Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder(21)

Carol and Jessie had two children. Jesseca was born in 1990. Then came Jesse, nicknamed “L’il Man,” born two years later in 1992. By all accounts, Carol was a good mother. The kids, of course, didn’t help the marriage. They never do when a marriage is built on unfulfilled childhood desires.

As the years went by, Jessie’s health deteriorated. His unchecked obesity led to diabetes, and circulation and heart problems. He suffered through a heart attack and a stroke. Eventually he was forced to leave his day job and go on disability.

Between his health and his weight, Jessie became bedridden. He looked like a beached whale under the cover of their bed. Reduced to playing nursemaid, Carol delivered Jessie’s injections every day. It was her responsibility to make sure he got the proper amount of insulin to keep his disease in check. She also had to administer his other medications.

As Jessie’s health failed, so did their marriage.

Jessie kept bothering her, telling her what to do, what to say, what to think. Sure, everyone that met him liked him. Jessie was charming with company. But when the door closed at midnight, he became a dictator.

Carol was an attractive twenty-six-year-old blonde, tall, slim, with a damn good body and a sweet smile. Attractive designer glasses framed her eyes. She was vibrant, alive. She wanted to be with someone who, like her, wanted to enjoy life in big gulps. Instead, she gave injections to a husband who treated her like a daughter.

She had married her father, or a man like him, who abused her, if not physically, then emotionally. Because of her childhood problems, she wasn’t aware how she had set herself up for the marriage to fail. But that’s exactly what was happening.

Eventually, Carol and Jessie fought all the time. Every little word they said to each other started an argument. Jessie was always telling her what to do and she hated it. Jessie just didn’t understand that she wasn’t his daughter.

Probably, Jessie didn’t care. He had his drug business to be concerned about. And he was upwardly mobile. He wanted to move away from Pontiac, a middle-class/working-class area twenty miles northwest of Detroit, a place best known for a white elephant of an indoor football stadium, the Silverdome. The goal was to relocate south, to one of the more affluent Detroit suburbs.

Jessie Giles had an incredible amount of nerve. But not just ordinary nerve—abject nerve. The kind of nerve you need when you’re a drug dealer and decide to set up shop within eyeshot of police headquarters.

That’s exactly what Jessie Giles had done.

In the summer of 1997, Jessie moved his family south, into the fancy suburb of West Bloomfield. The home he chose was a quarter of a mile down Walnut Lake Road from West Bloomfield Township Police Headquarters. Who would ever think to look for him there? What could possibly be a safer place to do his business than a few blocks down from police headquarters?

Besides, he wasn’t wanted for anything. Compared to the big guys in Detroit, he was small potatoes. What harm was he doing to the township? The cops had better things to do than bust him.

Only doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers or drug dealers raking it in could afford West Bloomfield. When the cops left work, they drove home to Novi or South Lyon, less affluent suburbs with more crime, smaller lawns and lower property values. Jessie, meanwhile, stayed in the township and enjoyed his new life.

Inside his new house—Jessie was actually renting because it’s difficult for a drug dealer, with undeclared income, to get a mortgage—he admired his surroundings. It was much nicer than Pontiac was. As for the cops down the block, Jessie had to smile.

For Carol, the move didn’t make any difference. Her discontent just rose in proportion to their affluence. She wanted out of the marriage, but she didn’t know where to go.

Where could she go if she left Jessie? If she left him, what would happen to the kids? He couldn’t take care of them, in the shape he was in. But Lord, she was strangling!

Carol had had enough.

What with Jessie and the responsibilities of taking care of the kids, Carol had no life. She needed to get out; she was desperate to get out. She felt like she’d murder somebody if she didn’t. So Carol got a job as an office assistant at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital, Jessie’s former employer. That was where she made the acquaintance of Timothy Orlando Collier, a member of the hospital maintenance staff and one of Jessie’s customers who loved crack.

Tim was not exactly short, but he wasn’t tall, either. What he was, at a little over five feet six inches tall, was incredibly well built and handsome, with the kind of smooth, café au lait skin that made Carol tingle all over her body.

After meeting Tim at the hospital, Carol would go over to his house to hang out all the time. For example, when she and Jessie got into it, she would go over to Tim’s house to mellow out. And they would sit around and talk.

Tim talked about his troubled life growing up in Sacramento, California. He alluded to a gang background and to the violent crimes he’d committed. It was a hard life he had been born into, which had forced him into things.

Because he and his mom didn’t get along, he escaped by getting high on drugs. Eventually he had come east. He had relatives in the Flint area, most notably his uncle Sammy Upchurch, whom he liked a lot.

Tim was everything Jessie wasn’t—young, vital, exciting. He was a real macho guy who didn’t take shit off anyone. Carol fell for him. Hard. She liked to push against his hard body. He pushed back and soon they were lovers. The best thing was, he didn’t tell her what to do all the time.