The stories usually were filled with intrigue or disaster, and Fritz inevitably came through with narrow escapes or emerged the hero, but they were always convincing.
In the spring of 1981, Ned and Wanda White separated, and within days Ned started seeing Fritz’s Blazer at his house on a regular basis.
People who knew Fritz thought that his behavior was becoming stranger and stranger that spring, the spring that should have seen him graduating from medical school. One day he came into John Forrest’s gun shop in Hillsborough and displayed scratches on his arms and ribs. People were out to get his daddy, Fritz said. Somebody had taken a shot at his daddy in the night, and he had shoved him out of harm’s way, getting himself creased by the bullet in the process.
“He was extremely paranoid always, but he was even more paranoid than ever,” Forrest recalled.
Soon afterward, Fritz hinted to Forrest that he had killed a man. He was secretive about it and offered no motive. From what Fritz said, though, Forrest got the feeling that if somebody went digging on his daddy’s farm, they might find a body.
Sam Phillips thought Fritz was beginning to fall apart emotionally. He talked more and more of the coming holocaust, and Sam realized it wasn’t something that Fritz merely feared and wanted to be prepared for, it was something he wanted to happen. “He was really looking forward to and hoping for a collapse,” he said. “He dreamed of setting up some sort of feudal society and he would be the kingpin.”
Fritz was wearing his hatreds more and more on the surface, not only the ones for blacks and Communists, but also the ones for his mother’s family, the Sharps, who, he said, had denigrated his father and never accepted him.
Sam discovered something else about Fritz. He was acquiring cyanide, making cyanide capsules and cyanide-tipped bullets, an unseemly activity, Sam thought, for a man who was a healer.
“He didn’t have any value for life,” Sam later recalled. “One day he told me, ‘If things really get bad, you can always take something as worthless as human beings and make something valuable out of them-like fertilizer.’”
To Sam, that kind of thinking simply didn’t jibe with being a doctor.
Earlier, Sam and his friends John Forrest and Bruce Robinson jokingly had come up with a nickname for Fritz. Behind his back, they called him Dr. Crazy. Now they were more convinced than ever that they had been right in dubbing him that.
“We all realized how sick he was,” Sam recalled.
Forrest began to get suspicious of Fritz’s abilities as a doctor. Once Fritz had talked of a new cure for heartworms in dogs, and Forrest had allowed him to treat his dog, but the dog died. Later, Fritz offered to cut a wart off Forrest, and Forrest noticed that he was extremely nervous as he did it. Afterward, to ensure quick healing, Fritz gave Forrest a shot of vitamin C that almost sent him into shock. Forrest had hired a manager for his gun shop and later sold him the business. One day the man suffered a fatal heart attack while Fritz was alone in the store with him. Instead of trying to save the man’s life, Fritz ran up the street to a dentist’s office for help, and the dentist administered CPR.
“I decided this SOB ain’t no doctor,” Forrest recalled.
Cynthia Phillips was wondering what was happening to Fritz. He didn’t call much anymore, and although he assured her that he loved her and wanted to see her, he said it without enthusiasm. He kept making excuses. He had to go to Reidsville. He had lab work to get done. He was sick. When she did see him, they never had fun anymore. He was not his usual self. He was clearly depressed, at times scared.
One time Cynthia went to see him when he was trying to come up with a disguise. He had connections in the FBI, he said, and he’d been warned that his life was in danger. (This was not the first time he’d spoken about his FBI connections. Once, early in their relationship, Cynthia mentioned that she had been to a couple of meetings of Students for a Democratic Society in college, and she wondered if the police had a record of it. Later, Fritz said that he had brought this up to a friend in the FBI, and his friend had checked and discovered that there was indeed a file on Cynthia’s attendance at the radical meetings, but his friend had seen to it that the file was destroyed.) Fritz was secretive about these threats on his life, but at one point he showed Cynthia parts of an intimidating letter he said he’d received. She noticed that all of the words he commonly misspelled also were misspelled in the letter. She thought that he was beginning to come apart emotionally.
He couldn’t make up his mind what he wanted from life, she knew, and he obviously was tormented about it. What he seemed to most want and need was to hide from the world with a little circle of dependent people around him that he could care for and defend. But she didn’t want to hide from life, nor did she want that for her sons. Too often her times alone with Fritz became psychological torture tests, with Fritz talking for hours about his unhappiness, his doubts and insecurities, his illnesses, his fears, always seeking reassurances.
“I would come out of there so drained,” Cynthia later recalled. “He would drain everything out of you. He relied on that kind of strength.”
Fritz needed help, she realized, and she wanted to help him. The root of his problems, she thought, was his father. At one of those draining sessions when Fritz complained that he was not what his father wanted him to be and couldn’t be what his father expected, that he never could be the brilliant and gifted man his father was, Cynthia encouraged him to have a confrontation, tell his father that he had to be his own man, live his own life.
“What’s he going to do, disown you?” she asked.
But even as she said it, she knew that finding the courage to stand up to his father was impossible for Fritz.
“I knew that was probably what he needed to save himself,” she said later, “but he couldn’t do it.”
Late in that spring of crisis, in another of their draining sessions, Fritz presented an alternative to Cynthia. He asked her to join him in suicide.
“It can be easy,” he said. “It can be painless. We can be together in Heaven.”
She was stunned to disbelief.
“There’s no way,” she said coldly, and walked out.
“I’m certain that if I’d said, ‘Yes, let’s do it,’ he’d have done it right then,” she said later. “He would have taken that way. I think he was scared to do it by himself. He didn’t want to be alone. He wanted somebody to be with him.”
From that point, Cynthia knew that she couldn’t help Fritz alone and that she had made a big mistake and would have to find some way out of the relationship.
One day not long afterward, her telephone rang. “This is Ruth Klenner,” said the voice on the other end. “I think we need to talk.”
A long pause followed as Cynthia tried to gain her composure.
“Yes,” she replied. “I guess we do.”
“Fritz had a gift,” Sam Phillips said years later. “He could sit down and talk to you and in an hour’s time he could feel you out and understand what your needs were, and he would come right at you from that angle.”
“He had a very acute instinct for sensing a weakness and exploiting it,” John Forrest said.
“Fritz would always have the appropriate emotions,” Sam said. “His emotions would be perfect for what he would be telling you. I always had the gut feeling that he hated women, but to women he had some of the charismatic appeal that somebody like a Manson had. He was a chameleon. Whatever you wanted or needed, he could provide. He was the knight on the white horse who’d come charging up and save you.”
All of that was in retrospect. That spring of 1981, when Sam discovered that his wife was in love with Fritz and that Fritz had been having an affair with her while pretending to help him resolve their problems, Fritz’s psychological makeup was of little concern to him. At first, he intended to kill Fritz. “And I would have if he’d kept seeing my boys,” he said later.
After Cynthia became almost deathly sick from a series of vitamin treatments th
at Fritz gave her, Sam became concerned that Fritz might bring harm to his sons with some of his treatments. Like his friend John Forrest, he, too, began to wonder about Fritz’s credentials as a physician. John Forrest’s wife worked at Duke, and he had her ask around the hospital what was known about Fritz.
Four years earlier, Sam Phillips had been treated at Duke Hospital for lymphatic cancer, which now was in remission. He’d heard Fritz mention his doctor’s name on a few occasions. So he called his doctor and asked what he knew about Fritz. The doctor had never heard of him.
John Forrest’s wife hadn’t been able to find anybody who knew Fritz, either. Their suspicions now even more aroused, John and Sam checked the admissions office at Duke. Only one Frederick R. Klenner had ever been enrolled there, they discovered, and he had been graduated in 1936.
Fritz was a fraud. He’d been pulling a scam not only on them, they realized, but probably on his family, and perhaps even on himself.
“He lived in such a fantasy world that I’m convinced you could’ve put him on a lie detector machine and asked him if he was a doctor and he would have passed,” Sam said. “He knew what was right and wrong and he knew what was moral, but I truly believe he did not know what was real and what wasn’t.”
Sam went to his house and seized several bottles of prescription medicines, syringes, and other medical paraphernalia Fritz had given his wife. His intention was to take it to the police and have Fritz arrested for practicing medicine without a license and illegally dispensing drugs. In turmoil, his wife did not want to believe what he was telling her about Fritz, and she would not until later. She pleaded with him not to go to the police and press charges, and out of concern that she might not let him see his sons if he did, Sam agreed that he wouldn’t.
Sam still thought that something should be done to stop Fritz, and on May 1, he talked to Mike Kelly, an agent for the State Bureau of Investigation who regularly brought his car for service to the garage where Sam worked. He told Kelly that Fritz was posing as a doctor and treating people, although he had never been to medical school; that Fritz was dispensing prescription drugs that he got from his father; that he was paranoid and carried lots of weapons. He didn’t want to press charges, he said, but he hoped that the SBI would start its own investigation, and he offered to turn over the bagful of medicines he’d taken from his house.
Intent on ending Fritz’s masquerade, Sam also called Reidsville and told Annie Hill Klenner that not only was Fritz involved with his wife but he had never been enrolled at Duke.
“I got nowhere with his mother,” Sam said later. “She was noncommittal. She told me I’d better be aware of what I was saying, that they would put an attorney on me. Later, I found out from Ruth that he had told his mother I might be calling, that I was a patient of his and had a brain tumor and was psychotic. ‘If he calls, don’t pay any attention to him,’ he told her.”
Mindful of all the weapons Fritz carried in his Blazer, and of the bumper sticker on the back that said DON’T GET MAD, GET EVEN, Sam took precautions. He started wearing a bullet-proof vest wherever he went, and every time he returned to his car, he checked it for explosives.
Cynthia Phillips met Ruth Klenner at a Pizza Hut near Fritz’s apartment. Despite initial tension, their meeting was amiable. Each felt empathy for the other as they discovered how much they had in common. As they talked over a long lunch, comparing stories, learning the truth behind Fritz’s many lies, they were dumbfounded by the extent of his elaborate deceptions. His whole life, they realized, was a sham. He was cunningly sick, and they were his victims. They parted with new perspectives and the knowledge that they would have to free themselves.
Soon after that painful meeting, Cynthia went to see an elderly priest in Durham. She carried with her the folded pages of exotic prayers to archangels she had taken from Fritz’s pocket.
“A person I know seems really obsessed with these,” she said, “and I’d like to know what they are.”
After glancing over them, the priest seemed reluctant to talk.
“Do you know what magic is?” he finally asked.
“Yes.”
“Then you know there’s good magic and black magic, right?”
He went on to explain that these were ancient religious writings that had been spurned because of their magical thrust, black magic cloaked as white.
“Whoever is dealing with this, you don’t want to know,” he said, “because they are dealing with evil. This is the work of the devil.”
Ruth left Fritz at the end of May, taking the BMW with her. She moved into the same apartment complex in Durham in which Sam Phillips lived, and she became friends with Sam and Cynthia, all bound by their bizarre experiences with Fritz. All were angry at Fritz, but they agreed that he was sick and needed help. Ruth and Sam talked of trying to have him committed to a mental institution, and later discussed it with a lawyer, only to learn that it was virtually impossible.
Cynthia and Ruth decided that the only way to end Fritz’s subterfuges and get him to seek help was to go to the source of the problem—his father. They called the Klenner home several times, only to have Fritz answer and thwart them. When Dr. Klenner finally answered one of their attempts, they poured out their story: Fritz never had been to medical school; he had affairs, lived a life of dangerous fantasy and lies; he was sick; he might hurt himself or somebody else; he desperately needed help.
The response wasn’t what they expected. “It isn’t your problem,” Dr. Klenner told them coldly. “You shouldn’t concern yourselves with it.”
As both women sought to persuade him to do something, they heard Fritz burst into the room shouting. They listened in disbelief while Fritz wrested the phone from his father, screaming at him, “I’ll blow your goddamned head off!”
Suddenly, Fritz came on the line, cursing, crying, threatening. He had a .45 in his hand, he said, and he was going to kill himself.
“Go ahead, Fritz,” Ruth taunted. “You don’t have the courage.”
From an extension phone, Cynthia pleaded for him to see a psychiatrist. He stopped her with one command, the last words he would ever speak to her.
“Get…the…fuck…out…of…my…life.”
But the voice wasn’t Fritz’s. It was guttural, cold and alien, a voice unlike any Cynthia had ever heard, and minutes after she’d hung up the phone she still shivered from its effect, convinced that she had heard the very voice of evil.
27
Only bits of information about the troubling incident at the Klenner house filtered down to the Sharp family that summer. Fritz had blown a fuse, word had it, suffered some kind of temporary breakdown. He had pushed his mother down the stairs, and, most unbelievable of all, threatened to kill his father. But as usual, the Klenner secretiveness prevailed, and few details were ever forthcoming. Sharp family members thought that stress brought on by the breakup of Fritz’s marriage, about which they also knew little, probably provoked the trouble.
Soon after the incident, Fritz stopped to see John Forrest in Hillsborough, and Forrest quickly made it clear that he did not condone deception and wife stealing. Fritz was apologetic, sorry, he said, that it all had happened.
Forrest asked what Fritz planned to do now that his parents knew that he was a fraud and had wasted more than four years of his life, not to mention vast amounts of money his father had supplied for tuition and expenses. Fritz said that he wasn’t sure.
“Our relationship is ended,” Forrest told him, “but I won’t ever do anything to hurt you.”
“Well, John,” Fritz replied, “you meant a lot to me and you never have to fear anything from me either.”
Forrest couldn’t help but notice that Fritz was wearing a Second Chance bullet-proof vest, and he passed the information on to Sam Phillips, who still was wearing his vest, too, in case Fritz was not quite so humbled as he appeared.
Ruth talked to Fritz several times that summer of 1981, and she later told friends that he sounded contrite. H
e said he was glad that everything was finally out in the open, happy that he no longer had to pretend. He still talked of medical school, but Duke’s wasn’t the only one in the world, he said. He might just go to one overseas.
Instead, he enrolled that fall at Durham Technical Institute in a two-year dental laboratory course, keeping it secret from everybody but immediate family. It was a demeaning step down for someone who had so long thought of himself as a doctor, and his heart wasn’t in it. Although he would attend the full two years, his presence would hardly be remembered by teachers and classmates, and he would complete only 60 percent of the required work and never receive a degree.
The front of contrition that Fritz presented to his wife and John Forrest turned out to be merely another pose. The elaborate structure of pretense that he had built to prop up his life proved formidable and enduring. Neither he nor his parents could face the humiliation of disassembling it, and with his parents’ knowledge and complicity, Fritz continued his masquerade. He still worked at his father’s clinic; still led patients, friends, and family—including his cousin Susie Lynch, who came regularly for treatment—to believe that he was continuing at Duke Medical School, now involved in postgraduate studies and research, and that he eventually would take over his father’s clinic. To strangers and casual acquaintances he presented himself as Dr. Klenner, still tramped about publicly in a physician’s coat with a stethoscope in the pocket, still carried a medical satchel loaded with vitamins and prescription drugs, which he dispensed as freely as ever. So long had he lived in fantasy that fantasy now seemed his only reality, and, feeding on itself, it grew.
Fritz continued seeing Betty James sporadically, but he spent more and more time with Wanda White and her sons, and all the time he was getting closer to his cousin Susie and her two sons, John and Jim. By the fall of 1982, however, just as Susie’s mother, Florence, began to grow concerned about her daughter’s relationship with her cousin, Fritz was about to enter another love affair.
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