Free Needle Work: Battery Acid, Heroin, and Double Murder by Fred Rosen Page B

middle-class white father and upbringing by taking up with a black man.
    At six feet tall and 468 pounds, Jessie was a big, proud black man. To Carol, he was the father she never had. To Jessie, Carol was the daughter he wanted. Their own personal neuroses fit together nicely.
    Jessie managed Carol like she was his daughter. Though they didn’t marry until 1993, Carol would eventually function not only as his wife but also as his business associate.
    Jessie worked in maintenance at Mercy Hospital in Pontiac, but that was his day job; the vocation that netted him the easy money was dealing drugs. According to Carol, she helped out on some of his business dealings, going so far as to sleep with clients to cement deals. The latter is not an uncommon occurrence in drug-dealing circles.
    If she had any sense of self, Carol would have bailed. But her sense of self had apparently been destroyed by incest. In turn, incest had left her with a strong sense of survival. Carol did what she needed to get by from day to day.
    And sex was different. If Jessie got on top of her and started pumping, all that weight would crush her chest. She wouldn’t be able to breathe.
    So they made love … carefully.
    Carol and Jessie had two children. Jesseca was born in 1990. Then came Jesse, nicknamed “L’il Man,” born two years later in 1992. By all accounts, Carol was a good mother. The kids, of course, didn’t help the marriage. They never do when a marriage is built on unfulfilled childhood desires.
    As the years went by, Jessie’s health deteriorated. His unchecked obesity led to diabetes, and circulation and heart problems. He suffered through a heart attack and a stroke. Eventually he was forced to leave his day job and go on disability.
    Between his health and his weight, Jessie became bedridden. He looked like a beached whale under the cover of their bed. Reduced to playing nursemaid, Carol delivered Jessie’s injections every day. It was her responsibility to make sure he got the proper amount of insulin to keep his disease in check. She also had to administer his other medications.
    As Jessie’s health failed, so did their marriage.
    Jessie kept bothering her, telling her what to do, what to say, what to think. Sure, everyone that met him liked him. Jessie was charming with company. But when the door closed at midnight, he became a dictator.
    Carol was an attractive twenty-six-year-old blonde, tall, slim, with a damn good body and a sweet smile. Attractive designer glasses framed her eyes. She was vibrant, alive. She wanted to be with someone who, like her, wanted to enjoy life in big gulps. Instead, she gave injections to a husband who treated her like a daughter.
    She had married her father, or a man like him, who abused her, if not physically, then emotionally. Because of her childhood problems, she wasn’t aware how she had set herself up for the marriage to fail. But that’s exactly what was happening.
    Eventually, Carol and Jessie fought all the time. Every little word they said to each other started an argument. Jessie was always telling her what to do and she hated it. Jessie just didn’t understand that she wasn’t his daughter.
    Probably, Jessie didn’t care. He had his drug business to be concerned about. And he was upwardly mobile. He wanted to move away from Pontiac, a middle-class/working-class area twenty miles northwest of Detroit, a place best known for a white elephant of an indoor football stadium, the Silverdome. The goal was to relocate south, to one of the more affluent Detroit suburbs.
    Jessie Giles had an incredible amount of nerve. But not just ordinary nerve—abject nerve. The kind of nerve you need when you’re a drug dealer and decide to set up shop within eyeshot of police headquarters.
    That’s exactly what Jessie Giles had done.
    In the summer of 1997, Jessie moved his family south, into the fancy suburb of West Bloomfield. The home he chose was a quarter of a mile down Walnut Lake Road from