Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder (7 page)

“Here you go,” said one of the MSP lab boys.

He handed over Nancy’s clothing and the flowered blanket she’d been found in. Nancy’s clothing reeked of gasoline. Fedorenko’s nose wrinkled up at the stench. He bagged the clothing as evidence and then began the grim task of gathering evidence.

Unless Fedorenko needed them, MSP could call it a night. Fedorenko thanked them, and they left. Using the search warrant that a local magistrate had given him, he and his search crew entered the house.

Fedorenko took out his camera. Using five rolls of film, he shot the entire interior of the house. Afterward, he collected two samples of blood spatter he found on the basement wall and one sample from the top of a table located near the blood-spattered wall.

Moving out to the garage, he looked up and saw a mattress in the rafters. What the hell was that doing there? He had the search crew take it down. Examining it, Fedorenko removed one side of the outer cover of the mattress. It was the side that contained blood and what looked like other types of fluids.

On a large round table in the living room, he found a plastic bag that contained an off-white hard substance that he suspected was the crack Tim had been smoking at the time of the murder. Crack, of course, is a deadly drug, but it doesn’t produce immediate physical devastation, not like the weapon he found in the master bedroom closet.

It was a shiny 12-gauge shotgun. Ever since it had become the weapon of choice for bad guys on TV, ordinary citizens had been buying them in droves. It was the sound that attracted the buyers. It was a hard, cold snap, the sound of a shell being loaded into the chamber that sent chills up any burglar’s spine.

Fedorenko broke it open and sniffed. It wasn’t loaded and it had not been fired recently.

Nothing in either suspect’s statement led anyone to believe it was involved in the crime. Still, considering that the residents of the house might not be back for a long time—at least he hoped so—Fedorenko thought it prudent to collect the weapon for safekeeping.

He carefully tabulated what had been taken and left that, plus a copy of the search warrant, on the dining room table. He had tow trucks come by to pick up the cars. By the time he got back to headquarters, it was 8:29
A.M.

Fedorenko secured the evidence in evidence lockers designed for that specific purpose, and the vehicles involved—Carol’s Sable and Jessie’s Caddy—were secured in the garage by locking them and placing yellow police tape around them.

The gas-soaked clothing, a shirt, a pair of jeans, two socks, women’s panties and a black shoe, as well as the blanket, were hung up to dry. From the blanket, Fedorenko cut out a sample, which was put into a can for further testing.

November 15, 1977

He had arrived home too late the night before to do anything about it, but he knew the office would be open early, even on Saturday mornings.

At 7:00
A.M.
, Shanlian called the admitting office at Hurley Hospital, where Nancy’s body had been taken. He told them the victim’s name and that the body was located in the hospital morgue.

At 8:00
A.M.
, Shanlian got Grant Williams, the county medical examiner, on the phone. He told him that Oakland County had venue in the case and that the body would be released to Dr. Dragovic, the Oakland County medical examiner.

Late that morning, the body was transferred to the ME’s headquarters in Pontiac for autopsy.

Carol awoke late morning on Saturday. About noon, a staff member knocked and then popped her head through the door of her room.

“You okay? Like to talk?” the staffer asked brightly.

Carol declined the offer and said nothing else.

“I’ll be around if you need to talk,” she said, and closed the door behind her.

Carol only left her room to get something to eat and smoke a few cigarettes. She interacted with no one, appearing to many of the residents to be withdrawn. One resident, curious at this new arrival, did happen to approach her and ask, “Hey, how come you have such a large room?”

“Because I might pick up my two children to come here also,” Carol explained.

She never mentioned why she was really there, or that it might be a very long time before she saw her kids again. While Carol engaged in whatever rationalizations were necessary for her to get through the day, Tom Helton was busy.

Helton went to the prosecutor’s office and presented all of the information they had to that point. Kate McNamara, the on-call prosecutor, wanted Carol to take a polygraph. While not admissible in court, police look at it as an accurate method of assessing the veracity of a suspect’s story. But with its low crime rate, West Bloomfield Township really had no reason to maintain such a sophisticated polygraph setup. The Oakland County Sheriff’s Department, which covered the entire county, did. Helton contacted them to set up a polygraph for Carol Giles.

During a polygraph, systems of measurements are taken that measure the body’s response to a series of questions. The questions that make the subject want to lie create a psychological emergency. In turn, that results in changes to the autonomic nervous system: respiration, galvanic skin response, relative blood pressure and pulse. Those changes are noted and evaluated by the polygraph examiner, who then tells the detective where the suspect has been truthful and where the suspect has lied.

Unfortunately, it was Saturday. The Sheriff’s Office didn’t have a polygraph examiner on duty. Helton had never been in this situation before and didn’t know where to get one. He’d have to figure that out later. He needed to get Carol. Helton drove over to Haven to pick her up and soon ran into trouble.

The women who availed themselves of the shelter’s services did so because they had been battered and had a problem with trust. Haven, in turn, felt a responsibility to keep their clients’ names confidential. They wouldn’t confirm or deny that any one person was there, even to the police.

“But this is a murder case,” Helton explained to an administrator, “and I brought this woman, Carol Giles, here myself last night.”

The administrator explained that that didn’t make any difference. “But we brought her here last night,” Helton complained to one of Haven’s officials. “She’s a suspect in a homicide investigation!”

“Sorry,” said the official. “We can’t let you in. It’s against the rules.”

“How about just calling her and telling her to come out here and meet us? We’re the police. We’re not the batterers. We brought her here for safety.”

The official shook his head. He wouldn’t even confirm for Helton that Carol Giles was there. Helton squared his shoulders. Striding deliberately out into the corridor, he pulled out his cell phone and dialed.

“You’ve reached Haven,” said the operator who answered his call. “May I help you?”

“Yes, this is Officer Tom Helton of the West Bloomfield Township Police Department. I’d like to talk to Carol Giles. She’s one of your residents.”

“We don’t take messages here for residents.”

“Well, can you give her a message to call me? I’m out front and—”

“Look, Officer Helton, I can’t even acknowledge she’s here.”

“Well, I need to contact her. What will you do?”

“We’ll post a message on the bulletin board,” the receptionist explained. “If she gets it, she gets it, if she doesn’t, she doesn’t.”

“That’s not gonna work! That’s not good enough.”

Damn.

Helton called Kate McNamara, the prosecutor, who, in turn, called the director of Haven. After haggling and negotiating, eventually they got Carol to call Helton on his cell phone. Helton identified himself and told her he was out front on his cell phone.

“Carol, please come out. We need to talk to you.”

If she didn’t come out, Helton probably would have had to get a warrant for her arrest. They still wanted to go soft on her until they knew exactly what happened, but if it became necessary, hard would have to do just as well.

Luck, though, was with them.

Finally, Carol came out front. Helton met her and introduced her to a uniformed deputy who, he said, would escort her to police headquarters. After she left, Helton went home.

Helton had been on duty for twenty-four hours. He was no good to anyone if he couldn’t think because of exhaustion. While he settled into his bed for some much-needed rest, his supervisor, Sergeant Mike Messina, would be taking over.

Six

Because of various regulations requiring detectives to rotate back to uniformed duty, plus retirements, there was no man or woman in the West Bloomfield Township detective division with more than two years of experience in investigations. Most, actually, had less.

Mike Messina was the exception.

Messina was a veteran, or a dinosaur, depending on your point of view. What was undeniable was the man’s experience.

By the time Jessie Giles had blown into town, Mike Messina had been a police officer for twenty-five of his forty-seven years. Since 1982 he’d been a detective. He was the go-to guy when a problem came up and experience was needed.

Relaxing at home with a cup of coffee on that Saturday, Messina was sitting at his kitchen table, reading the paper, when the phone rang. Still studying the Pistons stats from the game the night before, Messina picked up the phone.

“Hello?”

It was the chief. After briefing Messina on the case, he told him that the next step was getting Carol Giles hooked up to a polygraph. Messina hung up the phone and began to think.

West Bloomfield wasn’t Detroit, where they had murders all the time and polygraph examiners available twenty-four hours. Where was Messina supposed to get a polygraph examiner in an affluent, safe Detroit suburb on a Saturday? Messina realized he needed a favor, but from whom?

The answer was Chester Romatowski.

Chet was an old acquaintance of Messina’s. He was a polygraph examiner affiliated with the Oakland County Sheriff’s Department (OCSD). He called Chet at home and explained the situation. Immediately, Chet volunteered to help.

Messina briefed Romatowski on the case so he could tailor his questions accordingly. They were interested principally in the extent of Carol’s involvement with the killing and the disposal of the body. Messina arranged to meet him at the OCSD polygraph office in Pontiac. He then had a deputy transport Carol to Pontiac for the test.

L. J. Dragovic looked down at the naked body on the cold metal of the autopsy table. His skilled hands moved over it, examining, probing.

As the chief medical examiner for Oakland County, he had most recently tried to nail Dr. Jack Kevorkian for helping to administer lethal doses of carbon monoxide to Merian Frederick and Dr. Ali Khalili. And failed. Or at least the system had; Kevorkian had been found not guilty at trial in March 1996.

Now, Dragovic put all that out of his mind and noted that Billiter’s nostrils contained a large amount of dried blood, and the nose itself looked like it had been hit by something. Her lips were split from injury; her mouth contained dried blood. Neck, chest and abdomen also had been injured.

When he turned her over, he saw that her anus and lower extremities had been traumatized. Her body had been doused with some gasolinelike chemical.

Both of Nancy’s hands had been covered with plastic bags at the scene, which Dragovic now removed. He noted that her hands had a moderate “washerwoman’s hands” appearance.

Samples of combed and pulled scalp and pubic hair were taken, along with fingernail clippings. Oral, vaginal and rectal smears were also taken. If Billiter had been sodomized, and the perpetrator ejaculated, it should show up on a DNA analysis.

Going back for a more careful examination, Dragovic noted “blunt force trauma” on the right side of the forehead, right temple, right ear and back of the head with bleeding into the subcutaneous tissue of the scalp. The right eye socket was bruised, with swelling and bruising of the right cheekbone.

There was extensive bruising of the left eye socket, too, extending into the left cheekbone with marked swelling of the face in the area. There was a three-quarter-inch-long patterned tear of the skin on the left side of the lower part of the forehead. Another one-half-inch-long tear of the scalp was observed in the upper part of the left side of the forehead.

Farther down on the face, Billiter’s nose had been fractured and the skin scraped at various points. There were also extensive scrapes on the left side of the lower face extending into the left side of the chin. Both upper and lower lips were torn extensively, with bruising of the front parts of the upper and lower gums. As for her mouth, there was a large amount of aspirated (thrown up) blood in the upper and lower airways.

Along the extremities, hands, arms and wrists had been bruised extensively and in some places, the skin torn. Her belly had a bruise and the right lower chest area, too. There was dried blood within and around the anus with superficial tearing, indicative of sodomy. That is, sodomy while the victim was alive.

Dead bodies do not bleed. If she had been sodomized after death, there would have been no bleeding. But there was and that’s how Dragovic knew it had happened while she was alive. That didn’t mean, however, that the sodomy did not extend
into
death. The perpetrator could have penetrated her prior to death and then continued after she died. They wouldn’t know that until, at least, someone was held responsible for the crime.

Moving back across the body, Dragovic discovered fractures of the right seventh through eleventh ribs. Then he noted “sharp force injury.” There was an almost one-inch-deep cut in the “inner aspect of the left thumb.” As for the strange discoloring on her arms that the cops had noted at the scene, Dragovic solved that mystery quickly.

“There are multiple areas of injection sites,” he wrote in his autopsy report, “featuring superficial and deep chemical burns situated in the right and left sides of the neck, upper mid belly area, and mid lower and left belly areas, inner aspect of the right thigh, right lower groin and outside aspect of the right thigh as well as inner aspect of the right lower leg.”