Stranger in the Shadows

By Richard Lacayo

Susan Smith knew what a kidnapper should look like. He should be a remorseless stranger with a gun. But the essential part of the picture -- the touch she must have counted on to arouse the primal sympathies of her neighbors and to cut short any doubts -- was his race. The suspect had to be a black man. Better still, a black man in a knit cap, a bit of hip-hop wardrobe that can be as menacing in some minds as a buccaneer's eye patch. Wasn't that everyone's most familiar image of the murderous criminal?

As it turns out, the murderous criminal in the saga of Michael and Alexander Smith looks like an innocuous young white woman with wisps of teased hair. But while her invention failed to save her, Smith was scheming in a long and effective tradition. For centuries men and women have denied their own deadly impulses by recasting them in the features of some unnerving outsider. Depending on the time and place, the villains might be Jews, immigrants, longhairs or blacks, whoever might do as targets for the shared anxieties of the age. In late 20th century America, we keep ourselves supplied with useful goblins. When his wife and children were murdered in 1971, Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, the Green Beret physician eventually convicted of the crime, insisted that the killers were Charles Manson-type hippies who had broken into their home. What better suspect in a time when, in the minds of many, the whole counterculture was a bug-eyed intruder? And in a society that began to demonize African Americans almost as long ago as it first enslaved them, blacks have endured being cast as menacing shadows at the edge of bad dreams. What has changed is that political rhetoric and pop culture are increasingly willing to exploit these shadows. When George Bush's 1988 campaign needed a name and a face for the bogeyman, it came up with Willie Horton. Some black rappers have turned the stereotype to their own profit, striking "gangsta" poses -- in black knit caps. Susan Smith didn't have to use much imagination. She just had to reach for the available nightmares.

The process of demonization reached meltdown five years ago when Charles Stuart, a white furrier from a Boston suburb, claimed that a black stranger had leaped into his car as he and his wife were returning from a natural- childbirth class, forced them to drive to a remote location, then robbed and shot them both, killing her. It was Stuart, of course, who had murdered his pregnant wife, then shot himself to make his story unassailable. Stuart would eventually be unmasked and take his own life, but not before Boston police had bought the lies, rounding up scores of black men and further fouling the city's already polluted racial atmosphere.

In a pinch, whole cities can be demonized. Last spring Joseph Bales and Helene Lemay, a French-Canadian couple, found their 10-week-old daughter Muguet dead in her crib. Convinced that they might be accused of killing her, they disposed of the child's body in a wooded area 100 miles from home, then proceeded in their pickup truck to New York City, where they told police that their daughter had disappeared in Central Park. In the two-day search that followed, helicopters, bloodhounds and scuba divers scoured the park and its waterways until the couple broke down and confessed. They had thought it would be enough to say that Manhattan itself had opened its jaws and swallowed their daughter. Everyone knows the profile of a killer. It's a jagged and ominous skyline.

Susan Smith's invention of a black culprit didn't work as well as she had hoped. Her own not-quite-right account of the kidnapping, and perhaps memories of the Stuart case, kept people from rejecting the possibility that the distraught mother was a suspect herself. And though she may not have thought about or cared how her self-serving concoctions would affect race relations around Union, South Carolina, the worst was avoided. Despite the police sketch of a black suspect that papered the area, feelings never boiled over and authorities weren't goaded into harassing the black community. The ploy of the dark-faced stranger works only when those around you share your worst assumptions. And this time, in this case, enough people were prepared to recognize that the face of the killer could be hers.