Love, Lies, and Murder (5 page)

Because Perry March’s cooperation with the police had dwindled to the point that it appeared that it would soon be nonexistent, Detective David Miller, wanting to search the March residence again, wrote up an affidavit in support of a search warrant. They still had much work to do, and because Perry, with each passing day, looked more and more like a viable suspect in Janet’s disappearance, Miller needed to get back inside the house so that it could be gone over more thoroughly than it had been processed earlier. In preparing his affidavit, Miller went over the facts of the case as they were known at that time. He included information surrounding Detective Mason’s interview with Marissa Moody, Perry’s contention that Janet had taken an extended vacation because he and Janet were having marital problems, the fact that Janet had missed her son’s sixth birthday party, details about the construction workers reporting the foul odor in the March’s neighborhood after Janet disappeared, and details regarding the discovery of Janet’s Volvo. He also cited the fact that it appeared that Perry had been untruthful with him and his colleagues as they attempted to investigate the case, and that he had refused to take a polygraph examination and had become uncooperative.

Of course the fact that Perry had refused the polygraph examination was not proof that he was guilty of any wrongdoing. Refusing to take a lie-detector test is a common practice, according to longtime Nashville criminal defense attorney Charles Ray.

“Any criminal defense attorney worth his salt would not allow his client to take a polygraph exam,” Ray said, because it would require a suspect “to give full statements that could come back later to haunt him.”

Miller also stated in his affidavit that it was important from an evidentiary standpoint that the police be allowed to examine the personal computer inside Perry’s house.

As Miller prepared the affidavit, word got out from the district attorney’s office that a search warrant was forthcoming and imminent. As a result, at least in part, of the impending search warrant, Miller, along with an attorney representing the district attorney’s office, held a closed-door meeting with attorney Lionel Barrett, whom Perry had retained to represent him during the early stages of the investigation. At that meeting, according to what Perry would later tell the
Nashville Scene,
someone said that Perry might consider pleading guilty to charges of voluntary manslaughter. Such an agreement would have netted Perry a three-to-six-year term, with the possibility of parole after serving 30 percent of the sentence. When he learned of the purported plea-bargaining discussion, Perry claimed that his response was: “Fuck them. I didn’t do anything.”

The district attorney’s office declined to comment about the purported plea bargain meeting, and Perry’s attorney, Barrett, claimed in a prepared statement that no such agreement had been attempted.

The following day, Tuesday, September 17, Detective Miller presented his affidavit in support of a search warrant to a Davidson County judge, who promptly approved it. The search warrant was served and executed promptly, and a more thorough search of March’s house, outbuildings, and four acres was begun. This time several dozen police off icers and trainees converged on the house, accompanied by forensic experts, as well as a computer specialist.

Inside the house evidence technicians processed the hardwood floors for traces of blood and searched for palm prints, perhaps in blood, on the floor’s shiny surface. They also collected ashes from the fireplace for examination, and scoured the bathrooms, attic, and basement for anything that might lead them one step closer to discovering what had become of Janet. However, the house appeared devoid of any clues.

Outside, the police cadets carefully probed the ground with sharp stakes, while heavy equipment operators used a bulldozer and a backhoe to remove layers of earth in designated areas. While all the activity was occurring around him, Perry sat on the back porch with his brother, Ron. They talked quietly and smoked cigars, and didn’t appear to be too concerned about all of the police activity.

Since there were no traces of blood found inside the house, and not much of a motive for murder, the detectives found themselves wondering where the investigation would lead them, if it led them anywhere at all. The search of the outbuildings and the surrounding grounds had failed to yield any evidence of a body. Without a body, there wasn’t any proof that Janet was actually dead.

As they tried to piece the case together with what little they knew, the homicide detectives could only theorize about what might have happened. In one such scenario they speculated that Perry, in the heat of the argument that he admitted having with Janet on the night in question, might have killed Janet by accident with a karate blow. Holding a black belt in karate, he would have known how to deliver a deathblow that could kill a person in a matter of seconds without spilling a drop of blood. If her death had been deliberate, a karate expert would also know how to kill a person with a choke hold or, perhaps, a blow to the sternum. In either case there likely wouldn’t be any bloodshed. If Perry had killed Janet in such a scenario, the cops theorized, he could have temporarily hidden her body in the woods that surround their house, only to retrieve it the next day, wrap it up in the rug, which Marissa Moody had described, and then haul it away to dispose of it, likely inside a Dumpster. The detectives believed that Perry delayed calling his in-laws until midnight because that would have given him plenty of time to temporarily hide Janet’s body, write Janet’s “to do” list, drive her car to the Brixworth Apartments, and perhaps ride a mountain bike back to their home. He was fond of mountain biking, and the detectives learned from a Volvo dealership that Janet’s car was equipped to carry a mountain bike.

The detectives also considered that Perry may have enlisted the aid of his father to help him dispose of Janet’s body, and may have kept her body hidden until Arthur March arrived from Mexico. They also suggested that Perry and his father used Arthur’s Ford Escort station wagon to transport Janet’s body. Both Perry and his father denied being involved in such a scenario, and the elder March even told the detectives that they could search his car for clues if they so desired. The truth of the matter was the detectives just didn’t know what had occurred and could only guess at that point about what
may
have happened.

Perry referred to all of their theories as “bullshit.”

When the investigators finally got around to examining Perry and Janet’s Ambra home computer, they made another interesting discovery: the computer’s hard drive had been removed. When Miller and his colleagues had searched Perry’s home on prior occasions at a time when they had his permission, they had asked Perry to print a file—presumably Janet’s “to do” list—for them and he had complied. The hard drive, they knew, was still with the computer at that time.

Why had the hard drive been removed? The detectives wondered. And who had removed it? Furthermore, when had it been removed?

Perry was out of town on the weekend of September 14 and 15, just prior to the execution of the search warrant. He had taken Sammy and Tzipi, he said, to Chicago to celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and had left his father at his house, alone. When the detectives suggested that perhaps Perry’s father had removed the hard drive without Perry’s knowledge, Arthur denied the allegation. Instead, Arthur told the police that the burglar alarm for the house had been turned off during part of the time that he stayed there. The cops felt like he was alluding to the possibility that someone else had come into the house without his knowledge when the burglar alarm was turned off and removed the hard drive. Similarly, Perry said that he had no idea what had happened to the hard drive.

“I didn’t take it out,” Perry said. “I had nothing to hide on my hard drive. If someone thought they were helping me [by removing the hard drive], they didn’t. It hurt me.”

Unbeknownst to his in-laws or anyone else, except his closest relatives, when Perry March was in Chicago in mid-September celebrating Rosh Hashanah with his children, he was also making plans to relocate there in the near future. Suspecting Perry’s plans, Lawrence and Carolyn Levine immediately filed documents to obtain an emergency court order that barred Perry from taking Sammy and Tzipi out of Tennessee. However, they were too late. Fearing that the Levines would try to obtain custody of his children, Perry had already sent them to live with his brother, Ron, in suburban Chicago. When news of the court proceedings became public knowledge, a reporter asked him why the Levines would suddenly turn against him after treating him like their own son for many years.

“That’s the thousand-dollar question,” Perry replied. “I’m being treated like a murderer and they (his in-laws) are taking away all our property.”

On Tuesday, September 24, the homicide detectives continued their effort to find Janet’s body. They used specially trained cadaver-sniffing dogs to search the acreage in the vicinity of Perry and Janet’s home, where the foul odor was reported a few weeks after she disappeared. They also brought in an army helicopter that was equipped with a heat-sensitive device to scan for any sign of Janet’s remains. Divers searched nearby lakes, paying particular attention to Radnor Lake, located a few miles east of their Forest Hills home. They also examined freshly poured concrete foundations in the area, but their efforts, when all was said and done, had not yielded any results.

Two days later, on September 26, Lawrence and Carolyn Levine appeared in Nashville Juvenile Court and asked Judge Andy Shookhoff to order that Perry allow them to visit their grandchildren every weekend, beginning on October 4. However, by that time Perry had also relocated to Chicago, and Nashville authorities were unable to immediately serve him with the visitation orders.

As a result of continued legal actions by the Levines in their effort to be granted visitation rights to see their grandchildren, Perry March was subpoenaed and ordered to provide a deposition in a civil proceeding on October 15 about his wife’s disappearance, his financial affairs, and his current state of mental health. During the videotaped deposition Perry invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination at least fifteen times. He did so, of course, on the advice of his attorney. Because he had by then been named by the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department as the prime suspect in his wife’s disappearance and probable death, it was sound advice according to legal experts.

“They beat the shit out of me,” Perry said, referring to the deposition.

One of the questions that he had been asked and to which he had invoked his Fifth Amendment rights was whether he had killed his wife. The next day, the
Tennessean
front-page headline read:
MARCH TAKES THE FIFTH. WON’T ANSWER ON HOW WIFE DISAPPEARED.
If he hadn’t already been convicted in the court of public opinion, the newspaper headline had certainly accomplished it. Perry March, for all intents and purposes, was finished in Nashville—even if he hadn’t killed his wife. Even though he had been ostracized by all of his former friends and associates, he had intended to return to Nashville in the not-too-distant future to practice law so that he could gain “the future respect of his children.” He wouldn’t be able to do that now.

“The sad thing is, I had thought I wanted to go through life with these people,” Perry said of his former friends and associates, all of whom had literally turned their backs on him. “But when it’s all said and done, they are nothing but small-minded, petty little people.”

 

 

As Detective Miller continued his search for answers to the mysterious puzzle that he was handed, the subject of Perry’s employment with Bass, Berry & Sims—more appropriately his swift departure from that firm—surfaced again. He decided that he would look into it further, to see if he could use any of the information to help him in his search for a possible motive if Perry had indeed killed his wife, either accidentally or deliberately.

Among the things that Miller eventually learned as he ran down the potential lead was that on July 19, 1991, a Friday, an attractive blond paralegal employed at the firm found a letter on her chair when she arrived at work that morning. Leigh Reames was highly regarded by most everyone at Bass, Berry & Sims, and was recognized as a hard worker. When she opened the sealed letter, she noticed that it had been typed, single-spaced, and was three pages in length. It didn’t take long for Leigh to realize that the letter was a sexually explicit offer for her to have oral sex with the as-yet-unknown writer, who stated that he was a married man.

“I want to inhale the essence of you,” the letter said. “I want to taste your arms. The pure animal sexiness of your body grips me and embarrasses me. . . . I want to make love to you because I am attracted to you, all of you. . . . The thought of my tongue buried within you excites me more than anything else in the world. . . .” The letter included the writer’s notion of wanting to have “hours and hours” of oral sex with Leigh, and talked about “licking and sucking . . . kissing and caressing (your) soft belly and thighs.”

The letter included details of the writer’s marriage, including that “marriage has a way of making sex boring at times, routine and old. I do not mean that it loses its pleasure. We still climax. We still love passionately. We still love our partners and aim to please. . . . I want you to cry because you never knew how good it could be.”

The letter included somewhat complex instructions for Leigh to follow if she wanted to communicate with the letter writer: “This is an indication, if you ever should consider or wish to communicate, check out of the library the Tax Management Estates, Gifts and Trusts Portfolio No. 134-4
^th
, titled ‘Annuities’ located near the Westlaw terminal on the 25
^th
floor in the library. When you check it out, insert a library checkout card signed by you in its place. I will periodically notice if it is gone. If so, I will contact you to let you know how to reach me anonymously.”

Leigh, being a moral, upstanding woman, was disgusted by the letter. She wanted no part of it, and she immediately took the letter and showed it to her supervisor. Following a meeting with the firm’s upper management, it was decided that if the anonymous letter writer had placed one letter on Leigh’s chair, he would likely leave her another one, especially if she agreed to play along. She agreed, and with that thought in mind, the firm hired an outside security service, Business Risk International, to learn the identity of the mysterious letter writer.

The security firm promptly installed two inconspicuous closed-circuit video cameras and focused them on Leigh’s workstation, located on the twenty-fifth floor of the First American Center. They also set up surveillance in the library and waited. Leigh followed the instructions laid out in the letter and removed the annuities portfolio. She also signed a checkout card and left it in the space where the volume had been located. Just as they had suspected, Leigh received an additional letter from the anonymous writer.

By this time it was August 14, and the new letter began: “I can barely type this. My hands are unsteady and my thoughts are whirling in a maelstrom of emotions. . . . I feel as if my heart stopped beating. . . . My world is far less grey [
sic
] today than it has ever been in my life. I feel like the lucky leprechaun who has seen the rainbow and knows what lays [
sic
] beyond. And like the leprechaun, I wonder if I’ll ever find it. . . . Say what you will, my dearest, you will forever be my truest longing.”

The thing that was different this time was that the letter writer was no longer anonymous. Perry March, thirty years old at the time, had been captured on video as he removed Leigh’s checkout card from the shelf that had been designated in the letter, and he was subsequently named by Business Risk International as the mysterious letter writer. Perry’s office was also on the building’s twenty-fifth floor, not far from Leigh’s work area.

Perry’s son, Sammy, Miller reflected as he pondered the information, was only eleven months old when Leigh had received the letters.

Miller learned that upper management, upon learning of the letter writer’s identity, called Perry into a closed-door meeting during which they gave him two options. He could resign, or they would fire him. If he chose to accept the offer to resign, the firm required that he would obtain counseling for his sexual issues. Perry agreed, and the firm sent Leigh on a paid vacation.

However, when Leigh returned from her vacation, she saw that Perry was still there, working at the firm. She ran into him everywhere, despite her best efforts to avoid him. She couldn’t even go to the bathroom or get coffee without seeing him. Finally she’d had enough and resigned from the firm, and in the process retained a lawyer to represent her in a possible sexual harassment suit. Perry March left Bass, Berry & Sims two weeks later.

Miller learned that Perry had reached an out-of-court settlement with Leigh Reames for $25,000 over the letter-writing incidents in order to avoid a full-blown sexual harassment lawsuit. However, he had been slow in paying off the settlement, and by the summer of 1996, he had only paid half of it. Apparently, Janet had learned of the settlement, possibly through her father, Miller learned, or possibly by somehow getting hold of a letter that Perry had written to Leigh on August 13, two days before Janet disappeared, in which he had explained that he was having difficulty coming up with the remainder of the money that he owed her. Miller theorized that if Janet had learned of the letter, it could have been the cause for their argument on the evening of August 15. Miller theorized that Janet may have confronted Perry about the letter, perhaps even threatening him with divorce and the bleak prospect of cutting him off financially, and that the argument had been enough to send Perry over the edge.

It was only a theory, however, one of many that Miller and his colleagues would explore. By this point in time, however, there was little doubt in anyone’s mind that Perry March, if not a murderer, was a scoundrel.