Bitter Blood

by Jerry Bledsoe

  “Nancy,” he said with no preliminaries, “I’ve got some bad news. Nanna and Bob and Florence have been murdered.”

  Nancy started screaming uncontrollably, and Steve took the phone to find out what had happened. They would be right there, he said.

  They dressed quickly and rushed to their car, Nancy trembling so that she hardly could open the door. As Steve drove across town, Nancy began screaming again.

  “Susie did this!” she cried. “I know she did!”

  “It was the first thing that came to my mind,” she recalled later. “I just knew how weird she had been acting. I don’t know why, but I just started screaming that. I couldn’t say it enough.”

  Nancy arrived to find her mother packing. She was startled by her mother’s calmness until she realized that she must be in shock. “She was calm,” Nancy said, “and not there.”

  Nancy’s brother, David, arrived shortly, and Nancy went out to greet him.

  “Susie has done this,” were the first words he spoke.

  Inside, Nancy and David continued to insist that Susie had to be involved, bringing their mother from her stunned refuge.

  “Don’t say that,” Frances said. “You don’t know that. She’s family.”

  Nancy decided to go with her parents and brother to Winston-Salem while Steve returned home to stay with their two sons. Nancy drove her parents’ car, and she drove fast. For the first seventy-five miles, nobody even spoke, each in a cocoon of personal thought and pain.

  “It was like we were going to get there and find out it wasn’t true,” Nancy later recalled. “The faster we got there, the faster we’d find out it wasn’t true.”

  Susie was much on the minds of others that night. Rob had tried several times to call her after he became concerned about his parents and grandmother, but he never got an answer. He tried again after the call came from Winston-Salem that something was terribly wrong. Friends and neighbors who gathered at the Newsom house that night kept calling without success after Rob left for Winston-Salem.

  A little after midnight, Dr. John Chandler, a dentist, a neighbor, and a close family friend of the Newsoms, called again. This time Susie answered. She’d just gotten home from a trip, she said.

  Dr. Chandler told her that an accident apparently had happened at Nanna’s. He had no details yet. Rob had gone over.

  Susie seemed little concerned. She asked no questions, and when Dr. Chandler inquired if she needed somebody with her, she said no; she’d be fine.

  Later, when a call came to the Newsom house confirming that Bob and Florence and Nanna were dead, all murdered, Rob’s wife, Alice, called Susie again.

  “I’d rather your brother be here to tell you this,” Alice said, fighting back tears as she went on to tell what had happened.

  Later, Alice remembered that Susie showed no shock. She didn’t cry. For a long moment, she offered only silence.

  “Well, there’s nothing left, is there?” she finally said.

  Again, Susie declined when Alice offered to have somebody come to get her or stay with her, and Susie broke off the conversation by saying, “Well, my dog has run off. I’ve got to go find him. I’ll talk to you later.”

  A strange reaction, Alice thought, to the revelation that her parents and beloved grandmother had been murdered.

  Rob was then at the home of Fam Brownlee. His friend, Tom Maher, was with him, and so was his father-in-law, Fred Hill, as well as the Newsom family’s minister from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Dudley Colhoun. Detective Allen Gentry, who’d quietly assumed charge of the case, had come to the house to interview Rob, and Rob had told him of the murders of his sister’s former in-laws in Kentucky. Gentry took down Susie’s address and telephone number, as well as Rob’s, and suggested that Rob go home, take care of his family, and try to rest. Somebody, he said, would come to talk to him later.

  As Rob was getting ready to leave, Dudley Colhoun called Fam Brownlee aside.

  “Do you know Susie?” Colhoun asked.

  “I do not. I’ve heard her name.”

  “If she should come by here or call, would you please have her get in touch with me or the police or with Rob, because they can’t find her.”

  “Yeah, she’s probably involved in this,” Fred Hill added.

  Brownlee was taken aback by this statement. “I find that very difficult to believe,” he said.

  “Oh, he’s probably right,” said the minister.

  These comments, coming from people so close to the family, flabbergasted Brownlee, and while Colhoun was talking with Rob, Brownlee pulled aside Rob’s friend.

  “I don’t want to be stirring up anything,” he said, going on to tell what he’d just heard about the possibility of involvement by Susie.

  “I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised,” Tom Maher said. “Her or her boyfriend.”

  As soon as the group left his home, Brownlee sought out a detective and told him what he’d just heard, but that information never got to Allen Gentry.

  Rob had been gone for nearly an hour when Nancy pulled her parents’ car up to the gate of her grandmother’s home.

  “We are the family,” Nancy said to the officers stationed there. The officers directed her to the Brownlee house and said that somebody would talk to them shortly. While Nancy and her family waited in the car, they saw the SBI’s big mobile crime lab pull up to the house. This lab had come from Raleigh. A regional lab was stationed in an adjoining county, but its operator was sick that night and another one had to be sent.

  Shortly, a detective came to the Millers’ car.

  “It’s my mother,” Frances said. “Tell me what has happened.”

  The detective began, but had to stop when tears began coursing down his cheeks.

  Frances said that she wanted to go into the house and see for herself.

  “You can’t go in,” he told her. “You just can’t do that.”

  Nanna’s minister, John Giesler, was still at the Brownlee house, and when he and Brownlee learned that the Millers were outside, they went out to offer comfort and invite them in. Giesler called a Holiday Inn not far away and got a room for them. The Millers told the detectives where they would be and went to the motel, where a night clerk, upon learning of their tragedy, opened the closed restaurant and made coffee for them.

  Near dawn, Detective F. G. Crater came to the motel and gave the Millers a sketchy rundown of the facts. The Millers peppered him with questions, most of which he said he couldn’t answer.

  Crater had some questions of his own.

  “Do you know anybody who would do this?”

  Frances said no, and despite their earlier convictions that Susie had to be involved, Nancy and David kept silent.

  “We thought we were the terrible ones to be thinking that,” Nancy later explained.

  “Do you know where Susie Lynch is?” Crater asked.

  They all said no.

  “Do you know anything about the divorce in Albuquerque?”

  “I just know that it was bitter,” Frances said, then went on to tell about the murder of Susie’s in-laws the summer before.

  After the detective left, the Reverend Giesler came to the motel and told the Millers all that he had seen at the house.

  Frances sat with her head in her hands. “This can’t be true,” she said.

  At the Newsom house, while the crime lab crew went about its work, officers drank coffee fetched from a nearby fast-food place and theorized about the murders.

  Despite the evidence to the contrary, some still thought robbery the motive. Others thought somebody high on drugs might have done it. Ron Barker, the commander of the criminal investigation division, was certain that the murders had been executions. When he heard that Bob Newsom sometimes dealt with labor problems, his first thought was that this might have been a mob crime. “I thought, ‘My God, if it’s organized crime, it’s going to be a long case.’”

  Allen Gentry wasn’t joining in the theorizing, although he, too
, thought that the murders looked like executions. “For what we’re used to, it looked incredibly professional,” he said. He’d told this to his friend Tom Sturgill, when Sturgill arrived at 2 A.M.

  Tall, gaunt, and bald, Sturgill was the SBI’s lead agent in Winston-Salem. He was quiet and soft-spoken, never acted impulsively, and had a reputation for building solid cases. Gentry, himself meticulously thorough, liked Sturgill, had worked with him on several cases, and thought they made a good team. Sturgill had but one comment after going through the house: “This is going to be a tough one.”

  It was going to be made even tougher, Gentry knew, by the prominence of the victims. Not until a couple of hours after he arrived did he learn that Florence Newsom was the sister of Susie Sharp, the former chief justice of the state supreme court. “A little additional pressure,” he later called this news, but it didn’t bother him.

  “I don’t get nervous,” he explained. “You get down and do everything as best you can. You go at it in a deliberate and methodical way and try not to worry. You just take the steps you can, and if you run out of things to do, then you worry.”

  On this case, he knew, he was not apt to run out of things to do anytime soon.

  By 7 A.M., Gentry had accompanied Dr. Lew Stringer, the Forsyth County Medical Examiner, through his on-scene examination of the bodies, had completed a thorough search for clues, and had assigned officers to canvass the neighborhood and talk with construction workers who had been at the house. He hurried home to get a quick shower and shave, and abandon his informal attire for a coat and tie, his usual dress. He stayed barely long enough to tell his wife, Lu Ann, that this was indeed a big case, three prominent people murdered and few clues in sight. Then he rushed off without breakfast to rejoin the investigation at the house.

  While Gentry was gone, District Attorney Donald Tisdale arrived. At forty-two, Tisdale, a Wake Forest graduate, had been DA for ten years, and he had not been fainthearted in his work. “Far from shying away from controversy,” the Winston-Salem Journal once noted about him, “he seems to relish it.” Tisdale liked cops and sometimes rode with them on drug busts and undercover activities. They returned his respect. Rarely did an officer make a big move without first consulting him.

  Lieutenant E. B. Hiatt called Tisdale that morning, and Tisdale, who lived only a mile from the Newsom house, dressed and drove there before heading to his office where he was preparing for a big and controversial trial. Tom Sturgill and Captain C. C. McGee of the Forsyth Sheriff’s Department showed him through the house and filled him in on what was known. Tisdale thought it significant that the death blows were all wounds to the head. This had to be a drug-related killing or an execution, he said, and these were hardly the type of people to be involved with drugs. But why would anybody want to execute them?

  Near Nanna’s telephone, the detectives had found a calendar on which she jotted comments about her life and daily activities. Tisdale picked it up and thumbed through it. Some of the entries were touching. On February 4, Nanna wrote: “Bob’s birthday. 65 years ago was raining and cold. Dr. stayed all night.”

  On March 18, Tisdale noted, she’d planted lettuce and onions. On the twenty-seventh, she’d worked in the garden and mailed Jim’s birthday card. On the following day, the first asparagus appeared in her garden.

  Tisdale flipped over and read all of May’s entries:

  5. Went to church.

  6. Worked in garden, planted squash, painters still here.

  7. Circle meeting, chicken pie bake, septic drain fixed, painters still here.

  8. Painters finished.

  9. Beauty parlor. Dr. Sutton. Went to Bob’s for supper.

  10. Friday Charlie and Bobby worked all day.

  11. Bobby worked till lunch, left 2:07, went to Washington.

  12. Frances came, took me out to dinner. Had a nice day.

  13. Floor finishers here. Get wedding gift. Cloudy.

  14. Went to get monitor fitted. Floor finishers done. I can’t do much. Dust everywhere.

  15. Got monitor off. Floors beautiful.

  16. Finish men working. Washed. Cut broccoli.

  There were no further entries.

  But on the opposite page was a quote from Emily Dickinson: “A little madness in the spring is wholesome even for the king.”

  Tisdale was also a gardener—"a two-bit farmer,” he liked to call himself—and after he put down Nanna’s calendar, he went outside and walked alone in her garden, trying to cleanse from his mind the images of agonized death he’d seen inside. The garden was coming alive with morning, the mist rising, the squash Nanna had planted just days earlier already peeking from the damp and fertile soil. The broccoli was beginning to produce, the broad, blue-green heads glistening with dew. Such a fruitful and peaceful place, Tisdale thought. How could somebody who nurtured something so beautiful and life-giving be cut down so cruelly?

  “That affected me,” he said later.

  Not far away, at the Holiday Inn on Cherry Street, Nancy Dunn called her cousin Rob in Greensboro. She wanted to know how he was doing and whether the police had told him anything more than she and her family knew. She also wanted to know what he’d told the police, or might be going to tell them about his sister’s behavior.

  “He was scared,” she recalled later. “I said, ‘Rob, I’m going to tell them everything I know.’ He said, ‘I guess I will, too.’”

  35

  Susie’s friend Annette Hunt, Bob and Florence’s neighbor, was unaware of the turmoil that was going on next door until another neighbor called to tell her about the murders on Monday morning.

  “I was just reeling,” she recalled later. “I could not believe it. I wanted to get to Susie. I kept thinking, ‘I’ve got to get to Susie, I’ve got to get to Susie.’”

  She ran across the street to the Newsom house, only to find that Susie wasn’t there. Rob was expecting her, he said. He’d called and asked her to come over. Annette said that she’d drive to Susie’s apartment and get her. A friend, Shirley Darden, went with her.

  They found Susie sitting alone at the kitchen table, dressed and ready to go. Annette hugged her.

  “I just can’t believe it, you know?” Susie said.

  Susie fixed tea. Fritz was asleep, she said, and she didn’t want to awaken him. She’d sent the boys to school without telling them what had happened.

  “I think you’ve done the best thing,” Annette said.

  But Susie was worried about the boys, concerned that somebody might try to snatch them or harm them, and Annette made her call the school and leave word that nobody was to pick them up but herself.

  Afterward, Annette drove Susie to her house. Susie immediately got on the phone, calling people. She called the university to report that she would not be at class and to reschedule a test. She called Dr. Courts, her psychiatrist, to cancel an appointment that day. At one point she broke into tears on the phone.

  Annette made iced tea, and Susie took three huge orange pills from her purse and began to swallow them.

  “What on earth are those?” Annette asked.

  “B vitamins,” Susie said. “They’re stress tablets.”

  Later, she took more pills. “She was just chugging handsful of things,” Annette recalled.

  Annette accompanied Susie to her parents’ house across the street, where family and friends were coming and going and the phone was constantly busy.

  “Doesn’t somebody need to call Tom?” somebody asked at one point.

  “The son of a bitch can learn it from his lawyers,” Susie said.

  That was precisely how Tom was learning it. He called Bill Horsley’s office in Reidsville that morning to make sure that the hearing was still scheduled for Thursday. He had to get airline tickets and he’d waited until the last minute in case the hearing was canceled. He expected some such trick by Susie’s lawyer.

  The first news reports of the murders in Winston-Salem had been on radio by then, but they were only sketchy,
and word had begun to circulate by phone. It had reached Horsley’s office only a short time before Tom’s call. Horsley’s secretary told Tom that there had been some trouble at the Newsom house in Winston-Salem. Somebody had been killed. She didn’t know details.

  Tom hung up and called Rob.

  “It’s Tom Lynch,” Rob was told when he was summoned to the phone at his tense and crowded house.

  “Rob, don’t talk to him,” Susie said, but he ignored her.

  “Susie and Fritz have done this,” Tom told himself after talking to Rob. “This is too big a coincidence.”

  He picked up the phone again and dialed the number of Kentucky State Police Post Five in La Grange.

  Detective Sherman Childers, who long had been frustrated about the murders of Delores and Janie Lynch, took the call from Tom and listened with building excitement. He’d see what he could find out from North Carolina, he told Tom, and call him back.

  Just a couple of weeks before, Childers’s friend and partner, Lieutenant Dan Davidson, who was in charge of the Lynch case, had taken all the records home to pore over them at night. Davidson was almost obsessed with his inability to solve the Lynch murders, and he and Childers talked about it constantly. Davidson was away at an FBI Academy retraining conference, and Childers couldn’t wait to tell him about the call from Tom.

  “It sounds odd,” Childers said when he finally got through to Davidson.

  “Yeah, it damn sure does,” Davidson said. “If it’s a coincidence, it’s a funny one. Well, let’s just see what it is. I don’t want to get my hopes up again and get shot down.”

  “We were optimistic,” he explained later, “but we’d been hurt bad. We were not going to let ourselves get in that predicament again.”

  Childers called the Forsyth County Sheriff’’s Department to say that he had a case that might tie into the Newsom murders and to find out who was in charge of the Newsom case. He called Tom back with the name and number of Allen Gentry. Tom called, but Gentry was unavailable, and he left his number.