Bitter Blood

by Jerry Bledsoe

  Fritz took nearly twenty minutes to arrive, and when he pulled into the parking lot, Ian got out of the Mustang, leaving Carden watching from behind the wheel. Ian took several deep breaths to brace himself and quickly approached the Blazer.

  “Really scared the shit out of me last night,” he said after crawling inside. “Tell you what. Showed me the house. I saw the gold car and went in the house. It was a mess. It was right down the road from where I dropped you off.

  “I believe we were on a government mission, but I think there’s something that just ain’t kosher here. I’d just like to know what’s going on. I’m going to stick with the story.”

  “Gold car,” Fritz said deliberately. “What gold car did they show you?”

  “The one you had.”

  “The car I had was brown,” he said with subtle sternness.

  “They showed me a car. It was right down the road from where I let you off. That scared me. I didn’t know what was going on then. I didn’t know what to think. I don’t think you’re lying to me or withholding anything.”

  “How many cars did they show you?”

  “Just the one.”

  Fritz reached behind the seat, brought out a file folder, and handed the folder to Ian.

  “I want you to look at that. Names have been deleted from that that you didn’t need to see.”

  Inside the file were official-looking documents marked secret. They purportedly pertained to the mission Fritz had completed that night two weeks earlier. Some parts were blacked out.

  “There’s some pictures in there,” Fritz said.

  “But what exactly happened?” Ian asked. “I don’t understand. We were so close.”

  “Ian, I have never been to Nanna’s house. I do not know where it is. It could have been in the same area. I couldn’t take you there if my life depended on it.”

  “I’m not trying to doubt you or anything, but, you know, it was scary. I just didn’t really know what to do. ’Course, I’ll stick to the story. I won’t tell them anything other than that we were camping.”

  Fritz wanted him to go over everything the officers had asked and what he’d told them. Ian did.

  “They asked me if I wanted to change my story,” Ian said. “I said no. They seemed a little hesitant just to leave it at that, but they didn’t ask me anything else.”

  “They’re just fishing.”

  “I remember you telling me I better get a little better control of my nerves, but I was just—I’m not good at this. The only reason I got any sleep last night was because of that pill you gave me. I did sleep very well.”

  “How have those capsules been doing for you?” Fritz asked in his best bedside manner.

  “They’ve been working pretty good. I’m not shaking.”

  “I’ve got some Valium tablets for you, too,” Fritz said, taking the file Ian was holding. “I wish that had not had some stuff deleted, but you understand. At this point, you just do not need to know.”

  Fritz withdrew some photographs and gave the file back. “These are the people who were in the house. They’re the ones who went down the other night. That’s the one I had to hit five times.”

  “God,” said Ian, his voice filled with awe.

  “The one with the hat is one of the big—”

  “One of the big guys,” Ian put in.

  “Yeah.”

  “I told Chris I just wanted to see you a minute before we go back to tell you how the medication was doing,” Ian said.

  Fritz was still showing pictures. “He was on the patio.”

  “Which one did you use the knife on?”

  “I used the knife on this guy, and I used the knife on…on this one because he was still showing signs.”

  “I’m sorry to keep bothering you with all of this,” Ian said. “I hate to seem like a big chicken, but I just didn’t know how to deal with all of this.”

  “Where was the house?” Fritz asked.

  Ian explained, and Fritz drew a diagram showing that he had gone off on another street near the house.

  “How many cars were there?” Fritz asked.

  “Just a couple.”

  “There should have been, unless Rob has picked the car up, there should have been three cars.”

  Ian said he was so nervous that he’d thrown up the night before, and Fritz gave him some Valium.

  “Are you still going to see them tomorrow?” Fritz asked, wanting to know about the polygraph test Ian had told him he was to take.

  “I told them to delay it, postpone it indefinitely,” Ian said. “They didn’t seem too pleased, but they didn’t push it.”

  “See, what they are figuring, that they can play mind games with you. They found very little physical evidence. In fact, nothing to connect anything to anything. See, they figured you’re the youngest—actually, it should make you mad—they figured if I was a pro, if I’d done something they weren’t going to get apeshit with me. They figured you’re the youngest, that you were the weak link, you were the one if there was anything to pick.”

  “Well, I feel like I’m sort of letting Uncle Gerry down by getting so overworried about all this.”

  “Well Ian, if I’d had any notion that anybody was going to, I mean, you talk about the luck of the draw. I almost shit in my pants about that.”

  “I want to do the right thing,” Ian said. “I won’t crack. I don’t know if they’ll leave me alone after this, but I don’t think I’ll have any problems. You know, they tried to tell me you weren’t a doctor. ’Course, I didn’t believe that…”

  Gentry slapped the dashboard of the car in which he was sitting behind a nearby convenience store. “Let him talk, Ian.”

  “I know you’ve been in medical school,” Ian was going on. “I know you were doing your residency when Doctor died. Tried to tell me Annie Hill told them that.”

  “Ian, the reason I have not started practice—I went to Duke—I told you, I’ve been doing stuff. I first got contacted when I was at Woodward and off and on over the years, when they check anything—when I went to Duke I was enrolled there, which is in the process of being straightened out now. When Dad died was an inopportune time.”

  “They gave you your provisional license?”

  “Oh, yeah. When I was traveling, see, I went to several meetings and places you don’t need to know about right now.”

  “I don’t think I want to.”

  “But when I was in school, it was better for all concerned that I wasn’t traceable back to Reidsville.”

  “Let me ask you about this thing in Texas. I’m not going to have to do anything with that in the near future, are we?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Because I think it’s going to take a while to steel myself down to even think about this again—I feel a lot better now. I tell you that.”

  “The car I had was a gold car,” Fritz said. “What type of car?”

  “It looked like a Granada or a Monarch to me. I didn’t get that close to it.”

  “The car I had was gold, but it wasn’t a Maverick. Something similar to a Maverick.”

  Gentry realized immediately that Fritz had just contradicted himself, having earlier said the car he had was brown, and he was hoping Ian would catch it and call him on it, but Ian didn’t. Instead, Fritz gave Ian more papaverine. “Take one of these.”

  “I’ll take ’em if I feel like I need to,” Ian said, remembering the stern admonitions from the officers that he was to swallow nothing that Fritz gave him, “but I don’t think I have anything to be nervous about.”

  “Anytime they want to talk to you or anything like that, you take one of these. Give an hour for it to work.”

  “How’s Susie and everybody taking the whole mess?” Ian asked.

  “They’re numb. Susie’s just really—numb. Ian, what they’re trying to do is to get you to panic and say something. If I had been involved and they had something concrete to go on, they would already have done something about it.” />
  “I’m trying to imagine what kind of state I’d be in if I’d been there actually with you,” Ian said. “You know, had to help you. I’d probably be a pile of mush.”

  “See, what they’re going on, supposedly a little while after dark, one of the neighbors at Nanna’s house heard the dogs barking and looked out and said there were two men standing on the lawn. They thought with all the workmen that it was just two workmen, so they brought the dogs inside and that was it. There may have been two men on the lawn.”

  “Sergeant Gentry said that, uh—Florence, is it?”

  “Florence.”

  “That they had company that night, but I don’t remember what time he said they left.”

  “I think it was before dark.”

  Fritz mentioned that it wouldn’t be hard to arrange to find somebody who saw them on the mountain trail if they needed a stronger alibi.

  “That’s cool,” Ian said.

  “I wanted you to see this,” Fritz said, taking back the report, “so you’d have something to sink your teeth in. I know you trust me.”

  “I’ve got no reason not to. I’ve known you for years.”

  Fritz handed him a spray can. “Take that with you.”

  “Will that keep your odor down?” Ian asked.

  “That has aluminum chlorohydrate in it, which is a prescription thing they use for people who have over-perspiration.”

  “You must’ve noticed that my T-shirt smells a little.”

  “Anytime you have to talk with anybody, spray the palms of your hands, your feet real good. Saturate a cotton ball, wipe your face. That’ll keep you from perspiring.”

  “Yeah. That reminds me of a deodorant commercial I saw. It’s like, it’s okay to be nervous, it’s just not okay to let ’em know.”

  If the police wanted particulars about what they had been doing on the hike, Fritz told Ian to say they were running checks with compasses and a barometer.

  “Okay, thanks. ’Preciate it. Oh, I feel so much better.”

  “Here, take this regularly,” Fritz said, offering more pills, vitamins this time. “That’s B complex. That’s nature’s tranquilizer. You can take like three of those three times a day. That stuff’s amazing.”

  Ian said he’d call if he had problems.

  “I’ll be at one house or the other,” Fritz said. “Oh, another thing. I’ve checked the lines. I don’t think any of the lines anywhere are tapped.”

  “If I get any nervous anxiety attacks or they come call me again, I’ll call you for sure,” Ian said.

  His breathing came much easier as he walked back to his car.

  The detectives were more pleased with the second tape, although they were upset with Ian for answering his own questions and blabbering on when he should have been listening. Fritz had at least admitted killing people on the night of the murders, though not the Newsoms, and he had acknowledged being in a car similar to the one stopped by Officer Hull. He even had tripped himself and said the car he had been driving was gold colored. But Fritz was still playing his fantasy games, and the detectives were uncertain whether this was the solid evidence they needed to take to court.

  On Sunday night, five detectives involved in the case gathered at Ian’s motel room in Winston-Salem to play the tapes for District Attorney Don Tisdale. All along, Tisdale had had trouble believing Ian’s story, and because he had been so entangled in the big trial he was conducting, he had not yet met Ian.

  “I was quite surprised,” he recalled later. “We were dealing with a very intelligent, almost innocent person. If you’d told me his story apart from him, I couldn’t have believed it. I don’t think I could picture anybody being that gullible. But after I met him I believed it. There wasn’t any doubt about it. Scared me to know there were people out here like that, but I believed it.”

  The detectives had been debating whether or not they had enough evidence to draw warrants for Fritz and arrest him. Gentry and Sturgill wanted to try one more time to entrap Fritz. They were afraid that Fritz might be able to wriggle out from the evidence they had.

  “We might have had something if Ian hadn’t talked so much or if he had pushed on the issue of the cars,” Gentry said later, “but we really didn’t have the response that we thought Ian could get.”

  Their suspicions about Susie were one reason they wanted to try again. “We had absolutely nothing to show Susie had done anything wrong,” Gentry said. “It’s safe to say I thought she had more than just a passing interest in what had happened. It’s almost incredible to believe this series of events could take place and her not have the slightest idea what was going on.”

  After listening to the tapes, Tisdale agreed that another try might produce more incriminating results, and he gave the go-ahead for the following day.

  The detectives needed another cover story for Ian, one that would cause Fritz to know that they were getting closer to him. To this point, Fritz was unaware that the detectives knew that a police officer had stopped him in Nanna’s gold Voláre on the night of the murders. Maybe the time had come to let him know.

  42

  And there were voices, and thunders, and lightnings. And there fell upon men a great hail out of heaven.

  —Revelation 16:18–21

  Sherman Childers and Lennie Nobles, the Kentucky detectives, stayed after Ian’s confession and went along as observers for his first meeting with Fritz. By then, they were not only out of clean clothes but money as well, and late Saturday afternoon they headed home to replenish their stocks and pick up their commander, Lieutenant Dan Davidson, who wanted to be present for Fritz’s arrest.

  Childers and Nobles got home early Sunday, and by that afternoon they were on their way back to Winston-Salem with Davidson. They arrived after midnight and checked into the Innkeeper, only a short distance from the motel where Ian was spending another restless night.

  The long trip gave Childers and Nobles a chance to fill in Davidson on all the details of the relationship between Fritz and Susie, her troubles with her family, and the long struggle with Tom over the boys. Davidson, like all the detectives in the case, believed that Susie surely had to be involved in the murders. If she was completely innocent, wouldn’t she have suspected something and acted upon it? Regardless of whether a case could be made against her, though, he felt certain that her mere association with Fritz was enough to prove her an unfit parent and allow Tom to take custody of John and Jim. In the ten months that he had been investigating the murders of Delores and Janie, Davidson had developed a fondness for Tom, whom he called Doc.

  “The way things are working out,” Davidson said on Monday morning as the three detectives were trying to jolt themselves awake with strong coffee, “looks like ol’ Doc might be able to come and get his kids for good pretty soon.”

  At 9 that morning, Davidson, Childers, and Nobles joined Ian and a group of Forsyth County officers and SBI agents at the sheriff’s department in the basement of the Hall of Justice.

  The plan this time was to let Fritz know that the game playing was over. Ian was to call and tell him that he had been served a legal paper summoning him for a lineup. For this a bogus document was required, and Gentry typed up a “nontestimonial order,” misspelling the Newsom name in the process.

  Offense: Homicide.

  Facts which establish probable cause: On Sun. May 19, 1985, the bodies of Hattie Carter Newsome, w/f age 85, Robert Wesley Newsome Jr., w/m, age 65, and Florence Sharp Newsome, w/f, age 66, were discovered inside the residence of Hattie Newsome at 3239 Valley Rd., Winston-Salem, N.C. Autopsies and subsequent investigation have revealed that the 3 victims were murdered on Sat. night, May 18, 1985.

  Facts which establish reasonable grounds: A Winston-Salem officer stopped a gold 79 Plymouth, N. C. license #PSL-360 at 12:02 a.m., May 19, 1985, on University Parkway in Winston-Salem. Said vehicle is registered to victim Hattie Newsome of 3239 Valley Road. Said vehicle was driven by w/m with facial hair, and said vehicle was followed by a
black Chevrolet Blazer. The Winston-Salem officer has identified the gold Plymouth belonging to victim, Hattie Newsome, as the vehicle he stopped on May 19, at 12:02 a.m.

  Gentry signed the order, then scribbled the name of an assistant DA into the space requiring a judge’s signature. Ian was given the pink carbon, and he folded it and stuck it into his rear pocket.

  This ploy put Ian in more danger than the previous two. It would reveal to Fritz that Ian now knew for certain that Fritz had been in Nanna’s car and that his story of a CIA mission was a lie. It also would let Fritz know that the police were closing in on him. Ian was instructed to tell Fritz that when the officer who stopped Nanna’s car failed to identify Ian as the driver, Fritz surely would be called next for a lineup. Ian was to directly confront Fritz about the murders.

  From Winston-Salem, the task force of detectives went again to the SBI office near Greensboro, only two miles from Susie’s apartment. After a briefing, more than half the officers prepared to set up surveillance of the apartment. Although the airplane was in service, the officers wanted to be sure that Fritz was kept in sight from the ground as well. By noon three cars were on station.

  One of those was a tan Buick Riviera driven by A. G. Travis, a detective with the Greensboro Police Department. Travis was a liaison officer assigned to assist. He had no knowledge of the case before that morning. In Travis’s car was Ed Hunt, a short, neatly groomed man, who was supervisor of the SBI’s northern district and the commander of this operation. “He’s a good cop,” District Attorney Tisdale later said of him. “He’s as smart as any police officer I’ve ever worked with.” In the backseat of Travis’s car were Ron Barker, the chief of detectives for the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Department, and Dan Davidson, who was along only as an observer.