THE MISENERS WAIT

The Miseners expected Leann to be back about 1, maybe a little after. By 1:30 they were getting worried. She had a cell phone and was faithful about calling when she'd be late.

Two o'clock came and went. Then three. They were very nervous, now. No way would she just let them and Hannah sit there waiting without a call unless something bad had happened.

Jack was sitting in the front room, looking out the window when his heart sank. First one Troy police car pulled up in front of the house, then another.

"Oh my God, they're coming here," he said to Gloria, even before they'd got out of their cars.

They knocked on the door, identified themselves, came into the front room. "I'm afraid there's been an accident with your daughter," one of them said. Gloria and Jack both thought: car accident; she's at the hospital.

"What kind of accident?" said Gloria. "There's been a shooting."

"Oh my God, Jack, he shot her," said Gloria, setting the tone for much of what would follow. Her absolute and instant certainty would strike all the police she would subsequently talk to as important and revealing.

(Many months later, she would say: "We knew from the minute the police came exactly what happened.")

"What happened? How bad is it?" asked Jack.

"We don't know. Here's the number to call," said the Troy policeman.

They were to ask for Dennis Welch. He's the one who called the Troy police. A wiry, popular cop, he was normally quick with a joke and a laugh. This hit him hard from the start. Cops usually joke their way through tragedy and turmoil, a defense mechanism, but he'd do no joking this day. He felt guilty about turning a nasty job over to the Troy police but he didn't think it was right that the Miseners should get such bad news over the phone. When Jack called him, Welch said: "Can you come down here?"

"How bad is my daughter?"

"Would you please just come down, sir?" "You can't tell me how my daughter is?" "Would you please just come down?" "All right."

Jack was on the verge of hysterics. Gloria, exhibiting the strength that she'd show her family and the outside world for the next year, was surprisingly calm. And very, very angry. She knew her daughter was dead. If she were injured, they'd have sent them to a hospital.

"Jack," she said, "he's smart. He's going to get away with it." She was sure Mick had murdered her daughter, but she figured he'd done it at the range, somehow, did it there to look like an accident.

Leann's car was behind theirs in the driveway. It had a child's car seat. So they loaded Hannah into the car and made the 15-to 20-minute drive to the Hazel Park police station. They knew the way well. It was the same way they'd take to Leann's house; instead of turning left on Hazelwood, they just kept going four more blocks and turned left into the parking lot.

*

The Miseners walked down the flight of stairs to the basement police station. They identified themselves to the officer at the desk behind the thick Plexiglas. He told Welch they were there and Welch came out to let them in.

One officer took Hannah into a room they kept for that purpose, filled with toys and stuffed animals.

Welch told them their daughter had been shot and killed.

"Oh my God," said Jack. He'd thought the worst, but hearing it was something else.

According to the report Welch filled out later, "Gloria also became upset but quickly became grim and looked this officer directly in the eye and stated: 'That son of a bitch killed her.'"

The words had a stunning effect. The defense would later claim Gloria's declaration was the rudder that steered everything that followed.

"Do you feel like making a statement?" Welch asked. "Get the paper."

Jack was in shock. He couldn't talk. He couldn't begin to think about putting words to paper.

In a firm hand, writing quickly and without need for pause, she filled out one page of a standard statement form. It read:

Leann and Mick had a rocky relationship for the last 2 years. Mick has left 3 or 4 times, but always talked her into taking him back. She is a loving mother & wife. She suspected he was having an affair, but could never prove it. He turned from a loving husband after the first few years to a cold & distant person. He wanted to file for divorce (he did) & we loaned her the money for a lawyer. The day he was served, he started sending her flowers again & wanted her to take him back and he said he changed, so out of consideration for their daughter, Hannah, she gave him one more chance. He has went overboard on the loving husband routine & when he asked us to watch Hannah for 1 hour today while he showed her how to shoot a gun, I said to her before they left—Leann, has he taken out a new insurance policy on you? & she laughed & said mother he isn't going to shoot me. He was trained at a police academy & can handle guns. This was no accident.

It was signed: "Gloria Misener" and witnessed by Sgt. Hendricks.

He interviewed the Miseners for half an hour, forty minutes, and none of Mick's story rang true to Cleyman. He thought it ridiculously fishy the first time Mick asks Jack to babysit, the first time he takes his wife, who's scared of guns, to a firing range, that she ends up dead. He didn't like the absence of blood. He was pumped up. Something like this, it's what cops live for.

The Miseners left the station with Hannah. They had been kept apart from Mick and never saw him.

After the trial, in an interview for this book, Welch admitted that up till the Miseners arrived, he'd been sympathetic toward Fletcher, viewing him as a possible victim, too. But once Gloria arrived and stared him in the eyes and told him her son-in-law was a murderer, "To me, this is where everything fell into place. Because when I explained to them that their daughter was dead, and that she had been shot … the mom's reaction tightened it all up for me. I knew we were moving in the right direction because I can't picture anybody coming in—I know how mother-in-laws are and how in-laws can be—but that wouldn't be the

first thing out of a person's mouth."

*

Gloria's cocksure attitude, her calm anger, her fortitude all energized the Hazel Park police. Her "That son of a bitch killed her" had been a jolt of adrenaline, not that the small force working a possible homicide needed any.

By law, the cops at the scene had a right to be in the bedroom and anything in plain view there could be used as evidence. It was clear, now, that a search warrant would be needed for the rest of the house. If this was a murder, it would have a motive, and a warrant might tell them what it was.

Welch went over his interview with Hendricks, who read Fletcher's written statement. It was time for round two. Time also to turn it up a notch. "We moved the interview into more of an investigation," said Welch.

"A lot of things didn't add up, so we went back in and turned the screws up a little bit on him," said Hendricks.

Hendricks took first crack. He didn't read him his rights. Though by now he, Welch and Cleyman were all convinced they had a murderer in the interview room, he was still free to leave of his own volition.

Midway through the interview, Roy Gruenburg showed up. A former district judge in Warren, he was now a defense attorney. His daughter, Dawnn, was a judge in Warren. She would soon be involved in the case, as well, to everybody's surprise—and titillation.

Gruenburg was a well-connected legal heavyweight and Mick's boss of sorts. He didn't actually employ him, but he provided Fletcher office space, threw overflow cases his way and even let him sleep on a bed at the office during his and Leann's separations. It was Gruenburg's office Fletcher had stopped off at on the way home that morning from court in Warren.

Fletcher hadn't made any phone calls and police were puzzled how Gruenburg knew to show up. They figured out later he had been called by reporters who had picked up the news on their police scanners.

Cleyman escorted him to the interview room and Gruenburg asked Hendricks if he could have five minutes alone with Fletcher. Cleyman and Hendricks left

the room. Roy then came back out and asked if there was anything else they needed.

"We have some more questions for Michael," said Hendricks. "I thought he already gave a statement."

"Are you representing Michael?"

"I am, but I might not remain the attorney of record." "Well, we've got just a couple more questions."

Gruenburg, Cleyman and Hendricks went back into the room.

Hendricks knew he wouldn't have Fletcher long, not with Gruenburg there. He asked him about his loading the clip, then about Leann loading it. Why would Leann load the clip if she was afraid of guns? Fletcher said it didn't seem to bother her. Hendricks decided to make it clear where they were heading. As he would recount later: "We called him on why Leann would pick up the gun, if she was afraid of it. I said, 'You know, Michael, the only thing I can't understand is if she was deadly afraid of the gun—that she left the firing range because the gun scared her—why would she pick the gun up?'"

Gruenburg said quickly: "He's answered enough questions for today."

That was the last time police would talk to Fletcher. Before the week was out, Brian Legghio was his attorney, and he wasn't about to let Mick talk to anybody.

As Cleyman escorted Fletcher out of the station, he said to him: "You have a very beautiful daughter."

Fletcher replied: "Yes. She is my everything. She is my angel."

Cleyman took that as incriminating, too. Though Fletcher several times had broken down in front of Welch and while crying had told him how he and Leann had been getting along so well and how could this happen, now, Cleyman would later say about Fletcher's parting remark about Hannah: "That struck me funny. Supposedly your wife has just accidentally shot herself. Your daughter's important, but he never brought up his wife. He never said a word—nothing— about her."

Fletcher and Gruenburg went back to the office. Later, Hendricks and Weimer, on their way back from interviewing people at Double Action range,

stopped by the law office. The first search warrant had been approved, and allowed them to take Fletcher's clothes. Fletcher took them off, the police put them in brown paper bags and left.

At some point early in the evening, Gruenburg drove Fletcher over to the Miseners' to see Hannah. Mick banged on the door but the Miseners, who saw them pull up, wouldn't answer. Mick, wearing borrowed clothes, gave up, turned around and walked back to Gruenburg's car. There was a very real chance he would never see his daughter again.