Word: morgans
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
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...
...Still, Morgan says he doesn't buy into the idea "that Bud Billings brought this on himself." He points to the fact that Bud and Melanie "opened their home and fortunes" to their adopted brood as proof of their charitable side. But even that admirable domestic picture has come under scrutiny in the murder's wake: Billings, who was arrested in 1989 for adoption fraud, tried earlier this decade to copyright his adopted children's names in a bizarre scheme to extract money from Florida's Department of Children & Family Services. He had also recently thrown two of his teen...
...Morgan insists that if his department ultimately "can't prove a conspiracy, we'll drop it immediately. But as long as there are believable threads there, I have to pursue them. You can't have that kind of collective element operating in your community if it's true." Many Pensacola residents - including journalist Rick Outzen, who first broke the murder-for-hire story on his blog last month - now agree with him. Meanwhile, another friend whom Gonzalez tried unsuccessfully to recruit for the July 9 robbery told police the alleged killer "always acts like he's a thug, you know...