Authors: Wensley Clarkson
Brinson reckoned this call was very significant because it clearly showed that far from mourning her dearly departed husband, she was hungrily looking around for a man to seduce.
That same day, Jan Fern, wife of Jim Grund’s law partner Don Fern called Bob Brinson’s unit to report a significant conversation she had with Susan on July 12, three weeks before the murder.
Jan revealed that Susan had discussed working in the flower bed behind the house on Summit Drive and how she had gotten calluses on her hands. Jan had been astonished by this because Susan was not exactly known as a keen gardener. Susan also kept waffling on about redoing the back yard so it wouldn’t look so messy.
The investigators were intrigued by Jan Fern’s call because it seemed to suggest that Susan may have kept something carefully buried in the back yard between the time of the theft of David Grund’s gun and the murder of Jimmy Grund.
The following day, a search warrant was served at the Grund residence giving the probable cause that Susan possibly had been digging and hiding the gun which was stolen from David Grund. It was all part of the pressure tactics Wil Siders had decided should be a crucial part of their effort to wear down Susan Grund until she made a mistake.
The search warrant team included Sgt. Dean Marks of the ISP, who swept the ground outside the house on Summit Drive with a metal detector, along with Trooper Paul Daugherty, Sgt. Phil Oliver, Sgt. Bob Land, Sgt. Pat O’Connor, and Bob Brinson. The investigators entered the house by removing the garage door casing and inner garage door casing. But no items were found and nothing was seized.
Bob Brinson was naturally disappointed by his failure to find anything, but what he did not realize was that the raid on the house on Summit Drive was sending shock waves through Susan’s immediate family.
To start with, Susan—living in Vincennes by now—panicked when she heard about the search and called her sister Darlene. Susan instructed Darlene to go out to the house to make sure it was secure.
After doing that, Darlene walked across the green that separated the house from other properties and called Susan again from a neighbor’s house to say that everything looked in order.
“I want you to break back into the house and see if they found it,” explained a breathless and clearly flustered Susan.
Darlene was astonished. She presumed “it” meant the gun. At first, she did not respond.
Susan continued, “I want you to go into the laundry room and then call me and tell me ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”
“No way, Susan,” came Darlene’s reply. But Susan was being very forceful and she had always been the pushy one in the family, the leader of the pack.
A few minutes later, Darlene found a hammer in the neighbor’s garage and went back to the house, intending to break a window. But her husband George turned up just before she was about to do it and talked her out of it.
Darlene called Susan back and told her, “If it’s so important, why don’t you come up here and do it yourself.”
Susan was furious. She wanted to check the place out before the investigators had a chance to come back. But she could tell from the tone of her sister’s voice that her scheme was not going to work.
Susan then came up with a plan to meet her sister in Indianapolis and then return with her to search the house. Darlene agreed and even managed to persuade neighbor Mary Pruitt to go along with her to offer moral support and provide a decoy car to put investigators off the scent.
At approximately 4:00
A.M.
the three women met in the parking lot of a garage next to a McDonald’s. Susan asked Mary to drive her vehicle, and Susan then got into Darlene’s car with her and they returned to Peru together. Throughout the journey, Susan ducked down whenver she thought she saw any police cruisers.
As Darlene drove, her sister said to her, “I want you to promise me something.”
Darlene reckoned she knew precisely what was coming.
“I don’t make promises until I know what I’m promising.”
“I have to tell you something and you can’t tell a soul.… I shot Jimmy. It was supposed to be a murder/suicide.”
According to Susan, Jim was despondent about getting old and fat and losing her to a younger man. Susan said that Jim told her if he killed himself the insurance would not pay off to the children.
Susan also claimed that after killing Jim Grund, she didn’t commit suicide because Grund only put one bullet in the gun and she didn’t know how to reload it.
* * *
Leo Leger was asleep when he heard a loud knocking at the door of his house in the town of Kokomo, about two-thirds of the way from Indianapolis to Peru.
He got up and went to the door to see who on earth could be stopping by at this late hour. Standing there was his ex-girlfriend, Darlene Worden. The two sisters had stopped at Leo’s home so that Darlene could use the bathroom.
She walked straight past him in a highly agitated state.
“Honey, you okay?” asked Leger.
“No,” Darlene hesitated for a moment. Then she went on, “My sister wants to commit suicide because she killed her husband.” If it hadn’t been so tragic, it would have been funny. It actually sounded like the sort of thing Peg Bundy would say on Susan’s favorite TV show,
Married … With Children.
Leger—who did not know Susan well—had no idea who her husband was. But when it was explained to him that it was Jimmy Grund, he said, “Oh my goodness. Maybe we should bring her out from the car and talk to her.”
Moments later, a very flustered Susan came in to Leo Leger’s home. She pointed an accusing finger at Leger and screamed, “You told him, didn’t you?”
Susan was furious with her sister and wanted to know exactly what Darlene had told him. Darlene then admitted she had told Leo about Susan wanting to commit suicide. Susan rolled her eyes to the ceiling and realized she had broken the golden rule—don’t tell anyone what you have done. But there was no turning back now, so she told Darlene to hurry up, and a few minutes later they continued their journey to Peru.
Darlene deposited her sister at the end of the drive to the house at Summit and drove her car up alongside the garage doors. Darlene got out, unlocked the front door, and then Susan emerged from the shadows in the backyard and followed her inside the house. She had become so paranoid about the police that she did not want them to see her going into the house.
Darlene watched Susan go into the laundry room and emerge with two Christmas teddy bears, which she dropped into a black plastic trash bag. She did not dare ask what they were for. She had a pretty good idea, anyhow.
Then they left the house and drove directly to Darlene’s home on East 3rd Street, in Peru. On the way, Susan turned to her sister and said, “I heard that metal detectors can’t detect through cement.”
Darlene knew exactly what her sister was talking about, but she chose to ignore it in the hope it would all go away.
At the house, Susan asked Darlene for some cotton so she could sew up the back of one of the teddy bears. Then she went down into the basement of the house and finished off her needlework.
When Susan came back upstairs she suggested to her sister that she should swap cars again because she suspected the police might follow her. So, Susan drove Darlene’s husband’s pickup truck back to her refuge in Vincennes clutching the teddy bear that hid the murder weapon. Once back at the house, Susan put the gun and the bear downstairs, away from the children.
The next day, Darlene had to drive back to Vincennes and switch vehicles.
Throughout all this, Nellie Sanders was getting very nervous at the house she was now sharing with Susan in Vincennes. She knew the gun was on the property and she advised her daughter to get rid of it as quickly as possible. That day, Nellie went to her nephew Donny’s house and came back with a rusty old metal container. Susan then phoned Darlene in Peru and asked her to bring some concrete with her because she wanted to “bury it.”
Next day, mother and daughter mixed the concrete and poured it slowly all over the gun as it lay in the base of that metal container. Then they let it set for a couple of days.
A few days later they poured some earth over the top of the hardened concrete and put a plant in the container. It seemed like the perfect hiding place.
Some weeks later, Nellie Sanders got very twitchy about having the container in the house in Vincennes and insisted it had to go. Eventually, she put it in Susan’s van and the two women hauled it round to nephew Donny Ellis’s house, where Nellie somehow managed to single-handedly carry the seventy-three-pound container upstairs and dump it in the attic.
After a few days, Susan’s son Jacob asked his mother once again about the inserts he had read in her diary the previous spring. The references to divorce and marriage problems had taken on much more significance since the death of Jimmy Grund. Susan looked at Jacob distastefully and acted as if she didn’t know anything about any diary. Jacob did not pursue the matter, but he had a pretty good idea of what was going on.
* * *
Back at the Miami County courthouse office of Jim Grund’s old friend county prosecutor Wil Siders, efforts to gather enough evidence to arrest Susan were still failing to provide anything truly conclusive, although Siders was still as convinced as ever that she was the killer.
State police investigators and all other officials involved in the case met with Siders on September 17 to discuss the inquiry and hold a brainstorming session to try and come up with some fresh leads.
In the
Peru Daily Tribune,
Indiana State Police Lt. Carlos Pettiford said he believed the case would eventually be solved and he talked about “strong leads.” But nobody yet had enough to even consider convicting Susan Grund and as long as that situation continued there was no question of arresting her for the murder of her husband.
At the Indiana State Police Post, the four weeks between mid-September and mid-October were pretty quiet for the investigation. Bob Brinson had tried everything to subtly put pressure on Susan, but she had survived intact. He remained fairly convinced about her guilt, but he started to wonder if any weak areas would ever begin to emerge.
On September 30, another member of Peru’s elite upper middle class came forward to state that Susan had told her that she and Jim were having marital problems just a few weeks before his death. The most interesting aspect of this woman’s claims was that she said that Susan had told her that “the things that brought them together were now the things that were problems.” Those two things were:
1. Initially, Jim had liked Susan to dress sexy and now he was upset when she did.
2. At the beginning of the marriage, Jim had been strong and taken charge. Now Susan wasn’t getting that leadership from him.
Susan’s frank statement to her friend astonished Bob Brinson. Here was a strong-willed, powerful lady apparently complaining because her husband was not bossy enough! Susan Grund was emerging as an increasingly complex character.
The same informant also told Brinson that Susan had regularly discussed Jim’s will in the preceding few years and was concerned about her husband’s law firm partner Don Fern having too much power as administrator of the will.
On October 1, 1992, Brinson and his unit managed to trace one of the businessmen rumored to be having an affair with Susan. He told investigators that he was part of the lunch group which met on Wednesdays and stated that they consisted of a local attorney, an insurance salesman, an accountant and an attorney, plus himself. The meals were usually held at the local Holiday Inn.
The man emphatically denied ever having a physical relationship with Susan Grund. He admitted attending a fund-raising event in Peru when both Susan and Jim were present. The man even attended the funeral of Jim Grund, but insisted he had not seen Susan since that sad occasion. He also conceded that she had called him on September 29 and given him her unlisted phone number at her mother’s home near Vincennes. “She told me not to let anyone have it,” he explained.
* * *
During the week of October 8, 1992, Brinson finally received a copy of the toxicology report prepared by the Indiana University School of Medicine. The report was prepared from blood and urine specimens collected by technicians from the body of James Grund. But no drugs were found, and he had an alcohol level of just .05 percent.
In early October, a state police diving team drew a complete blank when they searched for the weapon used in Jimmy’s murder. Nine divers examined a stretch of the river that runs through the center of Peru for five hours. To onlookers, it appeared as if investigators had been told where to find the gun, but—it later emerged—the divers were on a speculative venture hastened by the investigators’ desperation for some positive proof to link the murder to Susan Grund.
The police divers scoured the areas near the town’s two main bridges in the hope of finding the gun. But they never came close to discovering anything.
On October 9, Susan’s role as the main suspect in the murder of her husband was made public thanks to a civil suit which alleged she was under investigation for the homicide. The suit was brought by David Grund and his sister Jama Anne Lidral to try and prevent Susan from being an executor of Jimmy Grund’s will. They clearly stated that the will filed on September 11 was not intended to be their father’s last will. David and Jama insisted that the only valid will was one dated October 31, 1986.
Documents filed October 9 described the July 17 will as “a fraud” and reiterated that the will was obtained under coercion.
The legal complaint to resist probate of Jimmy Grund’s will was filed at the Miami County courthouse. The request asked for a jury and petitioned for appointment of a special administrator. In short, Jim Grund’s two eldest children were challenging the legality of the will made by their father just before his death.
The complaint clearly stated that:
1. Grund had died leaving two wills.
2. The deceased was survived by the plaintiffs, David Grund and Jama Lidral, and by the defendant, Susan A. Grund and her two (2) children, Jacob James Grund and Tanelle Rachelle Grund, who were only his heirs-at-law.