Word: morgane
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...always blowing smoke up everybody's tail about, you know, 'I got this going on, we're gonna make some money,' da-da-da." As a result, "it would be easy to dismiss Gonzalez as a lying con man, which he is for the most part," notes David Morgan, sheriff of Escambia County in Florida's northwestern panhandle, who says he has heard some tall tales from Gonzalez since he was arrested. "But sadly there are instances in his life when his boasting had elements of truth...
...wealthy but bitter divorcee who lives near Pensacola. He said she hired him as a gumshoe to trail her ex-husband around the country and dig up anything illegal in his life that she could use to get him arrested. Gonzalez never uncovered anything incriminating; but the story, says Morgan, actually checks out. (See the top 10 unsolved crimes...
...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 he's taken part in other murders for hire.) Morgan tells TIME he expects to make more arrests soon in a homicide case that's become shocking and sordid enough to recall Truman Capote's In Cold Blood - and one that has orphaned the Billings' 17 children, 13 of them adopted and most with disabilities like Down Syndrome...
Tice denies involvement in any conspiracy, insisting to a Pensacola television station this week that he "never wanted any harm to come to Bud or Melanie." Still, Morgan says Tice and "three or four other people" remain "persons of interest" in the investigation. Tice, 63, a former business partner of Billings, has acknowledged that he "hated Billings" and that they had a rancorous falling out over thousands of dollars Tice owed Billings' loan company, Worldco. (Tice, in fact, has been charged with grand theft after Billings turned him in last year for allegedly writing Worldco $17,000 in bounced checks...
...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...