Judge Chrzanowski used to work with Greg Townsend. She was a young kid out of law school whose first big break was getting hired in May of 1993 by the Oakland County prosecutor. In a quirk of fate, she replaced Lisa Ortlieb at the Clarkston District Court in the northern end of the county, and now it was Ortlieb who was helping Townsend try to put Fletcher in jail for the rest of his life.
Young judge or not, male or female, it's an old-boys' world. And the boys will take care of each other today. Chrzanowski has not had to sit out in the hall with the other witnesses. She hasn't had to worry about reporters asking for quotes, or passers-by snickering or pointing or asking, "Is that her?"
Chrzanowski and her parents—her father is running for prosecutor in Macomb County—come in through the doorway to the judge's office, jury room and court-officials' lounge.
At 10:29, Cooper tells the clerk to summon Chrzanowski. The two pool photographers in the court standup, their cameras trained on the door. The film crew for "20/20" is standing and aiming, too. This is one of the moments of this trial, second only, perhaps, to a verdict, or third to a verdict and the sentence.
The door swings open, the cameras begin click-click-clicking and … Lisa Ortlieb walks in. The crowd breaks out in laughter, a rare moment of levity in the course of what will be three weeks of testimony and jury deliberations.
Here comes the judge, too small it seems to be such a focus, too young, dressed in a pink suit. She is sworn in, spells her name for the record, gets just halfway through her last name, pauses nervously, says "excuse me" and spells it again. Her hair is down. She is wearing little or no makeup, but is pretty, feminine despite a lack of adornment. Mrs. Misener, her husband, her daughters, all of the extended family that makes up most of the overflow crowd, are staring at her with palpable anger, with pure intensity.
The court seems to freeze, and then Townsend asks her to describe her relationship with Mick. For the next two hours, as the cameras click roll after
roll, the room will be riveted, straining to hear her so-soft replies, embarrassed at her tears but unable to look away.
Throughout the two hours, Townsend will treat her with kid gloves. There are many tough questions, but they will not be asked this day. He will ask her nothing directly about their last night together, the circumstances, where it was, how long they were together. He will mention nothing about the many cases she threw Fletcher's way in her role of judge. His deferential treatment of her is the one thing the Misener family will fault him on when things are over. And they will remain angry at a system that insisted on treating Chrzanowski as something special that day.
(Townsend will, in September, be a key witness in a Judicial Tenure Commission trial against her, testifying on her behalf, claiming that despite early falsehoods to Hazel Park police, she'd been forthright and honest with prosecutors.
Chrzanowski testifies that she met Fletcher briefly in 1996 when she stopped by the Warren city offices one day while campaigning for 37th District Court. "He was a law clerk, which was what I did there before I began working for you," she tells Townsend.
She took the bench in January of 1997. The following November, the affair began to take root. The judge and her husband were in a new home and needed someone to install computer wiring. Someone around the courthouse had heard that Mick was good at that sort of thing and picked up money moonlighting when he could.
"I asked him at a party the city employees threw for him for his passing the bar, and he said he'd be interested," she said.
Mick began the wiring on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. He would finish it after New Year's. The judge and her husband—she took the name Chrzanowski back when she decided to run for judge, Chrzanowskis being eminently electable in Macomb County—weren't living in the house, yet, but she'd stop by from time to time with coffee or food, and the two would talk. In fact, at a Christmas party that year, the Fletchers shared a table with Chrzanowski and her husband, and Leann and the judge spent a lot of the time talking about their mutual dislike
for Gruenberg; Leann would later tell her friends how much she liked Susan. "The first time we talked about lots of things—life, music, literature. I was
having trouble in my marriage and at some point I expressed my troubles on a small level. He said his marriage was not good, either. That they were not very close and had not been close for a long time."
The judge loses her composure, again. Voice cracks. A tear. Takes a deep breath.
"He relayed to me his marriage was going to come to an end at some point. It was inevitable. That's not his word. It's my word. We'd mainly talked about happiness, what makes someone happy in life.
"He seemed like a nicer guy than he seemed in court. He told me I seemed a lot different off the bench, too. I can be very straightlaced and conservative on the bench. A lot of people tell me I'm nicer off."
Mick was paid for the job, but a new one cropped up. At the end of January, Chrzanowski bought her new computer and asked the young attorney with an aptitude for things electrical if he'd help her put it together and get it running.
It was then, she said, that she felt emotional stirrings for Mick and thought he did for her, too. "It was a gradual thing. In the months of February, March, April, as things deteriorated in my marriage—" she stops, begins crying softly, regains her composure again. "As I said, that was a difficult time for me. He was a very good friend. He gave me encouraging words, words of understanding, of faith. I began to have feelings for him and he began having feelings for me, as well."
The heartless killer portrayed by the prosecution has taken on a human face, at least in this telling. But in court, Mick Fletcher remains so impassive he could pass for a corpse with open eyes. He rarely shifts, never changes his facial expression, doesn't seem pleased to hear words of praise from his former lover, a woman he also betrayed but who seems still to love him.
The Miseners continue to stare daggers. She isn't melting any of their hearts.
Mick and Susan talked by phone and by e-mail. "He would tell me I was a wonderful person, that I should have happiness in my life. Some of them [e- mails] expressed his love for me, too." (As the prosecution well knew, all of his
and her e-mails had been retrieved off hard drives and printed out by a computer technician for the Oakland County Sheriff's Department.)
"Mick had a wonderful way of saying things. I knew him to be poetic. I shared with him feelings of the heart because he seemed very wise in the ways of the heart. He'd say, 'Your happiness is important, too.' He'd try to point out to me that maybe I was being treated unfairly. Or I should listen to my heart. He could say it many ways."
And when, asked Townsend, did it get to the next level?
"Feelings were getting stronger, always. But the major change came when he separated from his wife in mid-to late June of 1998. I knew he was married and didn't feel like getting involved on that level. But when he moved out, it said to me his intentions were to divorce her, as well. He said our relationship was the kind of love that married people should have. Mick said he and Leann fought a lot, had always fought. He'd say, 'We argue all the time. She doesn't seem to care about my feelings.' People throughout the courtroom said she was bossy, that she kept a thumb on him. He'd say, 'She wants things her way and that's why we fight.'… The emotional relationship grew much faster than the physical relationship."
Sometime in June, Mick had moved back home with his parents. As for him and the judge, there was "kissing, hugging, things like that. I felt it was developing with a possible future. It was not so much what he said but how we were with each other. We talked. 'Would I like to have children?' Or, 'Would you go to Lamaze classes?'"
They would meet maybe twice a week, for day outings at parks on days she got out of court early, or they'd catch a bite to eat. By then, she was separated, too, so it was easier to work things out.
"It was a loving relationship. It was a relationship I hoped and believed would work, progress. He was separated from his wife, and I thought he'd file for divorce, as well. We didn't talk about marriage so much. We talked about what it would be like to have a life together. I took it to mean marriage. Those were the kinds of feelings I had toward him."
Over Legghio's objections to allowing copies of e-mails to be entered into
evidence—"They're all lacking the originating and intended addresses, they have an inherent lack of credibility and trustworthiness and are harmful to my client"—Susan, in a moment of high drama, begins reading one of Mick's messages.
With the jury present, Chrzanowski starts to read, her voice cracks, she stops, she dabs at her right eye with a tissue, she sniffles, she wipes her nose. Jurors follow along on an overhead projector as she continues.
"You mean more to me than I could ever articulate," Mick says in the e-mail. It had been sent to her offices in the 37th District Court. "A fleeting glance from you can move my soul … you are my pretty lady for many reasons. Remember, I am here for your many reasons."
She reads another: "I am here for you, Susan, and everything you are. I miss you already. I am so anxious for the day when I never have to say that again. That's my hope for the future, anyway."
And: "I don't need to remind you how much you are loved by me … keep that lovely little chin up, pretty lady. I miss you. I can't wait for the day when I never have to say that, again."
She is, he says, "a creature of true beauty, gifted with the sweetest spirit."
But despite his glib ways, and her feeling he would get a divorce and her admission that "I thought we had a future," things were as rocky for Mick and Susan as they were for him and Leann. It seemed the grass was always greener. He was continually breaking things off with the judge to move back with his wife, then leaving his wife to rekindle things with the judge.
One thing should have told her all she needed to know. After a profusion of love letters, cards and e-mails, Chrzanowski's divorce became final in August of 1998. She was surer than ever that she and Mick had a life ahead of them. The day ended in tears and emotional bleakness when Mick chose that special day to tell her he was moving back in with Leann. "I was crying. It hurt. But I was supportive. I know how tough divorces can be … Divorce was a very hard decision for him. Hannah was the most important thing in the world to him. He didn't want it to be bitter. He wanted to make sure he was doing the right thing." But by October, Mick and Leann were separated and he and the judge were
an item, again. In November, Mick moved back in with Leann. In January, he filed for divorce and moved back out. In March, back he moved, home to Leann and Hannah, "and he never left her, again." This time, Chrzanowski took the stuff he left at her house—some clothes, his toothbrush, his shaver and the like
—and gave it to him in a garbage bag.
Somehow, each time he left her for his wife, even on the day her divorce became final, Chrzanowski forgave him. In June, they resumed their sexual relationship and would continue to meet three times a week for the rest of Leann's life.
Chrzanowski was willing to forgive him everything and anything. Except … except that the last time Mick moved back with his wife, and the judge, after a brief stint of restraint, decided to resume their sexual relationship, she made him promise he was no longer having sex with Leann. She could tolerate anything but that. And so Mick had promised, and promised, and promised. Whenever it came up, in those post-coital moments or otherwise, Mick would continue to deny it. "He said, 'If you were a fly on the wall, you would know there is nothing between us.'"
I'll stop seeing you if I find out, she told him again and again. That's my bottom line. Do what you have to for Hannah, but I cannot and will not stand for you having sex with both of us.
"If you had known Leann was pregnant, would you have stayed in the relationship?" asked Townsend.
"No. I didn't think anything was occurring. Yes, he might have slept in the same bed with her. But I didn't think there were any relations."
The last night Mick and the judge had sex, the night before Leann was killed
—"We had relations and he told me he loved me"—Mick told Chrzanowski he'd been out with Leann and her parents. He didn't tell her they'd been celebrating her pregnancy.
*
After an hour and a half under direct examination, Chrzanowski is questioned for half an hour by Legghio. He finishes the portrait begun by Townsend of an
altogether more human Mick Fletcher than the headlines have let on. Weak? Sure. Torn between two woman? Certainly. A womanizer? Plenty of evidence there. But all in all a pretty charming guy to be accused of shooting his wife behind the ear after he has sex with her, and while she is pregnant.
The afternoon session is anticlimactic. Chrzanowski says she even now doesn't regard Mick as manipulative. He hadn't talked her into her divorce—"I got divorced because my marriage was bad and I needed a divorce"; he had genuine love for his daughter—"he was a very adoring father, he babysat for her every Saturday when they were separated, he always talked about how he'd played with her and helped her read"; and he had concern for his wife—"he always moved back for the holidays and said he didn't want to hurt Leann"; and, while Mick continued to have sex with Susan after he went back to Leann at Easter of 1999, he never sent the judge another card, letter or e-mail after his last attempt at reconciliation.
Mick even admitted to her in March, just before the last time he'd move home, that he loved Leann and needed to give his marriage one last chance.
Their last bout of intimacy, which began in June, was initiated by the judge. She had begun dating someone else, it had gone badly, and, desperate, she had turned to Mick for advice. She got that, and more.
At 2:20 p.m., Chrzanowski is excused. The next day, she will be back in court—her own.
During recess, one of the friends of the Misener clan asks a reporter: "What did Fletcher ever see in her? Leann was ten times prettier than her. I thought she was supposed to be beautiful? She ain't so hot. Leann? She was enchanting. Sexy? Whoa! I hope there's a bunch of black guys in prison who think he's a pretty white boy."