Bitter Blood

by Jerry Bledsoe

  While the boys were with their father that summer, Fritz was telling Amanda Jones about Susie and her boys. Amanda, who was in love with Fritz, knew that he spent a lot of time with his cousin, and asked about her. Susie and her boys were, after all, among the select few who would be joining them in Fritz’s little survival group when worldwide calamity struck, and Amanda was curious about her. Fritz said that he had to look after Susie and her boys because her parents had thrown them out of their house and wouldn’t do anything for them. He didn’t like it that the boys were in New Mexico with their father. Tom used the boys as a front to haul drugs into the country from Mexico, he said.

  “He knew a border guard who’d told him all about it,” Amanda remembered.

  30

  As spring of 1984 approached, Susie called Tom to tell him that snow days had cut short the boys’ spring break, so they couldn’t come for their scheduled visit. Instead, she was taking them on a brief trip to Washington to visit Senator Jesse Helms, whom she greatly admired.

  Delores was so angry when she heard about this that she wrote a letter to Judge McHugh in Reidsville telling him that this was an unfair violation of his order. She asked him to intervene and proposed an alternative: a weekend trip to Louisville for the boys at the end of March, when Tom would be there for an American Dental Association convention.

  “It could be a nice visit even tho short,” she wrote. “It would be the third time I have seen them in their lives…My husband will not be here to enjoy them. He died of a heart attack on Nov. 5th.”

  Delores enclosed some snapshots of the boys with Tom, along with a couple of her house, but she showed the letter to her friend Susan Reid before she mailed it.

  “Okay, Delores, you’ve written it,” said Susan, who thought Delores had no business meddling in her children’s lives and had told her so. “Now tear it up.”

  Delores mailed it anyway, enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope with a request that the pictures be returned.

  The letter was not enough to win Tom a visit with his sons in Louisville. Nor were any pleas to Susie. Tom’s lawyer had to file a motion before the judge allowed the visit. That Tom had to go to court and spend more money just for a weekend visit only added to the growing tension.

  That spring, Dr. Klenner found himself unable to go to his clinic to treat the hundreds of desperate patients who were dependent on him and his vitamins. The heart problems that had plagued him for several years made him too weak to climb the steep stairs. His wife, Annie Hill, who referred to him as Doctor, was nursing him at home. On a Saturday in late May, she went upstairs to check on him.

  “Doctor was sitting up there in our bedroom on the side of the bed talking,” she later recalled. “He just dived on back and just plain went out. Fritz resuscitated him, gave him oxygen, got him stabilized, got an ambulance and got him to a hospital. So Fritz knew what to do, and he knew how to do it, and he did it in quick order.”

  Although Annie Penn Hospital was less than a mile from the Klenner house, Dr. Klenner was taken to Morehead Hospital in Eden, fourteen miles away. Several years earlier he’d given up his privileges at Annie Penn in a dispute over his controversial methods, and after the dispute he would have nothing else to do with that hospital.

  Dr. Klenner died the following day, Sunday, May 20, with his son at his side. He was seventy-six. The family received visitors at the big Sharp house on Lindsey Street because the clutter at the Klenner house allowed no room for callers. Hundreds of patients came to see Dr. Klenner lying in state at Citty Funeral Home, and Fritz moved among them, calm and reassured, comforting one and all.

  “That was a very interesting phenomenon,” observed Dr. Klenner’s friend Phil Link. “It was as if Dr. Klenner had gotten inside Fritz’s body. He had all of his mannerisms and expressions. ‘Well, we have to forge ahead,’ he’d say, just as if Dr. Klenner was saying, ‘Don’t worry about me.’ That was the strangest thing I’ve ever seen, him just assuming Dr. Klenner’s identity.”

  The funeral was May 22 at St. Joseph of the Hills Catholic Church in Eden. Years earlier, Dr. Klenner had left Holy Infant Church in Reidsville in a huff after a dispute with the priest, and had refused to go back, even after the priest had long been gone. Normally, Reidsville doctors sit in a group at the funerals of other local physicians. Only one attended Dr. Klenner’s funeral—ironically, a black woman.

  After the service, Fritz again went through the large crowd, consoling patients. He was so much like his daddy, many said. They asked when he would be reopening the clinic. He was supposed to take his “national boards” that very week, Fritz told them, but the tests had been postponed because of his father’s death. Soon, he promised.

  Dr. Klenner was buried at Greenview Cemetery in Reidsville, next to a big magnolia, one of his favorite trees. No graveside service was held. Fritz allowed no one but himself at the gravesite for his father’s burial.

  “Fritz has been very emotional over his father’s death,” his mother observed later.

  About a week after the funeral, Fritz appeared at Park Chevrolet in Kernersville, halfway between Greensboro and Winston-Salem, where he regularly had his Blazer serviced. He’d come to know several of the mechanics there. They thought of him as a tough guy. He’d told them stories of fighting with the Green Berets in Vietnam, of being trapped behind enemy lines, of saving his buddies and barely escaping with his life. His Vietnam stories were so detailed and convincing that even Vietnam veterans to whom he told them believed him.

  When the mechanics offered condolences about his father’s death, Fritz began telling how he’d tried to revive his father at the hospital. In the past, he’d told many stories about saving his father from death in many circumstances, but this had been reality, not fantasy, and neither Fritz nor vitamins could pull him back. Once again, his father had gone to the Mountain without him. Fritz had failed him ultimately.

  He burst into tears trying to tell the story and began sobbing uncontrollably in the crowded waiting room.

  Fritz’s onetime friends Sam Phillips and John Forrest heard about Dr. Klenner’s death and wondered how it would affect Fritz.

  “I knew in the back of my head that something was going to happen one day after his father died,” Sam Phillips said, “because his daddy was the only thing really keeping him in this world.”

  “I always said if old man Klenner ever dies, look out world,” said John Forrest, “because that son of a bitch Fritz, won’t anybody have any control over him anymore.”

  Not long after Dr. Klenner’s death, Fritz began seeing selected patients at his father’s clinic. He had his name included on a soon-to-be-printed 1985 calendar listing area doctors and their telephone numbers. He wrote prescriptions that were filled by local pharmacists, who assumed he was a physician. But his aunt Susie Sharp had become suspicious and she asked her friend Terry Sanford, the president of Duke University, to check on her nephew. When Sanford reported back that Fritz never had been at Duke, the retired chief justice had a talk about the law with her sister Annie Hill, and to make sure that it was understood, she had a chat with the Klenner family lawyer, Allen Gwyn, son of the judge who had claimed the judgeship her father had coveted and become her high school debating coach. Soon afterward, Dr. Klenner’s clinic quietly closed for good. Many patients, offered no explanation, were left desperate for their regular vitamin treatments and wondering what had happened to “young Dr. Klenner.”

  Susie Sharp also called her sister Florence to tell her about her discovery. Should they inform Susie Q?

  “I don’t know,” Florence said. “Let me talk with Bob.” Florence called back, saying, “Bob said don’t say anything to Susie about this.”

  “Why? Are you afraid something might happen?”

  No, Florence replied, she and Bob thought that if they told Susie, Susie would think it was just another trick to try to separate her from Fritz, and that it would drive her further from family and deeper into isolation.

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bsp; “She wanted to keep somebody in the family to whom Susie would talk,” Judge Sharp recalled later.

  Several weeks after Dr. Klenner’s death, Nancy Dunn got a call in Raleigh from Susie. Nancy hadn’t seen her cousin since Susie moved out of her parents’ house a year and a half earlier. She’d talked to her only a few times by phone, and those times Susie had seemed distant, not like herself. Nancy still didn’t know the reason Susie had left. She had no idea that Fritz was living with Susie much of the time. She didn’t even know that Dr. Klenner had died until Susie called.

  “Where are you?” Nancy asked, happy to hear from her cousin.

  “I’m in Durham,” Susie said. “I took the boys camping and I had to stop over at Fritz’s apartment.”

  “Well, look, if you’re going to be there, I want to come and see you,” Nancy said.

  But Susie made excuses. “I’m so busy,” she said. “You know Fred died and left the biggest mess you’ve ever seen. He had absolutely no money. He left that poor woman destitute. I’m helping Fritz get his old coins appraised.”

  After that conversation, Nancy wondered about several things. The way in which Susie talked about Dr. Klenner’s death and all she had to do because of it made her sound almost as if she were a Klenner, not a Newsom, as if her own father had died. Just what was her relationship with Fritz anyway? And what was this business about camping? Susie camping?

  “The Queen of England does not camp,” Nancy said.

  While Susie was helping Fritz straighten out his father’s affairs, the boys were in Albuquerque for their summer visit. They arrived, as usual, looking pale and sunken-eyed, and this time they had fresh scars on their faces. Uncle Fritz had cut off moles, the boys said. That concerned Tom. From the little medicine he had studied, he knew that moles generally weren’t removed until after puberty.

  “Don’t worry, Dad,” Jim said. “Uncle Fritz is a doctor.”

  Tom had never heard that Fritz was a doctor. He thought he was just a physician’s assistant who worked with his father.

  “No, he’s just a doctor’s helper,” Tom said.

  But the boys insisted that Uncle Fritz was a doctor and said he also gave them shots.

  That wasn’t the only thing that Tom heard about Uncle Fritz that disturbed him that summer. The boys told of spending the previous Thanksgiving camping in the mountains with Uncle Fritz and their mother eating cold turkey sandwiches for Thanksgiving dinner and getting so cold that night that they thought they would freeze.

  Tom could never have imagined Susie camping. When he had suggested they go camping after moving to Albuquerque, her response had been “Only if there’s a Holiday Inn.”

  Fritz kept coming up in the boys’ conversations that summer. At one point they mentioned that he had an Uzi.

  Tom enjoyed guns himself, and he had a cabinetful at home. When the boys had come on their first visit, he’d showed them the guns, all hunting rifles, told them they were not toys, and instructed them to keep away. He couldn’t imagine why somebody would have an Uzi.

  “I was beginning to get a little concerned,” he said later.

  But that was something to worry about in the future. Now he had a full schedule planned for the boys. He taught them to ride the used bikes he had bought and fixed up for them. He and Kathy took them back to the ranch at Wagon Mound, where they rode horses, and to the Grand Canyon, where they rode donkeys down the precarious trails cut into the cliffs to the murky Colorado River. They returned to Albuquerque to find a gift mailed to the boys by their mother—T-shirts picturing Clint Eastwood peering over the barrel of a .44 magnum, saying, GO AHEAD, MAKE MY DAY. Tom was disgusted that Susie would send such shirts and threw them away.

  In mid-July, Tom and Kathy rented a cabin at Lake Vallecito in the mountains of southern Colorado and took the boys there for a weekend with their friends Duke and Betty Halle and their two children, Kelly and Kyle. Jim had a crush on Kelly.

  The weekend seemed almost jinxed. Things went wrong from the beginning. Duke’s car broke down in a small town in northern New Mexico, and they had to leave it and take a rental. On Saturday they rented a houseboat and had a nice outing with a cookout that evening. But that night, two water-skiers collided on the lake, leaving one young man drowned and missing, and the next day the water was covered with rescue workers dragging for his body, making further pleasure outings too gloomy to contemplate. Instead, they went to a ski resort named Purgatory, rode the chair lift, and whooshed down the Alpine Slide. On the way home that night, heavy rains engulfed them, and in the town of Bloomfield, a child on a bicycle darted out of the darkness into the path of Duke’s car. Everybody ended up waiting at the hospital while the child, who wasn’t seriously injured, was patched up.

  It was after midnight when Tom and Kathy and the boys finally got back home, and they expected the phone to ring at any minute. Delores usually called two or three times a week and always when she knew they were due back from a trip, even if it meant that she had to sit up half the night because of the two-hour time difference.

  But this night Delores didn’t call, and Tom and Kathy figured that she must have fallen asleep waiting for them to get back home. When she failed to call Monday, both Tom and Kathy thought it unusual. Maybe she was wrapped up in something with her theater group. If she didn’t call Tuesday night Tom said, they’d call her.

  But Tuesday afternoon, as Tom was hurrying to leave his office to meet Kathy and the boys at the Hiland Theater, the police department chaplain showed up, and the summer turned to sorrow.

  That night, Susie was one of many people Tom called to tell about the murders of his mother and sister. He was going back to Louisville, he told her, but the boys would stay in Albuquerque with Kathy. They’d be fine, he assured her. So stunned was he by events, that later he wouldn’t recall her response.

  Another person Tom called that night was his lawyer, Mike Rueckhaus. Tom knew that he was going to be heir to a lot of money, but if his plane crashed on the way to Kentucky, he wanted to make sure that none of it went to Susie through the boys. Rueckhaus worked all night drawing up a will that created trusts the boys would not receive until adulthood.

  Only hours after Delores’s and Janie’s bodies were discovered, Susie’s lawyer, Sandy Sands, arrived at his Reidsville home from a beach trip to find his telephone ringing. Susie was calling. It was the first of three calls she made to him that night, and she was nearly hysterical.

  “She just went bananas,” he said.

  Susie told him that Tom’s mother and sister had been found dead in a “gangland-style killing,” and she was scared because the boys were with Tom. Mobsters had killed Janie and Delores, she said, because Tom owed them money and needed his family inheritance to pay it. She was afraid that something else was going to happen, that the boys might be killed or kidnapped, and she wanted Sands to help get the boys home immediately. Sands managed to calm her and convince her that Tom no doubt needed the boys at a time like this. They should let John and Jim stay for the few remaining days of their visit, he said. He did not ask how she knew that the mob had killed Delores and Janie and that the murders had been “gangland” style. At that time, Kentucky police had said only that the murders appeared to be related to a robbery, and no details had been released.

  When Tom returned to Albuquerque five days later, after burying his mother and sister and undergoing the suspicious questioning by the police, he again called Susie, this time with a nearly tearful request. Could the boys stay a little longer, maybe through his birthday? He really needed to be with them now, he said.

  Susie’s answer was quick and curt. No. Impossible. She had plans for them. They were going camping. Tom couldn’t believe that she could be so cold and insensitive. Later he would remember that she didn’t even say she was sorry.

  “That’s when I resolved to use all the money to get the boys back,” Tom said, referring to his inheritance.

  On August 5, on schedule, Tom flew to Dallas with his s
ons so they could catch a direct flight to Greensboro. In the airport during their wait, he got a pocketful of quarters and played video games with them. John not only beat him, he scored so high on one machine that he got to add his initials to the list of top scorers. He strutted around proudly, like a football player who’d just raced ninety yards for a touchdown, but he cried when his father put him on the plane. He always cried on leaving.

  31

  Bob and Florence sent flowers to Delores and Janie’s funeral, and Tom used that as an opportunity to reestablish contact with his former in-laws.

  On August 27, 1984, just before leaving Albuquerque to return to Louisville to deal with estate matters and face his third lie detector test for Detective Dan Davidson, Tom mailed them a five-page, handwritten letter.

  Kathy and I want to thank you for the lovely floral arrangement. During a time like this, it’s knowing people care that is helping us deal with this terrible tragedy and senseless loss.

  I’ve wanted to correspond with you before this but I felt awkward. Since the divorce, I wasn’t sure how you felt about communicating with me. There really shouldn’t be any reason for us not to correspond. You are the only grandparents John and Jim have. Since this tragedy and having lost my father in November, I am much more aware of how precious life is and the importance of having a close relationship with the boys.

  Tom went on to recite a litany of concerns and complaints. He was worried that the boys took too many vitamins and medicines, concerned that they had no beds, slept on the floor, never got to play outside or participate in sports. He didn’t like it that they weren’t allowed to see Bob and Florence.

  The thing that worries me most is the boys’ mental state. I am told by the boys that they are not allowed to call us collect, say prayers about me, send school pictures, cards or letters, or even talk about us. I see absolutely no reason for this and it could cause problems for the boys as they seem to feel guilty about it.