Family Secrets, Part 1

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1:00with claims paid back in as little as two days. Go to fetch pet.com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetch pet.com slash save. Dr. Cleaner was quite famous. He had for many decades touted a theory that megasus of vitamin C that he administered to patients with cur polio and diseases such as multiple sclerosis. Green's bro news and record reporter Susan Spear. He drew patients from all over the United States and some from outside of the US to his small clinic. Dr. Fred Cleaner opened his clinic in Readsville, North Carolina in 1939. The sign on the door read, Fred R. Cleaner, Diseases of the Chest, Limited General Practice.

2:03He said that after he successfully treated his wife's bleeding gums with vitamin C, he used it to cure pneumonia and the measles. He started giving it to patients for anything from spider bites to arthritis to cancer. One reporter wrote that he was known to take 65 vitamin tablets every day. People started coming from all over for his help. One person later said his patients thought he was, quote, right next to Christ. Inside his office, Dr. Cleaner reportedly hung up hornet's nests. He displayed a leather-bound Bible and a large grandfather clock. He also kept segregated waiting rooms. Dr. Cleaner's parents had immigrated from Germany and during World War II, Dr. Cleaner was rumored to be a Nazi sympathizer. He also collected a lot of memorabilia from World War II.

3:03A lot of weapons. He kept a farm in Rockingham County, where there were reportedly bunkers and great stores of ammo and shooting practice for he and his son, Fritz. Fritz was Dr. Cleaner's youngest child and only son. By the time Fritz was 11, his father reportedly had given him his first real gun, a German-Luger pistol. He'd already given him hundreds of toy guns by then. Fritz developed a huge interest in guns and was also fascinated by German military history. One reporter wrote that he often worn army fatigue jacket to school. The Cleaner family lived in a large brick home on Huntsdale Road in Readsville. Down the street lived a family with close ties to the Cleaners, the Perkins. Dr. Cleaner was the Perkins family doctor.

4:04He delivered their son Ian when he was born. They were neighbors. They were social equals with high status. And Dr. Cleaner was credited with curing Ian's mother's polio when Ian's mother was a child. And so there were a lot of links between the family. Dr. Cleaner's son, Fritz, was 11 years older than Ian Perkins. Former Forsyth County detective, Alan Gentry. He had seen Fritz growing up around him, he'd been off with him shooting weapons out at his father's farm in Rockham County. One neighbor later said that Ian Perkins looked up to Fritz Cleaner, like an uncle. Ian Perkins was described in high schools being quiet and studious.

5:04He belonged to the Bible Club. He went to college at Washington & Lee University in Virginia, where he first tried to major in chemical engineering, but later switched to philosophy. He played Dungeons & Dragons, and he enrolled in the National Guard. During his junior year, he left school for a few months to train in Texas. He was a bit aimless, and he was interested in possibly getting involved in work with the State Department, like one of his great uncles. At this point, Fritz saw him when Ian was home from college. Fritz and Ian went shooting together when Ian was home, using Fritz as assault rifles, pistols, and machine guns. Then, Fritz visited Ian at Washington & Lee. While he was there, he told Ian a secret.

6:06He said he worked for the CIA. Fritz appealed to Ian's interest in government service and Ian's wish to try to go into FBI, CIA, type spy work as a career, and convinced Ian Perkins that he, Fritz, was an operative for the CIA, and that he could put in good words for Ian, could help shape his future, and indeed could give him some on-the-job training with some, quote, missions. He said he was being sent to Texas, where he had been tasked with killing someone, who was stealing from government armories and trading the weapons for drugs. He said he'd been authorized to bring Ian along to see how Ian performed under pressure.

7:13A few months later, on Friday, May 17, 1985, Fritz's clenor called Ian Perkins, and told him it was time to go. Fritz had asked him to drive the two of them to Virginia to the peaks of Otter, which is a camping area, and then to create a campsite together and establish an alibi for the weekend. As they drove to the campsite in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Fritz's Chevy Blazer, Fritz told Ian that their mission had changed. They would no longer be going to Texas, but instead would be going to Winston-Salem, North Carolina. When they arrived at the campsite early the next morning, they chose a spot with no one else around them. They set up a tent and went to bed. On Saturday evening, around 5 p.m., they started out for Winston-Salem several hours away.

8:19On the way there, they stopped at a rest stop, where Fritz changed his clothing. He also put on a bullet-proof vest. When they got to Winston-Salem, Fritz pulled into a dirt-bottom near a shopping plaza. He took out a briefcase and walked away. Ian went to a burger-king, where he got a cup of coffee and waited for 45 minutes. When he started worrying that it had been too long, he drove back to the shopping plaza and looked out for Fritz. When Fritz eventually returned, he told Ian that he didn't want to tell him much about what had happened. But he said he'd had to kill three people. On the drive back to Virginia, Fritz's clenor and Ian Perkins stopped along the highway. Fritz cut up his hat and gloves and threw them into a dumpster. He also threw away his shoes and stopped and shaved off his beard. When they got back to their campsite in Virginia around seven in the morning, Fritz threw his pistol into a lake and later buried a knife.

9:27On their way back to Washington and Lee, Fritz told Ian he had done well. He believed fully that he was doing something that was a government mandate. And that Fritz's clenor was trustworthy. Fritz had all of the props, all of the ways to convince a young man that he was the real deal. He had to put on a convincing show. He had an arsenal of weapons at his disposal. It was a compelling image that Fritz had made for himself, I believe. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. We'll be right back to listen without ads. Join Criminal Plus.

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11:31That's B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash criminal. Code criminal. Let's check it out. Hey there, it's Sue Bird. You know the drill. Another week, another new episode of Birds Eye View. This week I'm thrilled to be joined by Australia's most notable women's basketball player and my former Seattle Storm teammate Lauren Jackson. She talks about the pros and cons of going pro at 16, the Ofuls legendary Phoebe World Cup run in 2006, and how her role on a team differs between international tournaments and the WMBA. Plus in Sue's view, I answer your questions about the Yukon documentary that came out. Make sure to check out Birds Eye View on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Fritz Klaner was quite a character. He seemed to have no trouble whatsoever creating elaborate lies. Much of what we know about Fritz Klaner and the story comes from a book called Bitter Blood by North Carolina journalist Jerry Bludzo.

12:38He died last year. According to Jerry Bludzo, Fritz Klaner had always planned to become a doctor like his father. As a high school student, Fritz was known to carry a pouch on his belt filled with vitamins and medical supplies. Fritz was the chosen one to Dr. Klaner from many reports. Fritz Klaner grew up in his very domineering father's shadow and was quite worshipful of his father according to folks who knew the family. He enjoyed the cachet of being the son of a beloved physician. After attending the University of Mississippi as an undergrad, Fritz Klaner told his family that he had gotten into medical school at Duke University. The same program his father had graduated from decades before.

13:41But in reality, Fritz had dropped out of Ole Miss and had been hanging out, working odd jobs or goofing off, collecting weapons and pretending to attend Duke. Fritz kept an apartment in Durham near the school. He told his father that he was working on important blood research. He even had his father take blood samples from his patients and send them to him. He made a habit of being present at his father's medical office in Reitzville and he followed stethoscope around neck in a white coat portraying himself as an MD, administering medication. Sometimes without his father's guidance or directives and he was assumed to be a physician.

14:44No one seemed to question it. Even the local pharmacists had a glance calendar they printed which included Fritz Klaner's name as an MD and reference. Fritz told people other stories too that he'd worked as an undercover narcotics agent at Ole Miss and that he'd attended secret military training in Georgia. He said he had fought in Vietnam as a green beret and he told some people that he was doing undercover work with the CIA. His cousin Susie Lynch heard the same stories. She was seven years older than him, their mothers or sisters. Were Fritz and Susie close when they were children? Were their families close? Their families were reasonably close but Susie and Fritz I think forged their bond later.

15:50Their first cousins. Do we know in their relationship turned romantic? It's believed that it turned romantic in 83-84. Susie Lynch had recently moved back to North Carolina from Albuquerque, New Mexico after separating from her husband, Tom. She had brought her two young sons, John and Jim with her. Susie grew up in Winston Salem, the daughter of Bob and Florence Newsom. Susie's parents, Bob and Florence, were well connected in Winston Salem. Her father was a tobacco company executive. And what was Susie's life like growing up in Winston? She led a very privileged lifestyle attending good schools, afforded many opportunities. She ultimately attended Wake Forest University, which is a private map to school.

16:56She had a lot of social clout. Susie initially moved in with her parents after her marriage ended. But as her relationship with her cousin Fritz grew, things reportedly became tense. When Fritz started spending the night, Susie and her parents began fighting more. Eventually, Susie and her two sons moved into their own apartment in Greensboro. Fritz hung out at her apartment quite a bit and eventually became a fixture there. He could be seen coming and going, wearing jumpsuits, all kinds of military and paramilitary gear. He kept ammunition and all kinds of accoutrements that a soldier of fortune would maintain over at that apartment.

17:56But it was very much a cozy kind of situation where they were functioning like a quasi-family. Fritz and Susie told people they were married and Fritz referred to Susie's boys as his sons. He wanted them to call him Papa. And what were other people in their families saying about this Fritz' relationship with Susie? The fact that Susie was living with him and the children, they were in sense. Susie's mother Florence was rather undone, but folks seem to handle it in a very passive way. No one seems to have taken any kind of decisive bold action to intervene and say, listen, this is not good for your sons, this is not good for our family. What are you doing? That just didn't seem to happen.

18:59When Susie separated from her ex-husband, Tom, they agreed that Susie would have full custody of their sons. But as time went on, Susie and Tom began to disagree about Tom's visits with the boys. She wanted very much to prohibit Tom from seeing their boys. And she put lots and lots of restrictions on the amount of time he could have visitation. Susie didn't want her sons to have to fly by themselves to see their father. She wanted Tom to pay for her to fly with them, to drop them off, something he didn't want to do. She also became convinced that Tom was trying to take her boys away from her. For a while, she insisted that Tom could only see the boys in North Carolina. And when he was eventually granted a visit in New Mexico, he had to put up a $10,000 bond that would be forfeited if he didn't return the boys on time.

20:05As the years went on, Tom decided to seek increased visitation with his sons through the courts. He wanted the boys to spend more time in the summer with him and his new wife Kathy in New Mexico. And he found a lot of support from Bob Newsom, Susie's father and Florence, Susie's mother. And Bob Newsom, in fact, had agreed to testify in court on Tom's behalf to try to help get the grandchild. The grand sons, the time with their father, that he, their granddad thought they deserved. And I believe at this point Florence and Bob Newsom were fed up and they may have reached a point where they believed that Susie was beyond help in terms of correcting course.

21:08According to Tom, Susie's father Bob said that Susie was, quote, pathological in her paranoia about her children. In May of 1985, Bob Newsom called his daughter to tell her that he'd be testifying on Tom's behalf at an upcoming visitation hearing. That same day, Susie went to visit her lawyer who had an office in Readsville. She had a bag with her that contained two of her son's stuffed animals. Susie told her lawyer that earlier that year, after she and Tom had had an argument over visitation, someone had broken into their apartment and slit the throats of the stuffed animals. She implied that Tom had something to do with it. Her cousin Fritz had told her that Tom was affiliated with the mafia. Susie had also told her brother Rob about this. She said she never went anywhere without a pistol to protect herself and said that Fritz was protecting her and her boys.

22:14Fritz had also told people that Susie's ex-husband Tom was out to get them. He said he'd found a small bomb attached to the gas tank on Susie's car and that Tom was behind it. They kind of created an narrative in which they were pitted against the world and they believed that they would indeed lose their boys if Tom had the support of Susie's parents. And so a plan was hatched. The visitation hearing was going to be held on May 23, 1985. On May 17, Ian Perkins drove with Fritz Kleiner to the peaks of Otter Campground in Virginia and then on to Winston-Salem. We'll be right back.

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24:24So like any good millennial, I have a love-hate relationship with Gen Z. It's the phenomenon rattling millennials. They just look at you. They want something bigger themselves. Lifestyles of priority. Motivation is being inspired. But regardless of how you feel about Gen Z, it's undeniable that they're changing national politics. Generation Z is increasingly showing less loyalty to traditional political parties. Many now more likely to identify as independent. So what is going on with the kids? I think the biggest misconception about Gen Z's politics right now is that all of a sudden they're all socialist. That is just not the case. They are embracing candidates who are offering new bold ideas in the absence of those ideas from establishment Democrats. This week on America actually, Gen Z researcher Rachel Jem Faza joins us to separate Gen Z fact versus fiction. It's not rocket science and this is, you know, I keep saying like, young voters aren't that complicated after all. It's pretty simple. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast.

25:26No one ever expected in Winston Salem that we would have a triple homicide. But we did. Alan Gentry was a sergeant in the Criminal Investigation Division of the Forsyth County Sheriff's Department. When he got a call from a dispatcher on a Sunday night in May of 1985. The county called me. It was approaching midnight. And as luck would have it, I had been at Charlotte Motor Speedway the day before and that day for a sports car racing event. And so I was pretty exhausted. And they told me that we had a triple homicide. Detective Alan Gentry was 32 at the time and had been working for the Forsyth County Sheriff's Department for more than a decade. Had you ever gotten a call before that said anything like a triple homicide?

26:31No, typically we would have in an average year maybe five to seven individual homicides. I don't ever remember having any more than that. And on the way over, which was not all that far from where I lived at the time, I'm thinking, okay, this is going to be a murder suicide. You know, there's some guys killed two family members and then committed suicide. And when I got there, I realized real quickly that that was not the case. When Alan Gentry arrived at the location of the murder, a home on Valley Road in Winston-Salem, several police cars from the Winston-Salem Police Department were already there. He walked in the back door and into the living room. The home was pretty gruesome. The gentleman Suzie's dad was in the foyer and his mother, who was in her early 80s, was lying on a small sofa.

27:43And Suzie's mom was in the floor as well. And all three of them had been shot at least once in the chest and once at the base of the skull. And then Suzie's mother had been stabbed multiple times and it was pretty gruesome seeing. When you first walked in and surveyed the scene, what did you think had happened? Did you have any idea? Did it seem like a robbery or a... No, there was never any thought given to it being a robbery. There was some cash on a secretary in plain view. There was simply no reason to suspect that it was robbery. The TV was still on in the living room. A rocking chair in the fireplace tools had been knocked over.

28:43And a hole about 30 inches wide had been burned in the living room carpet. There was ash and charred paper in the middle of it. Bullet holes were scattered around the room. In the bedrooms, the dresser drawers were stacked up on the floor. Bob Newsom's briefcase was lying on the floor opened and emptied. The storm door to the back of the house was broken and there was a key in the lock. Detectives believed that Bob Florence and Bob's mother, had he Newsom, Suzie's parents and grandmother, had been murdered sometime a day or two earlier. When their son Rob couldn't get a hold of his parents, he asked a family friend to check on the house. When they arrived, they could see the bodies of had he and Florence through a window and called police. When Rob Newsom arrived from Greensboro late that night, he talked with Detective Alan Gentry.

29:46Alan asked him about the last time he'd seen his parents and grandmother. And if he knew of anyone who might want to kill them, Rob said no. And then Alan asked if there had been any problems or anything unusual in the family lately. Rob said yes. Something unusual had happened to assist her Suzie's former in-laws. He told us that Suzie's former mother-in-law and sister-in-law have been murdered in Kentucky the year before. And you know, the first thought that you have is this cannot be a coincidence. Coming up on our next episode, there were a lot of whispers about that Suzie and Fritz must be up to no good. And I'm thinking, he's got this thing booby trap or something. He saw a cleaner with sunglasses on looking down the barrel of an oozy.

30:47All of a sudden there was an explosion. He said, you're not going to believe it, may him. If you want to listen to Part 2 right now, sign up for Criminal Plus at patreon.com slash criminal. You'll be supporting our work and getting access to exclusive benefits like no ads, live events, chat rooms, and early listening. Part 2 will also be in the regular Criminal Podcast feed next Friday. Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajiko, Lily Clark, and Lena Silicin. This episode was fact checked by Katie Cedarborg. Special thanks to Stephen Conrad. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Seminetti. Julie Nalegsander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com.

31:49And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter. We're on Facebook at this is Criminal, an Instagram and TikTok at Criminal underscore podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com slash criminal podcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.