If You Only Knew

by M. William Phelps

  Danny said Vonlee was “very upset and very nervous” while she spoke to him during the dinner. She wasn’t bragging or being sarcastic. She had obviously been carrying around a burden, and she needed to rid herself of its weight. As the wine flowed, she explained more about herself and what happened that night between Billie Jean and Don.

  Piszczatowski objected, knowing the APA was walking a fine line here of hearsay and Danny working his feelings and thoughts into the testimony. They agreed that Danny could testify to what Vonlee had said, but that was it. He could not speculate about her feelings or his, or talk about what she might have thought or meant.

  Danny explained that the “secret” was beginning to wear Vonlee down and she had to tell him for fear of destroying her life with booze and drugs. She was now drinking more than she had been since arriving in Michigan. She was worried about her aunt, too.

  Danny continued to speak: “We continued to sit . . . and she said, ‘Are you not upset or anything?’ And I said, ‘No. How could I be upset? I mean, you just told me you are a man, and you just told me you killed somebody. How could I be upset?’. . . .”

  “Mr. Chahine,” the APA said carefully, now treading in waters Danny had likely said he was a little uneasy about going into, “let me ask you this.”

  “Yes,” Danny said, staring at him.

  “Had you, like, actually been physically intimate with this person?”

  “Yes.”

  “You kissed her?”

  Danny took a breath. He leaned into the microphone, this after being told several times that they were having trouble hearing him: “I mean, you want me to feel bad now, because I . . . kissed a man?” Danny had an attitude all of a sudden, as if the APA was accusing him of regretting his entire relationship with Vonlee.

  “I mean . . . no,” the APA said, a bit embarrassed.

  “I did kiss her. Yes. And I’m like . . . I’m not a homosexual and I do feel . . . It has never happened to me before.... There was nothing I could tell that she was a man. There’s nothing. That’s why I was very shocked.”

  It was not his fault for being duped, Danny seemed to say.

  Danny talked about how he demanded Vonlee show him the goods to prove she was a man. He told the jury about going out to the car, having that conversation, and Vonlee not dropping her pants until the next time they got together.

  After that, Danny explained how Vonlee eventually told him “about the way they did kill Don Rogers—and she was describing what they did.”

  The APA asked Danny to explain in detail.

  “She said that they got there at eleven and she said he was laying down on the floor, passed out from drinking, and that the other thing that she said that Billie Rogers told his family that they got there at three. . . .”

  So there was some discrepancy in the stories and Danny thought this might become a problem for them.

  The APA asked Danny to slow down a bit. Danny, obviously nervous, composed himself and continued in his broken, accented English: “When they got there, they found him on the floor, and Billie Rogers said to [Vonlee] that they got to do it now, because it’s a good time.... So she said they start pouring alcohol, vodka, in his mouth. The way they do it, one of them will hold his nose, he cannot breathe—he open his mouth. The other will throw vodka in his mouth and they did that so many times that actually [Vonlee] said to her, ‘Why are you wasting this good vodka on him? Let’s get some cheap vodka.’ That’s what [Vonlee said she] said. And he would not die. She said that he would not die. While . . . they were doing that [Don] was playing with [Vonlee’s] boobs.”

  And it was now clear to jurors where the APA and, likely, the TPD developed its narrative that the ME’s office tried so hard to back up with the science.

  Danny mentioned how Billie Jean had blurted out to Vonlee something about giving her twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand dollars, and how if Don woke up the next day and remembered what they had done (pouring that alcohol into his mouth), they’d be in big trouble.

  “So they got to do it right now,” Danny claimed, referring to how Billie Jean felt after she allegedly tried to kill her husband by pouring the booze down his throat. “He would not die. And she said, [Vonlee] could not kill him, could not put her hands . . . on his mouth and nose. Every time he gasped for air, she would let him breathe, because she couldn’t do it. So her aunt gets so frustrated, she went and got a pillow. . . .”

  What happened after that was obvious. According to the narrative Danny Chahine was putting out there for jurors, Billie Jean placed a pillow over her husband’s face and smothered him.

  The APA brought Danny back around to that moment in the car as he and Vonlee sat and talked, when Vonlee refused to show him her private parts to “prove” her manhood. The APA wanted to know what happened when she refused. Did Danny and Vonlee then leave the casino and go to his apartment that night or the next?

  Danny said the following night they were at his apartment, again talking about the “murder” and Vonlee’s penis.

  “What happened?”

  “And that’s when I found out exactly that she was man.”

  “How?”

  “By seeing.”

  “Her penis?” the APA asked, without any hint of irony.

  “Yes.”

  “His penis?” the APA then corrected, after realizing the possible confusion of his earlier query.

  Danny nodded in the affirmative, without speaking.

  The APA wouldn’t let it go. “You saw that?” he asked again.

  “Yes!”

  Danny talked about those videotapes Billie Jean had given him. He said he couldn’t understand why she would want to throw them out.

  However, in the grand scope of things, what did this part of his testimony mean? That the recent widow didn’t want a memory of Don around the house? It was clear from most everyone that the husband and wife had despised each other. More than that, mostly all of the tapes were pornography.

  Danny said he had called his friend, the cop in a nearby town, and asked him to relay the information about Don’s “murder” to the TPD.

  He then spoke of how he met with TPD detectives Tullock and Zimmerman at the TPD and talked through everything he knew.

  He testified how the TPD had offered him nothing for his “testimony.”

  “Has anyone given you anything to do this?” the APA asked.

  “No.”

  The APA took a look at his notes and indicated he was finished.

  CHAPTER 71

  IF WALT PISZCZATOWSKI WAS a knuckle-cracker, this would be the appropriate moment to stand, intertwine his fingers and then crack his knuckles out in front of himself before shaking his head and saying something along the lines of “Okay, Mr. Chahine, let’s talk about your story.” But Piszczatowski was, of course, a professional; he was a defense attorney who knew when to poke and prod a witness and when to allow him the space to bestow upon his client even more reasonable doubt than had already been presented.

  Piszczatowski established right away that Danny had reviewed his statements in the case just a few days before testifying, which can be significant, given that the best testimony is spontaneous truth; the worst is scripted and practiced recollection. Obviously, Danny had spouted a combination of the two during his hasty direct examination.

  After apologizing for ultimately delving into what was surely going to be “very personal matters,” Billie Jean’s lawyer started with Vonlee and Danny’s relationship. The questions focused on Vonlee’s ability to routinely posture herself as the “center of attention,” whether she was with Danny, Billie Jean, the two together or just perusing the casino by herself. Vonlee Nicole Titlow was a woman who “liked being looked at,” Piszczatowski suggested to Danny’s reluctant agreement.

  Danny testified that “every woman” he had dated previously “looked just like” Vonlee. He had been fooled completely by her appearance and the romance. He was totally taken in by the charm and lies.
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br />   Vonlee was also someone who “did most of the talking,” Piszczatowski suggested to the witness.

  Danny, in turn, believed Vonlee was quite “normal” in that regard.

  When they first met, Piszczatowski asked, wasn’t it Danny who “put the moves on” Vonlee, which Piszczatowski referred to as “sexual advances”? And when Danny put his hand on her leg one night inside his apartment, she “kind of pulled back”?

  “Yes,” Danny agreed.

  They settled on the idea that Danny and Vonlee were “emotionally involved.”

  “And during that . . . relationship,” Piszczatowski asked as sincerely as he could, “you did engage in intercourse with her on a couple of occasions?”

  “Well, I don’t know what you call ‘intercourse’ . . . if you want to say ‘sex’?”

  “Okay.”

  “Yes,” Danny said.

  “So you engaged in sex with her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Again, I apologize for getting personal, but on one of those occasions, or was it more than one, you had—it was oral sex, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the other . . . it was, well, I guess was considered more conventional sex, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Other than oral sex?”

  “Yes.”

  The goal Piszczatowski had in mind here was to convince jurors that Vonlee had lied to Danny about everything, even the most intimate aspects of their relationship. Danny was a guy who thought he was having sexual intercourse with a woman, but he was actually having anal sex with a man. And if she could lie about—or exaggerate—such intimate moments, was it so hard to believe she could do the same with the story she had told Danny about Don’s death? Also, another point Piszczatowski wanted to make to the jury, with his ingenious, leading way of questioning this witness, was that Danny Chahine, because he had been duped so easily (and completely) by Vonlee, may have had an ax to grind with her and Billie Jean. Therefore, coming in to testify might just be his opportunity to get back at Vonlee for all that dishonesty.

  Piszczatowski had Danny talk about the jewelry he had given Vonlee and how much it cost.

  When they arrived at Billie Jean, Danny called her “private, reserved, polite and well-mannered.”

  Not the way your typical, budding black widow might be described.

  Billie Jean liked to play the slot machines, Danny explained.

  As they discussed Billie Jean, Danny spoke of a night when she chastised him and told him “all” he wanted out of her niece was to “just have babies . . . and kidnap them and take them to another country. Meanwhile, she knew that she was a he.” The point being: Billie Jean had no standards when it came to taking Vonlee’s lie to this level. The indication was that Vonlee and Billie Jean were together in a big charade.

  A word Walt Piszczatowski kept going back to with regard to Vonlee was “deceive.” He asked Danny how it felt to be “deceived” on the “most basic level,” but Danny steered the defense attorney away, making it seem as though he “thought” it would have been Billie Jean who would “be more deceiving than” Vonlee. What had shocked Danny the most was that Vonlee had been the bigger liar between the two of them.

  “Were you upset with [Vonlee] for having deceived you?”

  “No.”

  “You were not angry with her for having deceived you?”

  “No.”

  “Over seven weeks?”

  “You see, I understand human beings who go through stuff like that,” Danny explained. “She was a man. She’s changed into a woman. Of course, she’s going to lie about it. I mean, that’s normal.... As long as she told me the truth [ultimately] that she wasn’t a man—that she wasn’t a woman.”

  This comment could be backed up by the videotape of Danny Chahine’s conversations with the TPD. During the initial interview the TPD conducted with Danny, when he talked about Vonlee and what he believed had happened to Don, Danny was relaxed and even laughing at himself for being cuckolded by a man. There was no animosity in his voice at all. He wasn’t angry, or even the slightest bit perturbed by the fact that a man had misled him into believing he was a woman. Danny was more dumbfounded and shocked than anything else. Not once did he raise his voice or speak unkindly about Vonlee.

  One important issue Walt Piszczatowski brought up next, tossing more reasonable doubt on Danny and his story, was that when Danny testified during the preliminary hearing phase of the case, all he could recall about that dinner conversation—the first one, which had not been recorded—was that Vonlee only had admitted to him that she was a man. She had not mentioned anything about what happened to Don. Piszczatowski wanted to know why, now, at the trial phase, was Danny changing that testimony?

  Or, rather, adding to it.

  “This is what happened,” Danny said. “Um . . .” He didn’t know what else to add.

  “And when you were testifying four months, five months ago [during the preliminary phase], you couldn’t remember anything else that was said at that dinner table, except that she told you she was a male, correct?”

  “See . . . ,” Danny tried to say.

  But Piszczatowski kept him focused: “If you could answer the question . . .”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay.”

  “Wait, wait,” Danny pleaded. “I didn’t answer yet.”

  “I thought you did.”

  “I’m just saying . . .”

  “Okay.”

  “. . . What happened before, you were asking me to just specifically answer your questions, and I kept asking, and I wanted to make sure if you asked me before dinner, I would say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Maybe after dinner, I have to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or ‘I don’t remember.’ I wanted to be very exact with you.”

  “Okay,” Piszczatowski said, trying to get Danny to stop talking, not quite understanding—same as everyone else—what he had just said.

  Danny concluded that the timing mattered little: whether it was before, during or after dinner, he couldn’t recall exactly when she told him about Don, but she did tell him on that night.

  Piszczatowski was saying that was fine, but Danny had not mentioned this during the preliminary phase of the trial.

  Perhaps brilliantly, Piszczatowski used the word “memory” several times during his next set of questions, bringing attention to the idea that perhaps Danny Chahine’s memory wasn’t—and shouldn’t be considered—science. Most importantly, Piszczatowski said at one point, anyone’s memory is more accurate closer to an event, and that the preliminary hearing was merely months after the events Danny was describing today.

  They stayed on this subject of the dinner for quite some time. It became tedious and repetitive. But Piszczatowski had a hard time letting it go, asking, “When you left the car that night, had you seen her, ah, his genitalia?”

  “No. In the car, no.”

  “And so . . . you hadn’t touched the genitalia?”

  “I touched something in her, but I didn’t feel anything. She—”

  “All right,” Piszczatowski said, holding up a hand for Danny to stop there.

  But he finished, anyway: “She said you can touch, and I did touch, but I didn’t feel nothing.”

  They discussed Vonlee’s penis for about five additional minutes, Danny wanting to make it known—and perfectly clear—that he certainly hadn’t touched Vonlee’s penis.

  Not then.

  Not ever.

  When they finally got off the subject of Vonlee’s penis, Piszczatowski switched gears and talked about Don, asking Danny if he had ever met him.

  Danny said no, but he knew what Don looked like from the photographs he had seen while at Billie Jean’s house.

  So Piszczatowski asked him to explain what he saw on those videotapes that Mrs. Rogers had given him.

  Danny said they were supposed to be pornography tapes, but there had been some family videos mixed in. And so it became clear that it wasn’t as though Billie Jean
had been ridding the house of all of her memories of Don. No, she believed she was getting rid of Don’s dirty business.

  As quick as they talked about porn, Piszczatowski switched it up again and asked Danny about the alleged “pillow” used in this case. He had told detectives he believed it was a “bedroom pillow.” Why did he say that?

  “I guess so,” Danny said. “I could have said that.”

  “Right.”

  “I don’t know exactly where this pillow came from,” Danny then admitted. “I wasn’t there.”

  “Exactly. And you have to rely on what [Vonlee] told you.”

  “Absolutely.”

  Piszczatowski circled back to his main argument: “Now, Miss [Vonlee] was very convincing in her deception of you—is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  As Piszczatowski began to wind things down, he reminded Danny that he was “convicted of a felony.”

  “Yes.”

  Sometime later, “Was it true that [Vonlee] told you that Don Rogers was worth ten million dollars?”

  “Yes.”

  From there, Piszczatowski went through a list of about ten lies Vonlee had told Danny—all of which Danny had bought into. When he was finished proving that Danny was very susceptible to Vonlee’s charm and believed all of her stories, he turned to look at his co-counsel, and then indicated he was done.

  There was very little redirect and recross; it was unrevealing and mostly a waste of time. With that finished, the APA called the car salesman from the dealership where Billie Jean bought those cars for her and for Vonlee. Over the course of about five minutes, the APA got the car salesman to explain how Vonlee and Billie Jean showed up not long after Don’s death and purchased two cars.

  Piszczatowski had no questions for him.

  And the day was over.

  CHAPTER 72

  ON DECEMBER 6, 2001, during the morning session, Donald Tullock and Donald Zimmerman, along with Donald McGinnis, Don Rogers’s lawyer, testified, bringing the total of Dons talked about to four—five, if Don Kather, Don Rogers’s best friend and business partner, was referenced. None of these three witnesses offered much to move the state’s case toward a conviction.