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My contribution to Patti Abbott’s first nonfiction Friday is a true crime story that happened in my back yard. So to speak.

BITTER BLOOD by Jerry Bledsoe, published in 1989, is a story of a southern family, pride, divorce, and child custody battles that eventually took nine lives. My hometown, Eden, is in a northern county of North Carolina. The town of Reidsville, ten miles away, is where this story starts.

Frederick Klenner was a general practitioner in Reidsville where he maintained a small office on Main Street. He is credited with curing polio with massive doses of vitamin C long before it was an accepted practice. His sister-in-law, Judge Susie Sharp, was Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court.

And then there was Klenner’s son, Fritz, Sharp’s nephew. A slacker, he dropped out of college, unknown to his father at the time, and was something of a survivalist type who was constantly alluding to people that he was a government agent, probably CIA. He carried a variety of weapons with him in a van and was always going on missions with a flunky that bought into his tales.

Susie Lynch was his first cousin, going through a contentious custody battle with her husband for their two sons. The pair began living together and time passed.

The ending of this story was how the general public first became aware that something strange was going on. It was all over the news suddenly one afternoon. The police were trailing Klenner’s van, which held Lynch and the two boys, having been spirited from school when their father was coming into town.

The police held back because every little bit, Klenner would stop, jump out with an automatic weapon and open up with it on the police, who wouldn’t return fire because of the two boys. They were following, waiting for some sort of break. News copters were in pursuit as well, if I remember, and television had broken in with the story.

That’s when the van suddenly exploded!

All this happened about ten miles from my home.

Jerry Bledsoe, a reporter and columnist for The Greensboro News, started investigating and interviewing everyone involved that would talk to him, piecing together the story that would become the book.

The year before that horrific ending, the parents of the boys’ father had been murdered in Kentucky in an apparent break-in. Later, Susie Lynch’s parents and grandmother were murdered similarly. It was proven that Klenner murdered the in-laws and suspected that he murdered Lynch’s family as well.

One last connection. In her younger days, before marriage, my sister lived in a place adjoining property, on the outskirts of Eden, owned by the Klenner family where rumors persist to this day that somewhere there, Fritz has a buried cache of automatic weapons and ammunition. None have ever been found.

The book is an absorbing look into the mind of a man that wasn’t all there and should be read by crime fans. Highly recommended. A miniseries starring Kelly McGinnis as Susie Lynch, Harry Hamlin as Fritz Klenner, and Keith Carradine as the father of the boys was made.