Daughter of one of Billy Chemirmir's suspected victims discusses second trial
DALLAS (CBSDFW.com) - Jury selection is underway in the second trial of Billy Chemirmir. He's charged will killing 18 older women in the Dallas area over a two-year span. The first trial ended in a mistrial after that jury was deadlocked.
One of Chemirmir's suspected victims was Marilyn Bixler, who was found dead in Frisco in 2017. Her daughter, Cheryl Pangburn, recently sat down with Andrea Lucia to discuss the second trial.
Andrea: So he's going on trial starting Monday, for the murder of Lucy Harris, who was believed to be his last victim. But this will be his second time he stands trial, because the first trial was last year and ended in a mistrial by Hung Jury. According to notes that we heard from, the jury as a whole, there was one juror who refused to deliberate. Were you there every day of the initial trial?
Cheryl: That is correct. And as we understood the strategy of how the trial was put together and when you have a case like this, how it's imperative to take the circumstantial evidence and physically brick by brick, build a house until you've got a structure that just is unquestionable. To sit through that last trial and to see that happen throughout the week, we just were confident that, you know, this first trial would ended in a verdict, and we'd be sitting through a second trial, which we anticipated, but it would be for another case. We were stunned that it ended the way it did. And that as we go into trial, number two, we call it 2.0 because it's the same retrial of the same case that happened back in November.
Andrea: What was it like to sit through the trial? There was a there was a group of you guys have family members of various victims and you were sitting together. You had a room. What was it like in that room?
Cheryl: Prior to that, we had never seen anything other than a picture of Billy Chemirmir. There was not a life behind that picture. That first trial was the first time we'd ever seen the man in person, the first time we'd ever heard him speak, or the first time we'd ever heard him, kind of start to weave his web of lies. That was very insightful. It's the first time that we were exposed to his tactics and to the ways that he went about accomplishing this over and over again for so long for so many victims. We sat in that room, and it was silent. We were riveted. We were glued to the TV. I don't think we left the room until there was a break. I don't think anybody did. I think we were all just very glued to the to the streaming. It's such a unique group of people that get together. Not everyone has the benefit when you go through something like this, of having such a large group of support system. We just sit in the room and different people react to different things. You lift people up, you pray for people, you encourage people and they encourage you. It's just an unusual community, but it's it's their family, and we we all experience it together. We can't imagine not having that.
Andrea: He denied murdering anyone. But at the same time, he reacted strangely for someone even being accused of murdering someone.
Cheryl: That's really our first exposure to seeing him interact with anyone, was with him having that demeanor. And, you know, this is like, one of the most traumatic traumatic things that you could go through as a family member, and when it should mom and then to just have that cavalier attitude, it was just disturbing. Another thing that stood out in the trial, and I know that so many of us when the golden Diamond Exchange gentleman was there, and they started putting up on the screen, his transactions. That's the first any of us had ever seen any of those documents. We were all getting cell phone cameras out and snapping pictures as they would scroll through those screens. I snapped a picture, I was like, that's the date of my mom's murder, that's the date of her best friend's murder, that's the date of the attempted murder. We could all go and correlate, this is when the murder happened. It was either that day or the following day that he showed up at this pawn shop.
Andrea: Those records show that he was selling jewelry, and he is accused of stealing jewelry from his victim. So that is supposedly, that goes to sort of the alleged motive here and that he was murdering mostly women to steal their jewelry and then to resell them at places like the Diamond Exchange and get money. The other thing that kind of stood out to me about that was really you see sort of, like $1 amount associated with the life of your, of your mother.
Cheryl: A lot of us can correlate that to the items that we knew were missing. A lot of us said he murdered my mom and got $600 for it, you know? So it was just a lot of emotion that goes into seeing that. It was huge for a lot of us.
Andrea: So how do you think the retrial will be for you? I know it's hard to predict what kind of emotions you're going to come up. I presume you're likely not going to be hit with as many surprises as you were in the initial trial. Are you also planning to be there every single day? This time, you will be allowed and it'll be open to the public.
Cheryl: We talked about the fact that we'd all like to be in there, but as you can imagine, with the community of family, we talk all the time, and especially, we're in communication all the time. We have our strategies in place. If we can't all be in the courtroom, then we will take turns. We've we've worked all of that out so that everyone has an opportunity to be in the courtroom. I think it's super important for a jury to see the extent to which this has affected so many people. It's not just his victims, but it's such a wide spread of the families of the victims, that are just countless, and I think it maximum, maybe 20-22 People at the trial the last time, but that's just a fraction of the total number of people that doesn't represent all of the families. That's very important for a jury, and I think it just injects humanity back into the process to see the extent of, you know, the damage that was done. I also feel like we've been exposed to Chemirmir in doses. The last trial, it was a seeing his mannerisms and him speak for the first time. But, I know one of the things that we always wondered last trial was: What is he whispering to his attorneys? What is he writing down on his envelope? What is he thinking what is in his mind, as he's gone through the trial? Because he has since then reached out to a podcast or to a news outlet and given interviews, we now know what's in his mind, which is that he he has convinced himself that he is totally innocent of all of the charges and that he will never be found guilty and that he will never see the inside of a prison. We know that was his mindset at the last trial. To the extent that I wish that he would see us as family members and have some feeling of remorse for what he's done with that mindset, I don't know if he has the mental capacity to do that which is kind of disappointing. You would hope that he would feel something for what he's done. Maybe it'll be telling to see him in person. That would be my hope, is that by being in the courtroom, that it would stir something in him as well.
Andrea: You likely won't be reacting to certain evidence as you did, when you saw it for the first time. You'll also likely be asked to keep your reactions subdued. Is that something you think you guys will be able to do?
Cheryl: I 100% know that we'll be able to manage that as far as the public eye or anybody else in the courtroom. That's not to say that we won't be sitting there squeezing each other's legs, you know, as tight as we can and that kind of stuff. We'll have we'll have our own communication where we're reacting, but we can definitely never do anything that would jeopardize us finally getting to be inside that courtroom.
Andrea: how are you preparing personally for the week to come?
Cheryl: It's funny. I personally came to Atlanta to help my daughter and son-in-law move and to spend time with my kids as my distraction. I know, others are taking trips. A lot of people are spending time with the grandkids. We're trying to distract ourselves as much that way. But at the same time, our group message is hot and heavy from morning till night, just talking about different things. It's just encouraging to see how some of this will say I'm super anxious about it, and then someone will give a word of encouragement. This brings us back down. It's just an ebb and flow of emotions, but it's the support system that we've grown accustomed to over the years. That will get us through the next week that in our faith and a lot of prayer for jurors and judges and lawyers and Chemirmir himself.
Andrea: Do you resent having to go through this again?
Cheryl: Resent wouldn't be the word that I would use. I have been prepared for it. We've always thought that we were gonna go through two trials. I'm sad that that it ended the way that it did and that we have to go through this trial. Again, I really feel for Lu Thi Harris's family. I think of her son-in-law, I think of him. When we're sitting in that courtroom as family members and he has to come in and testify again, I hope that he looks out and realizes that we're sitting there to support him. His mom's trial represents all of our moms. We're there, no matter who was on trial, we would be there in support of that family, because that is representative of of our mom's justice. So, I don't resent it. I'm sad that it's a repeat of trial number one. I'm anxious to get it over with so that we can move on to trial number two. I'm a Collin County Family so we're anxious to move on into the Collin County side of things. This prolongs all of that.
Andrea: I just wanted to end by asking you about your mom because. He [Chemirmir] is the one on trial and there will be a lot of focus on him next week because of that. But I just personally want to try to keep the people affected in the forefront. What do you want people to know about your mom? What are the kinds of things that I mean, I'm sure that she is at the forefront of your thoughts as you prepare to go into trial... If there's anything about her that that keeps coming to mind as you prepare for this.
Cheryl: Yeah, the one thing that I know is she would be proud of what we're doing. We talk about how we think our moms would have been the best of friends had they all known each other. We think that they all were spunky, vibrant, fun women and I think that's a lot of the reason that he was able to kind of stop them is because they were in and out so much because they were just so lively. I think I draw a lot of the ability to go through this over and over again from her. She would want us to be doing this and she would want us to make sure that we took the steps that were necessary to keep this from happening again. Especially to the people that lived in her complex and her friends. Had she been a survivor and that had happened in her building, she would have been the first one on the doorstep saying what are we going to do to make this right? We're all being the voices of our moms who aren't around to take those steps. That's kind of what I channeled in getting through this part of it. We just miss her every single day and I was with my kids last night and we just laugh and talk and tell mee maw stories all the time. And she was just a joy. Gone Too Soon.
Andrea: You shared videos with me and she just seems so funny. She was within a year of her death and she was taking a tequila shot in Mexico and telling stories about getting hit on on the bus. She was clearly a big character, and I'm sorry that I didn't get a chance to meet her.
Cheryl: Yes, I am too. You would have enjoyed her as everyone did.
