Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother who confessed to killing her two sons more than 20 years ago, wrote a letter explaining she never planned to hurt her children.
Smith, 43, was convicted July 22, 1995, for murdering 3-year-old Michael and 14-month-old Alex by strapping them to their car seats in her 1990 Mazda Protege and then watching as it rolled into the John D. Long Lake in Union, S.C., on the night of Oct. 25, 1994, according to NBC News.
At first, Smith had sympathy from the nation when she lied about the event, saying that a black man carjacked her and kidnapped her children. However, that sympathy turned to rage when she revealed nine days later that she actually committed the crime.
When asked by The State earlier this year about why she lied, Smith said it was because she "didn't know how to tell the people who loved Michael and Alex that they would never see them again," according to The State.
As a result, she planned to kill herself before the truth came out.
"I had planned to kill myself first and leave a note behind telling what had happened," Smith wrote to reporter Harrison Cahill. "I didn't believe I could face my family when the truth was revealed."
"I am not the monster society thinks I am. I am far from it," she said, according to the Palm Beach Post.
One thing she noted upset her the most about the trial was that prosecutors argued that she killed the boys because a man she was having an affair with ended their relationship eight days before the incident.
"The thing that hurts me the most is that people think that I hurt my children in order to be with a man. That is so far from the truth," she said. "There was no motive as it was not even a planned event. I was not in my right mind."
