Deadly Ride

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

(CBS) 
When Jane Mixer was murdered in 1969, Leiterman was 26 and single. He had served four years in the Navy and lived in a town about 20 miles from Ann Arbor. He says he did not know Jane Mixer.

Although the police kept grilling Leiterman, he stuck to his story. Schroeder says he didn’t believe him, because of the DNA.

The police lab could not pinpoint where the DNA came from but said it was not blood and not semen. It might be something like sweat, saliva or skin cells. It was enough for police to accuse Leiterman of murder.

What went through his mind? “They were wrong. I did not do this. My concerns for my family. Just the accusation is horrible,” says Leiterman.

He was taken into custody. “Detective Schroeder had put me on the phone with my wife, while she was in the car. I could hear the anguish, the terror in her voice,” remembers Leiterman.

At the time, Leiterman's wife was too distraught to talk with 48 Hours, so their close friend Rachel Kube stepped in to talk about the man she has known for three decades.

“I believe they got the wrong man. It isn’t Gary. The Gary I know wouldn’t have done this,” says Kube.

Leiterman had never been accused of a violent crime before. “My personal life was pretty much wrapped up with my family. Taking vacations with them. Dragging the kids along to Civil War battlefields,” he says.

But Leiterman did have one scrape with the law in 2001, when he was caught writing himself fake prescriptions. He had become addicted to painkillers during a bout with kidney stones. He was ordered to a treatment program, which he successfully completed, but his DNA was put in a database. And that’s how he now finds himself accused of murder.

Leiterman says he has nothing to do with the murder of Jane Mixer.

Prosecutor Steven Hiller doesn’t buy that, and believes Leiterman should pay for this crime.

What would Leiterman’s motive be for killing a woman? “The fact that her pantyhose had been taken down, her jumper had been pulled up so that her genitals were exposed, I think it's fair to conclude that the motive was sexual assault,” says Hiller.

But, there was no physical evidence of sexual assault and that’s just one of the many challenges Hiller faces in this old case. “We had missing evidence. We had lost evidence. People’s memories fade. We didn’t have the murder weapon,” says Hiller.

The state’s biggest challenge may be that Gary Leiterman’s DNA wasn’t the only DNA found on Jane Mixer. The state’s own lab says the DNA from the spot of blood scraped from Jane’s left hand in 1969 matches another man: a convicted killer named John Ruelas.

But Hiller says he is sure Ruelas did not murder Jane, for one simple reason. “He was four and a half years old at the time.”

“A four and a half year old didn’t put a gun to Jane Mixer’s head and pull the trigger, and put it to her head again and pull the trigger, knot a stocking around her neck and drag her body into the cemetery and arrange her clothes around her,” says Hiller.

So how did a four-year-old’s blood get on Jane Mixer’s hand? The Ruelas and Mixer cases were processed in the lab around the same time, raising the issue of contamination. But Hiller says that didn’t happen.

Hiller says Leiterman got away with murder for 36 years.