PICKING UP STEAM

While Welch and Cleyman found more than they'd hoped for upstairs, forensic scientists Sheryl Tortigian and David Woodford of the Michigan State Police were doing their tedious, painstaking work in the downstairs bedroom. The scene was full of blood, and their job was to make it tell the story of how and where Leann died.

Blood is blood, except when it comes to a homicide, especially one involving a gunshot to the head. There are nearly as many types of blood drops and blood stains as there are Eskimo words for snow, and Woodford and Tortigian would be hunting for them, measuring them, applying fairly complex mathematics— dividing the width of a stain by the length, then taking the cosine of that to figure out the impact angle—to try to trace them back to a central focus, the space in three dimensions where the bullet entered Leann's right ear.

The first blood to exit a shooting victim is called blowback or high-velocity blood spatter. The bullet enters with such force that immediately it propels a cloud of microscopic blood drops—a sort of aerosolized mist—back toward the shooter. They would look for that at the scene and on the gun; about the same time they were looking for it in the house, Dragovic was looking for it on Leann's hands. The state police investigators would also look for it—and claim to find it—on the right sleeve of Fletcher's shirt, in tests conducted by Woodford back at the lab.

They'd be looking for other blood, too—blood that would have flown more slowly from the wound or that might have dripped from her nose. This blood would show a direction the body might have taken while falling. They'd be looking for contact stains, where a hand or foot of a possible killer might have come in contact with Leann's blood and left it on another surface.

They would hunt high and low for blood—and find it on the mirror, on a computer stand, on the carpet, on the bed, on the walls. Blood, like other liquids, forms drops that are perfectly spherical. The teardrop shapes we often imagine don't exist. Their shape after they hit a surface tells investigators from which

direction they came—the drop hits and continues to spread in the direction of movement, leaving a tail.

So Woodford and Tortigian would look for drops with tails, measure the drops' width and length, measure angles of drops that had hit a surface while either rising or falling, would stretch string back from the various tails. Where the strings crossed, if they did their work correctly, would be where Leann was shot.

Their measurements painted an even more gruesome picture than the massive blood stain on the carpet. Leann Fletcher was shot, they would determine, while on her hands and knees, her head about 14 to 18 inches above the floor and about ten inches from the bed. Later, when Woodford's tests on the vaginal swabs taken by Dragovic from Leann came back positive for fresh sperm in her vagina, the picture was complete, at least to the prosecution—Fletcher had had sex with her from behind while she knelt on all fours, then seconds after ejaculating, had picked up his Smith & Wesson and blown her brains out.

*

Susan Chrzanowski was now a potential suspect in the murder of her lover's wife. She would need to be interviewed. More than that, she would need an alibi. Hendricks and Weimer knocked on Chrzanowski's spacious Warren home about 5:30 p.m. Tuesday. Her sister, Janet, opened the door. The cops showed

their badges, said why there were there.

"Just a minute," said Janet, closing the door on them.

She opened it a few seconds later. "Sue's not feeling well. Can she talk to you some other time?"

"No, I really need to talk to her today," said Hendricks. "Hold on." She shut the door, harder this time.

A minute later, the door reopened. Sue was standing behind her sister. "Come on in," said the judge, and led them into the den.

"We already had the cards and love letters," Hendricks would say later. "We knew they had a serious relationship. We didn't know the dates, but we had a Christmas poem; we assumed that was from Christmas of '98. So now we were

looking for motive, to see if it was an ongoing affair."

Chrzanowski lied to them, a lie that would eventually cause her to be removed from the bench. She admitted to an affair with Fletcher, but said it had been brief, in February and March of 1999, but that it was over.

Had she spoken to Fletcher recently? No.

She told them she'd met him at the Warren city attorney's office, had heard he was something of a handyman, a whiz with wiring and computers, and had hired him to do some work on her house. Her marriage had been struggling. She and Mick grew close during the time he worked for her, started having feelings for each other and eventually became lovers.

She said they dated only while he'd been separated, but that it was over and she hadn't dated him since he went back to his wife in the spring. She had heard at the office that Leann had committed suicide, which is why she was so distraught. What she didn't tell Hendricks is that after hearing the news, she'd left work early for the day, went looking for a church to pray in, and lit a candle in the chapel.

"I'm thinking, 'What you're telling me is not adding up,'" Hendricks would recount later, going over his thought processes at the time. "'You dated this guy from February to March and now you're all busted up that his wife had committed suicide?' It just didn't add up."

Not to mention the "'Twas the Night Before Xmas" poem. Why write a Christmas poem in March?

Hendricks asked her if she'd talked to Fletcher since the shooting.

No. She'd been at the Cedar Point amusement park in Ohio on a family outing all day Monday and didn't get home until 1 a.m. Tuesday. He'd paged her at 7:30 p.m. and left a voice mail on her pager that something terrible had happened and she should call Roy Gruenburg.

"Did you call Mick back and talk to him?"

"No. I just got the voice mail. It was late. I was going to talk to Roy, but when I got to work I found out what happened."

That didn't make sense, either. The guy's getting grilled by police and is suspected of murdering his wife, so he's going to call a woman he hasn't seen in

five months and ask her to call his lawyer? Two and two was still coming out three.

At that point, Chrzanowski's dad, Robert, showed up. Janet had called him and he'd driven over, pronto.

He didn't stop the interview, he stood outside the French doors to the den, listening quietly.

Hendricks began trying to pin her down on dates. Her dad stepped in and said, "Sue, I think you might need an attorney."

She looked at Hendricks. "Do you think I need an attorney?" she asked him. "I don't know. Do you think you need an attorney?" said Hendricks. Later he

would say, "Keep in mind, we're not dealing with Joe Blow off the street. The suspect is an attorney. The woman who has a relationship with him is a judge and an attorney, so they know their rights."

The judge looked at Hendricks, then over at her dad. "I think I'm going to get one. I might need to talk to one."

"Fine. Get yourself an attorney and have him call me and set up a time to talk."

At 6 p.m., Hendricks and Weimer left. Chrzanowski had lied to them—a judge lying to cops in the middle of a murder investigation—had gotten herself deeper in trouble, trouble she'd be fighting, trying to save her career, more than a year later. But one good thing had come out of it. She had an alibi, one they'd look into and would quickly check out. She was off the hook for murder, anyway.

As the police drove away, the judge began sobbing and apologized over and over again to her father for being an embarrassment to the family.

*

Hendricks, in the middle of his second straight 20-hour day, went back to the house on Hazelwood. They were still carting out stuff. They finished about 11

p.m. Fletcher was there, waiting for them to finish. They handed him the several- page tabulation of everything that had been confiscated, some 90 items.

At some point, Fletcher seemed to go "ooh" and slump a bit. Cleyman isn't

sure, but he thinks it was when Fletcher saw they'd taken his computers and discs. There were e-mails in there, lovey-dovey stuff from the judge that would create headlines at trial, and titters around the Warren courtroom. And plenty of porno.

One thing the cops missed, somehow, was a role of exposed film sitting in a plastic canister on the bathroom sink. Fletcher's defense attorney, Brian Legghio, would find it later when he walked through the house and would have it developed. It was shots of Hannah's third birthday party at some indoor place with kids' rides, just 15 days earlier. One of the photos was of Fletcher, holding his daughter, both of them beaming at the camera.

While Hendricks and the state police finished executing the search warrant, another soap-opera development was taking place a few miles away, at the Miseners' house in Troy. Another judge was about to join the growing scandal.

The Miseners, Leann's siblings and close friends all gathered on short notice for a series of interviews. Police talked to everyone in turn. By then, they all were convinced of Fletcher's guilt, and for the most part the proceedings were foreordained. Each in turn told him their favorite anti-Mick anecdotes, much of it amounting to nothing useful except, perhaps, further convincing police the guy was a scumbag and murderer.

Interesting, though, was the statement given by Chris Misener, Jack and Gloria's eldest. As one officer later wrote in his report: "Chris did not think Michael was capable of hurting victim."

Jeni Hughes, Leann's confidante, told him something that made him sit up and take notice, though. Chrzanowski wasn't the first judge Mick had messed around with. He'd also had an affair with another, more senior judge named Dawnn Gruenburg, the daughter of the guy who'd driven Fletcher away from the Hazel Park jail the day before. Mick was her boy toy.

Gruenburg, said Hughes, had gotten mad when Fletcher started working at Chrzanowski's house and threatened to hurt his legal career if he kept seeing the younger judge. Mick had basically told her where to get off and the judge got so mad she sent one of her relatives—who was a customer of the hair salon where Leann worked—in to tell Leann that the judge wanted to meet with her and give

her the lowdown on Mick.

Gruenburg, Jeni said, had always treated Leann meanly. Dawnn had been Mick's sponsor at the ceremony when Mick became a lawyer and Mick had thanked her, but hadn't mentioned his wife in his speech. Leann had been sure her husband was having an affair with Dawnn, and had driven by the judge's house hoping to catch Mick, but never had.

Leann hated the judge so much that she refused her request for a get- together.

Hmm, now that was some good stuff. Made the gathering worthwhile. Smick thanked everyone and left.

It had been a very interesting day for the Hazel Park PD. One to remember.

*

Wednesday was time for the overworked Hazel Park cops to take a bit of a breather. Hendricks filled out reports and waited for lab results and the inevitable arrest warrant.

Thursday morning, Chrzanowski and her attorney, Stephen Rabault, came in to the Hazel Park police station. It was time to set the record straight. Cleyman and Hendricks interviewed. She admitted that her affair with Fletcher was ongoing, that she had had sex with him the previous Sunday night, when he'd told her he'd been to church with Leann that morning and out to dinner with the Miseners before paging Chrzanowski. He hadn't, though, told her the reason for the dinner, that Leann was pregnant. The cops had broken that news to her.

She admitted talking to him after the murder. She had returned his page after she got back from Cedar Point, that he was extremely upset and told her to call Roy. She said she was in love with Fletcher, hoped something would come of it, had been assured by Mick that he wasn't having sex with his wife. When she pressed him about it, he'd said, "If you were a fly on the wall, you wouldn't need to ask me that."

"We got it all out," said Hendricks. "She was totally truthful, and from that point on she was totally cooperative."

Well, perhaps  not  totally  truthful.  Chrzanowski  maintained  then,  and

continued to maintain at subsequent hearings, that her affair with Fletcher began after her divorce in September of 1998. But in an e-mail sent to her months before her divorce, Fletcher wrote: "Knowing that you go home to someone who is not me is difficult. I know that he could not possibly look at you the way I do."

And another e-mail from Fletcher said: "I don't think I'll ever understand how your husband could stand being away from you so often as he is. Mind you, I'm not complaining."

*

Gruenburg came into the station on Friday with her attorney and was interviewed by Hendricks. She acknowledged an affair with Fletcher, saying it had been brief, from September to November of 1997 and inconsequential. It was for sex, not love. While it had been a sexual relationship it was, in the words of Hendricks' report, "not an intimate affair."

Gruenburg signed a consent form allowing police to search her office and computer. Since the computer was technically owned by the state of Michigan, state officials had to sign off, too, and did.

One of the things that would eventually enter the court file was a note sent to Gruenburg in December of 1997. She was clearly angry with Fletcher and he was trying to convince her of his friendship, even if their stint as lovers was finished. It read:

Dawnn,

I thought it might behoove me to write things I wanted to say, as opposed to trying to talk to you in person, given my addiction to breathing and all.

I did not want you to think that I was ungrateful for all the things you have done for me.… You have always acted in my best interests & for this I shall always be indebted to you.

I am concerned about your thinking that my friendship was limited only to that. You have a heart of gold, Dawnn.

Referring to allegations Gruenburg had made to him about a possible affair with her rival judge, and subtly denying them, Fletcher went on.

If I am to suffer because of politicized gossip, so be it. To me, my freedom to associate with anyone I damn well please is far more important than any reward the legal profession can possibly bring.

And then he finished with a declaration of friendship.

If I were given the ultimatum of befriending Dawnn Gruenburg at the expense of my legal career, I would just as soon collect trash for a living. I would rather be known for being a good and true friend than the world's most successful attorney.

I love you Dawnn. Your friend.

According to Hendricks' report, Gruenburg seemed hardly a friend. Not anymore. She ripped Fletcher up one side and down the other. He was a "user" of people and she had gotten tired of it. He was a "heavy drinker" who couldn't handle his alcohol and became "an embarrassing drunk."

He was a bad attorney, too. She'd referred her sister-in-law to Fletcher to handle a child-custody case, and both she and the sister-in-law were very unhappy with Mick's work.

And she confirmed that she had sent the same sister-in-law over to the Incognito salon to try to arrange a meeting between her and Leann, "because Leann did not need a husband like that."

Continuing, she said his affair with Chrzanowski was common knowledge among court employees and she described him as "sexually aggressive but not violent."

Hell hath less fury than a judge scorned.