Although the house had changed little since Paw-Paw first remodeled it, things around it had changed greatly. The city had surrounded it. New houses lined Valley Road, and new subdivisions jutted from it. Two acres had been chopped off the back of the Newsom land to make Reynolda Road into an expressway, where traffic zipped by day and night. Still, the house remained a serene oasis, guarded by huge oaks.
Bob wanted to make many changes. For one thing, he thought the house should have a circular drive in front, and Nanna encouraged him to rip out the huge boxwoods that she and Paw-Paw had planted and install one. When a friend asked how she could stand to see the boxwoods go, Nanna smiled and said, “I’ve had my forty years here. Now he can have his time.”
The renovation, which began at Thanksgiving, took far longer than anticipated. The whole back wing was being redone, with a new kitchen and dining room and a new bath upstairs for the refurbished guest room. Paw-Paw’s back porch was being enclosed with floor-to-ceiling sliding windows, creating a spacious new sun room. Nanna had grown a little impatient as the work dragged on. Her house was a mess. Furniture was piled in different rooms. Dust covered everything. Workers tramped in and out—when they showed up.
Nanna had moved her refrigerator into the breezeway connecting the living room to the garage, where she also put a hot plate on which she prepared her meals. It was a troublesome arrangement, and her family worried that she was foregoing cooking because of it and not getting proper nutrition. She suffered from diabetes, and proper diet was essential. As Nanna began to appear more drawn and stooped, her family became convinced that she wasn’t taking care of herself.
That made completing the house imperative, and by May of 1985, much to everybody’s relief, Nanna had been assured that the end was in sight. Painters and flooring people were at work. Soon order would be restored and Bob and Florence would be living with her.
Mother’s Day fell on one of those rare weekends when Bob and Florence weren’t at Nanna’s. Bob had arranged to take Florence to visit friends in Maryland while he attended to business in Washington. He knew that his sister, Frances, and her husband, Bing, would be with his mother that weekend.
Frances and her mother always had been close. From the time she was a child, Frances knew what she wanted to be in life: a newspaper reporter. Her mother encouraged her, even drove her to the
Winston-Salem Journal
when Frances was twelve so that she could submit a story for publication. Frances had gone on to become the first female news reporter for the
Raleigh News & Observer,
covering the legislature and writing the popular “Under the Dome” column on the front page until she gave it up to marry Bing Miller, a former professional baseball player who became a professor at North Carolina State University. She later returned to work in public relations and was now, as she had been for many years, director of the North Carolina Nurses Association. Frances and her mother were much alike in temperament. They always found something to laugh about, if nothing more than going shopping and trying on outrageous hats just to giggle about them.
Nanna didn’t feel well that Sunday. She’d stayed home from church because she knew Frances and Bing were coming. She was fretting about her messy house. Over the years, she and Paw-Paw had filled the house to overflowing with antiques and bric-a-brac, and with the renovation it was even more cluttered than usual.
Frances was helping her mother look for something in one of her big closets when she spotted an awful-looking old dress and pulled it out.
“Why in the world are you keeping this?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Nanna said, shaking her head. “You know, I sure hope, honey, that you don’t have to come in here and take care of all this stuff if something happens to me.”
“I hope I don’t either,” Frances said. “I’ve never seen so much stuff that you don’t need.” And they both began to giggle.
16
Fam Brownlee was playing with his new computer in the book-lined study of his antebellum home, a two-story, white farmhouse with teetering chimneys that looked out of place amid the modern city subdivision that had enveloped it. A writer who had published a history of Winston-Salem, Fam was now in public relations, and the computer was to be a boon to his work. This was the second night he had sat up late in the downstairs front room exploring its many facets.
He was interrupted by his wife, Mary, who had come from upstairs, already dressed for bed. Their two sons were upstairs watching “Christopher Columbus” on TV.
“There’s a car in the driveway,” Mary said.
It was late for visitors, nearly 10:30, and Fam couldn’t imagine who might be calling. The driveway was at the back of the house, and while his wife went to pull on some clothes, Fam walked through the kitchen, put on the outside lights, and stepped onto the porch to see who was there. His back steps were collapsing and he didn’t want anybody to get hurt on them. He saw a man and a woman with fear and panic in their faces.
Both started talking at once, and they were so excited that Fam couldn’t discern what they were saying. He had to calm them before learning that they were the Suttons, friends of the Newsoms. They’d just been to the Newsom house. Something was terribly wrong.
“We looked in through the windows and the TV was on and they were in there,” Homer Sutton said, the words tumbling out. “We tapped on the window and we couldn’t wake them up. We’ve got to call the police and an ambulance.”
He said nothing of murder, and Fam thought maybe there’d been a gas leak or some other accident. He helped the Suttons onto the porch and invited them into the kitchen, where there was a telephone. Mary had returned downstairs and was waiting with a look of anxiety.
“Something has happened at the Newsoms’,” Fam told her. “Call 911 and get somebody out here.”
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.