Death and Deceit

Forget that you once loved them, that of your body they were born. For one short day, forget your children; afterwards, weep. Though you kill them, they were your beloved sons.

-- Euripides, Medea

No town said sadder prayers than Union, South Carolina, last week. The easiest prayers were for the father who had lost his sons; rather harder for the mother who had surely lost her mind. But the hardest of all were for the boys. Dear God, let them have been asleep that night, snuggled in the safety of their car seats. That way they wouldn't have felt the rough gravel road through the forest, or seen the edge of the dark lake. They would not have wondered why their mother got out of the car, leaving the doors and windows shut tight, why the car was still moving forward with no one behind the wheel. It was too much to hope that they never felt the water, or the sinking, or the terror of dying together, alone.

The divers finally found the bodies last week, nearly 100 feet out from a boat ramp in the man-made lake stocked full of catfish. The children were still securely strapped in; with the windows shut, the car had floated slowly out into the lake as it filled with water, then flipped over and settled into the silt. When the search team finally dragged the car out, veteran diver Steve Morrow stood on the banks and cried. "There's no way to be thick skinned about something like this," he says. "When it's an accidental death you can deal with it a little better, but knowing that someone could deliberately . . ." his voice trails off. When he got home that night, Morrow says, he crawled into bed with his little boy. "I just had to hold him for awhile."

They had searched the lake before, but in the murky water it would have been impossible to find the car unless they knew just where to look -- as they did by Thursday afternoon. Sweet Susan Smith -- the mother America had come to know over breakfast, crying for the return of her stolen children on the Today show, playing with them at a videotaped birthday party, pleading that the kidnapper feed them and care for them -- had confessed to killing them.

! God made them cute so we wouldn't kill them, goes the old joke. All anyone wanted to know was how she could possibly have done it. What person watching -- and parents from the President on down couldn't turn their eyes away -- had not felt the sleep-depriving, soul-splitting pressures of parenting and worried about their own capacity for violence? But this was not the typical child murder, the experts rushed to explain, not an outburst of uncontrollable rage turned accidentally fatal. This was cold calculation. Parents who began the week trying to explain to their own children about Stranger Danger ended it having to explain something far scarier.

The statistics promise that kidnapped children are a hundred times more likely to be taken by friends, loved ones, parents, than by strangers. And yet, as the search for Michael and Alex Smith continued, it required too complex a calculation to suspend pity and suspect a plot. Even when wormy doubts poked through -- Could this possibly all be a hoax? -- millions watched Susan Smith's sorrowful pleas and put suspicions aside.

"I can't even describe what I'm going through. It just aches so bad. I can't sleep. I can't eat. I can't do anything but think about them."