The Racial Hoax Murders and the Killer of Killers

This episode contains descriptions and details

that some listeners might find disturbing.

Listener discretion is advised.

Well, hey there and welcome back to American Criminal.

In 1989, the murder of Carol Stewart

received a lot of attention in the media.

It was a complex messy case

that held America transfixed

and it left Boston reeling.

First, the city and its leaders said Carol's death

was an example of the drug-fueled violence brought on

by the crack cocaine epidemic.

Then the police marched into Mission Hill,

aggressively targeting young black men

for searches and interrogation.

And when the truth was finally revealed,

no one knew what to say.

The entire city had been fooled

and it had been so easy.

All Chuck had to do to sow that level of division

was say that a black man had attacked him and his wife.

But what Chuck Stewart did wasn't revolutionary.

Evil?

Sure, but hardly original.

Because stories like this have been repeated over and over

again, Professor Catherine Russell Brown,

who studies race and crime, sociology and criminal law,

popularized a term for these incidents.

Racial hoaxes.

These are instances of people taking advantage of fears

and stereotypes to commit or invent some kind of crime.

Professor Russell Brown has two categories for these.

The first are convenience hoaxes

when people make up an imaginary crime

for personal reasons.

Maybe they need an excuse for being late to work

to cover up some humiliation they've experienced

or even just to impress someone with an exciting story.

So they say they were robbed or assaulted.

And more often than not,

the perpetrator of this fake crime is a black man.

Here's an abridged version of such a story.

In 1931, there were two groups of teenage boys

riding a train in Alabama,

a group of white kids and one of black.

Now apparently, the white kids didn't like sharing

the rails with the black kids

and tried to force them off the train.

When the black guys refused to leave,

the white guys found a station master

and told him that the black guys had attacked them.

Pretty soon, cops had boarded the train

and arrested all nine of the black teens.

They also picked up a young white woman

and a white teenage girl.

Allegedly, both of them were sex workers

and were facing criminal charges of their own.

When they all got to jail,

the girls accused the black teens

of raping them on board the train.

News of this alleged crime spread quickly

and a mob of thousands showed up at the Scottsboro jail

where the teens were held.

Linching black men accused of raping white women

was a common occurrence back then.

So Alabama's governor mobilized the National Guard

to protect the jail and courthouse.

With so many eyes watching the case,

the Scottsboro boys, as they were collectively known,

were quickly convicted by all white juries.

They received sentences ranging from decades behind bars

to death.

But here's the thing.

One of the alleged victims of the rape

changed her story during the drawn out appeals process.

While on the stand, she recanted,

saying that she and the other young woman came up with the story

to avoid being thrown in jail for prostitution.

Several of the black teens eventually had their convictions

overturned or were pardoned.

But others ended up locked away for years.

Three of those who served time weren't pardoned

until 2013, decades after their deaths.

The Scottsboro boys case is one of the most famous

racial hoaxes in American history.

It's one that had a long, long tale

and is generally considered a miscarriage of justice

over a crime that never actually happened.

But not all racial hoaxes look exactly alike.

The second category that Professor Russell Brown

sorts racial hoaxes into are cover-ups.

When a person commits an actual crime

and then tries to blame a person or group of people

usually from another race.

Obviously, if you listen to our series

on the murder of Carol Stewart,

you already know one of these stories very well.

But there are plenty more stomach churning cases

of people blaming a faceless other for their own misdeeds.

And two of them came hot on the heels

of the explosive Stewart murder.

This is the racial hoax murders and the killer of killers.

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April 21st, 1992 is a Tuesday,

so it's an unusual night for Jesse and Barbara Anderson

to go on a date.

But babysitters for their three young kids

are easier to arrange on weeknight, so Tuesday it is.

The family lives a comfortable life

on the rural outskirts of Cedarburg, Wisconsin.

So Jesse and Barbara relish the chance

to come into Milwaukee for a little grown-up time

and civilization.

They start with a seven o'clock show

at the Northridge Mall movie theater.

When that lets out, they head to the nearby TGI Fridays

for a late dinner.

They pay their check around 1015 and head for their car.

Moments later, people inside the restaurant

hear a commotion coming from the parking lot.

Shouts for help, most of all.

A group of customers and staff run outside

where they find 31-year-old Jesse feet away from the door,

a black baseball cap in his hand

and a small knife sticking out of his chest.

He's standing over his wife who's lying on the ground.

A couple of the bystanders scream

at the site of 33-year-old Barbara, and I don't blame him.

She's been stabbed more than a dozen times

than the chast, neck, and face.

There's blood everywhere.

People rush to help the couple

while someone heads inside to call for an ambulance.

Stammering and seemingly in shock,

Jesse explains that they were attacked.

That much is obvious.

It was two young black guys, he says.

The couple were walking towards their car

when Jesse heard Barbara scream

and turned around to see some guy stabbing her.

He leapt to her defense, struggling with the two men,

trying to get the knife from them.

That's how the blade got stuck in his chest.

The attackers ran off after that.

Jesse holds up the black L.A. clippers hat in his hand.

He knocked this off one of their heads, he remembers,

while a server from the restaurant

helps him sit down on the curb.

When the cops arrive on the scene a few minutes later,

Jesse repeats the story,

handing them the knife that he's now pulled from his chest.

It's small, a red plastic handle and four inch blade.

It's the kind of thing you'd buy at an outdoor sports store.

Not that Jesse's thinking about the provenance

of weapons just now.

Barbara's rushed to the closest hospital

where doctors tend to her horrific injuries.

She has 21 stab wounds and all.

Right from the start, doesn't look good.

But her husband has been much more fortunate.

Jesse only received four stab wounds.

One of them punctured his lung,

but that's the most serious of his problems.

Or so he thinks.

So this probably isn't gonna shock you,

but Jesse Anderson is a big fat liar.

That's why Milwaukee's cops are stumped first

that doesn't seem to be any motive for this attack.

The Anderson's were robbed,

so the only thing people could think of

is that this is some kind of terrifying gang initiation ritual.

But even that doesn't seem likely

to people who know anything about local gang activity.

But early local media coverage of the case

brings in some tips that help investigators figure everything out.

The first useful call they get us from a 20 year old kid

called Tommy Miles.

He tells the cops that he was at a mall

the day before the attack,

when a man who looked just like Jesse Anderson walked up to him

and offered to buy his black clippers cap for 20 bucks.

Two of Tommy's friends back the story up.

And Tommy himself describes a grease stain inside the hat

that proves it's the one Jesse claimed he got from the attackers.

So that's not looking good for Jesse.

But it's not quite a smoking gun.

That investigators get when the owner of a military good store

calls to report that a man matching Jesse's description

bought a fishing knife from him about a month ago.

And he literally has the receipts to back his story up.

His store is the only one in Milwaukee

that stalks the kind of knife that stab Barbara and Jesse.

And they've only sold one of them, ever.

On Thursday afternoon, less than 48 hours

after the stabbing, Barbara Anderson dies from her injuries,

turning an already serious criminal case

into a murder investigation.

A couple of days after that,

Jesse is released from the hospital free

to return to his children and move on with his life.

But that new chapter is incredibly short, only last two hours.

He's barely made at home when police show up

to take him into custody.

The next day, Milwaukee's finest announced

that they're charging Jesse with his wife's murder.

Then they start assembling more evidence for their case

and they do not have to look hard.

A search of the Anderson's house turns up

a letter Barbara wrote to Jesse.

In it, she tells him that she wants to reconcile.

Exactly what they were fighting about.

She doesn't say, but she apologizes to her husband

for having gained weight since they got married

and promises to work harder on her appearance.

Whatever their problems, whatever her husband said to her,

she wanted their marriage to work.

Apparently, Jesse didn't.

The investigation reveals that just weeks before he killed her,

Jesse called to update Barbara's $250,000

life insurance policy.

Yeah, it's another one of those stories.

With all of that evidence stacked against him,

Jesse doesn't stand a chance at trial.

In August, just four months later,

he's convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

But he's given a glimmer of hope.

He will be eligible for parole in 60 years

when he's in his mid 90s.

He won't make it to 40 though.

And here's where this already tragic story

takes a truly wild turn.

Two years later, Jesse's serving time

at the Columbia Correctional Institute.

He's incarcerated with hundreds of other inmates,

but there are just two who are important to this story.

The first is 25-year-old Christopher Scarver,

a convicted murderer serving a life sentence of his own.

The second is 34-year-old Jeff Reed Dahmer,

the serial killer who targeted young men and boys

from the late 70s to the early 90s.

On the morning of November 28th, 1994,

Jesse, Christopher, and Dahmer

are carrying out their assigned cleaning duties

in the prison's gym facilities.

They're unsupervised.

So no one is around to stop Christopher

when he savagely beats his fellow inmates

with a 20-inch metal bar he hid inside his uniform.

After the attack, Christopher,

who's thought to live with schizophrenia,

returns to his cell and tells a guard what he's done.

God ordered him to do it, he says.

Dahmer is rushed to a hospital,

but he's dead within an hour.

Jesse lives for two more days,

but dies from his injuries on the 30th.

He's 37, and he takes to his grave

his reasons for killing his wife of seven years.

In the aftermath of the crime, no one could quite believe it.

Jesse and Barbara had seemed so happy,

but it at all turned out to be a lie.

The Anderson's had concealed their troubles from the world,

and in turn, it seems Jesse had disguised

as hatred for his wife.

Only a deep-seated loathing could have motivated him

to attack her so viciously.

And just like Charles Stewart,

he was sure that the community would believe him

when he blamed black men for the crime.

But the world hadn't forgotten about Carol Stewart

and Mission Hill just yet.

Newspaper articles about Jesse compared the two cases,

noting just how similar they were.

It seemed that the world was catching up to this kind of crime.

The cops had spotted this one a mile off.

Surely no one would be fooled

for even a minute the next time.

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["South Carolina"]

Around 9.30 p.m. on October 25th, 1994,

Susan Smith is found crying on a front porch

in Union County, South Carolina.

The owner of the house tries to comfort Susan

who seems inconsolable.

But slowly, through her tears,

she manages to tell him what happened.

Once she's got her story out,

the man brings Susan into the house and calls 9-1-1.

Yeah, that is a lady.

She'd come up, got nowhere.

And she's some guy jumping into a red light with her car

with her two kids in it.

And he took off, and she got out of the car here at our house.

And she's got the kids?

Yes, ma'am, and her car.

I don't know if she's real hysterical.

I just said, I need the car log.

Get them down here.

Get him going, pang him.

I got two kids.

Police rushed to the house just off Highway 49

and collect a statement from 23-year-old Susan.

She goes over the story with them.

She was stopped at a red light when a man opened the passenger

side door and threatened her with a gun.

There were no other cars around, so Susan

couldn't even call out for help.

He made her drive a short way, then ordered her out

of the car before he sped off with the vehicle.

It's a harrowing story on its own,

but the kicker is that her two young sons were

in the back of the car.

Michael is three years old, and Alex is just 14 months.

Before she got out of the car, Susan told her boys

to be brave for her.

And that was the last she saw of them.

The cops asked what the car jacket looked like.

And Susan says that he was black.

In his late 20s, early 30s was wearing blue jeans

and a plaid shirt, and that he had a toboggan hat on.

With an hours, a sketch artist

just come up with an approximation

of what this man might look like.

Not that it's a very useful tool.

Susan's description of the guy is so vague

that the sketch could be any one of hundreds

of young black men in the community.

Local police start going door-to-door that night,

seeking out the homes of black families

and questioning any man who remotely matched the description

Susan gave.

But they don't uncover any leads that way.

Thankfully, the cops aren't alone in their search.

The small city of Union comes together

to hunt for the man who's made off

with Susan Smith's children.

Police helicopters and search dogs

are sent to perform sweeps of the area,

while locals scratch their heads and wonder how such a shocking

crime could happen in their community.

I mean, they're only about 10,000 people in the city,

so everyone feels like they know just about everyone.

Surely, someone should know who this mystery car jacket is.

They just need more eyeballs on it.

Locals tie yellow ribbons to trees throughout the city

to raise awareness of the crime while others hand out flyers

with a picture of Susan's car and a sketch of the suspect.

But the truth is that the case didn't need any extra promotion.

The story captures the attention of the press

almost as quickly as it draws in the police.

Susan and her estranged husband, David,

appear on the nightly news.

Susan repeating the story of what happened

and making the plea for their son safe return.

But some local producers can help noticing

that Susan seems excited by all the attention.

Watching footage of an interview back,

they noticed that before Susan sat down in front of the cameras,

she was smiling and flustered.

Her demeanor switched once she sat beside David, though.

It was eerie to watch.

Of course, none of this was shown to the public.

All anyone saw on their television sets

was a distraught mother desperate to have her children back.

But although she has the general public on her side,

the police aren't convinced that Susan Smith

is telling the truth.

Within a day or two of the story breaking,

investigators start taking a closer look at her story.

There isn't a lot to work with,

but there's one key detail that gives them pause.

Susan says she stopped for a red light in an intersection,

which is where the man got into the car.

Crucially, she tells detectives that there were no other cars

in sight.

That's why the car-jacker was able to pull off the crime so easily.

No witnesses to give chase or call the cops.

But a little digging reveals that the traffic light in question

would not have changed to red without another car they're waiting.

It's a small thing, but it's enough to prove

that Susan's not being truthful about at least part of her story.

And if she can lie about that, then what else is she lying about?

Over the next few days,

while the media continues to pick over the case

and amplify calls for the return of Michael and Alex,

Susan is brought in for multiple polygraph tests,

each of them proving inconclusive.

The boy's father is frustrated by the cops' focus on his wife.

He can't imagine what they're thinking.

It feels like they're wasting time and manpower

that could be better spent out looking

for the man who has the kids.

But the police aren't simply talking to Susan

and hoping to catch her in a lie.

They've been actively searching for her car,

believing that she may have hidden it somewhere on her own.

They even discreetly send divers into John D. Long Lake,

which is close to where Susan says her car was stolen,

but the divers search at the water's edge proves fruitless.

There's no sign of a car in there.

As for the rest of Union,

its black residents are treading very carefully.

Young men especially are nervous to go out alone,

worried that they'll be thought of as suspicious

if they're spotted going for a hike in the woods

or fishing, so they stay home,

waiting for this all to end so their lives

can go back to normal.

They don't have to wait long.

On November 3rd, nine days after Susan first reported

her children missing, she gave a new statement to the police

and it's radically different from the first story, she told.

A short time later,

Sheriff Howard Wells makes an announcement

to an assembly of reporters and concerned locals.

Now, as you can hear from that clip,

no one in Union was expecting the news.

And the full story is more shocking

than the revelation of Susan's arrest.

On the night of the 25th,

she strapped her sons into their car seats

and drove towards John D. Long Lake.

She exited highway 49 onto a small road

that led down through a wooded area to the lake's boat ramp.

There, she put the car in gear, got out,

and watched it roll into the water,

with her son still inside.

After the car disappeared from view,

Susan made her way back to the highway,

then walked to the first house she could see,

where she started telling her tale to anyone who would listen,

the red light, the gun, the black man, all of it alive.

And people are angry.

Understandably, the black residents of Union County

have the most to be upset about.

Once again, the idea of the black guy

has been used by a criminal to try and get away

with their own actions.

But mostly, people are just devastated

that the two little boys the whole country

has been searching for have been dead this whole time,

killed by their own mother.

Hours after the confession,

divers returned to the lake to search for the car again.

Investigators had initially guessed

that if the car was in the water,

it would have stayed within a few dozen feet of the shore.

Turns out they were wrong.

The vehicle is eventually found

over 120 feet away from the water's edge.

When it's dragged from the lake,

the bodies of Michael and Alexander

are still strapped into their car seats.

In the trunk, detectives find mementos of Susan's life,

including her wedding album in a bridal gown.

Susan's quickly charged with two counts of murder,

and then everyone sits back to watch the trial unfold.

And no one's prepared for what comes to life.

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The trial of Susan Smith begins in July 1995,

less than a year after she confessed

to drowning her two young children in a lake

and blaming it on an imaginary black man.

The city of Union, South Carolina

has been transformed for the case.

As journalists from around the world arrive

to cover every minute,

parts of the streets surrounding the courthouse

are blocked off to make room for satellite trucks,

film equipment and for live feeds to major networks.

Media outlets run out homes and empty shopfronts

to set up base.

The associated press takes over an old roller ring

to use as housing and office space for its reporters.

But even with public interest in the case,

still sky high after all these months,

not everyone believes the trial should be broadcast.

Before proceedings can get underway,

the defense brings up the ongoing trial

of O.J. Simpson in California

and says that allowing cameras into the courtroom

will affect the jury and the witnesses here

just as it has there.

The judge agrees with the argument

and orders all cameras out of the building.

Now the trial can finally begin.

Thanks to her confession,

Susan's lawyers know that it's no use trying to prove

that she's not guilty.

That ship is sailed.

What they do instead is try to explain the state

of mine Susan was in at the time of the murders

and the ways her life set her up to fail.

Susan school counselor is brought in to talk

about how troubled she was as a teenager.

He recalls that when she was 13,

she tried to overdose an aspirin.

One of the star witnesses for the defense

is Susan's stepfather, Beverly Russell.

He takes the stand to tell the court

how he began sexually abusing Susan

when she was 15 years old.

He goes on revealing that he and Susan

had an ongoing sexual relationship

even after she was married with children.

After she confessed last year,

he wrote her a letter insisting that he was partly

to blame for her crimes.

He let her down as a father he said

and her sons paid the price.

These insights into Susan's earlier years

seemed to support a key aspect of the story

that she laid out in her confession,

that she was planning to take her own life that night.

But that her body willed her out of the car

as it rolled down the boat ramp.

To hear her lawyers tell the story,

the murders were the impulsive actions

of a woman with a traumatic past

and a fragile mental state who wanted to end it all.

But the prosecution gets to have their say too

and they've got a different explanation

of the events of October 25th.

Remember how I said that Susan and her husband David

were estranged?

Well, in the months leading up to the murders,

Susan had been dating Tom Finley,

a wealthy local bachelor,

but he'd ended things,

writing her a dear John letter to explain why.

Among the reasons he gives Susan or her children,

he didn't want kids

and he certainly didn't want the responsibility

of her children.

The prosecutors argued that this was the reason

that Susan killed her sons.

They were obstacles to a relationship she wanted to continue

and she believed that if they were gone,

she'd be free to do what she wanted.

So she packed her trunk with relics from her old life,

including her wedding dress and wedding album.

Then she bundled the kids into the car,

drove them to the lake, locked the doors

and watched her past slip out of sight.

This idea proves too compelling to ignore.

At the end of four days of testimony,

the jury retires to deliberate.

They take just two and a half hours

to convict Susan of two counts of murder.

Days later, the same jurors sentenced her

to two concurrent terms of life in prison.

The prosecution had argued for the death penalty,

but it was decided that it was more punishing for Susan

to have to live with what she'd done.

In 2024, 30 years after her crimes,

she's eligible for parole for the first time,

but her application is denied.

In the decades since Susan Smith's story Shocked America,

the full scope of it has been lost.

Most of the time, when people hear the tale,

they get the pieces that feel the most important.

Mother drowns own children in car.

But the scale of Susan's evil deed

is diminished in that version of events.

It leaves out the part where she made up a different crime

to explain her son's disappearance

and then blamed it on a black man.

Like Chuck Stewart and Jesse Anderson before her,

Susan Smith was sure everyone would believe her.

And for a moment, they did.

This episode may contain reenactments or dramatized details.

And while in some cases we can't know exactly what happened,

all our dramatizations are based on historical research.

American Criminal is a co-production

of airship and evergreen podcasts.

It's hosted, edited, and produced by me, Jeremy Schwartz.

Audio editing and sound design by Sean Ruhoffman,

music by Thromb.

This episode is written in research by Joel Callan,

managing producer Emily Berg.

Executive producers are Joel Callan,

William Simpson, and Lindsey Graham.

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