If You Only Knew

by M. William Phelps

  After moving in with Jay, Vonlee and her girlfriend were sitting around talking one night. Jay was at work.

  “I have to tell him,” Vonlee confided in her friend. She’d been freaking out lately about it, stressing over the “right time.” Their relationship had turned into something Vonlee never saw coming. They were deeply in love.

  Both women agreed that when Jay returned, Vonlee’s girlfriend would do the dirty work for her.

  “Sit down,” she told Jay when he walked in. Vonlee left the room.

  “I don’t understand,” Jay said when the girlfriend finished.

  Vonlee came into the room. She explained it to him as bluntly as she could.

  “He was upset, confused and didn’t believe it,” Vonlee recalled.

  Vonlee had always told Jay there was a secret about her he needed to know. She’d mentioned this many times. Jay had wondered, but never pressured her to tell him. He obviously didn’t think the secret was that she was a man.

  “Well, how in the hell did we have sex?” Jay asked. Vonlee could see that Jay was going back through his rolodex of memories and thinking, Were there signs? Did I miss something?

  Vonlee explained how she carefully manipulated the situation and fooled him into having anal intercourse. He had worn a condom, so there was no worry there for Jay, but he was still very disturbed by everything.

  “I was scared to death of losing him. I wanted him to get to know me for me, as a person. I loved the guy. Is it deceptive? Yeah, of course. But, at the same time, if you walk around telling everyone, they are going automatically to judge you and not even give you the opportunity to get to know you.”

  Vonlee was going through an incredible personal inventory at the time of who she truly was, she said. She wore “gaff” underwear every day, which kept her manhood tucked underneath. Vonlee never had a small penis, nor did she have an overly large penis. Still, it was hard for a while to hide it—until she amped up the female hormones and her private parts shrank remarkably.

  “At one time, another inch of shrinking and I would be a girl,” Vonlee explained with a casual laugh. “And it works the opposite way, too: For a girl to take male testosterone, her clitoris will grow—I’ve seen them three, four inches long! But it’s still easier to go from a guy to a girl. It’s much easier to dig a hole than to build a pole.”

  Jay and Vonlee dated for another year. She wanted to be clear that Jay was not a gay man. He was heterosexual—a heterosexual, nonetheless, now faced with a personal dilemma: should he give up the woman he thought he was in love with, or stop dating a man?

  “In the two years we were together, he had never seen my penis,” Vonlee said.

  Jay stayed with Vonlee, but he began to push her to get the surgery. He wanted Vonlee to be as completely female as she could be—or, rather, as surgically and humanly possible. When they talked about it, Vonlee was taken aback. It had been on her mind, clearly, for many, many years. What stopped her, every time, was the finality and how things could turn out. There were no guarantees with the operation. She could lose the entire feeling and sensation of orgasm—and every time she revisited getting the operation, it scared the hell out of her.

  “I’m going to open an account for you,” Jay said one night while they were discussing it. “I’ll give you half the money, but you need to come up with the other half to show you really want it done, too.”

  Vonlee said she kept “derailing” the procedure. Any money she saved for the surgery, she’d go out and shop until it was gone.

  “I don’t know if I was a shopaholic or I was just putting it off,” she later explained.

  Vonlee had gone as far as meeting with the doctor, taking and passing the required HIV test, then scheduling pre-op meetings. The surgery in Montreal she was going to get was about the estimated twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand dollars, which included hotel and airfare.

  “But I wasn’t ready,” she said. “This guy was everything I had ever wanted, too. He was the president of a company. Good-looking. He didn’t use drugs.... He had taken me to meet his mother. She pulled me aside and said, ‘He must really, really love you because he’s never brought a girl home.’”

  The second Christmas they spent together was special, Vonlee said. She decided to go all out on the guy as far as gifts. The surgery was on hold for now, but she’d promised to reconsider after the holidays. He seemed to accept that for the time being.

  There was something different about Jay, though, throughout that entire holiday season. And Vonlee knew it.

  “I’ve been reading a book,” Jay said during the holiday that year. He was sitting in the living room. He had a mocking look on his face. Vonlee could tell something was on his mind.

  “What book is it that you’ve been reading?” Vonlee asked.

  “Didn’t matter,” he said. “But in the book, there was a guy going down on a girl and it really, really turned me on.”

  Jay was missing out on so much was the point. He couldn’t experience the things he wanted to with Vonlee. There would always be a gulf between them. Operation or no operation, she was a man. Jay was having serious problems with it.

  “You’re never going to let up about the surgery, are you?” Vonlee asked.

  They got into a fight.

  During dinner later that same night, after another comment from Jay about something that only a guy could do to a “real” female, Vonlee “snapped,” she said. She shoved her food across the table toward Jay. Stood. Then screamed: “I cannot do this anymore. I am not what you want me to be, and I am not ready to be that right now. . . .”

  Vonlee ran into the bedroom and cried. Jay took his time, but he came in and consoled his girlfriend.

  “You’ve taught me how to love, Vonlee . . . ,” Jay said.

  Vonlee tried to get up to leave, but he wouldn’t let her go.

  “I’ve never felt like this,” he said (according to Vonlee).

  As they began another round of yelling, the phone rang. It was Jay’s work. The alarm system was going off and he needed to get over there immediately.

  Jay grabbed his coat and, before leaving, said, “We’ll finish this later.”

  Vonlee sat and watched Jay walk out the door. Moments later, she made a decision.

  It was time to leave—with all of her belongings.

  “And I never saw him again after that night. We had phone sex once, when he called, but that was it—we were through.”

  CHAPTER 38

  THE NUMBER GLUED ON the brick portico had a contemporary slant to its decor: 2090. A white plastic lawn chair sat in the corner of the entryway, just underneath that street number and door, which went into Don Rogers’s home. The blinds covering the side window attached to the door were closed, but it appeared someone was home. There was movement inside the house, Detective Don Zimmerman and a colleague noticed as they approached.

  It was close to four o’clock in the afternoon on January 5, 2001. The holidays had come and gone. The TPD had left Vonlee and her aunt alone for a while, but now it was time to pick up the pace of the investigation again. Now that the TPD had Vonlee on tape admitting that she had watched as Billie Jean murdered her husband with a pillow—and might have even helped Billie Jean with the crime herself—but detectives figured why not confront Billie Jean with some of what they knew. See what she had to say.

  Zimmerman knocked.

  No answer.

  So he knocked again.

  A dog barked on the opposite side of the street.

  The other detective with Zimmerman said, “They have a phone, don’t they?”

  “I can bang on the door again.”

  As they were figuring out their next move, somebody opened the door.

  “Hi, Mrs. Rogers,” Zimmerman said, extending a hand. He explained who he was before introducing his colleague.

  The house alarm was going off in the background. It was loud and obnoxious.

  “You remember me?” Zimmerman asked. “I ta
lked to you several weeks ago when your husband died.”

  The other cop asked, “Can you make that alarm go off? You want to take care of that.”

  Billie Jean let them in as she walked away to shut off the alarm.

  “Hi, Ms. Rogers,” Zimmerman said when they got settled and the noise of the alarm diminished. “We need to talk to you.”

  After a few moments of small talk, taking over lead in the conversation, Zimmerman asked, “Do you know what happened?”

  “Well,” Billie Jean said, an obvious sharpness in her tone, “he died.”

  “We need to ask you about the missing stuff.”

  “The what?” She was confused about this statement. What was missing? There hadn’t been anything stolen from the house—what were they talking about?

  After realizing he’d made a mistake, Zimmerman explained: “You may probably know that [Vonlee] told somebody about what happened that night, okay?”

  The other cop chimed in: “Don’s been murdered.”

  “And there is a break in the case,” said Zimmerman as the Rogers widow looked totally blindsided by the statement. “You remember Danny?”

  “Who?” she asked.

  They told her.

  “Yeah,” she said, looking at them.

  Of course, she knew Danny: Vonlee’s boyfriend.

  “[Vonlee] told Danny what happened here that night. . . .”

  “[Vonlee] . . . might say anything,” she said with a bit of how-dare-she in her phlegmy, smoker’s voice. “I don’t know what you heard.”

  “We’re here to get to the truth.”

  “Okay,” she acknowledged, as though she didn’t have a problem talking to two cops without her lawyer present, both of them coming across as pushy and accusatory.

  For cops looking to figure out who was the driving force behind a murder such as the case in front of the TPD (after all, they understood that Vonlee could have lied to Danny and planned and carried out the murder entirely by herself), there were two ways to approach an interview like this: One, lay everything down the way it happened and see if the subject drops her shoulders, takes a deep breath and, caving into her own guilt, admits everything. Or the second way, play one perp against the other and lie about certain details in order to allow the truth to rise to the surface by itself. With a subject like Billie Jean Rogers, considering her history of gambling (i.e., taking chances), it might be better to go with the latter.

  One of the detectives said the TPD wanted to give her “the opportunity to tell us the truth about what happened,” adding grimly, “[Vonlee] painted a pretty gruesome picture of you to us, and she has indicated that this entire thing that happened was all your doing, and that she’s really a minor part of that—and she’s putting basically everything off on you, okay?”

  Billie Jean was obviously surprised by this breach of trust. One could almost hear her thinking: How dare that bitch. All I did for her!

  The second cop added, “Um, we looked at her . . . criminal history—or his?—or her criminal history, whatever. What do you refer to her as? Your niece or your nephew?”

  Billie Jean started to say something, but they cut her off.

  “But we, we looked at . . . her criminal records. She’s got a criminal record.”

  “She does?” the aunt asked, seemingly surprised.

  “Yeah. And we’ve looked at yours and there is none. So Vonlee . . . we’ve come to think that Vonlee might’ve helped put you up to this, or at least she did it and you helped do it. We know that you were there and we have plenty of evidence . . . to say what’s going on, and Vonlee has told us things . . . but we know [she] told somebody everything that happened that night. They told us.”

  Don Zimmerman mentioned how they had it on good information that Vonlee had since moved to Chicago, and Billie Jean confirmed Vonlee had indeed left the state. It might have appeared, or these cops certainly made it seem, as if Vonlee had taken off in haste and had run. But she had told everyone where she was going and where she was living. It was no secret.

  “You know, now maybe you know what happened that night, and we’re here to find out the truth,” Zimmerman added.

  They walked from the living room into the kitchen for a moment as she poured herself something to drink. “I know nothing happened that I know of,” she explained, before blurting out, for no reason, what seemed to be an odd statement: “I did not asphyxiate my husband. I wouldn’t. . . .”

  “Well, you know, why would [Vonlee] say that you did?”

  Billie Jean said she had no idea why Vonlee would accuse her of such a heinous crime. She had no explanation for that. Did she need one?

  “She said that she assisted you in that endeavor . . . and that you paid her money.”

  “No. No,” Billie Jean insisted.

  “Did you pay her any money?”

  “I gave her some money to get a, uh, for a sex-change job.”

  “Yeah, you bought her a car, too.”

  “I wrote the check for the cash,” the aunt explained. She was having trouble with the idea that any of this was a crime. Could she not give her niece money—especially after suddenly coming into a fortune because of a death?

  They talked about money and how the widow had been spending frivolously. Then Zimmerman gave her a chance to ease her way out of what they were projecting to be seriously suspicious behavior on her part lately.

  “Well, what we’re trying to get at is the truth here. If you only had a little part to do with this, we want to know that—and you can tell us what part Vonlee had in it.”

  “I had nothing to do with it,” Billie Jean said right away, firmly. She walked back into the living room and sat down. She was feeling cornered and pressured. These cops were being overbearing bullies, following her around her own house, peppering her with questions that seemed to point a finger, all because her niece had said a few things. She didn’t understand it. Why were they doing this? They kept going back to Vonlee and how she had claimed her aunt paid her for her help. Didn’t matter what Billie Jean was saying now, Vonlee was apparently tossing her aunt to the wolves.

  “We don’t know the exact story what happened,” one of them said, “but she is telling us one and it makes you look pretty bad, okay?”

  Billie Jean explained that Vonlee, throughout her life, had always told lots of tall tales. She was known for this in the family. What she was saying now meant nothing to Billie Jean, she said.

  Zimmerman claimed they had spoken to Vonlee and that she was willing to “take a polygraph to say, you know, what she said is the truth. So it’s probably going to happen.”

  The aunt didn’t seem too concerned about this: “Whatever,” she said.

  They asked her what time she got home that night.

  She wouldn’t answer. She’d already told them, she explained.

  It seemed they had reached an impasse when Zimmerman suggested, “Now, you’re going to have to . . . tell us what actually happened, or we’re going to have to go with her story.”

  Billie Jean took a sip from her cup and stared at them.

  Checkmate.

  CHAPTER 39

  VONLEE TITLOW WAS AT a crossroads in her life once again. This time, she sat back and licked her wounds from that last relationship with Jay. She’d put two years into it. The only thing Vonlee could think of doing next was perhaps to leave Denver. Get the hell out of town and find her roots back home in Tennessee.

  So she packed her car and left. Unlike many people, if Vonlee understood one thing about life, it was that you could always start over. There would always be another sunrise. Maryville was home. Family would always be there for her.

  Along the way, Vonlee stopped and called Mandy, just to let her know that she’d thrown in the towel and had taken off.

  “Where you at?” Mandy asked.

  “I don’t know . . . halfway between Denver and home, I guess.”

  “What are you doing, Vonlee?”

  She started to cry.
“I don’t know. I am going a little crazy.”

  “Well, you turn your ass around and you come back here!” Mandy insisted.

  What made this so difficult for her was the belief that she “was truly, truly in love with this guy. Everything I thought I wanted in a person, he had,” Vonlee said. The demise of the relationship, however, made her feel like she “wasn’t good enough. And I knew that after I had the operation, the next thing for him was going to be ‘We cannot have kids,’” Vonlee wisely stated.

  As she saw it, with Jay, maybe with any heterosexual guy, there was always going to be that one thing she couldn’t give him: never being a complete woman.

  “[Jay] was the kind of person that wanted kids, and the type of person that wanted kids that looked like and sounded like him. It wasn’t ever going to be enough for him and I could see it.”

  The decision to transform into a female—that final operation—was a process that she needed to take her time at, Vonlee explained. If a guy did it when he was eighteen or twenty, or even midtwenties, it was far too early, Vonlee maintained, speaking for herself. However, being that young, he might not have known any different.

  “You need to live your life as you see it . . . ,” she elaborated. “I needed to be sure. My mother said to me, ‘Wait until you’re at least twenty-five.’ I promised I would.”

  Then there was the possibility of never experiencing an orgasm.

  “Look, I’ve heard stories of girls having no trouble after the operation having a ‘female’ orgasm. And I’ve been told by others that they could stab their new ‘vagina’ with a fork and not feel a thing. So it was always a big decision for me, because I valued and liked sex so much.”

  Vonlee drove back to Denver after talking with Mandy.

  “And I began to date guys that actually enjoyed being with a ‘she-male.’”

  Once again, Vonlee rolled with the changes of her life and thought she could find happiness in something new.

  The escort service was next. Vonlee opened it in Denver. Yet, after going home for a visit, she decided she wanted to leave Denver and move to Chicago. It was during that brief visit back home when Vonlee ran into Billie Jean and, after not seeing each other for almost a decade, the two sparked up a relationship. Vonlee mentioned to her aunt how she was going to be moving to Chicago in the near future and that she would be close to Michigan, where the Rogers couple was living.