If You Only Knew

by M. William Phelps

  “I would wear lingerie underneath my clothing,” she said.

  “Lingerie that hid a penis?” the attorney queried.

  “I was . . .” Vonlee started to say, but then stopped herself. Rethinking, she continued, “When we had sex, I was completely nude.”

  “Were you erect?”

  “I would say semi.”

  “Was it obvious that you had male equipment?”

  “Yeah.”

  A few questions later: “Did you place your penis between your legs and walk around like that so, like, he wouldn’t see it?”

  “No. But I just didn’t . . . flaunt it, either. I mean . . . I don’t hide it. I don’t use it, I guess [you] could say.”

  “Were you ever drunk in front of Danny?”

  “Yes.”

  “How often?”

  “Every time I would go to the casino.”

  It was apparent from Vonlee’s testimony that she and Danny disagreed on several different levels. Their stories were polar opposites in some places. Cataldo thought this was significant because it explained the possibility that Danny Chahine had an ax to grind and was sharpening it every time he said something about the relationship. It was plausible that he was taking various parts of a narrative Vonlee had given him and was twisting and turning each component to fit a story that painted Vonlee in a guilty light. This way, he could get back at her for deceiving him.

  When they landed on August 12, 2000, Vonlee told her story of the vodka and cranberry breakfast she had at Danny’s on Friday, August 11, before heading off to the Rogers household that morning, and then drinking all day with Billie Jean.

  Don came home at 4:00 P.M., or thereabout, Vonlee told jurors.

  She spoke of a plan the three of them had to go to the racetrack and how it had been curtailed by Don’s becoming too drunk—which made Billie Jean mad. Not angry, but a “here-we-go-again” annoyed.

  Then she spoke of how they all ate dinner together and . . .

  Don was sitting at the kitchen table after dinner and drinking himself into oblivion, which was something, Vonlee explained, he often did.

  Don passed out and Vonlee heard “a chair flip over” and a loud thud (“plop”) as Don hit the floor.

  Vonlee pointed it out to her aunt, who didn’t seem to care much.

  “He wouldn’t respond,” Vonlee said after describing how she walked into the kitchen to check up on Don. “I was pretty inebriated.”

  Billie Jean then said she’d get him up and put him to bed; this was after Vonlee had tried and failed to wake Don by herself.

  Vonlee told how Don’s legs were “crossed,” just like they were in the Polaroid photos.

  She talked about checking to see how Don was doing and believed he was totally out of it, unconscious from too much booze. However, she had no idea if he was breathing at that moment. She assumed he was because she felt over his mouth and breath was coming out later on.

  “What happened when Billie came into the kitchen?” Cataldo asked.

  “She told me to hold his mouth and hold his nose and that would wake him up. And I told her no, that I was not going to do that. I was not going to do that because I was afraid I would hurt him.”

  “What did she do after you told her?”

  “After that, she said, ‘Well, you hold his mouth and I’ll hold his nose.’ And I did.... My judgment was very poor and I shouldn’t have, but I put my hand over his mouth . . . [while] keeping my fingers apart.... He was breathing. And I kept letting go.... I told her, ‘I’m not doing that. I can’t do it. I just can’t do that.’”

  “Did you ever put your hand over his mouth so it was clasped?” the attorney asked, making sure the jury knew that Vonlee had never cut off his airway completely.

  “Never. I never held his mouth to where he couldn’t breathe. I would never hurt anybody. Ever.”

  From this “fact” forward, Vonlee placed the entire onus of what happened next upon her aunt, telling jurors that Billie Jean poured the booze down her husband’s throat and up his nose and “it came out and went on the floor.” Vonlee admitted she had “poured just a little” bit of the alcohol into Don’s mouth, but then she stopped when she realized it was wrong.

  They argued a bit, Vonlee said. She told her aunt to leave Don alone before she hurt him. Her aunt, she claimed, got mad and yelled at her.

  Vonlee then took the bottle of vodka Billie Jean had been using and poured herself a glass of straight booze. As Vonlee did that, her aunt “walked away from him. . . .”

  Not once during this period of time did Vonlee ever think that Billie Jean was trying to kill her husband. She thought her aunt was messing with Don.

  “Playing with him.”

  Then Vonlee said she walked into the bathroom to freshen up and finish her drink. It was about 9:00 or 9:30 P.M., she thought.

  She spent “five minutes” in the bathroom, teasing her hair, “peeing” and applying some lipstick. She thought they were still going out to the casino—only now without Don. She believed Billie Jean would, at some point, get Don up to his room, or Don would wake up himself after sleeping off part of his bender and then make his way up there himself.

  Cataldo asked Vonlee to describe for the jury what happened next.

  “I came out of the bathroom . . . and I seen her squatted down.... I was going to go upstairs, because I thought that’s where she would be.... And when I seen her, I walked over toward her and I said, ‘What are you doing?’ I saw she had a pillow on his face. . . .”

  The rest of Vonlee’s narrative was, basically, mechanics, various pieces of the puzzle: Which way was Billie Jean facing, and which way was Vonlee standing? Was Billie Jean on her knees or not on her knees? Vonlee said as soon as she realized what was happening, she asked Billie Jean “what the fuck” she was doing as she realized her aunt was smothering Don.

  Cataldo wanted to know if at any time prior to that moment, had Vonlee ever asked Billie Jean for money to get a sex change operation?

  “No.”

  As for Danny testifying that Vonlee said she “helped pin [Don] down” on the floor while Billie Jean smothered him, Vonlee said that statement was nonsense.

  “Don Rogers was passed out! I mean, he was . . . No one was holding him down. He was passed out. He was . . . unconscious.”

  They spent another hour or more discussing what happened next, and how Danny Chahine had gotten the story all mixed up, and how Vonlee felt guilty to this day for not stopping Billie Jean. It was the reason why she had told Danny what happened; she had felt responsible in some way. None of it was planned. None of it was thought out beforehand and talked about. (At least not by herself, Vonlee said.) None of it seemed real at the time it was happening. And none of it was done with any nefarious nature on her part.

  Vonlee said she got sucked into it and lied for Billie Jean because it was easier and less humiliating. After she lied, she started drinking more and more. The guilt was weighing on her soul, and the secrets she held were bubbling up inside. She started taking Xanax and other pills to quiet the demons inside her head. The images of Billie Jean and that pillow were nightmarish and overwhelming. She knew her aunt might have killed him. But she didn’t do anything about it, and that was the mistake Vonlee believed she needed to pay for.

  As her attorney’s direct questioning seemed to be drawing to a close, he asked Vonlee to talk about the dinner she had with Danny when she first told him what had happened. She had explained everything one night, and then Danny hooked up with the police and she told him again on a second night. Cataldo was asking about that first time she told Danny, which had not been recorded.

  After she told Danny what happened with Don and Billie Jean, Danny did something she had not expected.

  “I mean,” Vonlee testified, “Danny . . . gave me [a] ring and he said I could keep the ring on one condition.”

  “If you marry me,” Danny demanded. He was smiling. Vonlee claimed he had a sparkle in his eye. He was serio
us, Vonlee believed.

  “Marry you?” Vonlee said in turn. She was puzzled.

  “You’ve made a decision, right?” Danny asked. They had jokingly talked about marriage before this night. Vonlee had written it off as nothing more than conversation.

  “No!” she said during that unrecorded dinner. “Danny, you know that I can’t marry you legally.”

  “Why?” Danny asked. “I’m a citizen.”

  “Because I’m a male, Danny.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you know that I have a penis just like you do. And I cannot legally marry you.”

  Danny became “very upset,” Vonlee testified.

  Cataldo wanted her to clarify.

  “I don’t know if he was upset because I wasn’t going to marry him or [because] he [finally] realized I [had] a penis.”

  What’s more, on the night Vonlee first explained to Danny what happened to Don, she “went home with him” and “we slept together.” They had consensual sex. Vonlee recalled specifically walking around in his bedroom with the lights on; her penis was hanging out there, flopping around for Danny to see.

  “He had to have seen it,” Vonlee said.

  Closing out her direct testimony, Vonlee told jurors Billie Jean bought her a car, yes. But she never gave her that one hundred thousand dollars her aunt had written inside her checkbook next to Vonlee’s name.

  Cataldo wondered if Vonlee had been given any money at all.

  She said seventy thousand dollars.

  Cataldo posed a powerful question that jurors would certainly be asking themselves at some point: if Vonlee hadn’t done anything wrong, as far as participating in “killing” Don, why had Vonlee taken that money?

  “Well, I was drinking. She gave it to me. I wanted to get away. I didn’t want to go home to Tennessee. I knew they would know I was upset, and I figured it was a way I could just start a new life, and I just figured, just take it and . . . I don’t know, I just took it.” She looked down at a crumpled-up tissue in her hands. Then: “Because she gave it to me.”

  Her defense attorney asked where the lion’s share of all that money had gone.

  Vonlee claimed she gave most of it away, some to an AIDS organization, some to friends; she spent a lot of it on her drinking and drugging habits, which had become worse as each day passed and she lived with what she had done to Don.

  Finally, Cataldo prompted Vonlee to explain why she told Danny—which would be clear on the recording jurors would have available—that “drinking drove me to kill somebody”? That was the one quote she had to explain. It was perhaps the most unfavorable and liable comment Vonlee had said to Danny, and it was clear on the recording.

  “Drinking drove me to kill somebody.”

  How were jurors supposed to overlook what seemed to be such a bold admission—a confession?

  Vonlee thought about that comment. It was true. She had said it. “I felt that [God] was, you know, showing me that it was my fault. If I had stopped drinking . . . If I hadn’t have been drinking that night, I could have stopped her. I could have known that she was serious. I was just blaming myself. I felt like it was my fault. If [only] I hadn’t been drinking—because I had made a promise to God that I would stop.”

  CHAPTER 83

  VONLEE HAD ADMITTED TO taking part in a murder and also covering it up. Whether she was feeling guilty about it, sick over it, had drunk herself into denial and forgetfulness, it was all beside the point. For the APA, this was all about the law.

  Skrzynski wasted little time getting into what he thought was the most important aspect of his cross. His first question: “Miss Titlow, you have male genitalia, right?”

  “Yes.”

  From there, the APA brought in the escort business Vonlee had owned and operated, asking a series of questions regarding “soliciting men for sex.”

  “You never solicited undercover police officers?” the APA asked.

  “No, I did not.”

  “And you were never arrested by the police for that?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “You never solicited an undercover police officer to give him sex?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “But you were arrested?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  This was a contradiction in facts. When such exchanges were left unexplained, just floating out there, the jury would assume the worst. A good trial attorney, Skrzynski, being at the top of his game here, knew that assumption and speculative questioning could be as powerful as an admission. He moved on from that line of questioning and focused on the idea of Vonlee “posing for pictures.”

  She denied that they were dirty pictures for public consumption—the photos were for her personal use only.

  The postulation here by the state was that Vonlee had “made erotic pictures and sold them over the Internet.”

  She disagreed with the state on this point.

  Skrzynski speculated how hard it was to believe that Vonlee made upward of twenty-five thousand dollars a month as an escort service owner/operator, and she and her girls had not slept with any of the guys.

  She wouldn’t budge on this point. (Though she later told the author they had indeed provided sex in some form for pay.)

  The APA moved on to an idea that was central to any motivation Vonlee might have had for killing Don.

  “At the time that this happens in August of 2000, you’re not interested in the sex change operation, are you?”

  “It wasn’t on my mind, no.”

  “And that certainly was not a motive that you might have had to kill someone, was it?”

  “No, it was not.”

  “All right. So that idea of a sex change operation was a media invention you said?”

  “Yes, it was.”

  Bill Cataldo listened carefully and found no opening in which to interject and slow the pace down. With every question Skrzynski posed, Vonlee came across worse; the hole was getting deeper. Vonlee seemed to be a money-hungry transsexual, an escort service madam, a drunk, wild chick, who lived life in the fast lane, willing to go along with her aunt because she would ultimately benefit financially from the death. Skrzynski took a good hour questioning Vonlee on everything from how slippery the floor in the kitchen was to how she screamed at Zimmerman and Tullock, to those first responders arriving at the scene, to how Billie Jean had maybe once said to her niece that she should hire a “friend” for twenty-five thousand dollars to kill Don (a suggestion that Vonlee thought was nothing more than her aunt talking about the cost of a new floor).

  After all of that, the APA put into question the “fact,” according to Vonlee, that she had told Danny on the first day she met him she was a transsexual. The state wasn’t buying it.

  Then it was on to the ring Danny had given her and how she couldn’t accept it because she “had a penis.”

  Skrzynski wanted to know if she had ever told Zimmerman and Tullock that “there were ways of hiding it (her penis) so that no one will ever know.”

  Vonlee denied ever saying such a thing.

  The APA kept pressing. One question after the next. Hardballs, all of them, from the subject of her penis to how many drinks she had on the day Don died. Vonlee withstood the barrage fairly well and came across as sincere and, perhaps, a bit naïve.

  It was perfectly clear from the APA’s point of view that the state did not believe much of what Vonlee was saying. Her story didn’t have holes—it had craters! She might have been more involved in the entire murder than she was trying to sell to jurors.

  On and on, this went, well into the afternoon. Vonlee was asked about certain parts of her story, backward and forward. One would guess the APA was trying to trip her up. Skrzynski said a lot of “Now, wait a minute . . .” and “Is that right?” These phrases gave jurors the impression he did not believe her side.

  Not once during this blistering cross-examination, though, did Vonlee lose it, or come across as if she was flat-out lying. She tried
to answer every question as best she could, even those she knew would hurt her.

  Vonlee said a number of times, “I had no idea she was trying to hurt him,” as they discussed the actual moment when Don was passed out and Billie Jean and Vonlee were down on their knees, messing around with him.

  In the end, Vonlee stuck to her story that she believed, at first, it “was all a joke” and that Billie Jean had done this before. But when she came out of that bathroom and saw her aunt with the pillow, she realized Billie Jean had a plan to kill Don and she was initiating it. And Vonlee’s crime, or involvement, began right there, in that moment, when she helped her aunt toss the pillow and empty bottle of booze, went to the casino, came home, and called 911 and told the cops a story.

  As they sparred back and forth about the details of that night, Skrzynski brought out one major contention through his brilliant cross-examination: Why hadn’t Vonlee told Danny she went into the bathroom and came out and saw Billie Jean with the pillow? Skrzynski referred to the omission as a “big detail” to have left out of her recorded conversation with Danny—one that she was perhaps tacking on now to cover for herself.

  “I really didn’t want to discuss it with him,” Vonlee said.

  Skrzynski’s allegation was a well-placed one. If jurors thought Vonlee had added this “detail” later, she was guilty.

  The money came up again as Skrzynski wound down. The APA insinuated that Vonlee took the money because she earned it by keeping her mouth shut about the crime they had committed together.

  Vonlee disagreed.

  Skrzynski detoured back into Danny and when he realized Vonlee was a man. He was having a hard time accepting that Vonlee had told Danny when she first met him.

  “So”—the APA asked, pacing a bit back and forth in front of Vonlee—“as of the time of Don’ s death . . . you’re telling the jury that Danny already knew that you were a man?”

  “If he didn’t know, I don’t know how he didn’t. But he seemed very surprised when I relayed to him that I had a penis. I mean, there is a possibility he may not have known. I don’t know.”