Killer mom Susan Smith denied parole 30 years after drowning sons

Smith appeared emotional and crying on the feed. 

The reasons for the parole board's denial were the nature and seriousness of the crime and Smith's institutional record of offenses. 

He added that if Smith were granted parole, she would be living with her brother. 

The 53-year-old's ex-husband, David Smith, arrived at the parole hearing to face the woman who killed his children, wearing a pin showing his two toddler sons.   

"I'm asking that you please deny her parole today," he said emotionally, holding back tears.

"I believe the jury intended for her to serve a full life sentence," Tommy Pope, the prosecutor who helped convict Smith in her case, told Fox News Digital. "They wanted her to spend her life and remorse for Michael and Alex and what she had done, and she has time focused on herself having sex with guards, etc."  

Pope also attended Wednesday's parole hearing, and he asked the board to deny Smith's parole. 

"She never showed real contrition for murdering her children."

Bland said Susan Smith contacted her ex-husband at one point over the last several months, asking him if he'd be willing not to oppose her parole and to speak to other family members and see if they too would be willing not to oppose. 

Here is a timeline, detailing the events leading up to, during and after Smith's horrific crime all the way through her decades in prison: 

Susan Smith strapped her sons, 3-year-old Michael and 14-month-old Alexander Smith, into the back seat of her car and let it roll down a ramp into John D. Long Lake in Union, South Carolina.

Smith, 22 at the time, watched as it took six minutes for water to fill the car, drown her boys and sink the car to the bottom of the lake. 

She ran to a house near John D. Long Lake, falsely telling the homeowners that a "Black man" had stolen her car with her two sons inside. The homeowners called 911. 

For nine days, the young faces of Michael and Alexander Smith spread across national headlines, while authorities searched for the man Susan said kidnapped the boys. Susan and David Smith pleaded on national television for the return of their children. 

"The whole story sounded highly unlikely," Pope said in the Fox Nation special, "Never are you hearing a carjacker taking children normally."

After failing a polygraph test, Susan Smith retracted her lie about the kidnapping and confessed to killing her two sons. She was charged with two counts of murder.

Hundreds attended the funeral of Michael and Alexander Smith. 

Susan Smith's trial began less than a year after she drowned her sons. While prosecutors argued her motive for killing the boys was that a man she was seeing at the time didn't want children, Smith's defense said she was suicidal and originally planned to drown with her sons before somehow pulling herself out of it.

"I was very emotionally distraught. I didn't want to live anymore! I felt like things could never get any worse," Smith wrote in her confession letter, obtained by Fox News Digital. "I felt I couldn't be a good mom anymore but I didn't want my children to grow up without a mom. I felt I had to end our lives to protect us all from any grief or harm." 

Susan Smith was convicted in the murder of her two sons, Michael and Alexander. 

Though prosecutors argued that Susan Smith should receive the death penalty, she was ultimately sentenced to life in prison. 

Smith received 10 disciplinary sanctions, including one for having sex with a prison guard and others for repeated drug use.

Smith was charged on Aug. 26 and subsequently convicted on Oct. 3 for communicating with a victim/and or witness after speaking to a documentary filmmaker. South Carolina Department of Corrections inmates are not allowed to do interviews on the telephone or in person, according to SCDC policy, but they may write letters. Smith lost her telephone, tablet and canteen privileges for 90 days.

On Nov. 4, Susan Smith had spent 30 years behind bars, making her eligible for parole. 

Smith appeared on a jailhouse court feed for her first parole hearing on Nov. 20. 

Her parole was unanimously denied at the end of the hearing. One parole board member recused herself from the hearing due to the fact that she had previously been a warden at a facility where Smith was housed.  

Smith will be eligible for parole again in two years. 

Fox News' Audrey Conklin contributed to this report.