Deadly Seduction (21 page)

Luckily, the tiny, single-engine aircraft that also had been shadowing Susan since she left Peru remained glued to her car. It stayed with her until she got to her mother’s house in Vincennes.

Afterwards, Gary Nichols and his colleagues agreed that they should have put a “bird-dog”—a homing device—on Susan’s car.

By the time she got to Vincennes, Susan knew she had been followed, but was pretty sure she had shaken them off her tail. However, the constant presence of policemen was making her very nervous. She was convinced her phones in Summit Drive had been bugged by investigators. Susan also knew full well that her husband’s great friend Gary Nichols regularly worked surveillance jobs for the FBI and DEA. She feared that Nichols would do everything in his power to try and prove she had killed Jimmy.

After a few days in Vincennes, Susan befriended a member of her local church called Thomas Wolf. Although she emphatically denied any sexual liaison with Wolf it is clear that Susan confided a great deal in him. Wolf himself later claimed that Susan even confessed to him that she was hiding the gun that killed Jimmy Grund in the old church parsonage.

On August 17, Brinson’s ISP unit of investigators interviewed Jimmy Grund’s longtime business partner and old friend, Don Bakehorn. Bakehorn owned the American Stationary Company in Peru, as well as being a co-owner with Jimmy of Shanty Malone’s. Bakehorn was very anxious to aid police in their hunt for Jimmy Grund’s killer and offered them all the help he could. But despite his assistance no new leads came out of the interview.

The following day, Gary Nichols suggested that Bob Brinson contact Florida businessman Jack Vetter to set up a scheme that might just help them smoke out Susan. They believed Vetter’s close personal ties to Susan and Jim would make him the perfect person to try and trick a confession out of Susan. He had even witnessed their wedding on his boat nearly ten years earlier. Vetter assured investigators he would be more than happy to allow them to wire him up so as to record any subsequent meeting with her.

Bob Brinson fully realized that this was not going to be the simple open-and-shut scene he thought it would be when he first got involved. With only a small investigating unit available, Brinson regularly called on the FBI in Indianapolis for assistance with surveillance on Susan and others. There was also the matter of interviewing some of Susan’s relatives in Columbia, South Carolina, something that was out of ISP jurisdiction.

The surveillance requirements of the case also meant calling on the help of Sgt. Gary Nichols, who just happened to be an expert snoop as well as Jimmy Grund’s best friend.

Initially, Bob Brinson was not particularly happy about bringing on board someone with such close personal ties to the victim, but he needed all the help he could muster, and Nichols’s reputation as a superb surveillance operative was second to none. Brinson was pleasantly surprised by Gary Nichols’s attitude. He seemed much more open-minded and dedicated to legitimately solving the case than he had been just after Grund’s murder.

In fact, Gary Nichols had never stopped being determined to bring Susan to justice, but after his initial burst of outrage following Jim’s murder, he started to realize that it would take an enormous team effort to crack the case and everyone needed to pull together. Nichols also had immense sympathy for Bob Brinson because what had appeared an open-and-shut case was now proving to be an extremely difficult investigation because there was simply not enough lawful evidence to prove Susan had murdered her husband.

Gary Nichols was asked to supply audio tape equipment and a transmitter to record conversations between Florida businessman Vetter and Susan Grund. And then he set to work wiring Jack Vetter.

Nichols’s dual role as Jimmy Grund’s best friend and a very active investigator in the murder case was still questionable, but entirely understandable. He was hungry to find Jim’s killer and he had the expertise that might well come in very useful as the net closed in around Susan Grund.

Nichols—a twenty-year police department vet—did not shy away from letting the whole world know his feelings about Susan. “She was the Antichrist of Peru and Jimmy was God,” he would tell anyone who would listen.

Nichols was so upset by the murder of Jimmy Grund that he did not even like to glance at the scene-of-the-crime photos that showed his great friend lifeless and bloody with a ghastly death mask expression across his face as he sat slumped on that couch in the bedroom of the house on Summit Drive.

Nichols’s links to Grund were particularly close because the onetime prosecutor had saved his life during a scuba-diving accident in the Caribbean during which he suffered the bends. As tearaways in their late twenties and early thirties, Nichols and Grund would regularly double-date girls. They tended to go after sisters. The two men had seen each other virtually every day over the previous twenty years. They skied together, swam together, drank together, and played hard together.

But it must be remembered that Nichols’s primary reason for getting officially involved in the Grund murder case was his expertise at organizing covert police operations. He specialized in technical and drug investigations and was an expert phone surveillance—wiretapping—operative.

Nichols sometimes even carried out duties for the FBI and state-wide agencies. As such, he had become the self-proclaimed “Captain Gadget” of Miami County. There were also his other skills as a pilot which had unofficially come into use just twenty-four hours after Jimmy’s murder and would no doubt be put to use again during the later stages of the investigation.

Nichols already had unofficially linked up with his old buddy and fellow Shanty Malone’s regular Wil Siders a few days after Jim Grund had been buried. The two men already jointly had exerted some pressure on their chief suspect for his murder—Susan Grund. And now they were going to step up the psychological warfare.

They intended to pile the heat on Susan, since there was still absolutely no hard and fast evidence linking her to the murder.

The police plan that revolved around Florida businessman Jack Vetter was to lure Susan to a meeting with Vetter at the Signature Inn, near Peru. Two rooms were rented; one for Vetter and Susan and the other for officers to set up surveillance equipment. As the chief wire technician, Gary Nichols was on hand to monitor the entire operation.

Susan arrived at the Signature on the afternoon of August 20, 1992, at approximately 4:30
P.M.
after agreeing to meet Vetter following a call made by him to her rented home in Vincennes. Susan was driving her sister Darlene’s blue car. She met with Vetter in the room and they talked for three hours. The entire conversation was recorded, but Susan was incredibly careful not to say anything incriminating. Even when Vetter led Susan to believe that the police were closer to arresting her than they really were, she did not falter. At one stage, Vetter even offered to hide her murder weapon, but Susan coolly replied she had no knowledge of the handgun.

In the room next door, Gary Nichols and the Indiana state troopers were sweating profusely in the scorching heat. But throughout the three hours, Susan kept her head in a remarkably professional manner. The surveillance team were bitterly disappointed when she left the motel room at around 7:30
P.M.
They had heard absolutely nothing that would help them prove that she had murdered her husband. In fact, it was plainly obvious that Susan had sussed out the sting the moment she met Vetter.

Investigators continued to keep an eye on Susan even after that failed operation. In some instances, they knew she knew she was being followed, but that was all part of the psychological warfare being waged against her by representatives of three different law enforcement agencies.

Gary Nichols and Jimmy Grund had been planning to buy a plane together shortly before he died to replace the one he had sold a couple of years previously because of the financial strain of keeping Susan in clothes and property. In Nichols’s mind that was just another reason to track her down and bring her to justice.

On August 24, ISP Investigator Bob Brinson got word that Susan had enjoyed an illicit affair with a member of a local charity group, whom she had met through her work as an organizer for various local beauty pageants.

Rumors had been circulating that Susan had been regularly seen out with the man and there were clear implications that sex was involved. When interviewed by investigators, the man admitted he knew Susan and had shared a few drinks with her at Shanty Malone’s. The man even nervously confessed that he had told Susan his own marriage was in trouble. He insisted that Susan had given him some very good advice and that, as a result, he had repaired his own marriage. But he emphatically denied he had an affair with Susan. Now it seemed that besides being someone who adored sleeping with strange men, Susan was also a skilled marriage counselor. The investigators were bemused to say the least, but decided to give the man the benefit of the doubt. In any case, it was hardly as if he was the only man in Miami County to have slept with Susan Grund.

That same day, the state police unit served a subpoena on the Peru Trust Company located in Peru. The subpoena was to produce any records of an existing trust fund for Tanelle Rachelle Grund. It turned out that the trust for $25,000 had actually been established on July 19, 1985. With interest it had leapt up to $31,793.17 by the time the investigators got to it. It had not been touched by either Susan or her husband. Investigator Brinson was intrigued by the discovery of the trust because it totally contradicted what he was beginning to perceive as Susan’s
modus operandi.
Obviously, when it came to her own flesh and blood she could be as loyal and as generous as any other parent.

Fourteen

On August 27, the Indiana State Police unit talked to the father of a little boy who went to school with Tanelle Grund and had been with the Grunds on the day of July 4 when David’s gun was allegedly stolen. It emerged that this father had been over to Susan’s house to drop off his son who was going to let off some fireworks with Tanelle and a handful of neighborhood children in the backyard. At about 10:00
P.M.
Susan dropped off the little boy at his father’s house.

The man’s testimony seemed to tally with what they already knew, but then the man pulled out his pocket computer calendar and consulted it carefully to reveal that on August 20—sixteen days after the killing of Jimmy Grund—Susan had called him because she wanted to borrow his pickup truck to move some belongings to Vincennes. According to the man, Susan then brought up the subject of David’s gun being stolen and said that David was a suspect, but that she didn’t think he would kill Jim. Susan even made a point of saying to the man that the gun had been stolen on the same night that the man’s son had been round at the Grund house for the fireworks display. She also told him that the gun was probably the one used to kill her husband.

The man was astounded by the way the conversation was developing because she sounded more like a detective than a grieving widow. Then Susan rounded it off with an even more remarkable statement: “Jim took two files with him to Alaska for our vacation and I suspect that there was something in those files that got him killed.”

It seemed as if she was deliberately planting information with the man in the hope he would tell the police what he knew.

Instead of thinning out like most investigations, this one was gaining even more twists and turns.

*   *   *

On August 29, 1992, there was another murder in the Peru area, one that would be completely overshadowed by the Grund investigation.

Toni A. Spicer, twenty-seven, was found strangled to death in her home at the Maple Lawn trailer park, just south of Indiana 18 highway. The young mother’s body was discovered at 7:00
A.M.
by a baby-sitter, who was bringing home the single mother’s children.

Spicer had last been seen alive at the Hip Hugger, a dance bar and restaurant in Kokomo where she worked as a dancer. Her death could not have been more in contrast with the murder of Jim Grund. But Toni Spicer’s lifestyle represented precisely the world that Susan had managed to escape from, although, ironically, that didn’t stop Susan from being drawn into tragedy.

*   *   *

As Bob Brinson’s methodical investigation gained momentum, Gary Nichols, Wil Siders, and other investigators were continuing their occasional surveillance of Susan at her new base in Vincennes. Both men firmly believed that sooner or later Susan would make a mistake.

On August 31, 1992, Brinson and his unit of investigators flew to Oklahoma City with Wil Siders. The team was met at the airport by a member of the local FBI and the group headed to the County Prosecutor’s Office to meet with Assistant D.A. Ray Elliott. Elliott provided the investigators with the criminal files on the child battery arrest and charges concerning Susan Whited, as she was then known. After reviewing the files, Bob Brinson traveled to the offices of attorney Bruce Winston, who represented Susan’s third husband, Thomas Whited, Jr. Mr. Winston agreed to copy and mail portions of Susan Grund’s testimony in reference to the civil suit filed against her by the paternal grandfather of tragic little Tommy.

The following day, Brinson and his colleagues flew on to Colorado Springs where they interviewed Gary Campbell at his place of employment, the Chapel Hills Mall. Once again, to keep to official protocol, the unit was escorted to the meeting with Campbell by a member of the local FBI.

For Brinson, the interview with Campbell proved a real eye-opener because it revealed more details about the “business transactions” concerning the custody of Jacob, including the wedding that was paid for by Jimmy Grund.

Campbell was able to prove to investigators that he was in Colorado Springs on the night of the murder of Jimmy Grund and when the gun was stolen a month earlier, he was at home watching a fireworks display.

On September 2, 1992, another of Susan’s gentleman friends called in at Brinson’s unit at the Indiana State Police Post in Peru to report that she had telephoned him from her mobile phone that very day to ask him to meet her for lunch in Indianapolis. Susan also asked if he would like to go to the Colts ball game that weekend, but her friend declined the invitation and they promised to speak again in the near future. Obviously, Susan Grund was not going to let the murder of her husband get in the way of her having a good time.