THIS 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.