“We feel bad about this,” Kathy said. “We’re just doing what our attorneys are advising.”
Soon after the suits were filed, Rob flew to Albuquerque to attempt to reach a settlement with Tom, but they came to no agreement. In January 1988, a judge dismissed the suits, but Tom’s lawyers appealed and the case seemed headed for court.
Twelve days before the second anniversary of the boys’ deaths, Tom’s lawyers filed suit against the SBI, the Forsyth County Sheriff’’s Department, the Greensboro Police Department, and most of the officers involved in the attempt to arrest Fritz. The suit charged “deliberate indifference and recklessness” for the boys’ lives and “gross negligence” that would “shock the conscience.” “Little, if any, rational planning” was used in the arrest attempt, according to the suit and once Fritz started shooting, the officers “abandoned reason and their duty of care for innocent persons and became consumed with taking Klenner at any and all costs, including innocent life.”
The decision to sue the law enforcement agencies—it was primarily the SBI that was the target—had not been easy for Tom. He’d been warned that it would be a hard and painful fight, but he felt he had to do it for John and Jim. The suit was dismissed by a judge in September 1987, but Tom’s lawyers appealed the decision.
“I’m resolved,” Tom said. “I won’t be beaten down. My demons chase me around every night and I beat them down and I get up the next morning and go on.”
More than two years after the deaths of the boys, Tom and Kathy were thinking of selling their house on La Mancha. It held too many memories.
“We really want to move,” Kathy said. “I just think we need to start over.”
They were looking at land, considering house plans—and thinking of having children.
“We’re just going to kind of let it happen,” Kathy said of having children. “If it happens, that’s fine.”
“If we ever do have kids,” Tom added, “they’ll be the luckiest kids in the world. There won’t be any kids who will get any more attention or any more love.”
Afterword
I set out to write this book with two major goals: to learn to my own satisfaction what had happened in this immense family tragedy, and, more important, to understand why.
I failed at both.
I knew that I never would know exactly what happened. Some details simply could not be known because all the people who knew them were dead. I knew, too, that some people who could shed light on what had happened would choose not to talk with me, and that was indeed the case. Still, I hoped to learn enough to convince myself with sufficient certainty at least where the major guilt lay. But after more than two years of searching and talking with hundreds of people, I still lacked that certainty.
I had no doubt of Fritz’s guilt in the murders, but of Susie’s I could not be sure. If Susie and the boys had not died, she probably never would have faced charges for her parents’ and grandmother’s murders, for the police simply had no evidence against her. And although she surely would have been indicted in Kentucky, the chances of convincing a jury of her guilt beyond reasonable doubt seemed slight.
The murders of her children were another matter, however. If she didn’t kill them herself—and I was convinced that she did—neither did she make any apparent effort to save them. Were their murders evidence of her complicity in the other slayings or merely the outgrowth of a desperate and deranged woman caught in a hopeless situation?
Was she indeed, as the police and Tom thought, the mastermind manipulator, or was she, as some of her family members still believed, the manipulated victim? When two manipulators come together, as Fritz and Susie did, who ends up manipulated? I never could be sure.
What bothered me most, however, was that I couldn’t understand why Susie had come to so horrible a fate. What in her past had led her there?
Early in my work on this book, I wrote to Dr. Donald T. Lunde, a forensic psychiatrist and professor in the Stanford University Law School. Dr. Lunde, the author of Murder and Madness, is reputed to be one of America’s foremost experts on multiple murder. He was involved in two of the nation’s most sensational serial murder cases—the unsolved Zodiac killings of northern California, and the Hillside stranglings in the Los Angeles area. I sent Dr. Lunde an extensive series of newspaper articles that I wrote about the Lynch and Newsom murders, including lengthy articles on the backgrounds of both Fritz and Susie. I knew that he could not analyze the motivations of dead people from perceptions in newspaper articles, but I hoped that he might offer some impressions and insights that would lead to understanding.
“It is difficult to say what motivated Fritz Klenner,” he wrote in reply. “It would seem to me that he was not suffering from one of the classical mental disorders sometimes associated with this kind of behavior (e.g., paranoid schizophrenia). I would wonder if he was using drugs which are frequently associated with paranoia (e.g. amphetamines or cocaine). Susie Lynch is even more mysterious, but my impression is that she came under the domination of Fritz with regard to his paranoid ideas.”
While I had uncovered no evidence that Fritz had used cocaine, it was known that he always carried amphetamines, and he certainly had access to whatever prescription drugs he desired. But drugs alone could not account for his paranoia, I thought, and it seemed unlikely that they played a large role in the murders. Drug-induced killings come in a sudden burst of rage. Fritz’s murders were coldly calculated and savored.
Although I make no claim to special knowledge of psychology or psychiatry, I felt that I understood what had led Fritz to murder. The blame seemed clearly to lie with his father. The kindly doctor that patients saw at the office was a tyrant at home, and while Fritz loved him and sought desperately to please him, he also feared and resented him. Fritz never wanted to be a doctor. From childhood, he dreamed secretly of being a soldier or a spy, yet he never could bring himself to stand up to his father and seize his own life—and he hated him for it.
While he appeared to seek to please his father, Fritz’s actions all seemed designed, perhaps subconsciously, eventually to bring his father pain. How else to explain his failure to finish college for lack of a single course—and that course German, the tongue of the beloved homeland of his father’s family? Surely Fritz had to know that his father would someday find out that he had never been to medical school and that it would bring him great grief. (There are indications, incidentally, that Fritz’s parents were told as early as 1979 that he was simply posing as a medical student but they refused to believe it; that was two years before Fritz’s wife and former mistress joined to make certain that they knew.)
My suspicion is that Fritz wanted to kill his father, then take his own life. I thought the stories he made up of attacks on his father were his own secret desires. But just as he was never able to stand up to this all-powerful presence in his life, neither could he bring himself to destroy it. After his father’s death, when he could hurt him no more, the tumultuous mix of emotions and long-simmering rage within Fritz had to erupt, and the murders and grandly dramatic suicide that resulted seemed aimed at his father. It was no coincidence, I thought, that the Newsom murders fell on the same weekend that Dr. Klenner had died a year earlier, just as I felt sure that it was no simple mistake that Fritz would involve in the murders somebody so vulnerable and certain to betray him as Ian Perkins. I suspected that deep inside Fritz wanted the police to know he had done it, needed them to give him the courage to go out in his vision of glory, and the ultimate purpose was to disgrace his father’s name and destroy the reputation that Fritz knew he never could live up to.
But how, finally, to explain Susie’s role in all of this? A year and a half after Dr. Lunde told me that he found her mysterious, so, too, did I, despite months of additional research into her background.
As I was nearing the end of my work on this book, Susie’s aunt Frances Miller asked me how I felt about it. I told her that I was troubled, particularly about my comprehensi
on of Susie’s role.
“I just don’t understand why,” I said.
“Neither does any of us,” she said.
Several weeks later, on a stormy July afternoon, I told the same thing to Rob Newsom.
“To me,” he said, “the simplest part is my sister.”
How so?
“Why would somebody have this incredible psychotic outburst over extended visitation rights? Because we’re not talking about custody here. Dr. Lynch wasn’t asking for custody of his children. He was asking for a couple of more weeks to visit in the summer. What triggers a gigantic psychotic outburst over two more weeks of visitation? What single mother doesn’t want her husband to have two more weeks of visitation? Say, please, you know, six weeks of freedom instead of four.
“My theory is that my sister’s problem essentially was that she wanted to believe the fantasies that Fritz Klenner spun for her about the danger she was in, about the evil of her ex-husband, about the reality of the threat he posed to her and her children, that she wanted to believe that.
“Why would she want to believe it? I think it has to do with a seriously flawed character, flawed in this respect, that my sister believed that once a person did something wrong, there was no forgiveness for it.
“My sister despised the parable of the prodigal son. She thought it was unjust, unfair, and she didn’t believe Jesus said it, that it was made up. So in my sister’s mind, you always had to be right because the consequences of being wrong were awesome. So when her marriage failed, it had to be Tom Lynch’s fault. She had not been back in North Carolina a month after their separation when she told me how furious she was with Mother. I said, ‘Why?’ Because Mother had dared to suggest that maybe Susie could have done something different to save their marriage. Mother and Daddy were suggesting already at that early stage that she not be bitter, that she try to have amicable relationships with Tom for the sake of the children, that she examine herself and her own motives and see where maybe she had contributed to the failure of her marriage, and this made her furious.
“I don’t know anything to call that but a sort of spiritual sickness. I think my sister’s sense of self-worth was derived from a sense of being right. If she was wrong, she was worthless. If she was right, she was worthy. I think that’s how she saw the world and her place in it. That is sick thinking, and you can see the price she paid for it, and lots of other people, too.
“How she got it, I don’t know. I’ve pondered and I have no earthly idea. I know she didn’t hear it in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. That’s not the message preached there. I know she never heard it from my mother and father. My grandfather Newsom was a Calvinist, and that was part of his religious thought. Now understand, he didn’t live that way though. He didn’t live a hard and unforgiving life. He was one of the most forgiving people I know. But he talked it. I remember him once saying he never apologized in his life because he didn’t have anything to apologize for. Maybe things like that leave an impression on a little kid’s mind, I don’t know. Maybe my sister began to think that way because she did sense she was very different from the children around her at school. I’m not sure where it came from exactly. The only person who could tell us, I guess, maybe she could have found it someday, you know, after two or three years of hard analysis, is Susie, but she’s not here to do it.”
Wasn’t it true, though, I asked, that Susie was never one to see her own faults?
“That’s right. If you ever read Scott Peck’s books, in his book People Who Lie, that’s his definition of an evil person, is a person who refuses to look within, refuses to see the plank in their eye, refuses self-analysis and is always scapegoating other people, places, and things for their own dilemmas.”
Was that Susie?
“I agree it was my sister. I think there was a very real sense in which my sister was an evil person. I don’t think it’s the sense in which Dr. Lynch believes it.”
With the subject of evil broached, I asked how he viewed it.
“I think there are different kinds. I’m coming more and more to subscribe to John Steinbeck’s theory. Steinbeck believed that there were some creatures on the face of the earth that looked like human beings, they had human parents, but they were really monsters. The mother in East of Eden, Cathy, was one such character, and I’ve come to buy that a little bit.”
Perhaps not so strangely, a few weeks earlier, when I was talking with Rob’s aunt Frances, she had touched on a similar theory.
“You can talk about all kinds and aspects of mental illness,” she said, “but I don’t think that explains some people. I sometimes think there are people in the world who are just by nature mean. It’s almost like a touch of autism, where the rest of the world doesn’t matter. We’ll never understand that kind of mind.”
She had been talking about her niece, and I wondered now if Rob, too, thought the Steinbeck vision of evil applied to Susie.
“I don’t think that’s true of my sister, because she didn’t show all the propensities that people like that show. I think it’s true of Fritz. I think Fritz was a monster. I think an examination of the photographs of my mother’s body is all that’s needed to show that. I feel pretty strongly that only a monster would have done that to my mother.”
More than two years after his parents’ murders, Rob had hired a lawyer, investigators, and a forensics expert from California to dig deeper into Fritz’s background. Part of the reason was to help defend his sister’s estate, but there was more to it.
“I really feel like I understand my sister,” he said. “I may be wrong, but I think that what I’ve described is the way that her brain worked. I’m not sure that I understand Fritz. I’ve got some questions myself that just interest me personally. I want to know more about Fritz. I think it’s important to know what fuels these incredible sociopaths. It’s probably important for, you know, like serial killers, it’s probably important not to execute them. I mean, they’re a national resource. If we can learn enough about them, we may be able to stop them, and I just feel like knowing about Fritz is important. If anything is important in all of this, it’s how do we create a Mr. Hyde like that, number one, and number two, how do we keep ourselves from being victims of people like that?”
Rob thought that he understood some of Fritz’s motivations.
“I think there was a pile of pent-up hatred. I think that Fritz felt that the rest of the family felt that Dr. Klenner, Annie Hill, him, and everybody in the Klenner household was eccentric, superstitious, and laughable. And I think that he hated us for it. I think he misjudged that a little bit. I think people felt that Dr. Klenner was in many ways eccentric, that his political views were laughable, but I never heard anybody in my family question Dr. Klenner’s brilliance or his creativity.”
This brought up a theory I had been mulling. Did Rob think it possible that the Klenners might have set out to alienate Susie from her family, to claim and conquer her as the prize fruit on the Sharp family tree, the one bearing the name of the resented family matriarch and most successful member? Was it a means of striking back at the family for its failure to fully accept Dr. Klenner?
“Susie was always drawn to the Klenners,” he said. “She always liked them, even as a little girl, and Fred was especially fond of Susie. And when Susie got back to North Carolina after her separation, and my mother and father were telling her to do things like examine yourself and see where you might be at fault, all she had to do was ride up the road to the Klenner household where everybody was saying, ‘You were perfect. It was that son of a bitch that caused all of this.’ It wasn’t healthy, but it was what she wanted to hear. I think the Klenners did take a certain perverse pleasure to my sister being closer to them than to her own parents, in preferring their advice to her own parents’ advice, no question in my mind about that. And for some of the same reasons that you mentioned. They’re saying, ‘Aha, you high and mighty Sharps, one of your own has to turn to us.’”
Weren’t Susie�
��s spiteful acts toward her family and Tom a form of violence? I asked.
“Well, they express feelings of vengeance and hatred, yeah. You know, the difference between the way I look at my sister and the wrongness of Fritz goes beyond the way she acts out or chose to act out. There’s a big difference between spitefulness and meanness and scapegoating and a refusal to do any honest self-examination, on the one hand, and being a cold, calculating, premeditated life taker. There are orders of magnitude to wrongness and evil, and to my mind Fritz Klenner hit the platinum-label level.”
So did he believe that Susie was a victim of evil that she built herself, one spiteful and unforgiving act upon another, until it was out of control, while Fritz was simply born evil, or possessed with it at such an early age that it merely took a catalyst for it to assume command?
“Yes, I do. And they happened to come together.”
Gallery
LEFT: Delores Lynch. At sixty-eight she remained a hovering presence in her children’s lives. (Courtesy of Greensboro News & Record.) RIGHT: Janie Lynch. At thirty-nine, she looked far younger. She was sweet and without her mother’s guile. (Courtesy of Greensboro News & Record.)
LEFT: Janie with her last boyfriend, Phil Pandolfi, fourteen years her junior, at the University of Louisville’s dental school. RIGHT: Phil took Janie to the senior prom shortly before her graduation from dental school, only weeks before her death.
LEFT: The house on Covered Bridge Road. Delores isolated her paranoia in fourteen rooms protected by iron bars and alarms. RIGHT: The parking area beside the Lynch house has been marked for evidence by police. Delores’s body lies by the garage door. The killer probably lurked behind the car nearest the house as Delores arrived home from church.
LEFT: Lieutenant Dan Davidson of the Kentucky State Police. He had investigated so many grisly homicides that he couldn’t remember them all, but the Lynch case became the biggest of his long career. CENTER: Detective Sherman Childers of the Kentucky State Police took one look at Delores’s and Janie’s bodies and said, “This was a hit. A pro took these people out.” RIGHT: Lennie Nobles of the Oldham County Police had been a detective for only five weeks when he was assigned to the Lynch murders, his first homicide.
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