Love, Lies, and Murder (29 page)

 

 

As previously stated, Arthur March had granted
48 Hours
a final interview a few months before his death. According to the story by Bill Lagattuta, which aired on CBS in January 2007, Arthur March was no longer the same man that he had interviewed for the first time years earlier. No longer full of life, Arthur told Lagattuta that he never conspired with anyone to have the Levines killed.

“When you listen to those phone calls, it sure sounded like you were in on it,” Lagattuta said.

“Well, it does,” Arthur responded. “I have a big mouth. And I probably said some things I shouldn’t have said.”

“Did Perry tell you that he had killed Janet?” Lagattuta asked.

“Yes!” Arthur replied. “The only thing I did was help him remove the body from where he had buried it. . . . I picked it up, the body, and it was nighttime. I had one little flashlight. But I got it done.”

He told Lagattuta the story of how he and Perry had driven Janet’s body to Kentucky, where he had disposed of it in a brush pile, which he believed would later be set afire. At one point Lagattuta asked him how he could do such a thing to his daughter-in-law.

“Because at this point in time,” Arthur responded, “she was not my daughter-in-law anymore. She was just a dead body. . . . It was over. I had taken care of the body in such a way that nobody would ever find it.”

“He said he’s following the creek all the way along,” Postiglione told Lagattuta. “As he’s driving back, he looks up, and lo and behold, there’s this brush pile.”

“And he takes parts of the body, disposes [them] in the brush pile,” Pridemore added. “Drives back. Tells Perry, ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s taken care of. Go back to sleep.’ Perry just sleeps through this whole thing while his dad is out there disposing of his wife.”

“His days are done in terms of Perry March, Perry March, Perry March,” Postiglione said. “That’s over. And now maybe the attention will be on Janet versus Perry. It was a satisfaction of knowing that finally some justice for Janet, so to speak, she’s finally gonna get some justice.”

“I’m sorry and sad that our grandchildren have had to live ten years without their mother and with the person who took her from them,” Carolyn Levine said. “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about my daughter. She had so many talents. She was a very caring, compassionate person. Every parent thinks their kid is special. But she really was.”

As of this writing, Lawrence and Carolyn Levine still retained custody of their grandchildren, Sammy and Tzipi, providing them a well-balanced life, good education, and helping them as best they can to try and make some sense out of the horrific ordeal that had taken the life of their mother and had literally destroyed their family unit—twice. They are still battling Perry March in court for permanent custody of the children.

Russell Nathaniel Farris, still entangled in the grip of the Tennessee legal system, was released on 10 years’ supervised probation on February 8, 2007, following a guilty plea to facilitation of aggravated robbery from a case that dated from February 2005. The assistance he provided in the Perry March case was a major reason that he received probation.

However, Farris’s new-found freedom did not last long. Four days after his release, Farris was drug tested as part of his probation. He tested positive for cocaine. According to his attorney, Farris was supposed to turn himself in. When he didn’t, a warrant was issued for his arrest on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2007.

A little more than two weeks later, the police located him in a seedy east Nashville motel where he was holed up with his ex-girlfriend. On Saturday, March 2, 2007, local police, accompanied by the U.S. Marshals and a Metro SWAT team, surrounded the motel at approximately 3
P.M.
When confronted by the police, Farris refused to give up and a standoff began. The SWAT team had shown up at the scene because Farris apparently told officers that he was armed. Sgt. Pat Postiglione, as well as Farris’s lawyer, Justin Johnson, and his mother stood by, occasionally pleading with him to give himself up.

Finally, six hours later, Farris surrendered. He was taken into custody and charged with violating his probation by using drugs and for causing an armed standoff with the police.

“He was a drug addict that got out on the street who had not had drugs for quite some time, and it was just a really powerful draw,” said his attorney, Justin Johnson.

“In February I said the keys to the jail were in his own hands,” said Davidson County Deputy DA Rob McGuire. “If he goes to prison he’s turning the key. He blew it, in record time.”

On Friday, March 30, 2007, Farris, in tears, pleaded guilty to the charges. He testified during the hearing that the day after his release from jail, he attended his brother’s birthday party where he smoked marijuana that had been laced with cocaine. Davidson County Criminal Court Judge Cheryl Blackburn ordered Farris to begin serving the 10-year sentence that previously had been suspended due to probation. Because he was now known as a jail snitch, Farris would be placed on 23-hour lockdown for his own protection in the state prison system.

“Not only did he lose his freedom on the street,” Johnson said, “he lost his freedom in jail.”

 

 

While Farris was busy sorting out his legal problems with the authorities, Perry March began to have issues of his own. The local press cited that security concerns had arisen in early March 2007, prompting prison officials to transfer Perry from the Northwest Correctional Complex in Tiptonville, Tennessee, to the West Tennessee High Security Facility in Henning, Tennessee, where he was placed in isolation. According to his attorney, John Herbison, Perry had purportedly received death threats from other inmates.

“Perry called his sister,” Herbison told a
Tennessean
reporter, “and she was able to hear chanting in the background.. . .” Apparently a group of inmates were chanting,
Kill the fucking Jew.

“It does seem odd,” Herbison said, “because from the way Perry described it, he was doing well at Northwest prison.”

For the next few weeks, prison officials remained tightlipped about the transfer.

“All I can say is there were concerns of the security of the institution,” said Dorinda Carter, a spokesperson for the Tennessee Department of Corrections. “There’s still an investigation going on, so I can’t say much more than that.”

However, as news of Perry’s transfer to the high-security prison trickled out, it was eventually revealed that he was moved because prison officials had uncovered an escape plot that involved him at the Northwest facility. According to the “plot,” Perry was planning to somehow get transferred to a less secure prison so that he could escape. Instead, he was moved to a maximum security prison and placed in an isolation cell.

“We received information that (indicated) he was hoping to be moved to a minimum-security annex facility,” Dorinda Carter told reporters. “If that happened, he was planning on escaping from that facility.” Carter declined to say how prison officials learned of the alleged escape plot.

Perry March, due to his convictions, became one of 36,000 felons serving their sentences at various prisons in Tennessee. When he isn’t filing petitions against the Levines in an attempt to regain custody of his children, he spends most of his days uneventfully.

Recently WSMV-Channel 4 in Nashville televised a number of interviews that their reporter, Dennis Ferrier, conducted with Janet’s brother, Mark Levine, in November 2006. The interviews were well-received, particularly those shown in a two-part special, “Janet March’s Untold Story,” in January 2007. Ferrier had also been positioned to interview Perry March while Perry lived it up in Mexico and recently vocalized some of his experiences with him.

“I’ll tell you what the deal is,” Ferrier told a reporter for the
Nashville Scene
. “Perry March was the kind of guy you could sit by his pool and drink margaritas with as long as you kissed his butt and didn’t ask too many tough questions. He would talk all day, and he would call you and take your phone calls,” provided that he liked the questions that were being asked.

However, during that trip to Mexico, Ferrier had decided that he would go up against Perry, and instead of sympathizing with him, he would investigate the allegations of questionable business deals that were being made against him by his fellow expatriates and Mexicans alike. What Ferrier had discovered then was Perry’s standard operating procedure of using “bullyboy threats against any local who would try to stand up to him.” When Perry had learned what Ferrier had been up to, he became angry, and according to Ferrier, he had attacked Ferrier’s cameraman and had broken the camera’s viewfinder. Perry’s parting words to Ferrier had been: “Eat shit and die.”

“As I left, he kept demanding, ‘Where are you staying? I need to know where you’re staying,’” Ferrier said. “I don’t think he wanted to send me a fruit basket.”

 

 

Perry March will be eligible for parole in 2040.

Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals connected to this story.

 

 

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