Deadly Seduction (7 page)

Susan was annoyed at her failure to lure Don Deason out. He would have been a handsome catch. She had this thing about lawyers. The power, the money, the glamor. It all seemed so appealing. He would have been her ticket out of that life and into the next. Oh well, she’d have to spread her web until she found herself another perfect partner.

Meanwhile, poor little Tommy was left with severe sight impairment and permanent brain damage.

“She is undoubtedly responsible for the condition that little boy is in,” recalled Don Deason years later. “It’s one of the most pathetic cases I’ve dealt with since I’ve been assistant district attorney.”

Susan was pregnant, homeless, and penniless. There was only one place to go—home to Peru, county seat of Miami County, Indiana.

Four

Miami County, Indiana, is just thirty miles long and twelve miles wide and covers an area of 384 square miles, about sixty miles north of Indianapolis. The county arose from the ashes of the Miami Indians following the treaty of 1763 that allowed the Native Americans the right to settle in the woodland regions along the upper Wabash and Mississinewa river valleys. Less than thirty years later, the Miamis won one of the greatest Indian victories of all time when they defeated General St. Clair and his American forces in a battle near Fort Recovery, Ohio.

White settlers reached the area in the late 1820s. And with the building of the Wabash and Erie Canal in 1832 and the first railroad in 1854, the town of Peru grew out of the deserted flatlands.

Around this time, Ben E. Wallace began a long tradition of the town’s links to the circus when he purchased the C.W. Coup Circus. Eventually circuses from all over the country used the town as a staging post for their winter break.

The coming of the railroad to Miami County scattered towns around the countryside like cinders from the engines’ smokestacks. Whole communities sprang up and flourished along the routes of the main railroads, only to be abandoned if the rail companies diverted away from their original boundaries.

Composer and songwriter Cole Porter was born in Peru on June 9, 1891. Cole learned to play the piano and violin before the age of six and published his first song at the age of thirteen. He died on October 15, 1964, and is buried beside his wife Linda at Mount Hope Cemetery in the middle of town.

By the turn of the century, the county seat of Peru was on its way to becoming a civilized community. Streets were paved with brick, sewer lines laid, telephone wires strung, trolleys running, and roaming geese removed to the surrounding countryside.

It’s both appropriate and a bit misleading that Miami County should have been named after the once powerful Indian tribe that lived there and through much of America’s midsection.

The name is appropriate because in the dawn of America’s recorded history they were the territorial landlords, exercising full “ownership” prerogatives and leaving to the settlers who followed a vast and generally euphonious glossary of place names.

But the name is a bit misleading, too, for the Miamis were in fact merely caretakers in this land. They settled in the area only for a relatively brief time, going from being lords of the forest to herding cattle in just one generation. By 1840, they had virtually all gone.

In a similar sort of fashion, the family of Susan Sanders had laid claim to Peru as their home town a hundred years later. But in fact, most of her mother and father’s family came from Vincennes, another Indiana settlement some two hundred miles to the south west of Peru.

The town of Peru is itself an insular community, little things can come to mean a lot. Although not that far from the state capital of Indianapolis, Peru remains the epitome of a small, rural town, a place where people are born, raised, married, and buried within the same ten-square-mile area. People know each other here. The neighbors down the street are likely to be the folk you knew in grade school, or at least in Sunday school. The people who work together also play together and pray together.

In the late spring of 1984, Susan drove back into Peru in some style thanks to her gleaming Buick Riviera, which she had managed to persuade Tom Whited to give to her, despite the battering of little Tommy.

Once in Peru, Susan quickly managed to find herself a boyfriend. His name was Rick Cook and he lived opposite her mother’s home—still on the wrong side of the tracks—on 3rd Street. Susan was not particularly happy dating a poor man, but at least Rick was young and handsome and very good in bed.

However, Susan continued keeping an eye out for a more suitable long-term partner. She looked up an old friend, hairdresser George Myers, and bemoaned the fact that there were no really rich, eligible men in Peru. Then Myers came up with an idea. He was close friends with local police detective Gary Nichols, whose best friend was a recently divorced lawyer called Jimmy Grund. Susan’s ears pricked up at the sound of his name. The Grunds were a legend in Peru and she would give anything to become part of that family. A few days later, Myers got Grund’s close friend Nichols to arrange for Susan to go on a blind date with Jimmy Grund. Susan was delighted. Things were definitely looking up. She had absolutely no idea that Nichols and Myers believed they were pulling a massive stunt on their friend because he did not realize she was heavily pregnant.

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Jimmy Grund was part of a very rich and powerful dynasty in Peru. Grund came from a family steeped in local law. His father was James A. Grund, a fervent Republican who worked as Miami County Prosecutor throughout much of the 1970s. Before that, he served eight years as a Peru city judge. He had been a working attorney since 1950 in Peru.

James A. Grund served with the Air Transport Command from 1941 to 1945 and was in the China-Burma-India theater until nearly a year after the end of World War II.

Jim Grund was born in Peru on December 23, 1944, when his father was still serving in the Far East. Little Jimmy did not even meet his father until almost a year later when he returned home from his wartime travels.

Jim’s mother Connie—also born and bred in Peru and married to James A. Grund for more than fifty years—reckoned Jim and his brother Jeff switched personalities when Jim was about fifteen years old. Up until then, Jim had been the calm, serious one. But one New Year’s Eve the family was sitting around a dinner table making resolutions and Jim announced he was “going to get out and have more fun.” From that moment on, he never looked back. Jeff, meanwhile, switched into serious work mode and has remained that way ever since.

Jim graduated from Peru High School in 1962. One of his teachers later reckoned that he was the brightest student she ever taught even though he never got straight As. His friends and family genuinely believed he did not want to be a straight-A honor kid. Jimmy graduated from Indiana University with a bachelor’s degree in 1966 and went on to complete law school at IU in 1970.

Jim’s father, James A. Grund, was even admitted to the bar association of the nation’s highest court, the Supreme Court. He was one of only twenty-two Indiana prosecutors accepted. His new stature meant that Grund, senior, could argue appeals through courts from the county all the way to the Supreme Court.

In 1971, Jim Grund was sworn in as the then-youngest-ever member of the Miami County Bar Association. He then practised law as deputy county prosecutor from 1971–78 while his father was prosecutor. At that time, he even wrote a book on business law. The younger Grund then succeeded his father as prosecutor, serving from 1978–82. After that, father and son shared a law office on East Main Street, just a few blocks from the house where Jimmy Grund grew up.

Jim Grund was a fiery and able prosecutor by all accounts. He did not suffer fools gladly and he fast gained a reputation as a hard man in the courtroom. As prosecutor, fellow lawyers used to say that the H of his middle name stood for heartless.

Outside the court, Jim was known as a bright, sociable man who liked to fly planes and attend basketball and football games at his alma mater, Indiana University. He owned his own plane and often would joke about how he preferred flying to practising law.

Jim met his first wife, Jane, when they were at Indiana University together. His fraternity work in student registration enabled him and his pals to stop freshmen girls and get their names and date them. Jim ended up having a double date with his best pal and two girls. One of them was a pretty petite brunette called Jane Snyder. Jim, driving a 1962 Chevy complete with manual gear shift, was much in demand. Jane was eighteen and her new date just nine months older.

The couple married in January 1965—when they were both just twenty years old—and lived together in university housing. Their daughter Jama was born on July 17 that year. By this time, Jim was working full time and still going to law school, in order to support his young family.

In those days, Jim was doing very well in his day job as a production manager for RCA and he seriously contemplated taking it up as a proper career, but the lure of the legal profession was proving too strong. In any case, he also had a family tradition to uphold.

The couple’s second child, David, was born on June 30, 1970, just after Jim had finished law school and was preparing for his bar exam. He had continued to support his entire family throughout all this.

Once qualified, Jim and his family moved to his grandparent’s spare house on West 6th Street in Peru. But Jane was determined not to be just another homemaker and, armed with her degree in sociology, she also got herself a real estate licence so she would have two prospective careers to fall back upon when the children got older.

Daughter Jama attended Peru High School until her freshman year when she moved to the very exclusive and extremely academic Culvert Military Academy for girls. She boarded at the school, but came home most weekends.

Jimmy and Jane then started to drift apart, primarily because they had done too much too fast as a couple and the sparkle had fallen out of their relationship. However, the couple’s separation came completely out of the blue as far as their friends were concerned and they agreed to divorce by mutual consent in December 1980. But the couple decided to appear to continue to live together so as to make the split less painful for their children, so both stayed on in the house. There were no other parties involved, although for the first few years following the divorce, Jane had genuinely wanted Jim to agree to remarry her.

Friends of the couple remained completely bemused by the parting. Jim and Jane had seemed to be such a perfect match. They flew light planes together. They both adored all water sports. In fact, they seemed to have more in common with each other than couples who have been married for a lifetime.

But there was another side to Jimmy Grund. It was almost as if he refused to accept that he was married and had to settle down. He loved the company of a vodka and tonic and a pretty girl, in that order.

There were also the nonstop practical jokes that Jimmy constantly used to hide his true emotions. One time, he filled a horse trough with hot water and turned it into an open air hot tub for anyone who wanted to join him. Another time, he bombed his fellow lawyer Don Fern’s backyard with oranges dropped from his own plane as he swooped overhead. The idea had been to get them all in Don’s pool, but most of them ended up going through the windshields of cars, as well as killing a lot of the grass in Don’s backyard.

The end of Jim Grund and Jane’s marriage was a very low-key event. He never even told his closest friends he had got a divorce until the day before it was made final.

Jim had a reputation as a bit of tightwad when it came to money. He used to pride himself on getting a reduced club rate at most hotels whenever he went off on a trip or a vacation. He would not give his son David any allowance money, only support money that he and Jane had agreed to in their divorce settlement.

Jane and Jim managed to get along okay after the divorce. Jim continued to be concerned about David’s education and he agreed to pay half of his eventual law education expenses. Jim talked enthusiastically about having David one day join his law practice following his graduation. Jim had even taken David to Indiana University’s founders’ day event.

A few months before Susan went out on that first blind date with Jimmy Grund, he asked his ex-wife Jane to move out of their house. Their son David was thirteen years old at the time and struggling in eighth grade. Jane accepted the situation and found herself a comfortable rented apartment at 167 East Main Street, in the center of Peru.

Jimmy had another girlfriend at the time who was getting pretty serious about him and Jim’s wife Jane presumed that was why he had asked her to move out of the family house.

Jimmy Grund was a unique combination. He was a pillar of the establishment, but he also part-owned a lively local bar. He was a man who was always going to have fun. He was forever taking macho fishing trips with his pals to far-off destinations like Canada or Mexico, flying around the country in his private plane, and enjoying more than his fair share of his favorite tipple, vodka and tonic.

*   *   *

Just before Jimmy and Susan’s blind date, word got around the lawyers and cops’ favorite watering hole, Shanty Malone’s bar, that Susan was a stunning-looking woman. Jim was delighted to hear the rumors although no one even hinted at the fact that she was eight months pregnant!

Jimmy Grund handled that first date with Susan like a true gentleman. The fact that she was about to have another man’s baby did not seem to bother him in the slightest. The couple got on incredibly well. Jim was captivated by Susan’s good looks. She even managed to make being pregnant look graceful, but then Susan had been especially careful not to let the pregnancy affect her ability to look sexy. With her light frame and slim build she actually managed to appear as if she was carrying a pea in a pod rather than a healthy, bouncing baby.

Jim’s good friend Sgt. Gary Nichols was delighted that he had persuaded Grund to go on the blind date because it meant sweet revenge for a wisecrack Jim had pulled on him when he got Gary’s ex-wife to jump out of his thirtieth birthday cake at a party in Shanty Malone’s. Jimmy Grund had also managed to layer his friend’s bed with shaving cream as an added birthday bonus when he got home that night. That was the sort of guy Jimmy was.