If You Only Knew

by M. William Phelps

Skrzynski saw one final opening: “There is?” he asked, surprised by Vonlee’s answer. “So then he’s telling us the truth when he says he doesn’t know then, right?”

  “If he doesn’t know, I don’t understand how in the world he couldn’t know.”

  “I mean. Isn’t the whole idea of you getting dressed up as a woman . . . to convince people that you are, in fact, a woman? Isn’t that what’s the whole idea of this?”

  “No, it is not,” Vonlee said. She felt insulted by the statement. (Skrzynski obviously had no clue what it was like to live inside the body of a man as a woman, and Vonlee considered the APA was being insensitive.)

  “That’s not why you have hormone shots so you can have breasts? That’s not why you do that?”

  “No! It’s not.”

  “That’s not why you dress in low-cut gowns and miniskirts? You don’t want people to believe that you’re a woman? That’s not why you do that?”

  “That’s not the only reason.”

  Skrzynski kept at it, tossing salt.

  Finally, Vonlee said, “I do that for myself. Because that’s the way I feel.”

  “And your goal is to make people feel that you’re a woman, too, right?” Skrzynski said, not letting up.

  “My goal is for me to be comfortable, and I’m comfortable in dresses and heels and makeup and my hair done. That’s . . . the way I choose to live. I mean, it’s not to fool anybody.... I’ve always felt that way.”

  Skrzynski went through a series of questions centered on how dressing up as a woman was meant to “deceive people,” and that’s what Vonlee was good at—deception.

  Vonlee said no, no, no. The APA had it all wrong.

  “People think that I am a female,” she said defiantly.

  Skrzynski stopped. “Thank you,” he said.

  CHAPTER 84

  ON TUESDAY, MARCH 19, John Skrzynski and Bill Cataldo offered closing arguments. There was nothing new here—or, rather, nothing that hadn’t already been said ten times backward and forward. Each side argued calmly and with merit for his case. Vonlee was facing a mountain of evidence. Many courtroom watchers believed it would be an easy win for the state. Yet, as Billie Jean Rogers’s trial had proven, surprises did happen within the confines of a high-profile murder trial.

  As Vonlee sat and listened, she harkened back to a day when Billie Jean was “Aunt Billie,” the fun aunt, the aunt every kid screams for when she comes through the door at Christmas, the aunt every parent worries about.

  But here was Vonlee facing a murder charge at the hand of that same beloved, adored person. How life could throw daggers, with one seemingly always landing in the center of the heart.

  As the trial drew toward an ending, her hero-worship sentiments held a nostalgic bitterness and sadness for Vonlee. As she sat and listened to Judge Potts give the jury instructions after each side concluded its closing, Vonlee had mixed feelings about her aunt. She wanted to hate her, but she couldn’t. Still, had this all been some sort of a dream? Had Vonlee fallen into a black hole? She recalled this period when the judge was instructing jurors as being a moment when she felt as though she was living someone else’s life. It was that seven to fifteen years—there it was buzzing in Vonlee’s head as the day’s proceedings closed out.

  Seven to fifteen.

  It sounded so doable.

  So fair.

  * * *

  On the following morning, March 20, the jury sent a note to Judge Potts. Within that note, it was obvious that each juror had taken his and her responsibility seriously. The jury wanted “pictures” of the “crime scene, forensics of the body, transcripts of the tape” that Danny Chahine had made. They also wanted a transcription of Vonlee’s testimony.

  Then a rather telling question—one that made Bill Cataldo smile: “Does someone’s inaction, nonaction, to stop or prevent a crime resulting in death amount to fulfillment of condition three, second-degree murder, knowingly creating a high risk of death, knowing that death would be the likely result of his actions?”

  The judge explained that she had provided the jury with everything each needed within her instructions, concluding: “It is up to you to decide an answer.”

  Later that same day, Judge Potts indicated she was bringing in the jury because “they have reached a verdict.”

  After everyone got settled and the foreperson stood, Judge Potts asked Vonlee to do the same.

  With a worried gaze flushed over her, a look of utter instability, as though about to collapse, Vonlee stood. The wait was over. The jury was about to deliver her fate.

  “We find the defendant guilty of the lesser offense of second-degree murder.”

  Bill Cataldo had pulled it off. “He had a full recorded confession,” Cataldo said of the APA, “and I still beat him.”

  Judge Potts put off the sentencing until April. She wanted to take a look at everything, sit back, think it through, and then do the right thing.

  Cataldo believed all along that Vonlee had been “used by Billie Jean.” He considered the notion that the jury understood Vonlee had stopped. “She didn’t commit the ultimate act. She was consistent.” Her story never wavered. “Remember, she volunteered that statement to Danny Chahine. It wasn’t coerced. It wasn’t an interview in where the police are using leading questions to get information out of her. And she passed a polygraph.”

  Every one of those points, the defense attorney added, led the jury to believe that first-degree murder was not the right choice.

  This alone was cause for a celebration.

  CHAPTER 85

  A “CRUSHING BLOW” WAS how Vonlee described hearing “guilty,” regardless of the lesser count. She wanted a verdict of not guilty, obviously. Or maybe a manslaughter conviction with time served. But that wasn’t to be. Harry Vonlee “Nicole” Titlow was now a convicted murderer. And always would be.

  “I feel that I was found guilty of murder for not stopping Billie Jean,” Vonlee said later. Vonlee especially did not appreciate the way Judge Potts answered the jury’s question. She believed the jury was headed toward manslaughter and would have voted for the lesser offense, had their question been answered properly by the judge.

  “Everything changed at that point,” Vonlee said, talking about the moment they asked the second-degree murder question and Judge Potts told them to decide among themselves what the answer should be.

  There was something inside Vonlee that kept telling her maybe Judge Potts would go easy on her. Perhaps she’d see that Vonlee was not a murderer, in fact, but rather someone who had taken responsibility for her small part in a larger crime committed by someone else.

  Thank God I didn’t get first-degree, Vonlee gratefully thought as she went back to her cell and had a moment to take in what the course of her life had just delivered to her. She was ecstatic that it was simply over. Nothing was worse, she admitted, than all the waiting and wondering.

  As the days passed and she focused on the upcoming sentencing, another feeling arose. Vonlee was obviously going through what was a series of emotions after a decision had changed her life.

  “None of this was fair,” Vonlee now believed. “My aunt did this and I am the one paying for what she did? I did not kill anybody. I did not kill anybody. Billie Jean did.”

  Falling back on her Christian roots, Vonlee started attending church services inside the jail. Her faith had played a large role in her journey and where she ended up, Vonlee believed. There were times, she claimed, when she’d lie on the bed in her cell and “speak in tongues” and not know how in the world she was doing it. She’d never spoken in tongues before. It was something that just started one night after church services and she went with it.

  On her knees, praying, Vonlee became terrified by the notion that she had “let God down.” She had broken prayer promises to God and was now paying for that deceit.

  Seven to fifteen was what I should have taken, Lord, I know, she prayed one night. I realize now it was a blessing that I had been given.
Vonlee could see that God had given her a chance and she squandered it. A divine gift had been handed to her and she had rejected it.

  “I felt that the Devil had sent Mr. Toca in as one of His minions,” Vonlee said later. “I mean, I’m not a religious fanatic or anything, but he . . . he was the Devil. He came to me with an evil intent. And the entire motive for me to follow him was money, fame and fortune. It was something both of us were motivated by.”

  As April came to pass, Vonlee was called back into court to receive Judge Potts’s sentence. By now, she had left revenge in the wake of her emotional roller coaster and came around the curve of acceptance. Vonlee’s focus after sentencing, however, was going to be getting Frederick Toca disbarred for what she believed he had done to her. Beyond all the appeals that would be filed, Vonlee was on the hunt for an appellate lawyer that could take a look at what Toca had done. Vonlee spoke to Bill Cataldo and others about her plan; there wasn’t a lawyer in town she could find who actually disagreed with her on this matter.

  CHAPTER 86

  AFTER THE LAWYERS FINISHED haggling over an issue concerning sentencing guidelines, on that crisp Michigan day of final judgment, April 17, 2002, Honorable Wendy Potts indicated she was ready to proceed.

  The APA offered Fiona Baldwin (pseudonym), Don’s other daughter, on behalf of the family to stand up and say a few things for the victim. After all, despite his character defects, his supposed bad habits and the gulf between Billie Jean and her husband, Donald Rogers was a victim of murder. He deserved to be heard. In all of the sensationalistic grandeur associated with Vonlee’s trial, perhaps like most murder victims, Don had been cast aside like just one more sidebar conversation. It was his time now to be heard through someone who loved him.

  Fiona walked up and stood before Judge Potts, Vonlee to her right. She said her name, adding, “Don was my dad.”

  To most, Don was a business owner, maybe even a drunk, a man who kept to himself and had issues with his wife, seemingly since the day they had met and over the course of their two marriages. But here Fiona had put into perspective with one sentence what mattered.

  “Don was my dad.”

  Fiona spoke of returning from a vacation back in August 2000. She and her family had gone to an amusement park, with “roller coasters and fright rides.” Unknowingly, she walked through the door to face what was going to be a real-life “thrill ride” that would overtake every waking moment afterward and not ever let up.

  It was the voice of her sister on her answering machine that Fiona would never forget, a message that would “change” life “for all of us,” she said, her voice cracking as she spoke.

  “Dad died . . . ,” that message began.

  The remainder was a blur of words. What else was there to say?

  Dad was gone.

  As she spoke to the judge, Fiona Baldwin’s comments were blunt and brutally honest: “The day before the funeral, the story changed about where Nicole, the person who stands before the court today, and Billie (now her known accomplice) were when my dad died.” Fiona said she “kept asking” herself the same question: “How can anyone not remember where he or she [was] at the time of a loved one’s death?”

  She was referring to that story Billie Jean had told at the wake—how Billie Jean had said to anyone who asked that it was 11:00 P.M. when she returned home to find Don dead, but had told the cops 3:00 A.M.

  For Fiona, however, as she began to unravel the truth, in her opinion (Billie Jean was lying), the “answer soon became very clear. Nicole and Billie had killed my father. They killed him for money. Money that Billie had coerced my dad to give her in his will.”

  She continued, saying how Vonlee wanted the “money for a sex change operation” and Billie Jean had promised to give it to her.

  “But Billie is still without punishment of any kind.”

  Not Vonlee, though: “She sits before the court on her active, free willing and knowing participation in the murder of my father.”

  Toss the book at her was Fiona’s message. This was the opportunity to make Vonlee pay for the both of them. The judge could honor Don and avenge his murder on this day, at this moment. Judge Potts held that power in her hands.

  Fiona said, “Billie would be behind bars for life without parole, had [Vonlee] testified against” her, and that alone constituted additional punishment for Vonlee.

  As for Fiona’s life and how she’d managed, she told the court she had to “delete several painful and horrible memories, repercussions from” her mind “in order to function as a normal adult. . . .”

  Fiona broke down crying before asking for a box of tissues.

  The APA brought her some.

  After taking a moment to collect herself, she talked about “balance” in life. She spoke of how her two “sons threw up every night before a [court] hearing” and “throw up whenever I tell them what a horrible day I had at court.”

  Fiona said she could “not put into words the loss” she felt. She mentioned how she’d had to call her local police department “several times, believing I was being followed or watched.” She was “paranoid that Billie or one of her family is stalking” her, and how “every time I go into a store, I look around for Billie . . . or one of her family.”

  She was living inside a nightmare, still after all this time.

  It never let up.

  Potts interrupted and asked Fiona if she lived in Michigan.

  “Yes,” Fiona answered, outside of Troy, adding how she drove around town, “reading people’s license plates . . . and always paid attention to who’s behind me.”

  It was all so “horrible,” the life she was now being forced to live. She was deathly “afraid” the kids would be kidnapped and “taken away” from her.

  “I’m horrified to think of the things they did to [my father],” she told the court. “It’s disgusting. It was clearly planned out. Death was their goal. They achieved it.”

  Fiona called Danny Chahine a “saint.” Had it not been for Danny, they both would have gotten away with murder.

  She next told a story about Vonlee “walking by” Fiona and her family in the courthouse corridor, handcuffed, being led by sheriffs, “apologizing” for everything that had happened. All Fiona saw there was a “good actor.”

  Fiona was “baffled” by the fact that Vonlee had been found guilty of second-degree murder, because she believed this case was the epitome of first-degree murder, nothing less. Vonlee’s sentence should be “life without parole,” Fiona said, feeling that “Nicole and Billie actively, knowingly, willing and readily, murdered my dad.”

  On that note, she said, her father was “very angry with them,” and Fiona knew this because “he lives inside of me.”

  Fiona Baldwin was upset and hurt; she would never get over the death of her father. The court, at least, had the opportunity to lessen that emotional burden by making sure it punished the one murderer it could.

  Harry Titlow.

  * * *

  The APA encouraged the judge to “adopt” the probation department’s guidelines, which amounted to numbers Vonlee and Bill Cataldo did not want to hear. With that said, the APA went off on a little tangent and reiterated the entire case again before stopping himself to make the recommendation that the department’s guidelines should be followed.

  Defense attorney Bill Cataldo said he agreed with one thing everybody had said: “There was a lot of gambling in this case.”

  Cataldo went on to talk about how Vonlee had made a “mistake.” She hadn’t accepted the deal offered by the People up front. “And my understanding is it was going to be reduced to manslaughter with a ten-year sentence. Mr. Lustig, a very fine lawyer, was able to work the prosecutor, renegotiate down to seven years, seven to fifteen. Then Ms. Titlow received some advice and made a decision that was different.”

  He said he hoped Vonlee would not be made the “scapegoat in the whole case.”

  She passed a polygraph, Cataldo reminded the court.
>
  She did “nothing whatsoever to participate” in the actual murder.

  She should “receive some penance for what she did.”

  Cataldo said the PO was “blinded by their policy” of not giving anyone a “break.”

  * * *

  When Bill Cataldo finished, Judge Potts asked Vonlee if she would like to speak on her own behalf. Vonlee and Cataldo had talked about this. They decided Vonlee needed to man up (pun intended, perhaps). She had to take responsibility, and admit her faults and failures, before asking for the court’s forgiveness and leniency.

  “I’d like to express how very sorry I am for my part in Donald’s death and express to his children . . . I am sorry that they had to suffer through all of this . . . ,” Vonlee began.

  She continued by stating how “sorry” she was “that my aunt Billie was not made to answer for her actions that resulted in Donald’s death. I honestly don’t know how she can live with herself to this day. I can only pray that you can see she took advantage of me, because of who I am, and used my alcoholism to try to get me to help her murder Don.”

  From there, Vonlee expressed gratitude for those who had helped her along the way: the lawyers, the court and everyone else that had steered her in the right direction.

  In the end, she extended once again her sorrow for Don’s loss, admitting that “it should have never happened.”

  * * *

  Judge Potts said she wanted “to be very clear” that Vonlee’s plea agreement and her withdrawal of it had “absolutely nothing to do with . . . today.”

  This announcement gave Cataldo and Vonlee a moment of pause to reflect; they both felt the proverbial “uh-oh,” simply based on the tone the judge used. Potts was passionate and serious.

  “Another thing I’m doing,” Potts added, “I am not making you a scapegoat.”

  Attorney and client looked at each other.

  Potts said she was “taking the case on its own.”

  With all due respect, Potts then went on a bit of a rant: “The report says . . . you have no prior felony record.... You started using alcohol at an early age.... It’s well-known that you are undergoing a sex change, were not comfortable with the sex that you were born with and wanted to make a change. Obviously, you have an identity problem, a drinking problem, and you come to the court and I am sympathetic to your issues. . . .”