Martin Barner was a late-comer to law enforcement. He was 38 when Leann was shot, and he'd been on the force just five and a half years. He was an entrepreneur before becoming a cop; he had a bachelor's degree in business administration and had owned his own direct-marketing company before deciding the headaches of owning his own business outweighed the positives.
He became a private investigator and then head of security at a huge flea market in the Detroit area, which gave him a taste for police work. He applied for a job as a real cop in Hazel Park and was hired. He got his calling late, but he got it big-time. He has a passion for the job.
At the time of the Fletcher case, he was part of a multi-jurisdictional force known as the Crime Suppression Unit, funded by a federal grant. Several local police agencies kick in one cop and one squad car to the unit, which worked out of an office in nearby Madison Heights. It was their job to take on some of the local crime that fell through the cracks.
Drug units and auto theft units are common. What the Crime Suppression Unit does is pool resources to take a more organized approach to crimes that might otherwise go relatively unnoticed by individual jurisdictions. If they got a tip, for example, that Joe Blow had been doing home invasions in the area, Barner could put a surveillance team in place, see what he was up to, follow him across city boundaries, where otherwise they would have been unable to go, wait for him to commit a crime, then arrest him on the spot.
With Fletcher as the obvious number-one suspect in Leann's death and an evolving situation with a number of unresolved questions—Did he have access to clients' money? Did he have large funds of his own? Would he use his parents' home near the Canadian border as a springboard for flight abroad?—the CSU was asked to put him under 24-hour surveillance until, and if, a warrant for his arrest was issued.
Barner was point man for the unit. A big guy whose work attire is often a plaid flannel shirt, running shoes, baseball cap worn backwards and blue jeans,
he looks more like the cleanup hitter on the neighborhood bar's softball team than he does an undercover cop. Which is the point.
Hazel Park is a small city but on the afternoon shift that he once worked as a patrolman, the action was non-stop. Routine, but busy. Pulling over speeders on I-75, the freeway that bisects the city, looking for drunks weaving away from bars at closing time, heading out on domestic violence calls in the working-class neighborhoods, busting kids with pot. Always enough doing to make the time fly by.
His first few months with the CSU, Barner was bored out of his mind. He hadn't yet learned how to handle the hard time of surveillance—the interminable waits while nothing is happening, sucking down coffee, fighting sleep, checking your watch yet again to see that time has stood still. "I was absolutely bored to tears," he admits.
But—and it's a big but—the adrenaline rush of catching a perp in action made up for all the slow time and drowsy hours. "When it happens, it's a major rush. It makes it all worthwhile. We sit there, watch someone rob a place, let 'em get back in their car and leave the scene, then, Bam!" Sirens wailing, lights flashing, guns drawn, you're-under-arrest-and-you-have-the-right, etc.
The day of the shooting, Barner was working a home-invasion target in Hazel Park. He was monitoring the frequency, heard the call to nearby Hazelwood Avenue and decided to drive over and help secure the scene pending the arrival of more police.
He ran into the house, saw Leann on the floor, hung around until the full contingent of crime-scene investigators was on hand, then left.
"I remember thinking at the time—and I told another crew member—'This guy killed his wife.' That was just my initial impression."
It was an impression he shared with other Hazel Park police. Smart, intuitive police work, or, as defense attorney Brian Legghio would contend, a rush to judgment by police altogether inexperienced in homicide scenes?
Two days later, and coming off a 12-hour day, Barner was back on the case. Lt. Smick called, said a warrant was being sought and they wanted Fletcher under surveillance, so they could prevent any flight, and so they could pull him
in the minute word came down that a warrant had been issued.
The CSU unit knew his home address, of course, as well as the address for Judge Chrzanowski, his parents', and his office. They soon located his black 1999 Dodge Dakota pickup parked in the long curving driveway at his parents' home on 18th Street in Marysville.
A first glance was enough to send a jolt into Barner. There was a large fifth- wheel trailer attached to the vehicle, and there was a lot of activity. People were going back and forth between the house and the trailer. "It looked like maybe boxes of clothes and food. Our reaction was, 'Maybe this guy's getting ready to leave. Maybe he's packing up and getting out of here.'"
When the warrant would eventually come down, word would be leaked to the papers and show up high in the stories that Fletcher had been about to flee. Though eventually the trailer's license plate was traced to an out-of-town relative and the activity was found to be harmless and strictly coincidental to the arrival of surveillance units—and, in fact, the trailer was being unloaded, not loaded—it was impossible to know that in the dark. And the impression had been made, one that would be repeated on TV news shows and talk radio: The guy was about to make a run for it.
The corollary, of course, was that only a guilty person would be getting ready to flee before a warrant had even been issued.
Barner sat in his car throughout the night, in sight of the Fletchers' large corner house. Other surveillance units were parked nearby, one officer to a car. They had, in the vernacular, established "the eye." Whichever way Mick might head, Barner would put out the word, and someone would be ready to pull out in pursuit.
At one point in the long, boring shift, there was another jolt of activity for police. A car left the scene, with four occupants. It was followed to its destination. It turned out to be Mick's brother, Ben, his sister-in-law, and two of their friends.
Barner got his first clear sighting of Mick at 10:48 Thursday morning. There is a high wooden fence that runs along the back of the house, surrounding an in- ground swimming pool. Fletcher had come out the side door and was pacing a
10-foot swath, chain-smoking. Back and forth, one cigarette, two cigarettes, a third, in succession.
"He was like a caged animal," recounted Barner, freed by his chief, David Niedermeier, to speak after the trial, a year after events of the day. "He'd smoke three cigarettes in a row, then go back inside for a little while, then come back out and start all over again. Smoking like crazy."
At 1:30 p.m., Mick and his parents, John and Darla, got in John's black GMC Yukon, along with Amy and her husband, Phil. Brother Ben and his wife, Nicole, followed in their car. Surveillance units picked them up and followed them as they drove to I-94, a mile and a half away, then headed south, toward Detroit. They got off at the Mt. Clemens exit. Mt. Clemens had been a tourist destination known worldwide 100 years ago for the reputed powers of its numerous mineral baths.
Eventually the baths closed and prosperity went the way of the homing pigeons that used to fill the downtown squares. The town became, and remains, the county seat for sprawling Macomb County. Gentrification has begun, with abandoned blocks and buildings being saved from the wrecker's ball and remodeled back to their original high ceilings, wet plaster and wainscoting.
A new, expensive county courthouse serves as an anchor and much of the renovations have been financed by attorneys hoping to avoid the sterile look of suburban strip centers while at the same time being able to walk to work. Fletcher's defense attorney, Brian Legghio, is one of those in a renovated old brick building near the courthouse, and it was there the Fletchers were heading. It was their first meeting with Legghio and he wanted to meet the whole family. He told them that they were naive to think this would be dropped quickly. He told them to expect a full-court press by prosecutors and police. This was a high- profile case—"a made-for-TV movie"—and the authorities were going to go all out with it.
"I know you don't want this to go to trial, but trust me, this is going to go to trial. They will not let up. They will be relentless. They are going to push this. I don't want you talking to anyone. I don't want you answering the phone."
But, he told them, he had just got off the phone with the prosecutor's office
and he had a gentlemen's agreement that when and if a warrant was issued, he would be allowed to surrender his client. There would be no forceful arrest. At least there would be that.
Barner sat for 90 minutes while they huddled with Legghio, then followed them as they left downtown, drove back to I-94 and headed north toward Marysville.
Meanwhile, a Keystone Cops bit of business had continued. When Fletcher was put under surveillance, Barner had prudently notified the Border Patrol at the nearby Blue Water Bridge, one of the busiest entry points to Canada along the entire US–Canadian border, who Fletcher was, what vehicles he might be driving and their license plates. In the event of any apparent move by him toward the bridge, Barner promised to call and alert the Border Patrol.
That wasn't good enough for the federal officers on duty Thursday. "They were driving us nuts," recounted Barner. "They were calling us every 10 minutes. 'What's he doing? What's he doing? Is he coming? Is he coming?' They were driving me nuts. Finally, I had to tell them: 'I'm busy right now. If he comes your way, trust me, I'll call you. Believe me, I will.'"
At Hall Road, a couple of miles north of Mt. Clemens, word came over the radio that the arrest warrant had been issued. The normal procedure, according to Barner, when trying to arrest a potentially dangerous subject—and someone about to be charged with shooting his unarmed wife in the back of the head with a Smith & Wesson .45 certainly must be considered a danger—is to box the vehicle in front, back and side, then force it easy over. Given the circumstances
—John Fletcher was at the wheel and he was a respectable member of the community, a supervisor with Detroit Edison—Barner decided such action was inappropriate.
Instead, he radioed the nearby state police outpost and asked for some marked units up ahead.
At 21 Mile Road—streets in southeastern Michigan from Detroit's northern border, which is Eight Mile Road, are named in one-mile increments—two marked state police cars put on their sirens and lights and effected a traffic stop along the shoulder of the freeway.
The Fletchers saw one state cop car up on the entrance ramp. When its lights came on, Mick sighed and said: "Here we go." He had prepared his parents that an arrest can be ugly and temporarily violent. The night before, he had his father leave the front door of the Marysville house, with the stained-glass window, open with just the screen door locked to minimize the damage if the police broke in to arrest him. And he had his mother take her porcelain figures off the front room tables. Given the tenor of the newspaper stories emanating from the prosecutor's office, Mick thought an arrest was imminent. And he didn't trust the agreement Legghio had made with prosecutors that if a warrant was issued, he would be allowed to walk his client in for arraignment.
Moreover they knew they were being tailed. "You'd have been pretty dumb not to know, with those unmarked cars," said Amy later. "We just didn't know we were being followed by so many cars. It looked like six or eight of them when we got out."
"We knew we were being surveilled," said John Fletcher. "In a small town like Marysville it'd be pretty hard not to notice."
Though police didn't really suspect trouble with his family in the car, this was, after all, an arrest on a homicide charge, so police carried out what Barner called a felony stop. He said the two state troopers approached the truck on foot with service revolvers drawn. The five unmarked surveillance units were also on the scene but Barner says those officers did not have their guns out.
Mick's sister, Amy, her husband Phil, a church pastor, and his parents, though, all swear the other cops had their shotguns out, too.
It has become part of Misener family lore that the Fletcher vehicle was quickly surrounded by a bunch of cops with drawn shotguns, with Mick quaking in fear. They love that part. Barner said it was less dramatic, though the Fletchers' version of events coincides with the Miseners'.
Mick put his hand on his sister's knee. "It's going to be all right." Then, "Mom, don't cry."
John Fletcher jumped out of the truck.
A voice on a bullhorn said: "Get back in your car, sir." Then, "Michael Fletcher, please step out."
Barner put the cuffs on Fletcher and put him in his unmarked car.
"I'll never forget Michael's mother: 'Remember what the lawyer told us. Don't say anything. Don't say anything,'" said Barner later. John Fletcher started to cry. No one protested the arrest or caused any trouble.
John asked if he could give his son a hug. Barner said: "No. You can talk to him through the glass." A Troy cop, though, said to go ahead, let him hug his son. The car window was rolled down and first the father, then the mother hugged Mick.
Amy was at the window, too, crying. "It's going to be all right," he told her.
Mick said two syllables on the 45-minute drive back to the Hazel Park police station.
"Are those cuffs too tight?" Barner asked. "No."
"You need some air?" "Yes."
Barner rolled down his window a bit and that was that.
As they approached the station, figuring the TV trucks and media would be out in force, Barner called a superior, Lt. Smick, to ask him how he should handle it—park by the front door, or do an end run and come in the back door?
Just come in the front, said Smick. Barner pulled into the parking lot, backed into a stall by the front door and brought Mick in. The TV crews were waiting.
"Any comment?" said one reporter. "Did you do it?" hollered out another.
Fletcher was wearing a blue-gray suit. Thinking he was going to the funeral home later, he had worn Leann's favorite suit of his to Legghio's office.
The Fletchers continued on to Marysville to change and get ready for a visit to the funeral home, for the doubly dreadful duty of seeing Leann's body and facing the Miseners. Legghio called. "They're arraigning Mick. Get down here." They piled back in the GMC and headed back down I-94 to the Hazel Park police station/courthouse. But the ubiquitous road construction that summer bogged them down in a hair-pulling delay. By the time they got there, the arraignment was over and Mick was on his way to the Oakland County jail,
where he would spent the next nine months awaiting trial.
Legghio was still there. It was bad news. They had arraigned Mick on first- degree murder. And they were holding him without bail. The assistant prosecutor had labeled him a flight risk because of the incident with the fifth- wheel trailer, and the judge agreed.
"At least we got a laugh out of that," said Amy. The fifth-wheel, as it turned out, belonged to Mick's aunt and uncle, Ron and Jan Fletcher, who had driven in from Holland, on the far western edge of the state, to give some family support. "If Mick was going to flee, you'd think he'd take something that could go more than 50 miles an hour. This was a huge deluxe fifth-wheel. And it also had "The Fletchers" written in big letters on the back. That's not exactly a vehicle you'd flee in. You'd think he'd take one of my dad's Corvettes, instead."
Nine months after his arrest, on the eve of his trial, one of the reasons people had for assuming Fletcher's guilt was that, hey, the cops had caught him loading up a trailer and getting ready to run, right?
Meanwhile, Hendricks had called the Miseners at the funeral home to tell them Mick had been arrested and was in custody. The Miseners erupted in cheers. Lindy raced to the casket. "They got him! They got him!" she told Leann.