By Willy Stern
This is the second installment in a two-part series.
Editor's Note: Last week, in the opening installment of its series on the disappearance of Janet March, the Scene outlined for the first time in public the Metro Police Department’s detailed theory as to how Perry March may have killed his wife and then disposed of her body. On the morning after the Scene article appeared, Metro homicide detective David Miller was relieved of his responsibilities as chief investigator on the March case.
Even while he was heading the March investigation—the most highly publicized missing-persons case Nashville has witnessed in 20 years—Miller was responsible for a heavy case load. During the month of December, with the March investigation still under way, Miller was assigned to the 11:30 p.m.-8 a.m. “graveyard shift,” a schedule that made it even more difficult to investigate an already difficult case.
During 1996, he oversaw the investigations of 1,244 missing-persons cases in Davidson County. His only unsolved case that year was the case of Janet March.
The March case poses uncommon challenges, largely because her family did not report her missing until two weeks after her disappearance on Aug. 15. Numerous sources close to the Police Department say the department is particularly sensitive about the intense publicity surrounding the March case. The same sources say that Miller has been used as a scapegoat by department officials, who have little hope of solving a virtually insolvable case.
Writer Willy Stern conducted more than 200 interviews while researching this series. This article, like its predecessor, includes much information that has never before been made public.
This article includes descriptions of sexual situations and explicit language that some readers may find offensive.
On July 19, 1991, a paralegal, an attractive woman with a reputation as a hard worker, arrived for work at Bass Berry & Sims, Nashville’s most patrician law firm. On her chair at BB&S’s offices in the First American Center, she found a letter.
She opened it and began to read. As she read the unsigned letter, which ran to several typed, single-spaced pages, the paralegal freaked. The letter was a lurid come-on, a heated proposal for oral sex. In florid terms, it detailed the writer’s fantasies: “I want to inhale the essence of you. I want to taste your arms. The pure animal sexiness of your body grips me and embarrasses me,” the letter said, before proceeding to a languorous description of the woman’s “perfect” body and a graphic, no-holds-barred depiction of “hours and hours” of cunnilingus. “If I were granted a single wish in life,” the writer insisted, “I would not hesitate for that wish to be to devour you. This is what I think of most often.” There was talk of “licking and sucking,” “kissing and caressing” her “soft belly and thighs,” and “nibbling and stroking.”
The anonymous writer made it clear that he was a married man. “I have always wondered about men who have affairs. I could never understand them,” he said. An affair with the paralegal, he said, would “devastate” his wife. In a passing wave of remorse, he added, “and it breaks my heart.”
He justified himself by arguing that “marriage has a way of making sex boring at times, routine and old. I do not mean that it loses its pleasure. We still climax. We still love passionately. We still love our partners and aim to please.” Playing his Lothario role to the hilt, he said, “I want you to cry because you never knew how good it could be.”
Apparently, the paralegal, a cordial woman whom lawyers at the firm still remember as being thoroughly decent, wasn’t interested in “how good it could be.” She turned the letter over to her boss, and it quickly made its way to BB&S’s senior management, who hired a security firm, Business Risk International, to determine the writer’s identity. While Business Risk International laid out an amazingly simple scheme to discover the letter writer’s identity, the paralegal received two more anonymous letters from her would-be suitor. In just a matter of days, utilizing two closed-circuit cameras, the security team had captured on film the face of the man who, to all appearances, was the writer of the letters.
He was Perry Avram March, then 30, husband of Janet Levine March. The Marches’ first child, Sammy, had been born 11 months before the letter-writing began. The paralegal was especially troubled to learn that the letters had allegedly been written by a man who worked in such close proximity to her. March’s office and her desk were both on the 25th floor of the First American Center.
It is not clear whether Perry March ever acknowledged writing the letters. In a matter of weeks after the security firm singled him out as the writer, he was gone from Bass Berry & Sims. The paralegal had preceded him, angered because March had not been summarily dismissed by the high-powered law firm. In Davidson County Probate Court last November, lawyers representing Janet March’s parents said that Perry March eventually agreed to pay the woman a $25,000 settlement.
Payment was slow in coming. As late as this past summer, only half of the settlement had been paid.
Police Department investigators theorize that the letter-writing incident may have caused trouble in Perry and Janet March’s outwardly idyllic marriage. In fact, investigators theorize that, on the evening of Aug. 15, the night Janet March disappeared from the Forest Hills home where she and Perry lived with their two children, the couple was squabbling over the incident. Specifically, detectives suspect, Janet March confronted Perry over a letter he had allegedly written to the paralegal on Aug. 13, saying he was having trouble paying the remaining $12,500.
In a fit of anger, according to a Police Department scenario, Perry March, who has a black belt in karate, struck his 104-pound wife and killed her.
March has another story: He says his wife, in her own fit of anger, left on a spur-of-the-moment “vacation.” Now living outside Chicago with his two children, March denies having any knowledge of his wife’s whereabouts. What’s more, he says he is considering a suit against Metro Nashville, whose police department has fingered him as the prime suspect in the possible killing of Janet March. He has been ostracized by the social circle in which he and Janet moved, and he is embroiled in a legal battle with his in-laws, Lawrence and Carolyn Levine, over Janet’s assets. The local press—which, March says, has accepted the conventional wisdom that he is simply a criminal waiting to be caught—dogs his every step.
At the same time, Perry March refuses to keep a low profile. Indeed, he is threatening to go on a veritable litigation spree. Not only is he talking about a suit against the city of Nashville; he has also recently threatened to file suits against The Tennessean and against a woman who claims that he struck her in a fit of jealousy, more than 10 years ago, while she and March were both undergraduates at the University of Michigan. March’s lead attorney, Lionel Barrett Jr., says that even though he and March have discussed these potential suits, it is unlikely that any of them will ever end up in court.
Meanwhile, March is threatening a suit against Bass Berry & Sims. Among the possible charges are defamation of character and slander. March also challenges the firm’s scrupulously monitored reputation. He alleges that BB&S overbilled some clients and that the firm was anti-Semitic and racist.
Sources knowledgeable about the possible suit say March is demanding money from his former employers at BB&S, threatening to go public with his allegations if they do not meet his demands. According to a reliable source familar with March’s complaint, the threatened law suit is “a pathetic and frivolous attempt to get money.” Perry March, Bass Berry & Sims, and an attorney representing BB&S have all declined to comment on March’s threatened complaint.
In a signed affidavit filed in Davidson County Probate Court, March says it has been difficult for him to earn a livelihood in Illinois. His client base, he says, is in Tennessee.
In the weeks before Janet March’s disappearance, Perry March had been making plans to leave his job at Larry Levine’s firm, Levine Mattson Orr & Geracioti. He acknowledges that he had begun negotiations to rent space from Saturn &Mazer, the law firm whose offices are next door to Levine’s firm. Alan Saturn, a principal at Saturn &Mazer, declined comment.
March says he intended to open his own practice so that he could focus on “a more business-oriented practice” and so that he would no longer have to share his “sizable” income with his father-in-law’s firm. Detectives say that March asked at least one of his clients, home builder Garry Zeitlin, to delay paying March for his services until after March had set up his own firm. Zeitlin’s lawyer says his client declined comment. March says that all his dealings while at the Levine firm were above-board.
Persons regularly in contact with March say he now appears to be desperate for money. Meanwhile, even though his wife is still missing—and even though it is almost universally accepted on the rumor mill that he is guilty of a killing (a killing that may not have taken place)—Perry March says he intends to move back to Nashville to practice law and to earn “the future respect of his children.”
Nevertheless, March says he has come to understand some harsh realities about his former friends in West Nashville, the very people whose lives he once wanted to emulate. “The sad thing is, I had thought I wanted to go through life with these people,” he says. “But when it’s all said and done, they are nothing but small-minded, petty little people.”
Even when Perry March has chosen to remain silent, his silence has been interpreted, both in the press and on the streets, as still more evidence of his guilt. For example, during a civil deposition on Oct. 15 in connection with visitation rights for his children, March invoked his Fifth Amendment rights at least 15 times. March recalls the deposition and a later one as a grueling ordeal. “They beat the shit out of me,” he says. One of the questions he refused to answer on Oct. 15 was whether he had killed his wife.
Apparently, March was acting on sound legal advice. Shortly before the October deposition, March had been named as the Police Department’s prime suspect in the investigation of Janet March’s disappearance. When a suspect in a criminal case gives a deposition in a concurrent civil case, it is standard procedure for the suspect’s lawyer to advise him to take the Fifth. “Innocent or guilty, if March’s lawyer had advised him to do anything except take the Fifth in the civil deposition, especially early on in the case, he’d be a fool,” says Neil Cohen, a professor of law at the University of Tennessee Law School and the author of several books on criminal law.
Nevertheless, The Tennessean splashed the story on its front page on Nov. 15 with a headline that read, “March takes the Fifth. Won’t answer on how wife disappeared.”
On the advice of his attorney, March has also refused to take a lie-detector test. Initially, March did not take a polygraph test because he was taking two medications, Xanax and Zoloft, prescribed for him by his psychiatrist, Dr. Thomas Campbell. March says the medications were prescribed before Metro Police named him as their prime suspect. Law enforcement sources confirm that, if March had taken a lie-detector test while on an anti-anxiety medication such as Xanax, which could affect his pulse rate, the results would have been invalid. But Police Department sources also suggest that it may not be pure coincidence that March began taking Xanax shortly before he was singled out as the lone suspect in a possible homicide case.
Ever since March was named as the Police Department’s prime suspect on Sept. 17, he has persisted in his refusal to take a lie-detector test, but criminal defense experts state that such refusals are standard practice. “Any criminal defense lawyer worth his salt would not allow his client to take a polygraph exam,” explains Charles Ray, a practicing criminal defense attorney in Nashville for 24 years. During a polygraph test, Ray says, the suspect would be asked “to give full statements that could come back later to haunt him.”
In short, March’s refusal to take a lie-detector test is no real proof of his guilt. Nevertheless, literally dozens of persons, many of whom associated with the Marches as part of their upwardly mobile social set, have told the Scene that, as far as they are concerned, Perry March’s refusal to take the test is an indication of guilt.
March, however, remains adamant that he is not guilty of anything and that he does not know his wife’s whereabouts. When he does talk, his language is colorful.
On Sept. 16, the day before Police Department investigators obtained a warrant to search the March residence on Blackberry Road in Forest Hills, at least one lawyer from the district attorney’s office, along with Homicide Section Detective David Miller, who was then directing the investigation, met with March’s lawyer, Lionel Barrett. At that meeting, March says, it was suggested that March might consider pleading guilty to charges of voluntary manslaughter, which in Tennessee carries a term of three-to-six years for first-time offenders, with the option for parole after 30 percent of the term has been served. When he was told that plea-bargaining had even been mentioned, March’s response was, “Fuck them. I didn’t do anything.”
In a prepared statement, Barrett has said there has been no attempt to negotiate a settlement. The Office of the District Attorney declined comment.
One of Perry March’s classmates at Vanderbilt Law School remembers him as a “persistent and aggressive” adversary in classroom negotiating exercises. Another classmate recalls that, because of his intense desire for financial success, he was jokingly referred to as “the classmate most likely to be indicted for securities fraud.” Years later, the buddies with whom Perry March played tennis on Sunday mornings at Whitworth Racquet Club would describe him as a super-competitive player, a man who simply refused to lose.
The story of Perry March’s life is the saga of a complex, hard-driving, often angry young man determined to claw his way to the top. It is a story with its share of conundrums and seeming contradictions.
March, now 36, has a reputation as a vicious social climber who desperately wanted to be accepted by Nashville’s wealthiest young Jewish couples. On occasion, he handled real estate closings and did other legal legwork for some of those couples and never sent them bills. Meanwhile, he also boasted that he represented “all the nightclubs in Nashville.” He tells of showing his West Nashville friends a good time at local night spots such as the Music City Mix Factory, which he represented. Now, March says, the same people who enjoyed his hospitality have turned their backs on him.
In many ways, March’s life has had all the trappings of respectability. He is an attentive father who, it seems, is never far from his baby monitor. After March joined Bass Berry & Sims in 1988, James H. Cheek III, a highly esteemed partner with the firm, took the young lawyer under his wing. March says that Cheek even referred to him as “Nashville’s next Jewish consigliere,” suggesting that he would be the successor to Harris Gilbert, who is widely acknowledged to be Nashville’s most prominent Jewish attorney—and who is now representing March’s in-laws.
But there are also stories that suggest a less dignified Perry March. After he left BB&S, March allegedly received a hefty pile of cash from a prominent Nashvillian after March threatened to file a sexual harassment suit on behalf of one of his clients. March has boasted to friends that the case was settled out of court for an amount in “the high six figures.” March’s opposing attorney in the harassment case was none other than Jim Neal, the high-profile lawyer whose firm, Neal & Harwell, is now representing Bass Berry & Sims in its dealings with March. At the time the harassment suit was settled, March told friends that he had “Jim Neal shaking in his boots.” Neal’s only public response is that Perry March “must be hallucinating.”
Perry March’s paternal grandfather, Paul Marcovich, was a Romanian immigrant who arrived in the U.S. just after the turn of the century. Marcovich went on to settle in East Chicago, Ind., an industrial hellhole, within spitting distance of Chicago’s tough South Side. He worked hard, and his work apparently paid off. He eventually amassed substantial real estate holdings, and he owned a bank, a pharmacy, and a travel agency. According to family lore, the Marcoviches at one time were the second-largest taxpayers in the East Chicago area, second only to Inland Steel.
Marcovich and his wife, the Chicago-born Pearl Cohen, had two sons, Arthur and Martin. A self-made man, Paul Marcovich believed that each of his boys should learn a trade. Marty, a football star, was sent to Exeter and Princeton. Arthur, the Marcoviches’ first-born, earned a pharmacy degree at Ohio Northern University.
After he finished school, Art spent three years with the U.S. Army in Japan in the early 1950s; then he returned to East Chicago to work at his father’s Euclid Pharmacy. In 1956 Art shortened his last name to “March.” He made the change, he says, not to disguise his Jewishness but to make the name easier to pronounce and spell.
On a trip to Israel in the late ’50s, Arthur March met and fell in love with Zipora Elyson, a dark-haired Israeli-born beauty whose father worked as a supervisor for a Tel Aviv bus company. Her mother was an immigrant to Israel from Minsk, a town in Ukraine. In her photographs, the young Zipora Elyson bears a striking resemblance to Janet March.
Art and Zipora swiftly fell in love, were married, and moved back to East Chicago. Their first child, Perry, born in 1961, was quickly followed by Ron and Kathy. Art, with his crude manners, went through a succession of jobs in health-care administration. To all appearances, the family’s financial situation was secure; they spent substantial periods of time at their vacation home, some 40 miles away in Michiana, Mich. Michiana, nestled along an unspoiled stretch of the Lake Michigan shoreline, remains a popular summer lake resort for well-heeled Chicagoans, a sort of Hamptons for Midwesterners.
The Marches appeared to be a typical happy family. Twenty-five years later, friends would say that Perry and Janet March’s family life looked happy too.
But Art and Zipora’s paradise fell apart. Zipora died suddenly in 1970. It was widely assumed that her death, listed on her death certificate as the result of a “barbiturate overdose,” was in fact a suicide.
Arthur March says that in 1970 a physician prescribed Darvon, a well-known painkiller, for Zipora, who, he says, had cut her head. According to Arthur, his wife had an allergic reaction to the drug and died of anaphylactic shock. However, two death certificates—one from the state of Indiana and the other from the city of East Chicago—indicate that she died of “barbiturate overdose.” The East Chicago death certificate lists Zipora as an “accidental home death.” Her Indiana state death certificate says a “partially empty bottle” of Darvon capsules was found in Zipora’s bedroom.
The Scene consulted three Nashville doctors who specialize in allergic reactions. All three said that a diagnosis of “anaphylactic shock” would be a good cover-up for a drug-assisted suicide, since the two can have similar symptoms. Several Nashville doctors of Art and Zipora’s generation confirmed that, 25 years ago, “accidental home death” might have been used as a euphemism for suicide.
If Arthur March was attempting to cover up for his wife’s alleged suicide, he may have thought he had good reason for doing so. He may have been trying to protect his children, all three of whom were still under 10 when Zipora died.
After his wife’s death, Art and his children moved to Michiana full-time. Locals remember Art, who has never remarried, as an eccentric who used to ride through town in a horse and buggy. They also recall him tromping around in the dead of winter, wearing no shirt except a T-shirt. Art was known for hanging out with his Army buddies on weekends, but he was also known for being a devoted single parent who sacrificed much for his three kids. Today, Perry’s brother, Ron, is an entertainment lawyer in Chicago; his clients include the rock band Sonia Dada. Kathy is a dentist.
The rest of Perry’s youth, as he describes it, was unremarkable. He was sent to high school at La Lumiere School, a local Catholic prep school. As a day student, he made exceptional grades. He played a lot of tennis; on the weekends he studied karate, picking up a first-degree black belt while in high school. He earned four varsity letters in wrestling and three in soccer before heading off to the University of Michigan.
Perry says he considered other colleges but chose Michigan because, as an in-state student, he would be eligible for lower tuition. As the son of a pharmacist, he says, money was an important concern. March says he was also attracted by Michigan’s “exceptional” Chinese studies program. He also says he remains “fluent in Chinese” to this day.
Perry and Janet were both undergraduates at Michigan when they were introduced by Stacey Goodman, then Janet’s roommate and now a Nashville physician. According to Perry, Janet missed their first date. They had planned to go to synagogue together on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, but Janet overslept. When she and Perry finally did get together, they became inseparable. Perry says he was drawn to Janet because of her beauty, her soft voice and her Southern accent, her whimsical and artistic personality, and her offbeat, but perceptive, sense of humor. According to Perry, the couple had in effect been living together, ever since they met in college, until Janet went missing in August.
After Perry left Michigan in 1983, he moved to Chicago. Janet followed him about six months later. They lived in Chicago for about two years while Perry worked as a management trainee at a subsidiary of the brokerage house Oppenheimer and Co. Then, at Janet’s urging, they settled in Nashville, where Perry was accepted at Vanderbilt Law School.
The move to Nashville had another enticement: Janet’s parents had agreed to pay Perry’s way through law school. According to Perry, it seemed like the right time to give Nashville a try.
Perry and Janet were married in Nashville in 1987. Ever the romantic, Janet had grown tired of waiting for Perry to propose, so she got down on her knees and proposed to him at Percy Warner Park.
Lawrence and Carolyn Levine continued to be generous to their only daughter and her law-student husband. They provided money so that Janet and Perry could buy a spacious hillside house on 32nd Avenue, even before Perry was out of law school. In court documents, attorneys representing the Levines have said the monies were passed to Janet not for estate-planning purposes but to “make our daughter happy.”
Perry was grateful for the financial help, mostly because his own father’s uncertain fortunes had taken a recent turn for the worse.
Lakeshore Bank & Trust in Michigan City, Ind., had foreclosed on Arthur March’s Michiana, Mich., home in early 1986. Larry Levine, Perry’s father-in-law, bought the property from the bank for $115,000 later that year. Arthur March says that Levine, who is a successful attorney, allowed him to live in the house rent-free but later encouraged him to move to Nashville so that he could be close to Perry and Janet.
Arthur March made the move to Nashville, but records in the Berrien County (Mich.) Register of Deeds indicate that Levine terminated March’s lease on the house at 42 Apache Trail in Michiana in early 1987 for failure to pay rent. Levine sold the house a year later for $144,500. According to the Levines’ attorney, after March arrived in Nashville, the Levines took him into their house and loaned him money “to get him going.”
In 1991 Arthur March filed for personal bankruptcy protection in a Nashville court. Nevertheless, many of Perry March’s affluent young acquaintances say that in recent years Perry boasted that he too “came from money.” They say he insisted that his generation of Jewish men should build on the financial successes of their parents.
Perry March did well at Vanderbilt. He made the Law Review, and he says he received tempting offers, with hefty salaries, from two of the country’s top New York-based law firms, Cravath, Swaine & Moore and Shearman & Sterling. But Perry chose to sign on with Bass Berry & Sims, Nashville’s blue-ribbon firm. His starting salary was $42,500.
The late 1980s was a time of change at Bass Berry & Sims. For years, several prominent Nashville Jews who used BB&S for their legal work, including Service Merchandise chairman Raymond Zimmerman, had been hounding BB&S to hire a Jewish attorney.
When Perry March joined the firm in 1988, he and a Vanderbilt classmate, Bennett Ross, were the first Jews ever hired on a full-time basis at the Waspy firm. Dale Wainwright, an African-American, and several female attorneys came to BB&S that year as well. March says he and the other young minority attorneys jokingly referred to themselves as the “affirmative-action class.” Both Ross and Wainright deny ever hearing the term. Ross, who made partner at BB&S in 1994, is now a governmental affairs attorney with BellSouth Telecommunications. Wainwright left as an associate and now practices law in Houston.
Perry had been at the firm for over two years, and he seemed to be doing well. Then in the summer of 1991, the anonymous letter, with its frantic, seamy language, showed up on the paralegal’s chair. The melodramatic letter, ostensibly a plea for the paralegal’s attentions, sounded almost like a death wish: “I’m lost,” the letter writer said. “I’ve read that when a person drowns, they fight savagely for air and then, when fate ultimately defeats them, and they succumb, they say it feels so good, so comforting.”
After the first letter arrived, the outside security firm did not have too much trouble setting up their plan to catch the writer. The second letter arrived about two weeks later, dated July 31. It was just half-a-page long; like the first letter, it was typewritten, and it was unsigned. This time, the writer was all business:
This is an indication, if you ever should consider or wish to communicate, check out of the library the Tax Management Estates, Gifts and Trusts Portfolio No. 134-4th, titled “Annuities” located near the West law terminal on the 25th floor in the library. When you check it out, insert a library checkout card signed by you in its place. I will periodically notice if it is gone. If so, I will contact you to let you know how to reach me anonymously.
The investigators had all the clues they needed; they knew precisely where to aim their surveillance cameras. The paralegal agreed to cooperate. According to the instructions in the letter, she removed the annuities volume, signed a checkout card, and left it in the space where the book had been filed. The trap was set, and the letter writer walked right in.
Ecstatic, he typed another letter, this one dated Aug. 14. “I can barely type this,” he said. “My hands are unsteady and my thoughts are whirling in a maelstrom of emotions.... I feel as if my heart stopped beating.” Waxing poetic, he wrote, “My world is far less grey today than it has ever been in my life. I feel like the lucky leprechaun who has seen the rainbow and knows what lays [sic] beyond. And like the leprechaun, I wonder if I’ll ever find it,” he wrote. During the coming days, when his fantasies would be “on their brightest comet,” he said, he would think “constantly” of the paralegal. “Say what you will, my dearest, you will forever be my truest longing,” he wrote.
Then he gave more directions; this time he wanted the paralegal to leave a message for him. Carefully, he described the law firm’s 26th-floor library and its rolling bookshelves. The paralegal was to go to the “second rolling bookshelf from the door.” On “the bottommost shelf, near the front,” he said, she would find a series of dark-green books entitled Institute on Federal Taxation. He made sure to include the publisher of the series, Matthew Bender. The paralegal was to leave her message in “Vol. No. 28 on the bottom shelf, which is for 1970.” The writer assured the paralegal that her note would be safe in the tax books, since “no one ever uses them.”
By that time, however, Business Risk International already had Perry March on videotape. The security firm had filmed him removing the paralegal’s checkout card from the designated shelf in BB&S’s 25th-floor library. Senior management at BB&S quickly called Perry March in for a closed-doors conference. March was given two options: He could resign, or he would be fired.
BB&S management told March that, if he was to be allowed to resign, he would first be required to get counseling for his “problem.” BB&S sent the paralegal on a paid vacation. During her time away from the office, a BB&S manager called the paralegal to tell her that the letter writer had been given the order either to resign or be fired. The BB&S manager also told her that the apparent writer of the letters was Perry March.
But when she returned from her vacation, the paralegal found that she was still running into March in the parking lot they both used adjacent to the First American Center. She had to avoid him on her way to the bathroom and when she went for coffee. Distressed, she quit the firm. And she hired a lawyer.
Two weeks later, March was gone. William Ozier, then the firm’s managing partner, circulated an internal memo saying nice things about March and wishing him well.
Several lawyers who worked for Bass Berry & Sims at the time say that, even though they were not privy to management’s conversations with March, they figured that the publicity-shy firm was attempting to avoid the sort of public-relations nightmare that might result if March was suddenly fired. It’s also possible, they say, that the situation was complicated by the fact that March is Jewish. What’s more, it didn’t look good that March’s departure came after the paralegal had quit.
Bass Berry & Sims has retained James F. Sanders, a high-priced litigator with Neal & Harwell, and Mike Pigott, partner in the powerful public-relations firm McNeely Pigott & Fox, to assist the stodgy firm in its dealings concerning Perry March.
Both BB&S and Perry March declined public comment. The paralegal declined comment through her lawyer, Hal Hardin, who also declined comment.
In the years that followed his departure from BB&S, March continued to enjoy success as a lawyer. He joined his father-in-law’s firm, Levine Mattson Orr & Geracioti, where, March says, he mainly represented local businesses, including Music City Mix Factory and a strip joint known as the Platinum Club, and well-to-do individuals. In 1994 Janet and Perry’s second child, Tziporah, named for Perry’s mother, was born. By that time the couple was already making plans to build a 5,300-square-foot house on a four-acre lot in Forest Hills. Lawrence and Carolyn Levine financed the deal; they still hold a note on the house.
Everything about the house was designed according to Janet’s instructions. She even selected the name for the street on which the house was built. Neighbors recall that Janet had wanted to call the road “Chocolate Street” but settled for “Blackberry Road” after the next-door property owner complained.
The French-style house was intended to be Janet’s dream house, but it had been years since her marriage had been completely happy. Late last year the Levines’ attorneys filed a document in Davidson County Probate Court alleging that Perry and Janet’s marriage had been in trouble “for at least the last six years.” The same document alleges, “Janet did not trust Perry, as he badly mismanaged their money.” Because they figured that “Janet might have to sue for divorce,” the document states, the Levines kept all of Janet’s separate real property titled in her own name. March denies the Levines’ allegations.
According to Perry March, he was the “doer” in the marriage, while his wife was the “eccentric visionary.” Janet’s friends have repeatedly described her as a sensitive, nurturing, offbeat person, a “ditz,” the quintessential “artist type.” For example, they point to the fact that she held the patent on a collapsible baby chair but never made any commercial use of the design. On the other hand, many of Janet’s close associates said that Janet could be more than a little difficult when she was in what her friends called “one of her moods.”
Janet’s unpleasant side apparently surfaced repeatedly during the construction of the Blackberry Road house. Seven high-end construction subcontractors who worked on the approximately $650,000 project, and who requested anonymity, recall her as hard-to-please, the sort of client who threatened to call her husband or her father, both of whom are lawyers, unless work was redone. “There are always problems when you deal with these rich, spoiled women,” said one subcontractor, who said he had never worked with a client as difficult as Janet March.
Several of the subcontractors said that it was Perry who had to be called in to calm the waters when Janet became unreasonable. They remember him as the calmer of the twosome. On the afternoon before Janet disappeared, she spent more than an hour supervising cabinetmakers who had been called in to do warranty work on cabinets they had installed. Meanwhile, a spokesman for the cabinet company says, Perry played outside with Sammy and Tzipi.
As far as the Metro Police Department is concerned, Janet March is still classified as a “missing person,” and Homicide Section detectives have refused to discuss the case on the record. As far as the media, the general public, and Janet March’s friends and family are concerned, there seems to be little question that she is dead. Perry March, who has been charged with no crime, asserts that the Levines and the Metro police have mounted a smear campaign against him.
At the request of the Nashville Scene, a Nashville psychiatrist examined excerpts from the anonymous letters received by the Bass Berry & Sims paralegal. The psychiatrist was promised complete anonymity by the Scene.
The Scene informed the psychiatrist that the letters were allegedly written by Perry March. The psychiatrist has never met Perry March but has analyzed the letters utilizing informed speculation, based upon medical training and experience in psychiatry. The psychiatrist said the letter excerpts provided by the Scene provide a reasonable basis for informed speculation.
The writer of the letters, according to the psychiatrist, has exercised “incredibly bad judgment,” and the psychiatrist expressed concern for the letter writer’s “psychological well-being.” In describing the letter writer, the psychiatrist used adjectives such as “anti-social,” “manipulative,” and “unstable.” The letter writer’s scheming, according to the psychiatrist, is “juvenile,” the sort of thing “an 8- or 9-year-old” might attempt.
The psychiatrist noted that the sexual references in the letters “focus exclusively on [the man] pleasing [the woman] and not on his pleasure.” According to the psychiatrist, the letter writer’s descriptions of sexual activity are “self-degrading. The focus is always on her orgasm. His orgasm is never mentioned.” The psychiatrist asks, “Is he impotent, or is he afraid of being impotent?”
In the letters the writer describes himself as “an excellent husband.” “In all the time that I have been married and even before, when my wife and I were dating, I never was unfaithful or even desired to be,” he writes, adding, “I intend until death do us part.”
The psychiatrist has doubts that the letter writer is such a good husband. According to the psychiatrist, the letter writer is apparently making “an effort to prove this to himself.” The letters suggest that the writer “appears to think that his wife is in the way of his having what he perceives as a satisfying relationship,” the psychiatrist says. “Nobody who writes a letter like that could be an excellent spouse. It’s OK to have fantasies like that—but don’t act on them.” The letters also include evidence of “significant narcissism,” the psychiatrist says. “Count the number of I’s in the first letter. It’s pretty impressive.”
In short, the psychiatrist says, the writer of the letters is “a very sick man.”
Whether or not Perry March actually wrote the notorious letters, they do seem to fit into the apparent pattern of his life. They suggest a man desperate for attention and more than willing to brag about his own accomplishments. They paint a picture of a determined, self-centered man, big on bravado but perhaps unable to make good on all his promises—and unlikely to follow through on all his threats.
They are the over-compensating letters of a man who may not always have been a scrupulously faithful husband. That does not mean, however, that they were written by a man who killed his wife.
They are the over-compensating letters of a man who may not always have been a scrupulously faithful husband. That does not mean, however, that they were written by a man who killed his wife.
