If You Only Knew (4 page)

CHAPTER 6

WITH BILLIE JEAN ROGERS
traveling to California to fetch her son after he endured a life-threatening car accident, Vonlee Titlow and Don Rogers were alone inside Don's expansive house. Vonlee did not work. Don went into the office, but came home at all hours of the day. So they were home together, alone, a lot. Vonlee now waited to hear from Billie Jean about how her son was making out.

“What do you say we go out and celebrate your birthday?” Don asked Vonlee.

It was July 12, 2000. Vonlee had been at the house now since that July Fourth weekend she spent with her aunt in North Carolina. Vonlee had just turned thirty-three. She was thinking about heading back to North Carolina. The Chrysler had been repaired after it had been stolen and impounded for investigative purposes. Vonlee was told she could pick it up anytime now.

“Sure,” she told Don. What a nice gesture, Vonlee considered. The guy had a big heart, she realized since moving into the house. He meant well. It was the bottle holding him down. Billie Jean had him all wrong.

Don made reservations for the two of them at Bloomfield Hills Country Club, an exclusive, eighteen-hole golf course with one hell of a four-star restaurant attached, about a fifteen-minute drive from the house. Vonlee liked to be treated like a lady. She'd dated some wealthy men in her life and knew what luxury living felt and tasted like. Her aunt did not want her to leave for North Carolina until—the earliest—she returned with her son. Keeping Don busy and reaping the benefits of that were favors Vonlee felt obligated to do while her aunt was away. Billie Jean made it clear to Vonlee before she left for California that she had plans for the two of them, her and Vonlee. The accident her son had been in might have derailed those plans somewhat, but it did not cancel them out.

“Stay,” Billie Jean had said over the phone.

“I will,” Vonlee responded.

Everyone at the club knew Don well. Here he was with this beautiful woman on his arm, walking in and sitting down to a nice, elegant birthday celebration. For Vonlee, going out to dinner with an older gentleman was not such a stretch; she'd run that escort service and doing this exact thing had been part of that world for her and her employees—along with all things sexual, of course.

It was clear from the moment they arrived that this night would not be anything but a routine night in Don's life. He'd drank all day long. And by the time they got around to ordering dinner, “He was so blitzed! I had to get the manager of the club, who—thank God!—knew Don well, to help me carry him out into the car,” Vonlee later recalled.

They hadn't even eaten dinner.

Vonlee had no clue how to get back to the Rogers house and got lost for an hour or more until she finally found her way. When they arrived, Vonlee managed to wake Don up enough to get him to stagger with one arm over her shoulder up the stairs and into bed.

Damn,
she told herself walking down the stairs. Billie Jean wasn't lying about the way Don drank. He never had a few pops and got a good buzz on; Don went all out, every day. Passing out was part of his routine.

At some point during the night, Vonlee awoke to Don, in bed next to her, grabbing at her, she later said. In fact, Don had woken her up by placing his hands on her large breasts. He was fondling her violently, perhaps in a drunken stupor or even a blackout.

“Come on, baby . . . come on . . . ,” Don mumbled.

“Don . . . Don . . . what are you
doing
?” Vonlee screamed, waking up.

Don continued, “Come on . . . Vonlee . . . come on.”

“No, no, no, Don,” Vonlee said. “Stop that!” She jumped out of bed.

Vonlee decided to go downstairs and sleep on the couch. She told Don to stay put and don't follow her (not that he could manage, anyway). Nothing was going to happen between them. Not tonight, not ever. There was no way Vonlee was sleeping with her aunt's husband, who, by lineage, was her uncle! Vonlee loved Billie Jean. She understood from what Billie Jean had told her that she and Don had more of a partnership than a marriage and had not touched each other in years, but still.

Vonlee woke the next morning and thought,
What the hell.
She couldn't believe what had happened. As mad as she was at Don, however, she wasn't going to say anything to Don or Billie Jean about it. Don was blasted. He probably wouldn't even recall the incident, anyway. Why make a bad night worse?

“I've been drunk before,” Vonlee recalled, “and done some stupid things. It was no big deal.”

Vonlee walked upstairs into her bedroom. Don was awake. His arms, she could not help but to notice, were all bloody. There was blood everywhere, in fact: from the bathroom, down the white carpeting in the hallway, into Don's room and her room.

“Don, what the heck?”

“I fell,” he said.

“Fell?”

There was way too much blood to believe it was from a fall.

“Look, Vonlee, you have to help me clean up all this blood. If Billie comes home and sees it, she's going to go crazy.”

Vonlee went down the hall and into the bathroom and saw that Don had ripped the door off the hinges. He must have cut himself, she deduced, in the process of doing that. But also, when she looked in his bedroom, there was blood all over his bed. Don had been bleeding from his rectum again.

The other problem Vonlee now had was that if one followed the blood trail, it went from Don's room into her room and into her bed. Although the bleeding had started after she went downstairs to sleep on the couch, her aunt still might think they shacked up together, if she followed the bloody trail.

So Vonlee got a bucket, some bleach, got on her knees and went to work.

“I didn't want to tell her,” Vonlee explained. “Nothing happened. But I liked Don and I didn't want to see them have a conflict. He was nice guy, at least to me. He treated me good.”

The one thing Vonlee mentioned as the morning went on was all of the bleeding. Vonlee cautioned Don that he had to do something about the rectal bleeding—it was a sign of a much larger medial issue that could potentially kill him. Did he have colon cancer? Rectal cancer? Ulcers? There had to be an answer.

“I won't go to a doctor,” Don said. “Won't do it.”

He was one of those If-I-don't-know-it-can't-hurt-me guys.

Don had to realize he was dying a slow death from the drinking and the bleeding. Perhaps he didn't want to face a doctor telling him he had to give up the one thing he lived for.

Vonlee could not get the blood out of the carpet. There was way too much.

Billie Jean called.

Vonlee hesitated, but then explained what happened.

“But she was so distraught about her son and the accident that she didn't really care about it all,” Vonlee later said.

At least not then. It would come up again, though.

Vonlee hung up with her aunt. Then she spoke to Don.

“I'll let her get all new carpets and have the upstairs remodeled and she'll be all right,” Don said. Then he began talking about his life with his wife, which kind of shocked Vonlee. If what Don said was true, Vonlee didn't really know her aunt.

“He talked about lending [a family member of Billie Jean's] hundreds of thousands of dollars and not seeing any of it,” Vonlee recalled. “And he really didn't have a say in it.”

“What do you mean?” Vonlee asked. It was early morning. He was pouring his first glass of vodka of the day already.

“Well, she went down to the bank and signed off on it—I didn't know about it. She's my wife and they allowed her to do it.”

“That's horrible, Don . . . ,” Vonlee said. “Can't you do anything?”

He shrugged his shoulders and threw his hands up in the air. He was tired. Don didn't want confrontation.

Vonlee decided she needed to leave as soon as possible and go back to her life in Tennessee. Her aunt was a bad influence. She was obviously doing things Vonlee did not subscribe to. Sure, going out with her to the local casinos and drinking was fun. Spending some of her and Don's money was a good time, but this was not the way Vonlee wanted to live her life anymore.

“I'm going back home,” Vonlee told Don.

“I don't blame you.”

CHAPTER 7

DR. ORTIZ-REYES HAD BEEN
waiting for Don's body on August 12, 2000, when it came into the OCME. Ruben Ortiz-Reyes, a medical doctor trained in pathology, had been told that he needed to be ready for an older gentleman with obvious signs of alcoholism and perhaps other, more chronic medical issues. There was “nothing abnormal” about the death scene, Ortiz-Reyes was told, and the “family had found him on the floor.” For all intents and purposes, although sad, Don Rogers's death seemed to be a fairly common situation the OCME ran into all the time.

Ortiz-Reyes figured he'd conduct a routine examination on what he had been told was a “natural death.” It would be one more of about two thousand that Ortiz-Reyes had been involved in during a career spanning some ten years by the time Don Rogers's body came across his metal slab.

The word “autopsy” means, essentially, “see for yourself.” Many pathologists report that about 25 percent of all autopsies reveal some sort of surprise nobody ever saw coming. Doesn't mean there was nefarious behavior behind the death, but maybe the person did not know he or she had a bad heart valve or a growing tumor on the brain. Part of searching the body for answers is to give the family that much-needed closure at a time when they're trying to figure out what happened.

Getting started, Ortiz-Reyes first noted how Don was dressed in blue jeans, a T-shirt and undershorts. Perhaps most importantly at this juncture, Ortiz-Reyes reported:
There were no . . . obvious injuries on the body.

There had been quite a bit of discussion about Don's alleged rectal bleeding back at the scene, Ortiz-Reyes had been told. Vonlee and Billie Jean had both mentioned Don bled a lot. Ortiz-Reyes took a quick look at Don's anus and found no dried blood, nor any sign of fresh blood. On Don's undershorts, where one might expect to find bloodstains, either old or new, Ortiz-Reyes did not see any.

It was a Saturday, so Ortiz-Reyes was limited by time. He had come into the office especially to accept the body. He conducted a cursory examination, making several notes, and decided to put an actual autopsy off until Monday morning, when he could devote more time and attention to it. (If the ME, Ortiz-Reyes's boss, warranted further examination and wanted him to cut Don open.) This was not highly unusual for a pathologist to do on a weekend. The guy had a life, too. He could not just drop everything to conduct a full-on autopsy on a Saturday morning. Sure, if there was some sort of serial killer on the loose and the autopsy was crucial in finding him or identifying a victim, he'd gladly drop everything and do it. If the TPD had requested immediate answers in Don's death, Ortiz-Reyes would forgo any plans he had and do his work. But it was apparent that Don, an older gentleman, had died of natural causes. Putting him in the cooler and waiting until Monday morning was not going to hurt anything. On top of that, what did his family want?

The one injury Ortiz-Reyes noticed as he wound down his hasty examination was on Don's right eye. He had “an old injury” there.
Probably two days old,
the doctor later noted.

The one thing Ortiz-Reyes was obligated to do was come up with a preliminary finding; in other words, he needed to spend enough time with the body in order to determine a cause of death that he could put before the medical examiner on the death certificate, which the medical examiner would then have to sign off on.

Taken into account all Ortiz-Reyes had heard from responding officers and the OCME investigator sent to the scene, Ortiz-Reyes was comfortable with not proceeding with a formal autopsy on this day—i.e., cutting Don open and examining his innards, weighing organs, cutting open his brain with a buzz saw and initiating the lab to begin testing samples of tissue. Lab workers would come in early Monday, and if they weren't facing a backlog, they would test Don's blood and urine just to make sure there was nothing out of the ordinary as far as poisons or anything else that might cause alarm.

“When we have a body . . . [and] nothing out of the natural is related to the death of this person,” Ortiz-Reyes explained later, “we usually see the body to check for any kind of injuries. If everything is within the normal, we don't do autopsy.” Furthermore, Ortiz-Reyes added, because of Don's age being in the neighborhood “where most Americans die of heart problems, I thought he had died of heart problems.”

As Ortiz-Reyes stood over Don, still taking notes, thinking about the situation and all of the factors involved, he told himself,
There is no need for an autopsy.
He then reflected,
This gentleman more likely died of problems in the heart . . . arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, meaning that the heart—that the vessels around the heart are in bad shape and do not give enough blood to the heart to support the life.

It was an educated guess, based on Ortiz-Reyes's experience.

Generally, when a medical examiner thinks a human being died of a heart attack, the first thing he or she does is open that person up and have a look at the heart. But because Don was so old, by Ortiz-Reyes's swift estimation, he didn't feel the need to do that, at least not on this day.

Ortiz-Reyes took a sample of urine and blood from Don's body. He posted them to the lab for examination on Monday when they came back from the weekend.

“Heart attack,” Ortiz-Reyes later said in court that he thought at that moment.

There wasn't a doubt in his mind.

Ortiz-Reyes took one last look at Don's body, finished his notes and told the weekend staff Don needed to be put in the cooler.

He then shut off the lights in the autopsy suite and left.