CHAPTER 8
VONLEE NICOLE TITLOW DECIDED
to head back to North Carolina to pick up her new car, and then head home to Tennessee, where her former life was waiting for her. She could walk into the Waffle House and ask for her job back. She could explain she fell off the wagon and that she was now working with a clean slate and a clear head. She'd go back to AA. She'd clean up her life. It was a bump in the road. Everyone deserved a second chance.
The one lesson Vonlee took away from her time in Michigan with her aunt was that “I was seeing for the first time how Billie Jean wasn't the sweetheart that I had always thought she was.”
Back in Tennessee as the middle of July 2000 came around, and Billie Jean was home in Michigan with her son, Vonlee went to see Billie Jean's sister, her other aunt. She sat down and had coffee and explained what happened in Michigan with Don coming into the bed and fondling her and all that bleeding. Vonlee was concerned that she didn't know Billie Jean and might have trusted her more than she should have. Vonlee was also asking herself a question:
Why is Billie Jean so interested in me now, all of a sudden?
Vonlee had not heard from her aunt in a decade, save for a phone call here and there. Why now, at this point, was Billie Jean so crazy to have Vonlee in her life?
“I don't want to go back there,” Vonlee told her other aunt.
There was more to it than Billie Jean, Don and their marital and health issues. Vonlee still had that guy who'd signed over his house waiting for her. She wanted to end it completely with him, but she'd left without dissolving the relationship for good. So there were personal issues at stake here for Vonlee. She knew if she went back to Michigan, she'd be closer to Chicago and eventually go back to the penthouse and likely start dating the guy again. Temptation was the root of most evil, Vonlee knew. Seeing him might ultimately lead to her getting back into the escort service business and then the drinking and partying all night. She was exhausted just thinking about it. The way she saw it now:
Out of sight, out of mind.
Being back home felt good.
Billie Jean wasn't about to let Vonlee go, however. She actually came back into Maryville and tracked Vonlee down. Her son was doing better. Don was being a pain in the ass. Billie Jean pleaded with Vonlee that she needed her support.
“Come back, please.”
“I don't know, Aunt Billie. . . .”
“You've got to come back with me, if not for nothing else but to settle things with [your man],” Billie Jean said. “You cannot just leave him hanging in the air, Vonlee. That ain't right.”
“Billie Jean had a fit over this,” Vonlee later recalled. She rode Vonlee, following her around Tennessee for a few days, until Vonlee caved in and agreed to go back to Michigan and stay with her and Don.
Back now in Troy, Billie Jean, Don and Vonlee were once again a quasi-family. Billie Jean's son was recovering, doing much better. Billie Jean was dragging Vonlee along to the casinos again. They were drinking and staying out all night.
Just like that, Vonlee was back to square one.
Vonlee still had not said anything to her aunt about Don fondling her breasts in bed that night. She thought Don did not even remember what happened. Yet, with Vonlee being back inside the Rogers household again, Don picked up his persistence that he and Vonlee get together. He became more aggressive and sexually explicit, according to Vonlee's memory.
“We'd be eating dinner, Billie would walk out of the room and Don would play footsies with me under the table and make eyes with me,” Vonlee said later.
The passes continued as the end of July came around. It wasn't overbearing to the point where Vonlee couldn't manage, but more of a nuisance. Don would say things and make gestures. He'd grope at Vonlee. He was harmless in the sense that Vonlee never felt threatened that he'd do something forcibly. But Vonlee was constantly asking herself what in the world was she doing in that house. Why was she there? What purpose did staying at their house, subjected to this type of behavior, serve? Was it simply for the partying?
Vonlee sat her aunt down one day. “Billie Jean, listen to me, I have to leave. Don is becoming too much for me.” Vonlee explained to her aunt that she had awoken one night back when Billie Jean was in California to find Don fondling her breasts. It was too much. Vonlee said she thought maybe he was just drunk, but now she knew he was seriously making passes at her.
Billie Jean's face pinched. Anger arose.
“He plays footsies with me under the damn table, Billie . . . ,” Vonlee said again.
No sooner had Vonlee got those words out, than Billie Jean hauled off and slapped Vonlee across the face. Then she screamed: “You are a liar! Nothing but a liar. Liar! Liar! Liar!”
Vonlee was humiliated. “No, Billie, it's true. . . .”
“Liar. Stop lying to me.”
Vonlee started to cry. This was, she recalled later, “like a scene out of a movie.”
“Billie, I am
not
lying to you,” Vonlee said through tears. “It is happening all the time now.”
“Liar!” her aunt continued yelling.
Vonlee calmed her down. They spoke without yelling.
“Well, I don't believe you, Vonlee. Simple as that. Tell you what . . . I'm going to step out of the room next time and watch . . . see what happens.”
“You go right ahead,” Vonlee said.
The next day, as they were sitting in the formal room, Billie Jean gave Vonlee the eye and announced she was stepping out of the room and would be back in a few minutes. Don was sitting across from Vonlee.
According to Vonlee, as Billie did this and walked out of view, Don stood up, came over to her and laid his body on top of hers. He was rubbing on Vonlee, she claimed. Touching her all over, fondling her breasts again.
“Come on . . . come on . . . ,” Don said, according to Vonlee.
Billie Jean came out of the shadows and stood over them, red-faced and alarmed. Don had been talking of divorce lately. He knew Billie Jean was bleeding his bank accounts dry with her gambling and spending habits, and he was threatening her with cutting her off of the finances. This was a definite threat to Billie Jean's way of life. Without Don, Billie Jean really didn't have anything. One could argueâand Vonlee would certainly be the one leading the chargeâthat Billie Jean married Don for a second time because she missed the lifestyle Don had provided. She married the guy for his money.
“You bastard!” Billie Jean screamed as she stood.
Don jumped off Vonlee, surprised by his wife's presence.
“You go right ahead and try to divorce me now,” Billie Jean said. “You see what happens.”
“Come on, Billie,” Don pleaded. “I'm just playing around.”
“I got something on you now, you bastard!” Billie Jean screamed.
Then Don changed his attitude. “You know what, Billie,” he said, giving up on his let's-make-peace offering. “I don't give a shit
what
you do. I want to take herâyour niece!âupstairs right now and I want to fuck her. I'll do whatever I want, damn it all! I want to fuck her,” he said in his wife's face. “You hear me . . . I. Want. To. Fuck. Her.”
Billie Jean was livid. “How
dare
you . . .”
“You're a bitch! A bitch from hell!”
Vonlee was horrified. She got up and walked away from the two of them as they continued screaming at each other.
Billie Jean tried to say something, but Don wouldn't allow her to finish. “You're a bitch from hell, Billie Jean, and your kids are spawn from the Devilâyou're Satan. A fucking disgrace to women. I don't give a shit
what
you think. I would fuck Vonlee right here in this house while you're in it.”
Billie Jean was fuming. She started to say something.
But Don wasn't finished. “I want my damn thirteen thousand dollars you owe me for the credit card bill. You promised me that you would stop gambling. You know our agreement . . . you
promised
me.” Don was right on her now. In her face. “If you don't stop, I am going to take the credit cards away from you.”
Billie Jean had no comeback.
“I'm canceling the credit cards,” Don said as he walked out of the room.
CHAPTER 9
ON MONDAY, AUGUST 14,
2000, after Dr. Ortiz-Reyes returned to the office, he participated in the normal morning meeting. The Monday meeting was designed to review cases from the previous weekend and talk about them. See where each needed to go, who needed to do what and if there were any of those common surprises that often dictated a pathologist's day. The chief ME, Dr. Ljubisa Juvan Dragovic, was there, as well as all the toxicologists and pathologists in the office, and even medical students and residents. One of the other reasons for the meeting was to see if anyone had a problem with what had taken place over the weekend.
When it came to the toxicologist to talk about his findings in cases from over the weekend that he had looked at earlier that morning, it was the first time Dr. Ortiz-Reyes learned of what he later called a “surprise” pertaining to Don Rogers's death. The toxicologist was concerned, he explained to everyone at the meeting, about something found in Don's urine and blood.
As it turned out, the toxicologist told the team, Don had a beyond-dangerous amount of alcohol in his urine and blood. His opinion was based on two tests that didn't take days or weeks to come back, but were immediate. Even for a chronic alcoholic, Don's bloodstream showed a whopping alcohol level of .44, way above even for a guy who might like to overindulge, as Don clearly had. This number indicated acute alcohol intoxication. Don had enough booze in his system, in other words, to kill him. Take a man of Don's weightâ141 poundsâand heightâfive foot seven inchesâand put that amount of booze into his system, and it was far beyond what could be called a dangerous and deadly amount. In fact, that ridiculous amount was enough to make a morbidly obese alcoholic stumble and pass out cold. For a guy that weighed 140 pounds, according to most blood/alcohol percentage charts, a .27 was enough to cause deathâand Don had .17 more in his bloodstream.
So the question became: how did all of that alcohol get there?
Even a guy with Don's tolerance for alcohol would have passed out by about the .30 mark. According to the McDonald Center for Student Well-Being (formerly the Office of Alcohol and Drug Education), loss of consciousness occurs at about .25, with alcohol poisoning coming in near .39, and the onset of coma at .40, with death due to respiratory arrest near that same mark. Thus, Don was physically unable to put that amount of alcohol into his system by his own hand. It was impossible. He would have passed out before he was able to do it.
At .44, on paper, anyway, there was a pretty good chance Don Rogers was dead long before the level of alcohol in his blood reached the .40 mark.
The entire team around the conference room table was stunned by this revelation.
The urine sample, the toxicologist explained, was even higher: .47.
Ortiz-Reyes indicated that he would then have to go back and change his opinion regarding Don's cause of death and the hasty notes he had made on that Saturday morning. That was not a big deal; pathologists did this all the time. The simple fact was that yes, it could have been a heart attack that killed Donald Rogers, but acute alcohol intoxication was definitely a contributing factor. The guy didn't drink himself to deathâthat was not what the doctor meant by the change from “accident” on the death certificate to “contributory cause” of death.
In changing his opinion of Don's death, Ortiz-Reyes would have to issue an addendum to the certificate of death. He'd already written a certificate of death on Saturday and the medical examiner had signed off on it. Ortiz-Reyes had not yet filed it, however.
Don's heart problems could have been, as Ortiz-Reyes later explained, “contributory” to the root cause of death. However, they had a major issue now: how did that alcohol get into Don Rogers's system?
“We better do a complete autopsy,” the chief medical examiner suggested at the meeting. “We need to find out if anything else is going on here.”
Several in the meeting appeared perplexed by the proposition.
“What's the problem?” the medical examiner wondered.
Don Rogers's body . . . it was already gone.
CHAPTER 10
EVERY RECOVERING ALCOHOLIC KNOWS
there's a sleeping dragon, a beast, hibernating inside his or her soul. Even if the person finds sobriety, dries out and goes on to lead a productive, alcohol-free life, one day at a time, that beast sits, patiently waiting, ready and willing to breathe fire once again when a vulnerable moment arises. Since Vonlee had returned to the upper Midwest to live with Don and Billie Jean, she not only started drinking again, but she'd rattled the sleeping dragon wide awake.
While she had been back in Tennessee at her grandmother's house, Vonlee later explained, she had given everything up. Vonlee had walked away, she said, from a “three-hundred-thousand-dollar town house” that her old boyfriend was willing to sign over to her in place of her going home to sober up. While living inside that bubble consisting of Denver and Chicago, and running an escort service, Vonlee considered that she had “hit [her] bottom.”
“I was going to meetings. I was going to therapy. I was doing all of these things while back home.” And through that, Vonlee said, she had “made an understanding with God,” her higher power. She'd pleaded to God while immersed in her addiction that she wanted out of it all. “Okay, God, this is my bottom . . . ,” Vonlee had told herself while ripping and running in Chicago before taking off for home. “And if this is not my bottom? Please, God, take me there.”
The chaos her life had taken on since moving in with Billie Jean was perhaps that new bottom she had asked God for, Vonlee began to think as those days and long nights at the casino carried on. Maybe Chicago and Denver were not enough? Perhaps God wanted Vonlee to see another layer of living hell that would finally shake her into believing she had a drinking problem to begin with and that things could not possibly get any worse.
With Don dead, the police asking Billie questions, and Vonlee being around it all, feeling guilty and a part of what seemed to be, at the least, some moral culpability in Don's death, Vonlee asked herself,
Is this it? Is this my bottom?
One of the main issues for Vonlee was that she had been blind drunk herself on the night they returned from the casino to find Don on the kitchen floor.
If I wasn't drunk, would he have had a chance?
Vonlee wondered now.
The guilt ate at her.
“I was literally in another world while all of this was going on,” Vonlee said. “I made an appointment to go to the psychiatrist because I just couldn't deal with it.”
Don's kids, even Billie Jean's, were asking Vonlee what was wrong with her. She seemed so distraught. “Did you know Don that well, Vonlee? You are really taking this hard.”
Anytime somebody said something to Vonlee, she broke down. She couldn't handle hearing Don's name.
“Someone would say, âHow well did you know Don?' and I would bust out bawling like a child.”
There was a time a few days after Don's death when all Vonlee could do was pop Xanax her psychiatrist had put her on and wash those pills down with vodka.
“I'd get up off the couch only to take more Xanax, have a drink, and then [I'd] pass back out.”
She couldn't believe what had happenedâDon dying the way he had.
But if Don was dead when Billie Jean and Vonlee entered the house, why all the guilt? Why was Vonlee harboring so much responsibility for Don's death? What wasn't Vonlee sharing with anyone?
Billie Jean saw Vonlee on the couch one morning. “Look at you!” she said. “Pull your damn self together.”
“I'm . . . I'm . . . ,” Vonlee tried to say.
Billie Jean got down to Vonlee's eye level, put her hands on Vonlee's shoulders and stopped just short of shaking her, before saying: “Listen to me. You need to pull yourself together and move on. Forget about this. Forget it ever happened. Pretend it did not happen and get yourself back together.”