If You Only Knew

by M. William Phelps

  Who was more culpable, Vonlee or Billie Jean? That was not for Danny to decide. What Danny needed to do was think about his next move. Danny had information about a murder. What he did with that information from this point forward would determine if he was involved or not. Furthermore, Danny had been trying to secure citizenship for almost two decades now. Whatever he did would impact the decision by the U.S. government. He realized he couldn’t stay in the United States forever on a visa. Sooner or later, Uncle Sam would show up at the door with a plane ticket back to Lebanon.

  Billie Jean had given Danny a bag full of several unlabeled videotapes after Don’s death and told him it was porn and he could have it. She didn’t want it in the house anymore. So, as Danny sat in his living room that day after having such a remarkable dinner with Vonlee, thinking about what his next move was going to be, he decided to relax and watch some porn.

  He slipped one of the videotapes into his VCR.

  Only it wasn’t porn.

  This one—out of what was seventeen tapes in the bag (sixteen of which turned out to be “adult films”)—was a family video.

  It was a wedding. A man who Danny thought was Don (he had never met Don in person) was having a great time with family and friends. “I see him playing with his kids, with his family . . . ,” Danny said later. The video was nostalgic and emotional, Danny explained. He had lost his parents back home to murder and never knew why, when or where. He was only told they were victims of a double homicide. Watching “Don” and his family made Danny realize that the guy was a victim, a person whose life had been snuffed out for no reason. Don had people in the world who loved him. And Danny held on to information that could help answer some of the burning questions the family might still have.

  “I decided I got to—I have to, for my conscience—I got to go and tell somebody about what I know,” Danny recalled. “I mean, if I decided they’re guilty—then they’re guilty.... I had to go and tell someone.”

  Danny had a “friend” in the Bloomfield Township Police Department (BTPD), a nearby community to the west of Troy. They had met at a gas station Danny used to work at. They’d chat from time to time when the cop stopped in. Through that, they had developed one of those cop-citizen bonds. There were even times when people would try to pass bad checks at the gas station and Danny would have to make a report.

  Danny took out the cop’s phone number. Stared at it.

  He’d know what to do.

  So Danny picked up the phone and dialed the number.

  The one worry Danny had as the phone line rang was that he would be somehow implicated in the crime. Dragged into it by Vonlee and Billie Jean. After all, as Danny himself later admitted in court, “I got [a] . . . rap sheet.” Plus, it was a bizarre story, to say the least. Danny had dated a man he thought was a woman, and that transsexual had just told him about a murder.

  “So I was hesitant.”

  Indeed, it sounded like the makings of a trashy, true-crime TV movie from the 1980s, starring Susan Lucci.

  Calling a friend, someone from within the community he knew and trusted, was enough for Danny to ask the cop for his advice regarding what he should do with the information. In the end, Danny believed that by doing the right thing and going to a friend who was a cop, that cop would vouch for him in some respects.

  “I have a story to tell you,” Danny began after the cop picked up. Then he proceeded to explain everything that had happened during the dinner he’d had with Vonlee.

  “Wow,” the cop responded.

  Truly, what else was there to say?

  “Can you tell them,” Danny suggested, meaning the cops in Troy, “and see if they are interested in hearing it from me? If they are, I’ll go in and talk to them.”

  “Yup, yup . . . don’t worry. I’ll have a detective call you. Don’t go anywhere. Don’t leave your house.”

  Danny said he’d wait.

  After hanging up with Danny, the BTPD cop called the TPD. He explained what his “acquaintance” had told him.

  “I know and trust him,” the Bloomfield Township cop, who turned out to be a sergeant, told the TPD. “He has information about a murder that occurred in Troy during the past month that was made to appear to be a natural or accidental death.”

  CHAPTER 24

  AS DANNY CHAHINE SAT and waited for the TPD to call him, he was both nervous and inspired by the decision he’d made to do what he believed was the right thing. He needed to relieve himself of this burden he felt Vonlee had placed on him without warning.

  The phone rang.

  It was TPD detective Donald Tullock.

  “Can you meet with us here at the Troy PD?”

  “I can.”

  Danny went down to the TPD. He sat inside an interrogation room. He asked if they were recording the interview.

  The TPD told him no.

  It was untrue. The entire interview was being videotaped.

  Danny proceeded to give a detailed account, as he saw it, of the night he had gone out to dinner with his girlfriend/fiancée (or his boyfriend/fiancé?) and went home the same night thinking he knew absolutely nothing about this person. Danny focused specifically on what she had told him regarding Don’s death.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said in his broken English accent. “She’s man.”

  Speaking with detectives, Danny came across as believable and trustworthy. Yet, when the TPD had a look at Danny’s record, some credibility issues emerged. In fact, there was a time when Danny Chahine got into serious trouble for possession of cocaine. It was in 1987. The case was ultimately dismissed after the judge threw out some of the evidence against him. At the time, Danny had a green card, which meant he needed to stay out of trouble for five years in the country and work. The following year, 1988, Danny applied for naturalization. On the application, he was asked if he had ever been arrested. Danny said no.

  “I didn’t want to go back [to Lebanon],” he said later. “So I lied.”

  A year after that, in 1989, he was once again busted for possession of cocaine. This time, there was evidence and Danny pleaded guilty, and received several years’ probation.

  In 1990, when asked again, this time by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), if he had ever been arrested, Danny lied a second time.

  Despite all of these questionable actions, the U.S. government granted Danny Chahine citizenship in February 1993. Two years later, after the INS found out he had been lying to them, they charged him with illegally procuring citizenship and he pleaded guilty, receiving three years’ probation. His citizenship was revoked. When he met Billie Jean and Vonlee, Danny was not a citizen of the United States, though he had reapplied and was waiting to hear.

  As Danny got comfortable with the TPD, he talked about his life with Vonlee and the past several weeks. The day after Don Rogers died, Vonlee was upset; she was crying and hysterical. She called, Danny explained, and wanted to talk about what happened.

  “Calm down and speak,” Danny told his girlfriend. It was in those hours after the cops had left the Rogers house on the day Vonlee and Billie Jean claimed they found Don on the kitchen floor.

  “I need to see you,” Vonlee pleaded.

  They made plans to meet the following day.

  That next day, Sunday, August 13, Danny showed up at the Rogers household. He walked in and noticed that Billie Jean was rather casual, upbeat and even happy. She went about her business as if nothing had happened.

  Vonlee was a wreck.

  Danny looked at the new widow. He couldn’t believe her demeanor. He thought: What the heck? If my spouse had died the day before, I’d be very upset, crying....

  “I need to get out of here,” Vonlee told Danny. “I cannot be here.... I need to leave. . . .”

  Off they went.

  In those days after Don died, Danny and Vonlee had several conversations about the Rogers’es. According to Danny, Vonlee told him Don had “ten million” in the bank.

  “How did he
die?” Danny asked Vonlee during one conversation they had that same week of Don’s death. The scene was still raw for Vonlee; she was terribly distressed.

  “The police came and they were asking way too many questions, Danny,” Vonlee explained.

  “Why were they asking so many questions?”

  “I don’t know. . . .”

  Danny was suspicious then, he later claimed. He asked Vonlee, “Why would the police come and ask all these questions? Have you or Billie done anything?”

  “I’ll tell you everything later,” Vonlee supposedly responded.

  As he thought about it over the course of that week, Danny was “shocked” that Don had died so suddenly. It wasn’t his health. Danny, after all, did not know much about Don. He had never met him personally. During the time he had known the two women, Danny was under the impression that Billie Jean wanted to “get rid of Don.”

  Why?

  “Billie will pay twenty-five thousand dollars to get rid of Don,” Vonlee told Danny after he picked her up for a date, he claimed. They were heading out to dinner. It was a few weeks before Don’s death.

  There was another time, Danny told the TPD as he sat and recalled what had happened, when he picked up Vonlee and she seemed totally distraught, completely out of it. They sat in the driveway for a few minutes and talked.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Don and Billie are fighting.”

  Danny said that from outside, while they sat in his car, he could actually hear them screaming at each other.

  “Over what?” Danny asked Vonlee as they pulled out.

  “A thirteen-thousand-dollar credit card bill of Billie’s—she used the money for gambling.”

  The detectives asked Danny if Vonlee had ever told him why she came up from Tennessee to be with her aunt. Was there a reason she had ever given?

  “Yes,” he said. “To help her ‘do something.’ Billie wanted a divorce from Don, but she didn’t want to lose. Billie catch Don and [Vonlee] in compromising position and she will have something on Don.”

  The impression Danny gave was that Billie wanted Vonlee to set Don up with regard to him making a pass at her.

  Then Danny told the TPD about the conversation he’d had with Vonlee over dinner the night before, and what she said after she admitted that she was a man.

  Danny agreed to return to the TPD the following day. Walking out of the station house, he felt a bit apprehensive about a few things the TPD had asked of him. Danny was no rat bastard. He was turning in murderers, he believed. They must pay. He couldn’t walk away from that dinner and not do anything. But what the TPD had asked of him, well, it was something Danny didn’t really want to do. Yet, as he thought about it more and more that night, Vonlee’s (“former”) boyfriend felt it was his obligation.

  It needed to be done.

  CHAPTER 25

  VONLEE’S GRANDMOTHER IN TENNESSEE was the one person in Vonlee’s life whose opinion and advice Vonlee valued and respected more than most others. Vonlee had always looked up to the matriarch of the family, Annis Lee, a woman who never judged Vonlee, pushed her into doing “boy things” as a child or made jokes about Vonlee’s gender issues. In fact, when she felt she was in trouble and didn’t know what else to do, Vonlee went and spoke quite often to Billie Jean’s mother.

  Vonlee had called her grandmother and explained what she believed happened the night Don died. During the phone call, Vonlee went into detail, telling Annis what she remembered about the night, what time she and Billie Jean returned home and what her aunt had done. Vonlee was honest with Annis, telling her grandmother that she was pretty plastered that night and had drunk a lot of booze all day long.

  “My grandmother was a very, very smart woman, very country, but very smart,” Vonlee commented later.

  She had called home to Annis because Vonlee was facing a moral dilemma: Should she go to the cops with what she knew and tell them what she could recall from the night? Or should she just allow time to take its course? Whatever was going to happen would ultimately happen, Vonlee surmised. Her aunt was involved in a lot of things post Don’s death that Vonlee had no idea about. She had given Vonlee tens of thousands of dollars by this point and Vonlee felt that it was blood money. She was conflicted and confused, she later said.

  “It all comes back to . . . you know,” Vonlee later told me, “like, why I finally told Danny about my gender. I wanted to be honest. I thought that unless I start being completely honest with myself and totally honest about everything, I’m not going to get any better. I wouldn’t get anywhere.”

  She was, mainly, speaking of her lapsed sobriety.

  “Even Danny was telling me, right from the beginning, when I first met him, that he believed [my aunt] was not a nice person.”

  Now Vonlee wanted her grandmother’s advice—what should she do?

  The original call Vonlee had made to her grandmother, as Vonlee told her about the night of Don’s death, didn’t turn out the way Vonlee had imagined it might. Annis said, “You know it didn’t happen that way.... You know it didn’t, Vonlee.”

  Vonlee’s grandmother didn’t want to believe what Vonlee was saying about her daughter.

  “I needed someone to understand what was going on with me,” Vonlee recalled. “I was contemplating killing myself and taking it very seriously. I was thinking about, for the first time in my life, I’m done. I’m out. I couldn’t take it anymore.”

  She was looking for someone to talk her out of it.

  When Vonlee’s grandmother failed to respond the way in which Vonlee had assumed she would, Vonlee’s mother, Georgia Pinkerton, got on the phone.

  Vonlee told her mother what happened to Don, concluding with, “I am thinking about going to the police.”

  Georgia was shocked. “I’ll talk to Billie,” she said.

  A day or so later, Georgia called and spoke to Billie Jean, a conversation Georgia relayed to Vonlee later that night.

  Billie Jean took on a dark, cold tone with her sister after Georgia explained what Vonlee had said earlier in the day. “If you or Vonlee go to the police,” she allegedly warned, “I will make sure that your son spends the rest of his life in prison. I’ll make sure of it, Georgia. I have enough money now and enough influence.”

  “Your son . . .”

  Georgia could tell that her sister was serious when she referred to Vonlee as “your son.”

  When Vonlee spoke to her mother later on, Georgia said, “Listen, Vonlee, she’s capable of that.”

  Vonlee took this to mean: Do not go to the police. Let it play out.

  “Why didn’t anybody warn me, tell me about Billie before I came out here?” Vonlee asked her mother.

  “Everyone did, Vonlee. But you acted like she could do no wrong. Y’all never listened to anybody, anyway—not ever. Even your uncle told you, ‘Billie’s the Devil.’ You would not listen to him.”

  CHAPTER 26

  WITH LIFE IN A dismal downward spiral for Billie Jean Rogers, with law enforcement now creeping and sniffing around, seeking information about Don’s death, the widow pushed it all to the side on September 1, 2000, in order to satisfy what was, according to those who knew her best, a gambling addiction that had taken total control of her life long before Don’s death.

  Vonlee had not gone to the casino with her on this night. She was home waiting for Danny to pick her up. They had dinner plans. Vonlee had no idea, obviously, that two detectives from the TPD had wired Danny’s truck with a transmitter underneath the seat, which was connected to a recording device. Vonlee trusted Danny. She was looking to talk to him, hoping that he would be there for her and help her through a really bad time.

  “I looked to Danny as someone that was going to help me,” Vonlee said later. “If he would have come to me and said, ‘I’m going to the police, I need you to go with me,’ I would have gone with him. He was a smart man. I thought, ‘If I tell him the truth, he’ll know what to do.’”

  It seemed to Vonlee t
hat Danny still had intimate feelings for her. Why else would he still be hanging around?

  Before heading over to pick up his date, Danny stopped by the TPD so experts could wire up his truck, a black Suburban, with a digital recording device.

  “Oh, look at you! Look. At. You!” Danny said, greeting Vonlee as she stepped into his truck, the recording machine picking up every word.

  Vonlee was dressed to the nines.

  “Had my hair redone. . . .”

  “Look at you. Why you didn’t tell me you going to be dressed up like that?”

  They made small talk as Danny pulled out of the driveway and began the drive to the casino. Danny could turn on the charm when he needed. He said, “I can’t believe the way you look. I swear to God, you just, you look like a model. What did you do?”

  “I used to be a model,” Vonlee said, lapping up the attention.

  “I know. . . .”

  Vonlee said she had finally stopped drinking. She was feeling so much better now. Her skin even felt smoother since she’d stopped.

  It was a lie, Vonlee said later. “I was still drinking, just not quite as much as I was right after Don died.”

  “I went to the doctor,” Vonlee told Danny.

  “What doctor?”

  “She put me on nerve medicine.”

  “Nerve medicine?” Danny said, surprised. “For what?”

  “I’m a nervous wreck.”

  “You are a nervous wreck and I . . . You know what?” Danny sounded as though he’d wanted to say something, but then had changed his thought for some reason he failed to explain. Instead, he added: “If I was you, I would leave that house. I would leave that house.”

  “She’s got me on Xanax ’cause I . . . haven’t been drinking.... That drinking was killing me.”

  Vonlee later said she “was in another world as all of this was going on.” For her, going to a psychiatrist was a last resort. There were many nights when she sat at her aunt’s house contemplating putting a rope around her neck and checking out. “I’m like . . . drinking and drinking . . . lying about it . . . and then the psychiatrist puts me on the Xanax.” Everybody around Vonlee and Billie Jean—Don’s kids, Billie Jean’s kids—had been asking what in the name of God was wrong with Vonlee? She was so distraught all the time.