Deadly Ride

After 30 Years, A Suspect Is Charged In Coed's Murder

(CBS) 
“And she had also had a raincoat pulled up over her face to protect her from the elements. Very unlike the other cases,” says Detective Eric Schroeder, one of many investigators who believe Jane’s case stands alone.

For years, Jane Mixer’s murder has bothered Schroeder. He was convinced that Jane’s case should be taken out of the cold case files.

At the same time, as Schroeder and his colleagues began to quietly re-investigate Jane’s murder, Maggie was still writing her book, and struggling.

“It was a terrible book to write. I had terrible nightmares, I mean, many times thought I should abandon ship,” she explains. “I had this phobia that Jane’s killer might be alive and free.”

Schroeder says he has never been involved in a case this encompassing and says he was deeply touched by the story of Jane Mixer. “This case had kind of fallen through the cracks and been forgotten about,” he says.

So, in 2001, when Schroeder was put in charge of cataloguing evidence from old cases, he jumped at the chance to finally do Jane justice. He hoped to find new evidence that could not be detected in the 1960s: DNA.

The evidence included the pantyhose that were found on her body, and Schroeder sent it to a lab where forensic scientists took cuttings of sections with possible staining for DNA analysis.

The lab also looked for tell-tale DNA on Jane’s clothing, the ligature, and a bloody towel found under her head.

About a year later, Schroeder says, he got a call from the scientists.

The lab had found incriminating DNA, but that DNA did not match John Collins, the man who had been blamed for the murder for more than 30 years. Now there was a new suspect.

Jane’s sister, Barbara, was surprised to get a call from Detective Schroeder. “There would be no reason to think it would be closed, but I had no idea that there were people that were actually aware that it was an unsolved case,” she recalls.

Maggie was just finishing her book about Jane and says she was shocked by the news. “It definitely was beyond the realms of anything I could’ve ever imagined,” she says.

The lab found that the DNA on Jane’s pantyhose matched that of 62-year-old Gary Leiterman from Gobels, Michigan. Leiterman, a retired registered nurse, is a husband of nearly 28 years and a father of two grown children.

Schroeder says investigators spent a two and a half to three months doing a background investigation on Leiterman and eventually decided to contact him directly.

When police came knocking on his door in November 2004, Leiterman says he thought nothing of it. He says he was leading a pretty normal life. “Thoughts went through my mind. Perhaps there’s some problems in the neighborhood? Maybe somebody had something stolen?” Leiterman says.

After talking with Leiterman for more than three hours, the detectives dropped their bombshell. They told him his DNA was found on crime scene evidence that had been sitting in storage since 1969.

“I was incredulous. I said, ‘What do you mean, my DNA?’” recalls Leiterman.