On Wednesday morning, a group of officers and the Greensboro Police Department bomb squad showed up at the Mountain, the Klenner farm a mile east of Eden on Chumley Road. Reporters were not allowed onto the rugged, wooded property bordering the Dan River, and while the officers searched, reporters talked to neighbors. Frank Underwood, a sixty-three-year-old man who lived nearby, told them that once when his brother, George, was walking near the property, Fritz appeared from the woods, pulled a .44 Magnum, and ordered him never to come near the land again. S. B. Gilley, a sixty-eight-year-old farmer who had looked after the land for two years, told them: “In my book, they are fine people. I’ve never met the boy, but Mr. and Mrs. Klenner, when he was living, were as nice a people as I’ve ever known.”
When the search was completed, Wednesday afternoon, Rockingham County Sheriff Bobby Vernon revealed that the officers had found some empty casings for a .223 rifle, three reinforced foxhole bunkers, two of which appeared recently dug, several campsites, twenty-five well-tended marijuana plants, and twenty-five pounds of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer that, when mixed with fuel oil, creates an explosive. No weapons were found.
On Wednesday at 7 P.M., a memorial service was held for John and Jim at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Greensboro. The boys’ bodies were not present. Tom had gone earlier to a funeral home to see them and make arrangements to have them flown to Albuquerque.
“They didn’t look dead,” he sorrowfully told a reporter later. “They looked asleep. They didn’t look mangled or anything.”
Nearly one hundred people, including some of John’s and Jim’s classmates, attended the service. Tom, Kathy, and other family members filed into the church behind the priest.
“And anyone who has life, and has committed himself to me in faith shall not die forever,” the priest intoned during the ten-minute service, as he asked God to “take James and John into your kingdom of heaven.”
After the service, Tom and Kathy received callers at the Newsom home in Greensboro. When Susie Sharp said to Tom, “I just can’t believe Susie would have had anything to do with killing those boys,” Kathy became so angry that Tom had to lead her into another room to calm down.
YOUTHS POISONED, SHOT BEFORE BLAST, read the front page headline in Thursday morning’s Greensboro News & Record.
The shocking news was the first strong public evidence that Susie might have been something more than an innocent bystander in the bizarre series of events. But Susie’s family simply could not accept that she had taken part in killing her children.
“She wouldn’t have allowed that,” Susie Sharp told the News & Record. “Maybe she was dead and sitting up in the seat before they were killed. The possibilities are limitless. I just can’t imagine even a crazy person being so deranged.”
Louise blamed Fritz completely. “She was under his power,” she said.
The Winston-Salem Journal quoted District Attorney Tisdale as saying an undercover person had provided information that Fritz might choose suicide over arrest.
“We had an insight into him that he wouldn’t be taken alive,” he said. “They were trying to handle him with kid gloves, but this man couldn’t be handled with kid gloves.
“To be quite honest with you, if they weren’t going to have the children, nobody was.”
On Thursday morning, an unannounced graveside service with only family members and close friends in attendance was held for Fritz at Greenview Cemetery in Reidsville. He was buried beside his father. The footstone on Dr. Klenner’s grave read, BELOVED PHYSICIAN. The stone that would be placed at Fritz’s grave would read, DEVOTED SON.
Thursday afternoon’s Reidsville Review carried a story in which Louise responded to Tom’s charge that Susie might have accompanied Fritz to Kentucky to kill Delores and Janie.
“I don’t believe it,” she said. “I don’t believe one word of it.”
Neither could she accept that Susie might have been involved in any of the other killings.
“We feel that she was afraid of an unknown killer,” she said.
Susie Sharp was quoted as calling Susie “a most devoted mother, almost overprotective of the children.” She said that her niece had become withdrawn and very fearful in the past year.
She said of Fritz: “I’ve come to the conclusion he was evidently a paranoid schizophrenic.”
Louise called Fritz “obsessed and insane.” She said Dr. Klenner was very possessive of his son and wouldn’t let him see his aunts.
“I didn’t have any affection for him,” she said of Fritz. “He was taught to have little affection for his aunts. His daddy seemed to feel we wouldn’t mold the child the way he wanted him to be molded.”
One thing Louise didn’t mention was that, a year earlier, the Sharp family home had been broken into and her jewelry and the family silver stolen. She and her sister Susie had been certain that Fritz had done it. Fritz never visited his aunts, but one day the previous summer he had shown up at the house and told Louise he wanted to inspect her locks because he was concerned about her security. She had let him in, and after a tour of the house, he had pronounced her locks woefully insufficient. A week later, while Louise was out of town, the house was broken into and the jewelry and silver were taken. But Louise and Susie had not been able to bring themselves to tell the police about their suspicions of Fritz. He was family, after all, and they didn’t want to risk hurting their sister Annie Hill and creating a family scandal. The police had never solved the crime.
The Sharp and Newsom families gathered for a memorial service for Susie at 2 P.M. on Thursday in the same sanctuary where the service for the boys had been held the night before. Her body had been cremated, and her ashes were interred in the church columbarium.
After his sister’s service, Rob granted his first interview to two reporters from the News & Record. He described Susie, whom he’d seen only infrequently in the past twenty years, as “bright, hard-working, very reliable, very dependable, always carried through.” He told of her estrangement from her family, of her family’s fear that she was growing inward and too dependent on Fritz.
“We felt she was becoming very, very isolated, very withdrawn, that she wasn’t sharing her feelings or her plans with anyone but her cousin,” he said.
His parents thought that an “unhealthy relationship,” he said.
He told of his November meeting with Susie, during which she had expressed her fears of losing her children and being murdered. He revealed that she had been seeing a psychiatrist and had attended three group therapy sessions to try to learn to detach from her children.
Several months earlier, he said, he had arranged another meeting with his sister and Fritz to try to get a reading on how things were going. They met for lunch at Stamey’s Barbecue and had “the most normal conversation you can imagine,” mostly about his work as an alcoholism counselor.
He last saw his sister on the Saturday before her death, he said, when she came to his house and spent nearly an hour talking about their parents’ estate.
“She did not seem any more distant or different than she had for the past several years.”
Rob said he couldn’t believe that Susie had any part in the murders. “Nothing that has been disclosed to me by any police agency would lead me to believe that she was a participant,” he said, noting that he realized that Tom felt otherwise. “I certainly do understand why he thinks to the contrary. We have made it clear we are going to respect one another’s feelings.”
The blame, Rob felt, lay completely on Fritz. “I believe that Fritz came to see himself as my sister’s and her children’s protector and defender and anyone who irritated her or seemed to be causing her difficulty in her life, he set out to eliminate them. In his illness, that’s how he saw reality. Maybe in his illness he thought if he killed my sister and the boys before he went, it was like protecting them. I don’t think he had any more control over his own destiny and his own behavior than my sister did. I think their lives were just out o
f control and completely unmanageable.”
At the same time Rob was talking to reporters, Annie Hill Klenner and her two daughters were granting an interview to Jack Scism, of the News & Record, whose mother once had been a patient of Dr. Klenner. Annie Hill’s main purpose in giving the interview was to clarify what she said were inaccuracies about the weapons and explosives that had been found at her house.
Most of the guns taken by police had belonged to her gun-collecting husband, Annie Hill explained.
“It was Doctor’s hobby before Fritz was ever born. I could not tell you offhand the date of purchases, but I know there have always been guns around here and some are collector’s items. It’s not something Fritz started.”
She was particularly concerned about a .12-gauge cannon listed as being seized. It was just a “toy” replica of a Civil War cannon that fired a shotgun shell, she said, but it had caused great apprehension and misunderstanding in Reidsville.
“People drive by and slow down and you know they’re looking for the gun emplacement,” her daughter Gertrude said.
The dynamite found at the house had been bought by Doctor to remove stumps and boulders at the farm, Annie Hill said. She noted that she had been unaware of the land mines and submachine gun.
She could offer only one explanation for her son’s recent actions: he had multiple sclerosis, diagnosed by his father in 1977, which had gone untreated since Doctor’s death.
“When his father was alive, he gave him treatment for it. Since then, there’s been no one to give him that, and he’s had some difficulty. Sometimes he had to use a cane, and he’s had eye problems.
“In his right mind, he would not harm a flea. If he has done something like that, it certainly was out of keeping with his character, and the only explanation I have is that he was sick and had all he could take.”
Both of Fritz’s sisters pointed out that he loved children, and Mary Ann called him “a very, very caring person.”
Annie Hill acknowledged that Fritz had pretended to go to medical school to please his father, who, she said, was ill with heart problems and always had dreamed that Fritz would succeed him.
“Fritz told me he started it as a charade, but it built up so big he did not know how to stop it.”
Fritz’s relationship with Susie, she said, was simply one of consoling and helping, and she had joined in it.
“I went to Susie’s apartment; they came here. I cooked for them, mended, ironed, did anything they needed, and I loved them both the same way.”
As Annie Hill spoke, officers were completing the two-day cleanup job of removing drugs and vitamins from Dr. Klenner’s clinic in downtown Reidsville. All told, four dump truck loads were hauled away to be destroyed.
The main story in Friday’s News & Record quoted Ed Hunt, the SBI district supervisor, as saying Fritz had left a note naming an accomplice in the Newsom murders.
“It was not a confession,” Hunt said. “I really don’t want to address the specifics of it. It might bear on another case.”
Hunt wouldn’t name the accomplice, who, he said, drove Fritz to Winston-Salem on the night of the murders but didn’t take part in the killing.
Fritz’s note, Hunt said, contained statements “about some of the crimes he thought he was accused of. He knew he was a suspect. I’m not sure about the Kentucky cases, but I’m sure he knew he was suspected in the Winston-Salem crimes.”
Hunt said the note wasn’t a suicide note, didn’t imply that Fritz wouldn’t be taken alive, and didn’t indicate whether Susie knew about Fritz’s involvement in the murders.
Despite Hunt’s claim that a case might be developed against an accomplice, the Winston-Salem Journal was reporting that District Attorney Tisdale had called the case closed and said that “no charges would be brought against an unnamed man who gave Klenner a ride to Old Town.” The paper quoted captain Ron Barker of the Forsyth County Sheriff’’s Department as saying the accomplice “didn’t know what Klenner planned to do.”
Friday’s Journal also offered quotes from John S. Shumaker of Rural Hall, near Winston-Salem, who said he had been Fritz’s friend and patient for three years. Fritz had confided to him that he had been in Special Forces and was a member of the Delta Team. Shumaker had been impressed when Fritz predicted certain Russian moves in Afghanistan. He called Fritz a patriot and a staunch anti-Communist, and said that he never seemed violent.
“He was reasonable and sane,” Shumaker said.
Shumaker said Fritz confided in him that he and Susie lived together without sex.
“He said they just shared an apartment and he had taken up with the kids.”
Shumaker said Fritz had treated him for low blood pressure and a dislocated shoulder as recently as November 1984, six months after Dr. Klenner’s death.
“As far as I know, he was a doctor,” he said.
The story that attracted the most attention on Friday was the one in which Annie Hill placed the blame for Fritz’s actions on his supposed multiple sclerosis. It provoked outrage from MS patients and the National MS Society.
Saturday’s News & Record quoted Stephen Reingold, the National MS Society’s vice president of research and development, as saying: “I think the newspaper and this woman are doing an enormous disservice to the 250,000 persons with multiple sclerosis in the country by attributing such pathological social behavior to this disease when there is absolutely no evidence that this is the case.”
The story quoted Dr. John Butts, the medical examiner who had performed the autopsy on Fritz, as saying that he saw no signs that Fritz suffered from MS, although he couldn’t be absolutely certain that Fritz didn’t have it.
“It’s not always obvious,” Butts said. “It is a disease with progressive stages and early stages. There may be very little to see.”
The story went on to note that Dr. Klenner was not a neurologist and that doctors with neurological backgrounds often disagreed with his diagnoses.
“As far as I know,” Dr. Butts said about MS, “it doesn’t induce people to collect guns and kill other people.”
Of Fritz, he said, “If he had severe multiple sclerosis, he couldn’t have been able to be running around shooting people.”
Both the Greensboro News & Record and the Winston-Salem Journal offered recaps of the week’s events in their Sunday editions. The Journal, which had lagged in coverage all week, used the occasion to catch up. Written by Tom Sieg, the paper’s experienced columnist, the story filled half the front page and two inside pages.
It offered further evidence that even close family members hadn’t been told that Fritz had never gone to medical school.
“He was very devoted to his father,” said Bill Palmer, a Mississippi lawyer married to Fritz’s sister Mary Ann. “He felt his father wanted him to be a doctor and anything his father wanted to do, Fritz would do it…When his father died, he was supposedly finishing up his internship at Chapel Hill under some sort of special program…After his father died…it all seemed too much for him to take.”
Sandy Sands, Susie’s lawyer, pegged the beginning of Susie’s fears on Tom’s attempt to have custody decided in New Mexico. “She was always convinced that there was something funny going on because of the first judge not releasing jurisdiction…Susie was very, very concerned—and rightly so—that there was so much trouble…One of the basic fears she had was that if the children got out to New Mexico…Tom would start it all over again…This was a fear that was with her from 1981 until she died.”
Susie’s fears had convinced Sands that she had no role in the murders. “There is no doubt in my mind that she felt the deaths in Kentucky were as a result of some gangland hit, and she was afraid that it was the result of some tie-in Tom had.”
Sands said he was also convinced that when the police closed in the previous Monday, Susie thought they were actually killers who had come for her and the boys.
But Susie’s aunt Frances and cousin Nancy were quoted as saying they belie
ved Susie accompanied Fritz to Kentucky to kill Delores and Janie and that the evidence would be forthcoming.
Asked about Susie’s possible complicity in the murders of her parents and grandmother, Frances said, “I’m having real difficulty with that question. When I think about it, I wonder how an intelligent person—and Susie was very intelligent, she was very smart—how an intelligent person could be exposed to all these guns and all this stuff and not put two and two together.”
Tom also was quoted about Susie. “I don’t want people to think she was a poor little Patty Hearst under the influence of some lunatic,” he said. “I believe…that she knew what was going on.”
Albuquerque is a city set in a vast raw landscape of desert grays and reds, spotted with scrub growth, unmercifully beaten by the sun. Rainfall is scant, and those who desire the comforts of green growth must water it faithfully.
One of the city’s largest expanses of grass and trees is called Sunset Memorial Park. Shortly before noon on Monday, June 10, with the help of friends, Tom carried the small coffins bearing the bodies of his sons across that green oasis to their final resting places beneath a spreading cedar.
In the weeks to come, he would return to this spot nearly every day to stand looking at the tiny graves with temporary markers bearing the names of John and Jim.
On one of those occasions, a Sunday morning brittle with heat, he brought with him a visitor. At the gravesite, he stood for long moments, saying nothing as birds sang in nearby trees. Finally he spoke, his voice breaking.
“I wanted you to see it,” he said, “so you could tell the people back in North Carolina that I got them a shady spot.”
And he began to cry.
46
Early on the Monday morning that John and Jim were to be buried in Albuquerque, the detectives in the Newsom murder case met at the Forsyth County Sheriff’’s Department with Sheriff Preston Oldham and District Attorney Don Tisdale. The subject was Ian Perkins.
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