Bitter Blood (62 page)

Sturgill had radioed the highway patrol dispatcher that Fritz had turned onto 150 and shortly afterward the dispatcher notified him that a roadblock was being set up at the Guilford-Rockingham County line just a few miles ahead.

Fritz, meanwhile, continued at his slow pace, the Guilford County cars only a few hundred feet behind him. Thacker reported that he was at Bronco Lane. Soon after passing that road, Fritz slowed almost to a crawl. Both Thacker and Jackson, who was close behind Thacker, reported later that they heard sounds come from the Blazer, two distinct sounds in quick succession.

Clack. Clack.

Through the tinted windows, both officers saw frantic movement in the front seats of the Blazer.

Then the brake lights came on.

A school bus just had passed down Highway 150. It stopped at Strader Road, and Kerry Loggins and Crystal Jessie, neighbors, both thirteen, got off and started for their homes by the side of the highway. Kerry’s dog, Benji, raced to meet him, tail wagging, and Kerry stopped in the yard to play with him.

Crystal was on her front porch, about to go into the house, when she heard the sirens coming and stopped to see what was going on. Benji began barking wildly at the sirens and ran toward the road with Kerry chasing, trying to stop him. Kerry saw a black Blazer coming, moving slowly, pursued by sheriff’s cars. The Blazer seemed about to stop by the sign for Sunburst Farm, just down the road, where Susan Stout was at a nearby barn saddling a horse.

When Deputy David Thacker saw the brake lights on the Blazer, he hit his own brakes and went off the right side of the road. He thought Fritz was about to come out firing and would cut him to pieces with his submachine gun.

Before Thacker could jump from his car, he saw fire spurt from beneath the Blazer. A tremendous blast rocked his car. He sat, stunned, watching the Blazer belch a cloud of grayish white smoke as it rose from the pavement, pieces of it flying in every direction. It went nearly as high as the telephone lines, then slammed back to earth obscured by a hovering smoke cloud.

Debris rained about him, and Thacker came out of his car and crouched behind the door, clutching his .357 Magnum. Behind him, Jackson hunkered with a shotgun.

Thacker was so scared and excited that he wasn’t sure he had breath enough to speak, but he reached for his microphone to answer a call from his dispatcher.

“Ten-four, it appears it’s going to be a ten-fifty,” he said, using police radio lingo for a traffic accident. “Possible explosion at one-five-o, just east of Bronco Lane.”

The time was 3:07.

“He just blew the whole thing up!” Travis radioed excitedly. “Get an ambulance out here!”

Kerry Loggins watched the explosion, which sent his startled dog fleeing in fear, then turned away, not wanting to see the aftermath. Crystal Jessie came off her porch and started toward the road to see what had happened. Susan Stout was trying to control her horse, which had been frightened by the tremendous blast. She couldn’t imagine what had happened.

The line of unmarked cars came to a halt behind the sheriff’’s cars, and officers were piling out with weapons ready, some taking cover behind cars, others in the ditch. Nobody was certain whether Fritz might have jumped from the Blazer before the explosion and was waiting in ambush.

But even before the smoke began to clear, Fetter leaped from the lead car with his AR15 and began running toward the wreckage. So did Gentry, carrying a shotgun, and House with a pistol. Gentry could see Crystal Jessie coming toward the wreckage, and he was fearful that other bombs might go off.

“Get back inside!” he yelled as he ran, waving the shotgun in the air.

Other officers began moving cautiously toward the scene, stepping gingerly through the widely scattered debris. Yards of primer cord lay in the road, indicating that their fears of other explosives might be well founded. But Gentry knew that they need not fear ambush, for he already had spotted Fritz’s and Susie’s bodies.

Fritz lay facedown, straddling a drainage ditch on the east side of a driveway culvert on the north side of the road, about a hundred feet from the small crater in the pavement where the blast occurred. He was wearing tan corduroy pants, a checkered shirt in autumnal colors, and low-cut, blue hiking boots. He was remarkably unmarked by the blast, and even more surprising to the officers, he was still breathing.

Davidson hurried to his side and bent over him, touching his shoulder, saying, “Fritz. Fritz. Can you hear me? Can you hear me?” He was hoping for a last-minute confession.

Susie lay crumpled on the other side of the culvert with parts of the Blazer’s red seat imbedded in her. She wore blue jeans and a long-sleeve shirt, mustard color with pink and green stripes. Blood seeped from her nose, mouth, and ears. Her jeans were shredded, and the back of her body was pulp from the waist down. Her right leg ended at the knee, her left at mid-shin. A seat spring protruded from her vagina. She was dead without doubt, and it was obvious that she had been sitting atop the bomb.

When the officers turned Fritz over, they heard sounds from his body, as if bones were scraping. Gurgles came from his chest, and his breathing faded and slowly stopped as he drowned in his own blood.

What was left of the Blazer had gone down a slight embankment on the other side of the road and flattened a section of barbed wire fence around a horse pasture. The frame of the vehicle was bowed in the middle. The top and sides were gone, but the roll bars remained in place. The hood and front fenders looked as if they had been peeled forward, angling slightly toward the driver’s side, but the engine was relatively undamaged. The driver’s seat remained intact, a throne to destruction. The driver’s door hung askew. The passenger door was gone, and where the passenger seat had been was a gaping three-foot hole. Jim’s pale head sagged into the hole.

John lay behind the driver’s seat. Both boys were dead, their frail, camouflage-clad limbs entwined with the bodies of their big dogs.

Davidson walked over and took a quick glimpse of the remains of the Blazer. He saw what he feared he would see and turned away. Later, he would call that the worst moment in his long career in law enforcement, a vision he never would be able to shake from his mind. “I saw those two little children lying there dead and that just broke my heart.”

For a few minutes he had to walk off alone and compose himself.

Debris from the explosion was scattered for more than a hundred yards around. The Blazer’s passenger door was lodged fifty feet up in a pine tree. A small arsenal lay scattered. The Uzi was found yards from the blast site with a shell jammed in its chamber. A cocked 9-millimeter pistol, with a shell in the chamber and two other shells missing from the magazine, was propped upside down against the base of a utility pole. Two Ithaca lightweight automatic shotguns were gathered from the debris, along with a .45-caliber semi-automatic pistol, a 308 assault rifle with bipod, and a flare gun. Ammunition was everywhere, including KTW armor-piercing shells.

There were gas masks, tarps, tools, a big wood-cutting saw, extra boots, C-rations, climbing ropes, several kinds of knives, a machete, brass knuckles, handcuffs, choke wires, martial arts weapons, holsters, bandoleers, smoke grenades, flares, waterproof matches, a portable water treatment unit, and
The Pocket Black Book,
a guide to survival.

A plastic sandwich bag containing a thin stack of hundred-dollar bills was concealed in a pack. In the woods was a duffel bag stuffed with vitamins. Loose vitamin tablets were strewn hither and yon.

Amid all of this were classical music tapes, including Haydn’s “Mass in Time of War,” parts of a syllabus from a business course, some of Susie’s homework, and a children’s book with an ironic title:
No Monsters in the Closet.

Fritz’s Rolex watch was stopped at 3:08. He had a knife on his belt and Susie’s .25-caliber Browning pistol in his right hip pocket. On his right hand he wore a gold ring in the shape of a horseshoe with a lightning bolt across it, on his left hand a gold wedding band. Around his neck was a gold chain with a religious medallion. AGLA was the inscription on one side, IVA IANA AOY JEVA on the other. In his right front pocket were rosary beads and a cross on a gold chain.

Susie wore a Rolex watch and a gold ring with three small red stones on her left hand. Around her neck was a gold chain with a cross. She also wore around her neck a scapular, a string with two small cloth patches bearing prayers. On one of the patches was a pledge of salvation on the other a plea for a release from purgatory. The boys also wore these scapulars, and all three were carrying rosary beads.

Near Fritz’s and Susie’s bodies were laminated cards bearing prayers to St. Joseph, the patron saint of departing souls, that clearly had been ineffective: “Whoever shall read this prayer or hear it or keep it about themselves shall never die a sudden death or be drowned, nor shall poison take effect on them,” the cards said. “Neither shall they fall into the hands of the enemy, or shall be burned in any fire or shall be overpowered in any battle.”

As soon as Gentry had assessed the situation, he went to Crystal Jessie’s house and called his boss, Sheriff Preston Oldham. “It’s all come down,” he said. “We got him. It didn’t go quite like we thought it would.”

He went on to tell about the shoot-out, the explosion, the deaths of Fritz and Susie and the boys. He would remember the sheriff as sounding very subdued. “I’ll call the families,” the sheriff said.

Next, Gentry called his wife, Lu Ann, who was about to get off work at the telephone office in Greensboro.

“I just wanted to let you know I’m all right before you got to the car and heard the news on the radio,” he said.

She could not remember him ever sounding so wound-up and hyper as he was when he told her what had just happened.

This had been a blisteringly hot and sunny day for early June, and within twenty minutes of the explosion, the weather changed. The sky to the north and west turned dark and angry. Thunder rumbled ominously. The churning clouds were the blackest some officers could remember.

The storm came quickly and with an intense ferocity. Wind bent the trees. Lightning struck close enough to be smelled. Some officers took refuge in their cars. Gentry and Sturgill went to Crystal Jessie’s house. Davidson found shelter in Susan Stout’s barn. A dog that had been wandering amid the wreckage tried to shoulder into a police car, then scampered off with a whimper.

Hail the size of marbles beat down on the bodies of Fritz, Susie, and the boys. Torrents of rain washed away the blood and the acrid, lingering odor of explosives.

“It was like the Lord was mad,” Davidson said later. “Like He was
real
mad. I mean really pissed off.”

When the storm had passed and the officers emerged into the cooled and freshened air, steam rose from the melting hailstones and clung to the awesome scene of death and destruction, lending it an element of surrealism.

“It made it almost like a dream,” Gentry recalled.

Part Six

The Aftermath

43

Tom Lynch had just returned to his dental clinic from lunch when the phone call came from North Carolina.

The caller identified herself as a reporter. She asked Tom for a description of his former wife, Susie.

“Why do you want to know?” he said.

“Something has happened.”

“What?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“What the hell has happened?” he demanded.

“I can’t—”

He slammed down the receiver.

Earlier that day, Tom had tried to call Dan Davidson to find out if there had been any developments in the investigations. Two weeks had passed since he’d called to tell police of his suspicions about Susie and Fritz, and he had heard nothing. He had been growing more anxious by the day.

“We could feel the pressure building up without information,” he said. “It was like the silence was making the pressure go up.”

He had hoped to relieve some of that pressure with his morning call to Kentucky State Police Post Five, but the information it brought only increased his anxiety. Davidson, he learned, was in North Carolina with the other detectives investigating the murders of his mother and sister.

“We don’t have any word yet,” he was told, “but we understand something’s going to happen today.”

Tom took that to mean an arrest.

Now he was certain that something had happened. Had Susie been arrested? He dialed Rob’s number in Greensboro.

Rob had reached a heavy decision that day. While the police were chasing Fritz and Susie, Rob was at Southside Hardware buying a ten-shot .44 Magnum carbine. He was going to use it to kill his cousin—“der Fritzer,” he called him.

From the time his parents’ and grandmother’s bodies were found, Rob had feared that Fritz might kill him and his family. “I figured he was going to come through those doors pretty soon,” he said later.

He had decided not to wait for Fritz to make a move. He had been thinking about killing him for two weeks, although he had kept it to himself. It was the main reason he didn’t tell police of his suspicions about Fritz when he was first questioned, he said later. He didn’t want them to get Fritz before he had a chance to settle scores himself.