If You Only Knew (29 page)

CHAPTER 71

IF WALT PISZCZATOWSKI WAS
a knuckle-cracker, this would be the appropriate moment to stand, intertwine his fingers and then crack his knuckles out in front of himself before shaking his head and saying something along the lines of
“Okay, Mr. Chahine, let's talk about your story.”
But Piszczatowski was, of course, a professional; he was a defense attorney who knew when to poke and prod a witness and when to allow him the space to bestow upon his client even more reasonable doubt than had already been presented.

Piszczatowski established right away that Danny had reviewed his statements in the case just a few days before testifying, which can be significant, given that the best testimony is spontaneous truth; the worst is scripted and practiced recollection. Obviously, Danny had spouted a combination of the two during his hasty direct examination.

After apologizing for ultimately delving into what was surely going to be “very personal matters,” Billie Jean's lawyer started with Vonlee and Danny's relationship. The questions focused on Vonlee's ability to routinely posture herself as the “center of attention,” whether she was with Danny, Billie Jean, the two together or just perusing the casino by herself. Vonlee Nicole Titlow was a woman who “liked being looked at,” Piszczatowski suggested to Danny's reluctant agreement.

Danny testified that “every woman” he had dated previously “looked just like” Vonlee. He had been fooled completely by her appearance and the romance. He was totally taken in by the charm and lies.

Vonlee was also someone who “did most of the talking,” Piszczatowski suggested to the witness.

Danny, in turn, believed Vonlee was quite “normal” in that regard.

When they first met, Piszczatowski asked, wasn't it Danny who “put the moves on” Vonlee, which Piszczatowski referred to as “sexual advances”? And when Danny put his hand on her leg one night inside his apartment, she “kind of pulled back”?

“Yes,” Danny agreed.

They settled on the idea that Danny and Vonlee were “emotionally involved.”

“And during that . . .
relationship,
” Piszczatowski asked as sincerely as he could, “you did engage in intercourse with her on a couple of occasions?”

“Well, I don't know what you call ‘intercourse' . . . if you want to say ‘sex'?”

“Okay.”

“Yes,” Danny said.

“So you engaged in
sex
with her?”

“Yes.”

“Again, I apologize for getting personal, but on one of those occasions, or was it more than one, you had—it was oral sex, correct?”

“Yes.”

“And the other . . . it was, well, I guess was considered more conventional sex, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Other than oral sex?”

“Yes.”

The goal Piszczatowski had in mind here was to convince jurors that Vonlee had lied to Danny about everything, even the most intimate aspects of their relationship. Danny was a guy who thought he was having sexual intercourse with a woman, but he was actually having anal sex with a man. And if she could lie about—or exaggerate—such intimate moments, was it so hard to believe she could do the same with the story she had told Danny about Don's death? Also, another point Piszczatowski wanted to make to the jury, with his ingenious, leading way of questioning this witness, was that Danny Chahine, because he had been duped so easily (and completely) by Vonlee, may have had an ax to grind with her and Billie Jean. Therefore, coming in to testify might just be his opportunity to get back at Vonlee for all that dishonesty.

Piszczatowski had Danny talk about the jewelry he had given Vonlee and how much it cost.

When they arrived at Billie Jean, Danny called her “private, reserved, polite and well-mannered.”

Not the way your typical, budding black widow might be described.

Billie Jean liked to play the slot machines, Danny explained.

As they discussed Billie Jean, Danny spoke of a night when she chastised him and told him “all” he wanted out of her niece was to “just have babies . . . and kidnap them and take them to another country. Meanwhile, she knew that
she
was a
he.
” The point being: Billie Jean had no standards when it came to taking Vonlee's lie to this level. The indication was that Vonlee and Billie Jean were together in a big charade.

A word Walt Piszczatowski kept going back to with regard to Vonlee was “deceive.” He asked Danny how it felt to be “deceived” on the “most basic level,” but Danny steered the defense attorney away, making it seem as though he “thought” it would have been Billie Jean who would “be more deceiving than” Vonlee. What had shocked Danny the most was that Vonlee had been the bigger liar between the two of them.

“Were you upset with [Vonlee] for having
deceived
you?”

“No.”

“You were not
angry
with her for having deceived you?”

“No.”

“Over seven weeks?”

“You see, I understand human beings who go through stuff like that,” Danny explained. “She was a man. She's changed into a woman. Of course, she's going to lie about it. I mean, that's normal.... As long as she told me the truth [ultimately] that she
wasn't
a man—that she wasn't a woman.”

This comment could be backed up by the videotape of Danny Chahine's conversations with the TPD. During the initial interview the TPD conducted with Danny, when he talked about Vonlee and what he believed had happened to Don, Danny was relaxed and even laughing at himself for being cuckolded by a man. There was no animosity in his voice at all. He wasn't angry, or even the slightest bit perturbed by the fact that a man had misled him into believing he was a woman. Danny was more dumbfounded and shocked than anything else. Not once did he raise his voice or speak unkindly about Vonlee.

One important issue Walt Piszczatowski brought up next, tossing more reasonable doubt on Danny and his story, was that when Danny testified during the preliminary hearing phase of the case, all he could recall about that dinner conversation—the first one, which had not been recorded—was that Vonlee only had admitted to him that she was a man. She had not mentioned anything about what happened to Don. Piszczatowski wanted to know why, now, at the trial phase, was Danny changing that testimony?

Or, rather, adding to it.

“This is what happened,” Danny said. “Um . . .” He didn't know what else to add.

“And when you were testifying four months, five months ago [during the preliminary phase], you couldn't remember anything else that was said at that dinner table, except that she told you she was a male, correct?”

“See . . . ,” Danny tried to say.

But Piszczatowski kept him focused: “If you could answer the question . . .”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

“Wait, wait,” Danny pleaded. “I didn't answer yet.”

“I thought you did.”

“I'm just saying . . .”

“Okay.”

“. . . What happened before, you were asking me to just specifically answer your questions, and I kept asking, and I wanted to make sure if you asked me
before
dinner, I would say ‘yes' or ‘no.' Maybe
after
dinner, I have to say ‘yes' or ‘no' or ‘I don't remember.' I wanted to be very exact with you.”

“Okay,” Piszczatowski said, trying to get Danny to stop talking, not quite understanding—same as everyone else—what he had just said.

Danny concluded that the timing mattered little: whether it was before, during or after dinner, he couldn't recall exactly when she told him about Don, but she did tell him on that night.

Piszczatowski was saying that was fine, but Danny had not mentioned this during the preliminary phase of the trial.

Perhaps brilliantly, Piszczatowski used the word “memory” several times during his next set of questions, bringing attention to the idea that perhaps Danny Chahine's memory wasn't—and shouldn't be considered—science. Most importantly, Piszczatowski said at one point, anyone's memory is more accurate closer to an event, and that the preliminary hearing was merely months after the events Danny was describing today.

They stayed on this subject of the dinner for quite some time. It became tedious and repetitive. But Piszczatowski had a hard time letting it go, asking, “When you left the car that night, had you seen her, ah,
his
genitalia?”

“No. In the car, no.”

“And so . . . you hadn't touched the genitalia?”

“I touched something in her, but I didn't feel anything. She—”

“All right,” Piszczatowski said, holding up a hand for Danny to stop there.

But he finished, anyway: “She said you can touch, and I did touch, but I didn't feel nothing.”

They discussed Vonlee's penis for about five additional minutes, Danny wanting to make it known—and perfectly clear—that he certainly hadn't touched Vonlee's penis.

Not then.

Not ever.

When they finally got off the subject of Vonlee's penis, Piszczatowski switched gears and talked about Don, asking Danny if he had ever met him.

Danny said no, but he knew what Don looked like from the photographs he had seen while at Billie Jean's house.

So Piszczatowski asked him to explain what he saw on those videotapes that Mrs. Rogers had given him.

Danny said they were supposed to be pornography tapes, but there had been some family videos mixed in. And so it became clear that it wasn't as though Billie Jean had been ridding the house of all of her memories of Don. No, she believed she was getting rid of Don's dirty business.

As quick as they talked about porn, Piszczatowski switched it up again and asked Danny about the alleged “pillow” used in this case. He had told detectives he believed it was a “bedroom pillow.” Why did he say that?

“I guess so,” Danny said. “I could have said that.”

“Right.”

“I don't know exactly where this pillow came from,” Danny then admitted. “I wasn't there.”

“Exactly. And you have to rely on what [Vonlee] told you.”

“Absolutely.”

Piszczatowski circled back to his main argument: “Now, Miss [Vonlee] was very convincing in her deception of you—is that correct?”

“Yes.”

As Piszczatowski began to wind things down, he reminded Danny that he was “convicted of a felony.”

“Yes.”

Sometime later, “Was it true that [Vonlee] told you that Don Rogers was worth ten million dollars?”

“Yes.”

From there, Piszczatowski went through a list of about ten lies Vonlee had told Danny—all of which Danny had bought into. When he was finished proving that Danny was very susceptible to Vonlee's charm and believed all of her stories, he turned to look at his co-counsel, and then indicated he was done.

There was very little redirect and recross; it was unrevealing and mostly a waste of time. With that finished, the APA called the car salesman from the dealership where Billie Jean bought those cars for her and for Vonlee. Over the course of about five minutes, the APA got the car salesman to explain how Vonlee and Billie Jean showed up not long after Don's death and purchased two cars.

Piszczatowski had no questions for him.

And the day was over.

CHAPTER 72

ON DECEMBER 6, 2001,
during the morning session, Donald Tullock and Donald Zimmerman, along with Donald McGinnis, Don Rogers's lawyer, testified, bringing the total of Dons talked about to four—five, if Don Kather, Don Rogers's best friend and business partner, was referenced. None of these three witnesses offered much to move the state's case toward a conviction.

Most cops, for example, will testify about every aspect of an investigation: the interviews they conducted, the reports they filed, the leads, the dead ends, the persons of interest they developed and crossed off, forensic evidence collected from a scene, and so on. Here, in just twenty minutes of direct testimony, Detective Tullock discussed the scene as he came upon it, how Billie Jean and Vonlee acted that morning, and how “odd” Billie Jean's “demeanor” was throughout the time he was at the house.

Quickly, then, Tullock moved into meeting Danny Chahine and that entire thread of the case. He spoke briefly about the controversial medical examiner's involvement and how that all came about. By the time he finished, Tullock was explaining to jurors how the TPD transported Vonlee's car back from Chicago after her arrest. When all was said and done, some wondered what—if anything—his testimony had to do with shedding any guilty light on Billie Jean Rogers.

Detective Don Zimmerman's direct testimony lasted all of five minutes. He spoke of serving that search warrant on the Rogers house and collecting Billie Jean's checkbook and—big reveal—seeing that notation Billie Jean had allegedly made on the checkbook:
Vonlee—$100,000.

After Piszczatowski questioned Zimmerman, and the state refused to redirect, the APA stood and rested his case.

* * *

Piszczatowski called his first witness, Robert Allegrina, the investigator for the ME's office.

Allegrina was maybe the most important witness for Billie Jean besides a celebrity pathologist the defense had lined up. The ME's investigator was an integral part of the multipronged approach Dragovic talked about when deciding on death by natural causes or homicide. The investigator was the first to make a judgment call on a body. Some considered the investigator's role as biased from the start—hence, if he was called to a scene, well, that in and of itself meant that someone there had found something out of whack.

Focus is the defense attorney's best friend when bringing in witnesses to support the defendant. Here, Piszczatowski kept the emphasis on Allegrina's
role
for the ME's office in this case and asked what he did when he first got to the Rogers house.

“Well, as a general rule, we observe the scene, photograph the body, document the evidence, talk to the family and witnesses, and make a determination to bring the body in or release it.”

“All right. When you say ‘make a determination to bring the body in or release it,' what does that mean?”

This was a simple, direct question, and yet so vital in this case.

“Well, if there's adequate information and the person was under a doctor's care, we could release it, pending the doctor signing the death certificate.”

“And that when you say ‘under a doctor's care,' that would be under the care of a personal physician?”

“. . .. In this case, did you make some inquiry to determine whether you could release the body or whether you had to take the body to the morgue—to the medical examiner's office?”

“I talked to the wife and she advised that he had not seen a doctor, had [not] been to a doctor, so there was no reason, you know, we would have to bring the body in.”

Allegrina agreed that the woman sitting in the front of the courtroom wearing a beige blouse—with a fatigued air about her, quietly processing everything going on around her—was the same woman he spoke to at the scene.

Further, Allegrina said he basically went to a scene, took Polaroid photos of the body, spoke to cops, spoke to family members, before making an evaluation.

Defense attorney Piszczatowski wanted to know why Allegrina used Polaroid instead of 35mm film or even digital. It seemed that 35mm or digital would be more accurate, more detailed, more easily transferred, and would fall in line with what a crime scene investigator would use by today's standards.

Allegrina said Polaroid was a personal preference.

After the APA objected because of Piszczatowski's use of leading questions, Billie Jean's lawyer asked the investigator about the conversations he'd had with the defendant on that morning at the house. Basically, all they talked about, Allegrina testified, was Don's rectal bleeding and his desire not to go see a doctor. Beyond that, they did not speak about much else. Allegrina said he noticed what he thought was feces and dried blood on the carpet; he understood Billie Jean to be talking about a husband who was severely ill, bleeding rectally and unwilling to do anything about it.

Equally important was the fact that Billie Jean, after Allegrina asked her at the scene, was “not opposed to an autopsy” on Don.

Piszczatowski passed his witness.

The APA asked three questions.

None of them mattered.