Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder(43)
November 25, 1997
The temperature was in the low twenties with a wicked wind blowing that forced the windchill well below zero. The sky was gray and overcast; snow was in the forecast. The ground was as hard as a rock.
Officer Tom Helton shivered inside his overcoat. He looked down at a newly dug gravesite dusted with snow. The grave was only seven weeks old, but its occupant could not rest in peace. Not until the police knew for certain how he had died.
“We’re ready,” said a workman to Helton.
In Helton’s inside jacket pocket was the court order.
“Your Honor,” Helton told the district court in Pontiac a day before, “we have reason to believe that the decedent was murdered.”
The judge had granted the police department an exhumation order to proceed to Perry Mount Park Cemetery for the purpose of digging up Jessie Giles.
“Go ahead,” said Helton, and the workman signaled.
The backhoe moved in. It paused momentarily on the raised plot of ground that was supposed to be Jessie Giles’s final resting place. Then it descended with a roar and dug into the ground, moving it aside like it weighed nothing.
It only took a few minutes; then Helton was able to look down into the hole and see the metal casket that contained Jessie’s body. The backhoe backed off and workmen from Classic Removal, the company doing the exhumation, jumped into the hole, where they attached lines to a crane. When the lines were secured, the crane fired up and slowly lifted the casket containing the huge body, minus whatever weight he may have lost in the prior weeks.
The casket was put on a rolling gurney that county workers wheeled over to a van, where they slid it inside. The doors were slammed shut; one of the workers tapped the door a couple of times and the van pulled out. Helton got into his car and drove out of the cemetery, thinking what a gloomy place this was on a late-fall day.
It only took him a few minutes to get to the Oakland County Municipal Complex, where he headed straight for the morgue. Dr. Victor Ehrlich was in charge of the postmortem. The casket lay on the same gurney that had taken it from the grave to the van. Helton watched as Ehrlich opened it.
Jessie Giles was dressed like he was going to a party. He wore a bright green suit with a breast pocket handkerchief, matching shirt and tie, and gold-framed glasses. Jessie’s stylin’, Helton thought. Carol sure sent him off in style.
The casket had been airtight and it looked like decomposition had been minimal. Ehrlich had his assistants strip the body and carefully catalogue each piece of clothing.
“On my count,” said Ehrlich, “one, two, three.” And with everyone huffing and puffing, they lifted Jessie and placed him on the autopsy table.
The doctor opened Jessie up. Removing the heart from the chest cavity, the coroner examined it carefully. While noting what poor shape it was in, he could find no recent scarring. Jessie Giles had not died of a heart attack. Carol’s contention that he died of a heart attack was now proven to be false.
Ehrlich took tissue samples from Jessie’s liver, heart and brain. Each of those organs would retain vestiges of morphine, a heroin derivative, if heroin had been used to overdose him. The samples were labeled, put into evidence containers, and sent out for toxicology examination. The body was sutured closed.
Morgue attendants then dressed Jessie in his burial clothing, placed his body back in the coffin, and sealed it airtight. The workers from Classic Removal drove it back to the cemetery, where the body was quickly taken from the van and placed back in the ground. The backhoe moved in and efficiently filled the grave with the burial dirt. That night, it snowed. The next day, anyone passing by saw nothing unusual save for a mound of freshly dug earth covered with snow.
A few days later, the toxicology results came back. Jessie’s tissues showed a high concentration of morphine.
“Anytime you inject heroin into the body, it changes to morphine,” Dragovic, the Oakland County medical examiner, explained to the Detroit News. Jessie was “injected [with] a substantial amount and caused rapid intoxication” and then death, Dragovic continued.
Since Jessie wasn’t an addict, the only logical conclusion was exactly what Carol Giles had said in her statement: she had given him a heroin overdose when Jessie thought he was just getting his usual insulin injection.
That still meant that Tim Collier was not directly tied into Jessie’s death. It was Carol’s word against his. She said he supplied her with the heroin and expertise to commit the crime; he said she was lying.
It would be up to a jury to decide.
Another bulldozer picking up frozen earth. Another gray day. Another graveside.
As Nancy’s sister Susan Garrison looked around, she saw a lot of people. Nancy Billiter had gotten to know a lot of patrons at the places she worked. They knew her to be what she was—a very caring person, the kind who would do anything for you if she could.
That was it, Susan thought. She was always for the underdog. Always root for the underdog.
Just before she died, Nancy was going to college to be a nursing assistant. She’d always wanted to be a nurse. She’d been to school before but never completed the coursework because something, more or less, got in the way. This time—the last time—it had been death.
The coffin was lowered out of sight into the deep, dark grave.
Bill Bernhard had heard about Nancy Billiter’s death. He had seen a report on the news and had gone to her funeral. And, he felt, he knew something of value. Bernhard called up Helton and they met at South Boulevard Station.