Bitter Blood (49 page)

“Oh, dear me, Katy,” Juanita said. “We were just over there Saturday night.”

“You were? What time?”

“We were home by quarter to ten.”

“I’m sure the sheriff’’s department would want to know this,” Katy said, “because they aren’t sure when they were killed.”

Charlie called the sheriff’’s department to report that he might have some useful information about the Newsoms.

Allen Gentry spent Monday morning at the Newsom house, going through Nanna’s belongings, coordinating the investigation, and assessing the information that had begun to pour in. Reporters arrived at the foot of the driveway early and remained, clamoring for information, but all the officers avoided them.

A little before noon, the bodies were removed, each departing in an ambulance filmed by TV crews. Shortly afterward, Gentry and several other officers went to a nearby restaurant for lunch. When he returned to the house, Gentry got a call from Sheriff Preston Oldham, who had received a call from Rockingham County Sheriff Bobby Vernon saying that he had some information that might be pertinent to the murders. Oldham thought Gentry should go to Rockingham County.

Early that morning, Susie’s lawyer, Sandy Sands, had received a call from Annie Hill Klenner, who wanted to know if it was true that Florence, Bob, and Nanna had been murdered. Sands called Vernon, who confirmed the murders. Sands then went to Annie Hill’s house to tell her. Afterward, Sands called Vernon to say he had information, and Vernon called Oldham.

Gentry got Walt House, a young SBI agent, to go with him. House, a close friend, had been a Forsyth County sheriff’’s deputy before joining the SBI. After talking with Vernon, they went to Sands’s office near downtown Reidsville.

Sands not only filled in the officers about Susie’s divorce and the bitter battles over visitation, he went on to tell about Susie’s fears, her belief that Tom’s underworld connections had killed his parents, and her visit to his office just three days earlier.

“The trip was not all we were hoping for,” Gentry recalled later. “Sands was trying to lay it all at Tom’s doorstep, but I couldn’t figure out how Tom could benefit from the death of Susie’s family.”

Gentry left Sands’s office confused and tired—very tired; he’d been going for nearly thirty-six hours on less than two hours sleep. He and Walt House dropped by the Rockingham County courthouse in Wentworth to pick up copies of the documents in Tom and Susie’s court struggles, then headed for Winston-Salem.

On the way, Gentry stopped by Susie’s apartment to meet her and arrange a later interview. His knock was answered only by a ferociously barking dog that kept slamming into the door from the inside. He left his card in the door and drove on to Winston-Salem.

The lab team had quit for the day by the time Gentry and House returned to the Newsom home at 7:30 P.M. Gentry went home, had a cheese sandwich, fell into bed and immediately went to sleep.

Susie was at Annette Hunt’s house that evening, having dinner with Fritz, Annie Hill, and the boys.

The talk in the beginning was of the events of the day. Susie didn’t mention her parents, but she did talk about her grandmother. Nanna was a great student of the Bible, she said.

“Greed,” said Susie. “Nanna always said that was the ultimate sin. You could boil it all down to one word: greed.”

She went on to talk about what a wonderful woman Nanna was. It was hard to think of her gone, she said.

“She was such a sweet person,” Fritz added.

“Fritz never did have a tremendous amount to say,” Annette said later. “He never made any comment at all about Bob and Florence.”

But Fritz’s chair at the dinner table had a view of the Newsom house. “It’s hard to have to look over there,” he observed at one point.

After dinner, Fritz went outside to talk with Annette’s son, Joey, who was seventeen and had long looked up to Fritz, sharing his interests in weaponry and martial arts. While they talked, Fritz noticed Rob come out of his house across the street, and he walked over and offered condolences.

“He just said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and I said, ‘Thank you,’” Rob said later.

Fritz had to drive his mother to Reidsville, and Annette said that Joey could take Susie and the boys home. Before Joey left, Fritz slipped him a loaded pistol and told him to be very watchful. Joey’s mother was upset later when she found out about that.

When Joey didn’t return promptly, Annette called Susie’s apartment to make sure everything was okay. All was fine, Susie said. Joey was walking the dogs for her.

“The sheriff came by,” Susie said. “He left his card in the door.”

36

The Newsom murders were the top story on area TV newscasts Monday night, but the reports were sketchy, and newspapers in Greensboro and Winston-Salem could offer few more details in their Tuesday morning editions.

Most of what reporters had learned came from Homer Sutton, who had found the bodies, and John Giesler, Nanna’s minister, who also had gone to the house before police arrived, but even they hadn’t said much. One story noted that Dr. Sutton declined to answer many questions because Sheriff Preston Oldham asked him not to talk.

Oldham had little regard for the press, and on Monday he had circulated a memo through his department warning that information about the murders was to be released only through him, and he was inclined to release little.

Oldham’s reputation as a tough cop was hard-earned. He’d wanted to be a policeman since his childhood in a local orphanage, and he went at his work with uncommon zeal. His undercover narcotics work, during which he rode for two years with a motorcycle gang, was legendary, his adventures the stuff of movies. Once called Mule because of his stubbornness, he remained dedicated, driven, and distrustful of nearly everybody after twenty-two years in law enforcement. Humorless and blunt, he was short not only with the press. “I don’t have time to be a social worker,” the
Winston-Salem Journal
once quoted him as telling a local group. “I just kick ass and take names.”

Early Tuesday morning, the detectives involved in the case gathered at the sheriff’s department in the basement of the modern, seven-story justice building in downtown Winston-Salem to go over what they’d learned and decide assignments.

Afterward, Gentry called Rob to set up an interview. An appointment was made for 3 P.M. Gentry also called Susie about an interview. Sorry, not today, she told him, sounding, as he later described it, “perfectly chipper and happy.” She had other appointments.

“I thought that was a little odd,” he said. “If my parents and grandmother got murdered, I’d think talking to the police about it would be high on my priority list. It obviously was not on hers.”

Whenever something bothered Gentry, he ran it by somebody before forming an opinion. “Does this sound right to you, or is it me?” he said to SBI agent Tom Sturgill, telling him about Susie’s reaction.

“We both felt things weren’t quite kosher,” he said, “but at that point it was just a feeling.”

At 10:43, Gentry called Tom in Albuquerque. Tom told him about the murders of his mother and sister, and Gentry would not forget the date, July 22; that was his birthday. Tom told of Susie’s dislike for his mother and of Bob’s plan to testify in the upcoming hearing. Susie had been acting strangely, he said, and he wasn’t sure what was going on. She also had an unusual relationship with her first cousin, Fritz Klenner.

This was the first mention of Fritz’s name that Gentry had heard, and he misunderstood it, writing it on his notepad as “Clennerd.”

Fritz was a weird guy, Tom went on, a gun lover, some sort of survivalist. Tom thought he should be checked out. He would be, Gentry assured him.

Frances Miller and her family had returned to Raleigh Monday after stopping in Greensboro to see Rob and Susie. They picked up clothing and other necessities and drove back to the Holiday Inn on Cherry Street in Winston-Salem, where they were joined by the fifth member of the family, the youngest child, Debbie Parham, who had come from her home in Atlanta.

Although they had not slept Sunday night, sleep had not come Monday either.

“We stayed up all night and started playing detective,” Nancy remembered. “We were obsessed with it.”

They drew maps, charts, and diagrams, and they were frustrated with their lack of information. They wanted answers from the police, and they thought they might get them Tuesday morning. Officers had invited Frances to come to her mother’s house. They wanted her to tell them if she saw anything missing or out of the ordinary.

Frances was met at the house by SBI agents J. W. Bryant and Walt House, who explained what they wanted. “You talk,” Bryant said, “we’ll listen.” Frances entered through the broken storm door with Nancy on her arm. The officers guided her away from the foyer where Bob’s body had been lying less than twenty-four hours earlier and straight ahead to Nanna’s bedroom, where the drawers from the chest were still stacked on the floor. The experience seemed somehow unreal to Frances. Entering the bedroom where just nine days earlier, on Mother’s Day, she and Nanna had sat giggling over all the things Nanna couldn’t bring herself to throw away, Frances was flooded with memory:
“I sure hope, honey that you don‘t have to come in here and take care of all of this stuff if something happens to me.”

As
soon as she stepped into the room, Frances saw her mother’s expensive gold-and-pearl bracelet on the floor. That answered one of her questions. Surely, this had been no robbery.

The officers guided her upstairs, where Bob’s briefcase lay open on the floor of his bedroom.

“It’s empty,” she said. “He would never have carried an empty briefcase. What was in here?”

“We don’t know,” one of the officers said.

While her mother looked around the room, Nancy spotted some letters in Florence’s knitting basket next to the bed. She picked them up and glanced through them. They were copies of the letters exchanged between Tom and Kathy and Florence and Louise. Frances and her family had not known about the upcoming hearing, nor had they known of Bob’s plan to testify on Tom’s behalf. Nancy grew excited as she read the letters.

“Here it is!” she said. “This is it! Take these. This is the motive right here. Have you read these?”

The officers said little about the letters, but later Nancy learned that they had read them and made copies before returning them to the basket to see if Frances would notice them.

The letters convinced Nancy that Susie and her problems were behind the murders.

Rob and Susie drove to Winston-Salem in separate cars Tuesday morning to make arrangements for their parents’ funeral. Susie went first to St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, which she had attended until her marriage. She hadn’t been to the church in years, and the Reverend Dudley Colhoun invited her into his office in the church annex. He knew of Susie’s troubles with her family. He’d been briefed by Rob’s in-laws, who were members of the church and suspicious of Susie’s involvement in the murders, and he was curious to see how Susie was acting.

“I’m certainly sorry about what’s happened,” he said.

“It could’ve been anybody in Forsyth County who did it,” Susie responded. “There have been all kinds of workmen in that house, you know.”

The way Susie talked about the murders was almost as if she were talking about somebody else’s family, perhaps something she’d read in the newspaper, Colhoun thought. He realized that in cases of sudden death, family members sometimes have trouble letting out their emotions, and he thought this might be the case with Susie.

He asked what she’d been doing. She told about going to Taiwan. She was at UNC-G now, she said, about to get her master’s degree in business, and she was thinking about returning to China.

She asked about his son, Chuck, whom she’d taught in Sunday school.

“Know where Chuck is?” Colhoun said smiling. He pointed out the window behind him to the apartment building next door. “He lives right there, he and his wife.”

He tried to stir her emotions by recalling happy family moments from the past, but he realized that he wasn’t getting through. Susie turned conversation to the service, and after they’d gone through the order of it, she made ready to leave.

“How can I help you?” Colhoun asked, but she offered no suggestions. The meeting lasted only twenty minutes.

“It was a weird thing,” Colhoun said later. “There was no feeling whatsoever, no sense of remorse or loss.”

After Susie left, Colhoun made an observation to the church’s director of education, Wilma Smiley, who had been a friend of Florence. “Something’s not right,” he said.

Rob and Susie met at Vogler’s Funeral Home, only a short distance from Nanna’s house, where they were joined by their aunt Frances. Susie seemed hyperactive and very talkative to Frances, who found her behavior unusual. “It would not have been normal to anybody who loved their parents,” she said later. “I was looking for some signs of sorrow. I could find none.”

While Frances planned her mother’s funeral, Rob and Susie picked out a casket for their father, an urn for their mother’s ashes, and saw to other arrangements. At her request, Florence was being cremated. Bob would need a suit in which to be buried, the funeral director noted, and Rob said there was a new one at Nanna’s house. He’d pick it up if the police would let him and drop it off. Susie went to the house with him to look for some of her mother’s belongings. Officers accompanied them as they went through the house. Later, they stood on the patio at the back of the house, chatting with Captain Ron Barker.