The Red Parts (14 page)

Lying at the tracks now I mulled over the day’s events in court. I thought back to the testimony of a retired state policeman, Earl James, who had spent quite a bit of time discussing the horrific murder of Dawn Basom, the thirteen-year-old girl whose death was number five in the series. James had led the task force on the Michigan Murders back in the ‘60s, and has since devoted himself to the intrigue of serial murder. (In 1991, he self-published a book titled
Catching Serial Killers
under an imprint he christened “International Forensic Services, Inc.”) Perhaps because of this specialization, James tends to speak about Jane’s murder with great authority.
She had won awards for debating and it was clear that she had established a rapport with the killer
, he told a reporter during the trial.
But he couldn’t let her go because she could identify him.
He would seem to be the only person in the world to have access to such information.

James had tears in his eyes throughout his testimony; Court TV later reported that as he described the rape of Dawn Basom and her subsequent strangulation with electrical wire, “he stared at the ceiling and his voice shook.”

James’s tears were undoubtedly real, but they did not move me. In fact, they struck me as paternalistic, melodramatic, and more than a little creepy. I simply could not reconcile them with the spectacle of a man engrossed in making animated hand gestures to demonstrate exactly how the killer “sliced through the crotch of Dawn’s panties with his knife.”

Then I remembered that at some point during his testimony, James had said that Dawn was last seen on the railroad tracks, wandering homeward. And so, lying there, I thought of Dawn. I thought of Dawn, and I thought about how beautiful the railroad tracks are at night, illuminated by red and green signals, the two silver parallel lines gleaming off into the distance. The whole world hushed and hot and flickering.

A
S THE BAREST details of what happened to Dawn Basom might indicate, Jane’s murder was the least brutal in the series. She appeared to have died quickly, and she was the only one not raped. The prosecution wants to highlight this difference, as it seems to point to a murderer other than Collins. Nancy Grow’s son is subpoenaed to say that Jane’s bloodstained bag seemed intentionally “propped up” on the side of the road, as though a signpost leading to her body, while a retired cop who worked on the Michigan Murders testifies that the bodies of the other girls were tossed roadside or into ravines like garbage. Whoever killed these girls (Collins, presumably) also revisited them to inflict more damage—the hands and feet of the first victim, a nineteen-year-old named Mary Fleszar, were apparently cut off several days after she died, for example.

The cop who first arrived at Jane’s crime scene reemerges to describe how her suitcase and copy of
Catch-22
had been placed close at her side; her shoes, purse, and the yellow-and-white-striped towel between her legs; and her body then elaborately covered—first draped with the clothes on hangers, then with her wool coat, then spread out on top of all that, her raincoat, as if to protect the whole pile from the elements. When asked to compare this treatment to that of Mary Fleszar, this same cop—now an elderly man—just shakes his head.
That first girl, the shape she was in …
Hiller has to prod him to continue.
That first girl was just skin and bones. All beaten up with a belt. Her skin
, he says, breaking off, shaking his head again,
her skin was like leather.

Earl James sums it up on the stand this way:
It almost looked as though the perpetrator of [Jane’s] murder showed compassion for the victim.

The press likes this formulation, and KILLER SHOWED COMPASSION becomes the next day’s headline in local and national articles about the case. Court TV builds on the theme, reporting that “the meticulous arrangement of her body showed tenderness.”

When Schroeder first questioned Leiterman back in November, he too emphasized these gestures of care. He told Leiterman,
I’ve worked in homicide a long time, and I’ve seen things done by absolute monsters. This crime was not committed by a monster. Whoever did this was
not
a monster.
He says this line of talk almost got Leiterman to crack.

I could appreciate this angle as interrogative strategy. But after skimming the KILLER SHOWED COMPASSION headlines at a Starbuck’s the next morning before court, my mother and I toss the papers aside in disgust. Shrouding a woman’s body as if to protect it from the cold after you’ve shot her and strangled her and pulled down her underclothes in a final stroke of debasement, carefully arranging the limbs and belongings of a person who will never be able to use either again—together we agree: these acts cannot be classified as “tender.”

Schroeder and I had broached this problem months earlier on the phone. I told him then that despite these gestures of “care,” Jane’s vicious post-mortem (or near post-mortem) strangulation hardly seemed to me to indicate remorse or concern for her body.

Well, that’s a little complicated
, he said.

He told me that upon reexamining the location of the stocking, the nature of its knot, etc., they’d come to suspect that it might have been applied as a tourniquet, a somewhat perverse medical effort to stop the bleeding from the gunshot wounds to her head. I couldn’t tell whether he meant to suggest that her murderer tied the tourniquet in a fit of guilt or regret, or whether her killer was trying to stop the bleeding for other reasons—not to mess up the upholstery in his car, for example. But I didn’t inquire further.

For Schroeder was onto relating another discomfiting speculation. Before entering police work, Schroeder was a Marine. One day early on in the investigation of Jane’s case, he was going over some details of the crime scene with another former Marine—particularly how Jane’s clothes were piled up, and where her belongings were placed. His friend turned to him and said,
Schroeder, you’re the stupidest ex-jarhead I’ve ever met. Can’t you see that this guy was giving her a battlefield burial?

When a fellow soldier dies in combat and his comrades are unable to remove his body from the field, they are supposed to fold his belongings and place them between his legs so that his corpse and possessions might later be gathered with maximum speed and efficiency. Schroeder was convinced that they were looking for someone who had spent time in the service. Collins had not. Leiterman had.

And for more than twenty years since his time in the service (which took place in South America and Mexico, not Vietnam), Leiterman had been working as a nurse, at Borgess Medical Center.

In that time, it seems more than likely that Leiterman provided many patients with life-sustaining care, perhaps even life-sustaining comfort, along with who knows what else. If he killed Jane, what happens to that care and comfort now? Does it become null and void, retroactively?

At his July trial Leiterman will not resemble the befuddled, scraggly man in a green prison jumpsuit we first saw in January. He will have had a haircut, be wearing a suit and tie, and look much more focused. The shackles binding his ankles will be visible only when the bailiff leads him in and out of the courtroom, at which time he will wave to his family, sometimes cracking a smile.

After this first glimpse of the new Leiterman, however, my mother and I do not see him anymore. To be able to see the big screen, the exhibits shown to the jury, and whomever is testifying, we have to move to a spot on our bench from which he is no longer visible. He will never take the stand, which Hiller tells us is not unusual in capital cases, in which the stakes are so high. We will never hear his voice. Everyone on the witness stand will talk about what “was done” to Jane’s body, not what he did or allegedly did, not even what “her murderer did.” He will drop out of sight, out of mind, and out of language. It takes a concentrated effort for me to remember him, even now.

I had tried to learn more about Leiterman before the trial, primarily via that lazy, alienating, 21st-century way of learning about anything. I Googled him. Here is what I found:

Neither this nurse lamenting his evaporating investments and hoping for early retirement, nor this champion of female athletes everywhere, at home enough as a citizen of the world to write Letters to the Editor, squared easily with the shadowy, fugitive tormentor my mother, sister, and I had been battling for years in my dreams.

Leiterman’s reputation as a model citizen was challenged, however, by a headline that appeared about two weeks after his arrest for Jane’s murder: SLAYING SUSPECT HIT WITH PORN CHARGE.

When I first got wind of this headline I didn’t feel shocked as much as wary, or weary. It seemed too predictable—the next chapter in a classic American story in which the “regular guy” or “good neighbor” turns out to be an ax murderer and/or run a child porn ring out of his basement. In a country in which the porn industry brings in more money than all professional sports combined, I have my doubts as to whether one could search any American home without unearthing a porn stash of one kind or another, much of which would undoubtedly border on illegality. Plus, I like porn, and the only real panic that the words “porn charge” incite in me is that one day my own porn habits might make me a target of the family values revolution when it embarks on the militarized, domestic-invasion leg of its crusade. I called Schroeder right away to get the details.

Schroeder told me that in their search of Leiterman’s house after his arrest, the police took into custody two Polaroid pictures, taken with Leiterman’s Polaroid camera, which were found in an envelope in a bedside cabinet. The Polaroids depict a young teenage girl, apparently unconscious, naked from the waist down, arranged against the Leitermans’ bedspread.

When the police first saw the pictures, they worried they had another homicide on their hands. But when Schroeder saw them, he recognized the girl as the live, sixteen-year-old South Korean exchange student he had met at Leiterman’s home on the morning of his arrest.

On December 8, 2004, this exchange student, who spoke very little English, was forced to testify at Leiterman’s arraignment on the felony charge of creating sexually abusive material involving a child. She sobbed when shown the pictures, and said she had no memory of their being taken. The police felt fairly sure she had been drugged. In Leiterman’s shaving kit, also seized during the search of his home, they later found an unmarked vial of a powdered mixture of diphenhydramine (the active ingredient in Benadryl) and diazepam (that in Valium), which was identified by a state police toxicologist as a knockout potion.

Leiterman maintained that the exchange student was “a wild child,” that he did not take the photos of her, but rather came across them. Suspecting they had been taken by one of the girl’s boyfriends, he said he was keeping them at his bedside until Solly returned from a business trip so that they could decide together on what action to take next.

Leiterman ultimately pled guilty to the much lesser charge of possession of child pornography, and the girl was sent back to South Korea.

When I hear about this teenage girl sobbing on the stand, it is the first time—and, to be honest, the only time—I feel truly glad that Leiterman has been taken into custody, and remains there.

IN ESSENCE, the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation
, wrote the great French pornographic writer Georges Bataille. Bataille was mesmerized by images of Aztecs ripping each other’s hearts out of their chests, of Saint Teresa in the throes of a feral ecstasy. I doubt if he had in mind a sweaty old white guy in suburban Michigan churning up powder to knock out and then sexually abuse his exchange student.

LATER I LEARN that a female coworker once accused Leiterman of sexually molesting her while she was asleep on a bus during a work-sponsored trip. After Leiterman’s arrest, a man who lived with him in the late ‘60s will come forward to tell the police that Leiterman once showed him a vial of liquid and bragged that it would render a woman unconscious, and that too much of it would kill her. The prosecution also unearths a woman Leiterman dated in the late ‘60s who says she is prepared to testify as to his “sexual dysfunction.”

The judge does not allow any of this information to be introduced at the trial. Because Jane was not drugged, he also deems the child porn charge irrelevant. The defense wants to keep it that way, but that means it cannot call any character witnesses to speak on Leiterman’s behalf, including Leiterman himself. It will all come down to science.