Because You Loved Me (21 page)

Because it had been so hot and muggy over the past few days, Jeanne had placed a small air conditioner in the window downstairs. It had been on, buzzing and rattling the windowpanes, ever since she got home. As she and Billy continued arguing, Jeanne walked over to the door leading up the stairs to Nicole’s room to shut it. She was incensed that it had been left open. Closing it kept the cool air downstairs.

When Jeanne walked over to close the door, she turned her back to Billy.

Billy stood for a moment staring at her. He now had the aluminum bat in his hands. While he watched Jeanne close the door, he gripped the bat with rage. He then came out of whatever spell he had fallen under and tried to further explain why he and Nicole
needed
to be together. Their bond wasn’t an ordinary love, some teenage romance to brush off. It was much more.

Why can’t you understand that?

“What do
you
know?” Billy remembered screaming at Jeanne when she ignored what he had said. It was as if he had given Jeanne one last chance to accept the relationship on his terms.

Instead, Jeanne threw her hands up in the air, according to Billy, and screamed at him: “Because I’m her mother! That’s why I know. I know best.”

Wow,
Billy thought as Jeanne spoke,
this lady has serious PMS
.

At that moment, Billy explained to police later, “I just wanted, you know, to spit in her face and walk out.”

But, of course, he didn’t.

With her back facing him, Billy claimed, Jeanne said with force, “Nicole needs to get her ass home.”

“Fighting with my conscience,” Billy said, he then “swung the bat. My plan was to hit her in the back of the head. I fought with my conscience, three feet long.”

This is not going to happen.

And then he swung.

“You come to a point where you’d do anything for love,” Billy later said. “Nicole and I actually played that song from the band Simple Plan, ‘I’d Do Anything,’ on the way to Jeanne’s house that night.” Nicole looked at him, Billy said, as they drove around getting up the nerve to carry out “the plan,” and said, “In a couple of hours, Billy, I’ll be yours.”

A plan doesn’t always go as it should, however: thus, instead of hitting Jeanne in the head, Billy missed and struck flush across her back, leaving a welt from Jeanne’s right armpit up toward her left elbow. The impact of the blow pushed Jeanne against the wall by the attic door and startled her.

Shocking to Billy, she didn’t go down.

After she realized what had happened, Jeanne turned, holding her side and, according to Billy, said, “What the
f
- - - are you doing?”

Jeanne was no doubt surprised by Billy’s sudden outburst of violence. It was the last thing she could have expected. She knew Billy was unstable and had told scores of her friends there was something about him that “just wasn’t right.” Yet, she never once thought he was capable of such an outburst.

Billy later said after he struck Jeanne in the back, he then swung again and hit her in the head. Sketches by the medical examiner support this claim, as well as crime scene photographs, which illustrate a large split in the back of Jeanne’s skull.

Justifying what he had done, Billy told himself, “OK. I lost Nicole. That was the worst thing that could possibly happen and it happened. So what the hell. Who cares now?”

Finish it
.

The jig was up for Billy Sullivan. Now that he had exposed his true self in front of Jeanne, there was no way she was going to ever allow him to see Nicole again—better yet, take her back to Connecticut. Standing, looking at Jeanne as she held her side and cried out in pain, he thought,
The worst thing that I feared could happen, happened.

Why stop now?

So, Billy lunged at Jeanne. They both fell on a coffee table in the living room, breaking it to pieces. For a few seconds, they fought like stray cats, scratching, kicking, pulling hair.

“Wrestling,” Billy called it later.

He claimed it was a struggle to keep Jeanne down on the floor. She was much stronger than he had anticipated and wouldn’t let up. At some point during that part of their encounter, Jeanne even managed to run for the kitchen door.

Interestingly, while Billy and Jeanne fought inside the house, Nicole sat in Billy’s car and read a magazine she had purchased inside 7-Eleven.

Jeanne almost made it to the door. But Billy was right behind her—and pulled her back into the house. When she fell to the floor, she tried to get up, but Billy pushed her down again.

With that, Jeanne sat on the floor, caught her breath and then, according to Billy, “tackled me.”

“Then I figured, you know, I already started, I might as well finish.”

After breaking free, Billy ran into the kitchen and grabbed a steak knife off the counter as Jeanne tried to collect herself and prepare a defense. Then, running back at Jeanne, who was still trying to catch her breath and regroup, as the pain of being hit in the back and head with an aluminum baseball bat throbbed, Billy lunged at Jeanne with the knife and stabbed her on the corner of her right shoulder, burying the knife down to her bone, using so much force the knife blade broke off, sprang back like a diving board, nicked his hand and fell to the floor.

Realizing what had happened, Billy grabbed a second knife, this time from that same butcher block set Jeanne had been so against keeping in the house. It was right there on the countertop.

With a more durable weapon, Billy went straight for Jeanne’s upper body, and as he put it later, “I stabbed her a few times in the throat. I just figured”—he laughed here recalling the incident to law enforcement—“um, point of no return. No going back now. I was scared.”

Jeanne Dominico was being attacked savagely with a knife and Billy Sullivan felt frightened.

Billy later claimed that when Jeanne raised her voice at him, it triggered the attack. Once they started arguing and Jeanne yelled, he said, he felt he couldn’t stop himself from going after her. He even fantasized for a brief moment that “there was something [he] could [do to] make Jeanne lose her memory,” so she could forget about what had just happened. There was a moment while they fought when Billy said he considered,
If I would have just hit her in the back of the head, she would not have seen me.

At some point, while Billy struck Jeanne with a second knife, he dropped it on the floor. Jeanne got up off the ground, picked the knife up and ran at him. But as she tried to stab him, she slipped on her own blood, bumped into Billy’s side and went headfirst into the Plexiglas portion of the door, pushing the middle window out in a weblike crack.

From there, Billy grabbed a third knife and let loose in a flurry of motions, stabbing Jeanne anywhere he could get in a blow. In a quick burst of forward thrusts, he kept going and going until Jeanne stopped fighting. As this happened, Billy later told a friend, “I felt as if I was watching the entire scene on a television screen—looking at it all through someone else’s eyes.”

“What was going through my mind,” Billy explained to police, “is, no matter what you do, if she’s…If I leave now, she’ll bleed and call 911 and the cops will be at your door in an hour. If you finish it, you have at least that
little
chance of getting out of there.”

Billy remembered stabbing Jeanne “eight times.” In truth, the medical examiner counted forty stab wounds: two in Jeanne’s back, one on her wrist, seven to her chest and throat, six to her face, thirteen on the right side of her head, two on the left and nine in the back of her neck and head.

When Billy finally stopped stabbing Jeanne, he went straight for the door. What he didn’t notice then was that he had left bloody prints on the knives he had used, the baseball bat, a palm print on the refrigerator, which authorities believed happened as he and Jeanne fought, and a large print of his hand on the carpet in the living room, notwithstanding several bloody footprints throughout the living room.

As he grabbed the door handle to leave, Billy looked down. He noticed blood all over his clothes, face, hands.

He was covered.

With a punctured lung, Jeanne struggled to breathe.

“S- - -,” Billy said, looking at himself, “what do I do now?”

“OK,” he remembered hearing Jeanne say as she took her last breath, “I’m done.”

Billy Sullivan was a control freak. He was jealous beyond anything Nicole had experienced before meeting him. Nicole rarely left her house. It wasn’t, she explained later, that she didn’t want to, but Billy “thought I was always out with some guy, having sex with some guy.” So she decided that to avoid any snappish, accusatory jabs from Billy, it was better to just stay home.

A prisoner.

Nicole had given her telephone number to another boy she met online near the same time she hooked up with Billy.
Adam
was a nice kid, she explained. Just a friend she could confide in and talk to like a girlfriend. Billy got the kid’s name from Nicole one night as they talked (he was an expert at getting things out of Nicole without her knowledge of his manipulative ways). After that day, Nicole recalled, “Every time I wanted to do anything, Billy’s like, ‘I know you’re out with Adam. I know you’re screwing Adam.’”

The thought of cheating on Billy was so far removed from Nicole’s mind that whenever Billy mentioned it, she felt “awful.” It got to the point that when Nicole did leave the house, she had to telephone Billy and tell him where she was going and when she’d be back.

“And if I wasn’t there when he called, it was like there would be hell to pay.”

As the months of their relationship progressed, Nicole said she fell under Billy’s complete spell. What was once a normal mother-daughter relationship she had with Jeanne turned into a festering hatred—mostly, Nicole insisted, because of Billy’s constant mind control. School became secondary to Billy. Work slacked. Extracurricular activities were no longer an option. Even sleep, Nicole admitted, was a chore.

“…Because I wanted to talk to him so much.”

It was “all about Billy. I didn’t want to do anything other than talk to him. And the way I felt about him was so strong that I cared about everything he thought, that he felt, that he did. And if he was telling me something, well, I believed it one hundred percent.”

Near the end of Jeanne’s life, she, Nicole and Drew argued almost daily. Because Nicole was on the telephone with Billy for most of her waking hours, Billy was privy to the different points of view, listening on the other end of the line as they went at it. No matter what the quarrel was about, who was right or wrong, Billy spun the result of it into a way to make Nicole believe no one cared about her.

“See,” Billy said one night after Nicole and Jeanne screamed at each other for five minutes while he listened, “they don’t care about you. They don’t want to see you happy. Look what they’re doing to you. They’re making you miserable.”

Nicole had a tough time, she claimed, listening to, or believing, anyone else but Billy.

“I mean, after you hear that one time, it will probably go in one ear and out the other. But Billy said it so often that I just ended up starting to believe it. And that changed everything.”

So when it came time for Nicole to play a part in her mother’s murder and help Billy, he knew damn well she was going to do what he said, no questions asked.

Nicole was getting nervous. Sitting in Billy’s car at 7-Eleven, waiting for him to return, she wondered what was going on inside the house. Looking in all directions, fidgeting with Billy’s cell phone, Nicole wondered why he hadn’t returned yet.

What is taking so damn long?

Meanwhile, Billy was “panicking” as he stood by the door wondering what to do next. He had just taken Jeanne’s life. He was covered with blood. He needed to change clothes, get back to the car and get the hell out of town.

“So what I did was…the second I was done…it, you know, turned into a wrestling match. God, it did. So after the thing was done,” Billy said, he then walked over Jeanne’s body and ran up the stairs.

“Stupid me,” he added, “running with my bloody shoes up the stairs.”

He left a bloody trail of footprints throughout the house without realizing it.

When he got upstairs, Billy grabbed the first jacket he saw. Ran back downstairs. Threw it on the floor next to Jeanne and spread it out. Then he stripped down to his underwear, placed all his clothes in the jacket, folded it up and went into the bathroom to wash the blood off his hands and arms before putting on a fresh set of clothes.

After getting dressed, he ran out the door and headed for 7-Eleven. At that moment, Nicole was leaning against the back of the hood “reading a magazine.”

“It’s done…. Let’s go,” said Billy, startling Nicole, slapping the hood of his car.

“What…what’s happening?”

“Son of a bitch, I left my inhaler in the house. I need a towel. You gotta go back in there and get it.”

They got into the car. Billy’s eyes, Nicole said, “were bulging out of his head.” He looked stressed beyond belief. He couldn’t keep still.

Manic.

“Why are you wearing different clothes?” asked Nicole.

“S- - -, s- - -, s- - -. I had to change clothes in the house because there was so much blood.”

Nicole took a closer look. Billy still had blood on his shirt and face.

“Oh my God, Billy,” she said.

“Give me that Mountain Dew,” Billy said, pointing to a bottle of soda lying on the floorboard.

Nicole watched Billy take a good slug of the soda. And when he came up for air, he looked at her and said, “You
have
to go back into the house.”

“What?”

Billy started the car.

“I need a wet towel to clean myself off. You have to see if I left anything behind.”

“No way. There’s no way I can do that.”

Nicole was now crying uncontrollably. It was the first time she could recall where she had ever said no to a request Billy had made. “I never said no to him, ever. I always did what he wanted me to do.”

“You have to do your part! Come on, Nicole. I just did this
huge
thing and…you…you
have
to help me.”

Taking a left out of 7-Eleven, Billy hit the gas and traveled about sixty miles per hour down Deerwood, making a sharp right onto Dumaine. He then flew around the corner, barreling his way toward Jeanne’s house.

“You’re going in the house, Nicole.”

Crying, “I don’t want to see it.”

“I don’t care. You’re going in to get that stuff.”

“I know what you did. I don’t want to see it.”

Nicole let out a gasp.

“Shut up,” said Billy.

“Oh my God! Oh my God!” Nicole was losing it quickly. She couldn’t believe he had actually done it. What might have seemed like some sort of Dungeons & Dragons dare had turned into reality in a flash.

At this point, Billy later claimed, Nicole said, “Well, now we’re going to be together.” She seemed happy it was over, he insisted.

Regardless, Billy pulled into Jeanne’s driveway.

“Get out. I’ll meet you in the bank parking lot. Go! Go! Now.”

As Billy pulled out of the driveway, Nicole, trembling and crying, walked toward the house. After opening the breezeway door, she grabbed the screen-door handle, then tried to push open the solid door heading into the house.

But it wouldn’t move. Something was blocking it from behind.

Forcing it open a crack, Nicole looked in. It was Jeanne’s lifeless body.

“At first,” recalled Nicole, “I only saw her left foot. And there was blood on half of it.”

Realizing it was her mother’s body blocking the door, Nicole took a step back.

“I couldn’t handle it. I didn’t know what to do. I was thinking, ‘What’s going on? What am I doing? Why do I have to do this?’”

The influence Billy had over Nicole, however, was more empowering than her will. Standing there, Nicole realized Billy was counting on her. She felt she had to do what he said. No question about it. She feared his reaction if she didn’t.

So Nicole built up a bit of courage and pushed the door open with all her might. Walking in, she saw the woman who had given her life lying dead on the kitchen floor. Blood was all over the room. Household items smashed and tossed about as if the place had been burgled. The countertop was a mess. Jeanne’s eyes were open.

“Billy was depending on me.”

For a moment, as Nicole walked through the kitchen, stepping over her mother’s body, she “lost track of what” she was supposed to do. After making her way into the bathroom, grabbing a towel and wetting it, she headed for the door. As she made her way through the kitchen, Nicole noticed the broken knife blade on the floor.

“So I picked it up and I left.”

Leaving the breezeway, she ran toward the bank parking lot. Billy was pulling into the parking lot as she came out of her backyard and approached the car. On the opposite side of Billy’s car, several yards away, was a sewer drain. Nicole tossed the knife blade into the drain and hopped into Billy’s car.