Love, Lies,
Murder?
(Page 1 of 7)
Dec. 9, 2005
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Janet March (CBS)
Aired 12.10.05 |
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(CBS) Janet Levine March had a seemingly-perfect life at
the time she disappeared in August 1996. Married to a
successful lawyer, this mother of two had a flourishing
art career and lived in a dream home she had designed
and built.
48 Hours has been following this case for years, first
airing an episode in 2001. Now, nine years later,
correspondent Bill Lagattuta reports, police made a
surprising arrest.
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Arthur March and his son Perry are two Americans who
have escaped to the central Mexican town of Ajijic.
Years ago, Arthur March became one of hundreds of
American retirees who settled in the little lakeside
town.
But his son Perry was a successful Nashville attorney in
the prime of his career. Why did he come down to Ajijic?
“I brought Perry down here because he didn’t have any
other place to go,” says Arthur March.
On a summer night in 1996, Perry March’s wife Janet
Levine March mysteriously disappeared without a trace,
and ever since, Perry March says he has become a target
too, pursued by people he says are determined to destroy
him.
“About a month and half ago there was an effort afoot to
either have me killed, or have me arrested, to plant
something like cocaine in my car,” says Perry.
And, he says, these same people are trying to kidnap his
two children, Sammy and Tzipi.
Janet’s disappearance still mystifies her family and
close friends.
Her father, Larry Levine, says Janet’s plans included
kids. “Marriage, a family, a home, an art career,” her
mother Carolyn adds. The Levines had proudly watched
their daughter fulfill those plans, one by one.
Janet returned to Nashville with her college boyfriend,
Perry March, in 1985. They married in 1987 and lived in
a house just a few miles from her parents.
“I cared about him a lot, an awful lot,” Carolyn Levine
now says about Perry. She became almost a surrogate
mother to Perry; his own mother had died in an accident
when he was only nine years old.
“Janet loved him and as long as she did, then we wanted
to do everything we could to help him,” Larry Levine
recalls.
And Janet’s parents did help him. Larry Levine paid
Perry’s way through Vanderbilt law school in Nashville.
Then Perry began practicing law and ended up working in
his father-in-law’s firm.
“He treated me as a confidant and as a son,” says Perry.
Meanwhile, Janet pursued her art. “She had done some
really fine work, sold some paintings, and had been
hired to do some commercial illustrations,” says Perry.
Three years after they married, Sammy was born. Then,
four years later, Janet gave birth to their daughter
Tzipora, known as Tzipi.
And in 1995, Perry says Janet fulfilled yet another of
her dreams, building a spectacular home she had
designed. “This was her dream home,” he says.
On the surface, Janet had it all: a dream house, two
beautiful children, an art career, and a successful
husband. But something must have gone terribly wrong,
because around 8 p.m. on Aug. 15, 1996, Perry March says
she just walked out.
On that warm summer night, Perry says his wife packed
some bags, walked out the door and drove off.
March says Janet never told him where she was going, and
says when he asked her, she said, “None of your
business, I’ll see you in a couple days, see how it is
with the kids.”
Since that night, no one has ever reported seeing Janet
March again.
Love, Lies, Murder?
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Dec. 9, 2005
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Janet March (CBS)
(CBS)
Perry March says the evening started with a relatively
normal family dinner. It was after he put their two
children to bed, Perry says, that he and Janet began to
argue.
“You know, it’s the kind of argument that you have when
you’re both tired of the arguments. She had made a
decision that she was going to take a vacation,” he
recalls.
His wife was going away, Perry says, for 12 days, and
was to come back just in time for their son Sammy’s
sixth birthday on August 27.
“She had prepared a list for me of a lot of things that
needed to be done. Change the light bulbs, balance my
checkbook, clean the basement, you know, just a various
list of things that I had seemed to have dropped the
ball on in the course of my ten years with her,” he
remembers. “And she made me sign her list, that I would
have these things done when she got back and she said,
‘See ya,’ and the door turned and she started her Volvo
and she drove off.”
No one else, not even Janet’s parents, knew she was
going away.
Carolyn Levine says Perry called at midnight on August
15 to tell them Janet had left.
“I said ‘Perry, Don’t worry about it, I’m sure if you
had an argument she’s upset, she’s probably driving
around to cool off, she’ll be back. Call me when she
comes home,’” Levine remembers.
But Janet didn’t come back in the morning and Carolyn
Levine says she began to worry about her daughter.
Perry says he thought his wife might be luxuriating at a
hotel, and that her disappearance was a “stunt” to make
him understand what life as a young mother was like.
Perry says he became worried after the third or fourth
day. “Because I knew what she had taken with her, and I
knew it wasn’t the amount of things that she needed for
an extended period of time.”
When Janet didn’t call home, her husband and her parents
started looking for her. They called her friends. They
went to the airport parking lot and looked for her car
in the parking lot. They called hotels in Nashville and
out of state. What they didn’t do, oddly enough, is call
the police.
Perry says he didn’t call police because he says the
Levines forbade him to call the authorities. “They were
very concerned that if we reported something to the
authorities it would end up embarrassing Janet, and that
would make my situation with her worse,” he says.
But the Levines say it was Perry who didn’t want to call
the police. “Perry insisted he didn’t want to go to the
police, he wanted to see a private investigator,” says
Larry Levine.
Perry calls that an “outright lie.”
You can believe Janet’s husband or not, but the fact is
that the family waited a full two weeks before Perry and
his father-in-law walked into a police station in
Nashville and reported that Janet was missing.
Why did it take two weeks?
“Well, that’s my mistake. That’s my mistake. Because I
was living with these people, I loved these people,”
Perry says.
And Larry Levine also says they made a mistake. “But
Perry kept telling us maybe she went here, maybe she
went there.”
“He told us a story. And unfortunately I believed him,”
Carolyn Levine adds.
Love, Lies, Murder?
(Page 3 of 7)
Dec. 9, 2005
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Janet March (CBS)
(CBS)
At first, this was just another missing person case to
Nashville Detective Mickey Miller.
“The first thing we did is start checking credit card
accounts and things of that nature,” says Miller. But
Janet had not left a paper trail.
Already worried, Janet’s friends knew something was very
wrong when Janet wasn’t there for Sammy’s sixth birthday
party.
“At that point, I knew that Janet was dead,” one of
Janet’s friends told 48 Hours, “Because she would never,
ever not come to her son’s party.”
Then just a week into their investigation, police found
Janet’s car parked in the lot of an apartment complex
just a few miles from the March house.
“We found a lot of her personal effects, including her
passport,” says Detective Miller.
Three weeks after Janet disappeared, with no credit card
use, no phone calls home to check on the kids, and her
car found with most of her belongings still packed
inside, police decided this was no longer just a missing
person case. It was a homicide.
“This morning the Levine family and their friends posted
a $25,000 reward for information leading to the location
of Mrs. March or her body,” police announced at the
time.
And the prime suspect in the case was Perry March.
Perry refused police requests to interview him or his
children. When he also refused to allow his house to be
searched, police got a warrant.
One month after the disappearance, police went
inch-by-inch through the house.
“We vacuumed all the floors. We collected the vacuum
bags out of the vacuums that belonged here, we even
processed these hardwood floors for fingerprints and
palm prints,” recalls Nashville Crime Scene Investigator
Johnnie Hunter.
Investigators searched nearby woods, two lakes and a
river, yet found no trace of Janet and no evidence that
a crime had even been committed.
“They couldn’t find some other reason to explain Janet’s
being missing. They couldn’t find anything. And
therefore it must be me!” says Perry.
But there was one thing about the search that really
bothered police and still does -- not what they found
but what they didn’t find.
Perry had told police that a list Janet had given him
the night she left had been created on their home
computer. That list was practically the only piece of
evidence that backed up his story.
But police didn’t believe him. In fact, they wanted to
get their hands on the computer’s hard drive, because
they believed it might show that Perry, not Janet, had
written the list. The problem was that the hard drive
was missing.
Perry says he did not remove the hard drive. Asked who
he thinks removed it, Perry says, “Well, there’s two
people that are high on my list who could have removed
it. One of them is Larry Levine, and the other is my
father.”
Perry’s father, Arthur March, had come to stay at
Perry’s house several days after Janet disappeared. But
he says he doesn’t even know what a hard drive is.
And Larry Levine also said he did not remove the hard
drive. “I had nothing to gain by trying to get at it,”
he says.
Meanwhile, police became concerned about something else
they didn’t find -- the tires on Perry’s car. Six days
after Janet disappeared, Perry replaced the tires with
new ones.
“It was on my list! The tires on the Jeep were bald. And
she was worried the Jeep was going to be slipping in the
rain and all this other kind of stuff and I was just
knocking off the stuff on my list,” says Perry.
But according to Detective Miller, the tire company says
that the tires did not need to be changed. “In fact they
questioned that, why the tires were being changed, and
Perry said he just didn’t like the type tires that were
on the car at the time and he wanted a different brand.”
Yet even as investigators became convinced that he was
involved in his wife’s disappearance, they couldn’t come
up with the evidence to charge Perry March with a crime.
Love, Lies, Murder?
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Dec. 9, 2005
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Janet March (CBS)
(CBS)
When their daughter first disappeared, the Levines
struggled to make sense of their son-in-law’s account
that, after an argument, she packed her bags and left on
a 12-day vacation.
One thing that troubled Carolyn was the appointment her
daughter had talked about the day she disappeared. “She
asked me to go with her the next day to see a divorce
lawyer,” says Carolyn.
When Perry was named as a suspect and stopped
cooperating with police, the Levines’ suspicions grew.
Larry Levine says he his 100 percent certain Perry
killed Janet. “Unconditionally positive,” he says.
The Levines made their first move the day Perry was
named as a suspect. They filed a court action to stop
him from taking Sammy and Tzipi out of town. But that
very day, Perry moved with his children to Chicago.
The Levines then went to a Chicago court to file for
visitation rights with their grandchildren.
After a two-year legal battle, a Chicago court granted
the Levines weekend visitation rights. But when they
showed up in a courtroom in the spring of 1999 to
finalize the agreement, Perry wasn’t there. He had moved
to Mexico.
“I moved to Mexico because I needed to get the hell out
of Dodge and start a new life, and get out of their
clutches,” says Perry.
Perry and his two children settled into a new life in
Ajijic, the Mexican town his father Arthur had retired
to years earlier. Arthur March helped his son get
started on a new career as a financial and real estate
advisor.
Perry and his children moved into a house, along with
Carmen Rojas, who he met during his first week in
Mexico, and her three children. They married within a
year.
His old life in Nashville was a chapter Perry was now
more than ready to close. As for what happened to his
first wife, Janet, Carmen Rojas says she doesn’t know
what happened or why she went away.
“I’ve told the children the truth: That Mommy left home,
we don’t know what happened to her, it’s very sad, but
that’s the truth,” says Perry.
The truth for the Levines was also very sad, but totally
different. Two months after Perry fled with their
grandchildren to Mexico, Janet’s parents filed a
wrongful death claim against their former son-in-law in
a Nashville civil court. When Perry failed to show up in
court to fight the charge, Judge Frank Clement ruled
against him and found him “wrongfully responsible for
causing her death.”
For the Levines, it was a vindication. But Perry says he
thinks it’s a crock. “I think it’s unconstitutional,” he
says.
Love, Lies, Murder?
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Dec. 9, 2005
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Janet March (CBS)
(CBS)
After a year in Mexico, there was no question for Sammy
March, then age nine, and his sister Tzipi, six at the
time, that this was their home with their dad, Perry and
their new mom, Carmen.
But 1,500 miles away, the Levines desperately wanted to
see their grandchildren.
Since the Levines’ action against him for the wrongful
death of their daughter, Perry had refused to let them
have contact with the children. So in May 2000, the
Levines showed up at their son-in-law’s front door,
armed with legal papers from the United States, granting
them visitation and demanding to see their
grandchildren.
Perry refused to let the Levines visit Sammy and Tzipi,
and the grandparents went back to Nashville.
But then a month later came a day Perry says he’ll never
forget. It was just after 9 a.m., and Sammy and Tzipi
were just starting their school day.
Perry was in his office. “Four Mexicans walk in. One of
them with a badge and a uniform says he’s from
Immigration and I’m to come with him immediately,” he
recalls. “They grabbed me under the arms and put me in a
headlock, lifted me by my ears, lifted me off my feet
and shoved me through my conference room doors. And all
I get is ‘Your paperwork is not in order, you’re coming
with us.’ I get down the stairs and there’s an unmarked
old white van in the parking lot. The door opens and
they throw me in. These guys grab me in the car, hold me
down, and the van takes off.”
At that very moment, a convoy of cars was approaching
the entrance to Sammy and Tzipi’s school. Inside the
cars were a local lawyer, a Mexican judge, several
Mexican policemen, and the Levines.
This time, the Levines got Mexican authorities to help
them execute their court-ordered visitation. And Perry
was in no position to try and stop them.
What did he think was going on?
“I think my kids are being grabbed. Which is exactly
what was occurring,” says Perry.
But word of what was happening at the school immediately
got to Arthur March.
“This was the second time they came to kidnap my
grandchildren!” he says. Arthur March raced to the
school and says he told Larry Levine “to get his ass out
of there and leave my kids alone.”
Larry Levine claims Arthur March threatened him,
allegedly telling him that neither he or his wife would
get out of Mexico alive.
Asked if he ever pulled a gun on the Levines or anyone
working for them, Arthur March responds with shrugs and
a smile.
Back in the speeding van, Perry realized his armed
captors were taking him to the airport. He decided to
take a gamble: he dropped the name of the immigration
official he suspected his captors were working for.
“The chief of the van got out and got on a cell phone.
Three minutes of conversation, he gets back into the
van, turns around to me and says ‘It’s a terrible
mistake, I’m sorry, your paperwork is in order,’” Perry
recalls.
When he was finally released, Perry sped off toward the
school. “I was so angry I probably could have killed
someone at that time,” he says.
He was too late. After a chaotic hour of arguments and
threats, school administrators handed Sammy and Tzipi
over to the Mexican judge, who in turn handed them over
to the Levines.
“When they brought the kids down and they saw us, they
just came running. I just kind of knelt down, and we
hugged them, and they were happy to see us, and we were
overjoyed to see them,” remembers Carolyn Levine.
By the time Perry reached the school, the Levines and
his children were gone.
But just behind the Levines, in hot pursuit, was Arthur
March. “Maybe I wasn’t thinking rationally, but those
are my grandkids!” he says.
“We were very scared. We were very scared…of this man,”
says Carolyn Levine. “I believed that he would try and
kill us. Absolutely,” Larry Levine adds.
Eventually the Levines lost Arthur March, and headed for
an airport.
Within 24 hours, Sammy and Tzipi were back in Nashville.
“They are kidnappers! It was all a big orchestration,”
says Perry.
But Larry Levine denies they are kidnappers. “Absolutely
not
Love, Lies, Murder?
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Dec. 9, 2005
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Janet March (CBS)
(CBS)
How did the Levines choose that day to pick up their
grandchildren? They had gotten a warning from the FBI
that Mexican immigration officials planned to question
and maybe even deport Perry that morning. This would be
a good time, they were told, to try once again to
enforce their court order for visitation.
“This was a court order in which we were doing what the
court said we had a right to do!” says Larry Levine.
While the court order said they had to return the
children to their father in 39 days, the Levines were
now taking steps to get permanent custody of Sammy and
Tzipi. They enrolled the children in a Nashville school.
Back in Mexico, Perry was afraid he was going to lose
his children for good. But then everything changed.
“Two heroes showed up in my life – lawyers by the name
of Bob Katz and John Herbison – who had been following
my case, and volunteered to get my children back for
me,” says March.
His American attorneys found a law that changed
everything: not a Tennessee law, not even a United
States law, but an international treaty.
“The bottom line is that this treaty says that you can’t
steal children and try to make custody determinations in
the jurisdiction where you stole them to,” says Perry.
His lawyers took the case to a U.S. federal court and
won. The Levines were told to send the children back
“with all due speed.”
Perry says his kids’ return was a celebration. “The
first thing they did is they hugged me and said ‘Daddy,
why did it take so long to get us home?’”
By the summer of 2005, Perry and his new family had
settled into life in Mexico. Sammy and Tzipi were stars
in their school’s Spanish language production of
“Grease,” and Perry and Carmen opened a café.
But nine years after Janet’s disappearance, police were
about to make a stunning arrest.
Love, Lies, Murder?
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Dec. 9, 2005
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Janet March (CBS)
(CBS)
On the morning of Aug. 3, 2003, Perry arrived at his
restaurant around 8 a.m. His perfect world was about to
collapse.
Mexican immigration authorities grabbed Perry, saying
his visa had been revoked. They were deporting him back
to the United States immediately.
Perry wasn’t allowed to go pack a bag or kiss his wife
and children goodbye, and was driven directly to the
Guadalajara airport and put on a plane.
The investigation into the murder of Janet March became
the mission of Nashville’s cold case detectives Sgt. Pat
Postiglione and Bill Pridemore in 2002. Two and half
years later, they took their evidence to a grand jury.
The grand jury proceedings were conducted entirely in
secret in December 2004, and 59 witnesses testified. In
the end, and without his knowledge, Perry was indicted
for the murder of his wife.
After the indictment, the FBI and Nashville cops worked
with Mexican immigration officials to get Perry out of
Mexico and back on U.S. soil where he could be arrested.
Perry’s plane landed in Los Angeles, the first time he
had entered the United States since fleeing to Mexico
years ago. Once in L.A., he was arrested for Janet’s
murder and handed over to Detectives Postiglione and
Pridemore, who took him back to Nashville.
For the Levines, the news of Perry’s return to Nashville
was bittersweet. Almost immediately, they started
working to get the children back, going to court to seek
custody. It took weeks and a number of court
appearances, but eventually the Levines won custody.
Perry in the meantime had gathered a team of lawyers and
was fighting the criminal charges against him in
preliminary hearings. In addition to second-degree
murder, Perry had been indicted for tampering with
evidence and, despite the fact that Janet’s body had
never been found, the macabre charge of abuse of a
corpse.
Perry’s lawyer pleaded not guilty on his behalf.
Prosecutors are tight lipped about any evidence they
plan to present at the trial but acknowledge much of the
case is circumstantial, including the new tires Perry
put on the family car after Janet disappeared, the
missing hard drive from his home computer, and the
discrepancies with Perry’s original story of Janet’s
departure.
Detective Miller, though no longer working the case,
will be a key witness. “Perry said that when Janet left
that she had written out a…Allegedly she was going to go
on an extended twelve-day vacation,” says Miller.
The problem, says Miller, is that her son’s birthday
party was coming up. “I think if you look at the date
that she disappeared, on the 15th, and you add that 12
days to it, that would have her coming back on the 27th.
And that would make sense because Sammy’s birthday was
on the 27th,” he says. “What somebody didn’t think about
was that Janet had already sent out invitations for his
party for the 25th, two days before that.”
The grand jury also heard from a friend of Janet’s who
spoke to her the very evening she disappeared. She had
called to arrange a play date with Sammy and her son for
the next day.
On the morning of Aug. 16, Sammy's friend and his mother
showed up at the March house. The women told 48 Hours
they rang the doorbell, knocked on the door, got no
answer and let themselves in.
The woman walked down a hallway towards the kitchen,
calling out to see if anyone was at home. When she got
to a room, she says she heard Perry March's voice coming
from behind that door. She says he asked who it was. She
told him and he sent her on her way. But she did not
leave before noticing something in the room that she
later described as "strange."
“There was a new oriental rug, fairly large rug, it was
rolled up, basically blocking the doorway where you go
into Perry’s study and Janet’s art studio,” says
Detective Miller.
Investigators have not found this rug, and Miller says
Perry has denied its existence.
The police theory is that after killing Janet, Perry put
her body inside that rug and then buried it. Perry all
but laughed at that charge when 48 Hours spoke to him
four years ago.
“That’s a complete farce! I know the house I lived in
and I know there was no oriental rug in our house other
than one runner this wide. If she had been wrapped in
that rug she would have looked like a hot dog wrapped,
like one of those little sausages wrapped that you see
on an appetizer tray,” he said.
The rug issue came up again in a recent bond hearing.
Redina Friedman, who was Sammy March’s court appointed
guardian during the early custody battles between Perry
March and the Levines, said Sammy remembers the night
his mother left.
“The night his mother disappeared, he heard his parents
fighting. He did not see them. He heard them fighting.
And then he fell asleep. When he woke up the following
morning, his mother was gone. He saw a rug that was
rolled up somewhere in the vicinity of the kitchen, and
when he returned later that day, the rug was gone,” says
Friedman.
And there is yet another bizarre and surprising twist in
this case. Prosecutors now claim that Perry, while in
jail, conspired with his father to kill Janet’s parents,
the people he blames for all of his troubles with the
law.
The plan, prosecutors say, was to hire Russell Nathaniel
Farris, aka Bobby Givens, a convict Perry met in jail.
Prosecutors say after the job was done, Arthur would
meet the killer at the Guadalajara airport, pay him off
and help him get away. Authorities say they got wind of
the plan and they set up the meeting with Arthur March.
“It’s bullsh*t and they know it. The guy was never here.
That’s entrapment. They used the FBI to entrap me,” says
Arthur March.
So in addition to the charge of murdering Janet, Perry,
along with his father, faces charges of conspiracy to
kill her parents.
But Arthur March is taking a “come and get me” stance.
“According to my lawyers here, what they do in the
United States doesn’t affect me here. I don’t go
peacefully. I don’t go like Perry. There’s going to be
bloodshed somewhere, theirs or mine.”
Perry’s lawyers say they will mount a vigorous defense.
Their client has always proclaimed his innocence.
“Did you get in an argument with her that night, did you
get violent, did you kill her, either accidentally or on
purpose, and then dispose of the body?” Lagattuta asked.
“The question is highly offensive to me. I know it’s
your job to ask it, and the answer is no,” says March.
Perry March’s trial for Janet’s murder is expected to
start next summer.
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Sammy and Tzipi March are now living with the Levines in
Nashville. If acquitted, March plans to fight to regain
custody of his children.
Arthur March remains a fugitive in Mexico.
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