True Crime Campfire - Audacity: The Murder of Janet March

Episode Date: July 28, 2023

In The Godfather, Mario Puzo wrote “The strength of a family, like the strength of an army, lies in its loyalty to each other.” Family loyalty can be like armor in our most troubled times—when we’re at our weakest, our loved ones can lend us their strength. But loyalty can be a double-edged sword sometimes, making us choose family over reason—over sanity—over right. Join us for a Shakespearean tragedy of a story about a dirty little secret that led to murder, and a choice that took two proud families down in flames.Sources:Book, Never Seen Again by Jeanne KingBook, Love, Lies, and Murder by Gary C. KingCBS' 48 Hours, episodes "Love, Lies and Murder" and "Endgame"Nashville Scene, Willy Stern, "A Good Thing Gone Bad": https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/a-good-thing-gone-bad/article_9524cd0e-a771-5c13-a508-6890b8c34959.htmlFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers, grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. In The Godfather, Mario Puzzo wrote, The Strength of a Family, like the Strength of an Army, lies in its loyalty to each other. Family loyalty can be like armor in our most troubled times. When we're at our weakest, our loved ones can lend us their strength.

But loyalty can be a double-edged sword sometimes, making us choose family over reason, over sanity, over right. Join us for a Shakespearean tragedy of a story about a dirty little secret that led to murder and a choice that took two proud families down in flames. This is Audacity, the murder of Janet March. So, campers, for this one, we're in Nashville, Tennessee, August 16, 1997. Marissa Moody and her six-year-old son stood on the doorstep of Perry and Janet March's house,

waiting for somebody to answer the door. Marissa's son had a play date scheduled with the March's little boy, Sammy, but neither parents seemed to be anywhere around. Finally, though, little five-year-old Sammy opened up and let them in. Hi, Sammy, where's your mom? Marissa said, following Sammy into the living room. She's not home right now, Sammy said. My dad's in his study. Marissa looked around, but didn't see Perry March anywhere, just his closed study door. Sammy said his sister Zippy was out in the yard playing with the nanny. As Marissa and her son stood sort of awkwardly in the front room, thinking maybe Perry would come out to say hi to them, little Sammy ran over and plopped down on a big rolled-up

rug that was lying on the floor in the hall just past the kitchen. Dad said to tell you the playdates still on, Sammy said, bouncing up and down on the rug. This wasn't a surprise to Marissa. She thought of Perry March as a snob. He'd made it clear to her before that he thought he was better than she was. Maybe because she was divorced and a single mom. Maybe just because he was a successful attorney, she wasn't sure. This wasn't the first time he'd been rude to her. But whatever,

this wasn't about her, it was about her son. He was excited about his play date with Sammy. So, she kissed him on top of the head, told him she'd pick him up in a few hours, and left without ever seeing either one of the marches. As Marissa drove away, the image of that big rolled-up rug stuck

in her mind. She'd never seen a rug in that house before. They liked their bare hardwood floors. It seemed incongruous, and dang, it must have been a big heavy one for Sammy to be able to bounce on it like that without flattening it. For some reason, Marissa couldn't get the image of that rug out of her head. But when she went back to pick up her son later that day, she noticed it was gone, and still no sign of Janet.

What Marissa didn't know was that at midnight the night before, Perry had called his in-laws, Janet's parents, Carolyn and Larry Levine, to let them know Janet had packed a bag and stormed out of the house. Carolyn knew her daughter and son-in-law had been having some problems in their marriage for a while now, money troubles and other things. Janet had a book about divorce on her bedside table. Perry had been spending a lot of nights in hotels. They'd both been seeing a therapist. Perry's story was that he and Janet had gotten into an argument after they put the kids to bed, and Janet had ended it by packing a couple bags, grabbing about five grand in cash, her passport, and a bag of weed, saying, see ya, and driving off in her car.

Now, he wanted to know if she'd gone to her parents' house. No, Janet's mom said she hadn't heard anything about this until just now. Well, I called some hotels, he said, and she's not at any of them. Later, this conversation, and many others Perry March had with Janet's parents in the days and weeks after her disappearance would be called into question. Perry swears up and down that he wanted to call the police right away and report Janet missing, but her parents talked him out of it, said it would just embarrass Janet. But the Levine say this isn't how it happened at all. That not that first night, but very soon after, they wanted to call the police,

but Perry kept putting them off. One of the ways he did this was to show them a honey-do list Janet had allegedly left with him and had him sign on the night she stormed out. He didn't mention the chore list at all during that first conversation, the Levine said, he only brought it up later when they were pressing him to file a missing person's report. The list was typed, titled Perry's Turn for Janet's 12-day vacation, and included stuff like, feed the children nutritious meals, be with children all day, don't pawn off on mom and dad, and spend quality and quantity time with your children, not your guitar or

computer or clients. There were 23 items. Perry had signed it under the line, I agree to do all of the above before Janet's vacation in response to Perry's cowardly rash and confused vacation is over. She was mad at him because he'd spent so much time away from home lately. Janet, an artist and children's book illustrator, was always the one home with the kids. This list was weird. You can see why it might be reassuring because it obviously suggests that Janet's just taken off on a solo vacation, a little spite trip maybe, to give Perry a taste of what she does. all day and hold him accountable for some of what she perceived as his recent failures as

partner. But if he had this list from the start, then there was no mystery about what was happening. Janet was going on a 12-day vacation to teach him a lesson. So why would he have called the Levines in the first place? Why would he have called hotels? It didn't make sense. Could the list have been a strategy? As author Gary C. King put it, an ace in the hole that Perry kept close to his chest in case he needed it to show to the police? To support his story that Janet left on her own? Within a few days of Janet's disappearance, Perry's father, Arthur March, drove up from his home in Mexico, where he'd moved a few years earlier after going bankrupt. Allegedly, he was there to help with the kids. But to Janet's parents,

Perry kept up the narrative that she'd just left for a 12-day vacation and they didn't need to worry too much. The Levines worried anyway. They drove her on the airport, looking for Janet's car. They called hotels and hospitals. No joy. As they'd later tell 48 hours, they wanted to call the police, but Perry kept putting them off, saying how upset and embarrassed Janet would be if they got the cops involved. But then, Janet didn't show up in time for Sammy's sixth birthday party at Dragon Park. It made no sense whatsoever. She'd sent out the invitations already before she went missing. It was planned. People had RCPed. Perry and the Levines decided to go ahead and have the party. They told everybody that Janet had gone to visit her brother Mark out in

California and she couldn't fly back yet because of a nasty ear infection. Everybody accepted the explanation. I mean, why wouldn't they? And the party went fine. But for the Levines, that was it. Whatever else might be going on in Janet's life and in her head, her parents knew she'd never miss her little boy's birthday party. No way in hell. She'd be there for that kid if she had to crawl on bloody stumps to do it. And if for some reason she couldn't, she'd call or write, she'd explain. So now it was time to really, really worry. So two weeks after she disappeared, Perry March finally went to the police station and filled out a missing person's report on his wife. The Levines, worried sick, went with him. The detectives were shocked when they realized how

long ago Janet March had actually disappeared. They even scolded Larry Levine about waiting so long to file the missing person's report. They were two weeks behind now. Why didn't they report this sooner? The answer, of course, was that they'd accepted what their son-in-law was telling them. Their son-in-law, who they loved like their own, and wanted to trust. Because to think anything else was just terrifying. When the detectives interviewed the march's nanny, she said something hadn't felt right to her that whole day that Janet went missing. Janet didn't usually spend a lot of time on the computer, but that day, she'd hold up in the study for hours working on it. She seemed troubled, distracted. And then, of course, there was the timing of this 12-day vacation. Why would she do that

right before Sammy's birthday? The birthday party was in 10 days, not 12. And then she didn't show for Sammy's first day of school either. None of it made sense to the nanny. The housekeeper had a few things to get off her chest, too. She said she'd come in to clean the morning after Janet supposedly stormed out of the house on Perry, and it was weird. The house was already spotless. It looked like somebody had been up all night, spit shine in the place to perfection. Somebody had even gotten rid of the trash. The detective's first thought was, maybe Janet March was depressed. Maybe she was having a nervous breakdown or something like that. Maybe she was in a hospital right now, hiding from her life. Or maybe she'd just run off, but she didn't sound like the type to do that.

not without her kids. And when they looked into Janet's bank records, there was nothing. No activity whatsoever on any of her cards or accounts. That wasn't a good sign. The investigators were starting to get a bad feeling. And then nine days after Perry and the Levines filed that missing persons report on Janet, a resident at the Bricksworth Apartments, about five miles from the March's house, found Janet's missing Volvo.

It was backed into a space in the apartment parking lot, which was interesting because Janet's friend said she was kind of an awful driver, and she'd never back into a space in a million years. Yeah, me neither, Janet. Not me either. Inside the car, the police found a strange assortment of stuff. Janet's driver's license and passport, a pair of sandals neatly placed on the floorboard, an upended purse stuck into the pocket of the driver's side door, and there was a packed bag, but the stuff they found in it didn't make sense.

Like they found a bikini and like a couple changes of clothes, but there wasn't any basic stuff, like a toothbrush, extra underwear, makeup, a hairbrush, stuff any woman would bring if she was going on a trip. As one of the investigators put it later, it looked like a bagpacked by a man. And so the experienced detectives at the scene, the whole thing just looked staged. If they hadn't already been convinced that there was something sinister going on here, they were convinced now. Their missing person's case was now homicide.

So they got a search warrant for the market. his house and land. Perry and Janet owned five acres, so they went all out, brought in recruits from the police academy to crawl over every inch of the property, even got a helicopter to fly over with heat-seeking technology that could zero in on the signs of a decomposing body. Although later, Perry would get all indignant and self-pitying about this search, calling the CSIs and police cadets paramilitary types and comparing them to the Gestapo. At the time, he sat out on the front porch with his brother and his attorney smoking cigars and eating Italian takeout and talking and laughing and just watching the whole thing unfold, not, you know, screaming and crying and

throwing up. We don't tend to chow down on canollies when we're worried somebody's going to come up and put their boot in our neck, right? And one of the first big red flags for the investigators was that when they went to check out the March's family computer, thinking they might be able to tell who'd written the to-do list and when, the hard drive was gone. Ripped out. Hmm. When they asked Perry about it, he was like, oh, hard drive, what's a hard drive? Uh-huh. So it didn't really take a neurosurgeon to figure out who was suspect number one here.

And as soon as he realized the police were looking at him for his wife's disappearance, Perry went on the offensive, which seems to be his M.O. for life in general. He gave interviews all over the place, acting put upon and whining about how not only had he lost his wife and the mother of his children, but he didn't even have people hugging him and telling him how much they wanted to help him. He just had the police saying he did it. Yeah, he actually said that, like with the hugging and stuff on television. He was all, I'm a suspect. I'm a villain. Yeah, but you literally are, though, so shut up. Y'all have to see that clip, by the way. I need you all to understand the, like, Martin Scralian levels of, like, face punchability that we're

dealing with in this little weasel like he could be the cover model for rich pricks you'd like to kick in the nuts magazine which is a magazine i would like to subscribe to actually so absolutely let's get a kick starter going yeah it's just martin schrelly and this guy martin schrelly and parry march alternating alternating covers schrelly can be the center fold issue one with a Target. Oh, no, it's so good. Anyway. I see where you're headed with that. Uh-huh. Yeah, like a target you can put on your punching bag. And for all his claims of innocence, people couldn't help but notice how he always seemed to talk about Janet in the past tense.

Janet was a loving wife and mother. Yeah, that's a red flag. Obviously, Perry knew that both the police and the Levines were looking at him for murder. And his friends were given him the side eye, too. I mean, no one was hugging him. He was getting snubbed all over town. It was all very, no hugging. It was all very inconvenient for an up-and-coming young attorney like Perry. So much to the horror of Janet's parents, about a month into the investigation, he took the kids and moved to Chicago. He had Sammy and Zippy. He was getting away with murder, and there was nothing anybody could do about it for the moment. So how did we

get here? From the perfect house and the perfect family to whatever the hell this was? Well, at first glance, you'd probably think Perry and Janet would be a match made in heaven. They met as students at the University of Michigan and hit it off big from day one, but they were definitely an odd match in a lot of ways. I mean, they were both smart, obviously. They were both Jewish, but they'd come from very different families. The Levine's were wealthy and connected and knew how to get shit done. Larry Levine, Janet's dad, was a prominent insurance defense attorney with his own law firm. Perry's mom had died of an overdose of prescription meds when he was six, so his dad Arthur raised him and his brother and sister on his own, making it clear that he expected all his kids to be the best at whatever

they did. Money was always tight, but somehow Arthur still managed to make sure Perry got to go to a fancy private high school. He was determined his son would succeed. Personality-wise, Perry and Janet were very different. Janet was, as Nashville scene reporter Willie Stern put it, an artist in a dreamer, with a sort of spontaneous spirit and a tendency to flake on her appointments, which like, no judgment here. Sometimes you just got a GTFO and bail, right? Like, sorry, I have plans that night. Whoops. Perry, on the other hand, was a lot more pragmatic, and according to many of the people who knew him, arrogant. Judging by the clips I've seen of him in interviews, I'd say that's the understatement of the millennium. Perry March has elevated smugnesty.

to an art form of its own. That's his medium. Janet worked in acrylics. Perry works in smugness. Here's one fun little snapshot of what we're talking about. In college at the University of Michigan, Perry was voted, and this is not a joke. It might have been a joke, but he was voted, most likely to be indicted for securities fraud. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of our boy's character.

Ouch. Ouch. Also in college, a woman once accused him of punching her in the face. And when a reporter asked him about it years later, he just shrugged and said, oh, she was a slut. I fucked her for a few months. Then she came back from vacation and told me she had the crabs and I dumped her. What?

Huh? Oh, my God. He said this on the record. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That's Perry. This woman, by the way, said she never had. had sex with Perry and her life. So make of that what you will. Yeah, I'm pretty sure if I were under

suspicion of murdering my wife and a reporter managed to dredge up an accusation like that from my past, I'd be smart enough to come up with something a scosh better than she was a slut who had the crabs. Jesus Jones, dude. Oh, she, yeah, she totally rejected him. This man speaks like an unsolicited Instagram message. Like, you know. You ain't seen nothing yet. The Crabbs, but this is a perfect little microcosm of Perry's general attitude toward anybody who challenges him. And what Janet saw in Perry, I don't know, I guess she figured he was smart and confident and had a great career ahead of him, especially once he got into law school at Vanderbilt University. After they dated for a couple of years, Janet actually proposed to him, a woman ahead of her time. And Perry said yes in a heartbeat because Janet was a catch.

first off she was movie star gorgeous like seriously look it up this woman was gorgeous dark hair perfect skin beautiful smile but she was also a massively talented artist she'd illustrated children's books and shown her paintings and galleries and after the wedding she'd actually end up designing her and parry's stunning house by herself which is impressive but in my opinion there was another important reason why perry march decided to make it official with janet her wealthy powerful family larry levin wanted to make sure his new son-in-law had every advantage he could provide. He put Perry through law school at Vandy, not just tuition, but books, living expenses, everything. Damn. And on top of that, Larry helped Perry's father out with his failing finances and let him live with him and Carolyn for a while, before Arthur finally filed for bankruptcy and moved down to Mexico. When Perry graduated from law school, he took a job at a prestigious Nashville law firm called Bass, Barry, and Sims. He was the first Jewish attorney they ever hired. He had Janet, he had Sammy, and Zippy a few years.

years later. Perry was doing great at work. Janet was loving being a mom, but cracks were forming. Perry was hardly ever home. A lot of the people he worked out with at the gym thought he was single, because A, he never talked about his wife, and B, he spent so much time there. And although this was never proven in court, reporter Willie Stern heard from several sources who said they'd seen him around Nashville with other women, looking awful cozy. Perry, of course, has always denied this, but I have a hard time believe in it. And I've got a damn good reason why. The letter incident.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Y'all know anytime we've got letters, it's about to get interesting, so buckle up. By 1992, Perry was evidently feeling restless in the pants region, and he developed a little work crush. Did what any reasonable person would do in that situation, by which I mean that one afternoon, he snuck over and left a three-page anonymous letter on the chair of Lee Reams, a paralegal. at Bassbury and Sims. He did mention he was married in the letter. Good to be honest. You know, wouldn't want to come off as a dirt bag or anything. And y'all, okay, I'm just going to read you a few

excerpts from the letters, which again, he sent this woman anonymously, which makes the whole thing ten times weirder. Thanks to writers Gary C. King and Gene King for these quotes, okay? Just prepare yourselves. I feel like the lucky leprechaun who has seen the rainbow and knows what lays beyond. And like the leprechaun, I wonder if I'll ever find it. I want to inhale the essence of you. I want to taste your arms. I thought I was going to make it. The pure sexiness of your body grips me and embarrasses me. I want to make love to you. The thought of my tongue buried within you excites me more than anything else in the world. I'm sorry

Don't rush at him all at once ladies Try and keep it in your pants I know right Does this guy know how to pitch woo or what I mean what woman hasn't dreamed about her first time with a lebracot Right Wait is it possible when he said

I want to taste your arms what he meant to say was I wanted you to taste me lucky charms You wonder it tastes his lucky charms That's what it was honestly that would make it better i think it would be better actually than i want to taste your arms it's so weird not even like god i can't believe i'm about to say this on a podcast that's distributed as widely as ours is but i i can't like if he had said like i want to taste your armpits i'd almost like to be like okay that's obviously like a kink instead it's like arms it's the weirdest thing you could

It's almost the weirdest thing you could say. I think it might be. Like, it might be the weirdest thing you could say. I can't think, I, honestly, I'm so stunnedlocked right now that I can't think of anything weirder than I want to taste your arms. And honestly, he's given us an absolute horn of plenty here to choose from. But like, I want to taste your arms is unbeatable. Yeah.

That's the st-tier, man. I have to say, if some anonymous man at my work. said he wanted to taste my arms, I'd call the police. Well, she called HR and then she sued him. Good, good, even fucking better. Lee was, of course, horrified by the whole thing. And I'm assuming that as soon as she managed to stop projectile vomiting, she went to HR and showed them the letter.

And as soon as HR stopped projectile vomiting, they brought in an outside security firm to do a discreet investigation. It was like ankle deep in there, but everybody was just, ugh. It's like an S&L skit where everyone's puking. It's just awful. And Camper's it's about to get worse because that first letter wasn't the only one. There were two more after that. Each more harlequin romancy than the last.

In the second letter, he got even more. specific about what he wanted to do to Lee? Poor, poor Lee. And then he waxed eloquent about sex after marriage. And if you thought that first one was gross, I just hope you're not eating anything right now. Perry told Lee he wanted to go down on her for, quote, hours and hours, licking and sucking, I want to devour you, kissing and caressing your soft belly and thighs. Oh, God. Okay, I know it hurts. Just breathe through your nose. We're going to get through this together. Marriage has a way of making sex boring at times, routine and old. I do not mean that it loses its pleasure. We still climax. Oh, that's good to know. Thanks for sharing that.

we still love our partners and aim to please. So in other words, his wife is boring, but he can still get her there, if you know what I mean. And then the Pes de la resistance, I want you to cry because you never knew how good it could be. We are crying now, Perry. We're all crying now. We're all crying. Oh, no. When the sex talk was finally mercifully over, Perry spilled his guts about his insecurities, his worry that maybe after all this, Lee wouldn't want to go to Poundown with him after all. Maybe, perhaps, she would actually be upset?

Nah, surely not. Even though I know I am playing the fool here, I am wildly singing to heaven inside, Perry wrote, I know that your reasons to communicate elude me, but I will suffer the crash and burn of pure disappointment gladly to be granted a few short days of dreaming of you again. I feel like a prisoner on death row with his sentence commuted. Not that my dreams of you ever left me, Lee. They were only tarnished with my sadness. What?

I feel like there should be some violin music. Yeah, like. This is the, this is the angel on his. his shoulder being like, dude, don't fucking do it. Don't do this. Put it in the shredder. But instead he was like, I'm going to wax poetic about how I'm scared. Three times he did this.

Three times. O' Lee, I am so torn by this. I stop myself from bursting with excitement by reminding myself that you may only want to chastise me for my thoughts or to discover me. Your name rolls through my mind like a mantra being chanted over and over again. Yep, that's what a mantra is. Perry, you dumb fuck. Nothing you can say can vaguely approach the self-inflicted torment I am in. Okay, sorry, I'm going to stop pausing, but I...

I want to try. I want to try. That's all I'm saying, Perry. Give me, give me a chance. We can do it. God, ugh. The smell of your body, the touch of your skin. the taste and feel of you are always at my call. You are my horizon. I thought that, like a parched man in the desert, a mirage had appeared before me.

There it was, so simple, so trivial. I feel like a puppy whose master has finally come home to play. Jesus, the writing in this thing, he feels like a puppy, he feels like a guy on death row, he feels like a leprechaun, make up your mind, you smart me prick. It's so bad. God, just mixed metaphors all over. It's like a quezon art full of metaphors. Anyway, so this went on and on, just getting worse and worse.

And a little pro tip, we're going to read all three of these to the patrons. By the way, that's the kind of jazzy extra content you're missing if you're not on our Patreon. So look forward to that, patrons. And then finally, in the last letter, Mr. Anonymous came up with a clever little way for him and Lee to communicate. Because this really needed some, like, born identity shit too, right? But only if she was interested. There was a rarely used section of the law library in the building, Perry wrote. If Lee wanted to get a message to him, she could slip it into a certain page of a certain never-checked-out book on tax law, and he could pick it up later.

Brilliant plan, not only for its cinematic lifetime-after-dark qualities, but because it made catch-in-the-dum-ass super easy for the security folks, because all they had to do was put a hidden camera in the law library, zero it right in on that particular aisle, and boom. There was Perry skulking over to that exact same tax book, checking to see if he had a letter from the object of his obsession. Wamp, wamp, you bust it. Perry's bosses sent Lee on a paid vacation and called Perry into the office for a little talk. They told him he could either resign or get fired, and he chose the first option. And a couple weeks later, he was out on his ass. Lee Reams sued him for sexual harassment and won a settlement for $24,000, which Perry set up a payment plan to make good on.

Now, this is important to our story for a lot of reasons, but the most important one is that Perry's abrupt departure from Bassberry and Sims soon became a major point of contention between him and Janet. Now, Perry, of course, didn't tell her anything about Lee Reams, the letters, the sexual harassment lawsuit, any of it. He told her he left the firm because of professional differences between him and his bosses. But Janet was a smart woman, and she could smell something fishy, all over that story. The Levines were a little dubious too, but as usual, Larry stepped up to

help, offering Perry a job at his firm. Life went on, but Janet never could get that question out of her head. Why had her husband really left his first job? And that, along with Perry's careless attitude about money, his tendency to act like he was still a single guy, despite having a wife and two kids, and more, started to wear on the March's marriage. A narcissist to the core, Perry didn't take criticism well. Any attempt Janet made to get him to change his behavior, he took as an unjustified attack. Janet felt like he was leaving her behind, chasing his career and losing interest in her, and she was depressed about it. There were whispers about other women. Somebody had seen Perry leaving the movies with a blonde woman looking way too cozy. Somebody else had spotted

him at a nice restaurant with a brunette, and when Janet tried to get Perry to work with her to fix their problems, he'd get resentful. Sometimes, according to Carolyn Levine, he'd get abusive. According to true crime writer Gene King, whose book Never Seen Again was one of our sources for this case, during one argument where Janet brought up divorce, Perry's reaction was pure rage. I'll kill you, he said. Janet felt like she must have misheard him. Shocked, she said, Perry, did you just say you'll kill me? Perry just stood there glaring at her. Perry, did you say that? Janet said again, And Perry said, yeah, I said it, so what? Yeah, no big deal, right?

Just a basic garden variety death threat from your hubs. Who hadn't been there, am I right? See, the thing is, as bored as Perry might have been getting with married life, Janet was his meal ticket. He worked for his father-in-law's firm. If Janet left him, he'd be six kinds of fucked. That big house, in Janet's name, not his. The Levines had helped foot the bill for the Dreamhouse, Janice. Janet designed. They held the note on it, in fact. And the place was worth well over half a million

in 90s money. And because Janet had told her dad about how bad Perry was with money, Larry had advised her to keep her assets in her own name. That's the kind of thing that builds big, simmering rage. And by the summer of 1997, Perry March was full of it. In a deposition he gave a few months after Janet's disappearance, Perry had a bizarre answer to the question, did you ever hit your wife? Perry didn't say no. He said, not to the best of my recollection, which is an absolutely insane answer to that question. Absolutely. It's crazy. And when the lawyer pressed him on that, he doubled down. He just kept saying, I don't believe I ever hit my wife. Yeah, I can see how something like that would slip your mind, Pear, for God's sake.

He was, I think he was afraid Janet had told somebody that he hit her, and the lawyer knew about it and had a witness. That's what I think. Probably. So the March's marriage was on the rocks already. They'd been seeing a counselor, both together and separately, and at the time she went missing, Janet had an appointment scheduled with a divorce attorney. It was supposed to happen on August 16th, the day Marissa Rogers showed up to the March's house with her son for a play date and saw the rolled up rug on the floor. So what could have turned this tense situation into murder? Well, Perry had been late with his latest payments in the settlement to Lee Reams, and he'd written her a letter explaining that he

needed some additional time to come up with the money he owed her. Could this have been what Janet was looking at on the computer all day on August 15th, the day she went missing? Could she have found that letter and then gone looking for anything else she could find? If she'd found any of those gross letters, or even any reference to the lawsuit, and the real reason Perry left Bass Barry and Sims, that could have sparked one hell of an argument. Investigators suspected Perry and Janet had fought on the night of August 15th. She threatened to leave him and cut him off from his fancy lifestyle, and Perry killed her, probably by chokehold. And then he rolled her up in that rug.

Perry has a black belt and karate. He may or may not have actually in intended to kill her. Then he wrote the to-do list that Janet supposedly left for him, packed her bag badly, and staged the whole scene with a car at the apartment complex. They knew Perry had called his dad down in Mexico and asked him to come up to Nashville to help with the kids, and Arthur had driven up a couple days later. Investigators figured Perry stashed Janet's body somewhere, either in the basement or in the woods behind the house, while he waited for his dad to arrive. And then, While Perry was working overtime to keep the Levine's calm so they wouldn't call the police,

Arthur was disposing of Janet's body, who knew where. Interestingly, six days after Janet went missing, Perry replaced the still-new, still-perfectly good tires on his car. The guy at the tire place was confused about why he wanted to switch them out, but Perry insisted. So that was the theory, but the DA didn't know if he could prove it. As for Perry, he wasn't liking the temperature of, the states. Even Chicago felt like too close for comfort with the police scrutinizing him and the Levines trying for custody of Sammy and Zippy. Janet's parents were in a kind of pain most of us

can't even imagine. Perry hadn't even let the kids come to the memorial service the family had held for Janet. And the Levines were desperate to get their grandkids out of his hands. So in 1999, Perry packed up the kids and moved to Ahihik, Mexico, where his dad had been living for years. Arthur later told 48 hours, I brought Perry down here because he didn't have any other place to go. Aw, you poor little persecuted boy. Oh, the humanity. Arthur, honey, bless your heart. You'd need an electron microscope to see the violin I'm playing for you and your boy here.

Especially since Iheek is a little slice of heaven for well-to-do expats, a place where, in Arthur's words, the beer is cold and the women are hot. Ew. And before we get into Perry's adventures south of the border, we got to take a minute and focus in on old Arthur here. Arthur March. Ooh boy. If Perry's a piece of work, and he is,

Arthur's the old block they chipped him off of. Well, what? Anyway, he died in 2006, but in 1997, when Janet went missing, he was 68 years old and still going strong. He was a retired army reservist who took classes in guerrilla tactics, had a mouth on him that would stun a sailor,

still cycled 20 miles a day, and was not a fan of his daughter-in-law or her parents. Despite being Jewish himself, Arthur liked referring to Janet as a Jewish-American princess. Now, if you're not familiar, that's basically a stereotype of a vapid, spoiled, rich girl. Not a nice thing to say. And Arthur liked to tell big, sparkly lies

about his own military career. He told stories about his time as a special forces badass, a green beret who went on super cool Jason Bourne-style Black-Ops missions in Israel. He had business cards made up that said Colonel Arthur March retired. Only problem with that was, Arthur was never a colonel. He was a lieutenant colonel when he retired, and he was only on active duty for three years in the 50s during which time he worked as a pharmacist.

Not a green beret. When the Nashville scene asked him about all that, the year Janet disappeared, he doubled down on this embarrassing bullshit by faxing them an ID card that was either an error, or much more likely, in my opinion, a forgery. Eof. So embarrassing. So anyway, by 1999, Perry and his dad were living it up in Ahihique, which had a thriving expat community of Americans and Canadians. It's a chill place full of artists and retirees in the U.S. dollar, at least at the time, went really far. Perry must have figured he could live like a king. And for a while, that's just what he did. In record time, he met and married a young mom of three named Carmen Solorio, had a kid with her, and partnered up with another expat, a guy named S. Samuel Chavez to start a new business, by which I mean scam. Allegedly. Allegedly.

Allegedly. Shavez had a few fraud-related skeletons in his closet. He'd had his law license revoked in Indiana because of it. But if Perry knew about that, it must not have troubled him. I mean, he just had his own license suspended in Tennessee for, guess what? Allegations of fraud and embezzlement from his father-in-law's law firm. He'd get disbarred a year later. Perry and Chavez set up shop together, calling themselves doctorates of law and dangling a promising investment opportunity in front of the wealthy folks of Ahiheek. They were going to build an all-inclusive retirement community, they said. They just needed a measly 1.2 mill to get it started. It shouldn't surprise anybody that in no time at all, March and Chavez managed to get themselves on the shit list of just about everybody they did business with in Mexico. Soon, some nameless hero started posting unwanted posters with a picture of Perry and a bulleted list of all the allegations against him.

The fraud stuff he was allegedly up to in Mexico and the disappearance of his wife in the States. It pissed Perry off so bad that he couldn't figure out who was doing it. And of course, whenever he saw one of the posters, he'd have a little hissy fit and rip it down. but they'd always pop right back up. Delightful. If this was you and you're listening to this, please no. You're my hero. I might be in love with you.

Yeah, I might be in love with you, for real. Unwanted. Chef's Kiss. So good. Now, we don't have time to get into all the fraud slash theft allegations against Perry and his partner down in Mexico. If you want more details and they're pretty juicy details, read Gary C. King's book, Love Lies, and Murder.

he's got all of the tea, but we'll tell you one story, just to really bring home the fact that Perry is a piece of shit on every possible level. One woman named Gail, an American who grew up in New Orleans, saved carefully for years and retired Daha Heig in her 50s. And according to her, she ended up totally wiped out by Perry's alleged fraud. She agreed to let him handle the sale of some of her property back in the States, and she says he ran off with the money. Gail ended up losing her beautiful house in Mexico

and going from a peaceful retirement to an 80-hour workweek in a shabby little apartment she could barely afford. She told Gary C. King that Perry March ruined her life and didn't think twice about it. Oh my God. In addition to the hordes of pitchfork waving expats who were accusing him of fraud, Perry also had to contend with the Levines.

Janet's parents had not only won a multi-million dollar wrongful death lawsuit against him, but also managed to get a judge in Tennessee to grant them visitation rights with the kids and allow them to go to Mexico to pick them up for a couple months. Perry and Arthur, of course, considered this kidnapping and made enough noise about it that you could have probably heard it from the space station. Yeah, they tried to turn it to an international incident. By 2005, the investigation into Janet March's murder had pretty much stalled.

Everybody was beyond certain that Perry had killed her, but her body hadn't turned to. up. There were no eyewitnesses to what happened. There was, however, a pretty strong circumstantial case. The new Nashville DA was up for rolling the dice. So in secret, the DA's office drew up an arrest warrant and worked with the Mexican authorities to arrange the habeas gravis. Perry had no idea it was coming, which is, again, delightful. On the plane back to Nashville, sitting next to the detectives, Perry casually said, so what if I plead guilty? Tell the DA I want to plead guilty and I don't want to do more than seven years. Oh, Jesus. He was worried, he said, that his new wife might not wait any longer than that. And I feel so bad for Carmen, by the way. She sounds like a genuinely sweet person. Perry just bamboozled the hell out of her like he tries to do with everybody. But she seems like a, you know, a decent human being. He was afraid she wouldn't wait for him for longer than seven years.

I guess maybe that was just the arbitrary, like, seven years. And then she's going to marry some other guy. Unsurprisingly, the DA wasn't interested in a seven-year deal. So Perry, on a $3 million bail, sat his ass in jail waiting for trial. As one of the investigators later put it on the show Power, Privilege, and Justice, Perry's got two jobs to do in custody, that is sit there and keep his mouth shut. How do we think that's going to go, campers? this dumbass that couldn't sit and look sad or worried while the police were searching

his property for his wife's body yeah this this guy who got on TV and acted like he was the victim oh I'm I'm sure he was the epitome of silence yeah quiet as the tomb right it's a tale as oldest time as y'all certainly know by now if you've been paying attention in jail Perry met a dude named Russell Ferris Ferris had a rap sheet as long as as your arm and was in jail at the moment for an alleged assault on his girlfriend. Real nice, Russell. Anyway, obviously he and Pear Pear were made for each other, and they became friends. And it didn't take our boy long to start running his mouth about how much better his defense would go if Janet's parents were, you know, debt. Could his new best buddy help him out

with that? Oh, hell yeah, new best friend, Ferris said, and next chance he got, he was on the phone to the investigators, letting him know he had a live one for him, because we've said, We've said it eight million times now. Your prison buddy is not your buddy. Shut the fuck up. Now, this whole affair is way more interesting than we have time to explain here. So again, there are two great books on this case. If you want all the details, I read them both.

They're both awesome. This shit is hilarious. Like, you seriously, you should read the book. I wish we could go into it. I considered making it a two-part or so we could, but, you know, y'all tend to complain about those. For now, suffice it to say that now under the watchful, ears, I guess, of the investigators, Perry pretty much promised Ferris the world, a new life in Mexico, assisted, of course, by Big Daddy Arthur, who within about a couple weeks was talking

with Ferris on the phone, given murder advice, like, my suggestion is from the minute the product is gotten, you wear thin surgeons gloves, you do not take them off at all. The product, of course, was the gun. And my favorite thing about the recorded calls between Arthur March and this would-be hitman is that Arthur will be like real cagey and careful about saying shit like the instrument, the product, talking about the gun. And then he'll be like 35 millimeter. Like, oh, that's an uncrackable code, Arthur. He's such a moron. Oh, it's so funny. Anyway. So ultimately, the investigators ended up with six hours worth of recordings. Nobody in the media could believe it at first. A lawyer tried to hire a hitman in jail because it was so stupid. See? Oh, Perry, we've overestimated you again. So instead of freeing himself of the Levines, who I guess he figured were the best witnesses against him in his murder trial, he just caught himself a conspiracy to commit murder charge. Oh, he's such a dipshit. But aside from just, you know, giving everybody a good laugh, this little shenanigan also gave the investigators a valuable asset.

Arthur. And they'd always suspected he was involved in the disposal of Janet's body. Now, they had him red-handed trying to help his boy hire a hitman, and that, my friends, is a bargaining chip. Turns out, Arthur didn't really want to spend the rest of his life in prison, not even to help out his favorite kid. And it didn't take the prosecutors long to get him to flip on Perry. His dad, in exchange for 18 months in prison, he'd tell them the truth about Janet's murder. Y'all think your parents would roll over on you? I don't think mine would. well my dad maybe he's very rules oriented but my mom i think would take one for the team

i know both the years would like die for you so that's anyway i don't know i don't want i told them already i don't want them to i feel like i feel like it makes me like well and it's it's complicated because like might it save me maybe but it would also ruin their lives because like look at we we spent i don't know 20 minutes of this hour long episode dunking on this man. He's awful. He's so awful. He's so terrible.

Wait don't you like read the, oh, Arthur is such a piece of shit. He's awful, awful. But I, I hate him. I'm too, this is why, like, I can't commit any crimes because I feel guilty thinking about it. So this is, like, I'm not built for, I'm not built for murder. Remember I got like a one on the psychopath test that one time? Yeah, so sweet.

I think I got a two. But I also feel like, there's part of me that feels like you could just flip one neuron in my brain and I could go. like full-time friggin' cat burglar. I don't know. Who knows? I'm a sweet kid, too, though. You are. Now, what Arthur told them was pretty much exactly

what they'd always suspected, which is that Perry had called him in the middle of the night, told him he and Janet had had a fight, and she was dead. He didn't say how, supposedly, or admit to it being actual murder, he just sort of made it sound like an accident. And he needed Daddy to come help him out. So Arthur did.

He and Perry loaded Janet's body into the trunk of Perry's four and that big old rug. And then Perry said he really needed to get some sleep. So while he took his punk ass to bed, Arthur by himself drove all the way out to Kentucky, found a big brush pile in middle of nowhere and put Janet's body in it. He didn't remember exactly where and the investigators never found Janet's remains, which is the saddest part about all this, I think.

That's why you tell your kids no. Yeah. Next thing you know, you're going to be disposing a body for them while they take a little nappy nap. Like, come on. Probably need his little diapy changed after that too. Fucking probably. I mean, that was pretty much it for Perry. Dad was talking and he was six kinds of screwed.

Arthur didn't end up testifying in person at his son's trial. By then, he was really sick. But the judge allowed his videotaped confession to be played to the jury. In between that and the pile of circumstantial evidence, the jury didn't need any more convincing. One little interesting detail that came out at the trial was that, according to a friend of Janet's, Perry had threatened her after she spoke to the media. They found Perry guilty of second-degree murder, abuse of a corpse, and tampering with evidence. It had taken a decade, but the Levines finally saw some degree of justice for their beautiful, vibrant daughter.

But that was just the beginning. Perry would go to trial three times total. Once for Janet's murder, once on the hitman, attempt and once for grand larceny for embezzling 23 grand from larry levin's firm he was convicted in all three and all told he was sentenced to 56 years in prison arthur who thought he was only going to get 18 months because of spilling the beans on his son got a nasty shock when the judge decided to reject the plea deal and sentenced him to five years in prison which judges can do by the way so even if you take a plea deal it doesn't fucking matter he didn't serve

the five years, though. He died just three months later. Janet's parents told 48 hours that if she'd lived, they believe she'd have gone on to a bright career as an artist. Her paintings were always full of color and light, and a lot of them showed her sense of humor, too. I hope someday her loved ones can bring her home and lay her to rest with some dignity. As for Janet's children, the Levines raised them, despite Perry trying for years from prison to wrestle custody away from them. I'm sure they've been through a special kind of hell, and we wish them nothing but love and success.

Absolutely. So that was a wild one, right, campers? You know we'll have another one for you next week, but for now, lock your doors, let your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Erica, Brandon, Ashley, Stephanie, Kara,

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