The Bloodgood Gambit
Quick, sleazy, & cheap: a former Virginia death row inmate lied and scammed his way to the top of the chess world
CLAUDE FRIZZELL BLOODGOOD III (aka Klaus Frizzel Bluttgutt III) appeared gaunt, pale, and exhausted in 2000 as he sat in a wheelchair at Powhatan Correctional Facility, chatting with a Washington Post reporter about the death penalty in between bottled oxygen-fortified gasps induced by lung cancer, emphysema, and heart problems.
“I was never a terror,” he wheezed of his days on death row at the former Virginia State Penitentiary, from 1969 to 1972. “Most of us knew the political climate was on our side in [19]72 … I haven’t let myself waste away.”
But he was sometimes a terror. He killed his mother. He was sentenced to death, then had his sentence commuted by a U.S. Supreme Court decision. That is known for sure.
But everything else in Bloodgood’s life is mired in the murkiness of lies, deceit, and speculation. And while this conman’s body was wasting away from multiple illnesses, his mind was sharp as ever, honed by years of not just lying, swindling and manipulating, but by his mastery of Grandmaster-level chess gamesmanship, both in-person and by mail, which in 1997 got him listed by the United States Chess Federation (USCF) as the…
