THE FLETCHERS FIND OUT

August 16 was going to be a bad day for Mick's parents and their household in Marysville, even before Leann's shooting. Bad would, of course, get unspeakably horrible. Mick's mother, Darla had been out in San Diego, visiting her daughter Amy, while her son-in-law, Phil, attended a religious retreat for two weeks. Darla's prized 15-year-old shi-tzu, Gabby, had been ailing, and Mick's dad, John, thought it would be easier to have her put to sleep while Darla was out of town.

Darla, who had been told about Gabby while out in San Diego, was flying back on the 16th, arriving at Metropolitan Airport in the late evening. Originally, John had been scheduled to pull a night shift at Detroit Edison and Mick's younger brother, Ben, was going to pick her up. But John decided he didn't want her to spend her first night back in the Gabby-less house alone. So he changed his work schedule and told Ben he'd pick her up, instead.

Ben worked late on the day shift at his job at an auto-parts manufacturer in Marysville and got home to his apartment about 5:45 p.m. He had been a cook at Big Boy's and was the cook in the family now, and he set about getting everything ready for a spaghetti dinner.

The phone rang. He didn't recognize the voice, decided to let the machine get it, then saw on the caller ID that it was Mick's work number, at Roy Gruenburg's law firm. Ben picked up. It was the secretary. "Ben, there's been a horrible accident. Leann shot herself."

Knowing the recent ups and downs in their relationship, his immediate reaction was that she'd committed suicide.

Mick got on the phone. Ben says he'll never forget the moment, made all the more shocking by his brother's tone, the brother who had always been the level- headed rock of stability. "Whenever you talked to him, he was just real clear and very thoughtful about what he was saying," he would recall after the trial. "When I heard him on the phone, he was in just so much desperation, and just so much pain."

Mick told him to come get him, tried to give him directions, couldn't. The secretary got on the line and told him how to get there.

The police had got a search warrant allowing them to confiscate the clothes Mick had been wearing and would soon be combing through the home on Hazelwood. They would gather evidence, then present their findings in the next day or so to the Oakland County Prosecutor's Office, which would have the say- so on whether or not to charge Fletcher with a crime and issue a warrant for his arrest. For now, he was a free man. Legally, he was free to fly to Zaire if he wanted.

Ben, his wife, Nicole, next to him, tore the speed limit apart the whole way down I-94, still thinking Leann had killed herself. When he walked into Gruenburg's office in suburban Center Line, he was greeted by the incongruous sight of Mick in a white jumpsuit, the first hint of legal trouble to come.

Ben went over to give him a hug, and Mick collapsed into his arms. "I felt all 220 pounds of his dead weight."

"They think I did it. They think I did it," said his brother. "They think I've killed my wife. They think I've killed my honey."

And then he got incoherent. "He was just spouting off everything that came into his head. Just thinking out of his mouth," recalled Ben. "I had never in my life seen my brother like that. Never."

Gruenburg was out, attending to something on Mick's behalf. They waited for him. Finally he called and told them to go on, to get Mick some clothes from his house, a few miles away.

They got there about 10 p.m. The heat of the day was still oppressive. Mick asked Ben if he could get his clothes for him, that he couldn't stand to go in. Four cops were still executing the search warrant. Mick stood on the front lawn smoking one of an endless chain of cigarettes. Ben stood on one side of him with his arm around him. Nicole had her arm around him from the other side.

Larry Hendricks walked out of the house, carrying a blood-soaked square of carpet that had been cut from the bedroom floor. Instead of taking it on a straight path to the police van, Ben said he made a loop past Mick, held up the carpet for him to see, then said: "You're free to go in, now."

"I thought it was probably one of the sickest things I've ever seen," recalled Ben many months later. "Just cold. I thought 'What kind of an asshole would do something like this?' I'm thinking, 'Here's a guy who just lost his wife, hasn't been able to see his daughter, and they're doing this?' It was clear. They thought from the get-go he did it. How are you going to do any kind of objective investigating? You're going to go around looking for things to incriminate someone instead of looking for the actual facts of the case."

Ben braced himself, walked up the steps and into the house, walked down the hall and into the bedroom. "I'll never get it out of my head. Not the sight of blood, but the smell of blood. It was overpowering. That amount of blood in that small a quarters. It just [emanated] throughout the entire house. As soon as you walked in, you smelled it. And then realizing it was someone you were close to. It's something I'll never be able to get out of my mind."

He grabbed some of Mick's clothes and they left. Ben drove Mick's Dakota back to Marysville. Nicole followed in their car. And then they began calling their parents, the seconds ticking by, Mick sobbing uncontrollably, as they waited for John and Darla to get back to what they thought was already a sad situation: a house without Gabby.

*

Mick's sister Amy dropped her mother off at the John Wayne airport in Orange County, then headed off to her job at the church preschool, where her husband is a pastor and musical director.

After school, she got in her car and got a block away when her cell phone rang. It was Phil. Leann had shot herself. He didn't have any details. Amy got hysterical. Sat there in the car crying, then managed to drive the block back to school. She went back in, still hysterical. "My sister-in-law shot herself. I don't know where my brother is. I don't know where my niece is."

She paged Ben. Ben picked up. He was crying. She could hear someone else crying in the background. It was Mick. Ben told her what he knew, which wasn't much. Leann had been killed and they thought Mick did it.

*

John and Darla got home at 11:25 p.m. Their house in Marysville isn't far from the St. Clair River, the deep, wide, blue expanse of water that separated Canada from Michigan. Its fast running water had just emptied out of Lake Huron a few miles to the north, a couple of days earlier, and had in turn emptied out of frigid Lake Superior. Lake Huron and the river are nature's air conditioning on hot, humid Michigan summer nights. The temperature felt 20 degrees cooler than it had at the airport.

Darla went to the answering machine. It was lit up, with about 20 messages. She listened to one. It was Ben. She could hear Mick's voice in the background saying, "They're not home." And then the line disconnected.

Just then the phone rang and John answered it. Darla, with a mother's instinct, could tell there was something wrong just from the stricken look on John's face. She picked up the other phone. "What's wrong? What's wrong?"

She could hear Ben on the other end saying, "She shot herself." Darla: "Who? What?"

Ben: "She's dead."

Five minutes later, Ben, Nicole and Mick were at the door. Mick walked into the foyer and collapsed into his dad's arms. The two of them sank to their knees. The rest of the night was a blur. Mick alternated between staring off into space and crying jags. Darla wanted to take him to the emergency ward, maybe get him some sedation. He wouldn't go. Somehow the night passed. No one

slept. Mick would curl up into the fetal position crying.

"He'd cry a while, then go out and pace around the pool smoking," recalled John. "Then you'd hear him crying, again."

"He just kept saying, 'You don't know what it was like. You don't know what it was like. I tried to talk to her. I looked in her eyes. Her eyes open,'" said Darla many months later, the night still vivid in her memory.

It would be nearly a week before they remembered Gabby.

*

Amy called her dad late Monday night, early Tuesday morning. "I want to come home," she said.

The next night, she and Phil caught the red-eye back to Detroit, arriving at the airport early Wednesday morning. Ben picked them up. "I gotta warn you," he said. "It's not the Mick you know who's waiting for you."

They drove the hour and a half north to the Fletcher's Marysville home. When they walked in, Mick came over and collapsed into her arms, crying, dead weight. "I could hardly breathe," she recalled. "Mick said: 'They won't let me see my baby. They won't let me see Leann.' It was the most awful thing in the world. We all just cried together."