Deadly Seduction (13 page)

Don Bakehorn was concerned enough by that incident to bring it up with Jimmy Grund a few days later. Jim told his old friend that he would change the will back anytime he chose if he didn’t like the way things went with Susan.

Jim also told Don that he didn’t believe in prenuptial agreements because “a man should trust his wife or not marry her.”

But the tensions between Jimmy and Susan continued. It had got to the point where they argued regularly in public—a bad sign in any relationship.

On a trip to Minnesota for the NCAA playoffs, Susan and Jim really laid into each other when the name of Susan’s doctor in Indianapolis came up. It was clear to all their friends present that day that Jimmy Grund was jealous of the doctor and suspected Susan was having an affair with him. Actually, nothing could have been further from the truth. He was the doctor who had made Susan consult an older physician because he was so concerned about the sexual overtures given out by Susan.

Somehow, through all this, Susan continued to keep in contact with her former husband Gary Campbell, despite Jim Grund’s decision to blot him out of their lives. No one knows whether they were sleeping together or not, but it seemed as if Campbell was actually trying to get a further loan off the Grunds.

In the midspring of 1992, Susan visited Oklahoma to see her sister Simmy and attend her baby shower. Gary and Susan met for breakfast and talked about Jacob and how he had been progressing in school. Campbell later insisted nothing else happened between them.

Meanwhile, Susan’s resentment toward her husband Jim seemed to be increasing virtually on a daily basis. One time, a couple of friends called to drop off some scuba gear they had borrowed and witnessed firsthand the tensions between Susan and Jim when the couple started screaming at one another about some petty point.

In the middle of that particular row, Jim jokingly suggested his wife hire a hitman if she was so cheesed off with him. Susan screamed back that he would probably miss anyhow. Jimmy Grund then said that if someone was going to succeed they should shoot their victim in the eye because of the thin bone structure in that area. Susan Grund looked over at her husband with an intrigued expression on her face. “Really,” she thought to herself. “That is
very
interesting.”

Around this time, Susan met up with a girlfriend for lunch in Peru and the conversation got around to what Susan was doing workwise, now that her boutique had burnt down.

“My full-time job is setting Jim up good so that if he leaves me, he leaves without anything,” came her stone-cold reply. It was a remarkably similar comment to what she had told her senator friend a few months previously. A definite pattern was emerging.

Susan went on to shock another friend by talking in great, proud terms about how she could sexually please men and therefore get everything she wanted. She insisted it was that way with Jim Grund. She clearly made out she had him twisted around her little finger. She also made it clear that she loved sex with other men and would use it for whatever she wanted. Old habits were certainly dying hard for Susan Grund.

In May 1992, Susan started telling some of her closer girlfriends that she was planning to get her and Jimmy’s wills changed. She said she wanted to ensure that Tanelle and Jacob got more protection in case either of their parents died.

One friend was astonished when she saw Jimmy and Susan arguing yet again about the contents of their wills at a cookout at a neighbor’s home. There was absolutely no attempt on the part of Susan to hide what she was saying.

One of Susan’s best friends at this time was Pamela Oglesby. She lived just across the open land that separated each of the huge houses on Summit Drive. Susan and Pamela would regularly call round at each other’s houses for coffee and sometimes they would go into town and enjoy a healthy lunch together, usually paid for by Susan out of that generous allowance given to her by Jimmy every month.

Susan proudly boasted to Pamela about her extramarital affairs. She mentioned the accountant, although she insisted that had fizzled out because the sex was not very memorable. Susan also revealed to Pamela that she was hosting a “Wednesday dinner group,” which involved businessmen from Logansport. It all sounded incredibly blatant to Pamela, but that was exactly how Susan wanted it to be. She still believed in flaunting her behavior rather than hiding it. The dinner group was supposed to be a gathering of corporate minds where businesspeople could swap ideas. But some suspected it was more like a meat market for Susan to pick and choose whom she wanted to seduce.

There was another man who had had a liaison with Susan at Lake Maxinkuckee, she told Pamela. But she never revealed his name.

Throughout all these brazen confessions of adultery, Susan insisted to her friend Pamela that she had an open marriage, but Pamela had seen the Grunds together as a couple and it was crystal clear to her that Jim didn’t like Susan behaving in such a loose manner.

Susan also told Pamela that she was not at all happy with the will Jim had recently redrafted because it still did not have the sort of clauses she believed were essential to Tanelle and Jacob’s well-being. She admitted openly challenging Jim to make several changes. Susan kept on saying the will wasn’t fair to the children, but the overriding impression was that she was thinking about herself and the possessions she stood to lose. She kept on bringing the subject back around to exactly how much money Jim had.

Susan was careful not to mention her alleged affair with stepson David. Pamela was obviously a little too close to home for her to be told about that alleged relationship.

But Susan’s sexual prowess was sometimes overshadowed by the sort of domestic problems most couples can relate to. Jim was fed up with her spending so much money and he told her so one night. He was particularly angry because she had maxxed out her credit cards. Jim got so furious that time he thumped his fists on the table in front of Susan, but she glanced back at him with a totally blank expression. She didn’t really care.

*   *   *

Around this time, Susan’s glamorous photo once again popped up in the
Peru Daily Tribune.
On this occasion, she was pictured showing eighteen-year-old Kim Vrooman the proper way to walk while on stage during the Miss Miami County contest practice session. The photo was particularly memorable because Susan looked extremely chic and sexy in a short black skirt with black stockings and stiletto heels. Her hair appeared to have been styled especially for the occasion.

Less than two weeks later, she was in the papers again whilst training contestants for the Little Miss Pageant at the Grund home on Summit Drive. There seemed no end to Susan’s abilities for self-promotion. Every time she saw her photo in the paper she saw it as yet further evidence of her important role in Peru society.

Susan was also still involved in the reelection campaign for her favorite local senator.

At one particular Republican fund-raiser, Susan even showed up with her friend, the gay choreographer who once had turned down her sexual overtures, and introduced him to everyone there. Many present winced as they watched Susan petting the hand of her male friend. She considered him a great challenge and was still convinced they would have an affair.

That evening, Susan, her friend the choreographer, and Jim Grund, plus a few elite members of Peru’s high society, went to an establishment called Homer’s for drinks and dancing. Susan never once danced with her husband the whole evening, but she astonished other guests by grinding suggestively up against her gay friend. Susan still felt that the choreographer had thrown down the gauntlet by insisting he was gay. She wanted to prove to herself she could have any man she wanted.

Even more significantly, Susan began having very serious conversations with Jim about them both seeking help, from a marriage counselor. She was not keen on the idea, but Jim insisted they could sort out their problems with a little effort on both sides. His eternal optimism was shining through once again. But it was an aspect of his character that would ultimately prove his downfall.

One time, Susan went to Fort Wayne on a shopping trip with a girlfriend and she talked frankly about the problems caused by the large age gap between her and Jim.

Susan moaned yet again about how Jim was always coming home tired and rarely wanted to go out for the evening. She, on the other hand, looked forward to their social life immensely and could not understand or appreciate why he was so tired.

When Susan’s friend joked about Jim probably being tired because he was carrying on an affair, Susan snapped back furiously,
“I’d kill Jim if I ever caught him having an affair.”

She even went on to add that during one argument she had told him what she would do if she ever caught him. “I made it quite clear to him that I was serious,” she later told her friend.

*   *   *

It was around this time in 1992 that Susan was occasionally spotted out driving with her stepson David on Main Street, Peru. They would be sitting close to each other like a pair of lovestruck teenagers in Susan’s car, apparently oblivious to the attention they were provoking in that very small town.

Susan continued to spin her story to certain close friends, telling them that she was having an affair with David and that he was a fantastic lover, “much better than James [Grund].” Susan said it was hard to believe that they were father and son.

When some of Susan’s friends tried to persuade her to stop the friendship she became very protective of David.

“He’s a really wonderful guy,” she purred.

Susan sometimes used her part-time course at law school (paid for by Jimmy Grund, naturally) as an excuse to meet up with David or some of her other male friends.

*   *   *

One of the main bones of contention between Susan and Jim Grund was his ownership and patronage of Shanty Malone’s bar. Jim tended to stop by the friendly hostelry most evenings on his way home from his law offices.

Susan found it increasingly irritating that Jim would often find time to drop in and see his drinking buddies, but he was always so tired by the time he got home. Those far-off early days of their marriage when Jim seemed like such a romantic guy appeared to be locked in the past.

However Shanty Malone’s actually represented for Jim a refuge from Susan. Her incessant phone calls to the bar when she felt it was time Jim got himself home simply reaffirmed his belief that an evening with his friends, and a few vodka and tonics, was far preferable to a difficult supper for two at the house on Summit Drive.

Jim was encouraged in this belief by most of the regulars at Shanty’s—none of whom had any time for Susan. They considered her to be snooty, stuck-up, and dangerous.

Jim Grund was well aware of his wife’s bitterness, but he took the attitude that she needed his money, so she was highly unlikely to just get up and leave him.

Sometimes, even Jim was capable of being fairly cruel to his demanding wife. He put her to the ultimate test when he took a woman associate on a business trip to New York City after insisting to Susan that the woman had a legitimate reason for being on the trip.

Susan was livid. Afterwards she heard how nice her husband had been to this woman, although there is absolutely no suggestion that anything of a sexual nature occurred. But that got Susan even more annoyed. She wanted an excuse to pay him back by sleeping with even more men. Either that, or she wanted to give him a deadly ultimatum. At one stage, Susan was so irritated by her husband’s apparent fidelity that she started a rumor about Jim having an affair with another woman just to ease her own guilty conscience.

At an Easter gathering in March 1992 of most of Jim’s family and friends at the family lakeside cabin on Lake Maxinkuckee, Jim’s sister Jane overheard Susan and Jim having a vicious argument about Susan apparently lying about wanting Jim’s motor dealership partner Fred (Jane’s husband) to repair some of her relatives’ cars.

Jim had known nothing about the repairs and became angry at what he saw as an abuse of the business. In the end, Jim got so furious he said he was going to tell Fred to stop repairing Susan’s relatives’ cars, even at cost price.

Susan stormed out of the cabin and only returned a few hours later to pack her bags and tell Jim, “We’re outta here.”

When Jim hesitated she screamed at him in a piercing voice, quivering with emotion, and to all those present it seemed very scary.

A few weeks later, Susan telephoned the dealership and talked to Fred Allen. She put on her silkiest Southern-doll voice and insisted that she and Jim had straightened everything out, and Jim would never accuse Susan of lying again or “that will be the end of him.”

It was a strange comment to make to your own brother-in-law and it sounded terribly sinister to Fred Allen. He decided there and then that Susan was somebody to keep a close eye on.

Eight

If Susan was to be believed, her relationship with stepson David was beginning to resemble the mega-famous roles of Mrs. Robinson and the Graduate, played so effectively by Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross in the hit movie,
The Graduate.

During their illicit rendezvous, Susan and David would regularly talk about how he felt toward his father. They clearly did not get on very well, although much of that apparent animosity seemed to be fueled by Jim Grund’s generosity towards his pretty, younger wife. David felt frustrated by his father’s refusal to pay his son a reasonably sized allowance.

Then, just before Jim’s murder, according to Susan, she and her stepson were almost caught in the middle of the act of making love.

David had turned up at the house on Summit for one of his regular, intimate lunches. Just after David arrived, Susan got a call from Jim wanting to know if she would join him for lunch at Shanty Malone’s. Susan told Jim that David was at the house and promised that they would meet Jim down at Shanty’s.

But within minutes, according to Susan, she was making love to David in the house. Just then they heard a car approaching. It was Jim turning up in the driveway.