If You Only Knew (30 page)

CHAPTER 73

AFTER A LENGTHY DISCUSSION
(without the jury present) regarding the merits of the state's case, and if the judge should issue a “direct verdict” based on the lack of reasonable evidence presented so far, to which the judge basically laughed, Walt Piszczatowski called Scott Hadley, Billie Jean's future son-in-law, her daughter's fiancé.

Scott explained how he had helped his future mother-in-law with her finances after Don's death. He said he advised her not to buy the cars, but he did not intervene when she had made the decision. He didn't want to meddle in the woman's grief, no matter what way she chose to express it. There was also an issue of Billie Jean wanting one hundred thousand dollars, and then a quarter of a million, as wire transfers to help out her family in Tennessee.

Was it extreme? Was it irresponsible? Was it, perhaps, heartless in one manner, spending Don's hard-earned money like that so soon after he was dead, but also quite a morally acceptable gesture in another, showing how willing Billie Jean was to help out her less financially fortunate family?

The jury had the information and would take it either way.

Scott Hadley's direct and cross-examination testimony was rather terse and inconsequential in the scope of the trial as it had played out before he had taken the stand. Billie Jean spent Don's money at will. The continuous message was: big freakin' deal. So she was careless with cash. Maybe it was her way of dealing with the stress of her husband's death.

On cross-examination, the APA asked one question, and Scott said yes, he saw Vonlee at the wake/funeral and she wore an “extensive amount of jewelry on her hands.”

* * *

Billie Jean's daughter, Vanette Vereeke, was next. She spoke of a day she would never forget, when she and her mother went to the University of Michigan Medical Center. There was a doctor who wanted to see her mom in person. Billie Jean had gone in for a battery of tests in the months before this day and things were not looking so good. She was tired all the time. She felt nauseous and dizzy. According to Vanette, her mother did not know she had cancer at this time. No one did.

In realizing that her mother did not like to “deal with things,” as Vanette described the call, she had phoned the doctor herself to find out what was going on. Vanette feared her mother would blow the doctor off and not go, much like Don Rogers had done. Many adults live under the same rule when it pertains to their health: not knowing means there's nothing wrong.

“I told your mother that she has a tumor,” the doctor explained to Vanette when she called him. Since he had her on the phone, the doctor said he wanted to relay some additional important information to Vanette, asking if she could, perhaps, tell her mother, seeing that Billie Jean did not want any part of talking to the doctor. He needed Billie Jean to know this was no joke. She needed to take it seriously. “I need you to tell her this is severe,” the doctor explained.

Billie Jean cried as she listened to her daughter testify about this moment. It was actually heartbreaking for her to understand the fear and sadness in her daughter's voice as she explained to the jury how and when she learned that her mother did not have long to live.

“I can't do that,” Vanette testified she told the doctor on the day they spoke. “What if I bring her to you?”

“Yes,” the doctor answered.

Vanette convinced her mother to go. They brought along Vanette's sister, Billie Jean's other daughter. When they arrived, her mother was exceptionally calm, Vanette explained. Here they were heading into a meeting with a doctor, who was obviously not going to be delivering good news, and her mother was walking and talking as if it were another day. This was the reason why Piszczatowski had called Vanette: to explain by example how Billie Jean reacted to bad news—or, rather, some of the worst news a person could get.

Vanette and her sister, Billie Jean and the doctor, sat down. The doctor proceeded to describe how hard this was for him, but he did not want to paint his patient's health with any sort of broad brush. He needed to be completely up front. Billie Jean needed to know.

“Terminal,” he said. “The tumor is on the liver and now it went around the portal vein and it's inoperable.”

“How long?” Billie Jean asked. Again, not flinching a bit. No tears. No drama.

“Your chances of living a year are very minimal.” (This meeting occurred, Vanette explained, within the past eight months.)

“Is there anything I can do?” Billie Jean wanted to know.

“I'm sorry, but there's really nothing you can do, Mrs. Rogers,” the doctor said.

Billie Jean had been on a list to get a new liver. Yet, the doctor explained further, because the cancer had spread, she'd be taken off the list at this point. There was no sense.

“You can try an experimental drug, but there are no assurances in any way for that. But listen, go home and think about that. Don't make the decision now.”

As Piszczatowski brought Vanette back into her testimony and away from that anecdote, they discussed her mother's spending habits. Vanette said she had gone shopping with her mother many times: “When she saw something she liked, she would just buy it. You know, she really didn't have a concept of money. . . .”

Money was “fun” to Billie Jean. Paper. Spending meant nothing to her.

Vanette also characterized her mother during those days immediately following Don's death as being in a somewhat “dazed” state. She was never one to cry outwardly, anyway, or become overly emotional around people. Just wasn't in her. Billie Jean had grown up in Tennessee under very poor conditions, maybe below the poverty/welfare line. Because of that, she had been hardened. It took more than a death to knock her down. Vanette made an analogy of when her brother, Billie Jean's son, got into that near-fatal car accident and how her mother was calm and cool, working her way through it all. If she hadn't fallen apart when her son was knocking on death's door, how could she be expected to break down when Don died?

“My brother got in a severe car accident,” Vanette explained in her articulate and sincere manner of providing the facts as she understood them. “He almost died. He had a closed head injury and we had to fly out to California and he was really bad.” She described the scene in the hospital after they arrived: tubes “going down his throat.” She said she and her “sister . . . were basket cases. But my mom was, you know, pretty calm and trying to keep us calm and reserved.”

Her mother never cried, Vanette added.

Jurors listened intently. Was this why she had reacted the way she did when Don died? It was simply her nature to be the nurturer.

When the APA took his turn at Vanette, he once again asked about Vonlee and any jewelry she might have been wearing during the funeral/wake.

Was this all the PO had up its sleeve? The fact that Vonlee wore lots of rings and bracelets and Billie Jean had likely bought them? After all, her “boyfriend,” Danny, was a jeweler.

The day was over early. The trial took a break on Friday, and then continued on the following Monday, December 10, 2001, with Walt Piszczatowski noting he would be concluding his case by the end of the day.

CHAPTER 74

TWO NONESSENTIAL WITNESSES SET
up an expert who was as close to a knockout blow as Billie Jean's attorney could dredge up. In the courtroom, standing, raising his right hand, reciting the oath to tell the truth and nothing but, was Dr. Michael Baden, who, at the time, had a hit television series on HBO,
Autopsy.
Who better to present Billie Jean's side of that seemingly all-important medical examiner evidence than a well-known, well-respected, familiar face like Baden? Tall, slightly overweight—“Baden loves his Peking duck,” a friend recalled—with a reassuring, grandfatherly air about him, Dr. Michael Baden, who became a celebrity pathologist during the OJ Simpson case after joining the “dream team,” was going to scalp the PO and the medical examiner's findings. He would totally dismantle their argument from stem to stern.

Baden went through his massive list of credentials, extensive and noteworthy. At the time when he sat in the witness stand, Baden was employed as the chief forensic pathologist, the medical examiner for the New York State Police. As part of his dedication to science and the career path of his choosing, Baden was a popular hired gun, if you will, open to interpreting autopsies for defense attorneys and prosecutors, testifying on behalf of a defendant he believed in or a prosecutor that needed his expertise injected into a case. He made a serious living doing this side work. Baden had been in the game for forty years. He'd published articles and written several books, both commercial and educational. The guy was a walking/talking encyclopedia of forensic pathology knowledge, and he had traveled the world exhuming and studying corpses. More than that, he'd been to over one thousand crime scenes and had conducted, by his estimation, over twenty thousand autopsies. If there was a more experienced pathologist in the world who could better understand the Oakland County medical examiner's work in this case, he or she had yet to come forward.

Baden, under the direction of Piszczatowski, had looked at Don Rogers's death, specifically all of the documents and photographs. After Baden spent about five minutes explaining what he had looked at in the case—every report, Dragovic's findings, the photos, etc.—Piszczatowski cut to the chase: “Now, based on your review of these materials, were you able to form an opinion as to the cause of death of Donald Rogers in this case?”

Baden said yes.

Piszczatowski asked him to proceed.

“My conclusion after reviewing everything is that I agree with [Dr. Ortiz-Reyes's] initial diagnosis”—an ideal way to present his findings—“that the cause of death is acute alcoholism. Too much alcohol.”

Baden wasn't going out on a limb by himself and saying he'd drawn some wild conclusion: he was agreeing with the pathologist who examined Don's body for the ME's office.

Piszczatowski presented a “blowup” of the original death certificate on the overhead projector, another brilliant move. There, for everyone to see in black and white, written in the space allotted for cause of death:
acute alcohol intoxication.

What became a factor that might not have seemed important earlier, or ever, stood out as Baden explained that when the ME's office changed the original death certificate, no one changed the date, nor had they made a note of when they had changed their collective mind that Don's death was now by asphyxiation. So again, although the ME's office might not have been acting nefariously when changing its diagnosis, this ostensible, minor error of not changing the date—or at least noting it—gave the impression they were. And with juries, both Baden and Piszczatowski knew from experience, impressions are
everything.

Piszczatowski asked Baden to recite a list of medical problems Don had suffered from. These were well-documented findings: heart disease and polyps in the colon, which led to rectal bleeding. Don was a heavy smoker and a heavy drinker. His veins were clogged up with plaque, and his blood flow was not quite as slow as peanut butter being forced through a pipe, but one gets the picture. You look at all that, Baden said, and you could pick any number of ways in which this man might have died. He was a walking dead man.

The big reveal, in Baden's professional opinion, came into view after he had gone “over in detail the medical examiner's explanation for the change to smothering,” and, subsequently, when he “went over in detail Dr. Dragovic's
opinions
in the preliminary hearing as to the change to smothering.” It was then, Baden told jurors, “I must respectfully disagree that I think there isn't the type of evidence available to permit a diagnosis of a change to smothering.”

Baden had an uncanny way of verbalizing difficult medical matters in easily palatable language. Moreover, he wasn't coming out and blasting the doctor, a colleague, claiming he was incompetent. Instead, Baden was saying he respectfully disagreed with the man and then presented evidence to support that argument.

“Smothering,” Baden added, “is a diagnosis that may leave no evidence of injury at all. One can have smothering without any changes in the body or there
may
be changes in the body.” Baden had looked into hundreds of smothering cases throughout his career. He knew the particulars involved in this type of homicide. One might even call him an expert in this area. “And it's a diagnosis of
exclusion.
You have to
exclude
other more pressing causes of death, and here we have a very
impressive
cause of death—that is, acute alcoholism. . . .”

Further, Baden went on to note, people who drank a lot “have and, eventually, for whatever reason, the alcohol they consume can cause death. And without an internal examination to further evaluate whatever abnormalities may be present, I just think that the cause of death as established initially is valid.... and that there isn't sufficient change to make the change on the basis of all the evidence that's present in the files.”

Casting even more bad light on the ME's finding, without much effort, Baden explained how the ME's office had done an “inspection report” and also filled out an “autopsy document.”

“It was listed ‘autopsy,' but an autopsy
wasn't
done. It was an inspection, an internal inspection.”

As they went through the reports issued by Oakland County, Baden spoke of a “lethal amount of alcohol” in Don's system at the time of his death.

He spoke of the need for a “full autopsy” here, but that it had not been done.

He spoke of a seventy-four-year-old man who had diverticulitis and a host of other ailments who had, without a doubt, died from one of them.

He recalled how “people who drink a lot tend to bruise” more than others.

He maintained there just wasn't enough “evidence” to change the death verdict to asphyxiation, and Baden himself would have never done such a thing.

Baden testified to a whole litany of eye-opening observations:

Most deaths are “unnatural,” and that, in and of itself, is no reason to raise a red flag.

“Most—ninety-five, ninety-six, ninety-four percent—of deaths in this country nowadays, those deaths are certified
without
an autopsy . . . [and] autopsies are becoming rarer and rarer. . . .”

The initial medical examiner (Ortiz-Reyes) had enough information to make the call to issue a death certificate.

All of these events were “not at all uncommon.”

Baden was effectively saying the ME's office did the right thing, came to the right conclusion, followed the book, but then they suddenly changed their minds.

A valid point Baden made was that Don weighed about 140 pounds. The amount of alcohol in his 140-pound body (.44) was “significant and extremely high” for his weight. Baden further stated that for the chronic alcoholic, the more he drinks the later in life, the less he is able to handle the amount of alcohol he used to be able to consume.

“I think the problem with chronic alcoholism . . . it doesn't make you better. It makes you worse, because as you drink and damage the liver (the target organ of alcohol) . . . it causes cirrhosis and other damage to the liver. The liver, which is the main organ for getting rid of alcohol, becomes damaged, so that the older alcoholic often can handle it less well than when he or she was younger.”

They spent the next ten minutes breaking down the alcohol argument at its most basic level. Baden had his facts and figures ready and fully prepared. As they did this, the idea that “alcoholism” was a potential killer kept coming up within all that Baden talked about. Then he switched to cardiovascular disease and it was clear that without an autopsy, how was one to draw
any
conclusion?

The topic of Don's body possibly being repositioned came up next. Baden said he'd studied all of the photos and there was no way, based on what he had available for evidence, he could come to the same conclusion.

“I don't see any evidence that this was a tampered scene,” Baden told jurors. “Alcoholics can die just lying down and going to sleep. The legs being crossed at the ankles was not in any way remarkable.”

What's more, at one time, Baden had done hundreds of autopsies on skid row drunks dying in New York City. He knew what to look for, as far as death by alcohol went.

In fact, as they concluded twenty minutes later, there was very little Dr. Baden could agree with regarding Dragovic's findings in this case. For all anybody knew, Baden said at one point, with “all of the rectal bleeding” reported, Don Rogers “could have died of colon cancer.” It was possible—and “another consideration that an
autopsy
would have resolved.”

As far as those so-called bruises on Don's face and nose, supposedly left by a pillow, all “alcoholics leave” scars and fresh wounds from bruising themselves. There was just no way to tell if those minor scrapes on Don could have come from a pillow. Baden stopped himself just short of saying how ridiculous it was even to claim they had been made by a pillow. For all intents and purposes, Baden said near the end of his direct, those scrapes, especially, could have been discolorations in the photo negatives. There was no indication that they were actually scrapes in the surface of the skin.

Concluding, Baden said, if he had to guess, he'd say no, those were not scrapes, they were old wounds.

“I don't think it's sufficient to indicate foul play.”

* * *

What can an APA do after a show like Baden had just put on? Go after his ethics was about all. The APA began by hammering Baden on his “consulting” jobs, asking him repeatedly if he spent most of his time these days consulting on other cases, as opposed to conducting autopsies.

Baden said (twice) he split his time equally between autopsies, writing and consulting.

The APA asked where.

Baden said all over the world.

The cross-examination was, at best, a last-ditch effort; at worst, it came out as desperation.

Predictably, the APA went after Baden's “fees.”

Baden agreed that he got three hundred fifty dollars an hour, and five thousand dollars a day while on the road. In this case, it amounted to about twelve thousand dollars, paid for by Billie Jean Rogers.

From there, the APA asked about Baden's contention that .44 might have been lethal.

Baden agreed when the APA asked that not everyone with that level dies from it.

As they discussed the alcohol levels for what felt like a nauseating umpteenth time, it appeared the cross-exam was going nowhere. A lot of Baden's answers consisted of a simple “yes” or a simple “no.” Zero elaboration.

APA Skrzynski asked questions about the amount of alcohol in a person's system for the next twenty minutes; then he tossed in an OJ Simpson question (if Baden had testified in that case). As the state attorney finished, it was clear the PO had nothing left. If anything, Baden's cross-exam bolstered Billie Jean's case in the sense that the APA made a bigger deal than necessary about the amount of alcohol in Don's system, casting even more light onto it, which meant more doubt about the murder charge.

* * *

By 1:56
P.M.
, after lunch, the judge indicated all of the testimony had been heard. Closings followed a day later.

And then, quite unceremoniously, to no one's surprise, Billie Jean Rogers was found not guilty.

It had all happened so quickly. The closing arguments. The verdict. The good-byes.

And then the breakdown of Billie Jean's health: She faded fast. Heading toward Christmas that year, after it was announced that Vonlee would face trial within just a few months, Billie Jean secluded herself inside her home. No one saw her. Not many spoke to her. She'd beaten a murder rap—which was no easy task under any circumstance—but she still had a death sentence hanging over her.