If You Only Knew (35 page)

CHAPTER 86

AFTER THE LAWYERS FINISHED
haggling over an issue concerning sentencing guidelines, on that crisp Michigan day of final judgment, April 17, 2002, Honorable Wendy Potts indicated she was ready to proceed.

The APA offered Fiona Baldwin (pseudonym), Don's other daughter, on behalf of the family to stand up and say a few things for the victim. After all, despite his character defects, his supposed bad habits and the gulf between Billie Jean and her husband, Donald Rogers was a victim of murder. He deserved to be heard. In all of the sensationalistic grandeur associated with Vonlee's trial, perhaps like most murder victims, Don had been cast aside like just one more sidebar conversation. It was his time now to be heard through someone who loved him.

Fiona walked up and stood before Judge Potts, Vonlee to her right. She said her name, adding, “Don was my dad.”

To most, Don was a business owner, maybe even a drunk, a man who kept to himself and had issues with his wife, seemingly since the day they had met and over the course of their two marriages. But here Fiona had put into perspective with one sentence what mattered.

Fiona spoke of returning from a vacation back in August 2000. She and her family had gone to an amusement park, with “roller coasters and fright rides.” Unknowingly, she walked through the door to face what was going to be a real-life “thrill ride” that would overtake every waking moment afterward and not ever let up.

It was the voice of her sister on her answering machine that Fiona would never forget, a message that would “change” life “for all of us,” she said, her voice cracking as she spoke.

“Dad died . . . ,” that message began.

The remainder was a blur of words. What else was there to say?

Dad was gone.

As she spoke to the judge, Fiona Baldwin's comments were blunt and brutally honest: “The day before the funeral, the story changed about where Nicole, the person who stands before the court today, and Billie (now her known accomplice) were when my dad died.” Fiona said she “kept asking” herself the same question: “How can anyone not remember where he or she [was] at the time of a loved one's death?”

She was referring to that story Billie Jean had told at the wake—how Billie Jean had said to anyone who asked that it was 11:00
P.M.
when she returned home to find Don dead, but had told the cops 3:00
A.M.

For Fiona, however, as she began to unravel the truth, in her opinion (Billie Jean was lying), the “answer soon became very clear. Nicole and Billie had killed my father. They killed him for money. Money that Billie had coerced my dad to give her in his will.”

She continued, saying how Vonlee wanted the “money for a sex change operation” and Billie Jean had promised to give it to her.

“But Billie is still without punishment of any kind.”

Not Vonlee, though: “She sits before the court on her active, free willing and knowing participation in the murder of my father.”

Toss the book at her was Fiona's message. This was the opportunity to make Vonlee pay for the both of them. The judge could honor Don and avenge his murder on this day, at this moment. Judge Potts held that power in her hands.

Fiona said, “Billie would be behind bars for life without parole, had [Vonlee] testified against” her, and that alone constituted additional punishment for Vonlee.

As for Fiona's life and how she'd managed, she told the court she had to “delete several painful and horrible memories, repercussions from” her mind “in order to function as a normal adult. . . .”

Fiona broke down crying before asking for a box of tissues.

The APA brought her some.

After taking a moment to collect herself, she talked about “balance” in life. She spoke of how her two “sons threw up every night before a [court] hearing” and “throw up whenever I tell them what a horrible day I had at court.”

Fiona said she could “not put into words the loss” she felt. She mentioned how she'd had to call her local police department “several times, believing I was being followed or watched.” She was “paranoid that Billie or one of her family is stalking” her, and how “every time I go into a store, I look around for Billie . . . or one of her family.”

She was living inside a nightmare, still after all this time.

It never let up.

Potts interrupted and asked Fiona if she lived in Michigan.

“Yes,” Fiona answered, outside of Troy, adding how she drove around town, “reading people's license plates . . . and always paid attention to who's behind me.”

It was all so “horrible,” the life she was now being forced to live. She was deathly “afraid” the kids would be kidnapped and “taken away” from her.

“I'm horrified to think of the things they did to [my father],” she told the court. “It's disgusting. It was clearly planned out. Death was their goal. They achieved it.”

Fiona called Danny Chahine a “saint.” Had it not been for Danny, they both would have gotten away with murder.

She next told a story about Vonlee “walking by” Fiona and her family in the courthouse corridor, handcuffed, being led by sheriffs, “apologizing” for everything that had happened. All Fiona saw there was a “good actor.”

Fiona was “baffled” by the fact that Vonlee had been found guilty of second-degree murder, because she believed this case was the epitome of first-degree murder, nothing less. Vonlee's sentence should be “life without parole,” Fiona said, feeling that “Nicole and Billie actively, knowingly, willing and readily, murdered my dad.”

On that note, she said, her father was “very angry with them,” and Fiona knew this because “he lives inside of me.”

Fiona Baldwin was upset and hurt; she would never get over the death of her father. The court, at least, had the opportunity to lessen that emotional burden by making sure it punished the one murderer it could.

Harry Titlow.

* * *

The APA encouraged the judge to “adopt” the probation department's guidelines, which amounted to numbers Vonlee and Bill Cataldo did not want to hear. With that said, the APA went off on a little tangent and reiterated the entire case again before stopping himself to make the recommendation that the department's guidelines should be followed.

Defense attorney Bill Cataldo said he agreed with one thing everybody had said: “There was a lot of gambling in this case.”

Cataldo went on to talk about how Vonlee had made a “mistake.” She hadn't accepted the deal offered by the People up front. “And my understanding is it was going to be reduced to manslaughter with a ten-year sentence. Mr. Lustig, a very fine lawyer, was able to work the prosecutor, renegotiate down to seven years, seven to fifteen. Then Ms. Titlow received some advice and made a decision that was different.”

He said he hoped Vonlee would not be made the “scapegoat in the whole case.”

She passed a polygraph, Cataldo reminded the court.

She did “nothing whatsoever to participate” in the actual murder.

She should “receive some penance for what she did.”

Cataldo said the PO was “blinded by their policy” of not giving anyone a “break.”

* * *

When Bill Cataldo finished, Judge Potts asked Vonlee if she would like to speak on her own behalf. Vonlee and Cataldo had talked about this. They decided Vonlee needed to man up (pun intended, perhaps). She had to take responsibility, and admit her faults and failures, before asking for the court's forgiveness and leniency.

“I'd like to express how very sorry I am for my part in Donald's death and express to his children . . . I am sorry that they had to suffer through all of this . . . ,” Vonlee began.

She continued by stating how “sorry” she was “that my aunt Billie was not made to answer for her actions that resulted in Donald's death. I honestly don't know how she can live with herself to this day. I can only pray that you can see she took advantage of me, because of who I am, and used my alcoholism to try to get me to help her murder Don.”

From there, Vonlee expressed gratitude for those who had helped her along the way: the lawyers, the court and everyone else that had steered her in the right direction.

In the end, she extended once again her sorrow for Don's loss, admitting that “it should have never happened.”

* * *

Judge Potts said she wanted “to be very clear” that Vonlee's plea agreement and her withdrawal of it had “absolutely nothing to do with . . . today.”

This announcement gave Cataldo and Vonlee a moment of pause to reflect; they both felt the proverbial “uh-oh,” simply based on the tone the judge used. Potts was passionate and serious.

“Another thing I'm doing,” Potts added, “I am
not
making you a scapegoat.”

Attorney and client looked at each other.

Potts said she was “taking the case on its own.”

With all due respect, Potts then went on a bit of a rant: “The report says . . . you have no prior felony record.... You started using alcohol at an early age.... It's well-known that you are undergoing a sex change, were not comfortable with the sex that you were born with and wanted to make a change. Obviously, you have an identity problem, a drinking problem, and you come to the court and I am sympathetic to your issues. . . .”

Because the jury decided that Vonlee was guilty of the “second most serious offense,” the judge was imposing a sentence that reflected that verdict, she explained.

Potts was “clear” the crime had been committed “for greed . . . and the actions after death did not show remorse from any of the people participating. . . .” It was the cars and jewelry and gambling and “going out to dinners” that spoke of a certain coldness to the judge. Those luxuries showed a tremendous lack of care for the deceased. It seemed Don was dead and nobody gave a damn—with the exception of his daughters and family members and friends and business colleagues.

After a few more words regarding court matters, Judge Potts cleared her throat and gave Vonlee Nicole Titlow “twenty to forty years” in prison, with credit for 462 days she had already served. If the verdict had been a crushing blow, this sentence was the drop of a guillotine on that hopeful head, lapping it clean off.

The sentence took Vonlee's breath away. She was devastated. The low end was thirteen more years than she had been offered initially; the high end twenty-five more than she would have ever served.

And that was it. Court ended. Vonlee was handcuffed and taken away as she sobbed quietly and felt a twisting in her stomach.

She thought it, again and again.

Vonlee was closing in on thirty-five years—which meant the possibility of parole in twenty, putting Vonlee at fifty-five years old, which felt like a lifetime.

CHAPTER 87

JUSTICE CAN SOMETIMES BE
a slow-going, agitating movement of civic gears, like perhaps a water wheel keeping time by the running of a whispering mountain stream that sometimes runs dry, cramming up the components.
[Justice is the] first virtue of societal institutions, as truth is of systems of thought,
John Rawls wrote in his sprawling book, his magnum opus,
A Theory of Justice. [J]ustice denies that the loss of freedom for some,
Rawls goes on to say in an enlightening manner,
is made right by a greater good shared by others.

It is a critical statement and yet quite factual within the crux of the role justice plays in society: human nature at its absolute narcissistic core. We judge, therefore, not to be judged, but to continue feeling good about ourselves.

[A]nalogously, an injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice,
Rawls concludes.

To obtain true impartiality within the boundaries of a court of law, without the critical biases of witnesses and the seemingly uncritical bias surrounding the burden of proof, can take years. And for some, well, the truth never comes to light. For the inmate who believes he or she has been wrongly convicted—or, in the case of Vonlee Titlow, sentenced—those years can become an eternity. The soul can be torn apart by the time Lady Justice arrives with her scales in check. Thus, for Vonlee, the scorecard read,
Justice: 1, Vonlee: 0.

Still, there was no way Vonlee Titlow was going to take the twenty-to-forty sentence lying down—or, rather, sitting back in her steel bunk on a smelly inch-thick mattress chalking off the days and months and years with stick figures on a concrete wall. This sort of tossing in the white towel wasn't Vonlee's style. Perhaps it once was—whereby she would rather walk away from adversity than face it. Sure, Vonlee might have made her own bed, but she believed that the involvement of Frederick Toca had disrupted her destiny and she could not allow that to end by her bearing the brunt of it all.

Billie Jean Rogers was free; Vonlee sat in prison.

“Unfair,” Vonlee kept telling anyone who would listen.

In May 2002, nearly a month after Vonlee had been sentenced, Billie Jean lost her battle with cancer and died. If there was anyone that believed Billie Jean had not suffered, or the emotional and physical demands of her case did not contribute to her years being shorter on the planet, those people had never read about the sustained torturous toll that stress takes on the body and mind, not to mention the human spirit.

When Vonlee heard about her aunt's death, she cried. She was sad and upset. Death was not part of her plan for her aunt Billie Jean. She loved Billie Jean, despite all they had been through and all she would endure in the years to come.

According to Vonlee, for some in the family back home in Tennessee, Billie Jean had an inherent “evilness” about her that only those close enough to her could see, feel and understand.

And so the seesaw of emotions and feelings for her aunt continued: One minute, Vonlee loved the woman, said how much she adored her and that Billie Jean knew not what she did, but took what she felt was the easiest road. In the next moment, there was Billie Jean filling the role as tyrant, a seductress whose mainstay in life was money and gambling and drinking and deception.

By the end of 2002, Vonlee had made good on her promise and filed a civil suit against the man who she claimed had steered her wrong at a vulnerable stage of her case. Affidavits and depositions were being taken in
Vonlee Titlow
vs.
Frederick Toca and
[the guard who had introduced Vonlee to Toca].

They spent years battling out the malpractice suit Vonlee had brought against Toca.

The bench trial was heard in the Circuit Court for the County of Oakland, the Honorable Steven Andrews presiding. Vonlee represented herself. Toca had the law offices of Cyril C. Hall in Pontiac, Michigan, there on his behalf.

Finally, after all was said and done, years had passed and Judge Andrews, taking his time to decide on an outcome, submitted his thirteen-page decision on October 29, 2004.

Vonlee alleged malpractice, malfeasance, breach of contract and failure to uphold fiduciary responsibility in light of what Toca had done. These were hefty accusations against the lawyer. Vonlee was saying that because of Toca, she had been given a harsher sentence and effectively forced into trial. Vonlee had even alleged, Andrews wrote in his decision:
[It is]default judgment against [the guard], which the Court granted based on [the guard's] failure to appear or otherwise defend.

Andrews outlined the entire case, making a point that Vonlee had passed a polygraph. He said Vonlee accused Toca of convincing her to “withdraw” her plea:
Plaintiff maintains that Defendant Toca said that if he did not think they . . . could win, he would not be there, and that they (his firm) did not take cases unless they thought they could win them.

Bottom line concerning Toca, Andrews opined:
[He] denies that he advised Plaintiff to withdraw the manslaughter plea. . . .

He said.

She said.

In the end, Andrews agreed that this was a “troubling case.” However, he went on to write,
[The] Plaintiff claimed innocence and was unhappy with the 7-15 sentence for the manslaughter charge.... These were the factors that the Plaintiff elected to withdraw the plea and go to trial. The bottom line is that [the] Plaintiff chose to proceed this way and must accept the result of that choice.

Judge Andrews finally concluded,
[A] judgment of No Cause Action be entered in Plaintiff's claims.

Justice: 2.

Vonlee Titlow: 0.

Though, it still wasn't over for Vonlee Titlow.