Wow. It is like he had a split personality or something. Him bleaching the walls makes me think he committed more than one crime. Did he get blood on his apartment wall and paint over it or something??? He must have been wound so tight from having complete control. Moving to TN and back must have been his way of falling off the radar. I'm glad she is not in the state and hopefully her location is not public.
Luke Fleming was arrested for the murder of Sarasota accountant Deborah Dalzell in 2018, 19 years after it took place. His former fiancé says she never had a clue.
The handoff point was a bank parking lot, with a strip mall on the periphery, and she pulled her car up next to his. She really thought she knew him — they were engaged once, after all — but this is where the secret spilled.
It was a Sunday night, which meant the weekend was over, which meant it was time for Luke Fleming to return Kieran to his mother, Britney Meisch. She took her young son, strapped him in the child seat and watched as Fleming began to drive away.
The undercover detectives came from nowhere, so many, so fast. They surrounded Fleming before he could reach the exit, pulled him out and cuffed him.
Her hands shook on the steering wheel as she watched. She tried to yell, but all she could manage were whispers.
“What did you do?” she said. “What did you do?”
Snips from the article....
They moved to Tennessee, where they lived for a few years. He took a new job, one that involved a lot of travel during the week, but he was always home on weekends. There were good times, more good than bad, she remembers, like trips to Chicago, even Hawaii. He was there when Kieran was born, too, and for his first steps. A great father, she said.
And yet ...
“Something would happen with his eyes when he got angry,” she said. “Something was not right. He wasn’t like a normal person. It seemed almost dark.”
Looking back there were red flags she missed — “so many I don’t know where to start,” she said. She remembers his apartment when they first met. It had only a TV, couch, computer and mattress on the floor.
He was always bleaching the walls, she said, so often that she jokingly called him Dexter after the forensic analyst character from television who was a vigilante serial killer, hunting down murderers who had escaped justice.
Fleming liked to destroy things that were important to her, she said, like the antique camera he threw across the room. He was like an actor and never relaxed.
He could be as cruel as he was charming, and he never showed remorse. She remembers thinking: “This is not normal. I am not with a normal person.”
Fleming’s trial is scheduled for next month. Meisch is trying to keep an open mind and hopes it is fair, all the evidence properly presented. She agreed to talk, but wanted several things clear: She harbors no animosity towards Fleming, she is not seeking publicity for sharing her story, and she had no idea she was living with an alleged murderer. He
never mentioned Dalzell’s name once and nothing ever slipped.
She is
back in Tennessee now, her life on hold until after the trial. She is optimistic about the future, and excited about watching her son grow.
