Fritz needed little evidence to persuade himself that Tom was involved with the Mafia. That Tom’s dental partners and accountant all had Italian names was plenty. Add the judge with an Italian name who had ruled in Tom’s favor and the intimidating call to Dr. Davis from an Italian lawyer in Chicago and that was evidence enough.
That Susie, too, came to believe such a farfetched notion, many who knew her would not doubt. They could conceive only one reason she had turned to Fritz: just as his father was saving her from deadly illness with his vitamins, Fritz would save her and the boys from deadly mobsters with his guns.
Part Four
Spiraling Madness
25
From the time Fritz Klenner was old enough to sit unassisted, weapons were put into his hands. Rare is the childhood photo that shows him without a gun. At less than a year of age, he sits in a red barrel chair a tiny toy pistol gripped tightly to his chest. At five, he poses defiantly in a fringed black cowboy suit, his hands on his six-shooters.
“I had to run around with one of those play guns hanging on me all the time,” recalled his aunt Marie Jennings, his father’s eldest sister, who came from Pennsylvania to tend Fritz each summer while his mother, a nurse, worked in his father’s clinic. “He was Roy Rogers and I was Dale Evans.”
Marie, who became Fritz’s favorite aunt, remembered one time visitors came to the house when Fritz was about three.
“Don’t let ’em in until I get my guns,” he cried as he dashed to his room to fetch what had become even then the instruments of his security.
During his childhood, Fritz would possess hundreds of toy guns of every description—pistols, rifles, shotguns, machine guns, and other military armaments—all bought for him by his father. By the time he was eleven, he had his first real gun, a German Luger, a birthday gift from Dad. By then, too, he had acquired all of his father’s fears, insecurities, prejudices, and eccentricities, as well as his hopes and dreams, becoming his father’s worshipful clone.
Family, friends, and patients could not recall a happier time in Dr. Frederick R. Klenner’s life than the day on which his son was born at Duke University Hospital—July 31, 1952, less than three months shy of the doctor’s forty-fifth birthday. Dr. Klenner long had dreamed of having a son who would bear his name and eventually take over his important work, and now, nearly eight years after the birth of his youngest daughter, Gertrude, that dream had come true. He beamed to those who congratulated him, and passed out, not cigars, but a local product, packages of Lucky Strike cigarettes wrapped in blue ribbons. His friend Felix Fournier, manager of the American Tobacco Company plant that made Lucky Strikes, would become his son’s godfather.
From infancy, the baby was called Fritz, and he was nourished not only with large quantities of vitamins but with his father’s visions of miracles he eventually would perform with these wondrous natural chemicals. Fritz’s Aunt Marie recalled that the child hated to take the vitamins and that she had to play story games to get him to down them, spreading the pills and capsules over a tabletop as if they were steps in an exciting journey, each step rewarded with chocolate milk.
That the boy would be molded in the image of his father was unquestioned, for Dr. Klenner brooked no challenge. “He had a Prussian attitude,” recalled a family acquaintance who thought Dr. Klenner “an oddball, a kook.” “His word was law and that was it. He never let the children live a normal life. His wife, Annie Hill, was a prisoner in that house. She was his slave. She didn’t have a husband; she had a warden, and so did those children.”
“He was dictatorial,” said a family friend, “but he had a loving relationship with his wife and family. I’d say they were a very close couple. Her personality flourished under that rock he kept her under. She was a very sparkling personality.”
“He was a very kind and caring man, but he was Prussian to the core,” agreed another family friend who thought highly of Dr. Klenner. “An old German papa. He wanted to rule the family. He didn’t try to completely isolate his children, but he didn’t encourage his daughters’ having any friends. He didn’t like for them to go out to parties or do things that other girls did. And he kept Fritz close to himself.”
The relationship between father and son was a picture of closeness, jealously guarded by the doctor. “Fred idolized Fritz,” the doctor’s sister Marie recalled. “He just idolized him.”
“They were best friends,” said Fritz’s aunt Susie.
Fritz often didn’t attend Sharp family gatherings. His mother and sisters went, but Fritz frequently stayed behind with his father, who never felt fully accepted by the Sharps and still nursed the scars of rejection they had inflicted, scars whose memory he transferred to his son. Fritz always looked forward, though, to visits with his father’s family from Pennsylvania. The doctor had little time for trips back home, but now and then he drove his wife and children to Natural Bridge, Virginia, a halfway point, where he met family members from Pennsylvania. The reunions took place in the cavernous brick visitor center, with Dr. Klenner administering blood pressure checks to family members and Fritz romping around, sometimes firing his toy guns at passersby. Years later, Fritz would talk frequently of the good times he had at Natural Bridge.
Fritz had no childhood friends, even after he started going to school. Dr. Klenner discouraged his son from developing friends by forbidding playmates from the house, a forbidding place anyway, even to adults. Dr. Klenner considered the house his refuge, his sanctuary, and few outsiders were allowed to invade it. Those who were invited inside found dark rooms and unbelievable clutter. Books and papers and boxes and bric-a-brac were everywhere. In some rooms, little floor space was left for walking. Visitors sometimes had trouble finding a place to sit.
Dr. Klenner was an inveterate collector of stamps, coins, toys, electric trains, miniature wagons, clocks, German beer steins, miniature cannons, cut glass, and antique furniture, but his specialty was guns, particularly German army weapons. He bought and traded so many guns that he acquired a federal firearms license issued to dealers. He filled his house not only with his collections but also with cases of canned and preserved foods that he hoarded against coming calamities, with box upon box of vitamins and medicines and with thousands of books and periodicals. His library was vast, and mixed with somber law and medical books were mystical religious tomes as well as the published near-hysterical rantings of conspiracy-minded right-wing doomsayers. Comforted by his magnificent clutter, Dr. Klenner sat late into the night listening to classical music, reading his medical journals, and writing papers extolling the wonders of vitamins.
Neighbors thought the Klenners secretive, reclusive, eccentric, “a little strange.” They came to regard the Klenner house as an eyesore in the otherwise immaculate upper-middle-class neighborhood. The white paint peeled from the bricks. The shrubbery grew wild, the grass high. Stacks of decaying building materials, rusting vehicles, and unusual machinery parts filled the yard. Service people were reluctant to approach the house, fearing the big, ferocious-sounding German shepherd inside, a dog named Dorner that Dr. Klenner claimed to be gifted with extrasensory perception.
Years later, Fritz recalled a lonely childhood spent in this dark and cluttered house. He talked of filling his time practicing his cornet (an instrument his grandfather had played in an Austrian band), reading his father’s books, and studying with growing fascination his father’s weapons.
Over and over, he told one particular story that seemed to have great significance to him.
In the late forties, Dr. Klenner bought 256 acres of land at an estate sale handled by his father-in-law, James Sharp. The land was on the Dan River, fifteen miles west of Reidsville, near Leaksville, Spray, and Draper, three towns that later merged as Eden. It was rugged land, steep and wooded and rocky, and Dr. Klenner came to call it “the Mountain.” He went there almost every Wednesday, the one afternoon a week he took off from the office, and often after mass on Sunday. He fancied himself an arborist, and there he planted trees and grafted limbs.
Almost always, Dr. Klenner took his son when he went to the Mountain. They tramped the steep hills, hiked along the river, fired Dr. Klenner’s many weapons, set off dynamite charges. Dr. Klenner was convinced that caves lay under his land, and he frequently blasted holes searching for their entrances. He also believed that a legendary Bigfoot creature, locally called the Wampus Cat, lived along the river and prowled his land, and he and Fritz spent many hours searching vainly for the creature’s lair. Later, Dr. Klenner made plaster impressions of unusual footprints he found and sent off samples of droppings to the Smithsonian Institution in attempts to confirm the creature’s existence and identify it.
One day, when he was about ten, Fritz was supposed to go to the Mountain with his father. He was in his room playing with a radio when his father got ready to leave. His father called impatiently to him, but Fritz dawdled. By the time Fritz got downstairs, his father had gone without him. Fritz never got over it. He had failed his father, and his father had rejected him for it. He couldn’t bear that.
Pleasing his father was Fritz’s foremost goal in life. Everybody who saw the two together knew instantly that the son worshiped the father, but Dr. Klenner’s expectations were high, and pleasing him was not easy.
Dr. Klenner demanded academic excellence of his children and sometimes dispatched his wife to their schools to argue with teachers over fractions in grade points. Town gossips whispered that Dr. Klenner gave his children amphetamines so that they could stay up late studying and be more alert for tests.
A classmate of Fritz, Charles Kimbro, recalled a time when their teacher was returning test papers and Fritz’s came back with only a B-plus scrawled across the top.
“He just put his head down on the desk and started crying, because he was scared his daddy was going to find out about it,” Kimbro said.
“He feared his father,” said Randy Clark, who became Fritz’s closest friend after moving to Reidsville when he and Fritz were in seventh grade. “There was no question of the authority his father had over him. It was almost militaristic, a timid submission. Yes, sir! No, sir! Acting on command. His father was god of the house.”
Fritz attempted to please his father by becoming as much like him as possible. He became enamored of German history and Adolf Hitler, and drew swastikas on his school notebooks. “He was very prone to give a Sieg Heil! and a Remember the Third Reich!” Randy Clark remembered.
Fritz displayed his father’s love for military paraphernalia by wearing an army fatigue jacket and other military attire to school years before that became fashionable among other youngsters. “He liked to be militaristic,” Clark recalled. “He liked having an air of authority about him. He liked having a sense of superiority.”
Neighbors sometimes saw Fritz marching in the yard, counting cadence, a rifle on his shoulder—but never in the front yard. He wasn’t allowed to play there because his father feared kidnappers.
Of weaponry, military and otherwise, Fritz spoke with confident knowledge, being able to spew out the muzzle velocities and other vital statistics of a wide variety of guns before he was twelve. While other kids sneaked free reads of comic books at downtown drugstores, Fritz engrossed himself in gun magazines.
As he cloaked himself with his father’s obsessions, he also parroted his father’s religious and political beliefs.
He believed with his father in a superstitious and mystical Catholicism, rife with signs and omens, that harked back to the Middle Ages. He believed in demons and spooks and the power of holy water in confronting them, for he had seen his father expel such evil spirits with only a few drops of the magical liquid. He spoke often of Armageddon, the ultimate battle between good and evil predicted in the Book of Revelation, and he believed, as did his father, that that awesome moment of decision was imminent (his father on occasion claimed to know the actual date on which the great battle would begin).
Like his father, Fritz railed against blacks, liberals, and Communists. “Be A MAN, join the KLAN,” he wrote in Randy Clark’s yearbook in the ninth grade. “George Wallace for President in ’68.”
“He was increasingly paranoid in high school about blacks, the civil rights movement, Communists,” Clark recalled. “He thought blacks were low-class, no-class, and all the civil rights movement was just a Communist plot to overthrow the government. He had such a hatred built up in him. It was almost as if he were waiting for Armageddon any minute.”
More than in any other way, however, Fritz pleased his father by constantly expressing his wish to be a doctor. That was given, and he accepted it as if it had been preordained by his genes. After school and on Saturdays, he spent time at his father’s clinic observing him carefully getting to know patients, assuring all that one day he would be assuming his father’s work. On his belt, he regularly carried a pouch filled with vitamins and medical supplies. In tenth grade, when a girl fainted in class, he was quick to revive her with an ammonia ampule.
Fritz was so intent on pleasing his father that he had little time for play or other activities. Randy Clark would remember playing only one game with him: spy. They carried attaché cases with toy pistols inside and fantasized exotic James Bond intrigues. Only later did Clark realize why the game so appealed to his friend. “He liked being secretive. For Fritz, secretiveness was very important. If a person knew a lot about you, you couldn’t maintain your secrecy. You don’t want anybody to know about you.”