1 1. PROLOGU

Etimes in the tumultuous marriage of Michael and Leann Fletcher.

His fledgling legal career was finally taking off, with regular assignments to handle cases for the indigent who came before Judge Susan Chrzanowski of the bustling 37th District Court in Warren, Michigan, Detroit's largest suburb and the third-largest city in the state with a population of 144,864. The court was easily the busiest in Macomb County and a good place to be making the kinds of contacts Fletcher had made.

Their marriage, which had survived several separations in the last two years, was better than it had ever been since Mick—that's what everyone called him— moved back into their suburban Detroit house over Easter. Everyone had noticed how sweet he had been toward Leann the last few months, cooing in her ear at family functions, calling her "honey" and "sweetheart," and Leann told her friends and sisters she'd never been happier.

However, her parents, Jack and Gloria Misener, thought Mick was laying it on a little thick. "Every time he walks by her, he's got to bend his head and kiss her. It really looked stupid, when he started kissing her all over the place," Jack would say later. And Mick was doing stuff he'd never done before, like help load the car when they were leaving the Miseners' after family get-togethers.

 Leann had given Mick the happy news that she was nearly a month pregnant with their second child.

Saturday, they double-dated with her oldest sister and best friend, Lindy, and her husband, Mark. The sisters squealed and hugged over the pregnancy. Sunday, the Fletchers took her parents, Gloria and Jack Misener, out to the nearby Outback Steakhouse, a place the Miseners had heard about for its monster steaks but had never been to. The dinner was two-fold—to celebrate the new baby and to thank the Miseners for loaning them money to pay various bills over the last few months as Mick waited for invoices to be paid by the court.

Monday morning, the good mood and good times continued. Mick stopped

off at drugstore to buy a card for Leann, the kind of thoughtful, loving act he'd been doing with some regularity lately. He wrote a message inside expressing his love for her and his excitement over the baby. When he came back from the office, he handed her the card, which she read with joy, then tucked into her purse to show Lindy later.

They dropped Hannah off at her parents', chatted a few minutes, then left for the short ride to the range. Leann's good mood held until just inside the doors, where the joy quickly turned to discomfort bordering on chagrin upon arriving at the gun range at noon. Too loud, too scary. She hated the gun, she hated firing it, she asked if they could leave before their time was up.

Like many young parents who have some time away from a young child, they decided to take advantage of it. Though Leann had told her parents she'd be back in about an hour, they raced the ten miles or so in Mick's Dodge Dakota truck back to their house in the working-class suburb of Hazel Park for an early- afternoon quickie.

Within minutes, Leann was dead, shot behind the right ear with the Smith & Wesson and lying naked from the waist down in a swamp of her own blood on their bedroom floor. Mick's hysterical 911 call summoned police from the Hazel Park police station three blocks away. There'd been a horrible accident while he was in the bathroom, he told them. His wife had picked up the gun and somehow it had gone off.

Soon, two judges would be under a cloud of suspicion because of affairs with the young, extremely handsome attorney, and one of their careers would end up in tatters. Mick had gone with Leann to church on Sunday, and out with her and her parents to dinner Sunday. But after the steak and the beers, he hadn't gone back to his nearby office to wrap up some work, as he'd claimed. He'd gone to Judge Susan Chrzanowski's house, where, she told police, he'd had sex with her and told her he loved her. Mick hadn't told her Leann was pregnant; the police broke that news to her.

By Thursday Mick Fletcher would be in the Oakland County jail, accused of first-degree murder in the deaths of his beautiful young wife and his new baby. Prosecutors would allege that he was so cold-hearted and brutal that, moments

after he'd had sex with his wife, while she was still kneeling on the floor near their bed with his freshly deposited semen in her vagina, he'd picked up the Smith & Wesson and shot her in the right ear.

All that week, and continuing on until after his trial in the summer of 2000, headline writers, talk radio and local TV news made the most of one of those stories too good to be true—the beautiful wife, the equally beautiful judge, the movie-star handsome attorney who had them both. And a big gun, a bloody corpse and sex in the afternoon.

It seemed so clear cut. At the least, Fletcher was a cold-blooded murderer motivated by his love for another woman. At the worst, as one local half-hour TV show would luridly and breathlessly claim following Fletcher's arraignment, the murder was the bloody, logical last act for a psychopath who had been a Satanist and devil worshipper in college, and who was fixated on ultraviolent computer games.

Or was it clear cut? Before the often-delayed trial was finally over, the defense would raise legitimate doubts about the forensic evidence; rookie investigators, it would be clear, had made more than their share of mistakes in what seemed to some a rush to judgment. How could a cotton shirt that prosecutors alleged was splattered with a fine mist of blood blown out of Leann's head—the linchpin of the case against Fletcher—flunk a test for a DNA match with her blood? Had a mother-in-law's anger and accusations sent cops on the wrong path?

An hour-long "20/20 Downtown" ABC news show after the trial would reveal a jury torn by doubt, disbelieving the prosecution evidence and bent on solving the case itself with its own theory of what happened and how—even going so far as to reconstruct the crime scene with masking tape and reenact a sequence of events different from that alleged by the prosecution, which the defense never had a chance to rebut.

Was Mick Fletcher an evil psychotic who had planned and carried out the most brutal and heinous of crimes? Absolutely, say prosecutors and state and local police. Or the unluckiest man on the face of the earth, a modern-day Job who lost his wife and child to a deadly accident only to be charged with the

murder and stripped of his parental rights to his beloved daughter because of an unfortunate string of coincidences, police malfeasance and prosecutorial zeal? Firearms expert Frederick Wentling, a Pennsylvania state cop for 26 years, says Fletcher is an innocent man and that the case against him was a result of police and prosecutorial malfeasance so gross he describes it as "a railroad job."

Deranged murderer or hapless pawn? He was one or the other. There was no middle ground. Even after the verdict, for many the question would remain unanswered.