Criminal - Family Secrets, Part 2

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

In June of 1985, police followed in pursuit as Fritz Klenner drove through the streets of Greensboro, North Carolina, with his cousin Susie Lynch and her two sons. When the chase eventually ended, it was like “something right out of a movie.” This is the second part of a two-part story. You can listen to Part 1 here. Jerry Bledsoe's book is called ⁠⁠Bitter Blood⁠⁠. You can read more of Susan Spear's reporting in the Greensboro ⁠⁠News and Record⁠⁠. We're going on tour - and it's a different kind of show than any we've done before. Tonight we'll be in Portland, ME. Find ticket links and updates at ⁠⁠⁠⁠thisiscriminal.com/live⁠⁠⁠⁠. Say hello on ⁠⁠Facebook⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠TikTok⁠⁠. Sign up for our ⁠⁠occasional newsletter⁠⁠. Follow the show and review us on ⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠. ⁠⁠Sign up for Criminal Plus⁠⁠ to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make ⁠⁠This is Love⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠Phoebe Reads a Mystery⁠⁠. Artwork by ⁠⁠Julienne Alexander⁠⁠. Check out ⁠⁠our online shop⁠⁠. Episode transcripts are posted on ⁠⁠our website⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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 Cover Bridge Road, which I knew where it was, and I even knew the house, because we'd made alarm runs there before.

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, Janie 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. But there weren't men. many other clues. We've been having a lot of break-ins out there just because it's in a fluent 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. 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 she'd say, and complaining about how long it took us to get there. Her daughter, Janie, had just finished dental school. 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 Speer. 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 left, she was pretty much leaving to him and the daughter that meant he would get everything. 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. Detective's other leads went nowhere. Police ran ads in the newspaper, offering rewards for information, first a $10,000 reward, and later 15. 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. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal.

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

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. We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus. Support for criminal comes from tachiatry. Trying to navigate mental health treatments can feel overwhelming. But tawkiatry helps you move on from,

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The designs are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. I like their crew neck t-shirts and organic cotton. They're soft and breathable in the summer and easy to wear under warmer layers when the weather turns colder. Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers, or go to Quince.com, slash criminal. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada in the UK, too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash criminal. The day after Susie Lynch's mother, father and grandmother, were found dead in May of 1985. Detective Allen 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 Clenner, there were a few things that jumped out at him right away.

When 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 a end table. And when you go in in 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 a 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.

You would never know if she had lost any family member. She was like she was just entertaining a gift. which, again, most people are sitting there with a tissue and she had 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. And he went back to the back of the house. And he said, oh, I'm just helping Susie. with the boys or something like that, was the extent of that conversation. Almost a week later, they asked Fritz Klenner

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. And it's 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. Alan Gentry noticed one other detail.

He starts telling us about how the locks on the apartment door 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 Clenner where he had been on the night that Susie's parents and grandmother were murdered in Winston-Salem. Fritz told them he'd been careful. camping in the Blue Ridge Mountains with a family friend, Ian Perkins. 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 he,

I noticed he's trying to light a cigarette in the back seat 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 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 walked through the woods for three hours, and it's like, okay, if you're going to lie to me, you need to make it a remotely

believable lie, and that one just didn't work for me. And 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 with shame and mortification. 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 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.

But when he tried to bring up the murders of Susie's parents and grandmother, Fritz denied being involved, Ian wore 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. After that final recorded conversation, police were concerned that Fritz Clenner 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 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. Sheriff's 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. They 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 boxes. 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. 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. And Tommy Dennis had nowhere to go. He was stuck and he looked up. He saw cleaner 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-Clinner.

I was the car right behind him, and I heard something, 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. Tommy Dennis was hit. His bulletproof vest saved his life, although he was injured. Fritz Clunner kept on driving. He was running about 40, 45 miles an hour.

It was an unusual procession punctuated with gunfire from Fritz Clenner 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 back in. So it was a stop and start, herky jerky kind of chase. He went around the 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, don't let us, you know, come up on him. 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 away from him. And, of course, we stop and we're getting out the car. and 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. The blazer that he drove had a... fiberglass shell for a roof on it, and it was totally gone. 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, but just a explosive force was too much for anybody to survive.

And what about the children? They were still lying in the back of the back. 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 had 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. There were guns and ammunition scattered all around the explosion site,

as well as gas masks, knives, handcuffs, grenades, and a survival book. Police also found a duffel bag filled with vitamins, classical music tapes, and $100 bills. Minutes after the explosion, as the smoke was still rising from the Chevy Blazer, a huge thunderstorm rolled in. It began to hail. It's still as vivid now as it was 41 years ago. We'll be right back. Support for criminal comes from Wayfair. You want your home to look like you.

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right from your center display. Explore OnStar Tech today at OnStar.ca and discover how to take your summer to the next level. OnStar. Better never stops. Later that night, after the explosion, police went to search Susie Lynch and Fritz-Klenner's apartment in Greensboro. We were afraid that they maybe booby-trap the apartment with explosives as well, so we couldn't just overlook that. Greensboro PD's SWAT team were going to make the entry,

and I explained to them what I had observed before with what I thought. was a light and whatever the aluminum cartridge was. So they actually made entry by breaking a window beside of the front door to go in and crawled in that way. And sure enough, there was a clip of some sort wedged in the door that when opened, it would trigger the light sitting on the floor, which was a strobe thing to blind somebody. The aluminum cartridge turned out to be a tear gas container. and it was hooked by an islet to a hook on the back of the front door, that if someone had opened that door, it would immediately pull the pen

and that thing would have emptied the contents of tear gas on the intruder. At that point, there was no other explosives of any kind. There were still quite a few weapons in the apartment. Both of the boys had 22 rifles, with folding stocks for them. And there was such a contrast in the boys' bedroom that they shared. There was a Disney poster on one wall. And then there was a recruiting poster from Rhodesia about war and such stuff.

This has no place in a, you know, kids' room. let alone the rifles, but again, that was, that's how they were being raised by Fritz. Sitting on the kitchen table were four letters left by Fritz, one to his mother saying he loved her, and another that said the weapons in the apartment belonged to her, one that proclaimed his innocence, saying he had never killed anyone, and one that said that Ian Perkins had believed he was in training for a career in covert operations and was, quote, in no way involved in any wrongdoings of any kind. That single act of constructing that letter, it certainly makes me able to think of Fritz-Klinner as more of a real.

human being, it seems like one single act of authentic kindness. What happened to Ian? Ian was the only person who was convicted of a crime in this bizarre tragedy that claimed nine lives. I know that Detective Gentry went to bat for him and had. had hoped that he would not be charged at all. I felt kind of bad for Ian, because we knew he was in a lot of trouble for this idea,

even though you can see how he had been duped by Fritz-Klinner. The county district attorney told reporters that he believed Ian Perkins thought Fritz-Klenner was a CIA agent, authorized by the government to kill a drug dealer. But he also said, probably the most dangerous people are the people who commit murder in the name of God and country. Ian was charged with accessory after the fact of murder

and was indicted by a grand jury. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four months in jail and five years of probation. Ian Perkins declined to be interviewed for this story. But he told us in an email that the night before he went to jail to start serving his sentence, he watched the baseball movie, The Natural. He wrote to us, Glenn Close's character, Iris, says a line towards the end of the movie.

I believe we have two lives, the life we learn with, and the life we live with after that. He added, I've tried to do the best with the life we live with after that, as I could. North Carolina police said Fritz's death had closed the Newsom murder case. Kentucky police said they also had no doubt that Fritz had murdered Dolores and Janie Lynch. But they also wondered if Susie Lynch had been involved. Tom Lynch, Susie's ex-husband, told a reporter he was convinced Susie knew about both sets of murders. He said, quote,

she might have been the mastermind manipulator. He added, I'm just so angry. It really hasn't sunk in. Even though both Fritz and Susie were dead, Kentucky police decided to continue their investigation. They learned that there were no long-distance phone calls made from Susie and Fritz's apartment

during the weekend that Dolores and Janie were killed, leading them to believe that no one had been home at the time. They also found a map at Fritz and Susie's apartment, with a route drawn from Greensboro to Kentucky. It had Susie's handwriting on it. They also talked with a gun shop owner who had seen Susie and Fritz shortly after the killings. They sold him the gun that was used to kill Dolores and Janie Lynch. They didn't find any direct evidence that place Fritz or Susie in Kentucky on the weekend of the killings. But they pieced together a narrative of what they thought had happened.

They knew that Dolores went to church every Sunday. Former Oldham County police officer, Dennis Clark. So behind Dolores' house was a big hillside covered in trees and bushes and everything. So he apparently set up there and then waited for Dolores to come home. And he didn't know Jane was there. And when she came home, He shot her, and she went down, and he came down off the hill, you know, and shot her again. Kentucky police came to believe that after Fritz had killed Dolores and Janie,

Susie came back with their car to pick Fritz up. Someone spotted a black car resembling Fritz's Chevy Blazer near the home. Some people said they'd heard a horn blowing. So she was probably, there was before cell phone, so she'd probably blowing a horn, and he came out, jumped in a car. In September of 1985, Kentucky prosecutors brought the case to a grand jury. After hearing all the evidence, the grand jury recommended that Fritz Clenner and Susie Lynch be found responsible for the deaths of Dolores and Janie Lynch. The case was finally closed.

Do you remember when you first heard about this story in 1985? I do. I was living in Chapel Hill, and I was a student at UNC, and my father had run the newspaper in Madison, North Carolina, for many decades, and he phoned me at work to let me know what had happened. I think everyone in this region was on high alert. I've never seen such interest in a story. What did your father say when he called? He said, you're not going to believe it. Mayhem, you wouldn't believe it. You just won't believe it.

It's something right out of a movie. 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 Silison. This episode was fact-checked by Katie Cedarborg. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti.

Julie and Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at This Is Criminal.com. And you can sign up for a newsletter at thisiscriminal.com slash newsletter. Much of the reporting on the story was done by North Carolina journalist Jerry Bloodsoe, who covered it as it unfolded for the Greensboro News and Record, and later wrote a best-selling book called Bitter Blood. Jerry Bledso died on New Year's Eve of last year. We've got a link to Bitter Blood in our show notes. We hope you'll consider supporting our work

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