Because You Loved Me

by M. William Phelps

  Billy and Nicole showed up at Amanda’s early that morning. Jeanne and Chris arrived a short while later. As soon as Jeanne walked in, she put Billy and Nicole to work unpacking boxes and moving things where Amanda wanted them.

  “They all spent the day helping me unpack,” Amanda recalled. “You should have seen Chris. He had on his tool belt and did some minor repairs around the house, while Jeanne and I unpacked the kitchen.”

  The house was small, but Amanda loved it. There was a built-in china cabinet in the dining room. While Jeanne and Amanda unpacked, Jeanne came up with a great idea. She was moving wineglasses and other glassware into the dining room, getting them ready to go into the built-in cabinet.

  “Don’t touch anything in this room,” demanded Jeanne.

  “Why?”

  “Because I have a great idea on how to position it in the china cabinet.”

  “OK.”

  “Needless to say,” Amanda said, “it never happened and that glassware stayed in the same position for more than a year [after Jeanne’s death] because I lost the will to even care what the house looked like. Jeanne and I were excited when I bought the house because we were going to fix it up together.”

  They hadn’t really seen much of each other over the past few years because of their schedules. Both knew the house was going to be a great excuse for them to get together more often.

  On Sunday, August 3, Jeanne called Amanda. “I hope you’re still unpacking boxes,” she said teasingly. “I hope you’re not leaving them all for us to come back next weekend to help.”

  It was just like Jeanne to make a sarcastic remark, when, Amanda knew, she wanted to help as much as she could.

  Amanda said that was her plan: to leave everything where it was so she could spend the day with Jeanne again.

  “Yes,” Amanda said, not feeling bad about lying. “I am unpacking still.”

  “Jeanne really spoiled me,” Amanda remembered, “and I loved it.”

  CHAPTER 46

  It was no secret that Billy kicked back as much of his paycheck as he could to his mother. To him, it wasn’t a handout. He was a son picking up a role his father had vacated—and he valued the responsibility. It made him feel good about himself. Important.

  Shortly before dinner on Sunday night, August 3, as Jeanne, Chris, Nicole and Drew gathered round, Billy took a look at the dinner table Jeanne had set. It was quite a Rockwellian picture. A family dinner was about to go down in a big way.

  “Boy,” said Billy as he got settled in his chair, “it’s been a while since I’ve had a complete meal.” He smiled and patted his hands on his belly.

  “Really,” a genuinely surprised Jeanne responded.

  The tone in Jeanne’s voice—although no one else heard it that way—appeared mocking, condescending and arrogant to Billy. He felt Jeanne was insulting his home life and dissing his mother, Pat.

  “He blew it way out of proportion,” Nicole explained later. “He thought [my mom] meant that his own mother couldn’t provide for him or something. He just got so offended by it.”

  It was the expression on Billy’s face: the twists and turns, squinting of his eyes, raised eyebrows. He was ripped.

  After a long pause, Billy looked at Jeanne and explained, “Yeah, I generally eat at McDonald’s because I’m there so much and the hours I put in.”

  He wanted Jeanne to know that it wasn’t as though his mother never cooked; he just wasn’t home enough to enjoy the food.

  “Is that so,” remarked Jeanne, more or less just making conversation.

  “I wouldn’t be home when my mom cooks, or wouldn’t be hungry.”

  “Well, Billy, I can give you a complete meal tonight,” Jeanne said proudly.

  She meant it. Providing a home-cooked meal for her daughter’s boyfriend was a feat Jeanne enjoyed. She was happy she could offer it.

  That one comment, however, turned Billy inside out. Tore him up. He was thinking: Complete meal. Bitch. Like my mother cannot give me a complete meal. Who in the hell do you think you are?

  Jeanne wasn’t fazed one way or the other. She hadn’t meant any disrespect. It was odd that a comment like that had hurt Billy so badly. Was the guy so sensitive he couldn’t take a gesture of love?

  Whatever the case, the comment flipped a switch in Billy. He took it as a mean-spirited affront and became enraged. Later, he explained how he felt as he sat and thought about what Jeanne had said.

  “She was sounding like she was God. It just irritated me. She thought she was like the best thing in the world—and she’s not!”

  Deep down, Billy actually believed Jeanne, by cooking the meal to begin with, was trying to one-up his mother. He was “upset,” he said. He felt like Jeanne wanted to “replace” his mother—or, rather, show him how much better she was than Pat, as if the two were competing for his affection.

  Although he didn’t voice his outrage at the dinner table that night, Billy surely suppressed it and, perhaps, put the final “nay” mark underneath Jeanne’s name on a mental checklist he had been keeping for the past year.

  Her time was limited.

  The Sunday night dinner set the tone for the week. By Monday morning, August 4, Billy and Nicole talked about the fact that their days together were numbered. Billy’s vacation from McDonald’s would be over in days. He’d have to return to Connecticut. Nicole, of course, from every indication Jeanne had given her lately, was staying put in Nashua. Any pipe dream that Jeanne might change her mind after spending some time with Billy deflated quickly.

  If anything, Jeanne was even more convinced now as she got to know Billy that Nicole was better off without him. Jeanne knew the end of the relationship meant pain and suffering for her daughter. But she also knew she was going to get over it, like every other teenager.

  Perhaps out of fear, or an idea that there was no other alternative, on Tuesday, August 5, Billy and Nicole panicked. In order to be together, Jeanne’s demise seemed like the only option they had left, and their conversations now centered around how they were going to either take off together and run away, or murder Jeanne and get her out of the picture for good.

  “We can run away?” suggested Nicole.

  “The cops would find us,” said Billy.

  “You can live up here.”

  “My family needs me, Nicole.”

  “If I had my way,” Billy explained to police later, “…Jeanne wouldn’t have been as stubborn and would have, you know, given in. It was inevitable…. She knows what she wants. She knows what’s in her head and that’s all she wanted. It’s…it’s her own little world, is what we called it.”

  According to Billy (and Nicole), murdering Jeanne started off between them as a joke. A bungle of words spewed with smiles that turned into a serious conversation about killing her.

  “How life would be better. Nicole and I would be together…. And honestly…that’s all I could think about: Nicole. It was that bad. Try being in love with someone and having them live one hundred miles away?”

  While Jeanne was at work on Tuesday, the two love-struck teenagers sat in Billy’s car in the parking lot of the bank in back of Jeanne’s house. It was here where they first talked about using violence to change the predicament they found themselves in. Billy later referred to it as a “dry run.” The joking about Jeanne was over. In the days leading up to this moment, Nicole and Billy had put bleach in the cream Jeanne used for her coffee.

  But she threw out the rancid tasting milk.

  Then they tried to light her bed on fire.

  But the mattress was flame retardant and wouldn’t burn.

  They had tried to put a rope soaked in gasoline in the oil tank and blow the house up.

  But Chris walked outside and foiled that plan.

  Now, Billy insisted, it was time to get serious.

  “I’ll confront her,” suggested Billy, “and just hit her with a bat.”

  Although murder may have been implicit in their conversation, Billy insiste
d it wasn’t necessarily talked about in that way.

  “We’d point and laugh about it,” he recalled to police, speaking of that afternoon. “You know, it wasn’t really serious.”

  “How will it happen, Billy?” he claimed Nicole asked.

  “All right. So, I’d sneak out back”—Billy pointed to the back door of the house—“you know…and walk through there.”

  Nicole seemed intensely interested. She looked toward the house. Thought about it. Maybe even pictured Billy walking in with a bat in his hand. Perhaps without even realizing it, Billy and Nicole were creating a premeditated plan for murder. For them, the plan was something to grasp onto. It allowed them not to feel helpless over their situation. To take control of their destiny, which had been entirely, Nicole believed, in Jeanne’s hands, was to take control of their lives. It had to be done. They’d tried to talk to Jeanne. It didn’t work. Nicole begged her mother. Nothing. Billy wrote letters. Jeanne laughed. Nicole made promises. Huh! Right.

  Nothing worked.

  Now violence seemed to be their only way out. Maybe a good scare might change Jeanne’s mind?

  Billy said when he verbalized it there in the car with Nicole by his side that first time, he became “shaken up,” because he knew then he had “started something.”

  “I either,” he recalled, “at the point when I hit her with the bat, I should say, I didn’t want to. I, I’d much rather just nail myself in the head. Whenever I talked about something before [Nicole and I] did it, I usually backed down. I have a conscience.”

  Billy had made a solemn promise to Nicole that they’d be together. Somehow. Some way. Once he made that promise, he insisted, it was too late to go back on it.

  To illustrate how weak a person he believed himself to be, Billy told a story to police that explained how guilty he felt when he went back on his word to Nicole.

  Nicole was a vegetarian. As she and Billy grew closer, she went to him with a proposition. It was a way, he said, for him to prove his devotion to her.

  “Can you be a vegetarian for two days, Billy, for me?”

  Billy laughed. Meat was a staple not only at his home dinner table, but his working life revolved around meat.

  “Please, Billy? For me.”

  Nicole was testing him. She took being a vegetarian as seriously as anything else in her life. Nicole’s harsh resentment against meat, Chris McGowan believed, was rooted in the fact that when Nicole was a toddler, she had been exposed to the many trophy kills her dad brought home after a long day in the woods. Seeing deer hung from the shed rafters, bleeding out, their hides skinned and left to dry, had turned Nicole against eating any type of meat. She couldn’t do it.

  “Fine,” said Billy, agreeing to give it a try.

  The next day, however, while Billy was working, he snuck a Chicken McNugget.

  “I felt so bad about it,” he explained later, “I went and told her. I couldn’t even cheat on a diet, OK. Ha. Ha. That’s sad, isn’t it?”

  No matter how Billy and Nicole felt about murdering Jeanne, their original plan was not to stab (or even kill) her. While sitting in Billy’s car the day before the crime was expected to take place, staring at the house, plotting and planning every move, Billy said, “[I’ll] just sneak up behind her, nail her and walk out. Maybe twice. A one-two thing. I’ll walk in and walk out. And that’s it. If anything, I’ll walk out with the baseball bat.”

  As much as Nicole “hated” her mother then, she had reservations and believed they wouldn’t actually see it through—that it was, therefore, like her relationship with Billy, a fantasy. It was something they discussed to make themselves feel better about the impending separation.

  “I don’t know, Billy,” Nicole said that day. She was twisting a lock of her hair nervously, looking at the house.

  Billy talked about scaring Jeanne into leaving town. He felt that after sneaking up on her from behind, without her seeing him, and “nailing her at the back of the head…maybe,” he told police, “it would have knocked some sense into her.

  “I guess, sarcastically, what I was thinking, you know, was that maybe New Hampshire isn’t where Jeanne needs to be.”

  In other words, after being hit with a baseball bat, Billy hoped Jeanne would reconsider staying in the neighborhood and state of New Hampshire. Maybe she would see it as an unsafe place to raise a family.

  “I never would have thought we’d get into a fight and have it go that far. The original plan up to an hour and a half before it happened was if I was to hit her in the head…you know, not everyone dies when they get hit in the head with a baseball bat, do they? Maybe a serious concussion, right. It’s not definite death. In my mind, if I were to hit Jeanne with the baseball bat at the time, it was like, well, fate [would] not be in my hands now. [If] she’s meant to die, she will.”

  Before Billy and Nicole left the bank parking lot, they made an agreement. Be it a half-baked promise or not, it was an oath. The option of inviting violence into the situation in order to solve their problems had been optioned. As Billy himself said many times, once he started talking about something, some sort of action would follow.

  He couldn’t stop it.

  CHAPTER 47

  The morning of August 6, 2003, was piping hot. One of those days where just a simple walk from your house to the car produced patches of sweat in various crevices of your body. The humidity level in town by sunrise was close to 95 percent; the temperature creeping up right behind.

  The air conditioner in Jeanne’s house was on high. Billy and Nicole woke up somewhere around 11:00 A.M. No one was home. Nicole was beside Billy on the couch. They did, Billy later implied, what kids their age generally did when left alone in a house.

  Afterward, “This would really work,” Billy said as they sat and held each other on the couch. “It’s the perfect idea.”

  “Life would be better. We’d be together.”

  “Yeah,” said Billy. “Yeah! My mom would love to have you at our house.”

  “It won’t be in two years, either—it would be sooner, much sooner,” Nicole said.

  They had initiated a plan the previous day and slept on it. A decision had, apparently, been made.

  As the morning proceeded, Billy thought about his life. He concluded that he and Nicole were far better off without Jeanne in the way of their relationship. It seemed pretty simple. A golden opportunity had presented itself; it was time to capitalize on it. Life was going to be “ten times better.”

  “If only my mom wasn’t so protective,” said Nicole. “You have a car. We can just leave.”

  “Yeah, right. And the cops will be knocking on my door in two days.”

  They got up. Washed. Ate. And left the house.

  Billy later explained how the plan materialized as he and Nicole started talking about it throughout the afternoon. In fact, the more they talked about it, the more it seemed like it would work.

  “Nothing could go wrong.”

  Billy described it in terms of a light at the end of a tunnel: “And you want to get to that light…but then there’s a door between you and that light that you don’t see.”

  Near 4:40 P.M., Billy suggested, “Let’s go to Leda Lanes and bowl.”

  They had been driving around for a better part of the day in a state of agitated eloquence, weighing their options, one might assume, trying to dredge up enough courage to either take off or confront Jeanne.

  “OK,” agreed Nicole. Bowling sounded fun. But it was also, she admitted, the perfect place to create an alibi—the only reason they ended up going.

  Leda Lanes was a five-minute drive from Jeanne’s. During the trip, Billy said he and Nicole agonized over the predicament they found themselves in, with Billy having to head back to Connecticut the following morning. Essentially, his departure was the catalyst driving their decision making. Overwrought with emotion and confusion, they felt the separation was going to be devastating to both of them. Spending the past week together had made the bond be
tween them stronger. Billy’s leaving was now impossible for either of them to accept.

  Billy later described their demeanor that afternoon in a confused mesh of words: “This is a stupid thing,” he said, “that if something happened to her mom, then maybe, you know, we’d be able…Nicole would move closer. It wasn’t really a complete thought or, you know, whatever.”

  “I just wish,” Billy told Nicole as they pulled into the Leda Lanes parking lot around 4:45 P.M., “something would happen to your mom, and then you’d have no choice but to come to Connecticut and live with me.”

  On paper, it sounded plausible, like the plan might just work.

  Regarding their alibi, Nicole said, “When you play pool there, somebody has to sign to get balls. And it has the time on it. So that was…that was just to have it look like we were somewhere else.”

  Earlier that afternoon, Nicole cried to Billy, “I want more than anything to live with you.” She said she wished her mom understood that what she and Billy had wasn’t some teenage romance built on lust, but a “true love” that was going to last “forever.” Why couldn’t Jeanne recognize that—and make things easier on everyone?

  Billy couldn’t recall exactly who first mentioned killing Jeanne. But he said it was a running “joke” between them that “if, you know,” she died, they could be together without complication. At some point, Billy’s plan of “knocking some sense into Jeanne” turned into possibly killing her.

  And Nicole went along with it willingly.

  Billy and Nicole stayed at Leda Lanes for thirty minutes, according to the slip Billy filled out to rent pool balls. After they left Leda Lanes, Billy drove to Dunkin’ Donuts, just down the street. They sat in the parking lot there for a time, talking, planning, running through what was going to happen in the coming hours.

  “I’ll go into the house,” explained Billy, “and approach your mom with a bat. I’ll make it look like a robbery.”

  Among other things, Nicole said, “I don’t know, Billy.”