Susan Smith was born on September 26, 1971, in Union, S.C., to parents Linda and Harry Vaughan. She was the.

Susan Smith was born on September 26, 1971, in Union, S.C., to parents Linda and Harry Vaughan. She was the youngest of three children and the couple's only daughter.

Her parents divorced when Susan was seven and five weeks later Harry, age 37, committed suicide. Her parent's tumultuous marriage and the death of her father left Susan a sad, empty and oddly distant child.

Within weeks of the Vaughan's divorce Linda married Beverly (Bev) Russell, a successful local businessman. Linda and the children moved from their small modest home into Bev's house located in an exclusive subdivision of Union.

As a teen Susan was a good student, well liked and outgoing.

In her junior year she was voted president of the Junior Civitan Club, a club which focused on volunteering in the community. In her final year of high school she received the "Friendliest Female" award and was known for her cheerful and fun disposition.

But during those years of enjoying her popularity and positions of leadership, Susan was harboring a family secret. At the age of sixteen her step-father had turned from caretaker to molester. Susan reported the inappropriate behavior to her mother and to the Department of Social Services and Bev moved out from the home temporarily.

Nothing of any consequence resulted from Susan's report and after a few family counseling sessions Bev returned home.

Susan was chastised by her family for making the sexual abuse a public affair and Linda appeared more concerned that the family would be subjected to public embarrassment than protecting her daughter. Unfortunately for Susan, with Bev back in the house the sexual molestation continued.

In her senior year of high school Susan turned to a school counselor for help. The Department of Social Service was contacted again, but Susan refused to press charges and the matter was swiftly swept under the proverbial carpet of lawyers' agreements and sealed records which protected Bev and the family from the feared public humiliation.

During the summer of 1988, Susan got a job at the local Winn-Dixie grocery store and moved quickly up the ranks from cashier to bookkeeper. In her senior year at high school she was sexually active with three men - a married older man who worked at the store, a younger co-worker and with Bev.

Susan became pregnant and had an abortion. The married man ended their relationship and her reaction to the breakup was to attempt suicide by taking aspirin and Tylenol. While being treated in the hospital she admitted to having tried a similar suicide attempt when she was 13-years-old.

At work, another relationship was beginning to form with co-worker and high school friend David Smith. David ended his engagement with another woman and started dating Susan. The two decided to marry when Susan discovered she was pregnant.

Susan and David Smith married on March 15, 1991, and moved into David's great-grand-mother's house. David's parents were suffering the recent loss of another son who died from Crohn's disease just eleven days before Susan and David married. By May 1991, the strain of the loss of a son proved to be too much on David's parents. His father attempted suicide and his mother left and moved to another city.

This kind of family drama fit right into what Susan was used to and the young couple, both very needy, spent the early months of their marriage comforting one another.

On October 10, 1991, the Smith's first son, Michael, was born. David and Susan showered the child with love and attention. But having a child could not help the differences in the newlywed's backgrounds which began to put a strain on their relationship. Susan was more materialistic than David and often turned to her mother for financial help. David found Linda to be intrusive and controlling and resented Susan always doing what Linda wanted her to do, especially when it came to raising Michael.

By March 1992, the Smiths were separated and over the next seven months they tried on and off to mend the marriage. During the breakups Susan dated a former boyfriend from work which didn't help matters.

In November 1992, Susan announced she was pregnant again which seemed to bring David and her into clearer focus and the two reunited. The couple borrowed money from Susan's mother for a down payment on a house, believing having their own home would fix their troubles. But over the next nine months Susan became more distant and complained continuously about being pregnant.

In June 1993, David felt lonely and isolated in his marriage and began a relationship with a co-worker. After the birth of their second child, Alexander Tyler, on August 5, 1993, David and Susan reunited, but within three weeks David had once again moved out and the two decided the relationship was over.

Regardless of their broken marriage, both David and Susan were good, attentive and caring parents who seemed to enjoy the children.

Susan, not wanting to work in the same place as David, took a job as a bookkeeper at the largest employer in the area, Conso Products. She was eventually promoted to the executive secretary position for the president and CEO of Conso, J. Carey Findlay.

For Union, S.C. this was a prestigious position which exposed Susan to wealthy people with extravagant lifestyles. It also gave her the opportunity to get closer to one of Union's most eligible bachelors, the son of her boss, Tom Findlay.

In January 1994 Susan and Tom Findlay began casually dating, but by spring she and David were back together. The reconciliation only lasted a few months and Susan told David she wanted a divorce. In September she was dating Tom Findlay again and planning their future together in her mind. Tom, in the meantime, was trying to figure out how to end it with Susan.

On October 17, 1994, just days before David and Susan's divorce papers were filed, Tom Findlay sent a "Dear John" letter to Susan. His reasons for wanting to end their relationship included the differences in their backgrounds. He was also emphatic about not wanting children or wanting to raise her children. He encouraged Susan to act with more self respect, and referred to an episode when Susan and a friend's husband were kissing each other in a hot tub during a party at Tom's father's estate.

Findlay wrote, "If you want to catch a nice guy like me one day, you have to act like a nice girl. And you know, nice girls don't sleep with married men." Susan was devastated when she read the letter, but she was also living out delusional dreams which in reality were a combination of grotesque lies, deceit, lust and narcissism. On one hand she was deeply depressed that Tom ended their relationship, but unknown to him, she was still sexually involved with David and her step-father, Bev Russell and had allegedly had a sexual affair with her boss who was Tom's father.

In an attempt to get Tom's sympathy and attention, Susan confessed to him about her ongoing sexual relationship with Bev.

When that didn't work, she told him of her alleged affair with his father and warned him that the details of the relationship might come out during her divorce with David. Tom's reaction was one of shock and he reiterated that the two of them would never again have a sexual relationship. Any hopes to maneuver her way back into Tom's life had now been permanently severed.

On October 25, 1994, Susan Smith spent the day obsessing over the breakup with Tom Findlay. As the day progressed she became increasingly upset and asked to leave work early.

After picking up her children from daycare, she stopped to talk to a friend in a parking lot and expressed her fears over Tom's reaction to her sleeping with his father. In a last ditch effort to sway Tom's feelings, she asked her friend to watch the children while she went to Tom's office to tell him the story was a lie. According to her friend, Tom did not appear happy to see Susan and quickly got her out of his office.

At around 8 p.m. Susan put her barefooted sons in the car, strapped them in their car seats and began driving around. In her confession she stated that she wanted to die and was headed to her mother's house, but decided against it. Instead she drove to John D. Long Lake and drove onto a ramp, got out of the car, put the car in drive, released the brake and watched as her car, with her children sleeping in the back seat, plunged into the lake. The car drifted out a ways then slowly sank.

Susan Smith ran to a nearby home and hysterically knocked on the door. She told the homeowners, Shirley and Rick McCloud, that a black man had taken her car and her two boys. She described how she had stopped at a red light at Monarch Mills, when a man with a gun jumped into her car and told her to drive. She drove around some, and then he told her to stop and get out of the car. At that point he told her he wouldn't hurt the kids and then drove off with the boys who she could hear were crying out for her.

For nine days Susan Smith stuck the story of being abducted. Friends and family surrounded her in support and David had returned to his wife's side as the search for their children intensified. The national media showed up in Union as the tragic story of the boys abduction circulated. Susan, with her face spotted with tears, and David looking distraught and desperate, made a public plea for the safe return of their sons. In the meantime, Susan's story was beginning to unravel.

Sheriff Howard Wells, the lead investigator on the case, had David and Susan polygraphed. David passed, but Susan's results were inconclusive. Throughout the nine days of the investigation Susan was given numerous polygraphs and questioned about the inconsistencies in her carjacking story.

One of the biggest clues that led the authorities to believe Susan was lying was her story about stopping at a red light on Monarch Mills Road. She stated that she saw no other cars on the road, yet the light turned red. The light on Monarch Mills was always green and only turned red if it was triggered by a car on the cross street. Since she said that there were no other cars on the road, there was no reason for her to come up to a red light.

Leaks to the press about discrepancies in Susan's story resulted in accusatory questions by reporters. Also, people around her noticed her displaying questionable behavior for a mother whose children were missing. She seemed overly concerned with how she looked in front of the television cameras and at times asked about the whereabouts of Tom Findlay. She also had dramatic moments of deep sobbing, but would be dried eyed and tearless.

On November 3, 1994, David and Susan appeared on CBS This Morning and David voiced his full support of Susan and her story about the abduction. After the interview Susan met with Sheriff Wells for another interrogation. This time however, Wells was direct and told her that he did not believe her story about the carjacking. He explained to her about the light on Monarch Mills staying green and discrepancies in other adaptations she had made to her story during the past nine days.

Exhausted and emotionally badgered, Susan asked Wells to pray with her then afterwards she began crying and telling how ashamed she felt for what she had done. Her confession to pushing the car into the lake began to spill out. She said she had wanted to kill herself and her children, but in the end, she got out of the car and sent her boys to their deaths.

Before breaking the news of Susan's confession, Wells wanted to locate the bodies of the boys. A previous search of the lake had failed to turn up Susan's car, but after her confession she gave police the exact distance the car had floated out before it sank.

Divers found the car turned upside down, with the children dangling from their car seats. One diver described that he saw the small hand of one of the children pressed against a window.

Also found in the car was the "Dear John" letter Ton Findlay had written.

An autopsy of the children proved that both boys were still alive when their tiny heads were submerged under water.

Incredibly, Susan reached out to David in a letter filled with, "I'm sorry," then complained that her feelings were being overshadowed by everyone's grief. Stunned, David questioned who Susan really was and felt a brief moment of sympathy for her confused and demented state of mind.

But it did not take long for the sympathy to turn to horror as more facts about the murders of his sons surfaced.

He had assumed Susan had shown mercy by killing the boys prior to pushing the car into the lake, but after finding out the truth he was haunted by images of his sons last moments, in the dark, scared, alone and drowning to death.

When he discovered Susan had supplied the police with the exact location of the car and that the car lights had been on when she lifted the break, he knew she had stayed and watched the car sinking, motivated by her desires to rebuild her relationship with the wealthy Tom Findlay.

During the trial Susan's defense lawyers relied heavily on Susan's littered childhood of tragedy and sexual abuse which manifested itself into a lifetime of untreated depression and suicidal thoughts. They explained that her abnormal need to depend on others for happiness led to the multiple sexual relationships she was involved in during her life. The bottom-line was that Susan, as outwardly normal as she might have appeared, was in truth hiding a deep-seeded mental illness.

The prosecution showed the jury a more devious and manipulative side of Susan Smith whose only concern was her own desires. Her children had become a major handicap in Susan's ability to get what she wanted. By killing them she would not only get the sympathy of her former lover Tom Findlay, but with the children gone, it was one less reason for him to end their relationship.

Susan Smith was unresponsive during her trial except when her sons were mentioned which sometimes led to her sobbing and shaking her head as if in disbelief that the boys were dead.

It took the jury two-and-a-half hours to return a verdict of guilty of two counts of murder. Much against the protest of David, Susan Smith was spared the death sentence and received 30 years to life in prison. She will be eligible for parole in 2025, when she is 53 years old. David has sworn to attend every parole hearing to try to keep Susan Smith in jail for life.

Since her incarceration at South Carolina's Leath Correctional Institution, two guards have been punished for having sex with Smith. Her sexual activity in prison was discovered after she developed a sexual transmitted disease.

Michael and Alex Smith were buried together in the same casket in the Bogansville United Methodist Church cemetery on November 6, 1994, next to the grave of David's brother and the children's uncle, Danny Smith.

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