Deadly Affair by Tom Henderson

Author:Tom Henderson [Henderson, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Retail, True Crime
ISBN: 9780312977641
Amazon: 0312977646
Barnesnoble: 0312977646
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2001-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

REACTION TO THE JUDGE

Chrzanowski’s testimony led the evening news, was the lead every eight or ten minutes on the talk/news radio stations and drew derisive headlines in most of the next day’s dailies.

The media ate up the “pretty lady” quote. It got laughs the next day at the Warren courthouse. Judge Chrzanowski might have taken the appellation as personal, that it was his own little nickname for her. The media certainly took it that way.

Many of the women who worked at the court knew differently. “Pretty lady,” as it turned out, was Fletcher’s standard greeting for just about any female under the age of 40, from judges to clerks to secretaries to janitors.

He was a flirt, one of the few men who could routinely, in this day and age, get away with greeting women he only knew casually as “pretty lady.”

The Detroit Free Press put readers to sleep with its headline, below the fold on its Local News section—“Judge Gives Testimony in Fletcher Murder Trial” while the News was far juicier: “‘Pretty Lady’ Judge Tells of Affair, Lies” along with a photo of her on the stand and a liftout quote: “I loved him. I felt we would have a real future together.”

Brian Dickerson, the Free Press’ gifted columnist, who had nailed the situation so brilliantly in a column at Fletcher’s arraignment 10 months earlier, was on his game, though.

“Hope is the thing with feathers,” he began, quoting Emily Dickinson.

And even when it seemed Michael Fletcher had plucked that sucker clean, Susan Chrzanowski went on believing. As late as Tuesday, when prosecutors called her to testify at Fletcher’s first-degree murder trial, the young Warren District Court judge seemed not quite ready to let the affair go.

Speaking tearfully at times, but never bitterly, she described a 17-month liaison marked by frequent reversals, but sustained again and again by Chrzanowski’s hope that her lover would leave his wife and make a life with her.

Prosecutors have painted Fletcher as an equal-opportunity liar who regularly deceived both the women in his life. But in Chrzanowski’s retelling, the slaying suspect seemed less a master manipulator than a garden-variety scaredy-cat who benefited from his lover’s almost breath-taking capacity for self-deception.…

“‘We talked about what makes people happy,’” Dickerson wrote, quoting the judge’s testimony.

“We talked about what it would be like to have a life together.” But that August—the same day her divorce became final—Fletcher told Chrzanowski he was going back to his wife. Another woman might have taken that as a clue Fletcher was not the long-term investment opportunity she had imagined.…

The night before his wife’s death, Chrzanowski said, Fletcher paged her to a late-evening tryst. He told her he’d been to church that day and that he’d gone out with his wife and parents. He didn’t mention that they’d been celebrating Leann Fletcher’s pregnancy. She only learned about the baby her lover and wife were expecting, Chrzanowski said, when Hazel Park police investigators sought her out the day after Leann’s death.…

In the least convincing part of

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