Bitter Blood

by Jerry Bledsoe

  The decision to arrest Fritz came after officers determined that he might be preparing to leave to kill people who had information about the killings, Oldham said, apparently referring to the officers’ theory that Fritz might have been planning to kill Tom or other family members.

  “At our last infiltration Monday, it was indicated that Klenner posed a danger to the witnesses,” he said without amplification.

  Quizzed about motive, Oldham said that child custody and large inheritances were possibilities, and he mentioned the upcoming visitation hearing.

  “Almost everyone who died was going to testify in that custody case,” he said, although Bob, in fact, was the only one. “But the questions may never be answered. There are a multitude of things that could have prompted it. An exact, hard-core motive will never be known. It could have been revenge. It could have been greed. It could have been personal problems. It could have been child custody. Now we’ll never know.

  “There are a number of questions that can never be answered. If it had gone to court we might have answered them.”

  Was Susie a suspect?

  “She was in loose terms a suspect. It was a natural process that she could be considered a suspect because of that relationship, but there is no hard-core evidence that she was involved.”

  Would there be further investigation?

  “The case is closed. Based on our district attorney’s opinion, the physical evidence and Klenner’s own statements that link everything together…the Newsom case is resolved. This whole case, including the Kentucky murders and ours, it’s unreal how it was played out, almost like a dime-store novel with so many twists and turns. We have no doubt that he was the killer.”

  Even as Oldham spoke, more strange twists and turns were about to surface.

  At North Carolina Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill, Assistant Medical Examiner Dr. John D. Butts began his autopsy of Jim’s body by noting the obvious. Jim had been shot through the left eye, clearly at close range. Stippling surrounded the wound, indicating that the weapon had been held no more than a foot away. The bullet traveled upward and slightly to the right, exiting from the back of his head, clearly a fatal wound. He had a few minor lacerations on his thighs and some scratches and scrapes around his neck, but no blatant injuries from the bomb blast.

  When Dr. Butts sliced into Jim’s body, he got a surprise. A familiar bittersweet, almond-chlorine odor rose to meet him. He recognized it immediately as cyanide.

  Dr. Robert L. Thompson, who was performing the autopsy on John’s body, was recording similar findings. Like Jim, John had few injuries from the bomb blast, a minor cut on his cheek, abrasions on his left thigh. But like Jim, John also had been shot. Black powder in his hair indicated the weapon had been held no more than two feet away. The bullet entered the back of his head near the base of the skull and traveled upward, exiting above the left ear. Dr. Thompson found a fragment from a 9-millimeter copper-jacketed bullet in John’s brain. He also found cyanide in John’s stomach.

  Cyanide, the poison used in gas chamber executions, is also commonly used by jewelers for processing metal and is easily available in powder or pellet form from chemical supply companies. Ingested or inhaled in sufficient quantity, it brings unconsciousness, convulsions, and death within a matter of minutes. An average lethal amount in the blood is 1.2 milligrams per 100 milliliters of blood for an adult. As little as .6 milligrams has been known to kill. Blood tests showed that John had 1.7 milligrams in his blood. Jim, Susie’s favored son, had a whopping 18 milligrams, indicating that he probably had been given the cyanide first, allowing more time for it to get into his bloodstream.

  Both doctors agreed that Jim and John had been shot soon after taking the poison. The doctors believed the boys’ hearts were beating but both children were unconscious when shot.

  Autopsies also were performed on the bodies of Susie and Fritz that day. The results showed that neither had ingested cyanide, nor had they been shot. Both died from blast injuries, and both appeared to have been conscious when the bomb went off. Fritz had bruises, scrapes, and lacerations. A rivet had been driven into his liver. Several ribs were fractured. But internal hemorrhaging had killed him. A quart of blood had collected in his right chest cavity, a pint in his left.

  Susie’s was the only mangled body, her most blatant injuries from the waist down. She suffered multiple fractures and massive blunt-force trauma throughout her body. In her stomach was a partly dissolved capsule containing pink, white, and red particles that the doctors removed and turned over to the SBI for analysis. Her injuries made it clear that the bomb had been underneath her seat when it exploded.

  The autopsy findings were powerful, and they were summed up in a note on the boys’ reports: “The two brothers were apparently killed by their mother and her cousin prior to the vehicle being destroyed by a bomb contained within it.”

  The reports brought relief to the police, who had realized at the scene that the boys had been shot and feared that the wounds had come from police guns.

  At three Tuesday afternoon, the big bomb-disposal truck that had been parked in front of Susie’s apartment the night before pulled up to 1205 Huntsdale Road in Reidsville, and soon afterward, with Annie Hill’s permission, a group of officers began a search through the clutter of the Klenner house. In addition to vast amounts of prescription drugs and vitamins, they found large stores of military gear and survivalist supplies, plus a case and a half of dynamite, blasting caps, safety caps, fuses, twenty-eight pounds of black powder, fifteen tear gas grenades, two claymore mines stolen from the army, more than thirty thousand rounds of varied ammunition, another Uzi submachine gun, seven handguns, five semiautomatic military rifles, and six shotguns.

  The dynamite, grenades, and other explosives were loaded into the disposal truck and taken to the Reidsville city dump to be detonated.

  After the search, Reidsville Police Chief James Festerman told reporters that some of the discoveries had come as a surprise to Annie Hill.

  “She was not aware of the entire contents of the house, but she may have known of the dynamite,” he said.

  No charges would be brought against her for possession of illegal weapons, explosives, or stolen U.S. government property.

  45

  The murders and explosion continued to dominate the news in North Carolina and would for nearly a week.

  Much of Wednesday’s newspaper coverage centered on Fritz and Susie. Officials made clear that they had no doubt about Fritz’s guilt in the five murders. Susie’s possible involvement was another matter. Tisdale was quoted as calling her “an ostensibly innocent person.” Sheriff Oldham said his detectives had compiled no “hardcore evidence” against her.

  In another story, Greensboro News & Record reporters Jim Brady and Mike Vogel quoted unnamed family friends as saying that Susie had been fearful after the Lynch murders, that she had recently received anonymous threatening calls, and that the throats of two of the boys’ toy animals had been slit.

  They quoted Susie Sharp as saying, “She loved those boys and she loved her grandmother. I can’t believe that she would knowingly hurt them.”

  Of her nephew, Judge Sharp said: “Fritz is bound to have been insane. I just can’t conceive of any sane person doing what he did.”

  Several news stories reported that Rockingham Sheriff Bobby Vernon had granted Fritz fifty-one permits to buy handguns in recent years, noting that no permits were required for other weapons that he owned. Vernon, calling Fritz a “clean-cut and intelligent” gun collector said he couldn’t deny the permits.

  “He was crazy about guns,” Louise Sharp was quoted as saying of her nephew.

  Other newspapers were still reporting that Fritz had attended Duke Medical School, but Brady and Vogel revealed in the News & Record that it all had been a hoax, that he’d never been enrolled nor received any formal training as a physician, although many people still thought him a doctor.

  The News & Record also devoted a sto
ry to John and Jim, written by Sharon Bond. Several children from the apartment complex where the boys lived were quoted. They said the boys often wore military clothes, never went to the pool, rarely played outside.

  “The only time they came out was when they walked the dogs,” said Charlene Tatum, a neighbor, who was fourteen. “They didn’t say anything. They just kept to themselves. They always stuck real close together. It was just those two little boys. When you saw one, you saw the other.”

  “They didn’t have many friends,” said Robbie Dunham, another neighbor, also fourteen.

  Jim’s teacher at Guilford Middle School, Judy Glascow, described the reaction to Jim’s death of his classmates: “They took it hard. I don’t think there was a dry eye in the class. It was just sobbing openly.”

  She asked her students to express their feelings in words and pictures, and one drew a picture of Jim at Disneyland. At show and tell, Jim had happily told about his trip to California with his daddy and Kathy.

  Another Wednesday story in the News & Record told of Susie’s Monday call to Bob Connolly, her UNC-G professor, to reschedule a test.

  Connolly had talked at length with Susie about the strain she had been under since the murders.

  “She appeared to be greatly concerned about her kids,” Connolly said. “She talked about how she snatched the newspapers, tried to keep news reports of what had happened to their grandparents away from them. She talked about how they snuck the children into the church for the funeral and kept them away from the gravesite to keep them from being photographed. That seemed a little obsessive to me but I didn’t know at the time how affluent these people were.”

  Connolly said news reports belied everything he’d learned about Susie’s personality in the three weeks she had been in his class. He called her quiet and one of the most attentive students he’d ever had. He said other faculty members had told him that “the Susie Lynch in the paper was not the Susie Lynch they knew.”

  “I used to be in your business—a reporter—and after five years of interviewing and seven years as a teacher, I think I have a pretty good sense for people,” Connolly said. “She either fooled me completely or the things in the paper are wrong. She was as nice a person as I’ve run into in this business. Cool, calm, and collected.

  “I still can’t get over how this woman sat here, extra calm and collected, and said these things. Of course, you never can tell about some people. Some, that’s just the way they are. Others, it’s a defense mechanism, and still others are dissembling. The whole thing about her and him and what happened reminds me of the Patty Hearst story.”

  Tom Lynch read Wednesday morning’s news stories with growing anger. He had become convinced that Susie was involved in all the murders, and talk of her innocence grated. He was determined not to allow her to be portrayed as a Patty Hearst figure, a duped and brainwashed innocent, but other things had to be attended to first.

  Tom and Kathy had arrived the day before; they were met at the airport by his old college friend, Bob Brenner, who took them into his home in High Point and made a car available for their use. On Tuesday night, they went to Greensboro to meet Dan Davidson, who was deeply distressed about the boys’ deaths and dreaded facing Tom. For two hours, Davidson, Childers, and Nobles went over the events of the past few days. Tom talked about what a raw deal he’d gotten from North Carolina courts. If only he’d been given fair visitation to begin with, Tom said, none of this might have happened. But he didn’t blame Davidson.

  “I knew he would feel real bad,” Tom said. “I knew it wasn’t their fault. They’d done everything they could.”

  But Tom knew, too, that somebody had failed to ensure his sons’ safety, and he wanted to know why.

  “I just couldn’t understand why it happened like this,” he said, “why they couldn’t have taken Fritz when he was alone.”

  He’d gotten no good answers to that question when he talked to SBI agents on Tuesday, and on Wednesday morning, when he received a call asking him to come to the SBI office in Greensboro, he thought he might get a better explanation.

  He and Kathy were greeted by Tom Sturgill and Ed Hunt, the district supervisor, who ushered them into the conference room where, two weeks earlier, Sturgill and Gentry had interviewed Fritz. Hunt told them that other revelations were forthcoming and that he wanted them to know in advance. The boys, he said, had been given cyanide and shot in the head at close range before the explosion.

  The news not only confirmed Tom’s suspicions that Susie had a hand in destroying the boys, it convinced him that she had shot them herself. Two words described his feelings; and he uttered them to himself: “That monster.”

  The new revelations prompted Tom to an immediate decision. He would make himself available to the press.

  “I couldn’t let her get away with this,” he explained later. “This was outrageous, more than just outrageous. As far as I was concerned, this was motherhood’s worst moment. There had never been anything worse than this. Not only that, but to have a hand in killing your parents and your grandmother, too. This was a monstrosity. It’s the equivalent of the Holocaust, of turning your family in to the Nazis and having them gassed. I just could not not do something about it.”

  On Wednesday afternoon a press conference was held at the Greensboro Police Department. Present were Greensboro Police Chief Conrad Wade, Ed Hunt, Allen Gentry, Reidsville Police Chief James Festerman, and Guilford County Sheriff Jim Proffitt. Hunt disclosed the autopsy findings to the surprised reporters. He revealed that a fragment of a 9-millimeter bullet had been taken from John’s brain and that the bullet was believed to have been fired from a pistol found at the scene.

  “In our opinion, it came from that vehicle,” he said of the pistol. “It was found cocked and loaded, lying beside a telephone pole to the left of where the explosion took place.”

  Asked whether Susie or Fritz had shot the boys, Hunt said, “We’re not drawing any conclusions until we see the final autopsy reports.”

  Chief Wade disclosed that a Forsyth deputy and a Kentucky officer had fired six shots when Fritz first opened fire at the intersection, and that a Forsyth deputy and an SBI agent had returned four more shots in the second exchange of fire a few minutes later. Hunt, who had been one of those firing, declined to identify any of the officers. Hunt also said that he knew of no hits by the officers.

  “As best we can tell, the holes were from the inside out,” he said. Later examination, however, would show at least one incoming bullet hole in the Blazer’s rear panel.

  Hunt also disclosed that the SBI was interviewing a “possible accomplice” in the Newsom murders but would neither identify him nor reveal what role he might have played.

  Questioned about the nature of the bomb, Hunt replied, “I don’t have a report on that at this time. There could be several possibilities. It may be some time before we get all the results on that.”

  Had problems in arresting Fritz been foreseen?

  “Based on our information, we thought that there possibly could be problems,” Hunt said. “The nature of the crimes we were going to arrest him for would indicate that.”

  Gentry told the reporters that Fritz had become a suspect “early on.”

  “A couple of family members had expressed a little concern over the relationship as well as over his background,” he said. “He obviously had the interest and the capabilities. We had no idea how capable he was until all of this happened.”

  Chief Festerman revealed that large amounts of prescription drugs and vitamins had been found at the Klenner home and office, but that was not unusual for Dr. Klenner, he said.

  “Dr. Klenner was a proponent of vitamin C and there were large amounts of vitamin C in his office and his residence in boxes and cases,” he went on.

  Was Fritz selling drugs?

  “During our investigation, we at no time found any indication that he was involved in selling narcotics,” responded Gentry.

  Was cyanide
found at Susie’s apartment or the Klenner house?

  “Not to my knowledge,” said Gentry.

  While the officers were talking to reporters on Wednesday afternoon, Tom was doing the same. In the next thirty-six hours, he granted several interviews, but the first was with Jim Schlosser of the Greensboro News & Record, whom he told he wouldn’t be surprised if proof emerged that Susie had shot the boys.

  “I kind of assumed that she might have fired the shots because Fritz was busy driving,” he said.

  He labeled as “ridiculous” claims that Susie might not have been aware of Fritz’s involvement in the murders.

  “She may have been the mastermind-manipulator,” he said.

  He said officers had told him that Susie might have gone to Kentucky with Fritz to point out his mother’s house, which would be difficult to locate otherwise. He thought Susie wanted his mother dead because she believed Delores was paying for his court fight.

  “I wasn’t attempting to make Susie look bad,” he said, “only to make increased visitation look good.”

  Tom quoted Susie’s father as calling her “headstrong, stubborn, and pathological in her paranoia about her children.”

  “She wrapped herself in a world with those boys,” Tom said. “It was them against everyone else. She just thought everyone was trying to get her kids away from her.

  “Fritz was her protector. They fed off each other’s paranoia. She reinforced him. He reinforced her. You talk of spiraling insanity, this is the worst I have ever heard of.”

  Tom told of his own fear after the Newsom murders (“I had the guns loaded and the windows locked”) and of his and Kathy’s frantic efforts to try to get the boys from Susie and Fritz after the murders.

  “They wouldn’t have let them go,” he said dejectedly. “They were not going to let the kids live if they were caught. The boys were doomed.”

  Tom summed up his feelings with two sentences: “I don’t know what I think about this at this time. I’m just so angry.”