Bitter Blood (77 page)

Rob thought that he understood some of Fritz’s motivations.

“I think there was a pile of pent-up hatred. I think that Fritz felt that the rest of the family felt that Dr. Klenner, Annie Hill, him, and everybody in the Klenner household was eccentric, superstitious, and laughable. And I think that he hated us for it. I think he misjudged that a little bit. I think people felt that Dr. Klenner was in many ways eccentric, that his political views were laughable, but I never heard anybody in my family question Dr. Klenner’s brilliance or his creativity.”

This brought up a theory I had been mulling. Did Rob think it possible that the Klenners might have set out to alienate Susie from her family, to claim and conquer her as the prize fruit on the Sharp family tree, the one bearing the name of the resented family matriarch and most successful member? Was it a means of striking back at the family for its failure to fully accept Dr. Klenner?

“Susie was always drawn to the Klenners,” he said. “She always liked them, even as a little girl, and Fred was especially fond of Susie. And when Susie got back to North Carolina after her separation, and my mother and father were telling her to do things like examine yourself and see where you might be at fault, all she had to do was ride up the road to the Klenner household where everybody was saying, ‘You were perfect. It was that son of a bitch that caused all of this.’ It wasn’t healthy, but it was what she wanted to hear. I think the Klenners did take a certain perverse pleasure to my sister being closer to them than to her own parents, in preferring their advice to her own parents’ advice, no question in my mind about that. And for some of the same reasons that you mentioned. They’re saying, ‘Aha, you high and mighty Sharps, one of your own has to turn to us.’”

Weren’t Susie’s spiteful acts toward her family and Tom a form of violence? I asked.

“Well, they express feelings of vengeance and hatred, yeah. You know, the difference between the way I look at my sister and the wrongness of Fritz goes beyond the way she acts out or chose to act out. There’s a big difference between spitefulness and meanness and scapegoating and a refusal to do any honest self-examination, on the one hand, and being a cold, calculating, premeditated life taker. There are orders of magnitude to wrongness and evil, and to my mind Fritz Klenner hit the platinum-label level.”

So did he believe that Susie was a victim of evil that she built herself, one spiteful and unforgiving act upon another, until it was out of control, while Fritz was simply born evil, or possessed with it at such an early age that it merely took a catalyst for it to assume command?

“Yes, I do. And they happened to come together.”

Gallery

LEFT: Delores Lynch. At sixty-eight she remained a hovering presence in her children’s lives. (
Courtesy of Greensboro News & Record
.) RIGHT: Janie Lynch. At thirty-nine, she looked far younger. She was sweet and without her mother’s guile. (
Courtesy of Greensboro News & Record
.)

LEFT: Janie with her last boyfriend, Phil Pandolfi, fourteen years her junior, at the University of Louisville’s dental school. RIGHT: Phil took Janie to the senior prom shortly before her graduation from dental school, only weeks before her death.

LEFT: The house on Covered Bridge Road. Delores isolated her paranoia in fourteen rooms protected by iron bars and alarms. RIGHT: The parking area beside the Lynch house has been marked for evidence by police. Delores’s body lies by the garage door. The killer probably lurked behind the car nearest the house as Delores arrived home from church.

LEFT: Lieutenant Dan Davidson of the Kentucky State Police. He had investigated so many grisly homicides that he couldn’t remember them all, but the Lynch case became the biggest of his long career. CENTER: Detective Sherman Childers of the Kentucky State Police took one look at Delores’s and Janie’s bodies and said, “This was a hit. A pro took these people out.” RIGHT: Lennie Nobles of the Oldham County Police had been a detective for only five weeks when he was assigned to the Lynch murders, his first homicide.

Paw-Paw and Nanna’s house in Winston-Salem, where the lesson of love was always present until brutal murder intervened. (
Photo by Gerry Broome, courtesy of Greensboro News & Record.
)

An ambulance bears Nanna’s body away from her house. (
Photo by Gerry Broome, courtesy of
Greensboro News & Record.)

LEFT: Rob Newsom knew something was wrong when his parents didn’t return home as scheduled. CENTER: Hattie Newsom. At eighty-four, Nanna still gardened, cooked chicken pie suppers for her church, and tended her big house. People who knew her could not imagine a more unlikely murder victim. (
Courtesy of
Greensboro News & Record.)
RIGHT: Detective Sergeant Allen Gentry of the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Department was drawn between two loves, fast cars and police work. He thought the Newsom murders were executions.

LEFT: Florence Newsom had retired from teaching shortly before her death. Strain from family problems depressed her and seemed to turn her hair white overnight, but she was a woman of great will. Police thought she had struggled with her killer, who savaged her body. RIGHT: Robert Newsom, former tobacco company executive, civic leader, devoted son, was preparing to move into his mother’s house to look after her. Friends were shocked that a man so gentle should die so violently. (
Photo by Lorillard Co., courtesy of Greensboro News & Record.)

LEFT: Annie Britt Sharp, standing behind sofa, with four of her children and three grandchildren. Standing with his mother is James Sharp, her youngest son. Seated, left to right, are Annie Hill Klenner, with her daughters, Mary Ann, on end of couch, and Gertrude, Judge Susie Sharp, and Florence Sharp Newsom at right. Susie Newsom, called Susie Q, sits between her mother and Judge Sharp. (
Photo by Mrs. Bernadette W. Hoyle.
) RIGHT: Judge Susie Sharp, Su-Su, Susie Newsom’s favorite aunt, for whom she was named, became the first woman elected chief justice of a state supreme court in America. Time magazine named her one of America’s twelve most important women. (
Photo by Dave Nicholson, courtesy of Greensboro News & Record.
)