MID-SOUTH MEMORIES
25 years ago — 1995
Atlanta – Susan Smith doesn't claim demons ordered her to kill her kids.
Her confession doesn't even hint she was psychotic when she strapped them into her 1990 maroon Mazda and rolled it into John D. Long Lake.
She's never been diagnosed as schizophrenic or paranoid.
Yet when she goes on trial today, she's expected to insist she killed her kids, Michael, 3, and Alex, 14 months, because she was mentally ill and couldn't control her actions or didn't know right from wrong. It's certain she killed them.
It's just as certain the arguments of defense and prosecution psychiatrists about her state of mind will make the mind-numbing DNA evidence presented at O.J. Simpson's trial seem as simple as the ABCS.
50 years ago — 1970
Ground will be broken in about two months for a $60 million expansion of Memphis Air Route Traffic Control Center on Democrat Road, John H. Shaffer, administrator of the FAA, said yesterday.
Most of the cost will be in computers and electronic equipment to complete automation of the air traffic control system.
100 years ago — 1920
Judge David B. Puryear last night was the speaker at the meeting of union men in Carpenters' Hall in Memphis.
125 years ago — 1895
Judge H.H. Lurton of U.S. Circuit Court yesterday decreed the sale of the Tennessee Midland Railroad and today he will issue a similar order for the sale of the Paducah, Tennessee and Alabama Railroad.