Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder (12 page)

“Know where I can get a truck?” Tim asked his friend.

His friend told him to come back in an hour. They got back in the car and went over to Tim’s uncle Sammy’s house.

The man who answered the door was in his early fifties, tall and thin. She didn’t know him, but from what Tim had said about him in the past, it sounded like Sammy was his dad’s brother. The two greeted each other warmly and then Sammy invited them in.

Tim and his uncle smoked crack while Carol watched. She didn’t say a word. Finally, Tim had had enough and said, “Come on, let’s go.”

They went back to his friend’s place to pick up the truck, but the guy had punked out. He couldn’t get them a truck. By then, Carol was starting to get worried about her kids. They’d be getting home, she wouldn’t be there, they’d start looking for her, and they’d open the door to the basement. Whoops! “Hey, Ma, what’s Aunt Nancy doin’ with all that blood over her face, and her dead and everything?”

That was the last thing Carol wanted to happen. But Tim rode around Flint for a while anyway, until Carol told him they had to get back to the house.

“Nancy’s back there,” she reminded him.

They had a body they had to get rid of.

Tim turned the car around and headed for the interstate, got on and began clocking at about 70 mph.

They hadn’t been gone as long as Carol thought; they got home around 1:30
P.M.
It was still early. First thing Tim did was state that they had to “get rid of Nancy and the bed.” They went down to the basement.

Nothing had changed. Nancy was still tied up to the bed. Nancy’s face was still bloody. Nancy was still dead. Carol noticed that the dead woman’s hands were an unnatural shade of white.

Tim got a pair of scissors and severed the bonds around her hands and feet. The pantyhose were still tied to the bed but not to her. The hose wouldn’t be able to be used as a clue when the cops eventually found her, Tim figured.

“Come on, help me,” Tim ordered.

Tim wrapped her up in the blanket and then Carol grabbed her by the head and they started to pull her up the stairs. Tim walked up backward first, carrying her legs; Carol followed in the back, holding up her head.

Maybe it was the way Carol was holding the blanket. She wasn’t sure. Whatever it was, the damn thing ripped. Nancy’s head fell out and hit the floor with a loud
thud
. She didn’t moan. If there had been any doubt before, there was none now.

Nancy Billiter was definitely dead.

Carol felt bad; she’d dropped her dead friend’s head. She picked her up again. Tim was pulling her, and Carol was barely able to keep Nancy’s head above the ground. But they got her up the steps and then, when they got up the basement steps, they walked a little bit into the kitchen, then down the breezeway steps. It was only three steps. Tim walked too fast down them and Carol dropped the blanket and Nancy’s head hit the ground again.

Tim finished the job himself, pulling the corpse into the garage. Carol’s car was parked backward in the garage. He took her around the middle and set her down.

“Help me put her in.”

Carol came over. Tim went around to the driver’s side of the door and popped open the trunk. Carol helped lift her, this time taking the feet. She was very heavy. Carol’s arms and shoulders burned with the effort. She started to feel weak. Tim saw her struggling; he came over before she dropped her, and grabbed the blanket, and sat her up in the trunk.

She was too big. He tried to bend her, but she wouldn’t go; rigor mortis had made her stiff as a board. He laid her down toward the left side and managed with great effort to get her in sideways. The blanket at the top parted.

Carol saw Nancy’s face, a blue-white death mask laced with bright red blood, which was stuck in her hair like some thick syrup. She wanted to look away, but something just made her continue to stare.

Tim closed the trunk on her and went around to drive when Carol spied Nancy’s shoe. It had fallen to the ground when Tim pushed her in. She picked it up and gave it to Tim, who nonchalantly popped the trunk again and tossed it in.

It was 1:30 in the afternoon. Carol knew the kids would be home at 3:20
P.M.
That gave them a little under two hours to get rid of her and get back. But they also had to get rid of the mattress and they didn’t have a truck.

They thought about that—the mattress was too big to fit in the car. The mattress with all of Nancy’s blood on it. What could they do with it? Tim decided to bleach it and hide it in the garage.

He went back to the basement. Carol gave him a few minutes, then followed. When she got there, Tim had already treated the mattress with the bleach. She didn’t smell anything, but she assumed that he had done it, since it was his idea.

They carried the mattress together up the stairs and out into the garage. Tim climbed on her car and up into the garage’s attic, not really an attic but the four-by-fours and two-by-fours that laced through the top of the garage right below the ceiling.

He pushed the mattress up into the latticework. When he was satisfied it was lying there okay, he stepped back down on the car’s roof and down to the garage floor.

They went back downstairs again and got the two small box springs the mattress had lain on. They brought those up and put them up in the rafters in a different section of the garage. Everything was secreted in such a way that when the garage doors were opened, you wouldn’t see the mattresses and springs, at least not immediately.

“You can lie about the blood on the mattress,” Tim said, sounding out of breath, “but if the police, ya know, come over there, they’ll test it and see it’s Nancy’s blood. I have to find a truck so I can get rid of them, but until then, we’ll just leave it here.”

Back in the basement, Carol swept the area where the bed had been. Tim cut the pantyhose off the frame and put it in a garbage bag. Then he took the bed frame apart. When he was finished, he put the frame away in a corner.

“Change your clothes,” Tim ordered.

She put the old clothes in the garbage bag and put the garbage bag in the kitchen next to the garbage can. With their work done, they decided to wait for dark before disposing of the body.

Soon the kids came home from school. They were hungry, so Carol fixed them each a sandwich. Then she sat down to do homework with them, and afterward, they watched a little TV.

Tim, meanwhile, was going from room to room. When he was out of sight, he’d take a hit of crack, pacing from room to room, looking out the window; he was still worrying the cops were there. Gradually the day wore down; the light faded; until finally, it was dark.

Carol fell asleep.

November 13, 1997

It was 8:30
P.M.
Tim woke her. She had been sleeping for hours. During that time, he had gone back to Flint to scout out a dumping location and had come back.

Carol got up and ate part of a sandwich. Then she helped the kids get ready for bed. Jesseca had a headache, so she gave her some Tylenol to help her sleep. Her son didn’t want to go to sleep because he’d had a nap earlier. It took a while to put him down. By the time they were both tucked in and sleeping, it was a little after nine.

The stress was killing her. Carol took another nap and Tim woke her at midnight. Time to finish it.

With both kids sleeping soundly, but without a baby-sitter in case they awakened, Carol and Tim got into the gold Caddy and drove out of the driveway of the home, past the police station, on the way to the interstate.

As snow fell, the wipers whisked back and forth. Behind the wheel, Carol peered out into the darkness. Tim thought she was driving too slowly and insisted on driving. Carol pulled off into a snowbank, where they switched seats. Tim took over. He looked at the illuminated dashboard. The fuel tank arrow was on
EMPTY.

“We need gas,” he said.

They really shouldn’t have stopped. After all, they had a body in the trunk! But if they didn’t, they’d get stuck someplace between West Bloomfield and Pontiac. Sure, it was cold, but that didn’t mean the body wouldn’t start to stink. And that’s all they needed; a suspicious tow truck operator reporting a strange odor in their car to the cops.

Tim found a station that was open and quickly filled the tank. He also filled a big red five-gallon gas can that he had happened to bring along. It was the kind of can you could buy in any auto supply store.

They got on Interstate 70 and headed north into the driving snow. An hour later, they got off at the Flint exit. They had to stop by some railroad tracks to let a train pass. Tim wouldn’t wait; he got out of line instead of waiting. After they turned around, two white guys in the truck behind them rolled down their windows and shouted out an epithet. Tim reached for the gun in his waistband.

“Let me shoot them motherfuckers,” Tim hissed. “Let me shoot them; let me shoot them.”

“No, fuck! I’m not gonna let you,” Carol shouted back. “I’m not gonna let you shoot them.”

Tim’s automatic wasn’t the only gun in the car. Carol carried a .32 automatic hidden between the two front seats.

“C’mon, let’s shoot them.”

“For what?”

It was like Tim always wanted to do something like that. He always wanted to shoot everybody, anybody that bothered him. Maybe he thought he’d be bigger in her eyes if she saw him do it.

Carol told him they didn’t have time, but Tim insisted.

“Leave them alone,” Carol said firmly.

Tim went around the block like he was going back to get them. Carol realized that if she said yes, he’d do it. Instead, Carol insisted that they must dump the body; she wanted to be done with the killing. That’s when Tim pulled into the park.

Carol had no idea where they were, just that it was dark and silent. Suddenly the two white guys that had dissed Tim were long gone, distant encumbrances that had been shown mercy.

Tim backed into the park’s lot, so the back of the car faced the river. When they got out, he grabbed the gas can, walked a few paces down the snow-covered path. He stopped, looked around.

“Okay, right here.”

“Well, what are we gonna do?”

The idea, he said, was to bring Nancy to this spot and burn her. Nobody would see because it was a secluded spot.

“Let’s get it over with,” she said.

Carol thrust her frozen hands into her pockets. The snow was coming down heavier. Their breaths were heavy white plumes.

They went back to the car. Tim looked around to make sure no other cars were coming. Satisfied at their isolation, he popped the trunk. Looking around again, Tim sat Nancy up and grabbed her like he was hugging her. He pulled her out and onto the ground.

Carol started to grab Nancy’s feet and he just pulled her out, going with the momentum of the body, slinging her over his shoulder. She closed the trunk and followed Tim up the path.

Carol tripped over something and fell. She got back up and by the time she caught up, her boyfriend had dropped the trussed-up body to the ground and was dousing it with gasoline. The awful smell permeated the blanket and came up and hit her nostrils with a sickeningly sweet stench. Carol kept guard, looking around, making sure no one was coming.

“When I tell you, go back and start the car and be ready to go,” Tim ordered as he continued to pour.

A car came down the street.

“Get down,” Tim ordered.

Carol hid behind a tree. When the car was gone, Tim poured out the remaining gasoline. Carol saw him leave a small trail of twigs and leaves leading up to the gasoline-drenched body. It was really a fuse that he intended to light. It would burn along the ground and when it hit the body,
poof
! It would go up in flames, destroying the evidence.

“Okay, start the car,” Tim ordered.

“Well, you got the keys.”

He stood there for a minute, thinking. Then, instead of giving her the keys, he gave her a lighter.

“You’re gonna light her. Light the gas,” he said.

Carol hadn’t bargained for that. She didn’t know what they were doing. What did she know about disposing of a body by burning it? But this wasn’t the time to disagree with Tim.

Tim put the gas can in the trunk. Then he went and got into the car and told her that when he gave the signal, “light it.”

Carol looked around. She was scared; she didn’t know what to do. Tim cracked the door open and peered out. No one was coming.

“Light it,” he ordered.

She looked down at about a five-foot trail of leaves and twigs, saturated with gas that led toward the body. Carol took a piece of paper out of her pocket, lit it, and put it down on the ground. But it didn’t hit the gas. When the paper went out, she bent down and lit the gas. When it caught fire, she ran to the car.

She looked back. It was a small, weak fire. Tim pulled out and onto the street and hit the accelerator. Never mind it was snowing and icy. He wanted to get the hell out of there.

“Did the body catch fire?” Tim asked.

Carol said she didn’t know. Tim was upset, real upset that she hadn’t lit the body. He repeated that that was what she was supposed to do, to make sure the body was lit. That way, she’d burn and nobody’d recognize her.

“I lit the trail close to the body,” she lied. “It should catch.”

There was no more time to waste. Tim drove around some streets that were foreign to her, until he pulled up in front of Uncle Sammy’s house. They knocked on the door. Carol hadn’t seen Tim pull the gas can out of the car, but there it was, in his hand. He was putting it down on the steps inside the house after Uncle Sammy let them in. They went upstairs, into the living room. Two of Sammy’s girlfriends were already there enjoying his hospitality.

Tim pulled some crack out of his pocket. He gave Sammy some and the two girls some. The four of them lit up and smoked, drifting to heaven on the high, not worrying about anything except where the next pipe was coming from.

He started socializing, like they had just come over for a Sunday dinner.
What’s your name? Where you from? Was her brother so-and-so? Yada yada yada
. After a while, Tim got bored.