A prison guard who admitted to having an affair with murderous South Carolina mother Susan Smith has spoken out about his experience just days before she is set to have her first parole hearing.
Alfred Rowe was the captain of security at the Camille Griffin Graham Correctional Institution, where Smith was serving her life sentence for drowning her two sons, three-year-old Michael and 14-month-old Alexander, in a South Carolina lake in October 1994.
She had claimed told deputies the boys had been taken by an unidentified black man during a carjacking, sparking a manhunt for the kidnapper.
But her story was quickly picked apart and Smith eventually confessed to strapping the two boys into their car seat and watching the car roll into the lake.
She was sentenced to life in prison, and was just five years into her sentence when Rowe said she started flirting with him.
‘She explained she thought I was handsome, and wanted to know if I’d be willing to have sex with her,’ he told Fox Nation’s Jeanine Pirro in a special about Smith’s case that is interspersed with phone conversations she has had with various men.
At first, Rowe said he rejected her advances, as he was married at the time.
‘I said, “Susan, you should go to lockup right now. I suggest you go back to your bed and go back to sleep and forget this conversation ever happened.”
‘But then a few shifts later, another inmate came up and gave me an envelope, and it was a letter from Susan asking the same thing.
‘When I spoke to her about the note, she just said that she was lonely, she missed that part of being free,’ Rowe said, telling how the convicted murderer told him how much she missed her sons.
‘I never thought that the mind games would ever work on me with them at the institution,’ he confessed.
Soon, though, Rowe said he ‘would make it a point to be in her unit so I could talk to her one-on-one while everyone else was asleep’.
‘I guess I dropped my guard, and the relationship kind of grew and escalated from there,’ he said, noting that it has ‘haunted me for the past 24 years.’
Eventually, Rowe found out that Smith had also been sleeping with another guard, Lt. Houston Cagle, who ultimately pleaded guilty to two counts of having sex with an inmate and was fired.
‘She told staff and had him arrested, cause that’s the only way they’d find out,’ Rowe said. ‘I asked her why she told on Cagle, and what was her next step, and she told me not to worry about it, that I’m safe.
‘I believed her when she said no one will ever know,’ he admitted.
But when he returned home from a family vacation, two South Carolina Law Enforcement Division officers knocked on his door and said they wanted to talk to him about Smith.
They claimed she had given a sworn statement that Rowe sexually assaulted her, and passed a polygraph test.
He ultimately pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years probation. He also lost his corrections job as a result.
‘I ruined my life and the life of my family and friends and my career,’ Rowe lamented.
He says he now believes that she felt the more trouble she could cause there at the women’s center, the more likely it would be that she would get moved to the other women’s prison in the upstate.
‘That was much closer to her home town, that way her family and her friends that wanted to visit her wouldn’t have to travel so far,’ he said.
If Rowe is correct, Smith’s plan seemed to work, as she was soon transferred to Leath Correctional in South Carolina.
The murderous mother is now up for parole at the age of 53, as Rowe and other prosecutors speak out against letting her go free.
He had told NewsNation over the summer that Smith’s ‘prison record just shows that she’s not really learned anything while being in prison, except how to do illegal things, other than the killing of her sons.’
She has had a history of infractions during her incarceration, including drug use, and self-mutilations.
Smith was also recently found to be communicating with a filmmaker from the prison, discussing her crimes with him and providing him contact information for friends, family and victims, including her former husband, David Smith.
The filmmaker even deposited money into Smith’s account, police said.
‘I think Susan knows how to manipulate people, even over the phone to get to whatever her ultimate goal may be,’ Rowe told Fox Nation.
Smith had reported her two sons missing in October 1994 and wept on national television while her husband begged for their safe return.
It was claimed she killed the boys after the man she was having an affair with, Thoman Findley, broke up with her because he didn’t want children.
Her ex-husband, David, has since pleaded with the public to encourage the parole board to keep her behind bars.
‘She took the greatest gift that we have of life,’ he told Fox Carolina over the summer.
‘She took that away from them and I want people to remember that. Maybe those who are old enough when that happened to remember how they felt when they learned that Michael and Alex were dead and that she had done it, and for them to maybe themselves write a letter to the parole board or something encouraging them to keep her behind bars.’
The South Carolina Department of Probation, Parole and Pardon Services has now received more than 130 letters, with family members telling the New York Post that most of them oppose Smith’s release.
‘They’re awful,’ one resident said. ‘They say things like, “She belongs in that lake with her boys.”
‘People do not want her out of prison and they’re telling the parole board.’