Authors: Wensley Clarkson
The first either of them knew what was happening was when Susan heard the garage door opening. The two illicit lovers immediately both got up and rushed to get on their clothes. But Susan did not have time to make the bed, something she always did without fail each and every morning.
Susan and David went straight into the dressing room and he just sat down and watched television. At that moment, Jim came in the house. He claimed he’d forgotten something and that was why he had come home unexpectedly. Minutes later, Jim entered the bedroom and noticed the unmade bed. He wanted to know if Susan was getting lazy or if “something was going on.”
When he looked at Susan, he knew something was wrong. Susan looked embarrassed and told Jim that they should talk about it later, because she was afraid of what he would do to David if she told him. Somehow Jim bit his tongue and said nothing more about the incident but it was clear he had his suspicions.
At this time, David was in virtually daily contact with his stepmother. It has even been claimed that he was in love with Susan, the unattainable lady whom he originally felt had stolen his father. Although David would later deny that a romantic relationship existed between the two, phone records would show that scores of calls were made between David’s home and the house on Summit Drive.
Meanwhile, Susan clearly implied to certain friends and relatives that she was very much in love with her stepson. Her role as Mrs. Robinson seemed pretty real to many of her friends.
Susan claimed David was regularly turning up at the house on Summit Drive when his father was at work and Susan’s two children were at school. On a number of other occasions, she slipped out to the house in the country that he was by then sharing with Suzanne Plunkett. That particular property—on County Road—was just a mile west of State 19 and very easy to access.
On several occasions, Susan employed neighbor Mary Pruitt’s son Michael to babysit for Jacob and Tanelle when Jimmy Grund was out of town. Michael never forgot these particular evenings because David Grund was always at the house on Summit Drive when Michael showed up on the doorstep. After giving Michael a briefing on how to look after the children, Susan and David would leave together. Usually, they openly talked about how they were going night-clubbing in Indianapolis. On at least two occasions, David and Susan did not return to the house until the following day. She would always tell Michael to call his mother Mary if there were any problems with the children. She was definitely not going to be contactable.
Susan’s sister Darlene was not in the slightest bit surprised that she contended that the affair with David was continuing. To Darlene, it was typical of her sister. She had enjoyed flings with lots of other men during her four marriages. She had even tried to get fresh with Darlene’s husband, but that was the way Susan was in her sister’s mind. She wasn’t going to change. She always wanted a new man. A new experience. More often than not, once she had done it with the man she got bored of him and wanted to move on to new pastures. But with David, it seemed much more serious.
* * *
Susan’s stepson and alleged lover was also experiencing the sort of domestic problems with his girlfriend Suzanne Plunkett that can sometimes end in tragedy. The couple had moved in together and were constantly being hounded by Suzanne’s ex-husband, the father of her young child, Ryan.
In their desperation to keep the besotted man away, David and Suzanne purchased a 9 mm. semiautomatic handgun.
Jimmy Grund found out about the gun when legal paperwork for a gun permit arrived at 7 Summit Drive, the address David had been using at the time of his application.
Jim Grund was not at all happy about his son having a gun.
“Guns usually create more problems than they solve, David,” he told his son.
But David was adamant. He was not going to be intimidated any further by Suzanne’s ex-husband.
* * *
Jimmy Grund’s best friend and Shanty Malone’s drinking pal Sgt. Gary Nichols of the Peru Police Department had no doubt Jim’s marriage was crumbling well before the spring and summer of 1992.
Despite being the person responsible for that first blind date which initiated Susan and Jim’s relationship, Gary considered Susan to be a master manipulator and thought she was becoming increasingly an embarrassment to her husband.
Often Jimmy would pour his heart out to Gary as the two men sat around the table at the end of the bar at Shanty Malone’s that was known as “The Office” to all regulars. It was a large round wooden table where only the chosen few would sit and sip their drinks and discuss the meaning of life, or whatever.
Susan’s annoying habit of calling Jim at the bar at around 6:15
P.M.
each evening to find out when he was coming home had escalated into an almost nightly occurrence. In the early years, he had taken off like a bat out of hell to get home immediately, but gradually, he began to stay out later and later at Shanty Malone’s. He would come back from one of Susan’s phone calls to the bar and shout “to hell with it” and immediately order another vodka tonic.
But some nights, Susan would get so angry about Jimmy’s drinking sessions at Shanty Malone’s that she would come storming into the bar, grab hold of Jim’s neck, and virtually drag him out of the place. Susan always called her husband “James” or “Jim,”
never
“Jimmy”—that was far too common.
“Come on, James. You’re coming home,” she would shout at her husband much to the amusement of the assembled regulars.
One time, a drinker turned on her and said, “We know him as Jimmy in here.…”
Susan stared daggers at the man who dared to question her husband’s name, and then stormed out of the bar like a tornado.
But Jimmy was still making a point of trying to get home most lunchtimes, just to see who else Susan had in the house. It was almost as if he knew someone was using his bed to make love to his wife, but he did not know precisely who. When the kids were on vacation from school Jimmy would cook them something tasty for lunch, especially since Susan steadfastly refused to cook. She had made a point of never learning on the basis that it was beneath her to do so. The root of all this was undoubtedly her mother, whom she had watched slave over a hot stove almost constantly throughout her marriage. She always promised herself she would never end up like that and not cooking was one way of ensuring that.
* * *
Susan’s son Jacob had a child’s natural curiosity about life. He was a particularly sensitive boy, but then that was not very surprising considering the different homes and disturbing scenes he had witnessed throughout his short life.
But now things seemed to be much better for the twelve-year-old. He had a kind father—Jim Grund—who actually cared and loved Jacob and his sister Tanelle. They lived in a nice house and Jacob really appreciated all the love that was shown to him by both his mother’s and father’s families. He had mixed emotions about Susan, but then that was to be expected considering the outbursts he had witnessed. Jacob still had a vivid memory of those beatings his mother inflicted on her stepson Tommy all those years ago. No one ever mentioned Tommy now, but Jacob wondered what had happened to him. He had a feeling he might have been taken to the hospital to live, but he did not really know anything more about the boy other than that. Tommy was
never
referred to at home.
One day, Jacob was looking for a pen in his mother’s office in the basement of the house on Summit Drive when he came across a diary. He picked it up and started flicking through it casually. He soon realized from the handwriting that it was his mother’s and she had written some pretty weird things in it. As the weeks of 1992 had progressed, according to the diary, Susan seemed to be getting more and more unhappy. Then on one page, only a week or so before that very day, Susan had written that she didn’t know whether she wanted to leave her husband or not. She also talked about things getting worse and how she wanted to “crawl up in a nutshell.”
The contents of that diary hit young Jacob like a hammer from hell. The very chance that his beloved father and his mother might split up filled him with dread, as it would any young child stumbling upon such a revelation. But what bothered Jacob the most was that he feared it would mean moving away from his new father, the only person in his life who had offered love, care, and attention without wanting anything in return. Jacob had seen how upset kids at school got when their parents split up, but this was even worse because he knew in his heart of hearts that his mother would just replace her latest husband with another man and this time he might not be as kindhearted as Jimmy Grund.
Not long after that, Jacob managed to talk to his mother alone in the house. He had to know the truth about his parents. Susan told Jacob that she and Jimmy Grund were going to see a marriage counselor. But she said it in such a way that Jacob knew their marriage was probably already over. It filled him with dread.
* * *
Susan’s mistreatment of children reared its ugly head again in the early months of 1992 when Jimmy’s sister Jane’s son Brad stayed over one night at the house on Summit Drive. The child told her mother the following day that he had been locked in a darkened room by Susan on his own in the basement of the house. The child—four years old at the time—was so scared of staying in the house with his aunt that Jim Grund had to take the toddler to his office with him the following day until his sister got back from a trip she had taken with her husband.
That incident worried Jimmy Grund a great deal because he had gone to great lengths to give Susan another chance after finding out about the battery of little Tommy in Oklahoma. She had insisted she did not do the things the prosecutors had claimed she did, and that she had never hit a child since.
But the problems with his sister’s child made Jimmy start to wonder. He sincerely feared for the safety of any child who might be in her company when she blew a fuse. And he seriously started to question the mental state of the woman he had married.
Jim Grund should have turned to his family to find out what to do next. But he did not want to trouble his elderly mother or father. He felt that if he told them about Susan’s troubled background it would only make things worse. It was typical of Jim Grund. He was the type of person who genuinely believed he could sort things out with a minimum of fuss.
* * *
Meanwhile, Susan continued to paint a picture for her relatives of her affair with her stepson.
Her mother Nellie had absolutely no doubt they were sleeping together. She believed the relationship was partly built on the fact that David and his father were constantly rowing about his allowance. It had got so bad that every time David wanted money and couldn’t get it from Jimmy Grund, he would go to Susan.
Susan put up with it partly because she was attracted to David and partly because she wanted to keep the peace between David and his father, which was fairly bizarre since she claimed she was having illicit sex with David at the time.
Nellie Sanders was up at the house one time when David and Jimmy Grund clashed about money and she heard Jim shout at his son, “You’ll not get a dime more out of me!”
Adding to the suspicions about Susan and David’s alleged illicit affair was the way they used to treat each other in public. Some of Susan’s relatives witnessed them openly touch each other’s hands.
One time, Susan even told Nellie that David was “a great lover.”
Nellie—naturally very concerned about what her daughter was getting herself into—begged Susan to end the relationship. But she concluded that her daughter was infatuated with her stepson.
* * *
In late May 1992, David and his girlfriend Suzanne (later renamed Denise because her other name reminded the Grunds of Susan) were taken on a special vacation by David’s mother, Jane, who rented a light aircraft and flew them to Gulf Shores, Alabama, for a week. Halfway through the vacation, Susan and Jim turned up and the fivesome went out for a meal together. Jane was impressed at how well Susan seemed to get on with David compared with a few years earlier when she and Jimmy had thrown the youngster out of the house on Summit Drive because he was so awkward and troublesome.
A few weeks later, at a high-society barbecue in Peru, Miami County Prosecutor Wil Siders was talking to Jimmy Grund about various things when the subject came around to Susan. Grund took a deep breath and then told Siders and another legal colleague, “If I ever die you look at that bitch first.…” His eyes snapped in the direction of Susan, flirting with yet another man across the back yard from where they were standing.
On June 30 that year, Susan made a rare appearance at the cabin on the lake at Maxinkuckee on her own to help David celebrate his twenty-second birthday. She had been extremely instrumental in organizing the event. David’s mother Jane was puzzled by this as she had not realized that her ex-husband’s second wife and her son were that close.
Jim’s sister Jane cooked a special meal for David, but just before they toasted his birthday, Susan made an appalling joke about David and Jane committing incest. It was in especially poor taste since Jane had heard numerous stories about Susan going with other men in Peru.
The room went silent and David coughed and smiled in a brave attempt to break up the tension.
The following day, Jane went out looking for Susan to tell her it was time for lunch. She found her brother’s wife sitting alone on the end of the pier. She was deep in thought and did not even hear Jane approaching. Whatever was on her mind seemed to be enormously troubling her.
Around the same time, Susan called a friend in Peru who noticed that when the subject of David was brought up she responded as if he no longer existed. Her affair had obviously come to an end.
* * *
Jimmy Grund’s parents and his sister were hearing more and more rumors about Susan and David’s relationship. Susan had even made a point of telling Jane’s husband Fred that she almost always met David for lunch every Friday. Her perverse desire to flaunt every affair, whether they were true or not, was starting to take over this particularly dangerous friendship as well.