Addendum

AS JANE WAS going to print in the winter of 2004, I pondered writing an addendum that would announce the developments in her case. Schroeder had suggested it jokingly when we first spoke on the phone. My mother had told him about my forthcoming book, and, while he was intrigued by it, he wanted to make sure that I didn’t say anything in public about it before Leiterman had been arrested. I assured him that the book wouldn’t be out for months, and that poetry wasn’t a mass-market kind of a thing.

Even so, he said, you’d better get ready to write an addendum. An addendum that explains everything.

On November 12, 2004, I sat down at my desk in the Ponderosa Room, took out a piece of paper, and wrote at the top of the page:

FIRST ATTEMPT AT AN ADDENDUM THAT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING

The addendum took the form of a list:

1. In 2001, around the time I started writing this book, unbeknownst to me, the box of evidence pertaining to Jane’s murder was removed from its storage locker and sent to the state crime lab in Lansing, Michigan, for genetic testing.
2. Much of the genetic material found on the objects in the box—such as a large bloodstain on a yellow-and-white striped towel left at the crime scene, for example—presumably came from Jane herself. But certain pieces of evidence yielded foreign DNA, primarily in the form of cellular deposits found on several sites on Jane’s pantyhose.
3. These cellular deposits were not from blood, semen, urine, or feces. They came from an unidentifiable source—the lab analyst is currently guessing it’s sweat. Wherever they came from, the analyst says there are copious amounts of them. “A mother lode.”
4. On July 7, 2004, CODIS—the Combined DNA Index System, a computer database overseen by the FBI which compares DNA samples from convicted felons against evidentiary samples submitted by labs around the country—notified Lansing that foreign DNA cells from sampled sites #1–3 on Jane’s pantyhose had returned a cold hit, to a man by the name of Gary Earl Leiterman.
5. Gary Earl Leiterman is a retired nurse who lives with his wife of many years, Solly, in a lakeside home in Pine Grove Township near Gobles, Michigan. He and Solly have two grown, adopted children, who are his wife’s sister’s children, both from the Philippines.
6. Leiterman’s DNA entered CODIS due to a 2001 felony charge for forging narcotics prescriptions. He was arrested for using blank prescription forms from Borgess Medical Center, the hospital where he worked for many years, to obtain the painkiller Vicodin from a local Meijer’s. He was sentenced to drug rehab. Beyond this, he has no criminal record.
7. Putting aside, for the moment, the many factors that can complicate statistical inferences, the odds that the “mother lode” of cellular material on Jane’s pantyhose could have come from someone other than Leiterman are roughly 171.7 trillion to one.

The list could have ended there, and perhaps explained something. But it went on:

  8. On December 9, 2003, about eight months before the hit to Leiterman came in, CODIS returned a different hit in Jane’s case—this one to a man by the name of John David Ruelas.

  9. The Ruelas match came not from Jane’s pantyhose, but from a perfectly formed droplet of blood that was found on the back of the left hand of Jane’s dead body back in 1969. This droplet stood out to a cop at the time because it was not smeared, as was all other blood found on her. At her autopsy an examiner scraped this droplet into a miniature manila envelope, where it sat for the next thirty-odd years.

10. After the CODIS match to Ruelas came in, the police immediately set out to find him. They found a thirty-seven-year-old man in prison, serving out a twenty- to forty-year sentence for beating his mother, Margaret Ruelas, to death on January 25, 2002.

11. Ruelas had apparently beaten his mother for many years; his final assault left her with eleven broken ribs and her face “pounded purple.”

12. On March 20, 1969, the night of Jane’s murder, John David Ruelas would have been four years old.

13. From prison, Ruelas tells the police that he knows things about Jane’s murder—things he will share with them if they will bargain over his sentence. But since Ruelas was only four at the time and is now desperate to plea-bargain, no one trusts a word he says. As far as getting information from his caretakers in 1969 goes, his mother is (obviously) dead; it turns out that his father, David Ruelas, was also murdered, in a separate incident, back in the ‘70s. His father was killed with a hammer, rolled up in a carpet doused with gasoline, set on fire, and tossed into a dumpster. That case also remains unsolved.

14. In a conference call with my family, the detectives admit that the match to John Ruelas is bizarre and disturbing. But, given the science, they say they have no choice but to believe that the little boy somehow “came into contact” with Jane’s body on the night of her murder. In 1969 the Ruelas family was living in downtown Detroit—about thirty-five miles from Denton Cemetery, i.e., not exactly around the corner. (Leiterman, on the other hand, was living nearby.) But the detectives say that the idea that “little Johnny” might have been involved in Jane’s murder in some way isn’t as far-fetched as it might initially sound, given the “circumstances of his home life.” They do not elaborate, except to say that they know that Johnny was a childhood nosebleeder.

Looking over this list, I realize I cannot include it in Jane. In fact, I can barely share it with my friends, much less with strangers. I learn quickly that it does not make good cocktail conversation. Not only that, but it explains virtually nothing.

In all the permutations of murder mind that I had experienced, I had never imagined a scenario involving a child. Now I found myself pacing the Ponderosa Room in my bathrobe late at night with my thoughts swirling strangely and dreadfully around the question of how a four-year-old boy might have “come into contact” with Jane’s body. Or more specifically, how a drop of his blood could have ended up on the back of her hand.

I read this story yesterday and I’m still banging my head against the wall, writes a blogger on a criminal law Web site, responding to an article announcing the double DNA match in Jane’s case.

At a hearing in May 2005, a judge will ask Hiller how the state plans on explaining the presence of Ruelas’s blood in trial.

There’s a world of possibilities, Hiller will say.

Name one, the judge will snap back.

THE BIG MOVIE playing all season at the theater in downtown Middletown is Seed of Chucky, the fifth installment of a string of slasher comedies about a killer doll. Daily I pass by its poster, which features a bloodstained toddler in a striped shirt and white overalls, his demented face held together by stitches. I almost want to go see it.

EVENTUALLY other bloggers, some as far away as Australia or the U.K., start to weigh in:

Perhaps the 4 year old was indeed at the crime scene somehow. Or, perhaps the profile identification is a false hit. In the former case, it is spooky and tragic; in the latter it is, perhaps, a crack in the idea that DNA (done right) is infallible.

Interesting, and ultimately depressing, story … As for what could be an apparent 4 year old co-murderer, that might almost make an interesting anthology. Here’s the scenario, what is each writer’s solution? The fact that it’s twisted enough for me to even have that thought depresses me even more.

Something does not seem right in this reopening of her murder.

The defense agrees. It will argue that the reason why there is no discernible link between Leiterman, Ruelas, and Jane is that there is none—save the fact that genetic samples from all three people were being processed in the same DNA laboratory over the same period of time in early 2002. It’s true: bloody clothing from Ruelas’s 2002 murder of his mother was being tested in the Lansing lab on at least one of the same days that an analyst was working on the blood droplet scraped off Jane’s hand in 1969. And individual samples from Leiterman and Ruelas were both brought into the lab in early 2002 under a new Michigan law that went into effect on January 1, 2002, which required all convicted felons—violent and nonviolent alike—to provide DNA samples to CODIS.

One too many coincidences, Leiterman’s lawyer will say.

All spring I meticulously cut out articles from the New York Times about DNA lab scandals in Houston, in Maryland. In the Houston lab some evidence was stored so poorly that one observer saw blood leaking out of a cardboard evidence box after a heavy rain. Laboratory contamination seems a more likely—not to mention a more wholesome—scenario than any of the others I can imagine.

The boy was forced to watch. The boy witnessed it, inadvertently. Somehow the boy was forced to take part in it. He was forced to cause harm. The boy shed blood; maybe there was a fight. Maybe the boy was hurt and bleeding before he arrived at the scene. Leiterman knew his family, and he killed her at their house. For some reason the boy was in his car. The boy was wandering, on his own, and came across Jane’s body in the cemetery. The boy stood above her dead or dying body, horrified, confused, uncomprehending, as a single drop of blood dripped from his nose onto her hand.

Eventually I make a rule that I can only think about “the Ruelas question”—sometimes referred to as the “lost boy theory”—while swimming laps in the university pool. It seems right to think about it underwater.

Here’s the scenario, what is each writer’s solution?

Something does not seem right in this reopening of her murder.