Davidson, Childers, and Nobles had joined Gentry, Sturgill, and other detectives outside Susie’s apartment. When they were allowed to enter, their attention was first drawn to four sheets of white stationery, near an open edition of that day’s New York Times, on the cluttered kitchen table. The stationery bore the letterhead of Dr. Frederick R. Klenner of Reidsville, but his name and address had been scratched through. Each sheet bore a separate handwritten note that looked hurriedly scribbled.
This is to certify that my friend Ian Perkins was in no way involved in any wrongdoings of any kind. He was with me on a camping trip to Peaks of Otter on the weekend of May 18th and to the best of his certain knowledge in training for a possible career in covert operations.
Fred R. Klenner Jr.
The firearms in this apartment and in the Blazer were the property of Fred. R. Klenner Sr. and are the property of Annie Sharp Klenner, as are the computer, TV, electronics equipment, weight machines and camping gear.
Fred R. Klenner Jr.
I have in my life never physically harmed anyone as in taking human life. I am innocent of any accusations that have come to my attention and fear an elaborate frame. I have spent my life in the service of my God, my country and my family.
Fred R. Klenner Jr.
Mother,
I love you now and always.
Your Fritz
Whatever else Gentry and Sturgill could say about Fritz, they had to say one thing: he was consistent. He played out his games to the end.
44
The explosion on Highway 150 was the biggest news in Greensboro since a band of homegrown Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen opened fire on anti-Klan demonstrators in a black neighborhood in November of 1979, killing five members of the Communist Workers Party, an event that pleased Fritz, who gloated when all of the Klansmen and Nazis charged in the case were acquitted, even though the killings had been recorded by TV cameras and seen throughout the world. Ironically, a civil rights suit brought by survivors of the attack was being tried in federal court in Winston-Salem as police began closing in on Fritz; but in the coming days, that trial would be greatly overshadowed in the news by repercussions from Fritz’s own violent acts.
As reporters dug deeper into the story on Tuesday, Tom and Kathy were flying to Greensboro. Tom had but one purpose: to bring home his boys. He would not allow them to be buried in North Carolina.
At first Tom and Kathy had not been able to believe what had happened. “This is just a mistake,” they kept telling themselves. “They’re going to call us back and say the boys are all right and we’re going to get them.”
But the truth had sunk in as they sat up grieving all night, and Tom’s anger and disbelief had become weighted with guilt. He blamed himself for not doing something to prevent his sons’ deaths.
Why hadn’t he realized earlier that Susie might have been behind killing his mother and sister? Why hadn’t he told the police to check her long before the Newsoms were murdered? The thought had crossed his mind, to be sure, but just as he hadn’t been able to believe that she could abuse the children, neither could he believe she could have a hand in murder. Why hadn’t the strange things he’d heard about Fritz prompted him to realize his potential danger? And why, most of all, hadn’t he just gone back to North Carolina as soon as he heard about the Newsom murders and snatched his kids from school? Why had he depended on lawyers and courts and patience and civilities to save his boys? Why hadn’t he just grabbed them and run and hid, hang the consequences?
He had been concerned about the boys from the moment he heard about the Newsom murders. His first thought was to go to North Carolina for the funerals, not only to pay respects to the Newsoms, whom he’d always liked, but also to be available to the boys in such a traumatic time. He consulted a child psychologist, who told him that it would be good for the boys to have him there, but when he called Louise to find out what effect his appearance might have, she told him that Susie didn’t want him to come. Rather than cause a scene and create more difficulty for the family, he didn’t go.
Instead, he and Kathy tried to get the boys away from their morbid situation. Their hope was to find a way to begin the summer visit early and bring the boys to Albuquerque.
Over and over, they tried to reach the boys by telephone but couldn’t. They called Rob, Louise, and others, but the boys were not available.
On the day after the funerals, Tom called Guilford Middle School and asked the principal to get John and Jim out of class.
“Why are you calling us at school?” Jim asked.
“I haven’t been able to get a hold of you anywhere, Jim,” Tom said. “I wanted to make sure you guys were all right. How are you feeling?”
“We’re all right,” Jim said.
John sounded sad and scared and had little to say.
“Well, I just wanted to find out how you were and let you know that we’re okay,” Tom told him. “We’ll see you soon, okay?”
When he had been unable to reach the boys earlier, Tom had called his lawyer, Bill Horsley, in Reidsville.
He wanted to express his concern and to see if Horsley could get an earlier visit.
“I told him I was worried about the boys emotionally, mentally, and physically, right up to and including their safety,” Tom said later.
Horsley talked with Susie’s lawyer, Sandy Sands, to see if he could work out something, but Sands told Horsley that he was having trouble reaching Susie, Horsley said later. After Sands did talk with her, Horsley said he had trouble getting Sands to agree to a convenient time for rescheduling the visitation hearing.
“It was like everything was in slow motion,” Kathy recalled later. “It was so frustrating being so far away, waiting for the phone to ring with some news and hearing nothing. We were so desperate to do something, and nobody else seemed concerned.”
As they grew more fearful, Tom tried calling John and Jim again. He found them at home on Wednesday night, May 29.
“I tried to be as normal as I could,” he said later. “They didn’t say much. I told John I was trying to arrange for them to come out early. It was pretty obvious that somebody was standing over him. John was monosyllabic. The last thing I told him was, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll work something out.’”
Two days later, when they still had heard nothing, Kathy called Horsley in an emotional state.
“I said, ‘This is ridiculous! We’re afraid for their safety! Go directly to the judge!’”
“We had a real problem,” Horsley recalled later. “The law enforcement people weren’t favoring us with the results of their investigation. It was almost as if they were making a decided effort to keep us from thinking Fritz and Susie were involved. The only person Tom could think of who might have done it was this guy Fritz. He was very uneasy about Fritz, but there wasn’t anything we could put a finger on. We couldn’t go to a judge and say, This looks funny. You’ve got to have some grounds. Tom had a hard time accepting that. I think he felt something should be done.”
Soon after the Newsom funerals, Horsley had been interviewed by an SBI agent. “The way he was questioning me was that they looked at it as a breaking-and-entering that went wrong. It was almost like he was apologizing for taking up my time. They had this list of people they were supposed to talk to, and they were just checking me off. I don’t recall that he asked me anything of a substantive nature. I asked him if we should be concerned about anybody’s safety, and he said, ‘Nah.’ He was real flip. My feeling is very strong that the SBI intentionally misled me to keep us from going into court and blowing their investigation.”
Horsley prepared a motion for a new hearing to have the boys’ summer visitation begin early, and he had been trying without success to get the judge to hear it out of session. He probably would see the judge at church Sunday, he told Tom and Kathy on their last call, and he would ask him about it then. That was indeed what had happened, and the judge had told him he would hear the motion during the coming week. But Tom and K
athy didn’t know that, and the next day the boys were dead.
Now, as they flew toward North Carolina, both Tom and Kathy kept hearing John crying and pleading not to have to go back home at the end of their Disneyland trip just two months earlier. The burden of guilt was almost unbearable.
“Both Tom and I feel like we let the boys down,” Kathy said later.
“I told them everything would be all right,” Tom said, “and it wasn’t.”
Allen Gentry and Tom Sturgill spent Tuesday rummaging through Susie’s apartment in search of evidence. The clutter was even more amazing than they had imagined from their earlier visit.
Boxes of clothing, toys (including two plastic submachine guns), books and papers littered the dirty gold carpet in the living room. The two wicker chairs and a folding table were piled with newspapers, magazines, schoolwork, and books. Among the papers on the folding table was a Dear Abby column that told how to prevent child-snatching. A sturdy pine corner cupboard built by Paw-Paw was covered with bric-a-brac from Susie’s marriage. On the floor in front of it was a doll cradle Paw-Paw had made for one of her childhood Christmases. A wooden bookcase held volumes ranging from Iacocca to Crossroads of Modern Warfare and Having It All by Helen Gurley Brown. A thirteen-inch color TV sat on a small table, a cheap computer atop a wooden desk. The walls were decorated with Chinese scrolls Susie had brought back from Taiwan.
The small dining room, which had been shrouded by a screen on Gentry and Sturgill’s earlier visit, resembled a military supply dump. Piled on the floor around a Gympac 1000 exercise machine were loaded packs, ammunition clips, ammunition boxes, water cans, sleeping bags, military uniforms, camouflage folding chairs, filled canteens, field toilet paper, gasoline lanterns, and other field gear. Stacks of plastic milk crates, each carefully labeled in Fritz’s hand, held food and emergency medical supplies—one marked “Extras for long trip.” On the only piece of furniture in the room, a small desk, stood a framed color portrait of Susie’s Aunt Su-Su. Beside it lay a small snapshot of Dr. Klenner and Annie Hill.
John’s and Jim’s bikes were parked in the hallway, where each boy had his own wall displaying artwork and records of achievement. Jim’s wall included drawings of airplanes, a sunset, Columbus’s three ships. John’s had drawings of sea creatures and a big red ax, plus his honor roll certificate and another paper making him the adoptive parent of a white azalea at his school.
On the door to the boys’ room, next to a drawing by Jim of a barn in a snowstorm, a picture he had entitled “Winter Days, Winter Nights,” was a poster from the Rhodesian police showing the silhouette of a man with a rifle. YOUR MIND IS YOUR PRIMARY WEAPON, the poster said.
Inside the room, on a wall near a small picture of a Madonna and child and next to a Garfield poster, was another Rhodesian police warning, offering guerrilla war survival tips: IF ALONE BE EXTRA ALERT, USE A BACKUP WHERE POSSIBLE. AVOID SNIPER AREAS AND ALWAYS LOOK FOR COVER. CHANGE YOUR FIRING POSITION. REMEMBER SHAPE, SHINE, SHADOW, SILHOUETTE, SMELL AND MOVEMENT. CASUALTIES HELP THE ENEMY.
Filled canteens and scabbarded knives on field belts were draped from the posts of the boys’ bunk beds. The night before, the officers had found two loaded Ruger .22 rifles, made to look like assault rifles, on an Empire Strikes Back blanket on the top bunk. On the closet door were two targets peppered with small bullet holes, most near the bull’s-eye. Shells for the rifles were scattered around on the floor, where lay two military packs filled with schoolbooks. A toy rifle was propped against one wall. A kite hung from the ceiling. An inflatable R2D2 robot stood in a chair. Bible stories and Robinson Crusoe were on a small bookcase.
The windows in the other bedroom were covered with a camouflage blanket. The stout double bed, also made by Paw-Paw, was piled high with clutter. Above the bed was a framed tapestry of a horse and colt. On another wall was a picture of Susie with Paw-Paw at her wedding and a quote from Henry Van Dyke decoupaged by Nanna: “Be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars.” On another wall were big maps of the Soviet Union and the world.
In the mound of clutter on the bed was a recent transcript of Susie’s grades—all A’s. There, too, was a scrap-book containing her achievement certificates from grammar school, a picture of her as a tiny child with her mother and her aunts Susie and Annie Hill, other pictures of her as the Queen of the May at age five and as a college sweetheart. Also in the clutter next to a cross-stitch pillow done by Nanna that said “Home—the place where we grumble the most and are treated the best,” was a plastic bag containing the boys’ two stuffed travel toys with their throats slit.
On a bedside table were over-the-counter antihistamines and birth control pills with a current prescription bearing Susie’s name. On the floor were sleeping bags, more military gear, a wicked-looking, machetelike knife, combat survival kits, a military first aid kit, a book on emergency war surgery, and the Army Special Forces Medical Handbook.
In the bathroom, off the hallway, the rechargeable electric razor Fritz had used to shave off his beard after the Newsom murders lay beside the sink. A colorful Folies Bergère poster adorned the wall over the commode. The reading material at hand was a book by Gayle Rivers: The Specialist, Revelations of a Counter Terrorist.
In every room were crucifixes, and above the windows were small palm crosses like the ones found arranged in the hallway of the Lynch house two days after the discovery of Delores’s and Janie’s bodies. Over the front door was a small card, hand-lettered by Fritz:
I
NIR
I
Sanctitus Spiritus
I
NIR
I
All this be guarded here in time and there in eternity
Amen
Later, when Alice took down the card, she turned it over and found written on the back, also in Fritz’s hand: “I know that my Redeemer liveth. He will call me from the grave.”
The kitchen table was too cluttered to allow room for eating. Two tropical fish swam sluggishly in a small aquarium on a countertop. Garfield cartoons clipped from Sunday comic sections decorated the walls, along with a Kitchen Prayer. The refrigerator, freezer, and cabinets looked as if Fritz and Susie had been stockpiling against famine. They were jammed with supplies, much of them convenience foods. A large cache of liquor and wine filled the cabinet under the kitchen sink. One cabinet was crammed with vitamins and medicines. Eventually, the officers would find enough vitamins and prescription drugs in the apartment to fill five large cardboard boxes. The heavy aroma of B vitamins permeated the air.
The night before, officers had assembled a small arsenal of weapons from the apartment, including the rifles Fritz had bought for the boys, an M6 survival weapon that would fire .22-caliber bullets and .410 shotgun shells, a .20-gauge shotgun, a .22 revolver, a .25-caliber automatic pistol, two .45-caliber pistols, a 5.56-millimeter assault rifle, spare barrels, thousands of rounds of ammunition, a big assortment of knives and exotic martial arts weapons, Mace, gas masks, bullet-proof vests, bullet-proof diapers, a police scanner, and a parabolic microphone used for collecting sounds from great distances.
In Susie’s bedroom they found military ammo boxes that turned out to be treasure chests, each filled with gold and silver jewelry, hundreds of rings, bracelets, necklaces, brooches, many adorned with pearls and precious stones. They suspected some of the jewelry to be booty from burglaries, but they never would be able to prove it. Also found in ammo boxes were $1,219 in cash, a Presidential Rolex watch valued at nearly $9,000, a 100-ounce silver bar, 118 one-ounce silver bars, 3 one-ounce South African Krugerrand gold coins, 6 half-ounce, 10 quarter-ounce, and 20 tenth-ounce Krugerrands, plus numerous other gold and silver coins.
Gentry and Sturgill spent most of the day cataloging all of the items being seized as possible evidence. Among the weapons they would overlook was one that Rob found later atop the frame of the front door, just under the card with the strange religious reference
s. It looked like a ballpoint pen, but when Rob picked it up and touched the button on the side, a stiletto leaped out.
Forsyth County Sheriff Preston Oldham held a press conference at his office on Tuesday morning and gave the first official account of the investigation that led to the shoot-out and explosion.
On Saturday night, May 18, Fritz had caught a ride to Winston-Salem with a friend from Greensboro, who let him out near the Newsom house, he said. He declined to identify the friend, but described him as “clean,” saying that he had known nothing of the events that were about to take place.
“Klenner made his way to the residence through a footpath behind the house,” Oldham said, although detectives had determined no such thing. “Upon his arrival, we believe that because Klenner was known, he was let in”—another matter about which there was dispute among investigators.
He told how Klenner left the house in Nanna’s gold Plymouth Voláre after the killings and was stopped by a Winston-Salem policeman who had no reason to suspect him of crimes and let him go. He returned to the house in the same car and left it, Oldham said without explaining why. At that time he dropped a set of keys belonging to Florence beside the car and left Nanna’s keys in the back door.
“Upon arriving at the house, Klenner went in again to the residence. This time he picked up the empty casings in the residence. There were only two left on the scene.
“It is unclear at this time how Klenner left the area.”
He said that Fritz had become a suspect five days earlier and that an “infiltrator” had helped get information that confirmed Fritz was the killer.
“He indicated through his statements things we knew,” Oldham said of Fritz. “There are certain key facts we know only the killer would know.”
Questioned later, Oldham did not say what those facts were, nor would he identify the infiltrator.
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