Bitter Blood

by Jerry Bledsoe

  First she had questions. Earlier that day, she’d “given the third degree,” as she put it, to the SBI agents at the house, but she got few answers. “We don’t know,” they’d answer. Or “We can’t say anything about that now.” She got much the same responses from Boner and Carden.

  Giving up her questioning, Nancy spilled out her suspicions. When she and her brother and sister had tried to figure out who might have wanted these murders done, Nancy said, they came up with only one name: Susie.

  “Boner nearly swallowed his cigar,” she recalled later.

  Why did they think that? Boner asked, and Nancy reeled off the reasons. Later, Boner listed them in his report.

  Susie had a bad divorce, which was traumatic, and she had a change of attitude and short temper.

  When Susie returned from New Mexico, she and her two boys moved in with her parents.

  Susie moved out when she, Robert Jr. and Florence had a big fight.

  The fight occurred when Robert Jr. and Florence confronted her about her relationship with her first cousin, Fritz Klenner.

  It was thought in the family that Susie and Fritz Klenner were too close and probably slept together.

  Also Fritz was giving Susie and the two boys injections of what they thought was probably vitamin C.

  When Susie left she did not return, even sent someone to get her clothes and other belongings.

  Susie cut off her ties with the family, even Big Susie, Susie Sharp, whom she idolized and Big Susie idolized her.

  Susie carried with her a plastic bag of medicine that Fritz prescribed for her and the boys.

  Fritz was supposed to have gone to medical school, Chapel Hill or Duke, and flunked or dropped out.

  Robert Jr. and Florence tried to keep the fight low-keyed and not let the family know too much.

  Susie is too cool and calm and shows no emotion about the murder of her parents and grandmother.

  Robert Jr. and Florence, or Robert Jr. alone, was to testify on behalf of Dr. Tom Lynch four days after the murders for Dr. Tom Lynch to have more visitation of the children.

  Nancy also mentioned the possibility of Susie’s involvement in the Lynch murders in Kentucky.

  “We thought at the time that somebody should question her,” she said, “but nobody ever asked us, so we thought we were crazy.”

  While Rob talked with Gentry and House on Tuesday afternoon, Susie was shopping with Nancy Holder. Nancy, who had been Bob’s secretary at R. J. Reynolds for seventeen years, was now herself a Reynolds executive. She had remained close to the Newsoms. Rob and Susie had grown up calling her Aunt Nancy. Susie had called and asked Nancy to help her shop for clothes for the boys to wear to the funerals.

  Nancy tried to present a cheerful front. “I tried to keep off sadness as much as I could,” she remembered later.

  Susie talked at length about John and Jim and how proud she was of them. She spoke bitterly of Tom and said she didn’t want the boys spending time with him.

  “Susie, he’s their daddy and he’s bound to want them,” Nancy said.

  But Susie would hear nothing of that. Tom, she said, was up to bad things. She had a friend high in the CIA who’d told her about them.

  Susie told about going to Nanna’s house earlier that day and how upset it had made her.

  “It was just devastating to walk in there,” she said.

  “Everything’s sprayed black and they’ve cut holes in the carpet. It was awful.”

  Susie said she dreaded the funeral. She had no intention of riding in the family car.

  “I just can’t,” she said. “I just don’t like hearses and limousines.”

  “Would you like for us to drive you?” Nancy asked.

  “No, Fritz said he’d drive us.”

  That was the only mention she made of Fritz all afternoon.

  Nancy bought suits for the boys, and afterward, she and Susie drove to the K&W Cafeteria for supper. On the way, Nancy talked about Bob and Florence.

  “You know how fine they were and how much I loved them,” she said.

  “I know.”

  Nancy went on to say that she’d always felt more like family than friend with Bob and Florence and that she was glad that Rob and Susie had included her at such a time. “Thank you,” she said. “I do love you both.”

  Susie burst into tears and reached to hug her.

  “Hey,” Nancy said, “Cut that out. I don’t drive too well as it is. I can’t drive at all if you get me crying. I’ve already cried so many tears over this that I don’t think I have any more left.”

  Fritz had taken John and Jim to Annette Hunt’s house on Tuesday morning and left them for the day. Nancy brought Susie back to the Newsom house across the street at about 8 P.M., and when Susie went to Annette’s to get the boys, she said, “Ride with me to the apartment.”

  Annette thought that she needed company, so she went with her. At the apartment, they bathed the boys, took the dogs for a walk, and returned to put the boys to bed and talk.

  Soon afterward, Fritz arrived, angry and shouting.

  “He was really upset with her,” Annette recalled later. “He was fussing at her for not having contacted him that afternoon. He was beside himself. ‘Why didn’t you call?’ he kept asking. He didn’t want her out on the highway that late. She wasn’t too concerned that he was upset. She tried to calm him down, but he was just beside himself. I just kind of sat there and tried to fade into the wall.”

  37

  On Wednesday morning, the Newsom murders were relegated to an inside page of the Winston-Salem Journal. An anonymous source was quoted as saying that a fire had been set near the bodies, that the Newsoms appeared to have been shot, and that the house “had been ransacked from top to bottom.” Nanna’s next-door neighbor, Jerrel Bell, said deputies told her “that there was no sign of a struggle and that investigators thought it was possible the Newsoms knew their attacker or attackers.”

  Bob and Florence had two children, the report said. Rob had declined comment. Susie couldn’t be reached. Then, almost as if it were unrelated, came the revelation that Susie’s former husband had talked with a detective the day before.

  “He asked me if I knew anything that might help them there, but I didn’t,” Tom had said. “I just thought it was strange, having been through something similar myself.”

  Only then did the story mention that Tom’s mother and sister had been shot to death the previous July in Kentucky.

  Preston Oldham was a man who wore a uniform well and proudly, and always for press conferences. At 10 A.M. on Wednesday, when he walked into a sheriff’s department briefing room filled with TV cameras, reporters, and newspaper photographers, his uniform was form-fitting and freshly starched. TV lights reflected off the gold eagles on his collar as Oldham revealed that the murders had taken place some time after 9:30 P.M. Saturday, that all three victims had been shot and each suffered at least two fatal wounds. One victim, he said, was also stabbed, but he would not say which.

  “The apparent motive appears to be robbery,” he said.

  He confirmed the details revealed by the Journal’s anonymous source.

  “I don’t know if the fire was set to destroy evidence or what,” he said.

  Oldham said that fourteen officers were working on the case, and described the investigation as “multiple focus.”

  “There has been no central focus made on a particular individual or suspect,” he said, “but I think that will come in time.”

  Had family members been ruled out as suspects?

  “It wouldn’t be fair to make any comment on that,” he said, going on to say that nobody had been ruled out.

  The reporters wanted to know about links between the Newsom and Lynch murders.

  “We have not established a connection,” he said, but that was “high on the priority list.”

  The atmosphere between Oldham and the frustrated reporters was not one of amiability, and at one point the exchanges grew sharp.
Asked when the autopsy reports would be released, Oldham said that they wouldn’t be if he could get a court order to stop it.

  What difference could it make to the case if the nature of the wounds was made public? a reporter asked.

  “I’ve spent twenty-two years on the street,” Oldham said. “You haven’t. You’ll just have to trust my judgment on this one.”

  Contrary to what Oldham said at the press conference, the investigation had found a focus, and at the very moment the sheriff was denying it, Allen Gentry and Tom Sturgill were talking to her in Greensboro. After hearing what Nancy had told Boner and Carden the day before, Gentry and Sturgill were eager to know what Susie would say. But they had no intention of pressing her or letting her know that she was suspected in any way. “We were kind of on a friendly interview,” Gentry explained. “We wanted her to talk.”

  Chowy answered their knock, hitting the door from inside like a fullback crashing the line. Susie put the dogs up before opening the door.

  “She was just charming,” Gentry said later, “almost bubbly, bouncy.”

  The detectives were taken aback by the incredible clutter in the apartment. Susie invited them into the living room, where she introduced Fritz.

  “This is my cousin,” she said. “He helps us out.”

  Both detectives noticed that Fritz was wearing a folded knife in a leather case on his belt.

  Susie cleared books and papers from two wicker chairs so the detectives could sit. She sat on an ottoman. Fritz perched close behind her on a short stool.

  Trying to appear friendly, the detectives made small talk, but Fritz didn’t join in.

  “He didn’t have much to say at all,” Gentry remembered later. “He just kind of sat there and judged us.”

  Susie was different. “She was all sweetness,” Gentry said. “It was like she was interviewing for a job instead of talking to officers about the murder of her parents and grandmother.”

  Gentry led into the questioning by asking when she’d last talked with her parents. She said her father had called Friday morning before leaving for Winston-Salem, but she didn’t mention that the purpose of his call was to tell her that he planned to testify for Tom, as the detectives already knew.

  She was close to her grandmother, she said. Nanna had helped her with legal expenses in her divorce. Nanna often gave money to her grandchildren, she said, including sizable checks every Christmas. She believed that Nanna might have kept large sums of money stashed at her house and offered this as a motive.

  She was upset about the condition of the house after going by the day before, she said, and was especially concerned about all the fingerprint dust. Would it come off? The detectives assured her that it would. The dusting was necessary to help solve the crime, they explained. She was also worried about the whereabouts of her grandmother’s silver flatware, mink, and jewelry.

  Gentry asked if she’d mind going over her activities for the previous weekend, and she graciously complied.

  She’d had dinner at Annie Hill’s in Reidsville Friday night. Fritz had gone camping in the mountains. She spent much of Saturday at Annette Hunt’s house. She seemed vague about the rest of Saturday but remembered taking the boys to McDonald’s that night, then returning to the apartment. On Sunday afternoon, Fritz called from Lexington, Virginia, and asked her to meet him at Natural Bridge for dinner. She drove there with the boys, nearly a four-hour trip. They ate in the cafeteria in the big entrance building, took a short hike, and drove back to Greensboro, arriving about 11:30. As soon as they opened the apartment door Chowy ran off, chasing a cat, and Fritz spent four hours looking for him.

  “Isn’t that right?” she said, turning to Fritz and touching his knee.

  Fritz nodded agreement.

  About midnight, Susie went on, John Chandler, a neighbor of her parents, called and said there’d been an accident at Nanna’s. She thought it was a minor auto accident and wasn’t concerned. Later, Alice called and said that her parents and Nanna were dead. She didn’t believe it and called Annie Hill, who told her that it probably wasn’t true, not to worry, that she would try to find out something about it in the morning. Fritz went to sleep on the floor, but she stayed up all night working on a school paper. Rob called about 3:30 A.M. to tell her of the deaths, but not until Annie Hill called to confirm the news the next morning did she really accept that it was true.

  When Gentry asked if she knew anything about the Lynch murders, she became very vocal.

  “It was professional,” she said. “Nothing was taken.”

  Gentry chose not to press by asking how she knew that.

  Her former husband was involved in “shady dealings,” Susie said. He’d tried to get her to sell stolen trucks for him, and he was involved in drug trafficking. She didn’t think that Tom would have killed his mother and sister, she said, but he owed money to underworld characters, and they’d had them killed so that he would inherit money and be able to pay them. She said that Delores had a big estate and that she’d been trying to get her lawyer to get part of it for her sons.

  She went on to tell about finding the boys’ toy animals with their throats slit and the mysterious “two down and two to go” call.

  She was scared for herself and her boys, she said, but Fritz was protecting them.

  While the detectives were talking, they had been glancing around at the clutter of the apartment, taking note of what they saw. Behind a screen that separated the living room from the dining room, they noticed what appeared to be big piles of military field gear, but no weapons were visible. As they made ready to leave, they saw that the front door was rigged with a motion detector. A huge floodlight and a strobe light were aimed at the door to blind intruders. What appeared to be a gas grenade was fastened above the door. They thanked Susie for her time and help, and as they started to leave, Gentry asked Fritz for his address and telephone number. Fritz gave him his mother’s address and number in Reidsville.

  “What kind of work do you do?” Gentry asked, as if he were just curious.

  “I’m a physician,” Fritz said, “but I’m not licensed in this state right now.”

  “Is it just me, or did that seem strange?” Gentry asked after they got into Sturgill’s cruiser and jotted down the license numbers of the two Chevy Blazers parked in front of the apartment.

  Sturgill agreed that all did not seem right.

  “It didn’t make sense,” Gentry explained later. “Rob was upset about his parents and grandmother. He was really torn up. But as far as Susie was concerned, it was like there was no problem, that nothing had happened to her.”

  Susie had an appointment for a haircut and permanent on Wednesday afternoon. Annette went to her apartment to look after the boys. Fritz was there, fooling with camping gear. John and Jim were supposed to be cleaning their room. They squabbled, and Fritz broke it up. Annette had a headache and asked Fritz if he had anything for it.

  Fritz opened a kitchen cabinet, and Annette had never seen so many bottles of pills outside a drugstore—mostly vitamins, she noticed. He gave her two Tylenol tablets. She took them and went into the boys’ room to lie down. Maizie jumped onto the bed with her.

  “She just wants to cuddle,” Jim explained, but Annette shooed the dog back to the floor.

  The boys and dogs played while Annette rested. Fritz loaded the camping gear into his Blazer and left without explanation.

  Shortly, Annette got up to finish Susie’s ironing. She gathered some clothes, put them on hangers, and took them into Susie’s bedroom, where the door had remained closed. The room was a mess, the closet packed so tight that she couldn’t even squeeze in a T-shirt.

  “All I could see was Fritz’s stuff,” she recalled later. “There was no place to put anything. I said, ‘I shouldn’t be in here.’”

  She retreated, closing the door behind her, certain that Susie’s relationship with Fritz was more than Susie had acknowledged to her.

  Wednesday evening turned stormy. Tornado
es and severe thunderstorms ripped through Winston-Salem and Greensboro and continued on to the east, uprooting trees, damaging buildings, downing power lines, flooding streets, and pounding the crops of area farmers with hail. Frances Miller and her family received friends at Vogler’s Funeral Home, not far from Nanna’s house, shortly after the storms passed. Detective Steve Carden posed as Debbie’s escort at the funeral home to see if any suspicious characters showed up. Neither Susie nor Rob came, choosing instead to receive visitors in Greensboro. Nancy Holder represented them at the funeral home.

  Among the visitors who arrived early at the Newsom house in Greensboro that evening was Chris Severn, Susie’s close friend from college, now Chris Waters, a teacher who drove from Greenville, two hundred miles to the east. She arrived to find that Susie had gone to Reidsville to pick up Annie Hill, and she waited for her return.

  Like Susie’s other friends, Chris had great affection for Bob and Florence, and she had continued to keep up with them even when she no longer heard from Susie, always calling them or stopping to see them when she happened to be in Greensboro, and she was greatly distressed by their deaths. Only occasionally had she seen Susie since their years in college, usually by accident when she stopped to see Bob and Florence. Susie had been in Chris’s wedding, and she had attended Susie’s. Chris had seen Susie briefly after Tom finished dental school, then largely lost touch after Susie’s move to Albuquerque. She encountered her again soon after Susie left Tom, and visited after Susie dropped her anthropology studies at Wake Forest. Susie had told her a convoluted tale about strange requirements Wake Forest had tried to put on her and that had kept her from her degree. “It was the most cockamamy story I ever heard,” she recalled later, and it caused her to wonder what was happening to her friend.

  Susie seemed astonished to see Chris. They hugged, and Susie introduced her to John.

  “Oh, you look so much like your father,” Chris said, realizing instantly from Susie’s change of expression that she’d said the wrong thing.