"The No. 1 rule for everybody is one spelled out by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle through the mouth of Sherlock Holmes. 'You cannot advance theories before knowing facts.' If you create a theory, you fall into the trap of trying to fit the facts to your theory."
—Dr. Ljubisa Dragovic, discussing the philosophy behind his approach to his work during an interview with a reporter more than a month after Michael Fletcher was sentenced to life in
prison.
Did Michael Fletcher kill Leann Fletcher? A jury said he did. A judge agreed and sentenced him to life in prison. She will do all she can to make sure he leaves jail only when he's dead and ready for burial.
There certainly is room for doubt, though, beginning with jury members, themselves. They deliberated for four days, then brought in a verdict of second- degree murder, a verdict that stunned everyone, since the prosecution's whole case and theory of events was that this was a carefully orchestrated, planned and executed murder, a murder that may have taken months to carry out.
Fletcher had been too nice and too sweet in those months between the time that he moved back into the house at Easter of 1999 and when Leann died on August 16. His seeming change in attitude wasn't a change at all, but part of the plan.
When Mick bought a card the morning of the shooting and inscribed words of love and affection to his newly pregnant wife, they were just more of the alibi being put into her hands and into place.
When he took her to the shooting range, the intent was clear, said Greg Townsend. It wasn't to have Leann Fletcher practice her shooting, it was to get gunpowder on her hands, corroboration for a claim he'd make later in the day that she'd shot herself.
This was, all sides agreed going into the trial, during the trial and after the trial, either first-degree murder or it wasn't murder at all.
Until that Thursday afternoon when the jury walked back into Judge
Cooper's courtroom and jury foreman Rob Jensen pronounced Mick Fletcher guilty of second-degree murder.
To this day, the police, the prosecution, Judge Cooper and the extended Misener family are sure that an evil, calculating cold-blooded murderer got trapped by his own arrogance and is now where he belongs, in jail, serving a life term. Gloria Misener told him at his sentencing that she hoped they'd find him dead on his jail cell floor one day, naked from the waist down.
Mick Fletcher, in their eyes, is so evil that he can engage in the act of sex, get an erection and reach ejaculation knowing all the while that the instant he is done, that when his sperm is fresh in her vagina, inches away from the nearly microscopic little baby that is attached to Leann's uterus, he is going to pick up his Smith & Wesson and shoot her in the head, killing, in the most bloody and violent way possible, this woman he is joined to now.
That is a nasty, nasty image, and one that Townsend wanted to plant clearly in the jury's mind, even though it made the actual time-line that much more congested and gave that much more credibility to the defense claim that there wasn't enough time to have committed the murder.
But that's the creature Townsend is convinced he put away, and that's the creature he wanted the jury to see, not the handsome guy with the sexy spit curl dangling over his forehead sitting there in front of them.
Though they brought in a murder verdict, the jury itself seemed hardly sure of its work. The week after the trial, court officials turned over their court-and jury room to the producers of "20/20 Downtown",—getting the kind of cooperation their print brethren could never receive—and the ten jurors who chose to participate in a filmed post-mortem.
What they told "20/20" was so startling that the show's producers decided to forgo the hours of gavel-to-gavel footage they'd shot of the trial, decided to forgo the forensic evidence, decided to forgo Judge Cooper's dramatic condemnation of Fletcher at his sentencing, and show, instead, for virtually the entire hour of the show which ran on November 20, 2000, reenactments of the jury process.
It shocked the Fletchers, who feared the show would portray their son as a
murdering devil.
It shocked the Miseners, who expected the same.
It caused Brian Legghio to feel like vomiting and left him depressed. It left Greg Townsend muttering that all the producers wanted was entertainment value and not truth.
What "20/20" presented was extremely sympathetic to Mick Fletcher. If your only knowledge of the case was gleaned from watching that show, you couldn't have reached any other conclusion than this: Mick Fletcher got railroaded.
The jury, en masse, sitting together in front of reporter Elizabeth Vargas, said that they found the evidence weak; they thought the prosecution's witnesses were incompetent, unreliable, or, worse, lying. They also dismissed the prosecution's theory of motive as preposterous; and they agreed with Legghio that Leann Fletcher couldn't possibly have been shot where the prosecution said she was, on her knees, while her head was bent down over the floor, after having sex with her husband.
"Reasonable doubt." Everyone who has ever watched TV, seen movies or read books has heard that term. Almost no laymen really know for sure what it means. But to most people, if you said a jury didn't believe the prosecution witnesses, didn't believe the forensic evidence against the accused, didn't believe the motive and didn't think the deceased was shot where the prosecution said she was shot—well, if that doesn't seem to be at least reasonable doubt, what is?
Do I think Mick Fletcher is innocent? When the trial began, I only knew what I'd read in the papers. I figured he'd done it. As the trial unfolded and the prosecution's evidence seemed so assailable, I began to have doubts. Lots of them, at least a reasonable amount. I don't know if Mick murdered Leann. He's the only one in the world who does know. He may very well have killed his wife. But I do think that with all those doubts the jury admitted to, and which are covered more in depth in the chapter in this book on the deliberations, they were obligated to return a not guilty verdict.
After discussing the case at length at Rob Jensen's home after the trial, I thought their actions were egregious, and I was convinced of it after watching
"20/20".
The jury decided Leann had been shot on the bed, a scenario Legghio never had a chance to argue against. They thought they could prove a negative, deciding that it was impossible for Leann to have killed herself, even though their final proof for that theory was an embarrassment of illogic and bad science. The jurors put tape on the floor of the jury room to reconstruct the Fletcher's bedroom. Then, pretending to be on a bed that wasn't there, holding the actual murder weapon while only pretending to fire it, they couldn't get the gun to land where it should. Even a prosecution witness, Sgt. William Harvey of the Oakland County Sheriff's Department, had answered a question from Townsend about where the gun likely would go if fired by someone on the bed by saying he agreed it was unlikely the gun could have ended up where it did, but added: "Now there are obvious variables. It could have bounced on carpeting or
whatever, but I would expect it to be in this general vicinity."
The Fletcher bedroom was extremely cramped, a small room made all the smaller by the bed, a chest, a computer stand, a computer tower and the like. Pretending to fire a gun, pretending to give it a recoil, pretending to be shot, pretending to fall from a bed that isn't there, pretending to be in a differently configured room that was cluttered with real objects—doing all of that and then sending someone to jail for life because of the way the gun bounced? Preposterous.
The last holdout wanted one more play death. When the gun landed in the wrong spot again, she voted to convict. And what if, on that trial, the gun had taken a fluke bounce and rolled the opposite way? That fluke roll would have made Fletcher innocent?
The play-acting struck both MacDonell and Wentling as absurd. Both have been around firearms their whole careers; one wrote the book on blood evidence for the FBI and the other is a former Pennsylvania state cop who was a firearms examiner for 24 years. Both say there is no scientific validity in the game of pretend the jury played.
What the jury tried to do was fulfill another of Sherlock Holmes's maxims. Eliminate the impossible and what you have left, no matter how unlikely, is what
happened. They decided it was impossible Leann could have accidentally shot herself, therefore Mick had done it. Professor MacDonell, in an interview for this book, said he had been involved in a case of a rifle shooting under similar circumstances—the weapon slipped in someone's hand and the thumb discharged it with disastrous results—and that in any event, just because something was highly unlikely was proof of nothing. There is a one-in-two- billion chance, he said, of a sperm achieving its goal, and yet we are all testament to the reality that unlikely events can and do occur.
There are two extremely unlikely chains of events that might have happened in the Fletcher house on August 16, 1999. Neither is remotely likely. One of them happened.
Scenario A: A woman who is afraid of guns, who just got back from her first-ever visit to the gun range, decides to pick up the gun when her husband is out of the room. For some stupid reason her thumb—her thumb? Of all things?
—ends up on the trigger, somehow exerting the pressure needed to pull it, and she accidentally shoots herself in the head, just at the instant her husband—an unfaithful husband, by the way, whose lover is going to be enraged when she finds out his wife is pregnant—happens to be out of the room.
Come on. What are the chances? The very first time she ever goes to the gun range she just happens to get shot later? Why would she pick up the gun? Why would her thumb end up on the trigger? How could blood, any blood, end up in the drain trap? That all this could happen and the husband be innocent is preposterous.
Scenario B: A man with absolutely no history of violence, who has been known all his life for walking away from fights—heck, he even drives his wife nuts when he won't argue with her—who has never so much as slapped his wife during all their troubles and separations, is suddenly going to turn into a murderer? A cold-blooded, premeditated murderer?
So, let's see, he hatches a plan to take his wife to the gun range so she'll get gunpowder residue on her hands. Then, to get her back to the house where he can kill her, instead of going where they're supposed to go, which is to her parents', he asks her if she wants to have a quickie. And so they race home. But
having set up this elaborate plan, having got the baby over to the in-laws', having got gunpowder on her hands, having lured her back to the house where he's going to shoot her within minutes, instead of killing her right then and there, he waits until she's done going to the bathroom.
Never mind that there isn't a woman in North America who goes to the bathroom without washing her hands and never mind she's in a tiny bathroom just across the hall and he surely hears the faucet running, he decides to go ahead with it anyway? I mean, if the reason behind all the plans made that day was to get gunpowder on her hands, once she washes them, wouldn't you go to plan B: killing her another day?
What else? Oh, yeah, he's got this incriminating book on crime-scene evidence, which sets off alarms to the cops, but if he's so busy studying crime- scene evidence, why shoot her from 12 inches or whatever when he can just put the gun to her head and kill her without leaving any tell-tale stippling?
And, oh, yes, from the time they get home from the gun range till the time the 911 call is made, there's only going to be eight or ten minutes, but he decides to pack as much as possible into her last day by having sex before murder. Even though the whole point of killing his wife is to keep the judge from finding out he's having sex with his wife, his plan for getting away with it is to set up a fake death scene that involves getting ready for sex with his half-naked wife? He's going to cover up his sexual relationship with his wife by calling 911 and saying they were about to have sex when the gun went off?
There's more. Everyone agrees that a killing machine like a Smith & Wesson
.45 creates a cloud of high-velocity blood mist, a fast blowback aerosol of minute blood particles flying through the air. And even though he shoots her at close range, presumably getting blowback blood mist all over his hands, his shirt, just about everywhere, by the time the 911 ambulance arrives four minutes later—so quickly, in fact, that Leann, mortally wounded, still has electric heart palpitations, proof she has just been shot—Fletcher doesn't have any blood on him, nothing visible in his hair, on his face, anywhere that is seen by any of a series of cops who interrogate him over the next few hours.
He's on the phone for four minutes to the 911 operator, so if he cleaned up,
he had to do it before calling, but after pulling the trigger. He shoots her, he phonies up the death scene—including, inexplicably, dragging or pushing her so that all of one foot and part of another are under the bed—he washes all trace of this cloud of blood mist off his arms, face, hands, even hair, then he calls 911 and talks to them for four minutes. And when the ambulance arrives Leann's heart is still beating.
Preposterous? Absolutely.
Two preposterous scenarios. Yet, one of them was probably real. Is it likely Leann shot herself? Of course not.
But is the alternative any more likely? No.
The trouble with this case is, you can't believe anything. There are two very strange chains of events. Maybe Mick is an unbelievably cold-blooded psychotic; maybe this otherwise brilliant man really did plan this murder for months, pretending to be the loving husband to throw everybody off the scent, but was so stupid that the best plot he could come up with was to kill her in such suspicious circumstances (going to the gun range first, being alone with her in the house later) that he would be the first, obvious and only suspect.
Maybe Leann, in a hurry to have sex and then go get her daughter, starts grabbing a bunch of the gun stuff off the bed, grabs the gun and clip in one hand, goes to stand, slips, tries to brace herself, her thumb hits the trigger, BLAM!
The Miseners all say it is impossible Leann could ever have touched the gun under any circumstance, for any reason. Therefore, Mick had to have touched it, and fired it. But she'd fired it numerous times just minutes earlier. Maybe, despite its awesome power, having held it and fired it and hit a target, it no longer seemed so fearful. Maybe it was something she would, and did, pick up. And doing so killed her.
The jury agreed with the Miseners, even though they disagreed with nearly every element of the prosecution. And so they convicted him.
On the "20/20" show, at least one of them was already wracked with doubt that they had done the right thing. Another said he imagined that everyone on the jury had doubts, that you'd have to, given the weakness of the evidence.
As for me, I keep coming back to motive. It isn't necessary, legally, to prove
motive, but I can't believe that if this was a murder, it happened without one. To believe the prosecution's final motive, the one it used in the trial, you have to believe that Fletcher's love for Judge Chrzanowski was so strong, that when he found out his wife was pregnant, in order to keep the judge from finding out, he hatched a remarkably stupid plot to kill her. The judge's love was that important to him. And yet, this is the same judge, who divorced her husband and the same Mick Fletcher who moved back home to his wife the very day the divorce was final. The same judge and the same Fletcher who hadn't exchanged a single e- mail, or card, or poem—of all the e-mails, cards and poems detectives unearthed
—in the last four months of their relationship.
Like everything else in this case, the motive doesn't add up. One is left—if Mick did it—with a huge, seemingly unanswerable why?
*
One thing I have no doubt of is that nearly everyone seems to have violated the No. 1 rule as promulgated by Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Ljubisa Dragovic.
Brian Legghio said after the verdict was announced that this case had reasonable doubt written all over it. The jurors disagreed.
For sure, they and I agree, it had rush-to-judgment written on it, and "fitting facts to theory." The judgment may have been correct—that Fletcher killed his wife in cold blood—but I'd feel a lot better about it if the final judgment hadn't had so many snap judgments along the way. Reading the police reports and my subsequent interviews with everyone involved, it's striking how many people say they know "instantly," "right away," "as soon as," or some such variation, exactly what happened.
Gloria Misener made a rush to judgment when she said said, "Oh my God, Jack, he shot her," the moment the Troy police said there'd been a shooting. Maybe that was a cruel alignment of fate, too. When her daughter had told her she was going shooting, Gloria joked that she hoped Mick hadn't taken out another life-insurance policy on her. (As it turned out, they didn't have any policy on Leann.) But perhaps the thought had been planted, and when Troy
police told her there'd been a shooting, out it popped.
Gloria said in an interview for this book: "We knew from the minute the police came exactly what happened." But of course she didn't know. Until she got to the police station, she thought the shooting had happened at the firing range. She doesn't come from a gun family. She didn't know if they can fire easily or not. She didn't know if her daughter had been holding it and stumbled and fell in front of a dozen witnesses. She didn't know if it had happened at the range. She hadn't been told any of the particulars by Cleyman or Hendricks. The state police investigators hadn't even gotten to the scene and begun piecing the bloody puzzle together. How much did her assertion sway police?
The night before, they had gone out to dinner to celebrate the new baby her daughter was going to have with Mick. That morning they took Hannah to babysit. If you thought your daughter's husband was capable of planning her murder, would you have been celebrating that they were having another child just the night before? If you thought him capable of pulling that trigger, would you casually agree to babysit while they went to the gun range? But when you're told there's been a shooting, the first thought is that it's murder, and a planned murder at that?
But Gloria Misener is entitled to make all the rushes to judgment she wants.
What of the police? Welch said Gloria's statement that the son-of-a-bitch did it told him he was on the right track. Cleyman appalled the jury when he told them on the witness stand that he was "stone-cold certain" Mick was a murderer, when he hadn't been to the murder scene and based it on little more than seeing Mick walk into jail, and having seen a History Channel show on the Kennedys a couple of nights earlier.
His boss, Chief Niedermeier, says events proved Cleyman right and that his certainty on August 16 was nothing more than the good instincts a good cop cultivates over the years. But did his seemingly premature leap to "stone-cold" certainty, combined with Gloria Misener's anger and self-assurance of her own at the police station aim him and other cops toward fitting fact to theory?
Officer Barner wasn't a homicide investigator. Relatively new to police work, he was by all accounts a crackerjack undercover cop, whose forte was
casing and arresting B&E punks. He heard the Hazelwood call on his police radio and zipped to the scene in case he was needed. He wasn't. He was at the site a minute or two, then left. He told himself and others that it looked like a phonied-up crime scene and the husband did it. "I remember thinking at the time, and I told the other crew member, 'This guy just killed his wife.' That was my initial impression," Barner, who eventually arrested Fletcher, would say a year later. Was he right? Maybe. Did he have any experience or knowledge base to arrive at his quick conclusion? No. Was it a rushed judgment? Of course.
Dennis Welch got to the scene and thought something was fishy because Fletcher didn't have much blood on him, and if it had been his own wife, "I'd have been covered with blood."
Larry Hendricks, in an interview after the trial, said: "The scene seemed staged to us." This quick judgment from a cop heading up his first homicide investigation, who never even saw the body at the scene. He thought the gun should have kicked farther away from the body, that everything looked "too neat." Fair enough. Good police instincts? Possibly. Still, the state police were hours away from the real nuts-and-bolts stuff of measuring bloodspatter and trying to figure out what had happened and where.
Welch, Hendricks and Cleyman may have been right all along. But the fact remains they come from a small force where murders are rare and the kind of crime-scene tampering they were sure had happened is a once-or twice-a-career event you don't get any practice for. A classic example? Hendricks is going to head up the investigation, and he's at the Hazel Park police station just four blocks from the murder scene. So why in the world would they cart the body off before he got there? He was pulling up when the body was coming down the sidewalk. Couldn't they have let Leann lie there a few minutes more, till the lead investigator could at least survey the scene?
And that begs the question, of course, of why none of them, if they were so sure they were dealing with foul play, would do the basic next step of ordering that Leann's hands be bagged so as to leave any evidence such as gunpowder or blood mist inviolate.
Officer Lehman, the first cop at the scene, was another to jump to
conclusions. Was he right? Perhaps. But he jumped, nonetheless. When he arrived, he saw Mick Fletcher standing outside the house, smoking a cigarette, holding a cell phone. His written report later that day emphasized Fletcher's relative calmness, and he was used as a prosecution witness to paint an entirely different picture of Mick than came across on the 911 tapes.
And, yet, a reading of the transcript of that tape gives another perfectly plausible reason for Mick to be out on the lawn. Lehman saw him as an actor who was calmly smoking a cigarette and seemed not very agitated. But from the defense point of view, he has been warned repeatedly by the 911 operator not to touch anything at the scene. And he'd been asked several times to please try and calm down:
"Like I said, don't touch anything in the room, okay?"
"I'm not. I can't even be in there." Then, "there's a cop here, now."
The cop is Lehman. Is Fletcher calm? Or is he so freaked out by what's in the house that he can't even be there? Is he doing what a cigarette smoker does in times of stress—smoking? Has he been able to follow the dispatcher's advice and calm down?
Two ways to look at it. The cops' way was to see it as evidence of duplicity.
Fitting fact to theory? After Fletcher had been interviewed off and on for more than two hours, he was on the way out of the station with his attorney. As Cleyman escorted him to the door, he told Fletcher he had a beautiful daughter. Fletcher responded by saying that Hannah was his angel, his life. Cleyman brought up Hannah, and Mick answered. Later, Cleyman would say his brief response was further proof of his guilt because he hadn't mentioned his wife, either. But he'd just spent two hours talking about his wife, their activities together that day.
"They thought they'd figured it out in hours," said Legghio. "It goes back to the old argument of investigation by inclusion. That which builds a case gets included in the case. That which doesn't seem to fit or doesn't fly or doesn't bolster the case gets excluded."
I think the Hazel Park cops' reaction to the day's events were heart-felt, honest and industrious. Wentling, a retired cop who has spent the preponderance of his time in the witness box over the years testifying on the behalf of prosecutors, is far harsher. He says that not only did the Hazel Park police and state police fit their facts to their theory, they were incompetent to boot. However you look at it, clearly Sherlock's maxim was violated repeatedly on August 16, 1999.
*
Legghio used the word "systemic" several times in his closing arguments. The system may very well have been right, but there's no question that the system made a concerted, organized effort, steamrolling along in one straight direction from the first minutes at the scene right through the adoption proceedings for Hannah.
It involved police—"I think it was all just part of the natural antipathy that exists between police and attorneys; nothing makes a cop happier than getting a lawyer," Legghio said after the trial—the medical examiner, the prosecutor, judges and child-welfare officials. Cooper's harsh sentence and faith in Mick's guilt stemmed from David Woodford's testimony about blood in the drain trap and a word she said he used to describe it. She said in an interview for this book that the convincing evidence for her that Fletcher was guilty was Woodford's testimony that there had been "copious" amounts of blood in the sink and that there was none on the phone Mick used to call 911. Only a guilty man washes his hands before calling 911.
During sentencing, Cooper said: "I believe what Mr. Woodford testified to was that there was copious amounts of blood in the trap of the sink … his word was—I wrote it down—'copious.'"
Except Woodford never said it. Neither my notes of the trial, the official transcript nor the original computer discs of Cooper's former court reporter, Karen Hollen, show Woodford using the word. No actual blood was found. The gunk in the drain trap tested positive for the presence of blood but whatever was there was too tiny even to be tested for a DNA profile, and that's tiny, indeed.
Woodford implied, in his words on the stand, that the presence of any blood in the trap must have meant "a fair amount" was there before the last person to use the sink turned on the water. Later he amended it to "a significant amount."
The jury didn't believe a word Woodford said. Professor MacDonell said during the trial that the tests for blood are so sophisticated that one drop in a tub full of water would cause a positive result, and to him its presence in the trap wasn't significant. Trace amounts of blood could linger there depending on how much water was run through. (For this book, he went further, saying that drawing meaningful conclusions from a presumptive test for blood "is ridiculous." Moreover, he said, Woodford was so clearly incompetent on the subject of bloodstain evidence that he shouldn't even be allowed to testify at trials.)
But Cooper discounted MacDonell and gave more power to Woodford's testimony than even Woodford meant. She sentenced Fletcher with the picture of copious amounts of blood in the sink. Systemic? (And then there's Woodford's infamous, flustered, red-faced refusal to testify off defense photos moments after willingly drawing conclusions from his own photographic blow-ups for the prosecution.)
Or how about the system seeming to change its view about whether there was blood on Fletcher, and what it meant? At his arraignment in August and his pre-trial hearing in September, the prosecution said the obvious blood mist on his shirt was conclusive proof of his guilt, that the blood could only have gotten there if he was inches away from Leann's head when she was shot. But the shirt ended up having so little blood, if any, that it couldn't even be tested for DNA. So, at the trial, the prosecution's theory was that a lack of blood on Fletcher was proof of his guilt—one, he must have washed it off, and, two, in any event, if he wasn't guilty he would have cradled his dead wife and got blood all over himself.
Or the selective use of witnesses at trial? Officer Lehman testified that when he arrived at the scene, Fletcher was fairly calm. It was, said Townsend, a sharp contrast to the Fletcher on the phone. But the reports Officers Welch and Hamel filled out that day show a hysterical Mick Fletcher, even hours after the
shooting. Welch wrote that he had to help Fletcher walk, that he kept collapsing to the ground and breaking out in sobs. Maybe it was all the work of a gifted actor, but there was nothing calm about it.
*
Fletcher had a presumption of innocence up until the moment the jury voted 12– 0 for his guilt. But the presumption was theoretical, not practical.
For example, when it came time at his arraignment to set bail, the prosecution argued against it, claiming he was a flight risk, and presented evidence that by then the cops and prosecutors knew was false. Or should have known.
Upon Barner's arrival as part of a surveillance team to Fletcher's parents' house in Marysville—to keep an eye on Fletcher while an arrest warrant was being readied—he saw a fifth-wheel trailer being unloaded … or loaded. He couldn't tell in the dark. Of course his first thought was that this guy might be getting ready to make a run for it. But within seconds he had run the plate through Lansing and got back the answer that the vehicle was registered to another Fletcher, one who lived in Holland, who was in his 60s.
In any event, how stupid would you have to be to flee police in a huge, oversized fifth wheel that goes about 60 m.p.h. top end and has your name, "FLETCHER," printed in big letters across the back of the trailer? Especially when there's a Corvette sitting in the garage.
No, the police and the prosecutors knew by then the vehicle was not evidence of anything whatsoever, yet they told Hazel Park Judge Keith Hunt that the fifth- wheel showed Mick to be a flight risk, the judge agreed and put Mick in jail without bail. "What was he going to do with a trailer? Load up his furniture and flee?" said Legghio after the trial. "It was disingenuous. Clearly, clearly disingenuous," said Legghio.
If he committed the crime, you might argue, who cares if the system cheated to keep him off the streets? Still, we pretend to take the presumption of innocence very seriously in this country. At his arraignment, legally, Fletcher was still an innocent man. Yet, on that silly evidence, he was deemed a flight
risk and worthy only of jail.
*
As for the good Dr. Dragovic, no one ever questioned his moral authority or integrity. He is brilliant and dedicated, but even he acknowledges that his zeal in the past to see homicide where co-workers saw accident or ambiguity—second- guessing them, looking over their shoulders and even asking to redo their work
—once made him extremely unpopular when he was an assistant medical examiner in Wayne County.
Yes, he was right in some of those cases. He was wrong in others, too. Repeatedly, Oakland County jurors said he was wrong in judging the assisted- suicide cases of Dr. Kevorkian as murder, and even his supporters wondered if Dragovic had crossed the line into advocacy in his battles with "Dr. Death."
Legghio says a nearly instantaneous judgment of homicide in the Leann Fletcher case—before Dragovic knew the caliber of the weapon and the type of gunpowder, both of which affect stippling patterns, or whether Leann was right- handed or in need of glasses, factors that might be relevant—shows the doctor violated his favorite saying, too. And it was Dragovic, himself, in an interview for this book, who said it was clear to him what had happened as soon as Leann's body was wheeled in to him for the autopsy. "Right then and there it was clear," he said. Right then and there, before she'd been cleaned up, before he'd done any of the work that goes into an autopsy. Another violation of Holmes's maxim?
Dragovic is convinced Fletcher is a murderer, though even he would probably admit he's never erred on the side of caution when it comes to seeing evil in the corpses that lie on his table. No one has ever accused him of seeing accidental death when there's been murder. He has, over the years, been accused of seeing murder where there wasn't.
*
If Mick Fletcher killed his wife, he's where he deserves to be. And he is as evil a character as ever came through the Oakland County courts.
If Leann died as a result of some horrible, implausible, but real accident, then he's the unluckiest man on the face of the earth. Because if that's the way it happened, then he lost his wife—yes, he was cheating on her, but he also left a beautiful, powerful judge who made far more money than he did to take one last stab at making his marriage work—he lost his beloved child, he lost his unborn second child and he lost his freedom, likely forever, for something that was the fault of the Fates.
There are very intelligent people, well meaning, who are sure Mick Fletcher got what he deserved. There are others, equally intelligent, equally well meaning, who are sure an innocent man sits in jail, likely forever.
One other thing that happened that day: Two families were tragically and horribly changed forever. The Miseners lost their most beloved member, a combination of sunshine and angel who touched everyone she came into contact with. The Fletchers lost a daughter-in-law they loved, they lost their son, handsome and brilliant, and they lost their granddaughter.
Hannah, of course, is the biggest loser of all. She lost her mother, her father and two of her grandparents, and one wonders how she'll ever recover.