Doctor Says Son’s Cries Stopped Smith’s Suicide

Susan Smith said she considered throwing herself and her sons off a bridge hours before she drowned them, a psychiatrist testified Friday at her murder trial.

The cries of 3-year-old Michael stopped her, Dr. Seymour Halleck said she told him.

Halleck, who interviewed Smith four times at the request of her lawyers, told him she drove aimlessly on Oct. 25, thinking suicide was the “only solution” to her troubles, then arrived at a bridge over the Broad River several miles outside Union, he testified.

“She stops the car on the bridge and contemplates jumping in the river, and contemplates taking the children with her,” he said. “But she hears Michael crying and decides not to do that.”

Later, she drove to a lake and rolled her car into it with the boys strapped in their seats. Before finally confessing on Nov. 3, she claimed that a black carjacker had abducted the boys. Prosecutors contend she killed them to eliminate an obstacle to a love affair.

The University of North Carolina professor of psychiatry and law supported the defense contention that Smith intended to commit suicide when she drowned her sons.

If the jury finds her guilty of murder, a second phase of the trial would be held to determine whether she should receive the death penalty.

During their talks, Halleck said she mentioned contradictory voices--”like a devil and an angel”--in her head, and he wondered at first if these were signs of schizophrenic hallucinations.

But she told him she did not consider the voices real. “These are just arguments I’m having with myself,” he quoted her as saying.

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After Smith’s then-husband, David, left their home for the last time in August, 1994, she became increasingly depressed, telling Halleck that she thought of suicide almost every day, he testified.

Smith began drinking more and said she juggled sexual relationships with at least three men, Halleck said, including her stepfather, Beverly Russell, who molested her as a teen-ager.

These actions appeared to be “a desperate searching to deal with the loneliness,” Halleck said.

Like her depressed father, he said, the 23-year-old Smith is able to present a pleasant exterior that concealed serious mental illness. Her father, Harry Vaughn, killed himself when she was 6, and he once held his wife at gunpoint in the presence of their children.