Bitter Blood (73 page)

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 Louisville 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.

“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 powerful 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.”