If You Only Knew

by M. William Phelps

  “You’re going to learn that Billie Rogers was married [several] times. That she had liver cancer. That she knew Vonlee Harry Titlow, who is actually now Vonlee Nicole Titlow—that she’s a freak. That she’s a drunk. That she’s a person easily manipulated. She attempted to use her to do what she wanted to have done, and that was what she had to accomplish herself, the death of Don Rogers, so that she could collect the money.”

  Blame Billie Jean Rogers.

  Could it possibly work?

  CHAPTER 80

  AS FOR THE STATE’S witnesses on day one, for the most part APA Skrzynski kept to the same script he had during Billie Jean’s trial: The first responders came in and set the scene. Then Danny Chahine took to the stand to speak his truth. There were no surprises here. The direct testimony mimicked what they had said the previous year during Billie Jean’s case. The APA walked each witness through his or her story, step-by-step, this time piling the culpability for the death of Don Rogers on Vonlee’s shoulders, instead of her aunt’s.

  After a day off on Thursday, March 14, 2002, Bill Cataldo went to work on Danny Chahine. By far, Danny was the state’s most incriminating witness against Vonlee. He held the cards deciding her fate. Cataldo knew this. Vonlee knew this. The APA knew this. Danny? Maybe not so much.

  Cataldo kept on point with what was a familiar narrative: Danny’s business, criminal history, problems with citizenship and lying to INS, his accent and English being a second language, the “pornographic tapes” Billie Jean had given him, and Billie Jean and Don’s relationship. One important factor Cataldo was able to bring out during his cross-examination was that by Danny bringing forward the information he had about Vonlee, and then participating with police in recording her, would it ultimately “look good” for him in the eyes of the government when they checked to see if he was a “good citizen” before deciding whether to give him permanent citizen status?

  Danny did not agree with this idea.

  Cataldo moved on.

  Later, Cataldo explained that part of what he wanted to accomplish with Danny involved “embarrassing him” on the stand. With his client, Vonlee, in the predicament she faced—an uphill battle, and Danny the one stopping her at the top of that hill—it was one of the only approaches the defense attorney could take, really, in order to try and cast as bad a light as possible on the state’s most powerful witness.

  This began when Cataldo asked Danny about a hotel room the TPD had bought and paid for on the night Danny recorded Vonlee. Vonlee’s lawyer wanted to know if Danny had asked for the room because of “safety concerns,” as he had once said during a preliminary hearing.

  After argument and an objection, Danny answered: “Yes.”

  Further along, Cataldo was able to bring out the fact that the TPD had offered the room at the casino because Danny might be “emotionally exhausted” after recording his girlfriend with a wire. But through his expert way of questioning, the lawyer pushed forward the contention that Danny had bartered for the hotel room as a potential payment for what he had done—a trade that neither Danny nor the TPD had ever admitted or would agree to.

  Then it was on to the sex Danny had with Vonlee. This was an area where Cataldo could show, perhaps by the most intimate of examples, how naïve and ignorant Danny Chahine was at the time—not to mention how easily fooled he was by Vonlee’s lies.

  “The first time there was intimate contact, it was a matter of her giving you oral sex?” Cataldo asked, gradually leading into the raw, truly embarrassing material.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “At that time she was not naked?”

  “Top,” Danny said, confusing just about everyone in the courtroom.

  So Cataldo clarified, “She was topless? So you could see her breasts, but you didn’t see her vaginal area or the groin area?”

  “No, sir.”

  “And this was at your apartment?”

  “My house,” Danny answered.

  “And then there came a time when you engaged in greater physical, intimate contact with her?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And . . . this time it included an insertion . . .” Cataldo asked, looking up from his notes, waiting for Danny to answer.

  Quite a way to put it: “an insertion.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Cataldo finished: “. . . of your penis into what you thought was her vagina?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And this was done in some sort of Greek style—doggie style—from behind?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This was done at your house?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you’re indicating that you didn’t know the difference between a vagina and an anus at that time?”

  “I didn’t indicate that.”

  “Did you believe you were having vaginal sex or anal sex?”

  “I thought I was having vaginal sex.”

  “Okay. And so at that time, you didn’t know the difference?”

  “When we’re engaged in sex, no, I didn’t know.”

  “I would assume for her to participate in this act she had to be naked?” the lawyer wanted to clarify.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And so she was naked. You were naked.” He paused here, which brought a great deal of attention to his anticipated next statement: “And you still didn’t notice a penis?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You didn’t notice an erection?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You did no reaching around or touching down there yourself?”

  “No, sir.”

  “While you were having intercourse with her?”

  “No, sir.”

  “And that would have happened on a couple of occasions, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, I understand from your direct testimony that [Vonlee] had made some statements to you . . . that there was some sort of medical condition that made her embarrassed to show her vagina?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But she had, or was at least on these two occasions without pants—without underwear—in front of you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Feeling confident in pointing out the most embarrassing moments of Danny’s life by showing how Danny had been misled by Vonlee on more than one occasion, the defense attorney moved on. He asked about the jewelry Danny had given his girlfriend.

  Still, had the damage to Danny’s credibility as a witness, if the jury chose to see it that way, been accomplished?

  If there was one point Danny made that helped the state, it was when he testified that he had never seen Vonlee wasted. This was important for the state’s contention that Vonlee knew exactly what she was doing when she did it. If her boyfriend had never seen her “tipsy,” as Cataldo put it, how could the jury believe she was drunk on the night Don died? Or drunk when she tattled to Danny about what she and Billie Jean had done?

  For the next hour, Danny and Cataldo split hairs on common, well-worn subjects and facts related to the case. The one new piece of information that came out was that Danny had said during one pretrial hearing that he thought Vonlee had told him she held Don down while her aunt smothered him with a pillow. This was not an image Cataldo wanted the jury to have. Thus, he was able to get Danny to retract that statement by now claiming he had said so much over the course of the case that he couldn’t possibly recall everything.

  But a bell had been rung, nonetheless.

  Cataldo pressed Danny on the subject of the money Billie Jean had promised to pay Vonlee for her help, focusing on what Danny had actually heard Vonlee say. And maybe he pressed Danny too hard here, because no defense attorney wanted the answer Danny subsequently gave.

  “So,” Cataldo asked, “what you’re saying is while Billie’s got the pillow, she’s negotiating with [Vonlee]? If you want the money, I’ll make it higher, and if you want the fifty [thousand], you’re going to have to do more?”

  “Well, it’s probably hard to be
lieve, but they were negotiating while they were killing the man,” Danny said.

  The APA cracked a slight smile out of the corner of his mouth, noting to himself, possibly, that the image Danny Chahine had just provided the court consisted of a passed-out husband on the floor, unable to defend himself, while the two moneygrubbing women in his life were trying to decide the best way to kill him and split his money.

  CHAPTER 81

  VONLEE WAS GROWING IMPATIENT while waiting to hear her fate. On second thought, maybe “scared” was more accurate. She sat in court, watching, listening, wondering, unable to stop herself from holding on to a slight glimmer of hope that one juror would see she had made a terrible mistake in not stopping her aunt from hurting her uncle, which was her fear at the time, and also not turning Billie Jean in when she had the chance. Vonlee was willing to pay for her mistakes with years behind bars. She had no trouble taking responsibility. She wanted to stand up and shout this to the jury.

  But decades in a male prison? No. That wouldn’t be fair.

  Vonlee could not fathom the possibility of twenty years or more in state prison, especially considering her transgender situation.

  “What I had learned by then,” Vonlee said later, “was that the abuse from guards was going to be far worse than what I feared by my fellow inmates. And I had seen some of that abuse firsthand by then already.”

  There can be nothing worse—except death, perhaps— than living in fear, especially when your oppressor is your keeper.

  Don Tullock, Dr. Dragovic and two more witnesses sat in the witness chair next for the state and went over the same testimony they had during Billie Jean’s trial. Only, here it meant a hell of a lot more because of the tape recording and transcript from that conversation Vonlee had with Danny, which seemed to back up what these witnesses were saying.

  Friday, March 15, 2002, consisted of much the same, with Don Zimmerman and other familiar players casting a wider guilty net upon Vonlee, who began to believe that her only chance at this stage was to get up there and tell her own story.

  “What do you think?” Cataldo asked Vonlee during a break that afternoon. For the attorney, there was no hesitation, no question, no doubt, what his client needed to do.

  “Looks like I might have to,” Vonlee said.

  “I think so.”

  * * *

  By the end of that day, the state had rested its case and Bill Cataldo called his first witness, the ME office’s investigator. Cataldo wanted to point out through the investigator that this professional really did not see much out of the norm. The Rogers house was not even determined to be a crime scene until much later, when the investigator was asked about his Polaroid photographs by the TPD and the medical examiner. Cataldo was trying to make it clear that the ME office’s investigation, as well as the TPD’s, was flawed from the get-go. There was nothing here that indicated a homicide until sometime later, when Danny came forward and the TPD decided it was going to dig into Billie Jean’s life and look at it all differently.

  The midmorning session proved to be interesting when Cataldo brought in his own medical examiner to claim, for the most part, exactly what Dr. Baden had testified to during Billie Jean Rogers’s trial. There was no murder, so how could there be murder charges?

  And then, at 11:49 A.M., Bill Cataldo looked at his client. “You ready?”

  Vonlee nodded.

  * * *

  Settled into the witness chair after taking the oath, Vonlee looked nervous and on edge. Cataldo told his client to “take a deep breath.”

  In and out.

  Breathe.

  Vonlee explained that she was eighteen when she changed her name to Vonlee Nicole Titlow from Harry Vonlee Titlow.

  “Are you a female?” Cataldo asked.

  “No.”

  “You are a . . . ?”

  “I’m a transsexual.”

  Vonlee was having trouble breathing. A panic attack was slowly creeping up on her, because Cataldo repeatedly told her to “breathe deeply . . . relax a little bit.”

  After Vonlee took a sip of water, a few deep breaths and found her bearings, she and Cataldo talked about where she was born, when she realized she was a “female,” school, her time in Nashville, Denver, Chicago, her employment, the escort business, exotic dancing, meeting Danny at the casino, gambling, drinking, as well as her days leading up to living with Billie Jean and Don. They stayed on the topic of Vonlee’s escort service for quite some time. Vonlee was unafraid to be open and honest about how much money she made and how long she had been in business. She testified that moving to the Troy/Detroit area put a welcomed damper on it all.

  When they arrived at the topic of Billie Jean, Vonlee had a look of melancholy about her that she had not shown throughout the trial thus far. She cared for her aunt; there could be no argument there. It was clear to those who knew Billie Jean was in the throes of cancer and was facing her last days. Vonlee felt this. While growing up in Tennessee, and even after she moved to Nashville and Denver, Vonlee had not heard much from her aunt. It wasn’t until they connected at the Waffle House, and Billie Jean convinced Vonlee to follow her to North Carolina and then to Michigan, that their relationship began in earnest. From there, they were inseparable. Aunt Billie Jean needed a friend, Vonlee said, and she provided that companionship.

  Vonlee talked about how her aunt would “give” her money to gamble. Vonlee didn’t have much. Her aunt wanted Vonlee by her side at the casino, so she’d provide Vonlee with funds to have a good time.

  “I would have to beg her to leave the casino,” Vonlee said.

  Cataldo asked Vonlee about something she said on the recording to Danny regarding Billie Jean being sick. He wanted to know how sick her aunt actually was.

  “She had a liver problem from years of drinking,” Vonlee testified.

  Cataldo asked Vonlee about how “sexually aggressive” Don was toward her when Billie Jean wasn’t around. Through this line of questioning, Vonlee talked about how much Don drank on a regular basis, claiming that he was wasted all the time and passed out often, and kept his vodka in the freezer—a place where cops and the ME’s investigator never checked, Cataldo had gotten this on the record.

  Vonlee next spoke of how Billie Jean witnessed Don grabbing her breasts one night and her aunt snapped, screaming at him that she now “had something on him” if he ever tried to divorce her.

  According to Billie Jean, Vonlee explained, “she had the perfect marriage—that he didn’t mind how much money she spent or how much time she spent away from home” at the casino.

  Vonlee said Don drank about “half a gallon” of vodka every day.

  Cataldo then got into some of what Danny had testified to and asked Vonlee to explain, beginning with, “So they did fight over her gambling?”

  “Yes, they did.”

  “Were you involved in the argument?”

  “No. I called Danny to come and get me.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Because I . . . just didn’t want to be around it.”

  “Danny testified that you told him that during the time [Don] was allegedly being smothered, that he was playing with your breasts?”

  “That is not—” Vonlee started to say.

  “Did Don touch your breasts that evening?”

  Finishing, Vonlee added, “. . . That is not true. No, he did not.”

  “Did you say to Danny Chahine . . . ‘At least [Don] died happy’?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “Did you tell Danny Chahine that [Don] had touched your breasts?”

  “I told him . . . about the incident [of Don] getting in bed with me. . . .” Vonlee later explained that Danny must have mixed up the two occasions: when Billie Jean and Vonlee were with Don in the kitchen, and that night when Billie Jean was away and Don came on to her. Danny had taken one story and merged with the other and told the cops that Don was trying to touch her breasts while they were trying to pour vodka down his throat.
This seemed to be backed up by the simple fact that both Billie Jean and Vonlee, separately, had said Don was completely passed out during that time in the kitchen, and the toxicology results would indicate as much.

  There was another discrepancy in Danny’s testimony.

  “Did you ever tell Danny Chahine that you were a transsexual?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “When did you tell him that?”

  “I told him the first week I met him.”

  Danny would sometimes pay for Vonlee’s gambling, she said. He was very aggressive when they first met, she told jurors. Within a week of knowing him, he had taken her back to his home, broke out a bottle of expensive wine, and then put his hand on her knee while they sat on the couch. He began massaging her thigh, indicating he wanted to do something. Vonlee said she told him no and he brought her home on that night.

  Cataldo asked Vonlee to talk about the sex. He knew this was vitally important to bring up again, based entirely on what he knew Vonlee was about to say.

  CHAPTER 82

  BILL CATALDO UNDERSTOOD HE could take the scandalous tale of a straight man supposedly unknowingly having sex with a transsexual only so far without coming across as a defense attorney simply looking to embarrass a witness even further than he had been already. There was a fine line in there somewhere and the attorney had teetered on walking over it when he had cross-examined Danny Chahine. What would probing deeper into that same salacious content do for Vonlee’s defense?

  Vonlee deserved the opportunity to tell her side of the sexual story, Cataldo believed. Regardless of what anyone else thought, providing an opportunity for his client to do just that was the job he had signed up for.

  “When you were having sex, were the lights on?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Vonlee answered.

  “[Danny] said he didn’t see that you were a male. He didn’t see an erection. Were you hiding it from him?”

  “No.”

  Cataldo mentioned how the APA had shown some rather racy photographs of Vonlee wearing skimpy lingerie. He wanted to know if she had ever dressed “that way” for Danny.