If You Only Knew (3 page)

CHAPTER 3

OFFICER LYNN GIORGI GATHERED
Vonlee and Billie Jean in the den of the house and began to assess Don's medical history, trying to figure out what might have happened. With no outward signs of trauma, no injuries that Officers Giorgi or Dungjen could see, the “alcoholism” bell Billie Jean had rung when the officers showed up now seemed most plausible. Giorgi wondered if this was the root cause of Don's demise. Hell, in just the short time she'd been a patrol officer, Giorgi had seen death come to people in the most unimaginable ways.

Billie Jean was not at all surprised by Don's death. Or, rather, she didn't come across that way to Giorgi and Dungjen. She then went through all of the ailments Don suffered from, beyond being what she described as a chronic drinker who guzzled goblets full of vodka as though it was water.

“He'd take one of those mason jars and fill it up,” Vonlee explained. “Then down it. I had seen him do it more than once.”

Dungjen and Giorgi got together and decided their next move.

“We should probably call for the detective on duty and an ME,” Giorgi offered.

It was a formality, both cops considered, a not-so-routine part of their day, but an obligation, nonetheless. They did not suspect foul play, but that was, of course, not their call to make. First responders show up, evaluate the scene, do what they can to help, ask some questions and then call in the investigators if they believe a case warrants their time.

Giorgi covered Don with a yellow blanket and then sat with Vonlee and Billie Jean in the den. She wanted to ask a few more questions and hopefully help to figure out what happened. The mood in the house was subdued; despite however anxious Vonlee, who later admitted to being totally inebriated during this time, seemed. Billie Jean appeared composed, with a handle on things.

“Understanding,” one of the first responders called it later, referring to Billie Jean's demeanor.

Although, perhaps, alarmed that her husband was on the floor of their kitchen, dead, the wife's behavior, at least initially, seemed appropriate to the circumstances.

Vonlee, on the other hand, was acting “surprised and out of place, considering the situation,” that same first responder recalled. She was “resisting” questions posed by both officers.

“Vonlee and I went to the casino,” Billie Jean told Giorgi. “We were gone for a few hours—Donald did not want to go.”

In a statement Billie Jean later gave that night, she wrote about leaving for the casino at
9:30–10:30 . . . [and] came home at 4:15,
at which time she and Vonlee then called 911.

Billie Jean was “pretty calm” and “very quiet,” Giorgi observed. “Didn't really speak unless I asked her questions.”

Billie Jean also paced at times and chain-smoked cigarettes.

Probably nerves. Her husband was dead.

Giorgi walked back over to Don Rogers and thought about the scene a bit more, trying to picture what might have happened. Don lay directly next to the kitchen table. He was on his back, his legs crossed at the ankles, his arms outstretched in kind of a Jesus-on-the-Cross position. This didn't raise any red flags, specifically; but the more they looked at it, the way in which Don's body was lying seemed almost staged. Feeling this, the intuitive officer considered that she ought to look even closer. They had to wait for the detective and medical examiner (ME), anyway. What would it hurt?

His legs are crossed at his ankles?
Giorgi kept going back to it. This fact seemed odd, taking into account that Don might have fallen from the chair. How many people fall out of a chair and wind up on the ground, faceup, their legs crossed?

“It looked kind of unusual,” Giorgi later explained. “It appeared that he had fallen out of his chair . . . It just seemed unlikely that you could fall from somewhere and end up with your legs perfectly crossed at the ankles.”

Maybe it happened as one of the women tried reviving him? Maybe they had done this inadvertently?

Both said no.

Giorgi walked over to Billie Jean and asked several more questions. The officer was more direct and accusatory in her tone this time around. Maybe she didn't mean to be, but that was how it came out.

Vonlee stood by and appeared agitated with the officer. She viewed the situation as the officer attacking Billie Jean.

“You all just need to leave her alone right now,” Vonlee snapped at one point. Vonlee didn't think Billie Jean needed to be treated in this way—at least not right after her husband had died. “Why do you have to ask her all of these questions
now
?”

With her sassy Southern attitude and noticeable accent, Vonlee was “very excitable and very loud . . . and very protective of [Billie Jean],” Giorgi noted later.

“Why are you being so rude?” Vonlee then asked the officer. “You must be a cold person to be asking all of these questions.”

Giorgi and Dungjen tried to explain that they were just doing their jobs, but Vonlee wasn't having any of it. She didn't want her aunt subjected to such harsh treatment while her uncle was lying dead on the floor in the kitchen. It could all wait, Vonlee seemed to be suggesting.

“Look, this is a process,” Giorgi explained, trying to put out a Southern brush fire now gathering fuel, “and we've called in a detective and the medical examiner.... These are necessary questions we need answers to. I need to write a report.”

Giorgi asked Billie Jean and Vonlee if they could sit, calm down and perhaps write out for her what happened that night, what they did, what they came home to. Details would be important. Would they mind writing a statement?

Neither indicated any interest in doing this.

Giorgi changed her tactic, as she often did in situations when people became stressed. She, instead, asked questions that did not pertain to the situation. Questions with answers they did not need to think about. How old are you? Where'd you grow up? Where do you work? Things of that nature.

That tactic did not work, either. Vonlee hemmed and hawed about how the cops were being unsympathetic to Billie Jean and the notion that Don was dead.

Giorgi continued to insist that both females needed to sit down and write out a statement she could include in her report.

“Oh, well, okay, then . . . ,” Vonlee said.

She began writing. But as she did, Vonlee quickly put the pen down and stated, “You know what, I am not doing this right now!” She was angry.

“Miss Titlow, these are things we need to know,” Giorgi said again, more pleasantly than she had been previously in her tone.

Vonlee refused.

Billie Jean walked over and Giorgi asked about Don having any prior medical conditions—if either woman could shed any light on that.

“One time he passed out in the bathroom upstairs and hit his head on the tub,” Billie Jean said. “He was bleeding and I wanted to call 911, but he told me not to.”

The officers decided to check out the rest of the house. It was possible, since Vonlee and Billie Jean said they had just walked in and found him, that someone else had come by. But the only unlocked door into the entire house was the pedestrian door from the kitchen into the garage.

“That's how we came in,” Billie Jean said when one of the cops pointed it out. “We used the garage door opener to open the garage and then came in through that door.”

None of the windows or any of the other doors in the house were unlocked or seemed broken into. Even in the basement, Giorgi noticed when she went downstairs to look around, those windows seemed to be fine. No glass broken. Nothing out of place. All of them locked.

Giorgi went into the family room, which had a fully stocked bar. She noticed not one bottle was open or even out. Everything appeared to be in its place on the shelves. But when she walked over to the pantry area of the house, just beyond the kitchen, not far from Don's body, there were several large bottles—“gallon sizes”—of vodka. But upon a careful examination of those, they saw none of them had been opened, either.

Giorgi found Billie Jean. “Listen,” she asked, “you said he once blacked out and hit his head.”

“Yes,” she answered.

“Let's take a walk upstairs to check and see if anything like that might have happened again.”

They went upstairs and walked through all of the bedrooms and the bathrooms.

Nothing seemed out of place.

When they got back downstairs, she showed Giorgi one of the living-room chairs with blood on it. The blood was crusty and dried up.

“That's from Don's rectal bleeding.”

It was the only spot in the entire house where they could locate any blood.

Giorgi was stumped. And yet, with all the talk going on inside the house, including the questions Vonlee and Billie Jean had asked, the one inquiry neither had made was rather telling in and of itself:
What might have happened to Don?
Neither Billie Jean nor Vonlee seemed to be interested in the opinions of the two officers.

“Can't we do this tomorrow?” Vonlee asked one of the officers. She was tired of all the questions. Accusations, as Vonlee saw them. She was mainly worried about her aunt, Vonlee said, not herself.

“She was just sitting, at one point, smoking cigarettes and staring,” Vonlee later said of her aunt.

What the hell?
Vonlee wondered.

“I thought she was maybe ready to snap. I had never seen that look on her face before—it was eerie.”

CHAPTER 4

BILLIE JEAN ROGERS RENTED
a hotel room at the casino in North Carolina for her and Vonlee back in July 2000. As they partied throughout that weekend, Vonlee was, at best, lukewarm about the prospect of heading back into the party lifestyle and starting up all over again. It was as if that time in her life had come and gone, and although the drinking and gambling and dancing and doing drugs had been fun, it wasn't who she was anymore. Vonlee wanted to go back to the Waffle House, show some humility, then beg for her shitty job back.

The pull of her addiction, however, as she later described it, was too much. Vonlee was back on the bottle now—and the alcohol, her one vice, had just taken back control of her life and was telling her what to do once again.

As they were walking into the parking lot to get into Billie Jean's Chrysler LeBaron, the aunt said, “Didn't I park the car there?”

“What?” Vonlee asked.

“My car, Vonlee, where is my car?”

Billie Jean had issues with drinking herself, Vonlee claimed, the court record later backing this up through testimony. “She was addicted to gambling and she was an alcoholic, too,” Vonlee had once said. So it was hard to consider what she was saying after a night of losing at the casino—which she did on this night—and having a few too many pops.

They searched for the car. It was nowhere to be found.

Billie Jean filed a police report. She rented a car and asked Vonlee to drive her back to Michigan.

“Look, drive me back, if they ever find my car here, you can have it.”

Vonlee agreed.

They set out on the road back to Troy.

“That's how I ended up back in the upper Midwest,” Vonlee said.

The car was eventually located and Billie Jean kept her promise. They had been back for a day or so and the North Carolina authorities called to say they had located it, but that it would take about two to three weeks to process.

“You stay here with us at the house,” Billie Jean said. “Don won't mind. When they call for the car, you go back and take it.”

What the hell,
Vonlee considered.
A free car.

Vonlee soon found out that life inside the Rogers household, that suburban existence behind closed doors, was anything but hospitable and pleasant. Billie Jean and Don fought like two people that hated each other, Vonlee soon learned. And Don, Vonlee said, drank himself into oblivion almost daily. He'd fill large mason jars with vodka and down them in front of her and Billie Jean and then pass out.

“It was clear to me that this marriage was for convenience,” Vonlee explained later. “There was no love between them.”

One of the major issues Don had with Billie Jean was her incredible spending, not only on gambling, but her enormous shopping sprees, too. She spent a lot of time at the Detroit area casinos, and most of that money came from Don's savings and investments, filtered through credit cards Don had given to his wife. This was the cause of much conflict between them, as Vonlee stood on the sidelines listening and watching so many of their fights.

As chaos reigned supreme inside the household during the latter part of July 2000, Billie Jean took a call one night that sent her into a terrible spell of dread and worry. Her son from a previous relationship had been involved in a car crash in California, where he lived, in which several others involved had been killed. He was fighting for his life, in critical condition.

“I have to go out there,” she told Vonlee and Don. “I have to get him and bring him here.” She left.

Don and Vonlee were alone in the house.

CHAPTER 5

LYNN GIORGI LEFT THE
scene about 7:30
A.M.
as Officer Pete Dungjen hung around, waiting for the investigative team to arrive. As he stood in the living room, Dungjen thought back to how Billie Jean had failed to show any “real emotion, to speak of” throughout the entire time he and Giorgi had been there. This seemed odd to the officer, who had been at so many of these scenes he'd lost count. Most people were distraught and crying, but with Billie Jean, everything seemed so matter-of-fact.

Another factor Dungjen observed was that Don had been cold and lividity had set in. This meant he had been dead for a long time; it wasn't as though he'd fallen, passed out and died within an hour or two.

When the paramedics arrived, Dungjen explained what he and Giorgi had come upon. One of the emergency medical technicians (EMTs) lifted Don's shirt, put a heart monitor on his chest and determined, if only following procedure, that there was no heartbeat. Donald Rogers was dead.

“You notice those feet crossed like that?” Dungjen said to the paramedic as he removed the chest tabs from Don and put away his equipment.

“I do.”

“That's odd, huh?”

The guy shrugged. What could he say? Every death felt a bit different. No one died in the same manner, under the same set of circumstances. Death was unpredictable.

Fast.

Slow.

Loud.

Quiet.

Don's death appeared to be a heart attack brought on by years of excessive drinking.

As Dungjen went back and talked to Billie Jean, trying to get any details he could from her, she kept going back to Don's alcoholism.

“One or two gallons of vodka a day,” she said.

That was a lot of booze. No two ways about it.

Dungjen had noticed a half-full glass of clear liquid on a den table, with a pair of shoes on the floor next to it. He asked her about this. It felt like someone had been sitting in the chair, drinking a glass of what had been confirmed to be water.

Both Vonlee and Billie Jean spoke at the same time. Billie Jean said the shoes were hers, as Vonlee yelled in the background about the cops and what in the name of God were they doing busting on Billie Jean at such a volatile, sad time in her life.

“How did those shoes get there?” Dungjen asked, ignoring Vonlee's crude, drunken rant.

“We came home,” Billie Jean explained, “came in through the garage door and in through the laundry room and I got a glass of water, went into the family room, sat down, took off my shoes and started sipping on the water.”

This felt strange to Dungjen as he thought about it:
How could Billie Jean sit in this chair and sip a glass of water and not notice her husband on the floor in the kitchen?
If what she said was true, she would have come in, gotten a glass of water and walked around or over her husband's body on the floor before sitting down. The officer put himself in her position. Sitting in the chair sipping the water, she would have had a clear view of her husband on the floor in the kitchen. But that was not what she had told him.

Dungjen had called Detective Don Tullock, a twenty-five-year veteran of the TPD, the last fourteen with the Detective Bureau (DB), and explained that they had an “unexpected death” at the residence. Tullock was the investigator on duty. Tullock, of course, could sense that Dungjen's instinct told him something was off. Maybe he was overreacting to the situation, but the cop's gut was speaking to him and it was always, Dungjen knew, better to err on the side of caution when a potential murder was at stake.

Dungjen met Tullock outside in the driveway. “Her demeanor,” he told the detective. “I'm concerned about her demeanor . . . her lack of concern.” He was speaking of Billie Jean.

Tullock was told about Don's drinking.

“She's been living with the situation for so long,” the detective said, “and as a result, she might have become desensitized toward him.”

Tullock thanked the officer and told him he'd take it from here.

As Tullock met with the paramedic on scene, it was clear that Don had been dead for some time before the call had been made. Lividity took twenty minutes to begin and Don had “severe lividity and rigor mortis” clearly already set in. The lividity, especially, was obvious. Lividity is the pooling of blood, which is heavier than tissue. As gravity works its magic, the blood in the body is drawn downward. Don had dark red “splotches” on the bottom of his face closest to the floor, and also on his back. Blood, after death, finds the lowest point on the body and settles. Don also had what is called “cyanosis,” the bluing of the lips. Blood drains from a dead person's lips and they subsequently turn blue.

“Perfect,” the paramedic told Tullock. “He looks to be laid out perfect, like he himself laid down on the ground.”

“And . . .”

“It's unusual.”

The paramedic explained that he had been to “hundreds” of death scenes throughout his years of being a medic and he had not ever run into someone in this position with their legs crossed, lying on the floor almost as if placed there.

On top of that was the lack of any trauma to Don's body. Generally speaking, when an unexpected death occurred, the person fell and hurt himself as he fell down. There should have been some bruising or abrasion, at least on the elbows or hands as instinct took over and Don's body tried to break the fall. But not a scuffed knee or an obvious bruise was on him.

“Especially with a person this old—they're more brittle.”

Apparently, a seventy-four-year-old, one-to-two-gallon-a-day vodka drinker had fallen on a hard surface inside his kitchen and had not suffered one bump or scrape.

An investigator for the office of the Oakland County Medical Examiner (OCME) arrived next. Robert Allegrina was responsible for making the decision whether to bring the body in for further examination, or to release it to the family for burial. The OCME's protocol here was simple: “As a general rule,” Allegrina said later, “we observe the scene, photograph the body, document the evidence, talk to the family and witnesses and make a determination. . . .”

When Allegrina spoke to Billie Jean, she said her husband had not been to a doctor for as long as she could recall. He was one of those manly men who didn't think he needed a doctor. He'd rather not know what was wrong with him.

“Look over there,” Billie Jean said. She pointed to the carpet. They were upstairs in Don's bedroom. Vonlee was there by her aunt's side, ready to lash out at the detective if he became too aggressive.

There were “spots on the carpeting that appeared to be fecal matter, could have been dried blood.”

Allegrina wrote it down, documenting everything he saw.

“Are you opposed to an autopsy,” Allegrina asked, “under any religious reasons?” The doctor later explained he often asked that question because there were a lot of Jewish families in the area and he wanted to be mindful of their beliefs.

Billie Jean said no.

Allegrina's job was to report what he found at the scene to the medical examiner—and so that's what he did. And as long as the family wasn't opposed, an autopsy was probably warranted here. It was important for the state to understand how and why this man had died. There was plenty of evidence indicating he likely perished because of natural causes—rectal bleeding from ulcers in his stomach or colon cancer, severe alcoholism and maybe a host of other medical issues associated with those conditions or other medical issues that no one knew about. Yet both TPD officers and the detective on call had questions. With any luck, the medical examiner could clear them up and sign off on Don's death as natural causes.

After law enforcement cleared out of the house and Don's body was taken away, Billie Jean and Vonlee sat in the living room.

“What's wrong?” Billie Jean asked Vonlee. Vonlee was crying, shaking and had a hard time getting a handle on herself. Vonlee wanted a drink.

“What's wrong? I cannot believe he's dead, Billie!”

“Get over it,” Billie Jean snapped.

“Get over it? What do you mean?”

Billie Jean walked over and sat down next to Vonlee. She put her arm around her shoulder. “Just pretend like it didn't happen, Vonlee.”