She wound up in the maximum-security portion of lockup. When she was being escorted in, a series of “large, very large, black and white men” looked on, whistling and shouting obscenities and what they were going to do to her when they could get her alone.
It was only when she was forced to shower with all of them that a courageous guard stepped up and said, “There’s no way I am putting her in there with them.”
So from there, after a lengthy discussion, they put Vonlee in the psych ward.
“I mean, it was crazy. It was full of crazy people. It was like, if it was quiet, they turn on music for them, but if it got rowdy, they’d turn the music off. . . .”
After a time in the psych ward, they went to Vonlee and offered her protective custody, but she had to sign for it.
Some of the inmates in protective custody could shimmy their doors open enough to get out of their cells, Vonlee said. As she was walking by one particular cell, a guy grabbed her and pulled her in, then closed the door behind them.
“You don’t have to do this,” she pleaded with the man.
He came at her, forcing himself. She screamed.
“I kicked him as hard as I could in the nuts,” which slowed him down. She got up, threw him against the wall and went for the door.
It was open. She ran out, slamming the door behind her.
“That place was crazy,” she recalled.
Whenever she took a shower, Vonlee put up a sheet as a curtain so no one could see her.
“Well, this little black kid came up and ripped it down one day,” she said.
“Don’t you do that,” Vonlee said to him. They were on the second tier of a two-tier facility.
“Bitch, you talk back to me and I will throw your ass over that balcony,” he said.
After several days of this and an appearance in court, Vonlee was offered the opportunity to be extradited back to Michigan and she jumped at it.
“I would have been killed in Chicago.”
CHAPTER 47
DON TULLOCK WAS WITH Vonlee at the TPD station house while she was being booked. Of course, the obvious first question was her name.
Vonlee said she was a male, and her actual given name was Harry, but she had never used Harry. She went by Vonlee or Nicole. They could take their pick.
The conversation was short. Tullock asked, “Have you experienced the death of a loved one recently?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Who? When?” Tullock countered.
“My uncle was killed.”
On the medical intake form associated with Vonlee’s arrest and booking at the TPD, an interesting aside played out. Under the question of whether the arrested individual was at that time seeing a physician, Vonlee reported she was. Asked to explain, she wrote, Sex change.
Was Vonlee finally going through with the operation at the time of her arrest?
As Tullock sat and read through it, a report of a search done on Vonlee’s Riviera indicated cops had found a duffel bag of “misc. clothes,” a pair of glasses in a case, two CDs, a wallet, laundry basket, “misc. gay literature,” a sweater, several miscellaneous items, inconsequential to the charges, and one “nine-inch cock/dildo.”
When they searched Vonlee’s apartment in Chicago, they found nothing. As to her involvement in a murder, Vonlee thought, where was the corroborating evidence to back it up?
Vonlee was housed in a special section of the jail, where she could be alone and away from other men. The jail in Michigan was sympathetic to her situation, she said later.
While in lockup that night, Vonlee placed a collect call to Billie Jean. She happened to be home.
Vonlee wanted to find out if her aunt had secured a lawyer for her. After having trouble hearing each other, Vonlee said, “Well, I’m here.”
“You’re in Detroit?” Billie Jean asked, seemingly shocked.
“I’m in Troy.”
“When did you get here?”
Vonlee said about “thirty minutes” before the call, explaining how they had flown her from Illinois into Michigan earlier that day after she went to court. She did not get into anything that happened back in Chicago.
Vonlee had a scheduled court hearing the following morning to be arraigned and formally charged in Michigan. She wanted to know if her mother had sent money to a lawyer and if he was going to be showing up to represent her. Had Billie Jean heard anything about that?
“If he knows you’re there (in Michigan now), which I’m sure he does,” her aunt indicated.
The court had contacted Vonlee’s attorney for her and he had explained to them very candidly not to question her any longer. Vonlee told this to Billie Jean, before adding, “Can you believe this bullshit?”
“Well . . . all my money’s tied up,” her aunt said defensively, as if Vonlee had asked her to cough up legal representation funds or else.
“Huh?” Vonlee said, confused.
Her aunt said something about having only “twenty dollars” left “to her name.”
They discussed lawyers and Vonlee asked if Billie Jean’s attorney was going to be representing her all the way through the process.
Her aunt said she didn’t know because she didn’t even have enough money to pay a lawyer for herself, which she presumed she was going to need sometime soon.
This was untrue—Billie Jean Rogers was in the process of hiring one of the most expensive and top defense attorneys in Detroit.
Vonlee then pleaded with her aunt for legal help, asking if there “was anyway, please. . . .”
Billie Jean promised she would look into it.
After some small talk, back and forth, Vonlee said, “Billie, I don’t think they really have a case. I mean, we didn’t do anything. You know.”
“I . . . I know that.”
“They tried to get me to call you and say . . . you did, and stuff. I mean, I told them, ‘How can I say something that didn’t happen?’”
“They tried to get me to do the same thing.”
Vonlee told her aunt the TPD wanted her to believe Billie Jean was going to turn on her and the only way out of it was to take control and get her aunt to admit her part first. It was an old police tactic, Vonlee knew: play each side against the middle.
“Well, they haven’t arrested you yet, so that’s good,” Vonlee said.
“It’s only a matter of time.”
The conversation then moved from topic to topic. Vonlee focused mainly on the idea that cops had very little to charge either of them with, and Vonlee talked about how “facts are facts” and the cops needed to stick to the “facts of the case.”
Bottom line for Vonlee: what could they possibly have against either of them?
Billie Jean kept talking about how all of her money was tied up and she had no access to it.
“So, if I get a bond, there’s no way you can help me out, is there?” Vonlee wondered.
“I? No. I have not got a dime. . . .”
“How can they tie that up?”
“You’ve got money in your bank,” her aunt said, changing the subject.
“Huh?”
“You’ve got money!”
Vonlee said she only had seven or eight thousand left.
They then talked about family stuff and how Vonlee wondered if her aunt’s lawyer could access her money for her.
Billie Jean didn’t think so.
At one point, Billie Jean said she’d “die” if the TPD came for her. Vonlee was very sympathetic to that comment, saying how she had explained to detectives that it was not a good idea to lock up her aunt. She said she also told them they were “crazy” for accusing either of them of this crime, especially her aunt, who had taken care of Don “for twenty years” and counting, at the time of his death.
Vonlee then spoke of how, when she got out of jail, she was going to sell off everything she owned: car, jewelry, furniture, “anything. I will give you back the money.”
Billie Jean suggested Vonlee should have someo
ne do that now. As the widow talked, it appeared she knew a lot of details surrounding what was going on. She spoke of how Danny Chahine was being “checked out” and possibly working with a detective.
“Well, see,” Vonlee said, “they told me they thought you did it.”
“See,” Billie Jean countered, “they play people.”
“They said, ‘Oh, we know she had eighty percent to do with it, and you probably had twenty percent, but she’s going to blame it on you.’”
Billie Jean said the cops had said the same thing to her.
Both women, it appeared, had no idea the conversation—like most prison calls—was being recorded. But Billie Jean did mention how she believed that “they’ve got my phone tapped.” To which, Vonlee replied she didn’t really care, because neither of them had done anything wrong and they had nothing to hide, anyway.
Then Vonlee mentioned the only “evidence” they actually had was “Danny. But it’s circumstantial.... It’s hearsay. It’s . . .”
Billie finished for her: “A story!”
“Huh?” Vonlee asked, not hearing her well.
“I said it’s a made-up story.”
“I know. It’s just lies. A drunken lie.”
There was no crime scene, Vonlee suggested. Nothing more than a man with felonies of his own who came to cops with a story and then recorded her saying some things.
Vonlee latched onto details about that night. She wanted to clear the air between her and her aunt. Vonlee said she believed that when they left for the casino that night, Don was alive; and when they returned, Don was dead. It was that simple. She asked Billie Jean about the coroner’s report. What did it say?
Her aunt said, “Suspected murder. . . .”
Vonlee mentioned that she was done with booze and drugs for good this time. She was “never, ever going to take anything again.” This entire situation had taught her a great lesson.
The conversation kept moving back to the money. Her aunt was saying how she was strapped and had no control over any of it.
Vonlee came back with how Billie Jean might have to sell off everything she owned to defend herself, before asking her for a promise that she would help her as much as she could.
Her aunt said she’d do whatever she possibly could.
“And promise, Billie,” Vonlee said seriously, “please don’t, like, lie.”
“Vonlee, have I ever lied?”
“No, you haven’t.”
They continued to circle around the same subjects: Danny, lawyers, money. And as they talked for another fifteen minutes, it was clear that their relationship had turned fragile and fractured. Billie Jean was scared of being arrested, while Vonlee was trying to comfort her aunt by saying the cops had nothing against either of them.
The message: stick together, tell the truth, allow it to set us free.
“You know there are innocent people in prison,” Vonlee said.
CHAPTER 48
DETECTIVES STILL HAD SOME work to do. Making an arrest was one thing; getting Vonlee to talk and then obtaining more than circumstantial evidence against Billie Jean was quite another. When it came down to it, the TPD had very little on Billie Jean. A few recordings from an ex-felon and financial records that did not indicate anything other than a woman spending her dead husband’s money on whatever she wanted was not enough to convict Billie Jean Rogers in the murder of her husband. Any prosecutor knew that. Add an amended death certificate to it, and no real autopsy on a guy who had been cremated, and it was hard to tell if the TPD could gather up enough for an arrest, to begin with.
On March 2, 2001, Detective Zimmerman made contact with Don’s ex-wife, Doris. They’d split up in 1975, Doris explained. That was a long time ago. Since then, Doris added, she’d only met Billie Jean when Don and Doris’s daughter had gotten married. Beyond that, she didn’t know either of them that well.
Zimmerman pressed Doris. Could she recall anything about her ex-husband’s widow?
There was one story of Billie Jean having a boyfriend, she said. “Jack . . . I think his name is. He’s a truck driver. I also heard that she might have had a boyfriend in Tennessee, too.”
Billie Jean Rogers was preoccupied with Don’s money, Doris further explained. Everybody knew that. In fact, she wouldn’t marry Don a second time unless she was given access to all of his assets.
“Did Don know about her alleged affairs?” Zimmerman wondered.
This was a potential motivating factor—maybe a good thread to pursue.
“He never told me he did. But I think he knew, because he would roll his eyes whenever I asked him where Billie was, [whenever] she had been gone.”
CHAPTER 49
WHILE IN TPD LOCKUP, Vonlee thought about her life back in Chicago. It was the first time in a long while she had been able to live the lifestyle she had chosen. The Troy region wasn’t a bastion for the homosexual/transgender scene. She also had friends and an apartment of her own in the Windy City. Moving back to Chicago before her arrest, a place she had lived for three and a half years previously, Vonlee felt as if her life was getting back to normal—as normal as it could ever be, all considering.
“It’s a lot larger community, as far as transsexuals and gays or the alternative lifestyle, so I just felt that I would fit better there.”
While she sat alone, not being able to smoke, waiting to go to court so she could hopefully make bail, there was that one other issue Vonlee didn’t want to face: Billie Jean was desperately ill. That hadn’t been a lie to police when she told them that.
“She’d developed a liver problem,” Vonlee said later, “from years of drinking.”
It was actually more than that. Vonlee’s aunt was battling cancer.
And she was losing.
Her prognosis became grimmer as the year 2000 closed and she sat home wondering when the troops were coming through her front door to arrest her. Billie Jean didn’t seem to be paying too much attention to her illness, but before Vonlee left for Chicago, she could tell her aunt was a lot sicker than she had let on.
The more Vonlee considered what had happened on the night Don had died, the only conclusion she could come to was that Billie Jean had killed him. She didn’t want to share her thoughts with her aunt, obviously; but as she had hinted to Danny, in Vonlee’s opinion, her aunt had cold-bloodedly murdered Don. There were times, Vonlee thought, while back at the Rogers house when Don was alive, when it seemed Billie Jean wanted nothing less than for Don to be out of the picture for good. But was there anything to indicate, before Billie Jean took matters into her own hands on that night, that she had wanted her husband dead? Could Vonlee find premeditation somewhere? Or had Billie Jean, by Vonlee’s estimation, acted on an opportunity?
During many evenings, they would sit around the living room, drinking: Don, Billie Jean and Vonlee. There was one night, Vonlee recalled, after Billie Jean had put in brand-new wooden floors throughout the downstairs, including the kitchen, that stuck in her mind now. As it were, her aunt had routinely asked Vonlee about a “hit man” she believed Vonlee knew in Chicago—if he could do a job. It was always portrayed to Vonlee as a joke; but now, that joke, as Vonlee considered it in this new context of their lives, might have been a disguised request.
Don had “his chair” in the living room. He kept his vodka in the freezer portion of the refrigerator. When he finished a drink (he’d never ask his wife, because she’d never do it for him, Vonlee said), Don would get up and fetch another. As a habit, Don never wore slippers or shoes inside the house. Always “black socks,” Vonlee said. In fact, Don had died in black socks.
It happened “almost every night” while Vonlee was there—that same routine of Don in his socks walking into the kitchen to get a drink. Don got up one night, though, and as he walked into the kitchen, he slipped on the new wooden floors and fell on his butt.
Billie Jean laughed.
Vonlee jumped up. “You had better be more careful, Don,” she said, helping him.
Don got his drink and went back into the living space, where his wife was sitting.
Billie Jean eyed him.
“What?” Don wondered.
“Next time, I’ll just spend the damn twenty-five thousand and hire someone,” she joked.
Vonlee laughed. “I assumed she meant the floors cost twenty-five thousand dollars,” Vonlee said later.
But now, as Vonlee thought back to it, she wondered if her aunt was trying to say something to her without coming out and actually stating it bluntly. All those subtle cues—“How much would it cost? . . . Do you know anyone?”—were followed with a laugh. Vonlee now had to consider: was Billie Jean serious all those times?
CHAPTER 50
THE LEAD-UP TO DON’S death had actually started in the weeks before. Vonlee had always viewed her presence in the household, particularly during those last days, as the “peacemaker” between the two of them, she explained to this author. There had been some serious issues regarding money and Don lending a substantial amount to one of Billie Jean’s family members and that person not paying him back, according to Vonlee. This became a focal point for both Don and Billie Jean; it was something they fought about all the time.
“There was a lot of animosity going on there between them,” Vonlee explained.
Vonlee had spent August 10, 2000, at Danny’s house. They’d had a night out at the casino, gotten pretty drunk, and then had sex when they returned. The following morning, August 11, 2000 (the last morning Don Rogers would awake), Vonlee woke up and asked Danny to take her back to the Rogers house. She wanted to go home and sleep off the previous night’s bender.
“I’m hung over as shit,” she told Danny. “I need to go.”
“Yeah, yeah . . . no problem. I take you home,” Danny said in his broken English.
Vonlee grabbed a bottle of cranberry juice from Danny’s fridge, poured half of it down the drain, and then added a few inches of vodka from a bottle Danny kept in an entertainment center near his television.
If You Only Knew Page 17