Chapter One
Murder Mind
We have every reason to believe this case is moving swiftly toward a
successful conclusion.
These were the words spoken by a detective from the Michigan State Police,
in a phone call to my mother, one afternoon in early November 2004. After
hanging up with the detective, my mother called me and repeated the
message.
His words stunned me. As she said them I watched the hallway of my
apartment tilt slightly downward, as if momentarily flirting with the idea
of becoming a funhouse.
His words had stunned her also. She received his call on her cell phone
while driving, and immediately had to pull over to the side of the dusty
road near her home in northern California to absorb their impact.
The case in question was that of the 1969 murder of her younger sister,
Jane Mixer, which had gone officially unsolved for the past thirty-five
years. The detective said he had been working on it feverishly for the
past five, but hadn’t wanted to call until an arrest was imminent. Which
it now was.
This news would have been shocking in and of itself, but its timing made
it uncanny.
For the past five years, I had also been working feverishly on my aunt’s
case, albeit from a different angle. I had been researching and writing a
poetry book about her life and death titled Jane: A Murder, which was just
about to be published. I had no idea that Jane’s case had been active; my
book was about a cold case abandoned by investigators long ago. It was
about how one might live – or, rather, how my family lived, how I lived
– under the shadow of the death of a family member who had clearly died
horribly and fearfully, but under circumstances that would always remain
unknown, unknowable.
When I first meet this detective – Detective-Sergeant Eric Schroeder – at
a preliminary hearing for the suspect, Gary Earl Leiterman, on January
14, 2005 – he will greet me with a bear hug, saying, I bet you thought
you were working on this alone all these years.
Indeed, I had.
I grew up knowing that my mother had a younger sister named Jane who had
been murdered, but that was about all I knew. I knew Jane had been
twenty-three when she died, and in her first year of law school at the
University of Michigan. I knew my mother was twenty-five at the time, and
recently married to my father. Neither my sister Emily nor I had yet been
born. We were born in northern California, where our parents moved in the
wake of Jane’s death – Emily in 1971, me in 1973.
I had the vague sense while growing up that the deaths of other girls were
somehow related to Jane’s murder, but I didn’t know how. Then one
afternoon, home alone, around thirteen, looking for a book in my mother’s
office, I spotted the spine of a book I’d never noticed before. Though
nearly out of sight and reach, the garish, tabloid lettering, which read
The Michigan Murders, stood out among the highbrow literary classics that
my mother read and taught. I got up on a chair to pull the squat paperback
down.
This simple act carried its own legacy of trepidation, as the first of the
many bones I broke as a child – in this case, a cracked elbow that
occasioned reconstructive surgery and weeks spent motionless in traction
– was the result of climbing a bookshelf in pursuit of a book. That
accident had happened in a bookstore in Sausalito, the harbor town outside
of San Francisco where I lived for the first few years of my life. I was
only two at the time, but I remember a brightly colored rabbit on the
book’s cover, and I remember wanting it desperately.
After this accident I began to have a recurring dream. It was a dream of
falling – or jumping – off the carport of our house in Sausalito onto
the driveway, and hence to my death. I must have been dreaming this dream
very young, threeish. In the dream a crowd of people come to look at my
body, which lies at the bottom of the driveway as if at the base of a
steep Greek amphitheater. It is difficult to remember the tone of the
dream now: I remember horror at my action, a sense of detachment, a deep
sadness, and some discomfort in watching my body be scrutinized as a
corpse.
The cover of The Michigan Murders depicted a faux-photograph of a Farrah
Fawcett-like model, half of her face peeling away to reveal an infrared
negative. Its coloring and graphics, along with the furtiveness I felt in
examining it, immediately brought to mind a certain issue of Playboy I had
spent a great deal of time studying as a child in my father’s bathroom – the
Valentine’s Day issue from 1980, featuring Suzanne Somers. I remember
that my father had liked Suzanne Somers very much.
I opened to the first page of The Michigan Murders and read: In a two-year
period, seven young women were murdered in Washtenaw County, some in so
brutal a fashion as to make the Boston Strangler look like a mercy killer.
I flipped through the book anxiously, hungry to find something, anything,
about Jane, about my family. I quickly gathered that all the names had
been changed. But I suspected I was getting close when I read:
A trooper had brought the 1968 University of Michigan Yearbook [to the
crime scene], and the smiling likeness in it of graduating senior Jeanne
Lisa Holder of Muskegon, Michigan, did bear a resemblance to the puffed
face of the young woman stretched out lifeless in Pleasantview Cemetery.
"Jeanne Lisa Holder" bore a resemblance to "Jane Louise Mixer." One layer
had begun to peel.
Years later, while in the thick of researching and writing Jane, the
problem was not too little information. It was too much. Not about Jane – her
murder remained maddeningly opaque – but about the other girls, whose
horrific rapes and murders were described in excruciating detail in
newspapers from the period, several true crime books, and on many "serial
killer chic" Web sites. There were charts such as the one that appeared in
the Detroit Free Press on July 28, 1969, titled "A Pattern of Death: An
Anatomy of 7 Brutal Murders," which organized the details under the
categories "Last Seen," "Where Found," "How Killed," "Other Injuries,"
etc. The entries were barely readable.
During this research I began to suffer from an affliction I came to call
"murder mind." I could work all day on my project with a certain distance,
blithely looking up "bullet" or "skull" in my rhyming dictionary. But in
bed at night I found a smattering of sickening images of violent acts
ready and waiting for me. Reprisals of the violence done unto Jane, unto
the other Michigan Murder girls, unto my loved ones, unto myself, and
sometimes, most horribly, done by me. These images coursed through my mind
at random intervals, but always with the slapping, prehensile force of the
return of the repressed.
I persevered, mostly because I had been given an endpoint: the publication
date of Jane, on my thirty-second birthday, in March 2005. As soon as I
held the book in my hand, I would be released. I would move on to projects
that had nothing to do with murder. I would never look back.
The reopening of Jane’s case did away with these hopes entirely.
In the fall of 2004 I moved from New York City, where I had lived for many
years, to teach for a year at a college in a small town in Connecticut.
The town was aptly named Middletown: in the middle of the state, in the
middle of nowhere. My apartment there was beautiful – the bottom floor of
a rickety 19th-century house, forty times as large as any apartment I
could have afforded in New York. I set up my desk in a lovely room that my
landlady introduced to me as "The Ponderosa Room" – a mahogany-paneled
sunroom with three walls of windows.
In early October, about a month before Schroeder’s call, I sent galleys of
Jane to my mother for her sixtieth birthday. I was nervous; I knew the
book would immerse her in the details of a story she’d been trying to put
behind her for thirty-five years. More than nervous – I was terrified. As
I addressed the package to her in California, it occurred to me that the
book might not constitute a gift at all. If she hated it, it could be
construed as a birthday-ruining disaster, a bomb, a betrayal.
I was hugely relieved when she called me after finishing the manuscript.
She was in tears, saying she would be eternally grateful both to it and to
me. She said it was a miracle: even though I never knew Jane, somehow I
had managed to bring her back to life.
This felt like a miracle to me too. I never thought "my Jane" might
approximate the "real Jane"; I never even had designs on such a thing. But
whoever "my Jane" was, she had certainly been alive with me, for me, for
some time. The book’s cover had been designed and pinned to my wall for
months, and a defiant, androgynous, starkly lit, close-up photo of Jane’s
face at thirteen, taken by my grandfather, stared me down daily. The book
also contained many diary entries I had culled from Jane’s own writings,
so copyediting the manuscript – which is what I had been doing when my
mother called that November afternoon – involved paying as close
attention to Jane’s voice as I paid to my own.
To make sure I had her right, I had unearthed Jane’s original journals,
and it was not unusual that fall to find me sitting on the dark wood floor
of the Ponderosa Room in a sea of pages filled with her elegant
handwriting. In returning to them I was newly struck by their tormented
insecurity (often manifesting itself in torrents of rhetorical,
self-reprimanding questions), which contrasts starkly – sadly, even – with
her obviously deep powers of articulation and feeling. This contrast
runs through all her writings, from her childhood to her college years.
More than runs through them – it is their very engine. It was, in fact,
what made me want to write about her in the first place, as much as, or
more than, the weird and awful circumstances of her death.
Never be afraid to contradict yourself. But what is there to contradict?
Could I after all be very stupid – and very wrong? You’re a good kid,
Jane. Good for what? Who am I to judge? What was 1965? What’s been
learned? What’s been gained? Lost? Loved? Hated? What do you really
think? How do you explain yourself? Why don’t I ever know what I’m going
to be tomorrow? What right have we to happiness?
I recognized myself here, although I did not want to. I would have rather
chalked Jane’s self-doubting agonies up to the conundrum of growing up an
effusive, probing, ambitious girl in the sedate, patriarchal ’50s – a
conundrum that several decades of feminism were supposed to have dissolved
and washed away by the time I came across her words.
And now a detective had called to say that there had been a DNA match in
her case, and they were sure they’d found the right guy – a retired nurse
who had nothing to do with John Norman Collins, the man who was convicted
in 1970 of the final Michigan Murder, and whom most had always assumed
responsible for all. Schroeder told us that this new suspect was now under
surveillance, and would be arrested within a few weeks. They had every
reason to believe that the case would then move swiftly toward a
successful conclusion.
Leiterman was in fact taken into custody on the charge of open murder on
the day before Thanksgiving, 2004, and then held, without bail, until his
trial, which began on July 11, 2005, and ended on July 22, 2005. But over
these eight months, the dread that had accompanied my initial forays into
Jane’s story did not dissipate.
It shape-shifted. It grew.
As winter descended in Middletown, the sunroom became the snowroom, and
murder mind was back. In the morning I would pretend to know how to teach
Shakespeare to fresh-faced undergraduates, then return home to talk on the
phone to homicide cops and sift through the stack of books I’d checked out
from the university’s Science Library to try to keep up with the
developments in Jane’s case: DNA for Dummies, clinical psychology
textbooks with titles like Sexual Murder: Catathymic and Compulsive
Homicides. I flipped through the case studies in Sexual Murder only once
but still felt as though they might have given me a fatal disease. At
night I often found myself up late, unable to sleep, pacing around the
Ponderosa Room in my pale blue bathrobe, a tinkling glass of whiskey and
ice in my hand, watching the snow mount menacingly around the windows. I
began to feel like a ghost, a stranger to myself. It wasn’t quite as bad
as The Shining, but sometimes it felt close. At least Jack Nicholson had a
family to witness and rue his descent. At more jocular moments I felt like
John Berryman – a throwback, a poet trapped in a gothic college town,
some scraggly miscreant academic who went to dreary parties, swapped
wives, and occasionally defecated, blind drunk, on a colleague’s lawn.
Except that in Middletown there were no such parties.
In short the ideal of catharsis that had served as a naive but real spur
throughout my writing of Jane began to crack at the seams, and reveal
itself as the ruse I had suspected it to be all along. My identification
with my aunt – which had been the main thread of Jane, and which was
arguably a result of mistaken identity on the part of my grandfather, who
has called me "Jane" instead of "Maggie" for as long as I can remember – began
to feel like either a hoax or a horror. I had started writing Jane
with the presumption that my family’s repression of her awful death was an
example of faulty grieving, which my book could delicately expose as an
unhealthy vestige of a Midwestern, Scandinavian heritage – a grim Ingmar
Bergman scenario getting played out in the small, lakeside town of
Muskegon, Michigan – and that I could offer a more successful model in
its place.
The hubris of this idea is now abundantly clear to me. When I think now
about "faulty" or "successful" grieving, I feel only bewilderment. Beyond
the bewilderment, the edge of a shapeless, potent rage – a rollicking
protest, some loose, hot, wild event starting to take place under my skin.
Photo #1:
A ring of male detectives standing around the shrouded lump of Jane’s
dead body. Taken from behind the chain-link fence, looking into Denton
Cemetery. The picture cuts off around the men’s waists, so all you see
of them is a row of trench coat bottoms and matching black shoes. Jane’s
body lies at their feet, her head and upper body shrouded by her
raincoat. One of her arms strays out from under it, ghostly white, flung
above her head, as if she were not dead, just completely exhausted.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Red Parts
by Maggie Nelson
Copyright © 2007 by Maggie Nelson .
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Free Press
Copyright © 2007
Maggie Nelson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4165-3203-3
