The murder of Janet March

The case was not solved with a body, a weapon or a confession. Detectives who took it over in the Nashville police cold case squad had a suspect for years: Perry March had told several people different stories about where his wife had gone, bought new tires for his Jeep six days after she vanished, and a search found the hard drive of his computer missing. A grand jury indicted him in secret in December 2004, and Mexico expelled him in August 2005. What turned an indictment into a conviction came from his cell. A fellow inmate, facing attempted murder charges of his own, told police that Perry March had asked him to kill Janet's parents, and agreed to record their conversations. The recordings, made on October 6 and 7, 2005, led to five recorded calls to Perry March's father, Arthur, in Mexico. An FBI agent confronted Arthur March at the Guadalajara airport on October 27, 2005, and a grand jury charged him the next day. After he was deported from Mexico in January 2006, he pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiracy to commit murder and agreed to testify. In a videotaped deposition he said his son had asked him to throw away the hard drive and to help dispose of Janet's remains, and that he left them in a brush pile near Bowling Green, Kentucky. Detectives never found the spot. A second inmate testified that Perry March had told him another version, in which the body was burned. At trial in August 2006 the jury also heard Perry March's own remarks to detectives on the flight back from Los Angeles, a mitochondrial DNA result on a hair from his Jeep that was consistent with Janet, testimony about the apartment complex where her car was found, and the jail recordings. DNA only corroborated what the informant and Arthur March had put in place. It identified no one. Sources differ on Arthur March's sentence. The appeals court described an agreement for eighteen months, while CBS reported that the judge rejected it and imposed five years.