DROPPED KIDS IN ICY RIVER
Drugs, booze, love all played role as ma flung them off bridge
The crime was not only unspeakable. It was inexplicable. But the facts were undeniable. Shortly after 1 a.m. on May 23, 2009, Amanda Stott-Smith parked on the Sellwood Bridge in Portland, Ore. She took her two children, ages 7 and 4, out of the car. She dangled them over the edge, then dropped them into the dark water.
The mindnumbing murders, as Nancy Rommelmann’s “To the Bridge” proves, were far from uncommon. In America, 500 children are murdered by their parents every year, with mothers about as likely to murder as dads.
Perhaps no one was more likely than Stott-Smith, trapped in a marriage ruined by drinking, drugs, violence and abuse — and a culture that told her to put up with it. Until finally, she couldn’t. Stott hailed from a conservative Christian family. When it was time for college, George Fox University, a Quaker school in small-town Newburg, Ore., seemed like a safe place.
But Mandy, as she was known, was ready to rebel and eager for the attention of men. She quickly lost her virginity and became pregnant. She became a single mom when the father joined the Navy.
Stott-Smith named the boy Gavin and applied for food stamps. Otherwise, though, little changed. She stayed in school. She continued to go out partying, often leaving the infant with her increasingly annoyed girlfriends.
Soon Stott was pregnant again, this time by her pot dealer. They became engaged, but he didn’t have much money. The mom-to-be told her own grandmother that she didn’t want to marry a cash-poor man.She didn’t have to. Midway through the pregnancy, her fiancé committed suicide.
Stott quickly found a new boyfriend, another sometimes dealer named Jason Smith. He was 24, and had been in and out of rehab and trouble. But he had also just inherited more than $200,000 from his grandmother.
Stott considered him a better prospect and gave up her new baby for adoption. She and Smith became a couple.
He chauffeured her around town and treated her to shopping sprees at Nordstrom’s. Smith called a jewelry store, and asked them to stay open late so he could shop, and brought Stott in to pick out a diamond bracelet.
Stott’s girlfriends didn’t trust him. Smith’s mother didn’t trust her, and even went to court to seize control of her son’s assets. Mom cited his longtime drug problems and current “abusive relationship with a ‘girlfriend,’ which has resulted in the respondent being financially exploited.”
According to police records, the abuse flowed both ways. Stott gave Smith a black eye; Smith tried to strangle her. Meanwhile the Department of Human Services began its own file: one day, paramedics were summoned after Smith left little Gavin locked in a hot car.
Although Smith’s mother won control of her son’s inheritance, she simply used it to pay the bills he kept racking up. Soon the money was gone, and Amanda was pregnant a third time. Smith proposed and Stott accepted.
She was finally going to make his mother take those quotes off “girlfriend.” The couple welcomed a daughter.
And life improved temporarily. Smith landed a job, but was still doing drugs, and Stott, now Smith-Stott, was still partying. Then all went south again.
Stott-Smith would invite friends over and get so drunk that she forgot to cook dinner. Smith would scream at her in front of their kids.
“Wife, shut your mouth!” he yelled. At restaurants he humiliated her by ordering more food than anyone could eat, then telling her how fat she was. She would sneak into the bathroom to throw up.
They also added another child, a boy.
Things continued like that until 2008 when Smith walked out, telling his wife that she had to stop drinking, stop smoking, lose weight and get a job. Left with three kids, she went on welfare. He went into rehab in Eugene, Ore. When he completed the program, Smith told his wife he wasn’t coming back. Sometimes she would let the children visit him. And when they returned home from visits with dad, they told their mother how daddy had a new friend. She’s pretty, they said, and skinnier than you.
Although Stott-Smith’s family hadn’t taken her side before – it was their daughter’s Christian duty to obey her husband – they were concerned now. She had always been ditsy; now she was distracted, depressed. They drove her to see various psychiatrists, who prescribed various drugs.
“You might go out and kill someone on these,” one joked, “but otherwise have fun!” She sank deeper into despair.
It’s unlikely Stott-Smith ever read the classics. But, Rommelmann wonders, if she had, did she remember Medea? And how that scorned woman avenged herself on her own faithless Jason, by killing their children? Did
Stott-Smith think about punishing her Jason the same way?
No one knows what she was thinking by then, or if she was really thinking at all. But late on that May night in 2009, she put 7-year-old Trinity and 4-year-old Eldon in her car – 12-year-old Gavin wanted to stay home with his grandparents – and drove to the bridge.
She dropped her daughter in first. “Help me!” the girl screamed. Then Stott-Smith turned and went back for her little boy.
“Did you just put her in the water or something?” Eldon asked as she picked him up.Those were his last words.
Afterward she called Smith. He didn’t pick up. When his in-laws later phoned to say Amanda was missing, he finally called his wife back. It was hours before she answered. He asked if the children were OK.
“Why have you done this to me?” she asked him. “Why have you taken my joy away?”
Police tracked her to the ninth floor of a parking garage. An officer grabbed her just as she was about to jump.
Amazingly, Trinity survived the icy water — so Stott-Smith was only charged with murdering one of her kids.
Rommelmann points out that at least eight children were killed by their parents that week, many by their mothers.Yet, in a weird kind of sexism, men are punished more severely. Rommelmann suggests that’s because children are still considered a kind of property, a woman’s property. And who destroys their own possessions? You would have to be insane.
Which is why a man convicted of killing his child has a 72% chance of going to prison. A woman convicted of the same crime? Only 27%.
Amanda Stott-Smith proved the exception to that rule. The death penalty was very much on the table. Her mental state, or any past emotional abuse, was not considered. Stott-Smith pleaded guilty.
She was sentenced to life, with the possibility of parole after 35 years. She was 32.
That was in 2010, and after seven years of research and reporting, Rommelmann is no closer to a simple, clear-cut answer to why this happened than she was at the beginning. No one really is.
“Mandy did it,” Stott-Smith’s grandmother told the reporter flatly. “She’s guilty; she’s in prison and she deserves to be. But how did she get to that point? ... How do you understand the not understandable and forgive the unforgivable?”
Nancy Rommelmann’s “To the Bridge” will be out July 1.