If You Only Knew

by M. William Phelps

  He called his client “a very reserved individual,” who was “dignified” and “extremely accepting and loyal.” She was “nonjudgmental,” but also a “spendthrift,” which might have made her not your typical housewife, but certainly did not make her a killer. He presented the notion of the PO wanting jurors to think that because Billie Jean had acted a “certain way” on the night her husband died, her behavior should constitute guilt.

  Justice did not work that way. In a court of law, there needed to be proof, backed up by factual evidence; there should not be speculative assumptions based on a cop’s opinion of a person and how she acted on a particular night.

  Then he talked about Don, explaining how Billie Jean’s husband was “an intensely private individual. Almost reclusive. He was a functional—some might say barely functional—alcoholic. But he was, indeed, an alcoholic—indeed a heavy drinker, who was in deteriorating health. . . .”

  The “fact” that Don suffered weight loss came up next.

  How weak Don had become in his last days.

  How his “rectal bleeding” was a problem that signified an ending might be close.

  And then several bare facts: how Billie Jean found her husband on the floor and called 911, along with her niece/nephew, and how the responding officers, upon first viewing the scene, had found it to be “normal” in their opinion, according to an early police report.

  “Nothing unusual. No signs of trauma. No signs of any injury. No signs of any struggle. Those are the cold, hard facts.” It wasn’t until later that the case seemed to change: when a detective considered something might be off because Don’s legs were crossed, and a glass of water was on a table, and Billie Jean’s niece was acting weird, and then a man had gone to a cop friend to report something his girlfriend had said.

  As soon as Piszczatowski hit on Vonlee, he focused on “the fact” that Vonlee was blasted drunk that night. Nothing she said should be taken as any serious truth, simply based on the idea that a drunk did not make a good witness.

  Piszczatowski then spoke of how the medical examiner was going to walk into the courtroom and “rewrite history” with his “theories” about the way in which Don met his demise. The reason “they” would have to “rewrite history,” Piszczatowski added, “was because there’s nothing in evidence” backing up a murder charge.

  Once the ME changed his cause of death on a man’s death certificate—a man whose body had been cremated—Piszczatowski intoned, the floodgates opened and everyone jumped aboard a bandwagon of murder—which in turn made everything seem suspicious: the fallen-over chair, the shoes, the water. Plus, the slight bruise on Don’s lip had now become a rug-burn type of injury they presumed under an assumption of guilt.

  When he got to Danny Chahine, Piszczatowski held little back, saying at one point, “In spite of the fact that Danny Chahine was having sexual intercourse with Vonlee Titlow, he didn’t know that she wasn’t a woman. And there were a number of things that she said to him that are way out there. Way out there. She was not afraid to lie to him, when it suited her best interest. . . .”

  All salient facts.

  He then keyed in on Billie Jean’s gambling and her “losses”—still not a motive for murder.

  There was no “financial” reason, Piszczatowski said, because on the day Don Rogers died, Billie Jean already had everything she wanted: money, status, a nice home, cars and a nest egg.

  What else did she need?

  “She was living a very comfortable lifestyle.”

  “In the end, you’re going to find that another person’s life cannot be placed in jeopardy on the words of someone like Vonlee Titlow to Danny Chahine. Donald Rogers’s death was clearly a tragedy. The only great tragedy would be brought by you, if you found Ms. Rogers guilty on the words of Vonlee Titlow.”

  Direct, competent, confident words, coming from a lawyer who obviously understood his way around a trial courtroom.

  It was close to 10:00 A.M. when Billie Jean’s lawyer finished.

  The judge took a quick break.

  CHAPTER 60

  THE INITIAL COP ON the scene, Lynn Giorgi, was called as the state’s first witness. Giorgi took the oath and subsequently told jurors exactly what had occurred as she answered that 911 call that brought her to Don Rogers’s corpse lying on the kitchen floor of his home on August 12, 2000.

  Giorgi said she arrived on the scene at the same time Pete Dungjen did. They entered the home together.

  Wearing a gray sweater, her hair dyed brown, looking tired and unhappy, with a stoic look on her face, Billie Jean sat and stared at Giorgi.

  The officer talked about how “calm” and orderly both Billie Jean and Vonlee were when she first arrived and walked into the kitchen to have a look at Don.

  The state introduced those photos of Don they had warned jurors about. Don looked to be sleeping. He was on his back, legs crossed at the ankles. A chair was on its side near his head.

  Next, Giorgi talked about learning that Don had some “problems due to alcohol” and that Billie Jean had thought he was passed out, but then she learned he wasn’t breathing and realized he was likely dead.

  “Did she indicate to you how much he drank?” APA Skrzynski asked.

  “I believe she did, but I don’t recall what it was. It was some large amount.”

  “A large amount? Okay. She indicated he was a chronic alcoholic?”

  “Yes.”

  As they discussed the position of Don’s body and how neither she nor Dungjen thought it to be at all odd, Giorgi said, “We saw no signs of trauma on the body.” In fact, it wasn’t until they began to speak with Vonlee and Billie Jean that both officers considered something was off. The first indicator was the position of Don’s body as opposed to where the women walked into the house, that glass of water and the shoes in the great room, and how each of those clues told the officers they must have walked over Don’s body and sat down.

  The jury was shown a diagram of the house, Don’s body marked.

  Concerning where Don was lying, Giorgi explained during her testimony, as she and Dungjen thought about it, “It just seemed unlikely that you could fall from somewhere and end up with your legs—with your ankles perfectly crossed. . . .”

  “It just seemed unlikely”—that phrase kind of rang like an out-of-tune bell inside the courtroom. Was this powerful evidence? Or was it a cop’s “opinion” of what had transpired? How did they make the leap from legs crossed at ankles to murder?

  Giorgi talked about the layers of suspicion and how they grew the more time she and Dungjen spent inside the house. Like how “strange” Vonlee began to act, for example. She noted that “loud, excitable and protective” were three ways in which she believed Vonlee was not conducting herself normally, as most people under similar circumstances generally would.

  “[She] didn’t like me asking [Billie] questions,” Giorgi said.

  Was this a drunk person protecting her aunt, or someone trying to hide a crime?

  Giorgi didn’t make it clear.

  As they talked about Vonlee’s demeanor, Piszczatowski objected, due to relevance.

  It was sustained.

  The way the questions and answers were framed suggested that the way in which the situation was handled by Vonlee and Billie Jean was out of the norm compared to other death scenes Giorgi had attended. This generated some concern within the two cops. They wondered why the women were acting in such a way. To give an example, Giorgi mentioned how neither woman wanted to write a statement about what had happened. This seemed suspicious and out of the norm for how a similar scene should unfold. Most people would do whatever the cops asked of them. Giorgi and Dungjen were quite taken aback, Giorgi explained, at the notion that the women basically did not want to comply with whatever the police suggested.

  She said Billie Jean chain-smoked cigarettes and didn’t say much, while Vonlee protected her aunt and spoke very aggressively and loudly.

  Of course, when Giorgi talked a
bout what Vonlee was saying, Piszczatowski smartly objected (hearsay) and the judge encouraged the PO to move on.

  Within all of her testimony, Giorgi offered very little to bolster the PO’s case. In fact, at the end of the APA’s direct questioning, Giorgi noted that she had not written a report and had left that part of the call up to Dungjen. It was standard procedure to do this, she explained. But when Detective Don Zimmerman became actively involved, he then went to Giorgi and asked if she could, after the fact, write a report for him. But it wasn’t until Zimmerman had what Giorgi described as “other information regarding this case.”

  “Did he suggest to you anything to write?”

  “No.”

  It would have been a powerful statement, had the PO left it there. But APA Skrzynski then asked: “He just said, ‘Anything that seemed out of place’?”

  “We had a conversation,” she explained. “He had asked me if I could remember that . . . call and I did.”

  Giorgi said it stood out because of Vonlee’s off-the-wall, loud and boisterous behavior.

  That was it—the APA was done. He passed the witness.

  * * *

  Piszczatowski began by asking Giorgi—who was, most in the courtroom knew, an important witness for Billie Jean—about a meeting she had been at where he and “the whole cast of characters” in the case were asked questions: a pretrial deposition. He wanted to know if most of the direct testimony she had just gone through with the PO was on par with that line of questioning earlier in the year during the deposition.

  She said it was.

  Billie Jean’s defense attorney then pointed out that during her depositions in the case, Officer Giorgi had said the kitchen floor in Don’s house was linoleum, which it wasn’t, and that only when she went back and looked at photographs did she realize she had that fact wrong.

  “Yes,” she agreed.

  Memory, Piszczatowski was pointing out without coming out and actually saying it, was a fragile, delicate and not pitch-perfect way of accurately depicting situations. Even simple, basic facts, like a floor. It was a subtle, yet noticeable jab at the officer.

  He then focused on how Giorgi had once said she moved the chair in the kitchen “not more than . . . about one foot.”

  “That’s my approximation, yes,” she said.

  They talked about Giorgi not finding any injuries—she agreed.

  No signs of struggle—and she agreed to that also.

  And nothing unusual about the body: “Other than, what you tell us now, the legs were crossed.” Giorgi agreed “that was correct,” too.

  Next, Piszczatowski asked the cop about her training. How long she had been on the force at the time of the incident. How part of her training involved learning to write police reports, which was “an important part of your function as a police officer. . . .”

  “Yes.”

  The purpose of the police report, Piszczatowski said in one leading question, was to “note anything that you might think might be unusual . . . and something that might be relevant if, in fact, an investigation continues.. . .”

  “That you think might be pertinent,” she clarified.

  They moved on to the responding officer’s “role” at the scene.

  The way Piszczatowski went about pointing out all of these simple and relevant aspects of what first responders do every day was to let everyone know that as Giorgi surveyed the scene with Officer Dungjen, nothing seemed to be wrong—besides a dead man, a nontalkative wife, a drunk and loud niece. The scene was anything but a murder—it seemed more like what the women had claimed it to be: a tragedy.

  Piszczatowski then brought in Dungjen’s report as an exhibit.

  Giorgi agreed that she had reviewed her colleague’s report after Detective Zimmerman came into the case and asked her to write one herself.

  Then a significant question: Piszczatowski wanted to know if, prior to asking Vonlee to write a statement, “Did you give her any Miranda rights?”

  “No.”

  “And that’s because, based on your observations at the scene, you didn’t think there was any need to do that?”

  “That’s correct.”

  From there, they discussed how Giorgi had been to several death scenes and all were “different.” No two people responded to death in the same fashion. No two people cried, yelled or withdrew in the same manner; each scene, although very similar, was not the same.

  Yes. Yes. And yes, she agreed.

  “People are people, and every individual deals with death differently . . . ,” Piszczatowski said.

  Yes again.

  Giorgi also agreed that Billie Jean smoked constantly while she was at the scene and that it was pretty common for people to do that.

  Piszczatowski got the officer to agree that she had “approved” of Dungjen’s report and unofficially signed off on it.

  The bottom line with all of this, some of which came across by Piszczatowski as sarcastic and pushy (for good reason), was that for Giorgi, there wasn’t anything at the death scene misaligned to the point of making an accusation of murder until after Zimmerman came and asked her to rethink it. Piszczatowski hammered the officer on a number of valid points, making sure jurors understood that Giorgi and Dungjen did not conduct an investigation while they were there, nor did they suspect anything to be that much out of the norm besides a few women acting different and a dead guy’s legs crossed at the ankles.

  As Piszczatowski wound down his cross-examination, he asked about Zimmerman going to Giorgi and asking about “writing a report, and that was sometime in November—that correct?” Almost three months after the day she had been at the death scene.

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. And at that time, had you heard anything new about the case?”

  “No.”

  “So no one had . . . It wasn’t like the buzz of the Troy Police Department that a witness was engaging in sex with a transsexual?”

  “No!”

  “That wasn’t around the department at all?” Piszczatowski asked as if he had a hard time believing her.

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “Nobody had heard that fact?” Piszczatowski pressed.

  “No—and I work in the same area as Detective Zimmerman and I had not”—she started to add before Piszczatowski cut her off.

  “Okay,” the defense attorney inserted.

  But she finished, concluding, “. . . heard that.”

  “So that didn’t happen?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay. So he just came to you and said, ‘Write a report’? Write [a] report about what you remember at this scene, correct?”

  “Well, he asked me—we had a conversation. He asked me what types of things I thought were unusual and other things that weren’t on the report, and he supplied me with a copy of Officer Dungjen’s original report and I had reviewed that. And the few things that we had discussed, he said, yes, anything that you can recall, including those things, to please put in the report.”

  “Okay. Did you ask him why?”

  “He had told me at the beginning of the conversation that there had been some other types of information that would lead them into an investigation—that it might not have been a natural death.”

  This was important testimony for Piszczatowski. Giorgi had written her report while knowing that the detectives in the unit had come to a conclusion that there might have been a homicide.

  Casting a line, Piszczatowski then asked Giorgi if she knew, from Zimmerman, if the “position of the chair might be an issue” in his case.

  “No,” she said firmly.

  “You weren’t told that at all?”

  “No, I wasn’t told anything.”

  “Just that there was an investigation continuing into a possible unnatural death, right?”

  “Yes. They had gotten some other information he did not disclose to me—that it may not have been a natural death and for me to include these other items.”

  Piszczat
owski took a moment.

  “Thanks,” he said, feeling victorious. “I don’t have any other questions of this witness.”

  CHAPTER 61

  THROUGHOUT THAT FIRST DAY of the trial, Officer Giorgi testified, and withstood what turned out to be an inconsequential redirect and recross. The state next brought in Officer Pete Dungjen, who did not add or detract from anything Giorgi had testified to. Jurors would either believe these two cops had integrity and were speaking from a place of it, or would not believe them at all, tossing out their testimony altogether, feeling it was too vague to matter. The jurors could potentially side with Billie Jean and put the focus on a theme Giorgi herself had kept bringing up: not all death scenes are the same, and not all people react in a similar way when faced with the death of a “loved one.”

  By the end of the first day of testimony, forensic pathologist Dr. Ruben Ortiz-Reyes was in the hot seat answering questions posed by the APA—softballs. All of them. Ortiz-Reyes’s direct testimony would set the stage for the state to argue that it was not so uncommon for a pathologist to change his opinion once he learned new information about a so-called natural death. The only major problem—one that Piszczatowski would no doubt seize upon when given the opportunity—was that the medical examiner’s office never got a chance to conduct an actual autopsy after it changed its now-controversial opinion.

  A pathologist testifying in a court of law can be a cumbersome prospect, tedious and completely dull, if not handled correctly by the attorney doing the questioning. Allowing doctors to meander on and on about their profession, skill, medical knowledge or education can alienate jurors and leave a sour taste in their consciousness, even sometimes bringing a certain heaviness to their eyes, beckoning a nap, as they try to withstand the arduous task of what might be unimportant nonsense. Best way for a lawyer to handle a talkative pathologist or medical doctor is to keep peppering him or her with direct, pointed questions, while knowing when to butt in and interrupt.

  Luckily, Ortiz-Reyes was not your typical blabbering clinician, looking to boost his ego with a list of credentials, or a rundown of his accomplishments. He was terse at times, long at others, perhaps when he needed to be, and overall was a very confident and capable witness.