For more than a half century, I have been covering crime in Nashville and Middle Tennessee. I promise you, the Perry March murder case is the strangest of all.

Perry is on trial for murdering his wife, Janet, on August 15, 1996. And Perry, an ex-lawyer, has been the only suspect from the get-go.

So, what's so strange about this case?

Well, Perry was an attorney at the time and a graduate of Vanderbilt School of Law. That should put him in the upper level of lawyers in Nashville.

But investigators said for a man with his legal experience, March drew attention to himself as a suspect.

He urged his wife's parents, Larry and Carolyn Levine, to wait two weeks before he reported her disappearance to police, to avoid publicity.

There is the story about a missing rolled up carpet that three of Janet's friends say they saw in the house the day before she went missing.

Perry denied it, but his son, Sammie reportedly told a Juvenile Court official in Chicago that he had seen it.

Then there was the missing computer hard drive from the home. Perry showed investigators a letter he says Janet wrote him on the computer before she disappeared.

Detectives believed Perry wrote the letter to himself and wanted to check the hard-drive. Perry said someone must have broken into their home and stole it. Police, however, said they found no evidence of a break-in.

Then, investigators said, Perry told them he was too busy to give a taped interview about Janet's disappearance.

Instead, he wrote his own statement and gave it to police.

Investigators have never interviewed March about her disappearance.

The truth is, almost all of the case against Perry at the time he was indicted for murder was circumstantial, produced by investigators within weeks after his wife disappeared.

But it took prosecutors eight years to finally seek an indictment against Perry who was still living in Mexico.

The big break for prosecutors was March's revealing conversation with detectives on the way back to Nashville and his effort to have the Levines murdered.

The defense is still counting on Janet's body not being found, no murder weapon, no witnesses, no DNA, and no blood analysis.