Deadly Seduction (17 page)

Susan did not seem the slightest bit perturbed. “I don’t know, Bob.”

Brinson grimaced when she started calling him by his first name as she had been doing back at the house. It made him feel uneasy. Then Susan blatantly panned her eyes down from Brinson’s face to that special below-the-belt zone, only to snap her eyes upward again. What was she playing at?

Then she did it again. This time there was no mistaking it. That seductive glance. The licking of her lips. Then she subtly thrust her breasts forward just enough for Brinson to notice. He knew that if he had smiled back she would have happily laid out on that table there and then and encouraged him to make love to her. How could she behave in this way just a few hours after her husband had been shot dead in their bedroom?

Bob Brinson resisted Susan with relative ease. After his long and varied experience as a state trooper, he wasn’t about to throw away his career in one stupid moment. This was the calling card of the arch manipulator. She was trying to flirt with him to water down his interrogation of her.

Just then she clasped the investigator’s hand in hers as he stood alongside her. Brinson tensed up instantly and pulled his hand away.

This was not the behavior of an honest victim, thought Bob Brinson.

Then he noticed she was once again staring at his groin area. She wanted him to see her doing it. Susan had spent her life seducing men and Investigator Brinson was going to become her next conquest unless he was very careful.

Eventually, Brinson’s initial inner tension relaxed and he made a conscious decision to play along with her seductive games. It was obviously going to be the only way to get her to open up about what had happened.

He once again started questioning Susan on a very basic level, asking her things like her children’s names, ages, her family background. He was trying to soften her up because what he really wanted to know was whether there had been a time during the previous evening when she had been alone at the house on Summit Drive.

Every now and again, Susan shed a few tears, but to Brinson’s expert eye they seemed far from genuine. She kept saying she had no idea who had killed her husband. In Brinson’s opinion, she was giving an Oscar-winning performance. But he wasn’t finished yet.

Susan went on to tell Brinson all about the obscene phone calls she said she had received and how she contacted the telephone company, who had made a report to the Indiana State Police. Susan also claimed that Jimmy Grund had heard some of these obscene calls as well. (Brinson actually traced the police report that had been filed as case #16–5834 on March 15, 1991.)

Brinson then changed tactics and began asking Susan about her husband’s will. There was no point in beating about the bush, he thought to himself. She knew perfectly well why he had brought her in, so why not get down to basics?

“Has your husband made any new wills recently, Mrs. Grund?”

At that moment, Bob Brinson could have sworn he saw her lip curl and her tongue run seductively across the lower part of her mouth.

“I left all that to Jimmy,” she purred. “Apart from going to his office and signing on the dotted line.”

Susan was supremely cool at this stage, even though it was absolutely crystal clear that Brinson suspected her of being involved in her husband’s murder. She even admitted that Jim and she had signed a new will on July 17, 1992, less than a month before the homicide. She insisted that she had gotten him to change his will because of their vacation to Alaska.

“Was anyone else present when you signed the will?”

Susan said that Jim Grund’s legal secretary Diane Hough had been present throughout, but she repeated her claim that she could not remember the details of that meeting.

Susan then switched topics and began speaking in emotive terms about that last vacation, how good it had been for the kids to be with their father. She started sobbing. Then she went on, only to stop again within minutes. Then more sobbing.

*   *   *

Brinson was already well aware of that other break-in two years earlier, which he suspected had been stage-managed by Susan in order to make an illegal insurance claim. He also wondered whether it had been a dry run for the actual murder of Jim Grund.

He was especially keen to find out more about the carefully balanced seminude photograph of Susan that was found so conveniently positioned on a drawer following the alleged burglary and killing of Jimmy Grund. He asked her if she regularly posed for such photographs for her husband.

Another seductive smile curled onto Susan’s lips as she nonchalantly recalled to Brinson that she estimated between thirty and forty such photographs had been taken. Brinson was a bit surprised—after all, he was interviewing the wife of one of Peru’s most prominent citizens.

Just before winding up the interview, Bob Brinson decided to ask Susan the most obvious question of all. “Can you guess why anyone would murder your husband?”

Susan did not hesitate in her reply.

“I cannot.”

“Is there anything you want to add to this tape that you think we ought to know at this point?”

“No.”

*   *   *

The strangest aspect of that interview from Bob Brinson’s point of view was that Susan Grund had repeated, almost word for word, what she had told him just after that burglary at her home in 1990. The only difference this time was that her husband had been murdered.

*   *   *

Bob Brinson was never actually contacted by Susan Grund again following that interview. That, in itself, made him very suspicious of her role in Jim’s death. Usually, relatives of slain people were on his back within days if not hours of such a killing. They would pester him and demand all his attention. They always wanted to know what was happening, who the suspects were. They tended to want answers, even more than the investigators themselves. But not Susan Grund.

With many of Peru’s top notch citizens awakened in their beds the previous night with the news of Jimmy Grund’s murder, an account of his killing rapidly reached the town newspaper, the
Peru Daily Tribune.

ATTORNEY FOUND SHOT TO DEATH
was enough to grab the attention of any curious members of the community.

Investigators were at first naturally reluctant to provide the press with many details. Indiana State Police Sgt. Bob Land even refused to say whether there had been signs of a struggle or forced entry at the house on Summit Drive.

Up at the property, a row of brown and tan police cruisers outside the house contrasted sharply with the serenity of the wealthy area. Residents in the exclusive neighborhood were dismayed by the news of Jimmy Grund’s death.

“He was always friendly and seemed like a nice person,” said neighbor Thea Hoppes in a statement that could have referred to any of the hundreds of violent deaths that occur each week across the United States.

None of the residents who lived on the estate recalled hearing gunshots the previous evening.

Peru school superintendent Tom McKaig, who had worked alongside Jim Grund in his capacity as an attorney for the Peru School Board, was just as stunned. He told reporters, “I knew him well on a professional basis and that’s probably why I’m sort of sitting here in my own shock. Jim dealt with a variety of things from negotiations to policy matters to personnel matters, and he always handled them all in an exceptional manner.”

Also quoted in the
Peru Daily Tribune
August 4 report of the murder was Wil Siders, president of the Miami County Bar Association and the county’s chief prosecuting attorney.

“I think anyone that ever worked with him would give him all the respect as an attorney,” said Siders. “Members of the bar association lost a good member of the bar and a good friend. I feel very deeply for his family.”

On the day of the murder, police had to get a subpoena from the Honorable Judge Bruce Embrey ordering the Dukes Memorial Hospital to produce the taped telephone conversation between Susan Grund and the ambulance service. Sgt. Kenneth Roland served the subpoena to the hospital administrator and immediately had the tape transcribed. Wil Siders believed it might prove to be crucial evidence at a later date.

Wil Siders never at any stage felt his close proximity to the Grund family would in any way hinder his abilities as a prosecuting attorney. Yet he obviously was seriously upset about the killing of his friend and colleague.

Judge Embrey, who was to later be involved in the initial stages of the arrest—and charging of an eventual suspect—was also quoted in that same article in the
Peru Daily Tribune.
He had been to the house within hours of Jimmy Grund’s death, along with Wil Siders.

Judge Embrey said, “It’s like losing a family member. The whole thing is just a terrible shock.”

He had never forgotten how, a few years earlier, Jimmy Grund had been piloting a light plane they had been traveling in to Bloomington for an Indiana University ball game. The engine had started spluttering at ten thousand feet and they had to make an emergency landing in a field. Judge Embrey decided never to fly in a small plane again.

Embrey and Wil Siders had spoken at length during their visit to the house on Summit Drive, just a short time after the shooting of Jimmy Grund. Both played a prominent role in bringing the killer to justice, despite their close connections to the family of the victim.

Investigator Bob Brinson was very concerned about the presence of both the judge and Siders in the case. He felt that they were too personally involved.

Brinson felt the same way about Jimmy Grund’s good friend Peru Police Sgt. Gary Nichols. At the start of the investigation, he found Nichols to be very biased against Susan and it created endless difficulties. Brinson fully appreciated how hard it must have been for Nichols to separate his personal and professional views when such a close friend was a murder victim, but he found Nichols’s involvement in the case irritating. Brinson felt that some of the law enforcement officials who knew Jimmy Grund were trying to tell him how to do his job, not to mention the fact that they all believed they could solve the murder in a split second, if given the chance.

Nichols believed—rightly or wrongly—that Brinson was deliberately choosing to ignore his advice in those early stages of the homicide inquiry. He considered Brinson to be overconfident of solving the case quickly. Gary Nichols had known Susan Grund for almost ten years and in his opinion she was going to be the toughest nut of all to crack. He genuinely believed that Brinson would need all the help he could get. Also, Nichols felt a twinge of guilt. After all, he had been the one who first introduced Jim to Susan.

His own feelings of responsibility manifested themselves in a near obsession with Susan’s guilt. His best friend had been murdered by the woman whom he had suggested to Jim for a blind date. Nichols had always been more aware of Susan’s darker side than Jim, who had been prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt during the early years of their marriage.

Gary Nichols’s emotional feelings about what had happened to Jim Grund were driving him into the investigation whether other officials liked it or not. He was not going to stay out of it until Susan was brought to justice.

The day after the killing, reporters began appearing at the house on Summit Drive in dribs and drabs—many of them had trouble even finding the isolated property and spent hours asking round the neighborhood for directions.

Down at Shanty Malone’s on South Broadway, regulars were exchanging consoling hugs and collecting money for flowers.

As news of the murder of Jimmy Grund spread across the town, it sent shockwaves through the tightly-knit community.

Hours after the murder, a sign was hung on the door of the law offices of Fern, Grund, and Grund. It read, “Office closed due to the death of James Grund.”

Workers at the office were naturally upset by the news. One of them, Christian Sands, summed up the situation when he said that Jimmy Grund’s impact on his career would stay with him for the rest of his life. “He took me under his wing. I don’t know why exactly. I guess I was lucky.”

The day after her husband’s appalling slaying in the house on Summit, Susan Grund moved back into the property. Investigators and others in Peru were surprised that a grieving widow should return so quickly to the scene of such an awful crime.

Susan also moved her children Tanelle and Jacob back into the vast house. All three of them stayed in the basement of the property. It deeply disturbed the youngsters that they were expected to sleep in the house, but Susan could not stand the mess and clutter of her sister’s and mother’s homes on 3rd Street, Peru.

A few days after moving back in, little Jacob told one family friend, “I don’t understand why Mommy got us back in the house where Daddy got killed.” He was clearly shaken by the situation.

Helicopters buzzing overhead probably didn’t help, either.

Less than twenty-four hours after the killing, Gary Nichols broke all the rules by flying above the house on Summit Drive in a helicopter he was piloting on behalf of the county for another investigation. The other case involved a homicide where it was believed the victim had been buried in the backyard of a house, and Nichols and another technician were ordered to fly over that property and see if there were signs of a disturbance in the backyard using a highly complex infrared camera that was sensitive to within a tenth of a degree. Nichols was only one of six people in the state of Indiana certified to make such infrared searches.

However, on the way back from the real reason for his flight that evening, Nichols decided to go and take a look at his old pal Jimmy Grund’s house, in the UH1-style helicopter on loan from the local National Guard. The aircraft was very similar to the types of choppers used to ferry troops to front lines during the Vietnam War.

Nichols openly intended the constant whirling of those massive rotors as he flew just above treetop level across the open countryside near the Grund mansion to “psychologically freak out” Susan, if nothing else. And since he was up there anyhow, it made sense to give it a whirl.