Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder (10 page)

They stayed the night of October 31 and went home the next day. They began finalizing the plans for their California vacation. Child-care was all-important to Carol. Since Nancy owed her $200 for coke she’d given her, she offered to forgive the debt if Nancy baby-sat the kids while they were gone.

Nancy didn’t have any money to pay off her debt. It was a good offer. Besides, she loved the kids. It was agreed: for eliminating the $200 debt, Nancy would be home to get the two kids up and dressed for school and baby-sit them when they got home. When she went to work at five, she’d take the kids to Nancy’s sister Susan’s house in Pontiac and Susan would watch them for the three or four hours while Nancy was at work. Nancy would pick them up at nine or ten and get them back home in time for sleep and school the next day.

With the plan set, Carol and Tim left in her green pickup truck for California on November 4. It was Carol’s twenty-sixth birthday. They drove across the Rockies and the Great Plains, and inside of three days, they were in Sacramento, where they got a room at a local hotel. Sacramento was a large city, the state’s capital, and there were lots of motels and hotels to choose from.

Visiting her dad’s had set off a string of painful memories. Carol just had to talk about it. Tim said that he could see how uncomfortable she was.

“Maybe it’s just the way my dad is. If we could just hug and touch …” Her voice trailed off.

What Tim didn’t like was the way her dad was fondling his girlfriend in front of Carol and her brother and all the kids. Tim thought it was “inappropriate to do that in the living room in front of other people.”

“I want to kill my dad,” she finally said.

How bad did that make her look? Carol wanted to know. How bad was she that she wanted to kill her father?

“Well, just think about it. You know, we could do it and nobody would know,” Tim answered.

“What would we do?” she asked.

They could go into her dad’s place, Tim continued, and not leave any witnesses. If her brother was there, too bad. Would she be willing to kill her brother and his girlfriend if she was along?

Carol figured that if it occurred during the week, then nobody would be there but her dad. She didn’t think his girlfriend stayed with him. She pointed out that her dad had had several heart attacks and his heart was real bad. He also had some sort of disease in his spine. That led to a discussion about using heroin to kill her father.

Tim liked to cover the angles and he suggested filling up a few syringes. They only needed one to do her dad, but if they got up there and her brother was there with his girlfriend, they needed to be ready. They needed to be prepared: no witnesses.

If the brother was there, he would use his gun and make them lie down on the floor, and Carol could stick him while Tim kept her dad covered. Then it would be her dad’s turn.

“Stick one in his balls and one in his eye; so that way, whoever came in and saw this … maybe they could put two and two together and see that, you know, to see that he was a molester. Like the killer had left his calling card by killing him in that way,” Tim suggested.

Before Carol delivered the death wound, Tim wanted her to tell him, “No more. You won’t hurt me no more.” Then she would do it and just let him die.

As for the others, her dad’s girlfriend, her brother and his girlfriend, they could give them overdoses of heroin and then make it look like a robbery. Her dad had guns and money and other stuff in his house that someone would want to steal. They would also leave the needles at the scene.

After discussing it, they decided to “do” her dad when they got back. But then she realized that they were broke. They couldn’t kill him the way they wanted without the heroin and they couldn’t buy the heroin without the money. Still, Carol liked the plan.

Maybe if they got some money and got the heroin … but guilt began to eat away at her. She agreed to do it, but at the same time, she kept the thought in her mind that it wasn’t going to happen. She kept telling herself that everything would turn out all right.

On Saturday, November 8, Carol and Tim were still in Sacramento when Carol called Nancy to see how things were. It was 8:00
P.M.
on the West Coast; 11:00
P.M.
in Michigan. During that conversation, Nancy told her about the burglary.

Someone had broken in through the kitchen and stolen jewelry from the house. Nancy was so scared, she didn’t leave until the sun came up. Then she had to go to work.

“Well, Nancy, who do you think did it?” Carol asked.

“Maybe your stepdaughter Stephanie.”

Stephanie Johnson was Jessie’s daughter from a first marriage.

“We had a conversation and we got into it,” Nancy continued. “Steph was upset that you went to California and didn’t tell anybody about it.”

This argument made Nancy think that Steph was the one who broke into the house because she was the only one who knew what time Nancy would be gone and how long she’d be gone.

“I’ll take care of it when I get home,” Carol answered, clearly exasperated and not a little worried that her home, and that of her children, had some sort of security breach. “I’ll find out who did it when I get home,” she promised.

Carol hung up and told Tim what Nancy had said about the break-in. Tim got visibly quiet and withdrawn. He didn’t want to talk to her. She hated when there was so much silence and distance between them.

“What’s the matter Tim?” Carol finally asked.

“I think Nancy did it. Why would Steph steal the stuff? Because whatever Steph had wanted, after Jessie died, you gave it to her.”

And why would she come into the house and just steal the jewelry and not the fifty-five-inch TV and VCR in the bedroom? Tim wondered. He figured the answer was whoever burglarized the place took stuff that could be sold fast on the street for drugs. Or money to buy drugs.

Nancy had a coke habit she needed to support; Steph didn’t. Nancy couldn’t support her habit just by waitressing, Tim figured. She owed Carol for drugs she’d given her before they left, and Nancy had had to pay off the debt by babysitting the kids while they were gone.

Tim was convinced Nancy took the stuff and faked the burglary. She took it to sell fast and to buy drugs.

“We gotta get her,” Tim said.

Carol, though, wasn’t so sure it was Nancy. How could they know for sure who had done it—the house being back in Michigan and them being here in California? They didn’t talk about it anymore that night. But the next morning, they were both aggravated enough about their privacy being invaded by person or persons unknown that they decided to return to Michigan.

They had driven west in Carol’s truck. As they climbed the Rockies, they discovered it had bad brakes. They didn’t want to take the time to nurse it cross-country or spend the money on a brake job. Carol called Greyhound and got the schedule and location of the bus station. On Sunday night, they abandoned the truck and picked up the bus home.

While they sprawled in adjoining seats, the bus made its way through Green River, Utah, in country that had once belonged to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Some legends said that Cassidy had made it back from Bolivia and was buried somewhere nearby in a secret grave.

The bus passed through Glenwood Springs, Colorado, where Doc Holliday was buried in a cemetery up on a hill, his gravestone marked with a poker hand of aces and eights, the dead man’s hand. The town was now a preferred retirement site for senior citizens from the east.

They traveled out on the Kansas prairie that Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson had once roamed. Like zombies moving through the pale yellow light of the bus stations, Carol and Tim sleepily switched buses a few times along the route. It was always night, it seemed, and the cafeterias served the same tasteless food. Except for the chili, which was always good.

Mile after mile, they chattered on about this or that, but they never talked about the break-in, Carol recalled. To her, anyway, it was no big deal. After all, only material things had been taken. Who cared about those?

They had told no one they were coming home and so it was a surprised Nancy Billiter who looked up on the cold afternoon of November 12 to see the key turning in the door and her friend Carol and Carol’s boyfriend, Tim, come marching in with their suitcases.

Nancy, still surprised, asked how the trip was. Carol said it was fine.

“Why are you back so soon?” Nancy asked suspiciously.

Carol and Tim ignored that question. Nancy must have been thinking it had something to do with the burglary, but she didn’t let on.

Carol made a careful walk through the house to see if anything else had been stolen. She walked upstairs with her bags and looked in the closet and saw that the safe was gone, as were the VCR and the TV. There was something else in the closet that was missing, but she couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was.

It had been a long bus ride. Tim went into the bathroom to relieve himself. Through the closed door, Carol told him that something in the closet was missing, but she couldn’t figure out what it was.

Nancy was suddenly by her side.

“Come talk to me,” said the older woman.

The two friends went down to the living room and sat on the sofa, where Nancy peppered her with questions about the trip. Where did they go? What did they see? They blathered on for a while and then when Tim came out of the bathroom, he and Carol went out to the garage to get the gold Caddy. Carol went to put something in the trunk—she couldn’t remember what—and that’s when she saw it.

“It’s the kid’s piggy bank!”

Now, Carol knew for sure that Nancy was the burglar and not someone else, because she didn’t tell her that the piggy bank was stolen and yet she found it in the very car Nancy had been using to drive to work while they were gone. Tim and Carol theorized that Nancy had stolen the goods, pawned them for drugs, and then made it look like someone else had broken into the house.

“Leave the bank there for now,” Tim ordered.

Carol went out back and looked at the kitchen door, the one Nancy said the burglar broke to get in. There was one big hole, boarded up. Nobody but a midget could have climbed through that. And anybody who did climb through would have gotten cut.

Nancy never mentioned anything about blood on the kitchen floor.

“Why don’t we see if we can find the stuff that was stolen,” Tim suggested.

They took the Caddy and traveled around town to three different pawnshops, trying to find the jewelry that had been stolen. Carol knew that if the stuff had been pawned, there would be a name on the pawn ticket.

No dice. The pawnshops were a dead end.

They got back home at about 2:45 P.M It was still the same day, November 12. They agreed to let Nancy continue using the car to go to work. Then, when she got home, they would check the trunk. If she got rid of the piggy bank, they would know for sure.

“What do you want to do now?” Carol asked

“I’m going into Detroit to get some drugs,” Tim replied.

When the kids got back an hour later, they were surprised and delighted to see their mother home. Nancy, meanwhile, changed into her work uniform, and Carol volunteered to drive her to work.

In the interview room, Messina leaned back in his chair.

That didn’t make sense, Messina thought. That just didn’t make sense. As Carol continued to talk, he tried to figure it out.

They were going to let Nancy take the car to see if she got rid of the piggy bank. If she did, that would prove her guilt. Instead, Carol had inexplicably deviated from their plan?

Why? Unless, there never was a plan and she was making that part of her statement up.

“Anyway, when I got home after dropping Nancy off at work, I opened the trunk and took the piggy bank inside,” Carol continued.

By 6:30
P.M.
, Tim still wasn’t back. Everyone was hungry, so they left Tim a note saying they were going down to the Ram’s Horn for dinner. They had a nice dinner and returned by 7:30
P.M.
Tim still wasn’t back.

The bus ride, and the tension of the break-in, had made Carol very tired; she told the kids to be quiet for a half hour and she took a nap. While she lay on her bed upstairs, she could hear the kids watching TV downstairs in the living room.

She didn’t realize that a half hour had turned into two hours until Tim woke her at 9:30
P.M.
She got up quickly and put the kids to bed. By ten o’clock, they were tucked in. Carol went into her bedroom where Tim was seated on the bed.

From the front of his belt, he pulled a revolver that he liked to carry. He said that when he was in Detroit, he had to prove himself.

“Reload it,” Tim ordered.

Apparently, he had shot someone. Carol didn’t ask any questions; she knew better.

From a shelf in the closet, Carol took down a box of shells. She pressed the release on the side of the automatic and the clip popped down. It was empty. Unless he had fired some of the bullets at another time, he must have fired them in Detroit.

She reloaded the weapon—there was space for eight bullets, she said—and pushed the clip back into the stock. Then she handed it over to Tim, who put it away. Later, a little bit after 11:00
P.M.
, Carol was washing the dishes in the kitchen when Bill, a friend of Nancy’s, drove the waitress home and dropped her off. After coming in, she asked Carol:

“You got any drugs?”

“No,” Carol replied.

Just then, Tim walked into the kitchen.

“I do,” he said brightly.

Carol didn’t want her kids waking up to see them smoking and insisted they go downstairs. So they all went downstairs into the basement. It was furnished with a few sofas, tables and an extra bed that Carol immediately went to lounge on.

Nancy had an abnormal fear of spiders. She was afraid spiders would crawl on her if she slept in the bed in the basement. Instead, she slept upstairs on an uncomfortable couch. Carol thought her fear was silly, especially since she sacrificed her comfort for it. Nancy, though, had no problems sitting on the bed when others were there.