A Florida real estate agent was released on $10,000 bond Thursday, the day after she was charged as an accessory after the fact to the Florida Gulf Coast murders of Melanie and Byrd Billings.
The Billings were parents of 17 children, most of them adopted and with special needs.
Pamela Long Wiggins, 47, was the eighth person arrested in connection with the deadly home invasion last week at the Billings’ nine-bedroom house in the Beulah community near Pensacola on the Florida panhandle. The other seven have already been charged with murder and Pensacola police are looking for one more person.
Wiggins is the only suspect not charged with murder. She is accused of knowing about the fatal shootings after the fact.
Wiggins history is somewhat confusing but she has Georgia ties.
Public records indicate Wiggins lived in Albany from the mid 1980s until around 2002. Her widowed mother still has a house in the southwest Georgia city; Doris Long did not return messages left on an home answering machine or voice mail.
During those years Wiggins was in Albany, she married Charles Thomas Coco, who died in 2007.
She married a second time on May 5, 2007, according Jimmy Malden Jr. Malden said he left Wiggins five months later but they still are not divorced.
“I’m still fighting. It’s still pending. I’m still trying to get the title to my Harley [Davidson motorcycle],” Malden said.
He said he has been trying to divorce her for 1 1/2 years.
Yet, prosecutors said Wiggins was her “married name,” and CNN reported that records show she married Hugh Gregory Wiggins last year, and one of the accused killers may have been a witness to the ceremony, “Leonard P. Gonzalez.”
Neighbors told the Pensacola News Journal Wiggins had two children — a teenage son and younger daughter.
Records show she owns eight residential properties in Santa Rosa County, Fla., and her Magnolia Antique Mall is the registered owner of The Classy Lady, the 47-foot yacht moored at an Orange Beach marina where police found her on Tuesday.
Wiggins’ previous husband, Malden, said his former wife seemed to have a lot of cash that couldn’t be easily explained and she boasted about her wealth and “her position in society,” he said.
Police said one of her links to the July 9 crime was her tenant, Leonard Gonzalez Jr., a suspect police said had a critical role in planning the crime.
Gonzalez’s father, Leonard P. Gonzalez Sr. also is charged. The senior Gonzalez owned a power-washing company that Billings once hired.
Police and prosecutors said images captured on the Billings’ home’s security cameras led investigators to the suspects. The videos showed masked men dressed as ninjas coming through the front and back doors. They trained for 30 days, authorities said.
“The execution was basically flawless,” Escambia County Sheriff David Morgan told reporters. “The one gaping hole that would not have made this a perfect operation, if you will, was the fact that the surveillence system was not disabled. I guess the question was why was it not?”
The suspects, ranging in age from 16 to 56, were in the house only four minutes.
Nine of the couple’s 13 adopted children were home during the break-in and three of them saw the intruders. The couple also had four children from previous marriages.
The videos led investigators to a red van used as a getaway car and eventually to the suspects, a loosely connected group of mostly day laborers who knew each other through the Gonzalez washing business and an auto detailing operation.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
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