Joy and Jerry had a short and simple word to describe Susie: snob.
“Susie never really had an identity of her own,” recalled Joy. “She had this family and that was all. I always felt like she was just spoiled.”
“Susie was very much social-order conscious,” Jerry said. “She was always interested in associating with people she perceived to be in some elevated position.”
In Albuquerque she found few people worthy of her association.
Turkey was one of Susie’s favorite words during that period, lower class a favorite phrase. Everything in Albuquerque was lower class. Most of the people were turkeys.
Tom was a turkey, too, Susie told Irene. She wanted to go to the opera; he wouldn’t take her. She loved the classics; he had no comprehension of them. He loved to put on boots and go camping, hunting, fishing; she abhorred all of that. Tom bought a Toyota Landcruiser to prowl the desert; she wouldn’t set foot in it. He took up running again and began training for a marathon. People who run for miles are crazy, she said, and refused to take the boys to watch him race. Tom loved sports. “Athletes,” Susie announced, “are nothing but a bunch of sweaty, overrated turkeys.”
“She didn’t like anything he liked,” Irene recalled later. “She didn’t like anything anybody liked.”
The biggest turkey of all was Susie’s mother-in-law, Delores. Susie complained at length about her. She boasted to Irene that she threw away packages Delores mailed to the boys. She spoke proudly of turning Delores away in Beaufort.
“She loathed Delores,” Irene said. “She was not paranoid but very close to it about Tom’s parents. She absolutely refused to let Chuck and Delores see the boys.”
Irene could see trouble ahead next door.
By Tom and Susie’s third year in Albuquerque, the trouble had surfaced. Joy and Jerry no longer felt welcome in Susie’s house, and neither did other friends of Tom. Susie said cutting, double-edged things about Tom and his friends in front of them. Her only humor took the form of sarcasm. To Joy and Jerry, Susie seemed manipulative and domineering, traits she claimed to despise in her mother-in-law. She was that way not only with Tom and the children, but with everybody, Jerry and Joy thought. When she didn’t get her way, she stormed around in a cold fury.
“It was what Susie wanted and that was flat it,” Irene said. “I could hear her. We lived next door. I don’t think Tom ever had a chance to argue. She would state the absolute facts and then go slam the door. Tom was in absolute misery. He remained silent so there would be no disagreement. Tom got to where if he said two words it was a miracle. She made him miserable in a fiendish manner.”
To Irene, Tom seemed to be shrinking inside himself. He was not the type to stand up and confront, she knew, and she noticed that he seemed to be finding more reasons to stay away from home.
The problems between Tom and Susie were marked more with sullen silences than with arguments and screaming matches. Tom had learned early that arguing was futile. “She was a strong character,” he said later. “There was no really winning an argument with her. She was right and that was it.”
After they first moved to Albuquerque, Tom said, he tried to encourage Susie to do things. When he suggested going Jeep riding in the desert, or visiting Indian reservations or the Grand Canyon, she showed no interest. When he asked her to go to office parties and dental society functions he thought he should attend, she refused and he didn’t go. When he wanted to go hunting, she said she didn’t want to be left alone with the boys and he stayed home. Eventually, Tom started doing things alone.
“Of course, you felt guilty,” he said later, “because she made you feel guilty. That was part of the plan to manipulate you. But I started going anyway, because there was no reason why I shouldn’t go.”
The more Tom did things alone, the more isolated Susie felt.
“She had no friends,” Irene said. “Nobody would come around her. Nobody ever came to see her, and she didn’t go to see anyone else.”
Financial problems didn’t help matters. Tom and Susie had large debts, and with Tom’s practice slow in building, they had trouble managing their affairs. Susie partly blamed Tom’s family for their situation.
“She felt they had more money than they would ever spend and yet Tom had to borrow money to open his practice,” Irene said.
In the spring of 1978, Susie decided to go back to work. She took a job with Competitive Edge, a company that produced TV commercials. She started as a receptionist but quickly rose to be production coordinator, scheduling studio time for ten different offices around the country. Her bosses found her to be pleasant, charming, and highly capable.
Not only was the extra money a help, but Tom hoped the job would make Susie happier and their marriage better.
Susie also found another activity to occupy her time, reviving a longtime interest in Far Eastern culture. She had come to enjoy the subject at Wake Forest because of an Indian professor she admired, Balkrishna Gokhale. In graduate school she studied Far Eastern history, taking a special interest in China, reading everything Pearl Buck ever wrote. With China opening to the West, she got the idea that somebody who could speak Chinese would have a bright future. She found a Taiwanese student at the University of New Mexico to tutor her and began studying Mandarin. She bought books and tapes and diligently spent evenings practicing words and drawing Chinese characters.
Despite Susie’s work and new interest, things didn’t improve at home.
“We just weren’t communicating much with each other,” Tom said later. “I don’t think we ever really talked. We just didn’t have much in common to talk about. I liked outdoor things, hunting and sports and stuff, and I guess she wanted white gloves and teatime in the afternoon.”
A constant air of tension permeated the brown stucco house at 3121 La Mancha Drive.
Susie was not relaying her troubles back to North Carolina. Nanna and Paw-Paw came to visit that summer and returned to report to Bob and Florence that all did not seem well between Tom and Susie. Susie brought the boys home for Christmas 1978, leaving Tom behind and offering no explanation for it. Everybody noticed that something was wrong. She was tense, uncommunicative, didn’t speak at all to some people. To her cousin Nancy she talked about her mother-in-law. Delores wouldn’t leave them alone, she said. She called all the time, trying to control her, trying to tell Tom and the children how to live. “She’s evil,” Susie said.
Soon after returning from her Christmas visit, Susie told Tom that the way things were going it might be better if she just took the boys and went back home for good.
“It never occurred to me to get divorced,” Tom said later. “It just wasn’t part of life’s plan. I was a twenty-year-old kid when I got married. The only thing I’d ever known was school and basketball. I thought you went to school, got your career, got married, had kids, and lived happily ever after. Divorce just wasn’t part of the picture.”
That prospect disturbed Tom. “I told her, ‘Why don’t you just think about it?’ My main concern was for the boys. I didn’t want the boys to go. I thought things would get better. They didn’t.”
Matters grew particularly worse for the boys, especially John. He didn’t want his mother to go to work and when she left him he stood screaming at the window, throwing temper tantrums to rival those of Susie as a child.
Laura Gilliam experienced more of these fits than anybody. Soon after Susie went to work, Laura answered a newspaper ad for a baby-sitter and began tending to John and Jim. Laura had two young children of her own and lived not far from Tom and Susie. On some days she kept all four children at her house, on other days at the Lynch house. Laura was not impressed with Susie as a mother.
“I found that she wasn’t concerned over things that she should’ve been concerned about,” she said.
Susie was concerned enough about John’s actions to begin taking him to Dr. Harold Paine, a grandfatherly child psychologist, who later would not talk about John’s problems. But Sus
ie’s friend Joy, who later became a psychologist herself, thought that Susie was the source of John’s troubles.
“She was a person who needed to control every situation,” Joy said. “I thought she was inflexible the way she dealt with the children. You got the impression that they had a pretty insulated life. They didn’t have the normal freedom that little children want and need.”
John wanted to do things on his own, assert his independence. “He would resist,” Joy said. “Any time he tried to assert himself as a person, they really got into struggles.”
Clearly, Susie cared more for Jim than for John.
“Susie favored Jim,” Jerry said, “because she thought that Jim was more like her and John was more like Tom. In fact, it was really the opposite. John did look like Tom, but he was high-strung like Susie. Jim was more docile and relaxed like Tom.”
Joy thought that John was deeply frustrated and emotionally wounded by his mother.
“He didn’t look like a happy child,” she said. “He just seemed like a sort of sad, withdrawn, defeated little boy.”
Laura Gilliam would sometimes arrive at the Lynch house to look after the boys and be told by Susie that John was to remain in his room all day.
“She would say he had done something to the other one and he was to be punished,” she recalled. “I was not to let him out except to go to the bathroom and for lunch.”
On these occasions, John would sometimes rage in his room for hours. Susie instructed Laura to leave him alone until he wore himself down. “He would yell and scream until he got tired of it,” Laura said.
Sometimes he did more than yell and scream. He ripped apart his books, damaged his toys, and a few times smeared bowel movements on his walls.
To Laura, Susie seemed less concerned than she should be about such behavior.
By the spring of 1979, Jim, who’d just turned three, also began displaying behavioral problems. He kept putting objects into his eyes, and his eyes were constantly red and tearing. After one such incident, Susie got into an argument with the ophthalmologist and created a scene in his office.
“She was becoming a lot more frustrated with parenting,” Joy recalled. “The boys were resisting her control, and it was becoming more difficult for her to manage them. It was tense to be around her with the kids. She would be yelling, John would be crying.”
Her frustrations began to take physical form. In Jerry’s presence, Susie beat Princess, the family dog, with a plastic baseball bat, sending her yelping in pain. Irene could hear other slaps and howls. One day she saw marks on John’s face and asked him what happened.
“I fell down,” he said.
“He didn’t fall down,” Susie said. “I slapped him.”
“My god,” Irene said, “you must have slapped him hard.”
“I did,” Susie said with no hint of remorse. “I knocked him across the room.”
Irene was flabbergasted and told Hank what Susie had said. They debated whether to tell Tom about it, but decided they shouldn’t meddle.
One day that spring, Tom came home from work to find John holding his arm in an unusual manner. As soon as he took John’s shirt off, he realized the arm was broken.
“What happened?” he asked.
“I was doing trampolines on the bed at the babysitter’s and I fell off,” John said.
Tom took John to the hospital and had the arm set. He didn’t question the baby-sitter. If he had, she would have told him that the boys never got near beds at her house. Her husband worked nights and slept all day, and she kept the bedrooms closed. Because both boys had bed-wetting problems, she didn’t even let them sleep on the couch at her house. She had pallets fixed for them on the dining room floor. John had suffered no accident at her house and when he left the day before with his mother, his arm was fine. When Susie brought him the next morning, John was in a cast.
“She said something about a fall and he landed on his arm,” Laura recalled.
Laura was not unaccustomed to seeing injuries in the boys, especially John. He frequently had bruises on his legs and traces of blood in his nose. Susie told her that John often had nosebleeds in the night.
“She always had some excuse when she’d bring them to me and they had these things,” Laura said, “and they always sounded legitimate to me.”
One day, while John’s arm was still in the cast, Susie brought the boys to Laura’s house and left them without mentioning any injuries. Laura noticed that Jim’s eyes were red, but that was not unusual. Not until a few hours later, when she felt Jim’s head and he winced, did she realize something was wrong. Under the hair on the side of his head was a big lump.
“It was mushy,” Laura said. “If you can picture an overripe tomato, that’s what it felt like. I got scared.”
She called Susie at work, but Susie didn’t seem concerned. Susie said that John and Jim had been jumping on the bed the night before and Jim had fallen off. Laura said she thought Jim should see a doctor and offered to take him to the hospital. But Susie instructed her to bring the boys to her office and she would take care of it.
Instead of taking Jim to a doctor, Susie drove the boys to Irene’s house and asked if she would look after them for a few hours because the baby-sitter couldn’t keep them. Irene didn’t notice Jim’s injury.
Tom saw the lump on Jim’s head when he got home from work, and expressed concern. One of Jim’s eyes was beginning to blacken. Susie told him that John had pulled Jim off the bed at the baby-sitter’s while Jim was sleeping. Worried, Tom called his friend Jerry, who told him that he should have Jim checked. Susie went with Tom when he took Jim to Presbyterian Hospital.
“I could tell that the doctors suspected something was not right,” Tom recalled later. “You could kind of feel that they were looking at you weird.”
Jim had suffered a mild concussion and facial bruises, and the doctors wanted to keep him overnight for observation. Susie didn’t want that and argued with the doctors. When the doctors and nurses strongly suggested that this might not have been an accident, Susie got even more upset.
“I got kind of upset, too,” Tom said, “because I couldn’t believe that. I can’t imagine anybody hitting a kid hard enough to hurt them. I said, ‘No, this is just an accident.’”
Jerry came and looked at Jim, and he didn’t think it was an accident. The injuries didn’t seem compatible with a fall. They were compatible, he thought, with blows from a fist. He suspected they had come from Susie’s hand, but he didn’t press the matter with Tom.
“It was hard for me to believe,” Tom said. “I’d never seen her act that way, never saw her even spank the kids very much, never saw that kind of violence. If I’d seen that, I’d have sent her packing immediately.”
Irene didn’t hear until the next day that Jim had been at the hospital. Susie told her that John had knocked Jim over in his high chair. Later, when she learned from Tom that Susie told him that Jim had been hurt at the babysitter’s, she was furious because she knew the boys had been with her that afternoon.
“I was extremely indignant,” Irene said.
When she asked Susie about it, Susie said the doctors suspected child abuse and indicated that the baby-sitter might have done it. “She said, ‘There’s not anything I can do.’ I said, ‘The hell there isn’t.’ She wouldn’t do anything about it.”
Irene’s suspicions about Susie were provoked. “I started watching her,” she said. “I know damn well that she did it.”
But not until later did she admit that to Tom.
Soon after Jim was hurt, Susie did something that astonished everybody.
In the nearly nine years that Tom and Susie had been married, Delores had never spent a night in her son’s house. Several months earlier, Delores had flown to California to drive back to Kentucky with Janie so that Janie could begin preparing for dental school. They planned their trip through Albuquerque, and they arrived to find that Susie had booked a room for them at the Sheraton. Even Janie was
offended. “We weren’t even offered the floor,” she said.
During that visit, Delores realized that things were not going well between Tom and Susie, and through her regular telephone calls since that time, she knew that the situation had deteriorated.
After Jim was hurt, Delores called Tom and suggested that Susie and the boys come to Kentucky to visit until things calmed down. Chuck would pay the plane fares. Tom said she would have to talk to Susie. Surprisingly, Susie accepted.
“I think she just wanted to get out of town,” Tom said later.
Delores told all of her friends that Susie was coming.
“They’re having problems and she’s going to come with the boys and stay a few days,” Delores said to Joyce Rose.
During Susie’s stay, Delores took her and the boys to visit in Joyce’s homey kitchen. After all the derogatory things that Joyce had heard Delores say about Susie, she couldn’t believe how friendly they acted to one another. “This was a person Delores hated more than anybody in the whole wide world,” Joyce recalled. “She said Susie thought she came from royalty because her family had so much political power. ‘She’s got more power than I’ve got money,’ Delores said. She felt like she was a wealthy spoiled brat, but she had to tolerate her.”
Helen Stewart, Delores’s maid, was equally surprised at the visit. “She said Susie stole her son but she had to put up with it until TJ could get out of the mess,” Helen said.
Helen and Chuck kept the boys while Delores and Janie took Susie to the spring production at the Little Colonel Theater.
Later, Delores reported that Susie had acted very strange during the visit. She hardly let Jim out of her sight. She insisted on sleeping with him and wouldn’t even let him go out to play. When Delores suggested that Susie take the Lynches’ car and spend the day shopping, Susie chose to stay at the house with the children.
On the second day of her visit, Tom called.
“How are things going?” he asked.
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