Love, Lies, and Murder Page 11
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.
Not quite one month later, on January 16, 1997, following the appearance of “Part 1: A Good Thing Gone Bad” by Willy Stern, in the Nashville Scene, Detective David Miller was replaced as the lead investigator in the Janet March disappearance investigation.
It would be reported later that shortly after Perry March had moved to Chicago to try and make a fresh start, he purportedly told an acquaintance that he had been thinking about writing a book. He apparently said that what he had in mind would be a mystery, and that the story’s main character was an attractive, dark-haired young woman. Perry allegedly said that the title of the book was “Murder.com.”
Regardless of Perry March’s actions up to this point, the police knew that they had no direct evidence that Perry had murdered Janet. Furthermore, just because there was a lack of evidence was not a reason to automatically presume that Perry March had done a brilliant job of creating a cover-up. Being a bright lawyer, he was probably capable of masterminding such a plot, but it had to be considered that it was also possible that whatever had become of Janet March, Perry had had nothing to do with it. Without a body, the cops didn’t know with any degree of certainty that Janet was even dead.
Chapter 13
Shortly after Detective David Miller was taken off the Janet March case in January 1997, veteran homicide detective Sergeant Pat Postiglione, forty-five, and Detective Bill Pridemore, forty-three, were assigned to the investigation to work alongside Detective Mickey Miller, forty, who would later make captain and become commander of the West Precinct. Both Postiglione and Pridemore had been involved in the Janet March case from its earliest days and had participated in some of the searches that had occurred at the Blackberry Road home. Although they were both members of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department’s Murder Squad, they would begin taking more active roles in the investigation from this point forward.
Postiglione, who was born and raised in Queens, New York, and spent much of his youth living and working in blue-collar Italian neighborhoods, had wanted to be a police officer for as long as he could remember. He applied to the NYPD, but was not hired because the waiting list was so long, and he did not know anyone who could help move him more quickly up the list. As a result, h
e worked in construction for a while, but never lost his interest in police work. For reasons that aren’t clear, his interests lay in homicide.
“I’m not sure why,” he told a reporter. “But I had a cousin who was murdered when I was young. If you have personal experience with murder, you see what the victims’ families go through.”
While vacationing in Nashville, Postiglione responded to a police officer recruitment ad there and applied. In 1980, as soon as he was notified that he had been hired, he relocated to Nashville and began his police career as a patrol officer. After only a few years with Metro, Postiglione made detective grade and moved into the homicide division in 1987. He has been working homicide, either as a detective in the homicide unit or as a detective in the somewhat elitist Murder Squad, ever since.
“Once you do it,” Postiglione said, “it’s hard to see yourself doing anything else. Some guys can’t deal with the crime scenes, and that’s okay. We’re all affected by them. They stay with you, but if you can find justice for the victim and their family, it makes it worthwhile.”
Detective Bill Pridemore, on the other hand, moved around a lot while growing up, because his stepfather was a military career man. At one point his family moved to Nashville, and he graduated from Stratford Comprehensive High School there. Shortly after high school, Pridemore went on to Volunteer State Community College, which was when he decided to take the test for the police academy. After being on a waiting list for about a year, he was finally accepted and began his police career as a patrol officer in 1976. He attributes his decision to make a career out of police work to his exposure to a military background from his stepfather’s service years, and to the fact that a police officer once helped him recover his bike that had been stolen when he was a kid.
“A policeman was driving by and saw that I was upset,” Pridemore recalled. “He put me in his car and we rode around and found my bike. It left a pretty big impression.” It also left a pretty big motivation for Pridemore to want to help people who needed helping.
“I thought I would go to burglary,” Pridemore said, recalling where he thought his police career would take him. “Homicide was a pretty coveted division. You find out real quick if you’ll like homicide once you go on a couple of crime scenes.”
Pridemore eventually went into homicide, and found that he liked the work that it entailed. The homicide division was where he and Postiglione got to know each other well as they worked together over the years. The Murder Squad, created in 1980 by Chief Joe Casey, would come to both Pridemore and Postiglione a little later, because the high quality of their work was quickly recognized. The distinction between the homicide division and the Murder Squad was simply that the homicide division investigated murders, suicides, and other violent crimes in which there was a known connection between the victim and the perpetrator, whereas the Murder Squad cases involved homicides in which there was no known connection. Murder Squad cases were considered the most difficult to solve.
“If a woman was found dead in an alley and you had no idea who did it,” Postiglione recently said, “Murder Squad was called in.”
Being asked to join the Murder Squad was a “big deal,” Pridemore said. “You didn’t ask to join Murder Squad. They looked at you to see if they thought you could do it. And they asked the other guys on Murder Squad if they wanted you.”
The Janet March case wasn’t the first investigation that Pridemore and Postiglione have worked on together; there have been many, including serial killer Paul Reid. But the Janet March case was one of the most difficult ones, and was one of their cases of the longest running. They knew that it could be solved, but they equally knew that it would take some time.
“There were so many things that weren’t right with his story and weren’t right with him,” Postiglione said of Perry March, “but he always thought he was the smartest guy in the room. . . .”
“If you look at one piece of evidence, you say, well, no,” Pridemore said. “But put it all together and you feel like you might have a shot. It’s a ‘hip bone connected to the thighbone’ kind of thing. . . .”
Progress through the remaining years of the century would be slow at best, nonexistent at worst, as each man assigned to the case worked diligently to determine the truth behind Janet March’s disappearance. Many people, such as armchair detectives and mystery enthusiasts, bought into the scenario as described by Willy Stern in the Nashville Scene articles and were postulating, if not rehashing, the theory that Perry, a black belt in karate, had killed Janet, wrapped her up inside a large living-room rug, and disposed of her body. Whether that was what had actually happened was anybody’s guess, but the detectives assigned to the case were determined to dog Perry March until the case broke—even if it meant the rest of their careers.
It was revealed by this time that Perry March had been fired from his father-in-law’s firm for allegedly embezzling funds. His once lofty career, in which he had specialized in tax law, was now suddenly in shambles, as was his personal life. One of his former clients had been indicted for money laundering and racketeering prior to Janet’s disappearance, and there was speculation that he had helped another former client with tax evasion. A witness had purportedly told the authorities that he had seen Perry and the latter former client arguing in public shortly after Janet was last seen, which fueled speculation that Perry had blackmailed the former client into helping him dispose of Janet’s body by burying her beneath a building owned by the former client. The theory was never proven, and the former client was never charged in any capacity in connection with Janet’s case. It was merely one of many such red herrings that would crop up from time to time in the case.
Perry March was, naturally, feeling very unsettled by this time. Unable to find employment, first in Nashville and later in Chicago, Perry was becoming desperate for money. Steps had been taken by his in-laws to make certain that he couldn’t get his hands on any of Janet’s assets, and they had effectively taken the house on Blackberry Road away from him.
Because of the legal entanglements that were following him after Janet’s disappearance, Perry found himself with minimal personal funds and virtually no way to tap into Janet’s estate. As his life was being carefully scrutinized by the locals in Nashville, as well as by the police, he decided that he had to leave Nashville. He took the children and relocated to Illinois where he would be close to family members and where he thought he might stand a chance at making a fresh start. However, he soon found that the Levines, as well as the cops, dogged his every move.
On February 26, 1997, Mark Levine, Janet’s brother, went before a state legislative committee that had begun to study ways that Tennessee’s child custody laws could be overhauled. According to sources, Perry March would later say that the Levines had instigated the move while Mark was working as a summer intern in Senator Fred Thompson’s office, prior to going off to law school at Harvard. Thompson, who sometimes moonlights as a Hollywood actor, would later run with the proposed legislation, along with Senator Bill Frist, one of the main stockholders of Hospital Corporation of America (HCA, Inc.), a multibillion-dollar Nashville-based hospital corporation, that would, if the law was enacted, assist grandparents in obtaining visitation rights, regardless of the parents’ wishes. At this point the proposed legislation was still in its infancy, and would lie dormant for a while.
If things weren’t going badly enough already for Perry March, his efforts to block his in-laws’ sale of his Blackberry Road home would be rejected by a Nashville judge on March 19, 1997, when the judge approved a contract sale in the amount of $726,000 to a retired lawyer and his wife. Perry was, of course, further devastated by the judge’s decision as his life continued to spiral downward. From that moment on, light of day would only appear in minor glimpses in Perry March’s life.
In 1998, the Levines filed a petition seeking to summon forth a jury in the Tennessee Probate Court, in a wrongful-death action. Their goal, of course, was to find Perry March liable, in
absentia (he was still in Illinois, and the legal action had occurred in Tennessee), of Janet’s death. Perry chose, perhaps unwisely from a legal point of view, to avoid participating in the discovery process of the proceedings. As a result, on July 15, 1998, Davidson County probate judge Frank Clement Jr. ruled that Perry March had shown a “troubling and consistent pattern of contemptuous conduct,” which had served to make it more difficult to resolve the issues with his in-laws over Janet’s property. Clement had effectively gotten the ball rolling to push the Levines’ wrongful-death lawsuit a step closer to becoming a reality and an ultimate success for the in-laws.
At some point during May 1999, Perry March moved to Ajijic, in the Mexican state of Jalisco, taking his father, Arthur March, up on an offer to help him out by allowing him to move in with him. Arthur, retired and alone, had moved to Ajijic and obtained a retirement home a few years earlier and felt right at home with the large population of other American retirees residing there. Ajijic, a beautiful lakeside town approximately thirty miles from Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city, seemed like a welcome change for Perry and the kids.
“I brought Perry down here because he didn’t have any other place to go,” Arthur March would later tell CBS News.
Part 2
MEXICO
Chapter 14
Idyllic in its natural setting along the northwestern shore of Lake Chapala, Mexico’s largest freshwater lake, the small town of Ajijic boasts a wonderful climate for its approximately thirteen thousand inhabitants, about half of whom, like Arthur March, and now his son Perry, are expatriates. Most of the expatriate community in Ajijic is made up of American and Canadian retirees; there are also a few Europeans, as well as other nationalities. Many of the ex-pats moved there when they retired to escape the harsh winter weather “back home.” Many wanted to take advantage of the lower cost of living and saw the small fishing village as a place where they could live out their golden years much more extravagantly on a retirement income that would not go nearly as far at home. Some just liked the peace and quiet of living in a desirable lakeside setting. Perry March liked it there because it placed some 1,500 miles between him and the problems he faced back home, and he saw opportunity there.