He’d gotten no good answers to that question when he talked to SBI agents on Tuesday, and on Wednesday morning, when he received a call asking him to come to the SBI office in Greensboro, he thought he might get a better explanation.
He and Kathy were greeted by Tom Sturgill and Ed Hunt, the district supervisor, who ushered them into the conference room where, two weeks earlier, Sturgill and Gentry had interviewed Fritz. Hunt told them that other revelations were forthcoming and that he wanted them to know in advance. The boys, he said, had been given cyanide and shot in the head at close range before the explosion.
The news not only confirmed Tom’s suspicions that Susie had a hand in destroying the boys, it convinced him that she had shot them herself. Two words described his feelings; and he uttered them to himself: “That monster.”
The new revelations prompted Tom to an immediate decision. He would make himself available to the press.
“I couldn’t let her get away with this,” he explained later. “This was outrageous, more than just outrageous. As far as I was concerned, this was motherhood’s worst moment. There had never been anything worse than this. Not only that, but to have a hand in killing your parents and your grandmother, too. This was a monstrosity. It’s the equivalent of the Holocaust, of turning your family in to the Nazis and having them gassed. I just could not
not
do something about it.”
On Wednesday afternoon a press conference was held at the Greensboro Police Department. Present were Greensboro Police Chief Conrad Wade, Ed Hunt, Allen Gentry, Reidsville Police Chief James Festerman, and Guilford County Sheriff Jim Proffitt. Hunt disclosed the autopsy findings to the surprised reporters. He revealed that a fragment of a 9-millimeter bullet had been taken from John’s brain and that the bullet was believed to have been fired from a pistol found at the scene.
“In our opinion, it came from that vehicle,” he said of the pistol. “It was found cocked and loaded, lying beside a telephone pole to the left of where the explosion took place.”
Asked whether Susie or Fritz had shot the boys, Hunt said, “We’re not drawing any conclusions until we see the final autopsy reports.”
Chief Wade disclosed that a Forsyth deputy and a Kentucky officer had fired six shots when Fritz first opened fire at the intersection, and that a Forsyth deputy and an SBI agent had returned four more shots in the second exchange of fire a few minutes later. Hunt, who had been one of those firing, declined to identify any of the officers. Hunt also said that he knew of no hits by the officers.
“As best we can tell, the holes were from the inside out,” he said. Later examination, however, would show at least one incoming bullet hole in the Blazer’s rear panel.
Hunt also disclosed that the SBI was interviewing a “possible accomplice” in the Newsom murders but would neither identify him nor reveal what role he might have played.
Questioned about the nature of the bomb, Hunt replied, “I don’t have a report on that at this time. There could be several possibilities. It may be some time before we get all the results on that.”
Had problems in arresting Fritz been foreseen?
“Based on our information, we thought that there possibly could be problems,” Hunt said. “The nature of the crimes we were going to arrest him for would indicate that.”
Gentry told the reporters that Fritz had become a suspect “early on.”
“A couple of family members had expressed a little concern over the relationship as well as over his background,” he said. “He obviously had the interest and the capabilities. We had no idea how capable he was until all of this happened.”
Chief Festerman revealed that large amounts of prescription drugs and vitamins had been found at the Klenner home and office, but that was not unusual for Dr. Klenner, he said.
“Dr. Klenner was a proponent of vitamin C and there were large amounts of vitamin C in his office and his residence in boxes and cases,” he went on.
Was Fritz selling drugs?
“During our investigation, we at no time found any indication that he was involved in selling narcotics,” responded Gentry.
Was cyanide found at Susie’s apartment or the Klenner house?
“Not to my knowledge,” said Gentry.
While the officers were talking to reporters on Wednesday afternoon, Tom was doing the same. In the next thirty-six hours, he granted several interviews, but the first was with Jim Schlosser of the
Greensboro News & Record,
whom he told he wouldn’t be surprised if proof emerged that Susie had shot the boys.
“I kind of assumed that she might have fired the shots because Fritz was busy driving,” he said.
He labeled as “ridiculous” claims that Susie might not have been aware of Fritz’s involvement in the murders.
“She may have been the mastermind-manipulator,” he said.
He said officers had told him that Susie might have gone to Kentucky with Fritz to point out his mother’s house, which would be difficult to locate otherwise. He thought Susie wanted his mother dead because she believed Delores was paying for his court fight.
“I wasn’t attempting to make Susie look bad,” he said, “only to make increased visitation look good.”
Tom quoted Susie’s father as calling her “headstrong, stubborn, and pathological in her paranoia about her children.”
“She wrapped herself in a world with those boys,” Tom said. “It was them against everyone else. She just thought everyone was trying to get her kids away from her.
“Fritz was her protector. They fed off each other’s paranoia. She reinforced him. He reinforced her. You talk of spiraling insanity, this is the worst I have ever heard of.”
Tom told of his own fear after the Newsom murders (“I had the guns loaded and the windows locked”) and of his and Kathy’s frantic efforts to try to get the boys from Susie and Fritz after the murders.
“They wouldn’t have let them go,” he said dejectedly. “They were not going to let the kids live if they were caught. The boys were doomed.”
Tom summed up his feelings with two sentences: “I don’t know what I think about this at this time. I’m just so angry.”
On Wednesday morning, a group of officers and the Greensboro Police Department bomb squad showed up at the Mountain, the Klenner farm a mile east of Eden on Chumley Road. Reporters were not allowed onto the rugged, wooded property bordering the Dan River, and while the officers searched, reporters talked to neighbors. Frank Underwood, a sixty-three-year-old man who lived nearby, told them that once when his brother, George, was walking near the property, Fritz appeared from the woods, pulled a .44 Magnum, and ordered him never to come near the land again. S. B. Gilley, a sixty-eight-year-old farmer who had looked after the land for two years, told them: “In my book, they are fine people. I’ve never met the boy, but Mr. and Mrs. Klenner, when he was living, were as nice a people as I’ve ever known.”
When the search was completed, Wednesday afternoon, Rockingham County Sheriff Bobby Vernon revealed that the officers had found some empty casings for a .223 rifle, three reinforced foxhole bunkers, two of which appeared recently dug, several campsites, twenty-five well-tended marijuana plants, and twenty-five pounds of ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer that, when mixed with fuel oil, creates an explosive. No weapons were found.
On Wednesday at 7 P.M., a memorial service was held for John and Jim at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Greensboro. The boys’ bodies were not present. Tom had gone earlier to a funeral home to see them and make arrangements to have them flown to Albuquerque.
“They didn’t look dead,” he sorrowfully told a reporter later. “They looked asleep. They didn’t look mangled or anything.”
Nearly one hundred people, including some of John’s and Jim’s classmates, attended the service. Tom, Kathy, and other family members filed into the church behind the priest.
“And anyone who has life, and has committed himself to me in faith shall not die forever,” the priest intoned during the ten-minute service, as he asked God to “take James and John into your kingdom of heaven.”
After the service, Tom and Kathy received callers at the Newsom home in Greensboro. When Susie Sharp said to Tom, “I just can’t believe Susie would have had anything to do with killing those boys,” Kathy became so angry that Tom had to lead her into another room to calm down.
YOUTHS POISONED, SHOT BEFORE BLAST, read the front page headline in Thursday morning’s
Greensboro News & Record.
The shocking news was the first strong public evidence that Susie might have been something more than an innocent bystander in the bizarre series of events. But Susie’s family simply could not accept that she had taken part in killing her children.
“She wouldn’t have allowed that,” Susie Sharp told the
News & Record.
“Maybe she was dead and sitting up in the seat before they were killed. The possibilities are limitless. I just can’t imagine even a crazy person being so deranged.”
Louise blamed Fritz completely. “She was under his power,” she said.
The
Winston-Salem Journal
quoted District Attorney Tisdale as saying an undercover person had provided information that Fritz might choose suicide over arrest.
“We had an insight into him that he wouldn’t be taken alive,” he said. “They were trying to handle him with kid gloves, but this man couldn’t be handled with kid gloves.
“To be quite honest with you, if they weren’t going to have the children, nobody was.”
On Thursday morning, an unannounced graveside service with only family members and close friends in attendance was held for Fritz at Greenview Cemetery in Reidsville. He was buried beside his father. The footstone on Dr. Klenner’s grave read, BELOVED PHYSICIAN. The stone that would be placed at Fritz’s grave would read, DEVOTED SON.
Thursday afternoon’s
Reidsville Review
carried a story in which Louise responded to Tom’s charge that Susie might have accompanied Fritz to Kentucky to kill Delores and Janie.
“I don’t believe it,” she said. “I don’t believe one word of it.”
Neither could she accept that Susie might have been involved in any of the other killings.
“We feel that she was afraid of an unknown killer,” she said.
Susie Sharp was quoted as calling Susie “a most devoted mother, almost overprotective of the children.” She said that her niece had become withdrawn and very fearful in the past year.
She said of Fritz: “I’ve come to the conclusion he was evidently a paranoid schizophrenic.”
Louise called Fritz “obsessed and insane.” She said Dr. Klenner was very possessive of his son and wouldn’t let him see his aunts.
“I didn’t have any affection for him,” she said of Fritz. “He was taught to have little affection for his aunts. His daddy seemed to feel we wouldn’t mold the child the way he wanted him to be molded.”
One thing Louise didn’t mention was that, a year earlier, the Sharp family home had been broken into and her jewelry and the family silver stolen. She and her sister Susie had been certain that Fritz had done it. Fritz never visited his aunts, but one day the previous summer he had shown up at the house and told Louise he wanted to inspect her locks because he was concerned about her security. She had let him in, and after a tour of the house, he had pronounced her locks woefully insufficient. A week later, while Louise was out of town, the house was broken into and the jewelry and silver were taken. But Louise and Susie had not been able to bring themselves to tell the police about their suspicions of Fritz. He was family, after all, and they didn’t want to risk hurting their sister Annie Hill and creating a family scandal. The police had never solved the crime.
The Sharp and Newsom families gathered for a memorial service for Susie at 2 P.M. on Thursday in the same sanctuary where the service for the boys had been held the night before. Her body had been cremated, and her ashes were interred in the church columbarium.
After his sister’s service, Rob granted his first interview to two reporters from the
News & Record.
He described Susie, whom he’d seen only infrequently in the past twenty years, as “bright, hard-working, very reliable, very dependable, always carried through.” He told of her estrangement from her family, of her family’s fear that she was growing inward and too dependent on Fritz.
“We felt she was becoming very, very isolated, very withdrawn, that she wasn’t sharing her feelings or her plans with anyone but her cousin,” he said.
His parents thought that an “unhealthy relationship,” he said.
He told of his November meeting with Susie, during which she had expressed her fears of losing her children and being murdered. He revealed that she had been seeing a psychiatrist and had attended three group therapy sessions to try to learn to detach from her children.
Several months earlier, he said, he had arranged another meeting with his sister and Fritz to try to get a reading on how things were going. They met for lunch at Stamey’s Barbecue and had “the most normal conversation you can imagine,” mostly about his work as an alcoholism counselor.
He last saw his sister on the Saturday before her death, he said, when she came to his house and spent nearly an hour talking about their parents’ estate.