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American Idol for Readers

 

 

In This Issue

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Celebrity Justice In Steve Buscemi’s latest, the journalist-star sit-down is an interview between vampires

The Ride of Their Lives A thrilling documentary charts America’s race to the stars in the astronauts’ words

Words of the Week

Short Takes This week in local theaters

High Fashion Folly A Nashville fashion magazine goes belly up, leaving employees and advertisers holding the bag

Afflict the Afflicted When a columnist returns from a cancer fight, what does The Tennessean do?

Suspect Behavior

 

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by Chris Scott

Even more than people love a violent family drama, they love a murder mystery. And even more than they love a murder mystery, they love to see the rich and powerful self-destruct. So the country sat up and noticed 11 years ago when Janet March disappeared, and suspicion immediately fell on her husband, Perry. Now the first book about the case has been published. In the aptly titled An Unfinished Canvas: A True Story of Love, Family, and Murder in Nashville (Berkley, 384 pp., $7.99), Nashvillians Michael Glasgow and Phyllis Gobbell paint a portrait of a man who, if not for his arrogance, could have gotten away with murder.

It’s appropriate that this tortuous tale is recounted by locals. Glasgow and Gobbell had the inside track, not only with access to the principal characters, but with Nashville itself. In 1996, the city was well into the growth spurt that moved it beyond its reputation as the home of the Grand Ole Opry. March madness was symptomatic of the growing pains brought on by that expansion. A rich, seemingly perfect couple—Perry an up-and-coming attorney, Janet a well-respected artist—were revealed as a troubled pair of egoists. Their private life was full of conflict, with money often at the root of their hostility. On the verge of a divorce, Janet disappeared after an argument apparently turned violent. Perry reported her missing, claiming she walked out on him and their children. As everyone in Middle Tennessee knows by now, her body was never found, but almost no one doubted that Perry killed her. The problem for the police was how to build a case without a body, murder weapon or any physical evidence that anyone had been injured.

In the end, Perry March’s superiority complex solved the case. The police simply had to give him enough time to box himself in. It was a long, twisted, litigation-filled path. Glasgow and Gobbell, newcomers to the true-crime genre, stumble here and there in their reporting, but the story is so compelling that these small imperfections don’t ruin an ultimately commendable account of a case that is truly stranger than fiction.Michael Glasgow and Phyllis Gobbell appear at Davis-Kidd Booksellers at 6 p.m. Oct. 2.