Susan Smith let her kids drown in 1994 and now mourns their death: 'She cries for her children every Christmas'
Nearly 25 years after she killed her two young sons in 1994 and became the subject of international news headlines, Susan Smith still mourns them, according to a police source.
"The holidays fill her with guilt and regret. She cries for her children every Christmas. She knows she did the most horrible thing imaginable, and it tears her up every day. She’s a tortured soul," said the unidentified source, who says Smith keeps a Bible and a photo of her two sons in her cell.
At the time, Smith killed her children by letting her car roll into a lake with three-year-old Michael and 14-month-old Alex still strapped in their car seats. She did it because she was secretly dating a man who didn't want children.
Now 48, Smith is serving life imprisonment without the possibility of parole at Leath Correctional Institution in Greenwood, South Carolina.
Despite her harsh sentence, Smith has not been a model prisoner. Smith has been disciplined at least five times for various infractions, including self-mutilation and the use and possession of narcotics or marijuana.
She was also disciplined in 2000 for having sex four times with a prison guard. Then in 2001, a prison captain, Alfred Rowe, also pleaded guilty to having sex with Smith.
Since then, Smith spends most of her time in her cell or working as the ward keeper's assistant. Whenever she's being transported now, there is always a male and female guard with her.
Smith, in a letter to the State in 2015, claimed that she had been misunderstood and that she was "not the monster society thinks I am. I am far from it."
According to this written statement, she said: "Something went very wrong that night. I was not myself. 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."
While Smith is not permitted to give interviews, the prison source said that Smith "doesn’t talk about her boys much, but when she does, it's always with a lot of sadness." and that she is "still in mourning — and she’ll never stop mourning for the rest of her life."