DELIBERATIONS
As the jury began its deliberations Monday afternoon, the Miseners were sure of a quick guilty verdict, the Fletchers were equally confident of a not guilty, and both Legghio and Townsend knew juries well enough to be aware that predictions were useless, especially in a case relying so much on forensics and with so much conflicting testimony.
No one could have foreseen the dramatic circumstances that would unfold in the jury room over the next four days—four days of building tension and agony for the two families as they paced the hallway outside Cooper's courtroom—or the unprecedented and highly controversial way the jurors would attack their deliberations.
What no one knew as the ten men and two women began their deliberations
—two women out of the original pool of 14 jurors were eliminated by blind draw at the end of the trial—was the remarkable unanimity they had toward crucial aspects of the case. Had Legghio known what was in their minds, he would have been ordering up cold champagne on his cell phone. Townsend would have been dismayed. And the Miseners would have been in absolute disbelief.
There wasn't much time left in the day. The first order of business was to take a quick vote, not that anyone expected it to be decisive. But it would give them a starting point for their discussions.
Rob Jensen, a senior engineer at General Motors' sprawling Technical Center in Warren, had earlier been selected jury foreman. "Somebody said, 'Who wants it?' Nobody said anything. It was like dead quiet. It seemed like a year. I've got a pretty outgoing personality, so after nobody wanted it, I said, 'Well, if nobody wants it, I'll volunteer.' I couldn't even get the words out of my mouth and they were like, 'Yeah!'" he recounted.
Jensen asked if they wanted to vote and then they did so, orally. It was seven for conviction, four for acquittal, one unsure. Then, in their first 15 minutes in the jury room, they agreed that, given Leann's love for Hannah and her family
and her excitement over the new baby, suicide was impossible. Not that it had been brought up as a practicable defense, but the jurors decided to rule it out anyway, and they did.
That still left a range of options to discuss—not guilty, guilty of first-degree murder, guilty of second-degree murder or guilty of manslaughter. They went back and forth for a while, haphazardly discussing the case, making no progress, very much disorganized and without a blueprint for how to proceed before they broke for the day.
That night, Jensen decided to try to get things organized, and the next morning, at his suggestion, they began to get far more systematic, as befitting a jury with three engineers. It also included a small-town postmaster, the woman who owned the dog-bakery in affluent Birmingham and the older woman who had said at jury selection that she'd be able to overlook the issue of adultery because her father and husband had committed it.
Jensen asked Cooper for a flip chart and markers, where they could start writing things down on big sheets of white paper. He wrote down reasons that people thought Fletcher was guilty and reasons that they didn't. They put together a chronology of events. They compiled a list of things they all agreed on, and a list of all those they didn't.
These were people who had spent nearly three weeks sitting in judgment of the kind of high-drama, life-and-death issues most people only read about in bad novels or see on made-for-TV movies. They'd seen gruesome color photos of Leann in a thick, red-black sea of her own blood that had left some of them crying. They'd watched at close range as a young judge had told of her affair. They'd watched her cry. They'd listened to the heart-rending testimony of the Miseners and their loss. And they'd had to keep it all inside. Not one of them had been able to talk about the trial with a spouse or friend, they hadn't even been able to discuss it with each other during their many recesses and lunch hours and all those boring times sitting around waiting to be summoned back to the court. Now, finally, they were able to talk about all the amazing events they'd seen or heard.
They quickly discovered that doubts they thought might be theirs and theirs,
alone, were doubts they all shared. Despite their differences regarding guilt and innocence, as Jensen began totting up things on the giant sheets of white paper— some 25 of them would eventually fill the walls of the small jury room—they quickly realized they were in nearly unanimous agreement about many of the major elements of the case.
And what they agreed on was, they didn't buy almost any of the elements of Townsend's case against Mick Fletcher. What they agreed on was:
• They didn't believe much of the forensic evidence against Fletcher.
• They thought Townsend did a lousy job of placing Mick in the bedroom at the time of the shooting.
• They distrusted or outright disliked many of the prosecution witnesses. They thought some of them were incompetent and suspected others of lying.
• They disagreed with Townsend's version of a motive—that Mick had killed Leann to keep the judge from finding out he had been having sex with his wife all along. They agreed with Legghio's closing arguments that the judge would have gone right on forgiving Mick and would have taken him back in a heartbeat. And they thought that it made no sense whatsoever to stage a crime scene that involved getting ready for sex if you were trying to hide the fact that you were having sex with your wife.
• Most telling of all: They agreed with Legghio's witnesses that Leann could not have been shot on the floor if there was any accounting for the blood on the bedspread. MacDonell and others had said that was a violation of the laws of physics, and the jury, particularly the three engineers, agreed with them.
Jensen, in a two-hour interview at his home after the trial, had this to say about Townsend's witnesses:
"Nobody on the jury disagreed with this: Everyone was thoroughly—I want to say disgusted—with the way the police handled the investigation. Not Mr. Townsend, who was a class act all the way, but some of his witnesses really infuriated the jury. Part of the people who [were] originally thinking not guilty, a lot of it was everybody just had this rage against the police in this case. People were even using the word 'conspiracy.'
"You gotta get to the truth, and I didn't get that impression from a lot of witnesses for the prosecution. It sounded to me like 'This guy was guilty,' and they were going to say whatever it took to get him convicted.… It seemed to me the witnesses were tailoring their testimony [and] that infuriated me."
As for Sgt. Cleyman, who admitted under cross-examination that he had used the words "stone-cold guilty" in assessing Fletcher after his interview with him at the Hazel Park police station just after the shooting, Jensen said: "To us on the jury, it scared the hell out of us.
The jury thought Dr. Dragovic was believable but they thought he "came off as an arrogant ass."
As for Woodford, he came off worst of all. "Here was a guy who was actually getting upset on the stand," said Jensen, "and he was refusing to testify off photographs for the defense but he would for the prosecution. There were people on the jury who literally very aggressively hated this guy. They didn't like this guy at all."
Late in November, ABC's news show "20/20 Downtown" finally aired its coverage of the Fletcher trial, calling it "The Final Verdict." It was supposed to air earlier in the month but was bumped in favor of coverage of the much- delayed results of the Gore–Bush presidential election.
The daily media covering the trial weren't granted access to the jurors. They were allowed to leave by a back exit following the trial, and court officials refused to give out their names and phone numbers. But, in a move that angered the local media types—press, radio and TV—"20/20" was allowed to play by a different set of rules.
The show's producers were allowed to contact jury members, and a week after the trial, Cooper turned over her courtroom and the jury room for five and a half hours of filming, with the jury members being interviewed in two rows of chairs in the courtroom, and then re-creating their long deliberations in the jury room.
On camera, the 10 jurors who agreed to take part in the show concurred that they thought the prosecution case was weak and its witnesses biased and unreliable. One of the engineers said supposed blood evidence on the sleeve of Fletcher's shirt "was one of many elements the jury didn't believe."
Who had problems with the credibility of the prosecution witnesses? "I think we all did," was the answer.
Did the lack of credibility hurt the prosecution case? "Yes, it did," answered
Gloria, the older woman, who said the lack of motive was particularly troubling for her. "If he wanted to prove to the judge that he wasn't having sex with Leann, he certainly wouldn't have set up a murder scene with her getting ready to have sex."
So, in their minds, they had no motive, unreliable and untrustworthy prosecution witnesses, weak physical evidence and an impossible explanation of events by Townsend.
That second day of deliberations, had Legghio and Townsend been able to listen in to the proceedings in the jury room or able to see what was being totted up by Jensen on those white sheets, it would have seemed like a slam dunk: Certainly all of those things had to at least add up to reasonable doubt, and reasonable doubt meant not guilty. Legghio couldn't have added another item to a wish-list of things he wanted the jury to believe at the beginning of its deliberations.
But this wasn't the usual case, and it wasn't the usual jury. Unusual events and unusual deliberations still lay ahead for the twelve jurors.
*
On the prosecution side of the ledger, the jurors still had to account for a dead woman. How could this shooting have happened? Holding the gun with her thumb on the trigger, as MacDonell suggested, seemed ludicrous. And they had a defendant who had committed numerous acts of adultery, looked way too smug and cocksure to their eyes as he sat in court each day, and who just irritated the hell out of them.
Surprising—shocking, even—was how the 911 tape was perceived. Legghio had argued for its admission, and Townsend against its being heard by the jury. As it turned out, they were arguing the wrong positions.
The jury didn't believe the tape. Instead of convincing them of Fletcher's innocence, it helped convince at least some that he had pulled the trigger.
Some jury members, including Jensen, thought it included too much information, that it seemed more like his way of laying out his whole alibi than merely calling in a state of panic to report a shooting. Why talk about where
they'd been that morning? Why say they had gone back to the house to have sex?
"The whole damn defense was on the tape," Jensen would say later.
The owner of the dog bakery agreed Fletcher was genuinely emotional, but for reasons Legghio hadn't predicted. "We all agreed he was emotional on this tape, as you would be if you just shot someone."
One of the engineers had another unforeseen reason for saying the tape was the deciding factor in switching him from "not guilty" to "guilty": Fletcher had called his wife by pet names and not by her given name. "If something happened like that to one of my family members, I imagine I would be screaming their name. He didn't do that. He called her 'honey' and 'sweetheart.'"
Jensen agreed. He had a young son who had nearly choked on food once, and Jensen remembered calling him by name in panic. "In a moment of extreme panic, you'd go back to their regular name."
The honey and sweetheart stuff sounded too much like alibi-setting to some of them, too phony, too much for the benefit of the 911 operator and the official record. Add one surprise for the prosecution.
*
When they voted again on Tuesday after compiling their lists—it was eight guilty, four not guilty. Two of the not guilties were adamant.
Led by the engineers, the jury decided on a new tack: They would become crime-scene investigators, too. They sent out a note asking for masking tape and a tape measure.
"Masking tape? What do they want with masking tape?" Sgt. Hendricks wondered.
They used it to to help turn the jury room into the Fletcher bedroom. They marked off where the body was, they marked off blood, they marked off the bed and dresser.
They also asked for a copy of a transcript of the 911 tape to read as they listened to it, for an inventory of all items admitted into evidence and for something to magnify the photos they had spread out on the table.
One of the engineers did that one better. He carried around a miniature pocket microscope as part of his work, and they used it to look at the green Oxford shirt Mick had worn the day of the shooting. Woodford had left numerous pins in the cuff of the shirt where he said there were drops of blood. The jury, though, agreed with MacDonell that there was nothing there.
And then the jurors began their crucial play-acting, with the one named Bob playing the role of Leann as he pretended to be shot in the head, and pretended to be mortally wounded as he fell to the ground of the jury room.
And the more Bob fell, the more unlikely it seemed that Leann could have held the gun in any way that explained the trigger getting pulled, the wound being behind the right ear and the gun falling where it fell.
There was just one thing wrong with their role playing. They weren't acting out events as the prosecution said they must have occurred. They were acting out a different scenario, one Legghio had never had a chance to address or rebut. Sure, his own witness had suggested the shooting could have occurred on the bed, but he didn't say conclusively that it had. He had said conclusively that the shooting could not have taken place on the floor and had suggested the bed as an alternative scenario by way of establishing reasonable doubt.
Had Townsend based his case on the theory that Leann was shot on the bed, Legghio would surely have tried to rebut that, too.
The jury took MacDonell one step further. They decided the shooting had taken place on the bed. And using the table as the make-believe bed, Bob would hold out the gun, pretend to pull the trigger and then he and the gun would fall. Over and over he did it, and the gun never ended up where it did in the police photos.
*
Wednesday was a day off for the jurors. The entire courthouse was closed in the morning so employees could attend the funeral of an assistant prosecutor, and in the afternoon Cooper had to listen to motions on other cases.
Thursday, they resumed deliberations, resumed their crime-scene reenactments and resumed their votes. It was now coming out 9–3 for
conviction. They hadn't voted on whether it would be first degree, second degree or manslaughter. There was no sense arguing that unless they could agree on guilt or innocence.
As Jensen later explained, the crime-scene reenactments were a way of taking the back-door approach. They had unreliable or little forensic evidence, in their mind, linking Fletcher to the crime. But if they could come at it with inductive reasoning—more proof they were engineers—and eliminate Leann as the source of the gun being shot, then by logical elimination, it would have to be Mick who did it. The play-acting might cause the rest of the hold-outs to see how unlikely that was; then they'd be left with no other explanation except that the husband did it.
A couple of the jurors weren't sure this was legal, though. They weren't sure if proving Leann didn't do it was the same as proving he did. They sent out a hand-written note to Cooper.
"We have a legal question. If we decide that it was impossible based upon the evidence that Leanne [sic] shot herself, are we allowed to decide that the defendant shot her?"
Judge Cooper wrote back at the bottom of the same lined white sheet: "Please sit down and very carefully re-read all my jury instructions."
She hadn't told them they couldn't, which must mean they could.
By the end of the day, the vote was 11–1, with Gloria still holding out for acquittal.
"Just out of pure carelessness, she may have reached over and picked that gun up to get it off the bed and it could have gone off," she said later. "We know Leann's fate. Leann is dead. She is not coming back. We have the fate of a young man sitting in that courtroom—who I really don't like—but it's still a life in the balance."
Townsend was heartened by the jury's note to Cooper. It showed they were close. At least they weren't sending notes out saying they were hopelessly deadlocked, as you might expect on the third day of deliberations.
Said Townsend's boss, David Gorcyca: "It seems to me they're hung up on the central issue of the case. If Leann didn't shoot herself, the only one who
could have done it was Michael Fletcher. There is no other logical explanation.
… I think it was favorable for the prosecution."
Legghio tried to frame it in a better light. "I don't find the note to have any significance or insight," he said.
The Miseners didn't know what to make of it. Having expected a guilty verdict on Monday, by now they were fearing the worst.
"Trust me, it's okay," Townsend consoled them. "Trust me."
*
It was a horrible time for both families. The Miseners and friends would gather at one end of the hall outside Cooper's courtroom, the Fletchers and their friends at the other end. "We prayed a lot," said John Fletcher. "And we stared out the window a lot. It was probably the worst four days of our lives."
The Miseners kept thinking: How will we get through another trial if it's a mistrial? Then, worse: What if he gets off? "If there were even a chance they would let him go, I don't know how we would survive," said Lindy. "We need justice for our sister."
At one point, according to Darla, the woman who had been in charge of Hannah's case for the Family Independence Agency, came up to the Fletchers and said: "I just want you to know, Mrs. Fletcher, that regardless of what happens in there, we plan on telling Hannah the truth." Her truth, not the jury's truth, in case it was not guilty.
Friday morning, it was still 11–1 for guilty. Gloria asked Bob for one final reenactment. The gun went off, Bob fell from the bed (table), the gun landed in the wrong spot, again. Gloria had seen enough. "You couldn't get the gun in the right spot. That was the determining factor for me," she'd say later.
Another vote. Twelve–zip. Relief swept through them. What had been anguished, and at times extremely vocal, deliberations, had gotten over the hump.
Now that they had decided Mick did it, what crime, exactly, was he guilty
of?
Jensen saw it one way only: First degree. Given the trip to the gun range it
was hard to believe any subsequent death wasn't part of a planned effort. "If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck."
But the first vote on degree surprised him. Seven said second-degree murder, three said first degree and two were undecided.
Once again, things would get heated up. What seemed over, wasn't.
Some said they didn't want to vote for first degree, because that was an automatic life sentence, and what if they were wrong? Jensen reminded them that the judge had instructed them to disregard punishment, that their job was only to decide on guilt or innocence and on what charge. "They pissed me off," he'd say later. "They didn't have the balls to go with the sentence."
Others argued that the prosecution case was so weak they couldn't justify first degree. Others thought maybe it was truly second degree, that the trip to the gun range had been innocent, but once they were back at the house and the gun was sitting there, he acted on impulse and killed her.
They broke for lunch, the two main factions adamant. When they returned, Jensen surprised them by giving in. He knew in his mind that Fletcher was guilty of first-degree murder and he wasn't going to let a hung jury result. No way would this go to another trial and another jury, which might set Fletcher free.
"I gave a little speech, and I said I would compromise to second degree if we could agree on a verdict. The woman who owned the dog bakery agreed to switch to second degree, too, and so did the third one who had been holding out for first degree." The undecideds came aboard. It was finally settled, and a note to that effect was sent out to Cooper, whose clerk passed the word on to the attorneys.
An adrenaline rush went through those waiting out in the halls. The long wait was over. Legghio came out and told the Fletchers the verdict was coming in, to hurry in and get a seat in the front row.
The courtroom was ringed with bailiffs, which the Fletchers took to be a good sign. They must be worried about an outbreak of violence from the Miseners in case it was not guilty. One of the bailiffs reinforced that feeling when he leaned over and whispered to them: "I want you folks to know this is not because of you."
The "20/20" folks had even asked the Fletchers if they could buy them a victory dinner the night the jury came back, at the posh Townsend Hotel in the nearby upscale suburb of Birmingham, filming the happy reunion with Mick, of course.
Darla hoped against hope that the food she'd bought and stored in the freezer and fridge at home hadn't been a waste of money. She was going to cook Mick a week of his favorite foods—rib steaks from her favorite meat market in Port Huron, burritos, country ribs, cheesy potatoes ("It's a casserole, but you can't say the word casserole around Mick, so we call it cheesy potatoes"), lasagna, a roast, and enough potatoes to have mashed potatoes night after night.
The extended Misener family trooped in, pulses racing, terror in their throats.
*
The courtroom was soon packed. A dozen sheriffs lined the room, half of them separating the spectator pews from the defense and prosecution tables.
Lindy began to cry. Jeni Hughes was crying. John Fletcher gulped. Jack Misener looked ill. Gloria looked, as she had throughout, resolute. When everyone was seated and the prosecution and defense were at their places, Cooper said: "We have the deputies in the courtroom for a reason," she said quietly, but forcefully. "This will remain orderly. Bring in the jury."
There was a minute's delay. The tension could get no higher. The door opened, the jurors came in in single-file and took their seats.
"I have received a note from you that you have reached a verdict. Is that correct?" said Cooper.
"Yes, your honor," said Rob Jensen. "What is your verdict?"
Rob Jensen said quietly: "Guilty of second-degree murder."
It all seemed somehow anticlimactic. The courtroom gave a collective sigh.
And then broke into cheers.
Fletcher, in a blue-gray suit, slumped forward, his first sign of emotion since arguing about a tie three weeks ago.
The Fletchers slumped, too. Darla began crying. The jurors were thanked and
dismissed as the media descended on both families, the Miseners joyous, hugging, crying and laughing at once, the Fletchers in stunned disbelief. Cameras, microphones and notebooks were stuck in their faces, but soon their dozen or so friends and family members had formed a ring around them, giving them some space. Mick was led out without a chance to talk to them. The media were told to gather in the courtroom lobby two floors below for interviews. The Fletchers, unable to face the horde, were allowed to leave by a side exit and depart unimpeded.
"I want everyone to know: Nobody won here," said Jack Misener moments later, down in the lobby, his voice breaking. "I can't have my little girl back."
"We're just glad there's justice for Leann," said Gloria. "We would have preferred first-degree murder, but we're satisfied."
Legghio gave the obligatory comments to the press and said an appeal would be filed. "This is a case that had reasonable doubt written all over it," he said. "I thought we were going to be celebrating."
Privately, he would admit: "I was physically ill. Physically ill. I honestly thought we had won the case. I honestly believed we had scientifically and forensically undermined the prosecution case. It was painful. It was painful. Not just because I was the attorney, but because I had a client going downstairs in shackles."
The nature of the verdict—second degree—was even more of a shock than the word "guilty." "Nobody can rationalize or understand how they got second degree," he said. "It's so antithetical to the case. The prosecution and the defense both tried a first-degree murder case. They took four days to pin the tail on the dog. They knew what they wanted to come out with; they just needed a way to rationalize it in their own mind to get there."
*
"There was never a doubt in my mind that he was innocent," John Fletcher would say later. "We know he's not capable of it. We sat through the trial. I thought he was going to be acquitted. All I know is my son isn't capable of doing it. I'm proud of Michael. He was a good kid. He was every father's dream.
He respected his parents. Every promise he made he fulfilled."
"Isn't that sad?" Jack Misener would counter. "How much do you have to prove? I don't think I could still be in denial, even if it was my child."
The Fletchers went home. Their physician had prescribed some mild tranquilizers in case of bad news. "I just went to bed," said Darla. "I couldn't get out of bed for days."
Every time she opened the refrigerator, Mick's food was still sitting there staring at her.