The Wrench, the Rug, and the Ten-Year Wait: The Murder of Janet March

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

May 8, 2026

Janet Levine grew up in Nashville, the daughter of Lawrence Levine, a successful insurance defense attorney, and his wife Carolyn. She studied art at the University of Michigan, where during her sophomore year she met a young man named Perry March. They moved to Chicago together after graduation, Janet studying art while Perry worked as a futures broker, and eventually made their way back to Nashville so Perry could attend Vanderbilt Law School, tuition largely covered by Janet's parents. Perry made law review, joined the respected firm Bass, Berry and Sims, and the couple married in 1987. Janet illustrated children's books and held a patent, never commercialized, for a collapsible baby chair she'd designed herself. They had two children, Samson in 1990 and Tziporah in 1994, and in 1995 they built a $650,000 stone house in the Forest Hills section of Nashville, the kind of house that looks, from the outside, like the physical proof that a marriage has worked out. On August 15, 1996, Janet March, thirty-three years old, disappeared from that house, and she has never been found.

A Marriage That Had Already Come Apart

By the time Janet vanished, the marriage had been quietly falling apart for years in ways that only became public knowledge after the fact. Perry had been forced to resign from Bass, Berry and Sims after it came out that he had sent anonymous, sexually explicit letters to a paralegal at the firm, an episode he settled by secretly agreeing to pay her $25,000 over four years, money he never told Janet about. The couple began marriage counseling. Perry was increasingly absent, spending nights at hotels, seen around town with other women. By August 1996, Janet had had enough. She scheduled a consultation with a divorce attorney for August 16, the day after she disappeared.

According to Perry, the two of them argued that night after the children had gone to bed, over his infidelities, and Janet announced she was leaving for a twelve day vacation. He said she packed bags, including her passport, roughly $1,500 in cash, and left around 8:30 in the evening without saying where she was going. He immediately started calling friends and family to report that she'd left. The next morning, when people came by the house and Janet wasn't there, Perry told the cleaning lady and the children's nanny that she had gone to California on business.

The List That Didn't Add Up

One of the first things that struck Janet's family as wrong was a computer-generated list of tasks and instructions that Perry said Janet had left behind before leaving. Janet, according to her family, always wrote her lists by hand, in lowercase letters, dated at the top of the page. This list was typed, properly capitalized, and dated at the bottom. It also failed to mention a playdate Janet had personally arranged for her daughter with a friend named Marissa Moody, an appointment Janet would not plausibly have simply forgotten to note. Carolyn Levine, searching the house, found a legal pad near the computer with the words "two weeks" written and circled in Perry's own handwriting. Janet's brother, Mark, found a six-page computer file that appeared to list grievances against Perry, but was mysteriously unable to get it to print when he tried to show it to anyone.

Janet's family waited to report her missing, holding out hope she might come back in time for their son Samson's sixth birthday party on August 25. She didn't. They filed the report on August 29, two weeks after anyone had last reportedly seen her.

A Car That Had Been Sitting for Weeks

Police found Janet's gray 1996 Volvo on September 7, backed neatly into a parking space at an apartment complex roughly five miles from the house. It had clearly been there for some time: dust and pollen coated the exterior, cobwebs had formed in the wheel wells, and rust had already begun forming on the brake rotors. Inside were Janet's purse, her ID, and eleven dollars, directly contradicting Perry's account that she had left with $1,500 in cash. Her passport, credit cards, and a packed suitcase were also inside, along with toiletries that notably did not include a toothbrush or bras. A second gray suitcase Perry had mentioned was nowhere to be found. The driver's seat was pulled close to the wheel while the front passenger seat had been pushed back. Janet's white sandals sat on the floor of the car, arranged in a way several investigators later described as deliberate rather than kicked off.

A witness named Marissa Moody told police that on the day Janet disappeared, she had seen a large rolled up Oriental rug in the March home, positioned behind the family's nanny. That rug was never seen again, and Perry denied it had ever existed. When police eventually executed a search warrant on the house on September 16, they discovered that the hard drive had been forcibly removed from the family computer. Around the same time, Perry bought new tires for his Jeep, despite a tire company later confirming the original set was in excellent condition. A private investigator working the case noted that Perry had, on more than one occasion, begun referring to his wife in the past tense.

Mexico

As suspicion mounted and police formally named him a suspect, Perry relocated to Illinois with the children. In 1999, after Janet's parents won expanded visitation rights through the courts, Perry left the country entirely, moving to Ajijic, a small town on Lake Chapala in Mexico, where his father Arthur, a retired Army pharmacist, had already resettled. Perry soon remarried, to a local woman named Carmen Rojas, and opened a restaurant.

The Levines did not give up. In the spring of 2000, they obtained a Mexican court order and briefly succeeded in recovering their grandchildren, but Perry regained custody shortly afterward. The legal fight moved into American federal court, where Judge Aleta Trauger ultimately ruled that the children's "habitual residence" was Mexico under international custody law and ordered them returned to their father. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that ruling and was sharply critical of the Levines' actions in trying to retrieve the children, actions that had exposed them to kidnapping charges under Mexican law. For years, it looked as though Perry March had simply won: he had the children, he had a new life in another country, and Janet's case sat unsolved and, for all practical purposes, unsolvable without a body or a confession.

An Arrest, and a Plot from Inside a Jail Cell

The case was formally revived when a Nashville grand jury indicted Perry for second-degree murder, evidence tampering, and abuse of a corpse in December 2004. He was arrested in Mexico in August 2005 and extradited to Tennessee. On the flight back, a detective later testified that Perry, unprompted, said it was "time to close this chapter in my life" and began asking hypothetical questions about legal liability in cases of accidental death.

What happened next turned an already strange case into something closer to farce, if the stakes hadn't been so serious. While awaiting trial in jail, Perry approached another inmate, Russell Farris, and asked whether Farris would be willing to kill Janet's parents, Lawrence and Carolyn Levine, in exchange for Perry posting his bond. Perry gave Farris his father Arthur's contact information and a set of code words to use. Farris, instead of going along with it, reported the conversation to authorities, who then had him make recorded calls to Arthur March. On those recordings, Arthur gave detailed instructions covering timing, weapon selection, the use of surgical gloves, and escape routes. Arthur reportedly traveled to the Guadalajara airport to meet Farris in person and was intercepted there by FBI agents instead. Perry was hit with two additional counts each of solicitation to commit murder and conspiracy to commit murder.

The Father Who Turned

Facing his own federal charges, Arthur March eventually accepted a plea deal, though the judge overseeing his case rejected the agreed-upon eighteen-month sentence and imposed five years instead. As part of the process, Arthur gave a deposition that became the single most damning piece of evidence in his son's trial. He testified that Perry had confessed to killing Janet by striking her with a wrench, and that weeks after her death, Arthur himself had found her body in a leaf bag weighing somewhere between fifty and sixty pounds. According to his account, he and Perry drove the remains to Bowling Green, Kentucky, and buried the bag, along with her clothing, in a brush pile at dawn. When investigators later tried to locate the exact site with Arthur's help, they couldn't find it, but prosecutors found his account credible enough to build much of their case around it. Arthur March died in federal custody on December 21, 2006, roughly three months after his own sentencing.

The Trial

Perry's trial finally began in August 2006, ten years after Janet disappeared, with jurors selected from Chattanooga and sequestered in Nashville to limit the effect of local pretrial publicity. Prosecutors built a case out of the accumulated small inconsistencies: Marissa Moody's account of the missing rug, mitochondrial DNA from Janet's hairbrush found consistent with hair recovered from the Volvo, carpet fibers from Perry's Jeep that FBI forensic analysts matched to the Oriental rug pattern Moody had described, and testimony from an airline employee who recalled seeing Perry with a mountain bike at one in the morning, paired with a bike shop owner and a Volvo salesman who both testified that such a bike could, in fact, fit inside the car.

The defense leaned heavily on undermining a jailhouse informant named Cornelius King, who claimed Perry had told him he hit Janet with a wrench, burned her body, and scattered the ashes in a lake, and on a 2000 television interview in which the March's young son Samson recalled watching his mother wave goodbye as she drove away that night. Prosecutors dismantled that memory with their own witnesses: Samson's kindergarten teacher testified that just days after the disappearance, the boy told her his mother had left two weeks earlier without saying goodbye at all, and Carolyn Levine testified that from Samson's bedroom window, a person could see nothing but a section of roof, making the wave he supposedly witnessed physically impossible.

After roughly ten hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Perry March on all counts on August 17, 2006. He was sentenced to a combined fifty-six years: twenty-four years for the murder-for-hire conspiracy, twenty-five years for second-degree murder, two years for abuse of a corpse, and five years for tampering with evidence, along with a concurrent five-year sentence for theft. His appeals, pursued for years afterward through Tennessee's courts and eventually federal courts, were repeatedly denied; the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his case in 2015. He remains incarcerated at Tennessee's Morgan County Correctional Complex and has continued, throughout, to maintain his innocence.

What Was Never Found

Janet March was officially declared dead in 2000, four years after she vanished and six years before anyone was convicted of killing her. Her parents were eventually appointed administrators of her roughly $500,000 estate. Despite Arthur March's detailed account, despite searches of the Bowling Green area he described, Janet's remains have never been located. In 2004, Perry even sent prosecutors a photograph he claimed showed Janet alive at the Athens Olympics that year, a photo her own parents looked at and said plainly was not their daughter, a woman who looked far too young to be the Janet they would have recognized eight years on. It was one more small, strange lie in a case built almost entirely out of them: a typed list where a handwritten one should have been, sandals placed just so, a rug that vanished and was never explained, and a decade in which a husband who insisted his wife had simply left for a vacation instead built an entire second life on another continent, betting that no one would ever prove otherwise.

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