Bitter Blood

by Jerry Bledsoe

  “That’s intelligence information,” Davidson said angrily. “It should have been in intelligence. Records don’t mean shit to me. I’m wanting to know what kind of feller we’re dealing with. I want to know what his friends and neighbors say about him. I should have had that.”

  If he’d been supplied that information, as the SBI was obligated to do as a member of a private network designed for trading intelligence, the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit, Davidson knew that his suspicions would have been immediately directed to Fritz and Susie. He would have requested their telephone records, which would have led him to McHargue’s, which would have led him to the weapon, and he would have moved on Fritz long before Fritz had a chance to murder Bob and Florence and Nanna. Perhaps Fritz could have been taken in a situation that would have allowed the boys to survive.

  Davidson thought he had not received the information because for some reason it had not been in the SBI’s intelligence files, and he was furious when he learned that Robert Morgan had acknowledged at his August 15 press conference that the memorandum was indeed in the intelligence files.

  Why had Davidson not received that information and instead been supplied with the falsehood that Fritz was a doctor and a reputable citizen? Was it ineptitude? Was it because of the SBI’s obsession with secrecy? Or was it for political reasons?

  Davidson would not know, because the SBI would not tell (SBI officials declined to be interviewed about that or any other aspect of the Newsom murder case for this book), but he tended to believe it was for the latter reason. He thought that the SBI was either influenced by Susie Sharp or acting without her knowledge to protect her from embarrassment.

  Susie Sharp was appalled at that notion. A woman of utmost integrity, she had never spoken with anybody at the SBI or the attorney general’s office about Fritz or Susie or the Newsom murder case, she said, and she was doubtful that the SBI had acted on her behalf. “I can’t imagine Robert Morgan trying to cover up for me,” she said. “Robert Morgan has never been a friend of mine.”

  Bruce Hamilton still thought politics the likely reason that Davidson had not received the information that would have drawn his attention to Fritz immediately after the Lynch murders, and privately he spoke bluntly of a cover-up by the SBI.

  “If we’d had that information, we’d have been there the next day,” Hamilton said. “We’d have been on Klenner like a flea on a hound dog.”

  Hamilton’s suspicions about a cover-up were reinforced when his August 14 letter to Robert Morgan requesting SBI records to assist him in presenting his case to the grand jury was never even acknowledged.

  In Davidson’s mind, the SBI would forever bear a heavy portion of responsibility, not only for the murders of the Newsoms but also for the deaths that still bothered him most, those of John and Jim.

  The Oldham County courthouse occupies a verdant square in the center of La Grange. It faces Main Street, which has a railroad track running down the middle of it along which freight trains occasionally rumble. The courthouse is old and quaint, two stories high, built of red brick, with a cupola on top and a small, unsightly jail wing off to one side in the back. The spacious lawn is decorated with a gazebo and a huge tire rim that once served as a bell to summon the town’s volunteer firemen. It is shaded by stately oaks that in summer offer refuge to old-timers who come to escape the heat and while away the hours on benches provided by the county. On a sultry Thursday, September 5, 1985, the old-timers on the benches outside were unaware that in an annex of a second-floor courtroom a tale most bizarre was unfolding before a group of their fellow citizens serving as a grand jury.

  Directed by Bruce Hamilton, the jury members began hearing the story at 9:30 A.M. from Dan Davidson. After a break for lunch, they moved a block away from the courthouse to the District Court Building, which occupied a former skating rink on Jefferson Street, where Davidson picked up the story. Allen Gentry and Tom Sturgill had driven from North Carolina to testify, bringing with them the AR15 that Fritz used to kill Janie. It lay on the courtroom floor in an olive-colored carrying case. Warren Mitchell, a ballistics expert for the Kentucky State Police, also was present, carrying in his pocket the bullet that had passed through Janie’s head.

  After giving his testimony, Davidson chatted with newspaper reporters and left no doubt of his feelings about Susie and how gently she had been treated by North Carolina authorities.

  “Susie is not the least bit innocent,” he said, “and I don’t mind saying it because I’m not afraid of Big Susie down there in Raleigh.”

  As each officer was called into the closed anteroom to tell his part of the story, the others sat around a large table in the courtroom, laughing and talking. Stacks of grisly color photographs from the two murder scenes lay on the table and court workers occasionally ambled in to thumb through them, shaking their heads in fascinated revulsion. Among the officers, the conversation kept returning to Fritz and Susie and the many angles and remaining mysteries of these combined cases, which had so consumed their energies and imaginations.

  Late in the afternoon, TV news crews arrived and set up their cameras, but after learning that the grand jury would not be making its report as expected this day, because Circuit Court Judge Dennis Fritz, who was to receive it, had fallen ill and gone home, the reporters asked Dan Davidson a few questions on camera and left.

  Not until 6:40 P.M., after more than eight hours of testimony, did Bruce Hamilton and the grand jury members finally emerge, the jurors still talking in wonder of all that they had heard.

  Later, the jury foreman, Rick Lucas, who was thirty-three, a Baptist minister from Westport, the father of two young children, observed, “It was one of those kind of fantastic stories you expect to see on TV and not in real life.”

  The detectives gathered up their reports and evidence and made ready to leave. Their work on these cases was now, finally, behind them, but Susie and Fritz had forged a bond of comradeship among them that would not end. They all knew that their work was unlikely ever again to lead them to anything so big, so complex, so utterly unbelievable as the strange story they had just told the grand jury. But they knew that the jurors had believed it, and joined by Lennie Nobles, they went out to the nightspots of Louisville to celebrate.

  On the same day that the grand jury in Kentucky was hearing evidence against Fritz and Susie, the Greensboro News & Record was preparing a story that would deal a serious blow to the theories of Susie’s defenders who thought her incapable of having anything to do with the deaths of her children.

  The newspaper learned of an SBI report that said Susie likely fired a weapon shortly before the explosion that took her life.

  Normally, hand wipings taken during autopsies to determine if a person has fired a weapon are evaluated within a matter of days. But the hand wipings taken from Fritz and Susie and turned over to the SBI on June 4 were not even submitted to the lab until July 18. Not until August 21 was a report finally made by lab technician M.L. Creasy.

  When a weapon is fired, sprayed residue forms a cloud that settles on the hand of the person who fired it. The residue contains three elements, barium and antimony from the primer of the shell and lead from the bullet itself. The presence of those elements on the hand is strong evidence that the hand held a weapon that was fired.

  “Both subjects had significant concentrations of barium, antimony and lead, three trace elements, on backs of both hands and very high concentrations on palms of both hands,” said the SBI report.

  “These results indicate both subjects could have fired or handled guns which had been fired.”

  That the elements were found on the backs of Susie’s hands indicated that she had done more than just handle a gun.

  The SBI would not release the report or officially acknowledge it, but the newspaper quoted an unnamed “high-ranking SBI source” as saying, “We aren’t saying she killed one or both children, but that she most likely fired a shot.”

  The implication of this power
ful new evidence was plain. Susie obviously fired a weapon, but at what or whom had she shot? Neither she nor Fritz suffered bullet wounds, so she hadn’t shot herself or him. No officer ever saw her leave the Blazer to fire at anybody, nor did any see her shoot out of the window during the pursuit. Unless she was just shooting willy-nilly into the roof of the Blazer, that left only two objects at which Susie might have fired: the heads of her sons. That Jim, who was behind Susie’s seat, suffered a wound from a bullet fired very close to his head, while John, who was behind Fritz’s seat, was shot from as much as two feet away, added weight to the evidence that it was Susie who had destroyed her sons.

  On Thursday morning, September 12, Dan Davidson went to the District Court Building in La Grange where he joined Bruce Hamilton. They sat at the prosecutor’s table in the court room and listened while Rick Lucas fulfilled his duties as grand jury foreman by reading the jury’s four-page report on the Lynch murder case to Judge Dennis Fritz. The report called Susie “Susan” throughout, misspelled Fritz as “Fritts,” and added an e to the end of the Newsom family name, but it linked the Lynch and Newsom murders and found that either Fritz or Susie had killed the boys. The last paragraph was the one for which Davidson was waiting.

  “It is therefore the recommendation of the Oldham County Grand Jury at this session that the murder cases now open by the Kentucky State Police and the office of the Commonwealth Attorney and the Oldham County Police Department be closed and show that Frederick ‘Fritts’ Klenner and Susan Sharp Newsome Lynch were and are the persons responsible for the deaths of Jane Lynch and Delores Lynch at the residence of Delores Lynch in Oldham County, Kentucky, on or about July 22, 1984, which were discovered July 24, 1984, and that said cases be closed by all Departments with this report.”

  The judge accepted the report, thanked the jurors, commended their work, and dismissed them. Reporters crowded around Davidson and Hamilton for comments. A short time later, Davidson went to his desk at Post Five, where he talked to several more reporters by telephone.

  “The right two people have been blamed for the deaths up here,” he told Jim Schlosser of the Greensboro News & Record. “I’m going to close the case now.”

  Davidson was elated that the case had come to a successful conclusion and even more delighted that he finally had an official record of Susie’s guilt. Yet, alone at his desk with no more reporters calling and no last little bit of evidence to track down, he was struck by a feeling of emptiness, a letdown unlike any he’d ever experienced.

  Instinct told him just how to deal with such an awkward and unfamiliar mix of emotions.

  He got into his cruiser, drove to the Kentucky State Reformatory Lake, and went fishing.

  Epilogue

  Dan Davidson had difficulty letting go of the Lynch case. Even after the grand jury released its report implicating Susie, he wasn’t satisfied. He thought that Susie might have played more than a passive role in the murders. Certain that she had directed Fritz and accompanied him to Kentucky, he suspected that Susie had killed Delores herself.

  “I think she would have wanted her to know,” he said.

  To prove his theory, Davidson again questioned the bicyclist who had heard the shots, getting him to repeat time and again the sequence of two rapid shots followed soon after by a third. Davidson timed the bicyclist’s memory of the shots, seeking an average of the time that elapsed between the second and third shots. He then tried to reenact the crime within that time frame, he and his detectives pretending to fire the first two shots from the spot where angles determined they most likely had emanated, then dashing for the back steps to get off a third shot from a spot that would match the trajectory of the bullet that struck Janie in the back, passing through her and the gutter drain.

  “I didn’t even make the first step,” Davidson remembered.

  Neither did anybody else.

  “If he heard the shot sequence right, it’s impossible for one guy to do that,” Davidson said. “Hell, there’s no way. I believe that Susie shot Delores and Fritz shot Janie. I’ll believe it until I go in the grave.”

  Susie’s role wasn’t the only thing that continued to bother Davidson about the case. He was sometimes jolted awake by dreams in which he saw the pale, lifeless, camouflage-clad bodies of John and Jim entwined with their dead dogs in the wreckage of the Blazer. Whenever that happened, sleep was usually ruined for the rest of the night. On one such night more than a year after the boys’ deaths, he got up and began to write a long ballad of the whole tragic story. It ended with these lines:

  Nine people are dead and I wonder why,

  Especially why those two little boys had to die.

  On May 31, 1987, Dan Davidson retired from the Kentucky State Police after thirty years of service.

  “The Lynch case had a lot to do with it,” he said afterward. “Seemed like after that, everything was downhill. Nothing was interesting to me anymore.”

  As for other officers involved in the Lynch and Newsom murder cases:

  In the spring of 1987, Kentucky State Police Detective Sherman Childers, Dan Davidson’s close friend, was cited for bravery by the state police for returning fire after being struck by flying glass from Fritz’s bullets in the Greensboro shoot-out. He was one of only two state policemen honored for bravery that year.

  Lennie Nobles, the young Oldham County detective, recovered quickly from his gunshot wounds and returned to duty, confident that he had learned much from his first homicide investigation.

  Ron Barker, captain of detectives for the Forsyth County Sheriff’’s Department, ran against his boss in the primary election in the spring of 1986, citing his work on the Newsom case as one reason he should be elected. He was defeated by Sheriff Preston Oldham, who went on to win the general election in November. After the primary, Oldham demoted Barker to dispatcher, reducing his salary by half. Barker resigned and went to work selling security systems. Oldham promoted his old partner from undercover drug days, E. B. Hiatt, to captain of detectives.

  Allen Gentry, the detective sergeant who directed the Newsom murder investigation, was promoted to lieutenant and made deputy commander of the Criminal Investigation Division. On July 12, 1987, Gentry’s wife, Lu Ann, gave birth to their first child, a daughter, Stephanie Nicole.

  Tommy Dennis, the Greensboro squad leader whose bullet-proof vest and heavy leather gear stopped two slugs from Fritz’s Uzi, was slow in recovering from his injuries. He developed pneumonia, sustained permanent lung and nerve damage, and was out of work for two months. After returning to patrol duty and facing two more unnerving situations in the span of a year, he resigned from the police force in December 1986, for the sake of his wife and three-year-old daughter. He became a jeweler.

  Ian Perkins appeared at the Forsyth County Jail as scheduled on August 5, 1985, to begin serving his four-month sentence. He was sent to the Polk Youth Center in Raleigh for processing, and on October 1, he was transferred to the McLeansville Prison Unit near Greensboro, where he was approved for work release. A week later, he was moved to a minimum-custody unit at Sandy Ridge, west of Greensboro, where he was released during daytime hours to work as a laborer for a Greensboro insulation company, a job arranged by his lawyer. He continued to work for the company after his release on parole.

  “He’s doing very well,” his mother told a reporter a year after he helped police gather evidence on Fritz. “He’s working and planning to go back to school.”

  Beyond that, she did not want to talk about her son’s experience, and he declined to be interviewed.

  “It’s a difficult thing for us to talk about,” his mother explained.

  In the summer of 1987, Ian still worked for the company that had hired him in prison. He had enrolled again in college, this time at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, the college from which Florence Newsom graduated.

  “He’s trying to rebuild his life,” said a family friend.

  After granting two brief interviews following her
son’s death, Annie Hill Klenner declined to be interviewed further and retreated to the solace offered by family, friends, and former patients of her husband. She broke her public silence on the anniversary of Fritz’s death, after vandals cracked the footstone on his grave and splattered it with red paint.

  “Whoever did it, the only person they hurt was me,” she told a reporter.

  Of Fritz, she said this: “He was just as dear and thoughtful to me as anyone can possibly be. He was just not himself… It was just unfortunate that he and my niece got together. They were two lost souls helping each other.”

  A few weeks later, hundreds of antique dealers, collectors and curiosity seekers gathered in a sweltering tobacco warehouse in Mebane, a small textile-mill town about twenty-five miles east of Greensboro, to get a glimpse of some of the clutter that had filled the Klenner house and office. Many of the personal belongings of Dr. Klenner and his notorious son had been hauled in on flatbed trucks covered with tarpaulins and spread over a huge area of the warehouse, all to be sold at public auction. The auctioneers, rotating in shifts, all wearing western hats and string ties and calling one another Colonel in twangy country voices, mopped sweat from their brows as they cajoled the crowd to spirited bidding for hours on end.

  The sale continued over two weekends, and Dr. Klenner’s packrat instincts proved profitable. His large collections of cut glass, German beer steins, clocks, miniature wagons, Lionel trains, and toys still in original boxes turned out to be sound investments, all fetching handsome prices.

  Scattered through the mounds of material offered for sale were many personal items belonging to Fritz—his childhood Roy Rogers lunchbox (which brought thirty-five dollars); a ceramic crèche made for him by his favorite aunt, Marie; some of his grammar school homework; a scrapbook about the Civil War that he made in school, a postcard he sent home from a weekend jaunt to the beach at Panama City, Florida, while he was finishing high school in Atlanta (“Dear Mom, Dad. The waters wet and suns hot and I wish you all where [sic] here and I was there. Love Fritz”); his diploma from Woodward Academy, his only symbol of genuine success. But the objects that drew the most comment from the hundreds of people who came to the sale were the toy guns, hundreds of them—so many that they were sold by the box and barrel—all well used, Fritz’s vast childhood arsenal that later was replaced by a real arsenal nearly as big and far more deadly (the real arsenal, returned to Annie Hill Klenner by the police, was not offered at the auction, for it had already been sold to the Reidsville police chief).