In late 2004 a grand jury indicted him on murder and other charges in her death; it was kept secret by police until the following year, when they were able to arrange for him to be arrested in Mexico and extradited to Tennessee to face trial.

[6] After graduating with honors, Perry chose to attend the University of Michigan due to the lower tuition he paid as an in-state student, a strong consideration given his father's limited income.

During his time in the city, he often told people he had retired from the Army as a full colonel and had served with the Green Berets and on special-forces missions to Israel, a claim contradicted by his service records.

A paralegal at Bass Berry found the first of a series of anonymous typewritten letters on her desk, written by a secret admirer who praised her body and said it captivated him; he imagined performing cunnilingus on her for long stretches of time.

With the help of an outside investigator, they set up a hidden camera monitoring an obscure volume on tax law in the firm's library where the writer asked her to leave a note if she was interested in having an actual affair.

[2] His career continued at Levine Orr, his father-in-law's firm, where he represented some locally high-profile clients such as nightclub owners, and sometimes did pro bono work for the city's Jewish Community Center, where he was also a member of the board.

When Ella Goldshmid, the Marches' part-time nanny, arrived between 9:30 and 10 a.m., Perry told her as well that Janet had gone to California, but explained that she was visiting her brother Mark, who at the time was practicing law in Los Angeles.

That night, Perry also called his father, who by this time had moved to a caretaker's cottage on an estate in Ajijic, on Lake Chapala in the Mexican state of Jalisco, a popular destination for many American retirees, particularly former military personnel, due to its low cost of living.

Janet's brother Mark had come to Nashville from California by this time, and recalled that shortly after the report was made an MNPD police car came to the Levines' house.

[4] The first break in the case came a little over a week later, on September 7, when Janet's Volvo was found backed into a parking space at an apartment complex roughly 5 miles (8.0 km) from the house.

Inside, police found a purse with Janet's identification, credit cards, passport and $11 in cash; a suitcase packed with clothing and a small canvas bag with toiletry items.

[9] In early 1997, the Nashville Scene alternative weekly ran a two-part article about the case that disclosed some new information such as the content of the letters Perry had left for the Bass Berry paralegal in 1991 and the questions about his mother's death.

He compared himself to Richard Jewell, wrongly suspected of the Centennial Olympic Park bombing that summer, and said that he was arranging financing to buy his father-in-law's share of the house and return to Nashville, where he could start his own law firm.

It warned that given the difficult relationship between them, Janet's liquid assets would soon be depleted if the parties continued, which would force the court to require the sale of personal property to which either or both might ascribe great sentimental value.

Perry argued that their real goal was to allow the police and/or the media to interview Samson, which he did not want to permit (in any event, he claimed, the boy was asleep when Janet left).

The dissenting judge argued that the majority had too narrowly construed the precedents the trial court relied on, and that the issue of Janet's possible death at Perry's hands had been a part of the proceedings from the beginning.

The indictment, like the proceedings that produced it, remained secret while prosecutors worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Mexican government to secure the paperwork for Perry's arrest and extradition.

Perry hoped to finance the bond by selling property in Mexico or perhaps receiving a cash advance for a novel he had written in 1997, in which a detective investigates the murder of a small, dark-haired woman.

[4] The jury was shown a videotape of a deposition given by Arthur March, who had been arrested in January and taken a plea deal on the murder-conspiracy charges of a reduced sentence in exchange for offering evidence against his son.

A few weeks after the murder, he said, Perry had taken him one night to a wooded area on the north edge of the city, a 100-acre (40 ha) lot whose purchaser he had recently represented, and given him directions to where he had hidden the body in a leaf bag, then driven off.

As the dawn broke, he abandoned his original plan to throw it in a creek, since none were deep enough, and instead buried the bag, Janet's clothes, and her skeletal remains within a large pile of brush he found.

Several of the Davidson County jail's correctional officers testified that he had complained about ghosts in his cell and water that ran continuously due to a plumbing problem, and had possibly threatened Perry with physical harm to get extra food from him.

[4] In addition to the constitutional issues, Perry also claimed that the letters he wrote to the Bass Berry paralegal, her testimony, and the draft of his unpublished novel were prejudicial to him to an extent that far outweighed their relevance to the case.

Further, he said the tolling of the statute of limitations on the lesser charges associated with Janet's murder during the time after he left the state interfered with his freedom of movement, and denied him equal protection of the laws since it only applied to nonresidents.

Also in evidence was Perry's early deposition in the visitation case where he had invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than a dozen times, showing the appeals court that he knew how to do so should he have wished to.

After a lengthy analysis of various federal and state precedents where police had obtained incriminating statements from jailed defendants plotting with undercover investigators or informants to commit crimes that would improve their evidentiary position in cases pending against them, Woodall reiterated the U.S. Supreme Court's holding in McNeil v. Wisconsin[32] that the Sixth Amendment right to counsel is offense-specific and could not be assumed to apply to statements Perry made about Janet's fate while conspiring with Farris since the two crimes were not closely related enough.

And even if his Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights had been violated by the conversation with Postiglione and the tapes from the murder plot, the TCCA noted last, they made up a small portion of the overall prosecution case.

The letters to the Bass Berry paralegal, and her testimony, spoke directly to Perry's possible motive in committing the crime, especially since the defense had not objected to the introduction of his 1996 deposition where he had said the payments were not much of an issue between him and Janet.

[35] Sharp reiterated the TCCA's finding that the indictment alleged that Perry and Arthur conspired with each other, and that the identity of any actual killer was not something the state needed to prove as part of its case.

Though it ultimately agreed with the district court and the TCCA that their inclusion was harmless error due to the extensive other evidence, it departed from previous reviews in finding that the use of statements incriminating Perry in Janet's murder in recorded conversations between him and Farris at trial was a violation of his Sixth Amendment right to counsel.