Bitter Blood (63 page)

“I was going to invite him over and kill him,” he explained. “I was just going to plug the boy.”

He was buying the carbine to make sure that he did the job properly. “I’m no hand with a pistol,” he said, “but I’m a very good rifle shot, and I figured that one would be a real stopper.”

He felt a certain peace after reaching the decision and had no qualms about it.

“I wanted to kill him,” he said, “and I don’t think I was the only one. I think people were standing in line to blow him away. The guy was a monster, just a complete monster.”

Despite his moral upbringing, his brilliance, his long studies in theology, philosophy, and law, in the end his decision had been elemental. His justification was simple and basic and he summed it up in a single short sentence that might have graced the cover of a supermarket tabloid: “He hacked my mama to pieces.”

While Rob was paying for the powerful weapon, as a fierce thunderstorm beat on the store’s awning, the clerk mentioned hearing over a police scanner that a shoot-out had taken place with “some terrorist” at Guilford College. Could the police have already done his work for him? When the rain subsided, Rob dashed to his car, locked the gun in his trunk, and drove to his office. Jean Cook, the office records manager, rushed out to meet him.

“You have to go home,” she said without explanation, “and I’m going to ride with you.”

Rob knew that something terrible had happened, and Alice tearfully broke the news of the explosion to him when he got home. Friends arrived quickly as word spread, just as they had two weeks before. Among them was Wally Harrelson, the public defender, who began making calls seeking information.

“We couldn’t get any information from anybody,” Rob remembered.

Word finally came that Susie and Fritz were dead, but there still was no news about the boys.

When Susie’s death was confirmed, Alice called Tom’s home number and Kathy answered. The two women had never met. Alice told Kathy what had happened, and Kathy’s first question was about John and Jim.

“We don’t know,” Alice said, crying. “We can’t find the boys.”

“What do you mean you can’t find the boys?” Kathy said, but Alice was sobbing and handed the phone to a neighbor, Dr. John Chandler, who told Kathy that the boys’ whereabouts were unknown.

As soon as Dr. Chandler hung up, the phone rang and Tom was on the line, wanting to talk to Rob.

“There’s been an explosion,” Rob told him. “Susie and Fritz are dead.”

“Where are the boys?” Tom asked.

“We don’t know yet,” Rob said. “We haven’t heard anything about the boys.”

“I’m looking at my watch,” Tom recalled later. It was a little after 1:30 in Albuquerque, two hours later in Greensboro. “I’m thinking, ‘The kids are in school, I’m all right.’”

Later, Tom told Bart Ripp of the
Albuquerque Tribune
of his reaction to Susie’s death: “I was glad. I thought, ‘I’m rid of her, and the boys will be out here tomorrow.’”

Later still, he explained his reaction: “She had thrown up so many obstacles and been so cold and so overtly evil that there was no remorse at all that she was gone.”

Rob and Alice learned of the boys’ deaths from a neighbor who worked at Cone Hospital and had gotten the news from police. Soon afterward, Rob called Tom at his office. Tom knew from the tone of Rob’s voice that he didn’t want to hear his message.

“We’ve got word that the boys were with Susie and Fritz when the bomb went off,” Rob said. “It hasn’t been confirmed.”

Tom hung up and frantically called Greensboro police, only to hear that he could be told nothing until he was officially notified. His heart dropped. He knew what that meant.

Nothing ever hit him like that. Later, he was unable to find words sufficient to describe his pain, his anger, his feeling of helplessness.

Dr. Chandler called Kathy to tell her the boys were dead, and crying, she called Tom.

“Let me come and get you,” she pleaded. “Let me have somebody come and get you.”

“No,” he said, and hung up.

He picked up a single item from his desk. On his way out, he told the office receptionist that he didn’t know when he’d be back. He drove home and walked inside without saying anything. He was carrying a small photograph he had taken from his desk. The snapshot had been made at a friend’s house at Christmas 1983. In it, he, Kathy, and the boys were smiling broadly. At the heavy wood dining room table where they all had shared many happy meals he paused. Suddenly, he slammed the picture facedown onto the tabletop, shattering the glass frame to match his dreams for his sons.

District Attorney Don Tisdale was halfway through another afternoon in his controversial murder-rape trial when somebody tapped him on the shoulder, and he looked up to see Sheriff Preston Oldham motioning to him from the courtroom door. Oldham looked shaken. Tisdale had never seen him like that.

They stepped into the hallway, and Oldham told Tisdale about the shoot-out and explosion. The sheriff clearly was upset about the boys’ deaths.

Tisdale had a curious verbal quirk, a phrase that popped automatically to his lips whenever he faced something that couldn’t be changed.

“Well, good,” he said, realizing as it came out how inappropriate it was.

“What do we do now?” Tisdale remembered the sheriff asking.

“Well as tragic as it is, there’s not much you can do. You didn’t do anything wrong. You couldn’t dictate what happened. He dictated who his victims were going to be.”

Later, Tisdale admitted to another regret about the way things turned out.

“I felt sort of cheated, because I would’ve loved to have tried the case. It would have been the trial of the century.”

The bomb blast site teemed with police, emergency workers, reporters, and photographers. A truck with a high extension arm was brought in so that a highway patrol cameraman could get an overview for a videotape of the scene. A bomb squad moved through the debris, making sure no explosives had been thrown from the vehicle. When the bomb squad finished, grids were laid out, and evidence technicians swept through, noting and marking every piece of debris.

The boys’ bodies remained in the Blazer for several hours. Fearing that the Blazer might be booby-trapped or contain other explosives, the bomb experts treated it gingerly. Ropes were attached to the bodies and they were pulled slowly from the wreckage from a great distance.

Officers who got close-up looks at the boys before they were lifted into oversized body bags saw something that they kept to themselves, something that reporters would be two days in learning.

After the boys’ bodies were taken away to be sent to North Carolina Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill for autopsy, officers borrowed a shovel and buried Chowy and Maizie in the horse pasture.

The three officers hurt in the shoot-out all were treated at Moses Cone Hospital on Tuesday afternoon and released.

Dennis, the Greensboro patrolman, was most seriously injured, with muscle, nerve, and lung damage. He was upset that he had been called into such a dangerous situation without adequate information. Some Greensboro patrol officers thought that Dennis had been made a sitting duck by the detectives, brought in to take the gunfire for them, and they were angry. Angriest of all was Dennis’s wife, Sandy, who that night loudly confronted some of the officers involved in the shoot-out.

The injured Kentucky detectives, Childers and Nobles, were taken to the explosion site after treatment and rejoined their commander, Dan Davidson.

Davidson had suffered two blows that afternoon, the first being the deaths of the boys. The second came when he called his post commander to tell him about the shootout and explosion. Then he learned that his own son had been seriously hurt that day when the wall of a coal mine collapsed.

Later, Davidson, Childers, and Nobles checked into the Comfort Inn in Greensboro, and after calling to check on his son, Davidson did what he’d been dreading for hours. He called Tom Lynch.

“Doc, I’m real sorry,” he began.

“What happened, Dan?”

Davidson gave a capsule description of the day’s events.

“He just blew the truck up and killed everybody,” he concluded.

“I’ll be there tomorrow,” Tom told him.

“I just felt terrible,” Davidson recalled later. “I don’t ever remember feeling that bad over anything.”

Following the explosion, Greensboro police evacuated Susie’s apartment building and several others near it. The entire area was roped off, and nobody was allowed to enter for fear that other bombs might be in the apartment, timed to go off. A SWAT team arrived. Sharpshooters took up positions in nearby apartments in case armed confederates might be in the apartment. A special bomb-removal truck pulled up to the apartment.

Near dusk, Gentry and Sturgill left the blast site and went to the Greensboro Police Department, where Sturgill drew up a search warrant for Susie’s apartment and Blazer. Darkness was falling before police moved warily on the apartment.

A bomb squad used small charges to blow open the doors of Susie’s Blazer, but no explosives were found inside. Squad members broke the kitchen window of the apartment and entered cautiously. They disconnected the tear gas cannister above the door and began a thorough search. Not until nearly 11 P.M. was the apartment declared free of explosives and residents of nearby apartments allowed to return to their homes.

Davidson, Childers, and Nobles had joined Gentry, Sturgill, and other detectives outside Susie’s apartment. When they were allowed to enter, their attention was first drawn to four sheets of white stationery, near an open edition of that day’s
New York Times,
on the cluttered kitchen table. The stationery bore the letterhead of Dr. Frederick R. Klenner of Reidsville, but his name and address had been scratched through. Each sheet bore a separate handwritten note that looked hurriedly scribbled.

This is to certify that my friend Ian Perkins was in no way involved in any wrongdoings of any kind. He was with me on a camping trip to Peaks of Otter on the weekend of May 18th and to the best of his certain knowledge in training for a possible career in covert operations.

Fred R. Klenner Jr.

The firearms in this apartment and in the Blazer were the property of Fred. R. Klenner Sr. and are the property of Annie Sharp Klenner, as are the computer, TV, electronics equipment, weight machines and camping gear.

Fred R. Klenner Jr.

I have in my life never physically harmed anyone as in taking human life. I am innocent of any accusations that have come to my attention and fear an elaborate frame. I have spent my life in the service of my God, my country and my family.

Fred R. Klenner Jr.

Mother,

I love you now and always.

Your Fritz

Whatever else Gentry and Sturgill could say about Fritz, they had to say one thing: he was consistent. He played out his games to the end.

44

The explosion on Highway 150 was the biggest news in Greensboro since a band of homegrown Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen opened fire on anti-Klan demonstrators in a black neighborhood in November of 1979, killing five members of the Communist Workers Party, an event that pleased Fritz, who gloated when all of the Klansmen and Nazis charged in the case were acquitted, even though the killings had been recorded by TV cameras and seen throughout the world. Ironically, a civil rights suit brought by survivors of the attack was being tried in federal court in Winston-Salem as police began closing in on Fritz; but in the coming days, that trial would be greatly overshadowed in the news by repercussions from Fritz’s own violent acts.

As reporters dug deeper into the story on Tuesday, Tom and Kathy were flying to Greensboro. Tom had but one purpose: to bring home his boys. He would not allow them to be buried in North Carolina.

At first Tom and Kathy had not been able to believe what had happened. “This is just a mistake,” they kept telling themselves. “They’re going to call us back and say the boys are all right and we’re going to get them.”

But the truth had sunk in as they sat up grieving all night, and Tom’s anger and disbelief had become weighted with guilt. He blamed himself for not doing something to prevent his sons’ deaths.

Why hadn’t he realized earlier that Susie might have been behind killing his mother and sister? Why hadn’t he told the police to check her long before the Newsoms were murdered? The thought had crossed his mind, to be sure, but just as he hadn’t been able to believe that she could abuse the children, neither could he believe she could have a hand in murder. Why hadn’t the strange things he’d heard about Fritz prompted him to realize his potential danger? And why, most of all, hadn’t he just gone back to North Carolina as soon as he heard about the Newsom murders and snatched his kids from school? Why had he depended on lawyers and courts and patience and civilities to save his boys? Why hadn’t he just grabbed them and run and hid, hang the consequences?