The Red Parts

by Maggie Nelson

  Having the case reopened 36 years later—is like losing her not once—but twice, my grandfather wrote in his terse, 208-word “victim’s impact” statement, addressed “To whom it may concern,” which Hiller read aloud at Leiterman’s sentencing on August 30, 2005, on which day Leiterman was sentenced to life in prison, without possibility of parole.

  I feel no need to—on my part, to offer an apology or any statement of remorse to the Mixer family, Leiterman said on this day, breaking his long silence. And, as Dr. Mixer mentioned in his letter, to have to live through this trial again last July and hear all that ghastly testimony and view all those ghastly photos. What a horrible feeling. But, I also want to say that I’m innocent of this crime and I’m going to do everything I can within this jurisdictional system to appeal my conviction. And, I guess that’s all.

  Someday, when this is all over, I’d love to sit down with you and your family and spin out this whole crazy web, Schroeder had told me at the start. But despite hours of hard work on the part of over a hundred people from various agencies (the Violent Crimes Unit out of Ypsilanti, the Michigan State Police, the Major Case Team within the Livingston and Washtenaw Narcotics Enforcement Team, and so on), the police and prosecution were eventually unable to discover any links between Leiterman, Ruelas, and Jane. The defense raked the Lansing lab over the coals, but there was never any convincing evidence of lab error or contamination. No one has the faintest idea how the blood of four-year-old “Johnny” got dripped onto the back of Jane’s left hand. Leiterman will most likely sit in prison for the rest of his life claiming he never knew Jane, never laid a hand on her, and has no clue how “a mother lode” of his DNA could have gotten all over her pantyhose. As of July 11, 2006, his first appeal has been denied. The whole crazy web will never get spun.

  A few weeks after the sentencing, my grandfather finds himself up late watching a “cold case” TV show. The episode has to do with a recent string of murders in Texas. After the show he calls my mother to express concern that maybe this man from Texas actually killed Jane, maybe Leiterman was the wrong guy after all. He says he wants to talk to Schroeder about it; my mother gently discourages him from doing so.

  The day after Deadly Ride airs in November 2005, I get an e-mail from one of my father’s brothers, a man I do not know if I would recognize if he were sitting right here in my living room. Hopefully, this has given at least some closure to the Mixer family, he writes. Wish we had some more closure to Bruce’s death. A guess by the doctor as to the cause of death hasn’t been much to go on. A guess by the doctor? I write back immediately and ask if there was some kind of confusion about my father’s death that I don’t know about. I never hear back.

  When I first heard the term “open murder”—the charge upon which Leiterman was originally detained, and which the jury converted to “first-degree”—I did not understand what it meant. I thought I was mishearing the police. But now I know that “open murder” is an intentionally fuzzy charge. It means, essentially, murder without a story.

  Even if Leiterman were to “tell all”—assuming he “knows all,” whatever that might mean, or that he hasn’t eternally repressed whatever it is that he knows—“open murder” would probably remain, for me, the more accurate charge. The incoherence of the act, the suffering it caused—these things are not negotiable.

  His lawyer was wrong, however, to term the trial a disservice.

  The Hand of God

  IN MARCH 2005, about halfway between Schroeder’s November call and Leiterman’s July trial, I decide to go to Michigan to do a reading for Jane at a bookstore in Ann Arbor. I fly out to Detroit on a bitterly cold morning, rent a car at the airport, and find a cheap motel nearby to stay the night.

  After checking into the motel I find I don’t know quite what to do with my day. Michigan feels, as it has always felt to me, claustrophobic and haunted. Though I’ve only been in the state for two hours I already have the urge to flee. To staple myself into the day I call Schroeder and make a plan to meet him at the Ypsilanti state police post in the afternoon, then to have dinner with him in Ann Arbor before the reading.

  I spend the first part of the morning tooling around U of M in my rental car, watching undergraduates swaddled in parkas scurry around the campus. I drive past the impressive, stone Law Quad, where Jane lived at the time of her death, and where my father also once lived. He graduated from the U of M law school in 1968, just a few months before Jane started. I cannot easily imagine him here, but I know his ghost must walk here also.

  Then, without really thinking about what I’m doing, I find myself winding out of town on Route 12, the road that leads to Denton Cemetery.

  I had been to this spot once before, about three years earlier, while doing research for Jane. That visit was part of a painful but momentous trip I took with my mother, during which we traced the path of Jane’s final hours to the best of our—or my—knowledge. Going to Denton Cemetery with her then made sense. It felt like a service, to be able to accompany her to a place she’d always wondered about but was too afraid to visit on her own.

  Driving down the gray highway now I remember a creepy piece of fiction about the Michigan Murders I’d once found online, a poorly written horror story in which the female narrator and her boyfriend visit all the spots where the dead girls were found. At the last spot they visit together, the boyfriend reveals himself to be the killer, and murders her there. When I read this story I felt sick at the thought of someone visiting all these places to do research for a shoddy piece of writing about a set of murders that had nothing to do with her. Yet here I was, driving my rental car out to the same plot of earth, feeling very much the stranger.

  The last time I’d been out this way the cemetery was hard to find. There had been but one small, rusty, easy-to-miss metal sign. This time I’m surprised to find they’ve “done work” on the place. There are new, clean, and clear signs from the main road. The old chain-link fence, the one that Nancy Grow had been ashamed to pass through, and which my mother and I had once passed through together, has been replaced.

  On the gravel road leading to the cemetery entrance I get caught behind a garbage truck making lengthy starts and stops all the way down the street. The two garbagemen look back at me suspiciously for the rest of their ride after I park my car, get out, and stand motionless by the new fence, staring at the muddy ground.

  It had been sunny and pastoral, the air buzzing with summer insects, when I was here with my mother. Now it’s overcast and freezing, and I feel like a trespasser. A Peeping Tom, with nothing to see.

  I couldn’t say—I still can’t say—what this spot means to me, empty as it is. To me alone, without my mother, without the explanatory shelter of a “family story.” I know that Schroeder has also come out here alone on several occasions—to ponder, as a detective, what might have happened to Jane, but also, I suspect, for other reasons, reasons that may remain as unfathomable to him as my own do to me.

  One thing feels clear enough, however. The thought of dragging a body out of a car and abandoning it in this frigid, eerie place strikes me as exceptionally cruel. I stay just long enough to have this revelation, then get back in the car and drive to meet Schroeder at his post.

  A cop at the desk alerts Schroeder to my arrival over the intercom. He is downstairs in a meeting, and I hear him say playfully, We’re almost done down here, so don’t let her out—lock the door behind her.

  As one might imagine, the Violent Crimes Unit at the state police post is the kind of place where you feel locked in just upon entering. For the half hour that I wait there, I listen to the cop at the desk take incoming calls, and chronicle an astonishing litany of abuses. Yeah, that’s an aggravated domestic right there, a felony because he had the gun, then, what? He pistol-whipped her for what? Four hours? Yeah, he’ll do some time, he has a history of domestic, and now we’ll add another domestic on top of that. OK, sounds good, catch you later. When I don’t feel like listening I wander over to the
wall-sized map of the state of Michigan, and mindlessly jot down the finer points of the state’s flora and fauna: state bird, ROBIN; state tree, WHITE PINE; state fish, BROOK TROUT; state soil, KALKASKA.

  Eventually Schroeder buzzes me in and takes me on a whirlwind tour of the building. Several cops in the hallways ask if I am “the sketch artist”—an identity that has never occurred to me before, but momentarily sounds appealing.

  One of the rooms on the tour is Schroeder’s office. Above his desk is a strip of photos of the Michigan Murder victims clipped from a ‘60s newspaper—the same strip I once had pinned over my desk in an attic apartment in Brooklyn, New York, many years ago. To the left of his desk is a high shelf, upon which sit several cardboard evidence boxes. It takes me a moment to realize that these are the evidence boxes from each of the Michigan Murder cases. The girls’ last names appear on the side of each box writ large in Magic Marker: FLESZAR. SCHELL. SKELTON. BASOM. KALOM. BEINEMAN.

  I don’t know whether to laugh or weep. It feels like the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the all-important, destructive, and sublime ark has been crated up, and a whistling janitor is wheeling it into an enormous warehouse of identical crates, unwittingly resubmerging its mystery. God only knows what these boxes hold—what “cellular deposits” yet to be decoded, what flakes of dried blood, what ensembles of clothing, what other arbitrary and wrenching mementos from these girls’ bodies and lives.

  The tour also includes a small room full of dented file cabinets which, Schroeder tells me, he punches whenever he gets angry at all the fucked-up things people do to one another. I can’t tell if this is a confession, a performance, or both.

  We take separate cars to Ann Arbor and meet up at a dark pub across the street from the bookstore where I’m supposed to read later. We each order hamburgers. Schroeder then tells me that during the span of his investigation of Jane’s case, he faced down many demons. He left a bad marriage, quit drinking, fell in love with someone new, and started paying attention to his health, which was seriously in trouble. He takes out his wallet and shows me pictures of his new girlfriend, a social worker named Carol, and her two kids, with whom he says he is having a fantastic time. He especially loves playing with them in the pool.

  For the past several years, he tells me, he has been using a photo of Jane as the screen saver on his computer. Most likely it was taken in France, when Jane was there as an exchange student. The picture came from a roll of film that the police found back in 1969 when they searched her room at the Law Quad. Detectives developed the film in the days immediately following her murder, then scoured the prints for clues. The prints yielded none, but eventually provided Schroeder with this glorious photo of Jane. He says he is glad to have a picture of her that differs so dramatically from the crime scene and autopsy photos in her file that he’s spent so much time with. He says he showed this photo to Leiterman during his interrogation, in the hopes of eliciting a breakdown. No breakdown occurred, but Schroeder swears that Leiterman appeared shaken.

  He says that he doesn’t want to spook me, but he wants me to know that on more than one occasion, Jane’s ghost has come to him in the middle of the night. He has heard her voice, clearly. He believes that her ghost has come back to transform—even to save—his life, in addition to guiding his investigation. In fact, he believes that all matters related to Jane’s case—including my book, and our sitting here together, right now, at this sticky pub table—are being directed by “the hand of God.”

  I think back to an e-mail Schroeder once sent to my mother, which concluded: We work for you. Well, actually we always say we work for God (really, just ask me to show you the tattoo on my right arm), but I think you get the point.

  I listen to him and nod with interest as we eat our burgers, all the while feeling a little unnerved. I’m stuck on the image of the ghost of Jane—in her raincoat, her auburn hair held back by her baby-blue headband, her face stained with tracks of blood—whispering to this burly, ruddy-faced cop in the middle of the night. I’m tempted to reinforce my sanity by thinking that whatever voice of Jane’s he has heard or hears is whatever he needs to hear to spur him along, personally and professionally. But as he talks I am also remembering times, while working on Jane, particularly in the beginning, when I felt a presence with me, especially in my dreams—not something I would call a ghost per se, but certainly a presence, something that was very much “me” but also very much “not me.”

  I’m still not sure, however, who Schroeder’s Jane is, or who my Jane is, or what, if anything, they have to do with each other. Whoever or whatever they are, I can’t imagine they bear much resemblance to Jane, herself, at all.

  Once, after a reading from Jane, someone from the audience came up to me and said she thought it was cool that I’d changed my aunt’s name to Jane, so that she could become “Jane Doe,” plain Jane, an everywoman, a blank screen onto which one could project all one’s hopes and fears.

  I was interested in what this woman was saying, intellectually, but the idea of taking a person and making her into a blank slate horrified me. It seemed like another form of violence. I hadn’t changed Jane’s name, but nonetheless I went home wondering if I’d still committed some inchoate but grievous wrong.

  Shortly before the trial is set to begin, Schroeder will be hospitalized with a terrible ulcer, which will turn into a stomach-cancer scare. His superiors will take him off Jane’s case, citing his health troubles, but also saying that his “powers of objectivity” have come into question. My mother and I will be disappointed, but not surprised. When the trial is over, Schroeder will propose to Carol. They will invite us to the wedding, which will take place on the one-year anniversary of Leiterman’s conviction.

  But that’s all to come. For now Schroeder walks me from the restaurant to my reading, which he had considered attending, but declines after seeing the quiet crowd on folding chairs in the well-lit bookstore. It’s just as well. The reading leaves me feeling bizarrely emotional and exposed, as readings can sometimes do. Afterward, as I drive to my dark motel, I feel a familiar species of post-reading loneliness creeping in upon me, amplified by the eeriness of being in the land of Jane’s life and death.

  I get in bed and turn on the motel TV, hoping to fall asleep as quickly as possible and get out of Michigan first thing in the morning. Instead I find myself wide awake, sucked into a late-night episode of Law & Order. The principal story line involves a serial rapist whose trademark is strangulation; the women who have survived his attacks testify in court with reddish-purple rings around their necks, the bruises left over from the rapist’s cord.

  Photo #6:

  No face or body. Just a close-up shot of flesh, white flesh with a dark crease in it. It takes some time to recognize that this is a portrait of a neck, of Jane’s neck, after the stocking was cut out of it. This is the “the furrow is quite deep” photo Hiller had warned us about. In it Jane’s neck appears shaped like an hourglass, the compressed part in the middle unimaginably small, about as wide around as a toilet paper tube instead of a neck.

  This is about as far into the flesh as you can get. If you squeezed any further, you’d sever it.

  When I fall asleep, predictably, promptly, I have a nightmare. It is a recurring nightmare that starts off, as many nightmares do, as a beautiful dream. In this dream I am swimming in a gorgeous, powerful, blue and gold ocean. My mother is standing back at the shore. The waves start out small, but quickly grow in size and take me out to sea. When I look back to the shore, my mother is but a black dot. Then she is gone. I realize at once that she cannot help me, and that I will die this way.

  I know this dream well. Not only because it recurs, but because it is a restatement of a near-drowning episode from my childhood. My father had just died, and despite the fact that we were all in a state of shock, my mother and her husband decided that we should go ahead with a trip to Hawaii they’d planned months earlier. His six-year-old daughter from a previous marriage would
come with us and spend the whole trip blotchy and ailing from a mysterious allergic reaction that my mother and her husband insisted on linking to a pineapple pizza we all shared our first night on the island.

  One day on this excruciating trip we drove out to a remote black sand beach. Years of swimming in the Pacific had made me feel invincible, uncowed by any riptides Hawaiian waters might throw my way, and I swiftly charged into the water.

  After swimming for just a few minutes I looked back at the shore, and found that my new “family unit” appeared as nothing more than specks in the offing. Then, within what felt like seconds, I found myself crashing up against some large, jagged rocks at the far end of the cove. Each enormous wave knocked me down and pinned me there. I couldn’t get a breath. Looking down, I noticed that my legs were running with blood.

  Despite the chaos of this moment, it felt slow and elongated. And in it I realized, for the first time, that my father was dead. I also realized that my mother could not save me from dying—not now, not ever. I felt a calmness, heard a humming, and had the thought: So this is how it will end.

  I AWOKE FROM this nightmare into a freezing cold motel room: the heater had broken at some point during the night, and the fan was now blowing icy air into the room.

  At first I tried to keep warm under the crappy motel bedspread by thinking about the man I loved. At the time he was traveling in Europe, and was thus unreachable. I didn’t know it yet, but as I lay there, he was traveling with another woman. Does it matter now? I tried hard to feel his body wrapped tightly around mine.

  Next I tried to imagine everyone I had ever loved, and everyone who had ever loved me, wrapped around me. I tried to feel that I was the composite of all these people, instead of alone in a shitty motel room with a broken heater somewhere outside of Detroit, a few miles from where Jane’s body was dumped thirty-six years ago on a March night just like this one.