Cold Cases · Spotify Studios

Who Killed Jane Mixer?

August 21, 2023·29 min·1 clip

A 2018 study later argues that cross-contamination may have affected the DNA evidence against Gary Leiterman.

March 21st opens with a graveyard discovery. Police arrive at a cemetery and find Jane Mixer's body laid out on a grave, covered with clothing. Nearby are a suitcase, a purse, shoes, a blood-soaked towel, and Catch-22. It is a grim, strangely specific scene, and the episode does not rush past it. From there, the case moves into evidence work, identity checks, and DNA leads. Detective Schroeder uses databases that can cross-reference local, state, and national records, looking for something useful in old material. Months pass before the first hit. The towel blood belongs to John Rulis, a man already imprisoned for killing his mother after years of abuse. But the timeline snaps that theory in half: Rulis is thirty-seven when identified, which means he would have been four in 1969, when Jane was killed. His blood may tie to the cemetery or the killer, but the excerpt does not offer a clean answer. The interview does not help much either. Rulis says very little, and police cannot lean on a four-year-old's memory. That lead fades. Eight months later, DNA from the nylons points to Gary Leiterman, a retired nurse and father of two. His profile entered state records after he illegally wrote himself a painkiller prescription in 2001. The prescription is not the part that matters most. He was twenty-six in 1969 and lived about twenty miles from Ann Arbor. Schroeder spends three months studying him. Meanwhile, Maggie Nelson in New York City comes into the story as Jane's niece, trying less to solve Jane's murder than to understand who Jane was.

As heard by us

A DNA lead reshapes Jane Mixer's case when one match points to a man who was four years old in 1969.

Jane Mixer sits at the center of a case that starts with a cemetery discovery and quickly becomes a test of what DNA evidence can, and cannot, settle. She was found on a grave on March 21, shot twice in the head, with a stocking around her neck and Catch-22 beside her.

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Why you'd press play

You get a DNA hit that makes the room go colder: how did a four-year-old's blood end up with Jane Mixer?

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