Greg Townsend is an unlikely legal star. He isn't particularly glib. He's not a fancy dresser like others at the top of his profession. He's plain to look at, maybe even a touch homely. He drives a Ford 150 truck. On his off days, in black shirt and cowboy hat, he looks more like a guy on the line—or a line dancer on one of the cable shows on the Nashville Network—than the Oakland County Prosecutor's expert in criminal forensics.
His delivery in court is workmanlike, straightforward, lacking in histrionics or dramatics. Despite that, or maybe in part because of it, juries love the guy. They trust him and they believe him.
Townsend is a native Detroiter and grew up in Dearborn Heights, once the locus of Henry Ford's factory workers and now the center of the largest Arab population anywhere in the world outside of the Middle East. For generations of immigrants, Dearborn has been at the center of the prototypical American dream. People worked hard and made better lives for their kids.
Townsend went to school briefly at Detroit's Wayne State, an urban campus without much pretension, either. He dropped out, joined the Navy, did a tour in Korea, then returned home to get serious about his education.
He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan campus in Dearborn, then graduated with honors from the Detroit College of Law in 1983. He was 46 when the Fletcher trial began, and he had never worked anywhere else as a lawyer except the Oakland County Prosecutor's Office.
He was, and is, a lifer, a term he uses with pride. The way to make real money in lawyering is to pay your dues on the prosecutorial side of things, then switch sides and go into criminal defense. That was Brian Legghio's route. But Townsend realized early on he liked putting bad guys away, and he was good at it.
At the time of the trial, he was the resident expert in forensics and the senior prosecutor on a staff of more than 100. His official title was assistant to Prosecutor David Gorcyca, an elected official whom the electorate put in office
in 1996 when they got tired of former Prosecutor Richard Thompson's series of losing trials in assisted-suicide/murder cases involving the notorious Doctor Death, Jack Kevorkian, whose flamboyant attorney, Geoffrey Fieger, became a national celebrity more for his court-steps outbursts than for his string of victories.
Townsend had prosecuted upwards of 90 murder cases when he was assigned the Fletcher case. He had seen way more than his share of ugly, headline cases— the firebomber who killed three kids and their father; the punk who'd sodomized a woman, then kept her in the trunk of her car while he drove her around town for a week (she got so thirsty she drank the antifreeze in the trunk and died); a kid who liked to beat older gays to death; a psychopath who shot a high school football star to death because he'd dared brush shoulders with him in a McDonald's in 1992.
Townsend has a small, relatively unadorned office on the third floor of the building that houses the prosecutor's staff, across a driveway from the Oakland County Courthouse. There are several photos of Alcatraz on his walls, and several small monuments to evil people put in jail. If he put Fletcher away, he'd make room for one to him, too, on the small table that already bore the framed picture of Dr. Death, the one with a caption reading: "Do I look like a criminal?" The football player who'd been shot to death at the McDonald's? After his killer was put away for life, the family put a framed plaque together thanking Townsend. It included a small football helmet and a jersey bearing the number
72. It hangs on the wall and is one of the first things a visitor sees.
*
Lisa Ortlieb preceded Mick Fletcher as a criminal justice major at Michigan State, class of 1989. Like him, she went to law school in Detroit, graduating from the Detroit College of Law in 1993. Like him, she applied for a prosecutor's position at Oakland County. There, their paths diverted. She got hired. Mick didn't, and began relying more and more on Susan Chrzanowski.
Ortlieb also shared a career path with Chrzanowski. She preceded the soon- to-be judge in handling cases in the Clarkston District Court in northern Oakland
County.
Where Townsend is plain, Ortlieb is striking—tall, model-thin, pretty and something of a head-turner in Oakland County courts. She would help Townsend with tactical planning before the trial and in end-of-the-day strategy sessions during it. The arguments in court would be left to him.
Her main task, at least insofar as the Miseners saw it, was hand-holding and liaison. She would keep them informed of what was coming every step of the way. If she and Townsend hit some bumps in the trial road, she explained them and helped paint them as smaller rather than larger.
During breaks she'd come over to chat. She'd explain procedures or rulings during recesses. She'd huddle with them in the hall before sessions began.
It was a role that came naturally to her, having been the section leader of the Domestic Violence Section for half of her seven years with the Prosecutor's Office.
(During the trial, the Miseners would have made a bunch of sterling silver medallions with an angel on the front and the words "I Watch Over You" on the back, in honor of their fallen angel. Months after the trial, Ortlieb would still have one on her person.)
"My aspiration is to follow in Greg Townsend's footsteps," she laughs, then gets serious. "I'm a lifer. Just like Greg. We get paid in other ways besides big paychecks. Our rewards come in different ways. Prosecuting rapists. Fighting for the victims. Helping people. Making a difference in their lives. Having a family crying and hugging you and saying you made a difference, that justice was served."
Already grown close to the Miseners—she had been involved in the case since Fletcher's arraignment in August of 1999—she said: "I love the Miseners. They are a remarkable family and I wish I never would have met them. They are unlike any victims I have ever met. They're great people, and the fact that the apple of their eye was taken from them by their son-in-law and they were able to maintain their spirit and composure is amazing."
*
Brian Legghio was one of the Detroit area's best criminal defense attorneys, but compared to Fieger, relatively unknown in the local media until he got the Fletcher case. Where Fieger would have had an ear-splitting field day with it, playing to the press more vigorously than he'd play to the jury, Legghio would keep a very low profile. It would be, he decided early on, a case that would be settled by forensics; he thought the prosecution's case was far less substantial than the local media had been led to believe, and in turn had led its viewers, listeners or readers to believe.
A native of the working-class Detroit suburb of Roseville his dad, Adam, was a construction worker and ditch digger, Legghio did his undergraduate work at the University of Michigan, then got his law degree from Franklin Pierce Law School in New Hampshire in 1978. He worked as an attorney with the US Secret Service in Washington until 1982, then until 1988 served as an assistant prosecutor for the US Attorney's Office in Detroit. He took a job at a Detroit firm for the next three years, then put out his own shingle in 1991.
Gentlemanly and polite for the most part, he can be sharp-tongued, sarcastic and downright nasty when needed, and the Fletcher trial would eventually need all three.
His highest-profile case to date had been something that seemed more suited to a Carl Hiaasen or Donald Westlake comedy/mystery than real life—the infamous Chicken Condom Case in Manhattan in 1992. His client, Timothy Mucciante, like him a resident of the posh Grosse Pointe suburb and a lawyer, to boot, had been charged in federal court with operating a bogus $3.3 million investment scheme that involved … No, this was better than Hiaasen or Westlake way too funny for fiction.
Mucciante specialized in international law, namely, the arranging the adoption of Romanian orphans. In 1988 he hooked up with Dr. Stuart Berger, a 400-pound doctor, an image in itself too good for fiction. The Wall Street Journal described Berger as looking like what you might get if you inflated Billy Joel.
Berger and Mucciante distributed diet products in a licensing deal that allowed them to use comedian Dick Gregory's name. Mucciante and Berger
grew close; soon the attorney was wheeling around Manhattan in Berger's Silver Shadow Rolls Royce and trying to entice Berger's friends, including the congresswoman Bella Abzug, into investing in a deal to license Peter Max art works in Russia.
Mucciante had another good deal going, a pipeline down under, where he was able, or so he claimed, to get good deals on Australian bonds. Eventually he sold Berger $2.5 million of them. Berger never noticed such minor details as typographical errors and a lack of engraving, perhaps because he'd been blinded by the pre-payment of $143,000 in interest, delivered in cash to his office in a suitcase.
It gets better. Soon Berger and his Manhattan buddies were in on the ground floor of another deal, this, they were told, to take advantage of a seller's market for good condoms in Russia. Berger and pals had the money, Mucciante the contacts.
Mucciante could get top quality condoms and latex gloves in London—two million of each, in fact. They'd be swapped for frozen chickens in Russia. The chickens in themselves weren't of any value to the diet doctor, but they were worth plenty in Saudi Arabia, where it is well known that there are very few chickens. Mucciante collected $74,500 to get the project rolling; the business plan called for a profit of $3 million.
Months passed. The profits failed to materialize. Berger asked what was up.
There was, Mucciante told him, a delay. The chickens were in quarantine.
Some more time passed when the light bulb starting going on over the investors' heads. As one of them told the Journal: "I began to get suspicious. If they were frozen, why were they in quarantine?"
Exactly. Mucciante hired Legghio to explain to them and to the feds. He did the best he could. Legghio used all his considerable oratorical skills, and nearly pulled it off. Mucciante was acquitted on 15 counts but found guilty by a jury of masterminding the scheme.
"That case was a blast. A blast," said Legghio.
Criminal defense attorneys are known for their egos, and the better ones for their stagecraft, as well. Legghio's strength, as it is in all good actors, is you
don't notice him acting. He underplays the role to perfection.
"You're always conscious you're on stage," says Legghio. "I'll wear a suit that may look a little older or ruffled. I'll wear shoes that won't be as highly polished. You don't want the jury seeing the Palm Pilot." Or the Rolex.
"It's not about you. It's about the jury and their perceptions."
Legghio would impress in the Fletcher case, too, drawing the highest in post- mortem praise from one of the chief witnesses lined against him. Dr. Ljubisa Dragovic, the Oakland medical examiner. "A master," he would describe him. "A master. I didn't know him before the trial. I turned into his fan. He's a great defense attorney."
*
Marla McCowan, a slight, baby-faced woman who became pregnant shortly before the trial, had gone to law school with Fletcher at the University of Detroit–Mercy. She had him in several classes but didn't know him. She, like others, remained more or less aloof from most other students in the cutthroat environment of law school.
Their one encounter was hardly pleasant. Fletcher was one of those students who would gather outside before, during and after classes to smoke. McCowan briefly sat next to him in a criminal justice class. She is severely allergic, and he always smelled so strongly of cigarette smoke that she asked the professor to let her switch seats halfway though the semester.
McCowan read about the shooting on August 20, her birthday. "I saw his picture in the paper [and] when I was reading some snippet about the affair, I almost instinctively saw an injustice in the making." At the time she was working part-time for the State Appellate Defender's Office, the state-funding agency that would, if Fletcher were convicted, handle an appeal. If Ortlieb is a true believer and on a mission to put the bad guys away, McCowan is a true believer, too—in trying to keep good guys from being convicted as bad guys.
She cold-called Legghio, to offer her services. He met her twice and finally accepted. "Quite frankly, I just bugged Brian until he let me in." She was bright, she had a good background in appellate law, which might be needed down the
road, and she filled Legghio's need to have a woman on the team. Her presence might prove crucial, especially to female jurors.
When she showed up at jail the first time to meet with Fletcher, he didn't even recognize her from law school. By the time the trial would end McCowan would consider him a friend. "We have since become close, as a matter of circumstance," she would say after the trial, "but my guess is he became a totally different person after August 16, 1999, and that is the only person I know."
Another of her duties was to keep Fletcher socialized, to try to keep him from getting too demoralized or stir-crazy while sitting in solitary confinement. Every Monday for eight months McCowan visited him, partly to keep him abreast of developments, mostly to keep his spirits up, to keep him used to talking and interacting with people from the outside. "Part of my job was to keep Mick human," is how she put it. "I have seen guys who have spent a few months in solitary confinement come out drooling. This isn't by accident, it's by design. The Oakland County jail is run by a politician, not a warden. He doesn't understand rehabilitation, much less any aspect of the Eighth Amendment. He only knows he gets more votes if he says he is tough on criminals. So, without any real objectives, he just keeps everyone locked up and doesn't care how or when they come out."
Each trip she'd bring little but important things like cookies from his mother, vitamins, lip balm, Cokes and toothpaste.
"If I leaned over during trial and picked up a pen from him or said something in his ear, or whatever, I didn't want it to be just for show. I wanted it to come from a natural closeness that we had established from working together for a long time," she said.
After the trial, Dragovic also praised her highly. Not a great respecter of attorneys, dishing out accolades to both of Fletcher's attorneys was unusual. Generally he thinks of defense attorneys as lazy, shoot-from-the-hip types who come in unprepared. "She was astute," he'd say. "And worked very hard. She spent many hours with me in preparation … far more than the prosecution did."