Bitter Blood (55 page)

The detectives arrived in Lexington a few minutes after noon and went straight to the neat, story-and-a-half, shuttered home of Violet Firebaugh, a widow who rented spare rooms to college students. Mrs. Firebaugh had company and said that Ian was not there. He likely would be in a little later. The detectives went to lunch and returned to find Ian nervously awaiting them, clearly frightened.

“We need to talk to you,” Gentry said. “Would you mind coming out to the car?”

Ian accompanied them to the four-door Ford Crown Victoria and got into the backseat. The detectives got into the front. Ian lit a cigarette, and both detectives noticed that he trembled as he smoked it.

Gentry asked first for biographical information, then went straight to the camping trip with Fritz less than two weeks earlier. Would he mind telling them about that?

Fritz had called about 3 that Friday afternoon and asked him to meet him at Roanoke Mountain at 6, Ian said. He’d gone there and waited until the overlook closed, but Fritz didn’t arrive. He drove back to his room in Lexington and called Fritz’s mother, who told him that Fritz had left several hours earlier. A little later Fritz called from Roanoke Mountain and said that he’d come on to Lexington. He arrived before midnight and they struck out for the Blue Ridge Parkway. They went to Peaks of Otter, set up a camp and got to sleep about 6 or 7. They slept until about 1, had brunch at the coffee shop, and returned to prepare for a night hike. They left about 5 and got caught in a rainstorm near the top of the mountain, where they stopped and started a fire to dry themselves. They got back to the campsite well after midnight, went to sleep, got up late, made breakfast, broke camp. Fritz brought him back to his room, took a shower, called Susie and told her to meet him for dinner at Natural Bridge, then called his mother. After Fritz left, Ian said, he just stayed in his room the rest of the evening.

Ian lit another cigarette as he talked. His mouth was obviously dry, his tongue sticking. Now and then his voice cracked. The fine bead of sweat that broke out on his forehead and upper lip didn’t go unnoticed.

Had Ian seen Fritz since then? Gentry asked.

Yes, he’d talked to him just the night before. Fritz had called to find out how he was doing. And Fritz had come back to Lexington on the Wednesday night following the camping trip to help him study for his final exam in his medical ethics class. Ian went on to explain that Fritz was a doctor—of course, he realized, the detectives probably knew that—although he wasn’t practicing right now.

“He’s not a doctor,” Gentry said. “He was never even in medical school. He just pretended that he was. His own mother told us that.”

Ian looked startled, and Gentry pushed on with his questions. Was Ian aware of any weapons Fritz might own?

Yes, Ian said, they’d gone shooting together several times. They’d fired a .223 assault rifle, a .45 and a .22 pistol, he said, failing to mention the Uzi submachine gun. The last time they’d gone shooting was on Mother’s Day, just a few weeks before.

Gentry paused in his questioning and consulted his notes, leaving Ian, who still puffed nervously on his cigarette, to ponder what they’d just been over.

“You know,” Gentry finally said, “this just isn’t going to fly. Something’s wrong here. Fritz claimed that y’all left out on your hike about eight, but you said five. Fritz said that y’all didn’t go to bed when you got back, that you just laid around and talked, but you said you went to sleep. Which way is it?”

Ian gulped noticeably and took another quick puff on his cigarette. The detectives could see panic welling in his eyes.

“You know,” Gentry pushed on, “in the time you say it took for this hike, ya’ll could’ve driven to Winston-Salem, murdered three people, and returned to Virginia.”

He didn’t have to say any more. Ian broke into tears and began sobbing loudly, his head in his hands.

The detectives were surprised by his sudden outburst and looked wonderingly at one another, saying nothing.

“I’m thinking, ‘This is too easy,’” Gentry said later. “Usually, you wind up having to get a little ugly and go back and forth with ’em before something like this happens.”

Gentry and Sturgill sat quietly as Ian struggled to control himself. After a couple of minutes, Gentry broke the silence.

“You want to tell us what really happened?” he said softly.

It was true, Ian said, that he and Fritz had been to Winston-Salem that night but he had not known of any plan to murder the Newsoms. Fritz had recruited him for a CIA mission to go after arms thieves, drug dealers, traitors. He went on to tell the whole long story of how he’d dreamed of becoming a secret agent, how Fritz had finally told him that he was with the CIA and had invited him on a mission to Texas. The mission had been planned for a couple of months, he said, but after Fritz came to pick him up for the camping trip that was to provide their cover story, he had changed the plan. They were going instead to North Carolina, first to make a “touch” in Winston-Salem. There Fritz would steal a car, and then they would go on to Charlotte for a second operation.

Gentry and Sturgill had heard a lot of stories in their years in law enforcement, but never one like this.

“I’m writing,” Gentry recalled later, “but we kept looking at each other like ‘Is this guy for real?’ It was almost too incredible to believe.” But Ian was so rattled and so sincere that neither of them doubted that he now was telling the truth.

He and Fritz had gone to Peaks of Otter and camped just as he’d told them earlier, Ian said, but instead of going on a night hike, they had left at about 5 P.M. for Winston-Salem. Questioning Ian carefully about times and locations, the detectives were able to put together the exact route Fritz had taken across Winston-Salem. And when Ian described the shopping center where he had turned to let Fritz out nearby in the darkness, the detectives knew its location precisely. It was just down the hill from Nanna’s house. The time, Ian said, was about 11 P.M.

When Ian told of Fritz’s reappearance in the gold car and of his fear when the police car stopped Fritz later, the detectives grew excited. Surely there would be at least a radio record of the stop. From that they would learn the officer’s identity and perhaps he would remember Fritz. Regardless, it would still be corroborating evidence for Ian’s story.

After Ian told them of Fritz’s decision to cancel the Charlotte part of the operation and of Fritz’s return to the scene to leave the car, the detectives questioned him closely about the trip back to the mountains and all the stops to dispose of evidence. Their hope was to recover some of the items.

When Ian had finished his story, Gentry asked if he hadn’t been concerned after he heard about the Newsom murders. Ian said that he had been “stunned” at the news, but that he thought the murders had occurred on Sunday night, not Saturday, and that it was all just a big coincidence. Besides, he said, he trusted Fritz and couldn’t believe he would do that. True, he knew that Fritz had killed three people, but he believed that was sanctioned by the CIA and thus all right.

Gentry thought that Ian’s naïveté was a spectacle to behold, but even with such a handicap, Ian should have known that the CIA couldn’t operate in such fashion without stirring official interest.

“It’s not like James Bond where somebody goes through and kills people and nobody asks why,” he said.

Perhaps fear was what had kept Ian from linking his and Fritz’s activities to the Newsom murders and coming forth earlier, Gentry thought. Regardless, he was now clearly repentant, and seemed eager to do whatever he could to make amends.

Ian had mentioned in his story that Fritz had paid him three one-hundred-dollar bills for his part in the mission, and he had deposited them in an automatic teller at Dominion Bank shortly after Fritz left on Sunday. He still had the deposit slip, and the detectives wanted that for corroborating evidence. He also had mentioned the Colt Gold Cup National Match .45-caliber pistol Fritz had given him, and they asked him for that as well.

Both detectives went with Ian to his room to fetch these, and they again grew excited when Ian mentioned something that had occurred on Fritz’s return trip to Lexington the previous Wednesday. Not only had Fritz told Ian that his superiors at the CIA had been very impressed with how Ian handled himself, Fritz had changed the slide on the pistol he’d given Ian. Would he have put the slide from the murder weapon onto Ian’s pistol? It would be easy enough to check. The two empty shell casings found at the Newsom house had ejection markings on them that could be matched with the slide.

Gentry and Sturgill asked Ian to go with them to the Lexington Police Department, where they again went over the details of his story and asked if he would accompany them the next day to retrace the stops he and Fritz had made on the way back from Winston-Salem and search for the abandoned evidence. Now angry about being duped by Fritz, Ian quickly agreed.

After warning Ian not to make any mention of their visit should Fritz call or come back, Gentry and Sturgill dropped him off at his room, then stopped at a nearby gas station telephone booth to report to their supervisors.

Gentry called Captain Ron Barker.

“He was elated,” Barker recalled later. “I knew what he was going to say.”

Sturgill called his commander, Ed Hunt, and also called the SBI ballistics lab in Raleigh to alert them to have somebody standing by, because he and Gentry were bringing in Ian’s .45 to see if it could be matched to the shell casings.

Earlier that afternoon, not knowing how long it might take for the local officers to make a case against Fritz, the Kentucky detectives, Sherman Childers and Lennie Nobles, left Winston-Salem to return home with the information they had gathered so they could begin plotting strategy with Dan Davidson.

“I’ve got a good feeling about today,” Ron Barker told them before they left. “Don’t go more than two hours without calling me.”

Nobles called when they stopped in Asheville for supper.

“If I were you, I’d turn that car around and drive back to Winston-Salem about as fast as you can drive,” Barker told them.

“We’re on our way,” said Nobles.

Less than two hours later, the detectives hurried into Barker’s office and asked, “What’s up?”

Barker grinned and reached for two bags beside his desk. Earlier, local officers had promised Childers and Nobles visitors’ gift packages of sample local products, but the officer who was to pick them up let it slip his mind until Childers and Nobles already had gone.

“We finally got these gifts for you,” Barker said, “and I didn’t want y’all to go home without ’em.”

Then, without allowing time for Childers’s and Nobles’s colorful mutterings to abate, Barker said, “We got him! We got him!”

At 2:30 P.M. on Thursday, as Ian was telling his strange tale to detectives in Virginia, Susie called her lawyer, Sandy Sands. First, she thanked him for being supportive, but that wasn’t the purpose of her call.

“She was even more terrified than when I saw her that Friday before the murders,” Sands recalled later. “I could tell by the breaks in her voice, just the way she talked, that she was petrified.”

Her fear was that she was going to be murdered and that the boys would be kidnapped or murdered.

“She felt she and the boys were next,” Sands said.

She told of slipping the boys into the back of the church at the funerals and of shielding John and Jim from photographers at the cemetery to make it less easy for kidnappers or killers to spot them. She was certain that the mob was after them. Fritz had gone to pick up the boys now at school, she said, to protect them.

“What happens to my inheritance if I die?” she asked.

Sands explained that it would go to the boys, and if anything happened to them, it would go to their father.

“That can’t happen!” she cried. “They’ll kill me and the kids just to get it. What can we do?”

Sands said that he could draw a will for Susie that would leave everything to her children in a trust to age thirty. If anything happened to them before they reached thirty, she could have the inheritance go to her brother’s children.

Susie told him to draw up the will. She said that she wanted to take it to the newspapers and make it public so that anybody planning to kill her and the children for the inheritance would know that it wouldn’t do them any good.

Sands said he’d work on it and have it to her to sign by the coming week.

After getting Gentry’s call, Ron Barker and Detective John Boner went to the Winston-Salem Police Department and listened to the radio transmission tapes from the night of the murders.

They heard an officer stopping Nanna’s car. “What we were sitting there just praying for was for him to come back and say, ‘I want a license check on a Fred Klenner.’” Barker recalled. But the officer merely came back to clear himself from the stop.

Still, Barker was hopeful when he learned that the officer was Jim Hull. He’d known Hull for years. “He’s a sharp, fine officer,” Barker said later. “I knew if anybody would remember a routine stop, it would be Jim.”

At the SBI lab in Raleigh, Tom Sturgill and Allen Gentry learned that the shell casings found at the murder scene had not passed through the slide Fritz put on Ian’s .45. But this was only a minor disappointment to cap off an otherwise productive day, and they arrived back in Winston-Salem after midnight, tired but ecstatic, confident that they soon would be closing in on Fritz.