When the officers turned Fritz over, they heard sounds from his body, as if bones were scraping. Gurgles came from his chest, and his breathing faded and slowly stopped as he drowned in his own blood.
What was left of the Blazer had gone down a slight embankment on the other side of the road and flattened a section of barbed wire fence around a horse pasture. The frame of the vehicle was bowed in the middle. The top and sides were gone, but the roll bars remained in place. The hood and front fenders looked as if they had been peeled forward, angling slightly toward the driver’s side, but the engine was relatively undamaged. The driver’s seat remained intact, a throne to destruction. The driver’s door hung askew. The passenger door was gone, and where the passenger seat had been was a gaping three-foot hole. Jim’s pale head sagged into the hole.
John lay behind the driver’s seat. Both boys were dead, their frail, camouflage-clad limbs entwined with the bodies of their big dogs.
Davidson walked over and took a quick glimpse of the remains of the Blazer. He saw what he feared he would see and turned away. Later, he would call that the worst moment in his long career in law enforcement, a vision he never would be able to shake from his mind. “I saw those two little children lying there dead and that just broke my heart.”
For a few minutes he had to walk off alone and compose himself.
Debris from the explosion was scattered for more than a hundred yards around. The Blazer’s passenger door was lodged fifty feet up in a pine tree. A small arsenal lay scattered. The Uzi was found yards from the blast site with a shell jammed in its chamber. A cocked 9-millimeter pistol, with a shell in the chamber and two other shells missing from the magazine, was propped upside down against the base of a utility pole. Two Ithaca lightweight automatic shotguns were gathered from the debris, along with a .45-caliber semi-automatic pistol, a 308 assault rifle with bipod, and a flare gun. Ammunition was everywhere, including KTW armor-piercing shells.
There were gas masks, tarps, tools, a big wood-cutting saw, extra boots, C-rations, climbing ropes, several kinds of knives, a machete, brass knuckles, handcuffs, choke wires, martial arts weapons, holsters, bandoleers, smoke grenades, flares, waterproof matches, a portable water treatment unit, and The Pocket Black Book, a guide to survival.
A plastic sandwich bag containing a thin stack of hundred-dollar bills was concealed in a pack. In the woods was a duffel bag stuffed with vitamins. Loose vitamin tablets were strewn hither and yon.
Amid all of this were classical music tapes, including Haydn’s “Mass in Time of War,” parts of a syllabus from a business course, some of Susie’s homework, and a children’s book with an ironic title: No Monsters in the Closet.
Fritz’s Rolex watch was stopped at 3:08. He had a knife on his belt and Susie’s .25-caliber Browning pistol in his right hip pocket. On his right hand he wore a gold ring in the shape of a horseshoe with a lightning bolt across it, on his left hand a gold wedding band. Around his neck was a gold chain with a religious medallion. AGLA was the inscription on one side, IVA IANA AOY JEVA on the other. In his right front pocket were rosary beads and a cross on a gold chain.
Susie wore a Rolex watch and a gold ring with three small red stones on her left hand. Around her neck was a gold chain with a cross. She also wore around her neck a scapular, a string with two small cloth patches bearing prayers. On one of the patches was a pledge of salvation on the other a plea for a release from purgatory. The boys also wore these scapulars, and all three were carrying rosary beads.
Near Fritz’s and Susie’s bodies were laminated cards bearing prayers to St. Joseph, the patron saint of departing souls, that clearly had been ineffective: “Whoever shall read this prayer or hear it or keep it about themselves shall never die a sudden death or be drowned, nor shall poison take effect on them,” the cards said. “Neither shall they fall into the hands of the enemy, or shall be burned in any fire or shall be overpowered in any battle.”
As soon as Gentry had assessed the situation, he went to Crystal Jessie’s house and called his boss, Sheriff Preston Oldham. “It’s all come down,” he said. “We got him. It didn’t go quite like we thought it would.”
He went on to tell about the shoot-out, the explosion, the deaths of Fritz and Susie and the boys. He would remember the sheriff as sounding very subdued. “I’ll call the families,” the sheriff said.
Next, Gentry called his wife, Lu Ann, who was about to get off work at the telephone office in Greensboro.
“I just wanted to let you know I’m all right before you got to the car and heard the news on the radio,” he said.
She could not remember him ever sounding so wound-up and hyper as he was when he told her what had just happened.
This had been a blisteringly hot and sunny day for early June, and within twenty minutes of the explosion, the weather changed. The sky to the north and west turned dark and angry. Thunder rumbled ominously. The churning clouds were the blackest some officers could remember.
The storm came quickly and with an intense ferocity. Wind bent the trees. Lightning struck close enough to be smelled. Some officers took refuge in their cars. Gentry and Sturgill went to Crystal Jessie’s house. Davidson found shelter in Susan Stout’s barn. A dog that had been wandering amid the wreckage tried to shoulder into a police car, then scampered off with a whimper.
Hail the size of marbles beat down on the bodies of Fritz, Susie, and the boys. Torrents of rain washed away the blood and the acrid, lingering odor of explosives.
“It was like the Lord was mad,” Davidson said later. “Like He was real mad. I mean really pissed off.”
When the storm had passed and the officers emerged into the cooled and freshened air, steam rose from the melting hailstones and clung to the awesome scene of death and destruction, lending it an element of surrealism.
“It made it almost like a dream,” Gentry recalled.
Part Six
The Aftermath
43
Tom Lynch had just returned to his dental clinic from lunch when the phone call came from North Carolina.
The caller identified herself as a reporter. She asked Tom for a description of his former wife, Susie.
“Why do you want to know?” he said.
“Something has happened.”
“What?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“What the hell has happened?” he demanded.
“I can’t—”
He slammed down the receiver.
Earlier that day, Tom had tried to call Dan Davidson to find out if there had been any developments in the investigations. Two weeks had passed since he’d called to tell police of his suspicions about Susie and Fritz, and he had heard nothing. He had been growing more anxious by the day.
“We could feel the pressure building up without information,” he said. “It was like the silence was making the pressure go up.”
He had hoped to relieve some of that pressure with his morning call to Kentucky State Police Post Five, but the information it brought only increased his anxiety. Davidson, he learned, was in North Carolina with the other detectives investigating the murders of his mother and sister.
“We don’t have any word yet,” he was told, “but we understand something’s going to happen today.”
Tom took that to mean an arrest.
Now he was certain that something had happened. Had Susie been arrested? He dialed Rob’s number in Greensboro.
Rob had reached a heavy decision that day. While the police were chasing Fritz and Susie, Rob was at Southside Hardware buying a ten-shot .44 Magnum carbine. He was going to use it to kill his cousin—“der Fritzer,” he called him.
From the time his parents’ and grandmother’s bodies were found, Rob had feared that Fritz might kill him and his family. “I figured he was going to come through those doors pretty soon,” he said later.
He had decided not to wait for Fritz to make a move. He had been thinking about killing him for two weeks, alt
hough he had kept it to himself. It was the main reason he didn’t tell police of his suspicions about Fritz when he was first questioned, he said later. He didn’t want them to get Fritz before he had a chance to settle scores himself.
“I was going to invite him over and kill him,” he explained. “I was just going to plug the boy.”
He was buying the carbine to make sure that he did the job properly. “I’m no hand with a pistol,” he said, “but I’m a very good rifle shot, and I figured that one would be a real stopper.”
He felt a certain peace after reaching the decision and had no qualms about it.
“I wanted to kill him,” he said, “and I don’t think I was the only one. I think people were standing in line to blow him away. The guy was a monster, just a complete monster.”
Despite his moral upbringing, his brilliance, his long studies in theology, philosophy, and law, in the end his decision had been elemental. His justification was simple and basic and he summed it up in a single short sentence that might have graced the cover of a supermarket tabloid: “He hacked my mama to pieces.”
While Rob was paying for the powerful weapon, as a fierce thunderstorm beat on the store’s awning, the clerk mentioned hearing over a police scanner that a shoot-out had taken place with “some terrorist” at Guilford College. Could the police have already done his work for him? When the rain subsided, Rob dashed to his car, locked the gun in his trunk, and drove to his office. Jean Cook, the office records manager, rushed out to meet him.
“You have to go home,” she said without explanation, “and I’m going to ride with you.”
Rob knew that something terrible had happened, and Alice tearfully broke the news of the explosion to him when he got home. Friends arrived quickly as word spread, just as they had two weeks before. Among them was Wally Harrelson, the public defender, who began making calls seeking information.
“We couldn’t get any information from anybody,” Rob remembered.
Word finally came that Susie and Fritz were dead, but there still was no news about the boys.
When Susie’s death was confirmed, Alice called Tom’s home number and Kathy answered. The two women had never met. Alice told Kathy what had happened, and Kathy’s first question was about John and Jim.
“We don’t know,” Alice said, crying. “We can’t find the boys.”
“What do you mean you can’t find the boys?” Kathy said, but Alice was sobbing and handed the phone to a neighbor, Dr. John Chandler, who told Kathy that the boys’ whereabouts were unknown.
As soon as Dr. Chandler hung up, the phone rang and Tom was on the line, wanting to talk to Rob.
“There’s been an explosion,” Rob told him. “Susie and Fritz are dead.”
“Where are the boys?” Tom asked.
“We don’t know yet,” Rob said. “We haven’t heard anything about the boys.”
“I’m looking at my watch,” Tom recalled later. It was a little after 1:30 in Albuquerque, two hours later in Greensboro. “I’m thinking, ‘The kids are in school, I’m all right.’”
Later, Tom told Bart Ripp of the Albuquerque Tribune of his reaction to Susie’s death: “I was glad. I thought, ‘I’m rid of her, and the boys will be out here tomorrow.’”
Later still, he explained his reaction: “She had thrown up so many obstacles and been so cold and so overtly evil that there was no remorse at all that she was gone.”
Rob and Alice learned of the boys’ deaths from a neighbor who worked at Cone Hospital and had gotten the news from police. Soon afterward, Rob called Tom at his office. Tom knew from the tone of Rob’s voice that he didn’t want to hear his message.
“We’ve got word that the boys were with Susie and Fritz when the bomb went off,” Rob said. “It hasn’t been confirmed.”
Tom hung up and frantically called Greensboro police, only to hear that he could be told nothing until he was officially notified. His heart dropped. He knew what that meant.
Nothing ever hit him like that. Later, he was unable to find words sufficient to describe his pain, his anger, his feeling of helplessness.
Dr. Chandler called Kathy to tell her the boys were dead, and crying, she called Tom.
“Let me come and get you,” she pleaded. “Let me have somebody come and get you.”
“No,” he said, and hung up.
He picked up a single item from his desk. On his way out, he told the office receptionist that he didn’t know when he’d be back. He drove home and walked inside without saying anything. He was carrying a small photograph he had taken from his desk. The snapshot had been made at a friend’s house at Christmas 1983. In it, he, Kathy, and the boys were smiling broadly. At the heavy wood dining room table where they all had shared many happy meals he paused. Suddenly, he slammed the picture facedown onto the tabletop, shattering the glass frame to match his dreams for his sons.
District Attorney Don Tisdale was halfway through another afternoon in his controversial murder-rape trial when somebody tapped him on the shoulder, and he looked up to see Sheriff Preston Oldham motioning to him from the courtroom door. Oldham looked shaken. Tisdale had never seen him like that.
They stepped into the hallway, and Oldham told Tisdale about the shoot-out and explosion. The sheriff clearly was upset about the boys’ deaths.
Tisdale had a curious verbal quirk, a phrase that popped automatically to his lips whenever he faced something that couldn’t be changed.
“Well, good,” he said, realizing as it came out how inappropriate it was.
“What do we do now?” Tisdale remembered the sheriff asking.
“Well as tragic as it is, there’s not much you can do. You didn’t do anything wrong. You couldn’t dictate what happened. He dictated who his victims were going to be.”
Later, Tisdale admitted to another regret about the way things turned out.
“I felt sort of cheated, because I would’ve loved to have tried the case. It would have been the trial of the century.”
The bomb blast site teemed with police, emergency workers, reporters, and photographers. A truck with a high extension arm was brought in so that a highway patrol cameraman could get an overview for a videotape of the scene. A bomb squad moved through the debris, making sure no explosives had been thrown from the vehicle. When the bomb squad finished, grids were laid out, and evidence technicians swept through, noting and marking every piece of debris.
The boys’ bodies remained in the Blazer for several hours. Fearing that the Blazer might be booby-trapped or contain other explosives, the bomb experts treated it gingerly. Ropes were attached to the bodies and they were pulled slowly from the wreckage from a great distance.
Officers who got close-up looks at the boys before they were lifted into oversized body bags saw something that they kept to themselves, something that reporters would be two days in learning.
After the boys’ bodies were taken away to be sent to North Carolina Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill for autopsy, officers borrowed a shovel and buried Chowy and Maizie in the horse pasture.
The three officers hurt in the shoot-out all were treated at Moses Cone Hospital on Tuesday afternoon and released.
Dennis, the Greensboro patrolman, was most seriously injured, with muscle, nerve, and lung damage. He was upset that he had been called into such a dangerous situation without adequate information. Some Greensboro patrol officers thought that Dennis had been made a sitting duck by the detectives, brought in to take the gunfire for them, and they were angry. Angriest of all was Dennis’s wife, Sandy, who that night loudly confronted some of the officers involved in the shoot-out.
The injured Kentucky detectives, Childers and Nobles, were taken to the explosion site after treatment and rejoined their commander, Dan Davidson.
Davidson had suffered two blows that afternoon, the first being the deaths of the boys. The second came when he called his post commander to tell him about the shootout and explosion. Then he learned that his own son had been serio
usly hurt that day when the wall of a coal mine collapsed.
Later, Davidson, Childers, and Nobles checked into the Comfort Inn in Greensboro, and after calling to check on his son, Davidson did what he’d been dreading for hours. He called Tom Lynch.
“Doc, I’m real sorry,” he began.
“What happened, Dan?”
Davidson gave a capsule description of the day’s events.
“He just blew the truck up and killed everybody,” he concluded.
“I’ll be there tomorrow,” Tom told him.
“I just felt terrible,” Davidson recalled later. “I don’t ever remember feeling that bad over anything.”
Following the explosion, Greensboro police evacuated Susie’s apartment building and several others near it. The entire area was roped off, and nobody was allowed to enter for fear that other bombs might be in the apartment, timed to go off. A SWAT team arrived. Sharpshooters took up positions in nearby apartments in case armed confederates might be in the apartment. A special bomb-removal truck pulled up to the apartment.
Near dusk, Gentry and Sturgill left the blast site and went to the Greensboro Police Department, where Sturgill drew up a search warrant for Susie’s apartment and Blazer. Darkness was falling before police moved warily on the apartment.
A bomb squad used small charges to blow open the doors of Susie’s Blazer, but no explosives were found inside. Squad members broke the kitchen window of the apartment and entered cautiously. They disconnected the tear gas canister above the door and began a thorough search. Not until nearly 11 P.M. was the apartment declared free of explosives and residents of nearby apartments allowed to return to their homes.
Bitter Blood Page 47