Love, Lies, and Murder (15 page)

Whether in the United States or in Mexico, Perry March had become a center of controversy, motivating the media—for whatever reason—to continue to run articles on Perry’s exploits, to which he frequently responded by telephone to the newspaper in question and to the reporters in particular, threatening to file suit over any given story. Perry’s antagonistic, scolding telephone calls had become too much at one point for the
Guadalajara Colony Reporter.
It seemed that every time Perry called, he would upset people with his tirades. The newspaper finally had had enough and they began tagging the byline on their Perry March stories as “Staff Reports.” It would help keep the writer anonymous so that Perry would not know who to call to complain to and threaten with lawsuits.

Things also became worse for the business entities created by Perry March and Samuel Chavez, creating some local speculation that perhaps Perry had seen the failures coming and had bailed in July 2000 before the real damage occurred. Premiere Properties went belly-up, with its manager and real estate broker leaving town in the process. They also lost their Guardian Security manager, who took his family and returned to the United States. Much of the business plaza where C&M, Ltd., ran their businesses suddenly became vacant and were on the market again, and its owners were left holding unpaid rent bills that C&M had left behind.

Chavez remained in Ajijic for a few months after the businesses folded, then relocated to Guadalajara, where he opened up shop as a middleman handling international adoptions. Perry remained behind with his new family, living in his lavish rental home in the well-heeled subdivision of La Floresta, while he became more deeply occupied with his plans for the already-troubled Chula Vista Norte subdivision. There was also the café that he eventually wanted to open with his wife, Carmen, and he had begun thinking about starting up a new lakeside real estate project, or scheme, depending upon who was asked.

 

 

The Levines’ thirty-nine-day court-ordered visitation officially ended on Sunday, July 30, 2000. Earlier that month, on July 3, the Levines had filed paperwork in Tennessee asking that Perry’s parental rights be terminated, charging that Perry should lose custody because he had been found responsible for Janet’s disappearance in a civil court. Nashville Juvenile Court granted the Levines temporary custody of the children until the parental-rights determination could be made. When Sammy and Tzipi were not returned to their father, according to the terms of the court order, Perry asked his Mexican lawyer to file a motion requesting that his children be returned to him immediately. He had also asked for further investigation into the manner in which his children had been removed from Mexico by the Levines, but a search of immigration records in Mexico failed to turn up any records of the children exiting the country.

“The Levines signed this order for thirty-nine days and they pissed on it,” Perry said. “They’re liars. . . . I have been cut off from my kids. August twenty-seventh was my son’s birthday and they wouldn’t let me speak to him. I don’t even know where they are. People who have children will know what this feels like.”

Perry’s scenario could have been looked at another way—now he must at least have some semblance of how Larry and Carolyn Levine must have felt when their child, their only daughter, Janet, disappeared.

As the summer of 2000 raced on, John Herbison, Perry March, and another attorney continued their search for the solution to getting Perry’s children returned to him. After several weeks and hundreds of intensive research hours between them, their efforts were successful when they discovered an international treaty that addressed the problems associated with international child abductions. After studying the treaty intently, the three attorneys finally agreed that their remedy likely lay in the provisions of The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction (aka the Hague Convention), and with the International Child Abduction Remedies Act (ICARA).

According to the Hague Convention preamble, the Hague Convention was adopted by the signatory nations “to protect children internationally from the harmful effects of their wrongful removal or retention and to establish procedures to ensure their prompt return to the State of their habitual residence, as well as to secure protection for rights of access.”

Under the provisions of the ICARA, the lawyers learned, a “petitioner must establish by a preponderance of the evidence that his children were wrongfully removed or retained in breach of his custody rights under the laws of the contracting state in which the children habitually resided before they were removed or retained,” which, in Perry’s case, was Jalisco State, Mexico. Once wrongful removal is shown, the children must be returned. However, a court is not bound to order return of the children if the respondents establish certain exceptions under the treaty. The ICARA requires that a respondent establish by clear and convincing evidence the
grave
risk of harm to the children if they are returned to the custodial parent from which they had been separated. Notwithstanding these exceptions, the treaty further provides that “the provisions of this chapter (pertaining to the return of the children) do not limit the power of a judicial or administrative authority to order the return of the child
at any time
.”

March, with the help of Herbison in Nashville and another attorney in Mexico, filed his “Petition for Return of Children” under the ICARA, on August 3, 2000, with the U.S. District Court in Nashville, Tennessee, asserting that they were wrongfully removed from their habitual residence in Mexico in violation of his custodial rights and the Hague Convention. In addition to the return of his children, March requested that the district court expedite matters; enter a provisional order directing the Levines to return his children pending a hearing, or alternatively, that the court grant him immediate rights of access, including telephone contact with the children and a schedule for the children to have time with him until a hearing could be held to decide the outcome; and that trial be set in advance of the children’s school year, among other relief provisions.

The Levines filed a sworn “answer” on August 22, 2000. Among the numerous defenses that they had raised, the Levines had asserted that March should be “disenti-tled” from bringing his petition before the court under the “fugitive disentitlement doctrine.” They also asserted that Mexico was not the habitual residence of the children, as required for the return of children under articles 3 and 12 of the Hague Convention. They further asserted exceptions to the return of the children under “articles 13(b) and 20” of the treaty, i.e., that return of the children to their father would present a
grave
risk of psychological and physical harm, as well as place them in an intolerable situation, and that the return of the children would “violate human rights and fundamental freedoms.” In addition, the Levines asserted that “full faith and credit” were due to various state and Mexican court decisions under a variety of legal theories, including “abstention” or nonparticipation.

“We knew we might never see them again,” Carolyn Levine said of her grandchildren, sobbing. “He told the children that their mother ran away and abandoned them. Her children grew up thinking that their mother abandoned them. But nobody loved them more than their mother.”

In the meantime, on Friday, August 25, Perry March got at least part of what he had been seeking—arrest warrants naming Larry and Carolyn Levine, along with their son, Mark, on allegations related to “their probable criminal responsibility in committing the crime of abduction of minors.”

On Wednesday, August 30, 2000, Perry March filed a motion asking for a summary judgment or partial summary judgment on the question of whether the Levines had wrongfully removed, or had wrongfully retained, the children under the ICARA. The next day, the Levines filed a motion to dismiss Perry’s petition based on his inability to establish that Mexico was the children’s habitual residence and on the fugitive disentitlement doctrine.

“The bottom line is,” Perry said, “that this treaty says that you can’t steal children and try to make custody determinations in the jurisdiction where you stole them to.”

On Friday, September 1, 2000, the district court ruled that it would decide these pending motions prior to allowing any discovery. More than a month later, and after the court allowed a voluminous amount of evidence into the record in conjunction with the parties’ briefs and independently sought information under the terms of the treaty, the district court entered a fifty-two-page opinion and an order in which it granted Perry March’s petition and ordered the Levines to immediately return Sammy and Tzipi to him. Specifically, the district court held that Perry had met his burden of establishing wrongful retention. It further held that the Levines had not met their burden of showing exceptions to the return of the children under the treaty. In addition, the court declined to “disentitle” Perry from bringing forth his petition.

Without delay, the Levines obtained a stay from the court of appeals that was effective in preventing the children from being returned to Perry immediately. If the kids had been sent home immediately, the appeal would have become a moot issue, because the U.S. courts would lose jurisdiction of the children. And back and forth it went throughout much of the autumn and winter of 2000 and into the spring of 2001.

As part of the merits of their appeal, the Levines had argued that the district court erred when it declined to disentitle Perry March from pursuing his petition under the fugitive disentitlement doctrine based on various state court orders. The Levines also contended that the district court was in error when it refused to allow discovery or a hearing on the merits of their appeal prior to ruling on the petition, or “otherwise permit them to develop their affirmative defenses.” They further argued that the district court erred when it granted the summary judgment in favor of Perry. Finally, in their response to March’s response to their appeal and responding to March’s cross-appeal, the Levines asserted that the abstention doctrine (that had been based on another case called
Younger
) was applicable to this case.

An abstention doctrine is sometimes used or applied so that a particular court of law can refuse to hear a particular case when it is apparent that hearing the case would infringe upon the authority of another court. Abstention doctrines are typically brought into play when the same or similar legal issues are brought in two different courts simultaneously. In
Younger v. Harris
, the case cited by the Levines, the United States Supreme Court held that United States federal courts were required to abstain from hearing any civil rights tort claims brought by a person who is currently being prosecuted for a matter arising from that claim.

On cross-appeal Perry argued, among other things, that the district court had erred when it failed to address his argument that the Levines had no standing to assert any defenses.

What it all boiled down to in the end was that Perry March, along with the attorneys that came to his rescue and used the Hague Convention as their legal tool, had beaten the Levines in that battle of the child custody war that each was waging. However, although a federal judge had ordered that Perry’s children be returned to him, due to the stay that the Levines had obtained from the U.S. Court of Appeals, Perry would not see his children for another seven months. Finally a federal judge ordered the Levines to return the children to Perry immediately, and they arrived in Mexico to be reunited with their father on Saturday, April 21, 2001.

The Levines, although they had no choice but to comply with the federal judge’s order to return the children to their father, vowed to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court—and they did—to appeal the federal judge’s decision to return Sammy and Tzipi to Mexico. However, in January 2002, the Supreme Court declined to hear their appeal and thus ended this particular custody battle.

Meanwhile, Evanston, Illinois author Wendy Goldman Rohm publicly announced that she had plans to write a book about Perry March’s saga. She began putting the word out that she had already secured a book deal with Random House, according to published reports, and that her book, when finished, would set the record straight about the Perry March case.

“There have been inaccurate statements made on both sides,” Rohm told the
Nashville Scene,
“but it does seem like there has been heavy misinformation coming from those who assume that Perry March murdered his wife. To date, there has not been even the slightest bit of evidence that he murdered his wife.”

While it was true that the police had no physical evidence that Perry had murdered Janet, it was clear that Rohm’s take on the story would show that Perry had been unjustly smeared by a news media that was being manipulated. The reporting, she said, “seems incredibly one-sided. I don’t know if that’s a function of reporters not having access, but there has been lots of inaccurate reporting, judging by the facts I have collected.”

Rohm, according to the
Nashville Scene
article, was not familiar with the Willy Stern pieces that had appeared years earlier in that paper, and the fact that Stern had had access to Perry March, as well as the cops and numerous other people, when he had written those articles. Although Rohm claimed that her book would tell both sides of the story, her statements to the
Nashville Scene
made it appear that she was sympathetic to Perry’s plight for reasons that were not entirely clear.

Because Perry had been found civilly liable for Janet’s death, and although she believed the civil judgment to be a sham, Rohm, hinting that Perry’s civil rights had been violated, predicted that it would attract the attention of federal authorities and trigger a lawsuit against the state of Tennessee.

“Based on information I have seen,” Rohm said, “there will be a massive federal suit against the state of Tennessee.”

Rohm also opined that the powerful Levine family had set out to destroy Perry’s life, and it had been through their actions that Perry could no longer find work in the States to earn a living for himself and his kids. He had no choice but to leave the country.

“As we speak,” Rohm told the
Nashville Scene,
“they are telling the kids, ‘Your father killed your mother.’”

When asked how she came by that information, Rohm indicated that she had interviewed people who had talked with Sammy and Tzipi, but she did not name anyone specifically. The Levines, upon hearing of Rohm’s claims, denied that they had made any such statements to the children, leaving Rohm’s claims open to speculation that perhaps her interview subjects had consisted of Perry March and his new wife, Carmen. While she admitted that she had not spoken to the Levines, who have remained very selective about whom they talk to, she declined to acknowledge at that time that she had spoken with Perry.

Rohm later shared her opinion about Perry March with
Nashville Scene
reporter Matt Pulle: “I don’t have any judgments on whether he is guilty or innocent, but to this day there has not been evidence gathered to accuse him of killing his wife. He has been accessible and has answered all my questions. There are some areas in our interviews that have worried me in terms of inconsistencies, but nothing solid enough to prove one way or another that he is guilty.”