Bledsoe - Bitter blood [eBook - NC Digital Library]: A True Story of Southern Family Pride, Madness, and Multiple Murder

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Copyright 1988 by Jerry Bledsoe
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First Diversion Books edition May 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62681-286-4

Before He Wakes
Blood Games
Death Sentence

for Linda, who loved me and endured,
and for Erik, who kept the computer functioning

And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.

REVELATION 13:1

D elores was late. That was unlike her, and Marjorie Chinnock was concerned.

Marjorie and Delores Lynch met every Sunday morning in the parking lot of Grace Episcopal, a small granite church in south Louisville. Usually, Marjorie arrived first and waited for Deloress car to come down the long drive to the back of the church. Delores would park beside her and they would go inside, where Delores always went to the rest room before they entered the sanctuary. After the thirty-minute service, they would join other church members in the parish hall for coffee, a time Delores particularly enjoyed. Unlike Marjorie, Delores was gregarious and often made herself the center of attention at these gatherings. Afterward, she and Marjorie would walk to their cars and chat until Delores said, Well, I must go. Janie will have our doughnuts.

Delores lived in a country house seventeen miles from the church, and during the three years she and Marjorie had been attending church together, her daughter, Janie, had been a student at the University of Louisvilles School of Dentistry, training for her third career. Janie had a student apartment at the downtown campus, but she often spent weekends at home. On those days, while her mother was at church, she would drive to Ehrlers Dairy Store in Prospect and buy yeast doughnuts, only two, and have them ready with coffee when her mother got home. When Janie wasnt home weekends, she often drove out to spend Sunday mornings with her mother, stopping for the doughnuts on the way. Later, Delores and Janie would drive back to Louisville to the House of Hunan for the Sunday lunch special.

For Delores, the day provided a satisfying weekly ritual.

She craved ritual. Indeed, it was the reason she belonged to Grace Episcopal. When the Episcopal church adopted a new prayer book, Grace defied the diocese and refused to accept it, clinging to the more ritualistic liturgy of the 1928 prayer book, a defiance that eventually would cause Grace Episcopal to disaffiliate itself from the diocese. Grace was the first church Delores attended regularly after moving to Louisville in 1967, but she left it in 1969 because she didnt like the priest. He looked greasy, she complained, and she felt dirty after shaking his hand. That was something that Delores, with her obsession for cleanliness, couldnt abide.

She attended several churches before settling at St. James Episcopal in Pewee Valley, a tiny town northeast of Louisville, much closer to her home. But eventually she would leave that church alsoin bitterness. Made a rebel by her conservatism, she had returned to Grace five years earlier, in 1979, because of the maverick stand the church took on the prayer book issue. The greasy priest had departed, and she now felt comfortable at Grace.

Marjorie Chinnock met Delores in 1967, when she originally came to Grace. At first, Marjorie didnt understand why Delores sought her friendship. Marjorie was reserved, almost withdrawn. And she was far from being on the same financial footing as Delores, the wife of a top General Electric executive. Delores lived then on stock dividends and a monthly allowance from her husband in an expensive home on the grounds of a prestigious country club. Marjorie, a divorced mother of grown children, lived in a modest apartment in an older section of Louisville and worked at a Kroger supermarket.

This is strange, Marjorie told herself at the beginning of the relationship. Why does she seek me out? Im a working person. She belongs in a high echelon. Doesnt she know who she is?

But after careful consideration, she began to think: Maybe Im the snob, and accepted Deloress friendship without question. After Delores left Grace Episcopal, the two friends gradually drifted apart, and Marjorie had been surprised three years earlier to get a call from Delores. Disenchanted, Marjorie had left the church altogether in 1970, and Delores had never questioned why until she called that Sunday afternoon.

You were always such a devout Episcopalian, Delores said. Why dont you come back? Meet me in the parking lot next Sunday.

Marjorie did, and their Sunday mornings became ritual.

But on this morning, the fourth Sunday of July 1984, Delores was late. Marjorie kept looking impatiently at her watch as time for the 8 A.M service neared. Finally, she decided she could wait no longer. She would not be late. She went inside, and just as the service was about to begin, Delores slid into the pew beside her, smiling apologies.

After the service, conducted by a visiting priest from Cincinnati because the regular priest was on vacation, Delores explained that she just had been running behind. She was her usual self at coffee, flitting about, joking and laughing and talking loudlythe usual Sunday morning chitchat that nobody would recall later. Marjorie noticed that Deloress two-piece dress, a wispy thin print of tiny blue and red flowers, didnt match. The top was faded, as if it had been washed more than the bottom. That was nothing unusual, Marjorie knew, for despite her obvious wealth Delores bought all of her clothes at discount houses and bargain shops and wore them long past their fashionable usefulness.

As always, Delores and Marjorie walked to their cars together and stood between them to chat. Delores was excited about the impending visit of her son, TomTJ, she called himof whom she frequently boasted. He was due to arrive Friday from Albuquerque with his new wife, Kathy, and two sons from a previous marriage, grandchildren Delores rarely got to see. Three days earlier, Janie, fresh from taking her final tests to practice dentistry in Kentucky, had moved her belongings from her university apartment back into the house. The house was a mess, Delores said, and there was much to be done before Tom arrived.

Delores complained constantly about the demands her house made on herespecially since shed given up her once-a-week maidbut until recently Marjorie had had no idea of the scope of those demands because shed never been to the house. But two weeks earlier, as she and Delores were leaving church, Delores had said, Why dont you come and have breakfast with me at the house?

Marjorie was delighted to accept, and Delores went back into the church to call Janie and tell her to forget the doughnuts. They rode in the seven-year-old gray Volkswagen Dasher that had belonged to Deloress husband. As they pulled into the long driveway to the house, Marjorie took one look and said, Delores, whats the name of this hotel?