Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder (3 page)

Craig figured closing time for about one o’clock. She didn’t know Bernhard well, only from the restaurant. She had no idea where he lived.

“What was Mr. Bernhard like when he came back?” Shanlian asked.

“Like how?”

“Was he upset? Were his clothes disheveled?”

“No. No. He was real calm.”

“Was there anything out of place in your car? Anything that looked upset?”

Translation: Any blood or weapons in the car? How about a dead body?

“No. It was the same as when I gave him the keys.”

“How was Nancy acting in the last week?” Shanlian asked. “Was everything all right with her?”

“Well, Nancy was upset last week because her roommate, Carol, was accusing her of stealing from her. Nancy had told Carol that someone had broken into her house, but Carol was suspicious. She didn’t believe that.”

Yvonne wasn’t sure what Carol’s last name was, but she thought it might be “Giles.” She thought that Carol lived on Orchard Lake Road in Bloomfield but couldn’t be sure.

Edwards told the Flint cops that West Bloomfield was the next town over. He went out to the pay phone and called Information, trying to get an address for Bill Bernhard. But Bernhard wasn’t listed with Information and Edwards didn’t want to take the time right then to check with motor vehicles. Besides, it didn’t sound like Bernhard had had anything to do with the murder.

On his second call to Information, Edwards was able to locate an address for a Carol Giles. She lived on Walnut Lake Road in West Bloomfield Township.

At 9:00
P.M.
, the cops left the restaurant. The Slocum address Grant had given them, where Nancy Billiter lived with her mother, was only a few blocks from the restaurant. They pulled up to the modest house at 9:07
P.M.
The name on the curbside mailbox was
BURKE.
Shanlian figured that must be the mother’s name. Walking up the tree-lined driveway, they felt the chill wind picking up.

It was Phyllis Burke, Nancy Billiter’s sixty-four-year-old mother, who answered the doorbell. She opened the door and looked at three tall, burly-looking men in overcoats.

Edwards flashed the tin. He explained that they were police officers investigating a crime and that her daughter might be involved. The three men stepped inside; Burke had enough presence of mind to close the door behind them. Immediately, Shanlian asked her if she had a photograph of Nancy Billiter. His tone was gentle, considering the urgency of the circumstances.

Not saying a word, with a creeping dread in her heart, Phyllis Burke went into the living room and came back with a framed snapshot of a smiling middle-aged woman. Shanlian pulled the picture from his pocket and compared them.

The woman was the same in both photographs.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you, but Nancy has been murdered.”

Burke began sobbing, great heaves of grief. She called her two daughters, Susan Garrison and Karen Clason, and told them, “The police are here. They say Nancy has been murdered.” The girls said they’d be right there.

“Mrs. Burke, when was the last time you saw your daughter?” Edwards asked.

“Not for over a week,” she replied, wiping tears from her face.

They had had a big argument and she had asked her daughter to leave. Shanlian figured it must have been one hell of an argument.

“When was that?” Melki asked.

“Early October, I think it was the ninth. Even though Nancy was the legal guardian, I been taking care of my great-grandson since.”

Just then, the front door opened and an attractive woman walked in.

“Oh, Mom,” she said, and ran to her mother and put her arms around her. They hugged for a long, interminable moment, the cops shuffling their feet awkwardly, until they broke the embrace and the woman introduced herself.

“I’m Karen Clason, Nancy’s sister.”

Shanlian sized her up as a woman in her late thirties or early forties. A moment later, the door opened and another woman ran in, looking a lot like the other two in the room. She, too, embraced Burke and then introduced herself as Susan Garrison, Nancy’s other sister.

Shanlian suggested that while Melki and Edwards talk to Mrs. Burke, the sisters and he go into another room to talk. The two sisters followed him into a bedroom, where they began to talk about their sister.

Nancy Billiter’s partner, the one she lived with day and night, thought about, and worked her ass off for, was cocaine.

Sober, Nancy could function at work, but as soon as she was off, she craved that hit that made her forget her troubles and put her into another, safer, warmer place.

Susan Garrison was aware that her older sister Nancy Billiter had a problem with drugs, but Billiter had reassured her that that was in the past. Garrison had no reason to doubt her.

Nancy and her siblings, Susan, Karen and Doug, had grown up as part of a close-knit family in the middle-class Detroit suburb of Auburn Hills. Headquarters for the Chrysler Corporation, the town was a combination of upper- and middle-class families. The former were the executives, the latter the workers, either in the auto plant or the various businesses that fed off the business of building cars.

Growing up, the Burke children were happy. Then, when Nancy was eight years old, their father was killed in a car accident. At twenty-six, Phyllis Burke was left a widow with five kids. She didn’t work.

Garrison recalled that they lived off SSI and from people helping out. The siblings became very self-sufficient in helping out their mother. They became even closer knit.

Perhaps because of the trauma involved, Susan, who was six years old when her father died, didn’t remember that time of life. What she did remember was sharing a room with Nancy.

Susan and Nancy were into Barbie dolls. They shared the same clothes. It was the 1960s and they listened to the same music—the Beatles, Kinks, and Stones. Later on, when they hit their teens, if Nancy had a boyfriend, she’d introduce Susan and they would double-date.

The two-year age difference meant they were in the same high school at the same time. Nancy did nothing to distinguish herself there; she was just an average student who was into boys. But she had aspirations of being a nurse, and upon her graduation from high school, she began looking into the health profession. Life, though, threw her a curve.

Nancy got pregnant out of wedlock and had a baby she named Stacy. She decided to raise Stacy on her own and support her herself.

Nancy became a waitress. She was a personable, good worker and had no trouble finding jobs. For the next twenty years, she supported herself and her child with eight- to twelve-hour shifts. She was on her feet so much, it wasn’t uncommon for her to come home with swollen legs. But she kept going—she had to. Her kid was relying on her, and nothing was more important to Nancy than her family.

In those years, the only real means of self-expression she had was sports. She was a great softball player. It was after high school that she got into sports, particularly softball. Nancy played shortstop and first base. She batted right-handed.

In between double plays, Nancy tried marriage. She was in her early thirties when she married Jimmy Ryan. She was quite a bit older than Jimmy, Susan recalled, and because of that and other reasons, it didn’t work out. After only a few months together, they separated and divorced.

Like most detectives, Shanlian knew that the homicide victim usually knows her killer; that is, it is usually a friend or family member who commits the crime. That was an angle he needed to pursue.

He wanted to know if when she was married to Jimmy Ryan, there was any history of domestic violence. Both women answered no. They insisted he couldn’t be involved because the marriage took place ten years before; they didn’t even know if Ryan was still local. That didn’t let Ryan out, necessarily, but it did make him a remote suspect.

Garrison related how her niece Stacy, Nancy’s daughter, eventually grew up and met a guy in Michigan, then moved with him to Georgia “and got herself in trouble there,” Susan continued. “Nancy got custody of the baby.”

By that time, Nancy had made an arrangement with her mother.

“The baby lived with Nancy and my mother.”

Nancy had a grandchild to help support. But by that time, the 1990s, the pressure of a hardscrabble existence had gotten to Nancy and she had taken up with cocaine. As Nancy moved from one high to another, she also changed jobs, until she wound up as a waitress at South Boulevard Station. Susan Garrison and her mom went there all the time.

They would have dinner and sit drinking coffee afterward for hours, until they floated out of there. The restaurant had a very comfortable atmosphere. Everyone was very friendly. When Nancy’s grandson was about eight, Susan and her mom would occasionally take the boy to the restaurant for dinner during Nancy’s shift.

Nancy doted on her grandchild and loved him more than anything else in the world. In fact, the only other man she loved as much was probably Jessie Giles.

What a wonderful guy Jessie was, how good to everyone. When he died, Nancy knew she would miss him. But who Giles was wasn’t important right then. Shanlian needed to get her back on track. He asked them when was the last time they saw their sister.

The two women looked at each other and Karen replied not for about a week. Susan, a divorcée with three kids, said that sounded about right. Shanlian asked if they knew who supplied her with coke.

“I think it’s a guy named Ben Drier,” Karen Clason replied.

“You know how to spell his name?” asked Shanlian, taking notes.

“No. But I think he’s about forty. That’s what Nancy said,” Clason continued.

Neither woman knew anything about Drier. Taking another tact, the detective wondered if anything had happened recently to upset Nancy. Turned out that Nancy was upset. Or actually, her roommate Carol was.

Carol’s VCR had been stolen. She thought Nancy had stolen it. That was interesting, but Shanlian was having a problem.

“There’s one thing I’m confused about,” Shanlian said. “Nancy was living here with your mother, but she had a roommate named Carol?”

“Oh, that,” Garrison answered. “Nancy really wasn’t living there, just staying there with Carol to help her get through her grief.”

“Grief?”

“Nancy was just helping Carol out with her house and kids and stuff. Carol’s husband Jessie died a few months ago and she really needed the help.”

“So she really lived here?”

Nancy and her mom had had an argument, but she still lived at home.

That was the second time the argument was mentioned. Shanlian had to wonder what kind of argument was so severe Nancy would have been forced to leave.

Could her mom have had an ax to grind? Phyllis Burke didn’t look like a murderer, but then again, most murderers don’t.

The sisters explained that while Nancy and their mom had argued they had pretty much patched things up. Nancy was just about to leave Carol’s and move back in.

“Okay, would one of you please come down to identify Nancy? Perhaps tomorrow?”

Clason volunteered. Shanlian gave her the morgue’s address. The cops left Phyllis Burke’s house at 9:45
P.M.
The detectives had one more stop before calling it a night.

Three

Back in Genesee County, the body of Nancy Billiter was still lying where it was first found.

It had lain on the cold, hard ground since it was dumped. Because rigor mortis was gone by the time the body was discovered, the cops knew she had been there since long before dawn. Now, finally, the investigators had finished their death work and the body was ready to be removed.

Sergeant Ives Potrafka had done as Shanlian requested. He had preserved the integrity of the crime scene, making sure it wasn’t contaminated.

At approximately 9:39
P.M.
, C&M Ambulance personnel carried a stretcher/gurney into the park and put it down next to the body. Gently they transferred it onto the stretcher, then lifted and carried it back out to the lot. When they hit the gravel, they let the legs of the gurney come down and they wheeled it over to their ambulance, where they picked it up and shoved it in.

Sergeant Potrafka followed the body to Hurley Medical Center. They arrived there at 9:55
P.M
.

Under the direction of Dr. Grant Williams, the medical examiner, the body was tagged and placed into the hospital’s morgue by registered nurse Roger Gilmore. The autopsy would take place tomorrow morning.

Satisfied that his charge was in safe hands, Potrafka was able to go home and get some sleep. It had been a very long day, he thought, as he drove by the park.

The cops were still there.

Deputy Zudel had been instructed to stand by at the crime scene until the Michigan State lab techs completed clearing their equipment. After that, it would be his job to remove the yellow crime scene tape.

And after that, it would be like nothing had happened.

As Edwards tooled the car through the dark, snow covered streets of West Bloomfield Township, Shanlian pulled the crime scene photograph out of his pocket and examined it again.

Nothing had changed.

Nancy Billiter was still dead. Her face was beaten in, dried blood in a gash across her nose; the left side of her head and temple showed a discolored shade of red; she wore the burgundy T-shirt with the sporty
SOUTH BOULEVARD STATION
logo across the upper left breast.

“We’re almost there,” said Edwards.

Shanlian stuffed the picture back in his pocket.

“West Bloomfield Township police headquarters are in there,” said Edwards, pointing out a sprawling, low-lying gray building.

They passed the police station and not more than ten seconds later, he pulled over to the curb on the right. Shanlian looked out at a small suburban house recessed from the curb about two hundred feet back, surrounded by oak trees. The mailbox had the address on it and the name
GILES.

According to the people they’d interviewed so far, Carol Giles was Nancy’s temporary roommate. Or was it the other way around? Whatever. Maybe Giles knew something that could help them track down Billiter’s killer.