Bitter Blood

by Jerry Bledsoe

  I had a nice surprise last week. Bob asked me to go to lunch with him, and he took me to the Hilton—it turned out to be a surprise retirement luncheon for me by the staff and faculty of Rutledge College.

  Tom and Kathy learned about Christmas at the Newsoms when they returned from a holiday trip to her parents’ home in Nebraska and found a letter from Louise.

  Susie and the boys had come to the big Christmas Eve dinner, and Susie had seemed her old self. The boys looked well. They got jogging suits from Bob and Florence, pajamas from Nanna, and games from Louise.

  Florence served a big, traditional meal: ham, turkey, dressing, gravy, cranberries, yams, green bean casserole, squash casserole, wild rice, biscuits, coffee, egg nog, mincemeat and pumpkin pies, fruitcake, and cookies.

  “Poor Florence worked like a Turk,” Louise wrote. “She did not eat until we all left. Bob carved the meat and Nanna helped cook. Nanna spent the night. On Christmas Day the Newsoms went to Raleigh to be with the Millers.

  “I feel sure that your fall visit to Greensboro did a lot of good.”

  Thus the worst year of Tom’s life came to an end. The new year, he thought, would have to be better. Surely it would bring him more time with his sons.

  32

  Neither Tom nor anybody in Susie’s family realized that Susie and Fritz had become so close that they were now calling themselves husband and wife. Neighbors at Susie’s apartment complex assumed them to be married, and although Fritz and Susie seemed somewhat secretive and kept largely to themselves, when they did have contact with neighbors they did nothing to dispel that impression. At nearby businesses they frequented together Fritz referred to Susie as his wife in her presence and to John and Jim as his sons. He wanted the boys to call him Papa instead of Uncle Fritz, and they usually did.

  In February of 1985, Fritz presented Susie with an elaborate valentine “to my loving wife,” and she tucked it away for sentimental keeping.

  Early in March, Fritz moved out of his apartment in Durham, which had stood largely unused in the previous year. He left behind a telephone, smoke-permeated walls, and a big, perfectly round hole burned in the center of the living room carpet, causing the property manager to wonder what strange activities this young doctor had been up to. No request was made for the return of the security deposit.

  Fritz moved many of his things into Susie’s second-floor apartment, which became as cluttered as the Klenner house always had been. He hung blankets and camouflage sheets over the closed window blinds in the bedrooms, shutting out all light, and while Susie went about her routine of getting the boys off to school and diligently attending her classes at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she was nearing completion of her work for a master’s degree in business administration, Fritz continued his habit of sleeping through most of the day and prowling late into the night. He still presented himself as a doctor, and even some family members still thought he was one. The previous fall, when his cousin Vera Luten, the only child of Fritz’s favorite aunt, Marie, was dying of leukemia, Fritz drove to Pennsylvania with his mother, arriving late on a Thursday. Marie wanted him to hurry to the hospital because Vera was near death. “He said, ‘Aunt Marie, I’ve got to get cleaned up. I’m a doctor. I’ve got to get cleaned up and look like one,’” Marie later recalled. “We just assumed that he had got his papers.” Fritz continued to freely offer medical advice to casual acquaintances and strangers. Neighbors and others who encountered him on a regular basis assumed that he worked a late hospital shift.

  One neighbor, Larry Robinson, a Vietnam War veteran who lived in the adjoining apartment, overcame his curiosity by asking Fritz where he practiced. Fritz told him that he’d taken over his father’s clinic in Reidsville. Robinson wondered how he could keep a clinic going by working such odd hours.

  Robinson had come to know Susie in the spring of 1984, and frequently chatted with her when he encountered her outside, often talking about Oriental cooking, an interest they had in common. But getting to know Fritz had taken longer. Fritz was quiet and seemed mysterious. Sometimes days would pass and he wouldn’t appear at the apartment, then he’d be around for a week without leaving. And he was always shuttling military gear and weapons back and forth between the apartment and his ominous-looking black Chevrolet Blazer. Several times Robinson had seen Fritz loading weapons and field gear into the vehicle at 2 or 3 A.M., causing him to suspect that Fritz was involved in something other than medicine.

  By Christmas of 1984, Robinson had noticed that Fritz was now at the apartment almost all the time. One day he struck up a conversation with him and asked about all the guns. Fritz explained that his dad had left him a large gun collection and that he did a lot of buying, selling, and trading. Later, after thieves broke into several cars in the parking lot, including Susie’s new S-10 Blazer, from which a radar detector was stolen, Fritz and Robinson spent a night together in a patch of trees, drinking coffee from a Thermos and watching the parking lot in the hope that the thieves might return. Robinson could tell that Fritz had more than normal caution about intruders. Fritz talked of wiring his apartment with burglar alarms and of putting extra dead bolts on the doors, and as they kept watch through the night, he suggested with no hint of facetiousness that they should rig a car with a trip wire and a claymore mine for the thieves’ return.

  “When he started talking about explosives, the man was very, very knowledgeable,” Robinson said.

  Mostly that night, though, Fritz talked about his experiences in Vietnam, telling gory details about ambushes, two-week patrols, and the fall of Saigon. He’d been there for the collapse, he said, and described it at great length.

  “He talked a damn good game,” Robinson recalled months later. “You just don’t tell somebody who was in Vietnam that you’ve been there unless you were. He was very convincing. He knew the names of all the places. He knew what it was like. He was so damn convincing, it’s kind of scary now. I would’ve bet my life that he was a combat soldier.”

  Fritz was equally convincing to others he encountered in this period. He spent a lot of time at News ’n’ Novels, a bookstore in the Kroger Shopping Center on West Market Street, only a couple of miles from Susie’s apartment. There he bought large numbers of mercenary, survivalist, and gun magazines as well as poetry by Rudyard Kipling. He became friendly with Lynne McNeil, a clerk, and talked with her about medicine and poetry. The Rubaiyat, by Omar Khayyam, she later remembered, was one of his favorite works. (In the past he had given copies of the book to women he liked.)

  Fritz had brought Susie and the boys to the store and introduced them to Lynne as his wife and sons. He also offered her medical advice on occasion, and she had no reason to suspect that he was not a doctor. Later, remembering Fritz, a single poignant incident stood out most in her mind.

  One day she was wearing a brooch she had made from an odd little hand-painted trinket she’d found in her grandmother’s jewelry box. Fritz noticed it and told her it was a decoration from horse-and-buggy days that had been used to festoon harnesses on special occasions. His dad knew all about them, he said, and when he saw him, he’d find out more for her. He never brought it up again, and later she was surprised to learn that Fritz’s father had been dead for many months when he told her that.

  Fritz was a regular customer at the Kroger store, a twenty-four-hour supermarket, in the shopping center. He usually came in after midnight, wearing either camouflage fatigues or a white doctor’s smock with a stethoscope in the pocket. One night he arrived in a green surgical suit that appeared smeared with dried blood. Several employees got to know him and regularly sought medical advice from him. They thought him nice but a bit peculiar. He frequently spent fifteen or twenty minutes talking on the pay phone at the front of the store, causing the employees to wonder why a doctor would come to Kroger to use the telephone. That wasn’t all they wondered about. His purchases intrigued them most.

  He bought vitamins in vast amounts. He filled a shopping cart
one night with bottles of rubbing alcohol, rolls of adhesive tape and boxes of gauze, more than $300 worth. Why would a doctor buy medical supplies at Kroger? One night, he bought every box of Hershey’s cocoa on the shelves, and the checkout clerk could not contain her curiosity.

  “Somebody must be about to have a chocolate fit,” she quipped.

  Fritz smiled and said that cocoa was an appetite suppressant. In desperate situations, he explained, a person with cocoa could get along without food.

  Another night, Fritz became agitated when the bill for the customer ahead of him in line came to $6.66. Those numbers represented the mark of the beast in Revelation, Fritz pointed out, and he began to talk about the Battle of Armageddon and the end of time.

  “Before I’ll take the mark of the beast,” he said, “I’ll take my wife and my two boys and we’ll go so far back into the mountains that not even the devil can find us.”

  Phil Farlow knew that Fritz was preparing for some kind of battle, but he was unaware that it was for one so drastic as Armageddon. Farlow operated the Army-Navy Surplus Store on Lee Street in Greensboro where Fritz had been an occasional customer for several years. But late in the fall of 1984, Fritz started coming to the store on almost a weekly basis, sometimes more often, and he continued on through the winter. He usually arrived late in the afternoon, often just before the 6 P.M. closing time, but Farlow kept the store open as long as Fritz wanted to shop, sometimes for three or four hours.

  Fritz told Farlow that he was a doctor and had taken over his father’s practice in Reidsville. He occasionally offered medical advice to other customers, and once left some medicine for a customer whose dog was having a difficult time recovering from an encounter with a car. But Fritz never said why he was buying so much military gear, and Farlow never questioned. He assumed that Fritz must operate a commando or survival school, because he usually bought several of the same item.

  Over a period of about six months, Fritz became the store’s biggest customer. He bought knives, bayonets, canteens, field rations, sleeping bags, compasses, packs, field jackets, uniforms, camouflage materials. And he never looked at prices. He spent hours in the store’s book section, and carried books to the checkout counter by the stack—military manuals on arms (including heavy armaments, explosives, and combat skills), plus books on mercenary tactics, guerrilla warfare, survivalism, and killing techniques. Fritz rarely left without buying several hundred dollars worth of books and gear, and he usually peeled off hundred-dollar bills in payment. He always paid in cash, just as his father had done.

  Throughout his life, Fritz’s father had been Fritz’s only source of income, and he continued to be so. Dr. Klenner had made Fritz the beneficiary of a $25,000 life insurance policy, and although Fritz distrusted banks, as his father had, he had put the money in a Reidsville bank the summer before. By the spring of 1985 only a little more than $1,000 was left.

  Fritz had used some of the money to help Susie buy her new Blazer, but the bulk of it had gone for military equipment and weapons. He never missed an area gun show and he usually took Susie and the boys with him. Gun dealers later remembered Fritz and the two boys, because they all came dressed in jungle fatigues, and the boys seemed so worshipful and obedient to him.

  Fritz regularly ordered weapons and parts by telephone from faraway mail-order houses, using Susie’s Visa card to pay. He usually bought only the best, and at one point he had three of the expensive M-10 MAC automatic pistols so popular with drug dealers. He traveled regularly to a big gun store in Tucker, Georgia, where he bought several thousand dollars worth of military weapons. On the black market, he was buying stolen military grenades, mines, and other explosives, and was storing them at his mother’s house in Reidsville without her knowledge.

  But most of his weapons dealing was done at a small, heavily barred, two-story brick building next to an overpass in a seedy section of Winston-Salem. McHargue Guns and Coins was owned by Curtis McHargue, an employee of R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, and operated by his wife, Dot, and sons, Mike and Steve. They had known Fritz, whom they called Fred, for about six years, since he had first come in with his father. In the past year, they also had come to know Susie and the boys well. At Christmas, Susie brought them homemade fudge. She told Dot that she was thinking of making fudge for businessmen to buy as gifts in airports and she was eager to know how they liked it. When Susie and the boys came with Fritz, the boys usually read gun magazines or books while Fritz talked with Steve and Mike and Susie chatted with Dot. Usually, Susie talked about the boys or her classes, but she also liked to talk about guns.

  “She loved to shoot,” Dot later said.

  So, Dot said, did the boys. From the McHargues, Fritz bought them .22-caliber versions of the AR15 assault rifle and was teaching them to shoot. They were doing well, too, he boasted, filling their paper targets with holes near the bull’s-eye.

  The McHargues believed that Fritz and Susie were married because Fritz told them so, and Susie later confided to Dot that they’d had to go out of state for the ceremony because first cousins couldn’t wed in North Carolina.

  Fritz, too, confided in the McHargues, who loved intrigue as much as he did. He told them things that he told few others. These things were top secret, he said, but he could tell them, because he knew that he could trust them. He told that he was a contract operative for the CIA, that he was a special member of the Delta Team, the quick-response commando group stationed at Fort Bragg. He gave vivid descriptions of several operations on which he’d been involved for both groups, descriptions that the McHargues later would not reveal because Fritz had told them they had to be kept secret at all costs.

  The McHargues believed him, just as they always had believed him to be a doctor and a Special Forces veteran of Vietnam, because Fritz clearly was a man in the know. Four hours before news broke about the Russian downing of a Korean airliner in September 1983, Fritz told them about it, Dot McHargue said. A month later, and a full day in advance, Fritz told them about the U.S. invasion of Grenada. He also told them stories that didn’t make the news. One was that four Russian submarines had been sunk off Cape Hatteras, but nobody would ever know about it, Fritz said, because both sides chose to keep it secret.

  Susie, too, joined in the story telling, confiding to Dot that she also had worked as an agent assisting Fritz on “courier runs” by dropping off satchels full of money, the purpose of which she was not allowed to know.

  If anything ever happened to him, Fritz said, the government would deny any knowledge of him, perhaps even surreptitiously spread lies about him, but the McHargues would know that he had died in the service of his country.

  Death clearly was on Fritz’s mind in the spring of 1985. He told the McHargues that two recent attempts had been made on his life, as well as Susie’s.

  “He didn’t give a lot of details,” Dot McHargue remembered. “He was just worried.”

  As usual, Fritz also had bigger things on his mind. He was convinced that Armageddon would be set off by a nuclear explosion in the United States that would result in panic, civil disorder, and invasion from all sides, he told the McHargues. He pictured it vividly and warned that they should be ready.

  “He never told me he knew when it was going to be exactly,” Dot McHargue said, “but he knew everything was near the end of time.”

  33

  In March of 1985, Judge Susie Sharp was honored with a portrait hanging at the Rockingham County Courthouse in Wentworth, her portrait joining that of her father. She invited Susie, who kept the boys out of school for the ceremony. Su-Su insisted on having the boys pose with her for photographers, and the pictures appeared in area newspapers. The boys looked stiff and ill at ease, especially John. His clothes were rumpled and ill-fitting, his eyes dark circles in his sad face.

  Louise snipped the pictures from newspapers and mailed them in a letter to Tom and Kathy on March 22.

  You may like to see how John and Jim made the news here. They did well and w
e were proud of them. The portrait hanging was sponsored by the Rockingham County Bar Association, and Sandy Sands is the president.

  John and Jim looked fine. They are growing fast. Jim is almost as tall as John. Susie is too thin but seems full of vitality.

  She went on to talk of other family members and to mention Fritz before closing.

  Annie Hill frequently has supper with me. When she comes we watch “Wheel of Fortune” after supper before she goes home. She backs out at the last minute when Fritz shows up at home for supper unannounced. I have no idea how or where he spends his time, but he seems to have little consideration for his mother.

  On the day Louise wrote that letter, Tom wrote to his lawyer in Reidsville, Bill Horsley.

  Enclosed are most of the correspondence between Susie’s family, Kathy and me. The relevant parts have been highlighted and we’ve made comments in the margins that should be of interest to you. Notice especially that our visit to North Carolina last November prompted Susie to at least put on a cosmetic display of family unity over the holidays and permitted the boys a little more freedom. However, the situation seems to have returned to the pre-Christmas position, i.e., Susie and the boys are not spending much time with the family except Annie Hill.

  As for the visitation, I would like about 70 days starting this year on June 14 through August 19. This is from a Friday to a Monday, which should be the rule summer after summer. This will maximize the number of weekends Kathy and I can spend between visits and this would make for a more constant visitation schedule. The length of time in the summer will enable us to get in a routine as a family rather than just spending a few weekends with a goodtime father.

  I would like to get that part of the visitation changed that requires one of the parents to accompany the boys on their plane trips out here. This provision is a real financial and logistical problem. It usually takes a travel agent two days to coordinate the schedules and naturally doubles the cost of the visitation. On a couple of occasions, Susie has driven the boys to Atlanta and cashed in the tickets. I firmly believe this obstacle was put in as a purely punitive measure to make it more difficult and expensive to see the kids. I don’t think that my desires in this matter should be negotiable. You’ll need to notify Susie of my desires while I have the boys in Disneyland (April 3–9). I do not expect her to cooperate.