If You Only Knew (24 page)

CHAPTER 60

THE INITIAL COP ON
the scene, Lynn Giorgi, was called as the state's first witness. Giorgi took the oath and subsequently told jurors exactly what had occurred as she answered that 911 call that brought her to Don Rogers's corpse lying on the kitchen floor of his home on August 12, 2000.

Giorgi said she arrived on the scene at the same time Pete Dungjen did. They entered the home together.

Wearing a gray sweater, her hair dyed brown, looking tired and unhappy, with a stoic look on her face, Billie Jean sat and stared at Giorgi.

The officer talked about how “calm” and orderly both Billie Jean and Vonlee were when she first arrived and walked into the kitchen to have a look at Don.

The state introduced those photos of Don they had warned jurors about. Don looked to be sleeping. He was on his back, legs crossed at the ankles. A chair was on its side near his head.

Next, Giorgi talked about learning that Don had some “problems due to alcohol” and that Billie Jean had thought he was passed out, but then she learned he wasn't breathing and realized he was likely dead.

“Did she indicate to you how much he drank?” APA Skrzynski asked.

“I believe she did, but I don't recall what it was. It was some large amount.”

“A large amount? Okay. She indicated he was a chronic alcoholic?”

“Yes.”

As they discussed the position of Don's body and how neither she nor Dungjen thought it to be at all odd, Giorgi said, “We saw no signs of trauma on the body.” In fact, it wasn't until they began to speak with Vonlee and Billie Jean that both officers considered something was off. The first indicator was the position of Don's body as opposed to where the women walked into the house, that glass of water and the shoes in the great room, and how each of those clues told the officers they must have walked over Don's body and sat down.

The jury was shown a diagram of the house, Don's body marked.

Concerning where Don was lying, Giorgi explained during her testimony, as she and Dungjen thought about it, “It just seemed unlikely that you could fall from somewhere and end up with your legs—with your ankles perfectly crossed. . . .”

“It just seemed unlikely”
—that phrase kind of rang like an out-of-tune bell inside the courtroom. Was this powerful evidence? Or was it a cop's “opinion” of what had transpired? How did they make the leap from legs crossed at ankles to murder?

Giorgi talked about the layers of suspicion and how they grew the more time she and Dungjen spent inside the house. Like how “strange” Vonlee began to act, for example. She noted that “loud, excitable and protective” were three ways in which she believed Vonlee was not conducting herself normally, as most people under similar circumstances generally would.

“[She] didn't like me asking [Billie] questions,” Giorgi said.

Was this a drunk person protecting her aunt, or someone trying to hide a crime?

Giorgi didn't make it clear.

As they talked about Vonlee's demeanor, Piszczatowski objected, due to relevance.

It was sustained.

The way the questions and answers were framed suggested that the way in which the situation was handled by Vonlee and Billie Jean was out of the norm compared to other death scenes Giorgi had attended. This generated some concern within the two cops. They wondered why the women were acting in such a way. To give an example, Giorgi mentioned how neither woman wanted to write a statement about what had happened. This seemed suspicious and out of the norm for how a similar scene should unfold. Most people would do whatever the cops asked of them. Giorgi and Dungjen were quite taken aback, Giorgi explained, at the notion that the women basically did not want to comply with whatever the police suggested.

She said Billie Jean chain-smoked cigarettes and didn't say much, while Vonlee protected her aunt and spoke very aggressively and loudly.

Of course, when Giorgi talked about what Vonlee was saying, Piszczatowski smartly objected (hearsay) and the judge encouraged the PO to move on.

Within all of her testimony, Giorgi offered very little to bolster the PO's case. In fact, at the end of the APA's direct questioning, Giorgi noted that she had not written a report and had left that part of the call up to Dungjen. It was standard procedure to do this, she explained. But when Detective Don Zimmerman became actively involved, he then went to Giorgi and asked if she could, after the fact, write a report for him. But it wasn't until Zimmerman had what Giorgi described as “other information regarding this case.”

“Did he suggest to you anything to write?”

“No.”

It would have been a powerful statement, had the PO left it there. But APA Skrzynski then asked: “He just said, ‘Anything that seemed out of place'?”

“We had a conversation,” she explained. “He had asked me if I could remember that . . . call and I did.”

Giorgi said it stood out because of Vonlee's off-the-wall, loud and boisterous behavior.

That was it—the APA was done. He passed the witness.

* * *

Piszczatowski began by asking Giorgi—who was, most in the courtroom knew, an important witness for Billie Jean—about a meeting she had been at where he and “the whole cast of characters” in the case were asked questions: a pretrial deposition. He wanted to know if most of the direct testimony she had just gone through with the PO was on par with that line of questioning earlier in the year during the deposition.

She said it was.

Billie Jean's defense attorney then pointed out that during her depositions in the case, Officer Giorgi had said the kitchen floor in Don's house was linoleum, which it wasn't, and that only when she went back and looked at photographs did she realize she had that fact wrong.

“Yes,” she agreed.

Memory, Piszczatowski was pointing out without coming out and actually saying it, was a fragile, delicate and not pitch-perfect way of accurately depicting situations. Even simple, basic facts, like a floor. It was a subtle, yet noticeable jab at the officer.

He then focused on how Giorgi had once said she moved the chair in the kitchen “not more than . . . about one foot.”

“That's my approximation, yes,” she said.

They talked about Giorgi not finding any injuries—she agreed.

No signs of struggle—and she agreed to that also.

And nothing unusual about the body: “Other than, what you tell us now, the legs were crossed.” Giorgi agreed “that was correct,” too.

Next, Piszczatowski asked the cop about her training. How long she had been on the force at the time of the incident. How part of her training involved learning to write police reports, which was “an important part of your function as a police officer. . . .”

“Yes.”

The purpose of the police report, Piszczatowski said in one leading question, was to “note anything that you might think might be unusual . . . and something that might be relevant if, in fact, an investigation continues.. . .”

“That you
think
might be pertinent,” she clarified.

They moved on to the responding officer's “role” at the scene.

The way Piszczatowski went about pointing out all of these simple and relevant aspects of what first responders do every day was to let everyone know that as Giorgi surveyed the scene with Officer Dungjen, nothing seemed to be wrong—besides a dead man, a nontalkative wife, a drunk and loud niece. The scene was anything but a murder—it seemed more like what the women had claimed it to be: a tragedy.

Piszczatowski then brought in Dungjen's report as an exhibit.

Giorgi agreed that she had reviewed her colleague's report after Detective Zimmerman came into the case and asked her to write one herself.

Then a significant question: Piszczatowski wanted to know if, prior to asking Vonlee to write a statement, “Did you give her any Miranda rights?”

“No.”

“And that's because, based on your observations at the scene, you didn't think there was any
need
to do that?”

“That's correct.”

From there, they discussed how Giorgi had been to several death scenes and all were “different.” No two people responded to death in the same fashion. No two people cried, yelled or withdrew in the same manner; each scene, although very similar, was not the same.

Yes. Yes. And yes, she agreed.

“People are people, and every individual deals with death differently . . . ,” Piszczatowski said.

Yes again.

Giorgi also agreed that Billie Jean smoked constantly while she was at the scene and that it was pretty common for people to do that.

Piszczatowski got the officer to agree that she had “approved” of Dungjen's report and unofficially signed off on it.

The bottom line with all of this, some of which came across by Piszczatowski as sarcastic and pushy (for good reason), was that for Giorgi, there wasn't anything at the death scene misaligned to the point of making an accusation of murder until after Zimmerman came and asked her to rethink it. Piszczatowski hammered the officer on a number of valid points, making sure jurors understood that Giorgi and Dungjen did not conduct an investigation while they were there, nor did they suspect anything to be that much out of the norm besides a few women acting different and a dead guy's legs crossed at the ankles.

As Piszczatowski wound down his cross-examination, he asked about Zimmerman going to Giorgi and asking about “writing a report, and that was sometime in November—that correct?” Almost three months after the day she had been at the death scene.

“Yes.”

“Okay. And at that time, had you heard anything
new
about the case?”

“No.”

“So no one had . . . It wasn't like the buzz of the Troy Police Department that a witness was engaging in sex with a transsexual?”

“No!”

“That wasn't around the department at
all
?” Piszczatowski asked as if he had a hard time believing her.

“No, it wasn't.”

“Nobody had heard that fact?” Piszczatowski pressed.

“No—and I work in the same area as Detective Zimmerman and I had not”—she started to add before Piszczatowski cut her off.

“Okay,” the defense attorney inserted.

But she finished, concluding, “. . . heard that.”

“So that didn't happen?”

“Right.”

“Okay. So he just came to you and said, ‘Write a report'? Write [a] report about what you remember at this scene, correct?”

“Well, he asked me—we had a conversation. He asked me what types of things I thought were unusual and other things that weren't on the report, and he supplied me with a copy of Officer Dungjen's original report and I had reviewed that. And the few things that we had discussed, he said, yes, anything that you can recall, including those things, to please put in the report.”

“Okay. Did you ask him why?”

“He had told me at the beginning of the conversation that there had been some other types of information that would lead them into an investigation—that it might not have been a natural death.”

This was important testimony for Piszczatowski. Giorgi had written her report while
knowing
that the detectives in the unit had come to a conclusion that there might have been a homicide.

Casting a line, Piszczatowski then asked Giorgi if she knew, from Zimmerman, if the “position of the chair might be an issue” in his case.

“No,” she said firmly.

“You weren't told that at all?”

“No, I wasn't told
anything.
”

“Just that there was an investigation continuing into a possible unnatural death, right?”

“Yes. They had gotten some other information he did not disclose to me—that it may not have been a natural death and for me to include these other items.”

Piszczatowski took a moment.

“Thanks,” he said, feeling victorious. “I don't have any other questions of this witness.”

CHAPTER 61

THROUGHOUT THAT FIRST DAY
of the trial, Officer Giorgi testified, and withstood what turned out to be an inconsequential redirect and recross. The state next brought in Officer Pete Dungjen, who did not add or detract from anything Giorgi had testified to. Jurors would either believe these two cops had integrity and were speaking from a place of it, or would not believe them at all, tossing out their testimony altogether, feeling it was too vague to matter. The jurors could potentially side with Billie Jean and put the focus on a theme Giorgi herself had kept bringing up: not all death scenes are the same, and not all people react in a similar way when faced with the death of a “loved one.”

By the end of the first day of testimony, forensic pathologist Dr. Ruben Ortiz-Reyes was in the hot seat answering questions posed by the APA—softballs.
All of them.
Ortiz-Reyes's direct testimony would set the stage for the state to argue that it was not so uncommon for a pathologist to change his opinion once he learned new information about a so-called natural death. The only major problem—one that Piszczatowski would no doubt seize upon when given the opportunity—was that the medical examiner's office never got a chance to conduct an actual autopsy after it changed its now-controversial opinion.

A pathologist testifying in a court of law can be a cumbersome prospect, tedious and completely dull, if not handled correctly by the attorney doing the questioning. Allowing doctors to meander on and on about their profession, skill, medical knowledge or education can alienate jurors and leave a sour taste in their consciousness, even sometimes bringing a certain heaviness to their eyes, beckoning a nap, as they try to withstand the arduous task of what might be unimportant nonsense. Best way for a lawyer to handle a talkative pathologist or medical doctor is to keep peppering him or her with direct, pointed questions, while knowing when to butt in and interrupt.

Luckily, Ortiz-Reyes was not your typical blabbering clinician, looking to boost his ego with a list of credentials, or a rundown of his accomplishments. He was terse at times, long at others, perhaps when he needed to be, and overall was a very confident and capable witness.

After being asked, he explained his craft of carving up bodies, taking fluid and tissue samples, weighing livers and hearts, sawing through skull and bone. He talked about his vast education experience and how qualified he was to be sitting in the courtroom. He was no novice; he had done some two thousand autopsies in his years behind the buzz saw. Contrary to an unquestionable, soon-to-be focus of the defense, Ortiz-Reyes explained, there were “hundreds of times” in which a medical examiner's office would not perform a complete autopsy, but “only perform [an] external examination in order to determine the fate of the death. . . .”

After some lengthy discussion between the judge and the APA, along with several questions by Piszczatowski to qualify the doctor as the expert he claimed himself to be, the court said it was going to go ahead and meet the requirements of Ortiz-Reyes being considered “an expert in forensic pathology.”

He said he had testified in hundreds of cases, all over Michigan.

The judge agreed and the questioning by the APA picked back up.

Ortiz-Reyes talked about receiving Don's body at the morgue. It was a Saturday, he explained, so he did very little examining other than what needed to be done, establishing a “natural death” diagnosis, tabling the remainder until Monday, as they normally do on weekends, unless it's a law enforcement emergency of some sort.

When he did conduct the examination—Ortiz-Reyes said he never did a complete autopsy on Don—he came to the conclusion that Don had died of a heart attack, and his death was ordinary and there was nothing outwardly pointing to anything else but an older gentleman who had likely died of natural causes, facilitated by an unhealthy lifestyle. Furthermore, he had come to this conclusion because “most men in this country,” specifically in Don's age range, “die of heart disease.”

It was common. The ME's office saw it all the time.

But on that Monday after Don's death, a red flag popped up for Ortiz-Reyes and the team when the blood and urine analysis came back with those astonishing numbers, indicating an enormous amount of alcohol in Don's system at the time of his death. So this revelation made him change his “opinion” about the heart attack.

“In that death certificate, the first was alcoholic intoxication [as] the cause of death in this gentleman,” Ortiz-Reyes told the APA, “and the number two was the arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, meaning heart attack.”

This new information on Monday alerted the office that it might be prudent to conduct an actual autopsy. But when they went to go get Don's body, it had already been checked out under that first death certificate. They had no idea then that Don had been cremated.

So Ortiz-Reyes amended the manner of death to now read “accidental.” This, too, wasn't abnormal. Though not a common practice, it certainly happened from time to time.

Don had ingested an accidental overdose of booze, Ortiz-Reyes thought.

There was another surprise, Ortiz-Reyes explained, when the TPD called a “few days later” and said they had
more
information, which subsequently changed the status of Don's death yet again. It was at this time, he said, that the medical examiner, his boss, Dr. Dragovic, got involved, as is generally the protocol when a case proceeds as such.

“Every time there is a big surprise, he comes and takes over the case, because he is the chief medical examiner and he is in charge of the office. I also worked this case with him, but he is the one that takes over.”

As they talked back and forth about Don's death, and the way in which the medical examiner's office handled it was not so uncharacteristic a series of events, Ortiz-Reyes mentioned that the amount of alcohol alone in Don's system was enough to cause concern. Then, when they learned about Don's drinking habits, they realized he could very well survive drinking that much—which meant maybe something else had killed him. The point was: The medical examiner was open to interpretation of death, as facts became available. And sometimes “small findings mean a lot,” Ortiz-Reyes made clear.

Near the end of his direct testimony, Ortiz-Reyes talked about a “little abrasion” on Don's nose and lip—a few faint red marks that he did not notice the first and only time he looked at Don's actual physical body. It wasn't until he saw the marks in the photographs of Don's body later on, after they had learned Don might have been the victim of a homicide, that “it was suggestive that something was put on the face of this gentleman.”

Not that the marks could have been made as Don fell to the floor, or as he maybe stumbled into a wall while walking into the kitchen or by some other way people hurt themselves when drunk. For Ortiz-Reyes, these marks, coupled with everything else they had learned from law enforcement, possibly meant that someone had murdered Don by suffocation.

The APA asked what could have left those marks.

“Like some rough piece of something that's rough, like a pillow, but a
rough
pillow . . . and that [was] the reason he had that little scratch [on] there (meaning his nose).”

These were strong, accusatory words coming from an experienced pathologist. Ortiz-Reyes believed what he was saying. He was speaking from confidence.

The doctor called it a “fresh abrasion.” He likened the scratch to a cushion of a seat marking up the surface of the skin if a person, wearing shorts, sat down wrong.

All of this led Ortiz-Reyes to change the manner of the death yet again: “After reviewing
all
of the additional information, I said the gentleman was smothered by putting something on the face, plus the alcohol, of course.”