Bitter Blood (54 page)

“He’s a real cool customer,” Gentry agreed.

Both detectives realized after this interview that they never would get much out of Fritz that would be helpful to them. But they had been given someplace to turn.

“The problem was going to be Ian,” Gentry said later. “We didn’t know what to expect.”

But before they confronted Ian, the detectives had to take another step. That night, Lennie Nobles and Sherman Childers, the detectives who had been so long frustrated by the Lynch case, arrived in Winston-Salem and checked into a motel. Early Wednesday morning, they met at the sheriff’s department with Gentry, Sturgill, Barker, and other detectives investigating the Newsom murders. The detectives spent a full day going over all the details of both cases.

After the session with the North Carolina officers, Nobles called Dan Davidson. Months earlier, in a moment of despair, Nobles had gone to talk to a veteran homicide detective in Louisville about the Lynch murders, hoping for some guidance that might lead him to a break in the case. “That family has a dark cloud in it somewhere,” the detective told him. “Find that cloud and you’ve found your killer.” Nobles had passed this on to Davidson.

When Davidson answered the phone that night, the first thing Nobles said was, “I think we’ve found our dark cloud.”

40

The detectives knew little about Ian Perkins other than that he was a neighbor of the Klenners. But the relationship went much deeper than that. Ian was tied to the Klenners from birth. His grandfather, Felix Fournier, was Fritz’s godfather. Like Dr. Klenner, Fournier came to Reidsville an outsider. Like Dr. Klenner, his family was European, his religion Catholicism, and these things drew the two men together. But Fournier’s manner made him even more of an outsider than Dr. Klenner in the country town.

“He looked like a foreign diplomat,” said his friend Phil Link. “He had this formal bearing about him. He was the most perfect gentleman that I ever knew in my life. He was an old-school gentleman. He didn’t want to hear any gossip about anybody. He didn’t want to hear a dirty joke. He wasn’t a prude. He just didn’t care for that sort of thing.”

Fournier moved to Reidsville from Richmond in the forties to become a foreman of the American Tobacco Company plant. He brought with him his wife, Maria, and their only child, Camille, and they settled into a modest house near the country club. Later, when Fournier became manager of the tobacco plant, he built a larger, brick house on Huntsdale Road, a one-block street on which his friend Dr. Klenner lived.

A shy and gracious man, Fournier loved music, played the violin, and aspired to write fiction. He and his wife belonged to the Reidsville Studio Group, which delved into the arts. His wife painted with watercolors, and he wrote stiff and formal short stories in a nineteenth-century style. Once, after much persuasion, Fournier agreed to play his violin for the group, but he was so shy that he insisted on playing in a separate room, out of sight of his audience.

Fournier died of a heart attack after church one Sunday in 1960, five years before the birth of his only grandson.

Camille Fournier had been advised not to have children. As a child, she was diagnosed as having polio by Dr. Klenner, who treated her with vitamin C and won credit and undying gratitude from her family for saving her life. The childhood disease and her petite size would make childbearing difficult, Dr. Klenner told her, but after her marriage to Tom Perkins, an engineer with strongly conservative political leanings at American Tobacco Company, she wanted to try. Dr. Klenner cared for her during her difficult pregnancy with plenty of vitamins and later delivered Ian. If not for Dr. Klenner, Camille later told friends, Ian would not have been.

“Dr. Klenner was not an open subject with her,” said a former co-worker. “She worshiped the ground he walked on.”

Camille became managing editor of the
Reidsville Review
, and in February of 1971, she wrote a long and glowing article about Dr. Klenner and his work, tying it to the publication of Linus Pauling’s book
Vitamin C and the Common Cold,
in which Dr. Klenner’s vitamin experiments were noted. She later reprinted the article “at popular request.”

When Ian was four, Tom and Camille Perkins adopted a second child, a daughter they named Lori, Camille telling friends that she didn’t want Ian to grow up a lonely only child. Some wondered later if she’d been successful in that goal.

“Ian always just struck me as a very lonely little boy,” said a family friend. “I always felt sorry for him as a little boy. He was an idolized son in a strange sort of way. He was idolized and dismissed at the same time. But he was always idolized as a symbol instead of a person. They just had so many hopes pinned on Ian. He blinked a lot. He held his body in a way that always looked as if he felt he was in the way.”

When Ian was thirteen, his parents divorced, and he, his mother, and his sister moved first into an apartment, then into a house on Ann Ruston Street in a middle-income neighborhood not far from downtown. In July of 1972, Camille left the newspaper to take a job producing a company newsletter for Fieldcrest Mills, a textile plant in nearby Eden. There she met Jim O’Neal, an executive who worked in government relations. They married a year after her divorce, and later they moved into her family home, just down the street from the Klenners, to help care for her aging mother.

In high school, Ian was quiet and studious, a good student who favored science and won an award for a chemistry project. He was president of an amateur radio group and belonged to the Bible Club. After his graduation in 1982, he was accepted at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. A family friend recommended Washington and Lee to him, and he was drawn to its proud traditions. He began as a chemical engineering major but was less than an outstanding student and later switched to philosophy.

As highly patriotic as he was devoutly religious, Ian joined the National Guard during his freshman year and spent his first summer break in basic training. After his sophomore year, he had to choose a military job specialty, and he picked field medic. Dropping out of school for a quarter, he went off to training at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, on August 15, 1984. He completed the training on November 2 and returned to Reidsville. Soon afterward, he ran into Fritz, and they began talking about his training. Fritz spent hours instructing Ian on what he should have learned but wasn’t taught.

And Ian was grateful. He felt special being offered help by Fritz. Like all of the other Klenner family friends and acquaintances, he thought Fritz a doctor, a graduate of Duke Medical School. He knew there had been some problem, because Fritz had kept the clinic operating only a short time after his father’s death, but he thought Fritz was finishing his residency, had a provisional license, and would eventually reopen the clinic.

Ian had known Fritz all of his life, but they had never been close. Fritz occasionally came to Ian’s house with his mother for dinner, but there was an eleven-year difference in Fritz’s and Ian’s ages.

“Ian looked up to Fritz like an uncle,” a neighbor said later.

As they got together to talk about medical and military matters, their friendship grew closer, and Fritz told Ian that when he came home from school one weekend they would go shooting at his father’s farm.

“We’ll have to get out some rifles and see how good you are,” Fritz said.

Fritz and Ian also shared another interest, one that they hadn’t discussed yet. Ian was thinking about going into intelligence work after he finished college, perhaps becoming a covert agent. He had a great-uncle, Gerald Fournier, who was a secret agent in Europe, and after Ian returned to college in January, where his friends took to calling him “Doc” because of his new training, he wrote to his uncle, asking advice. His uncle sent the following reply.

I appreciate you requesting my advice about your career plans. It is not difficult to get accepted for the line of work which I have devoted my life to because it’s an occupation that grows on you. It gives you job satisfaction, but it is frustrating at times. Your mother asked me in the early sixties during her visit with your grandmother to Europe the nature of my job. Although I could not answer her because of classification, I did however ask her to read the book
War of Wits
by Ladislas Farago. But I do not know if you will be able to retain that book now.

Ian, what you want to get into will have to be your choice. However, if you choose to be employed by the CIA, I can put you in contact with a friend of mine who works out of Roslyn, Va. He can evaluate your educational background and assess your capabilities. He can then take you to the CIA screening officer for formal application.

During his midterm break in late February, Ian returned home and dropped by the Klenner house to see Fritz. Fritz had a bandage on the middle finger of his left hand and a splint on his ring finger. He’d found a small homemade bomb taped to the gas tank of Susie’s car, he said, and it had gone off after he removed it. He claimed that he had suffered nerve damage to the middle finger and sprained his ring finger.

He knew who’d put the bomb there, he said. He was certain that Susie’s former husband, Tom Lynch, had contracted with the mob to have her killed. This hadn’t been the only attempt on her, he said, going on to talk at length about Tom’s involvement with the mob. Tom had his own mother and sister killed, he said, so that he could inherit the family fortune and pay off mob debts. And Tom still owed Susie for paying his way through dental school, Fritz said.

They went to the farm, where Fritz got out an AR15 assault rifle, an Uzi submachine gun, and a .45 pistol, and they fired hundreds of rounds of ammunition.

Between rounds, they talked of Ian’s dream of becoming a secret agent, and Fritz hinted that he might be able to help. Later that weekend, Ian showed him the letter he had received from his great-uncle.

On another weekend trip home a couple of weeks later, Ian again went to the farm with Fritz. This time Susie and the boys also came along. Ian rode in Fritz’s Blazer with Chowy, Susie’s protective big male chow. Susie and the boys rode in her Blazer with Maizie, their female chow. Maizie was in heat, and after they got to the farm, Fritz tried to keep Chowy in his vehicle, away from Maizie, but Chowy, protesting, bit him.

That day, Fritz made “shape charges” by softening dynamite with water and pressing it into wine bottles he’d cut in half. He used them to blow holes in the ground, looking for “lava tubes” that he said lay under the surface. He wanted to get into one of the tubes and look around, he said, but he hadn’t been able to find one.

They all fired weapons that day, the boys shooting their .22 assault rifle replicas. Susie wore a .45 pistol in a cross-draw holster, but she chose to fire her .25-caliber Browning.

“Imagine a big, ugly black mugger is about to do something to your children,” Fritz told her as she took aim at the target, and she began firing with such a fierce intensity that she didn’t stop pulling the trigger even after the pistol had run out of ammunition, and Fritz practically had to pry the weapon from her hands.

That day Fritz told Ian that he’d like to come see the campus at Washington and Lee, and Ian said he’d be glad to show him around anytime.

In late March, Fritz came. He brought with him what appeared to be a camera, but later he disclosed it to be a weapon capable of firing a shell at an unsuspecting subject. Ian took him on a tour of the historic town, with its brick streets and restored buildings, as well as the hilltop campus of Washington and Lee, with its Victorian buildings, and the adjoining campus of the Virginia Military Institute, with its Gothic barracks, its military museum, and its ramrod-straight cadets.

Afterward, they sat and talked in the darkness by Lee Chapel, and Fritz disclosed that he was a contract agent for the CIA, that he’d been recruited years earlier when he was at Woodward Academy in Atlanta. He also spent a lot of time at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, he said, and mentioned the Delta Team, but quickly added that these were things Ian didn’t need to know about. He did talk of missions that on occasion had nearly cost him his life. They had brought him much closer to God, he said with a great show of emotion. One of those missions had been to search for POWs in Vietnam, he said.

Ian was flattered that Fritz chose to tell him these things. At last he understood all of Fritz’s mysterious comings and goings, all the exotic weaponry and military gear. He was amazed that he hadn’t realized it sooner.

But he could tell no one about it, for Fritz swore him to secrecy. Fritz knew that he could trust Ian, he said, because Ian, too, wanted to be a “Company man,” and Fritz was going to give him the opportunity to prove himself worthy. He had been authorized to take Ian on a mission to see how he functioned under pressure. Even Ian’s great-uncle Gerald had given his approval. The mission would be to Texas. It would take only four days, and it would involve a “touch,” a necessary killing, but Ian would not have to be part of that. His role would be support only. Would he be interested?

Ian couldn’t say yes quickly enough.

As they rode toward Lexington, Virginia, to find Ian on Thursday morning, May 30, Allen Gentry and Tom Sturgill felt good about the way their case was developing.

“Let’s say we were cautiously optimistic,” Gentry said later. “In this business you don’t want to get too excited, because we’ve all had cases where we felt like we knew who was responsible but couldn’t get all the pieces together to prove it.”