Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder(48)
According to Carol, she and Tim had sex after killing Nancy. Afterward, Carol got the kids up and ready for school. Not knowing that their “aunt” Nancy was lying in the basement dead, they got washed and dressed. Jesseca, though, was sick.
“You have to go to school, honey. You can’t stay home,” her mother had insisted.
The last thing she needed was her daughter around when they disposed of the body. Carol gave her some Tylenol and reassured Jesseca that she would “feel better.”
What if, while Carol was playing “concerned mother,” and without her knowledge, Collier slipped down to the basement. The urge to do it with a dead body was just too overwhelming. When he got to Billiter, he turned her over.
Nancy Billiter wasn’t dead. She was warm. She was unconscious but alive.
Collier pulled down Billiter’s pants and inserted an object into her anus. And he pushed and he pushed and he pushed, tearing the anus and causing the bleeding that would later be noted by the medical examiner.
There is no telling how long Collier might have stayed there. There is no telling when exactly Billiter died. He might have continued to sodomize her even after death; for while the rectal muscles would have relaxed, the physical damage would already have been done. There would be no way to tell, save his confession, that he had continued to sodomize a corpse.
Upstairs, Carol had convinced her daughter to go to school and then walked both kids to the bus stop. When she came back in the house, Tim was sitting there in the living room.
There was a body to deal with in her basement. That’s all Nancy was to her now—a body.
Monday, June 15, 1998
It took two days for the voir dire, the part of a trial where juries are questioned about their beliefs, predispositions, knowledge of the case, anything that might impact on their ability to serve on a jury. The defense had the opportunity to challenge jurors and so did the prosecution. And at the end of that time, thirty-two people became jurors—twelve jurors and four alternates for each jury.
Carol Giles watched them walk in and be seated at the side of the courtroom. It was hard on that bright June day, just a few days before the summer solstice, to believe that they had all assembled to dispense justice for a case that had happened in the dead of winter less than a year before. It was only nine months earlier that Jessie had died, but as Carol watched Skrzynski approach the lectern, it must have felt like it was another life, in another place.
Skrzynski began his opening argument with a scathing summary of the events leading up to Jessie’s death. He sketched out the diabolic plan the two lovers entered into to cause his death. He portrayed Jessie as an innocent victim, a diabetic caught in a murder plot that two vile human beings had cooked up for their own gratification.
In order to be together, their goal was to poison Jessie with heroin. To do that, Carol Giles violated her husband’s trust, blew it to smithereens when she laced his insulin with heroin and injected it causing certain, untimely death.
“As Jessie lay dying, laboring for breath, Carol Giles kissed his forehead. It was the kiss of a Jezebel,” Skrzynski told the jury.
The most vulnerable facet of his case was Collier’s culpability. Rather than hiding it, Skrzynski seized on it, declaring Collier to be if not the instigator of the plot, then a willing participant. Skrzynski asserted that Collier was enough of a participant to be as guilty as Giles. He told the jury unequivocally that Collier “helped plan and carry out” the murder. As such, he deserved the most severe penalty the law could dish out, life without parole.
Howard Arnkoff, Collier’s attorney, countered that his client simply offered advice on poisoning Jessie Giles. Tim Collier never believed, said Arnkoff in his opening statement, that Carol Giles would go through with it. Collier was as surprised as anyone else when she did.
Bottom line: Carol Giles killed Jessie Giles, not Tim Collier.
Listening in the courtroom’s front rows, Mike Messina, Kevin Shanlian and Tom Helton had to smile. Arnkoff had just characterized Tim Collier as an innocent bystander. Sitting at the defense table, Collier remained impassive.
When it was his turn to open, John Basch, Carol Giles’s attorney, countered that it was Collier who forced Giles into bad circumstances. Tim Collier was the one who convinced Carol Giles to administer the injection to Jessie. If she hadn’t, who knew what Tim might have done to her? Sure, she’d given incriminating statements to police, but she’d been aggravated, tired and desperate when she did. As the jury would hear, it hadn’t been her idea to kill Jessie.
Bottom line: Tim Collier forced Carol Giles into the plot to kill Jessie Giles.
Sitting near each other at the defense table, the former lovers, the ones locked in a loving, sexual embrace after killing Nancy, barely made eye contact.
As far as Carol was concerned, Tim’s talk about staying together had been just that, talk. It was just a con. At the first opportunity, he blamed her for everything.
Tim thought Carol a class-A, number-one rat and bitch. His stoic demeanor belied what he was probably feeling: pure rage that had only been let out when he tortured Nancy to death. And if Carol had kept her mouth shut, they wouldn’t be in custody charged with murder.
They’d be free.
June 16, 1998
Skrzynski’s case took no time at all.
He had the cops testify to Carol Giles’s statements and then offered them into evidence. He had the ME testify as to cause of death. And he introduced Tim Collier’s statement to Deputy Peitz that had led them to get a court order to exhume Jessie’s body.