Tucked into one of those boxes of toy guns was a large cardboard poster handlettered in Fritz’s childish scrawl. “Guns. Guards. NOW!” it said, then added, “Please come to my fort”—a plaintive plea from a lonely and frightened child who found comfort only in guns and bunkers.
In the clutter of Susie’s apartment, her friend Annette Hunt found a copy of a book When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Rabbi Harold Kushner. Susie had written her name inside it and dated it 1982, the year she began to draw close to Fritz. Throughout the book, passages had been underlined.
In the last chapter, Kushner wrote of a survivor of the Holocaust who had suffered unbearable personal tragedy, yet he chose to focus on the future, not the past, refusing to search for villains, deciding that “accusing other people of being responsible for your misery only makes a lonely person lonelier. Life,” he concluded, “has to be lived for something, not just against something.” Susie had underlined the last sentence.
A few pages later, Susie had underlined this: “You’re a good person, and you deserve better. Let me come and sit with you so that you’ll know that you are not alone.”
On the front flyleaf, Susie had written: “What each of us makes of our loneliness is the individual stamp of our destiny.”
“It’s almost like an epitaph,” Annette said.
Ironically, in the weeks following Susie’s death, her namesake aunt Judge Susie Sharp, was reading her own copy of that book, given to her by a friend, although she was finding little comfort in it.
“I don’t know that I’ll ever have any more peace on this earth,” she said.
Frequently, she was awakened in the night to the sound of Susie and her boys crying.
“It’s just unbelievable,” she said. “Those sweet little boys.”
Susie had been her favorite niece, and although in the time of her greatest need Susie had turned to Annie Hill, not her, Judge Sharp still held her close in her heart.
“All my special things were going to Susie,” she said. “I don’t know what to do with them now.”
Two years later, as her eightieth birthday neared, Judge Sharp still hadn’t decided what to do with her special things. Seven months earlier, she had been struck by a car while taking her morning walk and was seriously injured. The effects of her injuries made it impossible for her to take long walks anymore and difficult even to stand at her desk for work.
Two years and many revelations had not diminished her belief that Susie was completely under the control of Fritz.
“I don’t believe Susie killed anybody. I don’t believe Fritz wanted her to. I believe he wanted to do that himself.”
Suddenly, Judge Sharp was struck by a memory of Susie as a little girl. An Easter. Back when Bob and Florence were newly married and living in the little rented house in Winston-Salem, before Bob got his big promotion at R. J. Reynolds, at a time when they had little money. She smiled as she recalled it.
“Florence didn’t have a new hat or a new dress, but she dressed up Susie. She had a new dress and new shoes and little white gloves. ‘Isn’t she cute?’ Florence said. She was, and I loved her dearly, too.”
Clearly, time had not diminished the pain of all that had happened. Asked about the emotional damage she had suffered, Judge Sharp replied, “Oh, dear, I wouldn’t try to describe it. It’s just a constant source of grief. There’s no way anybody could come to terms with it. You keep wondering if there was anything you could have done. But none of us had the full information. There just won’t be an end of it. It’ll haunt us until we die.”
Soon after the Newsom murders, Frances Miller and her daughters, Nancy Dunn and Debbie Parham, filled out victim impact statements for Allen Gentry.
Debbie called her experience “unbearable emotional devastation.” She told of newly imposed fears, suspicions, depression. “My life will never, ever be the same,” she wrote. “It seems as if the hurt will never go away.”
“Unbearable,” wrote Nancy. “Life cannot be normal again. My torment for my mother… cannot be expressed.”
Wrote Frances: “I’ve lost all my family members other than my children, and because of these deaths, our homeplace, the well from which I and my children draw so much love, peace and spiritual support. I’m devastated that my beloved mother, who taught so many others to live and love in peace, died violently and had to witness as she died the brutal murder of her loved ones. Grief and rage will be with me the rest of my life.”
On a rainy Sunday in August, three months after the murders, Frances sat at the scene of the violence in the living room of the big house on Valley Road that had been the family homeplace for nearly half a century. She had come to make the house ready for market.
“This was the most nonviolent place on earth,” she said. “It’s where everybody came for spiritual renewal. It was so peaceful, and the lesson of love was always here. To think that kind of violence had to happen here and destroy that for everybody forever. It’s like a family has been raped.”
The house did not sell for nearly a year and a half, until the end of 1986. On Easter weekend of 1987, Frances, her daughter Nancy and son, David, drove to Winston-Salem to participate in the ritualistic scrubbing of family headstones at God’s Acre, the Moravian cemetery at Old Salem. Nanna had always done that in preparation for the Easter sunrise service, and they were intent on continuing the tradition.
Afterward, they drove by the family homeplace without stopping. The new owners had removed Paw-Paw’s little fence in front and drastically pruned back the huge boxwoods that Paw-Paw and Nanna had allowed to overtake the sidewalk leading to the front door.
“Looks nice, huh, Mom?” said Nancy.
“I guess it’s better to have somebody living there,” Frances responded.
At Forsyth Memorial Gardens, a couple of miles from the house, the family arranged fresh flowers over the graves of Paw-Paw and Nanna, Bob and Florence. As Frances stood silently in a cold drizzle, looking at her mother’s grave, she began crying softly, and her son and daughter moved to comfort her at each side. They stood for several minutes, arms locked, before Nancy and David led their mother back to her car.
“It never gets any easier,” Frances said, dabbing at her tears with a tissue.
Those who knew Rob Newsom marveled at the strength with which he faced the loss of his parents, his grandmother, his sister, and nephews. He credited his ability to deal with his problems to family, friends, neighbors, his church, and fellow members of Alcoholics Anonymous, who rallied to his and his family’s support.
“This has been an uplifting experience in a peculiar sort of way,” he said soon after the deaths. “My wife and I have found that with all the love and care and concern that we have been richly blessed.”
Shortly before his parents’ murders, he had been declared cured of organic brain syndrome, the condition that came in the aftermath of his heavy drinking and caused the short-term memory loss that led to surrendering his law license, and he was strong in his resolve not to risk his gains by turning again to alcohol.
Soon after his sister’s death, Rob gave up his job as an alcoholism counselor for Guilford County to attend to his family’s affairs. He hired a lawyer and a private investigator and took other steps to protect his parents’ and his sister’s estates.
He and his family chose to remain in his parents’ house in Greensboro, and they began remodeling it to suit their own needs. The renovation was done by Christmas 1985, and over the mantel of the living room fireplace was hung the framed antique needlepoint quotation from Joshua that had been on the wall in Nanna’s living room, where his parents and grandmother had died: “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”
In May of 1986, Rob regained his law license, and when the reason for its surrender was announced, he spoke publicly about his alcoholism for the first time. A few weeks later, on the first anniversary of the explosion that took his sister’s life, he spoke, too, about the effects of the previous year’s even
ts on himself and his family.
“I think everybody has one thing or another that’s hardest for them to accept,” he told Tom Sieg of the Winston-Salem Journal. “But everybody’s back to activities and to doing things and working and earning their living and getting on with life.
“I think people are doing pretty well. I don’t see any signs of anyone in the family just falling into deep depression and being unable to function. I think that’s what you have to avoid.”
Despite his upbeat mood, Rob told Jim Schlosser of the Greensboro News & Record that he still had difficult days.
“You think the grief is behind you, then Daddy’s roses bloom at the house and it reminds you. Or something exciting will happen and I’ll say to myself, ‘I can’t wait to tell Dad,’ and you realize you can’t.”
Rob opened a law office in a shopping mall not far from his home and returned to practice, but he closed the office in the summer of 1987, when he was appointed an assistant public defender. As he was about to be sworn in, he said later, a wish came to mind: that his mother and father could see the ceremony.
“My parents had awaited that day when I would be well enough to go back to practicing law and do something that I would enjoy doing,” he said.
The violence and destruction wrought by his cousin Fritz still haunted him, still produced occasional fits of depression and wakeful nights.
“I have had a recurring nightmare ever since this happened,” he said. “I dream that I’m running down a road, just an asphalt road, and that humongous Blazer of his is coming up behind me, and I’m realizing I’m not going to make it. I’m running toward something, someplace where I have a gun or something, and I’m realizing that I’m not going to make it.”
His cousin’s actions also gave him a different perspective on crime and the role of police in preventing and dealing with it.
“I have really come to believe that this whole establishment here is a joke,” he said, as he sat in his small office in the county court building of Greensboro’s governmental center. He motioned toward the nearby police department. “This whole fiction that the people over there in the lower floors of the municipal building protect us is a sick joke. They don’t do doodly squat. They can’t.
“Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence just was not designed to handle massive violations of criminal law. It was not designed to handle sociopaths with automatic weapons. The police cannot and do not protect us. They avenge us sometimes, but they don’t prevent anything.
“That may be why the cops are still agitated over this case, one reason Dr. Lynch is so agitated, is that it is an incidence of utter police failure. I’m not blaming the individual officer. In my personal opinion, they all did their duty. But the job description is all wrong if what you want to do is prevent something like this. They can’t.”
In the wake of his parents’ murders, Rob sought permission to view the police photographs of their bodies. “I don’t know why I did it,” he said. “I just had to.” Those images were indelibly seared in his brain, and along with his cousin’s actions and his new perspective on the police, served to create a permanent sense of fear and distrust.
“My doors still stay double-bolted,” he said. “I’m always going to have a barking dog and there’s always going to be buckshot for my shotgun. I do not intend for anybody to find me lying on the floor the way my daddy was. Or for my children to see my wife looking the way my mother looked. Not ever.”
By the fall of 1987, Rob had come to have a different perspective on his sister’s role in those brutal deaths. He still was convinced, he said, that she wasn’t present at any of the murders and that she hadn’t conspired with Fritz to commit them. “I’m also convinced she could have suspected he had done it and silently approved,” he said. “I think what it comes down to is she didn’t want to know the truth and she never would have confronted him about it. I think she had to have noticed that people who were causing her problems were dying. It’s conceivable to me that she could’ve announced to Fritz that Mother and Daddy were helping Tom with the suspicion that Daddy was going to end up dead before he got to court. I think at most my sister suspected and just didn’t do anything because it seemed to her that problems were being solved.”
Several months after his sons’ deaths, Tom Lynch appeared before a committee of the New Mexico legislature to testify on behalf of new child custody laws that would give equal consideration to both parents. Although he was asked to become active in fathers’ rights and antigun groups, he declined; he was no activist and knew that he never could be. He and Kathy tried to resume normal activities. He continued his dental practice. Kathy enrolled again at the University of New Mexico to complete a degree in speech pathology.
They made a concerted effort to keep busy, especially on weekends. They spent many weekends skiing in the nearby mountains, others prowling the desert in the beat-up, four-wheel-drive pickup truck that Tom bought. Realizing that they needed things to look forward to, they planned trips. They flew to Hawaii. They spent two weeks learning to sail in the Virgin Islands. But memories always tagged along.
“We always say, ‘The boys would have so much fun here,’” Kathy said.
Nothing seemed to offer more than momentary relief for their sorrow, pain, anger—and guilt.
“Nobody will ever know what we’ve been through,” Kathy said nearly two years after the boys’ deaths. “Just the feeling of helplessness, the sense of loss and emptiness.
“Why? Why? Why? Why us? Why the boys? Why not save the boys? At least one of the boys. My attitude about religion has totally just gone down the toilet. Life isn’t fair, but it ought to be just a little bit fair. If we had just saved the boys…
“People tell us, ‘What you’re feeling is normal.’ That’s reassuring, but it doesn’t make you feel any better. There are some days when you just don’t even want to get out of bed. It’s hard sometimes just to do everyday tasks. I’ll get days when all I want to do is cry. Nights, I’ll sit up with Tom sometimes until two or three in the morning and he just sits and cries. He gets so angry, and he’ll throw things, and then he’ll just sit and cry.
“Everybody says, ‘time, time, time.’ But neither of us can go through a day without thinking about it, and I don’t think we ever will. There’ll be some little thing that will trigger it.”
Seeking relief from daily reminders, Tom and Kathy took down the boys’ bunk beds and put their bikes and other belongings in storage with Delores’s and Janie’s things. But other things still caused the pain to surge to the surface. Something as simple as the song “Hotel California” coming from a radio would do it. Jim had loved that song and had gone around singing it throughout one of his summer visits.
Tom struggled to understand why his life had come to such a point.
“It’s hard to explain,” he said. “I’m not a goody-two-shoes guy. You know, I’ve done things in my life that aren’t nice, but I have always lived pretty much by what’s right and wrong and by the laws and everything has always worked out for me. I wanted to play basketball in college and it worked out. I had a couple of bad breaks and I didn’t play much but that was all right; I got to play. I wanted to be a doctor and I got to be a doctor. I wanted to do certain things and I always worked hard for them and when I was patient and worked at it, it always happened. We were being patient and working at this and doing exactly the right thing, and we were within just minutes of having everything come out. To have it end like that was… I don’t know. You know, it’s hard to describe. You have got to this point in your life, and you had a couple of sons, and you’re going to pass a little heritage on and teach them things to make things easier for them, and now I had a bunch of money and I could leave them with some money, too, and it’s just… I mean, it’s… so sad.”
In his grief and anger, Tom wanted to strike back, to do something, as he put it, “for the boys,” and he retained a North Carolina lawyer to investigate suing the SBI for not taking proper precautions to pr
otect John and Jim in the attempt to arrest Fritz. When the lawyer had not made satisfactory progress after nearly a year, Tom retained a Greensboro law firm. In April of 1987, that firm filed the first actions on Tom’s behalf: suits against the estates of Susie, Bob and Florence, and Nanna. The suits maintained that Susie was involved in the murders of her parents and her grandmother and either killed or was “culpably negligent in the deaths of her children.” Susie’s inheritance from her parents and grandmother, estimated at perhaps $500,000, rightfully belonged to the boys’ estates, the suits claimed.
Rob Newsom expressed surprise about the lawsuits. Despite their differing views about Susie’s involvement in the murders, Tom and Rob had agreed to respect one another’s feelings and had maintained cordial relations. On Thanksgiving of 1985, Tom and Kathy had flown to North Carolina and spent a weekend at the beach with Rob and Alice and their children. Rob had visited Tom and Kathy in Albuquerque.
“There is no vendetta against the Newsoms,” Tom told a reporter when the suits were filed. “It’s just a matter of going after some information to see if anything was coming to the boys.”
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