Love, Lies, Murder?

Surprising Arrest In Disappearance Of Janet March

(CBS) 
At first, this was just another missing person case to Nashville Detective Mickey Miller.

“The first thing we did is start checking credit card accounts and things of that nature,” says Miller. But Janet had not left a paper trail.

Already worried, Janet’s friends knew something was very wrong when Janet wasn’t there for Sammy’s sixth birthday party.

“At that point, I knew that Janet was dead,” one of Janet’s friends told 48 Hours, “Because she would never, ever not come to her son’s party.”

Then just a week into their investigation, police found Janet’s car parked in the lot of an apartment complex just a few miles from the March house.

“We found a lot of her personal effects, including her passport,” says Detective Miller.

Three weeks after Janet disappeared, with no credit card use, no phone calls home to check on the kids, and her car found with most of her belongings still packed inside, police decided this was no longer just a missing person case. It was a homicide.

“This morning the Levine family and their friends posted a $25,000 reward for information leading to the location of Mrs. March or her body,” police announced at the time.

And the prime suspect in the case was Perry March.

Perry refused police requests to interview him or his children. When he also refused to allow his house to be searched, police got a warrant.

One month after the disappearance, police went inch-by-inch through the house.

“We vacuumed all the floors. We collected the vacuum bags out of the vacuums that belonged here, we even processed these hardwood floors for fingerprints and palm prints,” recalls Nashville Crime Scene Investigator Johnnie Hunter.

Investigators searched nearby woods, two lakes and a river, yet found no trace of Janet and no evidence that a crime had even been committed.

“They couldn’t find some other reason to explain Janet’s being missing. They couldn’t find anything. And therefore it must be me!” says Perry.

But there was one thing about the search that really bothered police and still does -- not what they found but what they didn’t find.

Perry had told police that a list Janet had given him the night she left had been created on their home computer. That list was practically the only piece of evidence that backed up his story.

But police didn’t believe him. In fact, they wanted to get their hands on the computer’s hard drive, because they believed it might show that Perry, not Janet, had written the list. The problem was that the hard drive was missing.

Perry says he did not remove the hard drive. Asked who he thinks removed it, Perry says, “Well, there’s two people that are high on my list who could have removed it. One of them is Larry Levine, and the other is my father.”

Perry’s father, Arthur March, had come to stay at Perry’s house several days after Janet disappeared. But he says he doesn’t even know what a hard drive is.

And Larry Levine also said he did not remove the hard drive. “I had nothing to gain by trying to get at it,” he says.

Meanwhile, police became concerned about something else they didn’t find -- the tires on Perry’s car. Six days after Janet disappeared, Perry replaced the tires with new ones.

“It was on my list! The tires on the Jeep were bald. And she was worried the Jeep was going to be slipping in the rain and all this other kind of stuff and I was just knocking off the stuff on my list,” says Perry.

But according to Detective Miller, the tire company says that the tires did not need to be changed. “In fact they questioned that, why the tires were being changed, and Perry said he just didn’t like the type tires that were on the car at the time and he wanted a different brand.”

Yet even as investigators became convinced that he was involved in his wife’s disappearance, they couldn’t come up with the evidence to charge Perry March with a crime.