Bitter Blood (59 page)

“I’ve got no reason not to. I’ve known you for years.”

Fritz handed him a spray can. “Take that with you.”

“Will that keep your odor down?” Ian asked.

“That has aluminum chlorohydrate in it, which is a prescription thing they use for people who have over-perspiration.”

“You must’ve noticed that my T-shirt smells a little.”

“Anytime you have to talk with anybody, spray the palms of your hands, your feet real good. Saturate a cotton ball, wipe your face. That’ll keep you from perspiring.”

“Yeah. That reminds me of a deodorant commercial I saw. It’s like, it’s okay to be nervous, it’s just not okay to let ’em know.”

If the police wanted particulars about what they had been doing on the hike, Fritz told Ian to say they were running checks with compasses and a barometer.

“Okay, thanks. ’Preciate it. Oh, I feel so much better.”

“Here, take this regularly,” Fritz said, offering more pills, vitamins this time. “That’s B complex. That’s nature’s tranquilizer. You can take like three of those three times a day. That stuff’s amazing.”

Ian said he’d call if he had problems.

“I’ll be at one house or the other,” Fritz said. “Oh, another thing. I’ve checked the lines. I don’t think any of the lines anywhere are tapped.”

“If I get any nervous anxiety attacks or they come call me again, I’ll call you for sure,” Ian said.

His breathing came much easier as he walked back to his car.

The detectives were more pleased with the second tape, although they were upset with Ian for answering his own questions and blabbering on when he should have been listening. Fritz had at least admitted killing people on the night of the murders, though not the Newsoms, and he had acknowledged being in a car similar to the one stopped by Officer Hull. He even had tripped himself and said the car he had been driving was gold colored. But Fritz was still playing his fantasy games, and the detectives were uncertain whether this was the solid evidence they needed to take to court.

On Sunday night, five detectives involved in the case gathered at Ian’s motel room in Winston-Salem to play the tapes for District Attorney Don Tisdale. All along, Tisdale had had trouble believing Ian’s story, and because he had been so entangled in the big trial he was conducting, he had not yet met Ian.

“I was quite surprised,” he recalled later. “We were dealing with a very intelligent, almost innocent person. If you’d told me his story apart from him, I couldn’t have believed it. I don’t think I could picture anybody being that gullible. But after I met him I believed it. There wasn’t any doubt about it. Scared me to know there were people out here like that, but I believed it.”

The detectives had been debating whether or not they had enough evidence to draw warrants for Fritz and arrest him. Gentry and Sturgill wanted to try one more time to entrap Fritz. They were afraid that Fritz might be able to wriggle out from the evidence they had.

“We might have had something if Ian hadn’t talked so much or if he had pushed on the issue of the cars,” Gentry said later, “but we really didn’t have the response that we thought Ian could get.”

Their suspicions about Susie were one reason they wanted to try again. “We had absolutely nothing to show Susie had done anything wrong,” Gentry said. “It’s safe to say I thought she had more than just a passing interest in what had happened. It’s almost incredible to believe this series of events could take place and her not have the slightest idea what was going on.”

After listening to the tapes, Tisdale agreed that another try might produce more incriminating results, and he gave the go-ahead for the following day.

The detectives needed another cover story for Ian, one that would cause Fritz to know that they were getting closer to him. To this point, Fritz was unaware that the detectives knew that a police officer had stopped him in Nanna’s gold Voláre on the night of the murders. Maybe the time had come to let him know.

42

And there were voices, and thunders, and lightnings. And there fell upon men a great hail out of heaven.

—Revelation 16:18–21

Sherman Childers and Lennie Nobles, the Kentucky detectives, stayed after Ian’s confession and went along as observers for his first meeting with Fritz. By then, they were not only out of clean clothes but money as well, and late Saturday afternoon they headed home to replenish their stocks and pick up their commander, Lieutenant Dan Davidson, who wanted to be present for Fritz’s arrest.

Childers and Nobles got home early Sunday, and by that afternoon they were on their way back to Winston-Salem with Davidson. They arrived after midnight and checked into the Innkeeper, only a short distance from the motel where Ian was spending another restless night.

The long trip gave Childers and Nobles a chance to fill in Davidson on all the details of the relationship between Fritz and Susie, her troubles with her family, and the long struggle with Tom over the boys. Davidson, like all the detectives in the case, believed that Susie surely had to be involved in the murders. If she was completely innocent, wouldn’t she have suspected something and acted upon it? Regardless of whether a case could be made against her, though, he felt certain that her mere association with Fritz was enough to prove her an unfit parent and allow Tom to take custody of John and Jim. In the ten months that he had been investigating the murders of Delores and Janie, Davidson had developed a fondness for Tom, whom he called Doc.

“The way things are working out,” Davidson said on Monday morning as the three detectives were trying to jolt themselves awake with strong coffee, “looks like ol’ Doc might be able to come and get his kids for good pretty soon.”

At 9 that morning, Davidson, Childers, and Nobles joined Ian and a group of Forsyth County officers and SBI agents at the sheriff’s department in the basement of the Hall of Justice.

The plan this time was to let Fritz know that the game playing was over. Ian was to call and tell him that he had been served a legal paper summoning him for a lineup. For this a bogus document was required, and Gentry typed up a “nontestimonial order,” misspelling the Newsom name in the process.

Offense: Homicide.

Facts which establish probable cause: On Sun. May 19, 1985, the bodies of Hattie Carter Newsome, w/f age 85, Robert Wesley Newsome Jr., w/m, age 65, and
Florence Sharp Newsome, w/f, age 66, were discovered inside the residence of Hattie Newsome at 3239 Valley
Rd., Winston-Salem, N.C. Autopsies and subsequent investigation have revealed that the 3 victims were murdered on Sat. night, May 18, 1985.

Facts which establish reasonable grounds: A Winston-Salem officer stopped a gold 79 Plymouth, N. C. license #PSL-360 at 12:02 a.m., May 19, 1985, on University Parkway in Winston-Salem. Said vehicle is registered to victim Hattie Newsome of 3239 Valley Road. Said vehicle was driven by w/m with facial hair, and said vehicle was followed by a black Chevrolet Blazer. The Winston-Salem officer has identified the gold Plymouth belonging to victim, Hattie Newsome, as the vehicle he stopped on May 19, at 12:02 a.m.

Gentry signed the order, then scribbled the name of an assistant DA into the space requiring a judge’s signature. Ian was given the pink carbon, and he folded it and stuck it into his rear pocket.

This ploy put Ian in more danger than the previous two. It would reveal to Fritz that Ian now knew for certain that Fritz had been in Nanna’s car and that his story of a CIA mission was a lie. It also would let Fritz know that the police were closing in on him. Ian was instructed to tell Fritz that when the officer who stopped Nanna’s car failed to identify Ian as the driver, Fritz surely would be called next for a lineup. Ian was to directly confront Fritz about the murders.

From Winston-Salem, the task force of detectives went again to the SBI office near Greensboro, only two miles from Susie’s apartment. After a briefing, more than half the officers prepared to set up surveillance of the apartment. Although the airplane was in service, the officers wanted to be sure that Fritz was kept in sight from the ground as well. By noon three cars were on station.

One of those was a tan Buick Riviera driven by A. G. Travis, a detective with the Greensboro Police Department. Travis was a liaison officer assigned to assist. He had no knowledge of the case before that morning. In Travis’s car was Ed Hunt, a short, neatly groomed man, who was supervisor of the SBI’s northern district and the commander of this operation. “He’s a good cop,” District Attorney Tisdale later said of him. “He’s as smart as any police officer I’ve ever worked with.” In the backseat of Travis’s car were Ron Barker, the chief of detectives for the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Department, and Dan Davidson, who was along only as an observer.

Soon after the officers arrived at Susie’s apartment complex, they saw Fritz leaving alone in his Blazer.

When Ian called from the SBI office, Susie said that Fritz had gone out but that she expected him back shortly.

Fritz drove to the Kroger Shopping Center on West Market Street, which he often frequented, and went into the Radio Shack. He emerged a short time later, got into his Blazer, and took a roundabout way back to the apartment, causing the officers to worry that he might have spotted them tailing him. Several times he cut onto side streets and doubled back. Near Quaker Village Shopping Center, he pulled onto a side street and stopped under a tree. He sat for more than fifteen minutes, and because of the black-tinted windows in his Blazer, the officers, observing from more than a block away, couldn’t tell what he was doing. Had he bought a police radio monitor? Was he now installing it?

While Fritz was out, Susie called Bob Connolly, her professor of managerial economics at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. “The way things are going, I don’t think I’m going to get there for class tonight,” he later remembered her saying. She seemed calm and collected and told him she would come in Tuesday to take a scheduled test and talk about her progress.

Soon after Fritz returned to the apartment, Ian called again from the same spot he had used the day before. The time was 1:07.

“We’ve got problems,” he said. “We’ve got to talk right away.”

Fritz agreed to meet him and left the apartment eight minutes later. Most of the police cars were already set up at the Zayre’s store. At 1:26, the airplane advised that Fritz was five minutes away. Seven minutes later he pulled into the parking lot.

“Hold onto your seats, gang,” Ian said over his transmitter as he saw Fritz’s Blazer. “This is going to be a doozie.”

Ian got into the Blazer and told Fritz about being served the order for the lineup. Fritz asked to see it, and Ian handed it to him.

The officers listening in their cars heard first the rustling of paper, then only static, no voices. As the silence stretched on, Gentry began to worry. “I thought something had gone wrong with the wire,” he recalled later.

Ian’s voice calmed his fears.

“The stuff on the back is what got me,” Ian said.

“I didn’t have a gold car that night,” Fritz said. “I had a brown car.”

“Something’s wrong here,” Ian said. “Level with me, Fritz.”

Fritz paused as if in contemplation.

“I’m not playing games with you, Ian.”

“Fritz, did you murder the Newsoms?”

“Ian, I never
murdered
anybody.”

“Something’s sure fishy here.”

“Ian, I’m not going to let you be involved. Nobody saw you. Nobody can involve you.”

Ian said he was sure the cop wouldn’t be able to identify him because he hadn’t been in the car. But the police weren’t going to stop there, he said. After that, they’d call Fritz in for the officer to see.

“If they tie you in to this thing, that’s going to take me down with you,” Ian said. “I’ve got some grave doubts, Fritz.”

“I’m being set up, for what reason I don’t know,” Fritz said. “I’m about to take a royal screwing. I’ll pop a capsule. I will not—”

Fritz’s voice had changed. His bedside manner was gone. He sounded preoccupied, impatient.

“I’ll write a paper saying you were not knowingly involved, that you believed you were on a covert mission for the government,” he said.

It was clear that he was ending the conversation and wanted to get going.

“I’ve got things to do,” he said.

As Ian started to get out, Fritz said, “I won’t see you again.”

Ian trembled with relief as he got back into his car with Carden. The meeting had lasted fourteen minutes.

The officers were uncertain about their next move as Fritz headed back to Susie’s apartment, a nine-mile drive by the shortest route. All were aware that this operation was being closely monitored by higher-ups in Winston-Salem and Raleigh, and they knew that whatever they did, it would make big news. Mistakes might not only endanger the case but careers as well, and they didn’t want to make any.

They knew from what Fritz had said that they couldn’t use Ian anymore and that they were not apt to get more evidence against Fritz. It seemed apparent that Fritz was about to make a run. They knew that they would have to move against him soon. But they knew, too, that he was well armed and arresting him might not be easy. Should they try to take him before he got back to the apartment? They had no warrants.