Emilia was pregnant by then with Josh’s child.
It didn’t matter to Josh.
So Josh went and picked Heather and the kids up at Ben’s. He took them to a motel close by, where they all stayed the week.
(“This way, it gave Emilia time to get her shit out of my house,” Josh later told me.)
But as Josh and Heather would soon learn, their new life together was not a road paved with red rose petals and dancing unicorns, as Josh had sold it.
CHAPTER 38
DETECTIVE DONALD BUIE was thinking about Emilia and how she had walked Detective Brian Spivey through her mother’s trailer.
Why would she do this? What was her purpose?
“Obviously, Heather’s body had been found in her mother’s backyard—she had to have some type of knowledge of it,” Buie said.
What she knew exactly, Major Crimes still wasn’t sure. Was Emilia the “terrified” girlfriend, as she had said back in the soft room? Was she actually “afraid for [her] life”?
“She had told us that Josh said he killed Heather, placed her inside the trailer, put some boxes over her and left her there,” Buie said.
Josh was supposed to come back that night and bury her, Emilia told Buie and Spivey, but “he worked late.” So Josh couldn’t do it that day and, thus, Heather had been left inside the trailer for about forty-eight hours before he buried her in that shallow grave behind the trailer—all of which Josh was still blaming on James Acome and his friend.
“It was only out of curiosity, Emilia told us, that she went back into the trailer herself to check things out afterward,” Buie added. “To me, obviously, she wants to put herself inside that crime scene if anything is later linked back to her.... So if there is any evidence found of [her inside the trailer], she’s already explained that.”
But Buie saw something else when he looked at Emilia and listened to her during those interviews. Evaluating all of her interviews, Buie had developed some ideas.
“She’s a smart girl by far,” Buie said. “But she is also very conniving and very evil.”
CHAPTER 39
DR. BARBARA WOLF got to work finding out how Heather Strong died. Inside her autopsy suite, the sobering stench of death and disinfectant permeated the air. The more information the MCSO had about Heather’s death, the better they could question Josh and Emilia. Things were coming together on the investigatory side of things with Josh; it was not happening so much with Emilia, who was standoffish and elusive with information. The MCSO knew that, in time, Buie and Spivey could crack Josh and find out what he knew, when, and how deep he was involved. Emilia was another story; she was playing a bigger game here. She knew a lot more. They were going to have to squeeze it out of her, little by little. Most of the investigators involved in the case were now beginning to believe that both Josh and Emilia were telling partial truths and that perhaps the two of them had conspired to kill Heather. Something didn’t fit. The way their stories revealed new details each time they talked: Some things juxtaposed, others didn’t. The truth, as it is told by someone, should always mesh together seamlessly. There shouldn’t be big holes, except for missing periods of time.
This wasn’t the case where Emilia and Josh’s stories met.
James Acome and his friend, those same investigators felt, didn’t have anything to do with Heather’s death. There was nothing—not one shred of evidence—pointing in that direction.
The first thing Dr. Wolf did was fingerprint Heather and get those cards into the database to get a positive confirmation on the body. There was no doubt the corpse was Heather Strong, but scientists and cops like to have unequivocal proof, which those fingerprint cards, seeing that Heather had been previously arrested, would demonstrate.
As it turned out, the only finger available to Wolf was Heather’s right thumbprint, she said, adding, “Because the body was showing decompositional changes, that was the only fingerprint that was obtainable.”
Heather had been buried, by most estimates, for about one month. Even though the body was underground, the Florida weather could change it during that period into an unrecognizable state—they were lucky, as these things go, to have it in the condition it was, which turned out only to be because of the time of year.
Wolf X-rayed Heather’s body as it sat partially inside the suitcase on top of her autopsy table. Dirt and debris fell out of the body bag as Heather was hoisted up and onto the slab. Wolf wanted the body X-rayed in the position they had found it in order to best mimic the conditions and placement inside that hole. This would give Wolf an inside look into the contents of the suitcase bag and maybe whatever else had been used during the course of Heather’s murder.
Next, Wolf walked over to where the X-rays were processed and placed them on a backlight to have a look. As she studied each picture, it appeared that there were no “projectiles or fractures” present. All Wolf could see from the X-rays turned out to be “the presence of dental restorations [and] fillings. . . .” Heather had not been shot or beaten with a blunt object anywhere that Dr. Wolf could see within the X-rays.
With some help, Wolf removed Heather from the suitcase and spread her out on the autopsy table for a more thorough examination. The doctor then cleaned Heather’s body after removing all of the deceased’s clothing, as well as any jewelry. It seemed odd, but Heather did not have any shoes on, nor were there any shoes found in the hole or suitcase. Yet, she was wearing socks.
Barbara Wolf carefully studied Heather’s body, inch by inch. She noted that Heather was five feet eight inches tall, 108 pounds. However, postmortem measurements can be a bit misleading because Heather’s body had been so severely bloated. Thus, “as the body decomposes, it loses weight. . . .”
Still, Heather took care of herself. She was in good shape.
Heather’s body was in such a state that her skin had turned mostly green and would “slip” upon touch. Sections of it glided off her body like plastic sheets with the simple touch of a hand. She was in a fragile state. A week more, perhaps, and Wolf would not have been able to conduct the type of autopsy she wanted.
“The hair itself was slipping from the body. Some of the fingernails had become loosened and were actually separate.” Those had fallen into the suitcase.
Wolf opened a sexual assault kit and made sure to perform all those tests on Heather to see if she had been raped and/or her killer had left any DNA inside her.
Upon an examination of Heather’s shirt, which Wolf had removed, a reddish brown color of the shirt turned out to be body fluids that, because of the advanced state of decomposition, had discolored the shirt from its original gray.
There was a piece of duct tape stuck to the “butt” area of Heather’s jeans. Wolf took a pair of tweezers, carefully removed the tape and placed it in an evidence bag. A piece of tape actually had the potential to break a case. You match that piece of tape to a roll of tape in someone’s house and you’ve found your killer.
It took hours, of course, but Wolf finally tore off her surgical mask, unsnapped her latex gloves and sat down to write up a final report of her “findings” so far. These reports can change, actually, as the investigation moves forward. Medical examiners will sometimes amend a report based on what detectives later find. Things that didn’t make sense at autopsy begin to become clear, say, if a suspect makes an admission and this explains how a victim was murdered. Medical examiners are always open to learn more about a particular case. The main objective here was to see if anything stood out, or if Heather’s killer had left behind any telltale signs or forensic evidence of his crime.
Wolf concluded that Heather’s internal organs appeared “perfectly normal.” All of her major organs—heart, lungs, the entire contents of Heather’s abdomen—exhibited “no evidence or injury” or any “pre-existing natural disease process.” Had she not been viciously murdered, Heather had a lot of life ahead of her, it appeared.
Wolf explained how she had made an “incision” in the skull “to
examine the brain.” And that once she peeled back the scalp in order to saw through Heather’s skull, Wolf found “a bruise that was about two inches” located “in the mid-forehead region.” Wolf noted how this “wasn’t visible from the outside.” After peeling back the scalp, the doctor “opened the skull to examine the brain.”
The bruise itself was created by “blunt-force trauma,” Wolf assessed. She wrote: Something impacted the body at that point, the head, or the body hit against something with a blunt surface, not a cutting object.
There was no pattern to the bruise, giving Wolf any indication or clue as to what might have caused it. But, regardless, it was a blow strong enough to cause harm, and yet not a “life-threatening injury.”
Although Heather’s brain was “very decomposed,” Wolf could tell that the blunt trauma she located was not powerful enough to have caused any injury to the brain. Thus, a conclusion could be made that Heather might have been hit in the head while she was alive, or, perhaps, this injury happened when that glass window broke.
So, what had killed Heather Strong? If it wasn’t that blow to the head, what happened? In Wolf’s professional opinion, Heather died of asphyxia, or lack of oxygen, which essentially, as far as autopsies are concerned, becomes a hidden death. Not to be confused with strangulation, a means of murder that would leave marks and bruises on the neck, asphyxiation leaves nothing behind but a dead body.
Later in court, Wolf hypothetically noted in talking about Heather’s murder, “If someone is suffocated and . . . they’re not fighting back, they’re impaired or in some way incapacitated, the expected finding is actually no finding.”
What Wolf made clear here was that Heather’s body showed no obvious signs of what killed her. Therefore, the only reasonable, professional explanation, with all of the evidence they had so far, could only be asphyxiation, barring toxicology tests coming back to prove poisoning, which Wolf did not suspect based on her exploration of Heather’s internal organs.
“There’s no marker in the body for lack of oxygen,” Wolf explained later. “There’s no way to measure it. In a live person, we can measure blood levels. In a deceased person, we can’t.”
What Wolf said that made Detectives Buie, Mongeluzzo and Spivey take notice was that Heather’s death and the findings of the medical examiner were analogous to what the ME’s office had seen “quite frequently.” In other words, Wolf wasn’t pulling the cause of death out of thin air; there was context and basis for her determination.
Wolf finally said, “Individuals who commit suicide by putting a bag over their head—the suffocation itself leaves no physical findings.”
The MCSO had a witness saying she saw a bag over Heather Strong’s head. The medical examiner was backing up that claim with her findings.
CHAPTER 40
JOSH FULGHAM WOKE on Friday morning, March 20, 2009, near nine o’clock. A guard stepped near his cell and told him, “Those Marion County detectives are on their way.”
“Yeah, thanks,” Josh said.
He put his feet to the floor, sitting on the edge of his jail cot. Then he rubbed the sleep from his face and took a deep, long breath. Josh wanted a cigarette. Really bad. The past few days had been both foggy and grueling, not to mention emotional and sobering. Josh had been telling Detective Buie he was tired, but it had actually been a hangover from a substantial bender. Josh had smoked so much weed and taken so many pills the previous day—when Buie showed up at his door and he and Mongeluzzo claimed to have smelled pot smoke inside Josh’s house—that it burned him out for the following twenty-four hours. His head was a bit clearer this morning, but he was still feeling the haze of that nasty binge. All of it wasn’t necessarily from the drugs, but the fact that Josh realized he had given the MCSO the location of his wife’s body. Thinking about this now, Josh gasped when he thought about how much he now had to explain.
Shit, he thought.
Josh found his legs and stood up from his cot. Took a leak. Washed his face.
Buie and the MCSO were not going to let up. Josh knew he needed to come up with something to explain his part in knowing where Heather was buried, beyond shifting the blame to James Acome and his friend. Either that or he was facing potential death penalty charges.
Son of a bitch.
Josh arrived at Major Crimes near 10:00 A.M. “Hey, can we take these off?” Josh asked, referring to the handcuffs, as they entered that familiar interrogation room.
Buie nodded yes.
Rubbing the pain from his wrists after the cuffs were removed, Josh said he didn’t want anything to eat or drink after Buie asked him.
Buie then left the room and brought Detective Brian Spivey back with him.
Josh said he was “at least clearheaded today.” He was looking forward to talking, setting some things straight.
Before they could talk, however, Buie said he needed to read Josh his rights again.
“Inconsistencies,” Buie brought up right away after he finished Mirandizing his suspect. This, Buie added, was where they were at, effectively. Josh had told too many stories, kept so many things to himself, Buie felt. He wondered if Josh could be trusted anymore to tell the truth, now that the MCSO had a body?
Josh took a deep breath in and let it out slowly. He said he understood their frustration with regard to all the lies he had told.
Buie put it simply: “We [now] know someone’s been killed. We got our own idea what happened. Just be honest with us.”
Spivey piped in, “That’s all we’re looking for.”
Josh stared at the both of them. He wiped his mouth. He scratched the back of his head. “Well, I’m going to tell you all, man. I mean, I know I’ve lied to you. I know that I have lied to you. But I did not kill her. I did not. That’s my wife. I did not kill her.”
Buie looked at Spivey. Then at Josh: “What happened?”
“Well, like I told you . . . Heather did come in that day. I wasn’t home. . . .”
And from there, Joshua Fulgham gave Buie and Spivey his version of the events that led to the murder of his wife, Heather Strong.
CHAPTER 41
SO WHAT HAPPENED to Heather Strong, the twenty-six-year-old mother of two? The MCSO had so many versions of what they now believed to be one truth: Heather Strong was lured to Emilia’s house under a ruse of some sort and brought back into that abandoned trailer. (Probably, it happened forcibly, not under a guise of being paid money she was owed.) From there, she was bound to a chair, likely asphyxiated, and dumped in a hole about ten paces in back of the trailer. They had Josh and Emilia both pointing fingers at each other, a “he said/she said” farce. At one time, both of them had also made it sound as though James Acome and his friend had killed Heather.
But as the evening sun of Friday, March 20, 2009, set on Ocala, Florida, the MCSO investigation into this murder took a turn. That space in between—from the time Heather left work and met up with Josh—was now the MCSO’s central focus.
It had taken a night in solitary confinement for Josh to think about what had happened to his wife and to come clean.
“We put him in there (solitary) to limit his use of the telephone,” Buie explained. “We didn’t want him having contact with anyone else or him causing harm to himself. It also gives him a lot of time to think about what he has done.”
It was a Saturday, the following morning, when Josh called for Buie.
When Buie walked into the room, Josh looked up at him—and Buie knew.
“He wanted to wipe his slate clean,” the detective later said. “He was ready to tell us everything that had happened.”
What happened to Heather did not actually begin when Heather left work on that day, Buie and Spivey learned—it actually had started back in 2008, as the love triangle of Heather, Josh and Emilia turned into something Heather never really saw coming. And in a not-so-surprising twist to these cops, they now had a new suspect on the radar: the orchestrator and mastermind behind what they believed to be a terribly viol
ent murder.
CHAPTER 42
AFTER SPENDING THAT week in a motel, Josh, Heather and the kids returned to their trailer in Citra. Josh had made it clear to Emilia that she needed to pack her belongings and be out of the house by the time he showed up a week later with Heather and the kids. They were a family once again. He’d tried calling Emilia to see if she was gone, but she wouldn’t answer her phone.
“Josh always went back to Heather,” said a source close to this case. “Emilia would always play second fiddle. She knew that.”
But this time Emilia was taking charge.
Josh talked about how he was splitting his time, at least for a while, between the two women. Buie asked him: “You always went back to Heather?”
Josh responded, “Look at Emilia and look at Heather.”
The implication from Josh was that Emilia could not hold a candle to Heather as far as beauty.
Hearing this, Buie shook his head. How superficial. How shallow. And yet, that was how Josh thought.
Emilia simply wasn’t about to allow Josh and Heather to ride off into the Florida sunset together on their high horse, leaving her in the dust once again. After all, Emilia was carrying Josh’s baby (or so she claimed).
When Josh and Heather pulled into the driveway after that week at the motel, the first thing Josh looked for was Emilia’s truck. She hadn’t responded to his calls, maybe she was still there.
He didn’t see it.
She’s gone . . . , Josh told himself. Good!
Josh got out of his car and told Heather and the kids to wait. He tried the front door.
It was locked. He didn’t have his keys on him.
He had always left a window in the back unlocked for this reason. He told Heather he was going around to the back in order to crawl in through the window.
Josh fell onto the kitchen floor after going through the window. He got up and brushed himself off. He walked into the living room to go open the door for Heather and there was Emilia. She was sitting on his recliner, a blanket over her legs, smiling. “Like everything was fine,” Josh recalled.
To Love and to Kill Page 14