Deadly Seduction (27 page)

“At that time, I didn’t want to know anything or remember anything,” he told the court. “I figured the least I could say the better.”

But then, after talking to a friend involved in law enforcement, Ledger reconsidered and within twenty-four hours gave police a full statement of that encounter with Darlene and Susan on September 3, 1992.

In the early stages of her trial, Susan requested a delay because of her worsening ear infection. She told the court the ear ailment was so painful that she found it increasingly difficult to hear the proceedings. A specialist was then called in. He examined Susan in front of the judge and attorneys, and proclaimed her well enough to continue to stand trial.

The court also heard testimony that showed on the night of Jimmy Grund’s death there was a time gap of up to one hour between Susan’s travels to her house, Darlene’s house, their mother’s house, and the reservation campground, where the two boys were due to stay the night.

Then it came to Susan’s turn on the stand. The court hushed as she took her position. She had insisted to Charlie Scruggs that she was his best option. This was make or break time.

Under close cross examination from her attorney, Susan went through that last night of Jimmy Grund’s life with great precision, talking almost like a third party describing the events from a separate perspective.

But then it came to describing how she claimed she discovered the body.

“I, uh … I walked … over to him … and I saw a gun on the floor … and he had a trickle of blood coming out of his mouth. And I, uh, called out to him and there was no answer (sobs). And, uh … I touched him … (sobs) … and, uh, I picked up the gun.”

It was a moving display of emotion and it had the jury transfixed. Susan went on to insist she picked up the gun she found alongside the body and took it to the laundry room to hide it.

Q. Why did you do that [hide the gun]?

A. To hide it.

Q. Why did you want to hide it?

A. ’Cause I didn’t know what it meant.

Q. What do you mean by that?

A. I didn’t know why David’s gun would be there.

Q. Was there any other, other reason that you wanted to hide it?

A. ’Cause I had touched it.

Q. Why was that important to you?

A. (Pause) Because once I had touched, I knew that my fingerprints were on it (sobs).

Q. What was significant about that to you?

A. … (Sobs) Because if it had done anything to Jim, then, uh … (sobs) … then I would get blamed for it.

Q. Because your fingerprints were on the gun?

A. Yes.

Q. When you got to the laundry room with the gun, what did you do with it?

A. I hid it in my sewing basket.

Q. Why did you do that?

A. Because I didn’t want anyone to see it (sobs).

Q. What was your state of mind at that moment?

A. I just wanted to hurry and hide, and hurry and get him help.

And so the questioning went on. The one question on the minds of the jury was: why, if your husband lay dying in the bedroom, did you not get help instantly instead of worrying about a gun that did not have anything to do with you?

A few minutes later, defense attorney Charlie Scruggs appeared to reduce his client back to tears when he handed her State’s Exhibit 3, the gun that killed her husband, and asked her if she had anything to do with the murder.

Susan sobbed instantly and said, “Oh … (sobs) … no (sobs).”

Shortly afterwards Susan completely broke down when asked by Scruggs to mark an
X
on a photo of the crime scene to show where the gun was in relation to her husband’s body when she had found it.

Later, Scruggs dealt adeptly with one of the biggest holes in Susan’s testimony so far—that she had hidden the gun, but not told Trooper Bob Brinson that fact during the interview which occurred just a few hours after the murder of Jimmy Grund.

“I didn’t want him to know,” insisted Susan to the packed courtroom. “Because I touched it … and because I was sure it was David’s.”

Scruggs then asked, “What significance do you attribute to it being David’s gun?”

“I thought he might have had something to do with it,” answered Susan to a hushed courtroom. Once again, David Grund’s role in his father’s death was being questioned.

It was then that Charlie Scruggs decided to lay all his cards on the table.

Q. Okay. Why did you think that David Grund might have had something to do with it?

A. ’Cause they didn’t get along.

Q. How do you know that?

A. Because I’m normally the one that had to intervene between their arguments.

Q. What was the problem between the two of them [Jim Grund and his son, David]?

A. Basically, it was finances … and … and me.

Q. What do you mean about you? What, what was—why was that a problem?

A. Because … (sobs) … because we’d had an affair.

Q. Who had had an affair?

A. David and I did.

Q. When did that begin and how did it begin?

A. Uh, almost two years prior. One year when Jim went to Canada.

The courtroom was hushed into stunned silence. For the first time in public, details of the alleged affair were about to be discussed.

Susan continued her astonishing testimony. She insisted to the court that the affair with David went on for two years and the love-making became more and more frequent. The summer after their first sexual encounter it increased in regularity because of David’s classes. He would come home on a Thursday and then they would spend Fridays together.

And, assured Susan, sex sessions between the couple also took place at the apartment on Main Street where David lived with his girlfriend Suzanne.

Susan insisted she had slept with David the last time in June 1992, less than two months before her husband’s murder. Suddenly, this cut-and-dried case was looking a little shaky for prosecutor Wil Siders.

But Susan wasn’t finished yet. She also told the court that following a vicious argument with his father, David had said he would “do us both a favor,” which clearly implied he was considering killing Jim Grund.

“He said he was gonna get rid of his dad,” explained Susan, who claimed that she had ignored the threat as the childish outburst of an irritated young man.

Intriguingly, Susan also testified that on the day of her husband’s murder, David called her wanting to know his father’s exact movements, saying he had to talk to him urgently.

Susan insisted that David asked her where she was going to be for the remainder of that day. She told him she would not be home because she had to go over to her mother’s house. David seemed to want to ensure she was not around.

Susan also claimed that she was under the influence of Valium when she met her sister Darlene and neighbor Mary Pruitt in the dead of night near Indianapolis and made her confession about her role in the murder to Darlene.

She told the court that Darlene had told her to say she killed Jim Grund to protect her stepson/lover David. “I was going to tell them [the police] if I thought it would protect him.”

Prosecutor Wil Siders’s early interrogation of Susan on the witness stand concentrated on details concerning the day of Jimmy Grund’s murder and the July 4 theft of David’s gun.

But then he homed in on her alleged affair with her stepson and started to question the validity of her claims. By attempting to pin Susan down on exact dates and times he believed he would then be able to completely discount her story. At one stage, he seemed to be winning when he forced her to commit to a date on which she claimed she was making love to David in the house he shared with Suzanne Plunkett in the country outside Peru. It turned out that David was not even renting the house at the time, although it has to be said that the prosecutor’s method of questioning would have confused the most able person.

However, Susan did repeat one very pertinent remark about the phone call she claimed David had made to her at around 5:00
P.M.
of the day of Jimmy Grund’s murder. She insisted that David told her “not to be around” when he planned to call at the house later that evening.

Next, Siders insisted she again handle the murder weapon in front of the court. Susan mildly took hold of the 9 mm. gun used to kill her husband, grabbed it with less than a full grip and fumbled with it a bit.

She looked at the gun with disgust while Siders asked her to place it on the floor of the Miami County Circuit Court in the same position she found it the night of her husband’s murder.

At first, Susan seemed apprehensive, but she then followed Siders’s order and placed the gun on the floor, about two and a half feet from a table posing as the couch on which Jim Grund was found dead.

Susan then returned to her seat and fidgeted with a Kleenex tightly wrapped around her left hand as Siders continued his cross-examination.

Susan insisted that both Darlene and her mother were lying when they gave testimony that they did not know about Susan putting the gun in the container which was then filled with concrete.

But the most significant section of Wil Siders’s cross-examination came as he asked in very oblique terms whether David Grund was lying when he told the court earlier that he had not had an affair with her.

Q. Are you saying that David Grund is lying to us?

A. About what?

Q. David obviously said he’s never had sexual intercourse with you.

A. David’s lying.

Siders immediately changed subjects either because he had made his point or perhaps because she was so doggedly sticking to her allegations about an affair with David.

Another strange aspect of Susan’s testimony was that she still continued to refer to Indiana State Investigator Brinson as “Bob” despite him being referred to as “Officer Brinson” by everyone else in the court. Bob Brinson grimaced yet again when he heard her calling him by his first name. It reminded him of those awkward moments of flirtation during that interview just a few hours after Jim Grund’s murder.

Wil Siders and his team never revealed Gary Nichols’ sky snooping by chopper and later light-plane observation because it might have put them in a bad light. There were many aspects of the case which were never actually disclosed in open court.

*   *   *

One of the most emotional pieces of testimony came from Susan’s sister, Darlene.

For Darlene, her court appearance was a terrifying experience. She tried to stay focused on what she had to tell the court by staring at one spot across the room and not glancing in any other direction. But it was plainly obvious to all present that she was very scared.

Darlene recalled how Susan had told her at one stage that she had killed her husband and then panicked because she did not know how to load the gun to shoot herself. “She actually said, ‘I shot Jimmy,’” Darlene informed the hushed courtroom. Darlene then told the jury she did not know whether to believe Susan or not.

When asked by prosecutor Wil Siders why, Darlene replied, “She’s a liar. She’s always been a liar. I thought the whole thing was a lie.”

Darlene spoke softly about what her sister had told her that night on September 2 when they went to the house to hide the gun. She sat in the witness chair, twisting a ring on her finger and squeezing her folded hands nervously, barely audible to the jury or the rest of the packed courtroom.

After finishing her testimony, she broke down on the witness stand, red-faced and crying and looked across at Susan for the first time. “Why’d you do it?” she asked.

*   *   *

The last day of the trial began at 9:00
A.M.
when prosecutor Wil Siders held up a picture of James Grund, smiling and happy, and then showed a photograph of him on the couch, dead with one bullet through his head.

“Even though many seats in the courtroom are taken, we’re still missing one today,” he said as he held up the gruesome photograph. “We have a person who is lost here today. That person is Jimmy Grund.”

It was a blatantly emotional plea to the jury.

Meanwhile, Charlie Scruggs, for Susan, stated the obvious—that the prosecution was playing on the jury’s sympathies.

“And sympathy in a trial is a very dangerous thing,” said Scruggs.

The jury retired to consider their verdict shortly afterwards. They looked very concerned about their predicament.

*   *   *

The jurors examined the many photos, statements, reports, and physical evidence from the crime scene and investigation until they departed the courthouse at 6:00
P.M.
for a restaurant. At 8:05
P.M.
, they returned to continue their deliberation.

Judge Surbeck reconvened court at 11:10
P.M.
to hear the jury had still not reached a decision. Susan Grund was escorted by law enforcement officers to the courthouse from the Miami County Jail for the proceedings. On her way across Court Street, she was approached by an Indianapolis TV station reporter and cameraman.

The reporter asked Susan how she felt about her sister testifying against her. Susan did not respond, but looked straight ahead, head held up high in defiance of the journalist’s intrusion.

In the courtroom, jury foreman Joe Shoemaker told the judge the jury had voted numerous times and remained split. The jurors had voted 7–5 three times and 10–2 on one occasion, without indicating guilt or innocence in numbers.

Judge Surbeck asked foreman Shoemaker if the jury felt a unanimous decision could be reached today if it adjourned for the night, remaining sequestered and lodged somewhere in the area.

“I honestly don’t know,” responded Shoemaker.

The judge then recessed the court after asking the jury to retire to the jury room to decide how they wanted to proceed. The 156-strong courtroom audience was allowed to stay seated. Susan sat leaning forward with her head down and her arms crossed.

Fifteen minutes later, Surbeck told the audience in the courtroom that the jury had elected to continue deliberations that night. Sheriff’s deputies then asked the audience to leave the courtroom.

Just before Susan Grund was escorted from the courtroom, she smiled and gestured as she talked with her attorney, Charlie Scruggs. But she was repressing untold agonies.