Deadly Seduction (28 page)

The knots inside Susan’s stomach were tied so tight she felt as if she was about to explode. Most nights during the trial she had been literally sick with fear about how the case was progressing. But these last agonizing hours were playing even more havoc with her health.

The twelve jurors and two substitutes walked back into the courtroom looking like war-torn and defeated soldiers returning from the front line. Heads held low, shuffling their feet, the seven women and five men of the jury filed into their selected seats and promptly sat down.

It was 1:25
A.M.
—fifteen hours after they first departed to deliberate. Susan Grund watched their expressions closely, tightly holding the hand of her attorney’s assistant.

The packed audience sitting in the courtroom sat down in unison in accordance with Judge Surbeck’s instructions and an eerie silence filled the courtroom.

When Surbeck asked for the jury’s decision, it was clear that they wouldn’t be making one tonight—or any other night for that matter.

“We still have several people that won’t change their minds. And nobody feels that they could change their minds (with a night’s sleep),” explained jury foreman Joe Shoemaker.

Surbeck, looking tired but agreeable, knew there would be no decision. The question remained unanswered—for now.

“Then you are hopelessly deadlocked,” he said before declaring a mistrial.

Susan dipped her head into her cupped hands and pressed them upon her eyes. The crowd, unusually quiet, left the courtroom mumbling and with little incident.

It was a hung jury. A tie. In a famous sports phrase, it’s like kissing your sister. A non feeling.

“I’m just disappointed, that’s all I can say,” said Susan’s attorney Charlie Scruggs.

On the other side, the opinion was basically the same. “I respect their decision and their frustration, now we go back to square one and start all over again,” commented Wil Siders.

The jury members believed that two words were responsible for the disagreement—reasonable doubt.

Significantly, the biggest thing that swayed certain members of the jury to vote “not guilty” was Susan’s testimony. They felt they had to give her the benefit of reasonable doubt. Translated into simple terminology it means that many of the jury members believed her allegations about an affair with her stepson, David. It was possible that some of them even believed he might have played a role in the death of his father.

Juror Ned Titus was adamant. “We didn’t have the evidence presented to us to put her in this situation. We all felt that she was innocent until proven guilty and we didn’t think that it was proven.”

Joe Shoemaker insisted, “The prosecution hadn’t shown enough evidence to remove the reasonable doubt.” The final vote of the jury had been 7–5, not guilty.

The result was like a truism of a forward pass in a football game; three things can occur during a trial and two of them are bad. A mistrial is one of the bad things that happen.

Typically, prosecutor Wil Siders decided to talk to the jury after the verdict to discover what went wrong. He found a jury that was split right down the middle in terms of type; the ones who were overeducated and overpaid just could not believe a respectable woman would commit such a crime while the working “common” people could relate completely to the crime and were convinced of her guilt.

One of the jurors—a seventy-six-year-old woman—even wrote to Wil Siders afterwards to offer her own explanation. In a nutshell, she said, “When you select a jury you want someone who is in touch with reality, someone who has had problems in their life, not someone who has had everything handed to them on a silver platter and cannot relate to something that is bad.”

Wil Siders took great note of that letter and decided that whatever happened he was determined to follow that rule when selecting a jury for the next trial.

Meanwhile, Charlie Scruggs believed that although the hung jury had implied that his client was very believable, he was going to face an uphill task at the next hearing because the prosecution now knew all his tactics.

Scruggs believed that he lost the case on the day halfway through the trial, when Susan decided to come to court dressed in a dowdy outfit that hardly befitted that of the sophisticated socialite. In unspoken testimony terms, this was a disaster because it became clear to the jury that she was trying to manipulate them by changing her entire image. It was a huge mistake.

The other problem had been the way that Susan delivered her evidence to the court. It was all so obviously well rehearsed. Whenever Scruggs asked her a question, it was like pressing a button and getting an instant playback. Susan conveyed no
true
feelings or emotion during that testimony.

On cross-examination by Wil Siders, Susan was tactless enough to get angry and raise her voice at the Miami County prosecutor. That was another dreadful mistake. There are two things a defendant should never do; one is don’t be a smart-ass and two, don’t show anger. Susan had done both.

At that moment, two of the lady jurors had visibly stiffened and leaned back. Scruggs watched and rolled his eyes to the ornate ceiling. He reckoned things could only go downhill from then on.

Eighteen

Just days after the first trial had ended in a hung jury in November, Susan’s defense attorney Charlie Scruggs announced he was formally asking the Miami Circuit Court to allow him to withdraw from his position.

Three days later, Susan Grund found herself sitting alone at the large defense table in the courtroom to discuss Scruggs’s request with Judge Surbeck and Wil Siders.

Susan even made a motion to the judge confirming that Scruggs had received “grossly inadequate attorney’s fees.” The motion also stated that Scruggs had received just $3,000 for expenses, but had incurred over $6,000 in actual court litigation expenses.

The following month, Charlie Scruggs climbed back on board the Susan Grund defense team and tried his hardest to get his client released on bail. Scruggs had returned to Susan’s side after an arrangement had been made whereby he could be paid his fees for the first trial.

Once back in charge, Scruggs claimed that Susan had a constitutional right to bail because seven out of the twelve jurors found her not guilty. But the judge denied the motion.

A few weeks after the end of the first trial, Jim Grund’s sister Jane got a telephone call from Susan, still incarcerated in the Miami County Jail in Peru. She wanted to talk to her children, Tanelle and Jacob.

“Are they there?” asked Susan coldly.

She then struggled to talk to Jacob and Tanelle, who barely responded to her inane conversation. Eventually, the call ended ten minutes earlier than the time she had been allotted by the jail. Her role as their parent seemed to be over.

*   *   *

For the wasted lives and bartered souls that were making time at the Peru County Jail, it was the incessant echoing that dictated the mood of the place. More regular than a heartbeat, the eerie dark noise of voices reached into the viscera and pulled your poor helpless volition into alignment with the sweaty fear and rage that undermined the atmosphere in that clean-as-a-hospital-operating-room jail. The echoes were like the soundtrack to the endless hours of boredom, straining under the endless, oppressive hours, minutes, and seconds that strung together to finally mark the passing of another day. That distant echoing gave voice to a dark reality of the human spirit that polite society had isolated behind those eight-inch-thick walls.

Inside Miami County Jail, Susan Grund was considering her fate. Was this second trial an opportunity for justice or just another foregone conclusion?

Early-rising Miami County residents intent on exercise opened their doors in February 1994 to a gloomy, chillingly cold dawn, a rude introduction to the beginning of between-the-seasons weather that was too cold for spring, but not cold enough to pass for winter.

But before Susan’s second murder trial could begin, another careful jury selection had to be carried out. And a decision was made to hold the trial at the Kosciusko County Court in Warsaw, Indiana, because it seemed a more objective location than back to the “lion’s den” in Peru. The judge also felt that the vast crowds at the first trial were hardly conducive to a fair hearing. In Warsaw, there was a smaller courtroom, which meant less room for the sort of drama that filled the first trial.

Tighter crowd control and security was a top priority. Smoking was also banned from the entire first and second floors to avoid the complaints of excessive smoking during the first trial.

Three at a time, prospective jurors were escorted into the Kosciusko County Court; teachers, homemakers, business owners, retirees, hospital workers, the unemployed—they were all there. Then they were asked questions by Wil Siders and Charlie Scruggs. Susan showed little emotion as she assisted Scruggs in the selection, her hair pulled back in a neat and glamorous fashion with a sweater draped over her shoulders.

Susan, still apparently suffering ear problems, labored to listen to what was said in court and had to turn her neck almost completely around to hear what Scruggs, sitting to her left, said.

He asked questions to determine the jurors’ ideas on justice. Questions to see how logical they were. Questions to see if they had been tainted by the media coverage of the case.

“All I’m asking for is twelve people who know nothing about this case and are willing to give their one-hundred-percent attention to the case at hand,” Siders told the prospective jurors. “All I want you to do is promise not to make a decision until all the facts are in.”

Charlie Scruggs later reiterated Siders’s remarks, asking the potential jurors if they felt that rendering a not guilty verdict was as important as rendering a guilty verdict, when discussing the concept of justice.

All answered simply, “Yes.”

But still some were not chosen. Scruggs also asked the jurors if they would give Susan Grund a fair trial even if she admitted to hiding the murder weapon and having a sexual affair with her stepson, David—an affair he has always strenuously denied.

All answered simply, “No.”

This was a significant reaction because Scruggs based his most controversial decision of both hearings on that response; he stopped Susan from repeating her allegations about having sex with David in the second trial because he was afraid it might prejudice her case. Scruggs felt it would work against the interests of his client. In other words, she did not discuss the subject on Scruggs’ advice. Susan was angry about this decision because it made her feel as if she was retracting her claims of an affair with David made during the first trial. In fact, Susan still continued in private to insist the affair
did
happen, but she had no choice at her second trial as she had to take the advice of her attorney. It was a decision she later bitterly regretted.

Back at the jury selection session at the Kosciusko County Court in Warsaw, the two attorneys were finding it much harder to pick a good jury than at the first trial the previous September.

About halfway through the proceedings, one potential juror told the court she had been tainted by reading a story in the Sunday
Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette
and that others in the waiting room had been talking about the case.

Judge Surbeck then called the rest of the potential jurors into the courtroom to ask them to refrain from speaking about the case while waiting to be questioned by the attorneys.

“I know that when people get together and have nothing else to talk about these things happen,” Surbeck told the group. “But we ask that each of you refrain from commenting on what you think of the case.”

Many of those chosen to sit on the panel gave the perfect answers when discussing open-mindedness and innocence and the need to be proven guilty. But the two attorneys did agree on one juror who admitted to knowing one of the proposed witnesses, Zoyla Henderson, owner of Peru’s finest bed-and-breakfast establishment, Rosewood Manor.

Henderson had testified during the first trial that Susan once said her job in life was “to set up Jim so well that if he ever left me he’d leave with nothing.”

In a surprising admission, the same juror even admitted to reporters after the selection hearing that she knew things about both Henderson and Susan Grund that “would color my judgment of her.” But the woman remained a juror.

In all, eighty jurors were called during jury selection on March 7 and March 8, 1994. They were paid a modest twenty-five cents a mile from their homes to the Kosciusko County Courthouse. They were also paid $17.50 a day if not chosen and $35 a day if chosen.

At the end of the trial, it emerged that the county had spent $7,692.21 on jury expenses alone. The judge himself was on $25 a day and twenty-five cents a mile. He also received meals and free lodging.

There was also another reason for switching courtrooms to Warsaw. The jurors would have easier freedom of movement to come and go without actually having to step through the crowds. Authorities believed that this might make the jury feel less intimidated by the occasion.

Throughout the second trial, people got frustrated with the long wait to get in the courtroom because of the smaller audience capacity. But authorities refused to change the location. Everything was being done this time to ensure a fair trial for Susan Grund.

For Susan herself, this trial did not seem so frightening. She had been there before. She had sat in court and listened to Wil Siders call her a murderer. She had sat in court and listened to Charlie Scruggs try to defend her. She had sat in court before and watched the reactions of the jury sitting in judgment on her. The only difference was that this time the case was being heard at the Kosciusko County Courthouse.

Susan did look directly at the jurors without expression when the charge of murder against her was read to the full panel for the first time. But from that moment on there was a look of blankness on her face. She could do nothing more than sit back and listen.

Most of the arguments and testimony used in the first trial were wheeled out once more. Prosecutor Wil Siders referred to “the tangled web we are going to weave.” He was even using the same notes he had in front of him throughout the first trial.