If You Only Knew

by M. William Phelps

  “I’ll call you,” he said.

  Four days later, on August 21, 2000, the dealer called to tell her that the car was all set; she could pick it up.

  She arrived sometime later, once again with Vonlee. She handed over a cashier’s check for the balance: $50,676. 80. This money was paper to Billie Jean, it appeared. The way she had been spending since Don’s death was in itself a sign of a woman either in desperate and severe grief and mourning, or someone who had no concept of money. In the days before his death, Don Rogers was very active with his Merrill Lynch accounts, buying stocks and bonds and growth funds, working with his money to insure it continued to grow. And yet, no sooner did he pass away, than his widow began selling off the stocks and bonds in big numbers. Just days before showing up to buy the Cadillac, for example, four days after Don had died, she sold ten thousand dollars’ worth of funds, of which she would be penalized for selling off early. What’s more, between August 17 and the week after, Billie Jean had one hundred seventy thousand in cash transferred by wire to her bank accounts. In addition, on the day she bought the Caddy, she made a thirteen-hundred-dollar purchase at U.S. Jewelers, a store that Vonlee’s boyfriend owned. In the days following that, she made another four-hundred-dollar purchase at U.S. Jewelers and spent upward of nearly two thousand dollars on clothes.

  It certainly seemed Billie Jean was celebrating Don’s death and couldn’t wait until he was out of the picture. Yet, when one took a close look at the credit card statement Billie Jean and Don shared over the past year, what emerged was a woman who liked to spend her husband’s money all along. She had withdrawn thousands upon thousands of dollars in cash advances at two places: the MGM Grand and Motor City casinos in Detroit. Many times, on the same night, she’d withdraw five hundred dollars, which came with a $30.99 transaction fee, or one thousand dollars, which came with a $51.99 transaction fee. In many instances throughout the year leading up to Don’s death, the transaction fees alone every month added up to thousands of dollars. Reading the statements, studying the times and dates, you could almost see her walking up to the window for the cash advance, telling herself, This is it ... last time tonight—only to be back at the window an hour or two later after blowing through the five hundred or one thousand dollars. Don had a twelve-thousand-dollar limit on the shared card, and it was a good thing. Because as the year 2000 came, and Billie Jean continued to gamble, she’d hit that limit or close to it every month. It’s clear that she hardly ever won any money. She was constantly withdrawing.

  Don had taken lots of pride in his net worth. As a businessman, he had worked his ass off all his life to build it up, bolstering it with investments, until it grew into an amount he could retire comfortably with. Now his money was fading away at what seemed to be an uncontrollable pace. With no one there to monitor it or pester her about it, Billie could not get a handle on her spending in those days after Don’s death.

  While walking the lot, looking to buy Billie Jean’s Caddy, Vonlee had spotted a Buick Riviera she liked. As they drove back to the dealer to pick up the Caddy, Billie Jean said, “You want me to buy you that car, Vonlee?”

  Vonlee was a mess. She’d been back to drinking heavily and taking pills; she wanted to forget about what had happened to Don. In her mind, she kept going back to that night they returned to the house: What actually happened? What could I have done?

  “Come on,” Billie Jean added, “let me buy you that car. It’ll make you feel better.”

  “I don’t think anything is going to make me feel better,” Vonlee said.

  Billie Jean pulled into the dealer parking lot.

  “I’m telling you, Von, just let me buy you a car—it will make you feel better. Pick out whatever you want.”

  Vonlee thought about it. “Okay,” she said.

  The Riviera Vonlee had eyed days before was still in the lot. The salesman asked Vonlee if she was still interested. He’d noticed Vonlee looking at the vehicle.

  “We are,” Vonlee said. After all, she did not have any money.

  It was a used vehicle. When Billie Jean was finished inside the finance office, she walked out to where Vonlee and the salesman stood talking.

  “She wants it,” Billie Jean said.

  When they returned to the lot to pick up the Riviera, Vonlee had a check for $19,834.90. The salesman looked at it. Billie Jean’s name was on the check.

  “You okay with this?” he asked, just to make sure. She was standing next to Vonlee.

  “Of course,” she answered. To Vonlee: “Now you forget about everything, you hear me? Just forget it happened. Pretend it never happened, Von.”

  The salesman stood and watched as Billie Jean drove away in her new Cadillac, with Vonlee following right behind in her used white Riviera.

  CHAPTER 13

  WHEN BILLIE JEAN WENT to Scott, her future son-in-law, for the money to buy the new cars, he explained as her financial advisor that she might want to wait. Maybe think about it some more. She was grieving. People did strange things in order to deal with the death of a loved one. Spending upward of seventy-one thousand dollars on two cars was not a sound investment. Sure, Don had a little over 1.75 million dollars in assets, but one could burn through that mighty quick if one wasn’t careful.

  “Why not lease the vehicles?” Scott suggested.

  “No,” she said.

  “Well, you don’t want to pay cash for them.”

  Scott could not convince her.

  Not long after she bought both cars, she went to Scott and asked him for a check written out to Vonlee for twenty-five thousand dollars.

  “Doesn’t matter what it’s for,” the widow said when questioned.

  Scott did as he was told.

  CHAPTER 14

  IN THOSE DAYS AFTER Don’s wake, Scott continued in his role acting as the Rogers family financial guru. However, Scott later said he never considered himself the family’s “financial advisor.” Scott had convinced Billie Jean and Don’s siblings that he needed to have, at the least, limited power of attorney. With everyone’s blessing, Scott contacted Merrill Lynch and got the paperwork done so he could continue in his role as the family financial wizard and move Don’s money around without issue.

  “You should go home to Tennessee,” Scott and Don’s siblings suggested to the widow. “Spend some time with family. Allow us to take care of everything.”

  It was one of the reasons, Scott later explained, he was in favor of having limited power of attorney. She agreed and wanted to go back home to see her family for a few days, and there needed to be someone back in Troy who could sign off on financial issues and pay the bills.

  So Billie Jean signed the paperwork, turning over power of attorney.

  “You think I could get a look at the family records?” Scott asked.

  Billie Jean wondered why.

  “Well, Don has most of his money with Merrill Lynch, but I need to read through the life insurance policies and find out what else is going on.”

  Another important factor in handing over power of attorney to Scott, especially at Merrill Lynch, was that Billie Jean would need living expenses. She needed instant access to that money of Don’s in order to go about her day-to-day life. She didn’t want to have to call and wire money into her personal accounts. If her future son-in-law had the power, she could call him and have him get her cash or whatever she needed, whenever she needed it.

  Before she left, she signed about a dozen checks in case anyone needed to gain access to the money in the bank and pay bills or purchase items the household needed.

  As Scott dug into Don’s financial records, it became clear right away that Don was a tedious and thorough man in terms of keeping records. He saved receipts for everything. For Scott, this made it easy for him to “track everything,” as he later put it. Within Don’s records, for example, Scott found life insurance policies dating back to the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.

  “One of my objectives,” Scott later explained, “was to get Bil
lie through this process with as little outside pressure as possible.”

  Peace of mind was Scott’s goal as far as Billie Jean was concerned, according to what he later said in court. He needed to work with Don’s ex-business partner and Don’s accountant.

  Just about everything, with the exception of the business, was in both spouses’ names as marital partners. Billie Jean could say what she wanted about Don and his drinking and how they fought and there was no love between them, but in the end, Don had included her as his life’s equal partner. Even regarding the business, as a probate lawyer advised, she would be required to make a decision about whether she wanted to continue in Don’s role as a board member or sell out. But as Scott had explained over the phone to her, “You don’t have to do that now.” He wanted her to take some time. By the end of the year, November or December, they could revisit this part of Don’s financial life and she could decide what she wanted to do then.

  While she was in Tennessee visiting her mother, she contacted Scott and told him she was in the process of helping her mother purchase a home. She wanted Scott to transfer some funds from Merrill Lynch into her account so she could have access to it right away. Billie Jean wanted the money as soon as possible.

  Scott asked her how much.

  “One hundred thousand,” she requested.

  A wire transfer was made.

  There was some discussion between them about her financial future. Scott wanted to make it clear to Billie Jean that she needed to make responsible decisions that solidified her future. She needed to invest. The worst thing anyone on a spending spree could do was to think only about today. Buying cars and giving money away to family was fun and exciting and generous, but she needed to think about her own future.

  She asked what she could invest in. She knew nothing about investments. What was Scott suggesting?

  Scott talked about his company. At the time, he later claimed, it was experiencing a major growth spurt. He needed capital to finance the company’s progress, and the banks wouldn’t invest because the company was so young.

  Billie Jean indicated that she wanted to think about it.

  Scott went to his future wife and explained that he could use two hundred forty thousand dollars to take his company to the next level.

  A check was written in that amount and signed by Billie Jean’s daughter, according to Scott’s later testimony in court.

  Then Scott suggested that his future mother-in-law take all of Don’s money in Merrill Lynch and put it into another company.

  What company was that? she wondered.

  A financial investment firm Scott’s good friend owned.

  Billie Jean, who had agreed to the nearly quarter-million-dollar loan for Scott, said, “What the hell, go ahead.

  “Do it.”

  CHAPTER 15

  LOOKING INTO DON ROGERS’S death, TPD detectives Don Tullock and Don Zimmerman sat down and listened to the 911 call Billie Jean had made on the night she and Vonlee reportedly came home to find Don Rogers dead on the kitchen floor. This call—and Billie Jean’s demeanor, which had become somewhat of a discussion piece among investigators of late—was rather telling. It said a lot about her personality, despite family members claiming she was the type of person not to show much emotion.

  In a matter-of-fact tone, she called and said: “Yes, this is Billie Rogers in Troy, and I was . . . I came in the house and I think my husband is dead on the floor.”

  No panic. No tears. No hurried delivery. Just plainly simplified and expressionless: “I think my husband is dead on the floor.”

  “Do you know what happened?” the operator asked.

  “I have no idea. We were at the casino and he’s supposed to go with us. And then he decided he wanted to drink.”

  Don had never wanted to go with them to the casino, Vonlee later said. At best, that statement was an exaggeration; at worst, a lie.

  “Is he breathing?”

  “I can’t . . . I can’t feel any breath.”

  As they are trained to do, the operator began asking questions intended to reveal simple facts. Things nobody would have a problem answering off the top of his or her head, even under stress.

  “Okay. You just got home and he was home alone or . . . ?”

  “Yeah, he was here by himself. I was with my niece. She’s visiting us from out of town.”

  “Okay. I want you to stay on the line. I’m going to have you talk—”

  Billie Jean interrupted, as though she had trouble hearing: “Pardon me?”

  “Stay on the phone. I want you to talk to the paramedics, okay?”

  Billie Jean said that would be fine.

  They discussed the address. Then the 911 operator transferred the call.

  “Community Atlanta, this is Carol.... Are you at 2090 Grenadier?”

  Billie Jean said yes.

  “And what’s wrong?”

  The caller now sounded frustrated for having to answer the same question twice. “Well, my niece and I just walked in the door and my husband’s laying on the floor in the kitchen and it looks like he’s dead.”

  “Okay. Can you see if he has a pulse for me?”

  Apparently, she walked over, bent down and touched Don.

  “No, he’s kind of cold.... Yeah. I can’t feel his pulse.”

  “Do either one of you want to do CPR?”

  “No. I don’t think he has any pulse.”

  “Okay, but do you want to do CPR?”

  Vonlee took the phone from her aunt. “No,” she said. Then Vonlee said something about leaving the house, but the operator interrupted.

  “I know you want to run away,” the operator said, “but we need to do some CPR.”

  “Can you please just send somebody out here?” Vonlee pleaded.

  “Sure, honey, we can do that.”

  Vonlee came across as panicked and anxious, like someone who had come home and found a man she knew lying on the kitchen floor, cold to the touch, with clear signs of death settled over him. She was scared.

  “Please, just send somebody here. Please.”

  “Okay, they’re on their way.”

  Vonlee and Carol discussed the address and where the house was located on the street so there would not be any confusion once the EMTs and police arrived.

  The operator wanted to keep Vonlee on the phone until someone got there, so she asked, “How long were you gone?”

  “We left like, uh, like . . . I don’t know—like ten o’clock.”

  It was close to four in the morning. This was a surprising answer to the operator.

  “And you’re just coming home now?”

  “I was at the casino.”

  “So he’s been alone all that time?”

  “Yes. I know he’s dead. He is dead. He’s dead.” Vonlee was losing it. Her aunt stood by her side, calm as a river stone.

  “Send somebody out here, please?” Vonlee reiterated one more time before indicating that she wanted to get off the phone.

  “The ambulance is on the way.”

  “Thank you,” Vonlee said, and hung up.

  * * *

  Was the fact that a woman who’d called 911 and didn’t sound distressed, or that her husband’s will left everything to her—and he might have died by unnatural causes—enough to suspect murder and then launch an investigation?

  Perhaps.

  It was certainly enough to look further into things, both detectives considered, a task that they were now firmly engaged in.

  CHAPTER 16

  ON AUGUST 24, 2000, after sitting down and thinking about all the events that had taken place since her father’s death, Don’s daughter, Rose (pseudonym), called the TPD and spoke with Detective Tullock.

  “I don’t think my father died of natural causes,” Rose explained. “And it wasn’t an accident.”

  Tullock asked her to tell him why she thought this way.

  Rose said most of what she felt was instinctual, but certain things weren’t add
ing up for her.

  “Like what?”

  She talked about how Billie Jean and Don had been married once and then divorced, then married again a few years after that. Billie Jean sought to have the will amended after the second marriage (eleven years prior to Don’s death), allowing her access to Don’s entire estate, which she had valued at nearly two millions dollars.

  “Billie has always been emotionally distant from my dad,” Rose added. “His body was cremated, I feel, to cover up evidence.”

  What was true about this statement was that Don’s body had been cremated after his wake. There was no body to exhume, if that’s what the TPD had in mind.

  All of this was speculation, although the cop was listening closely because he, too, had his own suspicions.

  Then this from Rose: “The time Billie told us she came home is different from what she told others.”

  Tullock asked what Rose meant by that.

  “She told us she came home with [Vonlee] at eleven—we know she told you and others it was more like four A.M.”

  That was quite true, Tullock considered.

  The detective asked Rose to write out all of her thoughts and drop them off at the TPD. He’d take a look at it all. Get back to her.

  “I’ve done that already,” Rose said.

  Rose provided the TPD with a four-page, single-spaced account of what she believed to be “skeptical” information surrounding the death of her father. The document was clear in its contempt for certain parties, but the information was extremely revealing.

  Near the top of the document, Rose wrote, Dad HATED Billie’s kids. From there, Rose painted a picture of these kids (from another marriage) always being a thorn in Don’s side when money came into play. Rose recalled conversations with her father about the kids borrowing Don’s money and his credit to sign leases on buildings for businesses that failed, leaving Don with the bill. She accused Billie Jean’s kids of stealing money and jewelry; of charging up a “huge cable bill” while staying at the house; how Billie Jean’s son, the one who got into the car accident, would need round-the-clock care and Billie Jean needed to pay for it; finally the kids were “the cause” of the divorce of Billie Jean and Don.