Love, Lies, and Murder (11 page)

“I didn’t do the Northwest.”

“Why?”

“Janet is still the beneficiary there.”

“Why haven’t you changed that one?”

“I—I just didn’t get around to it. It’s a small policy in the back of my head. I don’t really—actually, I probably just forgot about it.”

“Now, who is the beneficiary on the policy on Janet’s life?”

“To the best of my recollection, I am. Just as she was the beneficiary on my policies.”

Detective David Miller and his partner, Detective Tim Mason, continued running down lead after lead in their search to learn the truth about what had really happened to Janet March. Their investigation into the disappearance of Janet March had quickly become the most intensive and most talked-about case in nearly twenty years—since nine-year-old Marcia Trimble was abducted in February 1975 while selling Girl Scout cookies in Nashville’s Green Hills neighborhood. Marcia’s body had been found thirty-three days later in a garage, barely 150 yards from her home. She had been sexually assaulted by at least two people and strangled, and her killer(s) had robbed her of her cookie money. Although that case remains unsolved and still has a cold-case detective assigned to it, Miller and Mason were determined that the Janet March mystery would be solved.

As with most investigations of a purported serious crime, the detectives naturally focused some of their attention on Perry March’s friends and acquaintances. Some of the people who knew Perry March characterized him as a man with high energy, a lawyer who was aggressive and determined to achieve his objectives. Almost everyone who knew him described him as highly intelligent and private, but those who did not think very highly of him described Perry as greedy, calculating, a schemer, and as someone not to be trusted.

“When he first told me Janet was missing, he had tears in his eyes,” said former friend Elliot Greenberg. “Perry’s very reserved. Typically, he won’t exhibit that kind of behavior in public.” It was clear that Perry had given the appearance that he was really broken up over Janet’s disappearance, and Greenberg, as would many others, believed him.

Meanwhile, Perry appeared prepared to accept the fact that he would likely never see his wife again, or so it seemed to the people who knew him in Nashville; yet at times it seemed like he continued to maintain hope that she would turn up alive. His children often wondered what had happened to their mother and, he said, would ask questions about her.

“We don’t know what happened to Mommy,” Perry, by his own account, would tell his children. He said that no matter the outcome, whether she turned up alive or not, the children would survive.

“The longer we go, the less likely we are to hear from her,” Perry was quoted as saying. “We can’t hold out false hopes. I have to tell them the truth. People live through worse.”

At one point in the investigation, Detectives Miller and Mason learned that Perry had replaced the tires on his Jeep Cherokee. He purchased the brand-new set of tires, the detectives learned, from Universal Tire in Nashville in August 1996, after Janet disappeared. When asked about it, he claimed that he replaced the tires because they were worn out. Naturally, the detectives wanted to know more—they contacted the management and employees at Universal Tire.

According to Robert Armstrong, the manager of the tire shop, the tires on Perry’s Jeep had considerable tread left on them, approximately 50 percent, and Armstrong said he advised Perry that he did not need new tires. Perry apparently responded that he wanted a different brand of tires on his car. The detectives agreed with Armstrong’s assessment that it seemed unusual for someone to replace perfectly good tires. The cops found themselves wondering whether Perry might have been concerned that tire impressions made in earth softened by the rainfall experienced in the Nashville area during the time of the massive search effort for Janet might prove incriminating, if found. Nonetheless, there was no law against purchasing a new set of tires, even when replacements weren’t needed.

As Miller and Mason studied the evidence—what little there was—and again went over the details of the night Janet disappeared, they felt even more confident with the theory they had formulated regarding what had happened to Janet March on the evening of August 15, 1996. It was December, and nearly four months had elapsed since Janet had disappeared, and they needed to believe that they were making progress. Their theory and various scenarios that they had worked out earlier were, of course, discussed with writer Willy Stern, and would be reported in the
Nashville Scene
the following month as part of a major two-part series about the case.

To recap their theory and the various plausible scenarios in perhaps a bit more detail, according to the
Nashville Scene
article, Miller and Mason hypothesized that Perry and Janet had become embroiled in an argument on the evening of August 15 and that it had escalated to the point that Perry had lost it and had killed her, likely accidentally, with a karate blow of some sort. After all, he held a black belt in the martial art, and a blow delivered to just the right spot could kill a person almost instantly and not necessarily leave behind any blood evidence. They believed that at some point during the argument Janet had said something that had caused Perry to snap. Perhaps, they theorized, Janet had said that she wanted a divorce and had threatened to cut him off monetarily. After all, she had her own source of income, and her family was wealthy, too.

The cops also believed that Perry might have hidden his wife’s body in their home’s basement, or perhaps in the nearby woods that nearly encircled their property, only to retrieve it later, wrap it up in the rug that Marissa Moody claimed she had seen inside the March residence the following day, and then haul away the corpse and dispose of it—probably inside a Dumpster.

Had he first hauled her body to the woods in his Jeep Cherokee, only to later haul it away for disposal? If so, had it been the fear of leaving tire tracks or impressions that had prompted him to change the tires on that vehicle, even though they hadn’t needed changing? Much of their theory was, of course, merely conjecture, and the only thing that had been confirmed at this point was the fact that Perry and Janet had had an argument—Perry had confirmed the argument while providing his deposition.

Since Miller and Mason’s theories also looked at the telephone calls that Perry had made to his relatives and to the Levines the night of August 15, they realized only too late that they should have interviewed everyone he had called right away. As they went over that scenario again, the cops were even more adamant that the telephone calls may have been Perry’s first attempts at covering up Janet’s death. Perry, of course, had claimed that he merely called his brother and his sister to inform them that Janet had left him. According to the Willy Stern article, the detectives did not conduct timely interviews with any of the people Perry called that night. That fact, when combined with the fact that they had divulged considerable information to Stern, would soon return to bite them.

The detectives theorized that it was when Perry had finished talking to his sister, at 9:18
P.M.
, that he hid Janet’s body, either in the woods or in the basement. They believe he then packed travel bags for Janet and placed them in her Volvo, which he drove to the Brixworth Apartments a few miles away. After parking her car in one of the spaces in the complex’s parking lot, according to Miller and Mason’s theory, and carefully placing her footwear on the driver’s-side floor, he abandoned the Volvo and either jogged or rode a mountain bike back to his house on Blackberry Road, while Sammy and Tzipi continued to sleep in their upstairs bedrooms.

A witness would later tell the police that he had seen a man walking alongside a bicycle at 1:00
A.M.
through the Brixworth Apartments complex about two weeks before Janet’s car was found. The witness said that he hadn’t realized until later that the man he had seen was Perry March.

The
Nashville Scene
reported that the local Volvo dealership that sold the car to Janet and Perry established that the Volvo 850 was designed to hold a typical mountain bike inside the vehicle. The detectives also believed that Perry created the so-called “to do” list on the home computer and printed it out before leaving for the Brixworth Apartments. They further believed that Perry had waited until around midnight to call the Levines so that he would have time to complete all of the aforementioned tasks in an attempt to cover up what had really happened that evening.

The detectives had apparently also mentioned that Perry’s father, Arthur, and his brother, Ronald, were being looked at as “possible accomplices in the crime,” according to the
Nashville Scene.
Both men, however, steadfastly maintained that they had no involvement in Janet’s disappearance, and there was no evidence to indicate otherwise. In fact, even though Perry March had already been convicted in the court of public opinion regarding his wife’s disappearance, there wasn’t much that could link him to any wrongdoing at all.

Perhaps because of the lack of evidence in the case, Perry March continued to speak out publicly about how he had been wronged by the police, by his in-laws, and by the community over Janet’s disappearance. At one point he compared himself to Richard Jewell, the Atlanta security guard who had been named by the FBI as the prime suspect in Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park bombing. It had been three months before the authorities in Atlanta publicly cleared Jewell of the bombing.

Perry had convinced himself that he had been victimized. He had been ostracized by his former friends and colleagues, as well as much of the community. By this time his in-laws had taken steps to gain control of the Blackberry Road house, since they had provided the financing for it, and Perry was no longer able to keep up the mortgage payments. It seemed to Perry that his father-in-law had played a role in Perry’s current hardships, including his sudden falling out of favor with the community and an inability to find work in Nashville. He said that he had also been accused of sexually abusing his children.

“Without a shred of evidence,” Perry told the
Nashville Scene
during an interview from his newly rented $3,000-a-month house in Wilmette, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, “the police and my in-laws have taken away my house, my livelihood, my community. They’re trying to screw around with my son and daughter. I’ve been wrongly accused of sexually abusing my kids. My daughter has been subjected to a complete medical examination. But you’ll see. I’ll be vindicated. . . . I will not allow one misguided police off icer, one vengeful man, and a few low-life journalists to destroy what I’ve taken years to build.”

It was generally believed that Larry Levine had put out the word that he preferred his colleagues in the legal profession to remain silent about Perry March’s difficulties, and some even said that Levine, a powerful and wealthy man in the community, had set out to destroy his son-in-law.

“When Larry is lucid, all he can talk about is destroying Perry,” said a colleague, who did not want to be identified.

A former Vanderbilt University Law School classmate of Perry’s recalled Perry as someone who held a passionate desire for monetary achievement, and lightheartedly referred to him as “the classmate most likely to be indicted for securities fraud.” An avid tennis player, who spent many Sundays at the Whitworth Racquet Club challenging opponents in the active sport, Perry was characterized as an aggressive competitor who did not take losing lightly.

It seemed as if the entire Nashville community had turned its back on Perry March. Shunned at the Nashville nightclubs that he and Janet used to frequent, by December 1996, Perry March was lucky if he found a former acquaintance who was willing to even speak to him. It was one of the reasons, but not the only one, why Perry took the kids and his possessions and moved to the rented home in Illinois. He left all of Janet’s clothing behind, including her wedding veil, hanging inside closets at the Blackberry Road home.

At one point the
Nashville Scene
enlisted the aid of a local psychiatrist, whom the newspaper asked to analyze portions of the anonymous letters that Perry had allegedly written to Leigh Reames while employed at Bass, Berry & Sims. The psychiatrist, who was assured anonymity by the newspaper, based his analysis of the letters on “informed speculation,” without ever meeting Perry March. The psychiatrist was told, however, that Perry March was the person who had allegedly written the letters.

The psychiatrist characterized the person who wrote the letters as “antisocial,” “manipulative,” and considered the writer as an “unstable” person who had used “incredibly bad judgment.” The psychiatrist said that the descriptions of sexual activity in the letters were “self-degrading,” and always focused “on her orgasm.”

“His orgasm is never mentioned,” the psychiatrist said. “Is he impotent, or is he afraid of being impotent?”

The psychiatrist stated that the letters were “juvenile” in nature, and were something that “an eight- or nine-year-old” might write. Because the writer had gone on so about what “an excellent husband” he was, and spoke of how he had never been unfaithful to his wife before, the psychiatrist felt that this had been an attempt at making “an effort to prove this to himself.”

“[He] appears to think that his wife is in the way of his having what he perceives as a satisfying relationship,” the psychiatrist said. “Nobody who writes a letter like that could be an excellent spouse. It’s okay to have fantasies like that, but don’t act on them.”

The psychiatrist said that the letters were written by someone who had displayed “significant narcissism. Count the number of ‘I’s in the first letter. It’s pretty impressive.” The psychiatrist summed up his analysis by saying that the writer of those letters is “a very sick man,” self-centered, and desirous of attention.

 

 

On December 11, 1996, an Illinois judge ordered Perry March to provide his in-laws regular visits with their grandchildren, Sammy and Tzipi. The judge also appointed a Chicago attorney to represent the welfare of the children. According to the ruling, the Levines would be allowed to visit their grandchildren for two hours that same evening; however, Perry was not at home when the Levines arrived. The Levines were told by a relative of Perry’s that Perry and the children had gone away, out of state. The relative was not specific about where they had gone.