Deadly Seduction (5 page)

Susan was exceptionally possessive about the Buick. She seemed to be more emotionally attached to it than to her own stepson. So, it made her very angry when Tommy urinated in the car several times after his visit to the hospital following that “accident” in January 1983.

Susan decided that Tommy was doing this deliberately. It was all part of his rejection of her as a mother, she believed. She did not once stop and consider what might be causing the boy to respond this way.

On one occasion, she made little Tommy stand in the living room while she called Tom Whited at work to tell him what had happened to her lovely car, her pride and joy. Tom was then expected to tell the child off on the phone.

Another incident happened a few weeks later when she took Tommy and Jacob out and put them in the car before setting off on a shopping trip. To her horror, Tommy had candy all over his face and hands. She took him out of the car and made him stand inside the house by the front door while she called Tom Whited at work yet again. This time she demanded that Tom leave work and return to the house to discipline his son.

Susan even persuaded Tom Whited to allow her to get a pit bull terrier puppy. She insisted the animal would prove a fine guard dog and a playmate for the boys.

But Tom Whited instantly took a dislike to the dog because it was always nipping at Tommy. Susan never disciplined the dog for doing that, although she always got angry with the animal when it did the same to Jacob. She insisted on keeping the dog because it got on so well with Jacob.

Susan told her husband the dog was always attacking Tommy because the boy was so timid and would not stand up for himself against the animal.

Meanwhile the Suenrams, Tom’s in-laws from his first, tragic marriage to Cheryl Ann, were virtually having to fight to gain any access to Tommy. It seemed as if Tom was deliberately preventing them from seeing their own grandson. Susan was actually quietly encouraging the situation because she knew the Suenrams would start questioning her about the never-ending flurry of bruises that constantly seemed to cover the child’s body.

In February, family friend Vivian Susil became so concerned about the well-being of little Tommy that she called up Susan and asked if she could talk to the child.

Susan’s reply astounded her. “Okay, but I’ll have to hold the phone for him because he’s got chocolate all over his hands and he’s got chocolate all over my Riviera and I’m making him keep it on him ’til Tom gets home.”

When Tom did finally get home that evening, the little boy ran to his father for comfort, spreading chocolate all over his suit in the process. Tom was so furious with Tommy that he punished him further.

Vivian often looked after both Tommy and Jacob for Susan. Vivian was astounded when she discovered that Tommy was starving because his stepmother had been keeping him on a strict diet.

Vivian Susil had a really bad feeling about what was happening behind the closed doors of the Whiteds’ house on Rushing Road. She heard Susan talking about Tommy in such a nasty way that she later came to the conclusion that she even might have wanted to kill her stepson.

After his first “accident,” little Tommy walked with a severe limp and had a horseshoe mark on his head where surgeons had made their life-saving incision. But he seemed to be all right mentally, although he became much more reserved and everyone noticed how he jumped to attention each time Susan walked in the room.

On the Easter weekend of 1983, Susan, Tom, and the two boys actually agreed to attend Sunday lunch at the Suenrams following church. Susan was more concerned with discussing how much money her sister had spent on a baby shower than on anything vaguely related to the two children under her care.

But at that lunch, Susan discovered that Lester Suenram, the father of her husband’s first wife, had taken out a hefty life insurance policy on Tommy. Lester Suenram had always bitterly regretted not doing that for his tragic daughter Cheryl Ann before her illness was diagnosed.

Susan showed a great deal of interest in the details of that policy and how much money Tom would get in the event of little Tommy’s death.

The Suenrams were also rather perplexed by Susan’s insistence on dressing the two boys in identical outfits. But they were even more stunned when Tommy and Jacob came to lunch and they saw that Tommy’s hair had been dyed brown to match his stepbrother’s.

Susan’s bizarre attempts to turn the boys into twins was becoming more than just an eccentric piece of parenting.

To make matters worse, Tommy still could do no right in the eyes of his stepmother. One day, Susan got so angry with the child that she pinned the two-year-old to a stake out in the backyard of the house and left him there all day in scorching eighty-five-degree heat. The boy suffered appalling burns and blisters and began being sick from the moment she took him in that evening. She then gave him a severe beating.

The following day, at 3:30
P.M.
on Saturday, May 7, 1983, Tom Whited arrived home at the family’s neat, comfortable detached house on Rushing Road and found Tommy, then aged two, throwing up. The doctor was called and Tommy was given a dosage of medicine to stop his sickness. He also appeared to be suffering from sunburn.

A few hours after the doctor had left, the little boy lost consciousness. As Tom Whited later put it, “I held the little man and he was as limp as a rag.”

Tom and Susan then decided to take him to hospital. As they carried little Tommy to the car, Susan pleaded with her husband, “Oh my, if we go to the Baptist Hospital they’ll think I’ve beat him again. Let’s go to the South Community.” But the pediatrician they had consulted before, Dr. Quillen Hughes, was not at the South Community Hospital where he worked, so the child was immediately transferred by ambulance back to the Baptist Hospital. Tommy was readmitted to the hospital in a coma. Doctors diagnosed the problem as a brain hemorrhage and general brain dysfunction.

Bruises were found on his forehead, body, arms, legs, and around the rectum, and there was also retinal hemorrhaging in his eyes. The injuries were the result of repeated blows over the course of four to seven days.

Susan had told her husband that the boy had been involved in an accident with a shopping cart while the family was out at a local supermarket. She claimed a car had hit the shopping cart while Tommy was in it. She also insisted the little boy had suffered another accident a few days earlier when he had fallen over their pet dog and hit his head on the concrete. She said the boy had cried a little and then stopped and continued playing, so she had not felt it necessary to take him to hospital.

At 9:30
P.M.
that evening Detective J. M. Einhorn of the Youth Bureau of the Oklahoma City Police Department was contacted at home by worried hospital officials. His presence was urgently requested.

Einhorn had dealt with numerous child battery cases over the years and he knew what to look for. Injuries to the arms and legs below the knee were not consistent with child abuse, but above the knee and chest and around the head, “you can pretty well know something is wrong because most children hold their hands out when they fall to grab out and reach for something.”

Einhorn joined the Oklahoma City Police Department in 1968 after spotting a recruitment sign as he travelled through the city while serving in the military, following a tour in Vietnam.

What sent a cold shiver up Einhorn’s spine with this case was that he had a child exactly the same age as little Tommy Whited and he could not imagine why anyone would want to hurt an innocent youngster.

Just before 10:00
P.M.
that same evening, J. M. Einhorn arrived at the Intensive Care Unit on the ninth floor of the hospital.

Einhorn was met by Officer T. Nelson and Nancy Agee of the hospital medical staff. All three went to Room 5, located in the southeast corner of the ICU complex. Einhorn was stunned by the sight that greeted him; there, on the bed, a child with blondish red hair was in a prone position on his back. The child was thrashing around from side to side and Einhorn could clearly see dried blood on the inside of the boy’s mouth and around the teeth and lips.

As Einhorn looked closer he saw what appeared to be second degree sunburn marks on the child’s chest, arms, and legs. Panning his eyes down, he then spotted a cigarette burn on the youngster’s right knee. Another similar mark was near the left ankle. Bruise marks were sprinkled across the toddler’s body in a blotchy pattern. The child’s face was extremely red and the sunburned areas were beginning to peel. The child’s legs were in a rigid position with the toes in a locked position.

Einhorn had absolutely no doubts he was dealing with an appalling case of child abuse. He picked up the boy’s medical notes and read that little Tommy Whited’s injuries represented, in the view of the attending doctor, a classic example of the battered child syndrome.

J. M. Einhorn immediately left the ward and went to speak to the boy’s father, Tom Whited. He advised him of his Miranda rights.

Not surprisingly, Einhorn presumed at first that it was most likely the father had been the perpetrator of these awful, violent acts. But then Tom Whited calmly revealed that this was not his son’s first visit to hospital.

“Back in January he had the same type of thing,” explained Whited.

Einhorn was appalled. The father was saying his son had been in hospital for a similar attack before. Einhorn told Whited they would go back to those events after he had given him a detailed account of the current situation.

As Detective Einhorn talked to Tom Whited, he shook his head in astonishment. Either this man was extremely naive, or he had inflicted the injuries to his own son.

“Did you do this to Tommy?” asked Einhorn.

“Oh my God, no,” replied Tom Whited before bursting into tears. “He’s the only thing I have.”

Einhorn decided to terminate the interview then, and made his way into Room 5 where poor, little battered Tommy Whited lay. Einhorn asked attending nurse Debbie Holstead why his legs and feet were completely rigid.

“That’s normal when an injury of this nature occurs involving brain damage.” Einhorn then tracked down the notes about little Tommy’s previous hospitalization. Some of the remarks made by nursing staff at the time appalled him.

He immediately headed for the waiting room of the ICU where Susan Whited was sitting. She waived her Miranda rights and agreed to be questioned.

At first, Detective Einhorn found it hard to accept that this neat, attractive woman could have done such awful things to a child. His first impression of Susan was of a woman from a good, middle class home. She was well dressed in high heels and was the epitome of good taste, in an Oklahoman sort of way. Einhorn never forgot Susan’s tone when he threw Tom Whited’s accusations of child battery at her at the beginning of his investigation. She would always coolly reply, “I don’t know what he is talking about.”

She just kept repeating over and over that she did not do it. It had the desired effect at first, because Einhorn did start to wonder about her innocence.

Susan repeated the story about the shopping cart she had made to her husband. But she admitted that her stepson’s worst injuries had occurred more than twenty-four hours before they finally took the child to the hospital.

Susan Whited insisted she did not hit the child regularly although she had occasionally used her hand or a belt.

Einhorn then referred to two statements made by Tommy to hospital staff in January that mentioned how “Mommy pushed me down,” and “Mommy hits me when I don’t do my exercises.”

Susan was startled. She paused before answering. “Well, when he doesn’t do his exercises I don’t hit him, I just sort of push him or tap him for him to go on.”

J. M. Einhorn was deeply disturbed by what he was hearing. Here was a mother who forced her two-year-old stepson to do aerobics.

“Did you in fact push Tommy’s head down to cause that injury to the front of his head?” asked Einhorn quietly but firmly.

“No.” She hesitated, then went on, “Why are you accusing me?”

Just then, Susan got up to get a cup of water. Seconds later, she fainted and fell to the ground. A charge nurse immediately went to her assistance and told Susan to “wake up.” She opened her eyes and said, “What happened?” The charge nurse turned to J. M. Einhorn and said, “She’s faking. If she was unconscious due to the fainting she would not have woken up that quickly.” It also emerged that she had “fainted” once already since bringing in little Tommy earlier that day.

While all this was happening, Einhorn decided to try and have a quick word with Susan’s son Jacob, who was in a nearby waiting room with one of Susan’s relatives. Einhorn offered the boy some candies and then asked the youngster how his brother got hurt.

“I don’t know, but he gets hurt in the garage,” came the child’s instant reply.

“Does Mommy hit Tommy in the garage?”

“Sometimes he falls down.”

“Are you sure?”

“Well, only when he doesn’t do his exercises.”

A few minutes later, Einhorn returned to Susan and asked her about the boy’s claims.

“He made up the story because he heard it from Tommy,” insisted Susan. Einhorn noted that she was not dry mouthed and she had looked him right in the eye. He knew that when people lie to policemen they usually fail on both counts.

That evening, Tom Whited refused to allow Susan to go back to the family home and she was eventually collected by her sister, Darlene Sanders. Understandably agitated, Whited made undisguised threats to kill his wife after realizing she had probably inflicted those injuries. But what really concerned Det. J. M. Einhorn was the fact that Tom Whited had apparently done nothing to prevent this tragedy. How could he not have known what was going on?

It was four in the morning before the hard-working detective finally left the hospital. He was determined to find out exactly how those injuries had been inflicted. It could so easily have been his child lying there helpless with tubes providing his only lifeline. It was the very least that little Tommy deserved.