THE DEVIL IN DISGUISE

On November 3, the demonization of Mick Fletcher stopped being a metaphor. The local ABC affiliate in Detroit ran a half-hour special featuring the sensational news that he had been a devil worshipper, and that one of his favorite evening pastimes was playing a violent bloody video game with Leann. He sat at the computer terminal in his upstairs office and she sat at the computer in their downstairs basement; with all the lights out in the house, he would play the game with a frenzy, usually resulting in her bloody, simulated death by dismemberment.

The Fletcher murder case attracted national attention from the start. Court TV aired his arraignment in August and made plans to televise the trial live, plans it scuttled when it found out that "20/20" had lined up family members on both sides, some exclusively, for an hour-long program that would air after the trial.

"First Edition" ran a piece on the arraignment, too, and named both judges, Susan Chrzanowski and Dawnn Gruenburg. It showed a shot of Mick being escorted to jail in handcuffs and a shot of his by-now-famous spit curl dangling over his forehead as he sat in court. It showed Chrzanowski on the stand referring to her sexual encounter the night before the shooting: "He told me he loved me very much." And it showed Jack Misener in a bright blue suit as he expressed his feelings toward his son-in-law: "Hatred. Pure hatred. That's all I'll ever feel for him. He was a piece of ice sitting there. A piece of steel. He loves nobody."

Channel 7, the local ABC affiliate, got into the act belatedly, with its half hour on the Fletcher case broadcast on its weekly "Impact" news show on November 3. Its revelations by reporter Shelly Smith were sensational. It portrayed a sick and evil man whose life had long been unraveling, a twisted Satanist who fed on games of murder and mayhem.

The setup was classic TV—the earnest, heavily intoning reporter standing outside the murder scene on Hazelwood Avenue, walking slowly toward the

camera and then on the sidewalk and up the stairs to the front door as the camera tracked along next to her and she said her lines:

"From the outside looking in, the young attractive couple had it all. So how did Leann Fletcher wind up on the floor with a bullet in her head, lying dead in a pool of blood on her bedroom floor?"

Smith said they'd contacted people who had gone to law school and college with Fletcher, tried to find someone who had been his friend, but no one would talk about him. Kevin Schneider, a criminal defense attorney who was Fletcher's best friend in law school, said, though, there was a good reason he refused to speak to her on the record. He said he had one informal conversation with her and soon after got a call from another former classmate whom Smith had called. "He said Smith had told him I'd said Mick talked about guns all the time. He said, 'Did you say all that stuff?'" Kevin responded that he didn't, and this led to others deciding not to cooperate with her.

The show had a brief history lesson—a yearbook shot of Mick in stage get- up at Marysville High School north of Detroit: he'd been an actor there, though one who was a loner, without friends; he'd majored in criminal justice at Michigan State, where he'd met Leann at a Halloween party where, Smith said ominously, Mick had gone up to her and said: "If you're the Devil, take me to Hell."

The devil line at Halloween was old news to those familiar with the case, having gotten plenty of play in the papers in the days after the murder, as reporters wrote their follow-up features.

But what came next was news. And it was shocking.

Lisa Rodela, one of Leann's friends, said on camera that Mick had said he'd practiced black magic in college and was into Satanism. As for Leann: "She was totally shocked," said Rodela. "He said he had a relationship with Lucifer."

There was more, said Rodela. Leann had told her that Mick would wake her up in the middle of the night, talking in his sleep—talking in different languages. Mick would be calling her name in his voice, then would be Lucifer in another voice, recounted Rodela. As Mick, he'd say: "Leave my angel alone. Don't touch her." Then, as Lucifer: "What about the girl?" Mick: "Don't touch our

angel." Leann would wake him up, petrified.

Then came a video clip the producers had gotten from the Miseners, a tape of Mick moments after inhaling helium at a New Year's Eve party, in the first few minutes of January 1, 1996. The foreshadowing was so eerie, it made the hair stand up on your neck as Mick, in his helium-induced falsetto, said, looking into the camera: "I would not, could not possibly have committed these crimes."

Smith then segued into Mick the Lothario, recounting his affair with Dawnn Gruenburg, saying the senior 37th District Judge first sponsored him when he passed the bar but then later threatened his livelihood when she found out "he was in the arms of another judge in the 37th District Court."

It was time for a break. The show cut from Smith to studio host Guy Gordon, who told viewers, "He is teetering on the edge," as they broke for commercial.

Back from commercial, Smith continued the theme they broke on: "Mick was unraveling."

The show then recounted Chrzanowski's rise to the bench, how Mick started wiring her house and they fell in love, her divorce, her summoning him to her house to supposedly work on a computer even as Leann was sick in bed and Mick was supposed to babysit, how Mick hung out with other young lawyers in Warren bars.

All signs of a busy social life and a philandering husband but none of it evidence of "unraveling" or "teetering on the edge."

But then the payoff. Suddenly on screen came violent scenes from the video game "Quake," whose robot monsters do the worst kinds of bloody violence. Leann would join him in the game he loved, said Smith, the house lights all turned off, Mick upstairs, Leann downstairs as he did his best to kill her. The game would always end in Leann's bloody death.

Rodela was back on screen, saying she used to ask Leann about the game: "What fun is that?" To which Leann would respond, said Rodela: "'Well, he just really likes it.' She always said he took it too seriously."

The show ended with a recounting of the final months together, when Mick seemed so much in love. "The former teen-age actor was putting on the performance of his life," said Shelly Smith.

Soon, Leann was dead on the bedroom floor, and Mick was charged with murder and awaiting trial.

It was amazing stuff. It certainly broke ground, the devil worship, the bloody video games in the darkened house each night, that other news organizations— print and electronic—hadn't stumbled upon. And much of it was exaggerated. It was TV news at its most sensational, stretching bits of truth into something else and weaving the sheerest of suggestions into a cloak of terror, witchcraft and the macabre. It was fun TV, but hardly probing investigative journalism.

Leann's best friend, Jeni Hughes, who ate dinner at the Fletchers' many nights and who routinely watched TV sitcoms with Leann while Mick was upstairs at the computer, said she never heard about "Quake" and never knew Leann to play it. Leann's sister, Lindy, with whom she talked every day, said her sister never mentioned "Quake," either. Neither they nor anyone else in Leann's family ever heard her say anything about Satanism or Mick worshipping the devil.

After the show aired, Lindy called Lisa and tried to pin her down as to what Leann had said about Mick and what he had said about the devil. The revelations had come as a shock, and Lindy, as mad as she was at Mick over the shooting, didn't believe them.

"I said, 'Did she actually that? Say Satan?'" recalled Lindy. "And she'd say, 'Well, ah, no. Ah, I don't know.' And I'd say, 'What do you mean? Did she say that?' 'I don't know.' 'Did she say that?'"

The more Lindy tried to pin her down, the more elusive Lisa was. She wouldn't say what had or hadn't been said.

"I was just so mad at her," said Lindy, who discounted nearly all that had been said on the show. She said she was equally mad at Shelly Smith, assuming she'd goaded Lisa on. She, and others of the Misener family, figured it was more a case of Lisa enjoying her 15 minutes of fame than it was about Leann and Mick.

One other thing, said Lindy: "Leann was never scared of Mick, never. She trusted him completely."

As for the voices in his sleep, Lindy said: "My husband talks in his sleep,

too."

In her first interview for this book, Rodela never mentioned either "Quake" or Mick's alleged Satanism. In a subsequent interview, to ask her about the charges on Impact, the entire Satan tale seemed to fall apart in under 10 minutes of polite but firm questioning.

Rodela said Leann had told her about the devil stuff "near the end of their relationship." But Rodela said she couldn't even remember if Leann actually used the word "devil" or "Satan," but said she might have used those words or maybe the word "Lucifer."

But she didn't remember? No. By devil worship, had she meant Mick lit candles and drew pentangles on the floor? Definitely not, said Lisa. Had he actually prayed to Satan? She didn't know. What were Leann's words? She couldn't remember. In fact, said Rodela, her own feeling was: "I don't think he was a devil worshipper." A far cry from what she had said on camera.

What, then, had she been alluding to? Well, she hemmed and hawed, she was sure that Mick had said something to Leann about having always communicated with a certain spirit. That he'd talked about this spirit "in the third person."

Since Mick was the son of evangelical Christians, talking about being in communication with a spirit is hardly proof of devil worship. It's the rare evangelical who doesn't talk about being moved by, or in communication with, the spirit. (During the college days he was supposedly worshipping the devil, his sister, Amy, remembers him coming home from college one weekend and rummaging in the basement for his old, childhood Bible. He'd read it front to back three times and had underlined numerous passages in yellow marker. Its spine was held together with brown tape. He told her that Leann hadn't had much of a church background and he wanted to take his Bible back to school to point some things out to her.)

Rodela even denied that Mick scared Leann, either through video games or talking in his sleep. Rodela maintained that Mick did talk in voices in his sleep, but "Leann wasn't fearful of it. She had a strong faith that allowed her not to be scared of it."

And she did say that once Leann expressed some concern about Mick's so-

called spirit because maybe it explained why he was so smart. Said Rodela: "She said, 'Lisa, what if he does have some kind of connection? He's so smart. He knows everything about every subject. How can somebody know everything about everything?'"

Mick hadn't even been an aspiring actor. He'd had two bit parts in high school plays, never anything approaching a lead—at Marysville, as with many schools, so few kids tried out for plays that just about everyone who did got a part—and he never took any theater classes in high school or college.

Rodela's claims about the devil and "Quake" were the juiciest, most memorable parts of the "Impact" show. They were also allegations easily challenged, refuted even by those who hated Mick, thought him guilty of the most heinous crime imaginable and couldn't wait to see him held accountable at trial.

But the show had left an indelible image in the minds of those who saw it. Presumption of innocence be damned: this was an evil man, a devil worshipper gone mad who'd practiced on home video games what he would later do in real life. He was a cold-blooded killer of his wife and baby.