Bitter Blood

by Jerry Bledsoe

  “I knew him at Wake Forest,” Chris felt obliged to explain.

  “Well, you don’t know him now,” Susie said.

  Because most of the people at the house were Rob’s friends, Susie took Chris next door to Annette’s house, where they sat at the kitchen table and talked with Annette and Annie Hill. The conversation centered on that night’s TV news, which had quoted Tom asking for an investigation to determine if the murders of his mother and sister were connected to those of the Newsoms. Only a short time earlier, while waiting at Rob’s, Chris had learned from a neighbor about the murders of Delores and Janie, and it had immediately caused her to remember how much Susie disliked her mother-in-law. Now Annie Hill remarked that this was probably Tom’s way of getting his foot in the door to obtain custody.

  “They were talking about things I didn’t know about,” Chris later recalled, and she was too polite to pry.

  Finally, Susie changed the subject and began talking about Chris’s family and remembering old times, particularly their weddings. She recalled that Chris had given her a sterling nail file as a bridesmaid’s gift. “I still have it,” she said.

  They laughed when Susie recalled how much she hated the dress that Chris wore to her rehearsal dinner.

  Soon, Chris left. She drove back to Greenville with the feeling that something about Susie had changed, that a terrible void lurked within her.

  As Chris was leaving, Linda Crutchfield, Susie’s best friend from high school, now Linda Chris, was arriving from her home in Chapel Hill. She hadn’t seen Susie in years, and Susie broke into tears at the sight of her, then took her around, introducing her to the people at the Newsom house. Linda was a little taken aback that Susie was so calm, but she thought that perhaps the shock had not had time to seep in yet and that Susie was maintaining the façade that her family background demanded for such occasions.

  Soon Susie took her to Annette’s, where they sat and talked about what had happened.

  “The police seem to think that we all are in some sort of danger,” Susie said.

  She told about being questioned earlier that day. “It’s almost as if they’re treating us as if we’re the criminals. Can you believe it?”

  She went on to talk about the holes the police had cut in the carpet at Nanna’s house and other things they had done there.

  “She seemed to be upset that they had not had a respect of property,” Linda recalled later. “I thought that was sort of strange, that concern.”

  While they talked, Annie Hill came in carrying a suit in a dry cleaning bag for Susie to wear to the funerals next day.

  “Oh, thank you,” Susie exclaimed. “I don’t know what I would do without you.”

  Susie introduced Annie Hill, and shortly afterward, Linda began making ready to go.

  “Please don’t leave,” Susie pleaded. “I want you to meet my sons.”

  She took Linda upstairs, where the boys were engrossed in a TV show.

  “I’d like you to meet Mrs. Chris, whose husband has the restaurant in Chapel Hill I’ve told you about on our trips to Raleigh,” Susie said to them.

  The boys seemed more interested in the TV than in Linda, and Linda turned to Susie and said, “If you’ve been to Raleigh, why didn’t you ever stop and see us?”

  “I was afraid if I came through and found you weren’t still there I would break the illusion,” Susie said.

  Linda had no idea what she meant. Did Susie prefer the illusion of a friend to a real one? She thought the remark strange indeed.

  Back downstairs, Susie and Linda joined in conversation with Annette and Annie Hill. Susie got Linda to talk about her family, and Linda began telling about her daughter’s learning problems and how diligently they had worked to overcome them.

  “I wish I had done that with Fritz,” Annie Hill said, causing Susie to turn and pat her shoulder.

  “You need not trouble yourself,” Susie said. “You’ve done the best you could.”

  Later, as Susie was walking Linda to her car, she started talking about Tom.

  “I have made some decisions that are unpopular with the family,” Susie confided, without amplification. “Tom wants extended visitation rights in the summer. The boys do not want to be with him.”

  “But he is their father,” Linda put in.

  “I’ve been real active with the boys,” Susie said. “We go hiking and camping. You’d be proud of me. While I can I’m going to keep up with them.”

  As Linda started to leave, Susie smiled and said, “You know, Linda, I had the greatest time at your wedding. I still have the dress I wore. I cut it off to tea length, and I’ve worn it many times.”

  When Linda arrived at her father’s house in Winston-Salem that night, her stepmother mentioned that they’d heard on the TV news that the police were looking into the possibility that a family member could have been involved in the Newsom murders.

  “Who could that be?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Linda said, “but something is wrong.”

  38

  Thursday morning’s newspapers headlined robbery as the motive for the Newsom murders. Both the Winston-Salem Journal and the Greensboro News & Record made extensive mention of the Lynch murders, saying that Sheriff Oldham intended to give high priority to determining if the cases were connected.

  The Journal quoted Lieutenant Dan Davidson of the Kentucky State Police as saying he planned to send two investigators to Winston-Salem the following week.

  “The reason we are looking at it is because Dr. Lynch’s ex-wife is the daughter of the victims,” Davidson said. “That is quite a coincidence. We just want to make sure there is no connection. There is a lot of similarity there.”

  The story pointed out the similarities: “In both murder cases, the victims’ homes were ransacked, pointing to robbery as a motive. Both victims in the Lynch murders were shot twice, and both sets of murder victims were members of prominent families who lived in large, secluded homes.”

  The Journal’s lead editorial that day also concerned the case.

  “Popular as the news media are these days, Sheriff E. Preston Oldham may well be considered something of a folk hero for the way he handles public information these days, which is, essentially, by keeping it under wraps,” the editorial began.

  It recited several recent cases in which the sheriff had withheld information and tried to keep reporters from doing their jobs.

  “How do you allow the police to operate in privacy and still remain comfortable that they are operating in a responsible, effective manner?” the editorial asked.

  It concluded: “Arrogance is not an appropriate pose for a sheriff or any other public official, especially one who serves in elective office. But after arrogance comes suspicion: What’s this person got to hide, anyway, that he won’t release any information? Or the standard media suspicion surfaces: If this person won’t reveal any information, is there any information to reveal or is the object simply to hide the fact that the police don’t know anything? After suspicion comes fear: If you don’t know what’s going on in a police department, chances are you become afraid of policemen.”

  Some who saw him that day said the sheriff was not in a good mood.

  At 10 A.M. on Thursday, family and friends filled the granite cathedral of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in downtown Winston-Salem for the funeral of Bob and Florence. Susie and the boys arrived separately, driven by Fritz in Susie’s Blazer. Susie wore a black dress with a white jacket and black earrings. Her hair was tied into a bun. The boys were dressed in the new suits Nancy Holder had bought for them. Susie and the boys joined the rest of the family in a small anteroom from which they were to enter the sanctuary as a group. As they started in, Fritz appeared in a stairwell, wearing a three-piece blue suit, a light blue shirt, and a burgundy tie.

  “Here, Fritz you get in here,” Susie said pushing him ahead of other family members.

  The Millers were startled by Fritz. “It made your flesh sort
of creep the way he just appeared out of nowhere,” Frances later recalled.

  Frances and members of her family were disturbed at having to sit behind Fritz, thinking all the time that he probably was the reason for these funerals.

  In her daily diary, Louise Sharp later wrote this about the first funeral:

  Fritz, John, Susie Q and Jim sat on bench in front of me at St. Paul’s. Fritz pawed John the entire time and held onto him as though John were his ticket. Fritz walked out of church first behind Bob’s casket—let Susie Q and Jim follow him and John. Fritz’s beard had been shaved.

  The service was formal and conventional, as Bob and Florence would have wanted it. The choir in which Bob had once sung so lovingly performed his favorite hymns, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” and “Lead On, O King Eternal.”

  After the service, Fritz and Susie hurried from the church with the boys.

  “They came out of the church, down the sidewalk, didn’t speak, cut through the Sunday school building, dodging everybody,” Nancy Dunn remembered. “A lady stopped Susie and asked if there was anything she could do for her. ‘Could we keep your children?’ But Susie said, ‘Oh, I’m taking the children back to school.’ I thought, ‘She’s lying about what she’s doing with those kids for no reason.’ She was keeping those children away from everybody.” Did the children know something that Fritz and Susie were afraid they might innocently reveal? Nancy came to wonder.

  Most who attended the service for Bob and Florence rode in a procession the five miles to the modern Bethabara Moravian Church for Nanna’s funeral at 11. Fritz parked behind the church, and when Susie spotted her parents’ neighbors, John and Martha Chandler, getting out of a car nearby, she hurried over and asked Martha if she could leave her purse in their car. Martha thought it a strange request but agreed. The purse was so heavy that Martha almost dropped it when Susie handed it to her.

  “What have you got in here, textbooks?” Martha asked, but Susie offered no explanation. Only later would Martha wonder if the purse had held weapons.

  Nanna’s service was simple and appropriate. The Reverend John Giesler read from Paul and Philippians. He spoke of Nanna’s “sweet reasonableness,” of her devotion to church and family. She always reached out to those who were troubled, he said, and so many had been touched by her life. Several people later said that they saw tears coursing down Fritz’s face during the eulogy.

  After the service, Linda Chris saw Susie and the boys getting into her Blazer behind the church and hurried to speak to her. She arrived to find Fritz hovering over Susie’s door, as if shielding her. It was the first time she had seen him, and she found him disturbing. Susie rolled down her window when she saw Linda, and Fritz stepped aside so they could speak.

  “He sort of glared at me,” Linda recalled later. “I said, ‘I just wanted to tell you good-bye.’ She started crying. I said, ‘Don’t forget you’re coming to Chapel Hill.’”

  At noon, a graveside service was held at Forsyth Memorial Gardens on Old Yadkinville Road, less than two miles from Nanna’s house and just a short distance from Green Meadows, where Bob and Florence had once lived. The procession wound up the hillside along a drive lined with hemlocks to the family plot where Paw-Paw already lay.

  Family members kept looking for Susie during the service but couldn’t spot her. They thought she hadn’t come. But she, Fritz, and the boys were standing away from the crowd at the back of the funeral canopy. When a TV cameraman approached, Fritz and Susie herded the boys between them, and Fritz turned his back to the camera. Detectives Boner and Carden, who’d been assigned to the funerals, made note of this in their reports.

  Dudley Colhoun, the minister from St. Paul’s Church, also missed Susie when he made his rounds after the service to console family members, but he spotted her preparing to leave and went to her. While he spoke to her, John and Jim grabbed him around the legs and hugged him with tight desperation.

  Family members and close friends had been invited to Nanna’s church for lunch after the services, and Susie was first to arrive. She came alone. Fritz had taken the boys and his mother for fried chicken, she told John Giesler when he greeted her, and they would not be attending.

  Giesler was struck by something he thought odd as he chatted with Susie: “She didn’t seem to be upset at all. She showed no sign of grief.”

  Only one thing seemed to be on her mind—that morning’s news stories linking the two sets of murders. She was outraged at Sheriff Oldham.

  “The gall of him,” she said.

  “She was seething with anger at him,” Giesler later recalled. “She was just burning up with this thing.”

  Soon, other family members arrived, and Giesler turned his attention to them, but some of them, too, were wondering about the way Susie was acting.

  “Susie’s behavior baffled everybody,” Frances said later. “It was as if it were a wedding reception or something. She just bubbled around.”

  Shortly, Susie went off into a corner with Jim Taylor, her cousin from Washington whom she hadn’t seen in a long time. She spent the remainder of the lunch with him, talking about chows.

  As Susie talked with her cousin, her namesake aunt, Judge Sharp, approached Frances and quietly asked, “Frances, do you think there could be any connection between this and that Kentucky killing?”

  “I don’t know,” Frances said.

  Judge Sharp had begun to wonder if Fritz could be involved.

  Earlier, she had been in her room at the family home in Reidsville when the telephone rang. She picked up the extension only to find that Louise had already answered. Her sister Annie Hill was on the line, and Judge Sharp could hear that Fritz was trying to tell his mother what to say.

  “Tell Fritz to shut up,” Louise said. “I can’t hear you.”

  Fritz took the receiver from his mother. “I’ll leave,” he said, “but you tell Judge Susie that it has just occurred to me that the murderer may have thought he was killing her instead of Florence. You know they often have been mistaken for each other.”

  Judge Sharp said nothing, and Fritz did not know she had heard him. She had never known Florence to be mistaken for herself and she couldn’t imagine why Fritz would say such a thing. Could it be a threat?

  Later that day, Allen Gentry asked Nancy Dunn, her brother Steve and sister, Debbie, if they would come to the sheriff’s department. Each went with two detectives for separate interviews, Nancy remaining with Gentry and Sturgill. She again went over everything she knew about Susie’s problems with Tom and her family and her relationship with Fritz. Even as a child, Susie had defied her mother, Nancy said, but in recent years her behavior had been in complete defiance, all of it seemingly designed as a slap in her mother’s face. Murder and mutilation, she didn’t have to point out, was defiance at its utmost.

  “Nancy is somewhat direct,” Gentry said later. “When she walked out of my office, there was no doubt in my mind about what she thought had happened, and I can’t say the same for anybody else I talked to. She thought Susie and Fritz had done it.”

  39

  On the morning after the Newsom funerals, Gentry and SBI agent J. W. Bryant drove to Reidsville to talk with Annie Hill.

  “We were trying to get some more background on Fritz before we went back to see him,” Gentry explained later, “to see if we were going to catch him in a lie.”

  As at Susie’s apartment, the detectives were greeted by fierce barking, and heeding the BEWARE OF DOG sign, Bryant slid his foot against the door.

  Annie Hill, alone in the house, invited the detectives in and directed them to a large formal dining room to the left of the foyer. She was a pleasant woman, short and plump and graying, with quick, dark eyes. The house had a shabby appearance, Gentry thought, and the clutter was even greater than at Susie’s apartment. Seemingly unperturbed by the mess, Annie Hill cleared books and magazines from dining room chairs to make places to sit. Bottles of pharmaceuticals and cartons of books were everywhere.
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br />   Annie Hill talked first about Susie. She and her mother were much alike, she said, and Susie always had been defiant of Florence. She told how Florence had quelled Susie’s childhood temper tantrums with cold showers. She was surprised by the breakup of Susie’s marriage, she said, because she thought that Tom was devoted to her. But Tom had told her to take the boys and leave, and Jim had told Florence that his daddy threw things and yelled. Along with the rest of the family she worried about Susie when she was in Taiwan, especially when it looked as if she wouldn’t get out of the country because the government thought she was a spy, but Jesse Helms had worked that out.

  The problem that brought the break between Susie and her mother, Annie Hill said, was the boys. The boys worried Florence; she fussed at them, and they were afraid of her. Susie turned to her because she couldn’t get along with her mother, she said, and now Susie visited her instead of her mother.

  Doctor, as she called her husband, helped Susie and the boys financially when he was alive, she said, but he’d left very little after his death because he’d had no investments.

  Now, she went on, Fritz was trying to help Susie and the boys.

  “She said some people thought there was more to it than that,” Gentry recalled later, “but her mind wasn’t in the gutter and she didn’t think there was anything to it.”

  “Fritz is very protective of the boys,” she said.

  She knew that Fritz lived at Susie’s some of the time, but it was only to look after them. He’d trained Susie’s dogs to protect them when he wasn’t there, Annie Hill said. Once Susie had been attacked on her way to the trash dump at her apartment, but the dogs had driven off her assailants. Susie thought the attack might have had something to do with Tom’s underworld involvement.

  Fritz was a good boy, she said. He had been very close to his father and very upset at his death. He and his father loved to go out to the farm and shoot. His father collected guns and Fritz had liked guns since he was a little boy. His father wanted him to have the farm, and she was going to leave it to him, she said.