SEARCH WARRANT
The first warrant was issued at 4:17 p.m. Monday. About 9: 30 p.m. a crew from the state police crime lab, headed up by Lt. David Woodford, a chemist, arrived at the scene to do some preliminary work. Most of the job, much of it tedious, involving the measurement of blood stains around the room to try to determine roughly where Leann was shot, would be done the next day. But it was important, in the meantime, to pull the drain trap in the bathroom sink. Blood is very water-soluble and any blood that might have been caught in the trap would need to be tested for as soon as possible. Tests for blood in the sink itself, and in the toilet, were negative.
The crew left at 11 P.M. after completing its quick plumbing jobs and taking 35-millimeter photos of the interior of the house. The gunk would be tested at the lab. At least one Hazel Park cop stood watch outside the house throughout the night. At one point, Fletcher, his brother, Ben, and his sister-in-law, stopped by to retrieve some clothes.
The next day, the search crew of Cleyman, Weimer and Welch arrived at the house about 8:45 a.m. They unplugged the PCs and removed them. A sheriff who was a computer specialist would later go through the files, as well as take the boxes apart, where he would find hidden several CDs which contained pornography Fletcher had downloaded from the Internet—garden-variety stuff, nothing involving kids or sadism and death.
The sheriff would find other stuff, too, which would make headlines for months.
At one point, Leann's sister, Lisa Felice, showed up to pick up the family pets. The cops gave her a cat, a rabbit and a tropical fish. Later, all three would be given to Leann's best friend, Jeni Hughes, who was as big an animal lover as Leann had been.
Cleyman went upstairs to the bedroom that served as Fletcher's home office. The entire house was a disaster area. By all accounts, Leann was a superb and loving mother, but she clearly didn't spend much time on housework. Clothes
were scattered everywhere. The sink was filled with long-dirty dishes. There wasn't a step leading upstairs that wasn't covered with junk. Police officers get used to some pretty untidy homes, but this was near the far end of the bell curve. Mick's office was a mess, too. It was clear that its occupant liked Coke and Busch Light. Cans and bottles filled every level surface and were lying sideways across much of the carpet. It was hard imagining any work getting done here.
Over the back of a black desk chair, fitted over it like a seat cover, was a white T-shirt; printed on the back was: "BEST DAD IN THE WORLD, HANDS DOWN."
The bedroom filled half the upstairs. Doors led to storage areas under the sloping part of the roof. When Cleyman opened them, he saw junk of all sorts that had been tossed on top of the raw, pink insulation in the floor boards. The one room that didn't disgust him with its disheveledness was what was obviously a child's bedroom across the hall from where Leann was shot. Though a mess, it had been painted by Leann, with billowing white clouds and a brilliant big sun. It was filled with toys and stuffed animals and the presence of a mother who deeply loved her child. It filled Cleyman with sadness. So, too, did the pictures of Hannah in every room.
Later, he would say: "The only humanitarian thing to come out of this whole thing—if you want to call it that—was I'm glad he got her out of there. He knew what he was going to do and he got his daughter out. If he wanted to be totally evil, he could have done it while Hannah was taking a bath or something."
The state police, who would arrive soon, would look for forensic evidence. Cleyman and Welch, snapping photos as they searched, were looking for motive. Cleyman didn't have to look hard. Almost immediately, in the desk, he found copies of divorce papers Fletcher had filed in St. Clair County. So, the marriage had been in deep trouble. He found a shipping bill from Gateway computers to the Hazelwood house, but it wasn't in Mick's name, it was in Sue Chrzanowski's. Cleyman knew her well from her days as a prosecutor in Oakland County when she'd worked the southern part of the county, where Hazel Park was. She was a judge in Warren. Fletcher was a lawyer there, and had been employed briefly by the Warren city attorney. Maybe the receipt was
work-related.
In the closet, Cleyman found a brown, accordion-style folder, opened it up and hit the mother lode. Motive? A beaut. There were several Hallmark cards, love letters, poems, and three photos of a woman and one of a man. Cleyman recognized the woman in the photos right off. One of them was a picture she used when running for judge in 1996. It was Chrzanowski. The picture of Mick was taken at a lake; he was bare-chested. One of the poems was on court letterhead.
"I was stunned. Just stunned," Cleyman would say later. He liked Sue. He was disappointed in her. Worse than that, though, she was now, instantly, a suspect in a murder. She was apparently part of a love triangle, and one of its members had been shot to death less than 24 hours earlier.
The cards were love cards. And a poem.
Chrzanowski had written on State of Michigan, 37th District Court letterhead:
To: Mick
With all my love—
(Please forgive the massacre of this classic poem) 'TWAS THE NIGHT AFTER X-MAS
And then, on another sheet of paper, she wrote:
'Twas the night after Christmas and all through the home, Not a creature was stirring, but my mind was a-roam.
Pretty garlands were hung by the chimney with care. I admired the stereo wires my love put there."
[Note: When Chrzanowski was still married to Derek Zunker, before she and Fletcher had begun their affair, Fletcher had moonlighted on weekends at the Zunkers' new house, doing some wiring and networking their computers.]
I nestled myself all snug in my bed
While visions of him still danced in my head. Till what did my wondering ears did hear But the sound of my pager drawing me near. With a little old message so lively & quick,
I knew in a minute it must be Sir Mick.
More rapid than eagles his pages they came, He told me he loved me, and I felt the same.
His eyes how they twinkle, his voice makes me sigh, His chest very sexy, his smile puts a sparkle into my eye His droll little mouth—and his lips not to miss,
And the bump underneath them that I like to kiss. No, he's not Santa—no reindeer in flight.
He is my Sir Michael, my own special knight. He gave me a gift much better than a toy.
It is the lesson of faith—for true love and joy. His pages are all I can have on this night.
I LOVE YOU, BABY!!
It didn't exactly scan but it was a blockbuster. Cleyman didn't have a murder case on his hands. He had a soap opera. One that would cause a frenzy in the local media, for Chrzanowski wasn't just a judge, she was a beauty. But more than that, she was from one of the most politically powerful families in southeastern Michigan. In the city of Warren or Macomb County, you could run for election with a first name of Butthead and win—so long as your last name was Chrzanowski.
The beautiful and powerful judge. The beautiful and powerless wife. The handsome husband who had them both. What else could you ask for? Court TV would be at the pre-trial hearing. ABC's "20/20" would cover the trial gavel-to- gavel. Book companies would scramble to find a writer on the scene. It was a career case for small-town cops. For big county prosecutors, too.
*
Chrzanowski, most agreed, had been destined for big things. She was connected, very bright, an able judge, extremely attractive, a hard worker who ran a tight courtroom, a rising political and judicial star with name recognition.
"I saw her with a very big future," said Margarete Sinclair, a former Warren city councilwoman and family friend. "I saw her in the Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court some day. Some people, you just know they are rising stars."
She was only 32 when the story broke, and had been on the bench since
1996, winning election to the 37th District Court for the first time after a losing effort two years earlier.
Her lawyer quickly walled her off from the media as the scandal unfolded, but friends, including many of the young attorneys who populated the bustling Warren court, said she was quick-witted, unpretentious, a good aunt to her young nieces and a lover of show tunes from big Broadway productions.
"A lot of people are going through the feeling of wanting to hug her and smack her at the same time and say, 'How could you? How could you have done something so dumb?'" Sinclair told the Detroit Free Press.
Her family would wonder the same thing. The Chrzanowskis, as a clan, had always been astute, politically and otherwise. Her father, Robert, had been chief judge of the circuit court that handled felony trials for Macomb County, where Warren was located; he'd also been Warren city attorney and was in private practice at the time of the shooting, preparing to run for county prosecutor in the fall of 2000. Her brother, Kenneth, was a county commissioner. Her sister, Janet, was an attorney. Her father's cousin, Mary Chrzanowski, was a Macomb County Circuit Judge.
(Mary, herself, has had her share of notoriety. In 1987, while in private practice, she was charged with drunk driving after hitting a parked car and then refusing a blood-alcohol test. Later that same year, she was fired from her new job as a member of the Macomb County Prosecutor's staff after getting into a loud altercation in a restaurant because the waitress gave free coffee to two cops but insisted she had to pay for hers. Then in January of 2001, while Susan was facing possible firing by the Michigan Judicial Tenure Commission, Mary was brought up before the same tribunal because, it was alleged, she had stormed into the office of newly elected Macomb County Sheriff Mark Hackel the month before and demanded he assign a certain deputy to her courtroom. She denied charges that she was drunk but accepted an offer by one of the other deputies to drive her home. She did admit, "I became livid" because she couldn't get the deputy she wanted.)
Susan had been, it seemed, to the position bred. At Warren's Cousino High School, she had been class president three years running and delivered the
commencement address. At the University of Michigan, she was an editor of the year-book. At Wayne State law school in downtown Detroit, she graduated magna cum laude, then was hired as an assistant prosecutor in affluent Oakland County.
In 1994, just a year out of law school and riding the family name as fast and far as it would take her, she ran for judge in Warren and lost, then ran again two years later and won. Warren is a hotbed of family politics. Chrzanowski ran against Jennifer Faunce, the daughter of Sherman Faunce, the long-time Warren judge whose seat they were after. Faunce was considered the favorite. Because of her inexperience, the Macomb County Bar Association, normally a rubber stamp, gave Chrzanowski a rating of slightly below average, which is about equal to a D-minus. But despite that rating and the formidable name opposition, Chrzanowski pulled off victory.
She surprised everyone with her acumen on the bench. She started court on time, not always the case with her colleagues, and was a tough, conservative judge known for her compassion and probation policies for young offenders. Prosecutors and defense attorneys both liked her.
"She didn't have a good reputation, she had a sterling reputation," said Jun Munem, a political observer and consultant in Warren.
She was also known as a soft touch for local charities, someone who could be counted on to say yes to requests for time or money. She was on the board of the Warren YMCA, a member of Warren Goodfellows and a volunteer for several youth organizations.
"She is the first one to raise her hand to give time and energy to a worthy cause," said John Iras, the head of the Warren Coalition for a Healthy Community.
The only blot on the résumé, the only thing that said she, perhaps, wasn't a wonder woman after all, was her divorce from Zunker in September of 1998. By that time, it appears, Sir Michael had ridden to the damsel's aid.