To Love and to Kill

by M. William Phelps

  Where the hell is she?

  Josh went back to insisting that all he needed was some time alone with Emilia and he could get out of her what James Acome and his buddy had done to Heather. He was certain of it. Emilia knew something, Josh kept saying.

  Buie asked Josh if he actually believed and thought James Acome and the other guy were holding Heather. It sounded ridiculous the way Buie put it. It was so asinine that Buie didn’t even want to talk about it anymore. You could almost hear Buie thinking: Come on, Josh . . . you’re a seasoned criminal—you have been fingered, friend.

  Let go. Give it up.

  “You think they got her somewhere for thirty days and they’re feeding her?” Buie speculated with a touch of sarcastic impatience in his tone. There was nothing worse for a man in Josh’s position than to patronize an irritated, fatigued detective on the cusp of getting his man.

  “I cannot see nobody killing [her],” Josh said.

  “But you know she’s dead—you know she’s dead, Josh.”

  “Man, I don’t know. . . .”

  Buie found it hard to believe that James Acome, a man he had interviewed earlier that day himself, had a motive to kill Heather. He wanted Josh to humor him with his idea of a motive.

  Josh said, “If they did, it would be for getting laid.”

  Rape?

  No way.

  “James was with her!” Buie pointed out. “He was living with her.”

  “They split up that day, man,” Josh said. “She put his ass out.”

  Now Josh was trying to say it was revenge?

  Buie wasn’t buying it.

  Josh said, “Listen . . . listen ... they split up that day. She was getting rid of him because he was trying to take over everything, and I told her, ‘Heather . . . there’s something else. He was fucking a fourteen-year-old little girl.’ ... I told her that. . . .”

  Buie recalled an interview with James Acome, which the MCSO had done, wherein James had admitted that Josh would say something like this, but James had said it was a sixteen-year-old girl. Perfectly legal. (Acome had never been charged with a crime even remotely connected to young girls.)

  Buie made a good point when he next said: “He ain’t been convicted of it.” The detective was somewhat disappointed in Josh’s feeble attempt to claim James Acome and his friend had kidnapped Heather. He kept telling Josh the MCSO wasn’t buying his pack of lies anymore and Buie, personally, was sick of it. They had caught Josh, time and again, in lies. Time was running out for Joshua Fulgham, Buie made perfectly clear. Josh needed to come clean with what he knew or there wasn’t much left that Buie could do for him.

  Then Buie made the suggestion that Josh knew where Heather was because he’d had something to do with murdering her.

  Suddenly things had just gotten very serious for Josh Fulgham.

  “I didn’t do that . . . ,” Josh balked.

  Buie said he was done. He was going out to find where Emilia was.

  CHAPTER 26

  JOSHUA FULGHAM HAD talked himself into a corner of problems that the MCSO was not willing to hear. Josh insisted that all he needed to do was speak with Emilia and he could tell them where Heather was and would clear everything up.

  The MCSO wasn’t biting, though.

  “You need to take us to that body,” a detective who had stepped in after Buie walked out told Josh. “You need to take us to where she’s at.”

  “I can’t do that ... until I talk to [Emilia].”

  “Josh, you can’t.”

  That ship had sailed, the detective made clear, telling Josh, “She’s denying the whole thing.”

  Josh continued to say he didn’t know what had happened.

  Buie came back into the room.

  “Josh, she’s telling me that you’re full of crap,” the other detective reiterated, referring to Emilia, as Buie got settled.

  “Full of it,” Buie added.

  Josh slipped down into his chair. They clearly had him on the ropes. The lies Josh had told all night were catching up with him. It’s one reason why cops allow a suspect to lie their way through an interview without being challenged (at first)—because sooner or later, the suspect cannot keep track of the lies. And that was the spot Buie and his team believed Josh Fulgham was now in.

  “Sit up, sit up,” Buie told Josh.

  Josh insisted he did not know where Heather’s body was located.

  Buie told him repeatedly that they were not accepting that statement any longer.

  Both detectives started to badger Josh, coming at him from both sides. “You know where’s she at.... Just tell us . . . just tell us. . . .”

  Josh complained of being sleepy. He said he wanted to go back to his cell. Josh said: “I don’t know where the body is.... I haven’t done anything. I did nothing to her.”

  “You are the last person that was with her,” Buie said.

  Josh snapped: “Damn, I should not have . . . fuck!”

  “You shouldn’t have been what?”

  “With the bitch, man . . . damn.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Fuck her!”

  “Tell me . . .”

  “It’s time to sleep.”

  “Tell me about her, Josh.” As any expert interrogator in the same position would do, Buie appealed to Josh’s anger, and what was potentially churning in his mind. It was time for Buie to take a real crack at him. This was the opening Buie had been waiting on. Clearly, Josh was becoming angry with Heather as he sat there. Rage was building. Buie fed off it and used it against Josh, banking on what the MCSO believed to be a motive.

  “She was taking your kids away!” Buie shouted.

  “She couldn’t take them from me. . . .”

  Josh then ranted about Heather and how he had always gone back to her—no matter what. He’d demand she toss out whichever man was living with her at the time after they split up and he would move back in. This seesaw love affair went on for eleven years. Josh loved the woman. He said this, over and over. There was no way he could ever do anything to hurt her. It was Emilia. They needed to speak with Emilia. She knew. Josh said he needed to get some sleep before he passed out on the table right there.

  “Let me go talk to [him] for a minute,” Buie said, indicating that he needed to step outside the room and speak with a colleague.

  Did Buie have an idea?

  CHAPTER 27

  AT SOME POINT on March 19, Josh Fulgham gave it up.

  Sort of.

  “He was getting, so to speak, worn down,” Buie said later. “He had let a few things slip out, which he then pointed to Emilia and blamed her.”

  Either way, Buie knew they had him. Josh, too, realized he was going to be better off in the end if he told them what they wanted to hear.

  Buie explained to Josh that the MCSO was going to go ahead and charge Josh with the flagrant use of Heather’s credit card. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to hold him.

  “Wait,” Josh said.

  Buie asked what he wanted.

  “Look, if you allow me to take my wallet to my mom and kiss my kids, I’ll . . . I’ll . . . take you to where Heather is.”

  Detective Buie . . . advised that Josh had disclosed to him about an area in the back of the [Maria Zayas, Emilia’s mother’s] residence that possibly could contain the body of Heather Strong, said a report filed by the MCSO.

  “He told me he was ready to go out there and find her,” Buie explained later.

  There was a team of detectives and crime scene investigators (CSIs) assembling to head out to the Boardman property and have a look around. Josh had claimed there was possibly a “freshly” dug grave and some “disturbed” dirt in an area near that abandoned trailer in the back of Maria Zayas’s property. And that was where they would “possibly” find Heather’s body buried in a shallow grave.

  Buie went to Maria and found her underneath the carport on the left side of her home. Maria said she had some information regarding Josh and a shovel.


  This, of course, was of great interest to Buie. “Can we go inside that car over there and speak?” Buie asked her. He wanted to get the conversation on tape.

  She said sure.

  “It was the fifteenth or the sixteenth,” Maria said, referring to February, “around three or four in the afternoon. Josh came by here and asked to borrow a shovel.”

  Maria was curious why Josh needed a shovel, so she asked him.

  “Oh, damn, wouldn’t you know, I just hit a dog on the highway and need to bury it,” Josh had reportedly told her.

  Maria gave him a spade shovel and then walked back into her home to finish cooking dinner.

  “I didn’t see where he went with the shovel,” Maria told Buie.

  “I see.”

  It was forty minutes later when Josh returned with the shovel. He said thanks and left.

  “The next morning,” Maria explained to Buie, “Emilia woke me up and said Josh was banging on her window. I went outside and saw him there. He said he wanted to come by and see Emilia. . . .”

  Josh came back later that same day after he got out of work. There was an argument between Emilia and Josh, Maria said, so Josh left and went back to his mother’s house.

  And that was all Maria Zayas could offer.

  CHAPTER 28

  WHILE EMILIA AND Detective Brian Spivey were inside that trailer talking later on during the day, on March 19, Spivey asked Emilia to point out for him exactly which chair she was referring to. Where was it Emilia had seen Heather strapped to a chair? Spivey was beginning to have a problem with Emilia and her sudden revelation of seeing Heather’s body inside the trailer.

  It all seems like a show she’s putting on, Spivey thought.

  Emilia pointed to the black chair closest to them: “Right there.”

  “Okay, then tell me what you mean, ‘She was taped to it’?”

  Emilia said Heather’s hands were bound and her body was fastened to the chair with “silver, gray tape.... She was kind of slouched in the chair and her head was leaning back.”

  Spivey asked for specifics: Where, exactly, was she taped? On which parts of her body? These facts would become important later. The detective wanted them coming out of Emilia’s mouth, into his ears, traveling then onto the pages of a report.

  Documented.

  That way Emilia would own them.

  “The tape was around her neck, where the bag was, and there was tape around her wrists, and there was some tape around her ankles.”

  Bag? Now there was a bag involved?

  This was astonishing information. It seemed to suggest that Heather had been kidnapped, held, and either tortured and murdered, or left to die.

  Emilia said she panicked when she saw this. It was startling. She had a tough time registering what she was looking at. It didn’t seem real. She then told herself she had to check to see if Heather was still alive. Staring at Heather, Emilia had no idea. So she put her fingers on Heather’s wrists to check for a pulse and then tried to find out if she was breathing.

  To Emilia’s dismay, Heather was dead.

  Spivey asked Emilia what she did next. The detective had a few issues with this story. Here it was a month later, for one, and Emilia was just now relating it to the police. Why would she hold on to such a sordid, horrific tale for such a long period of time? To protect Josh? Or had Heather’s killer (or killers) threatened Emilia, keeping her quiet?

  “I just kind of looked at her and started to cry,” Emilia claimed. “I didn’t know what to do, what to think. I turned and started walking out. Then I sat on the back step and I cried and then went inside.”

  Emilia needed a breath. She was back there, reliving that moment when she found Heather. It was exhausting and emotionally taxing, she said. She put both her hands on her belly and rubbed softly. The stress was not good for the child.

  Spivey needed to know what other information Emilia had been holding on to. He asked if she recognized the tape as coming from somewhere inside the main house or somewhere else. Had she ever seen that tape before?

  Emilia said, “Everywhere you can find rolls [of tape like that] . . . .”

  “That’s all you remember seeing that day?”

  Emilia looked down. She knew something. “That he . . . had told her there was money stashed somewhere.”

  He?

  “And who’s ‘he’?” Spivey wondered.

  “Josh.”

  If Emilia had thrown Josh under a bus earlier, as Detective Buie had suggested, well, now she had invited an eighteen-wheeler to come by and run over him. Because, according to what Emilia Carr was now saying, Joshua Fulgham had strapped his wife to a chair inside this trailer and murdered her.

  Yet as Spivey would soon learn as Emilia continued talking, there was more.

  Much more.

  CHAPTER 29

  IT WAS DARK outside, heading toward the morning sunrise of March 19. Detectives Mike Mongeluzzo, Brian Spivey, Donald Buie, along with Josh Fulgham, traveled down Highway 441 in an unmarked black Crown Vic.

  Josh had given it up—mostly. He now said he was willing to take them to Heather’s body. He wanted to go see his mother and his kids after escorting the team to where they wanted to go.

  Buie said sure.

  “Why do you shave your head?” Mongeluzzo asked Josh. This was something investigators did. They were Josh’s friends now. They would do what he asked—within reason—and cater to what he wanted while he was providing detailed, truthful information—all of which could help close this case and get Heather’s family some answers. Making small talk like this, building on a rapport, was part of being a good cop. It made Josh feel like he was a human being, not just some lunatic killer taking them to see his work.

  “It’s cooler,” Josh said. He rubbed his bald head.

  Spivey and Mongeluzzo talked together about the case as Josh sat, listened and then piped in, apparently wanting to make something clear.

  “Man, I’m going to tell you how it is right now.... I didn’t do this shit. I didn’t have it done. But I know it was done.”

  Mongeluzzo said, “Okay. And you’re taking us to her. It’s the right thing to do.”

  “Where I’m told she was,” Josh clarified. “I didn’t see her, but from what they tell me, she’s dead, man.”

  Josh kept saying he didn’t have anything to do with Heather’s death. He only knew about it from what others had told him. He said this, over and over, without offering any insight or new facts to back it up. Here was a guy taking cops to a dead body—a woman who just happened to be the wife he had been battling with and separated from—and he was saying he had nothing to do with killing her or dumping her body. With that, these cops had to wonder if Josh was blowing smoke up their asses, or was he beginning to come clean?

  As they got closer to Maria Zayas’s house, Josh said, “A pile of shit in front of the trailer, behind her mother’s house.” He was explaining—to the best of his knowledge, he claimed—where he thought Heather was buried, based on what he had been told. As Josh explained it, Heather was underneath a pile of brush and trash, buried in a shallow grave. He started to freak out a bit inside the car as they got closer to where her body was supposedly buried.

  Buie asked if Heather had been moved since she had been put out there.

  “I don’t know, man. I’ll tell you what I was told.... Please don’t make me see that shit again.”

  What did Josh mean by “again”? Had he seen it once already?

  The way he explained it, Josh didn’t want to view the body. He was getting nervous that they were going to make him stand by as CSIs dug Heather up from out of the ground.

  “You just point it out to me and I’ll go see it,” Buie said.

  They arrived at the trailer and Josh insisted he stay inside the car. In the back of the main house, where Emilia and her mother lived with Emilia’s sister, was the trailer. In back of the trailer, heading northeast about ten to twenty paces, was a pile of deb
ris.

  After some prodding, Josh got out of the car.

  “He walked around the yard,” Buie explained later, “pointing to various places.... ‘Maybe there, or there.... No, it’s over here . . . ,’ acting like he wasn’t sure.”

  Buie didn’t believe him. He felt Josh was jerking them around, but he kept it to himself for the time being.

  Then Josh said it was there (pointing), underneath that pile of garbage, based on what he had been told, that they’d possibly find Heather.

  Buie walked out into the yard. He looked around. He saw the pile of debris. Someone had done a poor job of raking leaves over a cleared area to make it look natural. Buie found the spot in the ground where, he believed, the earth had been recently dug. He grabbed a stick and stuck it into the ground—and the stick went down into the earth like a toothpick through a perfectly cooked cake.

  “And I knew that’s where she was,” Buie said.

  Before he walked away, something else struck Buie. There was a chair there, turned over. But it didn’t look weathered, like all of the other debris. It appeared to be much newer, as though it had been placed outside only recently.

  Buie called in the CSIs to navigate the search. It had to be done delicately. You find a body and that’s a win, but there is also evidence that needs to be collected at the same time.

  After the team assembled and Spivey went off to speak with other colleagues at the crime scene (he would ultimately stay at the scene), Mongeluzzo and Buie took Josh to his mother’s house, as promised, so he could see his “babies” one more time before he and the officers went back to Major Crimes and allowed Josh some sleep before interviewing him again.

  Josh was shackled and chained; Mongeluzzo carried a shotgun. There were not going to be any surprises for Buie and Mongeluzzo inside the house. They felt Josh’s mother had been hostile when they interviewed her earlier that month and here they were waking her up, her son chained, two detectives escorting him as he told them where to find his wife’s body. The situation lent itself to volatility and uncertainty. Buie and Mongeluzzo were not taking any chances.