The action requested that all matters, including property and child custody, be settled in New Mexico. It further asked that the separation agreement, the terms of which both had agreed would be part of any divorce settlement, not be included.
The separation agreement granted custody of the boys to Susie, and later Tom said that he really didn’t want custody at that time but agreed to let Rueckhaus include it in the suit as a bargaining tool.
Regardless of its purpose, it struck fear in Susie. She became convinced that Tom wanted to take the boys from her.
Sands immediately filed in Rockingham County to have custody and visitation settled in North Carolina, but Susie would still have to fight the New Mexico action, and he suggested that she hire a lawyer there. He recommended Barbara Shapiro, who worked in one of Albuquerque’s largest law firms.
Shapiro, a native of New York City, had a Ph.D. in English from Harvard. She went to law school after moving to Albuquerque for her husband’s allergies. She specialized in domestic relations, an area shunned by most lawyers. “I like it,” she explained. “I like the counseling side of it. I like people and I’m a problem solver.”
After studying the case, she told Susie that the law was on her side and she needn’t worry about losing custody.
Two weeks after Susie got notice of the divorce action, she was served with more papers asking that she be held in contempt for refusing to allow John and Jim to visit their father. In an affidavit, Tom said that he couldn’t afford to visit in North Carolina. “My children have expressed to me and to my mother their dismay in being unable to see me,” he said.
On September 22, Tom called Ron Davis, the psychologist in Winston-Salem. Davis later remembered the call as “tense.” An argument ensued about the children being too young to travel alone if they had to change planes.
“Dr. Lynch refused to listen to me and stated that my attitude was unreasonable,” he stated in an affidavit.
Later, Davis remembered Tom saying, “They’re children and children do what they’re told to do.”
“Children are people, too,” Davis responded, “and you work with children instead of just telling them what to do.”
Tom, in another affidavit, claimed that “Dr. Davis first insisted that visitation only be in North Carolina.” He said Davis told him that children shouldn’t “fly anywhere unless accompanied by an adult throughout.” He said Davis also told him that Susie claimed he was a neglectful father who had no desire to see his children.
“I explained to him my financial circumstance and advised him that I was simply being hassled,” Tom said.
The Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction Act sets out rules by which courts decide custody issues when parents live in different states. North Carolina was a partner to the act, and in July of 1981, New Mexico accepted it, too. The act stated a preference for custody to be decided in the home state of the children, that being where they had resided for the previous six months.
In October, Barbara Shapiro filed a motion asking that matters of custody and visitation be dismissed from the divorce petition because the children lived in North Carolina and had done so for two years; therefore, the New Mexico court lacked jurisdiction.
In an accompanying affidavit, Susie reiterated her concerns about travel arrangements for the children. “I have always encouraged visitation,” she said. “I am willing to have the children go to Albuquerque provided some arrangement is made to protect their safety if they have to change planes.” She went on to say she couldn’t afford to litigate the issue in New Mexico and thought the case belonged in North Carolina.
“Apparently neither of the parties can afford to litigate anywhere,” Tom responded. “If I could just get reasonable visitation with my children and make some financial settlement, the case would be over.”
The case was far from over. On November 17, it came before District Judge Gene Franchini in Albuquerque. Rueckhaus argued that the Uniform Child Custody Act did not apply because Tom had filed for divorce before it was enacted in New Mexico. Shapiro maintained that it did apply because notice was not served until after the act was in force.
Judge Franchini ruled that custody, visitation, and property settlement would be decided in New Mexico.
Susie was distraught, but a few days after the decision Judge Franchini left the bench, and Shapiro quickly filed for a rehearing. The motion came back to court in December before Judge Joseph Alarid, who turned the tables on Tom.
He agreed that the New Mexico court had jurisdiction, but deferred “to the Courts of North Carolina as a more convenient forum.”
After months of litigation, incurring big legal fees that neither Tom nor Susie could afford (Tom’s parents were helping with his; Nanna was helping with Susie’s), the only thing that had been accomplished was a hardening of position and a deepening bitterness on both sides. Visitation and property settlement seemed as far from being resolved as ever.
Convinced that Tom’s true intent was to take the boys, Susie was certain that if they ever went to New Mexico she never would get them back.
“Susie, if she had a fault,” Sandy Sands said later, “it was her overprotectiveness toward those children. That seemed to be her sole purpose in life, protecting her children.”
Tom, however, was not about to let another Christmas pass without seeing his sons. He demanded that they be allowed to come to New Mexico over the holidays, and once again the lawyers set to dickering.
The arrangement they finally worked out offended and angered Tom, yet he had no choice but to accept it if he wanted to see the boys. He would have seven days with them, but he would have to sign a $10,000 bond that would be forfeited if he took the boys out of New Mexico, did not return them on time, or if there arose “any dispute about the visitation that results in having to take court action or other action that incurs attorneys’ fees or other expenses.” Such a bond was allowed under the child custody act.
Tom would have to fly to Greensboro to get the boys and spend two days getting reacquainted with them at the Newsom house before taking them to Albuquerque. On the return trip, the children would be put on the plane in Albuquerque and go to Atlanta, where their mother would meet them. Tom would pay Susie’s expenses back and forth to Atlanta.
Tom put up the deed to his house as security for the bond, and while Christmas drew closer and legal documents shuffled back and forth, he remained uncertain whether the process would be completed in time for the visit.
Only hours before he was scheduled to leave, approval finally came, and he flew to Greensboro to see his children for the first time in more than two years.
24
Susie’s stress continued its effect on her stability.
In January of 1982, she dropped her anthropology studies at Wake Forest, calling her professors “idiots.”
She then enrolled at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, once Woman’s College, where her mother and her aunts Susie, Louise, and Frances all had gone. This time she chose business—in effect, starting over. Her mother, who was trying not to interfere in Susie’s life, shook her head and told a neighbor, “I think we’ve got a professional student on our hands.”
The problems between Susie and Tom once again fell into stalemate. Tom still called regularly to talk to John and Jim, but he no longer made any attempts to reason with Susie. As another summer loomed with no visitation scheduled and no progress being made with Susie’s lawyer in Reidsville, Tom knew that he would have to deal with the problem in North Carolina. He hired a lawyer in Reidsville, Bill Horsley, who was thirty-four. An Alabama native, Horsley had been an aspiring writer until rejection slips drove him to law school at Wake Forest in the fall of 1969, while Tom was beginning his senior year. He didn’t know Tom at college but after talking with him, he got down a college yearbook and remembered that he had been on the basketball team. Drawn to Reidsville because he wanted to rear his children in a small town, Horsley was an accomplished trial lawyer well on his way to building a reputation for winning big claims in personal injury cases. He didn’t mind domestic cases, had a record of success with them. That this case involved a member of the locally prominent Sharp family bothered him not at all.
On July 6, Horsley filed a motion in the General Court of Justice of Rockingham County asking that a schedule of visitation be decreed. A hearing was set for July 23. Susie sought to postpone it, knowing that a delay would leave little time for a visit that summer. Her motion was denied.
Several weeks prior to the hearing, Susie again took the boys to see Dr. Ron Davis, who had just left Wake Forest to enter private practice. Susie planned to have Dr. Davis testify at the hearing, and he wanted to know how the boys felt about visiting their father. He taped the session.
Both boys said that they liked their father, but both liked Kathy, their father’s former dental assistant, who now lived with him, even more.
“I like Kathy more because we’re not very used to Dad yet,” Jim said.
“John, you like your daddy?” Dr. Davis asked.
“Yeah,” he said
“You like Kathy better,” Jim put in.
“But I like Daddy, too.”
Both agreed that they liked to visit their father and wanted to go back.
“Well, see, we want to go to Daddy’s,” John said at one point, “but we just don’t want to get in trouble or anything.”
“If you had your choice of going to see your daddy or going to a birthday party, which would you choose?” Dr. Davis asked.
“The birthday party,” said Jim.
“Daddy,” said John.
Jim again put in for the birthday party. “That’s an easy choice,” he said.
“Well, it’s not for me,” said John.
When Dr. Davis asked whether they’d rather visit their daddy’s mother and father or stay in Greensboro, the answer was quick and unanimous: “Stay in Greensboro.” Given the choice between visiting their daddy’s mother and father and their daddy, they chose their daddy.
“If I ever went to Albuquerque if Kathy wasn’t there, I’d be happy with Daddy there,” Jim said.
“If Kathy wasn’t there and Daddy was the only one, we’d have to stay by ourselves when he went to work,” John said. “We could take care of ourselves. Yes, we sure could.”
Asked what they liked best about visiting their father, both named playing his Atari game.
“What if he didn’t have an Atari, would you still go visit him?” Dr. Davis asked.
“Yes,” said John.
“I wouldn’t,” said Jim.
Jim was concerned about the dogs at his daddy’s house. “See, there are two dogs who are bigger than Muffy, which is my dog friend. He’s nice to me, isn’t he, John?”
“It’s a
she,
Jimbo,” John said, laughing. “Only one is a he. That’s Ashley. Two of ’em like us and one of ’em doesn’t.”
“Who doesn’t like us?” Jim asked.
“Ashley.”
John had the microphone and pretended to be a TV star.
“Is there anything else from the audience?” he asked as Jim giggled.
Dr. Davis had his answer. The boys liked visiting their father and wanted to go back—John more so than Jim, but both were essentially in agreement—and he could see no reason why they shouldn’t.
Tom flew to Greensboro for the hearing and checked into a motel at the airport with his mother, who drove from Louisville.
The hearing was held at Wentworth, seven miles west of Reidsville, in the old red-brick Rockingham County courthouse, where a portrait of Susie’s grandfather, James Sharp, hung in a spot of honor, and where, less than three years hence, Susie would bring the boys to unveil a portrait of her famous aunt, Susie Sharp.
The presiding judge was Peter McHugh, himself the father of three young sons. A native of Buffalo, New York, McHugh had married into a prominent Reidsville family. He had been in private law practice in Reidsville for three and a half years before being appointed a district court judge, a position he’d held for nearly five years. Judge McHugh had been introduced to Reidsville’s most famous lawyer, Susie Sharp, at a bar meeting, but he’d never held a conversation with her and was unacquainted with any other members of the Sharp family. For a while he had worked in the same law firm as Tom’s lawyer, Bill Horsley, and both lawyers in the case, as well as the judge, were friends. Horsley and McHugh were members of the same church, St. Thomas Episcopal.
The afternoon before, while Tom was on his way from Albuquerque, Horsley had been served with a last-minute motion requesting that the matter of child support also be considered at this hearing. The opening arguments were over that motion, which was rejected by the judge because it had been filed with insufficient notice.
The hearing got under way with Tom being questioned by his lawyer. Horsley established how little he’d seen the boys in the three years since his separation, then brought up a touchy subject he knew the opposition would pursue, asking if Tom lived alone in the house he and Susie once shared.
“No, I share the home with my girlfriend.”
Horsley went on to show that Susie was aware of this situation before sending the boys for the Christmas visit and that the boys got along well with Kathy.