Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder (17 page)

November 19, 1997

Dr. Dragovic, the county medical examiner, was advised of the suspicious circumstances of Jessie Giles’s death. He checked his records and confirmed that an autopsy had not been done and issued a letter requesting that Jessie’s remains be exhumed.

Messina met with Maddie Marion and told her what was going on. If the family didn’t want an autopsy, the police would have to get one anyway, but it was a lot easier, and less painful, if the family went along.

They did. In his report, Messina wrote that Maddie gave permission to exhume “the body of Jessie Giles for investigative purposes.” This information was then faxed to the prosecutor’s office, where an official exhumation order was prepared.

November 22, 1997

Maddie Marion looked around the home. It was empty now, dusted for fingerprints, stripped of evidence, sterilized by the presence of cops and lawyers and medical examiners and all the rest. But to her, it had once been a home, her brother’s home—her brother and sister-in-law’s and her niece and nephew’s.

The children. What would become of the children?

It was a question that Maddie and her husband, Philip, had answered by opening their home to them. Susan Garrison, Nancy’s sister, later claimed that after the kids came to live with Maddie and Philip, Carol called the couple from jail.

According to Garrison, during that conversation, Carol told her kids that she had killed Nancy and she was going to jail for a real long time. Maddie and Philip would take care of them as long as she was gone.

“Mrs. Marion?” said Tom Helton. “You wanted to remove some personal property?”

That’s why Maddie was there.

“Just let us know when you leave,” Helton advised, and then he was out the door, leaving her alone to her memories and her grief.

November 25, 1997

The temperature was in the low twenties with a wicked wind blowing that forced the windchill well below zero. The sky was gray and overcast; snow was in the forecast. The ground was as hard as a rock.

Officer Tom Helton shivered inside his overcoat. He looked down at a newly dug gravesite dusted with snow. The grave was only seven weeks old, but its occupant could not rest in peace. Not until the police knew for certain how he had died.

“We’re ready,” said a workman to Helton.

In Helton’s inside jacket pocket was the court order.

“Your Honor,” Helton told the district court in Pontiac a day before, “we have reason to believe that the decedent was murdered.”

The judge had granted the police department an exhumation order to proceed to Perry Mount Park Cemetery for the purpose of digging up Jessie Giles.

“Go ahead,” said Helton, and the workman signaled.

The backhoe moved in. It paused momentarily on the raised plot of ground that was supposed to be Jessie Giles’s final resting place. Then it descended with a roar and dug into the ground, moving it aside like it weighed nothing.

It only took a few minutes; then Helton was able to look down into the hole and see the metal casket that contained Jessie’s body. The backhoe backed off and workmen from Classic Removal, the company doing the exhumation, jumped into the hole, where they attached lines to a crane. When the lines were secured, the crane fired up and slowly lifted the casket containing the huge body, minus whatever weight he may have lost in the prior weeks.

The casket was put on a rolling gurney that county workers wheeled over to a van, where they slid it inside. The doors were slammed shut; one of the workers tapped the door a couple of times and the van pulled out. Helton got into his car and drove out of the cemetery, thinking what a gloomy place this was on a late-fall day.

It only took him a few minutes to get to the Oakland County Municipal Complex, where he headed straight for the morgue. Dr. Victor Ehrlich was in charge of the postmortem. The casket lay on the same gurney that had taken it from the grave to the van. Helton watched as Ehrlich opened it.

Jessie Giles was dressed like he was going to a party. He wore a bright green suit with a breast pocket handkerchief, matching shirt and tie, and gold-framed glasses. Jessie’s stylin’, Helton thought. Carol sure sent him off in style.

The casket had been airtight and it looked like decomposition had been minimal. Ehrlich had his assistants strip the body and carefully catalogue each piece of clothing.

“On my count,” said Ehrlich, “one, two, three.” And with everyone huffing and puffing, they lifted Jessie and placed him on the autopsy table.

The doctor opened Jessie up. Removing the heart from the chest cavity, the coroner examined it carefully. While noting what poor shape it was in, he could find no recent scarring. Jessie Giles had not died of a heart attack. Carol’s contention that he died of a heart attack was now proven to be false.

Ehrlich took tissue samples from Jessie’s liver, heart and brain. Each of those organs would retain vestiges of morphine, a heroin derivative, if heroin had been used to overdose him. The samples were labeled, put into evidence containers, and sent out for toxicology examination. The body was sutured closed.

Morgue attendants then dressed Jessie in his burial clothing, placed his body back in the coffin, and sealed it airtight. The workers from Classic Removal drove it back to the cemetery, where the body was quickly taken from the van and placed back in the ground. The backhoe moved in and efficiently filled the grave with the burial dirt. That night, it snowed. The next day, anyone passing by saw nothing unusual save for a mound of freshly dug earth covered with snow.

A few days later, the toxicology results came back. Jessie’s tissues showed a high concentration of morphine.

“Anytime you inject heroin into the body, it changes to morphine,” Dragovic, the Oakland County medical examiner, explained to the
Detroit News
. Jessie was “injected [with] a substantial amount and caused rapid intoxication” and then death, Dragovic continued.

Since Jessie wasn’t an addict, the only logical conclusion was exactly what Carol Giles had said in her statement: she had given him a heroin overdose when Jessie thought he was just getting his usual insulin injection.

That still meant that Tim Collier was not directly tied into Jessie’s death. It was Carol’s word against his. She said he supplied her with the heroin and expertise to commit the crime; he said she was lying.

It would be up to a jury to decide.

Another bulldozer picking up frozen earth. Another gray day. Another graveside.

As Nancy’s sister Susan Garrison looked around, she saw a lot of people. Nancy Billiter had gotten to know a lot of patrons at the places she worked. They knew her to be what she was—a very caring person, the kind who would do anything for you if she could.

That was it, Susan thought. She was always for the underdog. Always root for the underdog.

Just before she died, Nancy was going to college to be a nursing assistant. She’d always wanted to be a nurse. She’d been to school before but never completed the coursework because something, more or less, got in the way. This time—the last time—it had been death.

The coffin was lowered out of sight into the deep, dark grave.

Bill Bernhard had heard about Nancy Billiter’s death. He had seen a report on the news and had gone to her funeral. And, he felt, he knew something of value. Bernhard called up Helton and they met at South Boulevard Station.

The bar was the same as Nancy had left it. Only there was an emptiness now, a listlessness among the patrons and staff, that only time could cure.

“I was here on November twelfth,” Bernhard told Helton.

“What time?” Helton asked.

“In the evening, during Nancy’s shift.”

“Know her long?”

“We were old friends. I knew her, twenty years. Nancy told me that her roommate had returned from California. She didn’t have her friend’s car any longer, ’cause her friend wanted to use it now. She needed to find a ride home.”

“What happened?”

“Well, I don’t have a car, either. But the bartender Dawn—well, she let me take her car and drive Nancy home with it.”

“Stop anyplace along the way?”

“No. We got back to the home in West Bloomfield, where she was staying with her friend, at about eleven o’clock.”

That jibed with everything Carol Giles had told them and would help establish Carol’s credibility in court.

“I walked in the house with her. Nancy had told me about the break-in there and I wanted to make sure she got in safely.”

Why would Nancy lie about the break-in to anyone but Tim and Carol if it didn’t really happen?

“I was inside with her about four minutes,” Bernhard continued. “Nancy hung up her coat and she told me that her friend and boyfriend were there in the bathroom. The door was closed but the light was on.”

Helton reasoned that they might have gone inside when they heard Bernhard talking to Nancy. They could have heard them when they came up the driveway. The last thing the murderers would have wanted was someone else showing up and spoiling their plan. Tim Collier would have known that if they killed Nancy and her body was later discovered, Bernhard would be a witness who could put him at the scene of the crime.

“I left to take Dawn’s car back to her at the bar. After a short while there, I caught a ride with a friend and went home. I called the bar the next day in the late afternoon to see if Nancy was working,” Bernhard continued. “Around three or four I called. Anyway, I was told that she had not shown up for work that day. I called her at home two or three times during the course of the evening and never got an answer.”

Of course he didn’t. Nancy was dead in the trunk of Carol Giles’s car.

Thirteen

The beleaguered Detroit Lions played their home games in the Pontiac Silverdome. Why that indoor stadium had been located in Pontiac, though, was anybody’s guess.

Pontiac was a middle-class town, hardly the sort of place to support the big-buck tickets and luxury boxes that are the financial mainstays of National Football League teams. West Bloomfield Township, with its more affluent citizens, would have been a much better place to put the stadium. Rich people, however, are usually smart enough to figure out that they would rather have a disruptive influence like a football stadium in another, albeit less affluent, community. They can just drive there in their BMWs and then leave after the game.

It is doubtful that the workers in the county office complex, of which the prosecutor’s office is a part, had season tickets to the Lions. The games were much too expensive for them to afford.

Within the county office complex is a white building. At the top of a hill in the middle of the city of Pontiac, it looms like a modern monolith. This is the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office. Inside the building in his small corner office, Chief Prosecutor John Skrzynski looked down on the area below. It was a large county.

Whoever was murdered in that vast urban sprawl, sweeping out toward the horizon, their file came across his desk.

Skrzynski picked up the folder marked
JESSIE GILES
and
NANCY RAE
BILLITER. He opened it and began to read.

The first killing disposed of a problem for the killers. The second—well, it still remained a mystery. Skrzynski didn’t buy the motive Carol had laid out—Nancy was killed because of the faked burglary—any more than Messina did. The prosecutor was particularly incensed at the savage way Billiter had been killed. That was something that could work to his advantage at trial.

Juries like to identify with the decedent. If the prosecution could downplay Nancy’s drug problems, she could be a very sympathetic victim, fitting the classic “wrong place at the wrong time” scenario that could happen to anybody. The fact of her torture made it more likely that the jury would go for personal identification, which, hopefully, would lead to two convictions.

But before a trial could take place, the suspects needed to be officially arraigned. Since the paperwork was still being put together on the Jessie Giles murder, the decision was made to arraign the defendants for Nancy Billiter’s murder first.

January 6, 1998

The formal arraignment for Nancy Rae Billiter’s death was supposed to happen in December 1997, but because it was taking so much time to put the toxicology and other forensic evidence together, and to give the defense equal time to examine that material, the arraignment had been moved to January.

The crowd in Michigan’s 48th District Court waited anxiously for the defendants to be brought in. It was the type of tension that makes your stomach turn over, the knowledge that something was going to happen, something bad, and there was no way to stop it. It was the knowledge that even though the crimes were over, they were about to be relived, in the courtroom, in all their bloody detail.

In the courtroom crowd was Nancy’s brother, Doug. Like all siblings, they had had their disagreements. They had had one before Nancy’s death, a big fight, sister Susan Garrison remembered.

“She died before they could make up,” said Susan. “This time there was no making up.”

Suddenly the door at the side of the courtroom opened. Clad in orange prison jumpsuits and manacled at wrist and ankle, Tim Collier and Carol Giles shuffled in and were escorted by the guards to their lawyers at the defense table. On the other side was the prosecutor, John Skrzynski.

An arraignment is anything but a formality. It is the time the state’s feet are held to the fire, where they must prove to the court’s satisfaction that they have enough evidence to go to trial, where they hope to get a conviction.

Likewise, it is the suspects’ opportunity to question the validity of the state’s evidence. If the suspects can prove the state does not have enough to hold them, or if the state illegally obtained or manufactured evidence, they walk.

In a sense, the arraignment is a mini trial, where each side has an opportunity to call the witnesses they plan to present at the actual event. What makes it interesting is that, like the end of a poker game, each side is forced to show what they have in their hand.