Episode 1: The Murder of Jane Mixer
Her body was found March 21st, 1969, in a cemetery west of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Sprawled on a stranger’s grave, shot twice in the head with a garrote wrapped around her neck, twenty-three-year-old Jane Mixer’s promising life had come to a bitter end.
Episode Resources
Memoirs by Maggie Nelson (Jane Mixer’s niece):
Nelson, Maggie. Jane: A Murder. Berkely, Soft Skull Press, 2005.
Nelson, Maggie. The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial. Graywolf Press, 2016.
CBS News: The Deadly Ride
The Eastern Echo - Four part series on the Michigan Murders
New York Daily News: The Elmer Fudd Killer
The Committee to Free Gary Leiterman: Case History
Chicago Tribune: Murder Mind
The Detroit Free Press: The Michigan Murders: Article Here
State of Michigan Court of Appeals: The State of Michigan v Gary Lieterman
Jurimetrics: A Bayesian Statistical Analysis of the DNA contamination scenario: PDF
The Ann Arbor News: Who Gave Murder Victim a Ride: Original Article posted by the Ann Arbor District Library
Full Transcript (Possibly Slightly Modified in Podcast)
Her body was found March 21st, 1969, in a cemetery west of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Sprawled on a stranger’s grave, shot twice in the head with a garrote wrapped around her neck, twenty-three-year-old Jane Mixer’s promising life had come to a bitter end.
The 1960s in the United States was an era of shifting. The Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War and the changing attitude of young people about their place in the world all contributed to a sense of evolution and unrest. A new wave of feminism arose as women shrugged off the traditional 1950s housewife roles and took to the streets, the universities and the world at large.
In 1969, Jane Louise Mixer was in the thick of it. A first-year law student at the University of Michigan and a political activist, Jane was in the golden light of coming into her own. She was also newly engaged to Phil Weitzman who would describe being attracted to her “intellect, her intense curiosity, her budding sensitivity to social issues, her ambition, and much later to her physical attributes.”
His life too would get fractured on March 21st, 1969.
Several years before that fateful day, Jane had studied abroad in France and then hitchhiked through Europe. In a letter she wrote home to her sister Barbara, Jane said, “There’s some kind of indescribable joy about climbing on a second-class car in the railway station in Marseilles and taking off for god knows where – I have almost a mystique about it-“
In many of Jane’s journals (compiled and published by her niece Maggie Nelson), we see a young woman trying to make sense of life. She writes of conflict with her parents whose differing political views had created something of a wedge in the previous months. She speaks of personal insecurities, inner longings and questions about who she was and who she would become.
In 1960, Jane wrote in her journal:
“There is so much now that yesterday doesn’t matter. I have so much, and am so lucky. Who could ask for more? I am happy. Tomorrow I may not be. Yesterday I wasn’t but I am NOW and that’s all that matters. Now! I must remember that and never forget it!”
Jane was serious, deeply introspective, outspoken, smart and independent.
The bright light that was 23-year-old Jane, would be extinguished on March 21st 1969, but another injustice would be done to Jane when her murder was simply absorbed into a series of murders happening in the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti area in the late 1960s.
And this is one of the painful truths of any person who dies at the hands of a serial killer, though in all likelihood Jane did not. The victims of multiple killers slip to the periphery and the monster takes center stage. Just as Mary, Joan, Maralynn, Dawn, Alice and Roxie became merely the victims of John Norman Collins, Jane too vanished into the shadows of his horrific crimes. Except Jane’s case was different and the police saw that thirty plus years ago, but largely the anomalies were dismissed.
I don’t think this was an intentional injustice, but instead a series of terrible coincidences. Jane fit the profile of the other victims. She died during the time frame. And in a way I wonder if investigators and the public could not stand to imagine there might be more than one individual violently assaulting and murdering young women in such a small area. One is so shocking that to make room in the psyche for multiple is almost too terrifying to consider.
I cannot tell the story of Jane mixer without also telling the story of the Michigan murders, also known as the Co-Ed Murders; however, for too long, Jane’s story has been buried beneath the other, so I will merely mention it here and in the next podcast, we will take a deeper look at the Michigan Murders.
In March of 1969, Jane had a lot to be excited about.
She was in her first year of law school, 1 of only 37 female law students in a class of 420. Her focus was on politics and civil rights litigation.
She was in love and newly engaged to Phil Weitzman, an economics professor and fellow political advocate she’d been dating for more than a year. The engagement would not come as a happy surprise to her parents as they had disapproved of Phil since he and Jane had started dating. Phil was Jewish and liberal and Jane’s father believed that his influence had caused Jane to get involved in progressive campus politics. Phil had also been offered a position at NYU, which meant he and Jane would be moving from Michigan to New York.
Jane wanted to break the news on her own and allow her parents time to adjust to the engagement before Phil joined her for Spring Break a few days later in her home town of Muskegon.
For those of you not familiar with Michigan, Ann Arbor is located on the lower east side of the state, about forty miles west of Detroit. Muskegon is on the opposite side of the state and slightly north on the shores of Lake Michigan.
In many ways the blessing of Jane’s engagement would turn out to be a curse.
These were the days of hitchhiking, of blind trust, of women who were sick of playing it safe. Still Jane didn’t hitch a ride with a total stranger, she posted a request on a ride board at the University of Michigan.
The campus ride board was in the basement at the Student Union Building. It consisted of a large map encased by thick plastic. Beneath the map, stood wooden cubbies organized by location. It looked a bit like a card catalogue. Jane wrote her name and phone number on a slip of paper and put it in the cubby for the Muskegon area. If another student was driving to that area, they could call Jane and offer to drive her as well.
And one did. He said his name was David Johnson.
So, let’s step back in time, more than fifty-one years gone now, to that chilly evening on Thursday, March 20th, 1969.
Jane and Phil are in her dorm room at the Law Quadrangle on the University of Michigan’s campus. The first day of Spring officially came the day before, but anyone who lives in Michigan knows the flowers and green likely won’t arrive for weeks.
That crisp evening, the world was still mostly painted in browns.
They said goodbye and Phil left for a tutoring session he had scheduled. At 6:30, Jane picked up the phone and called David Johnson who had not arrived for their scheduled meeting. The man on the other end said she must have it wrong; David was in a play that night.
I wonder if Jane sensed that something was not quite right after that phone call. If she did, it did not deter her from taking the scheduled ride.
She walked out the door with her suitcase and gift for her mother and she would never be seen alive again.
The first pinpricks of worry appeared for Jane’s father around 10pm. Jane had called earlier in the day to say she’d found a ride to Muskegon and should arrive by 9:30. At 11pm, the worry dug deeper and he could no longer wait. Dan Mixer got in his car and drove the highway towards Ann Arbor, searching for Jane for hours. He never found her. At midnight, Dan called Jane’s boyfriend Phil who said he hadn’t seen the person who picked Jane up, but since he’d called her dorm and gotten no answer at 7pm, he assumed her a ride worked out.
When there was still no sign of Jane at four am, Phil drove by her dorm and saw that her lights were out. At 8am, Dan Mixer called to tell him he’d filed a missing person’s report for Jane.
Phil then returned to her dorm and requested a key to her room at the Quad. He found nothing amiss inside.
Jane made it only fourteen miles into the one-hundred- and seventy-two-mile journey she had intended to make, except she did not travel; west toward Muskegon, but east in the opposite direction.
The following morning it was chilly as it so often is when the icy grip of winter in Michigan lets loose its fingers and Spring start to trickle in.
Nancy Grow was a housewife who lived near Denton Cemetery in Van Buren Township, about fourteen miles from U of M. On the morning of Friday March 21st, Nancy’s thirteen-year-old son shook her awake. He was late catching the school bus.
Nancy jumped out of bed and quickly readied the boy for school. Her son showed her a department store bag he’d found outside. In the bag, Nancy saw a giftwrapped package with a card as well as folders containing law school papers.
She opened the card and read “Dearest Mom- Sorry I’m late for your birthday, but in one hundred years you’ll never know the difference. I love you, Janie.”
Inside the gift-wrapped box was a pair of fuzzy purple slippers.
Nancy hustled her son out the door, so he didn’t miss the bus and returned to the bag. When she lifted the bag up, she felt something sticky and when she pulled her hand away, she was dismayed to see the substance was blood.
Shocked, she hurried out the door and got into her car suddenly worried bout her son walking to the school bus. As she drove passed Denton Cemetery, she noticed something yellow just inside the fence near the entrance. As she stepped closer, she realized a body lay on partially covered in front of a headstone.
Nearly hysterical, Nancy drove several blocks to her sister’s home and summoned the police.
The Ypsilanti police, including now retired Detective Donald Bennett, arrived at Denton Cemetery at the end of a gravel road around 10:30 am.
Jane Mixer lay dead just inside the chain-link cemetery fence. Her body had been covered with a rain coat and her personal items including a suitcase, a paperback copy of Catcher in the Rye and various clothes on hangers had been arranged around her body and between her legs.
She lay with one arm draped above her head, and the other arm covering her eyes.
It was obvious that Jane had been shot in the head, though lack of blood and drag marks made it clear she hadn’t been murdered in the cemetery. In addition to the gunshots, a stocking had been wrapped tightly around her throat. She wore a blue-gray jumper and her underwear and nylons had been partially pulled down.
Fresh tire tracks and the heel print of a man’s shoe was all they found of the perpetrator at the scene.
The Washtenaw County Medical examiner, Robert Hendrix, concluded that Jane died from two bullet wounds to the head. The first struck her in the left temple and the second in the lower left part of her skull. She’d also been strangled with a cinnamon colored stocking though it appeared the strangulation had happened after death. Although she was not sexually assaulted, her partial nudity lent itself to a possible sexual motive for the killing.
The medical examiner estimated that Jane was murdered between midnight and three am, which meant she’d been held elsewhere for four plus hours since it’s assumed she’d been picked up around 6:30. Soap granules found on her coat made investigators wonder if she’d been kept in a laundry area of some sort.
Jane’s father and mother identified their deceased daughter at the morgue. A daughter they’d not been seeing eye to eye with in the previous years due to their differing political views.
It’s a devastating thought really. To lose your child during that unruly patch of self-discovery. No opportunity to make amends or for the sands of time to smooth those bumps and ridges.
Jane’s fiancé Phil was also shocked and devastated by the news of Jane’s murder. Just after the police told him, he asked to call her dorm room, perhaps in the vain hope that it had all been a terrible mistake.
Despite their grief, Jane’s family put on a brave face. Her mother insisted on an open casket at her funeral.
During the service one of Jane’s friends read the words of Dylan Thomas “Do not go gentle into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
However, even their final farewell to Jane was a fearful affair for the Mixer family. The police told them to pay special attention to the attendees. The killer, they said, might be in attendance.
Police immediately began investigating Jane’s murder after her body was discovered. They quickly learned of the planned ride share with David Johnson. As they searched for evidence in her room and around campus, they discovered two clues as to the identity of the mystery driver. On Jane’s desk in her dorm was a check mark in a phonebook next to the name David Johnson.
Additionally, they found another phone book in the basement of the law school library. Written in the margins were the words Mixer and Muskegon.
The police went to the fraternity where the U of M student David Johnson lived. Johnson was not home, but police questioned other residents at the fraternity and soon learned that David was a theatre buff who was currently acting in a play and have been performing the night of Jane’s disappearance. David Johnson’s alibi was checked out and he was cleared.
Thus, they set about tracking down every David Johnson in the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti area, especially those who owned 22 caliber guns. All of them were ruled out.
Based on less than favorable statements regarding Phil Weitzman by Jane’s father, the police pressed hard on Jane’s fiancé, but he stuck to his original story and he too had an alibi.
The media jumped on the story of Jane and lumped it in with the other murder victims. Another Co-ed killed and the like.
However, investigators were less sure. The other murdered coeds in the area had been viciously stabbed and beaten as well as sexually assaulted. Their bodies had been left in remote wooded areas. Many aspects of Jane’s case simply didn’t fit with the other killings.
As police continued to investigate the murder of Jane Mixer, other murders continued happening around them. Within the series of Michigan murders, Jane, if she were also a victim of the same killer, would have been victim number three.
Just four days after the discovery of Jane’s body, another slain coed was found in remote area in Ann Arbor. Three more murders of young coeds in Ypsilanti and Ann Arbor would occur before John Norman Collins was arrested on July 29th, 1969
After the arrest, the community released a collective sigh of relief. The monster had been caught and the murders stopped.
However, the evidence from Jane Mixer’s murder would sit in a room of cold cases for years with many investigators still uneasy with the idea that Collins had been her killer. Her murder just didn’t fit with the others.
More than thirty years would pass before much movement occurred in the case.
Three decades after Jane’s murder, cold case detective Eric Schroeder opened up an evidence box. He surveyed the items in the box, which included a yellow and white striped towel, dark with blood. It had been wrapped around Jane’s head after she’d been shot to catch the large blood loss. Additionally, he saw pantyhose and other items that might be rich with DNA.
DNA was not used in a criminal conviction until 1986, nearly twenty years after Jane’s murder, but in 2001 when Schroeder started looking into the cold case, DNA had become the new gold standard of criminal trials.
Schroder sent the items to the State Crime Lab in Lansing, Michigan. DNA analyst, Steve Milligan began working on extracting DNA. He started by scanning the items with a black light. On the pantyhose Jane had been wearing at the time of her murder, he noticed four visible spots, which might include DNA. Although they weren’t blood or semen stains, they might have been sweat stains left by the killer when he transported Jane’s body into the graveyard. He isolated the stains and found that three of them had been produced by the same male donor.
He also analyzed a single spot of blood that had been found on Jane’s hand at the crime scene. When Milligan tested the blood, he found a second male donor. The analyst then compared the two male DNA samples to John Norman Collins, the serial murderer originally believed to have killed Jane. They were not a match.
The analyst put the DNA into CODIS - the Combined DNA Index System. The spot of blood returned a hit.
The man whose DNA matched the blood spot was John Rueles. A convicted murderer serving time for killing his mother.
Normally, such a match would be a celebration for cold cases detectives There was just one monster of a problem. John Rueles was four years old in 1969 and living in Detroit, around 40 miles away from the crime scene.
Still Schroeder went to Bellamy Creek Prison in Ionia, Michigan to talk with Ruelas. The man’s childhood had been anything but idyllic. His mother was transient and often left him home alone, sometimes sedating him with cough syrup.
Ruelas told a story from his childhood where he claimed to have interrupted an argument between two of his uncles in the garage. He saw a body covered in blood in the backseat of a running car. Police tracked down the still living uncle, but his DNA did not match any of the DNA at the Mixer scene.
They also heard reports that John Ruelas was a chronic liar and since they were not able to substantiate any of his claims, his DNA at the scene did little to move the case forward.
The police weren’t the only ones paying attention to the murder of Jane Mixer in the early 2000s. Maggie Nelson, the daughter of Barbara Nelson, Jane’s sister, was completing a book – part poetry, part memoir, and part true crime - about the aunt she’d never met. Maggie Nelson had been haunted and shaped in many ways by the brutal murder of her aunt Jane, though the woman had lived and died before Maggie had ever taken her first breath.
In researching this story, I read both of Maggie’s memoirs that weave elements of her own life into the life of her departed aunt and into the eventual trial of the man who police say murdered her.
They are interesting forays into the psyche of a young woman whose contemplation of her aunt’s murder in many ways had to be done in secret, in that shame-filled way we hide in closets to read the diaries of those we love. However, Maggie is a poet, a professor and a believer in sharing even the most brutal, and sometimes unflattering aspects of ourselves.
Since Maggie never met Jane, she can only reveal her aunt through Jane’s journals and stories from her mother, which I gather were few, likely due to the shock and grief that the Mixer’s went through when Jane was killed. It’s a look at how people process grief. Some families mourn openly, talk constantly of their departed loved one, and advocate mercilessly for justice. Others, like the Mixers, seem to bury it, layer on the years until its effects are felt not on the skin but in the bones, in that odd aching way where no clear cause can be identified.
Through Maggie’s memoirs, another view of Jane emerges. The girl beneath the ambitious law student, the outspoken advocate.
Quote:
“Never be afraid to contradict yourself. 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?”
The musings are familiar to me, a lifelong journaled myself. But I think we’ve all slipped in and out of that space of reflection, especially in early adulthood when we’re both carefree and invisible and simultaneously making the decisions that will pave the way for the rest of our lives.
In 2004, just as Maggie was preparing to release her memoir Jane: A Murder, she received a call from Detective Schroeder letting her know the case was moving forward. A case that had been written off as one of many murders by the infamous John Normal Collins.
Maggie and the rest of her family were stunned. Although they knew the case had never been officially closed, they’d assumed that it was forever lost in the sands of time.
A year after Detective Schroeder interviewed John Ruelas, he received another call from the state crime lab. The DNA on Jane’s pantyhose had returned a hit. It matched a sixty-two-year-old Gobels, Michigan man named Gary Leiterman. Leiterman was married, had two grown children, and was a retired nurse.
For more than two months, Schroeder investigated Leiterman.
At the time of Jane’s death, Gary was a twenty-six-year-old man living approximately twenty miles away from Ann Arbor. He was single and had served four years in the Navy.
Leiterman didn’t have a criminal history; however, he was arrested in 2001 for forging fake prescriptions. He’d apparently become addicted to pain killers after suffering from kidney stones. He was mandated to a treatment program and his DNA was added to CODIS.
In 2004, Schroeder took Gary Leiterman in for questioning. Three hours into the interview, he revealed his ace, Gary’s DNA had been found on the body of murder victim Jane Mixer.
In an interview with CBS News, Leiterman said, "I was incredulous. I said, 'What do you mean, my DNA?”
Leiterman insisted he was innocent. That, not only had he not murdered Jane Mixer, he’d never met the woman.
Still, Schroeder viewed Leiterman’s DNA on Jane’s pantyhose as incontrovertible evidence of the man’s guilt. He was taken into custody just before Thanksgiving 2004 and he was held without bail.
During a search of Leiterman’s residence, detectives found a polaroid photograph in a bedside cabinet which depicted the unconscious form of a teenage girl, naked from the waist down, lying on the Leiterman’s bed. Police learned it was a picture of a sixteen-year-old south Korean exchange student who had been living with the Leiterman’s. The girl would later testify, in a tear-filled admission, that she had no memory of the photo being taken.
Leiterman insisted he’d merely found the photo and had put it in the cabinet to show his wife after she returned from an out of town trip. He described the exchange student as wild and felt that he and his wife needed to consider what to do in lieu of the photograph.
In Leiterman's shaving kit, detectives also found an unmarked vial that contained a powdered mixture of diphenhydramine - the active ingredient in Benadryl and diazepam which is the active ingredient in valium. A toxicologist referred to the mixture as a knockout potion.
In January, a hearing which outlined the State’s case against Gary Leiterman was held.
Maggie Nelson, along with her mother Barbara and her grandfather (Jane’s father) attended the proceedings. Maggie recalled how her grandfather was the first witness to take the stand.
In Red Parts, Nelson’s second memoir about Jane Mixer, she described her grandfather as looking ancient on the stand (he was in his 90s) and as if he were still amazed at what he saw on that morgue table more than thirty years before.
She also mentions that one of her grandfather’s greatest fears surrounding the reopening of Jane’s case was that they would want to exhume her body. He said he simply wouldn’t allow it.
Other evidence presented at the hearing included a female coworker of Leiterman’s who had once accused him of sexually molesting her on a bus during a work-related trip.
A man who lived with Leiterman in the late 60s testified that Gary once showed him a vial of liquid and boasted that it would render a woman unconscious and too much would killer her.
A woman Leiterman previously dated claimed he had issues with sexual dysfunction
Much of this testimony was ultimately ruled inadmissible in the trial.
In 2005, Gary Leiterman went on trial for the 1969 murder of Jane Mixer.
A basic outline of prosecutor Steve Hiller case was this: Gary contacted Jane through her ride request at the University of Michigan. He used the alias David Johnson so as not to give his true name.
Gary then picked Jane up in front of her dorm a little after 6:30pm on March 20th. He took her to an unknown location and held her there for a period of time. Perhaps at gun point.
He may have attempted a sexual act, which was rebuffed. He then shot her twice in the head and strangled her before dragging her body into the Denton Cemetery sometime after midnight on March21st.
The main piece of evidence linking Gary to Jane was the DNA samples found on the pantyhose.
Additional evidence included the phone book found in the University of Michigan building with the scrawled words Mixer and Muskegon. Handwriting expert Thomas Riley compared the words with several writing samples from the defendant, Gary Leiterman. He believed it was quote “highly probable” that Leiterman wrote the words in the phone book.
A former roommate of Leiterman’s testified that while living with Gary during the late 1960s and early 1970s, he came across newspapers covering the story of John Norman Collins, the suspected murderer of the Ann arbor and Ypsilanti women. Additionally, the roommate said that Gary had owned a 22 revolver and had created a firing range in his basement. State records confirmed that Leiterman had purchased a .22 caliber Ruger revolver in 1967, which he later reported stolen in 1987.
Though he’d reported the gun stolen, police found a revolver cylinder that was determined by a state police firearms expert to be “consistent with the construction and design of a Ruger single 6 22-revolver cylinder.”
During the trial, a state police ballistics expert testified that bullet fragments taken from Jane during her autopsy were comparable to those found in Leiterman’s Van Buren County home in 2004.
The ballistics expert also testified that there are more than three dozen models of guns which could have fired similar bullets.
In her memoir, Maggie Nelson described the items displayed during the trial, some heart wrenching and others just rather disturbing. They included a powder blue scarf - a blue gray jumper which was probably wool - a wool overcoat - a bunch of clothes on hangers - one blue turtle neck turned inside out, which might have been bloody - one pair of pantyhose - a pale yellow half-slip patterned in lady bugs, underwear also patterned in ladybugs, a bra also in ladybugs, and a light blue headband streaked in blood. Of the stranger items, she mentioned a bloody tampax taken from Jane’s body and preserved in a jar as well as a jar with two bullets, one crushed.
According to a DNA expert, the odds that cellular material found on Jane’s pantyhose could have come from anyone other than Gary Leiterman were 171.7 trillion to 1.
The defense strategy was simple - to attack the state’s main physical evidence - the DNA found on the pantyhose. In many ways, they had a compelling argument since the blood found on Jane’s hand had been linked to a four-year-old who was highly unlikely to have been anywhere near the crime scene, which implies a laboratory mistake.
During the same period of time in 2002, genetic samples from Gary Leiterman, Jane Mixer and John Rueles were being processed in the same laboratory. Bloody clothes from the murder of Ruelas mother were being tested in the lab in Lansing Michigan on at least one of the same days that an analyst was working on the blood droplet scraped off of Jane’s hand in 1969.
Individual samples from both Leiterman and Ruelas were brought into the lab in early 2002 under New Michigan law, which required all convicted felons to provide DNA samples to CODIS.
Usually, DNA is pretty open and shut; however, the finding of a four-year old’s DNA on Jane’s hand was disturbing. Though prosecutors attempted to offer the possibility that John Ruelas somehow witnessed the murder, it seems pretty unlikely as there has never been a connection found between Leiterman and Ruelas.
Lab contamination seems more realistic and if contamination happened in with the blood on Jane’s hand, what proof was there that it hadn’t also happened with the DNA on the pantyhose and that was the strategy Leiterman’s attorney used to discredit the state’s case.
There were other issues as well. Primarily that Leiterman didn’t drive any of the vehicles that witnesses had claimed to see near the cemetery that night. His fingerprints also didn’t match any that were found at the scene.
The prosecuting attorney fought back, presenting witnesses who described the extreme measures used in the lab to ensure all evidence was kept separate and to prevent errors. Jeffry Nye, the lab supervisor insisted there was no contamination.
Gary did not take the stand in his own defense. The trial last for two weeks and jurors deliberated for mere hours before returning their verdict: guilty of first-degree murder.
Dan Mixer, Jane’s father began to sob. Barbara, her sister, said she felt numb. In Maggie Nelson’s memoir about the trial, she hinted at a sense of still not knowing if this was the man who murdered Jane.
In an interview with CBS News after the trial Maggie Nelson said,
"The horror of Jane's death made her a forgotten person because it was too hard, via fear and via grief, to look at it, and in some ways, she has come back to life, and my family got to remember how much they loved her."
Gary and his family were distraught over the verdict.
At his sentencing, Leiterman spoke in court for the first time. "It was probably an awful time in their lives back in 1969 to know that they lost their daughter and their sister. She appeared to be a lovely young lady. But I also want to say that I'm innocent of this crime," he said.
Gary Leiterman was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Leiterman continued to fight his conviction for years. Appeals were filed and other people took up the torch proclaiming his innocence. A new trial was never granted to Leiterman. In July of 2019, he passed away while in prison at the age of 74.
Today, the murder of Jane Mixer is considered a case closed.
Thank you for listening to Bitter Endings.
I’m your host J.R. Erickson.