There were no dogs.
Josh stepped out from around a corner inside the house. They exchanged pleasantries. Josh told his kids to go into another section of the house and do their homework.
Buie took in a deep breath through his nose and smelled a strong aroma of weed. Not as though someone in the house had sparked a joint and taken a few puffs. This was much more profound and pronounced, as if someone had been sucking on a bong for hours.
Donald Buie approached Josh and asked him if he had “a wife or anything.” Josh said, “I do, but I don’t know where the hell she is.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Buie finally said.
Buie got Josh to commit to some dates and information about Heather as Spivey, standing by, mentioned that he smelled pot smoke. They discussed where it was coming from as Spivey admitted the weed smell wasn’t all that important to them at this point or the reason for their visit.
Josh said he’d fired up a doobie earlier, but that was it. It was just a little toke—nothing more.
Buie asked Josh for a timeline.
Josh said it was February 15 and Heather had called from the Petro. (There was a difference of opinion in who called whom, but phone records would later flesh out that it was Josh who actually called Heather twice at the Petro on that day.) “She told me she was fixin’ to get out of here . . . because she was fixin’ to get into trouble. . . .”
Buie asked if there was more.
Heather was tossing her boyfriend out of the house and she wanted Josh to come and get the kids, Josh explained. But he didn’t want to go over there for fear of being set up and arrested for something he didn’t do. So they met, Josh said, “at a little Subway store” near the Petro. As an afterthought, he then said after he got the kids from Heather, he brought them over to his mother’s. He was living there at the time.
While he spoke, Josh seemed relaxed and calm.
A little too much, perhaps.
Probably the weed, Buie considered.
“She called me with the keys,” Josh continued, referring to something Heather had said to him on that same night. “She wanted me to come and get the keys from Petro.... She had two suitcases with her ... last time I seen her.” Josh said he gave her five hundred dollars in cash. It was all the money he had.
They chitchatted a bit more, focusing on when Josh and Heather were married. Then Josh said he had a girlfriend now, “Emilia. But we just came to the conclusion that, you know, we don’t need to [argue anymore].... If we can’t get along, we’re not going to live together.”
When they split up—just recently—Emilia went to stay with her mom, he added. She was there now.
Buie found all of this interesting, but not at all revealing in its entirety. He had a sense Josh knew more.
“Any idea where she might have gone off to?” Buie asked.
Josh said he felt he knew where Heather was: Mississippi. He mentioned something about her taking off with some “old guy . . . she used to get money off of. . . . I think she left with him.”
Using that point as a launch, Josh did a good job of selling a story that Heather had taken a sum of money from somewhere (he didn’t know where) and took off on the run, realizing that cops would soon be after her. He was basically calling his wife a thief, saying she ripped someone off for a large amount of cash and booked town.
Buie said there were no open warrants out for her arrest.
Josh countered by explaining that it hadn’t all been figured out just yet. In time, the cops were going to be notified, from what he had heard, and it would all come to light.
Buie asked Josh if he knew Heather’s ATM-card pin number.
Josh gave it to them and said he hadn’t heard from Heather since she left.
They were sitting in the living room. The kids came in from time to time and asked their father questions about homework and dinner. The situation, despite the foul aroma of stale marijuana permeating the air, soaking into the carpet and furniture, appeared to be a father taking care of his children. Nothing, save for that smell of weed, seemed to be out of place.
Buie said, “Listen, before we leave, can you go and get us any weed you have so we can get rid of it?”
Josh showed them a few roaches in the ashtray and said that was the whole of it.
Spivey asked Buie to hand Josh one of his business cards. “If anything should come up, if somebody sees her ... we need to know so we can close this case out.”
“I mean,” Josh said, seemingly confused, “well, what’s going on?”
They explained that Heather was considered a missing person. With any missing person case as old as this one, they needed to maybe get a DNA profile of Heather just in case a Jane Doe body showed up somewhere in the future. Would Josh be willing to help with that?
He said he would.
By the time they walked out the door, it was 6:31 P.M.
Spivey and Buie looked at each other as they sat in the car and prepared to leave. Both had a strong feeling they were going to be seeing a lot of Joshua Fulgham over the next few days.
He’s lying, both cops thought. He knows more.
Spivey turned the key, fired up the engine and pulled out.
They could have arrested Josh. But for now, as a strategy, both detectives chose to let him be.
CHAPTER 16
SPIVEY AND BUIE waited for a few hours and then returned to Josh’s front door. Josh seemed wired and uncertain this second time around, as if something was bothering him. Buie and Spivey were now prepared to tell Josh he needed to go with them down to Major Crimes for a formal interview.
The MCSO knew Josh was the last person to see Heather Strong. Detective Buie had interviewed several of Josh’s so-called friends and also one of Heather and Josh’s children. Buie had good information that Josh was in one way or another responsible for Heather’s disappearance, either aiding her escape from town or facilitating her demise. Buie and Spivey had made contact with Emilia Carr, after finding out that Josh and Emilia had been together as a couple and asked her to come in for an interview. Emilia happily and willingly agreed. They were working on picking her up at the moment.
“We have a warrant on fraud charges,” Spivey told Josh. “It stems from the use of Miss Strong’s debit card.”
Josh said he understood. However, Josh believed that as Heather’s husband, he had every right to use the card.
A third detective came in. Josh went with him to Ocala.
Spivey and Buie followed.
CHAPTER 17
THE MAJOR CRIMES division of the MCSO investigated homicides and felony assaults, in addition to other serious crimes and deaths considered suspicious or otherwise strange, until proven different: overdoses, suicides, the unexplained and so on. It was Major Crimes that got Heather’s case weeks ago when the information the MCSO was receiving told investigating officers that it was highly unlikely Heather had disappeared on her own.
Detective Brian Spivey grew up in Ocala. It was baseball that landed him a scholarship at Santa Fe Community College in New Mexico. Yet, the athlete in him understood that baseball was a springboard for a degree, not a professional contract.
“Every athlete dreams of the pros, but realistically I knew that getting a degree,” Spivey said with a laugh, “was the best thing that could come out of my baseball career.”
Upon returning to Florida after college and attending a local school to upgrade his education, Spivey went right into the police academy. Not because of a family obligation or some secret desire to chase bad guys, but because being a baseball player all those years and working with a team to accomplish a goal lit a fire within Spivey to carry that spirit into his vocational life.
“Working with a group of individuals to accomplish a goal,” Spivey told me, “law enforcement just seemed to be the next step.”
His first job happened to be with the Marion County Sheriff’s Office. He started like everyone else, in patrol. From there, he worked his way up into Maj
or Crimes as a detective. That was 2002. Spivey’s initiation into Major Crimes was a homicide involving a guy who had been stabbed seventy-eight times.
“Two guys put him in the trunk of a car and took him out into the woods after killing him and were in the process of burying him when a patrol car just happened to drive by and see the car. . . .” There was blood all over the vehicle, some even dripping down into the wheel wells and from the trunk. The officer called it in and they found the body soon after, along with the two guys hiding in the woods. It became Spivey’s first case.
Now he was supervising Major Crimes.
When Spivey and Buie arrived back at Major Crimes that night, Emilia was already sitting, waiting to be questioned. She had come in voluntarily and said she wanted to help any way she could. Spivey and Buie knew that Emilia possibly held the potential to open up this case. She knew Josh’s secrets. She had spent time with both Josh and Heather. Someone had even told the MCSO that Emilia had been Heather’s babysitter at various times.
They asked Emilia how long she had known Josh.
“Two years ... we dated for four months last year when Josh and Heather split up,” Emilia said. “When they reunited in December, though, Josh and I parted ways.”
Emilia came across as articulate and intelligent. Her voice was tethered to a Southern twang prone to those native Floridians more to the north of the state. Later it would be determined that she had an IQ of about 125. Emilia was no dumb street chick; she was a bright girl who knew exactly what she was doing.
This relationship—Josh, Heather and Emilia—had a sordid, rather confusing history over just the past seven months. When Emilia was with Josh, she, of course, had words with Heather and they didn’t get along. On occasion, both women had even tossed vulgarities at each other, shouted insults and argued. Your typical back-and-forth scorned-lover bickering.
“So you dated Josh?” Buie asked Emilia.
Emilia looked off to the side. She was a bit impervious in regard to sharing something—that much was obvious by the look on her face. Emilia had a secret. This much they knew to be true.
“What is it?”
Emilia looked down. She put her hand on her tummy.
“We parted ways, Josh and I, but I was already pregnant with his child.”
Buie had noticed a bump. One doesn’t ask a woman if she’s packing, however—just in case, she’s not!
“How long are you now?”
“Eight months,” Emilia said. This posed a problem, Emilia explained.
For Buie and Spivey, this was now a major development. The stakes had suddenly changed.
“So you’ve seen what’s been going on with Josh and Heather?” Buie wanted to know, asking for a bit of insight into the relationship from a third party.
“Yeah,” Emilia said. “Back in January, Heather claimed Josh pulled a shotgun on her—the gun belonged to my father. He went to jail.”
Buie and Spivey were well aware of Josh’s time in jail on that charge. They had gone back and listened to several recordings of Josh making phone calls from jail during that same time in January until he got out, just before Heather went missing. Those tapes, and whom Josh was speaking to, told an interesting tale all on their own.
“When he got out of jail, did you two get back together?”
“We tried to work things out,” Emilia said. “It was very rocky, though.”
“How’d you and Heather get along?”
“We weren’t necessarily friendly, so we pretty much maintained our distance. We never fought or anything like that, though.”
This was untrue, both detectives knew.
The impression Emilia gave was that she and Heather stayed away from each other. When they followed that rule, things were okay between them. When they didn’t, well, they argued like junior high school girls in the hallway between classes, fighting over a boy.
“When was the last time you saw Heather?”
“Oh, geez, probably like January tenth, a few days after Josh got hit with that gun charge. I babysat their kids while Heather worked.”
“You watched their kids?”
“Yeah . . . when she got home that night, we argued because of her calling the cops on Josh and him going to jail.”
Emilia went on to say that Josh never threatened Heather with a gun. He took the weapon so he could clean it. That charge was bogus. It was Heather and her new boyfriend making it up to get Josh out of the picture for a while.
“Did you put your hands on Heather?” Buie asked.
“No way—she would have had me in jail!”
“Did you fight with her, like grab her hair or anything?”
“No! When we got into it, I chose to leave. I didn’t have a problem with Heather. I didn’t,” Emilia claimed. It sounded sincere.
They took a break. Emilia was tired. She was feeling the day, the week, the month. She was going to be giving birth to Josh’s child in a matter of weeks. His wife was missing. Josh was sitting in jail on a fraud charge. Emilia felt helpless and unable to do anything. Her life seemed to be once again spiraling downward, and there was no way she could find to stop it.
Near 10:00 P.M. on March 18, after a break, Emilia sat down with Spivey and Buie for a second time. She said she wanted to clear something up and then be taken back home so she could rest.
“Sure,” Spivey said.
“I did grab Heather once. It was two or three nights before Josh went to jail. But I made sure not to have any contact with her after that. I stayed away from her.”
They talked about a few inconsequential pieces of information and then Buie got a patrol car to bring Emilia back to her mother’s house in Boardman.
As she left, Spivey and Buie stood, watching Emilia Carr walk out of the building. They looked at each other. Both investigators knew that they’d be speaking to Emilia again. She definitely knew more. That much was clear in the way she answered questions and her body language.
CHAPTER 18
JOSH FULGHAM SPENT the evening of March 18, 2009, in the local Ocala jail. Detective Donald Buie, not much convinced by the answers Emilia had given them, called Emilia just after midnight, indicating that the MCSO wanted her to come back in and chat some more. Would she mind?
“Yeah, okay,” Emilia begrudgingly said.
Buie sent a patrol car to pick her up. What he didn’t tell Emilia was that between the time she had gone back home and then, he had developed new information about the case.
And it involved her.
It was 12:39 A.M. when Emilia sat back down in the interview suite at Major Crimes to give her third interview within the span of about ten hours. She didn’t know it, but Josh was getting rustled awake from his cell to be interviewed, so they could record it and then play back sections for her if Josh said anything that could help—a standard police tactic when two people are thought to be involved and know more than they are sharing. Buie and Spivey were certain that between the two of them—Josh and Emilia—they would figure out where Heather was and what had happened to her. The hope at this point was that she had been kidnapped and was being held somewhere. Or perhaps Josh had threatened Heather and had scared her into leaving town. Thus far, there was no indication that anything deadly had happened to Heather.
“How are you?” Buie asked Emilia as she settled in.
“Exhausted,” Emilia said.
“You and me both.” Buie took a pause. “Listen, I had you brought back here because we developed some new information, okay? However, you are not under arrest.”
Emilia, who seemed calm, but very tired, nodded, indicating that she understood. Still, that last comment from Buie seemed to be serious. This was not a conversation anymore, Emilia knew. She was being interrogated.
Buie got serious. He said, “Because I had a patrol car bring you back here, okay, I need to question you—okay?” He explained that before he asked his first question, the MCSO needed to advise Emilia of her rights. “These rights are just so you and
I can talk.”
Emilia said she understood.
After Buie read Emilia her Miranda rights, as a professional formality, he asked if she was ready and willing to talk to him. At this point, Emilia could have said no, that she wanted a lawyer. But it sounded as though she had nothing to hide.
“I mean, I don’t see why not,” Emilia said.
Buie stood. He approached Emilia and explained: “Before we start, I want to go get something—I want you to listen to something, okay? Then I want you to tell me your thoughts after that. Okay?”
Emilia again nodded yes. She was curious as to what was going on.
Buie had interviewed Josh during the intervening time Emilia had left the MCSO, returned and sat down again with them. Josh was actually just in the adjacent room from where Emilia was now sitting. Buie had recorded that interview with Josh. When he returned to Emilia after a brief break, Buie had a tape recorder with him. He had obviously gotten something he could use from Josh. He placed it on the table in front of Emilia, who looked up, as if to say, “What the hell are you doing?”
Buie didn’t say much. He hit the PLAY button and pointed to the tape recorder. “Listen.”
The interview ran several hours. In it, Josh had admitted to knowing where Heather was, without giving away the location, what happened to her, why she was gone, or if she was alive or dead.
While the tape played, changing his tone from friendly to very serious, Buie said, “You can stop me at any time, okay, but Josh has got you driving the bus! He’s saying that you told him. . . .” Buie was obviously no longer the good cop, who was just having a friendly conversation with Emilia. The MCSO had information that Emilia was involved in some way. She needed to explain her role.
Emilia was confused. Told him what? What is going on here? she wondered.
She felt blindsided. What had Josh gone and done now? Had he turned on her? Was he lying to them about her? This worried Emilia greatly.
“You told him . . . ,” Buie began before stopping himself again. Then: “I’m telling you, he told me that you told him that! We know that he brought her (Heather) back to the house that night.” Buie was referring to February 15, though he never mentioned the date. By “house,” he meant Emilia’s mother’s house in Boardman, where Emilia lived.
To Love and to Kill Page 6