Bitter Blood (69 page)

Ian rose, trembling.

“This court and the law give to you the right to make the last statement to the court before judgment is pronounced. Do you have anything else you’d like to say?”

“Your honor,” Ian said, struggling to hold back tears as he spoke with hesitation, “I can’t take away the pain that the Newsoms suffer, nor do I blame them for what they feel. They have every right.” He paused, sniffling. “Nor can I expect myself to not share some of the pain that they suffer. But my only desire is”—his voice broke—“to see justice done.”

He dabbed at his tears.

“Take your time,” the judge said.

“That’s all, your honor.”

With that, Washington sentenced Ian to six years, suspended on grounds that he serve a four-month active sentence, remain on probation five years, and pay a $3,000 fine. Medford asked for a five-day delay in having Ian report to jail, and it was granted.

Ian’s family was surprised that he got an active sentence, although his attorneys were not unhappy with it. Members of the Newsom family, however, thought the sentence too lenient.

“He was kind of pitiful,” Frances Miller said much later of Ian. “He was a nerd to be that gullible. People have to be responsible for their own actions, though I just didn’t feel it was enough punishment.”

Before the year was out, noted Nancy Dunn, Frances’s daughter, Ian would be free to start his life anew.

“We’d like to start new lives, too, but we can’t,” she said. “Why should he?”

47

At the close of Ian’s trial, reporters swarmed around the district attorney, asking why the third tape hadn’t been played. On that tape Ian asked Fritz whether he’d murdered the Newsoms and Fritz claimed he was being set up. Fritz hinted at suicide and told Ian that he had things to do and wouldn’t see him again. But only the police and attorneys knew what was on the tape, and none had made any of the contents public. Was there something that the police wanted to keep hidden? Nothing that he knew about, Tisdale responded. He had not played the third tape, he said, for the simple reason that after listening to two tapes, the judge indicated that he didn’t care to hear the third.

Tisdale said he wanted the tape made public, and told reporters to call SBI agent J. W. Bryant, who would play it for them. But Bryant said no on orders from SBI Deputy Director Harold Elliott, who said the tape would not be released without a court order. Apprised of this, Tisdale said he would get the tape and play it for reporters, but the SBI denied it even to him.

The following day, the
Greensboro News & Record
filed a motion seeking a court order releasing the tape, but later dropped it after the SBI’s feisty director, Robert Morgan, told the paper’s editors that he would fight to the Supreme Court if necessary and the paper’s lawyers advised that the SBI likely would win.

North Carolina law required the SBI to keep all investigative records secret, but custom allowed top officials to release as much information as they deemed appropriate.

Usually any information that made the agency look good was released. All else was kept secret.

Because some information deemed inappropriate for public purview had been leaked to reporters and unfriendly politicians, the SBI had become almost obsessed with secrecy.

Although primarily an assistance agency for local police, the SBI wouldn’t even provide copies of investigative reports to those it assisted. In some instances, it was resentful of supplying documents to district attorneys. Agents who slipped copies of reports to fellow law enforcement officers knew that they did so in the face of certain dismissal and criminal charges. Agents knew, too, that they spoke to reporters at the risk of their careers, prompting most to remain mum.

Critics suspected that the real reasons for the strict secrecy were to allow the SBI to cover ineptitude and inaction and to use its considerable power against political enemies of the director and attorney general as well as perceived enemies of the state and big business (the SBI had been criticized, for example, for infiltrating and monitoring peaceful anti-nuclear-power groups while bothering little to keep tabs on heavily armed and violent racist and right-wing commando groups). The SBI was susceptible to political use because it answered only to the elected attorney general and was without review from the governor or effective legislative control. The press found penetrating the SBI’s operations difficult and rarely attempted it with success.

Started in 1938 with only a dozen agents, the SBI had remained small until Robert Morgan was elected attorney general in 1968. A former state senator who entered statewide politics as campaign manager for a segregationist candidate for governor, Morgan transformed the SBI from an agency with only 70 employees and a budget of less than $700,000 into one with 270 employees and a $4 million budget. He reveled in being called the “father of the modern SBI” and presided over it for six years before being elected to the U.S. Senate.

Although his single term in Washington was without notable achievement, Morgan seemed a likely candidate for reelection in 1980. His opponent was an obscure, right-wing, wheelchair-bound college professor, John East, the candidate of the National Congressional Club, which raised millions to finance the campaigns of North Carolina’s radical Senator Jesse Helms and other arch conservatives. Morgan had been declared the most conservative Democrat in the Senate by the American Conservative Union, and Ralph Nader had labeled him a “corporate tout,” but with the Congressional Club’s help, East mounted a campaign of deceptive TV commercials that painted Morgan liberal and led to his defeat.

“They were saying things like ‘Morgan’s for killing babies’ or ‘Morgan’s soft on Commies,’” Morgan later complained to a reporter. “It left me with bitter feelings.”

Morgan practiced law and lobbied the legislature after his loss. He was considering a return to politics when Lacy Thornburg was elected attorney general in 1984. Thornburg succeeded Rufus Edmisten, who gave up the attorney general’s office in an unsuccessful bid for the governorship. During his tenure, Edmisten, who gained fame as Sam Ervin’s assistant in the Watergate hearings, had made brazen political use of the SBI. By the time Thornburg was elected, the SBI had burgeoned into a powerful bureaucracy of more than 500 employees with a budget of more than $16 million, and Thornburg, a former legislator and superior court judge, took office promising to free the agency from politics. To do that, he appointed an old friend, Robert Morgan, as SBI director.

That a politician should be charged with eliminating politics from the state police seemed high irony, especially a politician of Morgan’s disposition. A short, banty-rooster-like man, Morgan harbored a peevish temper that was almost legendary. As a state senator, he once threatened to punch a fellow legislator who joked about his stature. As a U.S. senator, he angrily disputed constituents who disagreed with him.

“If somebody says no to him, he’s going to stand up and scream and stomp his feet,” a friend once told a reporter.

“If he gets peeved at you, he’s a real mean person,” an aide said.

“There will be no personal or partisan political roles in the SBI so long as I am associated with it,” Morgan said at his swearing-in ceremony. “I come to this assignment, to this opportunity, with but one thought in mind, and that is to give the people of North Carolina the most effective law enforcement possible.”

Now reporters wondered if politics might be the reason the SBI was keeping the Newsom murder investigation so secret. From the beginning, the SBI had released only the results of the autopsies, which were public records anyway. What had been done to determine whether Susie had anything to do with the murders of her parents and grandmother? Why wasn’t the attempt to arrest Fritz made before he got back to the apartment? Had any effort been made to find out whether Fritz or Susie had poisoned and shot the children? Did hand wipings taken from Fritz and Susie by the medical examiners reveal whether Susie had fired a weapon? What kind of bomb had been in the Blazer? All these questions and many more went unanswered. What purpose was served by keeping such information secret when the case was effectively closed and no trial could be jeopardized by release of the information? The SBI wouldn’t say.

Reports circulated that both Morgan and Thornburg had taken an unusual interest in the investigation, with Morgan closely monitoring events on the day of the shootout and explosion. Added to this, the SBI’s refusal to allow the third tape to be heard publicly raised several questions. Was the SBI trying to hide something? Was somebody trying to protect former Chief Justice Sharp and her family from embarrassment? Was the SBI trying to cover a bungled operation? Had the agent in charge acted with proper caution in trying to arrest Fritz, considering that the boys in the Blazer were essentially hostages? Should officers have fired at the Blazer knowing the boys were inside? Was the SBI fearful of a lawsuit from Tom Lynch?

Six days after Ian’s trial, the
Greensboro News & Record
revealed that the SBI had been warned that Fritz would not be taken alive and that methods used by some officers to stop him—“John Wayne tactics,” veteran officers called them—endangered police and bystanders.

More significantly the paper reported that the SBI had an earlier file on Fritz, that Sam Phillips and John Forest had told an SBI agent four years earlier that Fritz was “a dangerous psychopath,” who was practicing medicine without a license, but nothing had been done about it.

Surely, even a perfunctory investigation would have revealed that Fritz was posing as a doctor, treating patients and passing out prescription drugs. The unasked question in the story was clear: Had the SBI declined to act against Fritz because it learned that he was the nephew of the recently retired chief justice of the state supreme court, a greatly admired figure in state political circles?

“It was never brought to my attention,” said Rufus Edmisten, attorney general at the time the report was made. “I wish it had been.”

Justice Sharp said she’d never been told that her nephew had been reported to the SBI.

“If the SBI knew that and didn’t do anything about it, I think that was reprehensible,” she said.

Robert Morgan reacted angrily to the story, calling it “Monday morning quarterbacking.” Of the attempt to arrest Fritz, he said: “I can think of a hundred scenarios of how it might have been handled differently, but I’m not sure the results would have been different. We did the best we could under the circumstances.”

He called his agents’ handling of the case “commendable.”

Morgan acknowledged that Fritz had been reported to the SBI four years earlier. Ignoring that the point of the report was that Fritz was practicing medicine without a license, he noted that the SBI regularly gets allegations about dangerous people and that being a “dangerous psychopath” is no grounds for arrest.

“Apparently a lot of people in the Greensboro area who knew him didn’t think he was a psychopath,” Morgan said. “There were a lot of people who thought he was all right.”

Despite Morgan’s close involvement in the investigation and his strongly stated opinions about it, Attorney General Thornburg appointed him to conduct an inquiry into his agency’s handling of the case.

Morgan’s report was ready ten days later, on August 15, and he and Thornburg appeared at a press conference at SBI headquarters in Raleigh to reveal it. Thornburg spoke first, but only briefly. He said he was satisfied that the case had been handled in a “competent and commendable manner.” He went on to especially commend Ed Hunt, the SBI district supervisor who had commanded the operation to arrest Fritz. Hunt was then recovering from wounds he had suffered a few weeks earlier, when he was shot through the neck in a police standoff with a man who had killed his employer.

Morgan, who was himself recovering from a recent operation to repair nerve damage from tumor surgery, took the podium to offer his twenty-three-page report. He was flanked by huge charts showing the position of police vehicles at different points in the chase as well as a huge montage of aerial photographs showing the 12.1-mile route from Susie’s apartment to the spot where the Blazer exploded.

Acknowledging that he had been closely involved in the investigation from the beginning, including almost hourly briefings on June 3, the day of the arrest attempt, Morgan gave a version of events that at some points varied widely with descriptions offered by officers and eyewitnesses.

Fritz had been under surveillance “throughout all of Monday,” he said, when in fact it had begun only shortly before noon; otherwise, officers would not have been surprised when the boys appeared, for they thought the boys were in school. He emphatically denied that the SBI had been warned in advance that Fritz wouldn’t be taken alive and would “come out shooting,” although District Attorney Tisdale said so in print, and both Sam Phillips and John Forrest claimed they had told the same thing to SBI agents who called them beforehand.

Morgan further denied that “John Wayne tactics” had been used to stop Fritz. At the intersection where the first shooting erupted, he placed the blue Mustang driven by Officer Spainhour alongside the Blazer instead of blocking it from the front, where officers in the car and eyewitnesses placed it. The chart Morgan used to show the placement of cars at the intersection didn’t show the civilian cars that had played a crucial part in the situation.