Susan Vaughan Smith (born September 26, 1971), of Union, South Carolina, was convicted in 1995 of murdering her two sons (3-year-old Michael and 14-month-old Alex), and is now serving a life sentence. She is due for a parole hearing in 2025.

The case gained national attention because Smith initially told police on October 24, 1994, she had been carjacked by an African-American man and her sons were still in the car when the man drove away. For nine days, Smith made tearful pleas on television for the return of her children. However, she finally confessed to rolling the 1990 Mazda Protegé into nearby John D. Long Lake, drowning her children inside.

In 2003, a journalist from [| Bethlehem], Pennsylvania, gathering background information on Smith while working on a story that she was being held in general population at a South Carolina women's prison (a setting likely to endanger her because of her notoriety), began a reinvestigation of the case; and concluded that the deaths of Michael and Alex Smith were the result of an accident, not murder - an irresponsible accident for which Smith might indeed be subject to some blame, but still not intentionally-caused deaths. The conclusion was based upon the ambiguity in general of Smith's confessions and statements to investigators; the complete failure of the state to develop any sound evidence to support the widely-held theory that Smith murdered the children to clear the way for a wealthy man in whom she had a love interest but who wanted no children (a motive to which Smith never admitted); psychiatric evidence indicating that Smith, while not insane, suffered from a disorder that rendered her incapable of planning and executing a complex murder plot; and a laboratory report obtained under a [| Freedom of Information Act] request from South Carolina's State Law Enforcement Division (SLED) indicating that Smith could not have put the car into the lake from the top of the boat ramp by releasing the Mazda's hand brake as alleged by the state because of a pre-existing mechanical flaw in the car's braking system. The conclusions that the physical evidence better supports an accident scenario than any sort of homicide conviction have resulted in controversy in internet forums and in areas where they've been published, as they began to appear in early 2005. No legal proceedings based upon the findings are known to have been commenced on Smith's behalf at this time.

References

South Carolina Law Enforcement Divison (SLED); SLED Latent Print and Crime Scene Worksheet: Test of Floatation Characteristics of 1990 Mazda Protege; May 24, 1995