Brian Dickerson, a columnist for the Detroit Free Press, had the best line to come out of Michael Fletcher's preliminary examination before Hazel Park District Court Judge Keith Hunt.
"Susan R. Chrzanowski entered the courtroom a little before 4 p.m. She wore a prim white blouse, a navy blue suit, and a look of absolute mortification," read the lead for his column of September 29, the day after the judge's appearance.
Mick's father, John, would gain some notoriety—as well as some enmity from the Miseners—when he would tell the press in later months that if this case had involved a pizza cook and a waitress, none of this would have happened. That overstated things, certainly—cooks and waitresses get tried for murder, too
—but the media glare and public attention certainly grew out of the soap- operatic convergence of the handsome young attorney, his beautiful wife and the lovely judge he worked for and bedded.
Chrzanowski was the last witness in the two-day examination to see if there was enough evidence to bind Fletcher over for felony trial in Oakland County Circuit Court, but last certainly wasn't least. She was the star of this two-day show and the one everyone had been waiting for.
That Fletcher would be bound over was a foregone conclusion—it is very, very rare that a preliminary exam doesn't lead to an advancement of the proceedings into Circuit Court, where felonies are tried in Michigan. After all, police and prosecutors already had enough to convince the district judge at his arraignment in August that a crime had been committed and that there was reason to believe Fletcher did it; barring the dramatic, preliminary exams are a pro forma next step. The case is laid out in more detail but that's about it. In many cases, defense attorneys simply waive the right to a hearing and save a step in the process.
So, while everyone in court on September 27 and 28 knew the outcome, what they didn't know and hoped to find out were some of the juicy, salacious details the papers had only been able to hint at or allude to. They wouldn't be
disappointed. They might have been surprised, though, at the gentle treatment Chrzanowski would get at the hands of assistant prosecutor Lisa Ortlieb.
What few knew watching the proceedings was that Chrzanowski and Ortlieb had once worked together in the Oakland County Prosecutor's Office, and in fact, Chrzanowski had succeeded Ortlieb in handling cases in the Clarkston District Court in the northern end of the county. There was no love lost between Ortlieb and Chrzanowski—Ortlieb didn't think very highly of Chrzanowski's skills as a prosecutor and, like many, if not most, on the staff, was resentful that she had so quickly traded on her father's name, even dropping her own married name of Zunker in her judicial compaign. (Soon after Chrzanowski's election in 1996, the Michigan State Legislature adopted new legislation unofficially dubbed "the Chrzanowski law" that required a minimum of five years of experience before one could run for judge.)
Still, there is a pecking order and Ortlieb respected it, as would her boss, Gregory Townsend, when the case finally would come to trial the following June. Ortlieb was an assistant prosecutor, Chrzanowski was a judge, and one was going to be deferential to the other.
"There was no hint of hostility in Chrzanowski's demeanor as she answered questions about her year-long affair with the defendant," wrote Dickerson. "But there was little doubt she would have been happy to forgo her appearance, given the option of boiling in oil."
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The judge's stint on the stand was preceded by eight other witnesses including Leann's father and sister Lindy, and before the gathered media and assorted cameras could get to the judge, they would have to listen to Ortlieb lay out the state's case.
Jack Misener went first and recounted that Mick and Leann had told them Saturday night that she was pregnant, again, and that late Sunday afternoon they'd all gone out, Hannah included, in Jack's van for a steak dinner. After dinner, back at Jack's house, Mick had asked if he would babysit for Hannah for an hour during the day Monday so he could take Leann to the firing range.
Eye-witness testimony is the most trusted by juries, and the least reliable. The next witness, Paul Yaeck, showed why. A security guard at a hospital, he placed Mick and Leann at the Double Action gun range in Madison Heights on August 16. He was there testing some new semiautomatic pistols used by the hospital's security crew, and was emphatic in his observations.
Yaeck said his visual contact of Leann was limited to 30 seconds, but in that time, he deduced that she was firing a gun for the first time, that "she was startled by the weapon," that she "held the weapon in her hand is if it scared her," that after firing, she had "a surprised look on her face," and that at one point he and Leann had eye contact after she had fired the Smith & Wesson and she gave him an awkward smile like those "you see with folks who may not be that proficient with firearms."
He also said that the man helping her hold and aim the gun was "an older man with gray hair." Mick Fletcher was 29 at the time, with an unlined face and jet-black hair.
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Yaeck was followed by Ron Lehman, a Hazel Park cop who testified that he was dispatched to the Hazelwood house in response to a 911 call and found Fletcher on the front lawn, smoking a cigarette and holding a cell phone. (A transcript of the 911 tape later introduced as evidence in the trial itself would show that Fletcher was, in fact, inside the house when police arrived. They are heard on the tape asking him to step out of the house.)
Lehman told of the strong smell of gunpowder inside the house, the description of the body ("she was lying on the bedroom floor, and she was bleeding from the head area, and she had on a red shirt and white socks; that's all") and a description of the bedroom (carpeted) and the presence of the gun on the floor, a magazine containing several rounds, a bullet near the gun, an open box of ammunition and a gun casing standing on its end on the carpet, about five feet from the body.
He checked for a pulse and found none. He saw a lot of blood on the floor and a "gelatin-like substance in the blood which looked like brain fluid" still
oozing from the wound.
Four paramedics arrived, tried to revive her, were unsuccessful and left.
Dr. Ljubisa Dragovic, the county's colorful medical examiner, was next. He testified that he conducted the autopsy on Leann's body the next day, beginning at 9:10 a.m. In the passive tones of those who conduct autopsies and deal with death, Leann the warm, vibrant woman became "the body that was five-foot- three inches in length and 133 pounds, medium developed, medium nourished, white female." She also, in his opinion, was a homicide victim based on the pattern of gunpowder burns, called stippling, on her face. The tighter the pattern, the closer the shot. The pattern on her face led him to believe she had been shot from 12 to 18 inches away, making self-infliction impossible.
Dragovic also said he could find no traces of blood mist on her hands, a mist you'd expect to find on someone who has shot herself, and that he'd detected seminal fluid in her vagina.
And he described in clinical terms the catastrophic damage done to the Miseners' youngest daughter, as they sat in the courtroom, listening in shock. "The wound path went through the skin of the right ear and subcutaneous tissue. It fragmented the right temporal bone … a bone that is integral part"—Dragovic, in his thick Eastern European accent often drops articles like "the" and "an"—"of the human skull that's on the right side and includes the middle ear and a squamous part of the right side of the skull.
"This was perforated with a shattering of the petrous part of the skull, the hard, dense bone where the middle ear is placed. And it perforated the hard coverings of the brain that divides the front part of the skull from the back part bottom of the skull. It injured the right cerebellum, transected the upper part of the brain stem and tore the left side of the cerebellum."
The injury, he concluded "caused instantaneous damage to the brain stem and would have rendered the person immediately unconscious, instantaneously unconscious, and within seconds there will be the cessation of all the vital functions in the rest of the body."
And so it went. David Woodford of the Michigan State Police crime lab testified that from examining various blood stains in the room he determined that
Leann had been shot while on the floor, with her head nearly a foot from the bed and from 14–18 inches off the floor. He also said that the spermatozoa in her vagina was fresh. And that they found fresh blood in the trap of the bathroom sink.
A pattern was emerging: that of a woman kneeling on the floor, having just had sex, her head bowed, when she was shot to death. And of a shooter who had washed his hands in the bathroom sink.
Finally, Sgt. Tom Cleyman of the Hazel Park police testified that when the Miseners arrived at the police station, Gloria told him immediately that Mick had killed her daughter and was eager to fill out a report to that effect. He said Fletcher had told him he was having trouble loading a clip for the gun and asked Leann to do it, and that she must have tried to load the gun while he was in the bathroom. Cleyman provided details of the evidence that had been uncovered during the search of the Hazelwood Avenue house, evidence that pointed directly at Judge Chrzanowski and turned this into the headline-producing, soap- opera affair it had become.
*
The testimony seemed compelling evidence of Fletcher's guilt. But it was often tedious, mind-numbing in its detail, as it stretched into a second day. Judge Chrzanowski's appearance was compelling, too, and riveting. It lasted just 20 minutes but lived up to the anticipation, providing scintillating details of the love affair between the former Warren law clerk and the Warren judge who had been deemed to be a rising star in the judicial firmament.
Executing the search warrant, police had found photos of the lovers in a brown folder in Fletcher's home office. They had found cards and love letters. They had even found a sales slip for computer equipment that the judge had bought for her financially struggling paramour. Cleyman had provided the facts. Chrzanowski would breathe passion into them.
"For a riveting 20 minutes, Oakland County Assistant Prosecutor Lisa Ortlieb questioned Chrzanowski. It was a gentle interrogation, conducted in the deferential tone of voice favored by bereavement counselors," wrote Dickerson.
"At times, the prosecutor's delicacy ('Did you have a relationship that grew with the defendant?') verged on the Victorian.
"But there was no lack of moral indignation in the gallery, where a mute Greek chorus composed of the late Leann Fletcher's friends and relatives looked on malevolently, their reproval more than compensated for Ortlieb's restraint."
Dickerson continued: "It was hard not to feel a twinge of sympathy for the pale, petite Chrzanowski. You date a married man, you have to factor in that you may one day find yourself confronting an angry wife. But the wife's parents, siblings, colleagues and bowling teammates? In a public courtroom? With television and still cameras recording the scene?"
What did the judge tell them?
That she'd met Fletcher while campaigning for office during the summer or fall of 1996, during a visit to the Warren City Hall, and that their relationship had blossomed after her divorce in August of 1998. (Later, evidence would emerge that seemed to show their affair started earlier than that, and the discrepancy in her testimony would later be one of the reasons the state's Judicial Tenure Commission would cite in trying to have her booted from the bench.)
The relationship "was romantic, it was on and off."
After he filed for divorce in January of 1999, did she think they had a future together? "I had certainly hoped that; but yes, he would say things about us in the future together."
The judge said she briefly stopped seeing Mick when he went back with his wife the last time, at Easter of 1999, but in June began again, with liaisons "approximately three times a week."
Had they seen each other on Sunday, August 15? "Yes." Had it been planned? "It was spur of the moment."
How had it come about? "I was paged. It was later in the evening."
What had Fletcher said when she called him back on his cell phone? "That he had about an hour of free time and could we meet?"
Did they have sex? "Yes."
What did Fletcher say that night when they were together? "It was just, in a
way, a very typical meeting that we had. He told me he loved me very much."
Did they make future plans? "I was going to have some time on Tuesday afternoon. I thought we would be able to see each other Tuesday afternoon."
Did she speak to Fletcher on Monday? "Yes. Technically it would have been after midnight. So, it would have been very early morning of Tuesday. I was in Cedar Point [the amusement park] and when I returned home, which was sometime after midnight, I had received a page. And he sounded very upset on the pager, very distraught. And he said to page him when I got home. And it was already, like I said, I think after midnight. So, this is really the morning of the 17th that I did page him."
Did he return the page? What did he say? "He said something very awful has happened and that he could not talk about it. And that I was to call Roy Gruenburg, his employer, in the morning and that he would explain, but that he couldn't talk. He couldn't say anything. And he sounded extremely upset and distraught."
Did they ever talk, again, after that night? "No."
At 4:28 p.m., Judge Hunt, as expected, found there was probable cause to bind Fletcher over for trial in Oakland County Circuit Court, and the defendant was led out in handcuffs.