Deadly Seduction (20 page)

In any case, Brinson was back to square one and his main suspect was still Susan Grund.

But that didn’t stop her contacting a company called Kemper Insurance about a $250,000 life insurance policy on Jimmy. She was very anxious about how quickly a payment could be made to her following her husband’s death.

Thirteen

On August 12, 1992, just one week after the murder of his father, David Grund agreed to take a polygraph test for Indiana State Police Investigator Bob Brinson. It was a controversial move by the state trooper who was only too aware of the Grund family influence in Peru and the fact that everyone in town had tried and convicted Susan Grund in their own minds, and found her guilty of first-degree murder.

But Brinson was a stubborn son of a gun and he did not like the fact that everyone was walking around Peru treating Susan’s guilt as a foregone conclusion. He was extremely concerned about the relationship between Susan Grund and her stepson David. He had discovered that she was a regular visitor to the boy’s apartment and before that, to his house in the countryside outside town. He also had discovered that Susan was not averse to using her body for her own sexual satisfaction, and a lot more besides. Brinson had his suspicions that maybe David and Susan had a thing going and perhaps they had devised the entire “theft” of the gun as a stunt to confuse investigators when it came to the subsequent murder of Jimmy Grund. And even if that was not the case, there had to be a reason why Susan had used her stepson’s gun as the murder weapon. Maybe she had tried to enlist David and he had turned her down? Then, she had decided to keep the gun to make sure that David would not testify against her for fear he would be implicated in the killing? Bob Brinson knew full well that David was a crucial player in his investigation.

Despite the fact that all his investigations pointed to Susan as the sole killer of her husband, Bob Brinson wondered whether Jim Grund had been murdered as part of some larger conspiracy, a plot involving another family member other than Susan, perhaps Grund’s son. Within forty-eight hours, Brinson would discard this theory entirely, but at the time it seemed to make sense.

David Grund was in deep shock about his father’s killing. But as a law student, he knew that his involvement—after all it was his gun that was used to shoot Jimmy Grund—was questionable on the surface, although none of that mattered because he knew he had the whole town behind him. The only person they wanted to see up there in the dock was Susan.

However, Bob Brinson and his Indiana State Police unit still had questions about David’s involvement. There was no getting away from that fact that his gun was the murder weapon. And they had received calls from Peru residents insisting that David and Susan
did
have an affair.

Initially, Bob Brinson had been impressed by Trooper Investigator Boyles’ account of his earlier meeting with David just after his father’s murder. But David’s apparently photographic memory of the TV programs he’d watched on the night of the killing of his father did bother Brinson.

However, David willingly visited the Indiana State Police Post in Peru, and allowed trooper Sgt. Mark James to give him a polygraph test. Bob Brinson—still disappointed about his failure to get Susan to submit to a similar test—was very anxious to find out if David was somehow involved. Some of the other town officials were outraged that he should even vaguely suspect David, but Brinson was determined not to be swayed by the high and mighty of Peru’s closely knit upper class residents.

David was understandably nervous when he showed up at the ISP’s Peru post. He went through a brief pretest interview, during which he was told the nature of the questions he would be asked during the polygraph.

Then Sergeant James placed two pneumotubes on his upper and lower chest. Next followed a blood pressure cuff before wires were linked to two of his fingertips to measure his eventual perspiration during questioning. The theory behind polygraphs is that they measure the fear of detection in a subject. Experts claim that when a subject lies his or her body goes into what they call flight mode and that is picked up on the graph linked up to those wires.

When Sgt. James began asking some of his ten, carefully-formulated questions to David, his body went almost instantaneously into flight mode. Over the following hour and a half, David took at least three separate tests, during which he was asked the same set of questions. Between each test the heavily perspiring law student was given a breather so that his blood pressure did not get too high. The polygraph machine measured David’s temperature, blood pressure, perspiration, and breathing throughout the questioning. A straight line on the polygraph told the examiner that he might not be answering truthfully.

The specific responses of David to the polygraph have never been revealed. There was a virtual cloak of secrecy thrown around his involvement in the case and many of the town’s most powerful figures went to great lengths to prevent anything other than the barest details of that polygraph test ever being revealed.

Bob Brinson’s carefully documented report of the case’s initial stages only mentions the following, hidden in the middle of a wordy thirty-six page report:

On 8-12-92 David Grund was given a polygraph examination by Sgt. Mark James. David failed the polygraph. It was suspected that David may have problems with feelings that his stolen gun was used to kill his father James Grund. A second polygraph was scheduled later after David has time to recover from the emotions on his father’s death.

The report does not mention the specific questions that David was asked for the polygraph test. It does not detail any of his actual responses at the time. And there is absolutely no reference to the results of any further tests. Certain officials in Peru admitted two years later that no such follow up polygraph test ever took place.

Undoubtedly, David would have been asked whether he was involved in his father’s murder and the earlier theft of the gun from his home. His failure at the time left the question of his involvement open to conjecture. And ISP investigators even gently interrogated him further following his failure on the polygraph machine, as they would do with anyone who was a murder suspect and failed. Details of that interrogation are also very hard to come by.

Information about David’s polygraph test was kept completely out of the local newspapers, who gave every other aspect of the case saturation coverage for the first three months following the killing.

While polygraphs are by no means conclusive, they are used regularly by corporations across the United States for prospective employees and it is estimated they have a ninety-five percent success rate in relation to establishing whether a subject is lying or not.

The whole question of David Grund’s relationship with his stepmother was pivotal to the entire inquiry. Jimmy Grund’s good friend and colleague Gary Nichols put it in less than flattering terms when asked if he thought that David had had an affair with Susan.

“Let’s put it this way; blow jobs don’t count, do they?”

Gary Nichols insisted afterwards that he did not mean to imply that David was involved in a physical relationship with Susan, but it does make one wonder.

Nichols—who was probably closer to the entire scenario than any other person in Peru—openly admitted that David Grund was “not the best boy in town at that stage.”

He went on, “Like father like son. David drives a Toyota, Jimmy drove a Toyota. Jimmy married Susan, David’s girlfriend is a girl called Suzanne, although she now calls herself Denise.”

Nichols believed that David and his father were very much alike and, if that was the case, then Jimmy Grund’s son could be capable of doing
anything.

To further confuse the situation, investigators were given a deposition by David’s girlfriend’s ex-husband during which he insisted that David had been seen at a local bowling alley with his gun days after he had reported it stolen.

If true, this would imply that David was involved in the death of his father. But investigators and later, Susan’s defense attorneys, were never able to find any other witnesses to back those claims. And given the ex-husband’s possible bias, they were not credited.

Susan’s mother Nellie to this day believes her daughter and insists that Susan and David were lovers. She never forgot the giveaway signs that her daughter and her stepson were getting close, the touches, the smiles.

“David was red-hot for Susan. I could tell. It was all so obvious,” Nellie later insisted.

Most significantly, prosecutor Wil Siders admitted the following in February 1995: “If there is any part of Jimmy in his own son then I could believe it [that David was having an affair with Susan]. But I don’t care if David screwed her or not.”

Other friends of the couple believe that Susan did have an affair with David, but that it ended a few months before the murder and she was so angry with her stepson that she deliberately tried to frame him for the killing. They are convinced that David did not want his father to know about the relationship and he got Susan to agree to keep it secret. But when she saw David together with his girlfriend Suzanne, she got insanely jealous.

Interestingly, Bob Brinson did manage to persuade David’s girlfriend Suzanne Plunkett to take a polygraph and she passed with flying colors, providing David with an alibi for his movements on the night Jimmy Grund was murdered.

It is absolutely clear that Bob Brinson and his unit of investigators did suspect David Grund of being involved in his father’s murder up until that point in their inquiries. Why the finger of suspicion was lifted after the results of these polygraphs became known to certain law enforcement officials has never been fully explained.

In the middle of all this, Brinson found himself with the frustrating task of knowing more about the case than he could ever prove. A lot of anonymous callers had contacted the Peru post of the Indiana State Police, making suggestions about others being involved in the murder of Jimmy Grund. But when Brinson tried to persuade the callers to identify themselves, the line always went dead.

What really concerned Bob Brinson was that it was becoming increasingly clear that a lot of people knew much more than they were admitting. But the cloak of secrecy that surrounded the activities of certain members of Peru’s tightly-knit upper class was proving impenetrable.

Two days later, Brinson’s unit was once again approached by their earlier informant who had insisted Gary Campbell was involved in Jim Grund’s murder. The source was indignant that the troopers appeared not to believe her. But Sergeant Roland, who had conducted the original interview, noticed that his informant was not so sure of the actual details of her claims. It seemed almost as if she had been pushed into going back to the investigators by someone. Bob Brinson had his suspicions who that person might be.

That same day, August 14, investigators checked the records at the Miami County Jail to find out if the ex-husband of Suzanne Plunkett (David Grund’s girlfriend) was in custody on the night of the murder. Records clearly indicated that he had been in jail from June 26 on charges of intimidation filed by David Grund which meant he could not have been involved in the theft of the gun. He was still in jail on those same charges when Jimmy Grund was killed.

In Peru itself, people were starting to ask why Susan Grund had not yet been arrested. Her supposed guilt was a poorly kept secret. Pressure was mounting on the investigators for a fast result.

This was especially frustrating for the Indiana State Police officials involved in the inquiry because they were trying to remain as impartial as possible, despite the personal links that just about everyone had with the case.

On August 18, Indiana State Police District Commander Lt. Carlos Pettiford was obliged to make a statement about the fact that detectives from his Peru post had been working on the case seven days a week since the homicide. “They have put in enormous hours and we plan to continue until we apprehend someone or until we have more leads to go on. This is a priority case,” insisted Lt. Pettiford.

Meanwhile, one of Susan’s closest friends telephoned the house on Summit Drive to offer her condolences.

“Wouldn’t it be terrible never to know who killed Jim?” asked the friend.

The line went silent. Only Susan’s uneven breathing could be heard. Then she spoke, “What do you mean?”

“I mean, to never know who did it,” replied the friend.

Susan immediately changed the subject and began talking about the family’s vacation in Alaska.

Two weeks after Jimmy Grund’s murder, Susan and the children moved out of the house on Summit Drive and headed for a house her aunt had rented for her in Vincennes, Indiana, where many of her relatives lived.

Thousands of feet overhead, the FBI were piloting a light aircraft that swooped overhead the house as she departed. The investigators had no idea where Susan was heading. In fact, they feared she might be trying to slip out of the country in a bid to avoid justice.

Susan never even noticed the air surveillance team, mainly because the Air Force base near Peru was usually so busy that the distant buzz of a plane was not even worth thinking about.

Susan’s son Jacob was her only passenger as she had already sent Tanelle ahead with her sister. In the car, Susan behaved very strangely towards her young son, repeatedly saying to him that she didn’t want to live any longer because she thought the police believed she had murdered her husband. One can only wonder what long-term effect this must have had on the child.

On the ground, a surveillance team car occupied by four investigators including prosecutor Wil Siders, Sgt. Gary Nichols, and Bob Brinson kept a safe distance from Susan. They watched her through night-vision sight binoculars.

Susan spotted shadows on the ground and once she got on the freeway she pushed her foot to the floor and topped speeds of ninety miles per hour. She managed to lose the investigators just outside Indianapolis. Nichols and Siders were infuriated. It seemed as if she was always able to get one step ahead. They knew they were dealing with a very clever lady.