Susan Smith, woman who killed her children, started drugs to replace 'male attention'

A new documentary explores the prison life of convicted criminal Susan Smith, who drowned her two young sons in 1994, allegedly because her boyfriend did not want children.

In Friday's episode of Lifetime's "Cellmate Secrets," Susan Smith's former cellmates and a prison guard who had sex with her opened up about the infamous criminal's time behind bars. Alfred Rowe, the guard who pleaded guilty in 2001 to having sex with Smith and was sentenced to five years probation for his crime, recalled her extensive use of drugs in prison and claimed that it got worse because she was using it to replace "male attention."

Rowe noted that her drug use escalated when she switched prisons from Camille Graham Correctional Center in Columbia, S.C., to Leath Correctional Institution in Greenwood. According to him, it was because "she could not longer get the male attention that she used as a drug."

Christie Smith (no relation), Susan's former cellmate, revealed that it was her who used to procure drugs for the child killer. "I've seen Susan do everything. Snort, booty bump, swallow, shoot. I've seen her do it all. My main purpose was to bring her pills," Smith said.

Another former cellmate, Stephanie Hulsey, revealed that inmates procured pills for their fellow prisoners by stashing them in their upper cheeks to avoid detection by guards. Smith remains at the Leath Correctional Institution, where she is serving her sentence of life imprisonment. She will be eligible for parole in November 2024, marking 30 years of her sentence.

Smith's case had garnered international attention after she made several tearful pleas for the return of her two children, three-year-old Michael, and 14-month-old Alexander, alleging that a black man had kidnapped her sons during a carjacking. Nine days after her initial statement to police, she confessed that it was her who let her car roll into a lake with her two sons still strapped in their car seats, drowning them inside.

The then 23-year-old, who shared the children with her estranged husband David Smith, reportedly wanted to facilitate a relationship with a local wealthy man by the name of Tom Findlay, who had sent her a letter ending their relationship and expressing that he did not want children. She insists that she had no motive nor plans for the murder, but she did the crime because she was not in the right state of mind.