Bitter Blood

by Jerry Bledsoe

  Like his boss and close friend Davidson, Childers was a man of few words, a native of the Kentucky mountains and the son of a lawman. At forty-three, twice married and twice a father, his hair was graying; and at 210 pounds, he carried a little more weight on his six-foot frame than he liked. He had been a detective for fourteen years.

  Lynn (Lennie) Nobles had just turned twenty-nine. He was short, lean and freckled, with orange-tinged hair that lay in curls. The son of a career military man he had spent most of his early years in California but had finished high school in Louisville. He had followed two of his brothers into police work seven years earlier. Rarely at a loss for words, he was cocky and eager to get on with finding out who killed Delores and Janie. That the murders might not be solved never entered his mind. Davidson smiled at the brashness of this new detective, knowing that this case likely would temper his confidence.

  There was no supper break for Davidson, Childers, and Lennie Nobles that night. They drank Cokes from Delores’s refrigerator and ate bananas from her kitchen as they began a thorough search of the house, looking for things that would tell them about Delores and Janie—and lead them, they hoped, to the killer. They found address books, letters, a few tape recordings, bank records, Delores’s will. They made note of several large disbursements by Delores to her son, Tom, in Albuquerque. They also noticed that in her will Delores left the house and cars to Janie, the remainder to be divided by Janie and Tom. Was that an indication of favoritism that could have led to resentment?

  As the evening wore on, information began accumulating. A neighbor thought he heard shots Saturday night. Another saw a suspicious black trucklike vehicle turning around in his driveway after midnight Sunday morning. And Davidson had discovered in Delores’s records that Helen Stewart had been Delores’s maid. He’d investigated the killing of Helen’s uncle by her boyfriend, whom Delores had supported in jail and court, a man who’d done odd jobs around her house. Davidson also had had dealings with members of Helen’s family who’d been in scrapes with the law. His suspicions were aroused.

  But detective work is often a process of elimination, and he knew the first person he’d have to eliminate was Tom Lynch, the one person who would gain financially from the deaths of his mother and sister.

  It was 1:30 A.M. before the weary officers decided to quit for the day. Davidson assigned a trooper, Tom Kelly, to guard the house through the night, and suggested that he stay inside and watch TV. Kelly, who had a reputation for fearlessness, declined. There was something he didn’t like about that house, he said. He didn’t want to be in it alone. He’d watch it from his cruiser.

  8

  An hour after the news of the Lynch murders appeared on TV in Louisville, a volunteer minister who served one day a month as chaplain of the Albuquerque Police Department approached Tom Lynch’s Spanish-style dental office on Montgomery Boulevard. It was a little before 5 P.M., and Tom was rushing to get away. His wife, Kathy, was waiting for him at the Hiland Theater. His young sons from his first marriage were in Albuquerque on their court-ordered summer visit, and he was trying to spend as much time with them as possible. This evening, they were going to see Conan, the Destroyer. Kathy had called earlier to say that she and the boys would meet him at the theater for the five o’clock showing. He’d have to hurry, she said, because she had only two dollars, hardly enough for tickets, and the boys didn’t want to miss any of the movie.

  Tom was on his way out when the chaplain stopped him and introduced himself.

  “I’ve got some real bad news,” Tom later remembered him saying, filling Tom instantly with fear that something had happened to his wife and children.

  “There’s been an accident,” the chaplain said. “Your mother and sister have been killed.”

  Mother and Janie dead? An accident? A car wreck, no doubt. That treacherous road his mother lived on. He’d warned her it was dangerous. He’d been especially worried about her driving after her recent cataract surgery.

  Actually, it was worse than an accident, the chaplain was saying. Tom’s mother and sister had been murdered in a robbery at home.

  How could that be? His mother took so many precautions. She had alarms and backup alarms. She had phones in almost every room, even bathrooms. She had a battery-powered CB radio in case the phones and power failed.

  Stunned, Tom went out into the dry New Mexico heat and drove to the theater. Kathy knew that something was terribly wrong as soon as she saw him get out of the car across the street. “He looked dazed,” she recalled later.

  “We have to go,” he said, pulling her out of line. “Let’s go.”

  “Why?”

  “No, Daddy!” the boys protested. “The movie’s about to start.”

  “I’ve gotten some bad news,” Tom said. “Something’s happened to Mother and Janie.”

  “What?”

  “They’ve been killed.”

  “No!” cried Kathy.

  “Well, Daddy, who shot ’em?” asked Jim, the youngest son, startling his father. Why would a child of eight ask such a question? All the violence on TV?

  “That’s right, Jim,” his father said. “Somebody shot them, but they don’t know who.”

  Kathy gathered up the bewildered boys and followed Tom home, crying all the way.

  Next-door neighbors Henry and Irene Eichel took in the boys and sent out for pizza while Kathy and Tom went home and began calling friends and family with the news.

  Later that evening, Tom got a call from Helen Stewart, his mother’s former maid. She couldn’t believe what had happened, she said. She filled him in on details she’d heard on TV and told him she was there to help.

  Marjorie Chinnock worked until 9 P.M. at the Kroger store on Brownsville Road in Louisville and came home weary. She turned on the TV and went about some household chores. She paid no attention when she heard a newsbreak about a murder in Oldham County. When a second newsbreak mentioned a mother and daughter being killed, Delores and Janie flitted through her mind, but she dismissed the thought as silly.

  The thought struck again when she heard about the murders on a lead-in to the eleven o’clock news. She was turning the dial to another channel when an announcer said the name Lynch. Then she saw Delores’s house flash across her screen. She watched with disbelief as the camera zeroed in on the partly obscured body lying by the garage and she recognized the faded dress Delores had worn to church that Sunday.

  “It was just paralyzing,” she recalled later.

  Alone, she had an overpowering need for human contact, and in distress called her sister. That was not enough. Later, she realized what she needed. She got her prayer book, the 1928 book that Delores had fought the church to keep, and read the Requiem. Not until morning, though, did she realize that she might have information that would interest the police.

  After his summer school class that Tuesday, Phil Pandolfi got together with boyhood friends. They played football for a while late in the afternoon, lifted weights afterward, then hung out on the street that night, drinking beer and talking about old times. It was after 11 P.M. when Phil got home.

  “Ron King called for you,” his mother, Rosalie, told him.

  “Did he say what he wanted?”

  “No, he said he’d call back.”

  “I hope Janie’s not sick,” he said.

  He’d been thinking a lot about Janie in recent days. Just that morning he’d received her curt note signed “sincerely.” It bothered him, and he answered it immediately, trying to smooth things without sounding alarmed, but he couldn’t resist trying to make her a little jealous.

  “Thanks for the book list,” he wrote. “Hope you are feeling better. It’s too bad you can not come up. I am going to get tickets for the Mets game this Sunday at Shea. I’ll go with my friends. Two more weeks of teaching and I will be done. I will then have four days until I return. I think I might go down to the shore for the last weekend. This girl I went to high school with called me and said she had an extra t
icket for Air Supply at the Arts Center so I said I would go. Well, take care of yourself and try not to worry about things. I keep you in my prayers daily. I hope you say yours too.”

  He signed it with love and enclosed a cartoon he’d enjoyed. He’d mailed the letter only hours earlier.

  Phil had just stepped out of the shower when Ron King called again. Reeling from the news, Phil went into his parents’ bedroom, where his father, Everett, was watching TV.

  “What’s the matter?” his father asked.

  “He said that Janie and her mother were murdered.”

  Later, he remembered his mother trying to console him as he kept repeating, “She’s not dead.”

  “I’m not going to Kentucky,” he suddenly announced. “This is some nasty trick to get me down there. I’m not going.”

  In bed later, fighting to sleep, he had a vision of Janie that he recalled vividly. “Janie’s mad. She’s mad. She’s pointing her finger in my face. ‘What do you mean you’re not coming to the funeral?’ She’s saying, ‘You better be there.’ Her mother was there just smiling and Janie’s shaking her finger at me. ‘All right, all right,’ I’m saying. ‘I’ll come, I’ll come.’”

  When sleep finally came, he found himself jolted awake by a dream. Janie was in a vortex. She was crying out for help. He was struggling to save her, but she was sucked away, leaving him reaching helplessly. Never before had he felt such anger and frustration.

  Oldham County was unaccustomed to murder, and by Wednesday, July 25, the county was abuzz with talk of the deaths of Delores and Janie. The Louisville Courier-Journal carried a picture of the hearse bearing Delores’s body away from her house. The story quoted a neighbor, Zelma Jones, saying of Delores, “She was as plain as an old shoe.”

  “Nothing like this has ever happened around here,” said another neighbor, Anthony Parrish, a young man who had done yard work for Delores. “It’s a pretty quiet community. It makes me feel insecure.”

  No neighbors were feeling quite as insecure as Katy and Howard Cable. Police hadn’t found the key to their house that Delores kept. The Cables called a locksmith to change all their locks.

  Insecurity wasn’t confined to Delores’s immediate neighbors. Much of Oldham County’s population had come there to escape fear of crime, and now it had reached out to them.

  “There was a lot of ‘Oh, it couldn’t happen here, this is Oldham County,’” recalled Kit Wolfe, the young editor of the county’s only newspaper, the Oldham Era, a weekly.

  For generations, Oldham had been a sparsely populated rural county of large dairy farms and horse farms and only one major employer, which, ironically, was dependent on crime—the state prison system. But the population had burgeoned in the early seventies as affluent people filtered in from Louisville to escape big-city woes. Court-ordered school busing to achieve racial integration brought another wave of middle-class white flight in the late seventies. In little more than a decade, the county’s population more than doubled to nearly thirty thousand. Most of the newcomers were in the western half of the county, which bounded the Ohio River, and a rivalry between the newcomers and the old-time residents was reflected in heated sporting events between the county’s two middle schools. A rich county, ranked first in the state in percentage of high-income households, Oldham had few blacks and poor people and only one area that could qualify as a slum—Lake Louisvilla, a one-time resort that now resembled a poverty-stricken hollow in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. Lake Louisvilla was familiar to all of the county’s law enforcement officers, who often traced minor criminal problems there.

  While most of Oldham’s residents were pondering the possibility of murder and robbery in their serene midst, some who knew Delores were wondering if robbery had indeed been the cause of the killings.

  Paul Rose heard the news and said to his wife, Joyce, “Has Delores offended somebody so much that they’ve shot her?”

  Knowing Delores’s abrasiveness and stridency, the Roses considered it possible.

  Delores’s friends knew that she muscled her way into others’ lives and tried to control them.

  “Delores put into things that were none of her damn business,” Susan Reid said. “She could push you into responding. She could nag the living hell out of you. She never let anybody alone.”

  “She tried to control me and my kids, and I just told her it was my damn life,” said Helen Stewart.

  Friends knew, too, that Delores’s temper and her feelings of being put upon had caused her to offend many people.

  “She could be just as pleasant and nice as anybody,” said Susan Reid, “but she could turn just as quick.”

  Helen Stewart had been witness to many of these incidents. She had slunk away in embarrassment as Delores angrily chastised hapless clerks and waitresses when things didn’t please her. She had been present in even touchier situations. Delores didn’t like horseback riders passing along the road in front of her house, where the horses occasionally left unsightly plops. She had Paul Rose plant a hedgerow to keep them off her property. When the riders persisted in passing along the road’s shoulder, she hid in the shrubs and jumped out with a camera to confront one woman. An argument ensued, and Delores claimed the woman tried to run her down with the horse.

  But if somebody was going to kill Delores over such a thing, her friends wondered, wouldn’t it be in a moment of passion, not a calculated murder also claiming innocent Janie?

  “Delores was a pain in the ass,” said Janie’s former boyfriend, John Trent. “She was the kind of person you’d invite to leave, then take an aspirin and sit down to rest for an hour or two. But, you know, shooting her in the head is a bit extreme.”

  9

  The Kentucky State Reformatory rises from the open hills of Oldham County like a medieval castle, its twelve-story granite tower an imposing presence on the countryside. Set in the middle of three thousand acres of farmland near La Grange, the prison is Kentucky’s largest. At the edge of one of the prison’s bean fields, close by State Highway 146, is a modest red-brick structure that is Kentucky State Police Post Five. At the eastern end of the building, in the bedroom-size, institutionally furnished office of the post’s two lieutenants, Dan Davidson, the criminal division commander, and Ray Herman, the patrol commander, was a chair upholstered in dull green fabric where guests were received. On Thursday, July 26, two days after the discovery of the bodies on Covered Bridge Road, Davidson was waiting for that chair to be filled by Tom Lynch. So far Davidson was feeling good about the progress being made in case 5-84-543.

  “We have gathered an enormous amount of evidence,” he had told a Louisville Times reporter that morning. “I feel very optimistic.”

  He and his detectives had indeed collected a lot of information. First thing Wednesday morning, Childers and Nobles had gone to Lake Louisvilla to question Helen Stewart. She claimed to know nothing about the killings, and both detectives believed her. They asked her to go to the house to see if anything was missing. She noticed nothing gone but remembered that Delores had had a gun, a revolver, which the officers hadn’t found. She also recalled that Delores usually wore a turquoise cross on a silver chain around her neck. That wasn’t on her body, and the detectives couldn’t find it in the house. If that was all the killer took, the officers noted, it was small bounty for two lives.

  Later that morning, Childers and Nobles had gone to Louisville to watch the autopsies, which had turned up something curious. Delores’s blood contained .06 alcohol, only .04 away from legal intoxication. That meant she’d probably had the equivalent of at least two drinks in the hour before her death. The detectives had found two empty beer cans in her bedroom waste baskets, but if she had drunk those before leaving for church, her body would have burned up the alcohol before she got home. Marjorie Chinnock had seen no sign of drinking by Delores, except for the sip of wine at communion, and neither had Butch Rice at the gas station where Delores stopped on her way home. Had she gone somewhere for drinks with so
meone after leaving church? She hardly had time. Had she been drinking in the car on the way home? If so, she’d left no evidence. The information was puzzling and would remain a mystery.

  Davidson had requested an intelligence check on the only surviving family member, Tom, but it had produced nothing of consequence. He also had called airlines to see if Tom had made reservations into or out of Louisville in the past week. He found only the reservation Tom had made for himself, Kathy, and his sons for their planned trip to see his mother on the coming weekend.

  Shortly before noon on Thursday, a day ahead of his planned arrival for his visit with his mother, Tom landed at Standiford Field in Louisville with a friend from Albuquerque, Steve Mahieu. He was met by an Oldham County police officer and the department’s chaplain, a volunteer Methodist minister, who drove Tom and his friend the twenty-five miles to Post Five. Awaiting them were the four detectives: Davidson, Childers, Nobles, and Swinney.

  Tom Lynch was thirty-six, but he still had the rangy, muscular build that had enabled him to become a high school basketball star. At six feet, he towered nearly a foot over all other members of his family. (“Isn’t he tall and handsome?” his mother liked to boast when she showed him off to friends. “It’s because I kept him so well nourished and gave him so many vitamins.”) His long arms, slightly sloped shoulders, and loping gait still gave him the appearance of the point guard whose moves can’t be anticipated. His boyish good looks lurked behind a Vandyke beard, and his short brown hair, parted on the right, was combed over his forehead to disguise a slightly receding hairline. His blue eyes were rimmed with red from lack of sleep.

  Escorted into Davidson’s office, Tom shook hands with the detectives as they offered condolences. “Have a seat,” Davidson said, taking a moment to study Tom’s face. He saw such a devastated man that he was almost hesitant to question him. He began by asking if Tom had any idea why the murders occurred.