Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder (14 page)

Messina asked Carol to stand up. When she did, he told her that she was under arrest for the murder of Nancy Billiter.

“But—”

“Just listen. You have the right to remain silent. If you give up your right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to the presence of an attorney. If you cannot afford one, the court will appoint one for you. Do you understand these rights?”

“Yes,” said Carol.

Messina put the cuffs on her.

“Okay.”

Messina did not want Carol lodged in West Bloomfield, where Collier already was. It was a small jail; it would be too easy for them to talk to each other, to get their stories straight. Instead, he called in another favor and found her accommodations in a cell in the Oakland County Jail. But before she got there, he wanted her to make a few stops first.

Carol had given Messina a lot of information in her statement about where the evidence of the homicide had been secreted in various Dumpsters throughout the county. He sent her out with a few officers to recover that evidence, which they eventually did. Once that was done, she was taken to her cell in the Oakland County Jail.

Prisoners have rights, even when incarcerated. One of those rights is the ability to make phone calls during recreation periods. That night, Carol made a phone call.

At Phyllis Burke’s house, the phone rang. Nancy’s mother picked it up.

“Will you accept a collect phone call from Carol Giles?” the operator asked.

Burke looked down at her caller ID. The digital readout was
OAKLAND COUNTY JAIL.

Burke hung up and called her daughter Susan. She told her that Carol was the one and that she should come over right away. Susan didn’t understand, but she came over quickly. When her daughter arrived, Burke said that she thought it was Carol who killed Nancy.

Burke explained that she had just gotten a collect phone call from Nancy. She was in the Oakland County Jail. What would she be doing there—unless she’d killed Nancy?

Susan paused to think.

“Mom, call the police and tell them what’s going on. Make a report.”

Saturday night, November 15, 1997. Tim Collier was definitely not partying, though he would have liked to if he were on the outside. Instead, he had a lot of time to think in his cell in the West Bloomfield lockup. He kept wondering where Carol was; no one had brought her in. That meant only one thing.

She was free because she’d ratted him out.

The woman he had killed for, the woman he had loved, the woman he had trusted, had ratted him out. While Michigan didn’t have the death penalty, the state legislature had made it law that if you were convicted of first-degree murder—the crime he was charged with—you would get life without parole.

That would be it. Conviction meant no more partying, no more girls, no more anything. Unless he spoke up, he was going down for murder one—and Carol was going to walk.

Tim was nothing if streetwise. He knew better than to talk to a cop without an attorney being present. But he was so angry that Carol had ratted him out that he was willing to waive his right to have an attorney present while he gave his statement to police.

He was standing at the bars to his cell, looking out at the empty cells around him, at the blank, dark concrete walls, up at the fluorescent lighting, when he saw the jailer on duty come in.

Officer Henry Peitz entered the lockup area to assist in moving a female prisoner from cell #5 to cell #4. As he passed cell #1, the occupant, Tim Collier, called out to him.

“Can I ask you a question?”

Peitz nodded.

“Is Carol Giles incarcerated? She is not locked up in here?”

“No, she’s not locked up in jail. Should she be?”

“Yes,” Tim responded immediately. “I’ve done good and bad things in my life,” Tim began philosophically, “but that was a setup and I wasn’t responsible for this crime.”

Peitz patiently explained to Collier that Carol had provided a detailed written statement “that only incriminated you.”

Collier said that he didn’t understand, that the cops had asked him the wrong questions.

“What if something else happened?” Collier said casually. “Can you prove it after someone has been buried, that they’ve been killed?”

Typing up Carol’s second statement took a while. By the time Mike Messina got home, it was midnight. He was just getting into bed when the phone rang. It was Peitz, who told him about the substance of his conversation with Collier.

“Thanks, Henry,” Messina replied, and hung up the phone.

Messina couldn’t sleep. He kept thinking about Tim’s question to Peitz: “Can you prove it after someone has been buried, that they’ve been killed?”

Who was he talking about? If he told them and he wasn’t bullshitting, that meant exhumation and autopsy.

But who?

Messina had had the feeling that Carol had left something out. Something still wasn’t adding up right, Messina thought. He got up and went out into the living room and put on the TV.

It was late. All that was on were infomercials. It seemed like every one of them had some Englishman hawking housewares or cleaning solutions or some other junk he didn’t need. It made it easy to think.

Carol was claiming that the motive for the crime was that Nancy stole some drugs from them while they were on vacation. They came back and in revenge for faking a burglary and stealing from them, they tortured and murdered her.

It really bothered him. He’d been a detective over twenty years and in a few more he would retire. Then he wouldn’t have to think about someone’s motives, but now he did. And one thing was clear: you don’t kill a woman and torture her for stealing. Even if it were true, her booty wasn’t the crown jewels, just a small amount of crack. It just wasn’t adding up.

Messina turned off the TV and went into his bedroom. He curled up next to his wife and fell into a restless sleep. Next morning, he got up early and made himself a cup of coffee, extra caffeine.

“Can you prove it after someone has been buried, that they’ve been killed?”

It is common knowledge that murderers usually know their victims. It could be family or friends. So who was close to Carol or Tim or both of them who’s dead and buried and could have been murdered?

Messina turned on the TV to get the news and instead was staring at an infomercial of Richard Simmons exhorting a group of fat women to lose weight. Fat women … fat men … fat man?

Jessie Giles.

Messina called over to the Oakland County lockup and asked that his prisoner, Carol Giles, be transported to West Bloomfield Police Department as soon as possible.

They had a lot more to talk about.

Carol didn’t understand what was happening. Or why.

First they put her in one jail and then she was moved to another.

When she got to headquarters, Helton was already there. He had gotten some sleep and was back. Messina had briefed him. Helton put Carol into an interview room.

“What’s this about?” she asked.

Helton told her that Sergeant Messina needed to talk to her again to clear up some things. He left and a few minutes later, Messina walked in. He was freshly shaved, showered and dressed. He looked more like a businessman coming to work to process some orders than a cop trying to solve a double homicide.

“Morning,” he said, and Carol nodded in reply.

He carried two cups of coffee and a manila folder. Without saying a word, he placed one of the coffees in front of her.

“Thanks,” said Carol warily.

He sat down next to her, crowding her a bit. He took a couple of sips of his coffee. While he did so, he kept tapping the manila folder with his fingers.

“Smoke?”

He offered her a cigarette from a pack in his pocket. She declined. Messina got up and reversed his chair, turning it around so he was now straddling it. He still calmly sipped his coffee.

For a full minute, he didn’t say a word. Just looked at her.

“Carol, things are just not adding up,” he finally said, putting his coffee cup down. “The motive thing is not working out in my head. Something’s just not kosher there.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I don’t believe you and Tim would kill Nancy for stealing a lousy bag full of drugs and faking a burglary.”

She met his steady gaze just as Tim had advised her. But instead of backing down, he bore in.

“It’s not adding up,” Messina repeated.

He opened the manila folder and held up a typed sheet of paper.

“That’s a copy of the statement Tim gave to us when he was arrested. Read it,” Messina suggested, but he made it sound more like an order.

He put it down on the table and Carol picked it up to read. It was the first she had seen of it. Her face sagged as she read it. Afterward, she looked up, clearly shaken, and for good reason.

Tim said that everything was Carol’s idea. Carol was the driving force behind Nancy’s murder. If the cops believed him, she was facing hard time.

“I want you to look at Tim’s statement again,” Messina instructed her. “Look carefully at Tim’s sworn statement and circle every part of it that isn’t true. Then we’ll talk about the inconsistencies between his version and yours.”

“Okay,” she said, and began to circle all the discrepancies, which, she knew, were many. Messina noticed her hand was shaking. Before she was halfway down, Messina interrupted her.

“Carol?”

She looked up.

“Do you think we can prove it, after someone has been buried, that they’ve been murdered?”

For a split second, nothing happened. Then, at once, her head slumped down, her shoulders dropped. Tears welled up in her eyes. She buried her face in her hands.

“If we gave you a polygraph right here and now, would you pass it?”

She didn’t answer for a moment and then said quietly, “I can’t believe I killed Jessie.”

Messina didn’t show any emotion, but inside, he had a broad smile.

“You have to get it out in the open, Carol, before it consumes you,” he said, like a father confessor. “No more hiding anything or keeping anything back. If you don’t tell a hundred percent, it’s like not telling the truth at all.”

Messina sensed that despite her deprivations, she still had a conscience. But for a long time, she said nothing. Had he been wrong?

“I’ll give you a statement,” she said finally.

They took a break and in the interim moved into a large conference room that was lined with law books. On a rectangular oak conference table, around which the brass regularly met, he set up the tape-recording equipment. When they were ready, he depressed the machine’s button to record.

First thing he did was to advise her, once again, of her rights. The last thing he wanted was a conviction overturned on appeal because she claimed she never got her rights. Even though she had been read them three times previously, four with her arrest, it was standard procedure to read them to her every time she was questioned.

After Carol admitted that she understood her rights, she also admitted that Tim was the driving force behind Jessie’s murder.

Tim kept cajoling her, urging her on, insisting she kill her husband and end her misery. Finally, Tim supplied her with heroin. He told her to mix it in with her husband’s insulin and inject it.

She had and it had worked. Jessie died. Because of his past medical history, the coroner ruled it natural causes.

“Did you leave anything out, Carol?” Messina asked.

“No, this time I told you everything,” she answered.

“What can you do to assure us that you told me everything this time?”

“I don’t know what I can do, but I can’t get out of one without taking the blame for both of them because they coincided with each other.”

“Would you pass a polygraph on the story you told me today?”

“On this story, I would, yeah.”

“Any doubt in your mind, Carol?”

“No, no doubt at all.”

“Was what you told me tonight [about] Tim’s participation in the death of Jessie, was that true?”

“Yes.”

“Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

“No.”

“Did I promise you anything, Carol?”

“No.”

Until that moment of her true confession, Carol and Tim had done something to which every criminal aspires.

They had committed the perfect crime.

They had gotten away with murder.

Eleven

Tim Collier was so anxious to implicate Carol Giles that before Messina could even get to him, Collier told Helton the following:

He said that it was Carol who injected Nancy; it was Carol who had killed her. He also said that it was Carol, not him, who had used gasoline and charcoal lighter fluid to ignite Billiter’s body in the park in Flint, where they dumped it. As for having sex with Nancy either alive or dead, he denied ever having sexual contact with Nancy Billiter at any time. As for Jessie Giles, he had a lot to tell about that death, too.

On September 28, 1997, Carol Lynn Giles murdered her husband, Jessie Giles, Tim claimed, by lacing his insulin injection with heroin. Previously, Carol had indicated that a girl she worked with had wanted to kill her husband who was a diabetic, but she did not know how to go about it. That is, without raising any suspicion. This girlfriend wanted it to appear that her husband died of natural causes. Collier then suggested that this could be accomplished by lacing his insulin injection with heroin.

But, Tim said, he had no idea that Carol Giles was really talking about her husband.

On September 28, 1997, Carol contacted him by telephone at his home and said, “I did him. But it’s taking a long time.”

Tim asked her, “Did what?”

And Carol replied that she had injected Jessie with the heroin/insulin, but he wasn’t dead yet. Tim wasn’t happy that Carol had done this. He had been having an extramarital affair with her, and some people might become suspicious about Jessie’s death because they knew of the Collier-Giles affair. Tim said that he had decided to go to California for two weeks until things “cooled off.”

Tim’s “new” confession was verbal, not written. Helton briefed Messina on its substance and immediately had him brought out to be interviewed in the same room where he’d spoken to Carol. The chair was still warm.