Bitter Blood (74 page)

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).

Tucked into one of those boxes of toy guns was a large cardboard poster handlettered in Fritz’s childish scrawl. “Guns. Guards. NOW!” it said, then added, “Please come to my fort”—a plaintive plea from a lonely and frightened child who found comfort only in guns and bunkers.

In the clutter of Susie’s apartment, her friend Annette Hunt found a copy of a book
When Bad Things Happen to Good People
by Rabbi Harold Kushner. Susie had written her name inside it and dated it 1982, the year she began to draw close to Fritz. Throughout the book, passages had been underlined.

In the last chapter, Kushner wrote of a survivor of the Holocaust who had suffered unbearable personal tragedy, yet he chose to focus on the future, not the past, refusing to search for villains, deciding that “accusing other people of being responsible for your misery only makes a lonely person lonelier. Life,” he concluded, “has to be lived for something, not just against something.” Susie had underlined the last sentence.

A few pages later, Susie had underlined this: “You’re a good person, and you deserve better. Let me come and sit with you so that you’ll know that you are not alone.”

On the front flyleaf, Susie had written: “What each of us makes of our loneliness is the individual stamp of our destiny.”

“It’s almost like an epitaph,” Annette said.

Ironically, in the weeks following Susie’s death, her namesake aunt Judge Susie Sharp, was reading her own copy of that book, given to her by a friend, although she was finding little comfort in it.

“I don’t know that I’ll ever have any more peace on this earth,” she said.

Frequently, she was awakened in the night to the sound of Susie and her boys crying.

“It’s just unbelievable,” she said. “Those sweet little boys.”

Susie had been her favorite niece, and although in the time of her greatest need Susie had turned to Annie Hill, not her, Judge Sharp still held her close in her heart.

“All my special things were going to Susie,” she said. “I don’t know what to do with them now.”

Two years later, as her eightieth birthday neared, Judge Sharp still hadn’t decided what to do with her special things. Seven months earlier, she had been struck by a car while taking her morning walk and was seriously injured. The effects of her injuries made it impossible for her to take long walks anymore and difficult even to stand at her desk for work.

Two years and many revelations had not diminished her belief that Susie was completely under the control of Fritz.

“I don’t believe Susie killed anybody. I don’t believe Fritz wanted her to. I believe he wanted to do that himself.”

Suddenly, Judge Sharp was struck by a memory of Susie as a little girl. An Easter. Back when Bob and Florence were newly married and living in the little rented house in Winston-Salem, before Bob got his big promotion at R. J. Reynolds, at a time when they had little money. She smiled as she recalled it.

“Florence didn’t have a new hat or a new dress, but she dressed up Susie. She had a new dress and new shoes and little white gloves. ‘Isn’t she cute?’ Florence said. She was, and I loved her dearly, too.”

Clearly, time had not diminished the pain of all that had happened. Asked about the emotional damage she had suffered, Judge Sharp replied, “Oh, dear, I wouldn’t try to describe it. It’s just a constant source of grief. There’s no way anybody could come to terms with it. You keep wondering if there was anything you could have done. But none of us had the full information. There just won’t be an end of it. It’ll haunt us until we die.”

Soon after the Newsom murders, Frances Miller and her daughters, Nancy Dunn and Debbie Parham, filled out victim impact statements for Allen Gentry.

Debbie called her experience “unbearable emotional devastation.” She told of newly imposed fears, suspicions, depression. “My life will never, ever be the same,” she wrote. “It seems as if the hurt will never go away.”

“Unbearable,” wrote Nancy. “Life cannot be normal again. My torment for my mother… cannot be expressed.”

Wrote Frances: “I’ve lost all my family members other than my children, and because of these deaths, our homeplace, the well from which I and my children draw so much love, peace and spiritual support. I’m devastated that my beloved mother, who taught so many others to live and love in peace, died violently and had to witness as she died the brutal murder of her loved ones. Grief and rage will be with me the rest of my life.”