Bitter Blood

by Jerry Bledsoe

  Surprisingly, Davidson found two calls to the Oldham County Police Department on the night of July 24, the day Delores’s and Janie’s bodies were found, and he retrieved the tapes of those calls.

  The first had occurred at 10:06 P.M.

  “This is Mrs. Lynch,” Susie said. “I’m calling from out of state. I’m trying to get some information on Delores Lynch and Janie Lynch. Do you have any information on what might have happened to them in the last few days?”

  “Okay, what is your name?” asked the dispatcher.

  “Susie Lynch. L-y-n-c-h. I was given information through the family that they have been murdered and wanted to find somebody who could give me some confirmation.”

  “Okay. Hold on a minute, okay?”

  Silence ensued until the dispatcher’s voice returned. “Yes, that is true. That did happen.”

  “It is?” Susie said incredulously. “It is for real? Both of them?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I’m sorry. Could I have your phone number and I’ll have an officer give you a call back.”

  “God, yes, please. I’d appreciate it.”

  She gave her phone number.

  “What is your address?”

  “Greensboro, North Carolina. 28-L Hunt Club Road. My name is Susie Lynch. This happened today?”

  “It happened today.”

  Susie let out a heavy breath. “Okay, thank you very much.”

  The second call came an hour and a half later. Susie identified herself, said she’d called earlier, and asked if an officer was available to give her more information. The dispatcher switched the call to another number where conversations were not automatically recorded, indicating that Susie had spoken with an officer. But nobody in the department recalled talking with her. Davidson thought there were two reasons for these calls: to get information on what the police knew and were thinking about the murders, and to make Susie appear unaware and innocent. He also thought it significant that Susie had asked about what had happened to Delores and Janie “in the last few days.” At that time, Tom, who’d called to tell Susie of the murders, knew only that the bodies had been found that day and had no idea that the murders had occurred two days earlier.

  A call to Raleigh turned out to be to the North Carolina Board of Medical Examiners, the organization that licenses physicians, but the board had no record of the call and nobody there remembered talking to Fritz or Susie. Davidson had no particular interest in the call, but it did raise some interesting questions. Although Susie’s Aunt Su-Su and her parents had decided to keep from her their discovery that Fritz had never been to Duke, Susie was aware that Fritz did not have his license to practice medicine. At one point, concerned about Fritz’s doctoring on the boys, Su-Su had cautioned Susie about it, indicating that Fritz might not be fully qualified for that. “The only thing standing between him and his degree at Duke is a dissertation,” Susie said indignantly. Later, Susie indicated that she believed Fritz had received his degree. Two months before her death, she had dropped by her parents’ house with the boys and was chatting with Alice about classes. “Fritz has a degree from Duke,” Susie said out of the blue, for Alice would never dare bring up his name with Susie, “but there’s a problem with the computer. It’ll be straightened out.” Had Fritz convinced her that he had finished his dissertation and gotten his degree but couldn’t get his license because of a computer mix-up? Had he placed that call to try to make Susie believe that he was trying to straighten out the problem and obtain his license? Or had Susie made the call herself? If so, what had provoked it? Had she become suspicious of Fritz’s stories? Was she wondering about the closing of his father’s clinic? If she had indeed harbored suspicions about Fritz, why hadn’t they led her to take the next step and check with Duke about his degree? The call would remain another intriguing mystery among many.

  To Davidson, the most interesting thing about Susie’s phone records was a lack of calls over one three-day stretch in July 1984. Normally, long-distance calls were made from the phone every day, but on those three days covering the weekend that Delores and Janie were killed no calls were made. That indicated to Davidson that neither Susie nor Fritz was at her apartment that weekend, and he was sure that he knew where both had been.

  At 12:03 P.M. on Friday, July 20, a call was made to a company in California that manufactures combat pistols. The next call was not made until 11:47 P.M. on Monday, July 23, the day after the murders. Interestingly, that call was to Tom Lynch in Albuquerque, where the boys were at the time.

  Tom remembered the call. He had thought it unusual because it came so late, nearly 10 P.M. Albuquerque time. Usually, when Susie called to talk to the boys, she called at dinnertime, about 6 P.M. They would have just sat down to eat and the phone would ring. Kathy would have to keep the boys’ meals warm while they talked to their mother. Susie had never called so late before, and Tom wondered why this call had come when it did. He also remembered another unusual thing about the call that he mentioned to Davidson. Susie had sounded surprised when he answered. But not for nearly two more years would Tom remember exactly what she said. It came to him one night when a movie, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, came on TV. Then he remembered clearly. He and the boys had been watching that movie when Susie called, and the boys were upset about missing the ending. When he answered the phone, Tom recalled Susie said, “Oh, you’re there.”

  Susie talked to the boys for ten minutes, and three minutes after she hung up, a call was made from her number to the Klenner house in Reidsville. That call lasted nineteen minutes.

  Davidson was convinced that Susie was concerned because she and Fritz had heard no news about the murders. She had called the boys, Davidson thought, to try to get a reading on what was going on and had expected to find that Tom was in Kentucky. He was sure that Fritz was at his mother’s house and Susie had called him immediately to let him know that the bodies apparently hadn’t been found.

  Another set of calls on the following day confirmed this in Davidson’s mind. At 7:20 P.M. in Albuquerque, 9:20 in Greensboro, Tom called Susie to tell her about the murders. Their conversation lasted eight minutes. Four minutes after it ended, a call was made from Susie’s phone to the Klenner house. Surely, Davidson thought, Susie was calling Fritz to tell him the bodies had been found.

  After the last call to the Oldham County Police Department on the night the bodies were found, another call was made from Susie’s phone to the Klenner house.

  To Davidson, this series of calls was strong circumstantial evidence that Susie was a participant in the murders and was seeking information about the investigation to feed to Fritz.

  On July 7, Davidson and Lennie Nobles returned to North Carolina in search of more evidence. They visited Susie’s apartment, from which they took a brochure for the La Quinta Motor Inn in Lexington, Kentucky, which was found in Fritz’s briefcase, plus a map of eastern states with a plastic overlay on which lines had been drawn to various cities, including Lexington. Davidson thought the map might be part of Fritz’s CIA fantasies and preparation for the trip to kill Delores, but in fact Susie had prepared it for a report she had written for one of her business classes on distribution patterns from the port of Wilmington. He also wanted to poke around to see if a turquoise cross might have been overlooked in the clutter. Earlier, local authorities had sent Davidson photos of such a cross that had been found in Fritz’s treasure chests of jewelry, but Helen Stewart, Delores’s former maid, said it wasn’t the one Delores frequently wore, the only item known to be missing from the murder scene.

  During their three-day stay, Davidson and Nobles questioned Rob, Ian, Annie Hill, Annette Hunt, members of the McHargue family, and Greensboro Police Detective Furman Melton, who had interviewed Susie six months earlier at the request of Sherman Childers.

  Melton had made no written report of his interview and remembered few details. He did recall that Fritz had been at the apartment but went into the bedroom and closed the door while Melton and another det
ective talked with Susie. He added one curious memory. He thought he heard a noise, which could have been a rifle bolt closing, in the bedroom.

  Davidson quizzed Annie Hill carefully about Fritz’s whereabouts the previous July, but she professed to remember little.

  “You’ll have to remember my husband had just died,” she said. “I was under quite a bit of strain at that time.”

  She thought that Fritz might have gone to Pennsylvania during that month. “The only time he told me he was going anywhere was on the twenty-ninth, when he went to Atlanta.” She had marked that on her calendar, she discovered.

  Did she know of any travels by Susie during the month?

  “I know she went to Atlanta with Fritz.”

  Davidson brought up the phone calls from Susie’s apartment to her home on the nights of July 23 and 24. Did she answer the phone and talk with Susie or Fritz? Or was Fritz there to take the calls and talk to Susie?

  “I have no notation about it and I do not remember.”

  Had she ever heard Susie say anything against Delores?

  Only that Delores had alcohol problems, Annie Hill said, and Fritz had told her that at the visitation hearing in Wentworth, Delores had stalked out.

  Did Fritz say anything about Delores?

  “I don’t think he even knew her.”

  Davidson asked what Fritz and Susie had told her about the Lynch murders. She said she’d heard that the murders appeared to be a gangland execution and that if Tom hadn’t had it done, some Mafia connections had done it unbeknownst to him so that he would get money to pay off gambling debts.

  “As far as Susie and Fritz were concerned, there was never any connection,” Annie Hill said.

  Davidson went on to quiz her about Susie’s and Fritz’s actions after the Newsom killings.

  “Susie was in a state of shock, very, very concerned,” she said. “Susie was very much upset. When I did see Fritz, he didn’t make any great statements one way or another.” She described Fritz as being “like someone shocked and trying to console Susie.”

  Did Susie say anything about who might have done this?

  “She had no idea. None of us could understand why Hattie Newsom, who was such a dear person…it just didn’t seem logical to anybody except she just happened to be there.”

  Annie Hill said that she never suspected that Susie or Fritz were involved in any of the killings.

  “I do not think they had anything to do with the Lynches,” she said. “It is hard for me to believe that Fritz killed my sister. If he did, I do not believe that Susie knew it. The fact that he could come here and he was so natural that I did not suspect anything…and I’m not sure that Susie and Fritz were all that close. They helped each other out, but Fritz sort of would come and go. Be here till one, two, three in the morning and he would call Susie when he left…”

  Davidson could see that he was going to get nothing useful here and gave up the interview.

  From Ian, Annette, and Rob, he got only helpful tidbits.

  Ian told him of Susie firing weapons at the farm and of the attempts Fritz claimed had been made on his and Susie’s lives. He told how Fritz preached thoroughness—a body shot to bring a person down, a head shot for insurance, and never leave casings. That was the pattern of the Lynch murders, and it was sure to interest a grand jury.

  Annette told him how Susie felt that Tom didn’t want custody but was being pushed to get it by Delores, who was paying the lawyers. That established motive.

  Rob said Susie had told him that she was in Atlanta on the weekend of the Lynch murders but he had been unable to find anybody who could place her there, including their cousin Debbie Parham, who lived there, and to whom Davidson later talked.

  When he had asked Susie if she thought there was any connection between the Lynch murders and the killing of their parents and grandmother, Rob told Davidson, Susie replied, “Obviously, somebody wants my children to be very rich.”

  “What do you mean?” Rob said he had asked.

  “What do you think I mean?” she said.

  He took it to mean that whoever had killed the Lynches also had killed their parents and grandmother—and for the same motive, so that Tom would eventually get money. He thought Susie figured that if Susie got her share of her grandmother’s and parents’ estates and then she and the boys were killed, that money would go to Tom, just as had the money from the estates of his parents and sister.

  It was from Mike McHargue at the Winston-Salem gun shop that Davidson got some of the most helpful information from his trip. McHargue said that Fritz had told him that if he ever was killed, the government would cover up the circumstances of his death. That had now taken place, McHargue believed. He didn’t think that Fritz had anything to do with killing the boys or exploding a bomb. Police gunfire had set off dynamite Fritz had in the Blazer, he said. He further believed that the police had shot the boys and the medical examiner had added cyanide to their blood.

  In answer to a question, McHargue said he had no doubt that Fritz would kill anybody who messed with him or Susie and the kids. That was a help to Davidson’s case because he knew that Fritz and Susie thought Delores was behind an effort to take away the boys.

  Asked about cyanide, McHargue said he knew that Fritz carried it and would take it if he was captured by enemies or if nuclear war or some other catastrophe occurred. Susie carried it, too, he said, and she had told him and other members of his family that she and the boys would take it if anything ever happened to Fritz.

  “You don’t have to do that,” McHargue said he’d told her. “If anything happens to Fritz, we’ll take care of you and the boys.”

  That Susie carried cyanide and had told the McHargues that she and the boys would take it made Davidson all the more certain that she had poisoned John and Jim, then shot them for the sake of thoroughness before joining Fritz in the dramatic suicide that he had been fantasizing for so long.

  Five days after returning from North Carolina, Davidson finally got a report from the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Bureau detailing all of the weapons transactions between Fritz and the McHargues. From August 1983 until the week before his death, Fritz had bought 119 long guns from the McHargues. Many of those he had traded back, including more than twenty .223 military assault rifles, but one of those weapons fairly leaped from the report as Davidson read through it. A Colt AR15 .223, serial number SP 202537. Fritz had bought it in July of 1984 and traded it back on July 23, the day after the murders in Kentucky. Davidson immediately requested that the ATF trace and find the weapon. Later, Davidson called Mike McHargue to ask him about the gun.

  Yes, McHargue said, he remembered it because it was unusual. It had a nickel finish and Fritz didn’t like it. Fritz complained that he couldn’t find interchangeable barrels for it because they were so rare. Did he remember what time Fritz brought the gun in? Davidson asked McHargue. Sometime in the afternoon. Was he alone? No, said McHargue, Susie was with him.

  That was more evidence for the case Davidson was making against Susie. Winston-Salem is west of Greensboro on Interstate 40, the fastest and most direct route to Kentucky from central North Carolina. Surely, Fritz had stopped on his way back from Kentucky to trade in the weapon. That Susie was with him was significant. It was highly unlikely that he would have driven on twenty-five miles to Greensboro and picked up Susie merely to double back to Winston-Salem and trade the gun. Common sense told Davidson that Susie clearly had accompanied Fritz on his murder mission to Kentucky.

  Davidson figured that it was now just a matter of time until the ATF traced the rifle to its present owner, and he would finally have the solid evidence he needed to show who had killed Delores and Janie. He was right. The owner was found in Fayetteville, and Tom Sturgill drove there to pick up the rifle and take it back to Raleigh where it was test fired and the bullets forwarded to the Kentucky State Police ballistics lab.

  On August 19, Davidson was on his way back to Post Five from Standiford Field, the L
ouisville airport, where he had gone to check some records on another case. Suddenly his car radio crackled to life.

  “Fifty-one?” said the dispatcher.

  “Fifty-one,” answered Davidson.

  “Unit thirty advises that in case five, dash, eight, four, dash, five, four, three, ballistics tests are positive.”

  Davidson never violated the rules about unnecessary radio chatter, but in this instance he couldn’t help himself. He wanted to let out a whoop.

  “Ten-four,” he said instead. “That’s the best news I’ve heard in a long, long time.”

  “I was tickled to death,” he said later. “That’s probably the damned happiest ride I’ve ever had up an interstate highway.”

  The joy that Davidson felt for finally having a solution to the most vexing case of his career was not deeply satisfying because it also brought a grave confirmation that things might have been otherwise, for he knew that at least three of the deaths inflicted by Fritz’s hand should not have been allowed to happen.

  In August of 1984, when Davidson requested an intelligence check on Susie from the North Carolina SBI, it had come back with a bit of information that caught Davidson’s eye. It said that a camping trailer was jointly registered to Susie and Frederick R. Klenner, Jr., of Reidsville, “a doctor.” Curious about who Klenner might be, Davidson asked for intelligence on him. He got back nothing more than the basic data—date of birth, address, social security and driver’s license numbers, plus the information that Fritz had no criminal record and was a physician.

  After the Newsom murders, when his detectives went to Winston-Salem and called back the information that Fritz was the primary suspect, Davidson again asked for an intelligence check with the SBI. He got back a notation that a check had been made the previous summer and the status was unchanged.

  He was furious when he later learned that all along the SBI had in its files a memorandum saying that Fritz was a survivalist, that he was masquerading as a doctor, that he was paranoid and spent all of his money on exotic military weapons that he carried wherever he went.