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Not long after Christy and David's relationship ended amicably, David began dating Susan, attracted by her vivacity and "million-dollar smile," he would later say. They courted about a year before marrying; when they wed, David was 20, Susan 19 and two months pregnant. But the marriage ceremony was bracketed by tragedy. Eleven days before the vows, David's brother Danny died of Crohn's disease; within a few months, his father attempted suicide. David and Susan were a tempestuous couple. No one knew from day to day whether they were together or apart. "Both of them were really immature," says a friend. "Neither of them was exactly what you'd call virtuous."
Their pattern seemed to be public accusations of adultery, followed by reconciliation. Susan would storm into the Winn-Dixie, yelling at David that she was tired of his messing around. The next week she would come in smiling and laughing. Though her attorneys dispute this, local consensus holds that Susan was the first to be unfaithful. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, several acquaintances say that after Michael was born in October 1991, Susan had an affair. David retaliated with one of his own. The object of his affections was, and remains, Tiffany Moss, a cashier at the Winn-Dixie. David, who has said he believes Susan deserves the death penalty, has put his version of events into a book, Beyond All Reason: My Life with Susan Smith, which will be published next month. If the judge permits, Susan's lawyers will introduce details of his book advance and promotion deals to discredit him as a witness against her.
David will certainly have much to say about Susan's final affair. According to a deposition taken in March in connection with Susan and David's divorce (which became final in May), soon after she began working at Conso Products in 1993, Susan took up with Tom Findlay, the good-looking, 27-year-old son of the boss. Findlay stated that he and Susan slept together around 10 times, beginning in January 1994. They stopped seeing each other in March or April, he said, because David discovered their affair, but they started up again in September when Susan told Tom she was seeking a divorce.
Then, in October, Findlay sent Smith the now famous letter in which, it has been reported, he said he wanted to stop seeing her because he did not want the responsibility for her two children. But someone who has seen the two-page document insists that in fact this letter cannot have come as a shock to Smith: Findlay was answering a letter and card she had sent him and continuing a discussion the couple had been having about the reasons they should break up. In his letter, Findlay also writes that he is impressed because she has returned to night school and that he is proud she is taking steps to improve her life. But then Findlay adds that he is upset by Smith's "boy-crazy tendencies." He chides her for kissing and fondling the husband of another Conso employee when they, along with several other people, were nude together in a hot tub at the Findlay estate. "To be a nice girl," he writes, "you must act like a nice girl, and that doesn't include sleeping with married men."