Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder (22 page)

Checking her car trunk revealed blood spots. A search of the home turned up blood marks in the basement. The bloody mattress was discovered stashed in the garage.

Mike Messina testified as to Carol Giles’s confession and played it, all two hours, for the jury to hear. Then the prosecution rested and it was the defense’s turn.

September 14, 1998

Wearing a white T-shirt and black jeans, Carol Giles took the stand in her own defense. She maintained that it was Tim Collier who murdered Nancy Billiter. And to prove it, she finally told publicly why Billiter had to die. As the cops had always suspected, there was a much more plausible reason for her death than a simple burglary.

On October 1, 1997, just three days after they killed Jessie, Tim Collier drove the Caddy west along Interstate 80 for California. He was headed for Sacramento, where he planned to visit his mom and some friends. He told Carol he’d be home November 3, in time for her birthday, November 4.

As Tim drove west into the setting sunset, Nancy Billiter moved in to comfort her friend and her kids over their loss. Everything was going to be fine. Finally. Then Tim Collier got homesick.

Tim never expected that he would miss Carol and the kids so much. But after a day in California, he called every night. He said that he missed her, that all he could think about was her; he wanted to come home.

The wires from Sacramento to West Bloomfield burned up; they talked on the phone for hours. Tim knew he was showing too much weakness for her, but what could he do? He really loved and missed her. Hadn’t one of the reasons for killing Jessie been to be with her?

Collier used to tell Giles the story of his past with the gangs in California and his “adventures” with them. He claimed to have killed a lot of people. Carol figured he was trying to scare her, to keep her in line, but she always tried to act nonchalant about it. The last thing she wanted was for him to think she was afraid of him. But she was now, and for good reason.

Tim was a pretty jealous guy. Carol had started seeing him when she was still married. Maybe he figured that if she could cheat on her husband once, she could do it again.

On October 4, 1997, the kids were staying the night with their aunt. Tim was still in California and Carol was home alone. Having nothing to do, Carol tooled on over to South Boulevard Station. Nancy’s shift was over at about eleven o’clock and they were going to hang out. Hang out and get drunk—sounded like a good plan to the two best friends. And that’s what they did.

After Nancy’s shift was over, they hung at the bar, got really wasted, and got into the car to go home afterward. Before Carol could take off, she got a call on her cell phone.

It was Tommy, a male friend of hers from work. They had talked earlier in the day about possibly getting together. Carol explained that she and Nancy were on the way back to her place from the bar and they were drunk. Could he follow them home to make sure they got home in one piece?

In less than ten minutes, Tommy arrived and followed Carol and Nancy home. When they got there, Carol invited him in for a nightcap. They sat around the table in the living room. About midnight, Tim called from his mother’s house in Sacramento. That was Nancy’s cue.

Nancy closed the bedroom door, but not all the way, hustled Tommy out to his car, and then came back into the living room. Tim had heard the talking, muttering and movement in the background. He wanted to know who was there.

Carol said, “Just me and Nancy. We been to the bar and I’m drunk.”

“Carol, who is at the house?” Tim repeated edgily.

“Me and Nancy.”

“You are lying. I know you are lying.”

She said nothing.

“Who is at the house?” Tim demanded.

“Okay, me, Nancy and Tommy.”

Right away, he was upset. There was a conflict of a few months’ standing between the two men. Tommy didn’t want her to talk to Tim, and Tim didn’t want her to talk to Tommy. And she didn’t know why that was, just that they didn’t like each other.

Tim was more upset that she had lied about Tommy being at the house than the fact that the guy was there. Carol tried to explain, but it didn’t work. Tim was pissed. He had just helped kill the woman’s husband and now she was lying to him.

Would she watch his back, or would she kill him? Tim asked. Maybe she would have to watch
her
back? The only answer, Tim explained, was to stay together.

“All we have is each other,” said Tim.

“And because I lied about who was at my house, you don’t know if you can trust me anymore?”

That was it exactly.

During the conversation, Carol Giles’s voice got loud, loud enough to be heard in the living room, where Nancy was sitting. And Carol forgot Nancy was there and possibly hearing what was said.

“Tim, you know,
I
killed Jessie. I’m the one that injected him with the insulin.”

“But I’m still in trouble ’cause it was something
I
helped you with,” Tim answered.

Without him, he knew, there would have been no murder. But she told him that he didn’t kill Jessie, she did. She was the one who injected the heroin-laced insulin. Tim countered that he was the “mastermind” of the murder plot.

“The mastermind always gets more time than the person that did it,” he told her. They would both go to jail if the cops found out.

“But you didn’t do it. I’m the one that injected him, so that actually makes me the one that killed him.”

They dropped it at that and continued to talk every few days until the homesickness and separation finally got to Tim. After a few false starts, he left the coast to drive eastward. It took him three days and when he arrived back in Michigan, he strolled in. He hesitated when he saw Nancy.

He gave Carol a hug but continued to look at Nancy strangely. Later, in their bedroom, Tim said that he didn’t trust Nancy. During their phone conversation when they talked about killing Jessie, they were loud enough that Nancy could hear them in the next room.

Carol knew where this was going. She vehemently denied that Nancy had heard anything. She claimed she wasn’t that loud. There was no way Nancy could have heard. But, Tim explained rationally, on his end he had tried the same method of maintaining privacy, closing the door, and his mom had heard anyway.

“How do you know that?” Carol questioned.

Because his mom had told him so, Tim said.

It was a chilling answer because of what it implied. If his mom had heard their conversation with the door closed, then Nancy must have, too.

“No, c’mon!” said Carol.

“I tell you, Nancy knows!”

“No, she doesn’t.”

“She does,” Tim said with finality.

It was a death sentence.

“Nancy knows that we killed Jessie,” Tim stated matter-of-factly. Carol said she didn’t, but Tim waved her off. “She was in the house when we had that conversation [on the phone] last month from California where we talked about killing Jessie.”

“No, no, my bedroom door was dosed and I wasn’t that loud. She doesn’t know; she doesn’t know. I mean, she didn’t say anything.”

Of course she didn’t, Tim reasoned. Who would? She knew and she was keeping her mouth shut.

Carol didn’t want to continue arguing about it. Maybe if they stopped fighting, Tim’s suspicions would just go away. But they didn’t. Nancy heard them talking about killing Jessie. Tim’s mom surely wouldn’t tell the police, but what about Nancy? How did they know she wouldn’t rat?

“So it’s okay that your mom knows and she’s not gonna tell the police, and Nancy knows and she’s not gonna tell the police?”

Tim could vouch for his mom. He couldn’t vouch for Nancy.

“We can’t leave any witnesses,” Tim rationalized. “We have to get rid of Nancy.”

Shortly afterward, they visited her father and that’s when Carol began talking about killing him because he’d molested her. But did she really want to kill him, or was she just fantasizing?

Tim didn’t just talk, or fantasize. He had killed seven people, or so he said. Tim took murder seriously. If he had his way, they’d kill her father and Nancy, making their total kills together three.

Could they really get away with three murders?

They went to Sacramento to vacation. While they were there, the house was burglarized. Nancy said it was Stephanie Johnson; neither one believed she was telling the truth.

Tim was figuring that he should have killed Nancy when he got home from California. But he hesitated—because if he had killed Nancy, without Carol Giles’s permission, he would have had to kill her, too. And because he loved her so much, he decided not to do it. He spared both of them. But that was then, and this was now. With the burglary, and their suspicions about Nancy, they needed to get home fast.

The fastest way to get back, of course, was by plane. On short notice, however, the plane fares were outrageous. So were the trains. Their only recourse was the buses. Those fares, at least, were reasonable.

They left Carol Giles’s truck with the balky brakes in Sacramento and took the transcontinental bus out of San Francisco. Coming out of the city, they passed through the Feather River Valley, going east. It has some of the most beautiful wooded country Carol had ever seen. It was soft and tranquil, evergreens reaching as high as the sky, broad vistas of the Feather River flowing through a valley, and glimpses of fishermen casting their lines in for trout. It was a tranquil picture, unlike her mind that was raging.

Their bus hurled through the night. They dozed and then it stopped again in another anonymous bus station. The conversation changed over to talk of killing Carol Giles’s dad.

“I have the needles at home,” she reminded Tim, “the insulin needles.”

“We can use the needles and inject acid into his system,” said Tim. Carol thought that was “gross.”

The next night, they stopped someplace in Missouri. Around them, people ate sandwiches and drank their coffee. It was a placid, ordinary scene. Carol and Tim sat off to the side in shadows.

“Acid will just eat the organs up,” Tim began.

He’d been thinking about it a lot. And then Carol realized he wasn’t talking about her father; he was talking about Nancy! He wanted her to suffer.

“Or maybe I could just shoot her,” Tim mused.

Carol jumped at this opportunity to put Nancy out of her future misery. She didn’t believe any of it anyway.

“Yeah, we can just shoot her quick, quick and over with it.”

“No, that would be too easy,” Tim replied.

That’s when Tim thought of taking her into the basement. All the way home, Tim didn’t say another word about it. Carol hoped he’d just forgotten about it.

After three days and nights on buses, they finally got home. When they got in and talked to Nancy, sure enough, Tim didn’t make a big deal about the break-in. But upstairs, in private, it was different.

More than ever, Tim was convinced Nancy knew about Jessie’s murder. They didn’t know whether she’d told anyone about what she overheard, so they needed to get rid of her before things got worse.

Besides, their failure to let him pursue his sexual threesome fantasy still rankled. Tim still thought they were lovers on the sly and nothing Carol could say or do would disabuse him of that notion. Tim reasoned that if the two women were lovers, and Carol moved with him to the Coast, then Nancy, under the spell of jealousy, would turn them in to the police.

Worse, she’d turn
him
in in order to get Carol. She’d tell the cops that he’d done it, leaving Carol all to herself. It was a lesbian fantasy cooked up by a homophobic man.

Tim was fixated on murdering Nancy. Carol, though, figured she could change his mind.
She had to!
She liked Nancy. She was her best friend. She didn’t want to see anything happen to her best friend. It was one thing killing Jessie. There was ample reason and she stood to gain from it. But Nancy …

After they had returned home, Tim and Carol left to see if they could find their stolen jewelry in local pawnshops. They had had to pay the taxi driver $20 to take them home from the bus station. That left them with $20 in their pockets. Until she could make some drug deals, Carol planned to pawn her wedding ring while they were out looking. This way they could have some money. Nancy hadn’t even bothered to buy any food for the refrigerator.

After searching numerous pawnshops in Huron and Pontiac, they found nothing that even looked like it belonged to them. As for pawning her ring, they only offered her $100. A pawnshop she’d checked with a while back offered her $375.

It was getting cold and Carol remembered a sweater she had in the trunk. She opened the trunk. Staring up at her was her kids’ piggy bank.

“What the—”

Tim heard her and came around to look.

“So someone else broke in, huh?” he said sarcastically.

Carol continued to stare. Now she was convinced that Nancy had taken the stuff. She had used the Caddy to transport the rest of the stuff she had stolen and had left the piggy bank in the trunk because she could get nothing for it from her “fence.”

They drove home. When they arrived, Tim went to the bathroom while Carol made them sandwiches. She remembered that there were some people who owed her money from Jessie’s drug sales. After eating, they went over to collect the money they owed her. The debt collected, Tim said he was driving into Detroit to get the heroin for her dad. Carol gave him the money she just got. Tim dropped her off and drove south to Detroit.

November 13, 1997

Tim woke her up out of a sound sleep. It was 8:30
P.M.
He wanted to know if she had any pantyhose. She said she had four new pairs still in packages. Tim ordered her to get them all out and to get the piggy bank from the car trunk.

After she put the kids to bed at ten o’clock, Carol got the hose together, went out to the car, popped the trunk, and took out the piggy bank. Tim took the hose, opened the packages, and went down to the basement to the bed where Nancy liked to lounge and watch TV. She was still at work.

“We’ll tie her up,” he said.

Methodically, Tim tied the pantyhose to the front and rear of the bed, then tucked the ends under the mattress. Because the pantyhose had a clear color, you’d have to look twice to see it. He told Carol to go out to the garage and get the battery acid.