If You Only Knew

by M. William Phelps

  “Family members advised me to get a lawyer before submitting to the test.”

  Hanging up the phone, Zimmerman knew there was only one thing left for him to do at this point.

  CHAPTER 42

  SOME CONSIDERED IT AN unlucky number, but thirteen law enforcement officials were on hand at 11:25 A.M., on January 6, 2001, when a search warrant was issued for Billie Jean and Don’s Grenadier residence. With that type of personnel power, you’d expect a meth lab or bomb-making factory to be uncovered in the basement. Yet, this mighty show of force was there to go through and find any incriminating evidence against Billie Jean Rogers (and perhaps Vonlee) inside the home she shared with the husband she had supposedly murdered.

  Detective Don Zimmerman and a partner knocked on the door. Zimmerman handed her the warrant, saying, “We’re here to search your home for items associated with the homicide of Donald Rogers.”

  She let them in.

  Zimmerman asked if it was okay for the entire team to come in.

  She took a look outside.

  Man, what a crowd.

  “Yes, come on in . . . ,” she said without much ado.

  The TPD was now all over Billie Jean and Vonlee, though Billie Jean did not seem too concerned as the investigation took on an entire new level of intensity. Where Vonlee stood on it all was anybody’s guess: she was still in Chicago.

  In his twenty-nine-item search warrant, Zimmerman outlined the case he believed the TPD had against the two women. Mainly, it consisted of Don’s daughter, Danny Chahine’s recorded conversations with Vonlee and the money trail that alerted the TPD to a possible homicide, which from there tipped the scales of the medical examiner to say, “Yeah, you know what? Maybe Don was murdered, now that I think about it.” Detectives Zimmerman and Tullock had met with the medical examiner again and talked about Don’s death in more frank, focused detail during those days after Danny Chahine had come forward. Now that they had the information from the conversations Danny had recorded, it was easy—from their perspective—to put together the scenario that had vaguely shown up on the initial autopsy. Things made sense, in other words, now that they had all the pieces of the puzzle in place: the slight bruising on Don’s lips; the amount of alcohol in his system; the fact that one leg was crossed over the other.

  Essentially, the TPD needed the medical examiner’s office to change its stance on the cause of death. In order to proceed with criminal charges, Zimmerman said later, the cause of death needed to be homicide. It didn’t mean the medical examiner’s office or the TPD was forcing anything, or trying to convince each other there had been a murder. The fact remained: more information about Don’s death had become available—namely, a confession by someone who was there when it happened.

  For Don Tullock, he later said in court, Don Rogers’s legs being crossed had always bothered him. He thought it to be very odd from the first time he saw it. With twenty-five years on the job, Tullock had relied on instinct. And in this case, his gut said that Don Rogers’s killer staged that scene to make it appear as though he had fallen out of a chair onto the ground and died.

  Executing this search was an important moment for the TPD, especially for Detectives Zimmerman and Tullock. It meant a judge had agreed that there was enough probable cause to execute a search of Billie Jean’s home and, most important for these cops, Don’s financial records, much of which they expected to find inside the house. Whenever a spouse kills his or her significant other, it is generally motivated by money or revenge. Documents are the best source for detectives in finding the roots of that motive.

  The Rogers widow was cordial as she let everyone in.

  One of the first things Zimmerman looked for was Billie Jean’s checkbook and ledger. Zimmerman wanted to see what she had been spending her money on, whom she had paid money to and what other interesting factors the ledger might reveal.

  “It’s right here,” she said.

  “It was a financial record, number one,” Zimmerman commented later. “And number two, I was aware that checks pertaining to this case were issued through Bank One. . . .”

  Indeed, they had a check made out to Vonlee for $70,260 and signed by Billie Jean. It was dated August 24, 2000. The TPD believed that check was payment either to keep Vonlee’s mouth shut or for her participation in the murder—or maybe both.

  The TPD had already known about the cars, and the checkbook verified that information and the amount Billie Jean had paid for each.

  As Zimmerman looked at the back page inside the cover of Billie Jean’s checkbook, he noticed something else. A handwritten note, presumably by Billie Jean: Vonlee-$100,000.

  Other items they secured included: one plastic drinking glass from kitchen; last will and test[ament] for Don Rogers; death certificate . . . misc. Cadillac papers; two dining room chairs; cardboard box containing misc. documents relating to Donald Rogers. All of this was taken, along with other nonforensic-type evidence, which amounted to nothing.

  For Zimmerman and Tullock, despite the lack of locating any smoking gun that would undeniably nail Billie Jean and Vonlee, it was a matter of time before Billie Jean Rogers would be under arrest for the murder of her husband.

  CHAPTER 43

  FROM THE POINT OF the search warrant on, the investigation took on a familiar checklist type of routine for Detectives Don Tullock and Don Zimmerman. The documents they uncovered led them to witnesses and other people who knew the Rogers couple and interacted with them on a daily basis. One business associate Tullock spoke to, in particular, added a bit of insight into Don Rogers’s life and what he was thinking about in the days before he died. Essentially, the TPD needed whatever it could get at this point. Because when all was said and done, the best case they had was based on circumstantial evidence.

  The guy, who had worked for Don and his partner at the machine shop, told Tullock that Don had said to him one day, “Some people are just waiting for me to die so they can get my money.”

  “He ever say who?” Tullock asked.

  “No . . . and in all fairness to Mrs. Rogers, Don could have been talking about [other family members].”

  Tullock wanted to know about how Mrs. Rogers acted after Don’s death.

  “Toni [the company secretary] asked me to go over and help Mrs. Rogers remove some things from the home. I hauled out approximately one hundred large plastic garbage bags at the direction of Mrs. Rogers. Don was a pack rat and opted not to discard most of his possessions.”

  Still, just days after Don’s dead, here is his wife getting rid of any memory of the guy. It seemed far too soon to be cleaning the house of Don’s lifetime worth of personal belongings, in the detective’s opinion.

  “You know what was in the bags?” Tullock wondered.

  “Clothing, bedding materials, personal stuff. That type of thing. I also hauled away old furniture.”

  “Tell me about Billie Jean,” Tullock said. “How has she been?”

  “I’ve only seen her on a few occasions . . . but since his death, I found nothing unusual about her demeanor, other than she appears to be sedated or medicated whenever I see her.”

  Tullock asked about Vonlee.

  “I did meet [her],” he said sheepishly, almost embarrassed to answer the question. “Mrs. Rogers’s ‘niece,’ I was shocked to learn from a recent newspaper article, is male. I even saw her once wearing a ‘see-through’ nightie and could see her very large breasts.”

  And that was all he had.

  CHAPTER 44

  ON JANUARY 16, 2001, Vonlee was inside her Chicago apartment getting ready to go out for the night with a friend, Thomas (pseudonym). They had plans to party and gamble aboard a riverboat casino. Vonlee’s friend was in the process of having some remodeling done on his apartment and needed a place to crash, so he had been staying with her. As Vonlee applied her makeup in the bathroom, Thomas walked in.

  “Hey, can I borrow your car to go to the ATM?”

  “Of course.”

  He s
aid thanks and left.

  Vonlee decided to lie down and take a quick nap, knowing it was going to be a long night. She drifted away quickly, but was soon startled awake by a rap on her front door.

  “Yes, yes . . . just a minute,” she said. The knock on the door had an urgent, impatient tone to it. Vonlee wasn’t expecting anyone and wondered who it could be.

  “Who is it?” she said, opening the door to a man she had never seen before. There were several other men and one female standing behind him.

  Cops, great, Vonlee thought when she figured it out.

  “Do you know a man by the name of Thomas?” the man, now identifying himself as a detective, asked.

  “Why, yes, of course. He’s a friend.”

  “Does he have permission to drive your vehicle? We just stopped him in your car.” They had him in custody.

  “Well, yes, yes . . . he has permission,” Vonlee said.

  What in the hell is going on here?

  “Listen, can we come in?” the cop asked.

  Vonlee said fine as she opened the door and “that’s when they all came rushing in.” A swarm of law enforcement. The first domino was about to fall for the TPD. The Chicago Police Department, acting on a warrant issued by Troy, were there to arrest Vonlee on murder charges. Detectives Zimmerman and Tullock, Vonlee said, were there with them. But this was CPD’s collar.

  “You remember us?” Zimmerman walked over and asked Vonlee (she later recalled). Zimmerman, she said, had a smug look about his face. He was being sarcastic. Smarmy.

  “Uh, yeah,” Vonlee said. “I remember.”

  “Well, you are under arrest for the murder of Donald Rogers. . . .” He said the words as though he’d been waiting for this moment since first meeting Vonlee.

  “Have y’all arrested my aunt?” Vonlee asked.

  There was no answer.

  It wasn’t hard to secure an arrest warrant for Vonlee considering that she—in a recorded admission—claimed to have participated in Don’s murder. The TPD had a statement and a recording from Danny Chahine, and Vonlee certainly gave enough incriminating information against herself and her aunt to make any judge suspicious enough to sign a warrant. The trick for the TPD was going to be holding on to Vonlee once she was in custody.

  Later on, when she went back and revisited it in her memory, Vonlee said, “You ever watch a movie, and they show somebody walking out of a house, lights flashing, cops in uniform all around, and the person is in handcuffs and it’s in slow motion? Well, I swear to God, it was just like that.”

  Vonlee said her life stopped at that moment and began to move at a “snail’s pace.” It began when they were in the living room. Vonlee hadn’t even been dressed when they came in. She was wearing a robe. The shoulder of her robe kept falling down, and the female officer there to supervise the arrest kept telling Vonlee to pull it up. The detectives had to keep reminding Vonlee to get dressed, since it was time to go. She was milking it, Vonlee later admitted, thinking that every moment she stalled was another moment free.

  “Well, this is a first,” one of the detectives said, according to Vonlee.

  “What do you mean: ‘This is a first’?”

  “The first time we come to somebody’s house like yours and don’t find anything illegal.”

  To Vonlee, the judgments began with that comment.

  As they walked around the apartment, Vonlee recalled, Zimmerman and Tullock were taken aback by the “things” Vonlee owned. If there was one truth about Vonlee’s character she would readily agree to without a fight, it was that she liked expensive material possessions.

  “How can you live like this? How do you live like this?” one of the detectives asked, referring to all of the nice things Vonlee had inside her apartment.

  “Extravagant,” Vonlee said later. That’s what they were insinuating—that she lived in the lap of luxury. And it was some sort of a crime for her to do it. As they walked around and wanted to know how she could afford to live the way she did, without working a regular job, Vonlee inferred from the conversation that they were disgusted by it.

  Most of the things Vonlee had, she said, “I had my whole life. I designed my own bedroom set. I had it forever. I had antiques . . . and it might take me three or four years to pay for the things, but I wanted them and paid for them myself.”

  What she later suspected had set them off were some of the dresses and blouses with the price tags still attached, which she had hanging in her closet. They were expensive.

  “And they were just trying to chastise me for being able to afford such things,” Vonlee added.

  By nine-thirty on that same night, Vonlee was in custody at the CPD, being booked and processed. But the Chicago police had a major problem: where were they going to hold Vonlee until the TPD could get her into a Chicago court and ask a judge to extradite her—if Vonlee agreed, that is—back to Troy?

  CHAPTER 45

  WHILE IN CUSTODY AT the Chicago Police Department, waiting to go before a judge and face extradition to Michigan, Vonlee was “scared to death,” she said. It’s no secret that a transsexual like Vonlee, as good-looking and seemingly “female” as she appeared, would be a good candidate for excessive and violent rape while in lockup.

  Vonlee recalled how big the story was: “If I didn’t imagine this, I swear that while I was being taken into custody and led out of my apartment and into a patrol car, there were helicopters overhead . . . because it was on the news instantly.”

  She sat in a small room at the CPD, her hands handcuffed to the chair. Left with her own thoughts about what would happen next, all she could do was think about the stories she’d heard about Chicago lockup. It was one of the worst places a person like Vonlee could be housed.

  “You want to just go ahead and just tell us what happened?” one cop came in and asked Vonlee.

  “Well, why don’t you tell me what happened?” Vonlee snapped back. She’d been down this road before. She knew the drill.

  “You might as well go ahead and confess, because we got it all on the recording,” one cop explained—Vonlee could not recall who it was, whether it was Tullock or Zimmerman.

  “If y’all got it on the recording, well, you don’t need me to tell you what happened.”

  They looked at each other. This was not going to be as simple as they’d hoped.

  This sort of psychological impasse went on for hours. They’d come in, ask a few questions, leave Vonlee for a few hours to wrestle with her own thoughts, then come back and ask her what happened. They’d inquire if she needed to use the restroom, want a cigarette, coffee, soda, food, whatever.

  But Vonlee was not going to talk about anything. That was made clear to them right away, she later claimed.

  Because Vonlee wouldn’t eat anything, she said, “I guess that was their plan—to wait until I was really hungry and then use the food to make me talk. But I never got hungry.”

  She could not recall how long, exactly, she was with the CPD inside that room, handcuffed to a chair, “but it seemed to go on for days. . . .”

  It was about twelve hours.

  As she sat and thought about her situation, Vonlee considered that all she had to do was call them in and say, “Look, I understand that this was said, and that was said, and it is recorded, but I was afraid of Danny . . . and I was afraid of what he would do if he found out . . . because he knew that my aunt had killed her husband and he used to warn me all the time that she was a mean person, who could do such a thing, and I just decided to play along with him and that story. That story got out of control and . . . well, I told him what he wanted to hear.”

  Sitting, contemplating what to do, Vonlee thought, I could just lie about all of this, because they have nothing. I know they have nothing. That recording is nothing.

  Still, as she considered her options, Vonlee later said, “There was just something inside of me that just wouldn’t allow me to lie about it all.”

  Finally, after a rather long stalemate,
Vonlee called them in and said, “I’m going to tell you everything you want to know.”

  She said they gathered everyone together and sat down with a recording device placed in front of her. All of the cops seemed excited.

  “You’re not going to like what I am getting ready to say,” Vonlee explained after they asked a series of specific questions: name, address, where they were recording the interview, time of day, that sort of thing.

  “We know it’s hard, but it’s the right thing to do,” one cop told her.

  “Okay, y’all ready . . . ?”

  They waited on baited breath.

  Vonlee nestled up to the microphone and announced, “I want an attorney.”

  She smiled, sat back, crossed her legs.

  “Get her the hell out of here,” one of the cops yelled to a uniform outside the door.

  CHAPTER 46

  VONLEE WAS IN LOCKUP. From her point of view, it was as though she had walked into the Roman Coliseum, with lions and tigers pacing back and forth in front of her, ready to pounce.

  According to Vonlee, with no corroborating evidence to support her claim, the abuse started the moment she got into the elevator with a cop to head to lockup.

  “I was offered alcohol by a guard, first thing—that is, if I showed him my boobs,” Vonlee said. “They offered me weed to have oral sex with a white guy I was put into a bunk with.... I was raped . . . abused.... It was absolute hell.”

  Vonlee weighed about 140 pounds at the time, long blond hair down to her waist, the curves of a woman.

  “I was going to the tanning beds all the time then, and I had this little Playboy bunny sticker I would put on my skin so when I tanned and took it off, I had this Playboy bunny there.”

  She claimed she was forced to “strip twice in front of a whole group of guys and they were just freaking the hell out.”

  When she squawked about being put into the pen with all of these men who were hardened criminals, ready and waiting to do her harm in the most vile ways, according to Vonlee, she was told, “Look, we have to treat you the same as any other man—we were sued by a transsexual and that’s the way it is! We cannot discriminate.”