True Crime Campfire - Never Enough: The Crimes of Susan Grund

Episode Date: May 24, 2024

It’s not unusual or unhealthy to go a little wild when you’re young—to just go looking for a good time with little thought for the consequences. It’s just how human beings are made. But if you’re like that your whole life, relentlessly looking out for your own pleasures and barely aware of the damage you cause along the way, you’re likely to land yourself and everyone around you in a whole mess of trouble.Download the game "June's Journey" on Apple iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/junes-journey-hidden-objects/id1200391796"June's Journey" on Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.wooga.junes_journey_hidden_object_mystery_game&hl=en&gl=US&pli=1Sources:“Deadly Seduction” by Wensley ClarksonCourt papers: https://law.justia.com/cases/indiana/supreme-court/1996/52s00-9408-cr-00725-4.htmlFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. It's not unusual or unhealthy to go a little wild when you're young. To just go looking for a good time with little thought for the consequences. It's just how human beings are made. But if you're like that your whole life, relentlessly looking out for your own pleasures

and barely aware of the damage you cause along the way, you're likely to land yourself and everyone around you in a whole mess of trouble. This is never enough, the crimes of Susan Grund. So, campers, for this one, were in the small town of Peru, Indiana, August 3, 1992. Just before midnight, Susan Grunned called 911 from her expensive new house out on Summit Drive. It's my husband, she gasped to the dispatcher. We just got here and there's blood on him. There wasn't a lot of blood on her husband, Attorney Jim Grund, but it was enough.

He had a single gunshot wound to his left eye. He lay still on the couch in the bedroom, TV remote. beside him, notes for a speech he was planning to make on the coffee table. Except for the horrible bloody hole where his eyes should have been, he looked peaceful, like he'd just laid down for a nap on the couch. That was probably what happened, in fact, but Jim never woke up. He'd been shot in the head while he slept. The bedroom looked like it had been ransacked, with furniture overturned and drawers pulled out.

EMTs were quickly at the house, but it was clear that Jim was dead and had been for a while. Susan seemed almost numb. She started calling pretty much everyone she knew to tell them what had happened. One of the EMTs asked her what had happened to Jim. This place is a mess, Susan snapped back, evidently upset by all the clutter left behind by the apparent intruder. I don't know what happened. The first police officers at the scene called for state police investigator Bob Brinson as soon as they realized they had an apparent homicide on their hands.

When he got there, one of the EMTs pointed out to Brinston. a single nine-millimeter shell casing on the carpeted floor of the bedroom. On the edge of the open-top drawer of Jim's dresser was a sexy photograph of Susan Grund and lingerie, held in place by a belt partially across the top of it. Four other similar pictures were on the floor, all lying face up. Brunson reckoned the odds of a belt coincidentally falling across that first photo to hold it in place like that were about infinity to one. The picture had been deliberately placed so it would be found. There was no sign of forced entry, and Susan's sister Darlene, who lived nearby and had

arrived before the police, told Brinson the garage door had been closed and locked when she'd arrived. So how had the killer gotten in? Susan was sniffling and dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. Brinson looked at her closely, but he couldn't see any actual tears. Three hours after calling 911, Susan managed to get in touch. with a lawyer friend of hers, who advised her to stop helping the police and tell Darlene to do the same. And that can probably be filed under decent legal advice that looks suspicious

as hell at the moment. Darling was just baffled when her sister told her to stop answering the cop's questions and shrugged it off. Here's the thing. You should get a lawyer when talking to a police 100%. No argument there. But three hours after your husband's dad, that's a little suspicious. And I know. I know we're hypocrites. Get a lawyer no matter what. But we always talk about looking at cases holistically rather than piece by piece. It's possible. This is the only suspicious thing that happens, right? Oh yeah. Yeah. I'm sure she's golden. The Grun family were prominent in Peru with generation after generation of attorneys. Jim had previously been a prosecutor in the 80s and his best friend was a sergeant in the Peru PD. All this meant the crime scene on Summit Drive

was soon swarming. The county prosecutor was there, a circuit court judge, a whole posse of cops, too many people for Investigator Brinson's liking. Some of the bigwigs started trying to tell people what to do, and a couple of the cops openly talked about who they thought had shot Jim. All this threatened to start the investigation off in chaos and create headaches for Brinson and any eventual prosecution. So Brinson herded everybody who wasn't necessary off the property, determined to approach this investigation with the unbiased eye of. of an outsider. No one in Peru who'd known Jim Grunt could have had that distance. Pretty much all of them thought they knew who'd killed Jim as soon as they found out he was dead.

His pretty young wife, Susan. Sue Ann Sanders was born in 1958 and not into a happy family. She had six brothers and sisters, all crammed into a rundown house along with their mother and an alcoholic father who was both physically and sexually abusive. She grew into a bright kid, who cared way too much what other people thought about her and her family. She'd go around her friend's places rather than invite them over because she was embarrassed by her family in their house. Every week or so, she'd make herself a new dress, then tell her friends at school her mom had bought it for her.

By the time she started high school, Sue Ann was a cute, charismatic girl and never had to try hard to get a date. She got her first semi-serious boyfriend when she was 15, a guy named Chip Groat. That is a great name. Chip Groat. The Groats owned a local truck stop and were well off, at least compared to Sue Ann's family. When she had a massive fight with her family after another encounter with her creepy drunk dad, Chip's family let Sue Ann move in, or Susan, as she soon started calling herself. Understandably, she wanted a new identity to distance herself from her awful childhood.

Turns out, switching from just dating to living together is not great for teenage romance, and pretty soon Chip and Susan broke up, which meant she was out on her ass. She couldn't imagine going back home, so Susan drifted about 20 miles south to Kokomo. With about 50,000 people, this was the big city compared to Peru. She got a job as a waitress, and one night she went to see a hard rock band called Manikin. We don't know much about mannequin, but this was 1975. So just picture whatever combination of leather, spandex, and high shine hair products you can think of, and you'll probably nail it. One of the dudes in the band was Ronnie Lovell, and when Susan laid eyes on him, it was pretty much lust at first sight. After their set, Susan threw herself at Ronnie like a bug splatting onto a windshield, and

in no time at all, they were doing it in the alley behind the club. Ooh, boy, classy. Pretty standard for an F-list musician in the 70s. True. Susan told friends about the encounter in excruciating detail, a habit that would stay with her for the rest of her life. If you went to bed with Susan, every single one of her friends would know exactly what happened there. She'd draw you a diagram of the dimensions of your penis if you wanted.

Even if you didn't want. Just like Dick Notebook, remember? What a wild case. Her friends teased her, called her a groupie, which Susan did not like it all. She could be intensely charismatic, but that charisma didn't really include a sense of humor, especially when the joke was on her. Just a couple weeks after their first romantic, moment behind the dumpster, Susan and Ronnie got married. Married. She was like right out of high school. He was 22. They moved into a tiny apartment they could barely pay for with Susan's waitressing

and mannequin's gigs at local bars and high school dances. What do you think, y'all? Are these two crazy kids going to make it? Susan wanted all of Ronnie's attention, which was tough on her because so did Ronnie. He'd spend long minutes in front of the mirror, combing his beautiful long brown hair. Two narcissists together generally creates the kind of relationship that should have a biohazard sign stamped onto it, especially when both of them have a pretty lax idea of fidelity. And this may shock you about a musician who we first met when he banged a girl against a wall literally within minutes of meeting her, but Ronnie liked to screw around and didn't see much reason to change his ways just because he had a ring on his finger. Sometimes when

Susan showed up at a gig unexpectedly, she'd catch her new hubs making out with somebody else. Susan had a kind of old-school idea of justice, so she started slamming ass all over Kokomo herself. This slow-motion train wreck of a marriage crawled a little further down the tracks when Ronnie moved back with Susan to his hometown of Oklahoma City. He worked construction all day, while Susan got a job at the apartment complex they lived in. Living practically next door to them was a handsome young trucker named Gary Campbell. And pretty soon, while Ronnie was out pounding and nailing all day, Susan was doing much the same thing with the neighbor dude.

When Ronnie caught her coming out of Gary's place and confronted her, Susan just walked in and started packing. She'd already made up her mind. Ronnie was out, Gary was in. Which was quite a surprise for Gary, who'd really just wanted a casual hookup and now found himself with a pushy girlfriend moving herself in without really asking first. And, oh yeah, she was pregnant with his kid, too.

casual sex and no birth control is not a great combo gear bless your heart after a quick divorce from ronnie susan and gary got married in nineteen seventy nine and their son jacob was born not long after susan's romances followed a pattern intense attachment and lots of wild sex at the start followed almost inevitably by the guys getting kind of sick of her bullshit but that first phase was so great that by the time the second phase rolled around they were often often already married. What Susan wanted was the excitement of a new romance, if romance is the word, and if she wasn't getting it at home, she had no compunction about looking for it elsewhere. She cheated on every man she was with, and bragged to her friends about her affairs and about how many guys said she gave them the best sex they'd ever had. Given who Susan was, there's every chance she was just making that up, but I guess it depends on what they're into. Susan had a lot of relationships, but it's from her time with Gary Campbell that we get some of the gory details of her sex life. And I mean gory, literally. Buckle up for this one.

One time Gary started putting the moves on his wife when she grabbed a pair of scissors and stabbed him in the chest. It wasn't too deep a cut, but it bled a lot all over his chest. Susan was immediately all over the shocked Gary grinding on him, rubbing her hands, all over his bloody chest and grabbing his crotch, very obviously and very creepily, more turned on than he'd seen her in months. Another time, Gary told her he'd hurt his ankle at work. Susan grabbed a knife and stabbed him in the thigh. Now you won't think about your ankle too much, she said.

And once again, was all over him, grabbing his balls and rubbing up against him ready to get down to business. When they went jogging together, Susan would punch him hard in the arm when they ran. Then when they got home, she'd completely wail on him with her fists and desperately want to screw right after. I guess for some guys, all this weird shit might be the best sex I've ever had, but I think they'd be a minority, one that did not include Gary Campbell. He seems to have been almost relieved when his wife started messing around on him. Susan was bored of Gary and bored of her new job on the factory lines of Perry filters. She wanted to shake her life up, preferably in a way that meant she didn't have to work factory jobs like this.

One of her bosses was a good-looking guy called Tom Whited. Tom had money, kind of. Six months previously, his wife had died of leukemia. She'd been the daughter of the factory's owner and had made her dad promise to look after Tom and their young son Tommy. Tom had been a captain in the army until he'd had a car wreck and suffered a cerebral contusion that had kept him unconscious for three weeks. That's a significant brain injury,

the kind that can shake up your capabilities and decision-making skills. Tom was discharged right about when his wife got sick. So here he was, a guy with looks and money who was heartbroken and more than likely not quite thinking straight. With Susan on the prowl for a new life, Tom might as well have been a wounded wildebeest wandering away from the herd. Because she could never keep her damn mouth shut about her sex life, soon everyone at the factory knew what was going on between Susan and Tom. Soon Gary knew too. Susan didn't care. She was done with Gary, mostly.

Sure, she'd sneak around on Tom and go hump her X sometimes, but where's the harm in that? Regardless, 1982 saw another quickie divorce and then fall wedding for Tom and Susan, just a year after Tom's wife had died. And for now, we're going to put a pin into Tom and Susan's marriage. What happened there will be important later and we'll come back to it. For now, though, all we need to know is that 18 months after wedding number three, Susan was divorced again and making the long drive back to Peru, Indiana. Her tail wasn't exactly between her legs. She might be headed back to her hometown, but at least she was doing so in a shiny new Buick she'd gotten from Tom.

And that wasn't all she came home with. Susan, Central Indiana born and raised, was now putting on a sexy Southern accent. This is the kind of thing you can pull off when nobody knows you, but not when you're going back to your hometown with people who've known you for as long as you could walk. Oh my God. I love it when they fake an accent. It comes up all the time. Remember Tracy Richter and her fake British accent?

Why does this always come up? It's so funny to me that people think they're going to get away with this. People like this cannot stand not being the center of attention. And in their heads, they're the most interesting people in the world. So, of course, people are going to be like, oh, my God, your accent. Oh, my God. That's how they picture everyone reacting instead of like, oh, did you get an accent in the other town you were in? Like, that's the actual reaction, not.

At the grand old age of 25, Susan was already ruthlessly cynical about romance. She wanted sex and never had to try hard to get it. Not long after she was back in town, she had a regular thing with a young cute guy who was good in the sack. Unfortunately, though, he was poor. In fact, he lived right across the street from the rundown house Susan had grown up in, and that wouldn't do it all. That was part of the life she'd been trying to get away from from your years. Her marriage to Tom Whited had taught her that she wanted money and that she could get it by getting a ring on her finger. So when a friend offered to set her up on a blind date with Jim Grunned, Susan was all in.

The Gruns were a famous family in Peru, high flyers, as much creme de la creme as you could get in small town Indiana. Jim was 14 years older than Susan. He'd always been a bright kid and also studious and serious of until he was about 15 when he made a sincere New Year's resolution to get out and have more fun. That's so cute. I imagine he was wearing like suits to school and then like on New Year's Day he loosened up his tie and said, I'm going to get out and get out more and have fun. He followed up on that. He liked a drink. He liked girls. He liked sports. He loved to fly small planes and take his buddies out on long fishing trips in the wilderness. He breezed through

college in law school and was the youngest ever member of his county bar association. He followed in his father's footsteps, serving as county prosecutor for a few years before he and his dad started sharing a law office on Main Street. Jim had a reputation for being tough as nails in the courtroom and a friendly, sociable guy out of it. He'd gotten married in college, but by the time he was set up with Susan, he'd been divorced for a few years and had a daughter in college and a son in high school. Jim also liked a good prank. His good friend Gary Nichols once had a birthday party at Shanty Malones, a bar Jim was part owner of, and the highlight of the party was going to be a stripper bursting out of a cake.

Jim had set it up so that the lady coming out of the cake was actually Gary's ex-wife. That's a pretty good prank. That's good one. I think I've had a nightmare like that. Gary and Susan didn't know each other, but they shared a mutual friend, and together they arranged the blind date between Susan and Jim. For Gary, this was a revenge prank. See, he told Jim that.

Susan was cute and smart and fun, but had neglected to mention one thing, that she was eight months pregnant with Tom White's kid. But Jim took Susan's unexpected bump in his stride, and the two of them got on like gangbusters. They were both smart and charismatic. Jim was 39, confident and successful, a fully grown-ass man, really the first that Susan had ever been involved with. And Susan, like she always did at the start of her relationship, turned on the full force of her megawatt charisma and her sex appeal. Just a few weeks after meeting Jim, she complained to her sister,

Darlene, what am I going to do? Both Jim and Rick want to marry me. Rick was the hot young stud who lived across the street from Susan's mother. But which one do you love? Darlene asked her. Susan said, I love Rick, but I don't want to be poor. What would you do?

Darlene told her she'd marry for love. Huh. Yeah, but I don't want to be poor. so I'm going to marry Jim, Susan said. Darlene wasn't surprised. She also knew that Susan hadn't been asking her advice at all. She was just bragging about having two men wanting to marry her. That exchange, by the way, like the other quotes in this story,

is from Deadly Seduction by Wensley Clarkson, which has a ton more detail on this case if you're interested. Susan was nervous about introducing Jim to her extended and kind of redneck family at Thanksgiving. During his time as county prosecutor, Jim had in fact gone after a few of her siblings and cousins. But although he was from Peru's elite, Jim was no snob. He was straightforward and friendly. Her family liked him. Susan's introduction to Jim's parents was initially a lot more awkward because Jim went into their house ahead of her and with his expression deadly serious and

kind of embarrassed, told them he had a brand new girlfriend and she was already pregnant. Uh, congratulations? his mom said before Jim started cracking up. Don't worry, it's not mine, he said. Right after Thanksgiving, Susan's daughter, Tinell, was born. Six weeks later, Jim and Susan took the baby with them on a Florida vacation. Jim's mom knew what he was going to tell her as soon as he called from the Sunshine State. Just a couple months after meeting, Jim and Susan had gotten married on a yacht off the Florida coast.

Not long after they were married, Susan took advantage of Jim's money and legal. skills to get custody both of her son Jacob and newborn baby Tenel. And Susan decided that Jim's current house wouldn't do for her and her young family. It was a perfectly lovely three-bedroom place, but Susan talked Jim into buying some land out on Summit Drive and letting her build the soulless McMansion of her dreams. Jim actually had a reputation as kind of a tight wad, but not when it came to Susan. She got whatever she wanted, at least in the early years, and bragged to her friends and family that she could wrap Jim around her finger by blowing his mind in bed. Whenever they went out, she was always dressed to the sexy nines, with both she and Jim

enjoying the attention she got. In fact, Susan was so fond of giving strangers a glimpse of bras or stocking tops from her vast collection of lingerie that it bordered on a fetish. I actually maybe more than bordered on. She seems like a bit of an exhibitionist. Yeah. Susan decorated the new house in all white, white paint, white paint, plush white carpet. If you took more than a few steps inside without taking off your shoes,

she'd bark at you. Susan, who had grown up in chaos, hated clutter. She didn't even let anything be put on the shelves. The white walls were bare except for pictures of Susan. Man, is that ever a metaphor right there? In the bedroom was a huge $3,000 portrait of herself completely in the buff. She took a ton of sexy polaroids and insisted that Jim keep one of them, with Susan very nearly nude on display at his desk at work where everyone could see it. Yeah, she's an exhibitionist. She's getting up on that. It's like she knew men kept portraits of their wives at work but didn't really understand why. Surely it was to just show off their wives and what better way to show off than in a bra and panties, right? God, what a nightmare. Like, she's like the, she's like,

nightmare woman. That's what she is. I love the idea of the $3,000 portrait of her in the news. That's the only thing on the wall in this white room. You walk in and it's just naked me. Well, imagine, imagine being her, like, kids and, like, you're in the house and you just see, like, a picture of your naked mom. That's weird. Her teenage son's bringing his friends over and they're like, oh, God. Yeah. And like, again, there's nothing wrong with a naked body, okay? I'm not saying that. But like, these pictures were very obviously sexual. Like, there's no like, oh, it's just a body. No, she was like busting it wide open. Like, it was not subtle. I might have taken a few body picks myself. I'm not judging, but that's a $3,000 gigantic naked picture in like the living room was a little weird. It's a little weird. That's all I'm saying. It's what I've been saying from the beginning. This is a little weird, this whole thing.

In 1986, Jim's 16-year-old son, David, came to stay with them in the new house. Did anyone's internal alarm just start blaring? Just a question. Just a question. I don't know. Initially, he clashed with neat freak Susan because being a 16-year-old boy, his room was always a mess. But David's main fights were with his dad. A big part of this was David being a teenage hormone mom and Jim being unwilling to back down from any argument.

I mean, he was a lawyer. but a lot of their fights were specifically about money. Jim relaxed his tight-fisted nature for Susan, but no one else. David's stepmom got a new house, new cars, and a monthly $2,000 allowance, but David got barely any allowance at all. Soon, Susan was playing peacemaker, but Jim and David fought so often and so fiercely that the kids soon moved back in with his mom. Hi, I'm Darren Marler, host of the Weird Darkness podcast. I want to talk about the most important tool in my podcast belt. Spreaker is the all-in-one platform that makes it easy to record, host, and distribute your show everywhere, from Apple Podcasts to Spotify.

But the real game changer for me was Spreaker's monetization. Spreaker offers dynamic ad insertion. That means you can automatically insert ads into your episodes, no editing required. and with Spreaker's programmatic ads, they'll bring the ads to you, and you get paid for every download. This turned my podcasting hobby into a full-time career. Sprinker also has a premium subscription model where your most dedicated listeners can pay for bonus content or early access, adding another revenue stream to what you're already doing, and the best part, Spreaker grows with you. Whether you're just starting out or running a full-blown podcast network,

Spreaker's powerful tools scale effortlessly as your show grows. So if you're ready to podcast like a pro and get paid while doing it, check out spreeker.com. That's S-P-R-E-A-K-E-R dot com. Susan mostly behaved herself for the first few years of their marriage. And after that, she very much did not. She'd been occupied with the new house. and by establishing herself in Peru high society, by helping out with beauty pageants and getting her name and picture in the local paper. But by the late 80s, she was bored. It didn't help that

Jim worked long hours and was often tired and no longer wanted her sexually every minute of every day. Susan needed that kind of attention like other people need air and water. A couple of times every year, Jim would fly his buddies off on long fishing trips to Canada or Mexico. Susan, after years of playing the society wife, started using these trips to get back in touch with her wild youth. She'd put on a short leather skirt and a see-through top and go out to dive bars with old high school girlfriends to pick up guys. She didn't drink. She'd never been drunk in her life. The thought of being out of control scared her and she still had nightmares about her alcoholic dad.

Subtility wasn't Susan's game. Her main method of seduction with a guy she liked was just to look him straight in the eye and start flying. fondling his crotch. A couple minutes later, they'd be banging in the back of her car. Before long, she moved on from relatively anonymous hookups and skeezy bars to guys and her and Jim's own social circles. This obviously involved a greater risk of being caught, but that was part of the fun for her. One time, Susan and a friend went down to Indianapolis to watch a ballgame and met a

super handsome guy who worked as a choreographer for the cheerleaders. They all went out dancing, and Susan brought her A-game. game, sexy red dress, seamed stockings, three-inch heels, and told her a new dancer friend in great detail about the open marriage she had with Jim, how she was free to go to bed with anyone she wanted. All this would have been news to Jim. This was one of those open marriages where only one half of the couple knows about it. Susan went back to the guy's apartment and as soon as they lay on the bed to watch TV, she tried her signature move of her scrap and at his junk. He stopped her, turned out this handsome dancer and choreographer was gay and had a boyfriend.

Susan let this compute for a second, then said, huh, and made another grab for his dick. Eventually, she gave up and drove home, frustrated. Oh, God, poor dude. Yeah, she just blue-screened. The idea of a man who didn't want her was so far outside of her consciousness that she didn't get it and resorted to, like, sexually, like, assaulting him some more. Oh, God, that poor dude. Susan was getting careless. A neighbor saw her making out with a dude at the fairgrounds.

Whenever Jim was out of town, Susan's teenage babysitter would see her go out dressed like an extra in a rock video and come back early in the morning with an unmistakable, recently plowed look about her. And she just couldn't keep her damn mouth shut. All her friends and family heard about every tiny detail of her affairs. She encouraged her married friends and neighbors to have affairs themselves and gave them tips on how to do it. Did Jim know she was cheating? It's hard to believe he didn't. I mean, it was a small town.

people talk and Jim was a smart guy. And when Susan complained about obscene phone calls she was apparently getting, Jim had his cop buddy Gary Nichols tapped their phone line and record conversations for a week. Jim was the only one who heard the tapes and there's every chance he heard Susan chatting to her boyfriends. In 1990, that list of boyfriends had an eyebrow-raising addition. I'm having an affair with David, Susan told her sister,

as casually as if she was talking about her grocery list. Now, this was Jim's son, David, who was now in college, but Susan had been his stepmom since he was 14 years old. Now, David has always denied that anything went on between them, even on the witness stand, but he wouldn't be the first person to give false testimony about something he was ashamed of. They talked constantly on the phone. They went for long nighttime drives and parked for hours. You know, maybe they just wanted to listen to the West Coast baseball games on the radio, or maybe not. People noticed how at parties Susan would discreetly stroke David's hand. A friend of Susan's flat out saw the two of them making out on the street.

Every weekend, David would come back from college and he and his stepmom would screw like weasels and heat. Soon he moved back to Peru and would sneak over to the house on Summit Drive when Jim was at work. To add another wrinkle, when David couldn't get any money out of his dad, he'd get it from Susan instead. Now, like I said, David has denied all this, but Susan told him. told her mom and sister about the affair in much more detail than they wanted to hear. Everything she and David got up to, all the ways he was better in bed than his dad. If she was making it all up, then she'd missed out on a career writing some pretty messed up erotic fiction. And look, it's possible she did make it up.

Okay, she obviously liked shocking people with all the details of her sex capades. So I could see her getting off on the idea of doing something really taboo like that and telling everybody about it. even if it wasn't true. So it's possible, but when you've got people saying independently you have no reason to lie, like, yeah, I saw him making out, I don't know. We'll never know if Jim knew what was allegedly going on between his son and his wife, but soon after, their marriage was in serious trouble. They were regulars in the Peru social scene and started having loud public arguments that frequently devolved into yelling. During one of these fights, Jim said that if Susan was so pissed at him, she should hire a hitman to take him out.

And she should make sure he shot Jim in the eye because the bone behind it was thin. This was a tidbit he remembered from his days as a prosecutor. Susan was suddenly more curious than mad. Really? She said. Oh boy. File that one under.

Probably shouldn't have said that. Oh, my God. Susan wasn't the only one cheating. David lived with his girlfriend, Denise. And because this kid's romantic life wasn't already messy enough, Denise's ex-husband was kind of a psycho who threatened and intimidated them both so much that David bought a gun, a 9-millimeter pistol. He showed it off to Susan, put his arms around her to show her how to work the slide, and right then Denise walked in, and David and Susan jumped apart

like they were being pulled by big magnets. Oof. Yeah. David and Denise lived in a little old house in the country. Before she left, Susan berated them for having a back door that was only secured with a shoestring and asked if the dog in the backyard would bark at strangers. Just regular stepmotherly concern for domestic security, I guess. When David and Denise got home that night, the place had been burgled, furniture tipped over. But the only thing that had been taken was David's new gun. The couple gave up on country living and moved into a nice secure apartment in downtown Peru. You know, it's so funny, like, allegedly, the same day she was.

like, wow, your apartment is super easy to break into, or your house is really easy to break into. And then that night, it was broken into. Like, I know. You can't hold it together. Like, it's crazy. I don't know. Like, I don't know. It'd be, as I'm assuming they told the police that. And the police were like, huh, what a coincidence. By summer of 1992, Susan and David's affair was over. And based on Susan's reaction, and it was clear that David had come to his census and shut it down. When her friends asked Susan about him, she reacted as if she barely knew him. Her relationship with Jim wasn't improving either.

At a barbecue, Jim watched his wife flirting with yet another dude. He quietly told a friend, who happened to be the current county prosecutor. If I ever die, you look at that bitch first. In the following week, Susan developed a weird habit of budding into conversations with non-sequiters about David's missing gun. Like, a friend would be talking about her sick parents and Susan would say out of the blue, I hope nothing happens with that gun that was stolen. It was on her mind, obviously. Man, oh man, subtle.

Yeah, I know. Weird, great weather we're having. That gun is really scaring me. Super missing. It was stolen. It's extra missing. I have no idea where it is. This wasn't surprising because after she'd stolen it, Susan had buried it in the garden just outside the house on Summit Drive.

In July, after months of pressure from Susan, Jim agreed to have a new will drawn up. The new document included a raft of provisions that would benefit Susan and her kids if Jim died. Why Jim agreed to the new will is unclear, especially as right afterwards he told a lawyer friend that he was going to file for divorce as soon as the family got back from a summer vacation to Alaska. Maybe he figured that after the divorce he could get another will drawn up that would cut Susan out. It was a dangerous mistake. And it's very possible that he just, that was like picking his battles. He's like, I don't even want to argue about this. I'll just do it and then fix it later.

Yeah, I think that probably is what it was. But, oh, man, unfortunate. Unfortunate. Up in Alaska, Jim told Susan he was going to divorce her in that she wouldn't get the house or any of his money. For him, to be so sure about that, men he must. have had something fairly devastating to use against Susan. It wouldn't have been hard for him to get evidence of Susan's affairs, but my guess is he knew about her and David. Yeah. The family got back to Peru on August 1st, 1991, and went to an office picnic that afternoon. Jim's law

partner thought he seemed happier than he'd been in years while Susan was practically mute. No wonder. She'd lived a life of luxury for years, and it was all about to go up in flames. She'd be left with nothing. She'd be poor again. If she didn't, scare up another Rift husband in short order, she'd have to work again. God forbid! Say it ain't so! On the other hand, there was that big, fat, new will of Jims. If he divorced her, she'd get nothing, but if he'd died, she'd get nearly everything.

Obviously, Susan's thoughts had been turning in this direction for a while. That's why she had stolen David's gun. But until now, that had been just a vain. contingency, something she might have to use for the future. Now, things were urgent. She couldn't let Jim divorce her. So on August 3rd, just a couple of days after they'd gotten back from Alaska, Susan Grun dug up the stolen gun and shot her husband in the eye while he slept in their bedroom. She puttered around for the rest of the evening, taking her son Jacob out to a campsite where he'd spend the night, then setting up her eight-year-old daughter, Tinell,

down in the basement for a sleepover with her cousin. Jim was the only father Tinell had ever known. Just before she went to sleep, she asked Susan, can I go kiss Daddy good night? Susan paused for a moment, then said, You'll have to give Taddy a kiss in the morning because he's already asleep, sweetheart. Oh, God, that's so sad. A few minutes later, she called 911 and told them she'd found her husband dead.

State police investigator Bob Brinson was determined to keep an open mind about Jim Crun's death, despite all the locals immediately assuming Susan had killed him. Their gossip had already provided him with at least, least one more possible suspect. That first night, he heard about Jim's tempestuous relationship with his son David, rumors about an affair between David and Susan, and how David owned a nine millimeter pistol that had allegedly been stolen. But it was hard not to be suspicious of Susan, especially after his first interview with her in the police station at 4 a.m. With all her usual subtlety, Susan came on to him, hard. She slowly ran her gaze down from his face to his crotch and

licked her lips, then repeated the performance while very obviously pushing forward her recently enhanced abubis. Brinson thought she was sincere. She really was, like, turned on, and if he'd responded in kind, he thought she'd probably have screwed his brains out right there in the interview room, just hours after supposedly discovering her husband's murdered body. It was creepy as hell. Yeah. And Susan never checked up on Brinson's investigation, never asked how it was going or if progress had been made, spouses of murder victims usually do that stuff, you know, when they're not the one that pulled the trigger. David, as it turned out, had a solid alibi with his girlfriend for the whole day when Jim had been killed. He told investigators there were probably

shell casings from his stolen gun out at the little place in the country where he used to live, where he'd shot it off a few times. Sure enough, they found casings there. They were a match to the one found beside Jim Grun's body in the bedroom. David's gun, had been used to kill his dad. When he told them about Susan's interest in the gun and how it had been stolen the same night he'd shown it to her, their attention really focused on her. And that focus became laser sharp on August 7th when they learned about what had happened during Susan's brief marriage to Tom Whited down in Oklahoma City.

Tom, remember, had been Susan's recently widowed and recently brain-injured boss, who she'd seduced and married in short order. He and his first wife had a son Tommy, who was about the same age as Susan's own kid, Jacob, who was four. Susan started dressing them identically and claiming they were twins, so she wouldn't have to explain about her previous marriages. She even dyed Tommy's blonde hair brown, so it matched Jacob. Tommy was a bright, curious kid, which to Susan just meant he was irritating. Jacob was more withdrawn. He'd already learned to avoid his mom's temper. And a warning here, the next few minutes is going to include descriptions of child abuse, so skip ahead if you need to.

Every afternoon, Susan would put on her leotard and watch Richard Simmons on the TV, following each step of his exercise routines, sweat into the oldies. And she wanted the boys to do it, too. Apparently unaware that they were not just small adults, and so started horsing around, I mean, they were four years old, she'd get super mad and start smacking Tommy around for not exercising properly. Another time, she made the boys take their old toys down to the garage so they could be thrown out and was furious when Tommy snuck down to retrieve his favorite Tonka truck. She spanked him hard for minutes, then grabbed the metal truck and started smashing it into his head. Not long after, when Tommy couldn't do the Simmons routine properly, Susan lifted him up and dropped him on his head.

Three months after Susan had married Tom, his son was in the ER with a fractured skull and a hematoma. Susan said he tripped over the family dog and hit his head. The doctors absolutely should have reported this case to the police, but Tom and Susan were well-dressed and well-to-do and obviously concerned about the kid. So they didn't. And a week later, Tommy was released from hospital back to his dad and stepmother. He was terrified of Susan. Susan worried that he might have told people in the hospital, and that put her temper on even more of a hair trigger.

When the scared Tommy accidentally peed himself in the back of her new Buick, bless his little heart, she was convinced he was doing it deliberately to get back at her. She got so mad she tied him to a stake in the backyard and left him out in the sun all day, where his skin burned and blistered. When she finally brought him in, he threw up, which made Susan so mad she beat him, severely. Tommy lost consciousness. Tom and Susan took him to a different ER this time to try and avoid suspicion, but they weren't going to skate by this time. Tommy, still unconscious, was

diagnosed with a brain hemorrhage and general brain dysfunction. Oh, God, poor baby. Susan said this time Tommy had been in a shopping car when it had been hit by a car. He had days worth of bruises all over his body as well as sunburn and cigarette burns. He was rail thin because Susan kept the boys who, remember, were four years old on a strict near-starvation diet. These doctors called the police right away. Tom Whited seemed completely oblivious to the awful abuse of his son, and the only way to make that make sense is to remember that he'd suffered a significant brain injury of his own just before he met Susan and hadn't been quite right since. It's not an excuse, but it might be an explanation. When a detective questioned Susan, she denied everything, then fainted.

A nurse crouched beside her right away and told her to wake up. Susan came to, eyelids fluttering. What happened? She said. She's faking, the nurse said. If she'd been unconscious, she wouldn't wake up so quick. Nice. The detective asked little Jacob how his little brother had gotten hurt. The detective asked little Jacob how his brother had gotten hurt.

I don't know, but he gets hurt in the garage, was the kid's chilling reply. Susan was arrested and in quick succession, custody of Jacob and was divorced by Tom. Tom was compelled to promise he would help in Susan's prosecution, but when it came to it, he got cold feet. Incredibly, Susan had managed to get him back into bed. Without Tom's full willing testimony, the best the prosecution could get was a five-year suspended sentence for felony child meeting.

After the trial, Susan called up the prosecutor and asked him out for a drink. He initially thought this was some kind of scheme to get leverage, but no, she just thought he was cute and wanted to get him in the sack. Oh, Lord. The thought that he'd be utterly repulsed by her awful abuse of a child just didn't occur to her. He hung up on her. Tommy would need constant care for the rest of his life, which his grandparents provided. He was severely mentally impaired, almost entirely nonverbal, and had to be fed through a tube in his stomach.

Jesus. I doubt Susan thought about it for more than one collective minute after she shook the dust of Oklahoma City from her feet and headed back to Indiana. Oh, boy. Literally, like, this is one of the worst people we've ever covered. Like, I, treating a child that way, like, you shouldn't treat anybody that way, but a four-year-old child, four-year-old children don't know anything. They're little idiots on purpose. You know what I mean? A little baby.

They're just learning about the world around him. And she's the perfect example of a narcissistic mother who just uses the children as a prop. She wanted to have cute little kids that she could dress up. and and make do cute things. She'd be, she'd be an influencer mom these days. Oh, yeah, totally. A Ruby Frankie type. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, probably minus the religion because she would be too. No. Yeah, she's not interested in all that. Yeah. Like, what a scummy piece of shit. Yeah. That's rough. I hate, I hated reading that.

As far as the Indian investigators were concerned, somebody who could do all of that to a four-year-old could absolutely kill her husband. They executed a search warrant on the house on Summit Drive, which freaked out Susan, who had moved with her mom to a relative's house in Fincens, on the other side of Indianapolis, to escape all the attention in Peru. She called up her sister, Darlene, and said, I want you to break back into the house and see if they found it. Darlene was shocked, then said, uh, no way.

If Susan wanted the house broken into, she'd have to do it herself. So she went and picked Susan up. Way to take a stand, Darley. It really stood up for yourself there. As they drove back, Susan said, I want you to promise me something. Darlene had a sinking feeling that she knew just what Susan was going to tell her. I don't make promises until I know what I'm promising, Darlene said. I have to tell you something and you can't tell a soul, Susan said.

I shot Jimmy. It was supposed to be a murder suicide. Uh-huh. Conveniently, there had only been one bullet in the gun and Susan couldn't figure out how to reload it, so she never got around to the second part of the supposed pact. Uh-huh. Convincing. Throughout the rest of the journey, Susan kept pestering Darlene to promise not to tell, which she eventually did.

When they got to the house on Summit Drive, Darlene waited in the car while Susan let herself in. She came out a couple minutes later, clutching one of her daughter's teddy bears. The bear had a slit torn in its back. Susan had hidden the gun inside there after she'd shot Jim. Put it in her daughter's teddy bear. This bitch, I swear to God. They took the bear and the gun back to Vincennes and told their mom what was going on.

Over the next couple of days, Susan and her mom got a metal bucket, poured some concrete in, let it set, then put the gun in and poured some more concrete over it. When that was set, they covered the concrete with dirt, put some plants in it,

and had one very heavy and incredibly incriminating planter. For a month or so, investigators chased down leads that didn't lead much of anywhere. There was little doubt that Susan was guilty, but they had nothing like enough evidence to go to trial. Then one day, Darlene was at the courthouse to pick up an unemployment check and happened to see Bob Brinson come out of the sheriff's office across the street.

She'd been wrestling with her conscience ever since Susan had told her what she had done, and she also worried that Susan would somehow throw the whole business onto their mom. So she made her choice, right then and there, and hurried after Brinson, catching up with him just as he was about to get into his car. She told him everything she knew and agreed to testify against her sister. Investigators initially wanted even more evidence against Susan and convinced Darlene to wear a wire and go talk to her sister. But Darlene was shakingly nervous and Susan was suspicious right away,

even scribbling, are you wearing a wire onto his crap of paper? When Darlene brought up Susan's confession, Susan said loudly and clearly, My God, Darlene, I never said anything like that to you at all. I don't understand why you're saying that. So that was a bust, but they still had Darlene's testimony, and it was finally habeas-grabis time for Susan Grunned. After Susan was arrested, her mom decided to make a clean slate of things. She called investigators and told them about the hidden gun.

They arrived at the house in Vincennes with hammers and crowbars, and soon enough, there it was, the murder weapon. Susan's trial in Peru was a circus in front of packed galleries and ended in a hung jury. Some of the jurors didn't believe David's denial of an affair with Susan and thought his potential involvement created sufficient reasonable doubt. The retrial was moved to a smaller courtroom in the small town of Warsaw, and this time Susan's goose was cooked, the testimony of her mom and sister really solidifying her conviction. Her Oklahoma conviction for felony child abuse wasn't admissible during her. trial, which was certainly the right decision, because anyone who heard about it would want to

string her ass up right there in the courtroom. It was admissible for sentencing, though, and Susan received the maximum 60 years. She was apparently paroled in 2020. This case is another example in a long, so long, long, long list of how abuse can ripple down through generations. Susan went through hell with her dad and went on to reek hell for her husbands and stepkids too. Which is not to say that most abused kids grow up to be abusers. They don't. But it's important to realize that this stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum. Some people heal from it and others just pass the pain along. Now, this is anecdotal and we certainly don't have any proof of it, but while we were researching this case, we came across a three-year-old post on Reddit from a woman

who claims to have been in prison with Susan before her release, and she says Susan was every bit as manipulative and ruthless behind bars as she was before her incarceration. Allegedly, while she was on the inside, she met a man who fell for her and decided to write a book about her. If they're together now, I hope he's watching his back. So that was a wild one, right, campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons.

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