CRIMINAL COLD CASES-FUGITIVES FINALLY BROUGHT TO JUSTICE-33-JANE MIXER

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JANE MIXER: THEY GOT THE WRONG MAN
IN MOST CASES, FORENSIC DNA TESTING YIELDS RESULTS THAT PROVE THE IDENTITY OF A KILLER BEYOND DOUBT. BUT JUST OCCASIONALLY, DNA RESULTS ADD TO THE MYSTERY OF A CRIME. THUS IT WAS WITH THE CASE OF JANE MIXER, A YOUNG LAW STUDENT WHO WAS MURDERED IN 1969, AND WHOSE KILLER CAME TO TRIAL THIRTY-SIX YEARS LATER.
In 1969, Jane Mixer was a young law student at the University of Michigan. She had recently got engaged and in March that year was due to head back home for the spring break. She posted a message on a bulletin board at the university and received the offer of a lift from a young man who she assumed was another student. According to friends, she did not seem to be worried about taking a ride across the country with a male stranger, but was more concerned with how her parents would take the news of her recent engagement.

Dumped in cemetery
On 20 March, Mixer's body was found dumped in a cemetery. She been shot at point-blank range in the head. She had also been strangled with a pair of pantyhose. Her naked body was exposed, but she had not been raped.

At the time, there had been a spate of around half a dozen murders in and around the university, all of them young women. Mixer's murder was believed to be the work of the same killer, even though there were significant differences between her killing and that of the others: for instance, the others were not shot, and in most cases their bodies had been hidden away in bushes or under trees, rather than laid out in the open. Even so, Mixer's murder was put down to this serial killer, and eventually police tracked down the man they believed to be the culprit. John Norman Collins was arrested in 1970, accused of the murders, and convicted. He was sentenced to life in prison.

For many years, it was believed that the Mixer murder had been solved, but there were those who had their doubts. Over three decades later, the case was reopened and re-investigated. This time, DNA tests showed that the stains on Mixer's pantyhose linked to Gary Leiterman, a retired nurse now in his early sixties, whose name was in a felon's database because he had pleaded guilty to forging prescriptions.

The mystery blood spot
When detectives investigated further, they found that at the time of Mixer's murder, Leiterman had been twenty-five years old and working as a drug salesman. He had lived about half an hour from Mixer's dormitory building, and had owned the same type of gun that had killed Mixer. Most tellingly, he had bragged to his room-mate that he was capable of rendering a woman unconscious or even killing her with the powerful drugs he had at his disposal.

However, as well as Leiterman's DNA, the analysis turned up another piece of evidence that was completely mystifying. A spot of blood on the body's hand, which had been flaked off and saved as evidence by a police officer, turned out to have the DNA of another, different man.

To the excitement of the detectives on the case, it turned out that the DNA belonged to John Ruelas, a convicted murder now held in prison. Ruelas was the son of an abusive mother who had made his life a misery. He had eventually taken his revenge and murdered her, and was now serving a life sentence. He seemed exactly the sort of person who would have murdered Mixer. But then came the bad news: Ruelas was only forty years old now, and he was much too young to have committed the murder. At the time of Mixer's killing, he would have been just four.

There were several explanations for the findings, although none of them were very satisfactory. First, it was thought that the evidence could have been contaminated. However, it was hard to explain exactly how a person could have contaminated evidence so as to show up Ruelas' DNA. Second, doubts were raised as to how accurate DNA testing actually was in this case – or, indeed, any case. Scientists maintained that the testing was one hundred per cent reliable, but if that was so, how could it have come about that a four-year-old boy had been responsible for the crime? It simply was not possible.

For Leiterman and his lawyers, of course, the new evidence was a godsend. They argued that Leiterman was innocent, and that the evidence had been contaminated in the laboratory. They also argued that the murder had been committed by John Norman Collins, the serial killer who had been tried and convicted in 1970 for the Michigan murders.

The scene of one of John Norman Collins' killings: the area where thirteen-year-old Kawn Basom was found. She was the fifth victim of Collins

Surprise twist
However, the jury in the Leiterman case was not convinced. Despite the mystery of John Ruelas' DNA, they ended up convicting Leiterman, who received a life sentence. But there were many who disagreed, and who believed that Leiterman was innocent – or if not innocent, certainly not proved guilty. The surprise twist in the Jane Mixer case, leading to the identification of a four-year-old boy as a murder suspect, has led many to question the infallibility of DNA testing. It has also led to speculation that the boy might have been present at the murder, although Ruelas denies this. It is perhaps possible that Ruelas could have been unknowingly involved in the murder in some way: he had had a chaotic childhood, and his mother had been involved with numerous drifters. Even so, it does seem unlikely that he was present at the scene of the crime.

When Collins was imprisoned for his series of murders in and around Michigan University, it was assumed that he had killed Jane Mixer. When the case was reopened in the late 1990s, this was found not to be true

Whatever the truth of the matter, it appears that in the Mixer case, DNA results were used to convict one man – Gary Leiterman – but ignored in the case of another – John Ruelas. The mystery of how a four-year-old boy's blood came to be on the body of murder victim Jane Mixer still remains.