State: Tribe's role adds twist to difficult murder case

More than three years later, the defense attorneys want the jurors to know just how dark it was. They want them to be driven to the scene, 45 minutes west of Miami's lighted sprawl, and shown that the darkness of the city "is nowhere near the utter darkness on the Tamiami Trail in the middle of the Everglades," according to defense documents.

This, they hope, will help prove that Kirk Douglas Billie never saw that his sons -- Keith and Kurt, ages 3 and 5 -- were sleeping in the back seat when he angrily commandeered his former girlfriend's sport utility vehicle, drove it just outside the reservation, ran it into a canal along the Tamiami Trail and watched it sink.

Billie, who belongs to the 550-member Miccosukee tribe, is charged with two counts of first-degree murder, and jury selection began Monday in his trial. But that's "white man's justice," says tribal leader Billy Cypress, who insists the matter was settled long ago, "Indian to Indian."

Asserting its long-held rights as a sovereign nation under U.S. law, the tribe has barred Miami-Dade and federal authorities from its lands as they have tried to subpoena and interview the only people who saw what happened that June night in 1997: the Miccosukees who know Billie and the tribal police officers who initially arrested him.

Prosecutors plan to seek the death penalty, convinced that the 32-year-old Billie, who has a history of domestic violence, knew his sons were in the vehicle.

The tribe, meanwhile, has other ideas based on its own customs for "dispute resolution."

In a recent letter to Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez-Rundle, Cypress said Billie was forgiven three weeks after the drownings by the Miccosukee Business Council, the tribe's governing body. Members of the clans that make up the tribe met and shook hands and decided that "giving life is more rewarding than taking a life."

They deemed the boys' deaths an "unfortunate accident."

Cypress railed about "the non-Indian courts and justice system" and their failure to honor tribal customs. He said the tribe wants to help Billie, who is the nephew of a tribal council member.

Moved by the deaths of two children, Miami-Dade officials are not backing down.

Last month, after a federal judge upheld the tribe's right to keep police and prosecutors off its lands, the authorities took the unusual step of scooping up the boys' Indian mother when she left the reservation one day. She was held in a hotel for three days on a material witness bond until authorities got her to give a videotaped deposition. It might be used at trial if she fails to show up.

The drownings followed long-simmering problems between Billie and the mother, Sheila Mae Tiger, 24. The previous day, June 26, 1997, Billie had asked to see his children, but Tiger avoided him, fearing he was drunk and violent. She drove to a friend's house, where the boys went to sleep.

At 9 p.m. she returned to her trailer and found a note from Billie: "Don't ever think the kids will stop me."

Tiger returned to the friend's house, collected the boys and enlisted another friend, Melody Osceola, to drive around with her as the children slept in the back seat.

Shortly after 2 a.m. on June 27, Osceola left Tiger at a friend's house and Tiger asked Osceola to take the boys home with her.

It was the last time she would see her sons alive.

Two hours later, Osceola called Tiger, saying Billie had taken the Tahoe and the boys were still in back. Tiger was alarmed because Billie had threatened to total the vehicle.

Tiger next saw Billie shortly after 5:30 a.m. at the tribe's police station, where officers were holding him. She asked him where the boys were.

The story splinters from there, depending on which of Tiger's various sworn statements is being read.

In her original statement to police, Tiger said Billie responded "Yeah" when asked if he knew the boys were in the back seat. She also quoted him as saying they were okay.

A month later, she wrote a sworn statement, saying she was tired and in shock the night of the police interview and forgot to mention several things. In this account, Billie wears a shocked expression when told his sons were in the vehicle.

"I knew then that he didn't know until that moment the kids were in the Tahoe," Tiger wrote.

She said Billie would never hurt his kids and the foreboding note was "his way of scaring me."

In yet another statement to authorities in 1998, Tiger portrays Billie as responding blankly to the unfolding tragedy. When Tiger asked about the boys, "he was just looking at me," she said. "He was asking why I was running from him, but I just kept asking him about my truck and my kids."

Billie and Tiger have a third son together, now 4 years old, who was not in the vehicle that night.

At trial, prosecutors plan to highlight Billie's history of violence and threats, including a 1995 attack when he struck Tiger with a broomstick while she was pregnant. At various times, according to witnesses, he has threatened to kill himself, as well as Tiger and the children.

Billie's defense is that the "utter darkness" of the Everglades prevented him from noticing the boys in the back seat, and that the vehicle's interior dome light, which might have illuminated them, was not working.

Had there been any hope of him seeing them as they slipped beneath the surface, it was dashed by the car's tinted windows, his lawyers say.

The case has invited comparisons to Susan Smith, the South Carolina woman who killed her two sons in 1994 by strapping them in her car and rolling them into a lake.

The Miccosukees' stand in Billie's defense mirrors the aggressive tack they have taken in other disputes with outside forces, spending millions on legal fights over the right to build more homes in the Everglades and prodding federal officials to move faster on cleaning up the environment.

Flush with resources after the opening of its gambling facilities in the 1990s, the small tribe can afford to stand its ground after centuries of bending to the will of the outside world.

Although its efforts have worked against the prosecution, they also may have backfired against Billie, who is downplaying the tribe's involvement as the trial approaches.

Billie's attorneys have asked to move the trial out of Miami, citing media reports about the sovereignty issues raised by the tribe.

The public picture of an insulated group handling the deaths of two children with a handshake is not a flattering one, Billie's lawyers acknowledge in a motion filed last week.

It has "demonized" the Miccosukees, the lawyers say, making it appear the tribe -- and by extension, Billie -- is "indifferent to the loss of human life."

To have a Miccosukee suddenly distance himself from the tribe was simply one more twist in a long and difficult case.

Miami Circuit Judge Leon M. Firtel has not decided whether to move the trial, or even whether to have the jury see for themselves the ink-black darkness of an Everglades night.

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Lucy Morgan

From the Times state desk