Deadly Seduction (8 page)

Gary was a tad annoyed about that—not to mention the fact that he had always harbored a vague suspicion that Jimmy had a soft spot for his then wife.

What Gary Nichols did not realize was that his payback practical joke was about to turn into a very serious romance for Jim and Susan.

In many ways, Gary and Susan were quite similar to each other, street smart, charming, shrewd, charismatic. They spoke the same language and that helped Gary rapidly see through Susan’s facade.

During the early days of Jim Grund’s romance with Susan, Gary even felt a twinge of jealousy. After all, Susan was a very attractive woman and Gary never actually intended to hand her on a plate to Jim Grund. His practical joke had seriously misfired and he had provided his old pal with what appeared to be a classy lady.

But the similarities between Susan and Gary Nichols would ultimately contribute to her downfall because the savvy police officer soon started to spot things about Susan that made him feel very uncomfortable in her presence. Much sooner than anyone else, he started to question her motives for falling in love with Jimmy Grund.

*   *   *

However, at the beginning of the relationship, Susan was just delighted to have found a safe, secure, prestigious man. Never in her twenty-five years of life had Susan met anyone like Jimmy Grund. He was mature, charming, intelligent, polite, smiling, well-groomed, educated, ambitious.

On that first date, Jim took charge and she immediately liked him, even perhaps loved him. He was direct and forceful, a man who knew what he wanted and went out and got it. She had dated so much riffraff before, perhaps with the exception of Tom Whited. Jim Grund was thirty-nine years old, hair thinning, pale complexion, slightly overweight, dressed conservatively. In some ways he reminded Susan of the way she wished her father had been.

Jim and Susan spent hours on that first date chatting away over a candle-lit meal. The two of them seemed to instantly recognize that something special was happening between them. Susan was entranced by his tales of derring-do, like scuba diving in the Caribbean and flying his plane all over the continent. She felt a twinge of sorrow for him when he recounted the end of his marriage to Jane, but she was careful not to give away too many details about her three previous marriages. Susan did not smoke, drink alcohol, or do drugs, things that Jim Grund feared might create problems for a man in such a high-visibility career. Meanwhile, his courtly manners and soft accent told Susan that she had at last found a man of which she could be truly proud.

Five

“Darlene, what am I going to do?” Susan asked her older sister a few weeks after meeting Jimmy Grund on that blind date. “Both of them want to marry me.”

Susan was referring to her handsome young stud Rick Cook and that older, more secure, but prematurely balding Jimmy Grund.

“But which one d’you love, Susan?” replied Darlene.

“I love Rick, but I don’t want to be poor. What would you do?”

“I’d marry for love, Susan.”

“But I don’t wanna be poor, so I’m going to marry James.”

Darlene wasn’t that shocked by her sister’s proclamation. It was typical of Susan.…

*   *   *

Darlene first met her sister’s future husband when they all attended a Thanksgiving party in November 1984. Susan seemed rather tense throughout the evening while Jim was knocking back drinks at a solid rate and getting into the swing of the party. He impressed Darlene because he never once appeared uncomfortable or out of place amongst Susan’s hillbilly-type relatives, many of whom lived in trailers scattered all over Indiana.

Everyone at the party had been rather hesitant about inviting Susan and her new boyfriend because Jim Grund was a pro-tem judge. And to make matters worse, some of the Sanders kids had been prosecuted by Jimmy in court over the previous couple of years.

But Grund did not bat an eyelid and he even ended up having a giggle with Darlene when he and Susan walked into a room where her sister was changing dresses and caught her stark naked. Jimmy just grinned and moved out of the room. Susan was furious. She did not want this side of her family to be revealed to the rich and powerful man she intended to make her fourth husband.

Darlene and her mother Nellie were most taken by Jim Grund. He was the kind of guy who was happy to sip a beer and sit on the porch and talk about life with whoever happened to be around. He was not a snob. He was not trying to be somebody else and he was always extremely good to Susan’s family.

In 1985, he even helped Darlene purchase the house opposite her mother’s on East 3rd Street. It had been owned by Susan’s previous boyfriend Rick Cook, but then he fell behind on his payments and the property was virtually given away for a bargain $25,900. Darlene and her husband did not have the $5,000 deposit required but Jim went down and talked to the bank and got them the loan anyhow.

Jim Grund first introduced his own family to Susan when he took her round to his parents’ detached house on Main Street and announced his girlfriend was pregnant.

Connie and James went quiet for a few seconds, trying to digest what their son had just told them.

“Er, congratulations, Jim,” said his mother hesitatingly.

Then a big smile came to Jimmy’s face. “Don’t worry, Mom. It’s not mine.”

It was a hell of a way to break the ice, but then that was typical of Jimmy Grund.

*   *   *

A few weeks after Thanksgiving 1984, Jim Grund played the role of doting father and rushed to the hospital in Logansport with Susan as she started labor. When baby Tanelle was born, Jim was as pleased as if she were his own daughter. He looked on Susan and her newborn baby as a golden opportunity for him to make amends for not always being the best father in the world to his two eldest children, Jama and David. This time around he was going to be there when they needed him, not always off chasing down the best cases.

Susan went to great lengths to explain to Jim’s family that her other child, Jacob, was currently living with her previous husband Gary Campbell whom, she said, needed his son badly because he was a virtual invalid following a motorcycle crash. She never once hinted at the horrific injuries she had inflicted on her stepson, Tommy.

When Susan’s baby Tanelle was just six weeks old, Jimmy announced to his parents that he and Susan and the baby were off to Florida for a vacation.

A few days after departing on their Florida trip, Jimmy phoned his mother, Connie, back in Peru. She thought he was calling to see if his sister Jane had had the baby she was expecting. But Jim had something else on his mind.

“Are you sitting down, Mom? I have something to tell you.”

Connie mumbled a “yes.”

“Susan and I got married.…”

Connie grimaced on the other end of the line and then typically, played it all down.

“I thought that was what you were going to say, Jim.”

“You gotta be shitting me, Mom?”

“Nope. I knew you’d go and do that.”

Jim and his good friend Gary Nichols had made a wager that the first one of them to get remarried would owe the other $1,000. When Gary heard the news he promised himself he would get the money off Jim the moment he was back from Florida, before he had a chance to wriggle out of it.

By all accounts, Jim and Susan’s wedding could not have been more romantic. They married on December 6, 1984, on a boat owned by Jim’s good friend Jack Vetter, as it bobbed about on the Atlantic Ocean just a few miles off Flagler Beach. Vetter even acted as witness. Susan looked radiant in a pastel-colored dress and huge, hooped earrings. Jim Grund was immaculately turned out in a beige, lightweight suit and baby Tanelle was barely able to stay awake when a friend took a photograph of the newly married couple.

On the way back from Florida, Jim and his new wife and her baby daughter stopped off at his own daughter Jama’s home in North Carolina to introduce her to Susan. Everyone seemed to get on fine. The Grunds found Susan charming enough, but they did wonder a little about her background. She talked with a soft Southern drawl and said she was a devout Baptist. She never once mentioned that she was born and raised in Peru. Jim’s mother, Connie, sensed there were many grey areas about Susan. But for the moment the family was just happy that Jim had found himself a partner with whom he seemed to be genuinely in love.

Jim Grund had just finished his stint as prosecutor for Miami County where his father had also been prosecutor. They were the most powerful father-and-son legal team in the county. Susan liked that, she liked that very much indeed.

Once back from the wedding in Florida, Jimmy was quickly tracked down by his buddy Gary Nichols who demanded that check for $1,000. Nichols cashed it immediately and bought everyone in Shanty Malone’s a drink to celebrate. What had started as the blind date from hell had ended in marriage and a $1,000 check for Gary Nichols.

The one mystery about the entire romance had been what became of the woman who was Jim’s girlfriend at the time he met Susan. The woman had been unceremoniously dumped and left town almost immediately. Friends said she was heartbroken, but Jim was under the influence of a highly ambitious woman now, someone who was determined to get to a position of power and influence in a town where she was once considered to be a distinctly trashy resident.

Susan was bubbling with excitement when she arrived back in Peru following the marriage, ready to restart her life as the model wife and mother. As a child she enjoyed being right in the thick of things and she was determined to make sure she got treated just as well as Jim Grund in the community. She might even have also been head over heels in love with Grund at that time. She certainly had no doubt he was in love with her and it felt pretty good.

Jim Grund was completely smitten by Susan. But he was also fiercely ambitious about his work as the town’s most sought after lawyer following his four year stint as county prosecutor. Jim would spend long, long days and nights in the vast set of offices on Main Street, where he operated his law firm.

He charmed his fellow attorneys in the practice as well as every member of the predominantly female clerical staff and he totally immersed himself in the business.

At first, the happy couple and newborn baby settled into the same house on West 6th Street where he had brought up his first family. It was a neat, spacious three-bedroom property but Susan was far from satisfied. She had expected Jim Grund to be living in much more lavish style and she was determined to make sure that they moved somewhere more in fitting with her new status as the wife of one of the most influential men in Miami County.

A few months after his marriage to Susan, Jim Grund went off on one of his regular fishing trips with some of his pals, leaving Susan to her own devices in Peru.

Some time earlier, Susan had met another prominent attorney called John O’Neill while up at Jim’s parents’ cabin by the lake at Maxinkuckee. The moment Jim flew off for his fishing vacation, Susan drove up to the lake and stayed at O’Neill’s family home. It was the beginning of a friendship that was to outlast any other in her entire life.

*   *   *

One day, Susan felt it was time to tell Jim about her “problems” in Oklahoma. Whether it was out of a genuine inbuilt sense of guilt, or a blatant determination to wipe the slate clean and get back custody of her son, Jacob, no one will ever know. But there can be little doubt that Susan realized Jim Grund would have the connections to help her completely wipe out her past crimes.

Susan broke down in tears and told Jim the whole sob story about how unfairly she was treated in Oklahoma City. Jimmy Grund listened sympathetically and immediately began visitation rights hearings on Susan’s son, Jacob. Susan had been most insistent that she wanted her son back, so they could all be one big, happy family. Jobless ex-husband Gary Campbell was soon struggling to pay out the vast sums of cash needed to fight Susan’s legal efforts to win back custody of her son.

Then Susan put in a phone call to her ex-husband Campbell and
suggested
that he might like to move back to Indiana and get a job there. Gary was bemused by Susan’s call. What was the point in him moving back? But Susan repeated her offer obviously convinced that she could persuade him to move to the Peru area.

Gary then came clean with his ex-wife and admitted he was living with a girl whom he had gotten pregnant. Susan listened intently on the other end of the phone line. This was brilliant news as far as she was concerned, because it meant that Gary was desperate. Instead of screaming at Gary, as he presumed she would, Susan decided to play the role of savior to her ex-husband.

“I could help you, Gary,” she told him.

A few days later, Jimmy Grund wired over $800 to Campbell to pay for the girl to have an abortion. It was then that Susan realized she had regained complete control over the situation. She was negotiating from a position of strength and that made her feel very good indeed.

Shortly after the abortion, Jim Grund paid for Campbell to move to Indiana and an apartment to be found for him in nearby Logansport. It was not too close so that they had to keep meeting Campbell, but it was not so far that he would forget his obligations to Jimmy and Susan.

Gary was pleasantly surprised by both Susan and Jim’s attitude towards him. However, he did not appreciate or understand their true motives. Grund even mentioned to Gary that he was thinking of offering him a job as manager of the airfield in Peru which he was planning to buy.

It is hardly surprising that the moment Campbell arrived back in Indiana, he relaxed his custody of Jacob and the child began spending more and more time with his mother. Campbell found it hard to object, because Susan was obviously more able to provide a stable home for the young boy.

Soon Susan enrolled Jacob in the local school in Peru. Meanwhile, Jim Grund even managed to find Campbell a minimum wage job driving a truck after his airport deal fell through. Susan was delighted. This whole maneuver was proving exactly what she had always believed—money means power. Without it, you might as well never have been born.