Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder(46)
Who would the jury believe? They wouldn’t know until they went to trial.
January 8, 1998
Helton received a report from the Michigan State Police Crime Laboratory regarding the examination of evidence submitted for latent fingerprints. Examined were the gas can, the charcoal lighter can, Billiter’s driver’s license, which had been found in a search of the Giles home, and the .32-caliber Titan handgun found under the seat in Carol’s car.
No matches were made with the submitted comparison prints of Collier and Giles. That meant that, forensically, none of that evidence could be tied into either defendant.
Despite this setback, the prosecution pressed on.
January 9, 1998
Giles and Collier were back in Judge Avadenka’s court, to hear a new set of murder charges, this time for killing Jessie.
Messina testified to Giles’s confession, that she and Collier had conspired to and had killed Jessie by lacing his insulin with heroin. Dragovic took the stand and said under oath that tests on tissue samples from Jessie’s body showed a lethal level of morphine.
“Anytime you inject heroin into the body, it changes to morphine,” he explained once again. “It was injected in a substantial amount and caused rapid intoxication,” then death, he said. Because of Jessie’s poor health history, there was no reason to suspect foul play and an autopsy was not done at the time.
Speculating on other causes of death, Dragovic said, “Every other consideration is out of the question in this case. It was a homicide. That’s the bottom line.”
Tim Collier was not going to go gentle into that good night. Whether he believed it or not, he testified that he wasn’t in any way, shape or form involved in the killing of Jessie Giles. He’d had nothing to do with it.
At the end of the hearing, both he and Carol Giles were formally charged with first-degree murder in Jessie’s death.
March 2, 1998
The guilt swirled in Carol Giles’s mind like a carousel she couldn’t get off. There was nothing to look forward to now, except a long prison stretch if convicted. She wouldn’t be able to see her kids grow up, go to school, have babies. She’d be stuck in prison someplace, getting old.
Somehow she got a hold of a bottle of Tylenol and ate the pills like candy, hoping she’d take enough to die. But she didn’t really want to check out, at least not yet, because she told a prison counselor what she had done.
She was rushed to the POH Medical Center in Pontiac. Emergency room doctors pumped her stomach. Afterward, she was placed on a twenty-four-hour suicide watch.
All of the evidence had been gathered and catalogued in both murders. The state made the decision to press forward with the case against Carol Giles and Tim Collier for murdering Jessie first, and a trial date of June 15 was set, with the trial for killing Nancy set for July. Evidentiary hearings, including pretrial motions, would be heard in May.
Neither Carol Giles nor Tim Collier had any money with which to hire a private attorney. Both defendants were therefore given court-appointed attorneys to work their defense. Representing Carol Giles was John Basch; Howard S. Arnkoff performed the same function for Tim Collier.
The lawyers knew that the whole case came down to Giles’s confession. Basch and Arnkoff knew that if they could cast doubt on her statements, one or both clients could walk. Skrzynski knew that with the confession he had a strong case against Carol Giles, but it was not nearly as strong against Tim Collier.
It would always be her word against his, because the case, ultimately, was circumstantial. No blood—so far—or fibers had been found on Collier to tie him directly to either murder. And he continued to deny any wrongdoing.
May 21, 1998
Tim Collier was tired. He was tired and drugged and didn’t know what he was saying when he spoke to police after Nancy Billiter’s death.
“My head was kind of cloudy,” Collier said, stating that he had gone 144 hours straight without sleep. Anything he said to police had been influenced by that lack of sleep and too many drugs in his system.
Collier told all this to Judge Rudy Nichols at the pretrial hearing to determine the admissibility of the statements he made to police after his arrest. It was what prosecutors feared, the “I didn’t know what I was saying because I was under the influence” defense.
Nichols listened patiently. But he heard nothing to make him believe that Tim Collier was telling the truth. To Skrzynski’s relief, he ruled that Collier’s statements were still admissible.
May 26, 1998
It was now Carol Giles’s turn to try the same tactic.
Her attorney, John Basch, read the transcript of the polygraph examiner’s interview with Giles and thought he saw some daylight. The record showed that when Chester Romatowski, the polygraph operator, questioned Carol prior to the test, their conversation went like this:
“Are you withholding any information?” Romatowski asked. “Do you want to speak to an attorney?”
“I want to speak to an attorney,” Carol answered.
That was it. The interview should have ceased, Basch argued. His client had asserted her right to counsel prior to giving her most incriminating statements. Therefore, questioning should have ceased. Everything she said after that violated her Miranda rights, and the confession should have been thrown out.
When it was Skrzynski’s turn, he argued that after Carol Giles said, “I want to speak to an attorney,” the record showed that Romatowski answered as follows: