Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder(16)
Tim Collier
Great, Helton thought after reading it. Now they had both suspects pointing the finger at each other. Which one was telling the truth?
In Tim’s version, Carol wasn’t some innocent, abused waif. If you believed him, Tim said it was Carol who injected Nancy with acid, which accounted for the burn marks on the victim’s skin. As for Carol, she didn’t mention the injections at all.
Helton liked to go to the movies and he remembered an old Japanese film called Rashomon, where a woman was raped and three witnesses had three different versions of the event. Who was telling the truth? Unfortunately in the Billiter murder, life appeared to be imitating art.
Was Carol telling the truth or Tim? Maybe, neither? It still didn’t make sense. Damn it.
Why?
Nancy must have been killed for a reason. There had to be a reason. And why the damn acid? Tim had a gun. Why not just shoot her?
Detectives look for three things with which to obtain a conviction—motive, means and opportunity. The latter two criteria had already been taken care of. But the motive? That was unclear from both accounts.
In Tim’s version, Nancy had faked a burglary and, because of that, she deserved to die. Did that make sense? Sure, people had been murdered for doing less, a lot less. Hell, people had been murdered for giving dirty looks. But was that the case here?
If the murder wasn’t planned, certainly the body disposal was. Billiter didn’t just happen to be dumped in a park in Flint over an hour away. And she didn’t just happen to be covered with gasoline with a fuse of charred leaves meant to light her up like the Fourth of July. That was probably one thing they could be thankful for—neither suspect had any sort of pyrotechnic ability. Had they, the coroner would have been stuck with a corpse burned beyond recognition and cops know how difficult it is to get an ID out of one of those.
Did it make sense, Helton wondered, that the murder itself would be committed without some foresight? It was time to talk to Giles again and see what she was hiding. Maybe they could turn her against Collier.
Helton looked at his watch: 3:45 A.M. By now, Carol was probably asleep in Haven. They’d have to wait until morning to talk to her.
Officer Jim Fedorenko of the township forensic crew got to the Giles home at 3:27 A.M. The Michigan State Police (MSP) techies arrived soon after, straight from the crime scene in Flint.
“Here you go,” said one of the MSP lab boys.
He handed over Nancy’s clothing and the flowered blanket she’d been found in. Nancy’s clothing reeked of gasoline. Fedorenko’s nose wrinkled up at the stench. He bagged the clothing as evidence and then began the grim task of gathering evidence.
Unless Fedorenko needed them, MSP could call it a night. Fedorenko thanked them, and they left. Using the search warrant that a local magistrate had given him, he and his search crew entered the house.
Fedorenko took out his camera. Using five rolls of film, he shot the entire interior of the house. Afterward, he collected two samples of blood spatter he found on the basement wall and one sample from the top of a table located near the blood-spattered wall.
Moving out to the garage, he looked up and saw a mattress in the rafters. What the hell was that doing there? He had the search crew take it down. Examining it, Fedorenko removed one side of the outer cover of the mattress. It was the side that contained blood and what looked like other types of fluids.
On a large round table in the living room, he found a plastic bag that contained an off-white hard substance that he suspected was the crack Tim had been smoking at the time of the murder. Crack, of course, is a deadly drug, but it doesn’t produce immediate physical devastation, not like the weapon he found in the master bedroom closet.
It was a shiny 12-gauge shotgun. Ever since it had become the weapon of choice for bad guys on TV, ordinary citizens had been buying them in droves. It was the sound that attracted the buyers. It was a hard, cold snap, the sound of a shell being loaded into the chamber that sent chills up any burglar’s spine.
Fedorenko broke it open and sniffed. It wasn’t loaded and it had not been fired recently.
Nothing in either suspect’s statement led anyone to believe it was involved in the crime. Still, considering that the residents of the house might not be back for a long time—at least he hoped so—Fedorenko thought it prudent to collect the weapon for safekeeping.
He carefully tabulated what had been taken and left that, plus a copy of the search warrant, on the dining room table. He had tow trucks come by to pick up the cars. By the time he got back to headquarters, it was 8:29 A.M.
Fedorenko secured the evidence in evidence lockers designed for that specific purpose, and the vehicles involved—Carol’s Sable and Jessie’s Caddy—were secured in the garage by locking them and placing yellow police tape around them.
The gas-soaked clothing, a shirt, a pair of jeans, two socks, women’s panties and a black shoe, as well as the blanket, were hung up to dry. From the blanket, Fedorenko cut out a sample, which was put into a can for further testing.
November 15, 1977
He had arrived home too late the night before to do anything about it, but he knew the office would be open early, even on Saturday mornings.
At 7:00 A.M., Shanlian called the admitting office at Hurley Hospital, where Nancy’s body had been taken. He told them the victim’s name and that the body was located in the hospital morgue.
At 8:00 A.M., Shanlian got Grant Williams, the county medical examiner, on the phone. He told him that Oakland County had venue in the case and that the body would be released to Dr. Dragovic, the Oakland County medical examiner.