Fatal Fortune: Byrd & Melanie Billings

0:00 Hey everyone, and welcome back to Exposed Scandalous Files of the Elite. I am your host, Jim Chapman, and today I am bringing you a brand new episode in the Fatal Fortune series. Now we're going to be going to Escambia County, Florida for this one. And a little bit about Escambia County, it is very well known if you're from my neck of the woods in South Louisiana, really anywhere on the Gulf Coast. It is home to Pensacola Beach, Florida, which is a vacation destination for nearly three million travelers per year. Escambia County is so popular in the South in fact, as a travel destination that it's known as the Redneck Riviera. Now, although the Escambia County area is known for its beautiful beaches, it's not without its share of high profile cases. The Blue Moon murders occurred in the Pensacola Beach area. Ted Bundy was captured in Escambia County, so it's definitely had its share of high profile cases. Now, the area where this particular crime took place was in an area of Pensacola known as Bulah, which would be considered kind of a rural area of Pensacola, a very affluent area as well. They had almost no crime in this area of Pensacola, just a very quiet and nice place.

1:30 So you can imagine the shock when police entered the home of Bird and Melanie Billings. This was on July ninth of two thousand and nine, and they find this couple shot to death. So who did it, why did they do it, and what happened. That's exactly the questions that I'm going to answer for you today. And to do that, I need to give you a little history on this now murdered couple, and it really is the tale of several different lives. I'm going to start with Bird Billings. And bird Billings actually went by the nickname Bud, and Bud was sixty six years old at the time of his murder, and he was wealthy. Bud was known as a guy who just kind of always found his way to success. He was born and raised in Mississippi, and in nineteen seventy six he actually started a boat company in the state of Mississippi. In the eighties, he was a successful used car dealer there and eventually he made his way to Florida. Now, during all this time, he had a couple of marriages and divorces. He even owned a couple of strip clubs believe it or not in the nineties in Florida. But his third triumph marriage was the charm for him. He married Melanie Billings, who was twenty three years his junior. She was forty three years old at the time of her murder. So eventually

3:02 Bud leaves the strip club business behind him and he opens up several used car dealerships with in house financing, and he becomes very, very wealthy in the area. Now he and his wife live on what some considered the premier property in the area. It was thirteen acres, huge, multi story home. Life was great for these people. Now. Melanie Billings, she by all accounts, was just an amazing human being, and her passion and purpose in life was adopting children, and Bud he shared in that passion, and together they adopted thirteen children. But to tell you how awesome these people were, they specifically sought out special needs children because they knew these children would maybe find a little tougher road to finding a family to adopt them.

4:03 And they were just obviously very patient people and very special people to do that. Thirteen children at the time of their death. That's how amazing this couple was. So on July ninth of two thousand and nine, it was one of those children that called police and reported that Melanie and Bird Billings have been shot. So police and detectives they show up on the scene this massive property, this home that is secluded in many ways from the main road, and they enter that home and the first thing that they note is both the side door, the front door, and the back door had been forced open kicked in presumably. So as soon as they step into the living room, they start seeing a lot of blood and they know something ain't right. They follow that blood trail and they fine Bird Bud Billings face down in the bedroom. His hands they are zip tied, and they notice a single gunshot wound in his head area, and they also noticed two gunshot wounds in his leg areas. Now, Melanie Billings, she is found in a hallway facing toward a bathroom. She's found face up and she has multiple gunshot wounds to the head and chest. Both Melanie and Bud were dead when police arrived. So at this point,

5:37 not only do you have an active crime scene in which two people are dead, but you also have thirteen children in this residence with special needs that you now have to deal with and speak with. Police found children hiding under beds, they found children hiding in closet, you name it. And police they got to secure this crime scene. They got to make sure the bad guys are going, They've got to interview these poor children. Just a really difficult crime scene right off the bat to work. Now, think about this. These children were in the house when all of this went down, and it's important to mention that, thankfully, by the grace of God, none of these children were physically hurt. Definitely some mental squares there that I am absolutely sure lasted throughout their lives, but physically, thank god, none of them were shot. So police start investigating and they learned this is a very prominent couple in the area, a very wealthy couple. There was an enormous police presence on the scene as soon as this gut called out.

6:52 As I told you, this is not a normal thing in that area of Escambia County. Detectives start looking for evidence of what happened, and they find two nine millimeters shellcasings in the living room area and ten spent shellcasings in the bedroom and in the bedroom hallway. This particular house was so large even the master bedroom had a hallway. So they start recovering these projectiles from these bullets, and y'all, a projectile is the part of the bullet that pierces the body and causes the damage. They photograph every square inch of this massive house. And as I said earlier, there were three points of entry and those doors were kicked in to gain entry to the home. And so that was a big clue to police because now they knew there were definitely multiple assailants. They start interviewing the children, and one child in particular shocked detectives when she told them, hey, I saw the assailants pull up to the house. So she lived on the second story, that's where her bedroom was, and she told police that a red van pulled up all the way to the front door and several people got out. Police also noticed near the body of Melanie Billings there was a small linen closet, and they look inside of this small linen closet and they noticed there

8:24 are four indentions in the carpet. Now, to leave these indentions. Police knew right off the bat something relatively heavy must have been sitting on top of that carpet. So common sense here would tell you it's likely a safe, and the indentions they were spaced to part enough to dictate the safe was likely the size of like a microwave oven, so heavy but not so heavy that someone could not pick it up and carry it out. Now, when this stuff happens, the investigation starts, and one of the first things, if not the first thing that detectives are going to do, is they're going to dig into the background of the deceased, and they do this for obvious reasons. This is how they start removing suspects. Everyone, and I mean everyone in a murder case outside of the detective is a suspect. Initially, in any case, you start with the closest person to the victim and you work your way out of that inner circle and you weed out suspects as you go along.

9:38 So through that process, detectives discover that Bud Billings had a daughter from a previous marriage, and her name was Ashley Markham. He also had a son. Now, both of these biological children were adults, and they did not live with the Billings family. Detectives also discovered the Billings were in d need legit millionaires, which strengthened that robbery motive. That as soon as you pulled up on this scene and you saw this house, you know, that was the first suspicion you would have as somebody robbed these people. Now police knew they had their work cut out for them. Bud Billings owned a used car dealership several actually in Pensacola, and when you own car dealerships, you come into contact with hundreds of potential suspects every month, and that's a lot of folks to interview. Think about the amount of people that Bud Billings would just talk to and come across.

10:38 Police got to interview all these people because one of those might be the perpetrator, or several of those might be the perpetrators. Then they discovered what I consider the entire key to this case when upon securing the home, they stumble across the Holy Grail into work surveillance cameras in a surveillance system, so detectives remove the hard drive out of that system. This is a little bit before we had clouds and people were using you know, Google Cloud, and things of that nature to upload surveillance stuff. They still used hard drives back in those days, so they removed that hard drive. They bring it to the police headquarters and what they see is absolutely shocking. They see several people exit the van and go to the front door, and they see several people go to the side and rear doors of that home, and simultaneously, these people kick in the doors and they make entry inside of that home. Now, inside of the home, there were also cameras in the living room area and you can see these guys approach mister Billing and there's some quick dialogue that has exchanged between mister Billings and these people. But unfortunately these cameras

12:09 were not equipped for sound. It was only video. But you can tell from the mannerisms that this isn't a pleasant conversation. They're not saying, hey man, we came over here to watch the ball game. You can see this is a very serious situation. Now, you also see the perpetrators in this video in what they are wearing, and they're dressed in all black and what can be described as ninja costumes. So there's a short dialogue and then you see mister Billings get shot in the leg. You see them arguing some more. Mister Billings is getting thrown around.

12:51 Then you see them getting shot again in the leg. And then the next thing that you see is everyone disap peer into that master bedroom area of the home. Now, the unfortunate thing is there was no cameras in that master bedroom. In the sultry heat of Louisiana, where the bayous whisper secrets and the air hangs heavy with the scent of magnolias, a darkness lurked beneath the surface. Derek todd Lee was a man whose charm masked a sinister reality. He was a monster. Lee, a seemingly ordinary man with a disarming smile, led a double life that would unravel in a series of murders in the capital city of Baton Rouge and the surrounding areas. As the first reports of disappearances and murders began to surface, South Louisiana was thrust into a nightmare, igniting a frantic search for answers. The true horror was just beginning, and the hunt for a serial killer. Eventually, by just three letters, would reveal not only the depths of Derek Toddley's depravity, but also the resilience of those most affected by his evil acts, the families and the survivors.

14:10 This is DTL. DTL can be found by Searching Unspeakable, a true crime podcast by Kelly Jennings wherever you listen to podcasts, Episode one dropping November three. But the good thing in this case is now they had some surveillance video and they had the getaway vehicle or the vehicle that they used to get there and get away on that surveillance video, and they did something you don't see often when these cases, when these Martyer cases first occur, but it's extremely smart in this case. And what they did was they contacted the media and they released a picture of this van to the media, and the media at that point they took that and they just blasted it everywhere. Facebook wasn't what it is today, but they still posted it there.

15:11 They posted it on the local news anywhere they could post it. Ay, be on the lookout for this red van. Now, in many cases, detectives don't do that because they want some time to hunt for these folks before the perpetrators know the police are on their trail. If they're still in possession of that van, the police don't want to put it out there, and then the perpetrators get rid of the van and they could have caught them in the van. So it was really tricky on whether or not it was a smart thing to release this, but in this case, as you will discover in a little while, it was the right call. Now, another thing that police discovered through access to the surveillance video was that from start to finish this double murder, from the time that the assailants appeared on the property until when they left the property was only four minutes. It was really fast, and that told police one thing. This was very well planned out. This wasn't a bunch of guys driving down the road just looking for somebody to rob. So police go to daughter Ashley, who was a much older adult, and they asked her if she had any idea of who would want to do this, who would want to hurt your parents, and she said she can't imagine anyone wanting to harm her parents. But she did mention that

16:42 older adoptive brother, Justin, who had kind of a rocky relationship with Bud Billings, his adoptive father, and it was related to just the butting of heads that you have when you're growing up with your parents, and everything they say is wrong and everything you say is right. And when they asked Justin about all this, he admitted to the rocky relationship. But it's one thing to not get along with your dad at nineteen twenty years old. It's quite another thing to kill your dad. And when they checked Justin's alibi that he provided, it checked out and he was crossed off the list. So they then asked Justin the same thing. They asked his sister, who do you think would have done this? And Justin mentions a huge falling out that his dad had somewhat recently with a former business partner at one of his car dealerships.

17:44 That really got nasty, in Justin's words. So they start trying to locate this business partner, which they do in very short order. Y'all, this where we're at right now. In this case, this is over like a twelve hour time period. These police are moving fast, but they do locate that business partner. He's in a neighboring county and he owns a car dealership in that county, And you can't make this shit up. They drive over there, they pull into the car dealership and this guy is outside and guess what he's doing. He is cleaning up a red van. However, as coincidental as that was, and even though the guy was upfront with his disdain of Bud Billings, he was checked off the list pretty quickly and he really had nothing to do with the killings, nor did the van he was working on. That was just, believe it or not, sheer coincidence. But as I told you just a few minutes ago, remember they had released a picture of that red van as soon as they got it, and it was in short order, almost immediately after that picture was relayed on the local news that crime stoppers, they get a tip that the same red van is part behind a house really close to the crime scene.

19:12 The guy that called in the tip said the van used to be his van, but he had sold it to a guy by the name of Patrick Gonzalez Junior, and that it was sitting at his dad's house, who was Patrick Gonzalez Senior. This guy even had the address to where this van was located, so detectives head that way, but before they do, they run the background on the homeowner and they discover that Gonzalez Senior he has a criminal record that is a mile long, nothing major, but just a lot, just really a treasure drove of petty crimes.

20:00 So detectives go over there. They want to put their eyes on this red van and they pull up at the scene. It's a mobile home and they don't see a red van at all, but there is a shed that's behind the house, and that shed is large enough to park a van in, and just on the edge of the opening to that shed, you can see what appeared to police to be the very edge of the rear of a red van peeking out of that shed. Imagine those two doors that you have with these old dingy vans. You can see those just peeking out, just barely.

20:41 But police have a problem. They don't have a warrant, and they're trying to figure out how they are going to get back there legally. And about that time, a car pulls up and Leonard Gonzales Senior, his wife gets out Patrick Gonzale Leonard was his first name. So his wife gets out of that car and detectives they're like, how can we get back there? And one detective says, why don't we just ask her? He walks up to her and he says, hey, is that a van parked back there? And the wife says yes, And detectives ask if they can go back there and take a look, and she's like, sure, I don't care, you can go back there and look. So that's just what they do.

21:32 They go back there, and as soon as they start walking back there, two men walk out of the house, Gonzalez and another guy, and his name was Wayne Cauldron. Now Wayne sees these detectives and he just takes off running as soon as he sees them, so police grab him pretty quick, and police would discover later that Wayne and Ganzale they were neighbors and that Wayne was from Tennessee, but he had moved to the Panhandle of Florida after doing time in prison in Tennessee. So not a good guy by any means. So they grab him. They grabbed Gonzales Senior. They bring him back there to where that van is. Gonzales Senor is saying, hey, you ain't got all right to love back here, and they say, uh, your wife told us we could go back here. We have permission, we don't need a warr So as they go back there, they discover not only does this look like the red van in that surveillance video, but there was a lot of areas sanded off and there were spray paint near that van, and that indicated to police that someone was attempting to change the appearance of that van, and they were in the middle of that when police showed up, so they hauled the van down to the police headquarters to have that analyzed and scrubbed that van for DNA, etc. And here's where a detective does some

23:06 really amazing bit of detective work. So he's going to leave the shed where that van was parked, and he notices on a shelf a box of work boots and the box appeared to be brand new, and y'all, this inside of this shed, it was very dingy picture, just a ugly, nasty inside of a shed where everything's old and dirty and it's got a ton of dust on it. And this shoe box stood out to him because it looked brand new, number one, It had no dust on it, and it had a little picture on the side of it.

23:47 And the little picture on the side of that box was of boots that appeared to be combat boots. They were black, and it just reminded him of what he saw in the video. Now, they didn't have a search warrant to take anything off the property except that van. But he notices that box and he's going to head out, and he says, is anything in that box? And Gonzales Senior's wife says no, And he said, well, I'm leaving right now and be passing a garbage can, so if you want me to, I can throw that away for you. And she says, sure, you throw it away if you want to. So he grabs it and he walks out of that shed, but rather than throwing it in the garbage he throws it in the back of his police car.

24:41 Gonzales Senior and Wayne Cauldron. They are then hauled to the police station for questioning, and they also ask Gonzales Senior's wife if she would go down to the station and talk to them, And under questioning of Gonzales Senior's wife, she admitted yet that she had overheard her husband and Wayne Cauldron talking about a scheme to rob somebody. She said, I never heard a name mentioned. I never heard anything about them killing anybody, but I did hear something from them when they were talking, and I could tell they were trying to keep this kind of a secret because they were being quiet about it. But I do know that it had something to do with robbing someone. So armed with that information, police question Gonzalez Senior and Cauldron and they start putting the pressure on them and they say, hey, They tell Gonzales Senor, your wife has already told us she heard you kind of hashing out a plan to rob somebody. Gonzale Senor. He starts singing like a canary, and he mentioned that his son, Leonard Gonzalez Junior, is also involved. And he said that his son had business dealings with mister Billings in the past, and that's how they knew mister Billings. They have another name, and they go pick up Gonzalez Junior. He comes to the station

26:14 and in the meantime they do a lot of looking in his background. Now, Gonzalez Junior, he seemed to be totally opposite of his dad. He was a business owner. He was much more professional looking, if you will, than his dad. He was a karate instructor. You own the karate business. He had even been on the local news several times and police would discover that mister Billings. At one point he even donated five thousand dollars to Gonzales Junior's karate school for some sort of project they were doing. Now, they would also find out that Gonzalez Junior went to mister Billings a second time over the years to get money for some other business that he needed donated to, and mister Billings told him no, he didn't want to get involved in that just wasn't his deal. Now, eventually his karate studio started struggling and he would start losing money.

27:16 Police would find this out after, but gives you a pretty good motive to want to rob somebody, right. As a matter of fact, his karate studio was struggling so bad he ended up having his car repossessed, and his mother bought him that red van that was used in these killings. She bought that van for him so he would have something to ride around him because this car had been repossessed. So police present all this to Gonzales Junior, and of course he denies everything under questioning, and when they tell him, hey, it was your dad that told us all this stuff and your mom, he said, but his dad is crazy, he's a liar, he's not to be believed. He's a petty thief and you're gonna believe me a business owner who's got my shit together over my dad, et cetera. But police, they knew that it was only a matter of time before they could crack him.

28:19 And in the meantime, they start looking at that shoe box and looking into where that was purchased, and they discover that this particular brand of shoes they were bought at a Walmart. So they go to the Walmart and they go to the Lost Control people at that Walmart and they say, hey, we need you to pull surveillance videos from inside the store. And they knew what time that these guys were in the store because they managed to get a hold to the receipt for those shoes, and so Lost Control brings them in the back. They view the video and they see Gonzalis Junior as well as three or four other individuals. They all go into that particular Walmart and they all buy the same type of combat style boots together. They see them all leave on that surveillance video in a gold suv. So they do what they did with the red van, and they release a picture of that gold suv to the media, and again another Bolo be on the lookout for this gold SUV. If you know who owns it, give us a call, and sure enough, almost immediately they start getting tips.

29:49 But they had something even better than tips. At this point, they had a couple of suspects actually turned themselves in that owned that gold su Just the pressure right of this being all over the news, this was a big deal. Now at this point, there are two factions of people involved in this. Detectives would discover. First you have what I'm gonna turn the Pensacola group, which was Wayne Cauldron, Gonzalez Senior, and Gonzales Junior. And then you have what we're gonna call the Fort Walton Beach, Florida group, and it consisted of Rakeem Florence, Frederick Thornton, who actually those are the guys that called and turned themselves into police, and a couple of other people that I'm gonna get into in a minute. But Rakeem Florence and Frederick Thornton, they actually had quite a story to tell. Now, according to these guys, they were with the guys that broke into the Billings home and committed these murders. But according to these guys, they stayed in the van. They were sleeping the whole time that all this went down, which come on, police knew that was bullshit. They didn't realize police had all this surveillance video at that point, and

31:19 police let them know that, hey, we've got you on video actually going in the house. Now. When police dug into these two individuals were Keen Florence and Frederick Thornton, they found out they were young. These were just sixteen and seventeen year old kids by the time of this crime. But they were already little hulums. They already had their little scratches with police. If you will, so the ruling police work. If you're wanting to cut a deal with the police's squeaky wheel gets the best deal, right. And these kids they started talking quickly, and police let them know, hey, we got you all on camera going into the home.

32:04 We can charge you with first degree murders just like everybody else. It's up to you if you want to work with us and let us know everybody that was involved in how all this went down, we're willing to lessen. So these kids talk and they mentioned another guy by the name of Gary Sumner. Gary Sumner was forty years old. He owned a body shop in Fort Walton Beach, and they also mentioned another guy by the name of Donnie Stalwarth, which his involvement kind of shocked everyone because he appeared to be a pretty stand up guy. He was stationed at England Air Force Base, which I've actually stayed on England Air Force Base before. That's a whole nother story, so I want to get into it. But he was active in the Air Force and not the type of guy you would think was wrapped up in all of this.

33:01 This guy had a family, he was much older, he lived on the base, he was active military. Who would think that he would be involved in this. But as I said, these teens they started talking and they spilled the beans. And here's what they say that actually happened. They said through other people they met Gonzales Junior and at some point he basically tells them, Hey, I know this guy. His name is Bud Billings. He's a real asshole. He abuses his adopted kids, and he's a drug dealer. Just painting Bud Billings as this real piece of shit that nobody would care if this guy got robbed. And he goes on to tell these kids that Bud Billings had thirteen million dollars in cash in a safe at his house, and these kids by this this entire story hook line and sinker, and he also tells these kids, Gonzalees Junior, hey, we're gonna need other people to help us in this. This needs to be highly coordinated. So these kids recruit the rest of the Fort Walton crew, Stalworth and Florence, and Junior recruits his dad, Gonzalez Senior and Wayne Cauldron. Now, according to the teens, this was never a plan to shoot anyone. The plan was just

34:34 to rob the Billings. But according to the teens, as soon as Gonzalez Junior goes in the house, he shoots mister Billings in the leg. And hey, they're telling the truth. It's all on surveillance video. They said. At that time, all hell broke loose. Gonzales Junior eventually ends up killing both Bud and Melanie Billings. They steal that small floor, say, and they are in and out of that house in four minutes. And everything that these teens said matched up to the surveillance video. So everyone gets arrested that were mentioned by these two teens, And they also find out during this questioning that the safe could not be opened.

35:22 They couldn't figure out how to open that safe that they had taken out of that lenen closet, and the heat was on. So the police are saying, well, where is the safe and where is the murder weapon? And they find out from these teens that the murder weapon and the safe were dropped off with a lady who owned a flea market and she was also the landlord for Gonzales Junior. And her name was Pamela Wiggins. She was also a real estate agent. Again, a person you wouldn't think would be involved in something like this. On the outside, it appeared this lady had the perfect life.

36:05 She had it going on. She owned a lot of property, etc. And she's involved in a double murder. And in this case, she had rental property that Gonzalez Junior he rented from her. He was living in one of her rental properties. So they track her down. They end up arresting her as she's getting off of a boat in Orange Beach, Florida. She was partying. They come in from partying and whoop, they're the police. So was her affiliation where police eventually figured out where all this stuff was. The murder weapon was the first thing they recovered, and they actually recovered that murder weapon. It was inside of a vehicle that was on a car dealership lot, and it was hidden pretty good. It was nine milimeter hand and it was actually somehow the seat covers were taken off of a vehicle and it was shoved in between the foam and the springs, and then the seat cover was sewed back on to this vehicle. But they did eventually find it.

37:19 Someone obviously went through a lot of painstaking work to hide it. And they also learn where the safe is and that safe was actually buried in the ground at one of the properties that Pamela Wiggins owned, So they dig that up, and when they dig it up, they noticed the safe is still locked. So police they're able to crack open that safe and guess how much of that thirteen million was in it? You're ready for this. Zero? None, just this personal paperwork, et cetera. So these two amazing people were killed, and these perpetrators would have zero money to show for it. There was nothing in that safe.

38:15 They were killed for absolutely nothing. Nothing. There was ever a reason to kill somebody. But there was another safe that the perpetrators overlooked. They didn't know about. It was actually a wall safe in the home of the Billings, and they did have a substantial amount of cash in that wall safe that those guys overlooked, but it was like four hundred thousand dollars something like that. Substantial, but nowhere near the sixteen million dollars that Gonzales Junior had claimed. So after all of that, what happens to these six guys in that female real estate agent. Well, Leonard Gonzales Junior he gets the death penalty and he's currently on death row for that double murder. Donnie Stalworth he gets two life sentences. Wayne Cauldron gets two life sentences. Now Gonzales Senior he only got seventeen years in prison, but due to his age, that was pretty much a life sentence to him. He actually died in prison in twenty fifteen where King Florence he took a plea deal one of those teens and he ended up getting forty five years.

39:39 Frederick Forton also took a plea deal. He ended up getting forty years. Pamela Wiggins she got twenty eight years for accessory after the fact. However, again it was a life sentence for her because she died in prison in twenty fifteen, and she wasn't old. I mean she was in like her forties. Gary Sumner, who was what they called the back of the house getaway driver, he got twenty years in prison. He was the only one that didn't actually enter the house. So what happened to all these kids that were in the house that horrific day when Bud and Melanie Billings were killed. Well, the biological daughter of Bud Billings that I told you about way back at the beginning at the start of this one, Ashley Markham. She actually took custody of all thirteen of those adopted special needs children, which really spoke to me about what kind of person she was. But there you have it, another edition Fatal Fortune, and I hope you enjoyed that one. Now quickly, during this episode, you heard a promotion for a new series coming out. It's a docuseriies told by Kelly Jennings and executive produced by yours truly.

41:12 It's called DTL. I promise you it is unlike anything you've ever heard. I actually affectionately call this a listening experience. Go follow Kelly Jennings podcast if you don't already do so. It's Unspeakable a true crime podcast by Kelly Jennings. I will link it in the description of this podcast. Just an amazing storyteller. Honored to executive produce everything Kelly does. And until next time for exposed scandalous files of the elite, I'm your host, Jim Chaban. Much love,