Still, Josh chose Heather again.
“I didn’t know at the time that Heather was talking to dudes on the computer,” Josh recalled. Josh’s instincts were off at that time: Heather, apparently, had her own thing going by then.
She had met someone, a slightly older guy named Ben McCollum. Yet, according to Ben, he later recalled meeting Heather for the first time at a bar on Orange Lake while she was drinking with Josh (a second report backing up this claim), not online, as Josh had always suspected.
“She had marks all over her when I met Heather,” Ben said. “He was beating the shit out of her.”
Ben was a down-home country boy who didn’t take too kindly to men abusing their women. He felt sorry for Heather and thought she deserved so much better than “that piece of shit,” Josh Fulgham. Ben also said his relationship with Heather started out entirely professional. Ben had two kids of his own from a broken marriage. He inquired about Heather babysitting for him. “Josh didn’t want her to,” Ben remembered.
It was June 2008. Ben had gotten to know Heather and spoke to her one day when Josh wasn’t around. Heather was, of course, looking for any reason to step out of what was a bumpy, unhealthy and dangerous relationship with Josh. That pull of codependency, though, was powerful for her. Heather thrived on the chaos in her life, without even realizing it. She was locked in a cycle with Josh, not knowing how to break free. But when Ben came along, Heather saw a light. She realized there was more for her out there—a better man, number one, and also a more calming, normal life, which she had always dreamed of, but had no idea how to live.
Ben asked, “Come and watch my children for me? I’ll provide you with a vehicle to drive, money and a place to live.” Ben said later he viewed the relationship as a “live-in nanny” situation because it had been made clear to him that Heather wanted to move out of the home she shared with Josh, but not in order to begin another relationship. By then, Heather wanted to be rid of Josh for good. Her heart wasn’t in it anymore. They’d been through too much. Josh had always promised to change, but he would always return to his past behavior. Heather wanted a better life not so much for her, but for the kids.
“Josh was a bad guy,” Ben said, putting it as plainly as he could. Ben spoke with great respect for Heather. He adored the woman. “Heather wore ragged clothes all the time, and I think Josh liked it that way.”
Ben had seen Josh and Heather together around town. He “kind of knew” Josh, but he “didn’t really know him as well as [he] thought [he] did.” Ben knew the guy Josh occasionally worked for doing landscaping. Josh would stop by Ben’s airboat and vehicle restoration shop in McIntosh and hang around. Because he was so busy with work, taking care of his two girls and running the business, Ben never paid too much attention to Josh. He was just another dude from town scraping and scrapping his way through life—a troublemaker who didn’t get that it was time to grow up.
There was one night after they had met at that bar when Heather called Ben. She asked him to stop by the house. She wanted to talk about that job offer of being his nanny. Although Josh was totally against it, Heather told Ben, she was seriously considering taking it. A few days later, Ben and Heather made plans for her to leave Josh and move in with Ben.
“She was pretty much done with Josh and all of his bullshit by then,” Ben explained. Ben lauded Heather as a “sweet country girl.” She had a good heart, wanted decent things and a decent life, but she just couldn’t seem to get out of the situation with Josh. Ben considered her wanting to work for him as a nanny to be the first step she was taking toward a new life. Ben was attracted, sure; but he was also a gentleman and would never dream of overstepping the boundaries that Heather had put in place when she said she was moving in as the nanny, nothing more.
Ben borrowed a friend’s truck, drove over to Heather’s with another friend for support—and maybe backup—and packed all of Heather’s belongings (“which wasn’t much,” Ben said) and moved Heather and her kids into his house.
“Every time I seen her,” Ben recalled later, “she was always dressed in these ragged clothes, shorts and stuff—she never really had any nice clothes.”
Ben knew Heather didn’t want to dress poorly. She wanted nice clothes, like so many other women. But it was Josh who “wouldn’t let her.” It was another way, Ben supposed, of Josh controlling Heather. He was jealous. When Heather cleaned up and wore the best clothes she had, she would give any top model a run. She was beautiful in every way.
Ben never expected anything from Heather other than for her to work as the nanny.
“That’s the way it started out,” Ben said. “I gave her like two hundred dollars a week to watch my girls, pick them up from school and take care of things while I worked.”
According to what Josh later told me, Heather came to him one night and explained that he’d had his fun, so she wanted to go out by herself and have some fun of her own. Josh made no mention of this business relationship Ben and Heather had entered into.
Josh said he agreed, making his position clear to Heather that although he didn’t like it, Heather could go out and sow her oats, so to speak. He’d done it. He was fine with allowing her the space to realize how important her family was.
“I did it, so go ahead,” Josh said he told Heather. (Although, this comment seemed to go against all the available evidence, suffice it to say when you take into account Josh’s previous behavior and his overall attitude toward Heather in general.)
This sort of dysfunctional relationship went on, Josh insisted, between him and Heather for quite some time. Heather would go out, while he ran back into Emilia’s arms. There was one time Emilia told Josh that Heather, who was calling Emilia by then and chatting it up with her as though they were old friends, was speaking to all sorts of guys on the Internet. So Josh said he cut the Internet lines to the house, thus severing her access to the Web.
But he also did something else after realizing that Heather was, indeed, engaging in exactly what he had given his stamp of approval for her to do, he later claimed.
“I roughed Heather up a bit over that,” Josh admitted to me. “I am not proud of it, but I just want to be honest with you so you can set shit straight.”
“Roughed Heather up a bit” was beyond putting a shine on the truth. Ben saw Heather after this roughing up and said that Josh had beaten the snot out of her.
After Heather moved into Ben’s and started working for him, Josh began meddling right away. On the same day Ben moved Heather into his house, Ben and Heather were sitting outside Ben’s shop under an orange tree. They were having a nice afternoon together, eating lunch and talking. Normal stuff. Heather felt as though she’d taken a deep breath and had gotten past a part of her life she was ready to leave behind for good. Ben was telling her that everything was going to be okay. She didn’t have to worry about Josh, about anything. Ben was going to make sure she was taken care of—and that Josh wouldn’t bother her.
As they sat and talked, Ben happened to look down the road and there was Josh heading toward them.
He soon pulled up, rolled the window down and said: “Ben, look, man, you have no idea how far I am willing to take this.”
It was a bona fide threat. Josh came across as serious. He was filled with anger. No man was going to swoop in and take his family away from him without paying a price.
Heather started to say something, but Ben stopped her and stood. In the small of his back, Ben had a Glock .45, “a subcompact thirty,” he said. Ben was no stooge. He knew Josh wasn’t going to walk away from Heather and allow her to move on.
What Josh didn’t understand, however, was how far Ben was willing to take things.
Ben took the weapon out from the small of his back, pointed it away from Josh, making sure Josh saw it. “Look here, Josh,” he said, “I’m willing to take this shit as far as you’re willing to take it.”
CHAPTER 37
BEN RAN JOSH off his land on that first day Heather moved into
his home. Perhaps more than anyone else whom Josh had tried to push around for most of his life, Ben McCollum understood that when you stand up and face a bully, he generally will back down. For now, Josh was out of the picture.
That incident didn’t stop Josh from being a pest, however. He even stooped so low as to drive by the shop one day while Ben’s mother was working in her garden and harassed the woman. “Hey there, whore!” Josh yelled before taking off.
Real junior high school stuff, Ben said. That was Josh: a name caller. He only beat up women. A man presented himself in front of Josh and he ran away with his tail between his legs, like a bitch dog.
Soon Josh began throwing rocks and other things at Ben’s house. A nuisance, sure, but as Ben saw it, “He never would take it as far as I thought he would, and, to be honest, I was absolutely prepared for anything he could bring my way.”
For the first few weeks, it was an employee/employer relationship between Ben and Heather. Nothing more.
“But, you know, living together like that,” Ben explained, “things grew between us.”
Ben bought Heather her own car. They started doing things together. Normal stuff. That sparkle hit their eyes whenever they passed each other in the house. Heather was so happy. Her life did not revolve around enduring turmoil or walking on eggshells, controlled by a man who seemed to enjoy the pain he caused her and the power he wielded over her.
“I’d go out froggin’ in the middle of the night,” Ben explained. “She’d be there when I got back at midnight or later, waiting up for me. I could see that she not only wanted to be there for the kids, but me, too. She was feeling left out.”
Josh wasn’t going to beat Ben—he knew that the minute Heather moved into Ben’s house. So he did what he did best: turned the situation into a trade-off. The night Heather moved out, Josh helped move Emilia in. Emilia had always been Josh’s fallback woman. She had never been (and would never be) number one. And Emilia, who understood this, always took Josh whenever he came crawling back. This type of behavior might be a by-product of Emilia’s obvious lack of self-esteem, perhaps born from the sexual abuse she claimed she suffered as a child. Subconsciously (unconsciously, for certain), Emilia believed she didn’t deserve better than a guy living with the mother of his children or, at the least, sleeping with that same woman and her at the same time.
This went on between June and December 2008, Josh remembered (Ben and Emilia later backing up those dates). If you asked Josh, Heather kept the kids away from him for just about that entire time she lived at Ben’s house. He claimed he never saw them, and she refused to allow him to take them for weekends or weeknights.
According to Ben, Heather was terrified, really, to allow him to take the kids. They both knew Josh to be a pill head and into meth. Allowing him access to the kids, they felt, anything could happen. Still, Heather did allow him to see his children, Ben said. She never totally denied him.
“We were both playing games with each other, back and forth with our feelings,” Josh said of him and Heather during this period. They even went to court and slapped injunctions on each other to keep the children away from the other. It was a volatile, emotional chess match, pitting the children in the middle. Josh and his abusive, angry rants and threats existed there on the periphery of it all. Heather had gotten tired of the “same old/same old” with Josh. He’d work. He’d quit. He’d do drugs. He’d stop. He’d hit her and say he was sorry. He’d make promises he never kept—and make them again.
Heather was done and Josh knew it. He could not talk his way back into her life again. She had seen through him and realized there was better for her out in the world.
That confrontational nature Josh had set up inside the structure of his relationship with Heather, which carried over into Ben’s romance with Heather, occurred during the entire relationship. As much as he tried, Josh couldn’t let it go (or let Heather go) and move on with Emilia. Heather was his possession—that was clear in the testimonials left behind. What Ben later recalled was a madman who tormented him and Heather any chance he got—even after Ben made it clear that he was willing to take things to a violent level himself and had the firepower to back up his stance.
“[He] couldn’t just leave us alone,” Ben said disappointedly. It was all Ben wanted. He didn’t care about Josh or making sure Josh knew who was tougher. It was never about ego and macho bullshit for Ben. He was in love with a girl. Simple. Pure. Healthy love. And Heather deserved it.
Josh continued tormenting them. He threw “missiles” at Ben’s house—projectiles of some sort—one day. He would routinely pull up to Ben’s, roll down his window and shout obscenities at Ben and Heather. Josh even came by once with a firearm of his own (probably a shotgun he had taken from Emilia’s father after telling him he would clean it for him) and waved it at Ben, threatening him, Ben later recalled. And yet Josh would never confront Ben face-to-face, no weapons. He didn’t have the balls to do that.
The stress of it all was too much on Ben, who was running his business and dealing with a problematic ex-spouse himself. He loved Heather by now, sure. And there’s good evidence available proving that Heather loved him and knew how good Ben was for her. But this couldn’t go on forever like it was.
Sure enough, it all came to an end one day in December 2008. Heather made quite a strange and baffling decision. She sat Ben down. It was a Saturday, Ben recalled. He couldn’t forget because it was one of those days anyone in his position would remember. Ben was fond of Heather and her children, who got along great with his. Ben built airboats. He often took the kids and Heather for rides; they’d meet up with some of Ben’s friends, six or seven other airboat owners, and do day trips. Normal things that normal families did. It wasn’t constant chaos, as Heather had been used to all her life with Josh. There wasn’t that endless tension, always wondering what would happen next, where the day’s food would come from, as Heather had been so used to by then. There was calmness. There were family-oriented moments. The pace of Heather’s life had slowed considerably while she was with Ben. She was enjoying her life: cooking for him and the kids, cleaning, shopping, acting like a happy homemaker. Yet, ostensibly out of nowhere, Heather went to Ben on that Saturday and made what seemed like an unusual (and very bad) decision.
“I need to go back to my family,” Heather told Ben on that Saturday in December. “I need to put my family back together.”
Ben thought about it. He was going to play hardball here with Heather for her own good. “Look, Heather, I love you. But if you leave—I have to say, as much as I don’t want to—you cannot come back.”
Through tears, Heather said she understood. It had been a hard decision for her to make. She’d been going over and over it. But in the end, it was for the kids. They were asking about their dad.
Ben took a moment. Then: “Do you understand that if you go back to him, that guy right there, he will kill you one day?”
This thought had always been on Ben’s mind. He had seen Josh in action, all from a different perspective. Heather’s view of Josh was slanted, dulled by years of experiencing him firsthand. She really couldn’t tell how dangerous he was anymore because she had lived with that danger for so long. Ben could see it all clearly, though.
“He was just flat-out fucking crazy, that guy,” Ben remarked later. Josh even had Heather arrested on a trumped-up domestic violence charge while she was living with Ben. She was taken in, booked and jailed. Ben called his Ocala attorney and put up six thousand dollars of his own money to get her out. “The sheriff came over to my house one day, handcuffed her and took her away—and all she did was go over and drop the kids off at the house so Josh could spend time with them.”
Nonetheless, with all they had been through, Heather called Josh on that Saturday. There’s a good chance that Heather did this in order to save Ben from all the irritation Josh was going to cause them. It was just easier for Heather, as it always had been, to give in. Heather had sat by and had watched two men
wave guns at each other. The last thing she actually wanted was one of them to go through with violence, especially in front of the kids. Although she knew Ben would never do anything to damage the children, Josh didn’t care. He’d beaten her before in front of them. The best thing she could do for everyone was to submit.
According to Josh’s recollection of that phone call, Heather said, “I’m done [with Ben]. I love you, Josh. I miss you. I am ready to come home and be a family again.”
Josh was thrilled, but he had a serious problem. Emilia was now living in the house with him. He wasn’t torn, however. Josh was using Emilia—that much was obvious in the casual way he always treated her feelings. Emilia was the go-to girl when Josh had nobody else. Now with Heather beckoning him to rebuild the family, Josh told Emilia, without a second thought or concern that it was going to hurt her feelings, “Get out.”
Then Josh made a promise to Heather. He was going to change this time. She’d see. And, to prove it, after all the time they’d been together, after everything they’d been through, he was now ready to marry her.
(“I started giving Emilia the cold shoulder after that phone call from Heather and she knew what was about to take place,” Josh told me—though he did not tell Emilia then that he was planning on marrying Heather.)
“It’s time for you to leave,” Josh told Emilia. “Pack your shit and get out.”
Emilia was totally blindsided by this.
“What?”
“You have a week to pack your shit and get the hell out!”
To Love and to Kill Page 13