Bitter Blood (50 page)

“We talked about their childhood days and how much fun they’d had there as kids,” Barker recalled later. He also remembered Susie making some mention of Nanna’s will, an inappropriate time for that, he thought.

He thought a couple of other things were odd about Susie’s behavior that day.

“I’ve investigated a lot of murders,” he said. “Usually, the family asks you all kinds of questions. They stay on you constantly. Not one question did she ask.”

The other thing he noticed was this: “She was cheerful. She didn’t seem remorseful at all.”

Rob was late getting home for his appointment with Gentry, and Gentry and SBI agent Walt House were waiting for him. They talked for several hours, going over family background, the events of the past week. They talked about wills. Rob estimated his grandmother’s estate at nearly $1 million, his parents’ at about $750,000. He mentioned that his grandfather once kept large sums of money at the house, causing concern in the family that somebody might find out about it and rob him. After Paw-Paw’s death, $15,000 had been found hidden away. Perhaps somebody thought money was still stashed there. He told about the upcoming hearing and his father’s plan to testify on behalf of longer visitation. He said that his sister suspected Tom of criminal activity, but he would be surprised if it were true.

What Rob did not mention was his own suspicions. On the way home from Nanna’s house Sunday night, he and Tom Maher had talked about who might have committed the murders. They had agreed that Fritz was the most likely suspect. But Rob said nothing of this, nor did he tell about how his family was troubled about Susie’s relationship with Fritz. Only when Gentry asked, “Does anybody in the family have an unusual interest in weapons?” did Rob speak his cousin’s name. Later, Gentry would have trouble understanding that. But Rob had reasons for failing to mention his suspicions about Fritz, he said later. First, Fritz was still coming to his house, still a potential danger to him and his family; second, he had given Gentry all of the information on which he had based his suspicions and thought he could figure it out for himself; but the third and major reason was something that was forming in the back of his mind, something that he would keep to himself for a long time.

At 4:30 Tuesday afternoon, Nancy Dunn called the Forsyth County Sheriff’’s Department and said that she wanted to talk to a detective. John Boner, a tall, heavyset veteran detective who wore glasses, sported a mustache, and smoked cigars, took the call and said that he would come right out. He first went by the home of Stephen Carden, a young, boyish-looking detective, to pick him up, then drove to the Holiday Inn. Nancy, her brother David and sister Debbie went with the detectives to a private room so they could be away from their mother, who still didn’t want to believe that Susie might somehow have had a part in the murders. The letters Nancy had read that morning at Nanna’s house had convinced her that the time had come to do what she’d earlier told Rob she was going to do: tell everything she knew.

First she had questions. Earlier that day, she’d “given the third degree,” as she put it, to the SBI agents at the house, but she got few answers. “We don’t know,” they’d answer. Or “We can’t say anything about that now.” She got much the same responses from Boner and Carden.

Giving up her questioning, Nancy spilled out her suspicions. When she and her brother and sister had tried to figure out who might have wanted these murders done, Nancy said, they came up with only one name: Susie.

“Boner nearly swallowed his cigar,” she recalled later.

Why did they think that? Boner asked, and Nancy reeled off the reasons. Later, Boner listed them in his report.

Susie had a bad divorce, which was traumatic, and she had a change of attitude and short temper.

When Susie returned from New Mexico, she and her two boys moved in with her parents.

Susie moved out when she, Robert Jr. and Florence had a big fight.

The fight occurred when Robert Jr. and Florence confronted her about her relationship with her first cousin, Fritz Klenner.

It was thought in the family that Susie and Fritz Klenner were too close and probably slept together.

Also Fritz was giving Susie and the two boys injections of what they thought was probably vitamin C.

When Susie left she did not return, even sent someone to get her clothes and other belongings.

Susie cut off her ties with the family, even Big Susie, Susie Sharp, whom she idolized and Big Susie idolized her.

Susie carried with her a plastic bag of medicine that Fritz prescribed for her and the boys.

Fritz was supposed to have gone to medical school, Chapel Hill or Duke, and flunked or dropped out.

Robert Jr. and Florence tried to keep the fight low-keyed and not let the family know too much.

Susie is too cool and calm and shows no emotion about the murder of her parents and grandmother.

Robert Jr. and Florence, or Robert Jr. alone, was to testify on behalf of Dr. Tom Lynch four days after the murders for Dr. Tom Lynch to have more visitation of the children.

Nancy also mentioned the possibility of Susie’s involvement in the Lynch murders in Kentucky.

“We thought at the time that somebody should question her,” she said, “but nobody ever asked us, so we thought we were crazy.”

While Rob talked with Gentry and House on Tuesday afternoon, Susie was shopping with Nancy Holder. Nancy, who had been Bob’s secretary at R. J. Reynolds for seventeen years, was now herself a Reynolds executive. She had remained close to the Newsoms. Rob and Susie had grown up calling her Aunt Nancy. Susie had called and asked Nancy to help her shop for clothes for the boys to wear to the funerals.

Nancy tried to present a cheerful front. “I tried to keep off sadness as much as I could,” she remembered later.

Susie talked at length about John and Jim and how proud she was of them. She spoke bitterly of Tom and said she didn’t want the boys spending time with him.

“Susie, he’s their daddy and he’s bound to want them,” Nancy said.

But Susie would hear nothing of that. Tom, she said, was up to bad things. She had a friend high in the CIA who’d told her about them.

Susie told about going to Nanna’s house earlier that day and how upset it had made her.

“It was just devastating to walk in there,” she said.

“Everything’s sprayed black and they’ve cut holes in the carpet. It was awful.”

Susie said she dreaded the funeral. She had no intention of riding in the family car.

“I just can’t,” she said. “I just don’t like hearses and limousines.”

“Would you like for us to drive you?” Nancy asked.

“No, Fritz said he’d drive us.”

That was the only mention she made of Fritz all afternoon.

Nancy bought suits for the boys, and afterward, she and Susie drove to the K&W Cafeteria for supper. On the way, Nancy talked about Bob and Florence.

“You know how fine they were and how much I loved them,” she said.

“I know.”

Nancy went on to say that she’d always felt more like family than friend with Bob and Florence and that she was glad that Rob and Susie had included her at such a time. “Thank you,” she said. “I do love you both.”

Susie burst into tears and reached to hug her.

“Hey,” Nancy said, “Cut that out. I don’t drive too well as it is. I can’t drive at all if you get me crying. I’ve already cried so many tears over this that I don’t think I have any more left.”

Fritz had taken John and Jim to Annette Hunt’s house on Tuesday morning and left them for the day. Nancy brought Susie back to the Newsom house across the street at about 8 P.M., and when Susie went to Annette’s to get the boys, she said, “Ride with me to the apartment.”

Annette thought that she needed company, so she went with her. At the apartment, they bathed the boys, took the dogs for a walk, and returned to put the boys to bed and talk.

Soon afterward, Fritz arrived, angry and shouting.

“He was really upset with her,” Annette recalled later. “He was fussing at her for not having contacted him that afternoon. He was beside himself. ‘Why didn’t you call?’ he kept asking. He didn’t want her out on the highway that late. She wasn’t too concerned that he was upset. She tried to calm him down, but he was just beside himself. I just kind of sat there and tried to fade into the wall.”

37

On Wednesday morning, the Newsom murders were relegated to an inside page of the
Winston-Salem Journal.
An anonymous source was quoted as saying that a fire had been set near the bodies, that the Newsoms appeared to have been shot, and that the house “had been ransacked from top to bottom.” Nanna’s next-door neighbor, Jerrel Bell, said deputies told her “that there was no sign of a struggle and that investigators thought it was possible the Newsoms knew their attacker or attackers.”

Bob and Florence had two children, the report said. Rob had declined comment. Susie couldn’t be reached. Then, almost as if it were unrelated, came the revelation that Susie’s former husband had talked with a detective the day before.

“He asked me if I knew anything that might help them there, but I didn’t,” Tom had said. “I just thought it was strange, having been through something similar myself.”

Only then did the story mention that Tom’s mother and sister had been shot to death the previous July in Kentucky.

Preston Oldham was a man who wore a uniform well and proudly, and always for press conferences. At 10 A.M. on Wednesday, when he walked into a sheriff’s department briefing room filled with TV cameras, reporters, and newspaper photographers, his uniform was form-fitting and freshly starched. TV lights reflected off the gold eagles on his collar as Oldham revealed that the murders had taken place some time after 9:30 P.M. Saturday, that all three victims had been shot and each suffered at least two fatal wounds. One victim, he said, was also stabbed, but he would not say which.

“The apparent motive appears to be robbery,” he said.

He confirmed the details revealed by the
Journal’s
anonymous source.

“I don’t know if the fire was set to destroy evidence or what,” he said.

Oldham said that fourteen officers were working on the case, and described the investigation as “multiple focus.”

“There has been no central focus made on a particular individual or suspect,” he said, “but I think that will come in time.”

Had family members been ruled out as suspects?

“It wouldn’t be fair to make any comment on that,” he said, going on to say that nobody had been ruled out.

The reporters wanted to know about links between the Newsom and Lynch murders.

“We have not established a connection,” he said, but that was “high on the priority list.”

The atmosphere between Oldham and the frustrated reporters was not one of amiability, and at one point the exchanges grew sharp. Asked when the autopsy reports would be released, Oldham said that they wouldn’t be if he could get a court order to stop it.

What difference could it make to the case if the nature of the wounds was made public? a reporter asked.

“I’ve spent twenty-two years on the street,” Oldham said. “You haven’t. You’ll just have to trust my judgment on this one.”

Contrary to what Oldham said at the press conference, the investigation had found a focus, and at the very moment the sheriff was denying it, Allen Gentry and Tom Sturgill were talking to her in Greensboro. After hearing what Nancy had told Boner and Carden the day before, Gentry and Sturgill were eager to know what Susie would say. But they had no intention of pressing her or letting her know that she was suspected in any way. “We were kind of on a friendly interview,” Gentry explained. “We wanted her to talk.”

Chowy answered their knock, hitting the door from inside like a fullback crashing the line. Susie put the dogs up before opening the door.

“She was just charming,” Gentry said later, “almost bubbly, bouncy.”

The detectives were taken aback by the incredible clutter in the apartment. Susie invited them into the living room, where she introduced Fritz.

“This is my cousin,” she said. “He helps us out.”

Both detectives noticed that Fritz was wearing a folded knife in a leather case on his belt.

Susie cleared books and papers from two wicker chairs so the detectives could sit. She sat on an ottoman. Fritz perched close behind her on a short stool.

Trying to appear friendly, the detectives made small talk, but Fritz didn’t join in.

“He didn’t have much to say at all,” Gentry remembered later. “He just kind of sat there and judged us.”

Susie was different. “She was all sweetness,” Gentry said. “It was like she was interviewing for a job instead of talking to officers about the murder of her parents and grandmother.”

Gentry led into the questioning by asking when she’d last talked with her parents. She said her father had called Friday morning before leaving for Winston-Salem, but she didn’t mention that the purpose of his call was to tell her that he planned to testify for Tom, as the detectives already knew.