Deadly Seduction (31 page)

Near Valentine’s Day, on February 9, 1995, Mary received a card from her friend Susan. In it, Susan made clear she was still hinging everything on her eventual appeal. She wrote, “The attorneys are still moving too slow but at least they are moving.…”

*   *   *

Susan’s mother Nellie and sister Darlene have not spoken to her for more than two years. She has even refused to reply to their letters. Her sprightly sixty-three-year-old mother also firmly believes that more people than just Susan were involved in the killing of Jimmy Grund.

She talks in dramatic terms about gun running, drug dealing, dog and rooster fighting and even white slavery going on behind the respectable doorways of the tightly knit community of Peru.

In early 1995, Nellie claimed she received a number of threatening phone calls to her rundown home on East 3rd Street, in the center of town.

The callers refer to “one dead and two more to go and you’re one of them.” Nellie says it’s a muffled voice. She believes that she knows too much about her daughter’s case and, “I ain’t afraid to tell no one.…”

*   *   *

Meanwhile, Susan Grund continued to harbor a deep resentment for everyone involved in her arrest and subsequent trial. She felt she was the victim rather than the perpetrator of that horrendous crime.

Murder had not erased or changed the past because she hated everyone even more than she did before the climax of all that emotion ended in Jimmy Grund’s death. Even during the course of her alleged crimes, she found that it was only her own confused background that was being acted out by that ultimate act of violence. She had failed yet again. No real power could be achieved and Susan was feeling empty, forlorn, and damned as she had throughout the entirety of her troubled life. By committing a murder, she had simply reinforced all her own convictions. She had become the victim now because she remained unfulfilled and unsatisfied. Not even the huge banner headlines were enough to help her recapture the power she had once enjoyed.

For months after her sentencing she fed off her own sorrow. All the while she was going about life in jail, as if it were normal on the surface. She remained lucid, but it was expected that the fantasies would eventually return and then she would feel the need to get more revenge.

Back in Peru, Susan’s sister Darlene is still riddled with guilt over the testimony she gave against Susan in court.

“I feel torn up about telling on my sister. It has split the family up real bad. I would not have done it if I had known. Nobody in all this is entirely blameless. I don’t think Susan is innocent, but there were other forces at work. I have no doubt about that.”

Darlene stopped all communications with her sister when she threatened to try and implicate her mother in the hiding of the gun that was used to murder Jimmy Grund.

“You make your bed you lay in so don’t be dragging someone else into your mess,” is Darlene’s interpretation of that situation.

It seems that Susan Grund’s bed is permanently made.…

Afterword

There was not so much an ending as a final turning point in this complex story. The horrible events unleashed by Susan Grund left indelible marks upon everyone who came into contact with her. They seemed to have a dual need to see Susan behind prison walls for the rest of her life and to return to normalcy. The second could not be realized until the first was accomplished.

Then there was Susan Grund’s most tragic victim: her stepson, Tommy Whited.

Even Jimmy Grund’s elderly mother, Connie Grund, believed that, despite losing her own son, little Tommy was the most heartbreaking of Susan’s victims.

“He never had a chance. She just battered the life out of him before he could even begin to appreciate life.…”

Oklahoma City District Court Judge Charlie Weir has been haunted by the case ever since he tried it back in 1983. He believes to this day that it was something that should never have happened.

Usually in child abuse cases, there is unemployment, financial deprivation, and a general breakdown of home life as we know it. But with Tommy, the family appeared to be intelligent, fairly well-off people.

Judge Weir remembered the father as a fine-looking man and Susan as an attractive woman. But something inexplicably so frustrated Susan that she was driven to inflict that awful abuse on her stepson.

Almost as inexplicable was Tommy’s father’s failure to react to his son’s injuries.

“How could he not have noticed his child was being abused?” asked Judge Weir more than ten years later.

“Life is not fair, and perhaps we shouldn’t expect it to be fair. But that doesn’t make it any easier, does it?

“I signed the order that terminated Tommy’s father’s parental rights to him. But it doesn’t really affect the really important things, does it?”

Det. J. M. Einhorn, the solid, hardworking Oklahoma cop who also never forgot the evil mother whom he helped prosecute for child battery, described the sentencing of Susan Grund for her husband’s murder as “Tommy’s day.”

Meanwhile, little Tommy remains in a children’s convalescent center in Bethany, Oklahoma. His care is continuing to be provided for by his natural mother’s father, Lester Suenram.

One of Tommy’s hands remains in a curled, fixed position due to his mental retardation and the aftereffects of his medication to curb seizures. He can only volunteer one coherent word—food.

Tommy is not even able to support himself properly in a chair so he is moved around in a specially adapted wheelchair with a handmade curved back to fit the shape of his spine, which has curved because he has spent so much time in bed. He has a tray on his chair. But he cannot put anything in his hands because he cannot hold on for more than a few seconds.

Lester Suenram has spent a small fortune ensuring that Tommy is properly looked after. He built a new wing on his house after Tommy was originally released from hospital back in 1983. Then Lester himself suffered a stroke and the boy was transferred to the convalescent center.

They say Tommy looks a lot like his father. But his mouth is always bone dry and he needs tubes to be properly fed. The dried blood inside his mouth seems to be a permanent reminder of those awful beatings he suffered at the hands of Susan Grund.

Detective Einhorn once asked Susan if she felt any remorse about the beatings she inflicted on her stepson.

She replied, “Of course I do.…” She refused to say anything more about it.

Oklahoma City Assistant D.A. Don Deason, who prosecuted the child battery case back in 1983, says, “Little Tommy’s life is ruined. To have killed him might have been more merciful.”

In December 1993, further surgery was recommended for Tommy so he could be tube-fed rather than fed orally. He is a curious mixture of adolescence and a child. In many ways, he is much like the toddler he was before those awful beatings battered his brain into submission.

Tommy’s grandfather Lester Suenram and his wife visit Tommy every evening at the convalescent home in Bethany. Lester has absolutely no doubts that Susan Grund was probably trying to murder his little grandson for his life insurance when she battered him so brutally.

Epilogue

SUSAN GRUND
still is the only one who knows exactly what happened that humid, rainy night in August 1992, and some details could stay locked forever in her memory. Despite intensive psychotherapy in the Indiana State Women’s Institution, near Indianapolis, she has never shared with anyone a full account of the death of her husband. She actually insists she is innocent of the charges and is currently writing a book about her life, which she hopes will help her raise additional funds for that appeal against her conviction.

TANELLE
and
JACOB GRUND
are now living with Jim Grund’s sister, Jane and her husband Fred. According to Jane, the children have adjusted remarkably well considering the circumstances, but there is still a long way to go.

CONNIE
and
JAMES A. GRUND
still live in the same house on Main Street, Peru. Their feelings about Susan have never mellowed, and they visit the grave of their murdered son each and every weekend.

WIL SIDERS
remains Miami County Prosecutor and still pops into Shanty Malone’s bar for a bottle of beer on his way home most evenings.

ANDY PIERCE
has left his job as a reporter on the
Peru Daily Tribune
to work for a hard-hitting news agency in Chicago.

GARY NICHOLS
is still a detective for the Peru Police Department and has continued to work on surveillance operations for the FBI and statewide organizations, mainly on drug-related cases.

BOB BRINSON
continues to investigate homicides countywide for the Indiana State Police, but says he is unlikely, hopefully, ever to find himself at the center of such a controversial case as the Jim Grund murder.

CHARLIE SCRUGGS
says he is looking forward to retiring from the legal profession and he openly admits that if he could turn the clock back he would have done things a whole lot differently.

TOM WHITED
has long since abandoned Oklahoma City and all memories of his second wife, Susan. He infrequently sees little Tommy, Jr., and has moved to Texas where he recently qualified as an attorney.

DARLENE WORDEN
says she will not stop loving her sister Susan despite the murder she committed and the fact that Susan refuses to reply to her letters. But Darlene admits she wishes she had not split the family by informing on her sister to the authorities.

NELLIE SANDERS
remains convinced that others were involved in the murder of Jimmy Grund besides her daughter. She still lives in the same, rundown house on 3rd Street, Peru; the house that Susan so desperately tried to leave behind forever.…

St. Martin’s Paperbacks titles by Wensley Clarkson

D
OCTORS OF
D
EATH

W
HATEVER
M
OTHER
S
AYS
D
EADLY
S
EDUCTION

Wensley Clarkson was one of Britain’s most sucessful young journalists before leaving London for Los Angeles with his wife and four children in 1991—an experience which inspired his book,
A Year in La La Land.
His other books have included half a dozen best selling true crime books. He has also written biographies of actors Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise. He currently divides his time between homes in London and California.
Deadly Seduction
is his fourteenth book

DEADLY SEDUCTION

Copyright © 1996 by Wensley Clarkson.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].

ISBN: 0-312-95773-4

St. Martin’s Paperbacks edition/March 1996

eISBN 9781466873445

First eBook edition: May 2014