Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder(18)
Mike Messina was the exception.
Messina was a veteran, or a dinosaur, depending on your point of view. What was undeniable was the man’s experience.
By the time Jessie Giles had blown into town, Mike Messina had been a police officer for twenty-five of his forty-seven years. Since 1982 he’d been a detective. He was the go-to guy when a problem came up and experience was needed.
Relaxing at home with a cup of coffee on that Saturday, Messina was sitting at his kitchen table, reading the paper, when the phone rang. Still studying the Pistons stats from the game the night before, Messina picked up the phone.
“Hello?”
It was the chief. After briefing Messina on the case, he told him that the next step was getting Carol Giles hooked up to a polygraph. Messina hung up the phone and began to think.
West Bloomfield wasn’t Detroit, where they had murders all the time and polygraph examiners available twenty-four hours. Where was Messina supposed to get a polygraph examiner in an affluent, safe Detroit suburb on a Saturday? Messina realized he needed a favor, but from whom?
The answer was Chester Romatowski.
Chet was an old acquaintance of Messina’s. He was a polygraph examiner affiliated with the Oakland County Sheriff’s Department (OCSD). He called Chet at home and explained the situation. Immediately, Chet volunteered to help.
Messina briefed Romatowski on the case so he could tailor his questions accordingly. They were interested principally in the extent of Carol’s involvement with the killing and the disposal of the body. Messina arranged to meet him at the OCSD polygraph office in Pontiac. He then had a deputy transport Carol to Pontiac for the test.
L. J. Dragovic looked down at the naked body on the cold metal of the autopsy table. His skilled hands moved over it, examining, probing.
As the chief medical examiner for Oakland County, he had most recently tried to nail Dr. Jack Kevorkian for helping to administer lethal doses of carbon monoxide to Merian Frederick and Dr. Ali Khalili. And failed. Or at least the system had; Kevorkian had been found not guilty at trial in March 1996.
Now, Dragovic put all that out of his mind and noted that Billiter’s nostrils contained a large amount of dried blood, and the nose itself looked like it had been hit by something. Her lips were split from injury; her mouth contained dried blood. Neck, chest and abdomen also had been injured.
When he turned her over, he saw that her anus and lower extremities had been traumatized. Her body had been doused with some gasolinelike chemical.
Both of Nancy’s hands had been covered with plastic bags at the scene, which Dragovic now removed. He noted that her hands had a moderate “washerwoman’s hands” appearance.
Samples of combed and pulled scalp and pubic hair were taken, along with fingernail clippings. Oral, vaginal and rectal smears were also taken. If Billiter had been sodomized, and the perpetrator ejaculated, it should show up on a DNA analysis.
Going back for a more careful examination, Dragovic noted “blunt force trauma” on the right side of the forehead, right temple, right ear and back of the head with bleeding into the subcutaneous tissue of the scalp. The right eye socket was bruised, with swelling and bruising of the right cheekbone.
There was extensive bruising of the left eye socket, too, extending into the left cheekbone with marked swelling of the face in the area. There was a three-quarter-inch-long patterned tear of the skin on the left side of the lower part of the forehead. Another one-half-inch-long tear of the scalp was observed in the upper part of the left side of the forehead.
Farther down on the face, Billiter’s nose had been fractured and the skin scraped at various points. There were also extensive scrapes on the left side of the lower face extending into the left side of the chin. Both upper and lower lips were torn extensively, with bruising of the front parts of the upper and lower gums. As for her mouth, there was a large amount of aspirated (thrown up) blood in the upper and lower airways.
Along the extremities, hands, arms and wrists had been bruised extensively and in some places, the skin torn. Her belly had a bruise and the right lower chest area, too. There was dried blood within and around the anus with superficial tearing, indicative of sodomy. That is, sodomy while the victim was alive.
Dead bodies do not bleed. If she had been sodomized after death, there would have been no bleeding. But there was and that’s how Dragovic knew it had happened while she was alive. That didn’t mean, however, that the sodomy did not extend into death. The perpetrator could have penetrated her prior to death and then continued after she died. They wouldn’t know that until, at least, someone was held responsible for the crime.
Moving back across the body, Dragovic discovered fractures of the right seventh through eleventh ribs. Then he noted “sharp force injury.” There was an almost one-inch-deep cut in the “inner aspect of the left thumb.” As for the strange discoloring on her arms that the cops had noted at the scene, Dragovic solved that mystery quickly.
“There are multiple areas of injection sites,” he wrote in his autopsy report, “featuring superficial and deep chemical burns situated in the right and left sides of the neck, upper mid belly area, and mid lower and left belly areas, inner aspect of the right thigh, right lower groin and outside aspect of the right thigh as well as inner aspect of the right lower leg.”
He felt the neck and examined it closely. There was a hemorrhage into the soft tissue on both sides in relation to the puncture wounds. The larynx and trachea contained a large amount of blood.