Florida blogger finds fame digging up dirt on slayings

PENSACOLA, Fla. — The official storyline was clear. The state attorney said it was a robbery; Byrd and Melanie Billings, parents of 13 adopted children with special needs, were killed in their nine-bedroom house because they were rich.

But Rick Outzen, a local blogger and publisher of a small alternative weekly, heard a darker tale. A few days after the July 9 slayings, someone told him Billings once owned a seedy strip club and had a reputation for ruthlessness in the used-car business. Others, insisting on anonymity, said some of the seven people charged with the slayings told police it was a contract killing.

"I'm the only one who has it," Outzen recalled thinking. "Does that mean I'm wrong?"

He hit "publish" after talking to a lawyer. With that 277-word blog post July 19, Outzen, 52, a former accountant, became a controversial player in a case that has drawn international attention.

His coverage, with almost daily updates on his blog, has attracted assignments from The Daily Beast and help from volunteer researchers outside Florida. It also has brought rebuttals from competing news outlets and the threat of a lawsuit from Henry Cabell Tice, a Pensacola used-car salesman who has not been charged in the slayings and who denies claims by Outzen's sources that he might be linked to the crime.

Initially, even friends feared that passion had pushed Outzen's writing too far.

But six weeks after the killings, Outzen has not had to retract anything. The Escambia County sheriff, David Morgan, said Outzen had helped the investigation and his anonymous sources were largely right: about a safe the killers appear to have overlooked inside the Billings home, with $164,000 in cash; about Billings' dubious reputation; and about Leonard Gonzalez Jr., whom police have identified as the intruders' ringleader, and whom Outzen identified as a self-defense instructor who once worked for Tice.

Morgan would not confirm that someone paid $20,000 to $50,000 to have Billings killed, as Outzen has written, but he said police were investigating the claim.

"If I didn't think there was some validity to it, I wouldn't be pursuing it," Morgan said.

Outzen said he felt vindicated.

Kevin Doyle, publisher of The Pensacola News Journal, said Outzen was mainly benefiting from his vocal support for Morgan in the 2008 election and his blog's looser journalistic standards. But in the eyes of many here, Outzen has become an example of civic journalism that trades objectivity for an argumentative love of place displayed online.

"I don't always agree with him, but he is the conscience of the community," said Mort O'Sullivan, chairman of the Pensacola Bay Area Chamber of Commerce. "People have come to trust that Rick's going to be out there, pushing us in ways sometimes we're not comfortable with."

Outzen founded his weekly, The Independent News, 10 years ago after the oil company he worked for since the 1980s was sold. Joe Scarborough, now of MSNBC, started a competing publication a few months later. When their weeklies merged in 2001, Outzen and Scarborough had a falling-out that healed only recently.

Outzen says the Billings case, and the idea of a contract hit, has grabbed him because "I can't stand to think someone could order a killing and get away with it."

It is a side of Pensacola rarely discussed. Out by the Navy base sits what locals call "car city" — block after block of used-car lots with cheerful signs offering easy loans. This is where Billings made his money, former associates say, by financing used-car lots and other businesses. At one point, he even gave at least a few thousand dollars to Gonzalez for a martial-arts studio.

Billings' company, Markham Auto Sales, hardly stands out. The lot has space for about 35 cars. Next door is Worldco Financial Services, registered under the name of his daughter, Ashley Markham.

Robert Beasley, a lawyer for the Billings family, said Billings "never did anything unethical, however he did expect to be paid back the money he loaned, which sometimes involved hostilities."

Last year, Billings accused Tice of handing Worldco 12 checks that bounced, totaling more than $17,000, the basis for a grand-theft charge filed against Tice last week. Tice, in an e-mail, said he was innocent and that "these were checks to be held until I could make deposits to cover them."

Beasley, who acknowledged giving tips to Outzen because he respected his rabble-rouser role, said two other car salesmen were close with Tice and also owed Worldco sizable amounts of money.

"It's an underbelly," Outzen said. "It's a subculture."

Soon, more of that underbelly will be seen. A grand jury indicted Gonzalez and six others Tuesday on two counts of first-degree murder and one count of home invasion related to the killings. Authorities this week are expected to release 1,000 pages of transcripts from the case.

Morgan, the sheriff, said he expected to make more arrests. "Quentin Tarantino couldn't come up with this," he said.