Dateline to air episode on SC child killer Susan Smith. Listen to interview with ex-husband here

David Smith says what he remembers most about the days after his sons went missing is the media, following him and his estranged wife Susan, staking out the Union County Courthouse and his in-laws’ home.

“It was out of control,” he said.

And in those days, he told Craig Melvin for a Dateline episode to air Friday, he simply did what he was told.

“Got up every day and did work whatever somebody told me to do if it was go for an interview, if it was to take a polygraph,” he said.

That went on for nine days as law enforcement searched for the two boys, Michael, 3, and Alex, 14 months, before Sheriff Howard Wells got Susan Smith to confess she had let her car roll into the chilly water of John D. Long Lake in Union with the boys strapped in their car seats.

Melvin, a Columbia native who worked for WIS in high school and later as a reporter, anchor and photographer, said he was a student (at Columbia High School) when the Smith brothers were murdered.

He said he was glued to the television wondering what could have happened.

He is also a graduate of Wofford College in Spartanburg and lives in Connecticut with his wife and two children.

In January he took over co-hosting duties on The Today show after Hoda Kotb resigned.

The Dateline episode also features interviews with David Smith’s wife, Tiffany; Susan Smith’s defense attorney David Bruck and State Law Enforcement Division Chief Mark Keel in addition to clips from the time of the murders.

In a short preview on the NBC website, Smith says he doesn’t think his ex-wife would ever be rehabilitated and she should spend the rest of her life in prison.

Former WYFF-TV anchor Michael Cogdill, who was a reporter when the murders occurred, remembered how fear permeated the community on Halloween.

“People were hanging onto one another and one another’s kids,” he said. “They thought there might be a threat afoot.”

He also said he picked up on a sense of people coming together in Union, rather than being torn apart by Susan Smith’s lie that a black man had kidnapped her children.

“There was such love,” he said. “Blacks and whites arm and arm, hand in hand, holding onto each other’s kids.”

Susan Smith was denied parole in November, her first year of eligibility after serving 30 years in prison. She was convicted of murder in 1995. A jury gave her life in prison instead of the death penalty.

She was 23 when she killed her sons on Oct. 24, 1994.

Prosecutors said she killed them because her boyfriend at the time did not want children.

Her mother said in a book she wrote that her daughter suffered from mental illness.

Dateline airs at 9 p.m. Friday on NBC.