Chuck’s work, as usual, was consuming. He was one of a handful of executives who made the Hotpoint division highly profitable, and he was handsomely rewarded with bonuses and stock options. With her husband devoted to his job, her daughter away at college and her son in high school, Delores decided to return to work. For three years she was a nurse at her son’s school. “When she was school nurse, all of the kids, the troubled kids, would go over and talk to her,” Tom later recalled, “and she was very much in tune with everything.”
Delores quit work after Tom’s graduation, and while he was going off to college in North Carolina, she and Chuck were moving into a new waterfront home they had built at 259 Lake Shore Drive in Barrington, an upper-crust bedroom community northwest of Chicago. But they hadn’t even finished the landscaping before GE merged its appliance divisions, and, much to Delores’s chagrin, Chuck was transferred once again, this time to Louisville and the world’s largest appliance factory.
GE’s sprawling Appliance Park covers one thousand acres in Buechel on Louisville’s southern edge and is Kentucky’s largest employer. It produces all of GE’s major appliances—washers, ranges, refrigerators, air conditioners—and at its peak in 1973, it employed 22,000 people, a figure that was to drop drastically in the early eighties. Chuck became one of the plant’s top executives. As manager of product distribution, he oversaw warehousing and shipping and was responsible for getting every appliance to its eventual destination. Several thousand employees answered to him.
The Lynches bought a two-story gray Cape Cod house near the tenth hole of the golf course at Hunting Creek, an exclusive country club in the green hills of the Ohio River bluff north of Louisville, off U.S. 42, but Delores could find no happiness in that plush and tranquil setting. She liked Chicago—with the exception of its blustery winters—had friends there, and didn’t want to leave. She was disgruntled with the very idea of being in Louisville. While Chuck was engrossed in his new job, Delores was fighting with her new neighbors. She resented intrusions onto her property and confronted golfers who came into her yard to retrieve stray balls. She had a dense line of pines planted across her back property line to shield the yard from the golf course.
Although she mothered some neighborhood children, she often bickered with others who wandered into her yard. She had a particular animosity for the six Dougherty children who lived across the street. She hated their Great Dane, Rebel, and threatened to shoot him if he came into her yard. She toted a BB rifle when she went to the streetside mailbox, claiming she needed it for protection from the dog. One day she shot Rebel at close range, sending him home yelping with a tiny hole in his haunch. After one of the Dougherty children confronted her about it, Delores called the child’s church school and reported her for impudence.
Carolyn Kraft, who lived next door to Delores, was friendly with her at first. Delores called her “good buddy” and frequently popped in or telephoned. But Carolyn found her strange and her problems with the neighbors self-created and unnecessary.
“Everything irritated her,” she recalled years later from her retirement home in Florida. “The world is full of people like that. They look for problems. One day I told her, ‘Delores, you should live on an island. You should live where no other people are around, because other people aren’t always going to do what you want.’ She said, ‘I would if I could find one.’”
By 1969, after a dispute with the Krafts about drainage from their swimming pool, during which Delores hid in bushes and snapped pictures of her neighbors, she had found her refuge—four and a half acres on Covered Bridge Road, about five miles from Hunting Creek. There, far back from the road, she started building the dream house in which she vowed to live out her days. The land wasn’t exactly an island, but it was isolated, set among the trees on the hillside, and the nearest neighbors, the Cables, were out of sight.
When Delores finally moved into her new house, her neighbors at Hunting Creek breathed a collective sigh of relief and remarked how happy they were that she and her strident paranoia were gone. Delores was just as happy to leave. The people at Hunting Creek, she told her friend Marjorie Chinnock—her only friend in Louisville at the time—were just a bunch of snobs.
Delores had no sense for decorating, and her new house was an incongruous mingling of elegance and gaudiness—expensive Persian carpets were offset by sturdy and plebeian furniture that sometimes had been picked up at auction sales or on other bargain hunts; sterling silver serving sets clashed with art from cheap department stores. Delores admired the beautiful and tastefully decorated white-columned brick home of her neighbors, Howard and Katy Cable, and often remarked to Katy how much she wished her own house could look the same. Later she sometimes brought friends to see the Cables’ house.
Whatever talent Delores lacked in decorating was more than made up for by her obsession for cleanliness and order. She spent hours every day cleaning, dusting, polishing, spraying with deodorants and disinfectants. The house was immaculate, and Delores’s determination to keep it so often made visitors uncomfortable. She kept shoe racks by entrances and expected guests to deposit their footwear so they would not scuff her highly polished hardwood floors. Overnight guests would laughingly tell, with only slight exaggeration, of drying every drop of water from the shower stall after bathing, searching bed linens for lost hairs, and scouring lavatories for stray drops of toothpaste so they wouldn’t risk upsetting Delores.
She kept her yard as immaculate as her house, and during warm weather, neighbors frequently saw her wearing bib overalls and riding her big red lawn mower. Fallen tree limbs barely hit the ground before they were burning in a big barrel. Leaves were raked several times each fall. Every dropping left by her tiny dogs in the fenced backyard was picked up in tissue paper and disposed of properly.
After settling in her new house, Delores began building a new life for herself. Her children were again nearby. Janie had received a degree in education from Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, and moved to Kentucky, where she first taught in Scott County schools, then in Fayette County schools, before enrolling as a graduate student in special education at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, only seventy-five miles away. Tom had been graduated from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and newly married, had enrolled at the University of Kentucky School of Dentistry. Delores kept close contact with both.
By 1975, however, Janie had moved away to California, and Tom had finished dental school, joined the navy, and was beginning his practice repairing the teeth of Marine Corps recruits at Parris Island, South Carolina. Delores began looking for new interests—and a new church.
After leaving Grace Episcopal Church in 1969, Delores joined St. James Episcopal Church in the picturesque village of Pewee Valley, only about ten miles east of her home. St. James was a beautiful church, built of granite, set on a broad lawn shaded with spreading maples and festooned each spring with dogwood and azalea blossoms. Delores loved the priest there, Father R. C. Board, a traditionalist, and became very active in the church, even serving as a member of the vestry. She disdained the new priest who came after Father Board retired in 1975, led a faction of the congregation that sought to oust him, and eventually left the church in anger because of the bitterness that ensued. For several years, she had no church and often traveled many miles to attend services where Father Board was filling in for absent priests. After trying several churches, she finally returned to Grace.
Delores began spending a lot of time in Pewee Valley when she joined the church there. The town, once a thriving grape-growing area and early resort for wealthy people from Louisville, was the place where Annie Fellows Johnston, a local resident, wrote early in the century a series of popular books about a little girl who befriended an old plantation colonel. In 1934, The Little Colonel stories were made into a movie starring Shirley Temple, providing the later inspiration for an amateur theater group in Pewee Valley.
The Little Colonel Players, one of Ken
tucky’s oldest community theater groups, presented four plays each year, plus a special summer production featuring only high school and college students. The group had converted an old grocery store next to the town hall into the Little Colonel Playhouse, with a tiny stage and seating for ninety on folding metal chairs.
Delores began attending Little Colonel productions, then joined the group and tried out for a part. Her first appearance was in “My Three Angels” in December 1975, and she was widely congratulated for her skill. She had a knack for acting, the others told her, and she thrived on the attention. She became one of the company’s most enthusiastic members. In coming years, she would appear in eight more productions, always playing “little old lady parts,” as she laughingly called them. She liked the other members of the company, formed several friendships within the group, and particularly enjoyed the regular covered-dish social gatherings, where her Strawberry Delight dessert was always praised—and always the first to disappear.
Delores usually came to theater functions alone. Only a couple of times did Chuck ever come, and then he seemed uncomfortable. Louise Mahin, who, with her husband, Frank, was a founder of the theater, became friends with Delores and directed her in four plays. She thought Delores bright, curious, outgoing, funny, an excellent actress, “a sweet kid.” She did not like Chuck. On the few occasions she had been around him, she found him rude, belligerent, demanding, all words that could have come straight from Delores’s mouth. Delores filled her ears with complaints about Chuck, and Louise offered solace.
The entire theater company was aware that Delores was unhappy at home. She broadcast her discontent to anybody who would listen. One night at a party at the theater, Delores was complaining about her husband to a group in the kitchen.
“I wish he’d die,” she said.
Her friend Eddie Logsdon, who knew Chuck and liked him, stepped into the awkward silence that followed.
“Now, Delores, you don’t mean that,” he said.
“Oh, yes, I do too,” she replied.
Nobody knew the truth of that better than Delores’s maid, Helen Stewart, who started working for her shortly before she moved into her new house on Covered Bridge Road and had become a close friend. Hundreds of times she had heard Delores declare her wish for Chuck’s death. “He never walked out the door that she didn’t wish him dead,” Helen recalled.
The animosity between Delores and Chuck was of long standing. Neighbors at Hunting Creek knew that they lived separately—Chuck in the basement, Delores upstairs—an arrangement that continued in the house on Covered Bridge Road. The main living area of the house, the upper floor, was ruled by Delores, and Chuck was allowed to venture there only when Tom visited. The rest of the time he was remanded to the downstairs den, where he holed up with his business awards, his son’s athletic trophies, and the color TV on which he watched sporting events alone. Delores still cooked his meals, sometimes delivering them to the den, other times leaving them on the staircase in the foyer for him to retrieve. Two copies of the Courier-Journal came to the house because Delores refused to touch a newspaper that her husband had handled.
Chuck wasn’t secretive about his situation. “She lives upstairs in the farthest corner and I live downstairs in the farthest corner and we communicate by CB radio,” he joked to fellow jurors once when he found himself on jury duty.
Although he rarely talked about his private life at work, his colleagues were aware of the conflict at home. They knew that when Chuck came to GE social affairs he usually came alone and that the few times Delores had come with him she had done her best to embarrass him with outspoken opinions and put-downs. Delores’s friends knew in no uncertain terms how she felt about GE people: she detested them and wanted nothing to do with them.
At work, Chuck was an authoritative figure, widely respected and promptly obeyed. But at home he shrank before Delores’s unrelenting scorn and rarely stood up to her. He had learned that there was no winning against Delores, and he retreated to the comforts available in alcohol.
“A worthless drunk,” Delores called him.
Whatever drinking Chuck did, it never affected his performance at work, where he was greatly admired. But the pressures of his job were great, and combined with the conflict at home, they had taken a toll. In Chicago in 1965 Chuck had suffered a heart attack that kept him out of work for several months, and more recently he had been treated for ulcers. His boss of many years had retired, and a friend with whom he’d risen through the GE ranks was about to step down as well. Sales had slumped drastically, and automation was bringing great change. GE was about to lop 6,500 workers from its payroll at Appliance Park, some with as much as fourteen years seniority. Tired and feeling less than well, Chuck didn’t think he could muster the energy to deal with the coming new problems, and, in 1980 at sixty-three, he announced his retirement.
Delores was livid about his decision. She told friends that he was retiring only to keep her from doing what she wanted to do. “He just wants to cramp my style,” she insisted. She had been taking courses in music at Bellarmine College, a Catholic school in south Louisville, as well as studying piano. She often banged away on her piano, sometimes taping her efforts, but when Chuck retired, she stopped her lessons in protest, draped the piano in black muslin, and topped it with white lilies to symbolize her martyrdom and the murder of her musical dreams.
Chuck discovered that the pressures of retirement weren’t so easy for him to deal with, either. He tried doing things around the house, but nothing that he did pleased Delores. He couldn’t even mow the grass to suit her, he complained to friends. Delores didn’t want him at home expecting meals at certain hours, creating messes in his downstairs quarters, and fouling the air with smoke from the Pall Malls on which he puffed addictively.
Of all the things that irritated Delores about her husband, his smoking might have bothered her most. She once had smoked heavily herself, so much so, she joked, that she couldn’t even shower without a cigarette. But after she quit, she became a fanatical antismoker. She reprimanded people who smoked near her in restaurants, elevators, and supermarket lines. She posted a big NO SMOKING sign beside the door leading from the garage into the house and had smaller signs in the house and in her car. Helen Stewart, the maid, had to go into the backyard to smoke. But no amount of harping could stop Delores’s husband from smoking in the house. She even tried physically wresting cigarettes from him when he brought them home from the store, but he always smuggled in more. Delores refused to deal with the butts and ashes that he scattered throughout his quarters, leaving them for Helen to clean up.
GE had been too big a part of Chuck’s life for too long, and he was lost without the company. Retirement, he realized, was not for him, and he sought escape in volunteer work. He served on a mayor’s committee in Louisville, reorganized the transportation system of the Red Cross, advised small business operators at the Chamber of Commerce. He left home almost every morning and didn’t return until evening, just as he had done when working.
Delores became convinced that he was having an affair. Moist Pearl, she derisively called the woman, without the slightest proof that she even existed.
Janie had returned home from California to attend dental school by the time Chuck retired, and Delores enlisted her as an ally in her battles with Chuck. Delores did not use only Janie to try to catch Chuck in his affair, she even called on friends and one of Janie’s old boyfriends for assistance.
This former boyfriend, John Trent, a lawyer in Lexington, wasn’t surprised when Delores tried to get him to assist in her scheming, but he wanted nothing to do with it. He only hoped her suspicions were true. He liked Chuck and well knew the humiliations and turmoil he’d suffered because of Delores. Trent had once spent Christmas at the house on Covered Bridge Road, and on Christmas Eve, when Janie and her mother went to church, he had stayed home with Chuck.
Chuck began to talk about Delores, almost as if in apology, as though he needed to try to explai
n why she was the way she was. “She’s a good woman,” he kept saying. He accepted much of the responsibility for her actions. The demands of his job, his inattention, the many moves had affected her he said. What seemed clear to Trent was that he loved her and forgave her the abuses he endured. “He seemed like a moral guy,” Trent recalled. “I think he considered this was his payback for the suffering he had inflicted on Delores.”
Joyce Rose was one friend Delores asked to help trap Chuck in his supposed dalliances. Joyce and her husband, Paul, open and friendly country people, felt close to both Delores and Chuck. Paul first met the Lynches when he was running a garage and they began bringing in their cars and lawn mowers to be repaired. Paul particularly liked Chuck, who he considered to be a man of great character and breadth, and enjoyed talking with him about business and sports. Paul knew that Chuck was a man of integrity the day he brought a car to him that he was about to sell. A part was wearing but not yet defective. Paul told him that it would be a while before the part produced a problem, and since he was going to sell the car, he could get by without replacing it. Chuck told him to replace it. He didn’t think it right to sell the car knowing that a problem would soon surface.
Delores and Joyce became close friends. In the summertime, the Roses often drove to the house on Covered Bridge Road carrying dishpans filled with fresh vegetables from their big garden. Delores popped in frequently at the Roses’ old oak-shaded white house in Pewee Valley to sit at Joyce’s kitchen table, drinking coffee and talking. “You’ve got the warmest kitchen in the county,” Delores said.
Joyce shied from Delores’s efforts to recruit her into exposing Chuck’s supposed affair. But one day Delores called and said she’d discovered that Chuck was taking his paramour to the Sleepy Hollow Golf Club not far from the Lynch house, and Joyce drove to the club and questioned the manager to satisfy her curiosity.
Bitter Blood Page 2