Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder (9 page)

Only doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers or drug dealers raking it in could afford West Bloomfield. When the cops left work, they drove home to Novi or South Lyon, less affluent suburbs with more crime, smaller lawns and lower property values. Jessie, meanwhile, stayed in the township and enjoyed his new life.

Inside his new house—Jessie was actually renting because it’s difficult for a drug dealer, with undeclared income, to get a mortgage—he admired his surroundings. It was much nicer than Pontiac was. As for the cops down the block, Jessie had to smile.

For Carol, the move didn’t make any difference. Her discontent just rose in proportion to their affluence. She wanted out of the marriage, but she didn’t know where to go.

Where could she go if she left Jessie? If she left him, what would happen to the kids? He couldn’t take care of them, in the shape he was in. But Lord, she was strangling!

Carol had had enough.

What with Jessie and the responsibilities of taking care of the kids, Carol had no life. She needed to get out; she was desperate to get out. She felt like she’d murder somebody if she didn’t. So Carol got a job as an office assistant at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital, Jessie’s former employer. That was where she made the acquaintance of Timothy Orlando Collier, a member of the hospital maintenance staff and one of Jessie’s customers who loved crack.

Tim was not exactly short, but he wasn’t tall, either. What he was, at a little over five feet six inches tall, was incredibly well built and handsome, with the kind of smooth, café au lait skin that made Carol tingle all over her body.

After meeting Tim at the hospital, Carol would go over to his house to hang out all the time. For example, when she and Jessie got into it, she would go over to Tim’s house to mellow out. And they would sit around and talk.

Tim talked about his troubled life growing up in Sacramento, California. He alluded to a gang background and to the violent crimes he’d committed. It was a hard life he had been born into, which had forced him into things.

Because he and his mom didn’t get along, he escaped by getting high on drugs. Eventually he had come east. He had relatives in the Flint area, most notably his uncle Sammy Upchurch, whom he liked a lot.

Tim was everything Jessie wasn’t—young, vital, exciting. He was a real macho guy who didn’t take shit off anyone. Carol fell for him. Hard. She liked to push against his hard body. He pushed back and soon they were lovers. The best thing was, he didn’t tell her what to do all the time.

September 28, 1997

Carol had just come home from shopping when she found Jessie, unconscious, by the side of their bed. She picked up the phone and dialed. It was 2:00
P.M.

“He’s so cold,” Carol told the 911 operator. “I think he’s, you know, I think he’s already dead. He’s cold.”

“Well, just lay him on his back the best you can,” the operator repeated for the third or fourth time.

With the help of her landlord and his son, they were finally able to get Jessie, all 468 pounds of him, on his back. The operator told her to start CPR. Carol held his nose, opened his mouth, and almost threw up.

There was something really gross in his throat. She couldn’t be sure what it was, maybe some sort of puke. Ugh!

Carol heard sirens. Squealing brakes. Heavy feet pounding on pavement. The cop seemed to be by her side not more than a few seconds later. She stopped the CPR and told the operator that the police were there.

A moment later, the paramedics ran in, put their equipment down, tore Jessie’s pajama top open, and attached EKG leads. While checking the digital readout, a medic asked Carol the last time she saw him conscious.

Carol told them that the last time she’d seen Jessie alive was eleven o’clock. She had gone out shopping, and when she returned, she had found him unconscious and propped up on one elbow beside the bed.

She said that Jessie seemed like he was going to have a heart attack and he wanted her to leave the house. He wanted to be alone. The implication was he knew the end was near and wanted to die alone, with dignity.

“There’s no heartbeat,” the medic said finally, withdrawing the leads from Jessie’s bare chest. His skin was ice cold and rigor mortis had begun. The guy looked up at Carol.

“Looks like he’s been dead for a while,” he said sympathetically.

The medic asked Carol a few questions about Jessie’s overall health. She told him about the stroke, heart attack, and diabetes. The medic called North Oakland Medical Center and relayed that information to a doctor on duty, who declared Jessie officially dead.

One of the cops gathered up all of Jessie’s medications to list in his report; then he called the medical examiner, which was standard procedure in Michigan whenever a police officer arrived at the scene of a death. It didn’t mean an autopsy, of course. It was, obvious to everyone present that Jessie had died of natural causes.

Carol watched as the death professionals shared the information about Jessie’s health history and medications. An hour later, the man from the medical examiner’s arrived. He was the ME on duty. He did a cursory examination of Jessie’s body, still on the floor where he had fallen. He announced that, coupled with what they knew about his medical conditions, Jessie had died from a heart attack.

The state released the body. Carol had to call to have the body picked up. She looked through the phone book and found the name of a funeral home nearby. She called and they said they’d be right by to pick him up.

It was dark by the time the guys from the funeral home arrived. They were big, strong men and were able to pick Jessie up and transfer him to a rolling table, the kind with legs that collapsed as soon as you pushed it into an ambulance. Or a hearse.

Since the house was a ranch, they didn’t have to worry about steps. If they had, they didn’t know what they would have done. They wheeled Jessie out and down the driveway to their black van. They opened the door and lifted him up; the legs collapsed and they pushed him in. With a satisfying
snap
, they closed the door and got into the cab.

Carol pulled the drapes aside and watched from an inside window. The van drove down the street. After a few seconds, it was out of view. And just like that, Jessie Giles’s life ended. How was she going to break the news to their kids?

Later that night, the phone rang at Phyllis Burke’s house. Her forty-five-year-old daughter, Nancy Billiter, answered it.

“Nancy, its Carol.”

“What’s wrong? You sound—”

“Nancy, Jessie died.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry!”

“It was a heart attack.”

Jessie was Nancy’s cocaine dealer. That’s how the two women had met. Carol would drop in at South Boulevard Station on the way home from work for a drink. South Boulevard Station was a big restaurant with a friendly bar in Auburn Hills, another Detroit suburb. Nancy worked there as a waitress.

The two women just seemed to hit it off. They had a common interest in mystery novels and traded paperbacks frequently. Despite their age difference, they exchanged life stories, the way drinking buddies do at bars, but they took it a step further and began socializing.

Nancy was living at her mom’s house with her eight-year-old grandson, Garret; she had custody of the boy and was hoping to get together enough money to get their own place. Carol would come over to visit with L’il Man and Jesseca and they would play with Garret.

Nancy noticed that Jessie Jr. was having trouble learning how to ride a bike, so she spent hours with the six-year-old, helping him ride a two-wheeler, guiding him up and down the sidewalk in front of her mom’s house. Nancy was such a good person.

When Carol told her that the big man had died, she couldn’t get there fast enough. She had thought the world of Jessie. Rushing up the steps of Carol’s house, she couldn’t help but remember how she had helped Jessie and Carol move in barely three months before, and now tragedy had struck.

Carol was bereft. She just didn’t know how she could take care of the house and the kids and have a job, all at the same time.

“I’m living with my mom right now,” said Nancy. “But maybe I could move in temporarily and help you out. Would you like that?”

Carol’s face lit up.

“Oh yes!”

And so, temporarily, Nancy Billiter, a woman who would do anything for a friend, moved in with Carol to help her through her time of grief. One other person moved in, too: Carol’s boyfriend, Tim Collier. Carol was the type of woman who needed a man to take care of her. And that’s what, she hoped, Tim would do. But Tim had little time for love, at least immediately.

Tim had long planned a California vacation, and shortly after he moved in, he left for the coast. But while he was gone, he called Carol every night. He missed her terribly, and after a week, he cut his vacation short and returned home to live with Carol, her children and Nancy.

Eight

“I think she likes you. I think she, you know, likes you. Romantically.”

“No, she doesn’t.”

“Yes, she does. You can see it in the way she looks at you sometimes. That’s it, that’s why you’re on her side.”

“I’m not—”

“You did it together, right?”

Where did Tim get such a crazy idea?

Carol denied she and Nancy were lovers. But Tim was convinced that when he wasn’t around, she and Nancy were making love to each other. Carol thought that was crazy.

But Tim had another agenda.

He thought they should do a threesome. He prodded Carol to do it and, finally, she agreed.

“Look, if that’ll prove to you that we’re straight, okay, I will do it,” Carol said.

A few days later, they asked Nancy if she’d be interested in swinging. Nancy wasn’t interested. On three different occasions when Tim was high, he tried talking Nancy into swinging with them but to no avail.

Tim was so insistent that Carol finally talked it over with Nancy. Alone. They decided to appease Tim by pretending to go along with his idea. The two women joked about it, calling it their “Chinese scheme.”

What they would do is get naked, all three together, and then the women would chicken out. That way, he would get his fantasy, sort of, and he would leave them alone. One night, with the kids sleeping, they decided to try it.

When Nancy and Carol pulled back according to their plan, Tim got really upset and angry. They all started screaming at each other. After Nancy went down to the basement, Carol had to calm him down.

“We don’t love each other,” Carol insisted.

“Somebody else mentioned that they thought Nancy liked you. Like she was your regular girlfriend,” Tim screamed.

“Tim, stop! It’s just not true. The closest we got to hugging and kissing each other was, you know, her consoling me at Jessie’s funeral. Tim, I love
you
.”

“And I love
you
.”

But he still thought they were having an affair.

They were driving in the car shortly after that when Carol told Tim that Nancy had taken some of her drugs, the stuff usually sold to Jessie’s clients, and sold it herself without Carol knowing about it. Carol had discovered the drugs missing and knew to whom the stuff had been sold.

Carol couldn’t believe that she did it. She had not said anything to Nancy yet.

“You know, when they steal something small, they are going to steal something big.”

“But, Tim, it was just a fifty-dollar rock [of crack]. I don’t care. If she had taken the whole thing, yeah, I would be upset, but at the same time, I don’t care. I mean, I don’t do drugs. It’s just, you know, the extra money. I don’t care.”

Tim cared enough to confront Nancy. She denied taking anything. And when he then confronted Carol and asked her if she was upset that Nancy stole from her, she answered meekly, “Yeah, a little.”

It wasn’t a strong enough rebuke. Here he was ready to beat the shit out of Nancy for what she’d done and Carol wasn’t backing him up. That made him even more furious. Reading his expression, Carol knew what she had done.

The last thing Tim could tolerate was being made to look stupid in front of others; it caused disrespect. This was the second time, the first being when Tim wanted to have sex with the both of them and Carol backed up Nancy about not doing it.

Carol still figured everything would be cool. Tim had moved in; Nancy was helping out. So they had a few problems together, so what? They’d work it out, and besides, her birthday was coming up.

Carol and Tim started talking about celebrating it with a trip to California. Maybe they could find a house or an apartment in Sacramento and move out there. That didn’t sound too bad to Carol. It might be real cool.

Catch some rays, go to some of Tim’s old haunts in Sacramento, and look for a place at the same time. A little business, a little pleasure, and maybe a new life at the end of the rainbow.

With the decision made to vacation in California, all that was left was to pack and make sure the kids had child-care. But Carol had one family obligation to take care of before they traveled west.

Carol had promised to visit her dad in Port Huron for Halloween. Jesseca and Jesse wanted to trick-or-treat with their cousin, Lilly, her brother Sam’s daughter. Along with her father, they would all be there.

Carol, Tim, Jesseca and L’il Man all piled in the Caddy and tooled on over there. It wasn’t too far, maybe thirty miles as the crow flies, but for Carol, it was an extremely emotional trip.

They went to her dad’s house in Port Huron. Carol was glad Tim came along, because she was still scared of her father and what she claimed he had done to her. Even today, she wouldn’t go to her dad’s house unless there was someone else there. Even now, he still touched her and stuff … but the kids wanted to trick-or-treat with her brother’s daughter.

Tim knew all about the way Carol had been abused. She’d told him awhile back, which was why he didn’t say two words to her dad the whole time they were there. And there they were—the incestuous dad, or so Carol said, Dad’s girlfriend, Carol’s two kids, her brother, his child, and his girlfriend and Carol’s boyfriend. They really were one big, happy, dysfunctional family.