Bitter Blood (36 page)

At school, Fritz had no trouble maintaining secrecy. Most students steered clear of him, considering him weird, a nerd. He was shy and quiet, almost withdrawn, and except for Clark and Kimbro, he had no friends. If he had an interest in girls, he never displayed it. He shunned most school activities. He was too uncoordinated and inept for sports and never developed an interest in them. He joined Demolay, a secretive, teenage version of the Masons, was a member of the French, Latin, and Library Clubs, and became an audio-visual assistant in the library. He played cornet in the concert band, and other band members would remember him as being nervous and sweating before every performance.

Fritz took fast-track classes, and, at his father’s insistence, concentrated in science. Although he made good grades, he never quite achieved the high level of academic excellence for which he strived so diligently.

Spring of 1969 not only marked the end of Fritz’s junior year in high school, it also brought the end of his studies at Reidsville High. Plans were announced to fully integrate Reidsville’s schools that fall, and Dr. Klenner would not allow his son to attend. Fritz was in full agreement. He had vowed never to sit in class with “niggers.”

Instead, Dr. Klenner chose for Fritz what he considered to be a more suitable, and more white, environment at Woodward Academy, an expensive boarding school on thirty-six acres near College Park in Atlanta. Three years earlier, Woodward had been a military school. But it had become coeducational and was known for its strong discipline and heavy Christian emphasis. At Woodward, Fritz belonged to the rifle team, rifle club, pep club, and band. He took first place in the science fair. To patients and friends who inquired of Fritz’s well-being, his father replied that he was doing fine and boasted that his son was the roommate of the son of Jimmy Carter, the Georgia governor (who, six years hence, would become president). In the spring of 1970, Fritz graduated ninth in his class of 138. His father could barely contain his pride.

Fritz’s choice of college had long been decided. Like his sisters before him, he would attend the University of Mississippi. His father had chosen Ole Miss because he thought it would be the last academic bastion of white supremacy, and although James Meredith had integrated the university with the help of federal troops in 1962, Dr. Klenner had been impressed by the institution’s defiance and he continued his support of it. He had made donations to the school library and even had given $2,500 to have planted on the campus magnolias and dogwoods, both of which, symbolically, flowered white.

When Fritz moved onto the campus in the fall of 1970, his life was right on the track laid for him by his father, but all of that was soon to change.

26

In the summer of 1972, after his second year in college, Randy Clark was visiting in Reidsville when he happened by the Klenner house on Huntsdale Road. He spotted Fritz in the yard and stopped to chat. Fritz had finished his second year at Ole Miss, and the old friends caught up on what had happened since their days at Reidsville High.

Randy was surprised to learn that Fritz, whom he’d never known to have a date, was planning to marry. He’d met his fiancée at college, Fritz said. Her name was Mary Carolyn, and she was from a wealthy family, he noted, a debutante.

“He was very serious about her,” Randy recalled, “but I got the feeling that the marriage was more like an arrangement between prominent families than a real love affair. He seemed very stern about it. Very resolute.”

As they talked, Randy, who was studying religion and thinking of the ministry, realized that the hatred he long had seen in Fritz, especially for blacks, had grown even stronger. Fritz told of using karate to single-handedly fend off a group of blacks who jumped him in an elevator on campus. The story sounded dubious to Randy, but Fritz seemed to need for him to believe it, so he displayed polite awe; but later, as he was leaving, he wondered how long it would be before the hatred in Fritz built to an explosive level.

In coming years, Fritz not only repeated to others the story of being jumped by blacks in an elevator at Ole Miss, he also told of working as an undercover narcotics agent on campus, wearing a concealed pistol to classes, belonging to a campus vigilante group that “kept the niggers in their place,” and undergoing secret military training in Georgia. But one thing he did not talk about was what happened to his marriage plans.

Those plans went so far that at one point his fiancée’s name was painted on a wall plaque of the Klenner family tree, but before Fritz’s college days were through, the wedding was abruptly canceled, and friends and relatives beyond immediate family never learned what happened.

Whatever interests and outside activities Fritz had at Ole Miss, they served as distraction from study, and after four years, he still hadn’t accumulated enough credit hours for his degree in biology. His grades were only slightly above average and included some Ds, hardly the kind of record apt to win him quick entrance to the Duke University Medical School, the next step in the life course his father had so carefully charted. With that weighing on his mind, he entered summer school in 1974 and finished all of his requirements except for a three-hour language credit. He had successfully completed nine hours of German, a language in which he and his father sometimes bantered, and that fall he signed up for a correspondence course for the three hours he still needed. He never finished it, but he dared not tell his father. Instead, he went home at Christmas with the news that he had graduated. His diploma, he said, would be coming in the mail.

When the diploma hadn’t arrived by May, Dr. Klenner called the university to find out why. A dean wrote to tell him that his son could not have graduated in December, for the university had no commencement then. Records showed that Fritz still needed a three-hour foreign language requirement to win his degree. Confronted by his father, other family members later learned, Fritz claimed that enemies in the language department who had opposed his extracurricular campus activities had intercepted his work and kept him from getting a final grade on his correspondence course. He would straighten it out, he promised.

As he waited for the problem to be corrected, Fritz worked as an unlicensed assistant in his father’s clinic. He and his father agreed that this practical, on-the-job training would benefit him greatly after he started medical school. Patients liked Fritz. He had the bearing of a doctor, they thought, and he was as concerned and caring as his father. Beyond that, many exclaimed, he had the softest touch with a needle they’d ever felt.

His father’s side of the family thought Fritz the very image of Fred as a young man: tall, lean, and handsome, with a shock of dark hair across his forehead. His nose was not quite so prominent, and his eyes, true, were not the gentle grayish blue of his father but the soft brown of his mother—Blackwell eyes, they were called by the Sharp brothers and sisters, for they had come from their mother’s family.

Family members weren’t the only ones to notice the resemblances, however. On the street one day, a longtime acquaintance encountered Dr. Klenner and his son.

“Fred,” the man said, “as long as Fritz is alive, you’re going to be on this earth. He looks like you. He walks like you. He talks like you. He even puts his hat on like you.”

Dr. Klenner smiled broadly. Few compliments could have pleased him more.

If the day of Fritz’s birth was the proudest day in Dr. Klenner’s life, surely the second proudest was the day late in 1976 when Fritz announced his acceptance at the Duke University Medical School, which his father had attended. In January of 1977, Fritz drove off to Durham in the new BMW 320 his father had bought for him. For $240 a month he had rented a one-bedroom apartment, 5-G, in Holly Hill Apartments on LaSalle Street, just a couple of blocks from the Duke campus. Each Saturday, he returned to Reidsville to work in his father’s clinic and talk about his studies. His father soon was boasting to patients about how well his son was doing at Duke.

By that spring, Fritz was spending a lot of time in a gun shop in Hillsborough, a small colonial town west of Durham, where he came to know the owner, John Forrest. The two shared a love for guns and BMWs. At first, Forrest thought of Fritz as just another gun nut with money enough to indulge his hobby. Fritz bought many guns—shotguns, sporting rifles, handguns, and military weapons, particularly Belgian and German army rifles—but he also brought many back to trade for others. “He never could make up his mind what he wanted,” Forrest said.

Fritz had a fetish for knives, too, Forrest discovered, always wearing one super-sharp knife sheathed on his lower leg, another under his clothing on his back. Forrest had had some training in explosives in the navy, although he was by no means an expert, as well as some experience with fireworks, and when Fritz learned that he peppered Forrest with questions about how to make and use different charges.

“What he thought I knew and what I knew were two different things,” Forrest later recalled. “I’d say, ‘What you want that crap for anyway, Fritz?’ He had a real fixation on that kind of stuff.”

As Forrest got to know him better, Fritz began to confide in him. “He said he had a real unhappy childhood,” Forrest remembered. “Kids treated him as if he were different. People made fun of his dad, and other doctors ostracized his father. He went on and on about his dad. He had his dad up on a pedestal, no doubt about that.”

Forrest had a garage behind his house where several nights a week he and two fellow gun and car fanciers, Bruce Robinson and Sam Phillips, both mechanics, worked on BMWs, and soon Fritz began hanging out at the garage with them. Often he wore a white doctor’s coat with a Duke emblem on it and a stethoscope in his pocket. If anybody knicked a finger or had a cold, headache, or any other ailment, Fritz would fetch a doctor’s satchel from his car and offer treatment. He passed out vitamins freely and touted them as the preventive for all ills.

Fritz first told John Forrest that he was a medical student at Duke, but later led the group to believe that he had received his M.D. and now was engaged in research. All three wondered how a doctor involved in such important work could afford to spend so much time hanging around a garage, but they realized that he had a deep need of companionship and they accepted his company, even though they sometimes wondered if he’d ever leave. If they stayed until one or two o’clock in the morning, so, usually, would he, and only when they began making motions to leave would he say, “Well, I’d better go make the rounds at the hospital” or “I need to go check on the dogs at the lab.”

“He had no friends,” Sam Phillips said, although he didn’t realize that until later. “We were his sole support group.”

When Fritz was not talking about guns, explosives, the benefits of vitamins, or his work at the hospital, his conversation centered on only two other subjects: his father and the coming holocaust. He talked about both incessantly, and with both, his three new friends realized, he was obsessed.

“He believed something catastrophic would happen in the not-too-distant future,” said Sam Phillips, who, with the others, agreed it was possible and enjoyed talking about it.

Nearly every fluctuation in the news brought new certainty to Fritz’s fears that the end of civilization was at hand. A Mideast war would shut off oil supplies. A truckers’ strike would initiate a run on supermarkets. Communist-fomented internal strife would bring down the government. A financial crisis would destroy the world economy. Starving hordes would pour across the Mexican border. The Russians would launch a surprise attack. Everybody would have to fend for himself and fight for his existence, Fritz said, and he intended to be ready. He and his father stockpiled food, medical supplies, survival gear, and plenty of guns and ammunition at his Reidsville home, he said—and he had gold hidden away, too. When the big fall came, he would retreat to his daddy’s farm and take his friends with him, and anybody would pay hell getting them out of there.

“He was always in this fantasy world about how when the shit hit the fan, we’d all hole up,” John Forrest recalled. “He was really into that crap. He really believed it.”

While Fritz was working with his father in 1976, he met and began dating a young woman who came to the clinic with her mother, a regular patient. Her name was Ruth Dupree, and she was a student at Meredith College in Raleigh, just twenty miles from Durham. They dated regularly after Fritz moved to Durham, and in 1977 they became engaged. A Christmas wedding was announced. Invitations already had been sent when Fritz told Ruth that he wouldn’t be able to go through with the marriage; his father had diagnosed him as having cancer. The wedding was canceled.

Within a year, Fritz revealed that his cancer had been cured by his father’s vitamin treatments, and the wedding was rescheduled for Christmas of 1978. It took place on December 23, at Our Lady of Grace Catholic Church, an imposing granite structure in Greensboro. Ruth later confided to friends that, on their wedding night, Fritz left her alone for several hours, saying that he had to make hospital checks.

The newlyweds moved into a two-bedroom apartment on Maiden Lane in Reidsville, only a short distance from the Klenner home. Ruth became a teacher in the Reidsville city schools. Fritz continued his routine of working in his father’s clinic on weekends—patients sometimes were still there at midnight on Friday—leaving every Monday morning for Durham, where he remained until Friday.

His father had begun boasting more and more of Fritz’s accomplishments at Duke. Fritz was in his third year now, an honor student, his father told patients. Eminent doctors thought highly of him. He was involved in important blood research as well as other projects. Dr. Klenner even took blood samples from patients for Fritz to analyze.