Dr. Klenner was an inveterate collector of stamps, coins, toys, electric trains, miniature wagons, clocks, German beer steins, miniature cannons, cut glass, and antique furniture, but his specialty was guns, particularly German army weapons. He bought and traded so many guns that he acquired a federal firearms license issued to dealers. He filled his house not only with his collections but also with cases of canned and preserved foods that he hoarded against coming calamities, with box upon box of vitamins and medicines and with thousands of books and periodicals. His library was vast, and mixed with somber law and medical books were mystical religious tomes as well as the published near-hysterical rantings of conspiracy-minded right-wing doomsayers. Comforted by his magnificent clutter, Dr. Klenner sat late into the night listening to classical music, reading his medical journals, and writing papers extolling the wonders of vitamins.
Neighbors thought the Klenners secretive, reclusive, eccentric, “a little strange.” They came to regard the Klenner house as an eyesore in the otherwise immaculate upper-middle-class neighborhood. The white paint peeled from the bricks. The shrubbery grew wild, the grass high. Stacks of decaying building materials, rusting vehicles, and unusual machinery parts filled the yard. Service people were reluctant to approach the house, fearing the big, ferocious-sounding German shepherd inside, a dog named Dorner that Dr. Klenner claimed to be gifted with extrasensory perception.
Years later, Fritz recalled a lonely childhood spent in this dark and cluttered house. He talked of filling his time practicing his cornet (an instrument his grandfather had played in an Austrian band), reading his father’s books, and studying with growing fascination his father’s weapons.
Over and over, he told one particular story that seemed to have great significance to him.
In the late forties, Dr. Klenner bought 256 acres of land at an estate sale handled by his father-in-law, James Sharp. The land was on the Dan River, fifteen miles west of Reidsville, near Leaksville, Spray, and Draper, three towns that later merged as Eden. It was rugged land, steep and wooded and rocky, and Dr. Klenner came to call it “the Mountain.” He went there almost every Wednesday, the one afternoon a week he took off from the office, and often after mass on Sunday. He fancied himself an arborist, and there he planted trees and grafted limbs.
Almost always, Dr. Klenner took his son when he went to the Mountain. They tramped the steep hills, hiked along the river, fired Dr. Klenner’s many weapons, set off dynamite charges. Dr. Klenner was convinced that caves lay under his land, and he frequently blasted holes searching for their entrances. He also believed that a legendary Bigfoot creature, locally called the Wampus Cat, lived along the river and prowled his land, and he and Fritz spent many hours searching vainly for the creature’s lair. Later, Dr. Klenner made plaster impressions of unusual footprints he found and sent off samples of droppings to the Smithsonian Institution in attempts to confirm the creature’s existence and identify it.
One day, when he was about ten, Fritz was supposed to go to the Mountain with his father. He was in his room playing with a radio when his father got ready to leave. His father called impatiently to him, but Fritz dawdled. By the time Fritz got downstairs, his father had gone without him. Fritz never got over it. He had failed his father, and his father had rejected him for it. He couldn’t bear that.
Pleasing his father was Fritz’s foremost goal in life. Everybody who saw the two together knew instantly that the son worshiped the father, but Dr. Klenner’s expectations were high, and pleasing him was not easy.
Dr. Klenner demanded academic excellence of his children and sometimes dispatched his wife to their schools to argue with teachers over fractions in grade points. Town gossips whispered that Dr. Klenner gave his children amphetamines so that they could stay up late studying and be more alert for tests.
A classmate of Fritz, Charles Kimbro, recalled a time when their teacher was returning test papers and Fritz’s came back with only a B-plus scrawled across the top.
“He just put his head down on the desk and started crying, because he was scared his daddy was going to find out about it,” Kimbro said.
“He feared his father,” said Randy Clark, who became Fritz’s closest friend after moving to Reidsville when he and Fritz were in seventh grade. “There was no question of the authority his father had over him. It was almost militaristic, a timid submission. Yes, sir! No, sir! Acting on command. His father was god of the house.”
Fritz attempted to please his father by becoming as much like him as possible. He became enamored of German history and Adolf Hitler, and drew swastikas on his school notebooks. “He was very prone to give a Sieg Heil! and a Remember the Third Reich!” Randy Clark remembered.
Fritz displayed his father’s love for military paraphernalia by wearing an army fatigue jacket and other military attire to school years before that became fashionable among other youngsters. “He liked to be militaristic,” Clark recalled. “He liked having an air of authority about him. He liked having a sense of superiority.”
Neighbors sometimes saw Fritz marching in the yard, counting cadence, a rifle on his shoulder—but never in the front yard. He wasn’t allowed to play there because his father feared kidnappers.
Of weaponry, military and otherwise, Fritz spoke with confident knowledge, being able to spew out the muzzle velocities and other vital statistics of a wide variety of guns before he was twelve. While other kids sneaked free reads of comic books at downtown drugstores, Fritz engrossed himself in gun magazines.
As he cloaked himself with his father’s obsessions, he also parroted his father’s religious and political beliefs.
He believed with his father in a superstitious and mystical Catholicism, rife with signs and omens, that harked back to the Middle Ages. He believed in demons and spooks and the power of holy water in confronting them, for he had seen his father expel such evil spirits with only a few drops of the magical liquid. He spoke often of Armageddon, the ultimate battle between good and evil predicted in the Book of Revelation, and he believed, as did his father, that that awesome moment of decision was imminent (his father on occasion claimed to know the actual date on which the great battle would begin).
Like his father, Fritz railed against blacks, liberals, and Communists. “Be A MAN, join the KLAN,” he wrote in Randy Clark’s yearbook in the ninth grade. “George Wallace for President in ’68.”
“He was increasingly paranoid in high school about blacks, the civil rights movement, Communists,” Clark recalled. “He thought blacks were low-class, no-class, and all the civil rights movement was just a Communist plot to overthrow the government. He had such a hatred built up in him. It was almost as if he were waiting for Armageddon any minute.”
More than in any other way, however, Fritz pleased his father by constantly expressing his wish to be a doctor. That was given, and he accepted it as if it had been preordained by his genes. After school and on Saturdays, he spent time at his father’s clinic observing him carefully getting to know patients, assuring all that one day he would be assuming his father’s work. On his belt, he regularly carried a pouch filled with vitamins and medical supplies. In tenth grade, when a girl fainted in class, he was quick to revive her with an ammonia ampule.
Fritz was so intent on pleasing his father that he had little time for play or other activities. Randy Clark would remember playing only one game with him: spy. They carried attaché cases with toy pistols inside and fantasized exotic James Bond intrigues. Only later did Clark realize why the game so appealed to his friend. “He liked being secretive. For Fritz, secretiveness was very important. If a person knew a lot about you, you couldn’t maintain your secrecy. You don’t want anybody to know about you.”
At school, Fritz had no trouble maintaining secrecy. Most students steered clear of him, considering him weird, a nerd. He was shy and quiet, almost withdrawn, and except for Clark and Kimbro, he had no friends. If he had an interest in girls, he never displayed it. He shunned most school activi
ties. He was too uncoordinated and inept for sports and never developed an interest in them. He joined Demolay, a secretive, teenage version of the Masons, was a member of the French, Latin, and Library Clubs, and became an audio-visual assistant in the library. He played cornet in the concert band, and other band members would remember him as being nervous and sweating before every performance.
Fritz took fast-track classes, and, at his father’s insistence, concentrated in science. Although he made good grades, he never quite achieved the high level of academic excellence for which he strived so diligently.
Spring of 1969 not only marked the end of Fritz’s junior year in high school, it also brought the end of his studies at Reidsville High. Plans were announced to fully integrate Reidsville’s schools that fall, and Dr. Klenner would not allow his son to attend. Fritz was in full agreement. He had vowed never to sit in class with “niggers.”
Instead, Dr. Klenner chose for Fritz what he considered to be a more suitable, and more white, environment at Woodward Academy, an expensive boarding school on thirty-six acres near College Park in Atlanta. Three years earlier, Woodward had been a military school. But it had become coeducational and was known for its strong discipline and heavy Christian emphasis. At Woodward, Fritz belonged to the rifle team, rifle club, pep club, and band. He took first place in the science fair. To patients and friends who inquired of Fritz’s well-being, his father replied that he was doing fine and boasted that his son was the roommate of the son of Jimmy Carter, the Georgia governor (who, six years hence, would become president). In the spring of 1970, Fritz graduated ninth in his class of 138. His father could barely contain his pride.
Fritz’s choice of college had long been decided. Like his sisters before him, he would attend the University of Mississippi. His father had chosen Ole Miss because he thought it would be the last academic bastion of white supremacy, and although James Meredith had integrated the university with the help of federal troops in 1962, Dr. Klenner had been impressed by the institution’s defiance and he continued his support of it. He had made donations to the school library and even had given $2,500 to have planted on the campus magnolias and dogwoods, both of which, symbolically, flowered white.
When Fritz moved onto the campus in the fall of 1970, his life was right on the track laid for him by his father, but all of that was soon to change.
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In the summer of 1972, after his second year in college, Randy Clark was visiting in Reidsville when he happened by the Klenner house on Huntsdale Road. He spotted Fritz in the yard and stopped to chat. Fritz had finished his second year at Ole Miss, and the old friends caught up on what had happened since their days at Reidsville High.
Randy was surprised to learn that Fritz, whom he’d never known to have a date, was planning to marry. He’d met his fiancée at college, Fritz said. Her name was Mary Carolyn, and she was from a wealthy family, he noted, a debutante.
“He was very serious about her,” Randy recalled, “but I got the feeling that the marriage was more like an arrangement between prominent families than a real love affair. He seemed very stern about it. Very resolute.”
As they talked, Randy, who was studying religion and thinking of the ministry, realized that the hatred he long had seen in Fritz, especially for blacks, had grown even stronger. Fritz told of using karate to single-handedly fend off a group of blacks who jumped him in an elevator on campus. The story sounded dubious to Randy, but Fritz seemed to need for him to believe it, so he displayed polite awe; but later, as he was leaving, he wondered how long it would be before the hatred in Fritz built to an explosive level.
In coming years, Fritz not only repeated to others the story of being jumped by blacks in an elevator at Ole Miss, he also told of working as an undercover narcotics agent on campus, wearing a concealed pistol to classes, belonging to a campus vigilante group that “kept the niggers in their place,” and undergoing secret military training in Georgia. But one thing he did not talk about was what happened to his marriage plans.
Those plans went so far that at one point his fiancée’s name was painted on a wall plaque of the Klenner family tree, but before Fritz’s college days were through, the wedding was abruptly canceled, and friends and relatives beyond immediate family never learned what happened.
Whatever interests and outside activities Fritz had at Ole Miss, they served as distraction from study, and after four years, he still hadn’t accumulated enough credit hours for his degree in biology. His grades were only slightly above average and included some Ds, hardly the kind of record apt to win him quick entrance to the Duke University Medical School, the next step in the life course his father had so carefully charted. With that weighing on his mind, he entered summer school in 1974 and finished all of his requirements except for a three-hour language credit. He had successfully completed nine hours of German, a language in which he and his father sometimes bantered, and that fall he signed up for a correspondence course for the three hours he still needed. He never finished it, but he dared not tell his father. Instead, he went home at Christmas with the news that he had graduated. His diploma, he said, would be coming in the mail.
When the diploma hadn’t arrived by May, Dr. Klenner called the university to find out why. A dean wrote to tell him that his son could not have graduated in December, for the university had no commencement then. Records showed that Fritz still needed a three-hour foreign language requirement to win his degree. Confronted by his father, other family members later learned, Fritz claimed that enemies in the language department who had opposed his extracurricular campus activities had intercepted his work and kept him from getting a final grade on his correspondence course. He would straighten it out, he promised.
As he waited for the problem to be corrected, Fritz worked as an unlicensed assistant in his father’s clinic. He and his father agreed that this practical, on-the-job training would benefit him greatly after he started medical school. Patients liked Fritz. He had the bearing of a doctor, they thought, and he was as concerned and caring as his father. Beyond that, many exclaimed, he had the softest touch with a needle they’d ever felt.
His father’s side of the family thought Fritz the very image of Fred as a young man: tall, lean, and handsome, with a shock of dark hair across his forehead. His nose was not quite so prominent, and his eyes, true, were not the gentle grayish blue of his father but the soft brown of his mother—Blackwell eyes, they were called by the Sharp brothers and sisters, for they had come from their mother’s family.
Family members weren’t the only ones to notice the resemblances, however. On the street one day, a longtime acquaintance encountered Dr. Klenner and his son.
“Fred,” the man said, “as long as Fritz is alive, you’re going to be on this earth. He looks like you. He walks like you. He talks like you. He even puts his hat on like you.”
Dr. Klenner smiled broadly. Few compliments could have pleased him more.
If the day of Fritz’s birth was the proudest day in Dr. Klenner’s life, surely the second proudest was the day late in 1976 when Fritz announced his acceptance at the Duke University Medical School, which his father had attended. In January of 1977, Fritz drove off to Durham in the new BMW 320 his father had bought for him. For $240 a month he had rented a one-bedroom apartment, 5-G, in Holly Hill Apartments on LaSalle Street, just a couple of blocks from the Duke campus. Each Saturday, he returned to Reidsville to work in his father’s clinic and talk about his studies. His father soon was boasting to patients about how well his son was doing at Duke.
By that spring, Fritz was spending a lot of time in a gun shop in Hillsborough, a small colonial town west of Durham, where he came to know the owner, John Forrest. The two shared a love for guns and BMWs. At first, Forrest thought of Fritz as just another gun nut with money enough to indulge his hobby. Fritz bought many guns—shotguns, sporting rifles, handguns, and military weapons, particularly Belgian and German army rifles—but he also brought many back to trade for
others. “He never could make up his mind what he wanted,” Forrest said.
Fritz had a fetish for knives, too, Forrest discovered, always wearing one super-sharp knife sheathed on his lower leg, another under his clothing on his back. Forrest had had some training in explosives in the navy, although he was by no means an expert, as well as some experience with fireworks, and when Fritz learned that he peppered Forrest with questions about how to make and use different charges.
“What he thought I knew and what I knew were two different things,” Forrest later recalled. “I’d say, ‘What you want that crap for anyway, Fritz?’ He had a real fixation on that kind of stuff.”
As Forrest got to know him better, Fritz began to confide in him. “He said he had a real unhappy childhood,” Forrest remembered. “Kids treated him as if he were different. People made fun of his dad, and other doctors ostracized his father. He went on and on about his dad. He had his dad up on a pedestal, no doubt about that.”
Forrest had a garage behind his house where several nights a week he and two fellow gun and car fanciers, Bruce Robinson and Sam Phillips, both mechanics, worked on BMWs, and soon Fritz began hanging out at the garage with them. Often he wore a white doctor’s coat with a Duke emblem on it and a stethoscope in his pocket. If anybody nicked a finger or had a cold, headache, or any other ailment, Fritz would fetch a doctor’s satchel from his car and offer treatment. He passed out vitamins freely and touted them as the preventive for all ills.
Fritz first told John Forrest that he was a medical student at Duke, but later led the group to believe that he had received his M.D. and now was engaged in research. All three wondered how a doctor involved in such important work could afford to spend so much time hanging around a garage, but they realized that he had a deep need of companionship and they accepted his company, even though they sometimes wondered if he’d ever leave. If they stayed until one or two o’clock in the morning, so, usually, would he, and only when they began making motions to leave would he say, “Well, I’d better go make the rounds at the hospital” or “I need to go check on the dogs at the lab.”
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