Deadly Seduction (16 page)

By all accounts, Jim was in good spirits. He bumped into Miami Circuit Court Administrator Scotty Webster and spent several minutes discussing his trip to Alaska and what a great place it was.

“Scotty, you have to go there sometime,” enthused Jim Grund.

Webster never forgot how happy Jim had seemed on that day because it was unusual for the former prosecutor to be so expressive; normally he was a pretty laid-back character. It was as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He kept on about looking forward to the future—a future he wanted without Susan. Jim then strolled off for an appointment in Wabash.

Susan’s first chore of that day was to drop off little Tanelle for tennis practice at the Thursh Courts on East 3rd Street in Peru at 10:30
A.M.
Susan then went down the street to her mother’s shabby, rundown house opposite where her sister Darlene lived, on the wrong side of town.

Susan then visited a nearby grocery store with her mother’s shopping list and purchased the week’s shopping for her. At 12:11
P.M.
, Susan headed off to the D.M.V. offices where she bought licence plates for the camper she recently had purchased for her mother.

Lunch was spent with Tanelle and her mother Nellie in town. Then they headed over to a nearby campsite where the newly-purchased camper was parked. Susan noticed that it had been damaged by recent rain so the two women closely inspected it to see what repairs would be needed.

At around noon on nearby Main Street, Don Fern saw Jim Grund as he walked down the sidewalk near their office. He seemed in a good mood.

At those same law offices on Main at around 3:00
P.M.
, Jim’s brother-in-law and car dealership partner Fred Allen called in to ask Jim to trade cars with him that evening when they met for dinner at the Fireside Inn in nearby Logansport. Jim seemed in good spirits, but there was a little edge in his voice when it came to the subject of Susan and what her next dealership car should be.

“Make sure you don’t give Susan anything too nice, Fred. She’s been naughty and that ’88 Camaro will do just fine.”

At around the same time, Susan drove home and picked up Jacob from the house before driving him to her sister Darlene’s house at 412 East 3rd St. Susan then drove herself and her mother to Logansport, just fifteen miles away to do some more shopping.

Back in Peru, Jimmy Grund was making his daily appearance at Shanty Malone’s. His close friend Dr. John Crawshaw bumped into him at the bar and the lawyer regaled his friend with tales about the family’s adventures in the barren northern state of Alaska. He also mentioned that Susan had been a pain during the vacation, but did not expand on exactly why. Jimmy then had time to have a quick drink with his good friends Gary Nichols, attorney Pat Roberts, and Dick Sims.

In Logansport, Susan and her mother purchased gifts and clothes and Susan dropped her mother off at her own house at around 6:00
P.M.
On arrival at her mother’s tatty home, Susan found a message on Nellie’s answering machine from Jim Grund, asking her to call him at home.

Jim Grund informed his wife that she would have to switch cars that evening because his partner and brother-in-law Fred Allen had sold the grey Buick she had been driving around for the previous month. Susan was annoyed with Jim because it meant she would have to remove all the gifts and purchases she had made earlier in the day. But Jim was adamant. He had always warned Susan that the cars she drove were strictly on loan from the dealership and that they had saved many thousands of dollars in vehicle depreciation and car insurance charges through this arrangement.

At around 7:00
P.M.
, Jim turned up at Nellie Sanders’s house in his regular brown Toyota convertible. Darlene was spraying weed killer over the front porch of her mother’s house as he bounded up the steps, obviously in a bit of a hurry. He had promised Fred he would take the car to a dinner meeting they had arranged at the Fireside restaurant in Logansport and he was already running late. Jim Grund even went to the trouble of calling Fred at the Fireside to say he would be late for their seven o’clock dinner date because he had only just located Susan and managed to swap cars.

After Jim left with the grey Buick, Susan helped her mother with her hair before taking Jacob and his cousin Steven Worden (Darlene’s child) out to stay overnight at the new camper that evening. As part of that plan, Susan drove Jacob, Steven, and Steven’s girlfriend, Patty Ann Seifert, to her house where Susan dropped her off. Susan then went home with Jacob to pick up his sleeping bag and other overnight belongings.

Over in Logansport, Jim turned up for dinner with his brother-in-law at about 7:40
P.M.
He was wearing the same suit and tie he had been wearing all day. Jimmy Grund seemed delighted that his brother-in-law had brought along a black Camaro for Susan. He knew that she would consider it more scuzzy than usual. In fact, he told Fred he couldn’t have cared less if Susan had the worst car on the lot.

“She’s been bad and she doesn’t deserve any better,” said Jim coldly. Whatever had happened between them was obviously grating on Jim Grund.

At 9:30
P.M.
, Jim Grund arrived back home from his dinner appointment with Fred Allen and proudly showed his wife the black Camaro he had traded with Fred. Susan was not impressed; she considered the Camaro to be a redneck’s car, the sort of thing her own relatives might drive, but certainly unsuitable for a lady about town. That car made Susan very angry, although she still managed begrudgingly to make her husband some cheese and crackers, which Jim Grund took with him as he walked into their ground floor bedroom and started watching the Olympics on their big-screen TV.

By the time Susan departed a few minutes later with Jacob for the campsite, she was back to fuming about her husband’s choice of cars. How could he do this to me? she thought. I will be the laughing stock of Peru if I’m seen driving round town in a Camaro.

Susan was convinced that Jim had made certain she was given a car she would hate. She saw it as a sign that he was serious about getting a divorce. Susan was deeply concerned because she did not want her marriage to end yet. After all, she hadn’t found a suitable replacement for Jim and she was well aware that if a divorce went ahead then her extramarital behavior definitely would be thrown back in her face and cited as a cause. She’d be left penniless. In Susan’s mind, that was a completely unacceptable scenario. She started to consider her only other option. A plan was taking form in her mind. She had already laid the groundwork by stealing David’s gun. Now she might actually have to go ahead with that last option.

Before going to the campground that evening, Susan headed back to Darlene’s house to pick up her sister’s son Steven. She later claimed it was just after ten when she arrived because the local TV news was on and she recognized anchor Clyde Lee, whom she had met some years previously. Throughout the entire evening, she never once mentioned to her mother or sister that Jim had planned to divorce her.

It was between 10:30 and 11:00
P.M.
when she finally made it to the campsite with the boys. But on arrival she realized she had completely forgotten the key to the next-door camper, which had all the snacks and food inside it. Susan had also forgotten to bring drinks for the boys and had to return to her mother’s to get the drinks and the key to that other camper. It had just started raining lightly and she almost slipped over on the loose wet bricks that lined the pathway to her mother’s rundown house as she rushed in to get the goodies.

Susan also picked up Tanelle and her cousin Andrea from her mother’s house across the street and took them with her back to the campsite before they headed off to Summit Drive. She later told investigators that she unlocked the other camper and removed the food for the boys and stayed another thirty minutes while she settled them in. The children even managed to watch the 11:00
P.M.
Married … With Children
comedy show as Susan told the boys how to work everything in the camper.

“Make sure you stay in, don’t cause any trouble,” lectured Susan to the boys before departing.

Then Susan headed off back to her mother’s house after realizing she had forgotten to pick up her dog, Sugar. But Nellie Sanders shouted out the window at her daughter that it was too late, she was asleep, and she should come back the following day for the dog.

“Make sure you’ve locked the house up good and tight, Momma,” Susan told Nellie. “And don’t come out till morning.…”

It was a strange thing to say, but Nellie thought nothing more of it until many months later.

Susan then headed for Summit Drive with the girls, arriving home at around midnight. The only reason they had kept quiet throughout the tedious runaround was because they were transfixed by a Nintendo game they were playing in the back of the car.

Within minutes of getting to the house, the little girls gathered up their sleeping bags and pillows from Tanelle’s upstairs bedroom and moved down to the basement where they were going to sleep in the cozy den. Susan made sure they cleaned their teeth before they settled down.

“Can I go kiss Daddy good night?” Tanelle asked.

Susan hesitated for a moment after hearing her daughter’s words. Then she replied, “You’ll have to give Daddy a kiss in the morning because he’s already asleep, sweetheart.”

It was shortly after this that Susan turned off the rest of the lights in the house and retired to the bedroom only to discover Jim Grund’s body, or so she later told investigators.

No one has ever conclusively established exactly what happened in the few minutes leading up to Jim Grund’s death, but one thing seems certain: Susan aimed her stepson’s gun directly into her husband’s eye, just as she had been advised by him to do all those months earlier.

Ten

Among the platoon of investigators that swarmed to Jim and Susan Grund’s house as soon as it was discovered that a murder had taken place were three men who would play prominent roles in events that followed: county prosecutor Wil Siders, Jim’s best friend and Peru Police Department Sgt. Gary Nichols, and Robert Brinson, a tough Vietnam vet who would direct the investigation on the part of the Indiana State Police.

With their greater resources, it was decided that the ISP should run the investigation into the murder of Jimmy Grund. The inquiry was coordinated through Det. Sgt. Bob Land with Indiana State Police Investigator Brinson as the lead detective. He was to be assisted throughout by Trooper Investigator Gary Boyles and technician Dean Marks.

Bob Brinson, forty-six, tended to wear his state trooper’s badge with real pride. As a master trooper investigator, he had worked on numerous homicides throughout Miami County. His stern, straight-faced appearance disguised a dry wit and humor that come with fifteen years of police experience, not to mention two terms in Vietnam as a naval CB, building everything from roads to hangars to huts, often as enemy gunfire rained down on him.

Brinson immediately jumped into the nitty-gritty that accompanies any homicide investigation, chronicling details of the scene and trying to keep out of the way of the team of crime scene specialists who were turned loose after Jimmy Grund was officially declared dead. While Brinson moved methodically through the house, sketching the layout of the rooms and noting anything that seemed out of place, technicians took pictures, dusted for prints, and catalogued samples of material that might prove valuable later, both in narrowing down the list of suspects and helping to convict the killer or killers.

Back at Summit Drive, at around 3:00
A.M.
, Susan Grund tried for the second time to phone attorney and family friend Jim Boyles. This time he was in and told Susan to inform her sister that neither of them should give any more help to the investigators.

In the living room area, Brinson was appalled to overhear two officers discussing their theories as to who had committed the killing. When county prosecutor Wil Siders—waiting outside the house—suggested interviewing certain people there on the spot, Brinson intervened. This was his investigation and no one—however rich and powerful—was going to prevent him from doing his job in a fair-minded manner. That was the final straw; Brinson herded everyone out of the house and off the property. Some were none too happy about it, but, Brinson explained, he had a job to do. Brinson had the unenviable task of actually proving that someone had murdered Jimmy Grund. He wanted to stay unbiased, but it was difficult in this hostile atmosphere. Certain people already had made up their own minds who the killer was.

Brinson himself already suspected that the bullet which killed Jimmy Grund came from his own son’s gun. Rumors about Susan and David had been around Peru for quite some time. All sorts of possible scenarios were going through Bob Brinson’s mind. What was David’s role? It looked a little ominous at that early stage in the investigation. And if David was not involved then why did the killer steal his gun and use it to commit murder? And if Susan was the chief suspect then why would she be trying to frame her stepson?

*   *   *

At 4:00
A.M.
—just a few hours after her husband’s murder—Susan Grund agreed to meet Bob Brinson at the Indiana State Police Post in Peru, despite her lawyer’s advice against it. Her sister Darlene and her husband George drove Susan in George’s pickup truck. The meeting was, in the words of Brinson, the beginning of the “cat and mouse” games.

Susan seemed pale and nervous, but not particularly grief stricken, as Brinson sat her down in the small interview room, switched on the tape recorder that stood on the table between them, and carefully read through her Miranda rights.

Brinson began with some pretty basic questioning.

“Who d’you think might be a suspect in the death of your husband, Mrs. Grund?” Bob Brinson had a way of putting things that made everything sound perfectly ordinary. The tone of his questioning was more akin to asking someone if she took two sugars or one in her coffee.