by Gary C. King
At seventy-eight years old, and facing twenty years in prison, Arthur March didn’t have to stew for very long in jail before he began thinking about making a deal. On Monday, February 6, 2006, barely three weeks after being jailed, Arthur, through his attorney, told authorities that he was ready to make a deal in return for a lighter sentence. When it had been formally agreed that Arthur would serve only eighteen months in a federal prison in exchange for pleading guilty to a charge of solicitation to commit murder and for agreeing to testify against his son, Arthur seemed ready to tell the authorities what they had long wanted to know.
Chapter 31
While meeting with Detectives Postiglione and Pridemore, Arthur March explained that his son Perry had admitted to him that he had killed Janet. Arthur, who would later be formally deposed over a two-day period, told the detectives that Perry had told him that on the night that Janet had disappeared, Perry and Janet had engaged in a major argument. At one point, he said, Janet had come at Perry with either a butcher knife or a kitchen knife, and that Perry had subsequently beat her to death with a wrench inside their Forest Hills home. Arthur told the cops that Perry had originally buried Janet’s body himself, but he needed help moving it from its original location, because that area, he had learned, had become a construction site.
Arthur told the cops that four or five weeks later, he and Perry took Janet’s body and drove it to a location near Bowling Green, Kentucky. According to Arthur, they checked into a Bowling Green motel. After checking in, Arthur left Perry at the motel room and drove Janet’s corpse to a farmland area a short distance outside of town. After driving around for a while, he said, he came upon a brush pile, which he believed would likely be burned in the near future. He claimed that after parking the car, he placed Janet’s body into the brush pile and returned to the motel.
While Arthur’s story had proven interesting and had moved the police and prosecutors to a “very critical state” in the investigation, according to Metro police spokesperson Don Aaron, it had also raised a lot of questions.
Where was the blood evidence? If Janet had been struck on the head with a wrench, there would surely have been blood left behind. Dr. Corey Slovis, chairperson of the Department of Emergency Room Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, didn’t necessarily believe there would have been a lot of blood.
“It is possible to have a life-ending injury without a significant amount of bleeding,” Dr. Slovis told a Tennessean reporter. “It is also quite possible to have enough from ruptured blood vessels to have someone lose their entire blood volume.”
Although it is difficult to clean up all of the blood left behind at a crime scene, even by those who use bleach and water, Perry had two weeks to look for trace evidence and, if found, to clean it, and then clean it again and again. On the other hand, if Janet hadn’t lost much blood from her injuries, it was possible that there wasn’t any blood evidence to worry about anyway.
Another question raised by Arthur’s statements that some of the locals wondered about was how Perry March, having been named as a prime suspect in a high-profile missing-person case, had gotten out of town to dump his wife’s body? Wouldn’t the police have placed a tail on their prime suspect? Again, not necessarily.
“It is true that Perry March was named as a suspect in this case in search warrant documentation in mid-September of 1996,” said Aaron. “But to assume or presume that a police officer was with Perry March every second of the day in August and September of 1996 would not be correct.”
People also wondered why Perry and his dad would take the risk of moving Janet’s body out of state, as well as the difficulty of moving a decomposing corpse. Had Perry somehow been able to preserve it for four or five weeks? If he had buried it, the decomposition would be severe, messy, and the odor horrendous.
And how could a sixty-eight-year-old man remove a rapidly decomposing corpse from the vehicle and carry it to the brush pile that he said he had found? Would Arthur have been in good enough shape almost ten years earlier to carry out such a feat? After all, when Janet disappeared, it had been reported that she was five feet four inches tall and weighed 104 pounds. While she wasn’t large by any means, that much bulk and weight would be difficult, if not impossible, for an old man like Arthur to handle.
One of the biggest questions on everyone’s minds, however, was whether anything that Arthur had told the police had even been truthful. There was, after all, the witness who claimed to have seen Perry March placing a rolled-up rug into a Dumpster shortly after Janet had disappeared. Had Arthur made up the story as part of yet another father-and-son scheme concocted to somehow help Perry’s case by planting all of those seeds of doubt that had turned into questions? How might a jury react to such a scenario? No one, of course, had any way of knowing whether Arthur was telling the truth or not, or whether this was just another concocted ploy that Perry had worked out in his head. Due to a huge blunder by jail employees, he and his father had, after all, been allowed to have a face-to-face meeting a few days before Arthur had announced that he wanted to make a deal. Had they worked out such a plan at that time? The meeting between father and son had lasted about forty-five minutes, and had been approved by officials within the sheriff’s department without the knowledge of the district attorney’s office. The sheriff ’s department hadn’t considered what kind of problems such a meeting might cause in a criminal case of such magnitude—they had only been concerned whether the visit would have been a security problem for the jail. When it had been determined that security would not be an issue, the visit was allowed.
“It was a visit,” Davidson County sheriff Daron Hall said. “From our standpoint it presented no threat to either of them, nor did it present a threat to our institution. The visit was for forty-five minutes, it’s not going to reoccur, and I don’t believe that’s enough time to mastermind ten-year-ago murder scenarios.”
The sheriff said that the district attorney’s office should have informed the jail staff that they did not want the father and son meeting with each other.
“We have never received a request from anyone not to allow it, either prior to the meeting or after it,” Sheriff Hall said.
Deputy DA Tom Thurman, who had overseen the case from a prosecutorial standpoint since it began nearly ten years earlier, said that he had not been told of the meeting until after it had taken place. He said that because of the fact that Perry and Arthur were codefendants, their being allowed to visit “would give us concern.”
“I wouldn’t want to speculate on what they talked about or what impact it has on the case, because I really don’t know,” Thurman said.
“For nine years he says that Perry didn’t have anything to do with Janet’s death,” said another local criminal defense attorney. “He has a meeting with Perry, and within a very short period of time, he’s pleading guilty and telling the authorities that Perry killed his wife. . . . It’s very suspect.”
“Arthur has said what he needs to receive a shorter sentence rather than a longer sentence,” one of Perry’s attorneys, John Herbison, said. “Perry March and Arthur March are still father and son. They still love each other. They have very different accounts of what happened and what didn’t happen. . . . Whatever Arthur does, we’ll just respond to it at an appropriate time.”
“If I’m Perry March’s attorney,” said a Nashville criminal defense attorney not connected to the case, “I’m skeptical of it (Arthur’s deal) only because the government has the unique ability to offer something of value for a witness to testify. That would be like me offering some money to testify on my behalf. It’s worth more than money. It’s years of their life.”
Could it also be possible that Arthur March had concocted the entire story on his own in order to shave several years off his own sentence? Had he come to the point where, after years of trying to help his son get through his legal troubles, he was finally fed up with having allowed himself to have been dragged into, used, and made a part o
f a plan that had ultimately cost him his freedom? At seventy-eight years old, Arthur knew that he would likely die in prison if he had to serve a long sentence. Was it finally time for him to go against his son in an “every man for himself” scenario?
“At this juncture I’m afraid any comment from me might jeopardize the work that I’ve done toward resolving the case on behalf of Arthur March,” Arthur’s lawyer, Fletcher Long, said.
Arthur’s lawyer also said that he hoped his client would not be required to help put his son in prison. Long said that Arthur was sorry for the part he played in Janet’s disappearance.
“Maybe he won’t have to, if his son pleas,” Long said. “I think my client very much hopes that Perry will go ahead and plea. . . . I think Arthur March is guilty of loving his son.”
Could Arthur’s motivation in copping a plea have simply been a plan to pave the way for Perry to be able to get a plea deal as well? In other words, could Arthur’s offer to testify against his son make Perry’s case look all the more bleak for him than it already did? And would it be enough to prompt prosecutors—after all, Arthur’s deal could have been made up as a reverse psychology of sorts against the prosecutors—to trick them, if you will, into opening the door to offer Perry a plea bargain by thinking he might take it when faced with his father’s testimony? Such a plan, if that had been what it was, could have only been concocted by a sociopathic mind like Perry’s. Admittedly, they were rolling the dice if that had been their scheme, but the father and son could have worked it out at their face-to-face meeting. True, it was only one of several possibilities, but given Perry’s desire to manipulate the system, and to get one up on the prosecutors, made it seem possible, even plausible.
“It’s got to be powerful,” said U.S. Attorney Jim Vines, whose agency helped put together the case against Arthur March. “You have a father testifying that his son acknowledged that he killed the daughter-in-law.”
“Arthur March has a strong incentive to please the prosecutors. . . ,” Herbison said. He added that at trial the jurors would likely be informed that Arthur had cooperated with prosecutors, perhaps under pressure, in exchange for a lighter sentence in his case. Once the case made it to trial, Arthur’s statements would be subject to cross-examination. “Perry understands the situation.”
Although the father and son had pledged to each other during their jailhouse visit that neither would testify against the other, and both had agreed that they would “wear these orange jumpsuits as a badge of honor,” Arthur apparently had decided, for whatever reason, to roll over on his son. The deal had been made, Arthur had pleaded guilty to a charge of solicitation to commit murder, and his statement had served as Arthur’s first public acknowledgment that Perry had killed Janet. And if the sentencing judge agreed, he would only serve eighteen months instead of facing a sentence in which he surely would not survive.
At one point during Arthur’s plea dealing, Postiglione and Pridemore checked him out of the Metro Jail and drove him to the Bowling Green, Kentucky, area in the hope that Arthur might be able to show them where he had supposedly dumped Janet’s body. However, after spending nearly all day in the neighboring state, Arthur was unable to remember the exact location where he claimed he dumped his daughter-in-law’s body.
Arthur March was moved to a federal detention facility following his plea agreement. He was scheduled to be sentenced on May 1, 2006.
Chapter 32
The deposition of Colonel Arthur Wayne March, as it came to be known, was taken over two days—April 10 to 11, 2006, a Monday and a Tuesday. Arthur’s attorney, Fletcher Long, was present, as was his son Perry March. Tom Thurman and Katie Miller were present for the state, and attorneys William A. Massey, Lorna McClusky, and John Herbison appeared on behalf of Perry March. Following introductory remarks and the swearing in of Arthur March, the questioning began.
“State your name for the record, please, sir,” Thurman instructed.
“Arthur Wayne March.”
“And how old are you?”
“Seventy-eight.”
“Do you go by Colonel, Mr., what do you like to be called?” Thurman asked.
“Well, I prefer to be called Colonel, except sometimes they call me Dr.,” Arthur replied.
Thurman asked him if he was on any medication, and Arthur said that he was on “lots of it,” taking seventeen pills each day for a medical condition that he thought had been congestive heart failure—except all the tests had come back negative. He failed to provide any other information about his medical condition at that time except to say that he had lost twenty-four pounds of excess fluid from his body. Thurman took him through a series of questions that established that Arthur was being held in a federal facility in Kentucky. Details of his family, children, educational background, and retirement from the army also were provided. After discussing the terms of his guilty plea, Thurman transitioned his questioning to the night that Janet disappeared.
“Do you recall when your daughter-in-law Janet March disappeared on August 15, 1996?” Thurman asked.
“Yes. I was in Mexico.”
“Did you come to Nashville shortly after that?”
“I did.”
“And why did you come to Nashville?”
“My son asked me to come up and help him with the children. He needed help.”
“Do you know how many days after she disappeared before you were able to arrive here in Nashville?”
“I think it was three or four. I really don’t—”
“Do you recall the day of September 17, 1996, when a search warrant was served on your apartment, as well as . . . the home of your son, Mr. March?” Thurman asked.
“Yes.”
“Prior to that search warrant being served . . . did your son Perry March ask you to dispose of any items for him?”
“Yes, two items for the computer. One, I don’t know what it was, and the other was the hard drive.”
“And, did you do that for him?”
“Yes, I did.”
“And how did you obtain these items?”
“Perry gave them to me.”
“And what did you do with those items?”
“I—one that I don’t know what the name on it was, I put into a disposable garbage box in a strip mall in front of a drugstore. And the other was the hard drive—I disposed of it by throwing it . . . in a wooded area relatively near the house.”
In response to the questions being asked him, Arthur explained that he had disposed of the computer hard drive and the second computer item, which he wasn’t familiar with, on two separate occasions because Perry had given the items to him on separate occasions. Arthur also explained how he had driven a rental truck loaded with furniture from Perry and Janet’s house to the Chicago area the day after the search warrant had been served, September 18, which he had placed into storage in Hammond, Indiana, just outside of Chicago. He said that he had made the trip alone, and had taken a flight back to Nashville.
“Okay, did you ever travel back with your son Perry March?” Thurman asked.
“Yes.”
“When was that?”
“That was . . . later.”
“Later in September?”
“It could have been, yes.”
“Now, how did you return from Chicago with your son Perry March?”
“Uh—we came back in his Volvo.”
“On a trip back to Nashville . . . that time, did . . . you and your son stop and purchase anything?”
“Uh—we stopped . . . we bought . . . a shovel and I think the other item was Clorox, but I’m not sure.”
Although Arthur said that he could not recall which state they were in when they stopped to purchase the shovel and the bleach, he said that the purchase had been made at a hardware store.
“When you arrived back in Nashville, did your son ask you to do something for him, to assist him in a—in a matter?” Thurman asked.
“A little later on, he asked me to help—uh, d
ispose of Janet’s body.”
“And how was he acting when he asked you to do that?”
“Little nervous.”
“Did he say . . . why he wanted you . . . to help him dispose of her body?”
“Yes. He said where he placed the body was now being turned into a construction site and her body was placed right near the road that they were using to get to the construction site.”
“Did you agree to assist him in disposing of the body?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Where did you go from there, once you agreed to assist him?”
“Uh—we went in his car . . . up the highway . . . a fairly large, two-lane highway.”
Arthur explained that it was perhaps a ten-minute drive to the location where the body was buried. He said that they parked the car, and Arthur got out of the car to retrieve the body.
“He told me where the body would be and I . . . got out of the car and went to get the body and he drove around.”
“What instructions did he give you . . . about where the body was located?”
“Told me it was up this little road, ten to fifteen yards, and turn left and go in. It would be in the wooded section and I had a flashlight. He told me I should look on the ground and I would see where the body was.”
“Did you follow his instructions?”
“Yes.”
“Were you able to find—”
“Yes, with no problem.”
Thurman asked Arthur to describe his observations when he found the body regarding its appearance.
“It was in this black . . . plastic bag. We call it a leaf bag up north . . . a large bag.”
“Did it appear to have . . . any disturbance around where the body was located?”
“Yes, it looked . . . like there was some digging around . . . what proved to be the grave.”
“Was the body buried to any extent?”
“It had dirt on top.”
“And were you able to get the body in the trash bag, the leaf bag, out without digging yourself?”