Charmin' Billy

"He just stood next to [Angie] and put it in her mouth, and she inhaled. Then he took it back out, and then a few minutes later he asked her if she wanted a whole one, and if she could smoke it without her hands. She said yes.

"And then I think he retaped my mouth after he let me have some of his cigarette. He taped it very tight, tighter than it was at the other point in the night."

"Tight enough to hurt?" Tingle asks.

"It was uncomfortable, yes," she replies. "And so then he said he was going to get a treat for his cat."

It was about 11 p.m. Neal had been sitting in a white plastic patio chair next to the mattress. He got up and walked past Angela, disappearing from Suzanne's sight.

Suddenly, he reappeared behind Angie. In his half-raised hands was a long-handled splitting maul -- half ax, half sledgehammer. "Then I saw him hit Angie," Suzanne sobs. Her family, Angie's family and the other victims' families cry out as well.

In a flash, Neal brought the maul crashing down into Angie's skull. She fell to the side, but he struck her again and again, six times, before the young woman on the mattress could turn her terrified eyes from the gruesome scene.

Then, as if he'd finished some chore, Neal calmly walked away. He returned without the ax and stooped to pick something up. At the first blow, the cigarette Angie had been smoking had popped from her mouth and onto the floor. Now Neal settled into the chair next to the mattress to finish smoking it.

Suzanne could hear Angie's blood splashing onto the wood floor -- not one drop at a time, but like water pouring from a pan. Neal got up and placed a blanket under Angie's head "so you don't have to hear that," he said, and sat back down.

Angie had been saying things she wasn't supposed to, he explained. That's why he'd done what he had to do. "You see how calm and smooth I am," he boasted. "Bet you didn't know that was coming."

After he finished Angie's cigarette, Neal stood and undressed. He left his shirt on but removed his pants, underwear and boots. He came over to the mattress and untied one of Suzanne's hands. Then, laying down next to her, he made her manually stimulate his penis.

When he tired of that, he untied her other hand and her feet. Pointing a small-caliber handgun at her, he went and stood just behind the lifeless body of Angie Fite, slumped over but still held into the chair by the duct tape. He ordered Suzanne to kneel next to Angie, "maybe about a foot, if that" close, and then take his penis into her mouth.

At the defense table, Neal shakes his head. "He was holding the gun to my head, and I asked him if I was going to die," Suzanne cries. "He asked if I wanted to die. I said no."

"How was he holding the gun to your head?" Tingle asks. He knows this is hard on her, but they've got to see it through to the end.

Suzanne lifts her left hand and points it like a gun to her temple. "Like right here," she says.

"Could you see that gun?"

"No."

"Could you feel it?"

"Yes, I could feel it."

Suzanne says she will never forget the feeling of a gun barrel pressed against her head, with her face just inches from the body of a dead woman, being raped orally. When he tired of that torment, Neal took her back to the mattress and finished raping her.

He tied her up again, this time binding her legs together and securing one wrist to an eyebolt; the other hand he left free. "Then he sat, and he watched TV. He asked me if I knew what the movie was, and I didn't. He said it was something like Portrait of a Serial Killer."

The longer Suzanne testifies, the more her courage comes through. The spectators in the gallery are crying louder than she is. Those who haven't heard the story gasp when she says she asked Neal for a blanket to cover her nakedness and then, after he'd complied, invited him to come sit next to her on the mattress.

"I just wanted to have him next to me so that I knew that he couldn't sneak up on me," Suzanne explains. "He sat with me all the rest of the time that we were there."

"All night long?" Tingle asks, although he knows the answer.

"Yes."

"Did you hold his hand?" he asks.

Suzanne nods, unable to speak at first.

"Why did you do that?"

Her answer suddenly pours out. "Because I thought even if I fell asleep, that I would feel him move his hand so that I could wake up and I would see what he was doing so he couldn't sneak up on me like he snuck up on Angie."

The only time they got up off the mattress was when she had to use the bathroom upstairs. That itself another terror -- she'd never seen the "others," but she'd heard something, and Neal had warned her. Now he did so again. "He told me not to ever look to my left...because those people were there, and they didn't like to be looked at."

Neal stood guard outside the bathroom door while she went in. After she'd finished, he took her back down to the mattress, tying one wrist to an eyebolt and holding her other hand in his. The television stayed on all night. At least, she thinks it did; she might somehow have dozed off.

In the morning, Neal untied Suzanne and let her go to the bathroom to change her clothes. Then they left the townhouse in Holberton's Toyota truck and drove to her apartment.

Once there, he moved quickly, picking up all the cordless telephones and Suzanne's cellular phone, checking the bathroom to make sure there wasn't another phone in there. Then he let her go in and shower. "He said that we still had to go places," she remembers, so she dressed and dried her hair. "Then he told me not to unpack anything, because it still had to look like we had gone on this trip and that we were coming back."

Later, Neal changed his mind. "He even remarked what a good packer I was and that I had packed really well for this trip."

They left again. Neal was hungry, so they went to a restaurant, where he ordered himself a drink and Suzanne a beer, then insisted they both order lunch.

"Do you have words that you could use to describe your mental state, Suzanne?" Tingle asks.

She hesitates. "I kept expecting...I kept thinking that Angie was going to move. I kept thinking that person that I saw, they were going to move. I just kept thinking that somehow this wasn't true."

They spent the afternoon shopping, buying cigarettes for the both of them, Tums for Neal's indigestion and Nyquil for his cough. He drove to Southwest Plaza, where he bought a tape recorder at a Radio Shack, then on to Blockbuster Video, where he had Suzanne rent The Jackal, a movie about an international assassin. He picked that one, Suzanne says, "because Beth was always asking what he did for a living, and he thought that movie was the only thing that could describe what he did for a living good enough."

They returned to the women's apartment and called Beth at work, to tell her about the trip to Las Vegas. "How good it was, and I think we asked when she was going to be home," Suzanne says.

When Beth arrived, they watched the movie. Neal was "being like himself, you know, he was not acting strange at all...He had promised me that once the movie was over, that we would tell Beth what happened.

"So after the movie was done, we went to sit at the kitchen table, and he had me start to explain to Beth." Suzanne pauses, shakes her head slightly. "I really couldn't explain, so he finished telling her what happened."

In the gallery, Beth sits with her head bowed, holding the hand of her fiancé.

Later that night, Neal got out his new tape recorder and, sitting at the kitchen table with the women, began making a rambling, nearly two-hour confession. As he spoke, he took the gun from his waistband and placed it on the table.

Suzanne isn't sure how long she and Beth were forced to sit and listen to him recount his reign of terror, but at last she was allowed to go to her room. She shut the door and turned on her television, hoping to go to sleep. But sleep, if it came, was fitful...haunted. When morning came, she tried to stay in bed as long as possible "so I wouldn't have to go out into the living room."

Neal had to go out. He was leaving the women alone, but threatened that they had better not call anybody or do anything, "because if he got caught or somebody found out, more people were going to die." That was enough to terrorize them into compliance.

Suzanne wasn't totally cowed, however. She gathered up all the clothes and anything else she'd had with her at the townhouse and put it all in a plastic bag. She then hid the bag in her closet. She told Beth that if anything happened to her, she should give the bag to somebody -- it contained important evidence.

Otherwise, Suzanne and Beth didn't talk much. "We both just kind of wandered around our apartment aimlessly."

"What was going through your mind about those threats?"

"Just that he meant it," Suzanne says. "I didn't think that he would hesitate at all to hurt me or to hurt Beth. It just seemed like whatever we could think of to do to get help wouldn't work...wouldn't work good enough or fast enough."

Before they could come up with a plan, Neal returned. He told them that they could summon a male friend over to the apartment if that would make them feel more comfortable. "If we had one choice, who would we pick to come over and be with us, that we could trust...and wasn't going to try to come in and, you know, get rid of Cody."

One name leaped to both of their minds: David Cain, a 34-year-old friend of Beth's.

Beth called and invited Cain over. When he arrived, he was confronted by a gun-bearing Neal, who told him it was his choice, stay or leave, "but if he left...there was going to be consequences to everybody involved.

"Dave chose to stay with me and Beth," Suzanne says. "Then we all sat down at the kitchen table again, and Cody played that tape that he made the night before. He played that for Dave so that Dave would know what was going on."

They all spent the night together. Neal wasn't through partying. He made Cain drive him and the women to a strip club, where he complained loudly about the weakness of his rum and Coke. They stayed until closing.

The next morning was Wednesday, July 8. Neal began making plans. For days, he had been saying he was going to leave and find a place to commit suicide. "On Monday he said that he was going to leave. On Tuesday he said that he was going to leave. On Wednesday he said the same thing...that he was going to leave."

And finally, he did leave -- but not before giving out explicit instructions on what each person was to do after he was gone. Suzanne was to call 911 and tell the police what had happened. After she called, the three were to go outside and sit on the front lawn of the apartment complex.

"He said he was afraid for Dave, because if Dave was in the apartment...the police would think that Dave was actually a suspect, and he didn't want to get Dave hurt."

When the police arrived, Beth was to give them Neal's pager number and a message regarding what time to call. Then he was gone.

But the plan fell apart as soon as Suzanne called the police. She didn't want to go sit outside; she thought it might be a trick, another Neal "surprise." He might shoot them on the lawn.

Although Neal had given them specific instructions not to call anyone else, Cain had used Beth's cell phone to make a call. "It was just scary, because I didn't know if he was going to be able to know that we called somebody else or that we were not following his instructions just right."

The police arrived quickly. "Beth and I were basically hysterical...and I don't know that we were making sense to anybody. Dave was still on the phone, and so it was very chaotic when they first got there."

At last it was over. And at last Suzanne has told her horrible story, sitting just a few feet from the face of her nightmares.

Tingle has just one more image he wants to leave with the judges. Neal had driven Suzanne past the townhouse on that first day after they left West Chenango Drive. "We had gone by it...and he said we may have to go back inside just this once," she says. "I just begged him again and asked if he would please not make me go back into that house."

"Can you tell us what was going through your mind when you drove by there?"

"It was scary because, I mean, there wasn't anybody there...The police weren't there at that time, and each time he drove by it, I was very afraid that I was going to have to go back inside, and I didn't want to see what was inside again...and I was afraid if I went back inside that I wouldn't come back out."

As she speaks, Tingle shuffles through his photographs. Finding the one he seeks, he places it on the overhead so that it appears on monitors around the courtroom. It's a photograph of a beautiful, smiling young woman.

"Who is that?" Tingle asks.

"That's Angie," she answers softly.

The prosecution's turn ends. Judge Woodford asks Neal if he has any questions. Suzanne freezes. If he chooses to question her, she will have to look at him.

"Your honor, I do not," Neal says.

Next week: The judges' decision.