Endgame

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

(CBS)  Still, with what Arthur March told them, detectives were finally able to piece together the puzzle that eluded them for 10 years. "He said he's following the creek all the way along. As he's driving back, he looks up, and low and behold, there's this brush pile," Postiglione says.

"And he takes parts of the body, disposes in the brush pile. Drives back. Tells Perry, 'Don't worry about it. It's taken care of. Go back to sleep.' Perry just sleeps through this whole thing. While his dad is out there disposing of his wife," Det. Pridemore adds.

Asked how he could do something like this to his daughter-in-law, March tells Lagattuta, "Because at this point in time, she was not my daughter-in-law anymore. She was just a dead body."

"She was just a dead body. It was over. I had taken care of the body in such a way that nobody would ever find it," he says.

With the startling confession of Arthur March, detectives Postiglione and Pridemore believed they have a solid case against Perry March, despite not finding a body.

In the summer of 2006, ten years after Janet vanished, Perry March finally faced a jury for the murder of his wife.

Setting the stage, prosecutor Tom Thurman says Perry March killed in a rage.

With no direct evidence to connect Perry March to the crime, defense attorney Bill Massey argued that with no body, there was no murder.

Prosecutors may not have a body, but they do had Arthur March, the man who says he buried the body.

Asked how March reacted to his father's testimony against him, Det. Pridemore says, "The way I looked at it is, as if it was some stranger up there lying."

Another key witness was Perry March’s jail house "buddy," Nathaniel Farris.

Along with Farris’ damning testimony, jurors also heard the audio tapes of Perry March plotting to kill the Levines.

"You take your time at it, you don’t make any mistakes, you go carefully, you figure your reconnaissance, you do what you need to do," Perry March could be heard in a taped conversation with Farris.

But despite the incriminating evidence, March’s attorney kept insisting no one knew what happened to Janet.

The defense told jurors Janet left the house alive that night and that there was an eyewitness: her son Sammy, who they say was up in the window and as she’s backing out.

"She told me that she’d be back soon," Sammy testified.

The defense introduced a television interview from 2001, with Perry’s son Sammy, saying, "She came in and gave me my goodnight kiss. And then I got out of bed and went to the window to wave to her when she was driving away in the car."

The last person to take the stand was Perry March himself, the man who for ten years had proclaimed his innocence but suddenly had nothing to say.

"I choose not to testify," he told the court.

After one week of testimony, the jury began deliberating. After just ten hours of deliberations, jurors found March guilty on all three counts: second degree murder, abuse of a corpse and tampering with evidence.