Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder (23 page)

It was Carol Giles, not Tim Collier, who went out to the garage and came back with the acid that she put on the bookshelf in the basement. It was Carol Giles who came down with Jessie’s insulin needles, a pair of yellow gloves and a package of “rubbers.”

Seventeen

Listening to the testimony, Helton thought about the condoms. Why the condoms? he wondered. Unless …

“’Cause he said that he was gonna rape Nancy,” Carol Giles said. “I can’t remember what his exact words were, but he said he was gonna rape Nancy.”

If Tim Collier used the condoms to sodomize Nancy when Carol wasn’t around, that would explain why his fluids were not found on her body.

Carol continued her testimony.

Tim had told her she had to be “more assertive.”

She knew. She knew exactly what was going to happen and what he wanted.

Tim was going to kill Nancy, and Carol was going to be a part of it. Not an observer but a participant. Tim
needed
her to be a part of it. They were in this
together
.

“Okay, I know what I have to do,” she told him.

She helped him cover the bed with a plastic sheet. Tim wasn’t worried so much about urine as he was about blood. They put the blanket back on the bed and made it up to look neat. Tim put the piggy bank in the corner so it couldn’t be seen. Then Tim laid out the plan.

“When Nancy gets home, I will get her high and we’ll talk. We’ll question her about where the stuff [she burglarized] is. She’s gonna tell us where the stuff is.”

They went back upstairs; Carol to the kitchen, and Tim to the bedroom. They figured they had all the details taken care of.

Nancy came home about 11:15
P.M.
The guy who drove her home decided to be a gentleman and escort her up to the house. If he’d stayed, his chivalry might have cost him his life. As it was, the guy came in with Nancy.

Carol was in the kitchen; Tim was in the bedroom. The guy only stayed a few seconds. He said, “Good night” and quickly strolled down the driveway and got into his car. He started it up and drove away.

Nancy asked Carol if she had any drugs. Carol said no, and that’s when Tim walked in. She asked if she could buy some from him.

“Yes,” he said affably.

Tim suggested they go downstairs to the basement. That’s when Carol noticed Tim had his gun. That hadn’t been part of the plan.

They went downstairs and Carol watched Nancy and Tim get stoned. Carol was supposed to start the conversation about the burglary, but she didn’t. She didn’t want to start the plot going. She hoped Tim would forget about it.

He didn’t.

“Nancy,” Tim asked her, “where’s the safe and stuff at?”

“I don’t know,” Nancy replied. “I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t steal, you know. I wouldn’t steal from Carol. And bein’, you know, that’s Jessie’s jewelry, that’s like stealing from a dead man.”

Tim insisted she had taken the stuff.

“What are you talking about, Tim?”

“Carol, what do you think?”

“Nancy, I don’t believe you.”

Tim took out his gun and pointed it at Nancy.

“Where [is] the safe from the upstairs closet at?” Tim asked.

“Tim, you’re scaring me. Stop playing; you’re scaring me.”

“Do you think I’m playing?”

Carol took the piggy bank off the shelf and confronted Nancy with it. But when Nancy denied having any part in the burglary, Carol whacked her with the bottle/bank and Nancy’s cheekbone sank like a crater.

Bleeding, Nancy fell back on the mattress. She was dazed. As her cuts seeped blood and her cheek turned black and blue, she managed to right herself by instinct and crawl back up to the foot of the bed.

After her hands and feet were tied up, Tim slapped her, over and over; hard blows rained down upon her face and head.

“No, don’t, please,” Nancy pleaded.

As Carol continued to describe the last moments of Nancy’s life, she said nothing about questioning Nancy about the overheard conversation. But the cops knew they must have. That was the reason for the method of death: Tim had tortured her with the acid injections to find out if she had told anyone else.

Tim had punched her over and over in the stomach. With each punch, Nancy had groaned in pain. Carol gagged her, and Tim had her start the injections. After the first one, he probably removed the gag to ask who had been told. When Nancy said “no one” and screamed, Carol would have put the gag back in.

A second injection. Carol removed the gag. Nancy was probably breathing heavily and groaning in pain.

“Nancy, did you tell anyone else about Jessie’s murder?”

Of course, she would have denied it, because the whole thing was doubtful to begin with. And after her second denial, a third injection happened. At that point, Tim may have been so frustrated by Nancy’s lack of cooperation that he attempted the rape, only to be repulsed by her until later. Maybe a few more questions, followed by a few more injections; until Tim would have proclaimed, “She won’t answer.”

It was then that he would have smothered her; when he knew for certain, when he felt in his gut, that she hadn’t told anyone about Jessie’s death and they were free and in the clear—if they could just kill her and get rid of the body so it couldn’t be tied back to them.

On cross-examination by Collier’s attorney, Carol Giles didn’t deviate from her story. Just like with Jessie, Tim Collier was the planner. Whatever she did to Nancy, it was what Tim forced her to do, at threat of death.

Then it was Tim Collier’s turn to turn the tables, or at least to try.

“I never planned to do it. I never wanted anyone to die,” Collier testified, countering Giles’s claim.

It was Carol who killed Nancy. He denied hitting her with a gun. Tim told the jurors he just wanted to frighten Nancy, and that was why he helped tie her up.

On closing, Skrzynski said that even if Collier merely watched he was guilty of first-degree murder because he suggested smothering Billiter.

“You couldn’t write a more premeditated murder than what was going on in that torture chamber,” Skrzynski said.

What could Basch and Ribitwer do? If the jury believed her, Carol Giles’s testimony was fatally damaging. They could only counter that the other guy did it.

The closing arguments over, the judge charged the juries and sent them off to deliberate. This time, the verdicts didn’t come back in twenty minutes or ninety minutes.

It took two hours. And at the end of that time, both juries pronounced Carol Giles and Tim Collier guilty of first-degree murder in the death of Nancy Billiter. Neither Giles nor Collier looked stunned by the verdicts.

“That’s what she gets!” Stacy Billiter, Nancy’s twenty-six-year-old daughter, shouted out when Carol Giles’s verdict was read.

Stacy clapped loudly. Tears flowed down her face. She had flown in from her Savannah, Georgia, home just to see justice done. As Giles was led out, she glanced back at Stacy with a wistful look in her eyes.

“Not only have I lost my mother, but also my father, sister and brother because she was all of those things to me,” said Stacy afterward to the press. “She went out of her way to help friends, like she tried to do for Carol and Tim.”

As for Tim Collier’s contention that Carol had done it and not him, one juror said afterward that Collier’s testimony was “totally unbelievable.”

“There’s no way in the world Nancy knew about Jessie’s murder,” said Phyllis Burke. “I don’t know if we’ll get through this or not. Nancy was a good person. She loved everybody. That’s what I don’t understand. She was good to Carol.”

October 9, 1998

One more earthly judgment day before the Final Judgment would be rendered. They would have to wait for the latter, Tim and Carol, and they would have a lot of time to think about where they were going.

All of the lead cops were there—Shanlian, Messina and Helton. So was Nancy’s family, packed into the courtroom; some members were weeping as they listened throughout the sentencing.

Dressed in jailhouse orange, shackled at hands and feet, Carol Giles and Tim Collier were brought in and took their seats with their lawyers at the defense table. The ex-lovers sat several feet apart and did not exchange so much as a glance or a word.

“Do the defendants have anything to say before I pronounce sentence?” asked Judge Nichols.

This time, Collier declined to say anything. It was probably best; his last speech didn’t help. Carol Giles, though, stood.

“I just want to apologize to the family because I know they’ve been hurt,” she said in classic understatement. “I can’t explain how all this happened, but no matter how many times I say I’m sorry, this won’t change.”

Judge Nichols looked down on the convicted double murderers with a cold gleam in his eye.

“You look at these actions, at man’s inhumanity to man, and you cannot even fathom it,” he began.

Then he sentenced them to life in prison without parole.

“You will spend the rest of your life in prison trying to remember what it’s like to be a real human being,” he concluded, and banged down his gavel.

Michigan didn’t have the death penalty; if the state did, Tim Collier was one person who might benefit from it. At least that’s what Tom Helton thought.

Some of Nancy’s family had initially wished the state could impose that punishment. After sitting through the trials, they changed their minds.

“With the death penalty, they would not have suffered like my sister suffered,” said Karen Clason, Nancy’s sister, to one of the press people.

“Does it [life in prison] make it better?” asked Susan Garrison, also speaking to the press. “Nothing will make it better.”

Epilogue

Carol Giles and Tim Collier are now serving their time in the Michigan State penal system. They will be there for the rest of their natural lives.

Carol Giles’s children continue to live with Maddie Marion, Jessie’s sister. No one knows what the long-term effect of their mother’s incarceration for their father’s death will be.

In March 1999, John Skrzynski got the conviction of a lifetime when he convicted Jack Kevorkian of second-degree murder. The conviction was based upon a celebrated tape Kevorkian had shown on
60 Minutes
, where he administered a lethal injection to Thomas J. Youk.

Mike Messina is still a detective sergeant in the West Bloomfield Township Police Department. He is scheduled to retire in 2002.

Largely on the basis of his fine work in the Billiter/Giles case, Tom Helton has not been rotated back to patrol. He continues to work as a detective on the West Bloomfield Township police force.

Kevin Shanlian is still solving murder cases in Flint. He still has to consciously remember to wear his gun when he goes out in the field.

And the Billiter family? They continue to grieve. They also had some practical problems to consider.

“We were getting bills from the ambulance company that picked Nancy up and took her to the hospital,” says Susan Garrison. “It was like we don’t need this right now.”

Carol Giles and Tim Collier get all of their medical care for free.

A WORD ABOUT SOURCES

The story you have just read is true, but certain names were changed to protect the privacy of those individuals on the periphery of the case.

Interviews, official documents, as well as local news accounts, have all been used in the writing of this book. A few scenes have been presented out of chronological order not for dramatic effect but to simplify the narrative. Likewise, the investigation presented in these pages involved many police officers. For the sake of clarity, the story is presented principally through the eyes of the three lead cops.

The documentation on the investigation of both murders covered in these pages was the most detailed I have ever seen. One can never predict what the appeals courts will do, but it is highly doubtful either defendant will ever be freed on some police or prosecutorial irregularity.

In particular, I want to thank Tom Helton for his tireless cooperation. Mike Messina, Kevin Shanlian and Susan Garrison were also incredibly helpful in providing information about the case and, in particular, their feelings.

Finally I’d like to thank my editor Paul Dinas for his support.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Throughout the writing of this book, I kept two pictures of Nancy Billiter on my desk.

The first was Nancy, in death, as the police first discovered her. The second was a nursing school photo; Nancy with a bright smile in her nurse’s cap. The contrast could not be more startling and more indicative of the life Nancy Billiter lost.

Both the Billiter and the Giles families did not want this book written. They felt that it was dredging up old wounds, which they preferred to keep closed. One family member I spoke with accused me of making money off the dead.

Patiently, but angrily, I explained that if that were true, so were the
Detroit Free Press
, the
Detroit News
, the Associated Press and all the local stations in Detroit that covered the case.

What I do plead guilty to is painting as clear and as bloody a picture as possible of the murders. To do anything else would be to cheat Nancy and Jessie, just as Carol and Tim did.

It is only in the harsh light of investigation, in an attempt to make sense out of senseless events, that the most barbaric of acts can be finally understood. And accepted.

If in the process I have spoken for the dead, then I feel that I have done my job.

Fred Rosen can be contacted at
crimedoesntpay.com

APPENDIX

Note: Carol Giles actually gave three statements to police. Because much of what she said was repetitious, they were edited down in the text.

Yet, despite all she said, the one question that was never answered to anyone’s satisfaction was whether or not Nancy Billiter had been sodomized after death. Did Tim Collier perpetrate this crime while Carol Giles watched? Tom Helton felt that the first statement she gave police, in which she said she went upstairs while Tim remained downstairs, was the key to proving this heinous act.