News
By John Spragens
When Perry March awoke last Wednesday morning in the Lake Chapala region of Mexico, he had no idea that he would be spending the next night in the Van Nuys Community Police Station just outside Los Angeles, Calif. He certainly wasn't expecting several armed men to show up around 7:45 a.m. at Media Luna, the quaint, tourist-friendly bistro he and his wife Carmen own, to take him to the Guadalajara airport, where he would be formally deported from Mexico and handed over to FBI officials.
The Deportee: March's mug shot
That was the beginning of March's long journey back to Nashville, the scene of a murder prosecutors say he committed on Aug. 15, 1996, before disposing of the body and covering his tracks—literally, in this case. (He bought new tires for his Jeep shortly after Janet March disappeared.) In mid-2004, a Davidson County Circuit Court judge declared March legally liable for the death of his wife. Months later, and more than eight years after they began their investigation into the disappearance and presumed murder of Janet March, police and the district attorney's office presented their accumulated evidence to a Davidson County grand jury. On Dec. 7, those men and women charged Perry March with second-degree murder, abuse of a corpse and tampering with evidence.
Why now? Did new evidence surface that directly implicates March in his wife's killing? Did police and prosecutors simply reexamine old evidence and decide that they could make a case for murder in the second degree? The DA's office remains tight-lipped. For now, all they're saying about evidence is that Janet March's remains have not been found. At least one reason they went for a second-degree murder indictment—which carries a penalty of 15 to 25 years in prison—is that the Mexican government would likely refuse to extradite someone who could possibly face the death penalty. Even if prosecutors believe they can prove the killing was premeditated, they won't have to.
The Defense Attorney: John Herbison Photo: Josh Anderson
Several sources with indirect knowledge of the case tell the Scene that it is a strong circumstantial case if all the prosecution's evidence is ruled admissible at trial. Two of these sources, along with a source familiar with the investigation, describe a piece of physical evidence that the DA's office is expected to argue links March to his wife's killing: a strand of her hair, found in the backseat of his Jeep, intertwined with a carpet fiber. Will prosecutors allege that this supports their old theory that March rolled his wife's body up in a rug and disposed of it before reporting her missing? (See related story, "What the Scene Knows.")
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Nashville attorney John Herbison, who has represented March in the past and expects to be hired to defend him in this case, is coy about any physical evidence prosecutors might come up with. "I wouldn't want to speculate about the significance of a person's own hair being found in one's own car," he says, emphasizing that he has not learned what evidence prosecutors plan to present against his prospective client. Like any good defense attorney in a high-profile case, Herbison plants seeds of doubt early on.
Assistant District Attorney Tom Thurman declines to comment on evidence to be used against March, circumstantial or otherwise. A source in the DA's office confirms that the destruction of evidence charge relates to the Ambra desktop computer hard drive that was missing from the Marches' house when police showed up to search it in September 1996—after earlier tipping their hand by telling March that they'd be back for the hard drive with a warrant. Before they could return, it vanished. In March 2003, Samuel Chavez, a business associate of Perry March's in Mexico, gave Metro police a laptop hard drive he said Perry used for years in business matters; Perry has said it was not from a computer he had while living in Nashville. Now, however, Chavez is on the prosecution's witness list. While the laptop hard drive may not prove significant, Chavez may be called testify about statements March made to him "that indicated a guilty conscience," according to a source with knowledge of the situation.
Meanwhile, prosecutors have prepared quite a witness list—one befitting the elite West Nashville murder it purports to explain. Metro Council member and attorney Chris Whitson is on it, as is former U.S. attorney Hal Hardin. So are Lucinda Smith, head of the local Legal Aid society, and Larry Brinton, a veteran reporter currently working at WSMV-Channel 4. Brinton, who reported in September 2004 that prosecutors might soon have an indictment based on circumstantial evidence against March, knows why he's on the list. "They want to talk to me about an interview I did with Sammy," he tells the Scene, referring to March's now 14-year-old son. "I was told last year that I would be subpoenaed" if March were charged and indicted. Then working for WTVF-Channel 5, Brinton taped the interview on a 1999 visit to Mexico. It never aired.
The last two people publicly known to have seen Janet before she vanished are on the witness list as well. On Aug. 15, 1996, John Richie and John McAllister were doing some warranty work on wood countertops they had installed in the Marches' Forest Hills home. Janet supervised the repairs while Perry played outside with Sammy and his daughter, Tzipora. Reached at his home over the weekend, Jim Richie, who ran the short-lived company that employed the two men—John is his brother—says that even though they are on the witness list, the two have little to add to the prosecution's case. "They were over there doing some work, and she was alive and well," he tells the Scene. "When they left, they let themselves out. I really don't know anything beyond that."
Herbison knew that his former client had been seized by men in Mexico but didn't know that he was formally in custody until a TV reporter called him last Wednesday morning with the news that Perry March had been flown to a California jail. On Thursday, Herbison talked to March, who called him from the facility three times. Then there were the national media calls: Inside Edition, FOX News, 48 Hours, Good Morning America and Larry King Live—the latter of which has been talking to Herbison about an Aug. 18 appearance, perhaps with Channel 4's Brinton, he says. For the past few days, he has been able to do little but field calls from local and national media, even when out of town working on other cases. "It's been pretty much a full-time job," says the Eighth Avenue attorney.
At press time, March was expected to arrive in Nashville on Wednesday, escorted by the Metro Police fugitive unit. He will be booked and placed in the special management unit of the downtown criminal justice center and is expected to be arraigned via videoconference in Judge Steve Dozier's court next week. "The inmates in jail, of course, watch TV, and they will know all about him when he gets here. So we're trying to protect him from that," says one sherriff's office source, noting that it's possible that detectives interviewed Metro inmates in this case.
At the press conference held to announce March's arrest last week, a jocular Metro Police Chief Ronal Serpas declared that March's apprehension was a victory for the cops' cold case unit, which he reorganized over public complaints from the DA's office. Serpas seemed to regard March's arrest as proof that the cold case unit, under his watchful eye, could be successful—an attitude that led some to speculate that March's arrest was driven by the chief's desire for vindication.
The DA's office says its decisions were driven by investigative and legal concerns, nothing more. "We took it to the grand jury when we felt we had enough evidence to get a conviction," says Thurman, adding that the arrest "didn't have anything to do with the cold case unit's rearrangement" because the indictment was handed down before the reorganization took place in early 2005. "It wasn't like the cold case unit was reorganized and all of a sudden they solved this case," he says, noting that police detectives and DA's office investigators did solid work on the case both before and after the restructuring. There's plenty of credit to go around.
Even the grand jury that voted "true bill" on the three-count indictment did its job and did it well, says Stan Fossick, who was its foreperson at the time. "We had no inkling that [the March case] was coming in," he says. "Everyone to a person...had heard of it who was in that room—whether they were a native Nashvillian or were a transplant, they had at least heard the name Perry March." Fossick says it took one long December day of testimony for them to hear the evidence.
After they handed down the indictment, it was sealed by law—meaning everyone was sworn to silence—and the process of negotiating for March's deportation or extradition began. To keep it quiet, very few people were told about the indictment; eventually, after high-level negotiations between U.S. and Mexican immigration officials, March was deported for alleged fraud in Mexico. In fact, according to a Guadalajara news report, March was quite a persona non grata in his largely expatriate community: a Mexico-based movement to get him deported had grown quite widespread.
Chavez, March's former business associate who is expected to testify against him at trial, says his involuntary departure was long overdue. "I'm glad to hear that Mr. March was finally deported and that my efforts were not futile," he says, referring to his participation in the process of ousting March from the country. Chavez could provide key character evidence about his former colleague if it is admitted in court.
Of course, details about March's behavior, attitude and dealings with people—one person who knows him well describes him as a "sociopath"—would only be admissible if March's defense raises it. "If a defendant testifies and puts his character into evidence, that simply opens the door for a prosecutor to introduce other evidence about his character," says Bernie McEvoy, a Nashville defense attorney who recently served in the DA's office. Folks speculate that March, who's never been known to bite his tongue, will insist on taking the stand in his own defense.
For now, though, he remains silent, behind bars until the sheriff's office lets him talk to reporters, which Sheriff Daron Hall tells the Scene he will try to do if March requested it. A bigger question, though, is whether his attorney, assuming it's Herbison, will let him talk. "That's a judgment call we'll make later on," says the lawyer. "I expect I'll advise him not to."
Local legal watchers—mostly lawyers—have been handicapping the case for the past week, although almost no one knows what the state has up its sleeve. "I think you're going to learn a lot at the bond hearing," says Jim Todd, a 12-year veteran of the DA's office who left for private practice in April. "That's when the state's going to be required to tip their hand." Todd says he had no knowledge of the December 2004 indictment—even though he was criminal court supervisor for the 50-attorney office and talked regularly with lawyers who were involved in the March case.
It's reasonable to think that prosecutors could put on a strong circumstantial case even without a dead body; it will just be harder to do, he says. "You have to prove in a homicide case that someone was killed," Todd says. "Usually you have the body, and a medical examiner comes in and testifies that the cause of death was homicide by asphyxiation or whatever. In this case you're going to have to prove the homicide first before you can prove who committed it."
But, he adds, District Attorney Torry Johnson's office wouldn't make an arrest if they didn't think they could get a conviction. "Thurman crosses his T's and dots his I's, and Torry runs a good office over there. It's going to be a good case."
Carrington Fox and Liz Garrigan contributed to this report.