Susie Newsom Lynch and the Bitter Blood Murders

The Bitter Blood murders were a string of five family killings in Kentucky and North Carolina between July 1984 and May 1985, carried out by Susie Newsom Lynch and her first cousin and lover, Fritz Klenner Jr., to tilt a bitter child-custody fight in Susie’s favor. The case ended on June 3, 1985, when Klenner’s Chevrolet Blazer exploded during a police chase near Summerfield, North Carolina, killing him, Susie, and her two young sons, whom Susie had already poisoned and shot.

The Couple at the Center of the Case

Susie Sharp Newsom came from a prominent Winston-Salem family. Her aunt and namesake, Susie Marshall Sharp, had been the first woman elected chief justice of a state supreme court anywhere in the United States, retiring from the North Carolina Supreme Court in 1979.¹

Susie married Tom Lynch, a dentist, and the couple had two sons, John and Jim. They divorced in September 1979, and Susie moved back to North Carolina, where a long custody fight over the boys began.²

After the divorce, Susie reconnected with her first cousin, Fritz Klenner, and the two became romantically involved. Fritz was the son of a Reidsville, North Carolina physician, and had built an elaborate false identity around himself. He claimed to be enrolled at Duke Medical School, though he had dropped out of the University of Mississippi without a degree.³ He told people he was a CIA operative and styled himself as a survivalist. While working as an unlicensed assistant in his father’s clinic, Fritz diagnosed Susie with multiple sclerosis, a diagnosis his father supported but that was never independently verified.² Investigators later called him a “pathological liar.”⁴

When Fritz’s father died on May 20, 1984, Fritz inherited $25,000 from a life insurance policy and spent the money on weapons and military equipment.² By then, investigators later concluded, Susie and Fritz had come to believe that relatives on both sides of the family were conspiring to take the boys away from her.

The 1984 Kentucky Killings

The killings began that summer. On July 22, 1984, Delores Lynch, Tom Lynch’s mother, and her daughter Janie Lynch were shot execution-style in their home in Prospect, Oldham County, Kentucky.⁵ Police believed Delores was the intended target and Janie was killed because she was present. Investigators later concluded that Fritz Klenner carried out the shootings and that the killings were meant to frame Tom Lynch.⁶ The case went unsolved for nearly a year.

The Winston-Salem Triple Homicide

On May 18, 1985, Susie’s parents and grandmother were found shot to death in the family home on Valley Road in Winston-Salem. Robert Newsom Jr., 65, died of gunshot wounds. Florence Newsom, 63, was killed by a combination of stabbing and gunshot wounds. Hattie Newsom, 85, was also shot.² The killer had posed the grandmother’s body and taken Florence Newsom’s ring from the scene.

The murders happened the day after Robert Newsom told Susie he planned to testify on behalf of Tom Lynch in the upcoming custody trial.² Investigators came to believe that both the Kentucky and North Carolina relatives were killed to keep them from testifying against Susie in custody proceedings.⁷

How Investigators Connected the Cases

The Winston-Salem triple homicide was worked by Detective Allen Gentry of the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office and Agent Tom Sturgill of the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation. The two interviewed Fritz Klenner and Susie Newsom Lynch at their apartment in Greensboro.³

Gentry noticed a handcuff key on Klenner’s keyring. As he later put it, only law enforcement officers and criminals typically carry handcuff keys, and Klenner was not an officer.³ Around the same time, a phone call between North Carolina and Kentucky investigators tied the Winston-Salem killings to the 1984 Lynch murders.⁵ The common thread between both scenes was Susie Newsom Lynch and Fritz Klenner.

Gentry later said the SBI had failed to share a file with Kentucky authorities that documented Klenner’s “soldier of fortune” claims and his ties to a Durham gun shop. He also raised the question of whether Chief Justice Susie Sharp had intervened in some way on behalf of her niece during the custody disputes, though no definitive evidence of that was ever established.³

The Chase and the Explosion

As officers closed in, Fritz Klenner fled Greensboro on the afternoon of June 3, 1985, with Susie and the two boys in his Chevrolet Blazer. The vehicle was loaded with weapons, grenades, and explosives. Police pursued it north into Summerfield for about 30 minutes. At roughly 6:40 p.m., near the intersection of N.C. Highway 150 and Strader Lane, the Blazer exploded.⁴

Investigators determined that a bomb had been placed beneath Susie’s seat. Her remains were found in a nearby culvert.⁸ Klenner was found in a ditch, barely alive, and died shortly after. The bodies of John, 10, and Jim, 9, were recovered from the wreckage along with two dogs.⁴

The medical examiner’s findings were especially grim. Both boys had been poisoned with cyanide and shot in the head before the explosion. Investigators concluded that Susie herself had poisoned and shot her sons.⁷

The Only Person Prosecuted

With Susie and Fritz dead, only one person was convicted in connection with the killings. Ian Mark Perkins, a 21-year-old college student, pleaded to three counts of accessory after the fact to murder in July 1985 for his role in the Winston-Salem triple homicide.⁹

Klenner had told Perkins he was a CIA agent and that driving Klenner between Virginia and Winston-Salem on the weekend of May 16, 1985, was an “audition” for a career in government intelligence. Perkins drove Klenner to and from the area around the time of the Newsom murders, and the two concocted a cover story that they had been camping and hiking at Peaks of Otter in Bedford, Virginia.⁹ Perkins served four months in a minimum-security prison. Gentry described him as “profoundly naive” and a victim of Klenner’s manipulation, and said that had Klenner survived, he intended to use Perkins on further “missions” that investigators believed would have included killing Tom Lynch.

How the Case Lives On

The story became the subject of Jerry Bledsoe’s 1988 book Bitter Blood, which reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list and remains the standard account of the murders.⁶ In January 1994, CBS aired a four-hour, two-part miniseries adaptation titled In the Best of Families: Marriage, Pride & Madness, starring Kelly McGillis as Susie, Harry Hamlin as Fritz, and Keith Carradine as the ex-husband (renamed Tom Leary for the broadcast). It was directed by Jeff Bleckner and filmed in Wilmington, North Carolina.¹⁰

In November 2025, the Greensboro News & Record published a six-part investigative series marking the 40th anniversary of the murders, with updated interviews, archival-to-present photographs of the crime scene locations, and a guide to 21 key figures in the case.⁴ Gentry, who retired from the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office in 2001 and later served with the U.S. Marshals Service, still keeps the handcuff key from the case preserved in Lucite. “It’s the kind of case that won’t go away,” he told the paper.

1
Duke University School of Law. Without Precedent: The Life of Susie Marshall Sharp
2
Radford University. Frederick Klenner Serial Killer Case Study
3
Greensboro News & Record. Bitter Blood Investigation: Lead Detective Reflects on Case
4
Greensboro News & Record. Bitter Blood: The 40th Anniversary Retrospective
5
WLKY. 1984 Murders of Mother and Daughter in Oldham County
6
Huntersville Lawyer. Bitter Blood: The Shocking True Crime Story of the Lynch and Newsom Families
7
Spectrum News. Triad Residents Remember 30th Anniversary of Bitter Blood Killings
8
North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. The Bizarre Bitter Blood Murders
9
Greensboro News & Record. The Accomplice: Ian Perkins and the Bitter Blood Case
10
Variety. In the Best of Families: Marriage, Pride and Madness Review