Then he mentioned that his “case” wasn’t looking so good lately. Things were changing for him by the day. He was going to get a new lawyer and hoped for the best, but no guarantees.
Jail time no longer mattered to Tina: five years, ten, even thirty. She was totally taken by Billy. She said she would wait for the “finest guy in Valley Street [Jail]” all her life, if she had to.
While Tina worked on moving out of her house and away from her parents, Billy said he was heading for the jail law library to “attempt to find laws on rights of minors & parents as well as emancipation….” Doing the research, he implied, would take his mind off his case, which was now stressing him to the point where he said he was considering changing his plea to “guilty.” Although “[I’m]…innocent…this shit is too stressful.”
How convenient.
An inmate Tina knew who was in the same jail began to, as Billy put it, “mess with [him].”
“She’s f- - -ing with your head,” the guy told Billy one day, implying Tina was stringing Billy along, telling him what he wanted to hear.
“F- - - you!” Billy told the guy. He promised Tina he was going to “kick his ass” when they were alone, “but he (the other guy) pussied out and left.”
“I laughed” at him.
“She’s screwing with you, man,” the guy said again the next time he and Billy ran into each other. “She doesn’t give two shits about you.”
“Trust me,” Tina said in response, “I love you, Billy. Don’t believe him.”
Tina had a talk with her parents. They admitted to following Billy’s case in the newspapers and said they believed “without a doubt” he was guilty. Why was she having such a hard time accepting the facts of his case?
In reply to the pressure her parents put on her to stop communicating with Billy, Tina lied and told them she dumped Billy for another guy.
“They bought it,” she explained to Billy afterward. “Don’t ever give up,” she said. “Don’t ever change your plea.”
Billy wrote back. He said Nicole was causing a lot of trouble for him lately.
The setup.
Tina reacted by saying, “I swear to God, I’m going to bash Nicole’s face in with a baseball bat. I will get locked up just to fight her….”
The plan.
Interestingly, Billy’s next set of letters were much shorter. He went from writing five-to ten-page diatribes—random thoughts, essentially—to half-page notes directed specifically toward his goals, while always making sure to incorporate “I love you, baby, no matter what” into the text somewhere.
The execution.
In one “quick note,” he said, “I’m so depressed. I just want to tie the sheet, baby….”
“You cannot do that,” Tina told him the next time they spoke. “I’ll be here for you forever.”
By the first week of September, Billy was back to writing four-and five-page letters, repeating the same sexually graphic rhetoric he had written over the past two weeks, only now he started to include lies about his pending court case.
Around that same time, Tina got into big trouble with her father. Billy called the house. Her father answered the telephone.
“Babe,” she wrote, “please do not call here unless I tell you to….”
She feared she’d get grounded and never be able to see him again.
“If it continues, Tina,” said her father after the call, “I am going to call the jail and tell them about his aunt.”
In turn, Tina told Billy she was still working on “convincing” them she had disassociated herself from him. “OK, hunne?” she concluded. “Your fiancée, Tina Sullivan.”
Billy figured he had Tina where he wanted. So, on September 5, he laid out his plan. First he asked Tina to “get word” to Nicole that he wasn’t planning on testifying against her. “If she doesn’t testify, we both walk…. No joke,” Billy wrote.
The plan was for Tina to put a note inside a law book in the jail where Nicole was being held. Then send her a letter telling her—in some silly secret code Billy had created—where to find it.
“This is the break I needed…. My life is in your hands,” Billy wrote.
Billy believed his future was, once again, in the hands of a teenage girl. It seemed he took no responsibility for anything; it was always someone else holding the cards. First Nicole. Now Tina, whom he had only met in person once.
Farther along in the same letter, Billy said he was going to come clean about everything, because it was going to come out in his trial, anyway. Tina need only to pledge to never leave him.
Tina had an idea of her own: “Write to her (Nicole) and try to get her to admit that she set you up, then send your lawyers the letters….”
During the next call, Billy brought up how Tina might think about running away from home and going to live with his aunt in Rhode Island. In what could be construed as a viable threat, considering the party it was coming from, Tina later said Billy called the following night and laid some rather strong words on the table as they continued discussing how she could possibly liberate herself from her parents.
“They’ll freak out, Billy, if I ever did that,” she said, speaking of running away to Rhode Island.
“When I’m acquitted, we can live together there.”
“But my parents—”
Billy went quiet for a moment. Then laughed. “No matter what your mother says or does,” he said, “nothing can keep us away from each other.”
As the next set of letters arrived, Tina felt torn between her feelings for Billy and an obvious fear of what she had gotten herself into. In one of the letters, Billy confessed to killing Jeanne.
“He told me what her last words were,” Tina said later. In that letter, Billy said as Jeanne stopped fighting him and he continued to stab her, she raised her hands and said, “I’m done.” It was a bit different from the version he told police.
Still, it was enough to terrify Tina. How had she allowed herself to get in so deep with someone she obviously knew very little about?
“[Jeanne] was pleading for her life,” recalled Tina later, describing the letters, which Billy had asked her to burn after reading (which she claimed she did). “But he realized he was already going to get in trouble—so he finished.” Even more shocking was how Billy explained “in detail” how he killed Jeanne, describing the multiple weapons he used and the number of times he believed he stabbed her.
Feeling as though she had to end the relationship, Tina lied to Billy a few days later.
“What’s wrong?” Billy asked, sensing something was up.
Tina started crying. “I’m pregnant.”
“What?”
“I really don’t want to be with you, Billy. I’m having a baby with someone else.”
Unbeknownst to Tina, in an act of alliance and perhaps fear, several of her close friends got together one night after hearing stories of her love affair with Billy. They decided to go behind her back and tell her parents the truth about what was going on.
After the intervention, Tina’s mother said, “Thank you. You’re good friends for doing this.” The next time Billy called the house, Tina’s mother took the telephone from her.
“Never call this house again!”
“What? Who’s this?”
Dial tone.
The following day, Tina’s mother called the Nashua Police Department.
CHAPTER 63
By October 2004, the State of New Hampshire v. William Sullivan was back on track. AG Mike Delaney had officially stepped down. Will Delker had taken over. Billy settled his differences with the court and was appointed two new attorneys, Richard Monteith and Paul Garrity, both seasoned trial lawyers, confident they could handle any antics Billy might toss at them. Because of Billy’s claims of incompetence and the positioning of new attorneys, the trial had a continuance until the following year, which gave both parties a chance to regroup and develop strategies.
Will Delker, however, was still
in need of a partner. The genesis of the state’s case might have appeared cut-and-dry. But it was much more complicated than anyone knew.
It just so happened that around the same time Delker was searching for help, a young, attractive female attorney, Kirsten Wilson, was brought into the mix of the AG’s office and asked to assist him with what was shaping up to be one of the most high-profile first-degree murder cases the AG’s office had tried in quite some time.
Wilson was perfect. She could bring a fresh attitude and new vision to the case. Since graduating from Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, in 1991, where she earned degrees in police science and English literature, Wilson had essentially traveled the world. Spending a college semester in Italy had inspired her to set goals high and to live life to the fullest. After teaching skiing in Breckenridge, Colorado, after graduation, where she met her future husband, they headed farther north into Washington state. A year later, they decided a change was in order and headed due south to Baja California, Mexico, where Wilson took a sailing course before eventually heading back east.
If her college years and those after were any indication as to what awaited Kirsten in Boston, she had to believe the Northeast was going to be full of surprises.
“I interned and worked at a large public relations firm for about one year in Boston before we moved to New Hampshire,” recalled Kirsten. “I started law school in 1994, and during law school held various clerkships and was a law clerk at a small insurance defense firm in Boston.”
In 1997, Kirsten worked as a law clerk for what was called the “Jury Trial Project” in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, “and was hired under contract to work on one very large case at one very large firm in Boston.”
It turned out to be the apprenticeship she had been searching for all along—an opportunity she couldn’t resist. The experience alone was well worth the move back to the big city.
“I stayed there for less than a year and then took a position in 1999 at the Rockingham County Attorney’s Office,” which forced Kirsten and her husband to look for permanent housing in New Hampshire.
After prosecuting felonies for five-and-a-half years in the Rockingham office, a job opened up in the AG’s office. And it just so happened that in October 2004, as Billy Sullivan’s case moved forward and Will Delker was searching for a hardworking attorney to assist him, Wilson walked into her “closet-sized” office at the AG’s office and, ready to go to work, plopped her briefcase down on her desk.
At first, the Sullivan case was overwhelming. Wilson later described it as “an elephant in the room,” simply because she had a second-degree murder case scheduled within six weeks of taking the new job, and hadn’t even met most of her colleagues in the office.
The Sullivan case, all ten binders of it sitting on a shelf in back of Wilson’s desk, “loomed,” she said, as if calling out to her.
That first day in the office, recalled Wilson, was surreal. After a quick walk through the office and introduction to her new coworkers, she was led into her office and given two immediate tasks.
“We have a large drug investigation case we need you to begin,” said her boss, “and a second-degree murder case that is going to trial in a matter of weeks.”
Wilson stood stunned.
“Oh yes, and the William Sullivan murder case—the binders are right there—is coming up.”
“OK.”
What have I gotten myself into? Skiing the mountains of Colorado and sailing in Mexico seemed like another lifetime.
“Reading the Sullivan materials was in and of itself a daunting task,” said Wilson. “After I finished my second-degree murder case, I spent about a month just going through the materials and familiarizing myself with all of it.”
CHAPTER 64
Paul Garrity and Richard Monteith decided that insanity was the best defense they could offer a jury on Billy’s behalf. Despite Billy’s obvious rational and predictable behavior during his relationship with Tina Bell, and the fact that Billy gave police a videotaped confession, a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity was, in theory, Billy’s only chance to escape the worst possible sentence: life behind bars without the possibility of parole. With any luck, Billy could settle for confinement in a mental hospital, a place he was quite familiar with.
An insanity plea is often interpreted to mean the person being charged with the crime is mentally incapable of understanding what he or she has done. Or that at the time of the crime, the perpetrator could not deduce right from wrong. By definition, an insanity plea claims the alleged perpetrator is not guilty because he or she lacks “the mental capacity to realize” he or she “has committed a wrong.” Or, rather, doesn’t understand why it is wrong. In other words, at the time of the crime, the accused perpetrator could not make balanced, sane judgments. It almost beckons one to consider that if the perpetrator wasn’t capable of understanding right from wrong at the time of a crime, how could he or she be competent to stand trial (essentially, the foundation of Billy’s argument) to begin with?
In rare cases, defendants are allowed to argue that they “understood their behavior was criminal, but were unable to control it.” As any defense lawyer will likely agree, an insanity defense is a desperate effort and hardly the best defense to present to a jury. Billy had confessed; Nicole was slated to testify against him. On top of that, the forensic evidence collected was going to back up Nicole’s testimony and Billy’s confession beyond a reasonable doubt.
Prosecutors call it a slam dunk.
Still, despite how desperate it seemed to plead insanity, short of pleading guilty to a lesser charge under a deal with the prosecution (which the state wasn’t offering), Billy essentially had no other alternative. Insanity was the only way he could hope to receive a sentence that would land him in a psychiatric hospital, as opposed to a maximum-security prison—and judging by his size, age and attitude, such incarceration would likely put a bull’s-eye on his head and, to be frank, his ass.
Statistics regarding the effectiveness of insanity pleas in the United States didn’t support Billy’s chances. Most defense attorneys worry that just the nature of pleading guilty by reason of insanity itself sets a bias in place before they have a chance to argue their cases. It’s not an inherent prejudice, per se, more than simple ignorance. One misconception is that if an insanity defendant wins his or her case, at some point down the road, he or she will be allowed to walk away from confinement. When, in reality, according to an article published by the University of Pittsburgh in 2002, “Actual statistics show that defendants who were found not guilty by reason of insanity actually spent more time confined to institutions than people who were convicted of crimes and served [prison] sentences.”
Although insanity defenses might seem common among defendants who commit heinous acts of violence in which death results, insanity defenses are “raised in just [5 to 14] percent of homicide cases,” that same article contends. Additionally, out of those cases, one 8-state study in the early 1990s found that fewer than “one percent of defendants pleaded insanity,” and fewer than one-third of those involved murder cases.
Of those murder cases studied, one-quarter “won an acquittal.”
So, the odds were against Billy, but his lawyers were fully prepared to show jurors that their client had a long history of mental illness, for which he had been treated as far back as fourteen years prior to Jeanne’s murder. If there was ever a defendant that met the criteria for a textbook insanity plea, Billy was—at least on paper—that person.
Garrity and Monteith could also argue that Billy suffered from bipolar disorder, depression and several other psychiatric ailments long before he met Nicole. And after beginning a relationship with Nicole, which quickly escalated into chaos after Jeanne wanted to put an end to it, the strain Billy was put under exacerbated his mental capacity to be able to discern right from wrong. But the question remained: how to get a jury to believe such a complicated argument, one that was rooted, in a sense, in opinion—doctors,
family members, Billy himself and his prior behavior? Medical reports could be introduced, along with Billy’s history of violent and unstable behavior. But the bottom line couldn’t be overlooked: would a jury get it?
Adding to Billy’s troubles, on Monday, March 28, 2005, Nicole made a plea bargain with the state. In court, she pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder, which paved the way for her testimony against Billy.
Then, if things couldn’t get any worse, Will Delker and Kirsten Wilson filed a motion on April 25 “to admit evidence that the defendant attempted to tamper with a witness and provide false exculpatory evidence.”
Referring to Tina Bell by her initials to protect her identity, the motion laid out the relationship Billy had initiated with Tina and quoted several letters he had written to her. Now it was clear that every word Billy had scribed to Tina—and Nicole, for that matter—was going to be part of his trial.
As pretrial hearings were scheduled and witnesses prepped, Billy’s behavior behind bars provided a fair amount of proof to back up his contention that he was, in fact, mentally incapable of understanding that his prior actions were the result of his current situation.
By May 2005, almost two years since Jeanne Dominico’s death, attorneys on both sides began sifting through what seemed like an endless litany of motions, rulings and evidence, and set their sights on the first day of trial. Some were saying the trial was going to last anywhere between five to seven weeks. The charges—first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder—against Billy were extremely tough matters to prove in a court of law. Although they were confident in their case—backed up by forensic evidence, confessions, a “star witness” who had taken part in the crime and a surprise witness—Will Delker and Kirsten Wilson never took for granted the notion that any murder case was easy to prove. A jury could be swayed easily. Billy had just turned twenty, but he was eighteen—a junior in high school—when he murdered Jeanne. Get one mother on the jury to feel sorry for him and Billy had himself a mistrial—or worse, an acquittal, which was a reality Will Delker and Kirsten Wilson had to consider as they began final preparations for the first of Billy’s pretrial hearings.
Because You Loved Me Page 25