Lawyer to be tried in pregnant wife’s killing
Written by AP writer Jim Suhr and updated on 1/11/2011:
HAZEL PARK, Mich. -- For her toddler’s sake, Leann Fletcher was willing to do most anything to salvage her marriage -- even agreeing to go with her husband to a firing range, though she was deathly afraid of guns.
″‘Oh, Mother, he’s not going to shoot me,’” her mother, Gloria Misener, says Leann joked when the couple dropped off 3-year-old Hannah with her. Hours later, Leann Fletcher was dead in her bedroom, a bullet in her brain.
In the tale of sex, politics and death that has followed, authorities accuse attorney Michael Fletcher, 30, of gunning down his pregnant wife to further his romance with another woman -- a judge who assigned him thousands of dollars worth of indigent cases.
Fletcher says his 29-year-old wife shot herself, just days after she revealed she was carrying their second child. Today, Fletcher goes to trial on a charge of first-degree murder.
Macomb County Judge Susan Chrzanowski, who has testified she had an intimate relationship with Fletcher for about a year, is under state review for directing cases of indigent defendants to Fletcher.
And young Hannah at times cries out to join her mother in heaven as both sets of her grandparents tangle in court over her custody. “Every night she gets sad about her mother, about not baking cookies and pies with her and stuff like that,” Leann’s mother says. “She always says, ‘I miss her so, so much.’”
Michael Fletcher has mostly kept quiet. For months since the shooting, his attorney Brian Legghio has declined to return telephone messages.
Leann and Michael Fletcher met at a Halloween party at Michigan State University, where he was a student. He asked the woman in a devil costume to take him to hell. The couple married in 1993.
Hannah was born in 1996, and Fletcher got his law degree the next year. Then, his mother-in-law says, he suddenly became cold. Money and power, she says, “made him feel important.” Those close to the couple say Fletcher never showed much interest in his family.
The Fletchers separated several times. Leann suspected him of cheating but he denied it.
Fletcher met Chrzanowski in 1996 while she campaigned for a judgeship. He became a research clerk for her and three other judges.
After Chrzanowski’s divorce in 1998, she says, her relationship with Fletcher became more intimate. They exchanged gifts, cards, poems and computer messages.
In January 1999, he sued for divorce, declaring his marriage unsalvageable. He continued romancing Chrzanowski.
But as he’d done before, a flower-bearing Fletcher returned to his wife, pledging he’d be a better husband and dad. Leann took him back, and friends say their life together seemed to be going well.
Fletcher, though, never filed to have the divorce case thrown out. And by last June, two months before the shooting, he secretly was seeing Chrzanowski three times a week, the judge testified.
Last Aug. 14, Leann told family and friends she was pregnant. The next night, Chrzanowski said, Fletcher paged her to say he had an hour free. The two rendezvoused for sex, she said, and “he told me he loved me very much.”
The Fletchers went to the firing range the next day, then home with plans to have sex before retrieving Hannah, Fletcher told police. He says he asked his wife to finish loading a gun, then went into a bathroom.
That’s when he says he heard a gunshot and rushed to the bedroom, found his wife dead and called police. They found Leann’s body clad only in a bra and tank top.
In a closet, investigators found love notes, pictures and cards from Chrzanowski, 33, to Fletcher, and an invoice for a computer she had bought for him.
Authorities soon questioned Fletcher’s account of his wife’s death and said he overlooked a crucial detail a distinctive blood pattern on his shirt cuff, suggesting that Fletcher was just inches from his wife when the fatal shot was fired.
No such blood spray was found on his wife’s hands or body, though the gun was blood-covered, the scientist testified.
Prosecutors believe that Fletcher orchestrated the trip to the firing range to explain any gunpowder residue found on his hands and to get such evidence onto his wife’s.
The defense wants a judge to rule the shirt inadmissible, arguing it was illegally seized. “I understand there may be tendencies to dislike him,” Fletcher’s attorney Legghio says. “But it’s not our job to make him sympathetic (to jurors). The case is all about getting the evidence before the jury.”
Authorities believe that Chrzanowski, who is to testify at the trial in the coming weeks, had no connection to the shooting.
But the state Judicial Tenure Commission, which investigates alleged judicial misconduct, found in April that Chrzanowski had assigned Fletcher to represent 64 indigent clients since 1998, three times the assignments he got from all three of the court’s other judges.
It alleges that Chrzanowski failed to disclose her relationship with Fletcher to opposing lawyers and did not disqualify herself from presiding over the cases, though Chrzanowski says in many of the cases she was only making sentencing decisions and many of the assignments came when “there was no ongoing relationship” with Fletcher.
The commission has requested a misconduct hearing.
Kathy Pinna 
Daniel Pinna 
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