Parents Who Kill--Shocking True Stories of the World's Most Evil Parents by Carol Anne Davis Read Free Book Online

the police. Susan continued to spend her evenings and weekends in frenetic activity as if by filling every waking moment she wouldn’t have time to think.
    At 18, she started dating an older married man and was deliriously happy – but when he ended the affair, she took an overdose and spent several days in hospital. She again went into therapy.
    At 19, Susan became pregnant by David Smith, a year her senior, who already had a fiancée. Susan was working as a checkout girl at the local supermarket and David was the assistant manager. The couple had a church wedding in March 1991 and their first son, Michael, arrived in October. Susan was a good mother though she worried constantly about money and was very jealous when David spoke to other women, sometimes hitting him and accusing him of cheating on her.
    Two days after their first wedding anniversary, the couple split up but they later reconciled and created a second son, Alex. But, shortly after his birth in September 1993, they split up again. Susan no longer wanted David, but she hated to see anyone else with him and did everything that she could to break him and his girlfriend up. By now she was having full consensual sex with Bev, her stepfather, who was still married to her mother. She also had relationships with various other men in town.
A NEW START
    In September 1994, Susan filed for divorce, though this was against David’s wishes. She took a secretarial job with a fabrics firm and began dating Tom Findlay, the boss’s son. She often left the children with friends whilst she went out to party, sometimes spending her evenings at a popular country and western club. But when Tom realised that she wanted a seriousrelationship he admitted that he didn’t want to settle down with someone who already had children. He wrote her a very complimentary farewell letter, telling her that she’d ‘make some man a great wife.’ He could have played her along, but instead decided to be honest – yet he’d be left with feelings of guilt over what happened next. For, instead of finding someone who was happy to join a readymade family, Susan decided to get rid of her existing one. If she was single, Tom – who was affluent and attractive – would hopefully want her again…
    On the evening of Tuesday 25 October 1994, a week after the break-up, she drove 14-month-old Alex and three-year-old Michael to John D Long Lake. Parking on the bank, she got out of the car, took off the handbrake and watched the vehicle roll into the water and eventually sink out of sight. Racing to a nearby house, she begged them to contact the police, saying that she’d been carjacked at nearby traffic lights by a black man, and that he’d made her drive into the country at gunpoint, whereupon he’d taken control of her Mazda and driven away with both of her sons.
    Police – aided by hundreds of concerned local people – mounted a huge search of the area, and photographs of the boys and descriptions of what they were wearing were broadcast on national television. Susan and David (who had no reason to doubt his wife’s version of events) made a televised plea for their safe return. Susan said ‘I have prayed that whoever has them, that the Lord will let him realize that they are missed and loved more than any other children in this world.’ After further religious sentiments she added ‘I just feel in my heart that you’re okay.’
    For nine days, Susan stuck to her story whilst her son’s corpses decomposed in John D Long Lake – divers had searched parts of the lake but it was an enormous stretch of water and they failed to find the Mazda. She slept a lot, thoughshe became upset when she had to take a lie detector test. David told her that, when they got the boys back, they would reconcile as a family and she replied that he and she could do so even if they didn’t get the boys back.
LIE DETECTOR
    But the authorities were becoming increasingly aware that Susan’s story wasn’t adding