Susan Smith, the notorious South Carolina mother whokilled her two sons in 1994, is eligible for parole in late 2024 — but she won’t be with herlong-distance boyfriendif she gets out of prison.
Last year, Smith, 51, begancorrespondingwith a divorced man in his 40s. PEOPLE reviewed two of the letters, in which she wrote, “We’re going to have amazing chemistry in person. I can’t wait to build a life with you. Leave the past mistakes behind and start fresh, just you and me.”
But that meeting will likely never come.
“Yeah, that fizzled out,” a Smith family member tells PEOPLE. “They are no longer corresponding. It’s over.”
Dave Martin/AP; South Carolina Department of Corrections
Smith is one of the most notorious prisoners in South Carolina history.
But it was all a lie.
As her story began to unravel, Smith admitted that there was no carjacker, and that she had let her car roll into a lake with Michael, 3, and Alex, 14 months, still strapped into their car seats.
Dave Martin/AP.
Her motive: She was secretly dating a man who didn’t want children. The story became international news, even landing on the cover of PEOPLE. Smith was convicted of two counts of murder and is serving a life sentence at Leath Correctional Institution in Greenwood, S.C.
Smith’s time behind bars has beenfraught with disciplinary actions, including illicit drug use, self-mutilation and sexual contact with a guard.
But Smith claims she has been misunderstood.
In 2015, Smith wrote a letter toThe State. “I am not the monster society thinks I am,” she wrote. “I am far from it.”
“Something went very wrong that night. I was not myself,” she continued. “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.”
Smith’s ex-husband — and the father of the boys — told PEOPLE in 2010 that he has never fully recovered from the pain. “There’s always this nagging and gnawing heartache,” David Smith said. “It’s there every day, even if I’m not always conscious of it.”
For the last few years, Smithhas been behaving herselfin the hopes that she will be paroled in November 2024. In her prison letters to her boyfriend, she expressed a desire to settle down and find true happiness on the outside.
“I don’t think she’s got a snowball’s chance in hell of getting paroled in 2024,” the family member tells PEOPLE. “I think he realized that too. She’s exactly where she needs to be.”
source: people.com
