It also drowned another child, Austin (Cody) Roodvoets, 3, of Inman, S.C., and Carl Sydney White, 29, of Campobello. Both towns are about 30 miles northwest of Union. Mr. White, along with Mrs. Phillips, had tried to rescue the others.

Mr. Wells said Mr. Phillips was behind the wheel when the vehicle was found.

Union residents milled around the site of the latest drownings, as they had done in 1994, when the Smith boys were found. ''People here are dumbfounded,'' said Ralph Greer, a retired newspaper and radio journalist who covered Union and the surrounding countryside for 35 years, and has lived here for half a century. No one can believe, Mr. Greer said, that such a terrible thing as the drowning of children has visited this place not once, but twice.

It is eerie, he said, that the latest deaths came as a result of the curiosity over Mrs. Smith's crime, something that people here want to forget. It is as if the crime still haunts them.

''People have been coming ever since it happened,'' he said of the site. ''People from all over the world. They just want to look.''

The Suburban passed between the two markers as it rolled down the bank and over a small tree planted in memory of the Smith boys. The polished stone markers have likenesses of the two boys carved in them.

''It's like it's haunted or something,'' Tommy Vinson, 46, of Union County, told The Associated Press. ''It keeps taking lives.''

On Oct. 25, 1994, Ms. Smith dressed her children in neat clothes, drove to the lake and parked her car on the steep boat ramp. Then she stepped out, released the hand brake and let the car carry her children to their deaths.