One Breath Away: The Hiccup Girl - From Media Darling to Convicted Killer

by M. William Phelps

  “I took care of them,” she claimed. Meaning, she paid for their lifestyle and living accommodations. “It was kind of like a power thing. Kind of fun . . . You know, I loved those guys.”

  Moving to Chicago from Denver in 1999, Vonlee was effectively running from the escort lifestyle in Denver, while still dabbling in it to make some money in Chicago. But she wanted the simple life now. From the early 1990s until that move to Chicago, Vonlee had been running from herself, essentially. She’d gotten caught up in a life of booze, men, clubs, cars, and clothes. All material things. By the time she made it to Chicago, Vonlee had a life waiting for her, if she wanted it. A man she had been dating signed over the deed to a house that she could live in free of rent. All she had to do was be there for him when he needed her. The man wanted to take care of Vonlee. “A lot of men did this throughout the years,” Vonlee told me later. However, as Vonlee thought about it, she was nobody’s possession—nobody’s “thing” to have when he wanted. Whereas it might have been something she went for during her younger years, not anymore. Vonlee was now in her thirties. She needed to focus on herself and what she wanted.

  “It’s on the counter,” she said one night when that man came home.

  “What?”

  “The deed. I signed it back over to you—I’m going home to Tennessee.”

  By now, Vonlee had been to rehab, a familiar face in AA meetings around Chicago. She wanted out of the big city, away from that fast-paced nightlife she had taken part in through much of her twenties. Back in Tennessee, she took a job at the local Waffle House and went back to living with her grandmother, Annis Lee, the woman who had raised her.

  “I was giving her twenty or thirty dollars a day for rent,” Vonlee said.

  Life was simple. She was around family. The smell of that Tennessee air—there was nothing like it, she felt. She embraced the downhome, simple folks she interacted with every day, the sheer snail’s pace of life itself. She’d take her nephews fishing. She’d go for drives in the country to see friends. She’d attend barbeques the relatives spent all day preparing, and would enjoy Sunday dinners after church services.

  “I was extremely happy,” Vonlee recalled.

  But then something happened.

  “Aunt Billie Jean shows up. . . .”

  * * *

  Vonlee was actually working when Billie Jean walked into the restaurant, sat down, and called her over. Vonlee hadn’t seen her in over a decade. She’d spoken to her, but that was it. Now her aunt sat in front of her during the spring or early summer of 2000, surprising Vonlee with the visit, making a proposition Vonlee had a hard time turning her back on.

  As Vonlee approached the table, shocked to see her aunt there all the way from Troy, she noticed Billie Jean was laughing.

  “A waitress,” Billie Jean said in a mocking tone, talking down to Vonlee. “You’re a waitress in this dive? I cannot believe you took to waiting on tables, Vonlee.”

  Vonlee wanted to curl up in a ball right there. She felt belittled and a total failure.

  “Sit down,” Billie Jean said. It sounded as though she had an offer to make.

  “What are you doing here?” Vonlee asked. She was looking back toward the kitchen and register. She didn’t want her boss to see her sitting in a booth with a customer.

  “Look, honey, you don’t have any drinking problem. What are you running from?” Vonlee and Billie Jean, living somewhat close to each other in the upper Midwest, had communicated, and Billie Jean knew about Vonlee’s journey into recovery. In some ways, there was a bit of envy on the older woman’s part. She valued Vonlee’s no-holds-bar attitude, not giving two shakes about what people said or thought about her. Billie Jean wanted to be her own person, same as Vonlee. She knew the more she hung around Vonlee, the more of a free spirit she would become.

  As for Vonlee, she certainly had the pizzazz, flare, and fortitude, along with the clichéd, sassy Southern charm of a luxurious, expensive call girl. She looked the part with her long, muscular, and yet feminine legs, her bleached-blond hair down to her shoulders, and her curvaceous, womanly figure. And if you were to ask Vonlee, she had no trouble taking clients on by herself when her girls couldn’t handle the influx of calls or the specialized requests from such a high-powered clientele.

  But that was another time, another life. She was back home now in Tennessee and pretty content living a simple life.

  During those preceding months leading up to the early morning Don Rogers was found dead inside the kitchen of his home, however, Vonlee was determined to spend her free time seeing old friends and spending time with her rather large family. Chicago and the escort business were rather old and worn. And Billie Jean, who claimed she was back to visit family, insisted that Vonlee come back to Michigan at once with her and live inside the home Billie Jean shared with Don. Billie Jean told Vonlee that a restaurant, waiting tables, was not the place she wanted to see her niece. It was degrading.

  Vonlee considered the question: Should I go back? It isn’t Chicago. It’s Troy, Michigan. What kind of trouble is in Troy?

  “You don’t have no dranking problem, Vonlee,” Billie Jean said, that southern accent unmistakable. She was leaning over the table, almost whispering. “You just need to buy bigger bottles and drank it slow all day long.” The aunt laughed at her own wit.

  Vonlee suddenly pondered the idea. Maybe I don’t.

  “Let’s you and me get out of here,” Billie Jean said. “I got money.”

  “Where?”

  Harrah’s, Billie Jean suggested.

  July Fourth weekend was a day away.

  “In North Carolina?” Vonlee asked.

  “Yes.”

  Vonlee took off her apron, tossed it into the kitchen, and headed out the door. She would pack something while Billie Jean waited in the car. Like Thelma and Louise, she and Billie Jean would head out to Harrah’s Cherokee Casino in Cherokee, North Carolina, to party it up for the weekend. Any sobriety Vonlee had earned, she had just given away.

  It was a spur-of-the-moment decision that would change Vonlee’s life forever.

  CHAPTER 3

  OFFICER GIORGI GATHERED Vonlee and Billie Jean in the den of the house and began to assess Don’s medical history, trying to figure out what might have happened. With no outward signs of trauma, no injuries that Officers Giorgi or Dungjen could see, the “alcoholism” bell Billie Jean had rung when the officers showed up now seemed most plausible. Giorgi wondered if this was the root cause of Don’s demise. Hell, in just the short time she’d been a patrol officer, Giorgi had seen death come to people in both the most mundane and unimaginable ways.

  Billie Jean was not at all surprised by Don’s death. Or, rather, she didn’t come across that way to Giorgi and Dungjen. She went through all of the ailments Don suffered from beyond being what Billie Jean described as a chronic drinker who would guzzle goblets full of vodka as if it were water.

  “He’d take one of those mason jars and fill it up,” Vonlee explained. “Then down it. I had seen him do it more than once.”

  Dungjen and Giorgi got together and decided their next move.

  “We should probably call for the detective on duty and an ME,” Giorgi offered.

  It was a formality, both cops considered, a not-so-routine part of their day, but an obligation, nonetheless. They did not suspect foul play, but that was, of course, not their call to make. First responders showed up, evaluated the scene, did what they could to help, asked some questions, and then called in the investigators, if they believed a case warranted their time.

  Giorgi covered Don with a yellow blanket and then sat with Vonlee and Billie Jean in the den. She wanted to ask a few more questions and hopefully help to figure out what had happened. The mood in the house was subdued, despite however anxious Vonlee, who later admitted to being totally inebriated during this time, seemed. Billie Jean appeared composed, with a handle on things.

  “Understanding,” one of the first responders called it later
, referring to Billie Jean’s demeanor.

  Although, perhaps, alarmed that her husband was on the floor of their kitchen, dead, Billie Jean’s behavior, at least initially, seemed appropriate to the circumstances.

  Vonlee, on the other hand, was acting “surprising and out of place, considering the situation,” that same first responder recalled. She was “resisting” the questions posed by both officers.

  “Vonlee and I went to the casino,” Billie Jean told Giorgi. “We were gone for a few hours—Donald did not want to go.”

  In a statement Billie Jean later handwrote that night, she talked about leaving for the casino at nine-thirty or ten-thirty at night, and coming home at four-fifteen in the morning, at which time she and Vonlee then called 911.

  Billie Jean was “pretty calm” and “very quiet,” Giorgi observed. “Didn’t really speak unless I asked her questions.”

  Billie Jean also paced at times and chain-smoked cigarettes.

  Probably nerves. Her husband was dead.

  Giorgi walked back over to Don Rogers and thought about the scene a bit more, trying to picture what might have happened. Don was lying directly next to the kitchen table. He was on his back, with his legs crossed at the ankles. His arms were outstretched in kind of a Jesus-on-the-Cross position. This didn’t raise any red flags, specifically, but the more they looked at it, the way in which Don’s body lay seemed almost staged. Feeling this, the intuitive officer considered that she ought to look even closer. They had to wait for the detective and medical examiner, anyway. What would it hurt?

  His legs are crossed at his ankles? Giorgi kept going back to this fact. It seemed odd, taking into account that Don might have fallen from the chair. How many people fall out of a chair and wind up on the ground, faceup, their legs crossed?

  “It looked kind of unusual,” Giorgi later explained. “It appeared that he had fallen out of his chair, and looking . . . It just seemed unlikely that you could fall from somewhere and end up with your legs perfectly crossed at the ankles.”

  Maybe it happened as one of the women tried reviving him? Maybe they had done this inadvertently?

  Both said no.

  Giorgi walked over to Billie Jean and asked several more questions. The officer was more direct and accusatory in her tone this time around. Maybe she didn’t mean to be, but that was how it came out.

  Vonlee stood by and appeared agitated with the officer. She viewed the situation as the officer attacking Billie Jean.

  “You-all just need to leave her alone right now,” Vonlee snapped at one point. Vonlee didn’t think Billie Jean needed to be treated in this way—at least not right after her husband had died. “Why do you have to ask her all of these questions now?”

  Vonlee, with her sassy Southern attitude and noticeable accent, was “very excitable and very loud . . . and very protective of [Billie Jean],” Giorgi noted later.

  “Why are you being so rude?” Vonlee then asked the officer. “You must be a cold person to be asking all of these questions.”

  Giorgi and Dungjen tried to explain that they were just doing their jobs, but Vonlee wasn’t having any of it. She didn’t want her aunt subjected to such harsh treatment while her uncle was lying dead on the floor in the kitchen. It could all wait, Vonlee seemed to be suggesting.

  “Look, this is a process,” Giorgi explained, trying to put out a brush fire now gathering fuel, “and we’ve called in a detective and the medical examiner.... These are necessary questions we need answers to. I need to write a report.”

  Giorgi asked Billie Jean and Vonlee if they could sit, calm down, and perhaps write out for her what happened that night, what they did, and what they came home to. Details would be important. Would they mind writing a statement?

  Neither indicated any interest in doing this.

  Giorgi changed her tactic, as she often did in situations when people became stressed. She, instead, asked questions that did not pertain to the situation. Questions with answers they did not need to think about. How old are you? Where’d you grow up? Where do you work? Things of that nature.

  That tactic did not work, either. Vonlee hemmed and hawed about how the cops were being unsympathetic to Billie Jean and the notion that Don was dead.

  Giorgi continued to insist that both females needed to sit down and write out a statement she could include in her report.

  “Oh, well, okay then . . . ,” Vonlee said.

  She began writing. But as she did, Vonlee quickly put the pen down and stated, “You know what, I am not doing this right now!” She was angry. Vonlee had secrets. Big ones. She had a lot to hide.

  “Miss Titlow, these are things we need to know,” Giorgi said again, more pleasantly than she had been in her previous tone.

  Vonlee refused.

  Billie Jean walked over and Giorgi asked about Don having any prior medical conditions—if either woman could shed any light on that.

  “One time he passed out in the bathroom upstairs and hit his head on the tub,” Billie Jean said. “He was bleeding and I wanted to call 911, but he told me not to.”

  The officers decided to check out the rest of the house. Since Vonlee and Billie Jean said they had just walked in and found him, it was possible that someone else had come by. But the only unlocked door into the entire house was the pedestrian door from the kitchen into the garage.

  “That’s how we came in,” Billie Jean said when one of the cops pointed it out. “We used the garage door opener to open the garage and then came in through that door.”

  None of the windows or any of the other doors in the house were unlocked or seemed broken into. Even in the basement, Giorgi noticed when she went downstairs to look around, those windows seemed to be fine. No glass was broken. Nothing was out of place. All of the windows were locked.

  Giorgi went into the family room, which had a fully stocked bar. She noticed not one bottle was open or even out. Everything appeared to be in its place on the shelves. But when she walked over to the pantry area of the house, just beyond the kitchen, not far from Don’s body, there were several large bottles—“gallon size”—of vodka. But upon a careful examination of those, none of them had been opened, either.

  Giorgi found Billie Jean. “Listen,” she asked, “you said he once blacked out and hit his head.”

  “Yes,” Billie Jean answered.

  “Let’s take a walk upstairs to check and see if anything like that might have happened again.”

  They went upstairs and walked through all of the bedrooms and the bathrooms.

  Nothing seemed out of place.

  When they got back downstairs, Billie Jean showed Giorgi one of the living-room chairs with blood on it. The blood was crusty and dried up.

  “That’s from Don’s rectal bleeding.”

  It was the only spot in the entire house where they could locate any blood.

  Giorgi was stumped. And yet, with all the talk going on inside the house, including the questions Vonlee and Billie Jean had asked, the one inquiry neither had made was rather telling in and of itself: “What might have happened to Don?” Neither Billie Jean nor Vonlee seemed to be interested in the opinions of the two officers.

  “Can’t we do this tomorrow?” Vonlee asked one of the officers. She was tired of all the questions. Accusations, as Vonlee saw them. She was mainly worried about Billie Jean, Vonlee said, not about herself.

  “She was just sitting, at one point, smoking cigarettes and staring,” Vonlee later said of Billie Jean.

  What the hell? Vonlee wondered.

  “I thought she was maybe ready to snap. I had never seen that look on her face before—it was eerie.”

  Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals connected to this story.

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  Copyright © 2016 by M. William Phelps

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  ISBN-13: 978-0-7860-3501-4

  ISBN-10: 0-7860-3501-3

  First Kensington Mass Market Edition: March 2016

  ISBN: 978-0-7860-3501-4

  Kensington Electronic Edition: March 2016