Legendary SC lawman Pete Logan, who cracked Susan Smith case, dies at 90

Pete Logan, a lawman’s lawman who helped the FBI and State Law Enforcement Division solve numerous high-profile South Carolina and national cases and who for years served as a mentor to many in law enforcement, died early Wednesday morning, Dec. 17. He was 90.

Logan’s death at home was confirmed by a spokeswoman authorized by the family. He had been in hospice.

A Celebration of Life memorial service will be held at a later as yet unscheduled date. Funeral will be for family only. Survivors include his wife of more than 50 years, Fairey Belle.

Logan’s career in law enforcement spanned six decades, from the 1960s to the early 2020s, first with the FBI and then with SLED.

His best-known case came in 1994, when he as a SLED agent and another investigator convinced Susan Smith, who had drowned her two young children in a Union County pond, to confess to the crime. Up to then, Smith had claimed, to sensational national news media coverage, that a Black man had kidnapped her children.

Both before and after the Susan Smith case — a jury gave her life in prison instead of the death penalty — Logan investigated high-profile cases. They included working on President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination, the Ku Klux Klan and investigating South Carolina kingpin drug smugglers, murders and white collar criminals.

“He had an uncanny ability to get people to tell the truth,” said Robert Stewart, SLED chief from 1987 to 2007, and was Logan’s top boss during the Susan Smith case.

In 1988, when the state grand jury was starting to get cranked up, Stewart chose Logan — who had a reputation for rocklike integrity to be the lead investigator. Unlike a traditional county grand jury with limited powers, the new statewide grand jury had wide jurisdiction and subpoena powers to call witnesses and to subpoena bank and other records anywhere in the state.

“Pete was a consummate law enforcement professional who had a historic career,” Stewart said. “He was a go-to agent at SLED on sensitive and complex investigations.”

Current SLED Chief Mark Keel, who became chief in 2011, kept Logan on as an agent even though Logan was in his 70s.

“He truly was a legend,” Keel said. “He taught so many agents about so many things about integrity and honesty and how to interview. He was probably the best interrogator and interviewer that anybody knew. He was incredibly smart and had the highest ethics.”

Before joining SLED in the late 1980s, Logan was with the FBI working high-profile cases around the country.

“Pete was known for being the best interrogator in the country,” said former FBI agent Rob Waizenhofer, who joined the Bureau in 1990 in South Carolina. “He was the guy everybody wanted to do interviews.”

Logan’s special talent: “He made you feel like you were important to him in the first 30 seconds that you met him. It’s a skill you really can’t teach. As a new agent, he made me feel important. He made subjects feel like they were important,” Waizenhofer recalled.

Logan also made sure other agents and law enforcement officers working a case got credit, Waizenhofer said. And Logan was very good at organizing and putting cases together, he said.

Over the years, a host of people in the legal and law enforcement professions would seek Logan out for advice — prosecutors, defense attorneys, agents, sheriffs, judges, U.S. Attorneys and police chiefs would seek his counsel on how to proceed, Keel said.

One young prosecutor Logan influenced was Creighton Waters when Waters was starting his career as a state grand jury prosecutor in the South Carolina Attorney General’s office where Logan worked as a SLED agent.

In recent years, Waters has moved up, becoming state grand jury chief prosecutor and winning national recognition for prosecuting and winning guilty verdicts in the 2023 double murder jury trial against South Carolina lawyer and fraudster Alex Murdaugh.

Waters said Logan taught him a major lesson, which was that “ultimately, as a prosecutor or law enforcement officer, you had to always be the fairest juror a person would ever have. He didn’t coin that phrase, but he was certainly the one to always drive that home,” Waters said Wednesday.

Operation Jackpot

Another young prosecutor whom Logan made an impression on was current S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster. In the early 1980s, McMaster was U.S. attorney for South Carolina and overseeing a major investigation into international marijuana smuggling in South Carolina. The investigation was dubbed “Operation Jackpot” and resulted in more than 130 convictions.

Logan, then an FBI agent and an expert polygrapher, was a key agent on the Operation Jackpot cases.

“He was unique,” McMaster recalled Wednesday. Logan was a good listener, honest, caring, straightforward, not loud and easy to talk to, the governor said. “He had the ability to look at somebody and know if they were telling the truth or not.”

Logan’s reputation as an agent who could discover the truth was key to the success of Operation Jackpot, McMaster said. Although many defendants agreed to plead guilty and tell the truth to get a lighter sentence, when faced with Logan, it often turned out they weren’t telling the whole truth and were hiding ill-gotten assets and not revealing all of their criminal activities, McMaster said.

“He was a master,” McMaster said. “It was said he could spot a lie before you told him. ”

Sherri Lydon, a former U.S. Attorney who is now a federal judge, said, “No one in law enforcement would disagree that Pete Logan was the gold standard in law enforcement, and the respect he commanded reached even into my own family. Once, riding in the car with my then seventh-grade daughter Georgia and her friend, the friend asked if I was a big-time lawyer. I laughed and said, ‘Oh goodness no. I am just a regular, common lawyer.’ My daughter piped up immediately and said, ‘Don’t believe her, Abby. She knows Pete Logan’.”

Logan’s ability to get people to open up and tell him the truth came from a lifelong genuine interest in people. On vacations, he would just start talking to people, his wife, Fairey Belle, told the State in 2021 when the newspaper did a story on her husband.

“Pete would talk to anybody and everybody. We’d be sitting on chairs down by the water and say, ‘Look at Pete talking to that stranger. He’s being interrogated by Pete, and he doesn’t even know it’,” she said. “He’d come back with all kinds of information about the guy. We’d say, ‘How do you know that?’ He’d say, ‘Just in conversation.’ ”

Logan told The State in 2021 that he stayed an agent as long as he did because he likes people and likes to see them open up. “That’s my nature,” he said. “You have to get people to trust you, and to have confidence in what you tell them. Believe it or not, a lot of people who commit crimes like to get it off their chests. I’ve had guys who were in prison call me and say, ‘Pete, I appreciate you getting the truth out of me, and I’m going to correct my life.’ Whether or not they do is another matter.” Ironically, Logan said, “If I can show somebody didn’t commit a crime, I enjoy that as much as I do getting a confession.”

Former U.S. attorney in South Carolina Pete Strom said he “never heard a negative word spoken about Pete Logan,” who had “an almost savantlike ability to see situations clearly, fairly and ethically.”

Logan was a native of upstate New York, where his parents operated a funeral home. After graduating from a small military college, he once said, he kept in mind a piece of advice a professor gave him. “If you are truthful about everything and honest and straightforward, you will do fine. Don’t worry about grades. Just do what you think is right,” Logan recalled. “That impressed me more than anything else.”

“It’s been a wonderful ride, and I’ve loved every minute of it,” Logan told a State newspaper reporter in 2021 as he was getting ready to retire for what colleagues called the umteenth time. “I love the job, and I love the people who I work with, more than you will ever know.”

Logan finally retired in early 2022.

“He was everybody’s hero,” said Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott, who knew Logan over a span of years when Lott was a deputy, police chief and then sheriff.

U.S. Attorney Bryan Stirling, who knew Logan for more than 20 years, said, “You know the saying, ‘A life well lived’ — Pete epitomized that.”

“He was the best. There’s nobody that would dispute that,” Waizenhofer said.

This is a breaking news story and may be added to.

This story was originally published December 17, 2025 at 4:43 PM.