Endgame

Cold Case Cops Try To Solve A Nearly Decade-Old Mystery

(CBS)  Carolyn couldn’t help thinking about the conversation she had with Janet on the day she disappeared. "She asked me to go with her the next day to see a divorce lawyer. I was concerned for her marriage. It never occurred to me that I should be concerned for her life," she recalls.

At first, Nashville detective Mickey Miller treated Janet's disappearance like any other missing persons case. "The first thing we did is start checking credit card accounts and things of that nature," he recalls.

But Janet didn't leave any kind of trail. Then, just a week into the investigation, police found Janet’s car, parked in an apartment complex just a few miles from the March house.

Inside the car were a lot of her personal effects, including her passport. This was no longer just a missing person’s case - now it was a homicide investigation and the prime suspect was Perry March.

The fact Janet wasn’t reported missing for two weeks was working against investigators. "It gives somebody, whoever committed this crime a chance to dispose of the body. And, of course, you lose evidence with time," Det. Miller explains.

Police searched the March house from top to bottom, vacuuming all of the floors, checking bags and even processing the hardwood floors for fingerprints and palm prints.

But it was what police didn’t find that bothered them the most: "One of the items specified by the search warrant was a computer inside the home," says Miller. "Perry said that when Janet left that she had typed out a note basically the contract between the two of them for him to sign."

That list was practically the only piece of evidence that backed up Perry March’s 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 would show that Perry, not Janet had written the list. The problem was the hard drive was missing. Someone else had gotten to it first.

Perry March denied removing the hard drive, saying the only two people who could have done it was Janet's father Larry Levine or his own father Arthur.

Perry March’s father was staying at the March house shortly after Janet disappeared but he denies removing the hard drive. As for Larry Levine, he says he "had nothing to gain by trying to get at it."

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

Det. Miller says that according to the tire company, the tires did not need changing. "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," he says.

As investigators struggled to come up with enough evidence to charge Perry March, he stopped cooperating with the police. Then he packed up and moved to Chicago, taking with him his two children.

The Levines immediately filed for visitation rights with their two grandchildren but Perry March fought them for two years.

In 1999, once the Levine’s were granted visitation rights, Perry March was nowhere to be found - he had moved to Mexico.

Asked why he left the country, March tells 48 Hours, "I moved to Mexico because I needed to get the hell out of dodge and start a new life and get out of their clutches."