While Mary was dialing the emergency number, Fam suggested that he and Dr. Sutton go to the Newsom house, which wasn’t visible from the Brownlees’. It was across the street and a couple of hundred feet to the southeast, and unlike the Brownlee house, with its narrow front yard, it was set well back from the road. Fam and Dr. Sutton left by the front door and walked quickly up the dark street, but at the foot of the Newsom driveway, Dr. Sutton hesitated, and Fam got the distinct impression that he didn’t want to go back to the house.
“You want to go up and see if we can find out what’s going on?” Fam asked.
“The police will be here in just a minute. Why don’t we just wait here?”
At the Brownlee house, Katy had pulled herself together and called her son, Steve. She told him what they’d seen and asked him to call Rob Newsom in Greensboro and tell him that something had happened and that he should come immediately.
Rob was waiting nervously for the call he knew would soon be coming, and something told him that it was not likely to be a happy one. Soon after calling Dr. Sutton to ask him to check on his parents and grandmother, Rob had called his aunt in Raleigh.
“Aunt Frances,” he said, “there’s something wrong at the house in Winston.”
“What is it?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I’ve not been able to get the phone to answer. I just think there’s something bad wrong. I’ve sent somebody to find out and I’ll call you as soon as I hear something.”
Rob sprang to the phone at first ring and listened somberly as Steve Sutton repeated what his mother had told him.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
His wife, Alice, knew from his expression that the news was bad, and as soon as Rob hung up and explained the situation, they both were seized with fear. There had been trouble in the family and suddenly they were afraid for their own lives and those of their three children. They turned on every light, inside and out, checked the locks on all the doors and windows, and began calling friends and neighbors to come over. While Rob got out his shotgun and loaded it, Alice called the police and asked for a patrol on their street.
The night was growing chilly, but neither Fam Brownlee nor Homer Sutton noticed it as they waited in the darkness at the foot of the Newsom driveway. They noticed only the quietness. They had expected to hear approaching sirens, but they heard only the sounds of traffic on nearby Reynolda Road. Fam realized that fifteen minutes had passed.
“Homer, you wait here,” he said. “I’m going to run back and tell Mary to call again.”
Mary called 911 again, and Katy told Fam that she’d called Hattie Newsom’s minister, the Reverend John Giesler, to find out if she had been at church that day. No, he reported, she hadn’t been for the past two Sundays, and he was worried about her, thought perhaps she was sick. He was shocked to hear what Katy told him.
Fam returned to the foot of the driveway, where he and Dr. Sutton continued to wait. Shortly, they saw the headlights of an approaching car. It stopped, and John Giesler, who lived only a mile and a half away, got out.
The three men briefly discussed the situation and decided that they should go to the house for a look. As they walked up the driveway, Fam broke off and went to the living room window at the front of the house. Through it he could see across the room to the window Dr. Sutton had first looked in. He saw Hattie on the sofa just a few feet away. He could see only Florence’s back where she was curled on the floor in front of the TV.
“They look like they’re sleeping,” he reported to the others.
“They’re not sleeping,” Dr. Sutton said.
They went on to the back of the house and saw the broken storm door. Fam and John Giesler peered through the window on this side. From this viewpoint, there was no question that Dr. Sutton was right. Fam had seen enough corpses in Vietnam to know death when he saw it. He noticed bullet holes, big ones, in the plaster wall above Hattie’s head.
“Well, they’re dead,” Fam said.
All three had the same thought. “Surely Bob didn’t do this,” Giesler said.
“He must be dead, too,” said Fam. “He must be in there somewhere.”
“Maybe somebody’s still in there with a gun,” Dr. Sutton suggested.
All three thought it prudent to retreat down the driveway to wait, but Fam was losing patience. More than half an hour had passed since Dr. Sutton had come to his back door.
“Where are the police?” he asked angrily.
He ran back to his house, where his wife, who had come outside to see what was happening, met him on the front porch.
“Mary, get in there and call again!” he said. “Tell them we’ve got at least two people dead and probably three. Shot to death!”
Mary was shocked to disbelief. “No,” she said. “I can’t tell the police that. You know they’re not dead.”
“Call them!” Fam said. He was shaking with anger. “Tell them to GET OUT HERE!”
He rejoined the other men at the driveway, where they stood contemplating the possibilities of what had happened, shaking their heads with disbelief that no help had come yet. Another fifteen minutes passed before a Winston-Salem police car pulled up, without blue lights or siren, and a lone patrolman got out.
The three men quickly explained the situation, especially their concern about Bob, and all four walked to the house. The officer peeked in the front window, then went around the back for another look.
“I’m going to have to go inside,” he said, drawing his revolver.
The officer was still taking a cautious look through the house when four more police cars arrived, one behind the other, in answer to Mary’s latest frantic call. The officers in the cars jumped out and ran toward the house with weapons drawn.
“They came up there like the marines storming a beach in the Pacific,” recalled Fam, who rushed to meet them, saying, “Please be careful. There’s a police officer in the house. Don’t shoot him.”
Before the other officers reached the house, the first officer stepped out the door he had entered, holstering his gun.
“There’s a man on the floor right inside the door,” he said. “He’s dead, too.”
Fam Brownlee, Homer Sutton, and John Giesler all looked at one another. Nobody had to say anything. They all knew it was Bob.
Frances Miller was growing more and more anxious as she waited for her nephew to call back.
“It’s been nearly an hour,” she said to her husband. “What should we do?”
No sooner had she said that than the phone rang. She was surprised to find Steve Sutton calling from Winston-Salem.
“Mother says you must come here,” Steve said.
“Steve, what’s happened?” Frances asked.
“She asked me not to tell you anything, just that you need to come.”
At that moment Frances saw everything clearly, a phenomenon she later would not be able to comprehend, but she knew that her mother, brother, and sister-in-law were dead—and not by accident. Murdered. She felt it in the deepest reaches of her soul.
“Steve,” she said firmly, “are my folks gone?”
He paused for long moments before answering in a near whisper. “Yes.”
Frances handed the phone to her husband, who began quizzing Steve for details as his wife sank weakly into a chair.
Other calls were being made. Alice Newsom called her parents in Winston-Salem, and they, in turn, called their minister, the Reverend Dudley Colhoun, rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in downtown Winston-Salem, the church Bob and Florence Newsom had joined soon after their marriage and to which they recently had returned. Reverend Colhoun made plans to pick up Fred Hill, Alice’s father, and drive to the Newsom house. They knew that Rob would be arriving soon and would need their support.
Neighbors began calling Mary Brownlee to find out what was going on. But she had not heard from her friend Maya Angelou, who lived two doors away, directly across the street from the Newsom
house, so she called to make sure that she was all right. Maya’s house was often a gathering spot for literary, political, and show business celebrities. A professor at nearby Wake Forest University, Maya was also an internationally known singer, dancer, actress, director, screenwriter, composer, civil rights leader, and author whose series of books about her life had been highly acclaimed. Maya had been unaware of the commotion in the neighborhood until Mary told her what had happened. Soon afterward, Maya called back in disbelief.
“Mary, did you just tell me that Hattie was murdered?’’
More police had arrived. Fam Brownlee now counted nine cars, with more on the way. Officers were milling around, going in and out of the house. One asked Fam if he could identify the three cars beside the garage, and as Fam stepped between Bob’s Buick and Hattie’s gold Plymouth, he nearly stepped on a ring of keys.
“There’s some keys,” he said, and the officer stooped to pick them up, stopping only when Fam said, “They could be evidence.”
Still upset that the police had taken nearly an hour to respond to his wife’s calls, Fam became even more agitated as he watched their actions. Nobody seemed to be in charge or to know what to do. Officers kept going into the house to look at the bodies, drawn, Fam was certain, by nothing more than morbid curiosity. He thought he heard things being moved inside. Was evidence being destroyed inadvertently?
“Don’t you think you should get those people out of the house?” he asked one officer.
“We’ll take care of this,” she responded snappishly.
Fam went back to the foot of the driveway, convinced that the police were in a state of confusion.
On at least one count, he was right, for some officers had realized that the Newsom house might not fall within the newly annexed area of the city, that this might not be their case after all, and twenty-eight minutes after the first policeman arrived, a call went to the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Department.
17
The phone rang just before midnight at Allen Gentry’s modest brick home in Pfafftown, a village less than five miles from the Newsom house.
“County’s calling,” said his wife, Lu Ann, nudging him awake.
The young couple had been asleep for less than two hours after spending a tiring day at the sports car races at Charlotte Motor Speedway. They had, in fact, spent the weekend at the racetrack, driving the eighty miles back and forth each day. Allen Gentry never could get his fill of sleek, fast cars in close competition.
The call didn’t surprise Gentry. In the nearly two and a half years since he had been promoted to sergeant in the Criminal Investigation Division of the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Department, he had become accustomed to middle-of-the-night calls. He usually got two or three a week, almost always about minor matters that required a supervisor’s attention. He would make a decision, roll over, and go back to sleep.
But this time as he uttered his groggy hello into the receiver, the dispatcher began rattling on about a triple murder. His mind was too sleep-stilled to grasp that.
“I’m saying, ‘Huh?’” he recalled later. “You just don’t have triple homicides in Winston-Salem. You have those in California or somewhere else, not here.”
The news brought him awake quickly, and he jotted down the details on a side-table pad. “I’ll be right there,” he said.
“What is it?” asked his wife.
“A triple homicide,” he said incredulously.
He hurriedly pulled on jeans, a gray slipover shirt, and sneakers, and left by the carport door, passing his gleaming, black, T-top 280Z Datsun with its MY1VICE license tag as he made his way to the unmarked Dodge cruiser he detested.
For as long as he could remember, Gentry, a native of mountainous Wilkes County, had been drawn between two loves, the glamour of fast cars and the excitement of police work, and he never could reconcile the two.
After graduation from Elkin High School, he was torn about which course to follow: cars or law enforcement. He enrolled in a community college auto mechanics course but soon switched to a criminal justice program at another community college. He wanted to be a highway patrolman, but he weighed too little and his eyesight was too poor, so he dropped out of college and began selling cars in Winston-Salem.
On an outside chance, he submitted an application to the Winston-Salem Police Department and was surprised three months later to be offered a job in the communications division. He took it and a year later moved on to become a deputy with the sheriff’s department. A week before he was to start patrol duty, on September 1, 1973, he married Lu Ann Crump, whom he’d met in Spanish class in high school.
In five years as a patrol deputy, Gentry clung to his dream of becoming a highway patrolman. He gained weight, though not enough and corrected his vision with contact lenses. But his repeated appeals were denied, and instead he became a juvenile officer for the sheriff’s department for a year before stepping up to criminal investigations.
As a detective, Gentry thought he had found his calling. Bright and quick to learn, he was methodical and thorough, scrupulously honest and fair. He didn’t worry and was rarely rattled. He was a diplomat, never a bully, able to talk his way through almost any situation and achieve his objective. His even disposition, shy, soft-spoken approach, and boyish smile infused confidence, and made people trust him and want to talk to him. In good-guy, bad-guy situations, he was always the good guy.
Always eager to learn, Gentry sought whatever training was available. In addition to graduating from the FBI National Academy, he’d learned such varied skills as Breathalyzer operation and hypnosis. With his promotion to sergeant in January 1983, he clearly was on the rise in law enforcement.
Gentry was indeed almost too good to be true, the epitome of the all-American boy. He was always polite, rarely swore, still used expressions such as “gosh” and “neat,” didn’t smoke or drink, regularly attended the Baptist church. A sharp dresser, he was always meticulously groomed and had a standing weekly appointment with his barber, who kept his wavy, dark hair trimmed close.
At thirty-two, Gentry could finally meet the weight requirements of the highway patrol. He’d gained more than forty pounds since joining the sheriff’s department, although he was still trim. But he was glad now that he hadn’t won his battles to get into the patrol. In the years that he had kept that dream, he and Lu Ann had lived in apartments, knowing that if he got accepted they would be moved to some desolate part of the state. When the dream died, they bought the ranch-style house in Pfafftown and furnished it tastefully in vogueish country style. On their walls were prints by Bob Timberlake, a fashionable North Carolina artist whose simple rural scenes fetched handsome prices. Although they had no children, that void was partly filled by a twelve-year-old gray miniature poodle named Duffy, who stirred to see what was happening as Gentry hurried from his house in answer to the homicide call.
Gentry was happy with his life. He loved his work. But in his secret heart, he wished the flashy Datsun in his carport was a Porsche 911 convertible, and he couldn’t give up the idea that instead of going off to work each day in a business suit to investigate mundane burglaries, he should be wearing fireproof coveralls gaudy with patches and pulling on driving gloves and helmet to take to the track at Sebring or Riverside.
But that was not on his mind as he nudged his sluggish Dodge up the narrow, broken concrete lane that is Valley Road. Three people killed. Surely, Gentry thought, it must be a murder-suicide, a case that would be quickly cleared with a medical examiner’s ruling.
He didn’t have to search for the house. He topped the hill and saw police cars everywhere. Rarely had he seen so many at a crime scene. He parked on the opposite side of the street a short distance from the house and walked to the driveway. The confusion that had reigned earlier had subsided, and the house had been sealed off by Winston-Salem police. Two patrolmen were guarding the foot of the driveway, where rescue squad members and several bystanders also had gathered. Gentry saw his lieut
enant, Earl B. Hiatt, usually called EB, arriving and waited for him. The two walked up the driveway, where they were greeted by Larry Gordon, the first deputy to reach the scene. Any thought Gentry had of a case easily cleared was dispelled when Gordon told them that three bodies were in the house, two women and a man, all shot several times, and no weapon in sight. He read the names of the victims from a pad, but neither Gentry nor Hiatt had heard of the Newsoms. Gordon explained that jurisdiction was in question, and Hiatt and Gentry agreed they should proceed on the assumption that this was their case. More specifically, Gentry knew, the responsibility likely would fall on him.
Big changes had taken place in the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Department in the previous six months. In November 1984, when longtime sheriff Manley Lancaster was forced by failing health to step down, county commissioners had chosen as sheriff Preston Oldham, the hard-eyed commander of the criminal investigation division, who had built a legendary reputation for his undercover narcotics work. Less than three weeks earlier, Oldham had realigned his department. Ronald Barker was appointed new captain of detectives. A former public school teacher who had spent years as crime prevention officer, holding rape clinics for women, teaching bank tellers how to respond to holdups and homeowners how to discourage burglaries, Barker had expected to be appointed sheriff himself. Indeed, news reports had proclaimed him the leading candidate, and he had been asked to be present at the commission meeting at which Oldham’s appointment was announced. Disappointed, he had nonetheless sworn his allegiance to the new sheriff.
Barker had formed the department’s first homicide division with one other detective following a spate of murders in 1976, but he had worked at it for less than two years, never had a case of this magnitude, and had been away from it for a long time. Gentry, who was aware of the politics involved in his department but tried to distance himself from them, had only restricted homicide experience himself. The handful of cases on which he had worked all had been quickly solved by confessions. He realized, however, that he was the department’s most experienced investigator on the scene, and although he knew that a difficult case—and this one had all the earmarks of being just that—would require hard work by almost every detective in the department, he knew, too, that the case had to have a lead officer, somebody to take charge, and in his unobtrusive way he quietly assumed command.
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