agents

Speaker 8 that were standing in the back hallway at a courthouse and were just sobbing.

Speaker 8 And they were agents that had been to the scene when the car was pulled out of the water. And

Speaker 8 I know that there were some that said, you know, I wish... I wish I had not been there.
I mean,

Speaker 8 I saw emotions from agents that had been working homicide cases for years and years that, you know, you never saw emotion out of.

Speaker 8 You know, tough, tough guys,

Speaker 8 but you saw a lot of emotion that day.

Speaker 4 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 it probably a double murder, a car accident.

Speaker 4 You've seen some stuff.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 to see two little boys who were still, when they hoisted that car from John D. Long Lake, they were still strapped in.

Speaker 4 And they'd been strapped in for nine days. So you can only imagine what these officers saw.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 It wasn't just the killing of the children.

Speaker 4 It was the way that she did it. It is

Speaker 4 completely as odd as that may sound. No, I completely agree.
Because there's no way that that was quick or painless. Correct.

Speaker 4 And anyone who's had small children,

Speaker 4 you know, I remember kids are 10 and 8 now, and I remember the car seat phase. And I mean, the car seat is sacrosanct.
He's just, you gotta make sure they're buckled in the car seat.

Speaker 4 You gotta have the car seat. You gotta make sure the car, it's you're you become obsessed with the car seat.
And to think that

Speaker 4 these two little boys, they get strapped in their car seats by their mother

Speaker 4 and

Speaker 4 they die this

Speaker 4 slow

Speaker 4 death submerged in this lake that they,

Speaker 4 and I think that's for a lot of people. It's not,

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 But, you know, David Smith, Mank, he is, and this is of the takeaways for me

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 he decided to sit down with us exclusively because he wanted to make sure.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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 the the two times that he nearly killed himself he talked about not being able to get out of bed for for months and just going to work and you don't really think about this part of it but you know for a very long time

Speaker 4 Anytime anyone saw, I mean, he was on TV every day for a long time. Everyone knew how the guy looked.

Speaker 4 And so he would have these, these strangers, well-meaning strangers, who would come up to him at the grocery store, the bank.

Speaker 4 I've been praying for you. I prayed for those boys.
I prayed for Susan.

Speaker 4 And he had to leave town. He moved for a long time down to Florida just to get away from it.
This is one of the things we've...

Speaker 4 We've talked about before on previous episodes of Talking Dayline and elsewhere, which is there's this ripple effect to murder. It's not just the person.
It's not just the immediate family.

Speaker 4 It doesn't go away because the person gets convicted or locked up. And those people that approach you in the supermarket, like

Speaker 4 they're well-meaning, but they're not letting you move on from this.

Speaker 4 Right. It also defines your life.
Right. Whether you, and you probably don't wish that, I mean, when you don't want it to, but it will anyway.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 in my OBIT,

Speaker 4 this will be included. It'll be the husband of the ex-husband of, and that's, I mean, and think about it.
I mean, that's just,

Speaker 4 you know, and

Speaker 4 his new wife, God bless her, you know, Tiffany has been there. They got married in 2003, but she was there with him during all of this, during the search, during the trial.

Speaker 4 They went on, they had a child together, Savannah. She's 24 now.

Speaker 4 But she spent a fair amount of time talking about

Speaker 4 how

Speaker 4 for a very long time, she could not pull him out of what had to be the darkest of days.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Someone he completely trusted. Correct.
I really, there are a couple of times. He gets choked up.
I get choked up.

Speaker 4 What moved me the most, Mank, was

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 He said, one of the biggest problems now is 30 years later, he has a hard time remembering the boys.

Speaker 4 And when he talked about it with his therapist early on, the therapist explained it a way, the mind in an attempt to protect itself will guard you from certain memories because

Speaker 4 that'll just

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And you could tell that of all of the things that he wishes, he could chat. I think he just wishes that he had.
more memories of the boys. This is not something you get over.
Nope.

Speaker 4 It's why I hate the word closure so much. I mean, she was locked up and she didn't get parole, but there's no closure here.
No. Pretty clearly.
And that's the thing.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And in at the next one, I mean, increasingly, jurisdictions around the country are releasing older prisoners so they can stop paying for the cost of their health care.

Speaker 4 Assuming that Susan does not cause more problems behind bars, the odds go up just for that, that she's going to be released or that a parole board will want to release her. And he knows that.

Speaker 4 And that's why he told me and

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Like, you don't, you commit a crime like this in South Carolina.

Speaker 4 Good luck ever getting out.

Speaker 4 We sat down with her lawyer, David Brock. And he's never talked about this.
No, no, no. No, he never has.
And by the way, David Brock also, you know, represents the Charleston church shooter.

Speaker 4 I mean, he's spent a lot of his time representing

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 I said, David, should she be pro? And he said, well, yeah.

Speaker 4 I said, well, has she been rehabilitated? And he maintains it that she has.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 He maintains that she's paid her debt for the murders and she doesn't pose a threat to society. And the parole board sort of didn't buy it 30 years later.
I mean,

Speaker 4 did that surprise anybody? Was there anybody who thought that was going through? No, it surprised me. You know what?

Speaker 4 It didn't surprise anyone that I talked to, any of the legal experts.

Speaker 4 You know, the vote was unanimous. No, it did not.
It didn't surprise. Craig, thank you for joining us.

Speaker 4 After the break, I'm going to be joined by Dateline producer Carol Gable, and together we will answer some of your questions from social media.

Speaker 6 Some stories never make national headlines, but stories from small towns and coastal communities deserve recognition too.

Speaker 6 I'm Kylie Lowe, host of Dark Down East, a true crime podcast that gives voice to victims through investigative journalism and powerful storytelling.

Speaker 6 Set in my home state of Maine and the greater New England area, it's my goal to dig through the archives to bring the stories of the people at the heart of these cases to light.

Speaker 6 Listen to Dark Down East, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 4 We are now joined by producer Carol Gable. Hi, nice to see you.

Speaker 12 Good to see you, Josh.

Speaker 4 You started working on this episode for Dateline back in 1994, which was actually even before I joined Dateline, which is what you and many other people refer to as the good old days.

Speaker 4 Tell me a little bit about your journey with this case. Like, what sort of kept you?

Speaker 4 working on it for so long.

Speaker 12 It was obvious that once she was arrested, Susan Smith

Speaker 12 did not have an opportunity to talk about what had happened. As time went on, I really wanted to interview her.

Speaker 12 I thought that she was the center of one of the biggest stories in America, but we didn't know a lot about her.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 3 when you write her, did you expect to hear back?

Speaker 12 No.

Speaker 12 I mean, I didn't have any expectations at all, but I wrote her and explained that I had actually been in Union the entire week the boys were missing and I had covered the trial and I was surprised.

Speaker 12 She wrote back.

Speaker 4 The thing that everybody asks about is remorse.

Speaker 4 What do you detect from Susan Smith under that category?

Speaker 12 Total remorse, consistent remorse. People ask me this question a lot and it's almost like

Speaker 12 once you say and you show you're remorseful, why,

Speaker 12 you know, what else can you say?

Speaker 4 Let me ask you a question that is not among the social media questions that we're going to be answering today, but it is one that I know

Speaker 4 is out there. Why are you, Dateline and Carol Gable and Craig Melvin,

Speaker 4 giving this woman a platform to whine about her problems?

Speaker 4 She's a terrible person. She committed a horrible crime.
She's right where she belongs.

Speaker 4 Why are you giving her any airtime?

Speaker 13 I think what we're giving is understanding context depth and a bit more meaning not an excuse it's not an excuse but it's more information um now we're going to listen to some audio questions which were sent to us on social media okay this is from marion marshall hardy on facebook hello my name is marion marshall um my husband and i just finished watching return to the lake and my question is we were wondering where the 911 call was placed from.

Speaker 13 Was it in Union or was it in Carlisle?

Speaker 13 Because if she wouldn't have had a car, wouldn't it make a difference to know where the call was placed from?

Speaker 12 The Carlisle story was a made-up story that Susan told investigators before she confessed,

Speaker 12 after Sheriff Wells said,

Speaker 12 you couldn't have been in Monarch, which is a part of Union, because the traffic light situation you report can't happen.

Speaker 4 That's when they realize, okay, this person's lying.

Speaker 4 There was no question about where the call was placed from at the time the call was placed because it was from that woman's house that she ran to.

Speaker 12 Yes, it was. Yes, it was.
And her son is the one who actually called 911, but everything happened near that lake.

Speaker 4 Here's another audio question. This one from Gail Panis on Facebook.

Speaker 14 Hi, my name is Gail. I've got a question about tonight's episode.
Beverly Russell was Susan Smith's stepfather. Did the mother stay married to Beverly Russell after all this came out in court?

Speaker 12 They did get divorced. I don't know the timeframe, but fairly soon after they did get divorced.

Speaker 4 That's it for the audio questions today. Now we're going to go to other questions from social media.

Speaker 4 Southern Beach Girl says, I'm sure David or other family members would have been happy to take those babies in, and she could still have run off with the other guy.

Speaker 12 Of course, anyone in that town would have taken those boys.

Speaker 12 In her mind, and she has said this to me, in her mind, at that moment, she could not leave her boys like her dad left her when he committed suicide.

Speaker 4 Eight Lawana says, I can't believe it's been 30 years. Those little boys would have went to college and had lives of their own if not for Susan's selfishness.

Speaker 4 And that is something I always think about when kids are involved, which is

Speaker 4 the life that went unlived.

Speaker 12 Well, you can't help but think about that, you know, what might have been.

Speaker 12 And it's really hard. And that's why this is a very searing, searing story.

Speaker 4 Carol, thank you very much. And thanks, everybody, for listening.

Speaker 4 Now, remember, if you have any questions for us about our stories or any case that you think we should be covering, you can reach out to us on social at dateline NBC or you can send us an audio message for a chance to be featured in our next Talking Dateline episode.

Speaker 4 Also, do not forget about Keith's all-new podcast called Murder in the Moonlight.

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