Family Secrets, Part 2

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0:57Phoebe Judge:This is the second episode in a two-part series. If you haven't heard the first episode yet, we'd recommend that you go back and listen to that episode first. This episode contains descriptions of violence, including against children. Please use discretion. In July of 1984, a mother and daughter were found dead at their home in a rural area outside of Louisville, Kentucky. Dolores Lynch was 68. Her daughter, Janie Lynch, was 39. The chief called me at home and said, we've got a double homicide over on Coverbridge Road, which I knew where it was, and I even knew the house because we'd made alarm runs there before.

1:43Phoebe Judge:Dennis Clark was a police officer with the Oldham County Police Department. When he arrived at the home on Covered Bridge Road, he parked and walked up the long driveway. On the driveway in front of the garage, you could see the elderly woman dead, and she'd been shot in the back. She'd also been shot in the head. Her daughter, Janie Lynch, was found inside. She ran down the hall. And she was trying to get to the back room where there was a panic alarm. But before she could set it off, Jeannie Lynch was fatally shot. Police believed both women had been murdered several days earlier. Inside the house, they found an overturned jewelry box and a purse emptied onto a bed.

2:37Phoebe Judge:But there weren't many other clues. We'd been having a lot of break-ins out there just because it's an affluent area and the houses are isolated. And we thought it was probably a robbery. If it was a robbery, the thief left a lot of valuable things behind, like TVs and the silver. We got outside and the chief said, this is, you know, high-income area, going to be a lot of pressure on us to solve this. He goes, I'm going to call in the state and Louisville evidence technicians because if this goes sour and we don't arrest nobody, at least we can spread the blame. Dolores Lynch had lived at the home for more than a decade.

3:21Phoebe Judge:Most of the time, she lived alone. Her husband had died the year before. Dolores was known in her community as a woman who had a temper. People said she could be abrasive. She reportedly once shot and wounded a neighbor's dog with a BB gun. Officer Dennis Clark had met Dolores Lynch when he'd responded to her security alarm going off. Her burglar alarm would go off periodically, and I'd met her that way. She was sort of a cantankerous woman. I mean, not real friendly, I guess you'd say, and complaining about how long it took us to get there. Her daughter, Janie, had just finished dental school.

4:06Phoebe Judge:Janie's brother, Tom, was also a dentist. He lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He receives a call from authorities in Kentucky, and he learns that his mother, Dolores, and his sister, Janie, have been murdered. Greensboro News and Record reporter, Susan Spear. Tom Lynch headed to Kentucky, where he spoke with detectives. They certainly did cast a critical eye toward Tom, because Tom would have benefited from insurance policies had his mother and his other sibling died, and that certainly did put a bit of suspicion cast his way. Everything that she had, she was pretty much leaving to him. And the daughter, that meant he would get everything.

5:05Phoebe Judge:Tom told police he'd been fishing in Colorado with his two sons, John and Jim, during the weekend of the murders. They were visiting him from North Carolina. Police told Tom they wanted him to take a polygraph test. Tom agreed. The first two polygraph tests Tom took were inconclusive. Police thought he was too emotional for them to get an accurate reading. But then, Tom passed a third test. Detectives' other leads went nowhere. Police ran ads in the newspaper, offering rewards for information. First a$10 ,000 reward, and later$15 ,000. In December of 1984, the lead investigator in the case told one reporter, We're going to find out who did this, if it takes forever.

6:02Phoebe Judge:I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

6:10Phoebe Judge:Tom Lynch and his sister Janie grew up moving around a lot. Their father, Chuck Lynch, was an executive at GE. Their mother, Dolores, worked as a school nurse. Tom went to Wake Forest University in North Carolina. During his freshman year, he met his future wife, Susie. Tom was a basketball player for Wake Forest. He also was an aspiring dentist, and she was quite taken with him. But when Tom introduced Susie to his mother Dolores, they didn't hit it off. Susie reportedly told people that Dolores was overbearing. Dolores told a friend that Susie was pretentious. Tom later remembered that at his wedding to Susie in 1970, his mother told him he could still change his mind.

7:09Phoebe Judge:As the years went on, Susie refused to visit Tom's parents. When Dolores went to see Tom and Susie after they'd had their first baby, Susie told her that they had plans and she'd have to come by another time. Susie apparently was dismissive of Dolores Lynch and made it difficult for Dolores to visit her son, Tom, or her grandchildren. I believe in one instance or maybe two, Dolores tried to visit her grandsons and her son, and Susie insisted that Dolores take a hotel room rather than stay with the family, and then made visits very formalized. She saw Dolores as a threat. A threat how? I think the word would be defensive.

8:05Susie seemed defensive about the way she raised her sons and as if she were poised to defend herself as a mother to Dolores.

8:22Phoebe Judge:Tom and Susie's children, John and Jim, were born a year and a half apart. There were conflicting reports about Susie as a mother. Several friends and relatives reported that she was a bit rough with one of her children. One neighbor later remembered seeing red marks on her son John's face. She said Susie had told her she'd slapped him, saying, quote, I knocked him across the room. Then John broke an arm and Jim got a head injury. Doctors suspected that it was child abuse. I think she denied this, but there was an undercurrent. She did not seem to be someone who was content with motherhood. After Tom and Susie separated, and they began to fight over Tom's visitation rights, Tom's mother, Dolores, decided to get involved.

9:26Phoebe Judge:She contacted lawyers and judges on Tom's behalf. At one point, she reportedly told Tom's attorney, I'm a she-wolf, and I'll defend my cub if I have to. And then, in the summer of 1984, Dolores Lynch was found dead in her driveway. After police cleared Tom Lynch as a suspect, they looked into people who had been recently released from prison and talked with Janie's dental school patients. They said they interviewed about 300 people in total, but nothing helpful turned up. The Kentucky investigators were very, very lost at first. They were flummoxed. The case went cold until May of 1985, when Kentucky police received a phone call from Tom Lynch.

10:23Phoebe Judge:He said his former in-laws had been murdered in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. And he thought that his ex-wife Susie and her cousin had something to do with it.

10:37Phoebe Judge:We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus.

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13:02Phoebe Judge:The day after Susie Lynch's mother, father, and grandmother were found dead in May of 1985, Detective Alan Gentry says he reached out to Susie about setting up an interview. And she was busy having dinner with a girlfriend and that was not going to be convenient. and I'm thinking, okay, you've just lost your grandmother, your mother, and your father in a crime, and having dinner with a girlfriend is more important than meeting with law enforcement. When Alan Gentry did finally go to Susie's apartment, which she shared with her cousin, Fritz Klenner, there were a few things that jumped out at him right away.

13:44When I first walked in there, along with the State Bureau of Investigation agent that was working with me, I noticed there were two tear gas canisters sitting on an end table. And when you go in on the front door, there was a box with some kind of light in it sitting on the floor about four feet away from the front door inside. There was an aluminum canister attached to the upper corner of the interior door or the door frame, rather, with a string hanging down. And I'm thinking, who's got this thing booby-trapped or something? But Susie that day, she was absolutely charming. Susie had a glamorous way, and I think she, at this point, was certainly using a little flirtation to try to charm folks.

14:42You would never know she'd lost any family member. She was just entertaining guests, which, again, most people are sitting there with a tissue and will shed a tear or get choked up. And no, either she was really good at putting on this show or cold hearted. I don't know which. while we were having this conversation with her fritz came walking down the hall from the master bedroom he was wearing a green cotton flight suit like a military pilot would wear and she of course introduced us and i said i understand you're a physician and he said yes but I'm not licensed in this state. And seemed to get a little bit cold at that point, like he didn't want to talk about that.

15:39And he went back to the back of the house, and he said, I'm just helping Susie with the boys or something like that. It was the extent of that conversation. Almost a week later, they asked Fritz Klenner

15:55Phoebe Judge:to come to the State Bureau of Investigation office in Greensboro for an interview. He was telling us that he thought that the family was killed by drug dealers, that Susie's ex-husband had big gambling debts, and that was a warning to the family here that they needed to push him to pay his gambling debts. Fritz had talked before about how Susie's ex-husband, Tom, was affiliated with the mafia. And then he proceeded to tell a story about the two little boys had somebody broken in the apartment and had cut the throats of two little stuffed animals that they would frequently take with them when they went to visit their dad in Albuquerque.

16:45And I was like, okay, why would they do that? Well, that's just another warning, the gambling debts and they're trying to threaten everybody. So, again, he's trying to put the whole thing on Susie's former husband.

17:02Phoebe Judge:Alan Gentry noticed one other detail. He starts telling us about how the locks on the apartment door are somewhat faulty and didn't work right. And he pulls his keys out, and he's telling me this story about the locks on the apartment. And I noticed that he had a handcuff key on his key ring. There's only two people going to have a use for a handcuff key. It's either a police officer or a bad guy. Made no sense that he had it. Alan Gentry asked Fritz Klenner where he had been on the night that Susie's parents and grandmother were murdered in Winston-Salem. Fritz told them he'd been camping in the Blue Ridge Mountains with a family friend, Ian Perkins.

17:48Phoebe Judge:Ian Perkins was 11 years younger and a college student at Washington and Lee. State Bureau agent myself traveled to Washington and Lee University in Virginia and found Ian Perkins and invited him to sit in the car and talk to us. And, you know, 40 years ago, a lot of people smoked cigarettes. And I noticed he's trying to light a cigarette in the backseat of this car, and his hands were shaking so bad he was having trouble getting the match to the cigarette. And so he goes through and tells the same story that Fritz had told about camping at Blue Ridge Parkway at a park. and um i pointed out the fact that you know in the time we're talking about you and fritz could have driven to winston-salem committed these murders and came back up here because they claimed that they were they went on a hike about midnight and and walked through the woods for three hours and it's like okay if you're gonna lie to me you need to make it a remotely believable a lie, and that one just didn't work for me.

19:02And then I realized he started crying and nodding in agreement, and I said, y 'all came to Winston, and he conceded that they had. He folded like a cheap card table just immediately. He was emotional about how he'd been duped. I think he was overcome come with shame and mortification.

19:29Phoebe Judge:Ian Perkins agreed to help police with their investigation. They asked him if he'd wear a wire and secretly record Fritz. He agreed. Ian called Fritz and told him that he'd been questioned by police. He said that they'd asked him to take a lie detector test, and he wanted to talk with Fritz about it. Ian asked him if they could meet in a mall parking lot. And he was, of course, extremely nervous. Ian had a small recorder taped to his back under his shirt. He got into Fritz's car, a black Chevy Blazer. They drove around while police listened in on their conversation. Ian said he'd told police about their camping trip.

20:17Phoebe Judge:But when he tried to bring up the murders of Susie's parents and grandmother, Fritz denied being involved. Ian wore a wire two more times while talking with Fritz. During their last conversation, Fritz said he was being set up. He ended their conversation by saying to Ian, I won't see you again. and Fritz gave him assurances that he would not be implicated.

20:50Phoebe Judge:After that final recorded conversation, police were concerned that Fritz Klenner was dangerous and possibly on his way to murder someone else. They felt they had enough to arrest him. Alan Gentry and law enforcement agents from agencies including the SBI, the Highway Patrol, FBI. And I believe by that time there were also Kentucky Bureau of Investigation officers on the scene, sheriffs, deputies, you name it. Everybody gathered to arrest Fritz. They approached Fritz's, the apartment where Susie and Fritz lived, and they saw Fritz packing his Chevy Blazer. We had an unmarked car in the parking lot, not close, but close enough to see what they were doing.

21:52They also realized that Susie and Fritz were loading in lots of equipment, lots of belongings into the blazer very hurriedly and were also loading the two boys. That was something that, as I understand, detectives did not count on. I believe they were surprised that the boys were home on a school day. And so at that point in time, Fritz went to leave. He left the complex, and like I said, we had several officers in covert vehicles. They tried to box him in at the exit from the apartments, and the blazer that he drove was a large one with oversized wheels and tires and jacked up, so he simply drove over a curb and out into the street.

22:49Phoebe Judge:Fritz began driving through Greensboro. with several unmarked police cars behind him. So they put out a call to the Greensboro Police Department and asked for an officer to respond and help with this operation in progress. And they made note of the fact that the suspect was armed and dangerous. Officer Tommy Dennis heard the call over the radio and decided to respond. He was wearing a bulletproof vest. He put on his lights and attempted to make a U-turn to pull over Fritz. But at the same time, several of the unmarked police cars behind Fritz tried to pass him, cutting off Tommy Dennis. He had to swerve and ended up right next to the window of Fritz's Chevy Blazer.

23:44And Tommy Dennis had nowhere to go. He was stuck, and he looked up. He saw Klenner with sunglasses on looking down the barrel of an Uzi. And the next thing he knew, Tommy Dennis was sprayed with gunfire from an Uzi by a smiling Fritz Klenner. I was in a car right behind him, and I heard something. and it sounded like an impact wrench, like if you're at the tire shop, and they're taking the wheels off or putting them on, and they're tightening them with the hammering sound. And I saw glass flying out of an unmarked Greensboro patrol car.

24:32Phoebe Judge:Tommy Dennis was hit. His bulletproof vest saved his life, although he was injured. Fritz Klenner kept on driving. He was running about 40, 45 miles an hour. It was an unusual procession punctuated with gunfire from Fritz Klenner out the back of the Chevy Blazer. Fritz would stop intermittently, and he would spray gunfire to try to slow those following him, and then he would get back in. And so it was a stop-and-start, herky-jerky kind of chase. He went around a curve one time and stopped and got out and shot back at the motorcade. And we actually had a State Bureau airplane flying overhead. And at that point, he said, if he does that again, please tell us.

25:30Don't let us, you know, come up on him.

25:33Phoebe Judge:Fritz kept on driving with the police behind him toward Rockingham County, north of Greensboro. This is on NC-150 in Summerfield. Very lovely little road with pastures and cattle. I was in third or fourth car back when all of a sudden there was an explosion. He stops and detonates the Chevy Blazer. My first thought was that he'd thrown out some sort of smoke grenade or something to get us off away from him. And, of course, we stop and we're getting out of the car and I realized, no, that wasn't the case because you could hear car parts falling through trees in the neighborhood. The blazer blows to smithereens, sending all kinds of litter, all kinds of evidence of his life and his life with Susie into the trees, into the pasture.

26:51The blazer that he drove had a fiberglass shell for a roof on it, and it was totally gone. Um, as I recall, the doors were just barely hanging. It just destroyed the car. Fritz and Susie were both on the opposite shoulder of the road. Um, but just the explosive force was too much for anybody to survive.

27:20Phoebe Judge:And what about the children? They were still lying in the back of the blazer. We didn't know the full extent of it until the autopsy, but they had been given cyanide. And I guess that was part of the motorcade was buying time to make sure that they were dead. And then they were shot at the base of the skull. Police investigating later came to believe that Susie had likely shot her sons. Acquaintances of Fritz and Susie said they'd talked about carrying cyanide capsules with them. They were quite open with a number of people about the fact that they possessed cyanide tablets and were willing to take cyanide and give the boys cyanide should their lives be, and their lifestyle be threatened.