“Fair enough,” Piszczatowski came back with, before looking down at his notes—this, mind you, as Dragovic finished another thought.
“So, you know, but how people drink and how people die in relation to their drinking habits is part of being able to put logically the things . . . ,” he trailed off, losing the thought. Then Dragovic added: “And there is some common sense missing in this matter.”
“Yeah—at least in your opinion? That’s all you’re giving us?”
Important point.
“My firm opinion, yes,” Dragovic concluded.
They continued the exchange, with Dragovic explaining what constituted a “drink” in the eyes of the ME’s office.
“Vodka will be in shots,” he said. “Measured by shots, because that’s what a drink is. . . .”
As they reached what would become the midway point of Piszczatowski’s cross, the defense attorney brought up burking. This led the two of them into a long discussion about the so-called injuries Don had sustained, each party disagreeing with the other how severe the injuries were and where they were located.
After that, “There is no science that predicts how the body will come to a rest” when it falls off a chair? Dragovic asked after realizing what Piszczatowski was trying to get at.
Was there any science explaining that the body would or would not cross the legs when coming to rest after a fall?
Dragovic said no.
This sort of agree-to-disagree banter went on and on, all morning long.
CHAPTER 69
IT’S ONE THING TO get a witness on the stand and have him admit that an autopsy is, at best, a conventionally opinionated science, with some “exactness” involved, as Dragovic put it to Piszczatowski. Yet, it’s quite another for both sides to disagree on just about every facet of a medical examiner’s findings in a case. And that’s what was going on here as Dragovic’s cross-examination testimony wound down during the late-morning session of December 4, 2001.
A particular bone of contention was the idea that all heavy drinkers are created unequally. Piszczatowski would not allow the idea any rest.
“And you don’t know for a certainty, to ‘exactness,’ because you can’t do a test on a person to say, ‘Mr. Rogers, why don’t you drink to a .44 and let’s see if you stay alive or you die?’ We can’t do that—that is inhumane, correct?”
“I would have never attempted to do that. But there were . . .”
“Okay,” Piszczatowski said, having a difficult time getting Dragovic to answer simply with a “yes” or a “no.”
Dragovic finished, anyway: “. . . some tests done and volunteers who have been exposed to drinking over many years and some inferences had been made. Yes.”
“And you don’t know what his coordination was at a. 44, is that correct?”
“I know that being significantly impaired—”
“No!” Piszczatowski said, cutting him off.
But as was his MO throughout, Dragovic continued, adding “. . . but to what degree, of course, you have to assess the person himself.”
Piszczatowski dropped his head. Then: “And you don’t know whether, based on your review of all the photos in this case, and whether based upon your experience and training in this case, that . . . it was common for Mr. Rogers to hold on to a banister that was located in that house. Do you know that fact? Or not?”
“A banister?”
“A banister, yes.”
“I do not see a . . . banister in the photos.”
Piszczatowski moved on. His point had been made.
Some point later, Dragovic said, without being prompted, “He did not fall, as a result of the appearance of his body, as a result of the constellation of things at the scene.... I do not know who placed Mr. Rogers’s body there in that position. That I don’t know. But I can tell you that I do not believe that he fell. There is no evidence whatsoever that he fell there.”
Vonlee Titlow, a name that rarely come up in this trial so far, had said, in her statement, that Don passed out and fell that night. Dragovic, apparently, did not have that information at his disposal when he made his analysis.
“Now,” Piszczatowski said, pressing forward, “is other than the things that you told us before, the discrepancies that emerged from the scene as being an altered one and the lack of the bruising, we went through all that stuff, were not going to do that . . .”
“We did?” Dragovic said with a smart tone.
“Is there anything about the lividity of Mr. Rogers that would indicate that he had been repositioned?”
“The lividity, as is there . . .”
Piszczatowski was now more than impatient. “If you can answer ‘yes’ or ‘no,’” he said with as much restraint as he could manage, “I would appreciate that. Is there anything about the lividity of Mr. Rogers that would tell you whether he had been repositioned?”
“No.”
They went back to the chair and its position on the floor as the courtroom seemingly took a collective sigh.
Then the crossed-legs argument once again and the alcohol levels.
Piszczatowski brought up a valid point when he asked the doctor if he could say with absolute certainty that the slight “injury” on Don’s lip was not, in fact, a common cold sore.
Dragovic said he couldn’t.
Maybe a cold sore that had healed? Piszczatowski mentioned.
“I suspect that it is, but I am not sure,” Dragovic answered.
Piszczatowski put the photos of the injury on the overhead projector and had the doctor point to it, repeating what he now thought.
The doctor seemed to be all over the place. First it was an injury sustained when Don’s “killer” placed a pillow over his face, a scrape of some type. Now it was an old cold sore.
Then Dragovic agreed that .44 was a level of alcohol in the blood that would be “sufficient” to cause death “in people that are not regularly exposed to alcohol,” which led to a discussion about “regular drinkers” and the difference between those who drank responsibly.
After saying he considered himself a “regular” drinker because he had a glass of wine each night after work, Dragovic brought up the notion of a “regular heavy drinker”—a category they both placed Don into. This was a person who “regularly consumes substantial amounts of alcohol.”
“Now, asphyxia is a diagnosis of exclusion. Is that correct?” Piszczatowski asked, finally getting them out of the alcohol discussion.
“Yes.”
“And you would agree that as a general principle, medical examiners have always, I think, said asphyxia is a diagnosis of exclusion. Would you agree with that statement?”
“Well, it is. It’s a diagnosis of exclusion on physical grounds, examining the body itself, but it also incorporates the circumstances.”
In other words, it had to be ruled out.
“And when you talk about a diagnosis of exclusion, one generally excludes competing causes of death as a medical examiner . . . by way of autopsy, correct?”
Piszczatowski looked down at his notes.
Dragovic added something: “That’s a helpful tool to demonstrate that there is nothing in the body. Yes.”
“And in this case, we didn’t have that benefit, correct?” Piszczatowski pointed out.
“That’s correct.”
“And were you able to exclude any other cause—possible causes of death in this case, medically? And by ‘medically,’ I mean via the external examination viewing or via autopsy . . . ?”
“Well, we talked about that earlier, about forensic pathology—not being sterile signs without sense. We talked about forensic pathology taking into consideration everything. Sure enough, it would have been nicer to have the body examined and have all the details there and show that, hey, there is nothing there—because in asphyxia, you don’t see anything in the body . . . [and] scientific principles are only applied with common sense. If they are applied without common sense, then medicine is no good fo
r anything.”
“So, in this case, though,” Piszczatowski said, again looking for that “yes” or “no” answer Dragovic seemed unable to give, “we did not rule out any competing causes or possible competing causes of death via either the external examination or an autopsy?”
“We did,” Dragovic said, surprisingly.
“Oh, ‘we did’? Which ones?”
“As a matter of fact . . . all of them that prompted that report I issued in December of 2000, sir.”
“You were able to rule out other competing causes? You were able to rule out all other competing causes of death?”
“Absolutely, to my satisfaction. Yes.”
“To your satisfaction?”
The exchange was becoming heated and tense.
“Yes, sir.”
“Because that’s all you can give us?” Piszczatowski reminded the doctor, with the jurors looking on with intensity.
“I’m a person. Only one.”
“I understand. And you were able to do that via looking at the scene, correct? The absence of a bruise on the head—correct?”
“The absence of injuries. Not only on the head, elsewhere on the body.”
“Okay. And . . .”
“Particular injuries,” Dragovic added. “Specific injuries.”
“And the statements that you received from the police?” Piszczatowski noted.
Dragovic clarified that the statements he received from the police had actually “prompted” him to “evaluate everything. I did not take statements from the police as something that is without question.” He claimed that he needed to “satisfy” his “conscience first and that’s why I went through the process of reviewing everything. And if it made sense, it made sense. If it didn’t make sense, it didn’t make sense.”
“Personally, Dr. Dragovic, I’m just curious. How many times have you declared an unnatural cause of death, where you actually had the body, without performing an autopsy?”
Good question.
“On a number of occasions,” Dragovic said, “when I had some adequate history, information about the circumstances. That’s more or less routine in certain instances.”
“But you reviewed autopsy finds in those cases, correct?”
“No, we’re not talking about autopsies. You said without autopsy.”
“Oh, okay. So, on a number of occasions, you have?”
“That’s right.”
“And did you have the body in all those cases that we talked about [during this trial]?”
“In some instances, yes. In other instances, it was not even a body.”
“But that was why I asked the question. When you don’t have a body, I understand that. But when you did have the body . . . how many times have you opined as to an unnatural cause of death, without autopsy?”
“It’s a regular occurrence. If there are injuries occurring in a person . . .” Dragovic stopped himself. Then: “Did you want me to explain?”
“No,” Piszczatowski said, and then he asked the doctor if he had any research that could back up what he was saying.
“I probably have . . . yeah.”
Piszczatowski asked him to get it.
“In the year 2001, there was one case of homicide that did not involve autopsy,” Piszczatowski explained, going back to what he and the doctor had discussed the previous day. “Were you involved in that case? Do you know?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay. Did you have the body in that case?”
“Yes.”
“And in the year 2000, that would be this case. There were none in ’99. There were none in ’98. There was one in ’97. Do you know if you had the body in that case?”
“We had the body, possibly. But—”
Piszczatowski put up his hand like a traffic cop for Dragovic to stop. “Thank you.”
But Dragovic continued: “I might not have been involved. Sure, it’s a routine. . . .”
“‘Routine’?” Piszczatowski questioned.
“And I can explain that, too.”
Piszczatowski asked the doctor how many autopsies in the year 2000 the ME’s office performed.
“Probably about eight hundred fifty or so. I don’t know. I’m guessing. Maybe nine hundred. Maybe.”
“Okay,” Piszczatowski said, clearly heading toward a conclusion of some sort. “And do you know many of those . . . involved . . . homicides?”
“Well, I’ll have to check the statistics.”
“Okay.”
The doctor took a moment to look at the research provided by the APA.
“We are fairly low on homicides in Oakland County. It’s not like when I worked in Wayne County, we had seven hundred homicides a year, you know. This is different.”
“And is eight hundred fifty kind of a standard number?” Piszczatowski wondered. “I mean, is that about what you had? Is that an average number—seven hundred to eight hundred autopsies a year?”
“That’s within the reasonable variation there, depending on caseload and things that happen.”
“Okay. Thank you.”
Piszczatowski looked at the judge, asked for a minute, and then quickly ran through a checklist he had in his hand, making sure he covered every base.
A moment later, the defense attorney stated, “Thank you, Your Honor. I don’t have any other questions.”
Though APA Skrzynski gave the doctor a chance to clarify anything he wanted to on redirect, which lasted about seven additional minutes, Piszczatowski’s argument here was well-established by the questions he asked and answers Dragovic ultimately gave: The medical examiner’s findings, at least in Don’s case, were subjective—completely open to argument by other experts. There was no objective science in this particular case. And if a jury, Piszczatowski was no doubt hoping, could not come to an agreement on a cause and manner of death, well, how in the hell were they supposed to find the defendant guilty of the same crime?
CHAPTER 70
FOR THE REMAINDER OF day two, financial experts tried to lessen the widening gap in that kill-him-for-his-money motive the APA had been trying to prove. Amy Mouradian, a Bank One employee, and Randall Pan-gretic, a Merrill Lynch retirement advisor, looked at charts, graphs and financial documents presented by the state. The message was that Don had some money and Billie Jean spent it recklessly and generously before and after his death—mostly on stupid, worthless stuff, like clothes she didn’t need, gambling, drinking, cigarettes, dinners, and cars. The downside here for Billie Jean—if there even was one—became that the documents showed she was the estate’s main beneficiary when Don died. The upside, on the other hand, was that she had been spending her husband’s money long before he was dead. She had set her own precedent. All this testimony did, in the end, was drizzle more reasonable doubt into an overflowing pool. Okay, so the woman liked to spend her husband’s money on luxury items, liked to piss it away at the casino, she bought a few cars after he died, and she continued that behavior without seemingly having grieved for the loss.
Still, none of it proved Billie Jean was a killer.
* * *
After those two witnesses, Danny Chahine walked into the courtroom. Danny was dressed nicely in dark slacks and a dress shirt, his hair combed slickly back, a large flashy watch and several expensive-looking rings sparkling in the court’s modest lighting. Billie Jean did not know this man more than seeing him at the casino and once in a while with Vonlee at the house. Danny was there to talk about his conversations with Vonlee, a third party in all of this.
At forty-one years old, Danny had learned many lessons. Yet, the most predominant piece of life education on his mind as he began to talk about his background was undoubtedly the notion that nothing was what it seemed in this case. Everything had a gloss over it, some type of sheen shielding the truth just underneath.
A jeweler from Lebanon, who was running his own shop here in the United States, Danny explained how he had met Billie Jean and Vonlee at the casino. But it was many
months later before he learned the big secret—Vonlee was a man.
The APA got this out of the way quickly.
“But in [midsummer] 2000, you didn’t think so?”
“No.”
They talked about the “relationship” Danny and Vonlee had “formed” throughout that summer.
For the most part, Danny said, they went out to the casino, gambled and had nice, romantic dinners.
The APA had Danny talk through his issues with the law: possession of cocaine, a case that was dismissed; Danny lying to immigration about his citizenship status; a second cocaine possession charge that stuck.
It was Vonlee—or “Nicole,” as the APA referred to her—that called Danny to tell him Don had died. A day after she called, Danny went over to the house. He saw Billie Jean on that evening. He said she wasn’t crying and didn’t seem to be upset. This was striking to him, because he would have been sad, had his spouse just died. He couldn’t understand why Billie Jean wasn’t torn up and crying over the death of her husband.
One thing Danny made clear was that Billie Jean and Vonlee were at the casino in those days after Don had died, and Danny thought this to be in bad taste. And two or three days after Don’s death, Danny said, he wound up selling the widow a few thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry. Another red flag to him, one indicating she wasn’t acting “normal.”
Within just a few minutes of them talking back and forth, the APA asked Danny the most important question he was called as a witness to answer. APA Skrzynski set it up by explaining how Danny and Vonlee had dinner at the casino one night. As Vonlee ordered a bottle of vino, she told Danny she had a secret and wanted desperately to share.
“Well, she started telling me that she wants to tell me the truth about everything,” Danny began, adding that Vonlee had first made him “promise” he would not be upset and would not leave her after she divulged her so-called secret. “And I was like wondering what’s going on. . . .” So he promised Vonlee he would not leave or be mad. “And she started telling me that she’s not really a woman. She was a man. And I did not believe her, because of what I seen. It doesn’t match of what she’s talking about.... I did not believe she was man . . . and then she kept telling me what happened at the Rogers residence, how Rogers really died.”
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