Word: gonzalez
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Which makes the sheriff more inclined to believe that Gonzalez - who is charged with shooting Byrd "Bud" Billings and his wife Melanie in their spacious home as he and six others allegedly robbed it the night of July 9 - was hired to commit the murder by resentful local business rivals. In police documents released this week, Gonzalez says one used-car dealer, Henry "Cab" Tice, told him that he and other dealers wanted the 66-year-old Billings "whacked" and asked him to do the job. (Gonzalez claims he refused - although he boasted to police, without offering details, that...
...other males - including Gonzalez's father, an Air Force sergeant and a 16-year-old - have also been charged with capital murder as well as home invasion and, like Gonzalez, have pleaded not guilty. (The teen has been charged as an adult but will not face the death penalty.) An eighth defendant, a woman charged as an accessory to the murder for allegedly providing a van used in the crime, has also pleaded not guilty. But investigators say Gonzalez's accomplices have fingered him as the sole gunman - and add that while they'd been lured by his promise...
Morgan says "the one common thread" now expressed by Gonzalez's co-defendants, as well as their friends and family members, is a fear of being whacked themselves by figures who they believe contracted Gonzalez to organize the break-in and shooting. Making the investigation more baroque is the $20,000 that Tice, hoping to save his struggling car business, recently borrowed from people he says turned out to be "Mexican mafia" and wanted their money back more quickly, and at higher interest, than he could handle. The shadow of organized crime retribution, real or imagined, is another oft-mentioned...
Tice, a former employer of Gonzalez and one of his karate students, telephoned Gonzalez the night of the murders (for computer help, he told police) and again the next morning. Morgan admits that's not enough at the moment to bring conspiracy charges against Tice or any of the other car dealers who Gonzalez told police "just did not like Billings at all" and who described the deceased as a loan shark. But the sheriff believes "the pieces are coming together." Billings, like his competitors, many of whom owed him money, inhabited a Florida panhandle business world that resembled...
...Gonzalez was one person Billings didn't loan money to. Gonzalez's wife Tabitha told police that Billings once donated $5,000 to their nonprofit program to teach people self-defense, but he refused them a loan to save their martial arts studio, which later went under. According to Tabitha, she and Gonzalez have six children...