If You Only Knew

by M. William Phelps

  There was one night after Don’s death when Vonlee took Danny out to a “very expensive restaurant at the casino,” Danny later explained. It was a time when Vonlee (at least from where Danny saw it later) seemed to have more money than she knew what to do with it.

  Vonlee looked at the wine list and ordered a costly bottle of the restaurant’s finest.

  They clinked glasses and smiled. It was romantic. Cozy. Nice. They were a couple enjoying a night out—at least in those initial moments after they sat down, that was what it seemed like. Vonlee liked Danny a lot, maybe even loved him.

  “Good time, huh?” Vonlee said.

  “It is.”

  “I have something to tell you,” Vonlee announced, setting her glass down slowly, staring at her reflection. “It’s about me.” She took a sip from her wine, looked into Danny’s eyes. Vonlee had been in this position before. She had a secret. It was time she shared it with Danny. He deserved to know.

  “Vonlee, what is it?”

  Vonlee took a pause and another sip of wine.

  It was never easy.

  CHAPTER 20

  IT WAS LIKE GOING back to the old neighborhood where you grew up after not seeing it since childhood. Everything felt so much smaller, so much more crowded and cramped: the field where you played ball, it turned out, was just a patch of grass no bigger than a large garden; the biggest house on the block was a run-down, two-bedroom shack where five kids, a mother and father somehow managed to cram a life into; the road, which seemed like an expressway Mr. Frosty drove down after school every day in summers past, was only wide enough for one car; and your childhood home—it was so simple, so modest, plain and old-looking as you now stood in front of it wondering, How the hell did we do it?

  That was how Vonlee Nicole Titlow felt: tricked by life’s most treasured memories. She was someone else, always had been. She was a female trapped, screaming for someone to hear that she needed to be released. She was demanding that the soul inside the body with the penis and the hair growing all over it—which God had given her on the day she was born—wanted out.

  Yes, Vonlee Nicole Titlow was actually born Harry Vonlee Titlow.

  That was her legal name: Harry.

  It sounded so manly, so masculine.

  “Hey, Harry, stop by and take a look at my transmission.”

  “Harry, let’s catch the football game on Sunday.”

  Harry.

  Danny Chahine was about to find out, one could say, the hard way (although Vonlee would later say she had told Danny two weeks after meeting him). Both Vonlee and Danny recalled the story on this night the same, however: Danny was sitting, eating a nice dinner, sipping expensive wine with a person he believed to be the most beautiful woman in the entire building, maybe even the most gorgeous woman he had ever dated and had sex with.

  “I’m really not a woman, Danny,” Vonlee explained.

  “What?”

  “Danny, I’m a man.”

  The handful of times they’d had sex—which Danny later admitted (in court) included “intercourse”—had never caused any issues for Vonlee, she later told me. Vonlee insisted that she get on top and bounce on Danny. “I’ve had an operation for cancer.... You shouldn’t look down there,” she’d lie when they had gotten intimate the first time. “It’s an ugly sight.” From there, she simply covered her penis with blankets, and Danny had anal intercourse, which he mistook for vaginal, with a man he thought was a woman.

  “Anal sex,” Vonlee said later. “He didn’t have a clue.”

  “There’s nothing that I could tell she was a man,” Danny explained in court later. “There’s nothing. That’s why I was very shocked.”

  Don Rogers died never knowing. The Cadillac dealer did not know. Neither did anyone at the casino Billie Jean or Vonlee had befriended. Nobody at Don’s wake had a clue. Nobody ever asked. There was no reason to inquire. Vonlee wasn’t one of those transsexuals you’d see coming a mile away: muscular calves, arms with the definition of a body builder, an Adam’s apple, a masculine gait to her walk, hair on her arms and knuckles—wearing a dress and far too much makeup. She’d been on hormones for so long, Vonlee later said, she barely had a penis left at all.

  “It shrivels up—it shrinks,” Vonlee said. “Mine [was] basically gone.”

  And her breasts: a respectable, realistic large size—she had them done surgically many years ago. Every part of each breast felt and looked real, according to those who were in the know on that subject.

  From head to toe, with the exception of—one could argue—the most important part, Vonlee came across as a female.

  “Well, I’ve spoken to a lot of different psychiatrists,” Vonlee later said when asked to clarify what a transsexual is, “and what they explained to me was, it’s when a person is born in the wrong body or with the wrong gender and, therefore, they don’t really call it a sex change. They actually call it a gender change, because you’re actually changing your sex or your gender to become the sex that you are. So they look at you, as I am, a female, but with the wrong gender. So they’re going to—when I have a change, it will be a gender change, instead of a sex change.”

  As they dined together in that posh restaurant, Danny’s jaw was now squarely on the table. “No way,” Danny said. “Uh-uh. I cannot believe it.”

  Danny stopped eating, he later admitted, “because I felt like throwing up. . . . I didn’t believe her . . . because of what I had seen!”

  “I’m a transsexual, Danny,” Vonlee said. She tried to keep it together.

  It doesn’t match, Danny thought. “I don’t believe you,” he said again.

  Danny noticed Vonlee was on the verge of breaking down into tears. He didn’t want her to cry. The last thing he needed now was a scene at the restaurant.

  “Danny, please believe me. I love you.”

  “Just hold on,” Danny said. He could sense she was getting ready to cry.

  As Danny soon found out, however, there was more to this night than Vonlee revealing that she was a transsexual.

  She had another secret to expose.

  “It’s Don and what happened . . . the whole story,” Vonlee said (according to Danny’s recollection of this conversation).

  It was the main reason why Vonlee had so much anxiety and emotional turmoil over the past weeks, or since Don’s death. This was the reason why, she explained, she seemed to be so preoccupied and in a different place all the time. It was Don. Vonlee was carrying a heavy burden.

  Danny was interested in what she was referencing. He’d had a feeling about Billie Jean ever since meeting and hanging out with the two of them. To Danny, the older woman was “cold.” He said he “respected her” and she was a “classy woman,” but there was something about her that Danny did not trust. “I have nothing against her. . . .” There was a time when Vonlee had told Danny that Don Rogers had expressed interest in adopting Vonlee and even putting her in his will, and Danny felt that it drove a wedge between the aunt and niece. But now this: something had happened to Don and it was no surprise to Danny that Billie Jean was involved.

  “Just tell me the whole thing, Vonlee,” Danny encouraged.

  “I cannot take it anymore,” Vonlee said. She then explained that she had just gone out to get her nails and hair done. “And I felt so bad spending Don’s money.”

  “What happened?” Danny kept asking.

  “I felt really, really bad spending his money.... I cannot do this anymore,” Vonlee said. She had tears streaming down her face. She was nearly whispering.

  “What do you mean?”

  “My aunt Billie made me do it,” Vonlee said. “I feel so guilty.”

  “What?” Danny persisted. “Do what?”

  Was this going where Danny thought? Was Vonlee preparing to admit to something that would place Danny in a position where he was now involved, too? Danny had been in trouble with the law himself years before. He was trying to get his citizenship squared away. There was a lot at stake for him
.

  According to Danny Chahine’s recollection of this conversation, Vonlee then said, “Listen, Danny, I need you to promise me something. I want to tell you the truth about everything. You cannot get upset or leave me, okay?”

  “What’s going on? Tell me. I won’t leave or be upset. Von, what’s happening?”

  Vonlee said Don’s death was not what people had thought it was.

  This piqued Danny’s interest even more. He had suspected as much. Yet, he changed the subject—and as they finished dinner, he was back to wanting to know for sure that Vonlee was a man. He still didn’t believe her.

  “Show me,” Danny insisted.

  “Show you?”

  “Yes, I want you to take me out to the car and I want you to show me.”

  Vonlee gasped.

  CHAPTER 21

  IT WAS DIFFICULT FOR Vonlee to talk about the death of Don Rogers, especially what, in her view, actually happened inside 2090 Grenadier on that night. It was a tough conversation because Vonlee liked Don. Beyond a few personal issues with her own life, she had valued Don as a human being. She didn’t see Don as the angry husband in desperate need of controlling his wife. To the contrary, in those days before Don’s death, Vonlee was beginning to see Billie Jean as the domineering wife, addicted to gambling, pilfering her husband’s bank accounts and spending all of their retirement money. Those passes Don had made at her? Vonlee shrugged off as a lonely and drunk guy simply wanting some affection from the opposite sex, craving a woman’s attention that he wasn’t getting from his wife.

  Vonlee had indicated to Danny during dinner that Don might not have died the way in which her aunt said—that there was more to it. Thinking about it ever since Don’s death, Vonlee told her boyfriend, she was sick to her stomach. It was all she thought about. Spending Don’s money made Vonlee feel guilty. Vonlee wanted to leave and go back to Tennessee, but she felt she had to stay; Billie Jean didn’t want her to leave.

  “I felt sorry for her,” Vonlee later explained, referring to her aunt during this period. “I couldn’t believe that this person I had looked up to all my life had done something to her husband—and to me.”

  Billie Jean had a secret she wasn’t sharing, either.

  Vonlee was beginning to see that her aunt had invited her to Michigan to stay not as a thoughtful aunt looking to help out her niece, but perhaps so Billie Jean could, at the right moment, convince Vonlee to lie for her. Protect her. Provide an alibi Billie Jean might someday need.

  Maybe even help her with the deed.

  As far as Vonlee could tell, her aunt had a plan from the moment she walked into that Waffle House and convinced Vonlee to go back to Michigan with her.

  A plan that involved getting rid of Don.

  CHAPTER 22

  VONLEE AND DANNY NEVER finished dinner. They were out in the parking lot walking toward Billie Jean’s Cadillac. Soon as they sat inside the car, the only vehicle Vonlee and Billie Jean ever took to the casino, Danny started in on how he wanted a show-and-tell display. While Vonlee had been inside with Danny having dinner, letting him finally know about her manhood, teasing the idea that there was more to Don’s death than what people thought, her aunt was gambling the night away, entirely oblivious to what Vonlee was doing.

  “Show me,” Danny insisted.

  “No,” Vonlee said. She wasn’t some sort of sideshow or a carnival act. She was 99 percent female, just waiting to drum up the courage to go and get that final operation. She had her reasons why she had held off for so long—reasons that had nothing to do with the cost. But the “why” part of her decision was none of Danny’s damn business. He supposedly loves me, Vonlee thought. Well, here’s a test to how much.

  “Most guys, when they found out,” Vonlee explained, “didn’t have a problem with it.” Some had run, sure, but most were so impressed with Vonlee’s looks that they were willing to wait it out and be there when she got the final operation. And Vonlee expressed what had been a definitive feeling inside her all her life that there was never any question about who she was. This wasn’t a life crisis for her; she was a female. It was how she thought of herself. And everyone else that had known her thought of her that way, too.

  “I can remember when I was, like, five, six years old and I was playing with dolls and wanted to dress in female clothing and I would get Christmas gifts like the Tonka toys or something, and I would immediately want my sister’s Barbie dolls, instead. I’ve always just felt that way.”

  Vonlee never had a choice in the matter, according to her.

  She agreed to allow Danny to touch her “down there,” over her clothing.

  He leaned in and put his hand on her crotch.

  “But I didn’t . . . I didn’t feel anything,” Danny later said.

  Danny asked Vonlee about Don. If she wasn’t going to drop her pants and show him the goods, he wanted to hear about Don and what Billie Jean had supposedly done.

  Vonlee took a deep breath. It was time to come clean.

  “We got home that night”—Vonlee began, according to Danny’s later recollection of what was said inside the car on this night—“around eleven P.M. Don was lying on the floor in the kitchen, passed out.”

  It was getting chilly inside the car. Vonlee started it up and turned on the heat.

  Continuing, she explained to Danny (according to his later testimony) that her aunt had told everyone they had arrived home about 3:00 A.M., the cops even a little later. She had mixed up the times: one to Don’s family (11:00 P.M.) and the other to her friends and the police (3:00 A.M.).

  As they sat inside the car, Vonlee painted a somewhat vague picture of what happened next.1

  “We got to do it now,” Billie Jean said. She was standing over Don. They’d just come home from the casino.

  “What?”

  “It’s a good time right now,” Billie Jean continued. “He’s on the floor.”

  If this was what Billie Jean actually said, in terms of Danny’s choice of words to explain what Vonlee had allegedly told him, it would imply that there was a plan in place beforehand—premeditation. That one line—“It’s a good time”—would imply as much.

  “He’s on the floor,” Danny explained. “So [Vonlee] said they start pouring alcohol, vodka, in his mouth.”

  “Why are you wasting this good vodka on him?” Vonlee supposedly asked her aunt when she realized what Billie Jean was doing.

  “The way they [did] it was one of them would hold his nose [and] he cannot breathe, [so] he opens his mouth,” Danny said.

  “Let’s get some cheap vodka,” Vonlee allegedly told her aunt.

  “And he would not die,” Danny continued. “She said that he would not die. When they were doing that, she said . . . he was playing with [Vonlee’s] boobs.”

  “You’ve got to help me, Vonlee,” Billie Jean said at that point. “You need to help.”

  At this point, with Don on the floor still alive and breathing, but totally out of it, Billie Jean allegedly told Vonlee that she would “up the money from twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand.”

  Money?

  Danny gave the impression later that Vonlee said she and her aunt had made some sort of monetary agreement ahead of time: Billie Jean would pay Vonlee if she helped her kill Don.

  “If he wakes up tomorrow, Vonlee, he’ll know what we’ve done and there will be big trouble,” Billie Jean said. “We’ve got to do it right now!”

  As Danny later told this story in court, he explained how Vonlee, every time she tried to help her aunt, couldn’t bring herself to go through with it. She’d hold his nose, but when he gasped for air, she’d let go and back away, scared and unwilling to follow through with a deed she apparently wanted no part of doing.

  “I cannot do this, Billie. I just can’t.”

  According to Danny, Billie Jean then got really pissed off at her niece.

  “You’re no help.”

  Danny said Vonlee told him that her aunt then left the room in a huf
f and came back sometime later with something in her hands.

  A pillow.

  While they sat inside the car outside the restaurant in the casino parking lot, by using her upper body to dramatize what happened next, Vonlee supposedly explained and demonstrated to Danny that her aunt had placed the pillow over Don’s head and finished the job, suffocating her husband until he breathed no more.

  “We threw the pillow and the empty bottles of vodka on the freeway,” Vonlee told Danny. Vonlee was crying. She was upset. Yet, at the same time, she was quite relieved she’d gotten it off her chest.

  “Come on, let’s go back inside,” Danny suggested.

  As they walked toward the casino, Danny still felt that Vonlee might be lying about being a man. He had no idea why she would do such a thing, but based on what he had seen and the sex he’d had with her, it was hard for Danny to fathom that she was a male.

  They found Billie Jean by a craps table.

  “Give me some money,” Vonlee told her aunt.

  Danny stood by and watched as Billie Jean took out a bankroll, peeled off several hundred-dollar bills, then opened up a small notebook and marked inside how much she had given Vonlee, as if keeping tabs for some reason.

  The next day, Vonlee met Danny at his house.

  “Show me,” Danny said. He was back on the male/ female thing. It was clear he was serious.

  Vonlee felt she had no choice at this point. She dropped her pants.

  And he sat in total amazement, staring at a very small penis.

  “You believe me now?” Vonlee said, lifting her trousers back up.

  CHAPTER 23

  DANNY CHAHINE WAS AT home a day after he learned not only that he had been dating (and had had sex with) a man he mistakenly thought was a woman, but also what he believed to be the truth about Don Rogers’s death: the guy had been murdered.