Because You Loved Me (25 page)

Billy’s aunt picked Tina up at a local Manchester pharmacy on August 16 and they drove to the jail. Perhaps she was a little naive, or expecting too much, but the visit didn’t live up to Tina’s expectations. There she sat across from Billy, two-inch-thick Plexiglas separating them, talking on a prison telephone. It was loud. Dirty. The place smelled of a men’s locker room. All those fantasies she had about riding off into the sunset with Billy and having three kids, a big house, nice jobs and a picture-perfect life, at least for the time being, were washed away by the reality of prison. Did she want to be another woman sitting in the visitor’s room every Saturday morning, wondering about her man, having to drive up to a prison to see the father of her children? Failed promises. Lies. Was this the life they had talked about for the past three weeks? As Tina sat and stared at Billy, she could only think,
What if he never gets out of here? I’m going to wait thirty years for my life to begin?

Finally a light went off.

Billy’s aunt took a walk while Tina and Billy talked. Billy put his hand up on the Plexiglas and Tina put hers against it.

“You’re beautiful,” said Billy. “I had no idea.” He was in awe, really. The photographs Tina had sent were nothing compared to what she looked like person.

Holy shit…

Tina was speechless. There really wasn’t much to talk about. It was easier—perhaps safer—to sit on her bed back home and write to a man she envisioned. Now he was real. Billy looked like every other inmate walking around.

“If anybody looks at you,” he said, “I’ll get them later.”

“Oh, Billy.”

“Did you do what I said?”

“Yup.”

“It worked. I told you it would.”

Billy had told Tina to make up a fake name to get in to see him. Act like she was his sister.

Tina had mixed feelings when she left the jail. She didn’t know what to think anymore. She still loved Billy, but something didn’t feel right. Something was different.

Sensing, perhaps, that he was losing her, in his next set of letters after the visit, Billy put his insecurities front and center. He asked Tina how she was feeling and apologized for acting strange during the visit.

“I would change everything to be with you,” Tina wrote back. “Everything!”

She talked about a dream she had where they were married and she had Billy’s son.

“I was so nervous seeing you the other day. I was so afraid you’d think I was ugly…maybe you’d hate my nose ring or hair.”

Billy wondered if she was crazy. Tina was perfect. She was everything—and more.

After the visit, Tina caved into Billy’s sexual energy and started describing some of her own fantasies in more detail. Although quite graphic themselves, it seemed Tina was more concerned about satisfying Billy’s desires and keeping him happy rather than exploring the depth of her own sexuality. It was all about Billy. He dictated the subject of the letters: whatever he wanted to talk about, Tina followed.

With Tina now tapping into her own sexual fantasies, it fueled Billy’s cravings. He soon spoke of their next visit and encouraged Tina to “wear a dress where it’s easy access….” He asked her to “play w/yourself quietly and sneakily….” No shirt or bra, either, he suggested, but “only a zipper jacket to cover your chest….”

Next Billy devised a plan—although not too original—to get Tina’s mother to accept him. Tina hadn’t yet told her parents she was dating a con. Billy suggested that he write Tina’s mother a letter.

“Huh,” thought Tina. “Might just work.”

Billy had a way of dropping ideas into his letters by spinning them as jokes. For example, “Tell
Scott
and
Steve
[two friends of Tina’s] to threaten my jury—LOL,” Billy wrote on August 18. He and Tina had been discussing his case and the chances of him being released. “Looks good,” Billy told her that night on the telephone.

Tina was confused. In a letter, she wondered, “What did you mean by telling Scott and Steve to threaten your jury?” Then, as if the comment didn’t bother her, she continued laying out their plans for after his release. “If you want, I will get married to you August 1, 2006, become pregnant November 1, 2006, and have our first child on August 1, 2007….”

Billy kept the focus on Tina’s mother. He replied by saying that if they were married, her mother “would then have to allow us to be together….”

Tina’s ambivalence and anxiety after their first visit vanished as quickly as it came on. Billy sensed he had back that hold on her—maybe stronger than ever.

In his next letter, Billy mentioned an article in the newspaper regarding AG Michael Delaney stepping down from his position to take another job.

“Delaney rarely loses,” Billy said. He viewed it as a victory, calling it “great.”

He said on the day he read the article, he was “jumping up & down.” It was, he believed, “…a sign from God.”

“You are everything in my life right now,” Tina wrote back.

Tina’s mother began to put the brakes on the relationship. She picked up the telephone while Tina was talking to Billy one night. Later, she asked Tina, “Who was that? Who are you going out with
now
?”

“I do not want you to call on this phone line anymore,” Tina told Billy. “God, I hate this! But we
will
get through it.”

Emancipation became a recurring theme in Tina’s letters. Under Billy’s direction, she promised to look into it and do everything she could to find a way to break loose legally from her parents.

“I’d do anything for you—
anything!
” Tina pledged.

She called Billy’s aunt and cried to her over the situation she faced at home. Billy heard about the call.

“I mentioned…the option of running away together,” he wrote, “this is a real possibility…. My aunt will help.”

Billy made a point to say that running away was plan B—that if Tina’s parents continued to forbid the relationship, well, they could take off together.

“[But if] they accept it, this is unnecessary.”

In his next set of letters, Billy never answered Tina’s query regarding what he meant by her two friends threatening his jury; however, on August 25, Billy expressed a “need to know what you are willing to do if worst comes to worst to be with me?” He said he had some “pretty wild ideas,” but wanted to know Tina’s “limits” before going forward and detailing his plans.

By now, Billy was sleeping with Tina’s photographs. Cuddling with them at night because, he said, he felt so alone. The telephone numbers of his mother and aunt were blocked for some reason and he couldn’t talk to anyone.

“You’re it, baby.”

Tina wrote back and expressed her concern over some of the things Billy had written.

He said he was sorry for causing such stress. But he was “losing it.” The walls were closing in around him. He desperately needed to “do something” soon. And although she didn’t know it yet, Tina was going to play a role.

As September fell on southern New Hampshire, Billy focused on the idea that Tina’s parents were stuck on busting up their relationship. He worried nightly about losing his new love. He spoke of not knowing if he could live without her. There was no way, Billy suggested, he was going to allow it to happen to him
again
.

“They can try to separate us,” he wrote, meaning Tina’s parents, “but will never succeed. I promise!”

Then he mentioned that his “case” wasn’t looking so good lately. Things were changing for him by the day. He was going to get a new lawyer and hoped for the best, but no guarantees.

Jail time no longer mattered to Tina: five years, ten, even thirty. She was totally taken by Billy. She said she would wait for the “finest guy in Valley Street [Jail]” all her life, if she had to.

While Tina worked on moving out of her house and away from her parents, Billy said he was heading for the jail law library to “attempt to find laws on rights of minors & parents as well as emancipation….” Doing the research, he implied, would take his mind off his case, which was now stressing him to the point where he said he was considering changing his plea to “guilty.” Although “[I’m]…innocent…this shit is too stressful.”

How convenient.

An inmate Tina knew who was in the same jail began to, as Billy put it, “mess with [him].”

“She’s f- - -ing with your head,” the guy told Billy one day, implying Tina was stringing Billy along, telling him what he wanted to hear.

“F- - - you!” Billy told the guy. He promised Tina he was going to “kick his ass” when they were alone, “but he (the other guy) pussied out and left.”

“I laughed” at him.

“She’s screwing with you, man,” the guy said again the next time he and Billy ran into each other. “She doesn’t give two shits about you.”

“Trust me,” Tina said in response, “I love you, Billy. Don’t believe him.”

Tina had a talk with her parents. They admitted to following Billy’s case in the newspapers and said they believed “without a doubt” he was guilty. Why was she having such a hard time accepting the facts of his case?

In reply to the pressure her parents put on her to stop communicating with Billy, Tina lied and told them she dumped Billy for another guy.

“They bought it,” she explained to Billy afterward. “Don’t ever give up,” she said. “Don’t
ever
change your plea.”

Billy wrote back. He said Nicole was causing a lot of trouble for him lately.

The setup.

Tina reacted by saying, “I swear to God, I’m going to bash Nicole’s face in with a baseball bat. I will get locked up just to fight her….”

The plan.

Interestingly, Billy’s next set of letters were much shorter. He went from writing five-to ten-page diatribes—random thoughts, essentially—to half-page notes directed specifically toward his goals, while always making sure to incorporate “I love you, baby, no matter what” into the text somewhere.

The execution.

In one “quick note,” he said, “I’m so depressed. I just want to tie the sheet, baby….”

“You cannot do that,” Tina told him the next time they spoke. “I’ll be here for you forever.”

By the first week of September, Billy was back to writing four-and five-page letters, repeating the same sexually graphic rhetoric he had written over the past two weeks, only now he started to include lies about his pending court case.

Around that same time, Tina got into big trouble with her father. Billy called the house. Her father answered the telephone.

“Babe,” she wrote, “please do not call here unless I tell you to….”

She feared she’d get grounded and never be able to see him again.

“If it continues, Tina,” said her father after the call, “I am going to call the jail and tell them about his aunt.”

In turn, Tina told Billy she was still working on “convincing” them she had disassociated herself from him. “OK, hunne?” she concluded. “Your fiancée, Tina Sullivan.”

Billy figured he had Tina where he wanted. So, on September 5, he laid out his plan. First he asked Tina to “get word” to Nicole that he wasn’t planning on testifying against her. “If she doesn’t testify, we both walk…. No joke,” Billy wrote.

The plan was for Tina to put a note inside a law book in the jail where Nicole was being held. Then send her a letter telling her—in some silly secret code Billy had created—where to find it.

“This is the break I needed…. My life is in your hands,” Billy wrote.

Billy believed his future was, once again, in the hands of a teenage girl. It seemed he took no responsibility for anything; it was always someone else holding the cards. First Nicole. Now Tina, whom he had only met in person once.

Farther along in the same letter, Billy said he was going to come clean about everything, because it was going to come out in his trial, anyway. Tina need only to pledge to never leave him.

Tina had an idea of her own: “Write to her (Nicole) and try to get her to admit that she set you up, then send your lawyers the letters….”

During the next call, Billy brought up how Tina might think about running away from home and going to live with his aunt in Rhode Island. In what could be construed as a viable threat, considering the party it was coming from, Tina later said Billy called the following night and laid some rather strong words on the table as they continued discussing how she could possibly liberate herself from her parents.

“They’ll freak out, Billy, if I ever did that,” she said, speaking of running away to Rhode Island.

“When I’m acquitted, we can live together there.”

“But my parents—”

Billy went quiet for a moment. Then laughed. “No matter what your mother says or does,” he said, “nothing can keep us away from each other.”

As the next set of letters arrived, Tina felt torn between her feelings for Billy and an obvious fear of what she had gotten herself into. In one of the letters, Billy confessed to killing Jeanne.

“He told me what her last words were,” Tina said later. In that letter, Billy said as Jeanne stopped fighting him and he continued to stab her, she raised her hands and said, “I’m done.” It was a bit different from the version he told police.

Still, it was enough to terrify Tina. How had she allowed herself to get in so deep with someone she obviously knew very little about?

“[Jeanne] was pleading for her life,” recalled Tina later, describing the letters, which Billy had asked her to burn after reading (which she claimed she did). “But he realized he was already going to get in trouble—so he finished.” Even more shocking was how Billy explained “in detail” how he killed Jeanne, describing the multiple weapons he used and the number of times he believed he stabbed her.

Feeling as though she had to end the relationship, Tina lied to Billy a few days later.

“What’s wrong?” Billy asked, sensing something was up.

Tina started crying. “I’m pregnant.”

“What?”

“I really don’t want to be with you, Billy. I’m having a baby with someone else.”

Unbeknownst to Tina, in an act of alliance and perhaps fear, several of her close friends got together one night after hearing stories of her love affair with Billy. They decided to go behind her back and tell her parents the truth about what was going on.

After the intervention, Tina’s mother said, “Thank you. You’re good friends for doing this.” The next time Billy called the house, Tina’s mother took the telephone from her.

“Never call this house again!”

“What? Who’s this?”

Dial tone.

The following day, Tina’s mother called the Nashua Police Department.