The Red Parts Page 11

  Schroeder and I had broached this problem months earlier on the phone. I told him then that despite these gestures of “care,” Jane’s vicious post-mortem (or near post-mortem) strangulation hardly seemed to me to indicate remorse or concern for her body.

  Well, that’s a little complicated, he said.

  He told me that upon reexamining the location of the stocking, the nature of its knot, etc., they’d come to suspect that it might have been applied as a tourniquet, a somewhat perverse medical effort to stop the bleeding from the gunshot wounds to her head. I couldn’t tell whether he meant to suggest that her murderer tied the tourniquet in a fit of guilt or regret, or whether her killer was trying to stop the bleeding for other reasons—not to mess up the upholstery in his car, for example. But I didn’t inquire further.

  For Schroeder was onto relating another discomfiting speculation. Before entering police work, Schroeder was a Marine. One day early on in the investigation of Jane’s case, he was going over some details of the crime scene with another former Marine—particularly how Jane’s clothes were piled up, and where her belongings were placed. His friend turned to him and said, Schroeder, you’re the stupidest ex-jarhead I’ve ever met. Can’t you see that this guy was giving her a battlefield burial?

  When a fellow soldier dies in combat and his comrades are unable to remove his body from the field, they are supposed to fold his belongings and place them between his legs so that his corpse and possessions might later be gathered with maximum speed and efficiency. Schroeder was convinced that they were looking for someone who had spent time in the service. Collins had not. Leiterman had.

  And for more than twenty years since his time in the service (which took place in South America and Mexico, not Vietnam), Leiterman had been working as a nurse, at Borgess Medical Center.

  In that time, it seems more than likely that Leiterman provided many patients with life-sustaining care, perhaps even life-sustaining comfort, along with who knows what else. If he killed Jane, what happens to that care and comfort now? Does it become null and void, retroactively?

  At his July trial Leiterman will not resemble the befuddled, scraggly man in a green prison jumpsuit we first saw in January. He will have had a haircut, be wearing a suit and tie, and look much more focused. The shackles binding his ankles will be visible only when the bailiff leads him in and out of the courtroom, at which time he will wave to his family, sometimes cracking a smile.

  After this first glimpse of the new Leiterman, however, my mother and I do not see him anymore. To be able to see the big screen, the exhibits shown to the jury, and whomever is testifying, we have to move to a spot on our bench from which he is no longer visible. He will never take the stand, which Hiller tells us is not unusual in capital cases, in which the stakes are so high. We will never hear his voice. Everyone on the witness stand will talk about what “was done” to Jane’s body, not what he did or allegedly did, not even what “her murderer did.” He will drop out of sight, out of mind, and out of language. It takes a concentrated effort for me to remember him, even now.

  I had tried to learn more about Leiterman before the trial, primarily via that lazy, alienating, 21st-century way of learning about anything. I Googled him. Here is what I found:

  From the Business section of the Detroit News on March 23, 2001:

  “I watch the news every evening and night after night for the past year every single financial consultant they interviewed said everything was fine, this was just a little dip,” said Gary Leiterman, a registered nurse in Gobles, Mich. In his late 50s, he hoped to switch to a part-time schedule soon. But last year, a week before the market downturn started, his financial planner advised him to move 25% of his assets into aggressive growth funds. Most of that money has since evaporated along with gains on the high-tech Nasdaq market. “When I went back in a couple weeks ago he was a little short with me,” Leiterman said. “I’m not going to retire when I’m 60 anymore, that’s for sure.”

  Then, from the “Inside the News” section of the Detroit News on February 13, 2002:

  Responding to a Jan. 30 Inside the News column on how the newspaper covers women’s athletics, reader Gary Leiterman of Gobles, Mich., maintains there is room for improvement…. “The Detroit papers are sadly lacking in their coverage of women’s sports. A clear example is the coverage given to the Little League baseball, district, regional, and national tournaments. The same effort is not given to the Little League (girls) Softball World Series Tournament, which is played just two hours away in Kalamazoo. You should be aware that there are over 50,000 women ages 8 to 58 that play fastpitch softball in the state. From strictly a business point of view, if you wanted to increase your readership, this might be a good place to start.”

  Neither this nurse lamenting his evaporating investments and hoping for early retirement, nor this champion of female athletes everywhere, at home enough as a citizen of the world to write Letters to the Editor, squared easily with the shadowy, fugitive tormentor my mother, sister, and I had been battling for years in my dreams.

  Leiterman’s reputation as a model citizen was challenged, however, by a headline that appeared about two weeks after his arrest for Jane’s murder: SLAYING SUSPECT HIT WITH PORN CHARGE.

  When I first got wind of this headline I didn’t feel shocked as much as wary, or weary. It seemed too predictable—the next chapter in a classic American story in which the “regular guy” or “good neighbor” turns out to be an ax murderer and/or run a child porn ring out of his basement. In a country in which the porn industry brings in more money than all professional sports combined, I have my doubts as to whether one could search any American home without unearthing a porn stash of one kind or another, much of which would undoubtedly border on illegality. Plus, I like porn, and the only real panic that the words “porn charge” incite in me is that one day my own porn habits might make me a target of the family values revolution when it embarks on the militarized, domestic-invasion leg of its crusade. I called Schroeder right away to get the details.

  Schroeder told me that in their search of Leiterman’s house after his arrest, the police took into custody two Polaroid pictures, taken with Leiterman’s Polaroid camera, which were found in an envelope in a bedside cabinet. The Polaroids depict a young teenage girl, apparently unconscious, naked from the waist down, arranged against the Leitermans’ bedspread.

  When the police first saw the pictures, they worried they had another homicide on their hands. But when Schroeder saw them, he recognized the girl as the live, sixteen-year-old South Korean exchange student he had met at Leiterman’s home on the morning of his arrest.

  On December 8, 2004, this exchange student, who spoke very little English, was forced to testify at Leiterman’s arraignment on the felony charge of creating sexually abusive material involving a child. She sobbed when shown the pictures, and said she had no memory of their being taken. The police felt fairly sure she had been drugged. In Leiterman’s shaving kit, also seized during the search of his home, they later found an unmarked vial of a powdered mixture of diphenhydramine (the active ingredient in Benadryl) and diazepam (that in Valium), which was identified by a state police toxicologist as a knockout potion.

  Leiterman maintained that the exchange student was “a wild child,” that he did not take the photos of her, but rather came across them. Suspecting they had been taken by one of the girl’s boyfriends, he said he was keeping them at his bedside until Solly returned from a business trip so that they could decide together on what action to take next.

  Leiterman ultimately pled guilty to the much lesser charge of possession of child pornography, and the girl was sent back to South Korea.

  When I hear about this teenage girl sobbing on the stand, it is the first time—and, to be honest, the only time—I feel truly glad that Leiterman has been taken into custody, and remains there.

  IN ESSENCE, the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation, wrote the great French pornographic
writer Georges Bataille. Bataille was mesmerized by images of Aztecs ripping each other’s hearts out of their chests, of Saint Teresa in the throes of a feral ecstasy. I doubt if he had in mind a sweaty old white guy in suburban Michigan churning up powder to knock out and then sexually abuse his exchange student.

  LATER I LEARN that a female coworker once accused Leiterman of sexually molesting her while she was asleep on a bus during a work-sponsored trip. After Leiterman’s arrest, a man who lived with him in the late ‘60s will come forward to tell the police that Leiterman once showed him a vial of liquid and bragged that it would render a woman unconscious, and that too much of it would kill her. The prosecution also unearths a woman Leiterman dated in the late ‘60s who says she is prepared to testify as to his “sexual dysfunction.”

  The judge does not allow any of this information to be introduced at the trial. Because Jane was not drugged, he also deems the child porn charge irrelevant. The defense wants to keep it that way, but that means it cannot call any character witnesses to speak on Leiterman’s behalf, including Leiterman himself. It will all come down to science.

  AT THE START of the trial, I set aside a page in my legal pad to record all the information I will learn about Leiterman over the next few weeks. At the end, this page appeared as follows:

  GARY

  nicknames have included “Gus” and “Wimpy”

  known for a healthy appetite

  avid hunter of pheasant, squirrel, deer, rabbit, etc.

  once had a pet fox.

  The only other potential insight into Gary’s character came in the form of a dirty visual trick used by the prosecution. In a PowerPoint presentation that attempted to match Leiterman’s handwriting to the words “Muskegon” and “Mixer” found on the cover of a phone book found by a pay phone in the Law Quad the day after Jane’s murder, a handwriting expert for the state took the majority of his samples from letters Gary had written to his family from jail and from the “emotional diary” he was required to keep in drug rehab in 2002.

  The first sample appeared on the screen:

  The planning started in January when we

  Dear Fritzi

  The next was more lyrical, albeit truncated:

  To me she

  I remember Saline clearly from my first

  Bring the rain

  There’s a void in time

  He was but one man

  Very lonely

  The next veered away from this minimalist model, and was a chaotic collage in which the word “ANGRY” recurred about fifty times, often fiercely underlined. Many of the sentences referenced a female object of disaffection, as in I was so ANGRY at her. Other standout fragments:

  If pushed too far …

  Anger seething inside

  Leiterman’s lawyer immediately objected, saying that the content of the projected material would prejudice the jury. The judge sustained the objection, but allowed the presentation to continue, instructing the jury to perform the perfectly impossible task of ignoring the meaning of the words on the screen and focusing exclusively on their i-dots, baselines, pen drags, and initial strokes. But it seemed to me that the jury was riveted by the character being revealed—or constructed—onscreen. So was I. The “Gary” appearing there was pensive and explosive.

  While waiting for our egg-and-cheese sandwiches to come off the grill at the court coffeeshop later that day, I chatted with a Michigan State Police detective about the damning subtext of the handwriting presentation. He smiled mischievously. Yeah, that was pretty low on our part. But given how little information about Gary we’ve been allowed to bring in, I’m just glad we found a way to convey something of his character.

  I was glad too. But what that “something” was, I cannot say. Was it the fact that Gary carries around a lot of anger? Does that make him more likely to be Jane’s murderer? Do the Polaroids of the exchange student? His so-called “sexual dysfunction”? His alleged groping of a fellow nurse on a moving bus? His addiction to painkillers? His pet fox?

  Poetic License

  THE POET IN me may have loved these little handwriting collages, but the diarist in me was appalled. Having one’s intimate musings seized by the police, chopped up into incriminating bits, then projected onto a screen for all to see and later committed to the public record is nothing short of a Kafkaesque nightmare.

  It is also one way of describing what I did with Jane’s diaries in Jane. I had told the CBS producer at dinner that I made use of Jane’s journals so that she could speak for herself. That was true. But I also selected the words I wanted, chopped them up, and rearranged them to suit my needs. Poetic license, as they say.

  Years ago, home alone, about fourteen, I came across a soft, worn leather briefcase in a cabinet in my mother’s bedroom. It was a bedside cabinet, about a foot away from my stepfather’s jungle machete. I recognized the briefcase at once as my father’s. It was full of yellow legal pads, which I pulled out and started reading. Quickly I ascertained that these pads had served as his journals for the last year or so of his life.

  The diaries of the dead do not feel inviolable to me, though those of the living do. Perhaps they both should, I don’t know. All I know is that I felt no dread or wrongness in reading these pages. Only curiosity, and sadness.

  I learned there that my father had found out about my mother’s affair with the housepainter by reading her journal. He had read there that they’d first made love after going on a glider plane ride together, a ride that he had felt suspicious of at the time.

  As I read this that day suddenly jumped into focus. I was about seven, maybe eight. We had all gone out for dinner that night to the Peppermill, one of Emily’s and my favorite restaurants. Emily and I liked the Peppermill because it had a little pond by the bar with a fire floating miraculously on top, and cocktail waitresses who looked like Charlie’s Angels wearing long, salmon-colored evening gowns. Its burgers came with pink plastic spikes in the shape of miniature cows which announced, in tiny red lettering, RARE, MEDIUM, or WELL DONE.

  Our parents rarely fought; I rarely even saw them together. But that night there had been a fight, and it had something to do with a glider plane.

  I read through his journals once that afternoon and never saw them again. I copped to finding them in a family therapy session—one of a handful of attempts my mother made to keep our new “family unit” from spiraling out of control—and though she and her husband acted understanding in the therapist’s office, as soon as we got out I was grounded for snooping. At this same session Emily knocked over the therapist’s floor lamp, stormed out of the office, and later had to be discovered then coaxed out from her hiding place between two cars in the underground parking garage before we could go home. The next time I went to look for the briefcase and the legal pads, they were gone.

  I remember only a few other fragments.

  He referred to me as “the imp,” and described me as happy.

  He described Emily as quiet and sensitive, and said he was worried about her.

  He missed my mother’s breasts.

  He had recently enjoyed the services of a prostitute on a business trip to Japan, and had especially liked the way that, after each activity, she bestowed a kiss on his penis with a quality he found both delicate and discreet.

  Rarely does the man allow himself to be self-indulgent or sexually passive, letting the woman make love to him, my father wrote in an essay called “So You Think You Want to Be a Man?”—an essay that was collected, along with two others, in a little book of his writings his friends put together after his death.

  “So You Think You Want to Be a Man?” begins:

  For the first 37 years of my life I believed I had been lucky to be a male. After all, men had the best jobs, made the most money, had greater freedom to choose a career, had good women at home as companions and lovers, and generally felt superior to women for these reasons and more…. My wife used to say, “Bruce, why are you always so happy? Don’t you ever get
depressed or angry? You’re really missing important feelings; you’re missing part of what it is to be an alive human being!” “But Barb,” I responded, “I am happy. Why should I pretend to have all those feelings I just don’t have? What’s wrong with being happy 75% of the time?”

  A year ago the bottom dropped out. My wife wanted a divorce. She was in love with another man. We separated at her request, and she filed for divorce. What was I to do? Where could I go for help? Feelings new to me were overwhelming: shock, grief and loss dominated my days and nights. I felt helpless…. Why was I crying?

  He then spends several pages reciting statistics about the various “hazards of being male.” Men are 143% more likely to be the victims of aggravated assault, 400% of murder. Women attempt suicide four times more often than men, but men actually succeed in killing themselves three times more often, and so on. But, the eternal optimist, he concludes:

  I am not one who has ever enjoyed testimonials, so I will spare you the details. Recall that the introduction to this paper left Bruce Nelson grief-stricken, lonely, and needing help with nowhere to turn. That was a year ago. I reached out to my male friends, and they delivered far beyond my expectations…. I realized I had only been half alive for the last several years. The energy created by experiencing the full range has been high indeed.

  One night, after taking Emily and me to see the ballet The Nutcracker, he unraveled two rolls of toilet paper, wrapped their ends around his hands, and leapt around the living room in a wild impersonation of “The Ribbon Dancer.”

  He liked to don a rubber Nixon mask without warning and chase Emily and me around his house screaming, I am not a crook, I am not a crook.