If You Only Knew (16 page)

CHAPTER 38

THE NUMBER GLUED ON
the brick portico had a contemporary slant to its decor: 2090. A white plastic lawn chair sat in the corner of the entryway, just underneath that street number and door, which went into Don Rogers's home. The blinds covering the side window attached to the door were closed, but it appeared someone was home. There was movement inside the house, Detective Don Zimmerman and a colleague noticed as they approached.

It was close to four o'clock in the afternoon on January 5, 2001. The holidays had come and gone. The TPD had left Vonlee and her aunt alone for a while, but now it was time to pick up the pace of the investigation again. Now that the TPD had Vonlee on tape admitting that she had watched as Billie Jean murdered her husband with a pillow—and might have even helped Billie Jean with the crime herself—but detectives figured why not confront Billie Jean with some of what they knew. See what she had to say.

Zimmerman knocked.

No answer.

So he knocked again.

A dog barked on the opposite side of the street.

The other detective with Zimmerman said, “They have a phone, don't they?”

“I can bang on the door again.”

As they were figuring out their next move, somebody opened the door.

“Hi, Mrs. Rogers,” Zimmerman said, extending a hand. He explained who he was before introducing his colleague.

The house alarm was going off in the background. It was loud and obnoxious.

“You remember me?” Zimmerman asked. “I talked to you several weeks ago when your husband died.”

The other cop asked, “Can you make that alarm go off? You want to take care of that.”

Billie Jean let them in as she walked away to shut off the alarm.

“Hi, Ms. Rogers,” Zimmerman said when they got settled and the noise of the alarm diminished. “We need to talk to you.”

After a few moments of small talk, taking over lead in the conversation, Zimmerman asked, “Do you know what happened?”

“Well,” Billie Jean said, an obvious sharpness in her tone, “he died.”

“We need to ask you about the missing stuff.”

“The what?” She was confused about this statement. What was missing? There hadn't been anything stolen from the house—what were they talking about?

After realizing he'd made a mistake, Zimmerman explained: “You may probably know that [Vonlee] told somebody about what happened that night, okay?”

The other cop chimed in: “Don's been murdered.”

“And there is a break in the case,” said Zimmerman as the Rogers widow looked totally blindsided by the statement. “You remember Danny?”

“Who?” she asked.

They told her.

“Yeah,” she said, looking at them.

Of course, she knew Danny: Vonlee's boyfriend.

“[Vonlee] told Danny what happened here that night. . . .”

“[Vonlee] . . . might say
anything,
” she said with a bit of how-dare-she in her phlegmy, smoker's voice. “I don't know what you heard.”

“We're here to get to the truth.”

“Okay,” she acknowledged, as though she didn't have a problem talking to two cops without her lawyer present, both of them coming across as pushy and accusatory.

For cops looking to figure out who was the driving force behind a murder such as the case in front of the TPD (after all, they understood that Vonlee could have lied to Danny and planned and carried out the murder entirely by herself), there were two ways to approach an interview like this: One, lay everything down the way it happened and see if the subject drops her shoulders, takes a deep breath and, caving into her own guilt, admits everything. Or the second way, play one perp against the other and lie about certain details in order to allow the truth to rise to the surface by itself. With a subject like Billie Jean Rogers, considering her history of gambling (i.e., taking chances), it might be better to go with the latter.

One of the detectives said the TPD wanted to give her “the opportunity to tell us the truth about what happened,” adding grimly, “[Vonlee] painted a pretty gruesome picture of you to us, and she has indicated that this entire thing that happened was all your doing, and that she's really a minor part of that—and she's putting basically
everything
off on you, okay?”

Billie Jean was obviously surprised by this breach of trust. One could almost hear her thinking:
How dare that bitch
.
All I did for her!

The second cop added, “Um, we looked at her . . . criminal history—or his?—or
her
criminal history, whatever. What do you refer to her as? Your niece or your nephew?”

Billie Jean started to say something, but they cut her off.

“But we, we looked at . . . her criminal records. She's got a criminal record.”

“She
does
?” the aunt asked, seemingly surprised.

“Yeah. And we've looked at yours and there is none. So Vonlee . . . we've come to think that Vonlee might've helped put you up to this, or at least she did it and you helped do it. We know that you were there and we have plenty of evidence . . . to say what's going on, and Vonlee has told us things . . . but we know [she] told somebody everything that happened that night. They told us.”

Don Zimmerman mentioned how they had it on good information that Vonlee had since moved to Chicago, and Billie Jean confirmed Vonlee had indeed left the state. It might have appeared, or these cops certainly made it seem, as if Vonlee had taken off in haste and had run. But she had told everyone where she was going and where she was living. It was no secret.

“You know, now maybe you know what happened that night, and we're here to find out the truth,” Zimmerman added.

They walked from the living room into the kitchen for a moment as she poured herself something to drink. “I know nothing happened that I
know
of,” she explained, before blurting out, for no reason, what seemed to be an odd statement: “I did not asphyxiate my husband. I wouldn't. . . .”

“Well, you know, why would [Vonlee] say that you did?”

Billie Jean said she had no idea why Vonlee would accuse her of such a heinous crime. She had no explanation for that. Did she need one?

“She said that she
assisted
you in that endeavor . . . and that you paid her money.”

“No. No,” Billie Jean insisted.

“Did you pay her any money?”

“I gave her some money to get a, uh, for a sex-change job.”

“Yeah, you bought her a car, too.”

“I wrote the check for the cash,” the aunt explained. She was having trouble with the idea that any of this was a crime. Could she not give her niece money—especially after suddenly coming into a fortune because of a death?

They talked about money and how the widow had been spending frivolously. Then Zimmerman gave her a chance to ease her way out of what they were projecting to be seriously suspicious behavior on her part lately.

“Well, what we're trying to get at is the truth here. If you only had a little part to do with this, we want to know that—and you can tell us what part Vonlee had in it.”

“I had
nothing
to do with it,” Billie Jean said right away, firmly. She walked back into the living room and sat down. She was feeling cornered and pressured. These cops were being overbearing bullies, following her around her own house, peppering her with questions that seemed to point a finger, all because her niece had said a few things. She didn't understand it. Why were they doing this? They kept going back to Vonlee and how she had claimed her aunt paid her for her help. Didn't matter what Billie Jean was saying now, Vonlee was apparently tossing her aunt to the wolves.

“We don't know the exact story what happened,” one of them said, “but she is telling us one and it makes you look pretty bad, okay?”

Billie Jean explained that Vonlee, throughout her life, had always told lots of tall tales. She was known for this in the family. What she was saying now meant nothing to Billie Jean, she said.

Zimmerman claimed they had spoken to Vonlee and that she was willing to “take a polygraph to say, you know, what she said is the truth. So it's probably going to happen.”

The aunt didn't seem too concerned about this: “Whatever,” she said.

They asked her what time she got home that night.

She wouldn't answer. She'd already told them, she explained.

It seemed they had reached an impasse when Zimmerman suggested, “Now, you're going to have to . . . tell us what actually happened, or we're going to have to go with
her
story.”

Billie Jean took a sip from her cup and stared at them.

Checkmate.

CHAPTER 39

VONLEE TITLOW WAS AT
a crossroads in her life once again. This time, she sat back and licked her wounds from that last relationship with Jay. She'd put two years into it. The only thing Vonlee could think of doing next was perhaps to leave Denver. Get the hell out of town and find her roots back home in Tennessee.

So she packed her car and left. Unlike many people, if Vonlee understood one thing about life, it was that you could always start over. There would always be another sunrise. Maryville was home. Family would always be there for her.

Along the way, Vonlee stopped and called Mandy, just to let her know that she'd thrown in the towel and had taken off.

“Where you at?” Mandy asked.

“I don't know . . . halfway between Denver and home, I guess.”

“What are you
doing,
Vonlee?”

She started to cry. “I don't know. I am going a little crazy.”

“Well, you turn your ass around and you come back here!” Mandy insisted.

What made this so difficult for her was the belief that she “was truly,
truly
in love with this guy. Everything I thought I wanted in a person, he had,” Vonlee said. The demise of the relationship, however, made her feel like she “wasn't good enough. And I knew that after I had the operation, the next thing for him was going to be ‘We cannot have kids,'” Vonlee wisely stated.

As she saw it, with Jay, maybe with any heterosexual guy, there was always going to be that one thing she couldn't give him: never being a complete woman.

“[Jay] was the kind of person that wanted kids, and the type of person that wanted kids that looked like and sounded like him. It wasn't ever going to be enough for him and I could see it.”

The decision to transform into a female—that final operation—was a process that she needed to take her time at, Vonlee explained. If a guy did it when he was eighteen or twenty, or even midtwenties, it was far too early, Vonlee maintained, speaking for herself. However, being that young, he might not have known any different.

“You need to live your life as you see it . . . ,” she elaborated. “I needed to be sure. My mother said to me, ‘Wait until you're at least twenty-five.' I promised I would.”

Then there was the possibility of never experiencing an orgasm.

“Look, I've heard stories of girls having no trouble after the operation having a ‘female' orgasm. And I've been told by others that they could stab their new ‘vagina' with a fork and not feel a thing. So it was always a big decision for me, because I valued and liked sex so much.”

Vonlee drove back to Denver after talking with Mandy.

“And I began to date guys that actually enjoyed being with a ‘she-male.'”

Once again, Vonlee rolled with the changes of her life and thought she could find happiness in something new.

The escort service was next. Vonlee opened it in Denver. Yet, after going home for a visit, she decided she wanted to leave Denver and move to Chicago. It was during that brief visit back home when Vonlee ran into Billie Jean and, after not seeing each other for almost a decade, the two sparked up a relationship. Vonlee mentioned to her aunt how she was going to be moving to Chicago in the near future and that she would be close to Michigan, where the Rogers couple was living.

“Y'all better come and see me,” Billie Jean suggested.

“Of course, I will, Aunt Billie.”

Vonlee was taken by Billie Jean during the visit. Her aunt had made Vonlee feel as though she could do anything in life she wanted. She gave Vonlee hope. She planted within Vonlee the idea that anything she wanted was within her own potential, her own grasp. She taught Vonlee to go for it, if she truly wanted it.

“My aunt was classy, beautiful, one of the most gorgeous women I have ever seen. But that entire time, while in Denver and then after I left, I had zero contact with her until I went back home for that visit. Growing up, though, I always thought of Aunt Billie as a movie star—she was so glamorous and just, well, she had that star quality about her. I wanted to be like her. I loved her.”

Billie Jean and Vonlee's mother, Georgia, grew up in a family of eight kids. Billie Jean stood out from the pack—always. She “had to have the best of things,” Vonlee shared. “She was also different, someone that was very smart. She had this aura about her that once you were around her, you just wanted to
be
around her. She was funny and she was talented, and I never had anything bad to say about her.”

Contrarily, certain family members said Billie Jean had this “evilness” about her that only those close enough could see and actually feel. One family member claimed later that Billie Jean had asked him to kill Don once and she even drew a map of the house. The family member went to police with the map and told them the story. According to Vonlee, “Not long after that, he was beaten to death by a couple of men with chains . . . and I almost believe she had something to do with it.”

* * *

After starting out with an escort service in Denver, Vonlee decided it was time to move to Chicago. She had met a new guy and he allowed her to stay at one of his town houses in downtown Chicago. Barton (pseudonym) wouldn't be living there (he had his own), but he wanted her around. He had even once told Vonlee that he'd pay all her bills and give her a stipend if she was there for him. By now, though, Vonlee was making so much money with the escort service, she didn't need anybody else.

There were no secrets between the two of them. Barton knew Vonlee was a transsexual and he didn't have a problem with it. It was around this time that Vonlee began to meet a lot of men that preferred transsexuals, many of them straight men.

“You have to understand,” Vonlee explained, “these weren't ‘gay' relationships. When we were together, I was the woman [and] he was the guy. . . . You know, it was there—I don't know how to say it. Some guys, you have to recognize, are into it. They find the whole penis thing as being part of the package extremely attractive. Those ‘chicks with dicks' videos are the most popular in the porn shops. There's an entire market out there for it.”

Why not capitalize on that market, then?

“After moving to Chicago, I still had three escort services I was running—transsexuals, gay, straight. The transsexual phone lines rang off the hook.”

She had five transsexuals and she would turn dates herself if needed.

Vonlee's Telegrams, as she called it, began in Denver. It was an escort service, but Vonlee set it up with a tax number and she paid herself a salary. She hired an attorney to tell her what she could and couldn't do. All of her “girls” had to sign waivers that said they would not solicit customers for sex.

But come on now . . . business is business.

“I knew it was going on,” Vonlee admitted later. “But I couldn't . . . Well, I was trying to be as legal with it as possible. Look, it was about making money.”

When Vonlee took calls herself, there were only certain things she would do.

“Limits,” she explained. “I never once had anal sex or kissed one of these guys—I just wouldn't do it. Honestly, though, most of them just wanted to ‘do oral' . . . on me. They had always fantasized about it and it was something they always wanted to do. These guys weren't attracted to men. They were straight. Many of them were married. They would all say the same thing. ‘I'm not attracted to men, but I am
very
attracted to transsexuals. I love the way you look. I always wanted to give one oral sex.' It was always the same story. They claimed they had never done it before. They were always scared and a nervous wreck. It would last about fifteen, twenty minutes and they'd pay five hundred dollars.”

Moving to Chicago for Vonlee was her way of trying to get away from the escort business, though she kept doing it, running businesses in both cities at the same time. The money was too good. And by now, she was drinking a lot more than she ever had and dabbling in hard-core drugs.

And so, with her new lifestyle caving in around her, the idea that one man wanted to “keep her,” Vonlee decided finally to bail on it all and go back home, get that job at the Waffle House, and then try to clean up her act. She thought she could leave it all behind and bury it for good.

But then Billie Jean walked into the Waffle House and laughed at her niece, ultimately offering her a life in Troy, Michigan, with her and Don—a life that Vonlee Titlow, apparently, could not turn down.