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.
“We’ll give them a few days to get their case together,” Davidson told Childers, “and then you and Lennie can go down there and see what you can find out.”
After visiting with the Newsoms on Saturday night, Charlie and Juanita Clarke drove to Raleigh on Sunday morning to see their daughter Marsha. They left for home after breakfast on Monday, and after stopping several times along the way for shopping, arrived at about 3 P.M. The afternoon was warm and pleasant, and Charlie took his small boat onto the lake behind his house for some fishing.
A little after 5 P.M., the phone rang at the Clarke house. Juanita answered, and her daughter Marsha asked, “Are you standing?”
“Yes, why?”
“Sit down.”
“Okay, I’m sitting. What’s wrong?”
“The Newsoms have been murdered.”
“Marsha, you have to be kidding. I don’t believe it.”
Juanita went onto the high deck at the back of her house where she kept a cowbell for summoning her husband to supper. She rang it frantically.
Charlie muttered, reeled in his line, and paddled to shore to see what was wrong. The fish had just begun to bite.
After telling her husband about the murders, Juanita called Katy Sutton, the wife of Nanna’s doctor and an old Newsom family friend.
“I’ve just heard what happened,” Juanita said.
Katy told her that she and Homer had discovered the bodies.