Bitter Blood (47 page)

Annette once had been Susie’s closest friend, but she’d rarely heard from her in the past year and a half. Annette thought it was because Susie didn’t want her to know how close she’d gotten with Fritz.

“What are you doing?” Susie asked.

“Nothing much.”

“Can I come over?”

“Sure.”

Susie stayed several hours. She and Annette spent some time catching up, but mostly Susie wanted to talk about the upcoming hearing. She was convinced that Tom wanted to take the boys away from her and she couldn’t understand how her father could testify against her. She was clearly upset.

“She just went on and on about it,” Annette remembered later. “She said she just couldn’t believe he was going to do that. I said, ‘Susie, please go talk to Bob. Go talk to him.’ I wanted to see them work things out.”

Before Susie left, Annette told her that if she had to go back to court, she should try to get Tom to pay to send the boys to camp each summer. It would be good for all of them, she said. She gave Susie some material about a camp her boys had gone to, and Susie saw that it had a rifle program.

“The boys,” she said, “would like that.”

Charlie and Juanita Clarke were on their way home from a country barbecue that Saturday evening when they passed a road that triggered something in Charlie’s mind. Yadkinville Road led past Green Meadows, the small development where Bob and Florence Newsom once lived. The Clarkes had spent many pleasant evenings visiting there with the Newsoms.

“Know what I’d like to do?” Charlie said. “Let’s go see Bob and Florence.”

“Not unless we call,” Juanita admonished.

Charlie and Bob had grown up together. Charlie’s father was the pastor of the church Bob and his sister attended with their father. Charlie and Bob were close friends in high school and roommates at North Carolina State after Charlie convinced Bob that he should give up his dreams of a music career to pursue industrial engineering.

Charlie dropped out of college and went into defense work, but he later returned, got a degree in civil engineering, and moved to West Virginia to work on government hydraulic projects. For years he didn’t see his old friend at all, but in 1960 he returned to Winston-Salem to work for a construction company, and he and Bob picked up their friendship again.

He knew that Bob and Florence were spending weekends at Nanna’s now and soon planned to move there. The Clarkes drove to their home in Lewisville, just west of Winston-Salem, and Charlie called Nanna’s house. Bob answered and sounded delighted to hear from him.

It was about 8 P.M. when Charlie and Juanita arrived at the big house on Valley Road. Bob and Florence met them at the back door with smiles, handshakes, and hugs. Bob took Charlie on a tour of the house, showing the renovations. Florence and Juanita went off in a different direction. Nanna wasn’t feeling well, Bob said, and was resting in her bedroom.

While Charlie and Bob were taking in the new downstairs rooms, Charlie asked about the children.

“Rob is getting along just fine,” Bob said. “He’s with the county now, doing just great. They’re living with us, you know.”

“Oh,” Charlie said; he didn’t know.

“Susie’s living in an apartment and going to school at UNC-G getting a master’s degree in business,” Bob went on. “Just getting along great.”

“He wasn’t the type to tell you his family problems,” Charlie observed later.

Upstairs, where Florence was showing her the new guest room, Juanita was hearing a different story.

Florence asked about the Clarkes’ daughter, Marsha, whose wedding she’d attended four years earlier.

“She’s just fine,” Juanita said.

“That was the nicest wedding,” Florence said. “Is she happy?”

“She just seems to be happy beyond words.”

“I certainly hope that lasts,” Florence said. “I tell you, we’re having a problem with Susie. She’s having a hard time, and I don’t know how that’s going to end.”

Florence shook her head, then laughed and changed the subject.

Later, the four gathered to chat in the living room, and Nanna came out in her nightclothes to join them. Bob and Juanita sat on the sofa with an ashtray between them. Juanita was smoking cigarettes, Bob puffing his pipe.

“We don’t need the TV,” Florence said, flicking it off. She removed her shoes and settled comfortably in the recliner.

Charlie told a story over which they’d laughed dozens of times in the past, about the time Bob borrowed his transit to survey a property line and thought he’d lost the crosshairs from it. Then Bob and Charlie started reminiscing about their childhood neighborhood. Nanna joined in the story telling, and the Clarkes marveled at her memory for names and incidents.

About 9:15, Charlie noticed Bob stifle a yawn and figured he was tired.

“Well, we’ve got to be going,” Charlie said.

The leave-taking took several minutes. Outside, Bob mentioned a problem with water running off the back of the house, and Charlie stepped over to examine it, leaving a footprint in the sand next to one of the broad new windows.

“What you need here is a drain,” Charlie said.

A new round of good-byes followed before the Clarkes walked out to their car under the big oaks. It was a dark night, turning cool, but the thing Charlie later remembered most about it was the eerie quiet that enveloped them. As they got into their car and pulled away at about 9:30, the Clarkes looked back and saw Bob and Florence still standing in the big windows, smiling and waving to them.

Part Five

The Unraveling

“O haggard queen! to Athens dost thou guide
Thy glowing chariot, steeped in kindred gore;
Or seek to hide thy damned parricide
Where peace and justice dwell forevermore?”

—EURIPIDES

34

Nancy and Steve Dunn were already in bed at their home on Raleigh’s western edge when the phone rang shortly before midnight on Sunday, May 19, 1985. Nancy was surprised to find her father, Bing Miller, on the line.

“Nancy,” he said with no preliminaries, “I’ve got some bad news. Nanna and Bob and Florence have been murdered.”

Nancy started screaming uncontrollably, and Steve took the phone to find out what had happened. They would be right there, he said.

They dressed quickly and rushed to their car, Nancy trembling so that she hardly could open the door. As Steve drove across town, Nancy began screaming again.

“Susie did this!” she cried. “I know she did!”

“It was the first thing that came to my mind,” she recalled later. “I just knew how weird she had been acting. I don’t know why, but I just started screaming that. I couldn’t say it enough.”

Nancy arrived to find her mother packing. She was startled by her mother’s calmness until she realized that she must be in shock. “She was calm,” Nancy said, “and not there.”

Nancy’s brother, David, arrived shortly, and Nancy went out to greet him.

“Susie has done this,” were the first words he spoke.

Inside, Nancy and David continued to insist that Susie had to be involved, bringing their mother from her stunned refuge.

“Don’t say that,” Frances said. “You don’t know that. She’s family.”

Nancy decided to go with her parents and brother to Winston-Salem while Steve returned home to stay with their two sons. Nancy drove her parents’ car, and she drove fast. For the first seventy-five miles, nobody even spoke, each in a cocoon of personal thought and pain.

“It was like we were going to get there and find out it wasn’t true,” Nancy later recalled. “The faster we got there, the faster we’d find out it wasn’t true.”

Susie was much on the minds of others that night. Rob had tried several times to call her after he became concerned about his parents and grandmother, but he never got an answer. He tried again after the call came from Winston-Salem that something was terribly wrong. Friends and neighbors who gathered at the Newsom house that night kept calling without success after Rob left for Winston-Salem.

A little after midnight, Dr. John Chandler, a dentist, a neighbor, and a close family friend of the Newsoms, called again. This time Susie answered. She’d just gotten home from a trip, she said.

Dr. Chandler told her that an accident apparently had happened at Nanna’s. He had no details yet. Rob had gone over.

Susie seemed little concerned. She asked no questions, and when Dr. Chandler inquired if she needed somebody with her, she said no; she’d be fine.

Later, when a call came to the Newsom house confirming that Bob and Florence and Nanna were dead, all murdered, Rob’s wife, Alice, called Susie again.

“I’d rather your brother be here to tell you this,” Alice said, fighting back tears as she went on to tell what had happened.

Later, Alice remembered that Susie showed no shock. She didn’t cry. For a long moment, she offered only silence.

“Well, there’s nothing left, is there?” she finally said.

Again, Susie declined when Alice offered to have somebody come to get her or stay with her, and Susie broke off the conversation by saying, “Well, my dog has run off. I’ve got to go find him. I’ll talk to you later.”

A strange reaction, Alice thought, to the revelation that her parents and beloved grandmother had been murdered.

Rob was then at the home of Fam Brownlee. His friend, Tom Maher, was with him, and so was his father-in-law, Fred Hill, as well as the Newsom family’s minister from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Dudley Colhoun. Detective Allen Gentry, who’d quietly assumed charge of the case, had come to the house to interview Rob, and Rob had told him of the murders of his sister’s former in-laws in Kentucky. Gentry took down Susie’s address and telephone number, as well as Rob’s, and suggested that Rob go home, take care of his family, and try to rest. Somebody, he said, would come to talk to him later.

As Rob was getting ready to leave, Dudley Colhoun called Fam Brownlee aside.

“Do you know Susie?” Colhoun asked.

“I do not. I’ve heard her name.”

“If she should come by here or call, would you please have her get in touch with me or the police or with Rob, because they can’t find her.”

“Yeah, she’s probably involved in this,” Fred Hill added.

Brownlee was taken aback by this statement. “I find that very difficult to believe,” he said.

“Oh, he’s probably right,” said the minister.

These comments, coming from people so close to the family, flabbergasted Brownlee, and while Colhoun was talking with Rob, Brownlee pulled aside Rob’s friend.

“I don’t want to be stirring up anything,” he said, going on to tell what he’d just heard about the possibility of involvement by Susie.

“I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised,” Tom Maher said. “Her or her boyfriend.”

As soon as the group left his home, Brownlee sought out a detective and told him what he’d just heard, but that information never got to Allen Gentry.

Rob had been gone for nearly an hour when Nancy pulled her parents’ car up to the gate of her grandmother’s home.

“We are the family,” Nancy said to the officers stationed there. The officers directed her to the Brownlee house and said that somebody would talk to them shortly. While Nancy and her family waited in the car, they saw the SBI’s big mobile crime lab pull up to the house. This lab had come from Raleigh. A regional lab was stationed in an adjoining county, but its operator was sick that night and another one had to be sent.

Shortly, a detective came to the Millers’ car.

“It’s my mother,” Frances said. “Tell me what has happened.”

The detective began, but had to stop when tears began coursing down his cheeks.

Frances said that she wanted to go into the house and see for herself.

“You can’t go in,” he told her. “You just can’t do that.”

Nanna’s minister, John Giesler, was still at the Brownlee house, and when he and Brownlee learned that the Millers were outside, they went out to offer comfort and invite them in. Giesler called a Holiday Inn not far away and got a room for them. The Millers told the detectives where they would be and went to the motel, where a night clerk, upon learning of their tragedy, opened the closed restaurant and made coffee for them.

Near dawn, Detective F. G. Crater came to the motel and gave the Millers a sketchy rundown of the facts. The Millers peppered him with questions, most of which he said he couldn’t answer.

Crater had some questions of his own.

“Do you know anybody who would do this?”

Frances said no, and despite their earlier convictions that Susie had to be involved, Nancy and David kept silent.

“We thought we were the terrible ones to be thinking that,” Nancy later explained.

“Do you know where Susie Lynch is?” Crater asked.

They all said no.

“Do you know anything about the divorce in Albuquerque?”

“I just know that it was bitter,” Frances said, then went on to tell about the murder of Susie’s in-laws the summer before.