Bitter Blood (10 page)

But if somebody was going to kill Delores over such a thing, her friends wondered, wouldn’t it be in a moment of passion, not a calculated murder also claiming innocent Janie?

“Delores was a pain in the ass,” said Janie’s former boyfriend, John Trent. “She was the kind of person you’d invite to leave, then take an aspirin and sit down to rest for an hour or two. But, you know, shooting her in the head is a bit extreme.”

9

The Kentucky State Reformatory rises from the open hills of Oldham County like a medieval castle, its twelve-story granite tower an imposing presence on the countryside. Set in the middle of three thousand acres of farmland near La Grange, the prison is Kentucky’s largest. At the edge of one of the prison’s bean fields, close by State Highway 146, is a modest red-brick structure that is Kentucky State Police Post Five. At the eastern end of the building, in the bedroom-size, institutionally furnished office of the post’s two lieutenants, Dan Davidson, the criminal division commander, and Ray Herman, the patrol commander, was a chair upholstered in dull green fabric where guests were received. On Thursday, July 26, two days after the discovery of the bodies on Covered Bridge Road, Davidson was waiting for that chair to be filled by Tom Lynch. So far Davidson was feeling good about the progress being made in case 5-84-543.

“We have gathered an enormous amount of evidence,” he had told a
Louisville Times
reporter that morning. “I feel very optimistic.”

He and his detectives had indeed collected a lot of information. First thing Wednesday morning, Childers and Nobles had gone to Lake Louisvilla to question Helen Stewart. She claimed to know nothing about the killings, and both detectives believed her. They asked her to go to the house to see if anything was missing. She noticed nothing gone but remembered that Delores had had a gun, a revolver, which the officers hadn’t found. She also recalled that Delores usually wore a turquoise cross on a silver chain around her neck. That wasn’t on her body, and the detectives couldn’t find it in the house. If that was all the killer took, the officers noted, it was small bounty for two lives.

Later that morning, Childers and Nobles had gone to Louisville to watch the autopsies, which had turned up something curious. Delores’s blood contained .06 alcohol, only .04 away from legal intoxication. That meant she’d probably had the equivalent of at least two drinks in the hour before her death. The detectives had found two empty beer cans in her bedroom waste baskets, but if she had drunk those before leaving for church, her body would have burned up the alcohol before she got home. Marjorie Chinnock had seen no sign of drinking by Delores, except for the sip of wine at communion, and neither had Butch Rice at the gas station where Delores stopped on her way home. Had she gone somewhere for drinks with someone after leaving church? She hardly had time. Had she been drinking in the car on the way home? If so, she’d left no evidence. The information was puzzling and would remain a mystery.

Davidson had requested an intelligence check on the only surviving family member, Tom, but it had produced nothing of consequence. He also had called airlines to see if Tom had made reservations into or out of Louisville in the past week. He found only the reservation Tom had made for himself, Kathy, and his sons for their planned trip to see his mother on the coming weekend.

Shortly before noon on Thursday, a day ahead of his planned arrival for his visit with his mother, Tom landed at Standiford Field in Louisville with a friend from Albuquerque, Steve Mahieu. He was met by an Oldham County police officer and the department’s chaplain, a volunteer Methodist minister, who drove Tom and his friend the twenty-five miles to Post Five. Awaiting them were the four detectives: Davidson, Childers, Nobles, and Swinney.

Tom Lynch was thirty-six, but he still had the rangy, muscular build that had enabled him to become a high school basketball star. At six feet, he towered nearly a foot over all other members of his family. (“Isn’t he tall and handsome?” his mother liked to boast when she showed him off to friends. “It’s because I kept him so well nourished and gave him so many vitamins.”) His long arms, slightly sloped shoulders, and loping gait still gave him the appearance of the point guard whose moves can’t be anticipated. His boyish good looks lurked behind a Vandyke beard, and his short brown hair, parted on the right, was combed over his forehead to disguise a slightly receding hairline. His blue eyes were rimmed with red from lack of sleep.

Escorted into Davidson’s office, Tom shook hands with the detectives as they offered condolences. “Have a seat,” Davidson said, taking a moment to study Tom’s face. He saw such a devastated man that he was almost hesitant to question him. He began by asking if Tom had any idea why the murders occurred.

“I’ve just laid awake two nights thinking how it could happen,” Tom said in a voice heavy with pain.

But he had no idea why. He couldn’t understand how somebody could have foiled the alarm. His mother always had it on.

“What we need from you is to know if anything is missing,” Davidson said.

Tom replied that he wasn’t that familiar with his mother’s belongings. He knew she had TVs, radios, tape recorders. Not much jewelry. She usually wore plastic jewelry. “My mom’s kinda cheap. She didn’t want to spend a lot of money.”

“I notice she was right meticulous, kept good records,” Davidson said.

“She wasn’t one to carry a lot of cash.”

Davidson wanted to know when Tom last talked with his mother.

“I think it was last week sometime.”

She usually called two or three times a week, he explained, but he’d spent the past weekend with his kids and some friends fishing on a lake in Colorado and didn’t return home until late Sunday.

“We kind of thought it was strange that she didn’t call us Sunday or Monday of this week.”

Had his mother expressed any fears?

“No. Other than she’s paranoid about the alarm system. I don’t know why the alarm didn’t go off. I’ve set it off a million times taking the garbage out.”

Tom asked for details of the killings, but Davidson was cautious in reply, not wanting to give away too much.

“This doesn’t happen to me,” Tom said of the murders, his voice filled with despair.

Davidson changed the subject to Janie.

She was sweet and attractive, Tom said. No serious relationships that he knew about. He mentioned John Trent, the lawyer in Lexington of years ago.

How about friends of his mother?

There was Helen Stewart. “When I got divorced, Mom and Helen came out and cleaned house and cooked for me.”

Others?

“I don’t remember names too good. I met Susan Reid.”

What was Delores like?

“My mom was kind of a character. She’s a little bit eccentric, but she had a heart of gold.”

Had Tom given any thought to who might have done it?

He figured it was somebody who knew his mother, knew the layout, or knew somebody who did. “My first inclination was that it was somebody who knew Helen.”

After some questions about the contents of the house, including Delores’s revolver, an H&R .32, Davidson decided that the time had come to get to touchier business.

“Doctor, to be quite candid with you, I don’t know whether you realize this or not…”

“I think I know what you’re going to say,” Tom said. “I’m the sole heir. I think you’d be negligent if you didn’t look at that possibility, too.”

“What’s your opinion about a polygraph?” Davidson asked.

“I don’t know anything about a polygraph test. I certainly couldn’t have done it myself. I was fishing on a lake in Colorado. That’s a possibility that didn’t occur to me until yesterday.”

“Everything there is yours,” Davidson said. “There’s also a possibility, whoever did this, you could be next. Could be a possibility somebody else wants to inherit it.”

“I don’t even know who could possibly be in line for it. My whole family is gone.”

“This issue here of your inheritance is hard to address. If you’re innocent, which I hope you are—it’s very difficult to talk to a feller who’s had a tragedy like this.”

“This is a nightmare on top of a nightmare, Lieutenant.”

“What is your financial condition, Doctor?”

“Well, let’s see. I’ve been in practice about eight years, and I’ve got a few bills, and I make about a hundred and twenty thousand a year, and I live in a nice house. I’ve got two cars, I’ve got an IRA and a little money in the bank. That’s it.”

As an afterthought, he added that he paid five hundred dollars a month in child support.

Davidson made a note and again brought up the polygraph test.

“If you take care of it and deal with it at the outset, if anybody says what about this guy who got this inheritance, we can say he took a polygraph, he’s clean, he’s innocent.”

“This is elimination,” Childers added.

“What I’m trying to get at as tactfully as I can is before you go back to Albuquerque, we’d like to have a polygraph test,” Davidson said.

“Well, obviously, that’s the only thing to do. I can’t refuse to take it.”

“Well, you could.”

“Obviously, that would be the worst thing to do. I don’t know how it works. I’ve got a little high blood pressure. Obviously, I’m a little upset.”

“All of that is taken into consideration.”

“I can’t imagine anybody killing my mother. I never met anybody who knew them and didn’t like them.”

“We’ve got some leads on this case,” Davidson said.

“I hope so. I can’t imagine somebody getting away with it.”

“I hope they don’t.”

“I’m really concerned,” Tom said. “I didn’t know if this was a cracker outfit out here in the country, to be honest with you. I felt maybe we had some big ol’ Jackie Gleason type of a sheriff and it would just be…You guys seem to be working real hard at it. I’d like to be the guy who’d come out here and demand everything be done and stuff, but I realize you guys are pros and you have to do things your way. I mean, I want something done now, but I realize if you don’t catch the guy right there, you have to go step by step. I’ll try to be patient, too.”

“I can assure you, you’ve got three of the finest investigators in the country on this case,” Davidson said of the detectives before him.

Tom agreed to take a polygraph test, and Davidson arranged for it to be administered immediately in Louisville. Childers and Nobles would take him.

Not long into the interview, Davidson’s intuition had told him that this mild and emotionally wounded man was not capable of murdering his mother and sister. He wanted to know if he was alone in that feeling.

“I don’t think he did it,” he said to Childers after Tom had left his office.

“I don’t either,” said Childers.

But at 5:20 that afternoon, when Sergeant Ron Howard of the Jefferson County Police finished the polygraph test, he reported to Childers that it had proved inconclusive. Tom was too tense and upset, he thought, to get an accurate reading.

Tom was tired, but the detectives wanted him to do one more thing before they took him to his room at the Melrose Inn in Prospect—go by the house and see if he could spot anything missing or out of the ordinary.

When Tom walked into the house and saw the disarray, the scuff marks on the floors left by the officers who’d been trooping in and out, the black fingerprint dust everywhere, his first thought was that his mother was really going to be upset about this mess.

10

The funeral for Delores and Janie, whose bodies had been cremated, was at 10:30 Friday morning at Stoess Funeral Home, a remodeled frame house in Crestwood, next door to the hardware store where, on the day before her death, Delores had gone to see about a holster for her revolver. The chapel was filled with Delores’s friends from the Little Colonel Theater and Janie’s friends from dental school. Delores’s favorite priest, the retired Father R. C. Board, presided, reading the Requiem from the 1928
Book of Common Prayer.

Phil Pandolfi thought the service cold and impersonal. Nobody said anything about how sweet and wonderful Janie was. To come to the funeral, Phil used the money he had intended to spend when Janie came to New York—the trip she would have been on the weekend she was killed, if she hadn’t changed her mind—and he was feeling lost, left out, and helpless. He thought himself the closest person to Janie present, yet he had no say in anything and nobody knew how he was hurting. “I had so much to share,” he said, “and nobody even knew.”

During the service, Tom Swinney and a lieutenant from his department, Jim Roberts, took license plate numbers in the parking lot, and afterward they scanned the crowd for suspicious faces.

The ashes of Delores and Janie were taken to Harrod’s Creek Cemetery beside Brownsboro Christian Church, a small country church on Covered Bridge Road only a couple of miles from the Lynch home, and buried on a maple-shaded rise.

Saturday morning at 9, Tom arrived again at the Jefferson County Police Department in Louisville with Detectives Swinney and Childers to face his second round of questioning from Ron Howard, the polygraph operator. The session lasted until 12:40, and Tom emerged emotionally drained and agitated. “I was terrified,” he recalled later. “I could feel I wasn’t doing well. I had a lot of pressure on me, self-imposed pressure. I was worried that somebody would think I did it. I could just see the headlines, ‘Son Fails Lie Detector Test.’ That would be great, and here I am knowing I’m perfectly innocent. I was so afraid I would respond that I did respond.”