THE ANGEL MICK
Mick Fletcher, the strange loner who didn't even have a friend at his wedding. Who was a loner in college and law school. Who beat birds to death. A lazy lawyer who preferred pornography to practicing law, who was happy to let his wife put him through law school and buy the house and roof over his head. A user and abuser who, said Channel 7, worshipped Satan and insisted on playing cruel and bloody video games with his wife, trying to murder her electronic image on the computer screen as they sat in their separate darkened rooms in the ill-fated house on Hazelwood Avenue.
Those images formed in the public consciousness during the months between arrest and trial. The Fletcher family refused interview requests on Legghio's orders. But the Miseners had plenty to say about Fletcher, and so did the prosecutors—and the media had air time or column inches to fill.
These things became accepted fact:
• Leann saved up her money and bought the house on Hazelwood that he moved into after their marriage.
• Leann put him through law school with her earnings as a phone solicitor or nail technician.
• Mick was a loner who'd had no friends. No one, even, to come to his wedding.
• He had to have the best. His Dakota truck, for example, had to have the special bed liner, had to have the fancy gizmo to get rid of the smoke from his cigarettes, had to have the nice sound system. Nothing was too good for him, even if it meant building up a large debt to his in-laws.
• Mick spent no time with his daughter unless he wanted to put on a show for Leann's family.
• He was lazy. First, he was content to let Leann work while he went to school. Then, he was an underachieving attorney who'd rather sit in his room watching pornography on the computer than trying to make a living.
Perception isn't always reality. There was far more to Fletcher, as it turned out, than the images presented on TV or in the local papers. Perceptions are sometimes myths, too.
For example:
• Leann didn't buy the house on Hazelwood. The purchase agreement was signed with Re/Max
realty on March 2, 1993, with the house selling for $50,465.46, including county and city taxes. Leann's name was the only one appearing because Fletcher had to finance his way through law school with student loans, and he was afraid that if the loan for the house was in his name, too, it might damage his ability to get enough student loans.
First American Mortgage Services financed a loan of $48,850. The $1,000 in earnest money to hold the house pending loan approval was paid by Darla Fletcher, in a check dated March 23 on an account at Citizens Federal Savings Bank in Port Huron. If Leann's savings paid for anything, it was the balance due on the settlement statement of $615.46.
• Fletcher had always worked, from the time he got his first job when he was at Marysville High. The summer before they got married, Fletcher worked full-time at a machine shop in Lexington, north of Port Huron, and spent his paychecks buying furniture and appliances for the house.
During law school, he worked at a Radio Shack and then as a clerk in the Warren City Attorney's Office. His earnings paid the bills, too. And his law school bills were paid by his loans, not Leann.
• He did have friends at his wedding. His brother, Ben, was best man. Phil Count, his brother-in- law, who was such a family friend that he and Ben had Tigers season tickets together, also stood up at the wedding. None of his other friends stood up with him, says his sister, because Leann wanted the spouses and boyfriends of her sisters to be in the wedding party. Mick had other friends in attendance, and would have had more, said Amy, except the Miseners insisted the Fletchers trim their initial wedding-invitation list down to 75.
• Sure, his truck was his pride and joy. He'd bought it several months before the shooting, but it was the first new vehicle he'd ever owned. Until then, he'd had a series of clunkers, first a Chevette, then an old Chevy S10 truck with a blown engine he'd bought for $1,000 (John put another engine in it and Mick was able to get another 80,000 miles on it), then another S10 held together with duct tape. When he had clients to meet or on hot summer days when he had a couple of courts to get to and didn't want to wrinkle his suits too badly—he didn't have air conditioning—his mother would drive down to Hazel Park and switch her car for his rattletrap truck.
Leann always had the better vehicles, a Ford Probe, then a Villager, then a Taurus. Mick couldn't trade vehicles with her when he needed something nicer to drive because his truck was a manual shift and she never learned how to drive one.
• Fletcher seemed to his friends and family, at least, to be anything but an inattentive dad. He built a computer file for Hannah called "The Pontificating Two-Year-Old," and filled it with Veggie Tales and Barney videos. During his separations from Leann, Mick took Hannah every Saturday. According to Amy, who was visiting her parents where Mick, recently separated, was staying at the time, Leann called during a rainstorm to say she was having trouble closing a window. Mick, she says, got in his truck and drove an hour to Hazel Park to lower the window, then drove back to his parents'.
"Hannah has the vocabulary of a third-grader because Mick was the one sitting there playing computer-education games with her," said Amy after the trial. "She'd come up and say, 'Are you impwessed with me?'—she couldn't say her 'R's'—and it was like, 'Yes, I am impressed with you, because you're a three-year-old saying 'impressed.' He was the one who was always reading
to her."
• His law career was anything but foundering. Most criminal defense attorneys scuffle to pay the bills the first few years out of law school, and he was no exception. But a key to success is forming productive alliances with local judges, who pass out assignments for the indigent, and with powerful attorneys.
If anything, Fletcher was too successful in this regard. His alliance with Chrzanowski was both lucrative and sexual. And Roy Gruenburg, one of the most powerful attorneys in Warren and a former district judge, had taken Fletcher under his wing. He provided him office space—even a place to sleep during Mick and Leann's separations—and threw work his way. And Mick had an affair with Roy's daughter, Dawnn Gruenburg, another Warren judge.
Fletcher's connections, in fact, were things to envy in the eyes of the other young struggling attorneys working their way up the ladder in the busy Warren courtroom.
Mick the loner? Perception, yes, even during his trial. Legghio played things close to the vest, as defense attorneys do. Family members who could—and wanted desperately—to speak up for him weren't allowed to.
Fed information by the prosecutors, and with ready access to the Miseners, those on deadline cranked out their stories or filmed their pieces.
But Mick had never been a loner. He was, others say, affable, gregarious, well-liked, with a quick laugh and a sharp sense of humor. The stoic face presented before and during trial was not the only one he had for the world. And he had friends who were willing and able to speak up for him, for those who took the time to find them—friends who say they loved and love him and will never believe the Mick Fletcher they knew had any resemblance to the guy they kept reading and hearing about—the guy accused of murdering his wife while she knelt on the bedroom floor.
Rachael Schmidt knew Mick most of her life, through the Croswell Wesleyan Church. "He and Amy and I were inseparable. We were bosom buddies," she said after the trial. "Everything we did was with Mick. He made everything more fun. He had a great sense of humor."
At some point the friendship blossomed into romance. She was one year behind Fletcher in school and went out with him her freshman and sophomore years. She and Mick and Amy and her boyfriend double-dated to Mick's junior prom at Marysville High. Rachael went to school at Croswell–Lexington and she said that geography more than anything broke them up. "But even after we
stopped dating, we remained great friends. There was never a fight that broke us up. There was never any bad feelings. He was always super, super nice. Whenever we went anywhere, it was always more fun with Mick. He was just a great guy all round."
Schmidt, a German linguist, said that other than his sense of humor, she best remembers Fletcher for his intelligence. "His brain works so uniquely. He's just got an amazing brain. When synthesizers first came out, he got one and taught himself music theory and he was great on it."
Though they lost contact after high school, Schmidt said she never doubted his innocence. "It's absurd. He's way too smart. If he wanted to kill somebody he'd come up with a better plan than that, something that made sense. It's impossible. Never once for a second did I think he did it. There's just no way. It had to be an accident."
*
He had friends in high school. And he had friends in law school.
Kevin Schneider, now a defense attorney in Warren who considers both Judge Chrzanowski and Fletcher close friends, said they became friends because they had a common habit. Smoking inside buildings at the University of Detroit– Mercy law school was prohibited. "We pretty much smoked all day long together, for three years," said Schneider in an interview after the trial. "Mick's a gentleman. He's a very civil man and you could tell that the first time you met him."
He said Fletcher was affable but "not a giant socialite." Unlike a lot of the other students, who, says Schneider, "got schnockered up every Thursday night and most Fridays and Saturdays, too," Mick would grab a beer here and there but usually went straight home at the end of the school day.
He and Schneider talked politics—Mick was big on Second Amendment issues and was one of the more conservative classmates. Later, their career paths took them both to Warren, where young attorneys ran from court to court at the busiest, most bustling court in suburban Detroit. Mick fit right in, hanging out in the halls with the other attorneys while they waited for judges to take the bench
or for cases to be called.
"You can't say he was a social animal, but for people to say that he was a loner, that he had no friends—that's completely absurd," says Schneider. "He knew all of us. He was a regular guy. There was nothing loner or reclusive about him."
When word came out that Fletcher had been having an affair with the judge, "I was very impressed. When I heard that he was sleeping with Susan, I was like, 'You know, Mick, I didn't know you had it in you.' I was surprised. I mean, he's a good looking guy, but…"
Schneider considered himself in the know in the Warren court and Chrzanowski was a good friend—"she's a fine judge and one of the first judges to help me out when I first started practicing law, very nice, very knowledgeable"—but other than a secretary or two and one or two of Chrzanowski's confidants, he and most other courthouse hangers-on hadn't an inkling of the affair. They'd been discreet, even at many of the social functions where the lawyers and judges would find themselves.
When he heard of the charges against Fletcher, Schneider said, "I was floored. It just didn't make sense. It never made sense to me." He practices in Hazel Park, too, and even being privy to the cops' point of view—"almost immediately you heard from the cops that they had blood-soaked shirts, they'd found blood in the drain trap, they got him, they have him, but even based on that amount of evidence I didn't believe it. I still don't believe it. Pulling the trigger on the gun? He would not have proceeded in that manner. He's a pretty smart guy—he's not a brain surgeon but he's not that dumb."
*
"I've known Mickie my entire life," said Danielle Blais, a telecommunications specialist for Ameritech. Her parents go to church with the Fletchers and the siblings of both families grew up together. Amy Count, Mick's sister, is her best friend. She and Amy would drive up to spend weekends with Fletcher at Michigan State, and saw his relationship with Leann evolve from its beginnings. She remained friends with Leann until her death, and saw her for the last time at
church the week before the shooting. She congratulated Danielle on her new baby and they talked briefly about maybe Leann and Mick having another one in the not-too-distant future. Five days later, Leann found out she was pregnant.
"Mickie is a great guy. He really is," she said. "Very caring. Loving. It's hard for me to even think somebody would think he'd do that. I've never known him to have a mean bone in his body. Never a bad word for anyone. He was an easy guy to love. Obviously he was very good looking, and he had a heart of gold. He'd do anything for anybody. He'd always, always do things for Amy and me. If we called him and said we were broke down on the road, he'd be the first one there to help you out. Any time of day or night, if you needed him, he was there."
"People say, 'Oh, people snap.' Not this guy. Not this guy. I cried when I saw him on TV in his orange [jail] jumpsuit."
She remembers him growing up—he is four years older than she is—as a big brother, smart, joking, fun to be with. Her brother, Buck, was Mick's best friend. "We couldn't believe it when they'd say he had no friends. My friends and I said, 'They never asked us.' He always had friends. Absolutely.
"He would always console people who were in love trouble. He'd say, 'Don't you worry about it. You're a beautiful person. You'll be fine.'"
Her words were hauntingly similar to words of his in one of the e-mails to Judge Chrzanowski that would make headlines at his trial. They would be seen by some, then, as part of a con job by a wheeler and dealer trying to keep the judge on the line. As always with Fletcher, and with this case, there were two ways of looking at things.
"And as far as being a father, he was amazing with that baby. He adored her. And he loved Leann. He absolutely loved her. Everybody makes mistakes and he made his, but he loved her," said Blais. "You know, I loved Leann, but she didn't make things easy. She could be hard to live with. I remember when they were separated the last time and Amy and I were talking to him. He said he was going to go back and we said, 'Are you sure you want to do this?' And he said, 'Yes, I do. I really love her.' And we told him we'd support him 100 percent whatever he did."
Blais said the day she heard Fletcher had been arrested, "I cried. I could not believe it. They had the wrong person. There's never been any doubt in my mind. I've never, ever had a second guess, or a doubt about that. Never. And I never will. Of all the people this could have happened to, it happened to him, the most undeserving of all. That's the hard part. I feel so much pain for him and his family.
"My heart goes out to the Miseners because they lost a beautiful daughter. But Mick did not do it," she said, finishing the interview by saying: "Thank you so much for the opportunity to tell you what a wonderful person Mick is."
*
Jennifer Davis, a funeral director in the small town of Flushing, west of Flint, has known Amy Count for 15 years, since meeting her at a church summer camp. They later went to college together and she has known Mick well for much of that time.
"Mick—actually, we all call him Mickie—is easy going, friendly, thoughtful. I've never seen him in a bad mood. I've never known him to be nasty to anybody. He'd hold doors open for people. He always thought about other people before himself," she said several months after the trial. "He's very humorous, a great sense of humor. I can't think of anything negative about him. He reminds me a lot of my brother."
Like Blais, she was friends with Leann, as well, and was at the hospital the day Leann gave birth, and she recalls happy times baking cookies with Leann and Amy at John and Darla's house in Marysville.
Her reaction to hearing that Fletcher had been arrested for Leann's death? "It was a sickening feeling. I couldn't believe they thought he did it."
Could he have? "No way. Nope."
Was he a loner? "He was the farthest thing from a loner you could imagine. He could be anybody's friend. The Miseners say he looked down on people. He never looked down on anybody."
As for Fletcher the dad, she says: "He was always carrying Hannah around. Whenever I'd see them, he'd always be the one holding her. I mean, my dad
loves me, but there's no way my dad ever held me or treated me the way Mick did Hannah. He was an exceptional dad."
*
Marshall Hook, whose parents had worshipped with the Fletchers in the Croswell Wesleyan Church where Leann and Mick were married, was 19 when Mick went on trial. His memories of Mick were formed during a week-long fishing trip to a small lake in Chapleau, Ontario, about 120 miles north of the Canadian Sault.
Marshall says Mick took him under his wing, recounting one long hike around the lake, through deep woods and nearly impenetrable marsh and thickets. "Mick led the way. I was grumbling most of the way. He was trying to keep my spirits up. 'We can make it. We can do it. It's only a little bit more.'" Later, around the campfire, Mick helped Marshall whittle a walking stick and carve a face into the handle; for years, the stick was a proudly displayed souvenir in Marshall's bedroom at home.
*
Amy Count has always been close to her brother. They had the kind of relationship where, even after she moved out to San Diego, they'd call each other and spend small fortunes in long conversations, real conversations, about life and what they were up to.
She says her husband was, in fact, envious of how close she and Mick were, that he and his siblings kept in touch but it seemed far more perfunctory.
She and other Fletchers were baffled that the Miseners so quickly and readily believed the worst, that Mick could have shot Leann, and not only shot her, but in such a lurid, evil manner as the prosecutors allege.
And she is baffled, too, at the picture the Miseners and Leann's friends now paint of a cold, aloof, non-caring husband and father who had changed so much after getting out of law school. "I mean, if he was such a bad guy and had been for so long, why were the Miseners out celebrating with Mick and Leann the night before? Why would you be happy that your daughter was going to have
another baby with such a guy?
"And even that morning of the shooting, they were fine with Mick. They were willing to babysit so he could take Leann shooting. If you thought for one instant he was capable of doing that to your daughter, why would you be babysitting? If my parents thought my husband was capable of shooting me, they'd never let me anywhere near him. They'd have me so far from him. But they were out celebrating with him the night before."
John and Darla sent "20/20" video tapes of the Miseners and Mick at family parties. One showed Gloria dancing and laughing with Mick; another had Gloria jokingly warning Lindy's second husband to give his new wife everything she wanted because they had a lawyer in the family.
Her brother, she says, was the kind of guy who'd call home if he heard a report about tornado watches to remind his mother and sister which corner of the basement to go to. If he was going to be late, he'd call so no one would worry. When Amy visited him one time in jail, it was getting late when she was leaving. "This was the way Mick always was: He was, 'Do you have Mom's car phone? If something happens, make sure you pull over in a well-lit area.' He was always like that."
*
Buck Martin is a building contractor in Port Huron who has known Fletcher as long as he can remember. They went to church together, played on the church- league softball team when they were 14 and 15 and went to community college together. Like most kids their age in the Port Huron and Marysville area, when they turned 19, they'd head across the Blue Water Bridge with four or five other guys to Sarnia in Canada to drink beer legally—they were still underage in Michigan—and try to pick up girls. "Canada was a happening place. That's where all the girls were," said Martin.
After Fletcher transferred to Michigan State and met Leann, Buck and his future wife, Melissa, frequently double-dated with Leann and Mick. Later, Leann would come to Melissa's wedding shower and Melissa would go to Leann's baby shower for Hannah.
"I was shocked. I'm still shocked," said Martin of his reaction to Fletcher's arrest. "It hurts my heart to even think about it."
He was the kind of guy, said Martin, who, when he got a new sound system for his car, would take the old one out and install it in your car, free of charge, which he did with Martin's hot-rod Camaro.
As for Fletcher's reputation as a loner, Martin said, "He got along with everybody. He was a great guy. I could name ten guys right now that he hung with. He never had any problem making friends. What a crock! I tell you, it was hard for me to listen to Drew and Mike rip him apart. That wasn't the guy I knew. I don't know where they got that stuff."
(Martin was referring to a popular drive-time radio show on WRIF-FM. For some reason, the Fletcher case became something of a cottage industry for the two co-hosts: Drew and Mike. For months, up and through the trial, they savaged Fletcher and interviewed a series of Miseners and friends of Leann.)
Martin said he is convinced of Fletcher's innocence. "Let's put it this way. If something happened and he got out of jail and needed a place to stay, I've got a bedroom here and he's welcome to stay here any time. And if he ever needed a job, he could slip a tool belt on and go to work with me."