“I’m sorry,” Josh was told, “he’s dead.”
After he hung up, Josh didn’t want to believe it. “I’m going to Tennessee,” he told Heather a day later. “I need to speak with Emilia.” Josh wanted to talk to someone who was close to Adam during his last days. He needed to hear from Emilia how his friend was before he died, what he was talking about, what was going on in his life.
There was no “connection” there between Josh and Emilia; they were friends because of the mutual love they shared for the guy who had died. They sat and talked, sharing stories about their relationship with Adam. It was good, Josh said, to sit and speak to someone who knew his friend as Josh had. He needed that.
“Remember when he thought we could make porn?” Josh said to Emilia.
They laughed about it.
The more Josh got to talking to Emilia, the more he saw beyond his lack of attraction to her physically. They were connecting on a much deeper level. There was this sudden, shocking tragedy between them, in a way bringing them closer together.
“Here’s my cell number,” Josh said to Emilia as he got ready to leave. She had come into town to be there in this time of need. “If you ever need to talk, call me.”
They hugged and said their good-byes. Josh went back to his life in Florida with Heather and the kids.
CHAPTER 9
DEPUTY BETH BILLINGS felt there was something in what Brenda Smith had said regarding those two calls Heather had received that day she went missing. Call it a cop’s instinct, or that little voice every cop has on his or her shoulder, whispering,“Follow this lead. Listen more intuitively to this witness. Don’t believe him.”
“Heather would confide in me regarding her relationship with Josh,” Brenda explained to Billings on March 18. Billings had brought along Officer David McClain. The investigation was widening, expanding in scope and sensitivity. The MCSO was growing more curious (and suspicious) as each day passed and Heather had not returned or been heard from. With several detectives now involved, it was about gathering as much information as possible from all the parties, tallying it up and making a decision where to take the investigation next. Obviously, something was wrong here. It had been nearly a month and Heather had not called or come back to check on her kids—not once. She had simply vanished.
“What would she say about her and Mr. Fulgham?” Billings asked Brenda.
Brenda skipped that question and moved right into the heart of the matter, at least from her point of view: “I’m scared. I fear for Heather’s life.... He (Josh) was continually harassing her and threatening to do her harm in some way. . . .”
CHAPTER 10
BARTOW, FLORIDA, IS nearly smack in the middle of the state. East of Tampa, southeast of Orlando, Bartow is one of those areas of Florida that is close to the flashy tourism the “Sunshine State” so much depends on: Disney World, Universal Studios, Busch Gardens and so on. Emilia Yera was born on August 4, 1984, and grew up in Bartow, but soon her family moved to McIntosh, a little over two hours north, where Emilia would spend the rest of her life. It was the birth of her little sister, Milagro, “born with thirteen birth defects,” Emilia told me, when the family decided to move north into the Orange Lake region of McIntosh.
“My childhood was a freakin’ nightmare,” Emilia said, adding how she “endured years of abuse, regardless of the form.” She claimed two immediate family members, her father and grandfather, “sexually abused” her from the time she was four until the age of fifteen. “I finally came forward when I found out my sister was to be next.” Emilia couldn’t allow that to happen. She had to do something to protect Milagro.
Both parties were charged, and Emilia and family members would later testify about the abuse in court. Emilia later withdrew the charges of sexual abuse.
“Before his trial,” Emilia said of her father, “my dad tried to have me, my mom and grandma killed so we couldn’t testify.” Her father was later convicted of attempting to solicit the murders of family members and given a four-year prison sentence.
“My childhood consisted of responsibility, secrets and sexual perversion,” Emilia told a newspaper reporter during an interview.
She described a typical night from her childhood as sitting in bed while experiencing terrifying anxiety over hearing the floorboards in front of her door creak. It was because Emilia knew that if those floorboards made that creepy sound in the middle of the night, it was her father coming into her bedroom to sexually assault her.
“You’d hear that floorboard creak and you’d think, ‘It is going to be tonight,’” Emilia told that same interviewer.
It was a noxious and abusive upbringing, Emilia concluded, with the lack of a healthy male role model in her life. That absence set her up for future failures as she grew into her teen years and adulthood—not to mention all of the abuse she claimed to have survived.
Emilia said she dropped out of high school as a teen. From there, she was a frequent guest in foster homes. People “whispered” about her, she felt, wherever she went. Emilia was “that girl”—the one who’d been through hell and back and had been touched mentally by it all. She was the talk of the town. For her, small-town life in the South, Emilia said, was not an episode of The Andy Griffith Show, featuring a red-haired boy, fishing pole slung over his back, whistling as he walked down a dirt road. Hers was a form of torture, Emilia explained, a living hell she could not escape from.
“I got pregnant with my first son at the age of seventeen,” Emilia said. “I married his dad to keep the man from going to prison courtesy of the age difference.”
It was all of this, Emilia said, that made her emotionally unavailable to people in her life as she grew into adulthood. Emilia had no traditional family structure or parental guidance to fall back on. She had to learn how to live and survive, essentially, on her own.
With a son, Emilia realized she needed to work in order to care for him properly—she certainly couldn’t rely on her husband. Theirs was a relationship that was doomed from how it had started. It wasn’t supposed to work. After that relationship ended, Emilia jumped right into another. She constantly needed to have a man in her life. This was a subconscious need for her always to be on the lookout for that one person who would rescue her, take care of her, tell her everything was going to be okay, the suffering was all over: “I’ll now be your protector.”
“I dated because I was ‘supposed to be’ with men,” she said. “Yeah, you gotta love the South!”
Emilia said she grew up figuring out that it was best not to let the people around her “know everything” about her. Keeping secrets became a way of life. Hold on to personal things and never reveal the truth about you. Develop a shield from your emotions, not allowing anyone to get too close. Keep people at arm’s length. This was how Emilia walked through life.
All that ever mattered to Emilia were her kids. As time moved forward, Emilia got her GED and became a certified massage therapist, giving herself a chance for a life. She was determined to break the cycle, get out of poverty and abusive relationships and find peace and happiness.
Through one new relationship, as Emilia dated James Acome (before Heather got him), she said she’d see Josh “around town” once in a while. “Josh and Adam Stover,” Emilia said, “were like joined at the hip. James had always tried to get close,” Emilia added, “but James could hang out with them, but couldn’t come close to being what those two were.”
It was James, Emilia said, “who was my first when I was fifteen.” Emilia was “with James,” she said, when Josh went off to Tennessee to visit Adam from time to time. It was James who came “flying into my mother’s front yard” that day, Emilia said, announcing (in tears) that “Adam was killed in a car wreck. . . .”—which then sent Emilia running up to Tennessee to be near him.
“Has anyone told Josh?” Emilia asked James. She knew how close Josh and Adam were.
“I couldn’t. . . . I just couldn’t,” James had said.
It was Emilia who ended up telling Josh over the phone that night before she headed out herself for a quick visit to Tennessee to be Adam’s friend.
CHAPTER 11
THE IDEA THAT Heather Strong took off on her own seemed less likely as the middle of March came. The focus of the MCSO’s investigation had taken a turn toward Josh Fulgham and his rather unpredictable and volatile relationship with Heather. Thus far, everyone the MCSO had spoken to regarding Josh and Heather had nothing positive to say about Josh and Heather’s marriage. The two of them were like oil and water—where the oil (Josh) was always on fire.
Based on police reports alone, however, another angle emerged—one that didn’t quite fit into the MCSO’s attention on Josh and his violent tendencies. Back in September 2008, the MCSO had been called out to Josh’s home at 3rd Terrace in Citra. Josh and Heather had split up by then and Josh had been hanging out with Emilia for quite some time. It was near 7:15 P.M. when Josh called into the sheriff’s department to report a domestic dispute. He said Heather had come by the trailer to drop off their children and attacked him.
“You get [the child] out of the car, Josh,” Heather had said, according to that report.
As Josh leaned in to pick up the kid, he later told police, Heather came up from behind and “struck him with her hand on the left side of his head.” Josh was Kojak bald, with one of those heads as shiny as a cue ball. The officer noted in his report that Josh’s head and ear were “red in color.” This was “consistent with being struck by a hand.”
“You need to leave,” Josh told Heather.
Heather took off.
Emilia was with Josh at the trailer when the incident had occurred. She witnessed it all. She told the officer it happened the way Josh had described it.
“I saw it!”
The officer drove over to Heather’s and had a chat with her.
“I did drop off our child[ren],” Heather explained, “but I never struck him. That’s bullcrap.”
The officer didn’t buy it and arrested Heather, placing her in lockup at the Marion County Jail. Heather was charged with “simple domestic battery,” and the case was later tossed out of court.
CHAPTER 12
THE MSCO TRIED to track down Josh during that late March period of investigating Heather’s disappearance, yet, according to Beth Billings’s report, she had met with “negative results” whenever and wherever she went looking for Josh during this time. It seemed Josh was keeping a low profile these days and had either left town or was hiding out and did not want to speak with law enforcement.
On March 18, 2009, Billings found Josh’s mother, Judy Chandler. Judy had moved to Citra from Mississippi back in 2002. As Judy viewed the relationship, since Josh and Heather had been a couple as teenagers, they would “stay together for a while” and “split up and then [get] back together. They had problems off and on,” Judy said. And sometimes those problems escalated into violent, “physical altercations.” Throughout it all, however, Judy testified later, “I never seen Joshua hit her.... [But] on one occasion, they got into a fight and Heather did bust his head open with a cement block.”
Judy talked about how the relationship had progressed over the past year. Josh had come to know Emilia in early 2008 and saw her mainly throughout that summer and into the fall. But on December 26, 2008, a day after Christmas, Judy said, likely in the spirit of the holidays, Josh and Heather reconciled by getting married! It was a shock to everyone. As Judy saw it, Emilia was like a thorn in the side of Josh and Heather’s relationship and marriage by that time—she was always hanging around, getting in the way. The woman would not give up her fight for Josh. She just wouldn’t go away. Judy had even told Emilia once to stay the hell away from her son. Emilia didn’t seem to get it: Josh had run to her and had a fling, but it was over now and he was back with his family. Emilia needed to go out and find herself a new man, because Josh was finished with her and back with his girlfriend, whom he had now made his wife.
“Haven’t heard from Heather since mid-February,” Judy related to the MCSO when they tracked her down in March 2009 while searching for Josh. She couldn’t recall the “exact date,” but had spoken to Heather near that time. Since then, she had not heard a word from the girl.
“What about Josh?” Billings asked.
“Back on February fifteenth, I saw Josh here when I returned home. It was, oh, seven-thirty or so that night. Josh had the kids. We never talked about why he had the kids. I’m not sure how he got possession of them.” Judy was just happy to see her grandchildren, better yet with their father. Josh had just gotten out of jail, actually. He had gone in on charges of threatening Heather with a shotgun in January and had spent about forty days behind bars, being released after Heather dropped all of the charges.
To Beth Billings, Judy came across as “defensive,” and not at all interested in giving out information about her son.
A mother protecting her child, or something else? Billings wondered.
Changing the subject entirely, Judy told Billings that the MCSO should be looking for a man Josh knew, adding, “He’s the one who got my son hooked on drugs!”
“Could you have your son call me as soon as you see him,” Billings said, handing Judy her card.
Deputy Billings next made contact with forty-seven-year-old Carolyn Spence, Heather’s mother. Carolyn lived in Sturgis, Mississippi, where Heather had grown up. Carolyn was “extremely concerned” for Heather’s well-being, she explained to Billings. This sort of behavior was unlike Heather. Not to call or let the family know where she was, no way, not Heather. And the kids! Heather would “never” leave her children for this long a period—especially with Josh—Carolyn explained. The only way she would not contact her children all this time, she added, was if she couldn’t.
“I’ve tried calling and calling her,” Carolyn said in a voice that spoke of worry, dread and fear, all at once. Billings could feel it through the phone while speaking with Carolyn. Here was a mother greatly concerned about her daughter. A mother whose gut told her something bad had happened. The deputy could sense it. Carolyn had known Josh since he was sixteen. She’d had a front-row seat to their relationship throughout the years. She knew and completely understood what Josh was capable of.
“Well, we’re doing what we can to locate your daughter, ma’am . . . ,” Billings said.
“I spoke to Judy,” Carolyn then offered.
“What did she say?”
“I asked where Heather might be and she became very defensive and uncooperative—she didn’t want to say anything.”
Billings asked about Josh. Had she heard from him? Had she seen him?
Carolyn had some rather useful information to share, saying Josh had made “numerous threats” to Heather and the Strong family, as a whole, over the years. He was unstable and explosive. “About three years ago, there was one time when Josh called me to tell me he had tied up Heather, duct-taped her mouth shut and placed her in the trunk of his car. . . .” Carolyn began to cry as she told this story. Concluding, “Josh then said, ‘I’m going to feed her to the alligators! They’ll eat her live!’ I’m not sure what happened, but the cops were called.”
A picture of Josh Fulgham was coming into focus for the MCSO.
“Anything else you can offer?” Billings queried.
“Heather’s birthday is coming up on March twenty-third.” Carolyn fought back more tears. This was so hard. Carolyn had not been the mother she’d wanted to be. She had her share of problems. “Heather is very family oriented and would never miss this day or not make contact with us or her kids or friends.” This meant to Carolyn that Heather did not have the capability to contact anyone. She didn’t say it, but she feared that Heather was dead. It was the only answer.
They spoke for a short time more and Billings told Carolyn to call if she thought of anything else. Even little details mattered. Think things through. They were going to find Heather, Billings promised. The MCSO was not approaching this any l
onger as an adult runaway case: some woman who wanted to disappear with all her problems left behind. The MCSO was beyond that by now. There was something wrong and the MCSO was going to find out what it was.
For Beth Billings, however, as a patrol officer, there was little else she could do at this point. She’d exhausted all of her resources.
“Deputy Billings could only do so much because of her regular patrol work,” said a law enforcement source close to the investigation. “She was at a crossroads, essentially.”
With that, the MCSO assigned the case to a detective, Donald Buie, a seasoned investigator with over a decade of experience in solving felony crimes and finding people, both those who didn’t want to be found and those who did. If Heather was hiding out for some reason, a scenario that many believed could be true in this case, Detective Buie was the investigator to flush her out.
After Buie had a look at the case file on Heather Strong, he walked over to his supervisor’s office and handed Brian Spivey the file.
“Take a look at this and tell me what you think,” Buie suggested.
At some point later, they converged again.
“Yeah?” Buie said, walking back into Spivey’s office.
“Sit down.”
“What do you think?”
Spivey took a moment and sat back in his chair. “Regarding Miss Strong,” Spivey said, “she’s . . . dead.”
CHAPTER 13
SOME CLAIMED EMILIA had a strange and subtle “hotness” about her that men flocked to. She knew how to be sexy and used it to her advantage. She understood how to manage what she had, in other words. And if there was one thing Emilia understood without limitation of any kind, it was how to control men with that sexual allure and confidence. Not necessarily in a bad way, but a way that made Emilia stand out in a crowd of other women. Emilia was living with her mother in McIntosh. She had three children by the year 2007, had been married and divorced once. And yet, since reuniting with Josh after his best friend was killed in July 2007 (they were casual acquaintances then), Emilia and Josh had begun an intimate, intense sexual and romantic relationship.
To Love and to Kill Page 4