Bitter Blood

by Jerry Bledsoe

  Gentry and Sturgill asked Ian to go with them to the Lexington Police Department, where they again went over the details of his story and asked if he would accompany them the next day to retrace the stops he and Fritz had made on the way back from Winston-Salem and search for the abandoned evidence. Now angry about being duped by Fritz, Ian quickly agreed.

  After warning Ian not to make any mention of their visit should Fritz call or come back, Gentry and Sturgill dropped him off at his room, then stopped at a nearby gas station telephone booth to report to their supervisors.

  Gentry called Captain Ron Barker.

  “He was elated,” Barker recalled later. “I knew what he was going to say.”

  Sturgill called his commander, Ed Hunt, and also called the SBI ballistics lab in Raleigh to alert them to have somebody standing by, because he and Gentry were bringing in Ian’s .45 to see if it could be matched to the shell casings.

  Earlier that afternoon, not knowing how long it might take for the local officers to make a case against Fritz, the Kentucky detectives, Sherman Childers and Lennie Nobles, left Winston-Salem to return home with the information they had gathered so they could begin plotting strategy with Dan Davidson.

  “I’ve got a good feeling about today,” Ron Barker told them before they left. “Don’t go more than two hours without calling me.”

  Nobles called when they stopped in Asheville for supper.

  “If I were you, I’d turn that car around and drive back to Winston-Salem about as fast as you can drive,” Barker told them.

  “We’re on our way,” said Nobles.

  Less than two hours later, the detectives hurried into Barker’s office and asked, “What’s up?”

  Barker grinned and reached for two bags beside his desk. Earlier, local officers had promised Childers and Nobles visitors’ gift packages of sample local products, but the officer who was to pick them up let it slip his mind until Childers and Nobles already had gone.

  “We finally got these gifts for you,” Barker said, “and I didn’t want y’all to go home without ’em.”

  Then, without allowing time for Childers’s and Nobles’s colorful mutterings to abate, Barker said, “We got him! We got him!”

  At 2:30 P.M. on Thursday, as Ian was telling his strange tale to detectives in Virginia, Susie called her lawyer, Sandy Sands. First, she thanked him for being supportive, but that wasn’t the purpose of her call.

  “She was even more terrified than when I saw her that Friday before the murders,” Sands recalled later. “I could tell by the breaks in her voice, just the way she talked, that she was petrified.”

  Her fear was that she was going to be murdered and that the boys would be kidnapped or murdered.

  “She felt she and the boys were next,” Sands said.

  She told of slipping the boys into the back of the church at the funerals and of shielding John and Jim from photographers at the cemetery to make it less easy for kidnappers or killers to spot them. She was certain that the mob was after them. Fritz had gone to pick up the boys now at school, she said, to protect them.

  “What happens to my inheritance if I die?” she asked.

  Sands explained that it would go to the boys, and if anything happened to them, it would go to their father.

  “That can’t happen!” she cried. “They’ll kill me and the kids just to get it. What can we do?”

  Sands said that he could draw a will for Susie that would leave everything to her children in a trust to age thirty. If anything happened to them before they reached thirty, she could have the inheritance go to her brother’s children.

  Susie told him to draw up the will. She said that she wanted to take it to the newspapers and make it public so that anybody planning to kill her and the children for the inheritance would know that it wouldn’t do them any good.

  Sands said he’d work on it and have it to her to sign by the coming week.

  After getting Gentry’s call, Ron Barker and Detective John Boner went to the Winston-Salem Police Department and listened to the radio transmission tapes from the night of the murders.

  They heard an officer stopping Nanna’s car. “What we were sitting there just praying for was for him to come back and say, ‘I want a license check on a Fred Klenner.’” Barker recalled. But the officer merely came back to clear himself from the stop.

  Still, Barker was hopeful when he learned that the officer was Jim Hull. He’d known Hull for years. “He’s a sharp, fine officer,” Barker said later. “I knew if anybody would remember a routine stop, it would be Jim.”

  At the SBI lab in Raleigh, Tom Sturgill and Allen Gentry learned that the shell casings found at the murder scene had not passed through the slide Fritz put on Ian’s .45. But this was only a minor disappointment to cap off an otherwise productive day, and they arrived back in Winston-Salem after midnight, tired but ecstatic, confident that they soon would be closing in on Fritz.

  Fritz was not at Susie’s apartment earlier that night when Annette Hunt stopped by to see how Susie was doing. Susie fixed tea and began to talk about the murders.

  “The police seem to think the motive was robbery,” she said. “It’s not robbery. That’s obvious. Sixty percent of murders are covered up by making it look like robbery.”

  “She had a theory that Bob was working on a case in Washington, some kind of secret work he’d been up there to testify about, and maybe somebody had followed him back to kill him,” Annette recalled later.

  Susie went on to talk about her fears that she and the boys might also be murdered because of Tom’s mob connections. Annette urged her to tell the police about all of this, but Susie said they already knew. The hopelessness that Annette had sensed in Susie the week before now seemed overwhelming.

  “It was like there was nothing they could do and they were all doomed,” she said later.

  Early Friday morning, the detectives assigned to the Newsom case gathered at the sheriff’s department in a jovial mood. Flush with success, they were eager to hear in detail what Gentry and Sturgill had learned from Ian and to plan their next moves.

  They had two main hopes for this day: that in their search with Ian they might find physical evidence to tie Fritz to the murders; and that James F. Hull, the Winston-Salem police officer who had stopped Fritz shortly after the murders, would remember it and be able to identify him.

  After the briefing, SBI agent J. W. Bryant decided to go to Virginia with Sturgill and Gentry. Boner, Carden, and Barker would question Hull, who was as yet unaware of how close he came to death that night.

  A few hours later, Hull was summoned before the Forsyth County officers. He looked apprehensive.

  “He didn’t know whether he’d done something wrong or what,” Barker later remembered. “I felt sorry for him. We had to prolong his apprehension. We couldn’t tell him anything. He had to be treated like a witness.”

  The officers asked if he remembered stopping a car shortly before midnight on May 18.

  He didn’t, and the officers provided hints: a slow-moving vehicle; a drunk-driving check perhaps?

  Still nothing.

  Not until they mentioned the trailing Blazer was Hull’s memory jogged. He had stopped a car going especially slow, but the driver showed no sign of drinking and said he was having engine problems and was trying to nurse the car home. Hull remembered the motor knocking. He couldn’t run a check on the driver’s license or car tag because the computer was down that night. He had a vague memory of the driver, who, he thought, had a couple of days’ growth of beard and was wearing olive-colored pants. He couldn’t recall the shirt.

  “We knew then that he wouldn’t be able to pick out Fritz in a lineup,” Barker said.

  Barker got Boner to write several names on a sheet of paper, one of them Klenner, others similar. Shown the list, Hull couldn’t pick out one with certainty.

  “There went all hope,” Barker recalled. Hull would be a poor witness.

  “I know you’re in susp
ense,” Barker told Hull. “The man you stopped that night had just murdered three people.”

  The detectives left disappointed.

  Later, Hull claimed to a reporter that he had picked out Fritz’s name but told Barker he couldn’t be 100 percent certain. He also said he was sure he could have identified Fritz. He again described Fritz as having a couple of days’ growth of beard and this time recalled him as wearing camouflage fatigues. The detectives knew from Ian, however, that Fritz had had a full beard, and that he was not wearing fatigues but dress slacks and a windbreaker under which he was holding a .45 that he planned to use to shoot Hull in the head if the officer had asked him to step out of the car.

  Gentry, Sturgill, and Bryant arrived in Lexington in late morning to find Ian looking haggard. He was still upset and had slept little, but he was ready to help. The detectives had little hope of recovering any items Fritz had tossed into dumpsters and trash cans on the way back to Virginia, but they’d brought metal detectors to search for those he buried, particularly the knife he’d used to stab Florence and slit her throat.

  Guided by Ian, they went to Peaks of Otter to begin their search. Luck was not with them. They dug up barbed wire, soft drink caps, beer can tabs, pork and bean cans, but no knife. Ian showed them where Fritz went down to the lake to dispose of the gun barrel, and if necessary, the detectives decided, they could later have divers search the bottom.

  They did pick up the registration envelope Fritz had filled out at the campground, and they couldn’t help but smile over it. “Dr. Fred R. Klenner, Jr.,” he had written on it.

  At Roanoke Mountain, the detectives found a park ranger who remembered talking to Fritz, but this would be of little use to their case. After fruitlessly retracing all Fritz’s stops, the tired and dejected detectives returned to Lexington in early evening.

  Other SBI agents also were busy in the case Friday. The SBI discovered that it had a file on Fritz, the memorandum sent to headquarters by agent Mike Kelly in 1981 when Fritz’s friend Sam Phillips tried to get the SBI to investigate Fritz for practicing medicine without a license. The memorandum noted that Fritz was “a very paranoid person, and usually carried several weapons with him along with his black medical bag.”

  That day both Sam Phillips and John Forrest, the former gun shop owner who had been Fritz’s friend, received calls from the SBI.

  Phillips said he told the agent who called that Fritz would be heavily armed, that he likely would have automatic weapons, possibly explosives, and that he was extremely dangerous—“kind of a dormant caged animal.”

  “I said, ‘This guy is going to come out shooting,’” Phillips recalled later. “I knew he would go out and take as many people as he could with him if they tried to arrest him.”

  “I told him they’d better be damned careful,” John Forrest recalled telling the agent who called him, “that he went around continuously with knives and guns and that the guy was a psychopath and if they tried to arrest him, he probably was going to kill somebody, that if he ever got to the farm in Reidsville, they’d have a hell of a time getting him out.”

  Frances Miller was at her mother’s house that Friday with her friend Katy Sutton. They were going through Nanna’s belongings and trying to put her affairs in order, when Susie appeared at the door. Frances was uneasy about her showing up unannounced, and the private guard she had hired to look after the house was apprehensive, too. Whenever anybody in the Miller family sought a solution to the murders, only two names ever came up—Susie and Fritz—yet nobody in the family had said anything to Susie about it.

  “None of us wanted to confront her with that,” Frances said.

  Susie said that she had come to pick up her mother’s and father’s belongings, so Frances accompanied her through the house, pointing them out.

  When they walked into the upstairs bathroom, Frances saw Bob’s partial plates in a glass where he had left them the night he was killed. This was the first time she’d noticed them, and it nearly moved her to tears. Not Susie.

  “She didn’t respond at all,” Frances recalled later. “She just gathered everything up as if they’d sent her over there to pick it up for them.”

  Susie was concerned about some formal dresses that had belonged to Aunt Su-Su, dresses that Judge Sharp no longer could wear and had sent to Florence to try on. Florence had told Frances that she could have some of the dresses, but Susie snatched all of them up. Several times Susie mentioned her mother’s fur. It was in storage, she complained, and nobody knew where the receipt was.

  I thought, ‘Who cares about fur coats?’” Frances remembered later.

  While she and Susie were going through the house, the telephone rang and Frances answered it. Nancy was on the line, and she immediately detected strain in her mother’s voice.

  “Mother, you don’t sound right,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Well, nothing.”

  “Something’s wrong,” Nancy said. “Who’s there?”

  “Oh, Susie’s here. I’m helping her gather up her parents’ things.”

  “Is anybody else there?”

  “Yes, Katy’s here, and the guard. Would you like to speak to Susie?”

  “Yes,” Nancy said.

  Shortly, Susie came on the line.

  “Hi, Nance, how you doing?”

  “It was like nothing had happened,” Nancy remembered later. “She just started bubbling on about something.”

  “Why haven’t you talked to any of us?” Nancy finally asked.

  “I’m trying to keep the boys away from the press and off TV,” Susie said. “Can you imagine two better kidnap targets?”

  Nancy wasn’t sure what Susie meant, but before Nancy could say anything, Susie said, “My attorney told me not to move.”

  “What do you mean move?”

  “You know, it would look awfully strange for a person who had inherited all that money to move quickly.”

  “All what money?” Nancy asked.

  “You know, Delores left all the money to the boys in a trust. All of my daddy’s money and Nanna’s money was split up, and all that went to the boys in a trust.”

  Nancy knew no such thing had happened, but she also knew that something strange had happened to Susie during the course of this conversation. Her mother was noticing it, too. Susie’s voice had changed, growing louder, the words slower and more deliberate.

  Suddenly, she was talking about the murders.

  “They say it was robbery, but I told the SBI it was professional killers. I’ve told them but they don’t believe me.”

  She went on to say that professionals had killed Tom’s mother and sister because of his mob connections, and now they had struck here.

  “I’ve tried to tell everyone that this was a professional killing. We’re all going to have to accept the fact that professional killers are never caught. That’s why they are professionals.”

  As quickly as she’d changed before, Susie changed again, reverting to her previous bubbly self.

  “We’re going to have to keep in touch,” she said. “Nobody knows your address.”

  “I’ll mail it to you,” Nancy said, thinking fast.

  “That was the strangest telephone call I ever had with anybody,” Nancy said later. “I was scared to death. All I could think was, How am I going to get Mother out of the house?”

  She asked Susie to put her mother back on the line.

  “I’m going to call the sheriff,” Nancy told her mother. “I want you to go out back and stand near the guard until he gets there.”

  A sheriff’’s deputy arrived within minutes and pretended that he was just checking by while Susie cheerily loaded her parents’ belongings into her Blazer and departed.

  Gentry, Sturgill, and Bryant arrived back in Lexington that evening certain only about their next move: supper. Ian said he didn’t feel like eating and went to his room to rest, so the detectives went across the street to the Country Cookin’ Café, where a huge si
gn in the window proclaimed the house special: SIRLOIN STEAK, UNLIMITED SALAD, VEGETABLE, AND DESSERT, $2.99.

  During the meal, they discussed what their next move should be. Ian’s story was so fantastic that it might be hard for a jury to believe without stronger proof, they decided. Why not put a wire on Ian and let him try to trap Fritz into a confession? Would he do it? After supper, they took their idea back across the street to find out.

  “We told him, ‘You know this guy’s dangerous,’” Gentry recalled. “‘He’s killed three people and probably at least two more.’ But there was never any doubt on Ian’s part. He said, ‘Yes, I’ll do it.’ Ian was feeling so bad about what had happened that I think he would have willfully done almost anything we’d asked him to. He was that upset.”

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  After agreeing to help the detectives, Ian followed them to Winston-Salem in his bright orange Honda Civic and was put up at the Inn at Winston Square, a motel just two blocks from the Hall of Justice.

  The officers were worried that he was too nervous to go through with their plan to entrap Fritz into a taped admission of guilt, but Don Tisdale, the district attorney, agreed that Ian’s story was too incredible for a jury to believe otherwise and instructed them to go ahead. They decided to make the attempt the following day, Saturday, June 1.

  The plan was simple. Ian would call Fritz and tell him that three detectives had come to question him on Friday and requested that he take a lie detector test. He would say that he was scared, needed to talk, and ask Fritz to meet him in the parking lot at Pennrose Mall, Reidsville’s major shopping center.

  To protect Ian, five unmarked police cars with at least two officers in each would be close at hand, and an SBI observation plane would be overhead. Ian would be accompanied by Steve Carden, a sheriff’s department detective who looked young enough to pass as a college student. Carden would be posing as Chris, a friend from Washington and Lee, who’d come to spend the weekend with Ian. The officers gambled that Fritz would be reluctant to harm Ian knowing that somebody knew about the meeting.