Giorgi had to move the chair so she could kneel next to Don and begin to work on him.
Acclimating himself to the situation, trying to figure out the best way to help Don Rogers, Officer Pete Dungjen walked up and knelt on one knee next to Giorgi. By now, Billie Jean was a bit antsier, but not at all frantic or exceedingly concerned, both officers noticed. From the way she acted, this fall seemed to be perhaps a common thing around the house: Don tying one on and passing out on the floor.
Dungjen touched Don Rogers.
“He’s cold,” Dungjen said to Giorgi. “Rigidity has set in.”
Giorgi didn’t have to check for a pulse. She knew.
Don Rogers wasn’t passed out this time.
He was dead.
CHAPTER 2
THE OTHER FEMALE STANDING next to Billie Jean Rogers as law enforcement backup was called in to determine what happened to Don Rogers, and if the scene warranted further investigation, was Vonlee Nicole Titlow. Born in Maryville, Tennessee, a Deep South town at the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, Vonlee had lived in Nashville and in Denver. Vonlee even had a penthouse in Chicago at one time. Vonlee’s aunt Billie Jean, her mother’s sister, had invited Vonlee to stay with her and Don in Troy, and Vonlee had been living at the house for the past few months. While the age difference spanned decades, Billie Jean and Vonlee shared a common love of going out and partying at the local casinos in Detroit. Whereas Billie Jean was more focused on gambling, Vonlee was a nightlife gal, dancing and drinking, working the rooms. She’d been an exotic dancer and had run an escort service in Denver and Chicago, making upward of—Vonlee later claimed—twenty thousand dollars a week. Back then, Vonlee added, she was dating a few different men at the same time.
“I took care of them,” she claimed. Meaning, she paid for their lifestyle and living accommodations. “It was kind of like a power thing. Kind of fun . . . you know, I loved those guys.”
Moving to Chicago from Denver in 1999, Vonlee was effectively running from the escort lifestyle in Denver, while still dabbling in it to make some money in Chicago. But she wanted the simple life now. From the early 1990s until that move to Chicago, Vonlee had been running from herself, essentially. She’d gotten caught up in a life of booze, men, clubs, cars, clothes. Material things. By the time she made it to Chicago, Vonlee had a life waiting for her, if she wanted it. A man she had been dating signed over the deed to a house she could live in, rent-free. All she had to do was be there for him when he needed her. The man wanted to take care of Vonlee. “A lot of men did this throughout the years,” Vonlee told me later. However, as Vonlee thought about it, she was nobody’s possession—nobody’s “thing” to have when he wanted. Whereas it might have been something she went for during her younger years, not anymore. Vonlee was now in her thirties. She needed to focus on herself and what she wanted.
“It’s on the counter,” she said one night when that man came home.
“What?”
“The deed. I signed it back over to you—I’m going home to Tennessee.”
By now, Vonlee had been to rehab, a familiar face in Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings around Chicago. She wanted out of the big city, away from that fast-paced nightlife she had taken part in through much of her twenties. Back in Tennessee, she took a job at the local Waffle House and went back to living with her grandmother Annis Lee, the woman who had raised her.
“I was giving her twenty or thirty dollars a day for rent,” Vonlee said.
Life was simple. She was around family. The smell of that Tennessee air. There was nothing like it. The down-home, simple folks she interacted with every day. The sheer snail’s pace of life itself. She’d take her nephews fishing. Go for drives in the country to see friends. Attend barbeques the relatives spent all day preparing. Enjoy Sunday dinners after church services.
“I was extremely happy,” Vonlee recalled.
But then something happened.
“Aunt Billie Jean shows up. . . .”
Vonlee was actually working when Billie Jean walked into the restaurant, sat down and called her over. Vonlee hadn’t seen her in over a decade. She’d spoken to her, but that was it. Now Billie Jean sat in front of her during the spring, early summer of 2000, surprising Vonlee with the visit, making a proposition Vonlee had a hard time turning her back on.
As Vonlee approached the table, shocked to see her aunt there all the way from Troy, Vonlee noticed she was laughing.
“A waitress,” her aunt said in a mocking tone, talking down to Vonlee. “You’re a waitress in this dive? I cannot believe you took to waiting on tables, Vonlee.”
Vonlee wanted to curl up in a ball right there. She felt belittled and a total failure.
“Sit down,” Billie Jean said. It sounded as though she had an offer to make.
“What are you doing here?” Vonlee asked. She was looking back toward the kitchen and register. She didn’t want her boss to see her sitting in a booth with a customer.
“Look, honey, you don’t have any drinking problem. What are you running from?” Vonlee and Billie Jean, living somewhat close to each other in the upper Midwest, had communicated, and Billie Jean knew about Vonlee’s journey into recovery. In some ways, there was a bit of envy on her part. She valued Vonlee’s no-holds-bar attitude, not giving two shakes about what people said or thought about her. The older woman wanted to be her own person, same as Vonlee. She knew the more she hung around Vonlee, the more of a free spirit she would become.
As for Vonlee, she certainly had the pizazz, flare and fortitude, along with the clichéd sassy Southern charm, of a luxurious, expensive call girl. She looked the part with her long, muscular, yet feminine, legs, bleached-blond hair, down to her shoulders, and curvaceous, feminine figure. And if you asked Vonlee, she had no trouble taking on clients when her girls couldn’t handle the influx of calls or the specialized requests from such a high-powered clientele.
But that was another time, another life. She was back home now in Tennessee and pretty content living a simple life.
During those preceding months leading up to the early morning Don Rogers was found dead inside the kitchen of his home, however, Vonlee was determined to spend her free time seeing old friends and spending time with her rather large family. Chicago and the escort business were rather old and worn. And Billie Jean, who claimed she was back to visit family, insisted that Vonlee come back to Michigan at once with her and live inside the home she shared with Don. The aunt told Vonlee that a restaurant, waiting tables, was not the place she wanted to see her niece. It was degrading.
Vonlee considered the question: Should I go back? It isn’t Chicago; it’s Troy, Michigan. What kind of trouble is in Troy?
“You don’t have no dranking problem, Vonlee,” Billie Jean said. She was leaning over the table, almost whispering. “You just need to buy bigger bottles and drank it slow all day long.” The aunt laughed.
Vonlee considered the idea: Maybe I don’t.
“Let’s you and me get out of here,” Billie Jean said. “I got money.”
“Where?”
Harrah’s, she suggested.
July Fourth weekend was a day away.
“In North Carolina?” Vonlee asked.
“Yes.”
Vonlee took off her apron, tossed it into the kitchen and headed out the door. She would pack something while Billie Jean waited in the car and, like Thelma and Louise, she and Billie Jean would head out to Harrah’s Cherokee Casino Resort in Cherokee, North Carolina, to party it up for the weekend. Any sobriety Vonlee had earned, she had just given away.
It was a spur-of-the-moment decision that would change Vonlee’s life forever.
CHAPTER 3
OFFICER LYNN GIORGI GATHERED Vonlee and Billie Jean in the den of the house and began to assess Don’s medical history, trying to figure out what might have happened. With no outward signs of trauma, no injuries that Officers Giorgi or Dungjen could see, the “alcoholism” bell Billie Jean had rung when the officers show
ed up now seemed most plausible. Giorgi wondered if this was the root cause of Don’s demise. Hell, in just the short time she’d been a patrol officer, Giorgi had seen death come to people in the most unimaginable ways.
Billie Jean was not at all surprised by Don’s death. Or, rather, she didn’t come across that way to Giorgi and Dungjen. She then went through all of the ailments Don suffered from, beyond being what she described as a chronic drinker who guzzled goblets full of vodka as though it was water.
“He’d take one of those mason jars and fill it up,” Vonlee explained. “Then down it. I had seen him do it more than once.”
Dungjen and Giorgi got together and decided their next move.
“We should probably call for the detective on duty and an ME,” Giorgi offered.
It was a formality, both cops considered, a not-so-routine part of their day, but an obligation, nonetheless. They did not suspect foul play, but that was, of course, not their call to make. First responders show up, evaluate the scene, do what they can to help, ask some questions and then call in the investigators if they believe a case warrants their time.
Giorgi covered Don with a yellow blanket and then sat with Vonlee and Billie Jean in the den. She wanted to ask a few more questions and hopefully help to figure out what happened. The mood in the house was subdued; despite however anxious Vonlee, who later admitted to being totally inebriated during this time, seemed. Billie Jean appeared composed, with a handle on things.
“Understanding,” one of the first responders called it later, referring to Billie Jean’s demeanor.
Although, perhaps, alarmed that her husband was on the floor of their kitchen, dead, the wife’s behavior, at least initially, seemed appropriate to the circumstances.
Vonlee, on the other hand, was acting “surprised and out of place, considering the situation,” that same first responder recalled. She was “resisting” questions posed by both officers.
“Vonlee and I went to the casino,” Billie Jean told Giorgi. “We were gone for a few hours—Donald did not want to go.”
In a statement Billie Jean later gave that night, she wrote about leaving for the casino at 9:30–10:30 . . . [and] came home at 4:15, at which time she and Vonlee then called 911.
Billie Jean was “pretty calm” and “very quiet,” Giorgi observed. “Didn’t really speak unless I asked her questions.”
Billie Jean also paced at times and chain-smoked cigarettes.
Probably nerves. Her husband was dead.
Giorgi walked back over to Don Rogers and thought about the scene a bit more, trying to picture what might have happened. Don lay directly next to the kitchen table. He was on his back, his legs crossed at the ankles, his arms outstretched in kind of a Jesus-on-the-Cross position. This didn’t raise any red flags, specifically; but the more they looked at it, the way in which Don’s body was lying seemed almost staged. Feeling this, the intuitive officer considered that she ought to look even closer. They had to wait for the detective and medical examiner (ME), anyway. What would it hurt?
His legs are crossed at his ankles? Giorgi kept going back to it. This fact seemed odd, taking into account that Don might have fallen from the chair. How many people fall out of a chair and wind up on the ground, faceup, their legs crossed?
“It looked kind of unusual,” Giorgi later explained. “It appeared that he had fallen out of his chair . . . It just seemed unlikely that you could fall from somewhere and end up with your legs perfectly crossed at the ankles.”
Maybe it happened as one of the women tried reviving him? Maybe they had done this inadvertently?
Both said no.
Giorgi walked over to Billie Jean and asked several more questions. The officer was more direct and accusatory in her tone this time around. Maybe she didn’t mean to be, but that was how it came out.
Vonlee stood by and appeared agitated with the officer. She viewed the situation as the officer attacking Billie Jean.
“You all just need to leave her alone right now,” Vonlee snapped at one point. Vonlee didn’t think Billie Jean needed to be treated in this way—at least not right after her husband had died. “Why do you have to ask her all of these questions now?”
With her sassy Southern attitude and noticeable accent, Vonlee was “very excitable and very loud . . . and very protective of [Billie Jean],” Giorgi noted later.
“Why are you being so rude?” Vonlee then asked the officer. “You must be a cold person to be asking all of these questions.”
Giorgi and Dungjen tried to explain that they were just doing their jobs, but Vonlee wasn’t having any of it. She didn’t want her aunt subjected to such harsh treatment while her uncle was lying dead on the floor in the kitchen. It could all wait, Vonlee seemed to be suggesting.
“Look, this is a process,” Giorgi explained, trying to put out a Southern brush fire now gathering fuel, “and we’ve called in a detective and the medical examiner.... These are necessary questions we need answers to. I need to write a report.”
Giorgi asked Billie Jean and Vonlee if they could sit, calm down and perhaps write out for her what happened that night, what they did, what they came home to. Details would be important. Would they mind writing a statement?
Neither indicated any interest in doing this.
Giorgi changed her tactic, as she often did in situations when people became stressed. She, instead, asked questions that did not pertain to the situation. Questions with answers they did not need to think about. How old are you? Where’d you grow up? Where do you work? Things of that nature.
That tactic did not work, either. Vonlee hemmed and hawed about how the cops were being unsympathetic to Billie Jean and the notion that Don was dead.
Giorgi continued to insist that both females needed to sit down and write out a statement she could include in her report.
“Oh, well, okay, then . . . ,” Vonlee said.
She began writing. But as she did, Vonlee quickly put the pen down and stated, “You know what, I am not doing this right now!” She was angry.
“Miss Titlow, these are things we need to know,” Giorgi said again, more pleasantly than she had been previously in her tone.
Vonlee refused.
Billie Jean walked over and Giorgi asked about Don having any prior medical conditions—if either woman could shed any light on that.
“One time he passed out in the bathroom upstairs and hit his head on the tub,” Billie Jean said. “He was bleeding and I wanted to call 911, but he told me not to.”
The officers decided to check out the rest of the house. It was possible, since Vonlee and Billie Jean said they had just walked in and found him, that someone else had come by. But the only unlocked door into the entire house was the pedestrian door from the kitchen into the garage.
“That’s how we came in,” Billie Jean said when one of the cops pointed it out. “We used the garage door opener to open the garage and then came in through that door.”
None of the windows or any of the other doors in the house were unlocked or seemed broken into. Even in the basement, Giorgi noticed when she went downstairs to look around, those windows seemed to be fine. No glass broken. Nothing out of place. All of them locked.
Giorgi went into the family room, which had a fully stocked bar. She noticed not one bottle was open or even out. Everything appeared to be in its place on the shelves. But when she walked over to the pantry area of the house, just beyond the kitchen, not far from Don’s body, there were several large bottles—“gallon sizes”—of vodka. But upon a careful examination of those, they saw none of them had been opened, either.
Giorgi found Billie Jean. “Listen,” she asked, “you said he once blacked out and hit his head.”
“Yes,” she answered.
“Let’s take a walk upstairs to check and see if anything like that might have happened again.”
They went upstairs and walked through all of the bedrooms and the bathrooms.
Nothing seemed out of pl
ace.
When they got back downstairs, she showed Giorgi one of the living-room chairs with blood on it. The blood was crusty and dried up.
“That’s from Don’s rectal bleeding.”
It was the only spot in the entire house where they could locate any blood.
Giorgi was stumped. And yet, with all the talk going on inside the house, including the questions Vonlee and Billie Jean had asked, the one inquiry neither had made was rather telling in and of itself: What might have happened to Don? Neither Billie Jean nor Vonlee seemed to be interested in the opinions of the two officers.
“Can’t we do this tomorrow?” Vonlee asked one of the officers. She was tired of all the questions. Accusations, as Vonlee saw them. She was mainly worried about her aunt, Vonlee said, not herself.
“She was just sitting, at one point, smoking cigarettes and staring,” Vonlee later said of her aunt.
What the hell? Vonlee wondered.
“I thought she was maybe ready to snap. I had never seen that look on her face before—it was eerie.”
CHAPTER 4
BILLIE JEAN ROGERS RENTED a hotel room at the casino in North Carolina for her and Vonlee back in July 2000. As they partied throughout that weekend, Vonlee was, at best, lukewarm about the prospect of heading back into the party lifestyle and starting up all over again. It was as if that time in her life had come and gone, and although the drinking and gambling and dancing and doing drugs had been fun, it wasn’t who she was anymore. Vonlee wanted to go back to the Waffle House, show some humility, then beg for her shitty job back.
The pull of her addiction, however, as she later described it, was too much. Vonlee was back on the bottle now—and the alcohol, her one vice, had just taken back control of her life and was telling her what to do once again.
As they were walking into the parking lot to get into Billie Jean’s Chrysler LeBaron, the aunt said, “Didn’t I park the car there?”
If You Only Knew Page 2