Bill, I can not express to you in any stronger manner how committed I am in this. The information you glean from these letters is not half of the story, but I won’t put down on paper my feelings about how Susie is raising the boys. I do think that at this time even her family questions her methods.
The plan to take the boys to Disneyland had originated a year earlier, when Tom discovered that his regular spring visit had been cut short by snow days. He made it known then that he wanted a full visit the next year, and he had taken up the plan of the Disneyland trip with his and Susie’s lawyers well in advance. The boys had been enthusiastic about the idea, but Susie was not, and arranging it, as usual, had been a problem. Bob and Florence thought the trip a grand idea, and on the day the boys were to leave on a direct flight to Los Angeles, where Tom and Kathy had flown to meet them, Florence wrote to Tom and Kathy, sending along some snapshots made at Christmas.
John and Jim and Susie came over for a belated birthday dinner for Jim. He and John were quite excited about leaving this a.m. to meet you in Ca. I know you all will have a good time and I think it is great you are giving the boys such a wonderful vacation.
Well, I have finally finished teaching. I am now officially retired from Rutledge and am full-time secretary for Bob. He is keeping me busy.
The renovation in Winston is very slow and still not finished. I imagine it will be June before it is completed.
Bob and I will go to Reidsville to church with Louise, Susie and Judge Bobbitt Sunday. We always go to Mother’s church on Easter and place flowers in her memory since she died on Good Friday and was buried on Easter. Easter is a very sad time, but also a glorious time. The trees and flowers here are beautiful.
Tom, Kathy, and the boys had a wonderful trip. The boys were a little wild on arrival—“like barbarians,” Tom later described them—but he soon got them settled. They checked into a fancy hotel, where the boys bounced on the beds and tried escargot. They frazzled themselves taking in so many rides and shows at Disneyland. When the boys begged to try the shooting gallery, Tom, an avid hunter, agreed. The boys missed most of the targets.
The boys got to visit Granny Goose and Opa, their former Albuquerque neighbors, who now lived in Anaheim, and Jim went to sleep in his favorite Granny Goose chair. For three days, Tom, Kathy, and the boys visited friends in San Diego. They went to Sea World and roasted hot dogs and marshmallows on the beach.
On this trip, Tom talked to the boys about spending more time with him. John was happy with the prospect, but Jim was reluctant.
“Just tell your mother you want to stay longer,” Tom old Jim.
“We can’t say that to Mother,” Jim said.
“Yes, you can. You’re going to have to stand up to her and just tell her.”
“You want us to come back with a broken arm?” Jim asked.
Both Tom and Kathy noticed a funny thing on this trip. Three or four times, the boys called Tom Papa, something they’d never done before. After saying it, they acted almost as if they’d slipped and said something wrong.
“Where’d you get that?” Kathy asked once, but neither answered.
John acted different on this trip, as if he wanted to talk about something but couldn’t bring himself to do it. When Tom or Kathy asked if something was bothering him, he denied it.
Yet, on the drive back to Los Angeles to put the boys on the plane for home, John cried most of the way.
“Daddy, don’t drive so fast. We don’t want to have to go back any sooner than we have to.”
At the airport, John cried worse than he’d ever cried before on leaving. “Don’t send us home,” he pleaded.
“I tried to explain to him, ‘You have school to finish, and if we don’t send you back, your mom’s going to have the law after your daddy,’” Kathy remembered.
Tom told him that it would be only a matter of weeks before he and Jim would be coming back to Albuquerque, and he promised that he would see to it that they got to stay longer this time.
“It’s going to work out,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
But nothing placated John, and even as Tom and Kathy strapped the boys into their seats on the plane, John clung to them, crying and begging not to go home.
“Do you know what it’s like when you’re hugging them good-bye and kissing them and telling them we’re going to work it out and not to worry…” Kathy later said tearfully. “But our hands were tied. What could we do?”
As soon as Tom got home from Los Angeles, he called Bob Newsom. He really needed to spend more time with the boys, he said. If he went back to court to seek longer visitation would Bob be willing to testify that he thought it beneficial for the boys?
“I won’t have any trouble at all with that,” Bob said.
Tom wasted no time in calling Bill Horsley to tell him that the Newsoms were now willing to help.
On May 2, Horsley filed a motion for extended visitation, and a hearing was set for May 23. Tom again called Bob to fill him in and tell him that he should expect a subpoena.
Nine days later, on the Saturday before Mother’s Day, Bob and Florence left for Silver Spring, Maryland. The primary purpose of the trip was for Bob to attend hearings in Washington the following week for one of his clients. But Bob also wanted to take Florence out of town on Mother’s Day to lessen the pain of having Susie ignore her. As usual, Bob and Florence were planning to stay with Marvin and Taki Mundel, close friends of long standing that Bob had made through his work with the national society of industrial engineers.
The following Wednesday, a sheriff’s deputy appeared at the Newsom house with a subpoena for Bob. The subpoena caught Rob by surprise because his father had not told him about the upcoming hearing or his plan to testify. When Bob and Florence arrived home the following afternoon, Rob told his father about the subpoena.
“I knew it was coming,” Bob said, and went on to tell his son why he intended to testify on Tom’s behalf.
“Have you told Susie about it?” Rob asked.
“Not yet.”
Thursday night, Tom called Susie’s apartment to talk to the boys.
“John,” he said, “we’re going to have a hearing next week to see if you and Jimbo can’t spend some more time out here with us this summer.”
John said little, and Tom was certain that it was because Susie was listening and he didn’t want to upset his mother.
Jim objected. “I thought I told you we don’t want to stay any longer,” he said.
“We’ll just let the judge decide,” Tom told him.
“Jim always wanted to keep peace,” Tom later said of Jim’s reaction. “He knew a big stink was coming.”
On Friday morning, Bob steeled himself to tell his daughter of his intentions.
“That Friday when I left for work, he told me he was going to call her,” Rob said later, but he would never know the contents of that conversation.
At 3:30 that afternoon, Susie and the boys arrived in Reidsville at the office of her lawyer, Sandy Sands, for a scheduled appointment to talk about the hearing, which was set for the following Thursday. Susie was carrying a plastic bag containing two small stuffed toy animals, a green dragon and an orange-and-black tiger. The throats of each had been slit.
When Susie was ushered alone into Sands’s office she was trembling, crying, her voice quivering.
“Susie was as scared as any human being I’ve ever seen in my life,” Sands said. “She was terrified.”
She showed him the toy animals and told him that sometime in March Tom had called and asked for a longer visit in April. She’d said no. They’d argued. She’d hung up on him. Shortly afterward, she came home from class to find the two animals, toys the boys usually took when they went to Albuquerque, with their throats slit.
“Did you call the police?” Sands asked.
No, she said. Nothing else was disturbed, and there was no sign of forced entry. She went to the complex office, where passkeys to all of the apartments were kept on
a panel on the wall, but the one for her apartment wouldn’t open the door, she said. She figured that somebody had taken the right key and replaced it with another.
Soon after finding the animals, Susie went on, she got an anonymous call.
“Two down and two to go,” the caller said, and hung up.
Susie said she took it to mean that the Lynch murders were the two down. The two to go, she feared, were her children.
After the anonymous call, she said, Tom called again, renewing his request, and she was afraid not to grant it.
After Sands calmed Susie, they talked about the upcoming hearing. Sands told her that her father would be testifying for Tom, but he realized from her reaction that she already knew about it. They talked about what evidence might be presented and what they should present.
Sands wanted to put the boys on the stand to say that they didn’t want to spend more time with their father, and he called them in for a thirty-minute session without their mother. Among the things Sands asked them were what activities they were looking forward to with their mother this summer. Hiking and camping, they both agreed.
Sands liked the boys. He found them quiet but polite, erudite, well read for their ages.
“They were the kind of kids who could’ve impressed a judge,” he said later, “the kind that judges would listen to.”
After talking with the boys, Sands told Susie that he might also want to call the psychiatrist she and the boys had been seeing, Andrew Courts, to testify that they were handling their situation together well. Susie said that she and the boys had an appointment with Dr. Courts on Monday and that she would mention it to him.
The meeting lasted two hours, and as Susie was leaving, Sands assured her that it was not unusual that her father would testify for the other side. Grandparents often thought that the other parent should have more time with the children, he said. He thought she was satisfied about that.
“When she left here,” he said, “there was no reason for her to worry about her parents’ testifying.”
After leaving Sands’s office, Susie drove the short distance to the Klenner house, where she and the boys joined Annie Hill and Fritz for supper. Hearing from Susie that her father was planning to testify in Tom’s behalf, family members later learned, Fritz responded gravely, “I never dreamed Bob Newsom would turn traitor.”
During the meal, Annie Hill later reported, she suggested that if Susie were having to go back to court, she should try to get more money from Tom for the boys. After all, wasn’t he a millionaire now that he had inherited his family’s fortune? Susie said that she intended to do just that.
After the meal, she and the boys returned to Greensboro. Fritz left for Virginia, telling his mother that he was going camping in the mountains with Ian Perkins, a neighbor from down the street, the son of longtime Klenner family friends, a student at Washington and Lee University.
As Fritz was leaving, Ian was already waiting for him on Roanoke Mountain, thinking that he would be joining Fritz on a CIA mission to Texas. Not until several hours later, after Fritz finally showed up at his room in Lexington, did Ian learn that there had been a change in plans. Their mission would take them instead to North Carolina. First stop: Winston-Salem.
On Saturday morning, May 18, a day that would end in murder for the Newsom family, Annette Hunt, who lived next door to the Newsoms in Greensboro, got a surprise call from Susie.
Annette once had been Susie’s closest friend, but she’d rarely heard from her in the past year and a half. Annette thought it was because Susie didn’t want her to know how close she’d gotten with Fritz.
“What are you doing?” Susie asked.
“Nothing much.”
“Can I come over?”
“Sure.”
Susie stayed several hours. She and Annette spent some time catching up, but mostly Susie wanted to talk about the upcoming hearing. She was convinced that Tom wanted to take the boys away from her and she couldn’t understand how her father could testify against her. She was clearly upset.
“She just went on and on about it,” Annette remembered later. “She said she just couldn’t believe he was going to do that. I said, ‘Susie, please go talk to Bob. Go talk to him.’ I wanted to see them work things out.”
Before Susie left, Annette told her that if she had to go back to court, she should try to get Tom to pay to send the boys to camp each summer. It would be good for all of them, she said. She gave Susie some material about a camp her boys had gone to, and Susie saw that it had a rifle program.
“The boys,” she said, “would like that.”
Charlie and Juanita Clarke were on their way home from a country barbecue that Saturday evening when they passed a road that triggered something in Charlie’s mind. Yadkinville Road led past Green Meadows, the small development where Bob and Florence Newsom once lived. The Clarkes had spent many pleasant evenings visiting there with the Newsoms.
“Know what I’d like to do?” Charlie said. “Let’s go see Bob and Florence.”
“Not unless we call,” Juanita admonished.
Charlie and Bob had grown up together. Charlie’s father was the pastor of the church Bob and his sister attended with their father. Charlie and Bob were close friends in high school and roommates at North Carolina State after Charlie convinced Bob that he should give up his dreams of a music career to pursue industrial engineering.
Charlie dropped out of college and went into defense work, but he later returned, got a degree in civil engineering, and moved to West Virginia to work on government hydraulic projects. For years he didn’t see his old friend at all, but in 1960 he returned to Winston-Salem to work for a construction company, and he and Bob picked up their friendship again.
He knew that Bob and Florence were spending weekends at Nanna’s now and soon planned to move there. The Clarkes drove to their home in Lewisville, just west of Winston-Salem, and Charlie called Nanna’s house. Bob answered and sounded delighted to hear from him.
It was about 8 P.M. when Charlie and Juanita arrived at the big house on Valley Road. Bob and Florence met them at the back door with smiles, handshakes, and hugs. Bob took Charlie on a tour of the house, showing the renovations. Florence and Juanita went off in a different direction. Nanna wasn’t feeling well, Bob said, and was resting in her bedroom.
While Charlie and Bob were taking in the new downstairs rooms, Charlie asked about the children.
“Rob is getting along just fine,” Bob said. “He’s with the county now, doing just great. They’re living with us, you know.”
“Oh,” Charlie said; he didn’t know.
“Susie’s living in an apartment and going to school at UNC-G getting a master’s degree in business,” Bob went on. “Just getting along great.”
“He wasn’t the type to tell you his family problems,” Charlie observed later.
Upstairs, where Florence was showing her the new guest room, Juanita was hearing a different story.
Florence asked about the Clarkes’ daughter, Marsha, whose wedding she’d attended four years earlier.
“She’s just fine,” Juanita said.
“That was the nicest wedding,” Florence said. “Is she happy?”
“She just seems to be happy beyond words.”
“I certainly hope that lasts,” Florence said. “I tell you, we’re having a problem with Susie. She’s having a hard time, and I don’t know how that’s going to end.”
Florence shook her head, then laughed and changed the subject.
Later, the four gathered to chat in the living room, and Nanna came out in her nightclothes to join them. Bob and Juanita sat on the sofa with an ashtray between them. Juanita was smoking cigarettes, Bob puffing his pipe.
“We don’t need the TV,” Florence said, flicking it off. She removed her shoes and settled comfortably in the recliner.
Charlie told a story over which they’d laughed dozens of times in the past, about the time Bob borrowed his transit to survey a p
roperty line and thought he’d lost the crosshairs from it. Then Bob and Charlie started reminiscing about their childhood neighborhood. Nanna joined in the story telling, and the Clarkes marveled at her memory for names and incidents.
About 9:15, Charlie noticed Bob stifle a yawn and figured he was tired.
“Well, we’ve got to be going,” Charlie said.
The leave-taking took several minutes. Outside, Bob mentioned a problem with water running off the back of the house, and Charlie stepped over to examine it, leaving a footprint in the sand next to one of the broad new windows.
“What you need here is a drain,” Charlie said.
A new round of good-byes followed before the Clarkes walked out to their car under the big oaks. It was a dark night, turning cool, but the thing Charlie later remembered most about it was the eerie quiet that enveloped them. As they got into their car and pulled away at about 9:30, the Clarkes looked back and saw Bob and Florence still standing in the big windows, smiling and waving to them.
Part Five
The Unraveling
“O haggard queen! to Athens dost thou guide
Thy glowing chariot, steeped in kindred gore;
Or seek to hide thy damned parricide
Where peace and justice dwell forevermore?”
—EURIPIDES
34
Nancy and Steve Dunn were already in bed at their home on Raleigh’s western edge when the phone rang shortly before midnight on Sunday, May 19, 1985. Nancy was surprised to find her father, Bing Miller, on the line.
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