Deadly Seduction (26 page)

Nellie carefully moved the last box out from the back of the corner of the attic and lifted up the heavy metal container. A few minutes later, she loaded it up with the rest of her stuff and headed back to Peru.

The day after arriving in Peru, Nellie Sanders called the police and told them about the container and what was in it. Her conscience had got the better of her and she couldn’t keep quiet about it a moment longer.

As soon as he was told, prosecutor Wil Siders called Gary Nichols at his office on Broadway. “Come on down to Susan’s mother’s house. I think she’s got something for us to look at.”

The investigators went equipped with hammers and chisels.

On arrival at the house, Peru Police Sergeant Nichols—Jim Grund’s best friend—and Indiana State Police Investigator Bob Brinson struggled to lift the heavy container with its awkward oval shape. Its sides were beaten and dented. It was dirty and old. The investigators started chipping away at the concrete and it gradually began to crumble. There, lying in the bottom was the rusting semiautomatic that had once belonged to David Grund. It was embedded in concrete. They had at last found the key piece of evidence in the murder of Jimmy Grund.

Two aspects of the discovery of the gun really puzzled Nichols, Brinson, and Miami County Prosecutor Wil Siders:

1. Why was there still one bullet from the gun unaccounted for? Susan had started out with thirteen bullets. One was recovered after it exited Jimmy Grund’s head, but investigators only ever found eleven. The gun was also in the cocked position. No one could understand why an experienced markswoman like Susan Grund would be so careless.

2. Why did Susan keep the gun after killing her husband? Did she intend to use the gun as a means to prevent David from testifying against her? It was certainly true that at one stage in the investigation the close relationship between Susan and David raised questions for some investigators.

Charlie Scruggs, Susan’s defense attorney, was knocked sideways by the news of the discovery of the gun. It was a devastating blow to his defense case. Susan had given him no hint of its whereabouts throughout almost nine months of conversations with her defending counsel.

Up until that point Scruggs had been visiting Susan at least two or three times a week and they had always got along very well. But Scruggs was now beginning to wonder what he had let himself in for.

*   *   *

Throughout all this, Miami County Prosecutor Wil Siders was determined to retain the right to prosecute the alleged killer of his friend and colleague, Jimmy Grund. Inferences that he was too close to the Grund family were brushed aside—that was Wil Siders’s style.

Siders was born forty days earlier than Jim Grund on November 13, 1945, in Miami County, although his slim, athletic build gives a sense of him being younger than his fifty years. Siders has, as he jokingly put it, “four kids of record,” and his wife is a nurse. In short, he is yet another member of the same exclusive set that Jimmy Grund belonged to—a man who plays hard and fast, but plays by the book. A prime member of Peru society.

Siders served with the Marine Corps in Vietnam, mainly in Denang. “It gave me a twisted sense of humor when it comes to seeing lots of dead bodies,” is his way of explaining away his experiences. He came out of the Marines a captain and soon turned to the law as the best way to earn a good living.

Some observers of the Susan Grund case continued to be rather surprised by Siders’s involvement in the case. “Many people thought he was too close to this,” said
Peru Daily Tribune
reporter Andy Pierce. But it had long ago become clear that Wil Siders was not going to step down.

Rookie reporter Andy Pierce literally had been thrown in the deep end when he found himself covering the case just a few weeks after joining the paper, following a three-month stint on one of the group’s sister papers in nearby Frankfurt. Before that Pierce had been at journalism school. At first, the young reporter was flattered that he was being allowed to cover such a prestigious event, until it was pointed out that there was no one else available to do the job. The rest of the
Tribune
staff had been sent out to cover a big drug bust at a house in the country where a new, highly dangerous drug called CAT was being manufactured.

For Pierce, the Grund case was a dream assignment—literally. The twenty-two-year-old reporter rapidly found himself so involved in the story that he started dreaming about developments in the trial before they actually occurred.

An added test for the young scribe was that tape recorders were banned from the courtroom, so he had to use shorthand transcripts which then had to be turned into articles for his paper in double quick time. Peru was proving to have an insatiable appetite for news of the case. Pierce was told by his editor that they had as much space as he could fill each and every day.

Some of the other reporters covering the trial for newspapers in the surrounding areas even had strong personal links with Jimmy Grund and his attractive wife.

Anne Hubbard on the
Kokomo Tribune
had met Jimmy during school board functions she had covered. She had also encountered Susan when she was involved in some of the Miami County pageants. Anne recalled Susan as being very ego oriented and “into herself.”

Anne never forgot the day of Jimmy Grund’s murder for entirely personal reasons. She had been at the Peru City Park looking for her husband’s wedding ring which he had lost the previous day when the call came through that the one-time county prosecutor had been killed. But then most folk in Peru could remember what they were doing on the morning they heard that Jimmy Grund was murdered. It was
that
important of an event.

*   *   *

Back in Peru, Jimmy Grund’s ex-wife Jane was completely mystified by the business over the gun and how it had been stolen by Susan from her son David. On numerous occasions following Susan’s arrest, she had tried to tackle David about the weapon, but he refused to utter a word about it. Jane presumed it was all just too painful for David to relive. In the end, she completely dropped the subject and it became something that no one dared mention in David’s presence.

Seventeen

With the date of the trial finally approaching, the first task was to pick a jury. Initially, more than eighty potential jurists were interviewed in their home county of Kosciusko County.

The first day of jury selection was not a good day for Susan, though.

As potential jurors were being quizzed by attorneys, they could not fail to notice how sick Susan appeared. As her attorney Charlie Scruggs interviewed them, Susan began fidgeting with a tissue and motioning to her jail matron to take her out of the room.

After she returned, Scruggs continued talking with the potential jurors. At one point, he asked them if they would become “inflated or outraged” if they found out that Susan Grund was having an affair with her husband’s son, David.

Prosecutor Wil Siders immediately objected to the question, stating that it transgressed a pretrial agreement that extramarital affairs would not be discussed in court. Intriguingly, the allegations about David Grund’s affair with his stepmother were not apparently intended to be revealed by
either
side in court.

It was becoming increasingly clear that Susan’s claims were making the prosecution team feel very uneasy. Why?

Scruggs had in fact made the agreement not to disclose extramarital conduct himself, but only, he later claimed, so that prosecutors could not use such information against his client. Scruggs realized he had to go against his original intentions and make sure Susan’s alleged affair with David was discussed in open court, because it was probably the strongest part of his defense strategy.

Scruggs went on to ask jurors if they would be able to give Susan Grund a fair trial once they found out that she had hidden the murder weapon. Some of them soon disqualified themselves through their responses to such questions.

Prosecutor Siders didn’t ask too many questions of the pending jurists, except their feelings towards guns. He also asked if they held any religious beliefs that would forbid them from giving Susan a fair trial.

*   *   *

The trial of Susan Grund was being billed in Peru as the county’s trial of the century. A steady stream of people flooded into the courthouse from day one as the public gallery was filled to capacity throughout.

Often, people would start lining up outside the building as early as 7:00
A.M.
to ensure a good position in one of the court’s 156 seats.

To avoid distracting the jury, Special Judge John F. Surbeck, Jr., ordered that no standing would be allowed, and that admittance to the courtroom would only be permitted just before the proceedings began. The result was vast crowds assembling outside the building every morning.

Spectators were allowed to leave the court at any time, but would not be readmitted until the court recessed. Sheriff Jack Rich even reminded the audience before one lunch break in the first Wednesday of the trial that seating remained “first come, first serve.” He said leaving for lunch could mean losing a seat in the courtroom, as there were people waiting outside the courtroom for admittance.

After most lunch breaks throughout the first week of the trial, a double line of people hoping for a seat stretched the length of two sides of the courthouse balcony. Dep. Charles McCord counted an average of seventy-five people standing seatless outside the court each day. He and other sheriff’s deputies manned security throughout the case and even operated handheld metal detectors at the court’s entrance for fear that somebody might try and take a shot at Susan in the court. Feelings in Peru were running
that
high.

*   *   *

The trial eventually got fully under way on Monday, September 27, 1993.

Susan Grund sat in a not-so-large chair that seemed to envelop her small and thin frame. She sat there, sometimes emotionless, sometimes tearful, sometimes turning her head “no” and showing disagreement with what some witnesses were saying.

One hundred and fifty-six people were watching her every movement, her every mannerism, watching her wipe her eyes and mouth with a Kleenex, watching her turn her head away when pictures of her dead husband were brought before her.

She sat there, pale and sickly, her eyes dark and deep. She looked ill, still suffering from an inner ear infection that seemed to cause her to strain her neck to listen to both testimony and her attorney.

Charlie Scruggs told the jury at the start of the trial that he would attempt to prove his client Susan Grund had an affair with her stepson David Grund, heard him threaten to “get rid” of his father, and then hid the murder weapon.

Prosecutor Wil Siders was greatly worried by this revelation. He immediately sent word to David that he would be expected to give evidence after all. That was something the entire Grund family had been anxious to avoid if at all possible. Now they had no choice. David was going to have to come face-to-face with his stepmother—the woman who claimed he had betrayed his family by carrying out a clandestine affair with her.

Meanwhile, other witnesses were called. First on the stand was Carolyn Shafer, the Dukes Memorial Hospital emergency medical technician who was first at the murder scene. Indiana State Police crime scene technician Dean Marks then appeared and told the court that there seemed to be little evidence of a struggle at the house. Indiana State Police Officer Dennis Trigg, a lab technician at the ISP’s base in Lovell, told the court that his examination of the teddy bear didn’t find any gunpowder or lead residue inside the toy. But he did testify that when he opened the bear he was able to insert his hand easily and that a gun could have been hidden in the stuffed animal.

When Susan’s mother Nellie went on the stand and gave her evidence about finding the container that held the murder weapon, Susan listened intently. But the two women never made eye contact with each other, although Nellie did glance at her daughter a few times. On each occasion, Susan immediately looked away.

Susan and her son Jacob never exchanged one word. The fourteen-year-old walked into the courtroom on Susan’s left, passed behind her and took an oath stating he would tell nothing but the truth on the witness stand.

He talked about his mother. He mentioned the arguments between his mother and stepfather and he spoke of what happened on the night Jimmy Grund died. But he never looked, touched, motioned to, or acknowledged the existence of the woman in the courtroom—his mother. He talked about her as a presence, very factually and with little emotion.

Susan watched intently as her stepson David Grund took the stand in the courtroom.

“I never had an affair with that woman,” were the first words out of David’s mouth.

Susan watched the young man she insisted was her most secret of lovers, with calm disdain. She observed his every movement and there could be no doubt he was well aware of her eyes bearing down on him.

David went on to repeat that he had not slept with his stepmother. The two alleged lovers never once looked directly at each other. David’s testimony did not take long. Soon he was gone and others were taking the stand. Perhaps surprisingly, defense attorney Charlie Scruggs did not even attempt to cross-examine David. Two years later, the gritty defense attorney could offer no real explanation why. He simply stated that he did not think it would be in Susan’s interests to question David about their alleged affair.

The second day of the trial, a further fifteen people testified, many of them Susan’s one-time friends. A lot of them said that she had talked numerous times about having Jim Grund’s will changed.

Jim’s close friend and business partner Don Bakehorn told the court that Grund had complained to him about Susan constantly talking to him about his will.

Fred Allen—Jim’s brother-in-law and partner in the auto dealership—recalled Grund saying that the vacation to Alaska was fine “but Susan was a pain.”

Then Susan’s sister Darlene’s ex-lover Leo Leger admitted upon cross examination that when he was first interviewed by police he pretended he knew nothing about Susan calling by in the early hours of the morning on the way from Vincennes to the house on Summit Drive. He said he had been scared.