Bitter Blood

by Jerry Bledsoe

  “Mr. Lynch, you resisted completely the courts of North Carolina having jurisdiction over these children, didn’t you?” Sands asked.

  “I filed for divorce in New Mexico on the advice of my counselor because he wanted the courts in New Mexico to have jurisdiction over the divorce.”

  “Yes, sir, and y’all fought like the dickens to keep it out there, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know if you could say we fought like the dickens, but we had a couple of hearings with the judge. It was never my wish to have custody of the boys…My own personal wishes are that the boys remain in the custody of their mother.”

  “You think she has been a good mother to the children, hasn’t she?”

  “I think so.”

  Sands brought up Dr. Ron Davis, the psychologist Susie had appointed to negotiate visitation.

  “You have completely refused to cooperate with Dr. Davis in regard to visitation, haven’t you?”

  “Seems to me it is the other way around,” Tom replied.

  Horsley rose at the end of Sands’s examination to ask Tom a question he considered crucial.

  “Is it your intention to marry Kathy Anderson once you are divorced?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Susie wore a simple blouse with a Peter Pan collar as she took the stand. Her face was pale and powdered, her bearing demure and proper. She answered her attorney’s questions in a soft voice, describing the boys’ trip from Albuquerque the previous Christmas as “a rather unnerving flight.”

  “Do you feel the children will be able to fly on an airplane by themselves again?” Sands asked later.

  “I would prefer that they did not.”

  Sands led her through questions about the boys’ problems both before and after the breakup of her marriage. John had “severe emotional problems” prior to the breakup, she said, and she had sought help for him.

  “The psychologist communicated to me that children usually show the first signs of trouble in a marriage,” she said, before Horsley could object to the hearsay testimony. “He felt that John’s emotional problem was due to our conflict.”

  She went on to say that after her return to North Carolina, she’d taken the boys to Dr. Davis because of “a great deal of conflict” between the two, but the conflict had since disappeared.

  Susie recited a long list of plans she’d made for her sons in coming weeks before Sands asked, “Are you afraid of the children not returning if they leave again?”

  “I would not have been except for the kind of conflicts we had over jurisdiction, and so currently I am, yes.”

  “Mrs. Lynch, your jurisdictional matter has been resolved, hasn’t it?’’ Horsley asked on cross-examination.

  “Yes, it has.”

  Dr. Ron Davis was a witness in Susie’s behalf. He told of his telephone conversation with Tom the year before and of Tom’s objections to his recommendation of a succession of short visits instead of a single, long summer visit, to keep the boys from becoming homesick and miserable. He described the children as apprehensive because of the uncertainty about their visits with their father.

  Near the end of his questions to Davis, Sands brought up another call Dr. Davis had received, this one from Leonard Timpone, a Chicago lawyer who had been Janie’s high school sweetheart and a chum of Tom. Davis had thought the call hostile and an attempt to intimidate him. Although he tried several times to get those impressions on the record, Sands was unsuccessful.

  Delores had asked Leonard, the son of her old friends, Jackie and Mario Timpone, to make that call, although Tom and his father objected to it.

  “She said, ‘Look, Leonard’s a big shot attorney. He’ll do this and do that,’” Tom recalled later. “Not only was this way out of his jurisdiction, I got the feeling he wasn’t really interested. Leonard’s one of these blustery Italian guys, Mr. Personality, Wild Man. He would’ve been the perfect guy to alienate the entire state of North Carolina.”

  Horsley had one primary question of Davis, and it was about the boys.

  “Do you think it would be helpful for them to see their father more frequently and have a relationship with him?”

  “Sure.”

  Delores had sat through the hearing barely able to control herself, and as it was drawing to a close, without warning, Susie’s lawyer called her to the stand.

  “Mrs. Lynch, did you contact Mr. Leonard Timpone about representing you or your son on this particular matter?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Was he retained to represent your son or represent you, or both?”

  “I guess both.”

  Horsley had no questions, and Delores returned to her seat. Rarely had she said so little about something she felt so strongly about.

  Thus the testimony came to its nondramatic conclusion. Only the judge’s decision was left to be heard, and when it came, it was temporarily pleasing only to Tom. He could pick up the boys the following day, July 24, and after spending one day in Greensboro with them, take them to New Mexico. He would not have to sign a bond, and he must return the boys by August 12 so they could prepare for school. Final decision or a permanent schedule of visitation would be postponed to give Susie’s lawyers time to take more depositions in New Mexico to be presented at a future hearing involving only the lawyers.

  The only deposition Susie took that fall was from Tom. Her lawyer in Albuquerque, Barbara Shapiro, did that, asking mainly about property and financial matters. When her questions ventured into other areas, Tom’s sullen answers were short and less than illuminating.

  Shapiro wanted to know about the marriage breakup and pressed Tom for his reasons for not talking to Susie about his divorce action.

  “I didn’t feel any need to discuss it with her,” he replied. “You get divorced, you get divorced.”

  Shapiro also asked about Kathy, learning that she had quit work in 1981, was now studying at the University of New Mexico, and that she and Tom shared a joint checking account to which only Tom contributed.

  When Tom responded that he hadn’t declared Kathy as a dependent on his tax returns, Shapiro asked why.

  “You mean I can?” Tom asked.

  “Sure,” said Shapiro.

  Judge McHugh had set October 1 as the deadline for additional depositions from Susie. When none was received, he summoned the lawyers for final arguments. On November 22, he issued his order. In the summer of 1983, Tom would have the boys for the month of July. Each summer after that, he would get them for thirty-five days beginning on July 1. He would get a week at Christmas every other year, beginning in 1983, and a week at spring break in even-numbered years. He also would have the boys for spring break in 1983. He could visit them in North Carolina at any time with two weeks’ written notice. Transportation arrangements would be Tom’s responsibility, as would all costs. Until the summer of 1986, one parent would have to accompany the boys on one leg of the flight to assure that they changed planes safely. If that was Susie, Tom had to pay her expenses. After 1986, if Susie wanted to accompany the boys, it would be at her expense.

  Tom’s lawyer, Bill Horsley, had mixed emotions about the judgment. He thought the judge had compromised, trying to satisfy everybody. It wasn’t bad as a beginning, he told Tom.

  Tom had other ideas. He thought thirty-five days in the summer “ridiculous.” The travel stipulation, he felt, had been put in to penalize him. Susie had won. Her name, he was convinced, had prevailed.

  “I got hometowned bad,” he said bitterly.

  Delores was furious. She told friends that Tom never had a chance. The courts of North Carolina, she said, were under the thumb of “that old battle-ax,” Susie’s aunt, the retired chief justice.

  Horsley knew that wasn’t the case, but he never would be able to convince Tom and his mother of it.

  “Peter McHugh is one of the best district court judges in the state,” Horsley said later. “If anything he would have leaned over backwards to prevent that impression. I wasn’t real happy w
ith the decision, but I didn’t feel like we got hometowned. I could see how they might feel that way.”

  The enmity between Delores and Susie had grown even stronger in recent months. No longer was Delores allowed to talk to the boys by telephone. She had the evidence on tape.

  “Hello, Susie?”

  “Yes,” Susie said before the voice had fully registered. When the identification hit her, she sprang forth in a fury, “Delores, now listen! I can’t allow you to upset the children anymore! These boys are settled and you’re not playing games with them anymore! Now good-bye!”

  “Now what in the world is the matter with her?” Delores later recalled thinking. “I didn’t say anything wrong.”

  She called back immediately. “Susie,” she said, her voice dripping artificial sweetness, “what are you talking about?”

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about! And don’t call back anymore!” Click.

  Despite the judge’s ruling, Susie was more unhappy than ever, more watchful and protective of her children. Neighbors noticed that she was the only mother in the neighborhood who went to the curb with her children to await the school bus every morning, who stayed with them until they were safely aboard, who hovered over them even at play. She bickered more frequently with her mother, who worried that Susie was too preoccupied with her children, too absorbed in her bitterness for Tom, about whom she had begun to speak in sinister tones. Florence worried, too, that Susie was pushing herself too hard to keep top grades, sitting up until early morning hours studying. And, frankly, Florence was irritated that Susie had a regular late-night caller, a visitor of whom she disapproved.

  That visitor was Fritz Klenner, Susie’s first cousin. Florence and other family members had always thought him odd. He seemed to prowl mostly at night, and he had a fascination for guns and intrigue. The family thought him a medical student at Duke University, soon to be graduated with honors, certain to step into his aging and ailing father’s unusual practice in Reidsville. For years, he had assisted his father in his clinic on weekends, and Susie had renewed acquaintance with him when she began going to the clinic for her regular injections of vitamins. Susie was nearly six years older than Fritz, barely knew him as he was growing up, and rarely saw him for years, but now a close relationship had developed between them, rousing whispers of concern in the propriety-conscious Sharp and Newsom families. Most family members chose to believe that the cousins were simply consoling and supporting one another because both were going through divorces. Fritz’s marriage had come apart in 1981, and he’d seemed to be having a hard time because of it.

  Susie told friends that the boys liked Fritz and she felt safe when he was around. But her mother had begun to suspect that Fritz was more than a friend and protector, and she was mortified by the prospect. Fritz was coming around entirely too much, Florence thought, often far after midnight, when he would roust Susie from her late-night studies by pecking on the dining room window, sometimes disturbing the sleep of other family members. Occasionally Florence got up in the morning to find Fritz sleeping on her couch. She feared that Susie was becoming too dependent on her strange cousin, who had a disturbing way of looking at people. Fritz, she knew, was quick to see conspiracies, and she wondered what fears and exotic theories he might be pumping into her daughter’s head. Was he encouraging the wild and scathing new tales that Susie had been concocting about Tom?

  Susie even had brought up some of these tales to her lawyer. Tom was involved with drugs, gambling, and underworld characters, she told Sandy Sands just before the hearing that summer, and she was frightened by it.

  “What in the world gives you that idea?” Sands asked.

  She said that a friend of the family who was an FBI agent had told her. The FBI was getting ready to go after international smugglers, she said and Tom was just “a small fish in a big pond” but he was apt to get caught up in it. Pressed for her source, she wouldn’t reveal it and Sands discounted the tale and quickly put it out of mind.

  Later, Sands noticed Fritz at the July hearing, slinking around conspiratorially. He wondered what Susie’s cousin was doing there, but it would be years before he realized that Fritz had to have been the source of Susie’s strange tale about Tom and the underworld.

  Fritz needed little evidence to persuade himself that Tom was involved with the Mafia. That Tom’s dental partners and accountant all had Italian names was plenty. Add the judge with an Italian name who had ruled in Tom’s favor and the intimidating call to Dr. Davis from an Italian lawyer in Chicago and that was evidence enough.

  That Susie, too, came to believe such a farfetched notion, many who knew her would not doubt. They could conceive only one reason she had turned to Fritz: just as his father was saving her from deadly illness with his vitamins, Fritz would save her and the boys from deadly mobsters with his guns.

  Part Four

  Spiraling Madness

  25

  From the time Fritz Klenner was old enough to sit unassisted, weapons were put into his hands. Rare is the childhood photo that shows him without a gun. At less than a year of age, he sits in a red barrel chair a tiny toy pistol gripped tightly to his chest. At five, he poses defiantly in a fringed black cowboy suit, his hands on his six-shooters.

  “I had to run around with one of those play guns hanging on me all the time,” recalled his aunt Marie Jennings, his father’s eldest sister, who came from Pennsylvania to tend Fritz each summer while his mother, a nurse, worked in his father’s clinic. “He was Roy Rogers and I was Dale Evans.”

  Marie, who became Fritz’s favorite aunt, remembered one time visitors came to the house when Fritz was about three.

  “Don’t let ’em in until I get my guns,” he cried as he dashed to his room to fetch what had become even then the instruments of his security.

  During his childhood, Fritz would possess hundreds of toy guns of every description—pistols, rifles, shotguns, machine guns, and other military armaments—all bought for him by his father. By the time he was eleven, he had his first real gun, a German Luger, a birthday gift from Dad. By then, too, he had acquired all of his father’s fears, insecurities, prejudices, and eccentricities, as well as his hopes and dreams, becoming his father’s worshipful clone.

  Family, friends, and patients could not recall a happier time in Dr. Frederick R. Klenner’s life than the day on which his son was born at Duke University Hospital—July 31, 1952, less than three months shy of the doctor’s forty-fifth birthday. Dr. Klenner long had dreamed of having a son who would bear his name and eventually take over his important work, and now, nearly eight years after the birth of his youngest daughter, Gertrude, that dream had come true. He beamed to those who congratulated him, and passed out, not cigars, but a local product, packages of Lucky Strike cigarettes wrapped in blue ribbons. His friend Felix Fournier, manager of the American Tobacco Company plant that made Lucky Strikes, would become his son’s godfather.

  From infancy, the baby was called Fritz, and he was nourished not only with large quantities of vitamins but with his father’s visions of miracles he eventually would perform with these wondrous natural chemicals. Fritz’s Aunt Marie recalled that the child hated to take the vitamins and that she had to play story games to get him to down them, spreading the pills and capsules over a tabletop as if they were steps in an exciting journey, each step rewarded with chocolate milk.

  That the boy would be molded in the image of his father was unquestioned, for Dr. Klenner brooked no challenge. “He had a Prussian attitude,” recalled a family acquaintance who thought Dr. Klenner “an oddball, a kook.” “His word was law and that was it. He never let the children live a normal life. His wife, Annie Hill, was a prisoner in that house. She was his slave. She didn’t have a husband; she had a warden, and so did those children.”

  “He was dictatorial,” said a family friend, “but he had a loving relationship with his wife and family. I’d say they were a very close couple. Her personality flourished under that roc
k he kept her under. She was a very sparkling personality.”

  “He was a very kind and caring man, but he was Prussian to the core,” agreed another family friend who thought highly of Dr. Klenner. “An old German papa. He wanted to rule the family. He didn’t try to completely isolate his children, but he didn’t encourage his daughters’ having any friends. He didn’t like for them to go out to parties or do things that other girls did. And he kept Fritz close to himself.”

  The relationship between father and son was a picture of closeness, jealously guarded by the doctor. “Fred idolized Fritz,” the doctor’s sister Marie recalled. “He just idolized him.”

  “They were best friends,” said Fritz’s aunt Susie.

  Fritz often didn’t attend Sharp family gatherings. His mother and sisters went, but Fritz frequently stayed behind with his father, who never felt fully accepted by the Sharps and still nursed the scars of rejection they had inflicted, scars whose memory he transferred to his son. Fritz always looked forward, though, to visits with his father’s family from Pennsylvania. The doctor had little time for trips back home, but now and then he drove his wife and children to Natural Bridge, Virginia, a halfway point, where he met family members from Pennsylvania. The reunions took place in the cavernous brick visitor center, with Dr. Klenner administering blood pressure checks to family members and Fritz romping around, sometimes firing his toy guns at passersby. Years later, Fritz would talk frequently of the good times he had at Natural Bridge.

  Fritz had no childhood friends, even after he started going to school. Dr. Klenner discouraged his son from developing friends by forbidding playmates from the house, a forbidding place anyway, even to adults. Dr. Klenner considered the house his refuge, his sanctuary, and few outsiders were allowed to invade it. Those who were invited inside found dark rooms and unbelievable clutter. Books and papers and boxes and bric-a-brac were everywhere. In some rooms, little floor space was left for walking. Visitors sometimes had trouble finding a place to sit.