Cousins in love & a trail of murder: Infamous couple died in NC car blast 36 years ago
All that remained when a homemade explosive went off under the front passenger seat of a Chevrolet Blazer on a North Carolina highway in 1985 was a mangled mother of two and her first cousin-turned-lover, barely breathing in a ditch.
Two boys and the family dog were also dead in the backseat.
Thus ended the bizarre life of Fritz Klenner at 32 years old on June 3 — 36 years ago. Klenner, a fake doctor in a small town who occasionally posed as a covert CIA agent, was implicated in the murders of five people before his death. Investigators never got the chance to interview him, despite a last-ditch effort after the bomb went off.
“Hoping for a confession, the detective leaned an ear toward Klenner, who gurgled blood and died,” the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources said in a blog post describing his final moments.
The bizarre tale of Klenner and his cousin, Susie Newsom Lynch, became known as the “Bitter Blood” murders, after a book of the same name penned by Greensboro News & Record reporter Jerry Bledsoe.
An unusual love affair
Klenner and Lynch were born into rich families, Bledsoe reported. Klenner was the son of a controversial doctor in Reidsville known for touting vitamin C as a cure for polio and multiple sclerosis. Lynch was the niece of Susie Sharp, a North Carolina judge and the first elected female chief justice of a state supreme court in the U.S.
Lynch married a dentist named Tom and had two kids, John and Jim, according to The News & Record.
She eventually separated from her husband in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and returned to North Carolina with her sons. Lynch reportedly hated it in Albuquerque, feeling it was “a place beneath her position” that “lacked culture and dignity,” blogger Chris Knight wrote in 2015.
Lynch reconnected with her cousin when she moved to Greensboro and the pair became romantically involved, according to the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
At the time, Klenner was pretending to study medicine at Duke while working with his father, The News & Record reported.
Knight said his aunt still remembers “Fritz Klenner making the rounds at Annie Penn Hospital in Reidsville” while “wearing his white doctor’s coat,” often accompanied by his father.
Klenner also claimed to have been a Green Beret in Vietnam and gone undercover for the CIA, according to Knight. He frequented gun shops in the area, too.
A string of murders
It was during this time that Klenner and Lynch reportedly became convinced her ex-husband was trying to get custody of their two sons.
In July 1984, Delores Lynch and Janie Lynch — Susie Newsom Lynch’s former mother-in-law and sister-in-law — were found dead at Delores’ home in Kentucky, The News & Observer reported. They had been shot at close range just a few days before Lynch’s sons were due to visit.
The police reportedly thought it looked like a professional hit. According to the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, Klenner is suspected of killing them “in an attempt to make the ex-husband appear to have mafia ties.”
Then, a little over a year later, Klenner convinced a 21-year-old named Ian Perkins in Reidsville that he needed his help taking out “communist drug traffickers” for the CIA, The N&O reported.
Perkins, who reportedly believed he was auditioning for the federal agency, drove Klenner to Winston-Salem where Lynch’s parents and grandmother lived. All three were found dead about a half-mile from where Perkins dropped off Klenner, according to The News & Record.
It didn’t take long for detectives to find a common relative — Lynch — in the five murders, Knight said in his blog. They also found Perkins, who confessed to driving Klenner to Winston-Salem on the night of the murders.
Perkins wore a wire in three subsequent conversations with Klenner. The closest he got to a confession was on the morning of June 3, 1985, when Klenner told Perkins he’d “write a paper saying you were not knowingly involved, that you believed you were on a covert mission for the government,” The News & Record reported.
“I’ve got things to do. ... I won’t see you again,” Klenner reportedly said at the end of their conversation.
He was tailed by law enforcement to his cousin’s apartment, where they loaded the Blazer with camping equipment, according to The N&O. Lynch’s two sons and the family dog climbed in the back seat and the car drove off.
Police attempted to surround Klenner, who fired a machine gun at them before taking off again. He pulled over on N.C. 150 a short time later and fired the machine gun a few more times.
Then the car exploded.
‘Everybody’s gone’
Detectives believe the bomb was under Lynch’s seat, according to the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. Her body was found “blown apart” in a nearby culvert. She was 39 years old.
Klenner lived for a few moments. An autopsy revealed the boys, then 10 and 9, had been poisoned with cyanide and shot in the head before the explosion.
Perkins was the only individual charged in relation to the Winston-Salem murders. He served four months for being an accessory after the fact, according to the Associated Press.
At a news conference the day after the explosion, Oldham County, Kentucky, police Sgt. Dennis Clark told reporters that Lynch stood to inherit a significant sum of money from the individuals who were murdered, the AP reported. He said police “have no doubt” Klenner killed Lynch’s former mother-in-law and sister-in-law in Kentucky.
But some questions remained as to the motive.
“Was it their blood relationship? Was it the child custody case? There’s a multitude of potentials,” Forsyth County Sheriff Preston Oldham said at the time. “Only God knows, because everybody’s gone.”
