If You Only Knew (31 page)

PART 4

David Carr,
The Night of the Gun

CHAPTER 75

ON DECEMBER 19, 2001,
Vonlee's new lawyer, Frederick Toca, along with Vonlee by his side, appeared before Judge Wendy Potts and the APA to set a date for Vonlee's trial. Toca needed to ask for more time. He said he had not yet had a chance to order the transcripts from Billie Jean's trial and with the New Year approaching, the holiday season slowing things down, he wanted additional time to study all of the documents and consult with his client.

Judge Potts was not going to stand for any delays. Her court had always been run with an iron fist as it pertained to schedules. She said all of the witnesses had just testified in Billie Jean's case and their testimony was “fresh in their minds” and she did not want to disrupt that momentum.

It was a valid point.

From the state's point of view, Vonlee's trial was going to be a facsimile of Billie Jean's in the manner of witnesses and how they would appear—the most important among them being Danny Chahine.

After they hashed it out, Judge Potts said March 4, 2002.

No delays!

Gavel.

CHAPTER 76

BY FEBRUARY 6, 2002
, fewer than thirty days before the scheduled start of Vonlee's trial, Frederick Toca filed a motion that would once again change the course of his client's life.

Fred Toca was now withdrawing from the case—a case that he had claimed to his client he could win for her.

Citing a “breakdown of communication” between him and Vonlee, and “also some other issues,” Toca said he'd like the court to allow him to step aside.

Potts was a bit perturbed by this eleventh-hour revelation.

As he explained further, Toca said he was out of funds. They needed six thousand dollars to buy the Billie Jean Rogers trial transcripts and “certain financial arrangements have been made. Unfortunately, her family indicates that they may not be able to come through. . . .”

Vonlee looked angry. She stared at him.

“And, of course, that gives us four days until trial, and I think Ms. Titlow will tell you, quite frankly, that you know certain representations have been made by other family members of hers, that this was taken care of. It has
not
been taken care of.”

Was Toca now saying that Vonlee's family had been partly responsible for paying him to finance her defense? Was the guy blaming Vonlee's family for the position he now found himself in?

“Are you going to come through and have you retained Mr. Toca?” Judge Potts asked Vonlee, who was standing before the court. “Have you paid any money to Mr. Toca?”

“Just some jewelry, that's all,” Vonlee said.

“No money?” Potts asked, seemingly confused that zero dollars had exchanged hands.

“There was an agreement on, supposedly, on a
book
deal,” Vonlee said before looking over at Toca.

“But that's—” Toca began to say before Vonlee cut him off.

“That's how I retained his service,” Vonlee said.

“On a
what
?” Potts asked. She sounded perplexed by this.

“Your Honor, there was initially, per the first attorney in this case,” Toca said—a statement no one else connected to the case would later agree with—“a book deal on this table that fell through as well.”

“Oh!”

“But, Your Honor,” Toca continued, “this has
nothing
to do with my retention. I mean, this has to do with trying to retain experts. Trying to get transcripts, et cetera, et cetera.”

Toca claimed that the “book deal” portion of his defense, which was paid by Vonlee in her signing over rights to her story, only covered Toca's time and efforts, not his expenses. That money was supposed to, he said, come from Vonlee's family.

“Who is going to represent you in this case?” Potts asked Vonlee.

“I don't have anyone if he don't,” Vonlee said.

“Okay. You would need a court-appointed attorney?”

“Yes,” Vonlee answered.

Neither Toca nor his co-counsel was on the state's official court-appointed attorney list. So the state could not allow them to continue and pay them those monies they needed for expenses, if this was even an option Vonlee desired.

Potts asked Vonlee again if she wished to retain Toca or she wanted a court-appointed lawyer.

Vonlee said, “I just want it over with. Whatever is best.”

Potts said she would get to work right away finding Vonlee a competent, court-appointed attorney that might be able to keep the trial on schedule.

CHAPTER 77

HE DIDN'T KNOW IT
on that cold day in February 2002, as Judge Potts went to work locating an attorney to fill Toca's shoes, but forty-five-year-old—“feeling thirty-two”—William Cataldo was about to become involved in the legal mess that had become Vonlee Titlow's case. There had been so much misperception over what had happened between Toca and Vonlee, so much animosity between the two—with Vonlee telling people she was going to see Toca in civil court one day to prove he had destroyed any chance she had left to defend herself properly—the case was a complicated challenge for any defense attorney.

Cataldo, who was often called Bill, was a wispy, wiry man, with long, stringy, concrete gray hair, flowing inconspicuously around a shiny bald spot. He kept a salt-and-pepper mustache, wore small and round Ben Franklin glasses, and generally donned tailored suits. Cataldo had been a radio producer on his way toward entering the world of law. He'd overseen countless shows on ABC Radio in Detroit, finally producing a law series that sparked an interest in the profession. By 1984, Cataldo had given up on radio as his sole career and had graduated law school. His passion became trial work.

“Law was like my fourth career,” Cataldo told this author. “I graduated and still didn't practice law for years while I continued to produce the radio program.”

Oakland County did not have a public defender's office, same as many counties across the United States—a particular office, per se, where all of the cases in which defendants could not afford legal counsel were referred. Oakland had a court-appointed public defender list of lawyers it went to when in need of pro bono counsel. By the time Cataldo found his way into practicing law full-time, he had made friends with judges, lawyers and others involved in the business of criminal law. He knew the landscape and layout of a courtroom fairly well, and had become familiar with all the local players.

“Besides one house closing and two divorces, I have never touched civil law—all the cases I've done since 1984 have been criminal,” Cataldo explained.

Criminal law fit Cataldo's character: fast-paced, thrill-driven, drama-based and edgy. He liked to be around the action. He took careful preparation to avoid the nonsense and bullshit that many lawyers participated in.

Judge Potts thought of Cataldo immediately when Vonlee was in need of an attorney after what had happened between her and Toca. Cataldo was on Potts's list of lawyers she was familiar with and liked to see practicing in her courtroom.

“I had done several high-profile cases in front of her, so she was comfortable with my skill set,” he said.

One of the main factors for Potts, as the judge in this case, according to Cataldo, was she did not want to “adjourn the trial date.” Potts needed the trial to proceed, even with this legal hiccup. And, lo and behold, the trial was set to begin when she had scheduled it in March. She believed Bill Cataldo could fill those vacant shoes and make it happen. What's more, she knew that handing Cataldo over to Vonlee, Vonlee was getting the best representation she could for the money she was willing to spend.

“We were six weeks out from the time of my appointment and I assured her that I could turn aside my other cases and focus on this.”

A travesty,
Cataldo thought as he sat down to look through the documents, study the trial transcripts from Billie Jean's case (for which the state could now provide at its own cost), shaking his head in disgust, learning about what had happened between Vonlee and Toca. As he flipped through pages, looking at it all in its entirety, he also considered that Vonlee's case at trial was unwinnable. She had already admitted her involvement in Don's murder in a court of law and could be heard on tape confessing, essentially, to the crime. It didn't matter what she said, the lawyer knew. Didn't matter that her role was minimized and she might have not even participated in the actual murder. Didn't matter what kind of witness Danny Chahine made, or what history with the law he had. All jurors would hear, Cataldo was entirely confident, was Vonlee describing how she and her aunt carried out this crime.

Vonlee had seven to fifteen years on the table and was now staring down the barrel of what could be anywhere between twenty years to life.

Incredible,
Cataldo told himself. He wondered how someone could be so incompetent to have screwed that deal up for her. The attorney thought it was ignorance that had led to Vonlee's decision to remove Richard Lustig, and the deal he had brokered, and go with Toca.

What bowled Bill over the most was that his colleague and friend, a man he knew very well, Richard Lustig, Vonlee's initial attorney, was able to go into the PO and negotiate that deal of seven to fifteen during a time when the PO's administration had what Cataldo said was a “no plea” policy in place. That feat alone was nothing short of a legal miracle. Lustig had performed magic in that regard. The idea that a plea deal had been set between them, considering the evidence in Vonlee's case the state had against her, proved Richard Lustig had done the best work of his career, as far as Cataldo was concerned.

“Richard was able to have a deal struck,” Cataldo explained, “that included a
first-degree
murder charge—think about that!—pled down to a much lesser offense, with a cap of
fifteen
years, reducing the charge to, basically, manslaughter.”

Anyone practicing in Oakland County, he went on to note, “knew that those deals don't ever come along.”

It revolved around Vonlee's testimony against Billie Jean. The PO knew they could never get a conviction without Vonlee, and the verdict in Billie Jean's case had proven that.

“Vonlee wasn't even in the fucking room at the time of this murder,” Cataldo said. “They realized that.”

But that was months ago. Now Vonlee, because of a decision she and Toca had made, was facing murder one. There was no chance of any deal. Billie Jean's case was over. There was no bait to make the switch. No longer any carrot on the end of the stick to dangle in the PO's face. And the PO, coming from a loss, now wanted blood.

Vonlee was screwed.

“I made that request, of course, as a formality,” Cataldo said of a possible plea bargain, “but I was laughed at, just as I am laughing now thinking about it.”

As he sat and looked over everything, trying to find a strategy to defend Vonlee, what amazed Cataldo was that he couldn't understand why the PO had tried Billie Jean's case first.

“They should have tried Vonlee before Billie Rogers, made a deal with her, and then had her testify
against
Billie.”

Cataldo was certain they would have obtained a conviction if they did that.

One major factor for Cataldo was the idea that the Detroit metro area has always been “starved for glitterati,” and with Dr. Michael Baden riding the wave of his HBO series and the notoriety of the OJ Simpson case at the time, there was not a chance of winning against Billie Jean and that spectacle her defense put on. In Bill Cataldo's opinion, the PO knew it, going in.

“You bring Baden in and you put him opposite Dr. Dragovic, who can be exaggeratedly arrogant, an attitude not consistent with establishing an effective relationship with a jury and inconsistent with the local social structure out here . . . and Baden is a star. Remember, they had
no
evidence, and Dragovic was now coming in and saying it was a homicide—all with a little scratch on Mr. Rogers's nose and a
theory
?”

The PO's failure, Cataldo observed, was in the notion that they likely knew how the crime happened, how Billie Jean had allegedly killed her husband, based on what Vonlee had said and that she passed a polygraph, backing up her story, but they had no evidence to support their theories. And so going into the ring with that, “this is what happens,” Cataldo added. “Baden comes in and says this guy was so drunk, with heart disease and lung disease and liver issues, yada, yada, yada, this
very well
could have been natural causes.”

Slam dunk.

When he looked at Vonlee's role, however, Cataldo saw a few things he could not get around: these were fatal flaws—no matter what he did, or what expert he brought in, or how he portrayed Vonlee.

“All I could do,” Cataldo explained, “was ask for a reduction when the time came. There's not going to be a
not
guilty. Won't happen. The biggest thing here was that audiotape.”

There was just no way he could quash the significance of the admission on that tape Danny Chahine had made. It was going to ring inside the courtroom. It would be all the jury needed to hear. Moreover, he could not talk about Billie Jean's verdict or what had happened with Vonlee and her botched plea deal. None of it would be allowed in court.

“She explains it all on that tape,” Cataldo commented. “Complete confession, premeditation,
first
-degree murder!”

This was impossible to ignore as a defense attorney.

Another major obstacle he faced, which he knew from experience, was that a defense attorney cannot mess with the jury. You cannot try to confuse or misdirect them. You cannot lie to them. You cannot make them feel stupid. You cannot try to say,
“Hey, this tape here . . . it's not what you think it is.... It means nothing.”
That strategy would backfire.

“Here, going in, my only chance was, I needed to make the jury feel that, okay, Vonlee participated, but at
what
level? They needed to ask themselves that question. . . .”

If Bill Cataldo could get the jury to the point where they were asking that question during deliberations, he had a shot at a lesser charge, less time in prison for his client—that reduction he spoke of. Maybe even a manslaughter conviction.

On a personal level, Cataldo viewed Vonlee as someone he liked and someone he did not think was a vicious killer or dangerous in any way. However, she was a narcissist, in his view, which became another complication he needed to put a shine on for the jury. She couldn't present herself in court as the selfish-all-her-life, not-ever-wanting-to-work, looking-for-a-sugar-daddy, flashy-paid-escort transsexual she was—this would weigh heavily on their verdict. One juror gets it in his or her mind that Vonlee is a sexual deviant or a money-hungry transsexual looking to fund her operation through the murder of her long-lost aunt's wealthy husband—as the newspaper headline writers had tagged her—and it was over.

Cataldo also believed Vonlee had “turned a blind eye to the obvious.” Sure, she could have been wasted; she could have not known entirely what was going on inside that kitchen on that night because she had drunk too much. However, as Cataldo saw the truth through the documents and evidence, “She had
chosen
not to participate.”

The point being, she had a choice. And if she had a choice not to, then she probably knew what was going on at some point and had a choice to turn her aunt in or stop the crime.

“She's never worked, and she's always looking for the glitter—always looking for the easy way.”

These were all facts, whether Vonlee agreed or not, the jury might get into its collective mind-set. And once lodged there, it would be impossible for Cataldo to extract.

As a situation, Cataldo concluded, when Toca walked into her life and, combined with Vonlee's inherent narcissism, told her,
“You didn't do it,”
it was something, the lawyer contended, Vonlee
wanted
to hear.

“It's not that she's incapable of thinking logically, okay,” Cataldo explained about that moment when Vonlee and Toca decided to withdraw the plea. “But that she is
not
going to think logically if there is an easy way out of it all. So, when he comes in and promises two or three years, of course, she's going to jump at it. Why? Because. It's. What. She. Wants. To. Hear.
Period.
Therefore, Vonlee was the perfect foil for what Toca was attempting to do.

“Did Vonlee know something was going on in that kitchen and it was wrong?” Cataldo asked rhetorically.

“Probably,” he said, answering his own question.

“Was she a little bit wasted from all the booze?”

“Probably.”

The reality of Vonlee Titlow, though, was that she never “looked that far into anything,” he explained in his perfectly eloquent way of analyzing his client. “She knew it was wrong, yes, but let's look at this: her whole life has been ‘Who gives a shit! I'm going to do it because it feels good. . . .'”

Vonlee's failure on that night was in not processing the information and her reality properly in those moments with Billie Jean in that kitchen. Either impaired by alcohol, ignorance or both, she wasn't able to judge for herself what exactly was happening before her. If she had just stopped to think about it, Vonlee was smart enough to know that her aunt was drawing her into a web that included the two of them allegedly getting rid of Don and sharing in the responsibility equally. But she never, as Cataldo determined, thought that far in advance about what was going on at any time in her life.

So how could Bill Cataldo possibly work some magic and get Vonlee off on a crime she admitted committing?