Bitter Blood (53 page)

She’d been afraid to ask questions about it, she said, out of fear that he or she might be killed.

One day during the previous fall, she’d come home and found a mysterious package at the front door, addressed to Fritz, delivered by UPS, she said. She’d called Susie’s apartment to tell Fritz about it.

“Don’t touch it,” Susie told her. “We’ll be right there.”

When Fritz and Susie arrived, she said, he used an electronic device to check the package and announced that it was a bomb. He carried it carefully away and later said he’d disarmed it.

Up until she started talking about all of this, Annie Hill had seemed lucid and logical to the detectives. “It was just as if she’d wandered off into never-never land,” Gentry recalled. “She was as serious as a heart attack.”

The next thing she said had the detectives exchanging wondering glances. Recently, she told them, Fritz had been stopped by SBI agents who searched his Blazer. “She said they just tore it all to pieces and she had to give him three thousand dollars to have the car fixed,” Gentry recalled. “I was having trouble keeping a straight face.”

Had Fritz ever been hospitalized or had professional help?

No, she said, but he nearly died from Rocky Mountain spotted fever before his marriage. His fever had gone to 107, but Doctor had saved him with vitamin C.

Did Annie Hill remember if Fritz and Susie had made any out-of-state trips in July of 1984?

They’d gone to Atlanta one weekend, she said, but she couldn’t remember the exact date. She thought it was the last weekend in the month, though. The boys were in Albuquerque with Tom then, she remembered, and Gentry put an asterisk by this in his notes to remind him that Susie would have been free to go to Kentucky with Fritz at the time of the Lynch killings.

The officers asked if she knew about Susie and Fritz’s activities over the previous weekend.

Susie and the boys had come for dinner Friday night, but she didn’t hear from them again until Susie called late Sunday night to tell her something had happened. Annie Hill told her not to worry, that she’d try to find out something in the morning.

Fritz had come by Friday to let her know that he was going camping in Virginia with Ian Perkins, she said. Ian, she explained, was the son of family friends who lived down the street. He was a student at Washington and Lee University. Fritz was supposed to meet him at Roanoke Mountain on Friday night, but Ian called to say Fritz hadn’t arrived and he had returned to Lexington. Not long afterward, Fritz called to say he was at the mountain and couldn’t find Ian. She told him that Ian had returned to his room, and Fritz said he would go on there. Fritz had called Susie from Lexington on Sunday, she said, and Susie and the boys had driven to Natural Bridge to meet him for dinner. She was sure that all of this could be easily verified. Fritz, she said, no doubt used the telephone credit card from his father’s office to make the calls, and she gave the officers the number.

So here was Fritz’s alibi, and it all sounded very convenient. Too convenient, Gentry thought.

As the officers were making ready to leave, Annie Hill said something that both found interesting. Susie’s children, she said, were the only common denominator in the two murder cases.

“She just threw that out,” Gentry said. “Obviously, she’d been thinking about it. I thought she was dead on the money.”

Gentry and Bryant drove to the Reidsville Police Department, and Gentry called Ian’s house. Ian’s mother, Camille O’Neal, answered and said that Ian wasn’t there.

Could he be reached?

He was at school, she said, and she thought that he was attending a seminar all weekend, so it might be difficult.

“Who is this?” she asked, and Gentry identified himself.

“This doesn’t have anything to do with the Newsom murders, does it?” she asked tentatively.

“Yes, ma’am, I’m afraid it does.”

“Oh, my,” she said.

“I just need to verify an alibi,” Gentry told her. “Nothing more.”

Susie came by her parents’ house late that afternoon and went rummaging through it. Rob wasn’t there, and Susie wouldn’t tell Alice what she was looking for. Others had been there that day to take items that belonged to them but had been in the possession of Bob and Florence, or items that they cherished and wanted for keepsakes, but such things did not seem to be the object of Susie’s search. Later, family members would speculate that Susie was looking for letters between her parents and Tom and Kathy, letters her parents had kept at Nanna’s. When Alice offered Susie some of her mother’s silver, Susie responded, “I don’t want it.”

“Well, I’ll just put it away and keep it for the boys when they get married,” Alice said.

“Frankly, Alice,” Susie replied, “from what my children have seen of my marriage, they don’t want any part of marriage.”

Before leaving, Susie told Alice, “I’m going to be making four corporate moves in the next seven years,” but she was not specific about what they might be.

As Susie was leaving the house that evening, she spotted Annette across the street. Annette was helping her son Joey get ready for his high school prom. He was thoroughly tuxedoed. His car gleamed with polish. His mother had even scrubbed the whitewalls. Annette called Susie over to show off Joey in all his splendor.

“You’re overdoing this thing, you know,” Susie said to her friend.

“Someday, you’ll be doing the same thing for your sons,” Annette said.

“No,” Susie said, shaking her head gravely.

Later, Annette cried when retelling that incident. It seemed to her almost as if Susie had accepted that John and Jim never would live to see their prom nights, that nobody could have changed her gloomy outlook.

Captain Ron Barker was pleased when Gentry and Bryant returned from talking with Annie Hill Klenner on Friday and told him that they had an alibi for Fritz.

“That was what I was wanting,” he recalled later. “I said, ‘Okay, we have got him. You’re going to break this guy.’”

Gentry was eager to talk with Ian Perkins, and wanted to go to Virginia on Saturday to find him. He was hoping that Tom Sturgill could go with him, but Tom had a conflict, so Gentry asked Walt House to go. On Saturday, though, Sturgill called and said he thought they should hold off.

“Let’s let Fritz tell us his alibi rather than just taking his mother’s word for it,” he said.

Besides, he thought, it might be better to let Ian stew a few days, worrying about when the police might appear. Surely his mother would get word to him that they wanted to talk with him.

On Tuesday, May 28, a little before 11 A.M., Gentry and Sturgill appeared unannounced at Susie’s apartment. She came to the door wearing slacks and blouse, drying her shoulder-length hair with a towel. The detectives asked to see Fritz, and she invited them in, apologizing for not being dressed for company, and went to fetch him. He emerged from the bedroom shortly, bleary-eyed, yawning, wearing a one-piece olive-colored flight suit, socks but no shoes.

The detectives were still being friendly. “Somebody with education and money, you don’t just go in and ask for a confession,” Gentry said later. “They’re not going to roll over. They’ll say, ‘Talk to my lawyer.’” Gentry and Sturgill wanted to get everything they could out of Fritz before matters reached the lawyer stage. They asked if he’d mind coming with them to the SBI office for an interview, and displaying no alarm or concern, he agreed.

Fritz went back into the bedroom to dress, and returned wearing khaki pants and a sport shirt. He had a sheathed knife on his belt, and he stuck a small flashlight into his rear pocket, causing the detectives to wonder why he thought he might need a flashlight for a short trip in broad daylight.

The SBI office, a small, cinder-block building hidden behind an Interstate 40 motel near the airport, was only a couple of miles from the apartment, and the three rode there in near silence, arriving at 11:05. They went into the conference room, where a big table was surrounded by chairs. Gentry removed his jacket and hung it over the back of a chair. He wore an unusual pistol, an H&K 9-millimeter German squeeze cock, and he wanted Fritz to see it in the hope that he might mention it and start talking about weapons. If the weapon didn’t catch Fritz’s eye, surely he would notice the distinctive John Bianchi holster in which Gentry wore it, but Fritz said nothing about either.

The detectives knew that Fritz’s mother would have informed him of all that she’d told them, and they wanted to know his reaction to it.

“I believe you said you were a physician but you weren’t licensed in this state,” Gentry began.

“Well, I’ve trained as a physician,” Fritz said curtly. “I have no formal degree. I don’t see that this is relevant to anything.”

Gentry nodded and went on to what was relevant: Fritz’s activities for the weekend of the Newsom murders.

He’d left his mother’s shortly after Susie and the boys arrived for dinner on Friday, Fritz said. He was going camping and was supposed to meet Ian Perkins at Roanoke Mountain, but he was late getting away.

“I’m always late,” he said with a faint smile.

He got to the mountain and couldn’t find Ian, talked with a park ranger, then used the credit card from his father’s office to call his mother. She told him that Ian had gone back to Lexington, so he went there, arriving about midnight, and he and Ian drove to the Blue Ridge Parkway. They went to Peaks of Otter Campground and set up camp near dawn.

In fact, he said, he still had the campground receipt, and he produced it from his wallet. Gentry wrote down the camp space number: B-3.

They slept until nearly 2 P.M., Fritz went on, then went to the lodge for lunch. Afterward, they gathered firewood and made ready for a night hike they had planned to the peak of Flat Top Mountain. They left about 8, and as they neared the peak, they got rained on and stopped to build a fire to warm and dry themselves. They didn’t get back to the campsite until well after midnight. They rested and later fixed breakfast before breaking camp about noon.

Back at Ian’s room, Fritz said that he took a shower, then called his mother and Susie, again using the credit card. Susie had made all A’s in her classes and wanted to celebrate, so he told her to bring the boys and meet him at Natural Bridge for dinner. He liked Natural Bridge. He’d had happy family times there as a child.

After they all ate in the cafeteria and took a short hike, he followed Susie and the boys back to Greensboro, arriving about midnight. Chowy bolted from the apartment and ran off, chasing a cat, as soon as they opened the door, and it took hours to find him. By the time he found the dog and returned it to the apartment, Rob had called to tell Susie about the murders.

“What was her reaction?” Gentry asked.

“She was stunned,” Fritz replied.

Susie and her mother had problems, Fritz said, but he, Susie, and Rob always had been close, and he felt responsible for Susie and the boys.

Did he know Delores Lynch?

Yes, he’d met her at Susie’s wedding and seen her again at the visitation hearing in 1982. He knew Tom, he said, and got along well with him. He’d been divorced himself, and knew what it was to go through such a trying experience.

He’d heard that Delores had wanted visitation with the children for herself before her death, he said, and he was aware that Tom now wanted to double his. He thought that Susie’s troubles with Tom about extended visitation might have had something to do with the threatening calls she’d been receiving and other mysterious acts. He told about somebody tampering with Susie’s car and slitting the throats of the boys’ toy animals. He’d secured Susie’s apartment, he said, but the apartment managers apparently let somebody make off with the key for the new dead bolt lock he’d put on her front door.

As he told about this, Fritz took out a key chain, and Gentry noticed something unusual on it: a handcuff key.

“I know that only two kinds of people carry handcuff keys,” Gentry said later, “the police and the bad guys. Since he wasn’t a cop, I thought this was very strange. I know that no decent, honest citizen carries handcuff keys.”

Had Fritz had any military training?

No, he said, but he was a gun enthusiast. His father had been a gun collector and had loved handguns, but most were gone now. They once had had a third-class license to buy and sell guns, he said.

Did he and Ian often do things together?

They’d really only gotten close in the past year, Fritz said. They’d been camping together, and several times he’d taken Ian to his father’s farm to teach him such things as compass and map reading, rappelling, and rock climbing.

Had he ever been to Hattie Newsom’s house?

No, he said, and he was unaware of any problems she might have had with anybody. He couldn’t imagine anybody wanting to kill her.

On the way back to Susie’s apartment, the detectives attempted to feel out Fritz’s reaction about the murders. He said he’d been shocked along with everybody else.

“It just must’ve been terrible what they went through,” he said, hanging his head with a look of sadness.

Gentry and Sturgill thanked him when they let him out at the apartment.

“He was putting on a little show for us there,” Sturgill said with a smile as Fritz made his way up the stairs. “A real acting job.”