EARLY FLETCHERS

The Fletchers and the Miseners were families in contrast from the start. While the Miseners epitomized the urban-becoming-suburban generation, born the in city, moving out to the brand-new suburbs as the jobs and the housing followed the freeways out of the central city, the Fletchers were small-town, farm-town born and raised.

John Fletcher was the youngest of four children, the kid of the family whose nearest sibling was a sister eight years older than him. His dad was a heating and cooling contractor, but most of their friends or neighbors were farmers in the small community of Peck, 600 or so in size, in the thumb of Michigan's mitten. The Thumb—that's what everyone in Michigan calls it—has a few scattered resort communities on Saginaw Bay or Lake Huron, but it was and still is farm country, flat and filled to the horizon with cornfields or soybean crops.

Darla Armstrong grew up in the nearby, larger (but still small) town of Brown City, the daughter of a postman who had had his dreams of playing pro baseball—he'd had several tryouts—cut short by World War II.

Though their moms worked together as nurses' aides at a nearby hospital, John and Darla didn't know each other. They met in the fall of 1964, when he was a junior at Peck High and she was a sophomore at Brown City. One week, Peck had a football game on Saturday afternoon. Brown City was playing Deckerville Friday night, and John went to that game with a friend to see a girl. Darla, sitting nearby, caught his eye and they talked.

"I didn't like him all that much, but he was cute," says Darla. His cousin was dating her cousin and a double date was arranged. They've been together since.

By the next year they were going steady, and they got engaged just before she graduated in the spring of 1967. Her mom insisted she have something to fall back on, just in case, before she'd give her blessing to a marriage, so Darla got her cosmetician's license. "That was the quickest thing I could do," she says.

John went to Port Huron Junior College one year, dropped out, tried a couple of different jobs, didn't know what he wanted to do. It might not matter, anyway,

he figured. Those were the days of the big drafts to feed the Vietnam War. Being married no longer was good for a deferment. Being in college full-time was, but when John dropped out, he lost his deferment. He thought he'd be sure to go to Vietnam, like all the buddies he'd had from high school who hadn't gone on to college.

John and Darla planned to get married when he got back from the war. In the meantime, he'd been hired for a training program at Detroit Edison. Detroit Edison's training school was in the poor downriver Detroit community of Delray; coincidentally, right across the street from the training center was the old and mammoth Fort Wayne, where all of Michigan's would-be draftees came for their physicals. Get a 1A, go to Vietnam was pretty much the program.

Soon, Fletcher's notice to take his physical came in the mail. He rode down on a bus from Peck, along with a bunch of the local kids and took it. One part included filling out the inevitable government forms. One asked him to check off if he'd ever had this or that ailment or trouble. He'd had a bleeding ulcer in college that had since healed, but he checked where it asked him to.

At the last station in the process—you went in long snaking lines past a series of stations, with one doctor looking in your eyes, another in your ears, another grabbing your testicles and asking you to turn your head to the side and cough, etc.—a doctor looked over his paperwork, saw the checkmark by "ulcers," asked him for the phone number of his family doctor, called to confirm the past history, came back and said those magic words: "Well, we're sorry. We won't be able to take you."

Like that, Fletcher was 4F. "I didn't know what to do," he recalls. "I didn't know whether to laugh or cry or what to do. I knew guys who'd already been killed over there. It kind of made me feel like a heel; it's always kind of bugged me because I didn't go. Guys I knew in high school got killed there. And four of the guys I rode down with on the bus to take my physical ended up dying."

Darla had no mixed feelings, whatsoever. They began making plans to get married as soon as they could arrange a proper ceremony and became Mr. and Mrs. the following year. (The ulcer wouldn't rear its ugly head for many years; he suffered a recurrence when he was 49.)

They began their life together, and he continued on his career path at Edison. In those days, getting in at a utility like Edison, which handled the power for all of southeastern Michigan, meant top wages, great benefits and job security. "Back then, people used to be loyal," says Fletcher. "When you hired into Detroit Edison, once you were in, you didn't leave. It was like family."

He remembers his hire-in date as well as he remembers his birthday—Nov. 13, 1967. In 25 of his first 33 years, he had perfect attendance (storing up personal time that would come in handy when he needed time off to attend Mick's murder trial). Edison trained him to be an engineer, and over the years he moved steadily up the ranks. At the time of his son's trial in June and July of 2000, he was the operations supervisor of the big Belle River power plant north of Detroit. Four supervisors reported to him and more than 20 employees. Two weeks in a row he worked three 12-hour shifts, then for two weeks he'd work four 12-hour shifts, alternating nights and days in the various weeks.

The shift changes never quite allow you to feel caught up on your sleep, but they always left him plenty of time for the family.

In the meantime, Darla became a stay-at-home mom. Her cosmetician's license was something she never needed to fall back on.

They were married in April of 1968 and lived in an apartment for two years. Mick was born in October of 1969 and the following March they bought their first house. Amy was born in January of 1972 and Ben in July of 1974. All three kids were well behaved, did well in school, stayed out of trouble. "Mick was a joy," says his dad.

In 1976, John built a house on five acres of wooded land outside Peck, land he bought from his parents. He would build a second house in 1983, and his current house—in Marysville south of Port Huron, an hour north of Detroit—in 1987. He hired some craftsmen to help with things like hanging drywall, but did much of the work on the homes himself, including laying in the field stones for the fireplace and doing all the detailed woodworking.

A self-described "gearhead," John also rebuilds and restores vintage Corvettes. One that he rebuilt was later sold to a man in San Diego who has won numerous awards and trophies at auto shows around the country. His pride and

joy, a 1957 Corvette that he modified with a 1991 Corvette front suspension, power rack-and-pinion steering, a five-speed transmission with overdrive and a 450-horsepower engine, was sold to help finance his son's legal defense.

*

Life in the pastures and woodlands on the Fletchers' five acres, surrounded by the farmland, was idyllic, say Amy and Ben. The kids didn't have a lot of playmates, out several miles from town as they were, but they all got along and kept each other company. There wasn't much in the way of sibling rivalry. Both of them adored their older brother, and wanted to tag along with him wherever he went.

John and Darla were, and are, conservative, evangelical Christians, and the church was always an anchor. Both parents and the kids were at Croswell Wesleyan Church every Wednesday night, most Saturday afternoons for one function or another, and every Sunday. Years after they moved from Peck, all three Fletcher kids would get married in the beautiful old Croswell church.

Their own land and all the surrounding farmers' fields were a magic place for kids to grow up. John made trails through the woods with his tractor for them to go hiking on. He built them a fort, with entry by secret passwords or knocks. There were sand dunes on the property, and wetlands. In the winter, their dad would hook up big tires to the tractor and take them off sledding through the woods, or they'd toboggan down the dunes. In one house, John even built a roller rink in the basement for the kids.

Mick, say Ben and Amy, was the perfect big brother. A prankster with them

—he loved to jump out from behind trees or from around corners of the house and scare Amy to death—he was protective, too. Nobody ever got away with picking on them.

"He was always non-violent," says Amy. "He wouldn't get in fights to defend us, but if he saw somebody was picking on us, he'd come over and sit down or stand there. Just let the person know our big brother was there."

Once, a high school girl was picking on Amy when she and Mick were in junior high, and she got so mad at Mick when he came over to break things up

that she stuck a wad of gum in his hair that later had to be cut out, leaving a bald spot.

*

Before he could read, Mick memorized his books, and he'd sit there pretending to read, saying the words by rote as he turned the pages. Later, he'd add plot elements of his own. Mick became an inveterate reader, and he loved reading to Amy and Ben, or regaling them with tales he'd make up on the spot as they sat in the fort or played in the family playroom, waving his arms, taking them with his passion into his made-up world.

(Amy says the passion for storytelling is shared by her three-year-old daughter, Bailey, and by Hannah. "They both open their books and pretend to read. They'll wave their arms and make up stories about big scary monsters or whatever. They're just like Mick in that regard.")

At five, he was already a fan of Jacques Cousteau and announced one day to Darla: "Momma, I know what I want to be when I grow up. I want to be a marine biologist."

Despite their age difference, Ben and Mick were particularly close. Mick had started reading to Ben when he was still in his crib. He read him his shark books, he read him his dinosaur books. Mick later became a shark expert; Ben knew all there was to know about dinosaurs. "My brother was the kind of guy who knew it all, he could do everything," says Ben. "I was always wanting to be around him, even when we were older and he was with his friends. I wanted to hang out with him. I think I got to be a little bit of a nuisance."

When Ben was just three, Mick started teaching him to read. He'd sit with him and point out words, tell him about syllables, teach him about pronunciation. "He loved to share the information he'd compiled by reading," says Ben.

By the time Mick was in second grade, he was reading at the twelfth-grade level, and he'd be sent down to the kindergarten of the Peck school—it was so small, all grades were housed in one building, from kindergarten through high school—to read to them. At conferences, teachers would apologize to the

Fletchers for not calling on Mick enough; he was always waving his hand in the air and always knew the answers, but they had to give other kids a chance.

Mick, Amy and Ben would head out into the woods to hunt for treasures. Growing up with them, on that land, she was into frogs and adventure; dolls weren't her thing. Ben didn't quite get what fossils were. From his books they looked like things he found quite readily in the woods. He'd come back, his corduroy pants with the elastic waistbands halfway down his butt they were so loaded down with what he called "bossils." He'd dump them out on the kitchen floor; they were ordinary rocks that seemed anything but.

Amy was in awe of Mick's ability to climb trees. One day, dressed in a hunter-orange jacket, he climbed what she describes as "a humungous pine tree in the back yard. Mom looked out the window and saw an orange dot at the top of the tree. She came out screaming, 'Michael John Fletcher, you get down from that tree!'"

Later, when Ben got old enough, they began another tradition—fierce games of catch with whatever was at hand, baseballs, softballs, Frisbees. Two Christmases before Leann's death, the Fletchers were at a Christmas gathering with Ben's wife's family, at a church near Flint. The church had a gymnasium and somebody had left a Nerf ball on the floor. Sure enough, soon Mick and Ben were hurling it back and forth, hard, harder, hardest. Pretty soon, the spectators had cleared out of the gym, to safer ground. Eventually, exhausted, they were done. Ben's new wife, Nicole, who had never seen the tradition enacted before, came over and said, jokingly, "Okay, you done trying to kill each other, now?"

"We could stand out there for hours, just throwing the ball back and forth at each other," says Ben. "We'd start off throwing the ball back and forth for a little while and then the arms would loosen up and we'd throw a little harder. You start throwing harder, you start throwing harder, and pretty soon you're chucking the ball at each other as hard as you can. Just whipping the ball at each other. Like we'd be doing it to see who'd quit first. That's how we bonded," says Ben.

*

Mick wasn't the first Fletcher to make headlines. Back in the heyday of Christian cable TV in the early and mid-1980s—before Jimmy Swaggert and Jim Bakker brought shame and scandal—Amy Fletcher was one of its stars. A pretty little girl with a big, booming adult voice, she was a frequent guest on various shows on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, which later became the Christian Broadcast Network and then the Family Channel.

Amy's short-lived career as a concert soloist and recording star began when she was eight, at Christmastime of 1980. She had always sung in church, without much notoriety or attention. But that year, at their church's annual Christmas program, all of a sudden this big, powerful voice starting blasting forth.

Darla had been a frequent speaker at church functions and breakfasts. People started asking if she could bring Amy to sing at her talks. Soon it evolved to where they were asking Darla if she wanted to talk at Amy's concerts.

The next year, a family friend asked if he could send in a tape of Amy singing for a contest that was part of the National Quarter Convention in Nashville. The Fletchers reluctantly agreed. They soon got a letter back from organizers telling them that Amy had passed the tape audition and was welcome to come down and take part.

The family packed into their Pontiac compact, drove to Nashville and found a hotel with a pool for the boys. Amy sang and was named Child Vocalist of the Year.

That night, country star Larry Gatlin asked Amy up on stage in front of 20,000 at the Nashville Convention Center to give her her trophy. To her surprise, he handed her a mike and said: "You're going to sing a song, little girl."

She remembers looking down at her family in a row of folding chairs in front of the stage, then, without fear, belting out a version of "Just a Closer Walk With Thee" that brought the house down, and the crowd to its feet for a standing ovation. Mick and Ben stood up in the chairs and screamed and hopped up and down, and Ben's chair collapsed.

A star was born.

The family began appearing at churches in the Port Huron/Thumb area. Mick

had learned to play piano by ear—"He really had a gift," says Amy—and he'd accompany Darla. Little Ben would sing, too. Mom did the bookings, Dad shlepped the equipment around, drove the car and handled the sound equipment, and the family would get paid a modest share of the offertory.

When she was 10, the family put out her first album of contemporary Christian music, which sold well on the Midwest church circuit. She cut another album at age 11, which caught the ear of Nashville-based Love Song Records, which signed her to a contract and nationally distributed a third album, cut at age 12 and called By Invitation Only.

Amy would fly out to California with Darla once a month or so to tape TV shows in 1983–84, had her own special one year called "The Amy Fletcher Christmas Special," sang at Robert Schuler's Crystal Cathedral, and at the zenith of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker's fame, was a frequent opening act at concerts at their Heritage USA Christian theme park in North Carolina, the fund-raising for which later landed Bakker in prison.

"I'd get driven around in a limo and put up in big hotel rooms, so that was all pretty cool to me," says Amy. Her limo driver later married Tammy Faye's daughter.

In 1985, trying to figure out how to market this young girl with the big voice, the record company wanted to put her on the cover of her fourth album in makeup and a strapless dress. John and Darla said, "Enough," and pulled the plug on her career.

It was time, they said, for her to go back to being a normal kid, and for them to start paying more attention to Mick and Ben.

"I was mad at the time. But looking back on it, it was the best thing they could have done," says Amy. She cut her last Christian record in 1997 with a small Midwest label, and was happy when her three-year contract for live appearances expired.

Today, she still sings at a few weddings and in church—her husband, Phil Count, is music director at their church near San Diego, El Cajon Wesleyan— but is happily focused on raising her two young daughters and her part-time job in the church's day-care center.

*

In 1983, John built a house in Marysville, near the beautifully blue St. Clair River that separates Michigan from Ontario, and the family left Peck. Marysville is a small city by most standards, a downright metropolis compared to Peck.

At Peck, everyone went to one school. In Marysville, there were several elementary schools, a junior high and a high school. The adjustment for the kids, by all accounts, was pretty easy.

They all made friends readily. Ben later became a basketball star—he was honorable mention All-State—and ran cross-country and played baseball. Mick played sports, too—in 10th grade he was a defensive end on a JV team for one of the most renowned football programs in the state. "He wasn't big, but he could explode off the ball," says Ben, who used to go to Mick's games.

But as all the Fletcher kids were required to do, Mick got a part-time job, and decided he liked money more than football. After his sophomore season he quit sports so he could work more hours at a variety of fast-food jobs. "He liked making money," says his father. At 16, Mick was the closer at the nearby Pizza Hut, a rare job for a kid his age, in charge of making sure things were ready to go for the day crew, the money was safely put away and the doors locked.

Even in high school, Mick was still playing the good big brother at an age when many kids want nothing to do with their siblings.

Amy remembers when she was a freshman in high school and Mick was a junior, a popular jock who was also in the 11th grade asked her to the prom. She wasn't allowed to date, yet, so her parents told her no when she pleaded with them to let her go. Mick interceded. He offered to let his sister and her date double-date with him and his girlfriend, a girl named Rachel they went to church with. That way he would keep an eye out for his sister. Their parents reluctantly agreed.

"My date had sort of a reputation for being fast, and Mick didn't trust him," Amy recalls. As soon as they all got in Mick's car, Mick made a point of adjusting the rearview mirror so it aimed into the back seat and not out the back window. "It was his way of saying, 'I want you to know I'm watching you.' And

he kept coming over during the prom to make sure I was having fun and my date was treating me right."

Needless to say, the two couples did not go, in the vernacular of the time, "parking" that night.

The next year, Amy remembers having a boyfriend, and giving him a kiss in the school hall one day. Mick happened to be nearby and saw it. He came over. "Ahem," he said, fatherlike, disapproving.

After graduating from Marysville High in 1988, Mick attended St. Clair Community College for two years. Unlike many kids, he knew from the start what he wanted to major in, criminal justice, and what he wanted to be, a cop. And he made sure to take courses that would keep him on track to graduate in the shortest time possible.

"I told him, if he graduated in four years, I'd pay his tuition. If not, he'd have to pay me back," recalls John. Despite transferring to Michigan State in two years—its criminal justice program is considered one of the best in the country

—Mick graduated right on schedule. "That's the way Mick is, once he makes up his mind."

While attending a Halloween party after transferring to Michigan State, he'd meet a beautiful woman dressed like the devil. Their lives—and their families'— would never be the same.