Love, Lies, and Murder (12 page)

Not quite one month later, on January 16, 1997, following the appearance of “Part 1: A Good Thing Gone Bad” by Willy Stern, in the
Nashville Scene,
Detective David Miller was replaced as the lead investigator in the Janet March disappearance investigation.

It would be reported later that shortly after Perry March had moved to Chicago to try and make a fresh start, he purportedly told an acquaintance that he had been thinking about writing a book. He apparently said that what he had in mind would be a mystery, and that the story’s main character was an attractive, dark-haired young woman. Perry allegedly said that the title of the book was
“Murder.com.”

Regardless of Perry March’s actions up to this point, the police knew that they had no direct evidence that Perry had murdered Janet. Furthermore, just because there was a lack of evidence was not a reason to automatically presume that Perry March had done a brilliant job of creating a cover-up. Being a bright lawyer, he was probably capable of masterminding such a plot, but it had to be considered that it was also possible that whatever had become of Janet March, Perry had had nothing to do with it. Without a body, the cops didn’t know with any degree of certainty that Janet was even dead.

Shortly after Detective David Miller was taken off the Janet March case in January 1997, veteran homicide detective Sergeant Pat Postiglione, forty-five, and Detective Bill Pridemore, forty-three, were assigned to the investigation to work alongside Detective Mickey Miller, forty, who would later make captain and become commander of the West Precinct. Both Postiglione and Pridemore had been involved in the Janet March case from its earliest days and had participated in some of the searches that had occurred at the Blackberry Road home. Although they were both members of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department’s Murder Squad, they would begin taking more active roles in the investigation from this point forward.

Postiglione, who was born and raised in Queens, New York, and spent much of his youth living and working in blue-collar Italian neighborhoods, had wanted to be a police officer for as long as he could remember. He applied to the NYPD, but was not hired because the waiting list was so long, and he did not know anyone who could help move him more quickly up the list. As a result, he worked in construction for a while, but never lost his interest in police work. For reasons that aren’t clear, his interests lay in homicide.

“I’m not sure why,” he told a reporter. “But I had a cousin who was murdered when I was young. If you have personal experience with murder, you see what the victims’ families go through.”

While vacationing in Nashville, Postiglione responded to a police officer recruitment ad there and applied. In 1980, as soon as he was notified that he had been hired, he relocated to Nashville and began his police career as a patrol officer. After only a few years with Metro, Postiglione made detective grade and moved into the homicide division in 1987. He has been working homicide, either as a detective in the homicide unit or as a detective in the somewhat elitist Murder Squad, ever since.

“Once you do it,” Postiglione said, “it’s hard to see yourself doing anything else. Some guys can’t deal with the crime scenes, and that’s okay. We’re all affected by them. They stay with you, but if you can find justice for the victim and their family, it makes it worthwhile.”

Detective Bill Pridemore, on the other hand, moved around a lot while growing up, because his stepfather was a military career man. At one point his family moved to Nashville, and he graduated from Stratford Comprehensive High School there. Shortly after high school, Pridemore went on to Volunteer State Community College, which was when he decided to take the test for the police academy. After being on a waiting list for about a year, he was finally accepted and began his police career as a patrol officer in 1976. He attributes his decision to make a career out of police work to his exposure to a military background from his stepfather’s service years, and to the fact that a police officer once helped him recover his bike that had been stolen when he was a kid.

“A policeman was driving by and saw that I was upset,” Pridemore recalled. “He put me in his car and we rode around and found my bike. It left a pretty big impression.” It also left a pretty big motivation for Pridemore to want to help people who needed helping.

“I thought I would go to burglary,” Pridemore said, recalling where he thought his police career would take him. “Homicide was a pretty coveted division. You find out real quick if you’ll like homicide once you go on a couple of crime scenes.”

Pridemore eventually went into homicide, and found that he liked the work that it entailed. The homicide division was where he and Postiglione got to know each other well as they worked together over the years. The Murder Squad, created in 1980 by Chief Joe Casey, would come to both Pridemore and Postiglione a little later, because the high quality of their work was quickly recognized. The distinction between the homicide division and the Murder Squad was simply that the homicide division investigated murders, suicides, and other violent crimes in which there was a known connection between the victim and the perpetrator, whereas the Murder Squad cases involved homicides in which there was no known connection. Murder Squad cases were considered the most difficult to solve.

“If a woman was found dead in an alley and you had no idea who did it,” Postiglione recently said, “Murder Squad was called in.”

Being asked to join the Murder Squad was a “big deal,” Pridemore said. “You didn’t ask to join Murder Squad. They looked at you to see if they thought you could do it. And they asked the other guys on Murder Squad if they wanted you.”

The Janet March case wasn’t the first investigation that Pridemore and Postiglione have worked on together; there have been many, including serial killer Paul Reid. But the Janet March case was one of the most difficult ones, and was one of their cases of the longest running. They knew that it could be solved, but they equally knew that it would take some time.

“There were so many things that weren’t right with his story and weren’t right with him,” Postiglione said of Perry March, “but he always thought he was the smartest guy in the room. . . .”

“If you look at one piece of evidence, you say, well, no,” Pridemore said. “But put it all together and you feel like you might have a shot. It’s a ‘hip bone connected to the thighbone’ kind of thing. . . .”

 

 

Progress through the remaining years of the century would be slow at best, nonexistent at worst, as each man assigned to the case worked diligently to determine the truth behind Janet March’s disappearance. Many people, such as armchair detectives and mystery enthusiasts, bought into the scenario as described by Willy Stern in the
Nashville Scene
articles and were postulating, if not rehashing, the theory that Perry, a black belt in karate, had killed Janet, wrapped her up inside a large living-room rug, and disposed of her body. Whether that was what had actually happened was anybody’s guess, but the detectives assigned to the case were determined to dog Perry March until the case broke—even if it meant the rest of their careers.

It was revealed by this time that Perry March had been fired from his father-in-law’s firm for allegedly embezzling funds. His once lofty career, in which he had specialized in tax law, was now suddenly in shambles, as was his personal life. One of his former clients had been indicted for money laundering and racketeering prior to Janet’s disappearance, and there was speculation that he had helped another former client with tax evasion. A witness had purportedly told the authorities that he had seen Perry and the latter former client arguing in public shortly after Janet was last seen, which fueled speculation that Perry had blackmailed the former client into helping him dispose of Janet’s body by burying her beneath a building owned by the former client. The theory was never proven, and the former client was never charged in any capacity in connection with Janet’s case. It was merely one of many such red herrings that would crop up from time to time in the case.

Perry March was, naturally, feeling very unsettled by this time. Unable to find employment, first in Nashville and later in Chicago, Perry was becoming desperate for money. Steps had been taken by his in-laws to make certain that he couldn’t get his hands on any of Janet’s assets, and they had effectively taken the house on Blackberry Road away from him.

Because of the legal entanglements that were following him after Janet’s disappearance, Perry found himself with minimal personal funds and virtually no way to tap into Janet’s estate. As his life was being carefully scrutinized by the locals in Nashville, as well as by the police, he decided that he had to leave Nashville. He took the children and relocated to Illinois where he would be close to family members and where he thought he might stand a chance at making a fresh start. However, he soon found that the Levines, as well as the cops, dogged his every move.

On February 26, 1997, Mark Levine, Janet’s brother, went before a state legislative committee that had begun to study ways that Tennessee’s child custody laws could be overhauled. According to sources, Perry March would later say that the Levines had instigated the move while Mark was working as a summer intern in Senator Fred Thompson’s office, prior to going off to law school at Harvard. Thompson, who sometimes moonlights as a Hollywood actor, would later run with the proposed legislation, along with Senator Bill Frist, one of the main stockholders of Hospital Corporation of America (HCA, Inc.), a multibillion-dollar Nashville-based hospital corporation, that would, if the law was enacted, assist grandparents in obtaining visitation rights, regardless of the parents’ wishes. At this point the proposed legislation was still in its infancy, and would lie dormant for a while.

If things weren’t going badly enough already for Perry March, his efforts to block his in-laws’ sale of his Blackberry Road home would be rejected by a Nashville judge on March 19, 1997, when the judge approved a contract sale in the amount of $726,000 to a retired lawyer and his wife. Perry was, of course, further devastated by the judge’s decision as his life continued to spiral downward. From that moment on, light of day would only appear in minor glimpses in Perry March’s life.

In 1998, the Levines filed a petition seeking to summon forth a jury in the Tennessee Probate Court, in a wrongful-death action. Their goal, of course, was to find Perry March liable, in absentia (he was still in Illinois, and the legal action had occurred in Tennessee), of Janet’s death. Perry chose, perhaps unwisely from a legal point of view, to avoid participating in the discovery process of the proceedings. As a result, on July 15, 1998, Davidson County probate judge Frank Clement Jr. ruled that Perry March had shown a “troubling and consistent pattern of contemptuous conduct,” which had served to make it more difficult to resolve the issues with his in-laws over Janet’s property. Clement had effectively gotten the ball rolling to push the Levines’ wrongful-death lawsuit a step closer to becoming a reality and an ultimate success for the in-laws.

 

 

At some point during May 1999, Perry March moved to Ajijic, in the Mexican state of Jalisco, taking his father, Arthur March, up on an offer to help him out by allowing him to move in with him. Arthur, retired and alone, had moved to Ajijic and obtained a retirement home a few years earlier and felt right at home with the large population of other American retirees residing there. Ajijic, a beautiful lakeside town approximately thirty miles from Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city, seemed like a welcome change for Perry and the kids.

“I brought Perry down here because he didn’t have any other place to go,” Arthur March would later tell CBS News.

Idyllic in its natural setting along the northwestern shore of Lake Chapala, Mexico’s largest freshwater lake, the small town of Ajijic boasts a wonderful climate for its approximately thirteen thousand inhabitants, about half of whom, like Arthur March, and now his son Perry, are expatriates. Most of the expatriate community in Ajijic is made up of American and Canadian retirees; there are also a few Europeans, as well as other nationalities. Many of the ex-pats moved there when they retired to escape the harsh winter weather “back home.” Many wanted to take advantage of the lower cost of living and saw the small fishing village as a place where they could live out their golden years much more extravagantly on a retirement income that would not go nearly as far at home. Some just liked the peace and quiet of living in a desirable lakeside setting. Perry March liked it there because it placed some 1,500 miles between him and the problems he faced back home, and he saw
opportunity
there.

Like many parts of Mexico, Ajijic and the Lake Chapala area is home to an artist colony, which is culturally diverse in that it is comprised of Mexicans as well as non-Mexicans, and the fact that it is made up of artists who make souvenirs for tourists as well as artists who are painters and sculptors. There are several galleries located throughout the community, where the artists can exhibit their work. D. H. Lawrence lived there for a short time, and ended up writing about one of the local churches in his novel
The Plumed Serpent
. An oasis for tourists, Ajijic has something for every budget. There are plenty of hotels, restaurants, open-air cafés, ice-cream parlors, outdoor markets, cantinas, and sports activities for those who are sports-minded. One of the greatest pastimes is sitting at a lakeside bar, sipping a margarita while watching the ever-changing light as it glistens across the lake. To top it all off, the nicest homes in the area were those located inside gated communities. Perry March lived in a large spacious home in such a community. He and his father, according to those who knew them, preferred the cantinas, the nightlife, and cavorting with women when the urge struck.

Arthur was well-known around town. He had, after all, lived there long enough for the residents, barkeeps, and market owners to easily recognize the gruff-talking, sometimes crude man with the craggy face who was known to chase his tequila with beer. Rough-talking Arthur had managed to learn the language sufficiently to where it was not a barrier, and Perry, as he had done with Chinese, had soon claimed complete proficiency in the Spanish language.

Shortly after arriving in Ajijic, Perry met Carmen Rojas Solorio, a twenty-seven-year-old Mexican citizen with three children of her own from a previous marriage. Before much time elapsed, much less a courtship, Perry and his children had moved in with Carmen and they began a new life together. Perry enrolled the children in a nearby private bilingual school, and on the surface they seemed like one big happy family without a problem in the world.

Within a couple of weeks of his arrival in Mexico, Perry formed an alliance with a man named S. Samuel Chavez, a Mexican American who had received his education in the United States. Chavez claimed in promotional materials that he was a graduate of Purdue and the Indiana University School of Law. He also advertised that his specialty was dealing with immigration issues in a business relationship he had formed with a law firm in Guadalajara.

Perry March, soon after forming his association with Chavez, began claiming that their company was well connected to Mexican authorities, loosely translated as meaning that he had the ability to bribe government officials if needed. But in Mexico, who didn’t? All it really took was the right amount of money for any given situation and—presto, like magic—the legal barriers or governmental red tape magically disappeared. As long as one greased the hands of the officials with money when they wanted it and didn’t become high-maintenance for the government, a person like Perry March could do well for himself in Mexico.

Closer scrutiny later on revealed information that Chavez’s license to practice law in the state of Indiana had been revoked because of felony convictions for providing false information on a credit application and on a bankruptcy filing. Further scrutiny showed that he had purportedly maintained an address in Nashville in the mid-1990s, giving some people reason to believe, but without concrete evidence to prove, that Perry and Chavez had known each other prior to Perry going to Mexico. Nonetheless Perry, shortly after his arrival in Ajijic, had been quick to form a partnership of sorts with Chavez, who at the time was operating a business as a bilingual legal consultant. Given Mexico’s nearly unfathomable legal structure, which is considered an abomination by most outsiders, Perry had very quickly realized the need for bilingual legal experts to help the many expatriates deal with visa and real estate issues which required them to become involved in Mexico’s tangled and often unethical legal system. Such an opportunity seemed a natural fit for Perry, and Chavez already had the office space, where he had been running his own ventures at Plaza Bugambilias, part of a new business and shopping complex located in the town. Admittedly, it wasn’t much—but it was a start for what Perry had in mind.

A short time after partnering with Chavez, Perry took out a full-page ad in the
Guadalajara Reporter,
a weekly English-language newspaper for that area, and announced his business venture with Chavez, according to an article that appeared in the
Nashville Scene
.

“Chavez & March,” the ad read, “a private development and investment firm, wishes to announce a proposed significant investment in a state of the art clinc [
sic
] and emergency treatment facility.” The two men reasoned that any kind of proposed modern local health-care facility would likely attract interest and, hopefully, investors who could see the advantage of how such a facility would enable many of the area’s seniors to no longer have to make the hour-long drive into Guadalajara to obtain top-quality health care. According to the ad, the project would be called “PriMedical TM Medical Clinic Project,” and it invited the public to “Meet the administrators & developers: S. Samuel Chavez, Esq. & Perry A. March, Esq., doctorates of law,” on May 22, 1999.

The ad spelled out a project that would be financed by medical investors, mostly doctors; it was an international business venture that was set up as a Belize corporation. Chavez and March were seeking investors who could fork over a minimum of $1,250,000. What seemed amazing, in retrospect, to anyone looking at the details of this case was not so much the level of ambition their project had as much as the speed in which Perry March had relocated to Mexico with his children, met a young woman and formed a romantic relationship with her, moved in with the woman, met up and formed a business alliance with someone he had either just met or had known in the past, thought up the business plan for the aforementioned ventures while opening up shop, and began holding public meetings—all in a period of less than a month!

Later that same month, on May 28, 1999, the Tennessee Supreme Court suspended Perry March’s license to practice law while it looked into the allegations of fraud and embezzlement that were being made by his former employer. According to the charges being leveled at Perry by his father-in-law’s law firm, it was also alleged that he had not provided records to a client despite the client’s requests for them, and he had lied to prop up what was being described as an otherwise frivolous lawsuit. A year later, Perry March would be officially disbarred. Even before the disbarment occurred, he was unable to provide legal advice and services, at least legally, and he realized that he would have to find something else to do to make money. Being in Mexico, and with the large number of Americans living in Ajijic, Perry didn’t think that he would have much difficulty finding a way to make a living down there.

His status as a lawyer hadn’t seemed to matter much to him at the time. A short time after his license suspension, Perry and his partner placed another ad in the local newspaper under the helm of Chavez and March, Ltd., that read: “U.S. Doctorates of Law; Asset Protection Counseling; Protect Yourself from Judgements [
sic
], Creditors, Government Impositions, Divorce, Disaster, Swindles and the Unforseen [
sic
]. Principals are Members of the American Bar Association Asset Protection Planning Subcommittee.”

Chavez and March, Ltd., began to blossom. Although financial records showing just how much money their ventures had made, and who they had made it from, were held close to the vest, so to speak, no one, except for those who were involved in the day-to-day activities of their business dealings, namely Chavez and March, would know the company’s bottom line, and they weren’t talking. They were getting funding from somewhere, however, because by autumn of that year, 1999, the two men had added several new businesses to their “portfolio”: C&M Development, C&M Insurance, Premier Properties (a real estate service), and Guardian Security Services, all of which were in addition to their PriMedical TM Medical Clinic and their Chavez and March, Ltd., Legal and Financial Services ventures. As their businesses grew, so did their need for additional office space. It wasn’t long before their businesses had taken up most of the prime locations in the small business plaza, and they were able to purchase larger and classier advertisements in the local newspaper.

By the time the new year rolled around, Perry and his partner had come up with the idea of building a gated community for senior citizens. Plans for the development called for it to be a “full-service” community so that most of the residents’ needs could be provided for within that community. They were planning to call it Misty Mountain Extended Care Community, and it was to be built within an already troubled subdivision called Chula Vista Norte, whose residents were dealing with a number of legal issues that were related to the subdivision.

Meanwhile, as Chavez and March, Ltd., counted its money and made plans to continue expansion into the new year, displeased and unhappy clients began making themselves heard throughout the community. Complaints ranged from fees that were too high, to poor service, to services that were paid for but never delivered. Some of the more aggressive complainers began looking into Chavez’s and Perry March’s backgrounds, and disseminated details of their seedy pasts by telling their friends, posting the information on the Internet, and by placing posters throughout the community in public places, all anonymously, of course. Perry and his father publicly dismissed the flying accusations as “bullshit,” but business, nonetheless, began to dwindle. Before it was over, accusations toward Perry March and Chavez would include asset rip-offs that were tied to off-shore accounts and dummy corporations, which had been set up to dupe some of their unwitting older clients. It was not pretty even during the early stages of finding out what C&M was really all about, and it would get much uglier as more and more people learned that they had been swindled.

Things went even farther south for Perry when, on January 14, 2000, the judge in the wrongful-death lawsuit, which had been filed by the Levines, ruled that Janet March was dead and that Perry March was responsible for her death. The judge, Perry soon learned, had based his ruling on allegations that centered on Perry and Janet’s troubled marriage, the details of which were touched on during Perry’s November 1996 deposition, and on the fact that Perry had repeatedly refused to return to the United States to respond to questioning related to the lawsuit. If he had hated his in-laws before, he certainly held more hatred and animosity toward them now, after the judge’s ruling.

Two months later, a probate court jury awarded the Levines $113.5 million in damages in their wrongful-death lawsuit and ordered Perry to pay the judgment.

After winning the wrongful-death lawsuit against Perry, Janet’s mother and father were ready to step-up their efforts to gain grandparent visitation rights and, ultimately, they hoped, gain full custody of their daughter’s children. Now that the momentum seemed to be in their favor, the Levines would use every legal means available to them to accomplish their goal of bringing Perry March to justice.

In March 2000, with Janet now formally declared dead by a court of law for the first time (she would be declared “legally” dead again two years later), Perry married Carmen Rojas Solorio and had a child with her.

“We’re now the Brady Bunch,” Perry later told CBS News. “We have three and three, exactly three boys and three girls. I love it here. I have a wonderful life, I have a wonderful house, I have a wonderful community around here, and this is where I want to live. . . . I’ve probably never seen them (the children) happier in their whole life than here.”

“He’s a great husband,” Carmen said. “He’s sweet. He’s perfect. He’s perfect for me.”

But what had he told the children regarding the whereabouts of their mother?

“I’ve told the children the truth,” Perry said, “that Mommy left home, we don’t know what happened to her. It’s very sad, but that’s the truth.”