Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder(45)
In the courtroom crowd was Nancy’s brother, Doug. Like all siblings, they had had their disagreements. They had had one before Nancy’s death, a big fight, sister Susan Garrison remembered.
“She died before they could make up,” said Susan. “This time there was no making up.”
Suddenly the door at the side of the courtroom opened. Clad in orange prison jumpsuits and manacled at wrist and ankle, Tim Collier and Carol Giles shuffled in and were escorted by the guards to their lawyers at the defense table. On the other side was the prosecutor, John Skrzynski.
An arraignment is anything but a formality. It is the time the state’s feet are held to the fire, where they must prove to the court’s satisfaction that they have enough evidence to go to trial, where they hope to get a conviction.
Likewise, it is the suspects’ opportunity to question the validity of the state’s evidence. If the suspects can prove the state does not have enough to hold them, or if the state illegally obtained or manufactured evidence, they walk.
In a sense, the arraignment is a mini trial, where each side has an opportunity to call the witnesses they plan to present at the actual event. What makes it interesting is that, like the end of a poker game, each side is forced to show what they have in their hand.
As far as Skrzynski was concerned, he was holding a straight flush.
“The state calls Sergeant Mike Messina.”
Messina came forward.
“Raise your right hand,” said the clerk.
Messina raised his hand.
“Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”
“I do.”
Messina took his seat in the witness box. Without wasting time, Skrzynski asked Messina to relate the substance of his interview with Carol Giles.
“Tim told Carol to ‘stick her,’” Messina testified.
He told the court how Carol Giles and Tim Collier injected Nancy with battery acid and how Collier beat her with his gun. They finally killed her by smothering her with the wet towel.
According to Giles’s confession, after Nancy was dead, Collier wondered “what it would be like to have sex with a dead body.” Giles told Collier he was “sick,” Messina testified. “Tim asked if they could have sex and she said yes.”
No mention was made of the tearing in Nancy’s rectum indicative of sodomy and the strong possibility that Tim Collier had violated Nancy Billiter just before her death and perhaps stayed inside her afterward. It was just too horrible to contemplate. Besides, they still hadn’t gotten back the results of the DNA testing.
They had, however, gotten back the results of the tire analysis at the crime scene. After eliminating the police cars and other support and investigative personnel, there could be no positive identification of any other car at the scene. That meant that, forensically, there was nothing to tie Carol Giles’s car to the scene. Messina did not mention that, either, nor was he obligated to.
After Messina came the Oakland County medical examiner, L.J. Dragovic. He testified that it was he who had performed the autopsy that showed eleven puncture burns on Nancy’s body. He, too, omitted mention of the anal bruising. It would add nothing to the state’s case except make it more gruesome and more difficult for the family.
Some of Nancy’s relatives couldn’t take what the newspapers the next day described as a “gruesome tale.” They walked out of the courtroom; some in tears, never hearing, at least not yet, how Giles and Collier took almost twenty-four hours to dispose of the body, and when they did, how they tried to burn it to cover up the evidence.
“I just can’t believe someone could do that to someone else, especially someone who was supposed to be a friend of my sister’s,” Doug Billiter said afterward.
At the end of the hearing, the court handed down first-degree murder indictments against Timothy Orlando Collier and Carol Giles in the death of Nancy Rae Billiter. The state then made the decision to try the defendants with separate juries, simultaneously, in the same courtroom. While unorthodox, trying two defendants with two juries had been shown to be efficient in other criminal cases in Michigan. The judge agreed.
It meant a little bit of people jockeying when one jury was allowed to hear evidence while the other, for various legal reasons, could not. But it was efficient, since many of the same witnesses needed to testify in both cases, like the medical examiner, police officers and people who knew the decedents.
As to any lingering doubt that the trials might not take place because one or the other of the defendants would take a plea to lesser charges, Skrzynski quickly erased that possibility.
Giles and Collier were charged with capital crimes. The state might not have the death penalty, but they still took murder seriously. It was capital murder—the worst kind of crime—cold-blooded and premeditated. There was no talk of making a deal to spare the state the expense of two trials.
Besides, Giles had already flipped on Collier, and the self-confessed California gang banger was set for the fall. Skrzynski was betting on Carol Giles’s statement holding up at trial.
Unfortunately, sure things do not exist.
Despite what Carol Giles had stated to the cops, when the judge asked her how she pleaded, she had answered, “Not guilty.” That meant that her attorney, in any way he could, would try to suppress or downplay her confessions. Plus, Tim Collier had given the police two statements in which he said that she was the murderer, not him.