The Pensacola Adoptive Couple's Murder: Was It Robbery or a Hit?
By most accounts, Leonard Patrick Gonzalez Jr. the failed karate instructor who allegedly murdered a wealthy Pensacola, Fla., couple last month in front of their young adopted children is a blowhard.
"He's always got a big game," one friend told police, "he's always got some bullsh-t to talk about." Said another, "He's always blowing smoke up everybody's tail about, you know, 'I got this going on, we're gonna make some money,' da-da-da." As a result, "it would be easy to dismiss Gonzalez as a lying con man, which he is for the most part," notes David Morgan, sheriff of Escambia County in Florida's northwestern panhandle, who says he has heard some tall tales from Gonzalez since he was arrested. "But sadly there are instances in his life when his boasting had elements of truth."
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Which makes the sheriff more inclined to believe that Gonzalez who is charged with shooting Byrd "Bud" Billings and his wife Melanie in their spacious home as he and six others allegedly robbed it the night of July 9 was hired to commit the murder by resentful local business rivals. In police documents released this week, Gonzalez says one used-car dealer, Henry "Cab" Tice, told him that he and other dealers wanted the 66-year-old Billings "whacked" and asked him to do the job. (Gonzalez claims he refused although he boasted to police, without offering details, that he's taken part in other murders for hire.) Morgan tells TIME he expects to make more arrests soon in a homicide case that's become shocking and sordid enough to recall Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and one that has orphaned the Billings' 17 children, 13 of them adopted and most with disabilities like Down Syndrome. "We'd all prefer it if this were a group of losers visiting a random act of violence on this family," Morgan says, "but with each passing day and each new witness, we're finding that's probably not the case."
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