Bitter Blood

by Jerry Bledsoe

  “He had no friends,” Sam Phillips said, although he didn’t realize that until later. “We were his sole support group.”

  When Fritz was not talking about guns, explosives, the benefits of vitamins, or his work at the hospital, his conversation centered on only two other subjects: his father and the coming holocaust. He talked about both incessantly, and with both, his three new friends realized, he was obsessed.

  “He believed something catastrophic would happen in the not-too-distant future,” said Sam Phillips, who, with the others, agreed it was possible and enjoyed talking about it.

  Nearly every fluctuation in the news brought new certainty to Fritz’s fears that the end of civilization was at hand. A Mideast war would shut off oil supplies. A truckers’ strike would initiate a run on supermarkets. Communist-fomented internal strife would bring down the government. A financial crisis would destroy the world economy. Starving hordes would pour across the Mexican border. The Russians would launch a surprise attack. Everybody would have to fend for himself and fight for his existence, Fritz said, and he intended to be ready. He and his father stockpiled food, medical supplies, survival gear, and plenty of guns and ammunition at his Reidsville home, he said—and he had gold hidden away, too. When the big fall came, he would retreat to his daddy’s farm and take his friends with him, and anybody would pay hell getting them out of there.

  “He was always in this fantasy world about how when the shit hit the fan, we’d all hole up,” John Forrest recalled. “He was really into that crap. He really believed it.”

  While Fritz was working with his father in 1976, he met and began dating a young woman who came to the clinic with her mother, a regular patient. Her name was Ruth Dupree, and she was a student at Meredith College in Raleigh, just twenty miles from Durham. They dated regularly after Fritz moved to Durham, and in 1977 they became engaged. A Christmas wedding was announced. Invitations already had been sent when Fritz told Ruth that he wouldn’t be able to go through with the marriage; his father had diagnosed him as having cancer. The wedding was canceled.

  Within a year, Fritz revealed that his cancer had been cured by his father’s vitamin treatments, and the wedding was rescheduled for Christmas of 1978. It took place on December 23, at Our Lady of Grace Catholic Church, an imposing granite structure in Greensboro. Ruth later confided to friends that, on their wedding night, Fritz left her alone for several hours, saying that he had to make hospital checks.

  The newlyweds moved into a two-bedroom apartment on Maiden Lane in Reidsville, only a short distance from the Klenner home. Ruth became a teacher in the Reidsville city schools. Fritz continued his routine of working in his father’s clinic on weekends—patients sometimes were still there at midnight on Friday—leaving every Monday morning for Durham, where he remained until Friday.

  His father had begun boasting more and more of Fritz’s accomplishments at Duke. Fritz was in his third year now, an honor student, his father told patients. Eminent doctors thought highly of him. He was involved in important blood research as well as other projects. Dr. Klenner even took blood samples from patients for Fritz to analyze.

  At one point in 1979, Fritz became ill and told of a hush-hush research accident that had infected him and several doctors with a rare form of hepatitis. The doctors died, Fritz later told acquaintances, but his father saved him with vitamins.

  Fritz told several stories of this type. One involved radioactive materials that killed two researchers, while Fritz was shielded from harm by vitamins. Another was about the first known incident of airborne viruses infecting researchers with a rare cancer. Fritz was the only member of the team who didn’t contract the disease, and vitamins got the credit.

  In the fall of 1979, Cynthia Phillips came home from a PTA meeting to find a stranger in the wingback chair in her living room. He rose when she came in, and her husband, Sam, introduced his friend Dr. Fritz Klenner. Cynthia had heard her husband speak of this friend he’d met at John Forrest’s house, but she’d never met him. She was slightly embarrassed that her husband would bring a doctor to their modest house, but she was immediately impressed with Fritz’s friendliness and sincerity.

  He seemed almost too young to be a doctor, clearly younger by several years than she, a little reserved, almost shy. She thought him cute, though, with a certain rakish air about him, accentuated by his Australian bush hat on a nearby chair. He intrigued her. She was flattered that he immediately included her in the conversation. When she spoke, he paid rapt attention, his dark eyes transfixed on hers.

  Soon Fritz was coming to the Phillips house at least one night a week, sometimes more frequently. Cynthia looked forward to his visits. She found him an entertaining conversationalist with a wide range of interests. His friendship was an exciting interlude in an otherwise ordinary life. The Phillips’ two young sons also liked Fritz and enjoyed his visits. He talked with them about guns, camping, Indians, and karate.

  Fritz sometimes stayed so late that Sam, who had to be at work early, often excused himself and went to bed, leaving Cynthia to talk with him. She discovered that Fritz would stay as long as she allowed, and frequently it was one or two o’clock in the morning before she’d tell him that she’d better be getting to bed.

  Fritz talked about postgraduate studies at Duke and research projects, but he talked much more about his father and his father’s work. He loved to talk about the Mountain, the farm where he and his father went to shoot, blast for caves, and hunt monsters. He was fascinated by religion and would talk about it for hours. After he and Cynthia became closer, he talked at length about his childhood and his loneliness.

  “I never had any really good friends until Sam and you,” he confided one night.

  Gradually, Cynthia learned some of Fritz’s eccentricities. Although he seemed to be in marvelous shape, he was terribly insecure about his lean, muscled body and was always buying and using gimmicky exercise equipment. A childhood disease, he said, had left him with atrophied muscles in his side and back. At times, he wore ankle weights. He frequently carried squeeze devices to build the muscles in his hands and arms. He was addicted to Tab, a diet soft drink, yet he constantly gobbled high-calorie packaged pastries—pecan twirls, fudge brownies, and Little Debbie delights. He was fanatic about germs and was quick to combat them with spray cans of disinfectants and bottles of antiseptics. And although he loved dogs and talked regularly about his big German shepherd, Dorner, who was, he said, wildly protective of him and his father, he was afraid of cats. One night, when the Phillips’ cat jumped onto the back of the couch behind him, Fritz yelped and leaped up into a karate stance.

  He had a fetish about jewelry. He loved to fondle it and see it glitter, and he was constantly buying and trading it. If the $8,000 gold presidential Rolex on his wrist went unnoticed, he somehow managed to draw attention to it. Once he showed Cynthia a heavy gold necklace, thick with diamonds, that was so beautiful it nearly took her breath away. He said it was his mother’s, but it was the kind of thing, Cynthia thought, that only a queen or a movie star might wear. She couldn’t imagine how much it cost.

  To Cynthia, these were but mild eccentricities, and she found herself utterly charmed by Fritz. In June of 1980, after she had finished her school year, he came by one day while Sam was at work and invited her to a nearby park. He stopped in an out-of-the-way spot to talk. Soon, he drew her to him and kissed her. “I love you,” he said, and she found herself yielding to his embrace and his affection.

  “He just got you so wrapped up,” she recalled years later, trying to explain her actions. “He was your protector, your confidant, your best friend. He just consumed you. He was really sweet and always so delighted to see you. He made you feel that everything you said was interesting and you were the most important person in the world.”

  Soon after his profession of love, Fritz and his wife left on a long-planned trip to the West that was to take several weeks. For the trip, Fritz had bought a new Chevrolet Blazer, a bulky, fou
r-wheel-drive vehicle designed for rugged terrain. While he was gone, Cynthia found herself thinking about him almost constantly.

  Several times during the trip, Fritz called to say that he was thinking of her, too, his love unchanged. Then he called from Utah to let her know that the trip was being cut short. Fritz had stopped on a roadside to take in a vista, leaving Ruth in the Blazer. While he was across the road a car careened into the Blazer, demolishing it and injuring Ruth. Others were also hurt, including one man who died, despite Fritz’s self-described heroic efforts to save him. Ruth was not seriously injured, and as soon as she was released from the hospital, she and Fritz returned home. Fritz hurried to Cynthia to tell her how much he had missed her and how the trip had made him realize the depth of his feeling for her. More than ever he knew that he belonged with her and not with Ruth. His wife didn’t care for him, he said, and he told sordid tales about her that only later Cynthia learned to be lies. He was trying to get his marriage annulled, he said, and he was so sincere that Cynthia believed him.

  Cynthia began stopping by to see Fritz at his apartment. At first, she couldn’t believe the place. It was almost cavelike, dark and cluttered. Quilts and blankets hung over the draped windows, preventing light from entering or escaping. Votive candles were everywhere, and Fritz burned them whenever he was home. An old enamel table in the dining room was covered with vitamins, medicine bottles, and vials of blood. An antique desk was buried under stacks of medical books and papers. Military gear and camping equipment occupied the sofa, leaving no place to sit. The footstool, made from a camel saddle, another oddity his father had picked up, offered no room for feet. The bedroom, at the end of a short hall, didn’t escape the clutter either. An old chest, a lamp table, an ancient pedal sewing machine, all suffered equal burdens. Under the bulky, four-poster, antique mahogany bed were stacks of mercenary magazines filled with pictures of grotesque dead bodies and articles about exotic weapons and killing techniques.

  Cynthia had known for some time that her marriage was in the doldrums, but now, with Fritz in her life, she began to question whether it was worth saving. By the end of October, she wanted to get away alone and think. A girl friend invited her to visit in the mountains, and when her husband told her that she couldn’t go, she considered that the final blow to their relationship and told him that she wanted out. He packed his clothes and left home, renting an apartment in a complex on the same street as Fritz’s apartment and not far away.

  Fritz was supportive. “Everything’s going to work out,” he assured her. “This is the way it’s meant to be.”

  It was just a matter of time now, he told her, until they could be together permanently, man and wife.

  “I can’t wait for Daddy to meet you,” Fritz said. “He’s going to love you. We’re going to have so much fun as a family.”

  Sam Phillips knew nothing of his wife’s affair with his friend, and he and Fritz continued seeing one another regularly at John Forrest’s garage. Fritz pretended concern to Sam about the breakup, and offered to help work out the problems. For several months, he told Sam of his attempts to get Cynthia to reconcile their differences.

  Cynthia, meanwhile, was completely happy with Fritz’s love and attention. “I guess I was mesmerized,” she observed later. Friends told her that she’d never looked better or seemed happier. One day Fritz took her to see the Mountain, the rugged farm about which he had talked so much. He pointed out the hillside spot where someday they would build their love nest, a stone house, their own fortress against the world. His daddy would come to see them regularly, he said, and they would plant trees together.

  “The next time you come up here,” he told her with a broad smile as they were leaving, “you’re going to be pregnant with my baby.”

  On another occasion, Fritz took Cynthia and her sons on an outing to Raven Rock State Park on the Cape Fear River near Lillington. Cynthia was especially pleased at how Fritz lavished attention on her sons. He always made time for them and talked with them about their interests. He brought them presents and took them places. “They were crazy about him,” she said. At Raven Rock Park, he guided them on the hiking trails, pointing out different plants and wildflowers, talking about all the flora his father could identify on sight. He clambered alone onto the huge rocks overlooking the river, and when he reached the peak of the highest one, he stood looking down at the water and let out a bloodcurdling Indian yell that startled Cynthia and her sons. It was so intense and primitive, Cynthia knew, that for a moment Fritz had become an Indian of yore, master of the wilderness. It was almost comical, and she wanted to laugh, but she checked herself.

  “You didn’t laugh at Fritz,” she explained later. “I don’t think you would ever be safe laughing at Fritz.”

  The seriousness of Fritz’s demeanor was prominently manifested in his religious beliefs, and his Catholicism, Cynthia realized, was deeply entwined with mysticism. He carried protective prayers that he had gotten from his father. He believed them to be so powerful that by praying them he could have whatever he wanted.

  When Cynthia expressed guilt about her relationship with him, he invited her into the dark cave of his apartment, and with votive candles flickering, he told her to kneel before him and began a ceremony of affirmation. He held her hands, looked deeply into her eyes, recited prayers, and asked her to repeat vows of love and dedication. She was embarrassed, but she went through the ritual to please him and made no mention that she thought it weird. When it was over, Fritz told her that now they were married in the eyes of God and that was all that mattered.

  “It was as if he thought, ‘I’ve got this special relationship with God and I don’t have to follow the rules everybody else does,’” she recalled later.

  Despite his vows of love, his talk of marriage and of having a son of his own, as the spring of 1981 approached, Cynthia not only sensed that Fritz was drawing away from her, she realized that he had a wall around him that she had never been able to penetrate. What she did not know was that he was involving himself in the lives of other women.

  One was Betty James, a victim of multiple sclerosis. Her doctor had told her that little could be done for her condition, but then she heard about Dr. Klenner and his miracle vitamins. She lived out of state, and in the beginning she was making as many as three twelve-hour round-trips a week to Reidsville to get injections. She met Fritz soon after she began coming to the clinic, and she could tell immediately that he was interested in her. He seemed to single her out for special attention, and she considered him to be nearly as wonderful as his father, whom she thought to be the kindest and greatest man she’d ever encountered.

  “He was extremely gentle,” she later said of Fritz, “and his hands were so soft they were like a baby’s hands.”

  Like all of Dr. Klenner’s patients, she knew that Fritz was completing his medical training at Duke and soon would be joining his father in practice. He told her he had been a Green Beret in Vietnam, and he liked to tell gory details of accident victims on whom he’d worked in the emergency room at Duke Hospital. She knew, too, as all the patients knew, that Fritz was married, but when he asked her out, she said yes. He began calling her regularly, and she went out with him as often as possible when she came for treatment. He made her feel important and desirable, and his marriage, he told her, was fast coming to an end. Ruth was too resentful about his many hours at the hospital, he said. And she was jealous of the time he spent with his father.

  “I just can’t handle a woman being jealous of my father,” he told her.

  At about the time Fritz began entertaining Betty James, his friend Ned White began wondering about Fritz’s relationship with his wife. Ned and Wanda White were the parents of a small child who had been stricken with a rare disease that had caused doctors at major hospitals to give up hope. The Whites read of the miracles Dr. Klenner was claiming with vitamins and turned to him in desperation. Dr. Klenner began massive doses of vitamin C, which the Whites were certain had save
d their child’s life. But despite all of Dr. Klenner’s reassurances that he would make the disabled child whole again, there had been but slight improvement. For years, one or the other of the Whites had brought the child to the clinic every day for injections of various vitamins. They spent thousands of hours with the Klenners and became not only intimately close with them but emotionally dependent as well. Dr. Klenner, who never charged them, had become almost obsessed with the case and had made the child’s restoration a personal crusade.

  Gradually, Ned White realized that his child’s situation was hopeless. He began to think that his family’s dependence on the Klenners was insane, that it was depriving them of a normal family life. He wanted to wean his family from false hope. But his wife refused to give up, refused to break from the Klenners, and as they argued about it, an already strained marriage began to disintegrate. As their situation worsened, Ned noticed that Fritz seemed to be getting closer and closer to Wanda, who was several years older than Fritz.

  At one point, Ned had thought himself Fritz’s only real friend. They had spent hours talking about everything from Armageddon to medicine, had even discussed becoming business partners. Fritz had proposed that Ned build a new clinic to lease to him and his father after he got his medical license and joined the practice.

  Ned, an intelligent and well-educated man, enjoyed listening to Fritz’s stories about his studies and work at medical school. “He told me some of the damnedest things that happened at Duke,” Ned recalled. “He would create these incredibly detailed scenarios about things that happened in the emergency room or the lab. The stories were very, very medical, so complex, and he was so thorough in the way he would tell them.”