Nanna, who had grown a bit plump in her later years, had been shot three times. One bullet, apparently a wild shot, had grazed the left side of her head. A second hit her in the lower right side. The fatal shot struck her right temple, passed through her head, and lodged in her shoulder. She lay on the sofa with hands clasped beneath her chin, and many police officers who saw her were convinced that she had been praying when she was shot, although later evidence showed that she had been placed in that position after being shot. On the wall above her head, near two bullet holes in the plaster, was a framed antique needlepoint quote from Joshua: “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”
A floral-patterned blue-and-green easy chair near the archway had been pierced by a bullet that also went through one corner of an ornate étagère and ended up in the wall. Another bullet passed through the archway, struck a piece of molding on the far side of the staircase, and plopped back onto the steps. From the angle of the shots, most appeared to have been fired from near the breezeway door.
In a clear glass dish on the étagère, easily visible, was a small wad of currency—four one-hundred-dollar bills, a fifty, four twenties, a ten, and a one. Propped next to the dish was a North Carolina Department of Revenue income tax refund check for $661.26. In Nanna’s bedroom, on the other side of the hallway, drawers had been pulled from a chest and stacked on the floor. A heavy gold-and-pearl bracelet worth thousands of dollars lay on the floor near the foot of the bed. More drawers were stacked in an upstairs bedroom that Nanna once had used, a bedroom decorated with photographs of important events in the lives of her two children and five grandchildren. In another upstairs bedroom, the one Bob and Florence used every weekend, Bob’s briefcase lay open on the floor by an antique washstand. On the stand was a china urn hand-painted with roses. Paw-Paw had brought the urn home one day wrapped as a gift for Nanna.
“What in the world am I supposed to do with that?” she had asked on opening it.
“Well, I don’t know,” he’d replied with a grin, “but I’ll bet you’ve got the prettiest chamber pot of any woman in Forsyth County.”
The briefcase was empty except for a calculator and some pens.
His walk-through of the house convinced Allen Gentry that this was not going to be an easily solved case. For one thing, the trail was cold. The murders obviously had occurred hours earlier, maybe a day or more. And what was the motive? Clearly, this was no typical robbery. What robber would leave behind plainly visible cash and expensive jewelry? The murders looked like executions to him.
Several things about the scene were puzzling to Gentry. Why was the storm door broken, while a key was left in the back door lock? Had one of the victims been surprised by the murderer while entering the house? Why was another set of keys found between two of the cars? Was that footprint in the sand by one of the new windows at the back of the house significant? Why had Florence Newsom been so savaged, a blatant example of overkill? Why had the fire been set in the hallway? Was it an attempt to burn down the house and cover the murders? If so, why hadn’t it been fueled by the paint thinner and other volatile substances so handily available in the part of the house that was being remodeled? Had the purpose of the fire been only to burn a specific item or items? Had the killer or killers come only to find and destroy such items? Had they been found in Bob Newsom’s briefcase? Why was the briefcase empty? Gentry realized that he would have to find the answers to many hard questions before he could put this case behind him.
Shortly after Gentry and Hiatt left the house, their new captain, Ron Barker, arrived with his son Mike, a Winston-Salem police detective who had come along out of curiosity. Gentry and Hiatt filled in Barker, and the three decided to call for the State Bureau of Investigation mobile crime lab. They wanted investigative help from the SBI, too. Little could be done until the lab crew had completed its work and morning had arrived. Men couldn’t be sent to ask questions of neighbors and family acquaintances after midnight, but Gentry did want to talk with those who found the bodies and any other witnesses who might still be about.
“The son and grandson just arrived,” one officer told him, motioning down the driveway.
Rob Newsom had arrived from Greensboro, driven by his friend Tom Maher, while Gentry was inside the house. Gentry walked to the foot of the driveway and was told that Rob had been taken to Fam Brownlee’s house down the street, so Gentry went to his car, got one of the legal pads on which he preferred to take his meticulous notes, and walked the short distance to the old farmhouse.
Rob was in the living room with his father-in-law, Fred Hill, and his parents’ pastor, Dudley Colhoun, who had come to comfort him. He looked to be in shock. At times he sat with his head in his hands. “I can’t believe this has happened,” he kept repeating.
Gentry introduced himself and offered condolences. He had a few questions. Basic things. Ages, address, occupations of Rob’s parents. When was the last time he’d seen them? How had he learned of their deaths?
Rob told about his parents spending weekends with his grandmother, their plans to move in, the remodeling that had been under way. Briefly, he went through the events of the day, his futile attempts to reach his parents, the call to the Suttons.
Did Rob know why anybody might want to kill his parents and grandmother?
He didn’t.
Had there been any problems, any unusual events in the family?
“Well, last summer,” Rob answered, “my sister’s former mother-in-law and sister-in-law were murdered in Kentucky.”
Part Three
Family Unions
18
Music built the framework for Robert Newsom, Jr.’s life. His mother, Hattie, insisted on musical training for her two children. Frances, his younger sister, took quickly to the piano, but Bobby, as Robert was called in the family, screeched badly on violin. Not until his mother sent him for voice lessons did he find the true joys of music and begin to build his dreams around them.
By the time he was in high school, his heart was set on becoming a professional singer. The passing of his adolescence brought him a rich baritone voice and he had developed it well. Not only was he a soloist with his church choir as well as with the glee club and chorus at Hanes High School, he also was frequently invited to sing, accompanied on piano by his sister, at other churches and clubs. His high school music teacher, Flavella Stockton, encouraged him greatly, and because of her he began planning a career in music.
This concerned his practical, traditionalist father, the tobacco auctioneer. He had taught his son manly skills: how to fix machinery, how to build things with his hands, how to make plants grow from the earth. Was music an apt trade for a man? Could a decent living be made at it? Would it satisfy his bright mind?
His mother, who had instilled in him his love of music and literature, was secretly pleased with his choice. Her concerns about her son were others. All of his life, she had worried about his health. He was a puny child, a finicky eater. “He likes beans and apples and not much of anything else,” she said in exasperation. She took him to doctors. She wheedled him to try different foods.
“Mother, if you’ll hold my nose, I’ll try to swallow it,” he’d say.
Sometimes he pretended to eat his vegetables, but they would be found under the edge of his plate when the table was cleared.
He grew tall and precariously thin, almost pretty, with his dark good looks and bright brown eyes. Even one of his closest friends, Jesse Mock, thought him a bit sissy, but Bob was competitive and didn’t allow his size to hinder him from doing what he wanted to do. He was a Boy Scout. He played tennis. He even went out for his high school football team and became a gangly linebacker, although he spent most of his time on the bench. At almost everything but football, he excelled. He was an honor student, as gifted in math and science as in music and literature. Quiet by nature, he commanded respect and was extremely popular, elected class president every year and student council president in his final year of high school. As a senior, his classmates chose him best-looking, most intellectual, and best all-around.
After his graduation in 1938, Bob attended special summer classes in voice at Salem College, an all-female school, before enrolling in the music program at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. By the end of the first semester, his dreams were wrestling with his father’s practicality. Some of his friends thought he had been encouraged in music beyond his ability.
“You can sing pretty well,” his longtime friend Charlie Clarke told him bluntly, “but you’ll never be able to make a living at it.”
Charlie was an engineering student at North Carolina State College in Raleigh, and he encouraged Bob to consider the industrial engineering program there. Industrial engineering is businessman’s engineering, Charlie explained. Industrial engineers work closely with people. They do time and motion studies, long-range planning. They determine what has to be done to produce certain amounts of products in certain amounts of time. They make things work.
“You’ve got a good analytical mind and you handle people really well,” Charlie said. “You’d be great at it.”
Besides, he pointed out, if Bob came to State, they could room together. They’d have a fine time.
Robert Newsom, Sr., was more than happy to write the check for tuition when his son announced his intentions to study industrial engineering.
As usual, Bob excelled in his studies, but in his final years in college he often was tempted away. Something even more significant than music and achievement had befallen him. He was in love for the first time. He’d had a girlfriend in high school, but that wasn’t serious. Mostly, they’d gone together to group affairs or on double dates with his sister. This was serious. She was from the eastern part of the state, a student at nearby Peace College. Bob’s friend Charlie didn’t like the girl, thought she treated Bob badly, but Bob could see no faults. As he neared graduation, he told his family of his engagement.
Graduation in the spring of 1943 was a time of bittersweet excitement. Most of Bob’s classmates were going off to fight World War II. He didn’t have to. He was so underweight that the draft board had declared him 4-F. A patriot like his father, he yearned to serve his country. Turned down by the military, he joined the Merchant Marines and shipped out as an assistant engineer on a freighter of the American-South African Line. Over the next three years, he made trips to Italy, Africa, even across the North Sea to Russia. Numerous times his ship dodged bombs and torpedoes. Years later, he would tell his only son that he didn’t mind being shot at for his country, but he was glad he never had to shoot at anyone.
Bob returned from one of his trips to learn that his fiancée had found someone else. Although his family knew that he was deeply hurt, he never talked about it and seemed to shrug it off.
Late in 1944, music again stepped in, indirectly, to fashion his life. He came home on leave and went to Hanes High School to visit his music teacher, Flavella Stockton. She had somebody she wanted him to meet, a new teacher at the school, about his age, very pretty, with long wavy hair, dark eyes, and a bright smile.
“Bob,” she said, “this is Florence Sharp.”
Some people who knew the Sharp family well called Florence the dumb one. Not that she wasn’t plenty smart, for she was. But in a family of brilliant achievers, somebody had to be at the bottom of the list academically, and that was Florence. It never seemed to bother her, but some of her brothers and sisters bristled to her defense if anybody even hinted that she might be less than brilliant.
Florence, they pointed out, had had some bad breaks. For one thing, she was “double spoiled.” As the baby girl in the family, she was doted over as an infant. Her close brush with death at age four, when her younger twin brothers died of an illness all three contracted from tainted milk and she was left having to relearn to walk and talk, had caused her to be spoiled a second time. “She got over it mostly,” her sister Louise later recalled. “Let’s say she improved. There was a time when she was a mess.”
Florence also got a bad start in school. The method of teaching reading changed the year that she began, and many children had difficulty with the new method. Florence fell behind, and her mother began to worry. By the time she was in the fourth grade, Florence was doing so poorly that her mother decided to hold her back a year and let her catch up. That seemed to work, but the simple truth was that Florence never shared her brothers’ and sisters’ interest in academic achievement. She’d rather have fun than study. She had an outgoing nature, a keen sense of humor, a zest for life and adventure. She made friends easily and was by far the most popular of all the Sharp children. Laughter and joy were always around her.
As a teenager, Florence developed a talent for cosmetology. She fixed the hair of her mother, sisters, and friends, but she never seriously considered making a career of it, for she knew that higher callings were expected of Sharps. She had trouble choosing her course after high school, but from the limited choices available to women at the time, she finally picked teaching and followed her sisters to Woman’s College in Greensboro. She chose business administration as her major and made spending money giving home permanents to her dormmates. No less fun-loving than ever, Florence did buckle down at college, not only achieving respectable grades but taking part in many outside activities. She belonged to the Adelphian Literary Society, Gamma Alpha Sorority, the Education Club, and the Young Democrats. She was an ardent and outspoken supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt. One of her classmates at WC was Frances Newsom, who, by skipping more than a year of grade school, had finished high school at the same time as her older brother, but Florence didn’t get to know Frances well and didn’t even realize that she had a brother.