Bitter Blood (23 page)

Florence was fanatic about cleanliness and germs. Her house was immaculate. She allowed no pets to enter it. She made her children wash their hands numerous times daily. A piece of candy dropped on the floor could not be eaten, even if the floor had just been scrubbed and sanitized. Susie and Rob could not drink from the same cup nor take a bite from the same sandwich. Food couldn’t be taken outside because of flies.

Florence taught her children social graces and was emphatic about their value. She emphasized the importance of family, social position, and socially acceptable behavior, and Bob joined in full support.

“He wanted his children always to be circumspect,” his sister, Frances, recalled. “It was important to him that they not deviate from the norm, from what was expected.”

The Newsom children grew up in an atmosphere of cordial and genteel formality, a throwback to Old South aristocracy, their lives structured to family, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church (where Susie later taught a children’s Sunday school class), and the Forsyth Country Club. They were keenly aware of the differences between themselves and their less affluent rural neighbors, and each reacted differently. Rob took on a swaggering redneck pose before his peers, but Susie withdrew, and in her isolation began to think herself and her family special.

Susie spent much time reading and studying, especially about her favorite topics: history and anthropology. She developed an avid interest in the royal family of Great Britain, collected books about them, and decorated her bedroom walls with their photographs. Once, when Nancy came to visit, she found Susie in a party dress and her room decorated. “What’s the occasion?” Nancy asked. “Why, it’s the queen’s birthday,” Susie replied, as if everybody should be celebrating. Her interest in royalty continued through high school, leading some classmates to suspect she thought herself a princess.

Susie worked hard at her studies, but no matter how hard she tried, she never was the academic and intellectual equal of her younger brother and she resented it. Rob’s mind retained almost everything that entered it, and he could summon what he needed in an instant. He made top grades with minimal effort and eventually would have his choice of prestigious academic scholarships. Susie complained to friends about her brother, whom she nicknamed Three for the numerals that followed his name. He was given too much, she said, had things too easy. She thought her parents should be harder on him.

“There was a lot of sibling dislike directed toward me,” Rob later acknowledged. “I don’t recall and I don’t think there ever was any physical cruelty, but I think there was a lot of envy and that sort of thing.”

Susie developed into a strikingly beautiful young woman with a slim, well-proportioned figure. She wore her dark hair in a short pageboy cut with curls in the front. Family members thought she looked exactly like Nanna as a young woman and they displayed pictures of the two side by side as proof. Susie dressed demurely and tastefully, choosing expensive and fashionable clothes. She had an outgoing, bubbly personality, but little concern, it seemed, for the things that interested most girls her age.

Florence had been strict, not allowing Susie to use makeup, shave her legs, or wear nylons until long after other girls her age were doing so. Florence also had imparted her narrow view of sex to her daughter. Nancy was astounded at Susie’s naïveté about boys and sex when she brought up those subjects during their teenage years.

At Northwest High School, a sprawling country school several miles from her home that Susie entered in the ninth grade, she showed little interest in boys and made few close friends. She kept her grades high and avoided most school activities, especially sports, which she disdained. During the spring of her sophomore year, she received a lot of attention from teachers when her namesake aunt became the first woman to be appointed to the North Carolina Supreme Court. Her teachers thought of her as sweet, bright, a hard worker with great promise, obviously from a good family.

Some of her classmates didn’t hold such a high opinion of her. They thought her aloof, haughty. Her interests were not theirs. She preferred classical music to rock and roll, theater to drive-in movies, reading to cruising.

“She was not a frivolous person,” said Linda Crutchfield, Susie’s best friend in high school. “She set high standards for herself. She was very self-assured and responsible. I think Susie’s goals and aspirations were far beyond some of her classmates’, therefore they didn’t have a common ground. I think it may have been viewed as snobbishness by some.”

Linda thought that Susie was perhaps more comfortable with adults than with her peers, but she saw no snobbishness or haughtiness in her. She found instead a lightness of spirit, a deep caring for others. Linda’s family was not on the same economic plane as Susie’s. Her father was a foreman at R. J. Reynolds, a volunteer special deputy sheriff. Yet Susie loved and respected Linda’s parents. She even accompanied Linda’s father when he made rounds delivering firewood and food to poor families.

Susie was reserved, Linda knew, shy, slow to warm to people, but once she did she was a devoted friend. Perhaps a little too devoted. At times, Linda felt that Susie was almost possessive of her friendship.

They had a lot of fun together. They talked about boys, although later Linda couldn’t remember Susie ever dating. They went to movies, played badminton, the only competitive sport that seemed to interest Susie. They swam at nearby Crystal Lake, hiked, canoed, and rode horses at Tanglewood Park (Susie had a gentling touch with animals, especially horses). Susie loved hunting Indian artifacts and attending antique auctions, and they regularly pursued those passions. They also frequently spent nights at one another’s houses.

Linda enjoyed staying with the Newsoms. She thought them warm, gracious, welcoming, and she liked the sense of openness she found there, the constant exchange of ideas that seemed so much a part of their family life.

Susie had been a bit shielded by her parents, Linda thought, but not overprotected. Nor had she been overindulged or pampered. Linda knew that Susie’s upbringing had been strict, but she detected no resentment about it. She knew, too, that both Susie and her mother were strong-willed, but she was never aware of any conflict between them. Although occasionally she saw Susie flash anger toward her mother, she never saw it returned by Florence. The Newsoms, she knew, were not the type to indulge emotional displays in front of others.

Susie had a direct manner, tended to view things as black or white, harbored a strong sense of right and wrong, and was quick to form an opinion and was unbending in her views. But even when her mother disagreed with her in Linda’s presence, she encouraged Susie to express herself.

“I never saw her mother trying to dominate or control Susie,” Linda said. “I always saw her encouraging her daughter to develop herself. The Newsoms were a very reasoned, logical family. They talked about things. There was no ‘This is the way it is and that’s it.’”

Chris Severn, who became close to Susie a few years later and spent time at the Newsom house, saw the situation between Susie and her mother a little differently.

“I always perceived there to be a cautiously respectful relationship,” she said. “Her mother hesitated to maybe be critical of Susie because of the reaction she would get.”

Family members knew that to be the case, for they were well aware of Susie’s propensity to anger quickly—and her unwillingness to forgive. They knew that the least thing might set her off, and she would retain resentment about it forever. They remembered a family friend who angered Susie by teasing that she was too pretty to be her father’s daughter. She stalked from his presence and never spoke to him again.

While Susie was in high school, Bob decided that his family needed more space. Florence’s mother, Annie Britt, was staying with them frequently, and the house offered little privacy. Bob bought a new, much larger house in a small, private subdivision called Green Meadows, two and a half miles west of his parents’ home. The ranch-style brick house, with a stone entranceway, looked to be single-story from the front, but because of the steep lot on which it was built, it was actually on two levels. The glassed back of the house looked onto a small pond at the edge of the lot. Florence moved reluctantly. She loved Rob-Su Acres and later said that some of the best years of her life had been spent there.

At the beginning of Susie’s senior year of high school, in the fall of 1963, she suffered the trauma of having to attend a new school filled with strangers. A consolidated high school, North Forsyth, had been built near Winston-Salem to accommodate students from three other schools, including Northwest. There Susie took part in but one extracurricular activity, the Anchor Club, a community service club for girls of strong character who displayed evidence of leadership—
the
club for girls at the school. That Christmas, when the club president drew up her traditional list of Christmas wishes for members, she made this one for Susie: “Biographies of royal families Susie would never dodge. Make her a history teacher somewhat like Mrs. Hodge.” Susie didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life, but teaching, her mother’s profession, was an option she was considering.

When the 422 seniors who made up the first graduating class of North Forsyth High walked to the front of Wait Chapel at Wake Forest College to receive their diplomas on June 4, 1964, Susie was among them, but she was not among the 32 honor graduates. When many of the graduates left on chartered buses the next day for a traditional class trip to New York and the World’s Fair, Susie was making ready for an outing at White Lake with friends. Riding a crowded, rowdy bus to New York was not her idea of fun.

Appropriately, Susie chose Queens College, a small, expensive, private school for young women in a wealthy area of Charlotte. She had been taken with the place when she visited with other family members to see her aunt Su-Su receive an honorary degree.

She liked Queens at first, joined her classmates in talking about the boys at nearby Davidson College, but eventually she began to feel uncomfortable and restricted. Too many of her classmates were frivolous, she complained, too concerned with clothes and cars and hairdos. She called them butterflies. Although many were from wealthy families, they clearly weren’t from “good families,” and good families didn’t necessarily have to be wealthy. “She never felt that was something you based on money,” her brother later explained. “She felt there was such a thing as genteel poverty.” As the family of her grandmother, Annie Britt Sharp, no doubt would attest. Susie said that she wanted a more serious, academic atmosphere for her studies, and after her sophomore year, she returned to Winston-Salem and enrolled as a history major at Wake Forest College, just a few miles from her home.

For 122 years, Wake Forest had been a small college supported by Southern Baptists in the village of Wake Forest, sixteen miles north of Raleigh. But in 1946, the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation offered the college a perpetual endowment to move to Winston-Salem. Members of the Reynolds family donated six hundred acres of the huge Reynolds estate for the campus, which was built over the next ten years at a cost of $20 million. The college moved to its new home in 1956, and ten years later when Susie enrolled, it was growing fast in size and prestige and was just a year from changing its name to Wake Forest University.

That fall, shortly after Susie began classes, she went to the library to study and struck up a conversation with a basketball player, a quiet freshman, new to the state. His name, he told her, was Tommy Lynch.

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Tom Lynch had a toothy smile, sun-bleached hair, and a quiet, easygoing nature. Except in stature, he was much like his father. At an inch under six feet he stood eight inches taller than his father and weighed 175 pounds. But he shared his father’s love of sports and possessed the self-confidence of the natural athlete. He realized early in childhood that he was better at physical activities than most other kids.

At Morgan Park Academy, his prep school in Chicago, he played football, baseball, basketball, and was a member of the swim team, but it was basketball at which he excelled. In his senior year, he averaged thirty points a game and was named one of the top twenty high school players in Chicago. With college scouts sitting in the stands, he scored fifty-three points one night, buoying his dreams of being recruited by major universities.

Those dreams did not pan out, but Duke University and Davidson College, both prestigious institutions, both in North Carolina, expressed interest in him, and in the spring of his senior year his mother went with him to visit those campuses and talk to coaches. His grades kept both schools from offering encouragement. Since he was in the area, Tom wanted to stop at Wake Forest College in Winston-Salem, where Horace “Bones” McKinney had built a winning basketball program with an assistant named Billy Packer.

Wake Forest had a new coach and a losing season in 1966, but Tom showed his newspaper clippings to Packer and came away feeling good about the possibilities. Wake Forest might find a spot for him, Packer told him, but he would have to play his way into a scholarship. First he must prove himself on the freshman team.

Tom enrolled as a pre-med student. Encouraged by his mother, he had long talked of becoming a doctor. Although his grades were not so good in his first year, he ensured his scholarship by averaging six points a game on the freshman team, and in 1967, the year Wake Forest became a university and got yet another new basketball coach, he became a substitute guard on the varsity team. To his disappointment, he never would rise above substitute, averaging less than a point a game for his college career.