Stepfather Takes Blame for Smith’s Distress : Crime: In pleading for her life, he admits that he molested the woman convicted of drowning her two young sons.

UNION, S.C. —  Testifying that he sexually molested his stepdaughter, a South Carolina community leader said Thursday that he bears some responsibility for her emotional problems and pleaded tearfully for a jury not to sentence her to death for drowning her two sons.

“My heart breaks for what I’ve done to you, for your pain and your loss,” said Beverly Russell, reading from a recent letter he wrote to his stepdaughter, Susan Smith. She received it in her prison cell.

“All you needed from me was the right kind of love,” he continued. “I had the responsibility to do the right thing, and I missed the mark. . . . If I’d known at the time what the result of my sins would be I’d have mustered my strength to behave according to my responsibilities.”

Russell, a former member of the state Republican Party executive committee, previously had admitted to authorities that he fondled his stepdaughter when she was a teen-ager. After Smith reported the incidents, Russell received counseling and was forced to move out of the house for a while.

On the witness stand Thursday, he said he resumed having a sexual relationship with Smith in 1993. He also said they had sexual relations as recently as two months before the boys were killed.

The defense rested its case Thursday without calling Smith, 23, to the stand. Closing arguments are scheduled for today.

In order for Smith to be sentenced to death, all 12 members of the jury must agree to that punishment. Otherwise, she will receive life in prison and be eligible for parole in 30 years.

Russell was one of several defense witnesses Thursday who tried to persuade jurors that Smith killed her sons because of overwhelming emotional distress and that she does not deserve to die.

But the prosecutor tried to undermine the attempt of psychiatrists, religious counselors and friends to portray Smith as a woman in emotional turmoil because of such factors as the suicide of her father when she was 6 and the molestation by her stepfather.

Union County Prosecutor Tommy Pope questioned Russell on the details of his most recent sexual relationships with Smith. After he answered that they’d mostly had sex at his home but also at her home and once in Spartanburg, S.C., Pope asked, “Did you make a choice” to have sex with her?

Russell answered yes.

“Did Susan Smith have a choice to do that?”

Again, Russell answered yes.

Many of the witnesses used the same words to describe the former secretary whose claims that a black man had stolen her car and kidnaped her children sparked a nationwide manhunt. That manhunt ended nine days later when Smith’s car was found at the bottom of a local lake, her two boys strapped inside it.

While still in high school, she sought affection for a time from a 40-year-old married man and was torn up by guilt about that relationship, said a former teacher.

She also talked often of suicide, questioning whether God would forgive her if she ever succeeded, said the teacher, Kay Dillard. Smith has attempted suicide twice.

A guard at the prison where Smith has been kept for the past eight months under 24-hour suicide watch said she still has those obsessions. “She talks about [suicide] all the time,” said Felicia Mungo. “She talks about her boys, wondering if they’re going to forgive her.”