Lawman reveals how he got monster mom SUSAN SMITH to confess she drowned her TWO infant sons in a chilling EXCLUSIVE ENQUIRER INTERIEW
South Carolina lawman Howard Wells got monster mom Susan Smith to admit she drowned her two sons – and now nearly 20 years after the crime that stunned America, he reveals exclusively to The National ENQUIRER how he cracked the heartbreaking case.
On Oct. 25, 1994, Smith reported to police that she had been carjacked, and claimed a black man had driven away with her sons still in the car – Michael, 3, and Alexander, 14 months.
For the next nine days, the 23-year-old married mom pleaded on national television for the safe return of her children.
Former Union County Sheriff Wells told The ENQUIRER he had just graduated from the FBI Academy when the case erupted and it became his job to solve it. To add to the small-town drama, Wells, now 63, said he personally knew Susan’s entire family and all the demons that haunted the young mother.
“She lived on the same street I lived on,” he told The ENQUIRER, and he knew about her troubled past of sexual abuse, an attempted suicide as a teen and affairs with married men.
“You have to imagine the extreme pressure,” Wells said, describing the massive nine-day search by hundreds of FBI agents, state police and volunteers. “You can’t go out and hammer someone who is your victim/suspect, because if you turn out to be wrong, the whole world would be against you.”
The lawman didn’t know that the boys were submerged 18 feet under the John D. Long Lake strapped into the 1990 Mazda Protegé their mother had pushed into the water, but he had doubts about her tale.
To unravel her story, Wells prayed with Smith and gave her a shoulder to cry on while overseeing the massive search.
Then on Nov. 3, 1994, he tried a new tactic – and caught Smith off-guard. He told her he knew she was lying, and he falsely claimed that undercover cops were working where the supposed carjacking occurred.
“She just broke down and started crying,” Wells recalled. “She said she didn’t want to live, and then she told the whole story. I asked, ‘Why don’t you want to live?’ And she said, ‘Because my children are not okay.’”
At the time, an ENQUIRER investigation uncovered that only hours before she drowned her adorable, trusting youngsters, Smith tracked down a rich lover who’d dumped her and found him flirting with three women in a bar.
Wells hasn’t spoken to Smith since she was sentenced to life in prison. But he still greets her family whenever he runs into them. Radiating a dedicated lawman’s dogged determination, he said simply, “We had to do what we had to do.”
