Deadly Ride

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

(CBS) 
Now, in 2005, Leiterman is on trial for the 1969 murder of Jane Mixer.

Leiterman, maintains his innocence. His friends and family are standing by him. “I talk to my wife three or four times a week. I know they pray for me,” he says.

Jane’s sister, Barbara, and her daughter Maggie, vow to be in court every day and weigh the evidence themselves. “I wanted to bear witness to Jane’s life and this is, in some sense, you know, a part of her life. I couldn’t not be here. I had to be here,” says Barbara.

Jane’s father Dan Mixer was the first witness called. “They took us to the morgue, exposed the body, and it was my daughter, Jane,” Dan testified.

Leiterman says he feels sympathy for Dan Mixer: “I could not think of a more terrible and sad and horrifying feeling than being told that your daughter is never coming home again.”

David Johnson, the man who was acting in a play the night of the murder, testified that he never spoke with Jane or even knew her.

What does Hiller think happened on that March night in 1969?

“I think that Gary Leiterman called Jane Mixer in response to her ad for a ride to Muskegon, and represented himself as David Johnson,” says Hiller.

Hiller believes that Jane got in Leiterman’s car and that some time that night he made a sexual advance that ended in murder.

“Ultimately, that night he put a gun to her head twice, pulled the trigger,” Hiller says.

Leiterman, an avid hunter, did own a .22 caliber handgun but there is no proof it was the gun that killed Jane.

The old detectives did their best to recall the case, and the evidence they found and lost.

But the crucial issue concerned evidence they didn’t know existed in 1969: DNA.

The new investigators who took over the case testified about three distinct spots of DNA on Jane’s pantyhose that they say clearly matches the DNA of Leiterman. And, they say, DNA in other places was a partial match.

Those places included three additional spots on the pantyhose, spots on the bloody towel found under Jane’s head and spots on the nylon stocking that was tied around her neck.

Hiller says that is a lot of DNA, and proof that Leiterman was there when Jane was murdered, perhaps sweating as he moved her body.

Leiterman denies that and says he doesn’t know how his DNA got there.

Defense attorney Gary Gabry says he can imagine some possibilities. “I believe there’s innocent explanations in which the DNA could have been on there,” says Gabry. “Such as having contact with the pantyhose in the laundromat.”

Or, as his expert testified, DNA could have been transferred in a public place, with a chance encounter, like a sneeze.

Hiller dismissed that, saying there’s just too much DNA to explain away.

“It was in places where it would not have resulted from casual contact. There is no innocent explanation for Jane Mixer’s pantyhose to have Gary Leiterman’s DNA on them,” says Hiller.

But he could not so readily dismiss the crime lab’s finding that a spot of blood on Jane Mixer’s hand matched the DNA of a convicted felon who was only four years old when Jane was murdered.

In 1969, young John Ruelas lived in downtown Detroit, around 40 miles away from where Jane’s body was found. Police could not connect Ruelas to Leiterman or to Jane Mixer. The Mixer and Ruelas cases were in the lab around the same time, which begs the question: did something go wrong in the lab?