She remained bitter about what she felt was the FBI’s disinclination to thoroughly reevaluate its policies about the use of informants in general, as well as the training and supervision of agents in an office like Pikeville. “Left unchecked, the FBI remains a law unto itself,” she said.
Three years after he went to prison, she continued to proclaim her love and support for her husband. On sleepless nights, she blamed herself for not being able to prevent the tragedy.
“In hindsight, it’s always easy to see the mistakes, and I feel that I messed up the worst of all three of us. I knew Mark’s position and I knew what Susan was thinking. What I didn’t see was that there was too much going on for all of us, Mark, Susan, and me, to be able to evaluate it on our own.
“We each had our own agenda. For Susan, Mark was the only man she ever knew who treated her with respect. She never woke up in the morning, opened her eyes, and felt that she meant something to someone. Was it so wrong for her to want him for herself?
“I was fighting a different battle. I knew how much Mark’s job meant to him, but I could see that it was beginning to destroy us. I was determined to get out of Pikeville, desperately trying to hold on to the part of us that existed before. Doing that, I lost Mark. Poole was interfering, and Susan saw her opportunity.
“I know that Mark didn’t understand all of what was going on. He only saw me at home, coming apart at the seams. He had never seen me like that before. We were on a collision course, and there are no rules in that kind of game.”
Kathy said she is haunted by the thought of Susan. “I never sleep more than three hours at a time. Some nights, I actually wake up with the phone in my hand, thinking I’m talking to her.”
Meanwhile, Kathy struggled to provide as normal a life as she could for the two children and to shore up her husband in prison. In the summer of 1993, she was making plans to move back to Minnesota to be near him.
“He tells me from prison, ‘I think about the kids, how I screwed up their lives’—and I say, ‘You can’t think about that anymore, Mark. It’s done. You have a responsibility here, and that’s not to give up, and not to become a product of that place. Your responsibility is to come back to us as the man we knew. Think about what we still have. We love each other—we have something many people never find. We have beautiful, healthy children who are getting through this. Time is all that’s between us. Time will pass and we’ll be okay.’”
In prison, Mark endlessly analyzed the circumstances that led to his downfall, looking for wisdom in hindsight. “I often think about whether Susan was really pregnant. I don’t think she was. If she was, I don’t think now that it could have been mine. That’s one of the places I get totally aggravated with myself—in the hysteria of the moment, I never looked, in a cool way, at the situation. The baby was most likely someone else’s, if there even was one. She certainly believed there was, but then Susan believed a lot of things.
“I broke my standards. That was the compelling reason that I had to do what I did in confessing. Was I stupid? I don’t know. Here I am for the next twelve or fourteen years, whatever. Maybe I am just stupid. If I could take back those two minutes in that car . . .
“But I had a responsibility to live up to, and I failed it. For what I did, I sentenced myself. I didn’t have to give myself up, I know that better than anybody. And even then, I didn’t have to take sixteen years. Confessing was the only way I could see of even being able to start over with a clean slate.
“I know I could be on the beach right now with my family in Florida. I lost all of that. I lost my children’s childhood, and they lost their father. But I also know that now I can sleep at night; I can look myself in the mirror. I couldn’t do that for a whole year. Slowly, I am becoming at peace with myself.
“Why am I going to lie to anybody at this point about a trivial issue such as where and when I slept with her? I admitted to killing somebody. Anything else pales. It’s the most unconscionable thing you can do to somebody. By admitting it and doing the time that I have to do, I did the thing that I thought would square it away as much as I humanly could, by taking my punishment like a man, by accepting full responsibility for my own actions. This will be the worst thing that will ever happen to me, and I can only go one place from here: straight up.”
Just as his wife did, Mark worried that he would sound cold about Susan. “I cared for her. She accepted me when I first got there, when a lot of other people didn’t. For that reason, I was very grateful to her. She helped me to get on the map. I felt a certain amount of gratitude. She hung in there with me. She was as patient with me as I was with her.
“I felt a great amount of pity for her, for her upbringing and for the environment she had to live in. In that respect, I cared for her. I wanted to help her.
“The most important thing is that Susan lost her life because of me. I didn’t mean to kill her, but that changes nothing, because I did kill her.
“I had to explain all of this to Kathy. Can you imagine just coming home and telling your wife, ‘I’m going to jail. I killed somebody, Kathy’? At that point, my life was so miserable internally that I thought, ‘Just put me in jail and throw away the key. I deserve it.’ I had let the situation exacerbate, and it never should have happened.
“But I did the crime. I gave myself up when anyone else might say I didn’t really have to. What was gained from that? Well, Susan’s parents know where their daughter is, which they didn’t know for a year, and Susan’s children know. What else? I can’t think of anything else.
“I walk around here, I can’t believe I’m in prison. I ask, ‘How did this happen to you?’ It’s just unfathomable to me that I’m here. But dammit, I did it, I have to live with the consequences.
“And now I can live with myself. There are no secrets between Kathy and me anymore. When I come home, if she is still there for me, I know there’re going to be problems, but we’re going to beat it. There’s just no question in my mind.
“One of the things that hurts me most is the effect on my relationship with my son—we never got to know each other. Danielle and I had five years together, five good years. My son knows me as a voice on the phone.”
In prison, he read and reread the letters he got from his daughter, especially the first one, folded and creased until it was nearly in tatters:
Dear Old Pop:
I got this special paper for writing to you. I hope you like it. I have been a very good girl. I have been helping Mommy around the house sometimes without even being asked. I have been eating all my suppers. I stay up later now because I am older than my brother. And I should be able to. He is still being a pain. But I love him anyway. I can’t wait until we’ll be able to visit you and give you hugs and kisses. I want you to know that we are ok. We miss you but we are taking care of business. You take care of yourself for us. Eat good, sleep good, and brush your teeth. I got your letters and my heart puffed with love. Please write when you can and I will. I love you as big as the universe. Be good, and be careful.
Love,
Danielle Your #1 Girl
Epilogue
This sad story became sadder on February 5, 1998, when Kathy Putnam died at the age of thirty-eight. “Mrs. Putnam was found dead in her Manchester, Conn., home by her 13-year-old daughter, Danielle” and had died of “an apparent heart attack,” the Associated Press reported.
After Kathy’s death, her parents, Carol and Ray Ponticelli, took Danielle and Mark Jr. into their home in Manchester until Mark was released from prison in the fall of 2000. Kathy’s parents always remained close to Mark. “He’s a wonderful man. It was a crime of passion,” Carol told the Hartford Courant when Mark was released, his sentence reduced from sixteen years to ten for good behavior. A prison department spokesman said that Mark had been a “model inmate,” who volunteered in the chapel and commissary and took classes in maintaining heating and coolin
g systems.
Mark remarried and is living in the South, as are Danielle and Mark Jr.
After I interviewed him over several days in 1992 in a federal prison in Rochester, Minnesota, I had stayed in touch by mail with Mark until early 1999. I remained in close touch with Kathy for many years after Above Suspicion was published in 1993, while she struggled to keep her marriage and family together. She remained deeply wary of Ron Poole, whom she saw as a half-baked but nevertheless sinister Iago—scheming, jealous, and sexually obsessed with Susan. Poole’s incessant interferences were “contributing factors in causing the death of Susan Smith,” Kathy asserted in an eight-page statement to the FBI in March 1992. “I wish to make it known to the FBI that I am terrified of Ron Poole,” she said.
I had interviewed Kathy at length at her home in Connecticut in 1992, and for years afterward I spoke frequently with her on long phone calls. She was invariably honest and forthright; she always insisted that nothing be held back, that nothing was out of bounds in her deeply personal recollections, even things that were profoundly painful and sometimes embarrassing to her. Kathy was brave. I admired her enormously.
A local newspaper in Connecticut said that heavy drinking had contributed to Kathy’s sudden death. From prison in 1998, Mark answered my condolence letter with a long reply, in which he discussed his anguish about his wife’s emotional distress. “Joe, she couldn’t shake the deep depression which engulfed her, nor would she accept the fact that she had a problem. Over the years her condition deteriorated to the point where suicide was a common theme to our nightly calls. No matter what the family and I attempted to do, she shut us out. Her condition was exacerbated by the fact that she was drinking heavily. Unfortunately, the kids bore the brunt of her capriciousness. It got to the point where she wouldn’t let me talk to the kids alone, and wouldn’t let Ray and Carol see them,” he wrote, referring to Kathy’s parents. His letter, several months after her death, added, “The kids and I have indeed grown closer as a result of our loss and have a steely determination to succeed.”
I should note that in hours of one-on-one interviews in prison in 1992 and in letters to me, Mark never stopped expressing shock and remorse. “I can’t accept what I have done to my wife and kids,” he wrote to me from prison. “As I look around my environment, my insides scream that I don’t belong here, yet I know deep down I need to fulfill my societal obligations. I try to put myself in the place of Susan’s family and yes, I would want me away for a long time.”
In 2000, two years after Kathy’s death and the same year that Mark was released from prison, Ron Poole died at the age of fifty, after a twenty-year career as an FBI special agent. An FBI investigation into Poole’s actions in Pikeville veered into other cases in eastern Kentucky after 1990. Among them was the rogue agent’s role in advocating the release from jail of a convicted killer who then went on to commit multiple murders during the time he was also an informant for Poole. In another case in 1990, Poole’s undercover work was cited in a successful sting operation that led to federal bribery convictions of four eastern Kentucky county sheriffs and a police chief—but even that case raised questions about the agent’s behavior: A county sheriff testified that he had declined to work with Poole because he “appeared to be more interested in having sex with a woman he was sent to investigate.”
In 1991, the Lexington Herald-Leader excoriated the FBI in an editorial. “If the FBI has a woodshed, it should take Ron Poole there for some serious career counseling. Clearly, the FBI needs to take a long, close look at its policies and practices involving informants.”
The internal FBI investigation concluded with a censure, demotion, and suspension of forty days without pay for Poole, and a censure and suspension of fourteen days without pay for Terry Hulse, the supervisor in Covington who was responsible for the Pikeville regional office 215 miles away. However, despite his scheming and manipulations, the FBI investigation found that Poole was unaware that Mark had killed Susan until Mark made his confession.
In 2016, Jim Huggins, the FBI supervisor who conducted the investigation that led to Mark’s confession, told me that the bureau’s existing procedures for handling informants were “tightened” after the Putnam case. In general, said Huggins, who is now retired, a supervising agent’s job is to closely evaluate the use of and payments to informants. “If you’ve been around a while, you should be able to tell when something isn’t right. With a female informant especially, like when Mark told Hulse, ‘Listen, she visited the office and brought me a gift.’ Bingo, that’s when the first light goes off. So you call up Mark and say, ‘What the hell is going on here, buddy?’ Which opens a dialogue. There’s your opportunity to have a talk with a young agent, and it’s where an older mentor who has been around for a while makes the difference.”
In 1990, Susan’s family filed a wrongful death suit against Mark Putnam. A federal bankruptcy judge awarded $463,837 in compensatory damages and $500,000 in punitive damages against Putnam, who had filed for personal bankruptcy in prison in 1993. “We got the judgment against him and never could identify any assets in his name. It was not collectable,” said Larry Webster, the Pikeville attorney who filed the lawsuit.
In Pikeville in 1991, Det. Richard Ray was named Trooper of the Year by the Kentucky State Police. Ray took his plaque and resigned, saying he was disgusted by the department’s general penny-pinching on investigations, including the Putnam case. He is now retired.
John Paul Runyon, the Pike County commonwealth attorney, was reelected unopposed to a sixth term in 1992. Runyon remained convinced that Mark Putnam never meant to kill Susan Smith. “I believe it was accidental,” he said in 1992. He remained distressed by what he regarded as the FBI’s casual attitude toward using informants, and by what he saw as its failure to heed warnings sent up by the Putnam fiasco. “I was very emphatic. They sent agents to my home to talk to me about it, and I told them flat-out, if there’s one thing you need to learn from this case, if nothing else, you need to take a real close look at how you deal with informants—what kind of protection you give them and what concern you have for them. I told them, if you don’t have a policy already, you need to develop one, and if you have a policy, by God, you need to start enforcing it.”
Runyon, who had discussed his role in the Putnam prosecution at length with me in Pikeville in 1992, died in 2015 at the age of ninety.
As for Susan’s children, her son, Brady, died several years ago after overdosing on a combination of methadone and Xanax. Miranda is married with a child, and living near Phelps, Kentucky. Kenneth is living quietly in the same area.
In the summer of 2016, I went to see Shelby Ward, who, at sixty-one, still lived beside the Tug Fork River in Freeburn. Unfortunately, Shelby said she was unable to discuss the quarter-century-old case and its aftermath, including a surprising long-distance friendship that had developed many years earlier between her and Kathy Putnam. After Mark went to prison, Kathy reached out to Shelby. Though the two women had never met, and Shelby was the first person to suspect that Mark had killed her sister, they became friends through long phone calls of the sort that Kathy often had with Susan. In an interview in 1992, Shelby said that Kathy “would talk of waking up in the middle of the night with the telephone receiver in her hand, swearing she had been talking with Susan.”
The material in this book all comes from my own conversations with the people involved, as well as from police and FBI files, court records, and historical research. There are numerous passages in this book of reconstructed dialogue. These were always derived from the recollections of at least one person who was directly involved in the conversation. In dialogue involving Susan Smith, I satisfied myself that what someone recalled her saying in a specific instance was also consistent with what other people who knew her recalled about her attitudes and state of mind at the time. I depended on Mark Putnam’s recollections to reconstruct the final conversation between him and Susan.
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As a journalist I have written thousands of stories, including more than nine hundred columns for the New York Times. Most of them quickly fade in memory, but the details of this one have haunted me for twenty-five years, partly because Above Suspicion is fact-based journalism that is also a narrative tragedy involving complex personalities and events in a compelling setting. Meanwhile, I have always been curious about and sympathetic toward Susan Smith, the only one of the principal characters that I was, of course, unable to speak with.
Susan, as everyone who knew her agreed, could drive you nuts with her prattling and her fables and exaggerations, and her pitiful desperation to get herself out of the circumstances and geography that held her. As Kathy Putnam always told Susan: Choices have consequences; goals can be set and achieved; there is usually a way out, especially if you’re young and smart and so personable (as Susan definitely was) that the world is actually inclined to cut you some slack and meet you more than halfway.
“That girl was just likeable,” Bert Hatfield, the deputy sheriff who first befriended Mark as a rookie agent new to the territory in 1987, told me in the summer of 2016. “She was so convincing, no matter what bullshit she was talking. Her personality was just that good. People liked her, me included. But Susie always wanted more out of life than she was able to get. She didn’t know how to go about it, even when the answers were so clear.”
Much of what I learned about Susan’s real personality, as opposed to the one assigned to her by gossips, came from detailed and deeply emotional recollections by Kathy Putnam, who should have been Susan’s adversary, given the circumstances, but who, even in the depths of her despair, always considered her a friend whom she had lost.
Larry Webster, the Pikeville attorney who represented Shelby Ward and the rest of Susan’s family after she was killed, still had a vivid impression of her a quarter century later. He said, “I hate to be stereotypical, but she was kind of typical of a lot of young mountain women. They just have a certain charm to them, and their sexuality is kind of overt and unashamed, but sort of innocent in a way. I’m sure Mark Putnam was charmed by Susan, who was different from any girl he knew before—unlike his wife, who was probably kind of prudish and had money, the kind of wife he needed to marry.” Of course, Kathy (whom Webster never met) didn’t have “money,” but she did project outward poise and, to Susan’s hungry eye, a cosmopolitan style that may have seemed exotic in Pikeville at the time.
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