Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder (6 page)

“I just looked at him. I didn’t know what to say. He still had the gun in his hand.”

Tim got up and looked out the windows.

“‘They could be out there,’ Tim said. ‘They know what we did. They won’t come in but they know.’

“‘We didn’t do anything, you did,’ I answered. He turned real fast, looked at me strange, like someone had taken over his body. His eyes didn’t look the same. I felt like he was looking thru [
sic
] me. He came over to me.

“‘We’re in this together. The police won’t believe I did it. I was never here. We’ll take Nancy somewhere.’ I was sitting on the couch, watching him pace the floor back and forth, back and forth. Before I know it, I had to get the kids up for school. It was 7:05.”

She got the kids up and out for school. Carol went back to her bedroom, where Tim was smoking crack.

“‘Sit down,’ he said.

“I sat next to him on the bed.

“‘I’ll take Nancy for a ride. Everything will be all right,’ he said.

“‘Timmy, I’m scared,’ I said.

“‘Just remember, look them in the eye and say you don’t know anything. If you look them in the eye, they’ll never know.’

“I just sat on the bed while he smoked. Time just went … on by.

“‘Come on,’ he said finally.

“We went downstairs. He untied Nancy and wraped [
sic
] the blanket around her. I just stood there.

“‘Come and help me,’ he said.

“I couldn’t. I just stared at him. He pulled her by the legs and started towards the stairs. Her head hit the floor and she didn’t scream. I almost cried out. He pulled her up the stairs. He pulled her to the garage. He put her in the trunk of my Sable. Tim acted real nervous. Fidgety. He kept smokin’ crack.

“‘I’ll get rid of all the evidence and the body. They’ll never know.’”

They wound up going north and dumping the body in a park in Flint that he knew.

And that was Carol’s statement.

After he finished reading it, Shanlian knew Carol was full of shit. It was his gut telling him that. He just knew it. But he couldn’t prove it, at least not yet. One essential element had been established, though.

The murder had been committed in West Bloomfield Township, part of Oakland County and not in Flint, part of Genesee County. The county where the murder took place had venue in the investigation and prosecution. That meant the ball was now in West Bloomfield’s and Oakland County’s court, literally and figuratively.

Flint had more than its fair share of homicides; the force was already overworked. In just the brief time he’d been in West Bloomfield, Shanlian had discovered that homicides were rare. The locals were really looking forward to working the case.

At 2:00
A.M.
, Kevin Shanlian officially turned the case over to Helton and the West Bloomfield Police Department.

“Whatever you need on my end, just let me know,” Shanlian told Helton.

“Will do.”

Driving north on the interstate, Shanlian was weary. He needed sleep. But he was a good detective; his mind kept working. He needed to know who had actually killed Nancy Billiter.

And why. He was convinced it wasn’t because Tim suspected Nancy of faking a burglary. There had to be another reason. There had to be.

Otherwise, human life was just too damn cheap.

Back in West Bloomfield, Carol Giles was thinking nothing of the sort. Actually, she wasn’t thinking at all, at least consciously.

Police officers had checked her into Haven. She found the place to be exactly that. Once she put her head down on the pillow in her rather large room, she slept and slept and slept.

Five

A search warrant was quickly obtained for Carol Giles’s car. At the Giles house, Helton entered the garage area. There was a Caddy there; he found nothing of value inside. Outside, Carol’s Sable was still in the driveway. Helton searched it and made a list of what he found:

1. From the center area between the two front seats, I found a white plastic container that contained battery acid. It was about 1/6th full.

2. Just in front of the container of acid, under some napkins, I found a loaded .32 Caliber Titan. It was unloaded by removing the loaded magazine and also taking a round from the chamber.

3. In the drivers side vassar I found written directions to a road near Flint.

4. Under the drivers seat I found the victims drivers license.

5. In the trunk, I found an empty red gas can.

6. In the trunk I found suspected blood on the floor carpet. The whole floor carpet was removed.

After removing the items from the vehicle, Helton carefully bagged, tagged and secured them. A copy of the search warrant tabulation was made out and left in the vehicle.

Officers Duncan and Renaldo were lounging in their patrol car on Main Street in Flint when they saw the gold-colored Cadillac go by. There was a young black man behind the wheel. Something about him and the car looked familiar to Renaldo, but he couldn’t figure out what it was.

About an hour later, the car went by again. This time it was Duncan who noticed it, because his partner was catching a few winks. It looked familiar to him, too.

The guy hadn’t broken any laws. There wasn’t any need, let alone reason, to stop him. Of course, had the two officers remembered the APB they had received earlier in the evening on a gold-colored Cadillac being driven by a young black man named Tim Collier, who was wanted in connection with a murder down in West Bloomfield Township—well, they certainly would have stopped him.

Parked in the driveway of the Giles house, Officer Ralph Sampson felt lonely. Usually he had Rollo, the department’s German shepherd, to keep him company.

Sampson was the department’s canine officer. Usually it was just he and Rollo on a case. But he’d been drafted into service because he happened to be in the office at the time the call came in. Rollo, meanwhile, was back at the kennel, happily sleeping through the night. That sounded good, being in bed at home, instead of staking out a house, waiting for a suspect to come back, who probably …

He saw the headlights in his rearview mirror. They approached slowly, down the east side of the street, then turned in. The car parked right behind him. Car doors slammed. Two guys came out of the gold-colored Caddy.

“Hey, what the hell you doing—”

“Police,” said Sampson.

The short, handsome man looked behind him and saw a marked police car pull in behind his Caddy.

“Are you Tim Collier?” Sampson asked.

“Yeah, what’s this—”

“Put your hands on the car and spread your legs.”

“Hey!” said the guy Collier was with.

“Hey,
sir
,” said Sampson, who kicked Collier’s feet apart, frisked him quickly, and then snapped on the cuffs.

“Hey, sir, what’s—”

“Check this guy out and if he’s clean, let him go,” said Sampson to the two uniforms. Collier was hustled over to the unmarked car, while the uniforms checked on Tim’s companion.

Over at the unmarked vehicle, Sampson pushed Tim’s head down, ensuring it didn’t hit the top of the car, into the backseat behind the chicken wire.

“There’s some people who’d like to talk to you, Tim.”

“Really?” said Collier.

“Yeah,” said Sampson, smiling down at him from outside the car, “and they’ve been waiting all night.”

Sampson pulled out, but the marked car stayed at the scene. Inside it, the central processing unit (CPU) in a portable computer hummed. It was tied into a mainframe at headquarters a few blocks away.

The name of Tim’s companion was John Ellis. The uniforms had punched Ellis’s name in. They were waiting for the readout. The CPU hummed and clicked and onto the screen came John Ellis’s record:

• Failure to Appear—$100 Bond

• Non-Moving Traffic Violation—$100 Bond

• Non-Moving Traffic Violation—$100 Bond

• Failure to Appear—$150 Bond

• Non-Moving Traffic Violation—$100 Bond

• Non-Moving Traffic Violation—$100 Bond

• Non-Moving Traffic Violation—$500 Bond

“Looks like you were hanging out with the wrong guy at the wrong time,” said one of the uniforms. He put Ellis in the car for transport to police headquarters.

“Why am I being arrested?” Ellis asked as the car took off.

One of the uniforms looked at the screen.

“How about five unpaid tickets and two failures to appear?”

“You’re taking me in for that?”

Then Ellis thought a minute.

“Was there a murder, killing, beating or what?”

The two uniforms in the front seat looked at each other.

“Man, whatever he did, it must have been bad,” Ellis said ruefully.

Helton had walked into the outer vestibule. Bulletproof glass covered the processing station at the front. Behind it sat two cops at desks who acted as receptionists. They answered calls and began prisoner processing.

As Helton watched, the large double doors to the parking lot opened. Sampson walked in with a handcuffed Tim Collier and escorted him into the detective area on the left for fingerprinting and mug shots.

In his many years as a street cop, Helton had seen all kinds of people—druggies, prostitutes, killers. There were also all kinds in each category, and sometimes, there was something about a suspect, something indefinable, that you couldn’t put your finger on.

Despite Collier’s muscular build and handsome, chiseled features, his stature—five feet six inches—did not make him look particularly dangerous. No, it was the air about him, the vibe he gave off.

Helton had seen some guys who cultivated it, bad guy wanna-bes who were better off going to Hollywood than trying to make it on the street. Collier, though, was different. He was the genuine article; he felt mean.

They took Collier to the same interview room previously occupied by his lover and read him Carol’s written statement. He showed little outward reaction. Inside, he must have been boiling.

“Did you kill Nancy Billiter?” Helton asked.

“Why would I kill her?” he countered.

“Do you know of any reason why Carol Giles would accuse you of murdering Nancy Billiter?”

“No. But I want to hear Carol say that at trial.”

“Did Giles participate in this murder and should she be held?”

“That’s for you to find out.”

Tim said that he didn’t want to answer any more questions about the murder until he talked to an attorney. Eventually, though, he relented and gave police this written statement:

“Carol, Nancy and I were sitting in her basement. Me and Nancy were getting high, we were loading our stems (get high equipment) when Carol told Nancy that she thought she was the one who ripped her off, reason being that we found the piggy bank in the trunk of Carol’s car and also knowing that the person Nancy suspected of breaking in was too fat to go or reach through that doors amongst all that glass. Nancy kept saying she loved Carol; and she thought they were closer than that and she wouldn’t do anything like that. Carol hit her with the piggy bank and dazed her. I continued getting high and walked towards the Ping-Pong table where the cat was at and took a couple of hits and walked back over to wear [
sic
] Carol was in the process of tying her off with the pantyhose and asked, what do she do next and I told her ‘handle your business.’ Nancy kept saying ‘I love you,’ he has come between us and something to that nature and me and Carol told her to shut up. Carol injected bleach and battery acid into Nan and then when she realized it was taking too long for her to die, a wet towel was placed over her face to suffocate her to death. When she was dead, we put her in the trunk of Carol’s car and put the mattresses in the garage and that night, I helped her get rid of Nancy’s body in Flint.”

Tim Collier

Great, Helton thought after reading it. Now they had both suspects pointing the finger at each other. Which one was telling the truth?

In Tim’s version, Carol wasn’t some innocent, abused waif. If you believed him, Tim said it was Carol who injected Nancy with acid, which accounted for the burn marks on the victim’s skin. As for Carol, she didn’t mention the injections at all.

Helton liked to go to the movies and he remembered an old Japanese film called
Rashomon
, where a woman was raped and three witnesses had three different versions of the event. Who was telling the truth? Unfortunately in the Billiter murder, life appeared to be imitating art.

Was Carol telling the truth or Tim? Maybe, neither? It still didn’t make sense. Damn it.

Why?

Nancy must have been killed for a reason. There had to be a reason. And why the damn acid? Tim had a gun. Why not just shoot her?

Detectives look for three things with which to obtain a conviction—motive, means and opportunity. The latter two criteria had already been taken care of. But the motive? That was unclear from both accounts.

In Tim’s version, Nancy had faked a burglary and, because of that, she deserved to die. Did that make sense? Sure, people had been murdered for doing less, a lot less. Hell, people had been murdered for giving dirty looks. But was that the case here?

If the murder wasn’t planned, certainly the body disposal was. Billiter didn’t just happen to be dumped in a park in Flint over an hour away. And she didn’t just happen to be covered with gasoline with a fuse of charred leaves meant to light her up like the Fourth of July. That was probably one thing they could be thankful for—neither suspect had any sort of pyrotechnic ability. Had they, the coroner would have been stuck with a corpse burned beyond recognition and cops know how difficult it is to get an ID out of one of those.

Did it make sense, Helton wondered, that the murder itself would be committed without some foresight? It was time to talk to Giles again and see what she was hiding. Maybe they could turn her against Collier.

Helton looked at his watch: 3:45
A.M.
By now, Carol was probably asleep in Haven. They’d have to wait until morning to talk to her.

Officer Jim Fedorenko of the township forensic crew got to the Giles home at 3:27
A.M.
The Michigan State Police (MSP) techies arrived soon after, straight from the crime scene in Flint.