Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder (19 page)

“What happened then?”

“Nancy’s pants leg was off. …”

What if, Helton theorized, while Giles was upstairs, Collier sodomized Billiter? He could have used a condom, which he flushed down the toilet afterward. Or maybe he had used an object in the room that hadn’t been tested. The basement itself was a combination sleeping area/laundry room/work area, with tools, laundry bottles and other things scattered about; none of these things had been tested for fluids because there were just too many.

There was still another possibility that Helton and the other detectives, even the medical examiner, had not considered because it was just too gruesome to contemplate.

In her statement, Carol Giles clearly stated that when she and Tim Collier left the basement, she thought Nancy Billiter was dead. What if Billiter wasn’t?

According to Carol, she and Tim had sex after killing Nancy. Afterward, Carol got the kids up and ready for school. Not knowing that their “aunt” Nancy was lying in the basement dead, they got washed and dressed. Jesseca, though, was sick.

“You have to go to school, honey. You can’t stay home,” her mother had insisted.

The last thing she needed was her daughter around when they disposed of the body. Carol gave her some Tylenol and reassured Jesseca that she would “feel better.”

What if, while Carol was playing “concerned mother,” and without her knowledge, Collier slipped down to the basement. The urge to do it with a dead body was just too overwhelming. When he got to Billiter, he turned her over.

Nancy Billiter wasn’t dead. She was warm. She was unconscious but alive.

Collier pulled down Billiter’s pants and inserted an object into her anus. And he pushed and he pushed and he pushed, tearing the anus and causing the bleeding that would later be noted by the medical examiner.

There is no telling how long Collier might have stayed there. There is no telling when exactly Billiter died. He might have continued to sodomize her even after death; for while the rectal muscles would have relaxed, the physical damage would already have been done. There would be no way to tell, save his confession, that he had continued to sodomize a corpse.

Upstairs, Carol had convinced her daughter to go to school and then walked both kids to the bus stop. When she came back in the house, Tim was sitting there in the living room.

There was a body to deal with in her basement. That’s all Nancy was to her now—a body.

Monday, June 15, 1998

It took two days for the voir dire, the part of a trial where juries are questioned about their beliefs, predispositions, knowledge of the case, anything that might impact on their ability to serve on a jury. The defense had the opportunity to challenge jurors and so did the prosecution. And at the end of that time, thirty-two people became jurors—twelve jurors and four alternates for each jury.

Carol Giles watched them walk in and be seated at the side of the courtroom. It was hard on that bright June day, just a few days before the summer solstice, to believe that they had all assembled to dispense justice for a case that had happened in the dead of winter less than a year before. It was only nine months earlier that Jessie had died, but as Carol watched Skrzynski approach the lectern, it must have felt like it was another life, in another place.

Skrzynski began his opening argument with a scathing summary of the events leading up to Jessie’s death. He sketched out the diabolic plan the two lovers entered into to cause his death. He portrayed Jessie as an innocent victim, a diabetic caught in a murder plot that two vile human beings had cooked up for their own gratification.

In order to be together, their goal was to poison Jessie with heroin. To do that, Carol Giles violated her husband’s trust, blew it to smithereens when she laced his insulin with heroin and injected it causing certain, untimely death.

“As Jessie lay dying, laboring for breath, Carol Giles kissed his forehead. It was the kiss of a Jezebel,” Skrzynski told the jury.

The most vulnerable facet of his case was Collier’s culpability. Rather than hiding it, Skrzynski seized on it, declaring Collier to be if not the instigator of the plot, then a willing participant. Skrzynski asserted that Collier was enough of a participant to be as guilty as Giles. He told the jury unequivocally that Collier “helped plan and carry out” the murder. As such, he deserved the most severe penalty the law could dish out, life without parole.

Howard Arnkoff, Collier’s attorney, countered that his client simply offered advice on poisoning Jessie Giles. Tim Collier never believed, said Arnkoff in his opening statement, that Carol Giles would go through with it. Collier was as surprised as anyone else when she did.

Bottom line: Carol Giles killed Jessie Giles, not Tim Collier.

Listening in the courtroom’s front rows, Mike Messina, Kevin Shanlian and Tom Helton had to smile. Arnkoff had just characterized Tim Collier as an innocent bystander. Sitting at the defense table, Collier remained impassive.

When it was his turn to open, John Basch, Carol Giles’s attorney, countered that it was Collier who forced Giles into bad circumstances. Tim Collier was the one who convinced Carol Giles to administer the injection to Jessie. If she hadn’t, who knew what Tim might have done to her? Sure, she’d given incriminating statements to police, but she’d been aggravated, tired and desperate when she did. As the jury would hear, it hadn’t been her idea to kill Jessie.

Bottom line: Tim Collier forced Carol Giles into the plot to kill Jessie Giles.

Sitting near each other at the defense table, the former lovers, the ones locked in a loving, sexual embrace after killing Nancy, barely made eye contact.

As far as Carol was concerned, Tim’s talk about staying together had been just that, talk. It was just a con. At the first opportunity, he blamed her for everything.

Tim thought Carol a class-A, number-one rat and bitch. His stoic demeanor belied what he was probably feeling: pure rage that had only been let out when he tortured Nancy to death. And if Carol had kept her mouth shut, they wouldn’t be in custody charged with murder.

They’d be free.

June 16, 1998

Skrzynski’s case took no time at all.

He had the cops testify to Carol Giles’s statements and then offered them into evidence. He had the ME testify as to cause of death. And he introduced Tim Collier’s statement to Deputy Peitz that had led them to get a court order to exhume Jessie’s body.

The prosecution rested. Time for lunch.

Carol spent much of the break hunkered down in the empty jury box, where she was allowed to stay instead of the holding cell. She looked out at the courtroom, with only a few people seated in the gallery during lunch. Her head swiveled around, looking at the people, and then suddenly her head whipped back so fast, she just about gave herself whiplash.

“Oh my God!”

Sitting there in the front row was Nancy Billiter. Carol continued to stare at the ghost and then her eyes focused on the woman next to “Nancy.” That calmed her down.

It was actually Nancy’s niece. Susan Garrison’s twenty-two-year-old daughter bore an amazing resemblance to her aunt. She was sitting in the front row with her mother.

Behind the scenes, a drama was unfolding.

John Basch had been arguing with Carol Giles, trying to talk her out of testifying. He didn’t want her to testify. He didn’t want Skrzynski to get a shot at her. But Carol was insistent. She wanted to tell her side of the story. When court reconvened in the afternoon, Basch stood when the judge asked if the defense was ready.

“Call your first witness,” said the judge.

“Carol Giles,” said Basch.

The courtroom erupted into hushed whispers. The accused murderess got up slowly from her chair and walked across the well of the courtroom.

“Raise your right hand,” said the clerk. “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

“I do.”

“Please be seated.”

Messina, Shanlian and Helton thought Carol would violate the oath. Why not? It was time to save her ass. More than likely, she would try to lay the blame for what happened on Tim. At least if she was smart, that’s what she would do.

Basch asked her to describe what happened.

“I meant to kill Jessie,” Carol said.

Holy shit! thought Helton, just about falling off his seat.

“I know it will establish elements of first-degree murder, but I want to tell my side of the story,” said Carol.

It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be. Only in movies and on TV does a suspect confess to murder on the stand. But here it was, real life, and Carol Giles was about to do exactly that.

Carol’s testimony was that she was just fifteen years old when she ran away from home and was taken in by Jessie Giles, a man more than twice her age. He got her pregnant twice before marrying her in 1993.

Carol said she spent much of her marriage nursing her 468-pound husband through severe health problems, including a stroke and a heart attack, despite the abusive way Jessie treated her.

“Why didn’t you just divorce him?” Basch asked.

“I had to rule it out,” Carol said, “because I was afraid what Jessie might do to me and the children. My kids mean everything to me.”

Carol Giles testified that she met Tim Collier at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital, where she worked as a secretary and he as a custodian. They had an affair. Eventually she began to confide in him about the problems in her marriage. Tim responded to her complaints by telling her: “The best way to get rid of your pain was to get rid of your problem.”

“It was Timmy who told me how to kill Jessie and gave me the heroin to mix with his insulin. Tim figured that with Jessie’s history of heart problems, his death would look like it was from natural causes.”

In a hushed, emotional voice, Carol described in detail how she had killed her husband, Jessie Giles.

She couldn’t remember what started the conversation about killing Jessie. What she did remember was it happened in October 1996. What day exactly, she couldn’t be sure.

She and Tim started talking about Jessie. They had talked about him before, of course, about how difficult he was and how sick he was. Tim always listened with a compassionate ear. Only this time, Tim seemed to steer the conversation in a different direction.

“Jessie’s really sick with a stroke and he just had a bad heart [attack],” Carol said.

She just hated being with him. Tim rationally explained that she didn’t have to go on feeling so bad. There was an alternative.

“We’re fighting all the time, all the time,” Carol lamented.

Tim told her that he could get a gram of heroin and they could mix it with Jessie’s insulin. They could make it look just like he had a heart attack, Tim explained. As Tim talked, Carol listened, really listened.

She thought that, well, it felt like the only way out.

“I told him okay.”

Sure, she’d be killing her children’s father, she reasoned, but was that any better than living with parents who hated each other, who bickered all the time? And was Jessie better off living with his diabetes and his stroke and his heart?

Jessie’s time on earth was limited. One of his ailments would get him sooner or later. Maybe it was better to end it now. He’d be out of his misery and so would she.

Carol Giles and Tim Collier talked and plotted a little more until they were ready to act.

September 27, 1997

Carol made sure that the kids were staying at their aunt’s house that weekend. She didn’t want them around when she killed their father.

That Saturday, Carol went over to Tim’s house. He had gotten her the heroin and told her to put it on a spoon and mix it with the insulin. She tried doing it and saw that it was a dark brown color, whereas insulin was crystal clear.

“That’s all right. Just, when you give Jessie his insulin shot, don’t let him see the color,” Tim had advised.

Otherwise, Jessie wouldn’t let her do it. He’d know from the wrong color that something was up. She capped the syringe and took it home. She intended to do it that night, but Jessie had decided he needed to chill out and had gotten a room at a nearby motel. He’d intended to be there for two nights, but they messed up his reservation and he came home Saturday night. By then, it was too late to give him the injection. It would have to wait till the following morning.

Sunday morning, Jessie was in bed, like he always was, watching TV.

I
better do it now, while I have the courage to do it
, thought Carol. They were home alone; the kids were out, staying with Jessie’s sister.

Most of the time, she gave Jessie his injection. The only time he did it himself was if he was gone someplace or if he was by himself. Otherwise, she played the dutiful wife.

It really was a tremendous responsibility, Carol had realized soon after they were married. If just one air bubble got into the solution, if she didn’t squeeze all of them out, that bubble would go directly to his heart and he’d throw a coronary.

Air bubble. That was the sort of thing that would show up during an autopsy. She squirted a little of the deadly solution out the top of the needle. She looked at the liquid, cognizant of the heroin coloring the insulin. Both she and Tim knew that heroin would show up during an autopsy toxicology screen. But no one performed an autopsy on a sick fat man with a history of heart disease and stroke who died from a heart attack.

Jessie was watching Sam Donaldson on TV; Sam’s toupee looked like it had been sprayed on; he was prattling on about some bullshit. With the syringe held behind her back, Carol approached the bed.

Where to give it? It was an intramuscular injection, meaning it went in the muscle, not the vein. Some diabetics liked it in the stomach, but Jessie hated it there. It was painful.

The other good place was the top of his leg, in his quadriceps, the muscle that ran across the top of the thigh. Usually, for his morning injection—he took one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and one at night—she gave it to him in the leg.

She looked at her watch: 11:00
A.M.
Actually, a little late for the injection. Jessie tried to balance it out, to keep his blood sugar level right. But, hey, it had been a busy weekend, what with getting the kids out and going over to Tim’s.