If You Only Knew

by M. William Phelps

  Most cops, for example, will testify about every aspect of an investigation: the interviews they conducted, the reports they filed, the leads, the dead ends, the persons of interest they developed and crossed off, forensic evidence collected from a scene, and so on. Here, in just twenty minutes of direct testimony, Detective Tullock discussed the scene as he came upon it, how Billie Jean and Vonlee acted that morning, and how “odd” Billie Jean’s “demeanor” was throughout the time he was at the house.

  Quickly, then, Tullock moved into meeting Danny Chahine and that entire thread of the case. He spoke briefly about the controversial medical examiner’s involvement and how that all came about. By the time he finished, Tullock was explaining to jurors how the TPD transported Vonlee’s car back from Chicago after her arrest. When all was said and done, some wondered what—if anything—his testimony had to do with shedding any guilty light on Billie Jean Rogers.

  Detective Don Zimmerman’s direct testimony lasted all of five minutes. He spoke of serving that search warrant on the Rogers house and collecting Billie Jean’s checkbook and—big reveal—seeing that notation Billie Jean had allegedly made on the checkbook: Vonlee—$100,000.

  After Piszczatowski questioned Zimmerman, and the state refused to redirect, the APA stood and rested his case.

  * * *

  Piszczatowski called his first witness, Robert Allegrina, the investigator for the ME’s office.

  Allegrina was maybe the most important witness for Billie Jean besides a celebrity pathologist the defense had lined up. The ME’s investigator was an integral part of the multipronged approach Dragovic talked about when deciding on death by natural causes or homicide. The investigator was the first to make a judgment call on a body. Some considered the investigator’s role as biased from the start—hence, if he was called to a scene, well, that in and of itself meant that someone there had found something out of whack.

  Focus is the defense attorney’s best friend when bringing in witnesses to support the defendant. Here, Piszczatowski kept the emphasis on Allegrina’s role for the ME’s office in this case and asked what he did when he first got to the Rogers house.

  “Well, as a general rule, we observe the scene, photograph the body, document the evidence, talk to the family and witnesses, and make a determination to bring the body in or release it.”

  “All right. When you say ‘make a determination to bring the body in or release it,’ what does that mean?”

  This was a simple, direct question, and yet so vital in this case.

  “Well, if there’s adequate information and the person was under a doctor’s care, we could release it, pending the doctor signing the death certificate.”

  “And that when you say ‘under a doctor’s care,’ that would be under the care of a personal physician?”

  “. . .. In this case, did you make some inquiry to determine whether you could release the body or whether you had to take the body to the morgue—to the medical examiner’s office?”

  “I talked to the wife and she advised that he had not seen a doctor, had [not] been to a doctor, so there was no reason, you know, we would have to bring the body in.”

  Allegrina agreed that the woman sitting in the front of the courtroom wearing a beige blouse—with a fatigued air about her, quietly processing everything going on around her—was the same woman he spoke to at the scene.

  Further, Allegrina said he basically went to a scene, took Polaroid photos of the body, spoke to cops, spoke to family members, before making an evaluation.

  Defense attorney Piszczatowski wanted to know why Allegrina used Polaroid instead of 35mm film or even digital. It seemed that 35mm or digital would be more accurate, more detailed, more easily transferred, and would fall in line with what a crime scene investigator would use by today’s standards.

  Allegrina said Polaroid was a personal preference.

  After the APA objected because of Piszczatowski’s use of leading questions, Billie Jean’s lawyer asked the investigator about the conversations he’d had with the defendant on that morning at the house. Basically, all they talked about, Allegrina testified, was Don’s rectal bleeding and his desire not to go see a doctor. Beyond that, they did not speak about much else. Allegrina said he noticed what he thought was feces and dried blood on the carpet; he understood Billie Jean to be talking about a husband who was severely ill, bleeding rectally and unwilling to do anything about it.

  Equally important was the fact that Billie Jean, after Allegrina asked her at the scene, was “not opposed to an autopsy” on Don.

  Piszczatowski passed his witness.

  The APA asked three questions.

  None of them mattered.

  CHAPTER 73

  AFTER A LENGTHY DISCUSSION (without the jury present) regarding the merits of the state’s case, and if the judge should issue a “direct verdict” based on the lack of reasonable evidence presented so far, to which the judge basically laughed, Walt Piszczatowski called Scott Hadley, Billie Jean’s future son-in-law, her daughter’s fiancé.

  Scott explained how he had helped his future mother-in-law with her finances after Don’s death. He said he advised her not to buy the cars, but he did not intervene when she had made the decision. He didn’t want to meddle in the woman’s grief, no matter what way she chose to express it. There was also an issue of Billie Jean wanting one hundred thousand dollars, and then a quarter of a million, as wire transfers to help out her family in Tennessee.

  Was it extreme? Was it irresponsible? Was it, perhaps, heartless in one manner, spending Don’s hard-earned money like that so soon after he was dead, but also quite a morally acceptable gesture in another, showing how willing Billie Jean was to help out her less financially fortunate family?

  The jury had the information and would take it either way.

  Scott Hadley’s direct and cross-examination testimony was rather terse and inconsequential in the scope of the trial as it had played out before he had taken the stand. Billie Jean spent Don’s money at will. The continuous message was: big freakin’ deal. So she was careless with cash. Maybe it was her way of dealing with the stress of her husband’s death.

  On cross-examination, the APA asked one question, and Scott said yes, he saw Vonlee at the wake/funeral and she wore an “extensive amount of jewelry on her hands.”

  * * *

  Billie Jean’s daughter, Vanette Vereeke, was next. She spoke of a day she would never forget, when she and her mother went to the University of Michigan Medical Center. There was a doctor who wanted to see her mom in person. Billie Jean had gone in for a battery of tests in the months before this day and things were not looking so good. She was tired all the time. She felt nauseous and dizzy. According to Vanette, her mother did not know she had cancer at this time. No one did.

  In realizing that her mother did not like to “deal with things,” as Vanette described the call, she had phoned the doctor herself to find out what was going on. Vanette feared her mother would blow the doctor off and not go, much like Don Rogers had done. Many adults live under the same rule when it pertains to their health: not knowing means there’s nothing wrong.

  “I told your mother that she has a tumor,” the doctor explained to Vanette when she called him. Since he had her on the phone, the doctor said he wanted to relay some additional important information to Vanette, asking if she could, perhaps, tell her mother, seeing that Billie Jean did not want any part of talking to the doctor. He needed Billie Jean to know this was no joke. She needed to take it seriously. “I need you to tell her this is severe,” the doctor explained.

  Billie Jean cried as she listened to her daughter testify about this moment. It was actually heartbreaking for her to understand the fear and sadness in her daughter’s voice as she explained to the jury how and when she learned that her mother did not have long to live.

  “I can’t do that,” Vanette testified she told the doctor on the day they spoke. “What if I bring her to you?”

  “Y
es,” the doctor answered.

  Vanette convinced her mother to go. They brought along Vanette’s sister, Billie Jean’s other daughter. When they arrived, her mother was exceptionally calm, Vanette explained. Here they were heading into a meeting with a doctor, who was obviously not going to be delivering good news, and her mother was walking and talking as if it were another day. This was the reason why Piszczatowski had called Vanette: to explain by example how Billie Jean reacted to bad news—or, rather, some of the worst news a person could get.

  Vanette and her sister, Billie Jean and the doctor, sat down. The doctor proceeded to describe how hard this was for him, but he did not want to paint his patient’s health with any sort of broad brush. He needed to be completely up front. Billie Jean needed to know.

  “Terminal,” he said. “The tumor is on the liver and now it went around the portal vein and it’s inoperable.”

  “How long?” Billie Jean asked. Again, not flinching a bit. No tears. No drama.

  “Your chances of living a year are very minimal.” (This meeting occurred, Vanette explained, within the past eight months.)

  “Is there anything I can do?” Billie Jean wanted to know.

  “I’m sorry, but there’s really nothing you can do, Mrs. Rogers,” the doctor said.

  Billie Jean had been on a list to get a new liver. Yet, the doctor explained further, because the cancer had spread, she’d be taken off the list at this point. There was no sense.

  “You can try an experimental drug, but there are no assurances in any way for that. But listen, go home and think about that. Don’t make the decision now.”

  As Piszczatowski brought Vanette back into her testimony and away from that anecdote, they discussed her mother’s spending habits. Vanette said she had gone shopping with her mother many times: “When she saw something she liked, she would just buy it. You know, she really didn’t have a concept of money. . . .”

  Money was “fun” to Billie Jean. Paper. Spending meant nothing to her.

  Vanette also characterized her mother during those days immediately following Don’s death as being in a somewhat “dazed” state. She was never one to cry outwardly, anyway, or become overly emotional around people. Just wasn’t in her. Billie Jean had grown up in Tennessee under very poor conditions, maybe below the poverty/welfare line. Because of that, she had been hardened. It took more than a death to knock her down. Vanette made an analogy of when her brother, Billie Jean’s son, got into that near-fatal car accident and how her mother was calm and cool, working her way through it all. If she hadn’t fallen apart when her son was knocking on death’s door, how could she be expected to break down when Don died?

  “My brother got in a severe car accident,” Vanette explained in her articulate and sincere manner of providing the facts as she understood them. “He almost died. He had a closed head injury and we had to fly out to California and he was really bad.” She described the scene in the hospital after they arrived: tubes “going down his throat.” She said she and her “sister . . . were basket cases. But my mom was, you know, pretty calm and trying to keep us calm and reserved.”

  Her mother never cried, Vanette added.

  Jurors listened intently. Was this why she had reacted the way she did when Don died? It was simply her nature to be the nurturer.

  When the APA took his turn at Vanette, he once again asked about Vonlee and any jewelry she might have been wearing during the funeral/wake.

  Was this all the PO had up its sleeve? The fact that Vonlee wore lots of rings and bracelets and Billie Jean had likely bought them? After all, her “boyfriend,” Danny, was a jeweler.

  The day was over early. The trial took a break on Friday, and then continued on the following Monday, December 10, 2001, with Walt Piszczatowski noting he would be concluding his case by the end of the day.

  CHAPTER 74

  TWO NONESSENTIAL WITNESSES SET up an expert who was as close to a knockout blow as Billie Jean’s attorney could dredge up. In the courtroom, standing, raising his right hand, reciting the oath to tell the truth and nothing but, was Dr. Michael Baden, who, at the time, had a hit television series on HBO, Autopsy. Who better to present Billie Jean’s side of that seemingly all-important medical examiner evidence than a well-known, well-respected, familiar face like Baden? Tall, slightly overweight—“Baden loves his Peking duck,” a friend recalled—with a reassuring, grandfatherly air about him, Dr. Michael Baden, who became a celebrity pathologist during the OJ Simpson case after joining the “dream team,” was going to scalp the PO and the medical examiner’s findings. He would totally dismantle their argument from stem to stern.

  Baden went through his massive list of credentials, extensive and noteworthy. At the time when he sat in the witness stand, Baden was employed as the chief forensic pathologist, the medical examiner for the New York State Police. As part of his dedication to science and the career path of his choosing, Baden was a popular hired gun, if you will, open to interpreting autopsies for defense attorneys and prosecutors, testifying on behalf of a defendant he believed in or a prosecutor that needed his expertise injected into a case. He made a serious living doing this side work. Baden had been in the game for forty years. He’d published articles and written several books, both commercial and educational. The guy was a walking/talking encyclopedia of forensic pathology knowledge, and he had traveled the world exhuming and studying corpses. More than that, he’d been to over one thousand crime scenes and had conducted, by his estimation, over twenty thousand autopsies. If there was a more experienced pathologist in the world who could better understand the Oakland County medical examiner’s work in this case, he or she had yet to come forward.

  Baden, under the direction of Piszczatowski, had looked at Don Rogers’s death, specifically all of the documents and photographs. After Baden spent about five minutes explaining what he had looked at in the case—every report, Dragovic’s findings, the photos, etc.—Piszczatowski cut to the chase: “Now, based on your review of these materials, were you able to form an opinion as to the cause of death of Donald Rogers in this case?”

  Baden said yes.

  Piszczatowski asked him to proceed.

  “My conclusion after reviewing everything is that I agree with [Dr. Ortiz-Reyes’s] initial diagnosis”—an ideal way to present his findings—“that the cause of death is acute alcoholism. Too much alcohol.”

  Baden wasn’t going out on a limb by himself and saying he’d drawn some wild conclusion: he was agreeing with the pathologist who examined Don’s body for the ME’s office.

  Piszczatowski presented a “blowup” of the original death certificate on the overhead projector, another brilliant move. There, for everyone to see in black and white, written in the space allotted for cause of death: acute alcohol intoxication.

  What became a factor that might not have seemed important earlier, or ever, stood out as Baden explained that when the ME’s office changed the original death certificate, no one changed the date, nor had they made a note of when they had changed their collective mind that Don’s death was now by asphyxiation. So again, although the ME’s office might not have been acting nefariously when changing its diagnosis, this ostensible, minor error of not changing the date—or at least noting it—gave the impression they were. And with juries, both Baden and Piszczatowski knew from experience, impressions are everything.

  Piszczatowski asked Baden to recite a list of medical problems Don had suffered from. These were well-documented findings: heart disease and polyps in the colon, which led to rectal bleeding. Don was a heavy smoker and a heavy drinker. His veins were clogged up with plaque, and his blood flow was not quite as slow as peanut butter being forced through a pipe, but one gets the picture. You look at all that, Baden said, and you could pick any number of ways in which this man might have died. He was a walking dead man.

  The big reveal, in Baden’s professional opinion, came into view after he had gone “over in detail the medical examiner’s explanation for
the change to smothering,” and, subsequently, when he “went over in detail Dr. Dragovic’s opinions in the preliminary hearing as to the change to smothering.” It was then, Baden told jurors, “I must respectfully disagree that I think there isn’t the type of evidence available to permit a diagnosis of a change to smothering.”

  Baden had an uncanny way of verbalizing difficult medical matters in easily palatable language. Moreover, he wasn’t coming out and blasting the doctor, a colleague, claiming he was incompetent. Instead, Baden was saying he respectfully disagreed with the man and then presented evidence to support that argument.

  “Smothering,” Baden added, “is a diagnosis that may leave no evidence of injury at all. One can have smothering without any changes in the body or there may be changes in the body.” Baden had looked into hundreds of smothering cases throughout his career. He knew the particulars involved in this type of homicide. One might even call him an expert in this area. “And it’s a diagnosis of exclusion. You have to exclude other more pressing causes of death, and here we have a very impressive cause of death—that is, acute alcoholism. . . .”

  Further, Baden went on to note, people who drank a lot “have and, eventually, for whatever reason, the alcohol they consume can cause death. And without an internal examination to further evaluate whatever abnormalities may be present, I just think that the cause of death as established initially is valid.... and that there isn’t sufficient change to make the change on the basis of all the evidence that’s present in the files.”

  Casting even more bad light on the ME’s finding, without much effort, Baden explained how the ME’s office had done an “inspection report” and also filled out an “autopsy document.”

  “It was listed ‘autopsy,’ but an autopsy wasn’t done. It was an inspection, an internal inspection.”