COUPLE WHO ADOPTED 12 CHILDREN SLAIN

[Bailey]

Suspect Thornton details carnage that took place inside house

Kris Wernowsky • kwernowsky@pnj.com • October 21, 2009

Five days after Byrd and Melanie Billings were shot to death inside their Beulah home, Frederick Lee Thornton Jr. described to investigators a robbery that went horribly awry.

Thornton, 19, of Fort Walton Beach told officers that the ringleader, Leonard Patrick Gonzalez Jr., said the Billingses' home contained a safe with $13 million in it.

For participating in the lucrative snatch-and-grab, Thornton's payday would be $100,000.

Thornton wanted that money for his family, he told investigators. He was a low-level player, he insisted.

The murders, he said, were unexpected.

"I know I'm going down for it, but I don't want to go down for something I didn't know that he was going to do," Thornton said in the hour-long interview on July 14.

"I didn't know that they were going to shoot him. I thought he was going to get the money and that was it."

The State Attorney's Office released 36 compact discs of evidence this week. The interview with Thornton is contained on one of the CDs.

In volumes of investigative paperwork, Gonzalez Jr. is described by friends and relatives as a teller of tall tales.

But Thornton believed Gonzalez Jr. when he claimed that the safe contained $13 million in cash.

In reality, it contained less than $200,000. And, as it turned out, the robbers grabbed a second safe that didn't contain any money at all.

Thornton is one of seven people charged with first-degree murder in the Billinges' deaths. Five are accused of entering the house while two stayed outside.

The state is seeking the death penalty against four of the five who went in, including Thornton. The fifth is a teenager, Rakeem Florence, who is ineligible for the death penalty because he is a minor.

Gonzalez Jr., 35, of Gulf Breeze was the sole shooter, according to several participants, including his co-defendant and father, Leonard Gonzalez Sr., 56, and co-defendants Wayne Coldiron, 41, and Thornton.

Gonzalez Jr. recruited several participants from a Fort Walton Beach car detailing shop called Fifth Dimension. Thornton got involved because he lived across the street from the shop.

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'The whole truth' Thornton came to the July 14 interview with a different version of the story, something he and Florence concocted.

He first told homicide investigators Lee Tyree and Rusty Hoard that he and Florence waited in the van while the other men entered the house to buy marijuana.

But Tyree told Thornton that the Billingses' extensive security surveillance system captured him on video. The security system was installed to help track the couple's nine adopted children, most of them severely disabled.

"We see you on the video so we know that you didn't shoot those people," Tyree told Thornton. "Don't come halfway. If you're going to tell us the truth, let's tell the whole truth."

But Thornton was reluctant.

He told investigators that Gonzalez Jr. said after the shootings that, if anyone said anything about what happened, "he was going to kill us and our family."

In his own interviews with deputies, Gonzalez Jr. claimed that the slaying had been murder-for-hire with connections to the Mexican mafia.

Tyree sought to set Thornton at ease by calling those claims nothing but talk.

"I know he's told you this big old line of story about how they're going to come after you and your family and all of this," Tyree said., "Let me tell you, I don't believe it for a minute that he's connected like he's saying he's connected."

Gonzalez Jr. implicated

Thornton then opened up.

He described the rehearsal of the robbery inside Gonzalez Sr.'s trailer in the 300 block of Palm Court.

He described the surveillance photographs Gonzalez Jr. took of the Billingses' home.

He described entering the left-most door to the sprawling home and what happened inside.

Thornton said he saw Gonzalez Jr. fire a gunshot into the floor near a startled Byrd Billings.

The shot startled Thornton, too. He'd never heard a gun fired before.

Amid the commotion, Thornton returned to the van driven by Gonzalez Sr. to retrieve a camouflage bag meant to bring the money from the house to the van.

When he returned to the house, Thornton stumbled across Byrd Billings' body in the entrance of the couple's master bedroom.

He peered down the hallway and saw Gonzalez Jr. fire a 9mm pistol again.

The shot killed Melanie, investigators said.

"We realized we got ourselves into something we didn't want to be in," Thornton said.

As the interview concluded, Hoard asked Thornton one more question: "Don't you feel better that you talked about this?"

Thornton paused.

"I haven't been able to sleep. Period," he said.

"You just got messed up into something that's bigger than you and bigger than me," Hoard said.


http://www.pnj.com/article/20091021/NEWS01/910210338

[Bailey]

Kris Wernowsky • kwernowsky@pnj.com • November 13, 2009

All James Maulden wanted was his motorcycle and a divorce.

He got both.

A deputy led Maulden’s estranged wife, Pamela Long Wiggins, into the courtroom this morning. Dressed in a lime-green jumpsuit issued to her at the Escambia County Jail, Long Wiggins appeared unaffected when a judge granted her a divorce from one of her two husbands during a hearing at the M.C. Blanchard Judicial Building.

Long Wiggins, 47, is one of eight people arrested in connection with the July 9 murders of Byrd and Melanie Billings in their Beulah home. She and Maulden married in May 2007 in Baldwin County, Ala. The couple separated in October of that same year.

As is the standard procedure in a divorce proceeding, Maulden’s attorney Edward Seitz asked his client if his marriage was “irretrievably broken.”

“Oh, yes,” said the 57-year-old Bay Minette, Ala., man.

Long Wiggins only answered a few simple, routine questions Allen asked.

In addition to her charge of accessory after the fact to first-degree murder, a charge that carries a potential 30-year prison sentence, Long Wiggins faces a single count of bigamy. If convicted, the third-degree felony carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

She married Hugh Wiggins on Dec. 31, 2008, in Okaloosa County. He became a key witness in the early part of the investigation into the Billings killings. Authorities say Wiggins helped his wife take guns linked to the shootings to Mississippi, but he has not been charged with a crime to date. The State Attorney’s Office gave him limited immunity for his statements.

Wiggins and her attorney Bruce Miller are scheduled to appear at a pretrial conference Dec. 4 before Circuit Judge John Brown in Okaloosa County. The bigamy charges originated from Okaloosa County; that is where Hugh and Pam Wiggins filed a marriage certificate with the Clerk of Courts office.


http://www.pnj.com/article/20091113/NEWS01/91113005

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