Bitter Blood (43 page)

It was after midnight when Tom and Kathy and the boys finally got back home, and they expected the phone to ring at any minute. Delores usually called two or three times a week and always when she knew they were due back from a trip, even if it meant that she had to sit up half the night because of the two-hour time difference.

But this night Delores didn’t call, and Tom and Kathy figured that she must have fallen asleep waiting for them to get back home. When she failed to call Monday, both Tom and Kathy thought it unusual. Maybe she was wrapped up in something with her theater group. If she didn’t call Tuesday night Tom said, they’d call her.

But Tuesday afternoon, as Tom was hurrying to leave his office to meet Kathy and the boys at the Hiland Theater, the police department chaplain showed up, and the summer turned to sorrow.

That night, Susie was one of many people Tom called to tell about the murders of his mother and sister. He was going back to Louisville, he told her, but the boys would stay in Albuquerque with Kathy. They’d be fine, he assured her. So stunned was he by events, that later he wouldn’t recall her response.

Another person Tom called that night was his lawyer, Mike Rueckhaus. Tom knew that he was going to be heir to a lot of money, but if his plane crashed on the way to Kentucky, he wanted to make sure that none of it went to Susie through the boys. Rueckhaus worked all night drawing up a will that created trusts the boys would not receive until adulthood.

Only hours after Delores’s and Janie’s bodies were discovered, Susie’s lawyer, Sandy Sands, arrived at his Reidsville home from a beach trip to find his telephone ringing. Susie was calling. It was the first of three calls she made to him that night, and she was nearly hysterical.

“She just went bananas,” he said.

Susie told him that Tom’s mother and sister had been found dead in a “gangland-style killing,” and she was scared because the boys were with Tom. Mobsters had killed Janie and Delores, she said, because Tom owed them money and needed his family inheritance to pay it. She was afraid that something else was going to happen, that the boys might be killed or kidnapped, and she wanted Sands to help get the boys home immediately. Sands managed to calm her and convince her that Tom no doubt needed the boys at a time like this. They should let John and Jim stay for the few remaining days of their visit, he said. He did not ask how she knew that the mob had killed Delores and Janie and that the murders had been “gangland” style. At that time, Kentucky police had said only that the murders appeared to be related to a robbery, and no details had been released.

When Tom returned to Albuquerque five days later, after burying his mother and sister and undergoing the suspicious questioning by the police, he again called Susie, this time with a nearly tearful request. Could the boys stay a little longer, maybe through his birthday? He really needed to be with them now, he said.

Susie’s answer was quick and curt. No. Impossible. She had plans for them. They were going camping. Tom couldn’t believe that she could be so cold and insensitive. Later he would remember that she didn’t even say she was sorry.

“That’s when I resolved to use all the money to get the boys back,” Tom said, referring to his inheritance.

On August 5, on schedule, Tom flew to Dallas with his sons so they could catch a direct flight to Greensboro. In the airport during their wait, he got a pocketful of quarters and played video games with them. John not only beat him, he scored so high on one machine that he got to add his initials to the list of top scorers. He strutted around proudly, like a football player who’d just raced ninety yards for a touchdown, but he cried when his father put him on the plane. He always cried on leaving.

31

Bob and Florence sent flowers to Delores and Janie’s funeral, and Tom used that as an opportunity to reestablish contact with his former in-laws.

On August 27, 1984, just before leaving Albuquerque to return to Louisville to deal with estate matters and face his third lie detector test for Detective Dan Davidson, Tom mailed them a five-page, handwritten letter.

Kathy and I want to thank you for the lovely floral arrangement. During a time like this, it’s knowing people care that is helping us deal with this terrible tragedy and senseless loss.

I’ve wanted to correspond with you before this but I felt awkward. Since the divorce, I wasn’t sure how you felt about communicating with me. There really shouldn’t be any reason for us not to correspond. You are the only grandparents John and Jim have. Since this tragedy and having lost my father in November, I am much more aware of how precious life is and the importance of having a close relationship with the boys.

Tom went on to recite a litany of concerns and complaints. He was worried that the boys took too many vitamins and medicines, concerned that they had no beds, slept on the floor, never got to play outside or participate in sports. He didn’t like it that they weren’t allowed to see Bob and Florence.

The thing that worries me most is the boys’ mental state. I am told by the boys that they are not allowed to call us collect, say prayers about me, send school pictures, cards or letters, or even talk about us. I see absolutely no reason for this and it could cause problems for the boys as they seem to feel guilty about it.

It bothers me, too, that the boys are so secretive about their lives. They seem to have certain subjects they aren’t allowed to talk about. I can’t understand the need for such secrets.

One of my biggest regrets is that the boys were never allowed to have a close relationship with my family and didn’t get to spend more time with them.

I don’t want to put you in an awkward position, but I love the boys and I’m concerned about them. I know you are concerned for their welfare, too.

Two weeks after receiving Tom’s letter, Florence mailed a reply.

“Yes,” she wrote, “we agree it is very important that the boys have a strong and good relationship with their father.”

She said she had little knowledge of the boys’ day-to-day activities and that she had offered beds for them but Susie had refused.

It would be nice if you could come and spend a few days and go through their daily routine with them. Also, I’m sure the boys would like for their teachers and friends to meet their father.

Bob and I feel that you should maintain as much contact as you can with the boys, and as they get older they will make more decisions for themselves.

We do what we can to maintain contact and have told Susie and the boys to call us at anytime they need us. We are here to help when our help is wanted or needed.

Tom made a copy of the letter he sent to Bob and Florence and enclosed it with a thank-you note for her sympathy card to Florence’s sister Louise, who lived in the big Sharp house in Reidsville. She responded immediately telling Tom that John and Jim were sweet children but she and other family members saw them infrequently.

Susie brought them to see me when she came to Reidsville to Dr. Klenner’s office, but she has not been here since his death. Florence rarely sees her, so she can give me little news. One-sided communications are hard to pursue.

I don’t know why Susie is being so difficult. Florence feels that she is making her a scapegoat for her unhappiness. Of course, we don’t know what happened in Albuquerque to break up your home. Susie can be awfully bossy and stubborn.

She closed by saying that she hoped Tom and Kathy would come for a visit.

There was purpose in Tom’s courting of Susie’s family. He and Kathy had been collecting information about children of divorce and how to develop cooperative plans to care for them, giving more balanced roles to the parents. They had consulted family counselors and a psychologist, who told them that the time Tom was allowed with his children was well below the norm. Tom wanted that time extended, wanted more influence in his sons’ lives. Down the road, he hoped the boys might choose to come and live with him. First, he wanted to know how Susie’s family felt.

I wanted to see who I was fighting against,” he recalled, “whether I was having to deal with the whole family or just her.”

He decided to involve Louise, the guardian of Sharp family heritage, for two reasons: “Number one, to get as much information as we could. Number two, to find out how things looked from Reidsville.

“We wanted everybody to know how the boys were being treated out here and to ask them how the boys were being treated back there. We were relying on Louise to feed us information we didn’t even ask for, the more information the better.”

Uncertain how to proceed, Tom decided to take Florence’s suggestion and come to North Carolina to see the boys and meet their friends and teachers. The trip had other purposes as well.

“We wanted everybody to see me and make sure I wasn’t some kind of ogre from out west and also to meet Kathy and let them see how she got along with the boys,” Tom recalled.

In October, Tom gave Susie the two weeks’ notice required by the court. He and Kathy flew to Greensboro the first week in November for a five-day visit. Wanting to have plenty of space for the boys, Tom rented an apartment at Guest Quarters. Not until he arrived did he realize the apartment was in the same complex as Susie’s, only a short distance away.

Susie was hostile when Tom picked up John and Jim. “She looked like a harpy,” he recalled. “Her hair was all disheveled and she had a weird look in her eyes. She looked like she was coming unraveled. She just threw their luggage at us.”

That morning, Susie had called her brother Rob, and with great urgency in her voice asked if she could come and talk with him. After moving in with his parents in March of 1983, Rob had gone to his uncle, Fred Klenner, for a couple of B vitamin treatments for his alcoholism. But the effects of the heavy drinking he’d given up two years earlier still lingered. He suffered from short-term memory loss that had caused great problems when he tried practicing law for several months, problems that attracted the attention of the state bar. He stopped practicing in September of 1983 and gave up his license in July 1984. Meanwhile, he had begun treatment at an alcoholism clinic in Southern Pines that was having good results, and he had taken a job as an alcoholism counselor with Guilford County. He agreed to meet Susie at his office on North Eugene Street.

Their conversation lasted nearly two hours and caused Rob concern and distress. Susie was filled with fears, frightened of Tom’s purpose in his trip, frightened of Tom himself, convinced still that he wanted to snatch the children. Earlier, she had said things that indicated that she thought Tom had criminal associations and was abusing prescription drugs. Now she said that she knew for certain that Tom was involved with the Mafia, that his underworld enemies had murdered his mother and sister, and that she feared that she might be murdered, too. She never went anywhere without her pistol or her dogs, she said. Since Rob last visited her apartment nearly a year earlier, Susie had bought another black chow, this one a female named Mai Ling, called Maizie by the boys. Susie took a .25-caliber Browning semiautomatic pistol from her purse and showed it to Rob, making him uncomfortable.

“Have you got a permit for that?” he asked. She said that she did and returned the weapon to her purse.

Rob reminded her that carrying a concealed weapon could get her arrested.

“That’s a heck of a lot better than being dead,” she said.

Rob, ever the lawyer, sought proof of her allegations against Tom. “I talked to her and tried to determine on what basis she believed these things,” he recalled later, “and never got any answer that was satisfying to me. Whenever I would ask her why she believed it she said she and Fritz had friends in the federal government, that Fritz was an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency and had access to all of this information.”

When Rob quizzed his sister about her relationship with Fritz, she said that he visited often to make certain that she and the boys were safe and sometimes took them camping. “She said she felt safer with him around and checking on them frequently,” he said later.

Rob didn’t believe any of the things Susie was saying about Tom, nor did he believe that Fritz was connected with the CIA.

“My initial thought was, Why don’t I call mental health and have her committed?” he said. He remembered his mother’s cousin who’d gone off the deep end and killed her estranged husband and herself, and wondered if nuttiness might be in the blood. When he suggested that Susie ought to seek counseling, she responded that she and the boys were already seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Andrew Courts, whom Rob had also seen briefly.

After Susie left, Rob was so disturbed that he called his parents, who were at Nanna’s that day. He told his father about the conversation and said he thought that Susie was acting irrationally and seemed deluded. He warned that they should be circumspect and cautious over the weekend, because Susie had seemed very excitable.

“I wasn’t worried about Susie so much as I was about Fritz,” he said later. “I suspected all along that this was bull that Fritz was feeding her.”

He wasn’t certain how his father received his call. “I had the distinct impression that Dad only half believed me,” he said. “I wasn’t sure my testimony was given great weight, that maybe they weren’t sure how far along the road to recovery I was.”