It bothers me, too, that the boys are so secretive about their lives. They seem to have certain subjects they aren’t allowed to talk about. I can’t understand the need for such secrets.
One of my biggest regrets is that the boys were never allowed to have a close relationship with my family and didn’t get to spend more time with them.
I don’t want to put you in an awkward position, but I love the boys and I’m concerned about them. I know you are concerned for their welfare, too.
Two weeks after receiving Tom’s letter, Florence mailed a reply.
“Yes,” she wrote, “we agree it is very important that the boys have a strong and good relationship with their father.”
She said she had little knowledge of the boys’ day-to-day activities and that she had offered beds for them but Susie had refused.
It would be nice if you could come and spend a few days and go through their daily routine with them. Also, I’m sure the boys would like for their teachers and friends to meet their father.
Bob and I feel that you should maintain as much contact as you can with the boys, and as they get older they will make more decisions for themselves.
We do what we can to maintain contact and have told Susie and the boys to call us at anytime they need us. We are here to help when our help is wanted or needed.
Tom made a copy of the letter he sent to Bob and Florence and enclosed it with a thank-you note for her sympathy card to Florence’s sister Louise, who lived in the big Sharp house in Reidsville. She responded immediately telling Tom that John and Jim were sweet children but she and other family members saw them infrequently.
Susie brought them to see me when she came to Reidsville to Dr. Klenner’s office, but she has not been here since his death. Florence rarely sees her, so she can give me little news. One-sided communications are hard to pursue.
I don’t know why Susie is being so difficult. Florence feels that she is making her a scapegoat for her unhappiness. Of course, we don’t know what happened in Albuquerque to break up your home. Susie can be awfully bossy and stubborn.
She closed by saying that she hoped Tom and Kathy would come for a visit.
There was purpose in Tom’s courting of Susie’s family. He and Kathy had been collecting information about children of divorce and how to develop cooperative plans to care for them, giving more balanced roles to the parents. They had consulted family counselors and a psychologist, who told them that the time Tom was allowed with his children was well below the norm. Tom wanted that time extended, wanted more influence in his sons’ lives. Down the road, he hoped the boys might choose to come and live with him. First, he wanted to know how Susie’s family felt.
I wanted to see who I was fighting against,” he recalled, “whether I was having to deal with the whole family or just her.”
He decided to involve Louise, the guardian of Sharp family heritage, for two reasons: “Number one, to get as much information as we could. Number two, to find out how things looked from Reidsville.
“We wanted everybody to know how the boys were being treated out here and to ask them how the boys were being treated back there. We were relying on Louise to feed us information we didn’t even ask for, the more information the better.”
Uncertain how to proceed, Tom decided to take Florence’s suggestion and come to North Carolina to see the boys and meet their friends and teachers. The trip had other purposes as well.
“We wanted everybody to see me and make sure I wasn’t some kind of ogre from out west and also to meet Kathy and let them see how she got along with the boys,” Tom recalled.
In October, Tom gave Susie the two weeks’ notice required by the court. He and Kathy flew to Greensboro the first week in November for a five-day visit. Wanting to have plenty of space for the boys, Tom rented an apartment at Guest Quarters. Not until he arrived did he realize the apartment was in the same complex as Susie’s, only a short distance away.
Susie was hostile when Tom picked up John and Jim. “She looked like a harpy,” he recalled. “Her hair was all disheveled and she had a weird look in her eyes. She looked like she was coming unraveled. She just threw their luggage at us.”
That morning, Susie had called her brother Rob, and with great urgency in her voice asked if she could come and talk with him. After moving in with his parents in March of 1983, Rob had gone to his uncle, Fred Klenner, for a couple of B vitamin treatments for his alcoholism. But the effects of the heavy drinking he’d given up two years earlier still lingered. He suffered from short-term memory loss that had caused great problems when he tried practicing law for several months, problems that attracted the attention of the state bar. He stopped practicing in September of 1983 and gave up his license in July 1984. Meanwhile, he had begun treatment at an alcoholism clinic in Southern Pines that was having good results, and he had taken a job as an alcoholism counselor with Guilford County. He agreed to meet Susie at his office on North Eugene Street.
Their conversation lasted nearly two hours and caused Rob concern and distress. Susie was filled with fears, frightened of Tom’s purpose in his trip, frightened of Tom himself, convinced still that he wanted to snatch the children. Earlier, she had said things that indicated that she thought Tom had criminal associations and was abusing prescription drugs. Now she said that she knew for certain that Tom was involved with the Mafia, that his underworld enemies had murdered his mother and sister, and that she feared that she might be murdered, too. She never went anywhere without her pistol or her dogs, she said. Since Rob last visited her apartment nearly a year earlier, Susie had bought another black chow, this one a female named Mai Ling, called Maizie by the boys. Susie took a .25-caliber Browning semiautomatic pistol from her purse and showed it to Rob, making him uncomfortable.
“Have you got a permit for that?” he asked. She said that she did and returned the weapon to her purse.
Rob reminded her that carrying a concealed weapon could get her arrested.
“That’s a heck of a lot better than being dead,” she said.
Rob, ever the lawyer, sought proof of her allegations against Tom. “I talked to her and tried to determine on what basis she believed these things,” he recalled later, “and never got any answer that was satisfying to me. Whenever I would ask her why she believed it she said she and Fritz had friends in the federal government, that Fritz was an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency and had access to all of this information.”
When Rob quizzed his sister about her relationship with Fritz, she said that he visited often to make certain that she and the boys were safe and sometimes took them camping. “She said she felt safer with him around and checking on them frequently,” he said later.
Rob didn’t believe any of the things Susie was saying about Tom, nor did he believe that Fritz was connected with the CIA.
“My initial thought was, Why don’t I call mental health and have her committed?” he said. He remembered his mother’s cousin who’d gone off the deep end and killed her estranged husband and herself, and wondered if nuttiness might be in the blood. When he suggested that Susie ought to seek counseling, she responded that she and the boys were already seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Andrew Courts, whom Rob had also seen briefly.
After Susie left, Rob was so disturbed that he called his parents, who were at Nanna’s that day. He told his father about the conversation and said he thought that Susie was acting irrationally and seemed deluded. He warned that they should be circumspect and cautious over the weekend, because Susie had seemed very excitable.
“I wasn’t worried about Susie so much as I was about Fritz,” he said later. “I suspected all along that this was bull that Fritz was feeding her.”
He wasn’t certain how his father received his call. “I had the distinct impression that Dad only half believed me,” he said. “I wasn’t sure my testimony was given great weight, that maybe they weren’t sure how far along the road to recovery I was.”
Although Rob
didn’t know it, his parents were scheduled to meet Tom and Kathy for lunch on Friday, and his testimony was given more weight than he realized, for, after his call, Florence called Tom and canceled their appointment, suggesting that they meet at Bob’s office that afternoon instead.
Tom and Kathy were unaware of the reason that made the Newsoms change the time and place for their meeting, but they realized that something wasn’t right.
“They were nervous,” Kathy recalled. “Mrs. Newsom acted very strange. She sat not facing us. She wasn’t talking. She didn’t say much.”
Tom thought this was because of the awkwardness of the situation and meeting Kathy for the first time. Kathy, too, was nervous, wanting to make a good impression. “I was scared to death,” she said.
Tom and Bob did most of the talking. Tom began by essentially repeating what he’d said in his letter.
“I said I didn’t think the boys were being handled properly and there had to be some solution to this so I could see them more and they could be exposed to a more normal life-style. Mr. Newsom agreed. He basically said that we had seen the boys more than they had in the last couple of years. He said they wanted to keep the windows open for the boys so they could always have opportunities. He felt the same way I felt. There wasn’t any difference of opinion. He said that when the boys reached the age they could talk to the judge, ‘I’m one hundred percent sure the boys will come to live with you, Tom.’ He said that was fine.”
Tom said if that should happen, he would be glad to pay for the boys to come back regularly for visits.
“He asked me if I would pay for college,” Tom remembered. “I said there would be no doubt they would go to college and I would handle whatever it cost.”
Tom was surprised at some of the things Bob said about Susie that day, all of which Tom had already observed. She had to have her way, Bob said, had to be in control. She was spoiled, stubborn, bossy, and “pathological in her possessiveness of the children.” At one point, he called her a “smartass” and said he didn’t know what to do about her.
Before he and Kathy left, Tom had a question.
“What is the relationship between Susie and Fritz?”
Bob remained silent.
“We really don’t know,” Florence finally said.
Not until this trip did Tom realize that Fritz was actually living with Susie. He saw Fritz walking the two chows at 8 A.M., an unusual time for somebody just to come calling. The boys said that Fritz stayed there most of the time now, and Tom didn’t like it. Neither did he like the boys’ appearances. Their shoes were too small, their toenails long and curling, their hair dirty. They wore crosses and St. Christopher medals on chains around their necks.
Tom and Kathy went shopping for new shoes and clothes for the boys. They took them to see the movie Gremlins. They went to their school and met their teachers. On Saturday, Tom and his friend Bob Brenner of High Point, a former Wake Forest football player who had been an usher at Tom’s wedding to Susie, took the boys to Raleigh to see their first live college football game between North Carolina State and South Carolina. Later, Tom bought a kickball for the boys and went out to play with them but the boys were too concerned about soiling their clothes to have a good time.
“Mother will kill us,” they said.
On Sunday, Tom and Kathy took the boys to Reidsville to have the lunch buffet at the country club with Louise Sharp. Bob and Florence came, and so did Annie Hill Klenner. Bob and Florence had a good time with the boys, whom they hadn’t seen for several months. Later, Louise took Tom and Kathy on a tour of the big Sharp home. She showed the boys photos of the tragic, long-dead twins, their great uncles whose names they bore.
On Monday, Tom and Kathy had lunch with the boys at school, and John’s teacher told them that John had been crying all morning because his father would be leaving the next day. She told him to keep John for the afternoon.
“I won’t tell his mother,” she promised.
Taking the boys back to Susie was difficult.
“John was crying,” Kathy remembered. “He kept looking at me and looking at her.”
Tom and Kathy wanted to see the apartment, see the boys’ room, but Susie made it plain that they weren’t welcome. She swept the boys up before they had a chance to give good-bye hugs and took them inside.
Tom and Kathy flew home the next day, election day, feeling sad about leaving the boys but good about the effect of their trip. They felt they had made a good impression with Susie’s family and possibly had won support for the future.
Judge Sharp missed little that went on in the family. Having been informed of Tom’s earlier letter to Louise, she knew his purpose, and after hearing about the Sunday meeting in Reidsville, she called her niece at Florence’s suggestion and asked her to lunch at the K&W Cafeteria in Greensboro. Actually, it was Rob who had suggested to his mother that his aunt Su-Su meet with Susie to see if she could get a reading on his sister’s mental condition and the situation with Fritz, although his aunt was unaware of that.
As Tom and Kathy were flying westward, Susie Sharp was waiting at the cafeteria for her niece to arrive. “I thought maybe I could get her to talk,” she said later, “but she showed up with Rob. I was thoroughly thwarted.”
After lunch, Su-Su stopped at Bob’s office to report her conversation to Bob and Florence. She found them in a low mood. Although they had evaded mentioning it to Tom and Kathy, they remained deeply distressed about Susie’s relationship with Fritz and greatly worried about its effect upon the boys.
“Florence and Bob were at their wits’ end,” Judge Sharp recalled later. “They just didn’t know what to do. They were very apprehensive that something terrible was going to happen. They were afraid Fritz was going to kill the children with his doctoring.”
On November 10, Louise wrote to Tom: “It was good to see you, Kathy, John and Jim last Sunday. Your concern for your boys is commendable and heart-warming.”
She went on to write about the election, family visits, and other affairs, before reporting the cafeteria meeting arranged by her sister Susie.
“After lunch she met Bob and Florence at Bob’s office for a talk before returning to Raleigh. I believe she has Susie Q ready to find bunk beds for the boys and to go to Bowman Gray for a medical check-up. She looks pretty but is too thin.”
Susie did pick out bunk beds for the boys, and Su-Su sent a check to pay for them. John and Jim argued the first night about who would sleep on top. Later they sent thank-you notes to Su-Su. John called the new beds “neat.” Susie also took the boys to her parents’ house for Thanksgiving dinner. Susie had been made aware that if Tom went to court again, it would be in her best interest for the boys to have a closer relationship with their grandparents. Susie stayed only long enough to eat, but despite the strain, everything went well.
On December 13, Kathy wrote long, almost identical letters to Bob and Florence and Louise:
It is hard to believe that Christmas is just around the corner. Usually, this is my favorite holiday, but this year with all that has happened, it is hard to get into the spirit. Tom and I are going through the motions. We were supposed to be in Kentucky this Christmas, and we were hoping John and Jim would have been able to join us for a couple of days.
Both of us are trying to keep busy so we won’t be reminded of how empty this Christmas will be. Tom needs me now more than ever. I feel so frustrated at times because sometimes no matter what I say or do makes Tom feel better.
We have gotten our shopping for John and Jim finished. We just have to get their gifts in the mail. Tom says he hopes the boys will be allowed to play with their presents from us because in the past the items were given away or put up. The same was true when Delores sent their gifts, so she used to send everything here for the kids to enjoy.
Tom says he will be surprised if he gets a Christmas card, phone call or thank-you note from the boys.
I am still concerned about Tom. He has been through so much this yea
r with the loss of his mother and sister. It doesn’t help that he is always worrying about John and Jim and that he misses them a great deal.
I know the Lynches loved John and Jim very much and they were upset that they weren’t allowed to see them. Tom says he knows Susie has painted a distorted picture of his family because she never wanted anything to do with any of his relatives while they were married. The boys have told us the awful things their mother has said about Chuck, Delores and Janie. All this has hurt Tom terribly. Tom says Susie tried to dominate him and alienate him from his family just like she is trying to keep John and Jim away from him, you and the rest of her family.
We understand that Susie Marshall bought bunk beds for the children. That was a thoughtful and generous thing for her to do. The boys are pleased that they finally have beds. Tom is happy the boys came for Thanksgiving dinner and he feels it was our trip to North Carolina that prompted them to go. The boys are still very secretive and we get all kinds of conflicting stories from them. Tom says the boys are still being told what to say and what not to say. When talking to the boys on the phone we can always tell when their mother is there by the way the boys act. Jim and John say they want to spend more time with us but are afraid to tell anyone. We would also like to see more of them. Thirty-five days in the summer (when they get ninety days off from school), every other Christmas and every other spring break is not enough time to form the kind of close relationship the kids need.
Florence answered Kathy’s letter five days before Christmas.
We are looking forward to our Christmas Eve dinner here. It will be our last Christmas dinner in this house. Susie and the boys are coming and we will be delighted.
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