Mourners Still Visit Lake as Smith Trial Opens : Courts: Debate centers on whether she should be executed for killing her sons. Community where she was derided as a baby killer is divided.

Eight months later, the mourners still come.

They stand in respectful silence beside the still waters as if in church. Birds sing overheard in the trees. A breeze ripples the surface of the lake. A concrete boat ramp leads down to the water and vanishes near where a family of geese floats quietly and unconcerned.

“It’s just a beautiful place,” said Cynthia Boatright. She had driven with her husband nearly two hours from Columbia to stand in this spot. “It’s hard to believe that something that terrible happened here.”

Thousands of people have come since Nov. 3, when a 23-year-old secretary named Susan Smith confessed to drowning her two children in John D. Long Lake. She confessed after first deceiving her estranged husband and a sympathetic nation for nine days with tearful lies of a kidnaping.

With the start of jury selection Monday in her trial, the eyes of the nation once again are riveted on this town as lawyers prepare to debate not whether Smith is guilty or innocent but whether she should live or die. County Solicitor Tommy Pope has rejected her offer of a guilty plea in return for life in prison, choosing instead to seek her execution--a decision that has divided this community of 10,000 people.

For many, the revelations sure to come out in the trial of sexual molestation, marital infidelities and attempted suicide--all allegedly leading up to the killings--are too ugly for public airing.

Union, with its freshly swept streets, its Mayberry-like storefronts and vestiges of July 4 bunting, presents a perfect picture of bucolic small-town America. But, as the details of Smith’s troubled past reveal, the truth is closer to the twisted, subterranean tales of filmmaker David Lynch.

Smith’s parents divorced when she was 5.

Her father, a firefighter, committed suicide a few months later. When she was 16, Smith told a high school counselor that her stepfather had fondled her.

The stepfather, Beverly Russell, is a prominent businessman, active in the Christian Coalition. He has admitted molesting Smith when she was 15, and resigned in April from the state’s Republican Party executive committee because of the scandal.

It gets even more sordid. The Charlotte Observer, quoting unnamed sources, reported in April that Smith had told a psychiatrist she had been a “willing participant” in a long-term sexual relationship with Russell and had had sex with him as recently as six months before she killed her children. She had accused him of molestation, the paper reported, to hurt her mother.

Tales such as these have shocked this close-knit, God-fearing community where everybody, it seems, knows everybody else.

Smith’s troubled history, which includes at least two suicide attempts, will figure prominently in her defense. Her attorney, David Bruck, will try to show that she was not responsible for her actions on the night of Oct. 25 when, reportedly despondent over a failed love affair, she rolled her car into the lake. Her sons, 3-year-old Michael and 14-month-old Alex, were strapped in their car seats.

Prosecutors are expected to portray her as a cold, selfish woman who wanted to get rid of the children to win the love of a man who had spurned her. The former lover is Tom Findlay, the son of the wealthy owner of the textile mill where Smith worked. Telling her he did not want a ready-made family, he broke up with her a week before the killings.

On Monday, at a hearing designed to determine if Smith is competent to stand trial, a psychiatrist testified that she suffers from depression, is suicidal and has a fantasy of dying and rejoining her children. The doctor maintained, however, that she understands the charges and should stand trial. The hearing will continue today.

When Smith was arrested, the sense of betrayal and outrage locally was so great that hundreds of people gathered at each of her court appearances to jeer and shout epithets such as “baby killer” and “murderer.” Many African Americans in particular were outraged because she had said a black man had taken the boys during a carjacking. Here, in a South that death penalty opponents call the “Death Belt,” the prevalent sentiment was that a mother capable of so heinous a deed should be executed.

Many have since softened their views.

A trial would be too expensive, would reopen too many wounds, some here now say. For others, the revelations about Smith’s past are key.

One woman wrote to the local newspaper: “Not one of us knows what kind of pressures were on her mind that night, what caused her to slip over the edge. We can’t judge her until we have been in her place . . . Susan is mentally ill and needs help. She and her family need our prayers, not our hate.”

The letter is now tacked to a memorial that has sprung up beside the lake. A roped-off area, near a photograph of the two boys and a freshly planted tree, is filled with flowers, toys, plaques, poems and scribbled notes.

The words in the letter found a receptive heart in Joey West of Graniteville, S.C., who visited the site Friday.

“When I heard that she had confessed I just went numb,” he said softly, as others drifted to the memorial to pay their respects and snap photographs. “I had some hard feelings toward her, just as hundreds of thousands of other people did,” West said. “I kept saying that, as long as she’d confessed and there’s no question that she did it, we ought to just put her in a car and run her off in the lake and let her drown the way her kids did.”

But now, he said, he feels differently. “It just takes time to heal,” he said.

For many, though, the pain will never heal.

Smith’s ex-husband, David, an assistant supermarket manager, is among those who support the solicitor’s decision to seek the death penalty. And some who come to the memorial still consider the crime unforgivable.

At the lakeside, parents shush their children as if they are at a sacred place. Pointing to the picture of the two boys, a little girl asks her mother where they are. “In heaven,” her mother says.

While the scene at the lake is peaceful, in town everyone has been gearing up for the trial. Downtown has been spruced up. A block-long scaffold has been set up across the street from the courthouse to hold television cameras. Despite the fact that the judge has barred broadcasts from his courtroom, four networks have leased space to use as offices for the duration of the trial. Local townspeople with parking lots or room to lease are looking at a financial bonanza.

Despite all the preparations, the scene downtown Monday was quiet as Smith was brought to the courthouse, in contrast to the hissing crowds that swelled whenever Smith appeared at the courthouse last November. There were no angry hecklers. No shouts of “baby killer.” No cries for blood.

Some here question whether the changing tide of opinion about Smith is due entirely to the passage of time and the revelations about her mental state, or if it might also be influenced, in part, by who she is.

This was no faceless menace who struck in the night--no nameless black man, as Smith alleged--but a well-known, white neighbor, a middle-class woman from a good family who was voted friendliest in her high school class, a woman known to dote lovingly on her two children.

“If it had been a black man [who killed the children], he’d be dead already,” said Modest Keenan, a black town barber who opposes the death penalty because he believes it is administered unfairly.

Tensions in the town were so high during the nine days before Smith’s confession that a black culprit would have been the victim of vigilante justice, he alleged.

Of the 287 people who have been executed in the United States since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976, 55% have been white and 39% have been black, according to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, which compiles figures.

Although there are approximately 40 women on death row across the country, only one woman has been executed in the modern history of the death penalty--Velma Barfield, a North Carolina grandmother, who was executed in 1984 for poisoning her boyfriend after also confessing to killing her mother and two other people to cover up check forgeries.

Stephen Bright, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, said there seems to be a reluctance to execute women in some states. “That probably is something Smith . . . has working in her favor in this case,” he said.

But Nancy Munch, executive director of Parents of Murdered Children, a volunteer organization based in Cincinnati that supports the families of murder victims, decries that attitude. “We have to take the gender off of it,” she said. “We have to take the race off of it. We have to quit finding excuses to allow people to escape punishment . . . .

“When it is a parent killing a child, we have a tendency to excuse that behavior,” she said. “We want to believe so much that all parents love their children the same way we all do. So, if they have harmed them, there’s got to be something wrong with them . . . She had to be temporarily insane, or some type of psychotic breakdown, because mothers don’t do this to children. We just know they don’t do it . . . . “

Walter Gove, a sociology professor at Vanderbilt University, said Smith does not fit the profile of a typical death penalty defendant. “She’s not someone who has all the attributes of being an evil person,” he said, adding that she comes across as both offender and victim.

The death penalty is being sought in this case, argues David C. Baldus, a law professor at the University of Iowa and co-author of a book on the death penalty, not because of the crime but because Smith enraged the public by committing “massive fraud.”

“There are many children that are murdered and most of them are murdered by their parents, and death sentences are extremely rare in such cases,” he said.

Times researcher Edith Stanley contributed to this story.