Bitter Blood (65 page)

“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.

The decision to arrest Fritz came after officers determined that he might be preparing to leave to kill people who had information about the killings, Oldham said, apparently referring to the officers’ theory that Fritz might have been planning to kill Tom or other family members.

“At our last infiltration Monday, it was indicated that Klenner posed a danger to the witnesses,” he said without amplification.

Quizzed about motive, Oldham said that child custody and large inheritances were possibilities, and he mentioned the upcoming visitation hearing.

“Almost everyone who died was going to testify in that custody case,” he said, although Bob, in fact, was the only one. “But the questions may never be answered. There are a multitude of things that could have prompted it. An exact, hard-core motive will never be known. It could have been revenge. It could have been greed. It could have been personal problems. It could have been child custody. Now we’ll never know.

“There are a number of questions that can never be answered. If it had gone to court we might have answered them.”

Was Susie a suspect?

“She was in loose terms a suspect. It was a natural process that she could be considered a suspect because of that relationship, but there is no hard-core evidence that she was involved.”

Would there be further investigation?

“The case is closed. Based on our district attorney’s opinion, the physical evidence and Klenner’s own statements that link everything together…the Newsom case is resolved. This whole case, including the Kentucky murders and ours, it’s unreal how it was played out, almost like a dime-store novel with so many twists and turns. We have no doubt that he was the killer.”

Even as Oldham spoke, more strange twists and turns were about to surface.

At North Carolina Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill, Assistant Medical Examiner Dr. John D. Butts began his autopsy of Jim’s body by noting the obvious. Jim had been shot through the left eye, clearly at close range. Stippling surrounded the wound, indicating that the weapon had been held no more than a foot away. The bullet traveled upward and slightly to the right, exiting from the back of his head, clearly a fatal wound. He had a few minor lacerations on his thighs and some scratches and scrapes around his neck, but no blatant injuries from the bomb blast.

When Dr. Butts sliced into Jim’s body, he got a surprise. A familiar bittersweet, almond-chlorine odor rose to meet him. He recognized it immediately as cyanide.

Dr. Robert L. Thompson, who was performing the autopsy on John’s body, was recording similar findings. Like Jim, John had few injuries from the bomb blast, a minor cut on his cheek, abrasions on his left thigh. But like Jim, John also had been shot. Black powder in his hair indicated the weapon had been held no more than two feet away. The bullet entered the back of his head near the base of the skull and traveled upward, exiting above the left ear. Dr. Thompson found a fragment from a 9-millimeter copper-jacketed bullet in John’s brain. He also found cyanide in John’s stomach.

Cyanide, the poison used in gas chamber executions, is also commonly used by jewelers for processing metal and is easily available in powder or pellet form from chemical supply companies. Ingested or inhaled in sufficient quantity, it brings unconsciousness, convulsions, and death within a matter of minutes. An average lethal amount in the blood is 1.2 milligrams per 100 milliliters of blood for an adult. As little as .6 milligrams has been known to kill. Blood tests showed that John had 1.7 milligrams in his blood. Jim, Susie’s favored son, had a whopping 18 milligrams, indicating that he probably had been given the cyanide first, allowing more time for it to get into his bloodstream.

Both doctors agreed that Jim and John had been shot soon after taking the poison. The doctors believed the boys’ hearts were beating but both children were unconscious when shot.

Autopsies also were performed on the bodies of Susie and Fritz that day. The results showed that neither had ingested cyanide, nor had they been shot. Both died from blast injuries, and both appeared to have been conscious when the bomb went off. Fritz had bruises, scrapes, and lacerations. A rivet had been driven into his liver. Several ribs were fractured. But internal hemorrhaging had killed him. A quart of blood had collected in his right chest cavity, a pint in his left.

Susie’s was the only mangled body, her most blatant injuries from the waist down. She suffered multiple fractures and massive blunt-force trauma throughout her body. In her stomach was a partly dissolved capsule containing pink, white, and red particles that the doctors removed and turned over to the SBI for analysis. Her injuries made it clear that the bomb had been underneath her seat when it exploded.

The autopsy findings were powerful, and they were summed up in a note on the boys’ reports: “The two brothers were apparently killed by their mother and her cousin prior to the vehicle being destroyed by a bomb contained within it.”

The reports brought relief to the police, who had realized at the scene that the boys had been shot and feared that the wounds had come from police guns.

At three Tuesday afternoon, the big bomb-disposal truck that had been parked in front of Susie’s apartment the night before pulled up to 1205 Huntsdale Road in Reidsville, and soon afterward, with Annie Hill’s permission, a group of officers began a search through the clutter of the Klenner house. In addition to vast amounts of prescription drugs and vitamins, they found large stores of military gear and survivalist supplies, plus a case and a half of dynamite, blasting caps, safety caps, fuses, twenty-eight pounds of black powder, fifteen tear gas grenades, two claymore mines stolen from the army, more than thirty thousand rounds of varied ammunition, another Uzi submachine gun, seven handguns, five semiautomatic military rifles, and six shotguns.

The dynamite, grenades, and other explosives were loaded into the disposal truck and taken to the Reidsville city dump to be detonated.

After the search, Reidsville Police Chief James Festerman told reporters that some of the discoveries had come as a surprise to Annie Hill.

“She was not aware of the entire contents of the house, but she may have known of the dynamite,” he said.

No charges would be brought against her for possession of illegal weapons, explosives, or stolen U.S. government property.

45

The murders and explosion continued to dominate the news in North Carolina and would for nearly a week.

Much of Wednesday’s newspaper coverage centered on Fritz and Susie. Officials made clear that they had no doubt about Fritz’s guilt in the five murders. Susie’s possible involvement was another matter. Tisdale was quoted as calling her “an ostensibly innocent person.” Sheriff Oldham said his detectives had compiled no “hardcore evidence” against her.

In another story,
Greensboro News & Record
reporters Jim Brady and Mike Vogel quoted unnamed family friends as saying that Susie had been fearful after the Lynch murders, that she had recently received anonymous threatening calls, and that the throats of two of the boys’ toy animals had been slit.

They quoted Susie Sharp as saying, “She loved those boys and she loved her grandmother. I can’t believe that she would knowingly hurt them.”

Of her nephew, Judge Sharp said: “Fritz is bound to have been insane. I just can’t conceive of any sane person doing what he did.”

Several news stories reported that Rockingham Sheriff Bobby Vernon had granted Fritz fifty-one permits to buy handguns in recent years, noting that no permits were required for other weapons that he owned. Vernon, calling Fritz a “clean-cut and intelligent” gun collector said he couldn’t deny the permits.

“He was crazy about guns,” Louise Sharp was quoted as saying of her nephew.

Other newspapers were still reporting that Fritz had attended Duke Medical School, but Brady and Vogel revealed in the
News & Record
that it all had been a hoax, that he’d never been enrolled nor received any formal training as a physician, although many people still thought him a doctor.

The
News & Record
also devoted a story to John and Jim, written by Sharon Bond. Several children from the apartment complex where the boys lived were quoted. They said the boys often wore military clothes, never went to the pool, rarely played outside.

“The only time they came out was when they walked the dogs,” said Charlene Tatum, a neighbor, who was fourteen. “They didn’t say anything. They just kept to themselves. They always stuck real close together. It was just those two little boys. When you saw one, you saw the other.”

“They didn’t have many friends,” said Robbie Dunham, another neighbor, also fourteen.

Jim’s teacher at Guilford Middle School, Judy Glascow, described the reaction to Jim’s death of his classmates: “They took it hard. I don’t think there was a dry eye in the class. It was just sobbing openly.”

She asked her students to express their feelings in words and pictures, and one drew a picture of Jim at Disneyland. At show and tell, Jim had happily told about his trip to California with his daddy and Kathy.

Another Wednesday story in the
News & Record
told of Susie’s Monday call to Bob Connolly, her UNC-G professor, to reschedule a test.

Connolly had talked at length with Susie about the strain she had been under since the murders.

“She appeared to be greatly concerned about her kids,” Connolly said. “She talked about how she snatched the newspapers, tried to keep news reports of what had happened to their grandparents away from them. She talked about how they snuck the children into the church for the funeral and kept them away from the gravesite to keep them from being photographed. That seemed a little obsessive to me but I didn’t know at the time how affluent these people were.”

Connolly said news reports belied everything he’d learned about Susie’s personality in the three weeks she had been in his class. He called her quiet and one of the most attentive students he’d ever had. He said other faculty members had told him that “the Susie Lynch in the paper was not the Susie Lynch they knew.”

“I used to be in your business—a reporter—and after five years of interviewing and seven years as a teacher, I think I have a pretty good sense for people,” Connolly said. “She either fooled me completely or the things in the paper are wrong. She was as nice a person as I’ve run into in this business. Cool, calm, and collected.

“I still can’t get over how this woman sat here, extra calm and collected, and said these things. Of course, you never can tell about some people. Some, that’s just the way they are. Others, it’s a defense mechanism, and still others are dissembling. The whole thing about her and him and what happened reminds me of the Patty Hearst story.”

Tom Lynch read Wednesday morning’s news stories with growing anger. He had become convinced that Susie was involved in all the murders, and talk of her innocence grated. He was determined not to allow her to be portrayed as a Patty Hearst figure, a duped and brainwashed innocent, but other things had to be attended to first.

Tom and Kathy had arrived the day before; they were met at the airport by his old college friend, Bob Brenner, who took them into his home in High Point and made a car available for their use. On Tuesday night, they went to Greensboro to meet Dan Davidson, who was deeply distressed about the boys’ deaths and dreaded facing Tom. For two hours, Davidson, Childers, and Nobles went over the events of the past few days. Tom talked about what a raw deal he’d gotten from North Carolina courts. If only he’d been given fair visitation to begin with, Tom said, none of this might have happened. But he didn’t blame Davidson.

“I knew he would feel real bad,” Tom said. “I knew it wasn’t their fault. They’d done everything they could.”

But Tom knew, too, that somebody had failed to ensure his sons’ safety, and he wanted to know why.

“I just couldn’t understand why it happened like this,” he said, “why they couldn’t have taken Fritz when he was alone.”