Piedmont Historic Homes

This looks like a nice house, doesn’t it? It’s in Winston-Salem, and it just went on the market. Real-estate listings sometimes fail to mention the most interesting aspects of houses, and this is one of them. Usually, it’s because the agents don’t know the history of a particular house, although in this case the agent grew up in Winston-Salem and knows the whole story. It’s just that some homes’ histories have details that don’t fit well with descriptions of living rooms, kitchens and updated bathrooms. Murder is a good example.

Consider the house above, 3239 Valley Road in Winston-Salem, or 303 W. Main Street in Yanceyville. Both are now for sale, both with odious murders in their background. One was the actual site of a particularly infamous triple murder. Understandably, you wouldn’t know that from looking at their listings. There are at least a couple other houses in the Triad that have been sold in past few years with killings or killers in their histories, all becoming more obscure as time passes.

The house on Valley Road caught my eye when it went on the market last week because it’s unusually old, built in 1880. Renovations have erased essentially all of historic character inside — the interior looks like any suburban house built since 1970 or so — but, still, almost any 1880 house that comes up for sale is worth noting. I tried to find the original owner but could trace the deeds back only to 1936. The seller then was David Settle Reid, who was about 89 years old. When he died seven years later, he was the oldest living Confederate veteran in Forsyth County.

The buyers in 1936 owned the house for 50 years, a detail worth pursuing. Robert and Hattie Newsom — I didn’t recognize the names, and did I get a surprise when I looked them up. Robert was fortunate to have died in 1980 (he was 82). In May 1985, Hattie was murdered in their home, along with their son Robert Jr. and his wife, Florence Abigail Sharp Newsom. The killer was Fritz Klenner — a name I did recognize. 3239 Valley Road was the scene of the “Bitter Blood” triple murder.

Klenner was a psychopath whose girlfriend was the daughter of Robert Jr. and Florence, Susie Newsom Lynch. He killed Robert, who had sided with Susie’s ex-husband, the father of her two young sons, in a court case involving the ex’s visitation rights. And he killed Hattie and Florence as well. There’s a lot more to the story — Klenner apparently murdered Susie’s ex-mother-in-law and ex-sister-in-law in New Mexico, he and Susie were cousins (his mother was one of Florence’s sisters), he was a medical con man, he had an unhealthy interest in Nazis, he and Susie killed her two children and then died when he set off dynamite in their SUV while being chased by police. Jerry Bledsoe wrote a famous best-seller about it all, Bitter Blood.

And now the house where Hattie Newsom and her son and daughter-in-law were murdered is for sale. The price is $689,000. It’s on 4 acres in north Winston-Salem’s Old Town neighborhood. The house is in move-in condition. Looking at it, you wouldn’t guess anything horrible had happened there. It was last sold in 1986, just a year after the murders, for $242,000, so its then-new notoriety couldn’t have depressed the price too much.

Listing agent Charles Reece of Berkshire Hathaway Carolina Realty knows all about 3239 Valley Road. He was happy to talk about the history of the house when I called him. It’s just not something you put in the listing.

Here are three other Triad-area homes where killers lived and/or where killings occurred.

An 1870 Klan Murder in Yanceyville

303 Main Street West, Yanceyville, Caswell County
The S.T. Richmond House, aka the Sallie Martin House

• Now for sale at $350,000 (originally $399,500)
• 3 bedrooms, 4 bathrooms, 1,164 square feet, 0.46 acre
• Price/square foot: $301
• Built in 1840
• Listed November 3, 2023
• Last sale: $95,000, June 2019
• Neighborhood: Yanceyville Historic District (NR)
• Note: A 2005 Yanceyville walking guide identifies the house as the home of Dr. Stephen Trib Richmond (1824-1878), a physician and pharmacist. “Dr. Richmond was a Klansman, named by John G. Lea in his posthumously published confession of the murder of Senator John W. Stephens. Today it is popularly known as the Sallie Martin House, a later owner.”
  • From the historic district’s NR nomination: “The Ku Klux Klan chapter in Caswell County was one of the most active in North Carolina, and the hatred and bitterness of the Reconstruction Period throughout the state was embodied in the murder by members of the Klan of John W. Stephens, a resented politician, in the Caswell County Courthouse on May 20, 1870. Governor William W. Holden immediately imposed martial law on the entire county.” Holden, who had opposed the war and fought the Klan afterward, was soon impeached and thrown out of office.
  • The Klan’s murder of Sen. Stephens is a particularly infamous incident in the county’s history. As a state senator and, before that, justice of the peace, Stephens was a “relentless and tenacious” champion of freed slaves. Lea’s detailed confession accuses Stephens of multiple cases of arson and of killing his own mother.
  • “Stevens was tried by the Ku Klux Klan and sentenced to death. He had a fair trial before a jury of twelve men,” Lea’s confession said. Lea identified Richmond as one of a gang of men who attacked Stephens in a room in the county courthouse. They put a rope around his neck before a man named Tom Oliver stabbed him to death.
  • “The knife was thrown at his feet and the rope left around his neck. We all came out, closed the door and locked it on the outside and took the key and threw it into County Line Creek.”
  • From An Inventory of Historic Architecture: Caswell County, North Carolina, Ruth Little-Stokes (1979): “Sallie Martin House. Early 19th century. 1.5-story Federal brick-and stucco house with four exterior end brick chimneys. Considerably altered, but retains eave moldings, 9/9 sash.” No mention of Richmond.
  • Sallie D. Walker Martin (1882-1968) was married to William C. Martin (c. 1866-1942) a farmer. She sold the house to her granddaughter Mary Elizabeth Boswell Bradner (1927-2014), in 1952.

The Boyhood Home of Fritz Klenner

1205 Huntsdale Road, Reidsville, Rockingham County
The Fred and Annie Klenner House

• Sold for $449,900 on September 16, 2022 (originally $469,900)
• 5 bedrooms, 3 1/2 bathrooms, 3,870 square feet, 0.81 acre
• Price/square foot: $116
• Built in 1942
• Listed July 25, 2022
• Last sale: $300,000, October 2018
• Note: French Country-style home, relatively uncommon around here.
  • The original owners were Dr. Frederick Robert Klenner Sr. (1907-1984) and Anne Hill Sharp Klenner (1914-2003). They married in 1937 and bought the property for $2,200 in 1941. Anne sold it 1994.
  • There’s much to say about Fred and Annie and, especially, their psycho son, Frederick Jr., nicknamed Fritz, who grew up in the house. The murderous Fritz gets all tyhe attention now, but Fred is notable in his own right. This is condensed from their pages on findagrave.com, for which someone has provided quite a bit of information, and other sources.
  • Fred was a physician and a pioneering researcher on vitamin C. He was born in Johnstown, Pennsylvania; in 1936 he graduated from the Duke University School of Medicine. Annie was a nurse at Duke Hospital. They settled in her hometown of Reidsville, where Fred began practicing medicine.
  • Annie worked in the practice. She was an active garden club member and flower-show judge. One of her sisters was Susie Sharp, the first woman to serve as chief justice of the N.C. Supreme Court. Another sister was Florence Abigail Sharp Newsom, who was murdered by Fritz.
  • “Beginning in the 1940s, Dr. Klenner began experimenting with megadoses of vitamins, mostly vitamin C, to treat a variety of medical disorders. … His research of those treatments inspired others, including Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling.”
  • In an account of Fred’s research, Clinical Guide to the Use of Vitamin C (1988), Pauling wrote a brief foreword: “The early papers by Dr. Fred R. Klenner provide much information about the use of large doses of Vitamin C in preventing and treating many diseases. These papers are still important.“¹
  • While practicing medicine, Fred published 27 papers about the benefits of vitamin C therapy for treatment or prevention of more than 30 diverse illnesses and diseases, including colds, diphtheria, hepatitis, measles, multiple sclerosis, mumps, polio, viral pneumonia, rheumatic fever, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, scarlet fever, sudden infant death syndrome and tetanus.
  • “Then on May 23, 1946, Dr. Klenner made national headlines when he delivered the world’s first set of surviving identical black quadruplets, the Fultz Sisters, at the Annie Penn Hospital in Reidsville. In his opinion, Klenner attributed their survival to massive doses of vitamins that he administered to the babies while under his medical care.”²
  • Unsurprisingly, many local doctors thought Fred was nuts. He claimed, though, that he treated more than 10,000 patients with massive doses of vitamins over 30 years without any ill effects.
  • Fred died in 1984, missing the horror that was to come. Annie lived through it, dying in 2003 at age 89.

¹ In case it needs mentioning, Pauling’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1954) had nothing to do with vitamin C. And neither did his other one, the Nobel Peace Prize (1962). Pauling is actually the only person ever to receive two undivided Nobel prizes. He just went off the deep end a bit when it came to vitamin C.

² Klenner’s treatment of the quadruplets and his relationship with the family — he actually named them, all after women in his own family, because the parents were illiterate — raise serious questions, as the Wikipedia article points out. All of the women died of breast cancer, three of them by age 55. One attributed the cancer to Klenner’s treatment of them as newborns.

1969: A Thanksgiving Day Killing

1611 Dunbar Street, Greensboro
The William and Madeline Malone House

• Sold for $88,500 on September 8, 2022 (listed at $99,900)
• 3 bedrooms, 1 1/2 bathrooms, 1,391 square feet, 0.21 acre
• Price/square foot: $64 (it needed a lot of work)
• Built in 1956
• Listed July 7, 2022
• Last sale: $19,000, August 1973
• Neighborhood: Lincoln Heights
• Note: In 1962 this modest Mid-Century Modern house was bought by Odell Delano Clanton Sr. (1916-1993) and Mary M. Clanton (died 1969). The Clantons had a troubled marriage, and on Thanksgiving Day 1969, Odell killed Mary, beating her to death in the kitchen. He was convicted of manslaughter, a ruling upheld on appeal all the way to the state Supreme Court. The high court’s ruling details the crime. Odell served his time, was released and died in 1993, age 76.
• In 1971, ownership of the house passed to the Clantons’ four children, who sold it in 1973.