Bitter Blood (51 page)

She was close to her grandmother, she said. Nanna had helped her with legal expenses in her divorce. Nanna often gave money to her grandchildren, she said, including sizable checks every Christmas. She believed that Nanna might have kept large sums of money stashed at her house and offered this as a motive.

She was upset about the condition of the house after going by the day before, she said, and was especially concerned about all the fingerprint dust. Would it come off? The detectives assured her that it would. The dusting was necessary to help solve the crime, they explained. She was also worried about the whereabouts of her grandmother’s silver flatware, mink, and jewelry.

Gentry asked if she’d mind going over her activities for the previous weekend, and she graciously complied.

She’d had dinner at Annie Hill’s in Reidsville Friday night. Fritz had gone camping in the mountains. She spent much of Saturday at Annette Hunt’s house. She seemed vague about the rest of Saturday but remembered taking the boys to McDonald’s that night, then returning to the apartment. On Sunday afternoon, Fritz called from Lexington, Virginia, and asked her to meet him at Natural Bridge for dinner. She drove there with the boys, nearly a four-hour trip. They ate in the cafeteria in the big entrance building, took a short hike, and drove back to Greensboro, arriving about 11:30. As soon as they opened the apartment door Chowy ran off, chasing a cat, and Fritz spent four hours looking for him.

“Isn’t that right?” she said, turning to Fritz and touching his knee.

Fritz nodded agreement.

About midnight, Susie went on, John Chandler, a neighbor of her parents, called and said there’d been an accident at Nanna’s. She thought it was a minor auto accident and wasn’t concerned. Later, Alice called and said that her parents and Nanna were dead. She didn’t believe it and called Annie Hill, who told her that it probably wasn’t true, not to worry, that she would try to find out something about it in the morning. Fritz went to sleep on the floor, but she stayed up all night working on a school paper. Rob called about 3:30 A.M. to tell her of the deaths, but not until Annie Hill called to confirm the news the next morning did she really accept that it was true.

When Gentry asked if she knew anything about the Lynch murders, she became very vocal.

“It was professional,” she said. “Nothing was taken.”

Gentry chose not to press by asking how she knew that.

Her former husband was involved in “shady dealings,” Susie said. He’d tried to get her to sell stolen trucks for him, and he was involved in drug trafficking. She didn’t think that Tom would have killed his mother and sister, she said, but he owed money to underworld characters, and they’d had them killed so that he would inherit money and be able to pay them. She said that Delores had a big estate and that she’d been trying to get her lawyer to get part of it for her sons.

She went on to tell about finding the boys’ toy animals with their throats slit and the mysterious “two down and two to go” call.

She was scared for herself and her boys, she said, but Fritz was protecting them.

While the detectives were talking, they had been glancing around at the clutter of the apartment, taking note of what they saw. Behind a screen that separated the living room from the dining room, they noticed what appeared to be big piles of military field gear, but no weapons were visible. As they made ready to leave, they saw that the front door was rigged with a motion detector. A huge floodlight and a strobe light were aimed at the door to blind intruders. What appeared to be a gas grenade was fastened above the door. They thanked Susie for her time and help, and as they started to leave, Gentry asked Fritz for his address and telephone number. Fritz gave him his mother’s address and number in Reidsville.

“What kind of work do you do?” Gentry asked, as if he were just curious.

“I’m a physician,” Fritz said, “but I’m not licensed in this state right now.”

“Is it just me, or did that seem strange?” Gentry asked after they got into Sturgill’s cruiser and jotted down the license numbers of the two Chevy Blazers parked in front of the apartment.

Sturgill agreed that all did not seem right.

“It didn’t make sense,” Gentry explained later. “Rob was upset about his parents and grandmother. He was really torn up. But as far as Susie was concerned, it was like there was no problem, that nothing had happened to her.”

Susie had an appointment for a haircut and permanent on Wednesday afternoon. Annette went to her apartment to look after the boys. Fritz was there, fooling with camping gear. John and Jim were supposed to be cleaning their room. They squabbled, and Fritz broke it up. Annette had a headache and asked Fritz if he had anything for it.

Fritz opened a kitchen cabinet, and Annette had never seen so many bottles of pills outside a drugstore—mostly vitamins, she noticed. He gave her two Tylenol tablets. She took them and went into the boys’ room to lie down. Maizie jumped onto the bed with her.

“She just wants to cuddle,” Jim explained, but Annette shooed the dog back to the floor.

The boys and dogs played while Annette rested. Fritz loaded the camping gear into his Blazer and left without explanation.

Shortly, Annette got up to finish Susie’s ironing. She gathered some clothes, put them on hangers, and took them into Susie’s bedroom, where the door had remained closed. The room was a mess, the closet packed so tight that she couldn’t even squeeze in a T-shirt.

“All I could see was Fritz’s stuff,” she recalled later. “There was no place to put anything. I said, ‘I shouldn’t be in here.’”

She retreated, closing the door behind her, certain that Susie’s relationship with Fritz was more than Susie had acknowledged to her.

Wednesday evening turned stormy. Tornadoes and severe thunderstorms ripped through Winston-Salem and Greensboro and continued on to the east, uprooting trees, damaging buildings, downing power lines, flooding streets, and pounding the crops of area farmers with hail. Frances Miller and her family received friends at Vogler’s Funeral Home, not far from Nanna’s house, shortly after the storms passed. Detective Steve Carden posed as Debbie’s escort at the funeral home to see if any suspicious characters showed up. Neither Susie nor Rob came, choosing instead to receive visitors in Greensboro. Nancy Holder represented them at the funeral home.

Among the visitors who arrived early at the Newsom house in Greensboro that evening was Chris Severn, Susie’s close friend from college, now Chris Waters, a teacher who drove from Greenville, two hundred miles to the east. She arrived to find that Susie had gone to Reidsville to pick up Annie Hill, and she waited for her return.

Like Susie’s other friends, Chris had great affection for Bob and Florence, and she had continued to keep up with them even when she no longer heard from Susie, always calling them or stopping to see them when she happened to be in Greensboro, and she was greatly distressed by their deaths. Only occasionally had she seen Susie since their years in college, usually by accident when she stopped to see Bob and Florence. Susie had been in Chris’s wedding, and she had attended Susie’s. Chris had seen Susie briefly after Tom finished dental school, then largely lost touch after Susie’s move to Albuquerque. She encountered her again soon after Susie left Tom, and visited after Susie dropped her anthropology studies at Wake Forest. Susie had told her a convoluted tale about strange requirements Wake Forest had tried to put on her and that had kept her from her degree. “It was the most cockamamy story I ever heard,” she recalled later, and it caused her to wonder what was happening to her friend.

Susie seemed astonished to see Chris. They hugged, and Susie introduced her to John.

“Oh, you look so much like your father,” Chris said, realizing instantly from Susie’s change of expression that she’d said the wrong thing.

“I knew him at Wake Forest,” Chris felt obliged to explain.

“Well, you don’t know him now,” Susie said.

Because most of the people at the house were Rob’s friends, Susie took Chris next door to Annette’s house, where they sat at the kitchen table and talked with Annette and Annie Hill. The conversation centered on that night’s TV news, which had quoted Tom asking for an investigation to determine if the murders of his mother and sister were connected to those of the Newsoms. Only a short time earlier, while waiting at Rob’s, Chris had learned from a neighbor about the murders of Delores and Janie, and it had immediately caused her to remember how much Susie disliked her mother-in-law. Now Annie Hill remarked that this was probably Tom’s way of getting his foot in the door to obtain custody.

“They were talking about things I didn’t know about,” Chris later recalled, and she was too polite to pry.

Finally, Susie changed the subject and began talking about Chris’s family and remembering old times, particularly their weddings. She recalled that Chris had given her a sterling nail file as a bridesmaid’s gift. “I still have it,” she said.

They laughed when Susie recalled how much she hated the dress that Chris wore to her rehearsal dinner.

Soon, Chris left. She drove back to Greenville with the feeling that something about Susie had changed, that a terrible void lurked within her.

As Chris was leaving, Linda Crutchfield, Susie’s best friend from high school, now Linda Chris, was arriving from her home in Chapel Hill. She hadn’t seen Susie in years, and Susie broke into tears at the sight of her, then took her around, introducing her to the people at the Newsom house. Linda was a little taken aback that Susie was so calm, but she thought that perhaps the shock had not had time to seep in yet and that Susie was maintaining the façade that her family background demanded for such occasions.

Soon Susie took her to Annette’s, where they sat and talked about what had happened.

“The police seem to think that we all are in some sort of danger,” Susie said.

She told about being questioned earlier that day. “It’s almost as if they’re treating us as if we’re the criminals. Can you believe it?”

She went on to talk about the holes the police had cut in the carpet at Nanna’s house and other things they had done there.

“She seemed to be upset that they had not had a respect of property,” Linda recalled later. “I thought that was sort of strange, that concern.”

While they talked, Annie Hill came in carrying a suit in a dry cleaning bag for Susie to wear to the funerals next day.

“Oh, thank you,” Susie exclaimed. “I don’t know what I would do without you.”

Susie introduced Annie Hill, and shortly afterward, Linda began making ready to go.

“Please don’t leave,” Susie pleaded. “I want you to meet my sons.”

She took Linda upstairs, where the boys were engrossed in a TV show.

“I’d like you to meet Mrs. Chris, whose husband has the restaurant in Chapel Hill I’ve told you about on our trips to Raleigh,” Susie said to them.

The boys seemed more interested in the TV than in Linda, and Linda turned to Susie and said, “If you’ve been to Raleigh, why didn’t you ever stop and see us?”

“I was afraid if I came through and found you weren’t still there I would break the illusion,” Susie said.

Linda had no idea what she meant. Did Susie prefer the illusion of a friend to a real one? She thought the remark strange indeed.

Back downstairs, Susie and Linda joined in conversation with Annette and Annie Hill. Susie got Linda to talk about her family, and Linda began telling about her daughter’s learning problems and how diligently they had worked to overcome them.

“I wish I had done that with Fritz,” Annie Hill said, causing Susie to turn and pat her shoulder.

“You need not trouble yourself,” Susie said. “You’ve done the best you could.”

Later, as Susie was walking Linda to her car, she started talking about Tom.

“I have made some decisions that are unpopular with the family,” Susie confided, without amplification. “Tom wants extended visitation rights in the summer. The boys do not want to be with him.”

“But he
is
their father,” Linda put in.

“I’ve been real active with the boys,” Susie said. “We go hiking and camping. You’d be proud of me. While I can I’m going to keep up with them.”

As Linda started to leave, Susie smiled and said, “You know, Linda, I had the greatest time at your wedding. I still have the dress I wore. I cut it off to tea length, and I’ve worn it many times.”

When Linda arrived at her father’s house in Winston-Salem that night, her stepmother mentioned that they’d heard on the TV news that the police were looking into the possibility that a family member could have been involved in the Newsom murders.

“Who could that be?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Linda said, “but something is wrong.”

38

Thursday morning’s newspapers headlined robbery as the motive for the Newsom murders. Both the
Winston-Salem Journal
and the
Greensboro News & Record
made extensive mention of the Lynch murders, saying that Sheriff Oldham intended to give high priority to determining if the cases were connected.

The
Journal
quoted Lieutenant Dan Davidson of the Kentucky State Police as saying he planned to send two investigators to Winston-Salem the following week.