The Jane Mixer Case, the Contaminated Michigan State Police Crime Lab, and the Man Who Died in Prison for It

Jane Mixer, March 1969

Jane Louise Mixer was twenty-three years old, newly engaged, and one of the first women admitted to the University of Michigan law school. She was from Muskegon, roughly a three-hour drive from Ann Arbor, and in the spring of 1969 she wanted to get home for a visit. She did what students at U of M did at the time: she posted a ride request on the student union bulletin board, listing her destination and her name.

On the evening of March 20, 1969, someone contacted her using the name David Johnson. He was supposed to drive her to Muskegon. She never arrived.

In the early morning hours of March 21, 1969, Jane Mixer’s body was discovered in Denton Road Cemetery, east of Ypsilanti, approximately fourteen miles from her school. She had been shot twice in the head with a .22 caliber firearm. A nylon stocking had been knotted around her neck. Her clothing had been arranged around her body. Her belongings were placed neatly nearby. Across the road, someone had left a bag containing a card that read “Sorry I missed your birthday.” No one has ever satisfactorily explained that card.

Jane Mixer had been dead for several hours before she was found. Her parents were waiting for her in Muskegon. They had not yet been told she was not coming.

Her murder was initially attributed to John Norman Collins, who was active in the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti area during the same period and would be convicted in 1970 of murdering another U of M student, Karen Sue Beineman. Collins became known as the Michigan Co-Ed Killer, and investigators at the time assumed the connection was likely. No direct forensic link between Collins and the Mixer murder was ever established. As the years passed without new evidence, the case went cold.

Jane Mixer’s file sat in storage for thirty-three years. Everything in it sat with it.

Thirty-Three Years in Storage

In the early 2000s, Michigan enacted a law requiring all convicted felons to submit a DNA sample for inclusion in the federal CODIS database. This was standard practice by then across most states, part of the national architecture built on the premise that biological evidence from old cases could now be matched against a database of known offenders. Cold case units across Michigan began pulling preserved evidence from storage and submitting it for DNA analysis.

The MSP crime lab was processing a significant volume of material. The Jane Mixer cold case evidence was among it. So was biological material from Gary Leiterman, who had been arrested in 2001 for forging prescriptions for pain medication and was required to submit a DNA sample. And so was biological evidence from the case of John Ruelas, who had been convicted in 2002 of killing his mother and whose DNA was similarly entered into CODIS.

Leiterman, sixty-two years old at the time of his arrest for the prescription offense, was a retired nurse living in Gobles, Michigan. He was married with two grown children. He had no violent criminal history. He had served four years in the Navy and had spent his professional career in healthcare. He lived approximately twenty miles from Ann Arbor. In 1969, he had been twenty-six years old and single.

When MSP analysts ran the Mixer cold case evidence against the CODIS database, they got two hits.

Two Profiles, One Problem

The first hit matched Gary Leiterman. His DNA profile appeared on several locations on a pair of pantyhose found on Mixer’s body. The DNA was not blood and not semen. It was identified as touch DNA: the kind left by sweat, saliva, or skin cells. The statistical probability of the profile matching another Caucasian male was cited in court at 170 trillion to one. On its face, this appeared to be a clean, overwhelming result.

The second hit was the problem.

A blood spot scraped from Mixer’s left hand in 1969 and preserved in storage produced a DNA profile matching John Ruelas. The same John Ruelas who was four and a half years old in 1969 and living in downtown Detroit, forty miles from Denton Road Cemetery. The same John Ruelas who had no documented connection to Jane Mixer, to Gary Leiterman, or to Ypsilanti.

The only connection that existed was institutional. Ruelas’s DNA had entered the MSP crime lab in 2002. Leiterman’s DNA had entered the MSP crime lab in 2002. The Jane Mixer cold case evidence had been processed in the MSP crime lab in 2002. All three were present in the same facility during the same processing window.

The MSP lab supervisor recognized what this meant. She called the analyst working the Ruelas homicide case back from the Grand Rapids lab location to discuss the timing and circumstances of the analysis. The supervisor’s concern was documented. The lab’s own records established that someone inside the MSP crime lab understood that a four-year-old’s DNA profile on a 1969 murder victim was not an accident of history. It was a product of 2002 laboratory processing.

That internal acknowledgment did not stop the prosecution of Gary Leiterman.

What the Degradation Data Shows

Biological material degrades over time. This is not a controversial scientific proposition. DNA extracted from evidence stored for three decades will show characteristic signs of that degradation: fragmented profiles, reduced signal strength, the markers of molecular decay that accumulate over years of storage regardless of preservation conditions.

Forensic analysts who reviewed the Mixer case evidence later identified a pattern in the laboratory results that the prosecution did not address at trial. Jane Mixer’s own biological material on the 1969 evidence showed exactly the degradation profile that thirty-three years of storage would produce. The DNA extracted from her remains was consistent with decades-old evidence.

The profiles attributed to Gary Leiterman and John Ruelas showed no such degradation. Their DNA appeared pristine. In the words of one forensic expert who reviewed the electropherogram data, the absence of degradation defied the basic laws of thermodynamics as they apply to biological systems. Decades-old DNA does not remain pristine. Fresh DNA does.

The implication was direct: if the degradation data showed that Ruelas’s blood was introduced during 2002 lab processing rather than deposited in 1969, the same logic applied to Leiterman’s touch DNA profile. The mechanism that introduced one profile could have introduced the other. The contamination event that the MSP lab supervisor had already internally acknowledged was not limited to the Ruelas hit. It called into question the entire evidentiary foundation of the case.

Three forensic scientists later performed an independent statistical analysis of the DNA results and concluded that both profiles were most likely the product of laboratory contamination. Their conclusion was not that Leiterman was certainly innocent. It was that the DNA evidence was not reliable enough to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and that the scientific explanation for what the lab found was contamination, not a 1969 crime scene deposit.

The Prosecution’s Theory and What It Left Out

Washtenaw County Prosecutor Steven Hiller built his case around the DNA and the DNA alone. The theory was this: Leiterman had seen Mixer’s ride request, used the alias David Johnson to contact her, picked her up outside her dormitory on the evening of March 20, attempted a sexual advance, and killed her when she refused. He then transported her body to Denton Road Cemetery and left it there.

In support of this theory, Hiller offered a phone book found in a U of M building with the names “Mixer” and “Muskegon” written in it. Handwriting analysis was used to argue that Leiterman had written those words, though handwriting analysis is among the least reliable forensic disciplines, a fact the prosecution did not emphasize. Leiterman owned a .22 caliber firearm, the same caliber used to kill Mixer. That was circumstantial. The DNA, Hiller argued, was the case.

What the prosecution did not address at trial in any satisfactory way was a series of facts the defense placed in the record.

Gary Leiterman’s fingerprints were compared against unidentified prints from the crime scene. They did not match. No vehicle in Leiterman’s history matched witness descriptions of a car seen speeding away from the area the night of the murder. No witness placed Leiterman near the University of Michigan, near Denton Road Cemetery, or near Jane Mixer at any point. No connection between Leiterman and Mixer was ever established beyond the DNA that the defense argued was contaminated.

On the Ruelas problem, Hiller’s position was that a four-year-old child could not have committed the murder, therefore the blood spot from that child on the victim’s hand was irrelevant to the question of Leiterman’s guilt. He argued that the presence of contaminated evidence in one location did not contaminate the evidence in another location. He did not offer a scientific explanation for how John Ruelas’s blood arrived on Jane Mixer’s hand in a cemetery in 1969. He argued that this question, though unanswerable, should not trouble the jury.

The jury deliberated for several days. According to Leiterman’s wife, Solly, who was a registered nurse and had read the trial transcript closely, the deliberations ended on a Friday afternoon with a jury that had grown exhausted. Gary Leiterman was convicted of first-degree murder.

Convicted

Gary Earl Leiterman was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. At sentencing, he spoke in court for the first time during the proceedings. He told the Mixer family that he understood their loss and that Jane appeared to have been a remarkable person. Then he said he was innocent of her murder.

The appeals process began. Leiterman’s defense team, led by attorney Jerome Sabbota and later others, filed multiple challenges to the conviction. The core argument did not change: the DNA evidence was contaminated, the contamination was documented in the MSP crime lab’s own records, and no conviction should stand on evidence the state’s own laboratory had internally flagged. The Michigan Court of Appeals denied the appeal. The Michigan Supreme Court declined to take the case. Federal habeas petitions followed and were similarly denied.

The legal system, at every level it was asked to review the case, concluded that the conviction was sound. None of the reviewing bodies engaged in a sustained analysis of the degradation data or the internal MSP lab documentation in a way that produced a different result. The standard for overturning a jury verdict is high. The standard was met in the reviewing courts’ judgment. Leiterman remained in prison.

He continued to maintain his innocence. So did his family. So did the forensic scientists who had reviewed the data.

The Innocence Project and the Death of the Clock

In March 2018, the Innocence Project of New York accepted Gary Leiterman’s case. This was not a symbolic gesture. The Innocence Project does not accept cases it does not believe have merit. It accepted this one after reviewing the DNA degradation data, the lab processing timeline, the MSP supervisor’s documented response to the Ruelas hit, and the forensic scientists’ independent analysis. It concluded that the case warranted investigation toward exoneration.

Gary Leiterman died in Michigan state custody on July 4, 2019, before any new proceedings could be initiated. He had been incarcerated for approximately fourteen years. He was in his mid-seventies. He had maintained his innocence for every one of those years. The Innocence Project closed his file after his death.

There is no post-mortem exoneration mechanism that would apply here, no proceeding through which Leiterman’s conviction can be formally vacated now that he is gone. The case is closed in every institutional sense. His conviction stands on the official record. The Michigan Department of Corrections records him as a deceased inmate who served a life sentence for first-degree murder.

The laboratory that produced the evidence on which he was convicted has said nothing publicly about what its own records document.

What the Michigan State Police Crime Lab Has Never Answered

The Michigan State Police crime lab is a state institution. It processes evidence in criminal cases across Michigan. Its analysts testify in court. Juries rely on its results. Prosecutors build cases on them. Defendants are convicted on them.

In the Mixer case, the lab’s own processing produced a result that its own supervisor identified as a problem significant enough to require pulling an analyst back from another location for a conversation about what had happened. That conversation is documented. The fact that Ruelas’s DNA ended up on evidence from a 1969 murder he could not have committed is not disputed. The only dispute is whether that fact also contaminates the adjacent evidence, the Leiterman profile, produced in the same facility during the same processing window on the same cold case materials.

The lab has never publicly addressed that question. There has been no published audit of the 2002 cold case processing period. There has been no public statement identifying what went wrong, how it happened, or what procedural changes were made to prevent it from happening again. There has been no independent review commissioned by the MSP or by any Michigan oversight body that has been made public.

The question of who killed Jane Mixer in 1969 remains genuinely open. Gary Leiterman may have been guilty. The contamination of the evidence does not establish his innocence; it establishes that the evidence used to convict him was not reliable. Those are different things, and the distinction matters. What the record does not support is the position that a conviction built on contaminated DNA, prosecuted by an office that could not explain a four-year-old child’s blood on a murder victim, reviewed by courts that did not engage the degradation data seriously, and accepted by a laboratory that has said nothing publicly about its own internal acknowledgment of error, is a closed matter.

Jane Mixer deserved a real answer. Gary Leiterman deserved a fair trial. The people of Michigan deserved a crime lab that accounts for its errors. What the record shows is that none of them got what they deserved, and the institution most responsible for that outcome has declined to say a word about it.