Dateline NBC - Talking Dateline: Return to the Lake

Episode Date: February 19, 2025

Josh Mankiewicz and Craig Melvin sit down to talk about Craig’s episode, “Return to the Lake.” In 1994, the disappearance of two young brothers, Michael and Alex Smith, following an alleged carjacking in Union, South Carolina, was all anyone could talk about. The nation felt their mother’s despair as she told the harrowing story of a man who drove off with her two young boys after threatening her at gunpoint.  Nine days after Michael and Alex disappeared, Susan Smith confessed to the unimaginable – she had killed her sons. Josh and Craig discuss Craig’s heartbreaking interview with David Smith about the deaths of his sons 30 years ago and his ex-wife’s recent bid for parole. Dateline Producer Carol Gable joins Josh to discuss the letters she and Susan Smith have exchanged for the past 20 years and to answer questions from social media.Listen to the full episode of “Return to the Lake” on Apple: https://apple.co/3CM39jzListen to the full episode on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/13y8ZWq4lKB5kM9ZY7Crli

Hi everybody, it's Josh Mankiewicz and we're talking Dateline today with Craig Melvin. Hi Craig. Josh, how are you, man? Good, and congratulations on that new non-Dateline job that you have. I see you trying to fit in around your Dateline responsibilities. Well, you know, my primary obligation remains to Dateline. This Dateline thing, this is correct. Yeah.

So, this episode is called Return to the Lake, and it is about a horrifying case that everybody of a certain age, that being me, will remember. It's from 1994. It's the story of Susan Smith Smith who murdered her two young children. Now, 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. Now, if you've not listened to this episode yet, it is the episode right below this one on the list of podcasts that you just chose from. 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. 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 gonna be joined by a special guest. And that is Dateline producer, Carol Gable, who exchanged letters with Susan Smith for 20 years. And she's gonna 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 to A-Line. You were a small child when this happened, I know that. I was not a small child. No, you were like, you saw this, I'm thinking through the bars of your group.

No, I was 15, I was 15. Okay, all right, because I was, I think, 65 then. Chef. I remember this story. I was actually, not only was I a TV reporter 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. In Columbia, South Carolina, where I'm from, WIS Television was the big station there, still is. And it was one of those stories for two weeks. Multiple stories, every newscast. And this little town, Union, South Carolina, where it happened, it was about an hour from where I grew up. Things like this didn't happen to Union. I mean, Union was, it was like Mayberry, you know? Everyone knew everybody, you know?

Half the town's 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 boy. 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 top of mind for a long time. And I'm presuming that even when the TV wasn't on, everybody was talking about it.

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 and he's like, just drive. And she said, 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.

They knew how frightened she was. 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. 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. And so from jump, she immediately starts to garner justifiable sympathy, you know? And so it triggers this manhunt and you've got... 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, she absolutely played her part. And that obviously helped tremendously. And then when they put out the pictures first and then the video of these little boys, it was really sort of 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. And she still kept it up.

And it wasn't just the telling of the lie. The telling of the lie, the initial lie, and then there were other lies, obviously, because when you lie once, you got to keep lying to cover up the lie. She did it for nine days. A good friend of mine is from Union, and we've talked about it many times since then. People in carjack in Union back in the 90s. First of all, there were only two intersections and you only had like 30 cars. So much of it didn't make sense. And granted, we're looking at it now through the lens of today. And we talked to two other journalists who covered the story closely at the time.

And they both brought it up separately. 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 the story itself and not immediately giving her a pass. Yeah, I mean, I don't wanna say it was a simpler or more innocent time,

but it may have been a less suspicious time. Because without social media and the internet, the impulse was to believe her story. She's telling the truth. And people did believe it. And then, clearly, I mean, at some point, law enforcement starts doing what I think was a pretty good job, like figuring out her story

about the stoplight couldn't have been true. That's pretty good police work, in a time when there weren't cameras at every intersection. That's one of my favorite parts of the episode, is the police start working together, and they give her the polygraph. We know how it turns out.

Then you got Pete Logan, who, by the way, fun fact, worked on the Kennedy assassination 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 it works beautifully. But to your point though, you're right. I mean, this was before we lived

in a time of ubiquitous surveillance. There's no social media, no phone record. Like there's no cell phone towers that we can check. Track her, nothing. Yeah. No, no. Old school. Right, I mean, today that story wouldn't stand up because of technology.

Back then, you told it and you sold it and she did. Mm-hmm. You guys got some conversations Some audio from those conversations. Those have not been played before and they're chilling I thought Well, that's good. I'm concerned about you and just want to know how you were doing. Well, I appreciate you calling. That means a lot. Yeah, I would agree with you. And it was interesting to me just hearing her voice on those tapes. Yeah. So, you know, Susan Smith initially, 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? Funny you should bring that up.

I put that question to Tommy Pope, who was the chief prosecutor in the case at the time. 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. If she had been in the water, there would be 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. 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 gonna come back one day. Yeah. And you included some of those. Is Susan Smith still selling the story, you think?

Oh, no question. No question. These letters have never been shared, and you get a unique insight into what she was thinking then, what she thinks now. And I know you find this to be true with a lot of killers. There is this clear detachment from reality that still very much exists in the letters, and I found that strange. 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. 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. 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. Now, he has not really talked about this case.

No, in part because of not wanting to give air to Susan Smith. 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. We actually talked to him during the Murdoch trial, which he had also not talked about

before. But during this particular case, Chief Keele, 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, in fact, he talked about at one point, he skipped some class to go search for these two little boys, or that black guy from the sketch. And this is for him as well. This is one of those stories that really has always stayed with him. And he was there at the parole hearing in November, which he never does.

He never does. This is full circle for him. I mean, he went from being like part-time on a pilot and now he's running sled and he's still on this story. Yep. Yep. 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. Let's listen to that. What do you remember about the emotions of members of law enforcement back then, after we found out that she had a fake kidney? It was very emotional. And I can remember seeing our agents and other law enforcement personnel as well, but specifically some of our agents,

that were standing in the back hallway at a courthouse and were just sobbing. And they were agents that had been to the scene when the car was pulled out of the water. And I know that there were some that said, you know, I wish I had not been there. I mean, you saw, I saw a motion from agents that had been working on the side cases for years and years that, you know, you'd never saw a motion out of.

Tough guys, but you saw a lot of motion that day. I think to the chief's point, even these guys who had, you've been at SLED for a while, you've seen a murder, you've seen probably a double murder, a car accident, you've seen some stuff. But to see two little boys who were still, when they hoisted that car from John D. Long Lake, they were still strapped in. And they'd been strapped in for nine days. So you can only imagine what these officers saw.

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, it wasn't just the killing of the children. It was the way that she did it. I agree. It is as odd as that may sound. No, I completely agree. Because there's no way that that was quick or painless.

Correct. And anyone who's had small children, you know, kids are 10 and 8 now, and I remember the car seat phase. And I mean, the car seat is sacrosanct. You just got to make sure they're buckled in the car seat. You got to have the car seat, got to make sure the car seat. You become obsessed with the car seat, you gotta make sure the car... You become obsessed with the car seat. And to think that these two little boys, they get strapped in their car seats by their mother. And they die this slow death, submerged in this lake that they...

And I think that's for a lot of people. It's not... 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. But, you know, David Smith, man, he is... And this is of the takeaways for me of the episode, I had never met David before. Obviously I knew who he was, and he doesn't do a lot of interviews at all. And he decided to sit down with us exclusively because he wanted to make sure

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 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, 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. 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 two times that he nearly killed himself. He talked about not being able to get out of bed for months and just going to work. You don't really think about this part of it, but for a very long time, anytime anyone saw—I mean, he was on TV every day for a long time. Everyone knew how the guy looked. And so he would have these strangers, well-meaning strangers, who would come up to him at the grocery store, the bank. I've been praying for you. I prayed for those boys. I prayed for Susan. 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 talked about before on previous episodes of Talking Dateline and elsewhere, which is there's this ripple effect of murder. It's not just the person—it's not just the immediate family. It doesn't go away because the person gets convicted or locked up. And those people that approach you in the supermarket, like they're well-meaning, but they're not letting you move on from this, right?

It also defines your life. Right, and you probably don't wish that, I mean, when you don't want it to, but it will anyway. And 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, in my obit, this will be included. It'll be the husband of, the ex-husband of, and that's, I mean, and think about, I mean, that's just, you know, and 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. They went on, they had a child together, Savannah, she's 24 now. But she spent a fair amount of time talking about how for a very long time, she could not pull him out of what had to be the darkest of days. 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. Someone he completely trusted. Correct.

I really, there are a couple of times, he gets choked up, I get choked up. What moved me the most, Mank, was 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. He said, one of the biggest problems now is 30 years later, he has a hard time remembering the boys. 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 that'll just prolong the trauma. 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. And you could tell that of all of the things that he wishes he could share, I think he just wishes that he had more memories of the boys.

This is not something you get over. Nope. It's why I hate the word closure so much. I mean, she's locked up and she didn't get parole, but there's no closure here. No. Pretty clearly. And that's the thing. 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. And 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 healthcare. 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. And that's why he told me and 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. Like, you don't, you commit a crime like this in South

Carolina, good luck ever getting out. We sat down with her lawyer, David Brock. And he's never talked about this. No, no, no, he never has. And by the way, David Brock also, you know, represents the Charleston shirt shooter. I mean, he's spent a lot of his time representing... 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 I said, David, should she be pro? They said, well, yeah. I said, well, has she been rehabilitated? And he maintains that she has. 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. 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. No. Did that surprise anybody? Was there anybody who thought that was going through?

No. It surprised, you know what? It didn't surprise anyone that I talked to, any of the legal experts. You know, the vote was unanimous. No, it did not. It didn't surprise. After the break, we will be back with Dateline producer, Carole Gabel, and we will answer some of your questions from social media.

We are now joined by producer Carol Gable. Hi, nice to see you. Good to see you, Josh. 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. Tell me a little bit about your journey with this case. What sort of kept you working on it for so long? Susan Smith It was obvious that once she was arrested,

Susan Smith did not have an opportunity to talk about what had happened. As time went on, I really wanted to interview her. I thought that she was the center of one of the biggest stories in America, but we didn't know a lot about her. So, when you write her, did you expect to hear back? No. 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 she wrote back.

The thing that everybody asks about is remorse. What do you detect from Susan Smith under that category? Susan Smith Total remorse, consistent remorse. People ask me this question a lot, and it's almost like once you say and you show you're remorseful, what else can you say? Dr. Craig Love 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 is out there. Why are you Dateline and Carole Gable and Craig Melvin giving this woman a platform to whine about her problems?

She's a terrible person. She committed a horrible crime. She's right where she belongs. Why are you giving her any airtime? 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.

Now we're gonna 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. 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. Was it in Union or was it in Carlisle? Because if she wouldn't have had a car, wouldn't it make a difference to know where the call was placed from?

The Carlisle story was a made up story that Susan told investigators before she confessed, after Sheriff Wells said, you couldn't have been in Monarch, which is a part of Union, because the traffic light situation you report can't happen. Nat. That's when they realized, okay, this person's lying. 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. Yes, it was. Yes, it was. And her son is the one who actually called 911. But everything happened near that lake.

Here's another audio question, this one from Gail Panis on Facebook. 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? They did get divorced. I don't know the timeframe, but fairly soon after they did get divorced. That's it for the audio questions today. Now we're going to go to other questions from social media. 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.

Of course, anyone in that town would have taken those boys. 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. Eight Lawanna 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. And that is something I always think about when kids are involved, which is the life that went on lived. Well, you can't help, but think about that, you know, what,

what might have been. Um, and it's, it's really hard and that's why this is a very searing, searing story. Carl, thank you very much. And thanks everybody for listening. 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 at DatelineNBC, or you can send us an audio message for a chance to be featured in our next Talking Dateline episode. Also, do not forget about Keith's all new podcast

called Murder in the Moonlight. It's very, very good, and I know that because Keith told me that personally. So you can listen to the first two episodes of Murder in the Moonlight right now for free for early access to future episodes and to listen to all Dateline podcasts ad-free, which I know you want to do, subscribe to Dateline Premium on Apple, Spotify, or at datelinepremium.com. See you next Friday for an all-new Dateline on NBC. you