Bitter Blood (20 page)

Neighbors began calling Mary Brownlee to find out what was going on. But she had not heard from her friend Maya Angelou, who lived two doors away, directly across the street from the Newsom house, so she called to make sure that she was all right. Maya’s house was often a gathering spot for literary, political, and show business celebrities. A professor at nearby Wake Forest University, Maya was also an internationally known singer, dancer, actress, director, screenwriter, composer, civil rights leader, and author whose series of books about her life had been highly acclaimed. Maya had been unaware of the commotion in the neighborhood until Mary told her what had happened. Soon afterward, Maya called back in disbelief.

“Mary, did you just tell me that Hattie was
murdered?’’

More police had arrived. Fam Brownlee now counted nine cars, with more on the way. Officers were milling around, going in and out of the house. One asked Fam if he could identify the three cars beside the garage, and as Fam stepped between Bob’s Buick and Hattie’s gold Plymouth, he nearly stepped on a ring of keys.

“There’s some keys,” he said, and the officer stooped to pick them up, stopping only when Fam said, “They could be evidence.”

Still upset that the police had taken nearly an hour to respond to his wife’s calls, Fam became even more agitated as he watched their actions. Nobody seemed to be in charge or to know what to do. Officers kept going into the house to look at the bodies, drawn, Fam was certain, by nothing more than morbid curiosity. He thought he heard things being moved inside. Was evidence being destroyed inadvertently?

“Don’t you think you should get those people out of the house?” he asked one officer.

“We’ll take care of this,” she responded snappishly.

Fam went back to the foot of the driveway, convinced that the police were in a state of confusion.

On at least one count, he was right, for some officers had realized that the Newsom house might not fall within the newly annexed area of the city, that this might not be their case after all, and twenty-eight minutes after the first policeman arrived, a call went to the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Department.

17

The phone rang just before midnight at Allen Gentry’s modest brick home in Pfafftown, a village less than five miles from the Newsom house.

“County’s calling,” said his wife, Lu Ann, nudging him awake.

The young couple had been asleep for less than two hours after spending a tiring day at the sports car races at Charlotte Motor Speedway. They had, in fact, spent the weekend at the racetrack, driving the eighty miles back and forth each day. Allen Gentry never could get his fill of sleek, fast cars in close competition.

The call didn’t surprise Gentry. In the nearly two and a half years since he had been promoted to sergeant in the Criminal Investigation Division of the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Department, he had become accustomed to middle-of-the-night calls. He usually got two or three a week, almost always about minor matters that required a supervisor’s attention. He would make a decision, roll over, and go back to sleep.

But this time as he uttered his groggy hello into the receiver, the dispatcher began rattling on about a triple murder. His mind was too sleep-stilled to grasp that.

“I’m saying, ‘Huh?’” he recalled later. “You just don’t have triple homicides in Winston-Salem. You have those in California or somewhere else, not here.”

The news brought him awake quickly, and he jotted down the details on a side-table pad. “I’ll be right there,” he said.

“What is it?” asked his wife.

“A triple homicide,” he said incredulously.

He hurriedly pulled on jeans, a gray slipover shirt, and sneakers, and left by the carport door, passing his gleaming, black, T-top 280Z Datsun with its MY1VICE license tag as he made his way to the unmarked Dodge cruiser he detested.

For as long as he could remember, Gentry, a native of mountainous Wilkes County, had been drawn between two loves, the glamour of fast cars and the excitement of police work, and he never could reconcile the two.

After graduation from Elkin High School, he was torn about which course to follow: cars or law enforcement. He enrolled in a community college auto mechanics course but soon switched to a criminal justice program at another community college. He wanted to be a highway patrolman, but he weighed too little and his eyesight was too poor, so he dropped out of college and began selling cars in Winston-Salem.

On an outside chance, he submitted an application to the Winston-Salem Police Department and was surprised three months later to be offered a job in the communications division. He took it and a year later moved on to become a deputy with the sheriff’s department. A week before he was to start patrol duty, on September 1, 1973, he married Lu Ann Crump, whom he’d met in Spanish class in high school.

In five years as a patrol deputy, Gentry clung to his dream of becoming a highway patrolman. He gained weight, though not enough and corrected his vision with contact lenses. But his repeated appeals were denied, and instead he became a juvenile officer for the sheriff’s department for a year before stepping up to criminal investigations.

As a detective, Gentry thought he had found his calling. Bright and quick to learn, he was methodical and thorough, scrupulously honest and fair. He didn’t worry and was rarely rattled. He was a diplomat, never a bully, able to talk his way through almost any situation and achieve his objective. His even disposition, shy, soft-spoken approach, and boyish smile infused confidence, and made people trust him and want to talk to him. In good-guy, bad-guy situations, he was always the good guy.

Always eager to learn, Gentry sought whatever training was available. In addition to graduating from the FBI National Academy, he’d learned such varied skills as Breathalyzer operation and hypnosis. With his promotion to sergeant in January 1983, he clearly was on the rise in law enforcement.

Gentry was indeed almost too good to be true, the epitome of the all-American boy. He was always polite, rarely swore, still used expressions such as “gosh” and “neat,” didn’t smoke or drink, regularly attended the Baptist church. A sharp dresser, he was always meticulously groomed and had a standing weekly appointment with his barber, who kept his wavy, dark hair trimmed close.

At thirty-two, Gentry could finally meet the weight requirements of the highway patrol. He’d gained more than forty pounds since joining the sheriff’s department, although he was still trim. But he was glad now that he hadn’t won his battles to get into the patrol. In the years that he had kept that dream, he and Lu Ann had lived in apartments, knowing that if he got accepted they would be moved to some desolate part of the state. When the dream died, they bought the ranch-style house in Pfafftown and furnished it tastefully in vogueish country style. On their walls were prints by Bob Timberlake, a fashionable North Carolina artist whose simple rural scenes fetched handsome prices. Although they had no children, that void was partly filled by a twelve-year-old gray miniature poodle named Duffy, who stirred to see what was happening as Gentry hurried from his house in answer to the homicide call.

Gentry was happy with his life. He loved his work. But in his secret heart, he wished the flashy Datsun in his carport was a Porsche 911 convertible, and he couldn’t give up the idea that instead of going off to work each day in a business suit to investigate mundane burglaries, he should be wearing fireproof coveralls gaudy with patches and pulling on driving gloves and helmet to take to the track at Sebring or Riverside.

But that was not on his mind as he nudged his sluggish Dodge up the narrow, broken concrete lane that is Valley Road.
Three people killed.
Surely, Gentry thought, it must be a murder-suicide, a case that would be quickly cleared with a medical examiner’s ruling.

He didn’t have to search for the house. He topped the hill and saw police cars everywhere. Rarely had he seen so many at a crime scene. He parked on the opposite side of the street a short distance from the house and walked to the driveway. The confusion that had reigned earlier had subsided, and the house had been sealed off by Winston-Salem police. Two patrolmen were guarding the foot of the driveway, where rescue squad members and several bystanders also had gathered. Gentry saw his lieutenant, Earl B. Hiatt, usually called EB, arriving and waited for him. The two walked up the driveway, where they were greeted by Larry Gordon, the first deputy to reach the scene. Any thought Gentry had of a case easily cleared was dispelled when Gordon told them that three bodies were in the house, two women and a man, all shot several times, and no weapon in sight. He read the names of the victims from a pad, but neither Gentry nor Hiatt had heard of the Newsoms. Gordon explained that jurisdiction was in question, and Hiatt and Gentry agreed they should proceed on the assumption that this was their case. More specifically, Gentry knew, the responsibility likely would fall on him.

Big changes had taken place in the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Department in the previous six months. In November 1984, when longtime sheriff Manley Lancaster was forced by failing health to step down, county commissioners had chosen as sheriff Preston Oldham, the hard-eyed commander of the criminal investigation division, who had built a legendary reputation for his undercover narcotics work. Less than three weeks earlier, Oldham had realigned his department. Ronald Barker was appointed new captain of detectives. A former public school teacher who had spent years as crime prevention officer, holding rape clinics for women, teaching bank tellers how to respond to holdups and homeowners how to discourage burglaries, Barker had expected to be appointed sheriff himself. Indeed, news reports had proclaimed him the leading candidate, and he had been asked to be present at the commission meeting at which Oldham’s appointment was announced. Disappointed, he had nonetheless sworn his allegiance to the new sheriff.

Barker had formed the department’s first homicide division with one other detective following a spate of murders in 1976, but he had worked at it for less than two years, never had a case of this magnitude, and had been away from it for a long time. Gentry, who was aware of the politics involved in his department but tried to distance himself from them, had only restricted homicide experience himself. The handful of cases on which he had worked all had been quickly solved by confessions. He realized, however, that he was the department’s most experienced investigator on the scene, and although he knew that a difficult case—and this one had all the earmarks of being just that—would require hard work by almost every detective in the department, he knew, too, that the case had to have a lead officer, somebody to take charge, and in his unobtrusive way he quietly assumed command.

“Well, let’s see what we’ve got,” he said, heading for the back door of the Newsom house.

To the right, just inside the back door, a short hallway with rose-adorned wallpaper led to the living room, foyer, and staircase. There Bob Newsom’s tall, slender body lay on its right side in a near-fetal position. He was wearing blue jeans; a green, blue, and lavender plaid flannel shirt with long sleeves; and black corduroy house slippers with no socks. He had been shot three times in the abdomen, once in the right forearm (the only close shot), and once in the back of the head. He was just outside the arched entrance to the living room, and it appeared that he had been trying to flee when fatally wounded.

On the drop-leaf cherry table in front of which Bob’s body lay was a large antique hurricane lamp with a rose-colored globe that was a particular treasure of his mother. Once the lamp had had a twin, but Debbie Miller, Nanna and Paw-Paw’s youngest grandchild, kicked and broke it while sliding down the bannister as a child, a memorable experience to the family because it marked the only time anybody ever saw Nanna angry at one of her grandchildren. A tall grandfather clock, one of Paw-Paw’s most prized possessions, stood near Bob’s head, and on the floor beside the clock, where it had been placed to wait out the renovation of the house, was a wood-framed table clock with a .45-caliber bullet casing on top. Only six inches from Bob’s feet, in front of a small table with its single drawer pulled out, another orphan of the remodeling, a hole thirty inches in diameter had burned through the olive green carpet, charring the floorboards underneath. Inside the circle were ashes and odd bits of scorched paper, some from an organic gardening magazine that apparently had supplied fuel for the fire. Florence’s pocketbook lay beside Bob’s body, its contents dumped onto the carpet.

In the living room, a large mirror over the fireplace at the end of the room opposite the archway reflected a macabre scene of disorder. A wooden rocking chair lay on its side between the flickering console TV, tuned to a High Point station, and the door to the breezeway where Nanna had set up her temporary kitchen. A set of fireplace tools had been overturned. A green recliner near the fireplace was in the full rest position, and beside it, neatly aligned, were Florence’s shoes. A bunch of red grapes lay on a
Fortune
magazine by a Winston-Salem telephone directory on a marble-topped table next to the chair. On the telephone directory was a green plastic supermarket vegetable tray with raw cut cauliflower on it. A full can of spray starch stood on the coffee table.

Florence’s thin body lay in a grotesque sprawl in front of the TV in a pool of dried blood. She was wearing a white skirt and a light blue-and-white striped knit top. Although investigators would not notice it immediately, her throat had been slit, a deep, two-inch gash just above the glasses that hung around her neck on a decorative chain. She had two shallow stab wounds in the right side of her neck, a third in her right shoulder. More prominent were three deep stab wounds that penetrated her back. One, it later was discovered, had severed her aorta. A single shot in the right side of her chest had penetrated her liver, heart, and both lungs. She also had been shot in her left temple as she lay on the floor, the bullet passing through and lodging beneath her. Her wedding band was bent, the finger under the ring cut and broken, as if somebody had tried unsuccessfully to remove the ring. Her engagement ring, with its three-quarter-carat diamond, was gone.