Bitter Blood

by Jerry Bledsoe

  “I’ve just laid awake two nights thinking how it could happen,” Tom said in a voice heavy with pain.

  But he had no idea why. He couldn’t understand how somebody could have foiled the alarm. His mother always had it on.

  “What we need from you is to know if anything is missing,” Davidson said.

  Tom replied that he wasn’t that familiar with his mother’s belongings. He knew she had TVs, radios, tape recorders. Not much jewelry. She usually wore plastic jewelry. “My mom’s kinda cheap. She didn’t want to spend a lot of money.”

  “I notice she was right meticulous, kept good records,” Davidson said.

  “She wasn’t one to carry a lot of cash.”

  Davidson wanted to know when Tom last talked with his mother.

  “I think it was last week sometime.”

  She usually called two or three times a week, he explained, but he’d spent the past weekend with his kids and some friends fishing on a lake in Colorado and didn’t return home until late Sunday.

  “We kind of thought it was strange that she didn’t call us Sunday or Monday of this week.”

  Had his mother expressed any fears?

  “No. Other than she’s paranoid about the alarm system. I don’t know why the alarm didn’t go off. I’ve set it off a million times taking the garbage out.”

  Tom asked for details of the killings, but Davidson was cautious in reply, not wanting to give away too much.

  “This doesn’t happen to me,” Tom said of the murders, his voice filled with despair.

  Davidson changed the subject to Janie.

  She was sweet and attractive, Tom said. No serious relationships that he knew about. He mentioned John Trent, the lawyer in Lexington of years ago.

  How about friends of his mother?

  There was Helen Stewart. “When I got divorced, Mom and Helen came out and cleaned house and cooked for me.”

  Others?

  “I don’t remember names too good. I met Susan Reid.”

  What was Delores like?

  “My mom was kind of a character. She’s a little bit eccentric, but she had a heart of gold.”

  Had Tom given any thought to who might have done it?

  He figured it was somebody who knew his mother, knew the layout, or knew somebody who did. “My first inclination was that it was somebody who knew Helen.”

  After some questions about the contents of the house, including Delores’s revolver, an H&R .32, Davidson decided that the time had come to get to touchier business.

  “Doctor, to be quite candid with you, I don’t know whether you realize this or not…”

  “I think I know what you’re going to say,” Tom said. “I’m the sole heir. I think you’d be negligent if you didn’t look at that possibility, too.”

  “What’s your opinion about a polygraph?” Davidson asked.

  “I don’t know anything about a polygraph test. I certainly couldn’t have done it myself. I was fishing on a lake in Colorado. That’s a possibility that didn’t occur to me until yesterday.”

  “Everything there is yours,” Davidson said. “There’s also a possibility, whoever did this, you could be next. Could be a possibility somebody else wants to inherit it.”

  “I don’t even know who could possibly be in line for it. My whole family is gone.”

  “This issue here of your inheritance is hard to address. If you’re innocent, which I hope you are—it’s very difficult to talk to a feller who’s had a tragedy like this.”

  “This is a nightmare on top of a nightmare, Lieutenant.”

  “What is your financial condition, Doctor?”

  “Well, let’s see. I’ve been in practice about eight years, and I’ve got a few bills, and I make about a hundred and twenty thousand a year, and I live in a nice house. I’ve got two cars, I’ve got an IRA and a little money in the bank. That’s it.”

  As an afterthought, he added that he paid five hundred dollars a month in child support.

  Davidson made a note and again brought up the polygraph test.

  “If you take care of it and deal with it at the outset, if anybody says what about this guy who got this inheritance, we can say he took a polygraph, he’s clean, he’s innocent.”

  “This is elimination,” Childers added.

  “What I’m trying to get at as tactfully as I can is before you go back to Albuquerque, we’d like to have a polygraph test,” Davidson said.

  “Well, obviously, that’s the only thing to do. I can’t refuse to take it.”

  “Well, you could.”

  “Obviously, that would be the worst thing to do. I don’t know how it works. I’ve got a little high blood pressure. Obviously, I’m a little upset.”

  “All of that is taken into consideration.”

  “I can’t imagine anybody killing my mother. I never met anybody who knew them and didn’t like them.”

  “We’ve got some leads on this case,” Davidson said.

  “I hope so. I can’t imagine somebody getting away with it.”

  “I hope they don’t.”

  “I’m really concerned,” Tom said. “I didn’t know if this was a cracker outfit out here in the country, to be honest with you. I felt maybe we had some big ol’ Jackie Gleason type of a sheriff and it would just be…You guys seem to be working real hard at it. I’d like to be the guy who’d come out here and demand everything be done and stuff, but I realize you guys are pros and you have to do things your way. I mean, I want something done now, but I realize if you don’t catch the guy right there, you have to go step by step. I’ll try to be patient, too.”

  “I can assure you, you’ve got three of the finest investigators in the country on this case,” Davidson said of the detectives before him.

  Tom agreed to take a polygraph test, and Davidson arranged for it to be administered immediately in Louisville. Childers and Nobles would take him.

  Not long into the interview, Davidson’s intuition had told him that this mild and emotionally wounded man was not capable of murdering his mother and sister. He wanted to know if he was alone in that feeling.

  “I don’t think he did it,” he said to Childers after Tom had left his office.

  “I don’t either,” said Childers.

  But at 5:20 that afternoon, when Sergeant Ron Howard of the Jefferson County Police finished the polygraph test, he reported to Childers that it had proved inconclusive. Tom was too tense and upset, he thought, to get an accurate reading.

  Tom was tired, but the detectives wanted him to do one more thing before they took him to his room at the Melrose Inn in Prospect—go by the house and see if he could spot anything missing or out of the ordinary.

  When Tom walked into the house and saw the disarray, the scuff marks on the floors left by the officers who’d been trooping in and out, the black fingerprint dust everywhere, his first thought was that his mother was really going to be upset about this mess.

  10

  The funeral for Delores and Janie, whose bodies had been cremated, was at 10:30 Friday morning at Stoess Funeral Home, a remodeled frame house in Crestwood, next door to the hardware store where, on the day before her death, Delores had gone to see about a holster for her revolver. The chapel was filled with Delores’s friends from the Little Colonel Theater and Janie’s friends from dental school. Delores’s favorite priest, the retired Father R. C. Board, presided, reading the Requiem from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer.

  Phil Pandolfi thought the service cold and impersonal. Nobody said anything about how sweet and wonderful Janie was. To come to the funeral, Phil used the money he had intended to spend when Janie came to New York—the trip she would have been on the weekend she was killed, if she hadn’t changed her mind—and he was feeling lost, left out, and helpless. He thought himself the closest person to Janie present, yet he had no say in anything and nobody knew how he was hurting. “I had so much to share,” he said, “and nobody even knew.”

  During the service, To
m Swinney and a lieutenant from his department, Jim Roberts, took license plate numbers in the parking lot, and afterward they scanned the crowd for suspicious faces.

  The ashes of Delores and Janie were taken to Harrod’s Creek Cemetery beside Brownsboro Christian Church, a small country church on Covered Bridge Road only a couple of miles from the Lynch home, and buried on a maple-shaded rise.

  Saturday morning at 9, Tom arrived again at the Jefferson County Police Department in Louisville with Detectives Swinney and Childers to face his second round of questioning from Ron Howard, the polygraph operator. The session lasted until 12:40, and Tom emerged emotionally drained and agitated. “I was terrified,” he recalled later. “I could feel I wasn’t doing well. I had a lot of pressure on me, self-imposed pressure. I was worried that somebody would think I did it. I could just see the headlines, ‘Son Fails Lie Detector Test.’ That would be great, and here I am knowing I’m perfectly innocent. I was so afraid I would respond that I did respond.”

  Once more, Childers had to report to Davidson that the results were inconclusive, causing his normally placid lieutenant to explode with curses. Tom was leaving the next day for Albuquerque and wouldn’t return to deal with family matters for another month—a month of not knowing whether he had something to do with the killings.

  The second week of the investigation began with a break that gave Davidson a better idea of what happened on the day of the murders as well as a new clue that might prove valuable.

  A citizen called to say he was a sport bicyclist who rode regularly past the Lynch house. His route was marked for distance, and he timed himself as he rode. On Sunday morning, July 22, he passed the house without noticing anything unusual. A short time later, as he reached the entrance to Sleepy Hollow Golf Course, only a mile away, he heard two distant shots in rapid succession, followed a few seconds later by a third. The golf course entrance was one of his distance marks and he was looking at his watch. It was 10:47.

  The man hadn’t connected the shots with the murders at first, because he thought the killings had occurred on Monday. He also remembered something else that might be significant. About a quarter mile from the Lynch house he had seen an empty, battered car—yellow with a dark top, maybe an Oldsmobile, 1960s model—parked by a road sign.

  A trooper sent to the spot found a wrapper from a Budweiser twelve-pack and several empty cans. Had somebody parked there drinking beer and plotting murder?

  The new information not only gave Davidson the exact time of the shootings, it told him that Janie had been alive when her mother arrived. The first two shots had been for Delores, the third, delayed, shot no doubt had been aimed at Janie when she came to investigate and the killer discovered her in the backyard. The fourth shot, fired inside the house, would have been too muffled for the bicyclist to hear.

  Next morning, Tuesday, July 31, Davidson held a meeting of detectives in his office. He reviewed everything they had learned, including a new wrinkle—rumors that Tom was a heavy gambler. Assignments were divided. Davidson wanted all of Delores’s friends and acquaintances questioned, as well as people who had worked at the Lynch house. He also wanted all of Janie’s friends interviewed, particularly anybody she had dated. Even though Delores seemed the primary target, an angry suitor rejected by Janie couldn’t be discounted as the killer. Weeks of work lay ahead.

  The detectives had been back to the house on Covered Bridge Road every day checking for specific items or clues they might have overlooked. Davidson had spent hours there alone, poking around and contemplating, as if he hoped the house itself might tell him something about the evil it had seen. He didn’t like the house. It gave him a strange feeling. “It was a lonely damn place,” he recalled later. But he was not ready for the radio call he got from Childers on Wednesday morning, August 1.

  “What are these crosses doing down here?” Childers asked, his voice agitated.

  “What are you talking about?” Davidson said.

  “These damn crosses on the floor.”

  “Are you guys going crazy?”

  Davidson thought it a joke, but Childers made clear it wasn’t. He and Nobles had entered the house through the garage and spotted six small crosses fashioned of palm leaves arrayed on the hallway floor, as if some kind of hex. Frightened, they retreated hastily. If Davidson wasn’t playing a practical joke, as his detectives knew he was prone to do, somebody had been in the house—or other forces were at work.

  Neither Davidson nor Childers believed in ghosts, and both had paid little attention when Helen Stewart mentioned strange experiences she had had in the house. Helen thought the house haunted and didn’t like to be in it alone. She’d heard footsteps when no one else was there, she said, had answered voices that never responded. After Chuck Lynch’s death, she’d spotted faint impressions of male footprints in the Persian rugs where Delores allowed no feet to tread. “That house was spooky,” she adamantly insisted.

  Joyce Rose, Delores’s friend, who had been to the house many times, didn’t think it haunted, but she didn’t like the house and had mentioned having strange sensations there. “You could feel the tension and misery in that house,” she said.

  Childers and Nobles returned with weapons drawn and made a cautious and thorough search. The only explanation they could offer for the crosses was that they had been tucked into the back of a picture on the hallway wall and had fallen when a departing officer slammed a door, but that wasn’t a satisfactory explanation, and the mystery of the crosses would forever perplex them.

  During his search that day, Childers opened the lavatory cabinet in the bathroom off Delores’s bedroom and spotted a revolver and a box of shells. It was Delores’s .32 that had been thought stolen. The find was a disappointment. A recovered stolen weapon could be the piece of evidence linking a killer to the scene. Now that possibility was out.

  Later that day, Davidson got a call from Albuquerque police asking if he had Tom Lynch under surveillance. Tom had reported strange cars in his neighborhood and was frightened. No, Davidson said, he had no officers in New Mexico. Perhaps the killer was stalking Tom, as Davidson had warned. He told about the rumors of Tom’s gambling and asked for help in looking into that.

  On August 5, Davidson got his best lead in the case to date. A woman called to report her suspicions that her daughter’s boyfriend might be the killer. The boyfriend, José Peralta, was a Cuban refugee who had drifted into Kentucky with another refugee, Felipe Alonzo, to work in the stables of horse farms. After arguing with his girlfriend, he hit her with his fist and threatened her with a gun. The girlfriend’s mother said that on the weekend of the Lynch murders, Peralta and Alonzo had stolen riding apparel from a horse farm near the Lynch house, and Peralta had come in with blood on his clothing. Friends of Peralta had told her that he pulled a robbery in another Kentucky town, that he carried a derringer in his boot, and that he bragged of killing people in Cuba.

  The detectives grew excited when they learned that Janie had been to the stables a couple of times while Peralta worked there. They got even more excited when they discovered that his friend, Alonzo, drove a beat-up yellow car.

  Peralta sold goods at a flea market in Louisville, and the detectives went there, bought riding paraphernalia from him, and took it straight to the horse farm, where it was identified as stolen. Davidson thought his men were closing in on the killers.

  Suspicions about the Cubans were buoyed on August 24, with the discovery of two pairs of black riding gloves, similar to those stolen at the stables, in a field behind the Lynch house, an indication that the thieves might have been at the house.

  Two days later, Davidson was ready to move against Peralta. Warrants in hand, a group of officers raided his house and arrested him for burglary.

  Alonzo was brought in the next day and questioned by Childers and Nobles. He denied knowing anything about the murders and agreed to a polygraph test, which he passed the following day.

  “We can write ’em off,” said Childe
rs.

  On August 29, the detectives confronted Peralta, who insisted he knew nothing about any murders. He agreed to a polygraph test with the stipulation that the questions not stray into burglary.

  “After Peralta passed the polygraph,” Nobles later recalled, “me and Sherman hit the Patio Lounge in Louisville and got drunk.”

  That same day, two weeks after his thirty-seventh birthday, Tom returned to Louisville to begin removing his family’s belongings from the house on Covered Bridge Road, the house his mother had intended Janie to have. Now it was his, and he wanted to sell it as quickly as possible. Two days after his arrival, Nobles drove him seventy miles to Covington to take his third polygraph examination. Disappointed at the results of the first two tests, Davidson wanted to try another operator this time.

  The operator, Louis Mathias, Jr. asked five relevant questions.

  1. Regarding the shooting of your sister and mother, do you intend to answer truthfully each question about that?

  “Yes,” said Tom.

  2. Did you yourself shoot your sister and mother?

  “No.”

  3. Did you have someone shoot your sister and mother?

  “No.”

  4. Did you know your sister and mother were going to be killed before it happened?

  “No.”

  5. Do you know for sure who shot your sister and mother?

  “No.”

  Mathias noted reactions to question four, but Tom had explained that he felt something was wrong that weekend when his mother didn’t call, and Mathias thought that could have been the reason for the reactions. After studying the polygrams, Mathias reported his opinion: Tom had answered all questions truthfully.

  Less than six weeks after the murders, Dan Davidson already had eliminated all suspects. One question was bothering him: Where do we go from here?

  When Davidson’s mind was troubled, the one spot that offered serenity was the big lake on the grounds of the Kentucky State Reformatory, just over a hill from his office. There he had landed many a lunker bass and gigged many a fat bullfrog while cleansing his mind of tribulation and restoring order to his thinking. The lake had offered him such comfort and pleasure that he told his wife he wanted his ashes scattered over it from the Kentucky State Police plane when he died. As the fall of 1984 approached, Davidson found himself going to the lake with increasing frequency as he fretted about the Lynch murders, a lonely figure hunkered in his tiny boat, rod and reel in hand, rehashing details of the case over and over, searching for answers.