Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder(44)

The bar was the same as Nancy had left it. Only there was an emptiness now, a listlessness among the patrons and staff, that only time could cure.

“I was here on November twelfth,” Bernhard told Helton.

“What time?” Helton asked.

“In the evening, during Nancy’s shift.”

“Know her long?”

“We were old friends. I knew her, twenty years. Nancy told me that her roommate had returned from California. She didn’t have her friend’s car any longer, ’cause her friend wanted to use it now. She needed to find a ride home.”

“What happened?”

“Well, I don’t have a car, either. But the bartender Dawn—well, she let me take her car and drive Nancy home with it.”

“Stop anyplace along the way?”

“No. We got back to the home in West Bloomfield, where she was staying with her friend, at about eleven o’clock.”

That jibed with everything Carol Giles had told them and would help establish Carol’s credibility in court.

“I walked in the house with her. Nancy had told me about the break-in there and I wanted to make sure she got in safely.”

Why would Nancy lie about the break-in to anyone but Tim and Carol if it didn’t really happen?

“I was inside with her about four minutes,” Bernhard continued. “Nancy hung up her coat and she told me that her friend and boyfriend were there in the bathroom. The door was closed but the light was on.”

Helton reasoned that they might have gone inside when they heard Bernhard talking to Nancy. They could have heard them when they came up the driveway. The last thing the murderers would have wanted was someone else showing up and spoiling their plan. Tim Collier would have known that if they killed Nancy and her body was later discovered, Bernhard would be a witness who could put him at the scene of the crime.

“I left to take Dawn’s car back to her at the bar. After a short while there, I caught a ride with a friend and went home. I called the bar the next day in the late afternoon to see if Nancy was working,” Bernhard continued. “Around three or four I called. Anyway, I was told that she had not shown up for work that day. I called her at home two or three times during the course of the evening and never got an answer.”

Of course he didn’t. Nancy was dead in the trunk of Carol Giles’s car.





Thirteen

The beleaguered Detroit Lions played their home games in the Pontiac Silverdome. Why that indoor stadium had been located in Pontiac, though, was anybody’s guess.

Pontiac was a middle-class town, hardly the sort of place to support the big-buck tickets and luxury boxes that are the financial mainstays of National Football League teams. West Bloomfield Township, with its more affluent citizens, would have been a much better place to put the stadium. Rich people, however, are usually smart enough to figure out that they would rather have a disruptive influence like a football stadium in another, albeit less affluent, community. They can just drive there in their BMWs and then leave after the game.

It is doubtful that the workers in the county office complex, of which the prosecutor’s office is a part, had season tickets to the Lions. The games were much too expensive for them to afford.

Within the county office complex is a white building. At the top of a hill in the middle of the city of Pontiac, it looms like a modern monolith. This is the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office. Inside the building in his small corner office, Chief Prosecutor John Skrzynski looked down on the area below. It was a large county.

Whoever was murdered in that vast urban sprawl, sweeping out toward the horizon, their file came across his desk.

Skrzynski picked up the folder marked JESSIE GILES and NANCY RAE BILLITER. He opened it and began to read.

The first killing disposed of a problem for the killers. The second—well, it still remained a mystery. Skrzynski didn’t buy the motive Carol had laid out—Nancy was killed because of the faked burglary—any more than Messina did. The prosecutor was particularly incensed at the savage way Billiter had been killed. That was something that could work to his advantage at trial.

Juries like to identify with the decedent. If the prosecution could downplay Nancy’s drug problems, she could be a very sympathetic victim, fitting the classic “wrong place at the wrong time” scenario that could happen to anybody. The fact of her torture made it more likely that the jury would go for personal identification, which, hopefully, would lead to two convictions.

But before a trial could take place, the suspects needed to be officially arraigned. Since the paperwork was still being put together on the Jessie Giles murder, the decision was made to arraign the defendants for Nancy Billiter’s murder first.

January 6, 1998

The formal arraignment for Nancy Rae Billiter’s death was supposed to happen in December 1997, but because it was taking so much time to put the toxicology and other forensic evidence together, and to give the defense equal time to examine that material, the arraignment had been moved to January.

The crowd in Michigan’s 48th District Court waited anxiously for the defendants to be brought in. It was the type of tension that makes your stomach turn over, the knowledge that something was going to happen, something bad, and there was no way to stop it. It was the knowledge that even though the crimes were over, they were about to be relived, in the courtroom, in all their bloody detail.