Bitter Blood

by Jerry Bledsoe

  The detectives gathered at the sheriff’s department on Saturday morning with their jittery informer, who, though obviously scared, assured them that he wanted to go ahead. Several narcotics officers were assisting with the surveillance, and the police caravan drove to the SBI office near Greensboro. Ian called Susie’s apartment only to learn that Fritz wasn’t there, although Susie expected him soon.

  The officers drove on to Reidsville and regrouped at the police department, where the chief, James Klenner Festerman—named for Fritz’s father, who had delivered him—assigned a detective to assist them. When Ian called again, Fritz answered and agreed to meet him. Ian said he was with a college friend who needed to go to the mall and suggested that they meet there so they could talk while his friend shopped. The drive from Greensboro would take half an hour, giving the officers plenty of time to take positions.

  Nervously smoking, Ian waited in his car with Steve Carden. A small, flat recorder was taped to his back, under his shirt, a tiny transmitter secreted on his belt. Ian and the officers were aware of the risk he was taking. They knew that if Fritz detected the devices, Ian could be killed before anybody could get to him.

  Allen Gentry and SBI agent J. W. Bryant were parked at a nearby Hardee’s with the receiving equipment. When they asked for a check of Ian’s transmitter, Ian said, “Say a prayer for me.”

  The airplane followed Fritz from Greensboro, and the SBI agent on board kept the officers at the shopping center advised of his location. When Fritz pulled into the parking lot and stopped, Ian got out and walked to the Blazer. Carden went into the mall, where he kept watch out of sight.

  Ian got in with Fritz and said he’d told his friend they were just going to sit and talk for a little while.

  “Let’s ride somewhere,” Fritz said, immediately starting the engine and causing consternation among the officers.

  Ian told Fritz about Gentry and two SBI men coming to talk to him the previous day as Fritz pulled away from the shopping center, police cars following at a discreet distance.

  “What did the SBI people look like?”

  “Oh, cop types.”

  Ian tried to describe them and recall what they’d asked. He said he’d told them about the camping trip just as Fritz had instructed.

  “They told me the murders had taken place on Saturday night,” Ian said. “I was sweating. I hope I didn’t seem too nervous. I was scared to death.”

  They were in traffic, and the noises made it difficult for officers to understand all that was being said.

  “Well, what do you think?” Ian asked.

  “Well—first off, we had nothing to do with that.”

  “Right. I know that.”

  “We’re just the fall guys.”

  Fritz asked the agents’ names, and Ian said he wasn’t sure about them.

  “It’s quite possible the third guy was a Company person who was there to judge your reactions.” Fritz said, then remarked on some new construction they were passing.

  “I told Chris I wasn’t going to be too long,” Ian said nervously. “We were thinking about going and seeing Rambo today. I’ve got to get my mind off this.”

  Fritz gave Ian a capsule that he identified as papaverine, a drug for calming muscle spasms. It would slow his heart and respiration, Fritz said, telling him to take it.

  “No, Ian,” Gentry said as he listened in his car, but it was obvious that Ian was swallowing it.

  “Oh, Lord,” Gentry said. For all the officers knew, the capsule could have contained cyanide.

  Fritz asked Ian to repeat everything he’d told the officers, and Ian began reciting the litany of the camping trip. When he got to the part about calling Annie Hill, Fritz interrupted. “That’ll be on the phone records.”

  Fritz was turning now into Greenview Cemetery, not far from the mall, the trailing police cars keeping well behind, advised of the Blazer’s location by the agent in the airplane that was circling overhead. The police cars slowed and headed to different vantage points as the Blazer wound down the hill and through the tombstones. Ian was completing his version of the camping weekend as Fritz pulled up under the big magnolia tree next to his father’s grave. After shutting off the engine, Fritz got out a map.

  “Show me exactly what you showed them,” he said. “Where did you show them that we started from?”

  Ian pointed to a spot, and they began talking about the trail.

  “Okay, about tomorrow morning,” Fritz said. “There will be, back at the rock, off the trail, there will be remains of a—”

  “A fire,” said Ian quickly.

  “—of a fire. You don’t have anything to do tomorrow, do you?”

  “Tell him yes,” Gentry said to himself.

  “I got this polygraph thing.”

  “Oh, it’s tomorrow morning?”

  “Oh, no, Monday. I was going to go back to Lexington tomorrow.”

  Fritz went back to the trail, tracing it on the map. “Now, I’ll meet you somewhere tomorrow morning,” he said.

  “I’m going to be with Chris tonight. I could probably change that. I don’t know. I’d have to talk to him.”

  “No, Ian, no,” Gentry muttered, coaching helplessly. “Tell him you can’t go.”

  “That’s fine,” Fritz said. “I was just thinking we could go up there tomorrow and hike a section of that trail.” Suddenly he changed thoughts. “Okay, you do not have to take the polygraph.”

  “Be kind of suspicious if I backed out of it. I’m going through with it. I’ve just really got to get myself composed.”

  “That’s a tactic people like that use. If they really were going to give you a hard time, they would want you to do the polygraph then, not give you three or four days to think about it. See, that’s psychological. They want to get your head screwed out. You always have the option to tell them that—”

  “You don’t see any need for it?” Ian offered helpfully.

  “All you have to say is that”—Fritz took a long pause—“you’re privy to information that falls under the National Security Act.”

  “What if they ask me about that?”

  “Say nothing.”

  “Name, rank, and serial number deal. I think I can remember that. I’m sorry. This has been eating me up. I didn’t sleep at all last night.”

  “Never say I’m associated with anybody,” Fritz said, as a train screamed past on the nearby mainline Southern Railway tracks, again blotting out what officers could hear. “Just say…that you…you can always say that…like Gordon Liddy and the Watergate thing…”

  “Uh-oh,” Gentry said, when he heard that. A Liddy admirer. He wouldn’t break easily.

  “…that you don’t belong to any organization,” Fritz was saying as the train receded. “Just say that you have been advised that taking a polygraph, that, just say flat that you are not to take one under any circumstances because of information that could be divulged indirectly in questioning. See, this is all mind games. They like to play with your head.”

  “Yeah.”

  Fritz reached into the back of the Blazer for his medical bag.

  “I’ll give you a phenobarb tablet to take so you can get a good night’s sleep tonight. Take it about thirty minutes before bedtime.”

  He got out several capsules. “That’s papaverine. Take one of these about every twelve hours.”

  “I feel better just talking to you,” Ian said.

  “Okay, now what you’ve got to do the next forty-eight hours, you have to develop a mindset. You have to tell yourself you were in Peaks of Otter.”

  “It has to be the truth,” Ian said.

  “That’s right. You were not in Winston-Salem, so you can’t say that you were in Winston-Salem. I’ll lend you something that Dad gave me the first time I ever went on any type of covert operation.”

  He brought out a small cloth patch. On it was a figure of the Virgin Mary with a crown on her head. Flames leaped from a heart on a cross. He also took out a small car
d, encased in plastic, bearing another religious figure with a prayer to a saint.

  “These are scapulars that come from, it would be in East Germany today. This one was his mother’s sacred heart, and this one was his father’s. They got those as children at the Shrine of Mary of the Hills on a pilgrimage the night before their family came to this country.”

  His voice became heavy with emotion, almost tearful. “I’ve always found great comfort in these,” he said deliberately.

  Ian accepted the objects and later gave them to the police.

  Suddenly, Fritz changed the subject, talking again about prescription drugs and their effects. Ian said he’d heard of people taking downers before undergoing a polygraph test.

  “I think Valium’s probably a very good drug for that,” Fritz said. “I’ve got some.”

  “I better be getting on back,” Ian said.

  Fritz cranked the engine and backed away from the gravesite. He drove slowly back toward the mall.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever be as scared as I was yesterday,” Ian said.

  “Ian, if anybody ever asks you anything about being nervous, you know, just out of the blue, well just out of the blue people like this descend on you, anybody in their right mind’s going to be nervous. Gracious.”

  Gentry couldn’t help but smile over that. When he and Sturgill had descended out of the blue on Fritz, he hadn’t been nervous at all.

  “Did you ever think, Ian, you don’t have to prove anything?” Fritz asked. “What they are doing—they have nothing. See, they are fishing.”

  “When they told me it was late Saturday night that this happened,” Ian said, “I almost—it took sheer force of will to keep from falling apart right there.”

  “I still haven’t heard any actual confirmation of when it occurred,” Fritz said. “There’s been nothing official, and the papers have had everything from Friday night to Sunday morning.”

  Fritz turned in at the parking lot and pulled into a space beside a car in which a small dog was barking squeakily and incessantly.

  “Now, I do want to see you sometime tomorrow before you take off because I want to see how this medicine’s working.”

  “What really scared me was when they said a forty-five was used,” Ian said, using some of the material he’d been coached to say. “That’s probably the biggest coincidence I’ve heard about.”

  “They said, uh, they said…” Fritz paused, as if collecting his thoughts. “They haven’t given a caliber that’s been released in the paper that I’m aware of. There was an article yesterday in which they were saying it was not the same type gun as what was used out in Kentucky. What I suspect was that it probably was a fairly professional thing, that Tom had his sister and mother killed, and I would not be surprised if he were not behind this.

  “Even if it was a forty-five, Ian, for a professional, that’s not much of a coincidence at all. I mean forty-fives and twenty-twos are the most commonly used weapons because they are subsonic.”

  “I don’t think they picked up on anything,” Ian said.

  “Don’t worry about it. See, people read body language, but it means nothing.”

  “It’s the first time I’ve ever been really confronted, you know, asked questions by a policeman.”

  “Like I said, that third person might very well have been a Company person judging the type of reaction you would have, how well you kept your cool.”

  “I’m going to go on and get Chris,” Ian said.

  “What do you want to do?” Fritz asked.

  “I’ll call you,” Ian said, trying to open the door. His hands were so sweaty that he couldn’t pull the lock up. Fritz reached behind him to get it, sending a rush of fear through Ian that he might detect the recorder on his back.

  “If I don’t get you at Susie’s, I’ll get you at the house,” Ian said with relief as the door opened. “Well, I’ll be talking to you.”

  After his meeting with Ian, Fritz drove to his mother’s house. Later that afternoon, he walked across the street and chatted with Dr. David Henderson, a pediatrician, who was building a new house. Henderson, who had met Fritz a couple of months earlier, invited him in for a tour. They chatted about the construction, the neighborhood, medicine. Later, Henderson described Fritz as “nice, calm, peaceful, and pleasant.”

  “He was not nervous,” Henderson told a reporter. “He seemed like a fairly normal person.”

  He was looking forward to getting to know Fritz better, Henderson said.

  That evening, Fritz drove his mother to Susie’s apartment for dinner. Susie had a guest, Taki Mundel, her mother’s close friend from Maryland. Bob and Florence had spent most of the last week of their lives at the home of Taki and her husband, Marvin. The Mundels had been on a business trip when Bob and Florence were murdered and were not able to come for the funeral. When Taki called Susie to apologize and offer condolences, Susie asked her to come whenever she could. Taki had arrived the day before, and that night she took Susie and the boys out for a Chinese dinner.

  Taki was staying with Rob’s family, and early on Saturday Susie picked her up to go shopping. Susie said she wanted to buy a new blouse and shoes in anticipation of job interviews she was planning. After the summer school session she was now attending, Susie said she needed only one more course to complete her master’s degree in business. She anticipated having it by December, and she was trying to decide what she wanted to do after that. She was thinking about moving to Atlanta, she said. Taki helped her pick out a silver-gray blouse and a pair of low, dressy black shoes. Susie seemed pleased with them.

  To Taki, Susie was cheerful and didn’t appear to be acting abnormally. “Same ol’ Susie,” she said.

  The only thing out of the ordinary was Susie’s strong fear that the boys might be kidnapped, but Taki didn’t question her closely about it.

  Taki was of Japanese origin, and Susie enjoyed talking with her about Japanese culture and Oriental cooking. Taki had promised to cook one of Susie’s favorite meals for dinner, and that afternoon, after helping Susie straighten her apartment, Taki set about putting the kitchen in order for the meal.

  Taki made an asparagus salad with sesame oil. She steamed broccoli and whipped up a spicy dish of ground beef, onions, tofu, and bean paste served over rice. For dessert, she had fresh strawberries.

  As they ate, Taki began talking about Bob and Florence. She hadn’t mentioned the murders earlier, and neither had Susie, but now Taki brought up the subject.

  “Who in the world could kill such nice people?” she asked.

  Nobody said anything, and the question was left hanging.

  After dinner, John and Jim nestled under Taki’s arms and hugged her.

  “We’re so glad you’re here,” Jim said.

  “Yeah,” said John. “Thank you for a yummy dinner.”

  Fritz and Annie Hill left soon afterward, and Susie and the boys drove Taki back to Susie’s parents’ house.

  Taki planned to stay several more days. Susie said that she had to study all day Sunday for a test on Monday, but she wanted Taki’s assistance in sorting some of her mother’s things later. Taki said she would be glad to help.

  “I’ll see you Tuesday,” Susie said cheerily as she left for home.

  Ian took deep, nervous breaths, trying to calm himself. The recorder strapped to his back took note.

  This was Sunday, June 2, a little after noon, and Ian was about to try once again to trap Fritz into admitting he’d murdered the Newsoms. His first attempt the day before had proved less than successful. It had confirmed his hard-to-believe story of the supposed CIA mission, but it had brought out no hard evidence about the Newsom deaths. The detectives were concerned that in court Fritz might be able to explain the whole thing away, and with their lack of physical evidence the case might be lost.

  “We wanted to do everything possible to get a perfect case,” Gentry recalled later. “We were being very, very careful trying to make all the right moves, to do
everything we could to make a good, solid case.”

  After Saturday’s tense meeting between Ian and Fritz, the detectives had taken Ian back to Winston-Salem, where they decided that a second attempt would be necessary. For this, they concocted a story Ian was to tell Fritz that the detectives had returned to talk to him Saturday night at his mother’s house. They had asked him to accompany them to Winston-Salem, and they took him past the scene of the murders. Not only had he realized that it was just up the hill from where he had let Fritz out on the night of their mission, he had seen in the driveway at Nanna’s house the car Fritz had been driving when he was stopped by the police.

  This time the detectives planned to have the meeting take place at Carolina Circle Mall at Greensboro’s northeastern edge on U.S. 29, the main highway between Greensboro and Reidsville. The surveillance cars were already spread out around the mall when the officers discovered that no outside telephone booth was handy from which to call Fritz. They had to drive a short distance up Cone Boulevard to the O. Henry Shopping Center before finding one. Ian reached Fritz at Susie’s apartment. Something had come up, Ian told him. The cops had come for him again. They had taken him to Nanna’s house. He needed to talk right away.

  “Where are you?” Fritz asked.

  “I’m at the Zayre’s store on Cone Boulevard,” Ian answered.

  “Stay right there,” Fritz said. “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  Fritz’s impulse caused the surveillance cars to be moved hurriedly into new positions, and this time the officers had no notice of Fritz’s progress because the SBI airplane was grounded with a flat tire.

  Now Ian, who seemed even more nervous than the day before, waited with Carden, who was again posing as his friend Chris. The day was hot, and Ian sweated as he waited, trying to remember all of the specific points the officers had instructed him to bring up. One of those points was Susie. Another was Fritz’s medical credentials. A third was the mission to Texas. From the time Ian had told them that the original mission was to Texas, the detectives figured that it really was to New Mexico to kill Tom Lynch. They wanted to know if Fritz still had that in mind.