The Red Parts (18 page)

LATE THAT night I return to the trendy hotel in the meatpacking district where CBS has graciously put me up. Not knowing beforehand that the penthouse bar there will be wall-to-wall drunk fashion models, white linen suits, and $18 bright-blue cocktails, I had invited some friends to stop by and say good-bye to me there.

The bar is too loud for conversation, so eventually we give up and crouch on our toadstools, watching the beautiful people do their thing. The most amusing spectacle is a group of Hasidic men getting lap dances from a trio of busty blondes. Things really get going when the blondes tear off the men’s yarmulkes and put them on. The Hasidim think this is hilarious, and take several photographs of the half-dressed, yarmulked women with the digital cameras on their cell phones.

Life is a cabaret
, toasts one of my friends, gesturing out to the scene.
Come to the cabaret.

You can also look upon our life as an episode unprofitably disturbing the blessed calm of nothingness
, wrote Schopenhauer.

Eventually I take the elevator down to my room, where I lie down to sleep under a wall-sized, framed glass portrait of Kate Moss.

T
HIS TRIAL HAS done an enormous disservice to both of these families.

So said Leiterman’s lawyer at the start of his closing arguments. He went on to say that Leiterman was a father and a grandfather who had been uprooted from his home, where he was needed and loved, incarcerated for months without bail, then forced to stand trial for a decades-old murder he had nothing to do with. Meanwhile my family had been dragged through an agonizing ordeal that had cracked open old wounds, and which would undoubtedly leave us racked with more uncertainty, more pain, and more unanswered questions. At the end of his monologue he approached the jury box and asked theatrically,
Why Jane?
To underscore the fact that there was no apparent motive linking his client to her death, he repeated,
Why Jane? Why Jane?
several more times, as if it were a question no one in my family had ever posed before.

None of it makes any sense
, he concluded, shaking his head.

He was right on almost every count.

In his closing arguments, Hiller was as deadpan and meticulous as he had been all along. But to this somber presentation he now added gesture, elaborately miming how the killer would have lifted Jane out of the passenger side of a car and deposited her on the cemetery ground. He was trying to give the jury a visual image of how and why Leiterman’s skin cells would have sloughed off around certain parts of her pantyhose, his hands slick with the sweat of adrenaline, the physical expenditure of killing, carrying, and dragging. Throughout this performance it looked as if Hiller were carrying an imaginary bride over the threshold, or putting a ghost to bed.

Having the case reopened 36 years later—is like losing her not once—but twice
, my grandfather wrote in his terse, 208-word “victim’s impact” statement, addressed “To whom it may concern,” which Hiller read aloud at Leiterman’s sentencing on August 30, 2005, on which day Leiterman was sentenced to life in prison, without possibility of parole.

I feel no need to—on my part, to offer an apology or any statement of remorse to the Mixer family
, Leiterman said on this day, breaking his long silence.
And, as Dr. Mixer mentioned in his letter, to have to live through this trial again last July and hear all that ghastly testimony and view all those ghastly photos. What a horrible feeling. But, I also want to say that I’m innocent of this crime and I’m going to do everything I can within this jurisdictional system to appeal my conviction. And, I guess that’s all.

Someday, when this is all over, I’d love to sit down with you and your family and spin out this whole crazy web
, Schroeder had told me at the start. But despite hours of hard work on the part of over a hundred people from various agencies (the Violent Crimes Unit out of Ypsilanti, the Michigan State Police, the Major Case Team within the Livingston and Washtenaw Narcotics Enforcement Team, and so on), the police and prosecution were eventually unable to discover any links between Leiterman, Ruelas, and Jane. The defense raked the Lansing lab over the coals, but there was never any convincing evidence of lab error or contamination. No one has the faintest idea how the blood of four-year-old “Johnny” got dripped onto the back of Jane’s left hand. Leiterman will most likely sit in prison for the rest of his life claiming he never knew Jane, never laid a hand on her, and has no clue how “a mother lode” of his DNA could have gotten all over her pantyhose. As of July 11, 2006, his first appeal has been denied. The whole crazy web will never get spun.

A few weeks after the sentencing, my grandfather finds himself up late watching a “cold case” TV show. The episode has to do with a recent string of murders in Texas. After the show he calls my mother to express concern that maybe this man from Texas actually killed Jane, maybe Leiterman was the wrong guy after all. He says he wants to talk to Schroeder about it; my mother gently discourages him from doing so.

The day after
Deadly Ride
airs in November 2005, I get an e-mail from one of my father’s brothers, a man I do not know if I would recognize if he were sitting right here in my living room.
Hopefully, this has given at least some closure to the Mixer family
, he writes.
Wish we had some more closure to Bruce’s death. A guess by the doctor as to the cause of death hasn’t been much to go on.
A guess by the doctor? I write back immediately and ask if there was some kind of confusion about my father’s death that I don’t know about. I never hear back.

When I first heard the term “open murder”—the charge upon which Leiterman was originally detained, and which the jury converted to “first-degree”—I did not understand what it meant. I thought I was mishearing the police. But now I know that “open murder” is an intentionally fuzzy charge. It means, essentially, murder without a story.

Even if Leiterman were to “tell all”—assuming he “knows all,” whatever that might mean, or that he hasn’t eternally repressed whatever it is that he knows—“open murder” would probably remain, for me, the more accurate charge. The incoherence of the act, the suffering it caused—these things are not negotiable.

His lawyer was wrong, however, to term the trial a disservice.

I
N MARCH 2005, about halfway between Schroeder’s November call and Leiterman’s July trial, I decide to go to Michigan to do a reading for
Jane
at a bookstore in Ann Arbor. I fly out to Detroit on a bitterly cold morning, rent a car at the airport, and find a cheap motel nearby to stay the night.

After checking into the motel I find I don’t know quite what to do with my day. Michigan feels, as it has always felt to me, claustrophobic and haunted. Though I’ve only been in the state for two hours I already have the urge to flee. To staple myself into the day I call Schroeder and make a plan to meet him at the Ypsilanti state police post in the afternoon, then to have dinner with him in Ann Arbor before the reading.

I spend the first part of the morning tooling around U of M in my rental car, watching undergraduates swaddled in parkas scurry around the campus. I drive past the impressive, stone Law Quad, where Jane lived at the time of her death, and where my father also once lived. He graduated from the U of M law school in 1968, just a few months before Jane started. I cannot easily imagine him here, but I know his ghost must walk here also.

Then, without really thinking about what I’m doing, I find myself winding out of town on Route 12, the road that leads to Denton Cemetery.

I had been to this spot once before, about three years earlier, while doing research for
Jane.
That visit was part of a painful but momentous trip I took with my mother, during which we traced the path of Jane’s final hours to the best of our—or my—knowledge. Going to Denton Cemetery with her then made sense. It felt like a service, to be able to accompany her to a place she’d always wondered about but was too afraid to visit on her own.

Driving down the gray highway now I remember a creepy piece of fiction about the Michigan Murders I’d once found online, a poorly written horror story in which the female narrator and her boyfriend visit all the spots where the dead girls were found. At the last spot they visit together, the boyfriend reveals himself to be the killer, and murders her there. When I read this story I felt sick at the thought of someone visiting all these places to do research for a shoddy piece of writing about a set of murders that had nothing to do with her. Yet here I was, driving my rental car out to the same plot of earth, feeling very much the stranger.

The last time I’d been out this way the cemetery was hard to find. There had been but one small, rusty, easy-to-miss metal sign. This time I’m surprised to find they’ve “done work” on the place. There are new, clean, and clear signs from the main road. The old chain-link fence, the one that Nancy Grow had been ashamed to pass through, and which my mother and I had once passed through together, has been replaced.

On the gravel road leading to the cemetery entrance I get caught behind a garbage truck making lengthy starts and stops all the way down the street. The two garbagemen look back at me suspiciously for the rest of their ride after I park my car, get out, and stand motionless by the new fence, staring at the muddy ground.

It had been sunny and pastoral, the air buzzing with summer insects, when I was here with my mother. Now it’s overcast and freezing, and I feel like a trespasser. A Peeping Tom, with nothing to see.

I couldn’t say—I still can’t say—what this spot means to me, empty as it is. To me alone, without my mother, without the explanatory shelter of a “family story.” I know that Schroeder has also come out here alone on several occasions—to ponder, as a detective, what might have happened to Jane, but also, I suspect, for other reasons, reasons that may remain as unfathomable to him as my own do to me.

One thing feels clear enough, however. The thought of dragging a body out of a car and abandoning it in this frigid, eerie place strikes me as exceptionally cruel. I stay just long enough to have this revelation, then get back in the car and drive to meet Schroeder at his post.

A cop at the desk alerts Schroeder to my arrival over the intercom. He is downstairs in a meeting, and I hear him say playfully,
We’re almost done down here, so don’t let her out—lock the door behind her.

As one might imagine, the Violent Crimes Unit at the state police post is the kind of place where you feel locked in just upon entering. For the half hour that I wait there, I listen to the cop at the desk take incoming calls, and chronicle an astonishing litany of abuses.
Yeah, that’s an aggravated domestic right there, a felony because he had the gun, then, what? He pistol-whipped her for what? Four hours? Yeah, he’ll do some time, he has a history of domestic, and now we’ll add another domestic on top of that. OK, sounds good, catch you later.
When I don’t feel like listening I wander over to the wall-sized map of the state of Michigan, and mindlessly jot down the finer points of the state’s flora and fauna: state bird, ROBIN; state tree, WHITE PINE; state fish, BROOK TROUT; state soil, KALKASKA.

Eventually Schroeder buzzes me in and takes me on a whirlwind tour of the building. Several cops in the hallways ask if I am “the sketch artist”—an identity that has never occurred to me before, but momentarily sounds appealing.

One of the rooms on the tour is Schroeder’s office. Above his desk is a strip of photos of the Michigan Murder victims clipped from a ‘60s newspaper—the same strip I once had pinned over my desk in an attic apartment in Brooklyn, New York, many years ago. To the left of his desk is a high shelf, upon which sit several cardboard evidence boxes. It takes me a moment to realize that these are the evidence boxes from each of the Michigan Murder cases. The girls’ last names appear on the side of each box writ large in Magic Marker: FLESZAR. SCHELL. SKELTON. BASOM. KALOM. BEINEMAN.

I don’t know whether to laugh or weep. It feels like the last scene of
Raiders of the Lost Ark
, when the all-important, destructive, and sublime ark has been crated up, and a whistling janitor is wheeling it into an enormous warehouse of identical crates, unwittingly resubmerging its mystery. God only knows what these boxes hold—what “cellular deposits” yet to be decoded, what flakes of dried blood, what ensembles of clothing, what other arbitrary and wrenching mementos from these girls’ bodies and lives.

The tour also includes a small room full of dented file cabinets which, Schroeder tells me, he punches whenever he gets angry at all the fucked-up things people do to one another. I can’t tell if this is a confession, a performance, or both.

We take separate cars to Ann Arbor and meet up at a dark pub across the street from the bookstore where I’m supposed to read later. We each order hamburgers. Schroeder then tells me that during the span of his investigation of Jane’s case, he faced down many demons. He left a bad marriage, quit drinking, fell in love with someone new, and started paying attention to his health, which was seriously in trouble. He takes out his wallet and shows me pictures of his new girlfriend, a social worker named Carol, and her two kids, with whom he says he is having a fantastic time. He especially loves playing with them in the pool.

For the past several years, he tells me, he has been using a photo of Jane as the screen saver on his computer. Most likely it was taken in France, when Jane was there as an exchange student. The picture came from a roll of film that the police found back in 1969 when they searched her room at the Law Quad. Detectives developed the film in the days immediately following her murder, then scoured the prints for clues. The prints yielded none, but eventually provided Schroeder with this glorious photo of Jane. He says he is glad to have a picture of her that differs so dramatically from the crime scene and autopsy photos in her file that he’s spent so much time with. He says he showed this photo to Leiterman during his interrogation, in the hopes of eliciting a breakdown. No breakdown occurred, but Schroeder swears that Leiterman appeared shaken.