To Love and to Kill

by M. William Phelps

  “Why?” Emilia wanted to know.

  “I was just wondering, baby,” Josh said. He had an unabashed and obvious patronizing tone to his voice, as if he knew something no one else did. “I was just wondering.”

  “O . . . kayyyyy,” Emilia said, stretching out the word. Then she laughed.

  “I was just wondering . . . but anyway . . . I been in jail. I been thinking a lot.”

  Emilia started cracking up, as though she had just gotten the punch line to a joke.

  There was another word for what Josh was suggesting here: “premeditation.”

  Without Emilia knowing about it at first, Josh Fulgham was planning the murder of his wife, Heather Strong. At least that much was obvious in this one phone call.

  Over the next several days, after they understood perfectly what they were discussing, now both on exactly the same page, Josh began asking questions designed around a definite plan he was concocting. He wanted to know what “the neighbor” was going to do eventually with all that land around Emilia’s momma’s house, especially the old trailers. Did the owner of the land have any plans that Emilia knew about? Was he going to be excavating or building or selling at any time in the near future?

  Emilia explained that she heard the guy was going to be clearing the lot, getting rid of the trailers and turning the land into pasture for some horses.

  “All right, all right ... I was just wondering,” Josh said, again with a diabolical, smug, self-assured tone. Her answer seemed to give him great comfort that the land—along with the trailer—would be cleared and taken away. “Because this motherfucker,” he said, referring to himself, “has been doing some thinking.”

  “About?” Emilia said, laughing.

  “This shit.”

  She laughed harder. She and Josh were a team now. Working together. Understanding each other. On the same page entirely.

  They were coming together.

  “We’ll talk when I get home.”

  “Okay.”

  During another call, Emilia asked about Heather and if things didn’t work out for Heather and whichever guy she was seeing when Josh got out. What was going to happen then? Was Josh going to drop Emilia again and go running after the sweetheart from his teenage years?

  Josh became livid. There was something different in his voice. He had written Heather off—completely. He had wiped her from his mind and his heart. He was finished with her, but there was more to it. He had erased Heather. And one of the only ways he could be certain of never going back was to make sure she wasn’t around.

  “You don’t ever worry about that,” Josh scolded Emilia, referring to him getting back with Heather. “Listen to what I am saying—Don’t worry about that.”

  “Okay, I believe you.”

  “You don’t be worrying about me and Heather no more. I promise you. You’ll see when I get out.”

  Emilia hung up and stared at the phone. For the first time, she felt Josh was being straight with her.

  CHAPTER 52

  JOHNNY STRONG GREW up in Lebanon, Indiana, where his father was a hardworking construction foreman subjected to long, grueling hours out on job sites. As a young boy, Johnny and his family packed it up from Indiana and moved south to Tennessee because his father got a better job offer. The Strong family finally ended up in Mississippi, where life took a turn for the worse. Johnny’s dad developed cancer at a young age, so Johnny, his brother and his sisters wound up in foster care after their momma couldn’t take care of them.

  By the time he was fourteen or fifteen, Johnny said, not quite able, these days, to recall exactly when, he was already working a steady job roofing houses. School wasn’t something Johnny thought about much ever since he could swing a hammer and pound nails. Johnny needed to take care of his siblings and get back with Ma. And by the time he was nineteen, Johnny reunited once again with his sisters and aunt and mother. Johnny’s brother was in Nashville, staying with family there. It wasn’t the ideal situation and some time had passed, but the family was back together again.

  During the late 1970s, when Johnny was cutting his teeth as a teenager, he was hanging out at a local bar one night, shooting pool, when a young gal who tickled his fancy walked in.

  “We was dranking, you know, and partying like young people do,” Johnny explained later.

  “Carolyn,” the young girl said her name was.

  Johnny liked what he saw. He had seen Carolyn around town. But here she was right in front of him.

  “Johnny, pleasure to meet y’all.”

  Johnny said he and Carolyn “wound up getting together that night” and shacked up “together for about six months” before Carolyn demanded that they “go ahead and get married.”

  So he proposed.

  It was 1980 when Carolyn and Johnny wed and moved to Texas to begin raising a family. For construction workers, like Johnny and his father before him, they followed the work. Johnny had become an all-around laborer, like his old man: roofer, framer, concrete, whatever he could do to earn enough to drink and take care of the family. At the turn of the new decade, the fabulous 1980s, Texas was a booming mecca of construction with all of that oil money floating around and being pumped back into infrastructure and new housing. Johnny wanted his piece of it.

  After a year in Houston, however, Johnny saw his work decline sharply and he was getting laid off a lot, so he decided to follow the trail once again. But this time, work was drying up everywhere in Johnny’s chosen field. He couldn’t find much, so they moved to Mississippi, where Johnny’s mother had a house and she could take him and Carolyn in.

  Then, on March 23, 1982, Carolyn gave birth to Heather. Now Johnny needed steady work. He had a daughter. He started asking around.

  “Dallas,” someone told him. “They’re hiring down there.”

  Johnny, Carolyn and Heather left for Dallas shortly after Heather was born.

  In Dallas, Johnny and Carolyn both found work: security guards for Gateway Bank One. With some cash in their pockets, though, an itch started. They were looking for something to do, something exciting, something fun for once. It seemed to be nothing but a struggle since they married, and now that they were working different shifts, Carolyn and Johnny rarely saw each other. Johnny worked a twelve-hour shift—half a day—and Carolyn the other. It got to the point where they decided they wanted to move back home to Mississippi.

  “Big mistake,” Johnny said later.

  That excitement and fun they were searching for in Dallas came when they got back home—in the form of partying to excess, at least for him, Johnny explained.

  Carolyn and Johnny were equally responsible for drifting apart and leaning on other things to get them through tough times. And Johnny admitted that he was not nearly close to being the father that Heather deserved.

  As a young girl, Heather believed life was what you made of it. For some strange reason, later on, she felt connected to Josh Fulgham forever simply because they had kids, even though she knew he was never going to give her what she wanted and, in turn, would likely cause her grief. Maybe it was the kids? Perhaps she didn’t know any better? Some claimed Heather was raped repeatedly when she was young by someone she knew. If that was the case, well, what chance did she have without any psychological help to cope? Her codependency was placed inside the wiring of her brain long ago as she witnessed her parents slowly begin a struggle with not only each other but with life in general. Heather turned ten, and Johnny and Carolyn were constantly at odds.

  “She was a wonderful child,” Johnny said of his daughter. “She was always trying to help around the house. Washing clothes, washing dishes, cleaning. Heather was always there for her mother.”

  Heather was your typical teen. She liked having friends over. She liked watching television, playing outside, heading off to the local teen hot spots, laughing under her breath about the neighborhood boys she had a crush on.

  “In fact, every birthday she had,” Johnny explained, “Heather didn’t like ca
ke. So she had to have her pizza. That was her main food love.”

  Heather did well in school, Johnny said. All was fine and her life was going on as any typical teen until Heather, as a fourteen-year-old, put her focus on boys. That was when her studies started to slip.

  “Them boys began to come up to the house,” Johnny said. “She had a few boyfriends. I guess my discipline wasn’t what it should have been, maybe not enough.” Johnny went on to say he and Carolyn were seriously involved with their own difficulties then, especially Johnny’s heavy drinking.

  “I was a pretty bad alcoholic myself,” Johnny said. “I drunk a lot.”

  As a teen, Heather became pregnant with Josh’s baby. Johnny didn’t have any problem with Josh before the young man got his daughter pregnant. Josh was a “yes, sir/no, sir” kind of kid, Johnny recalled.

  In the beginning.

  “He had a steady job, nice pickup, kept his hair nice and clean, dressed nicely, and I thought, ‘Well, he seems to be a pretty nice fella and all. Looks like he’s trying.’ All the other guys she was going out with or dating didn’t have nothing. They didn’t even work.”

  But maybe, Johnny said, the Josh he knew then was just for show. Johnny understood that maybe Josh wasn’t who he appeared to be. Years later, Johnny saw this firsthand as one of the last to find out that Josh and Heather had even gotten married. It wasn’t until after Heather was dead and missing that Johnny was told she and Josh had married that previous December.

  Heather and her dad lost touch during those years Heather had taken off to Florida with Josh and had more kids of her own. It was just one of those things that happened, Johnny said, clearly disappointed in himself for not pursuing a more intimate father-daughter relationship.

  “Heather acted like she was twentysomething from the time she was maybe fifteen or sixteen,” Johnny recalled.

  It’s always the case: Someone dies unexpectedly and we go back and think what we could have done differently. Johnny recalled a daughter he wished he’d had another chance to raise; a second go of being the dad Heather deserved. There was once, he explained, when he took Heather fishing. She loved to fish. Mississippi had some monster catfish. Well, she and her dad were sitting in the boat talking when Heather hooked herself a whopper.

  “And the thing dragged us in the boat around for a time until it broke the line,” Johnny said. “We laughed and laughed.... Heather even done liked to hunt,” Johnny remembered.

  The “close time” they shared, Johnny pointed out, was always minimal because of his work and then later he was unavailable because of his own demons. Johnny was quick to point a finger at others, but he realized that when he did that, there were three fingers pointed back at him. He wished like hell that he’d done things very differently, but life was the way it ended up. You can’t rewrite it. You have to live with it and accept your mistakes, and he has.

  “I just remember my kid as loving and caring and always willing to share with people, and would help you out any time in any way. She always had a smile on her face. I never done seen her upset or angry. It took a lot to get Heather mad.”

  All of this made Heather’s life in Florida, and what happened, that much harder to take for Johnny. He was at home, much older, much weaker, fighting several health ailments, including the removal of a kidney and two bouts of cancer, when the sad news came. His health had deteriorated after years of excess partying. Johnny lived in Mississippi and saw Heather and his grandchildren whenever Heather came up from Florida and stopped by. But there was one day when Johnny heard that his daughter had turned up missing. He didn’t want to believe it, of course. But Heather’s brother had called Johnny to tell him how cousin Misty had spoken to the Florida police to report that Heather had not been seen or heard from in a fortnight.

  “Missing?” Johnny asked. “Heather?”

  Johnny knew Heather’s children were her life and she would not leave without them. “She would have given up her own life for her children.” He considered Heather to be streetwise and street-smart. “Missing” and “Heather” did not sound right to Johnny.

  Lord, there’s got to be something going on, Johnny thought when he heard Heather had vanished. His next thought was Foul play . . . Johnny found out that the kids were with Judy and, to him, that could mean only one thing: “I knew [Josh] had to do something with her, either have her put away, or . . . Well, look, I knew she wouldn’t leave her kids.”

  In the days that followed, Johnny said, “I felt like killing myself. I realized I was not a good daddy. I was not there.”

  Those memories (good, but mostly bad) flooded back and made the impact of Heather’s disappearance all that more penetrating and powerful. Johnny was helpless.

  And then, as Johnny sat one day on his porch enjoying a rather mild Mississippi early spring day, he looked on as two cops pulled into the driveway and got out of the car and walked up to him.

  “Florida authorities found your daughter’s body,” Johnny recalled the local cops telling him that day. “They have her husband . . .”

  Johnny wanted to vomit. He wanted to end his own life right there, he said. But not before, “going down to Florida, and if I could get my hands on Josh, choking him to death!”

  Heather’s murder was a devastating blow to a guy who didn’t see himself as someone who showed her the love he truly felt in his heart.

  “Josh took her air,” Johnny said. “He is still down there eating, living and breathing, and my daughter is not. I’m still not over it.” Johnny paused. Then: “I guess it is something you never get over.”

  CHAPTER 53

  JOSH GOT OUT of the local jail on February 6, 2009. By then, he had heard, James Acome was back living with Heather. From all he had been told, Josh was livid at the idea that James and Heather were not watching the kids the way Josh thought they should. Imagine: Josh was stepping out of jail after forty-plus days of not seeing his kids and the first thing he did was judge the adults taking care of them. It seemed absurd when placed into that context, but that was Josh Fulgham. Josh never looked at himself. He was always concerned with what others were doing to him.

  According to Josh, he had heard stories about the kids being neglected. This was never proven, mind you, but Josh didn’t need proof to be enraged about anything—he needed only to get it into his head that it was going on and there it could fester like a tumor, growing each day, becoming more of an annoyance to his thought process.

  Josh thought about it, though; after consulting with Emilia, he decided that he had better watch himself messing too much with Heather and maybe ease his way back into the kids’ lives. His great concern was that Heather would make something up about him and he’d be right back in jail. Nevertheless, he needed to abide by all of Heather’s rules whenever he had the children. Or else ...

  “She did set him up for that gun charge,” a source later said. “She made it all up.”

  One night shortly after Josh was out, he took his mother’s car (Heather still had his car; Emilia had never gotten it back, as she had promised) and drove over to see Emilia. After picking up Emilia, they were at a stoplight in town when Josh spotted his car coming through the intersection, going in the opposite direction.

  “Look at that, Emilia!” Josh yelled.

  “Oh, my.”

  Josh could not believe his eyes. James Acome was driving his car. Not only driving, but “spinning the tires out,” Josh recalled. “[He was] cutting in and out of car lanes like he was in a race. . . .”

  Josh followed him. James ran out of the car after stopping at his parents’ house.

  Josh decided to call the cops, instead of chasing James inside and putting a hurt on.

  The police came and Josh proved it was his car and James did not have permission to be driving it. The cops got the car back.

  “But this pissed Heather off,” Josh recalled.

  A day later, Heather called him: “If you don’t give me that car back, you will never see your children
again,” Josh said Heather threatened.

  “You will not get the car and I am taking your ass to court to get my kids back!” Josh screamed.

  The War of the Roses was back on, in full force.

  As he thought about it in the days ahead, however, Josh thought he’d had enough this time around.

  By the following weekend, February 14 and 15, when Heather disappeared, she kept to her word and told Josh he wasn’t going to be seeing the kids.

  Not then. Not ever again.

  So Josh decided to put into action that plan he’d come up with while in jail.

  CHAPTER 54

  ON FEBRUARY 14, 2009, Ben McCollum stopped by the Petro with his kids for something to eat. He hadn’t even realized Heather was working there. By then, Ben had severed all contact with Heather. As much as he loved her, he had moved on with his life.

  Heather walked over to the table.

  The kids went wild; they loved her. For a fleeting moment, there it was, like old times at Ben’s house when they were all a family.

  Ben and Heather didn’t say much of anything to each other right away. Both just stared. Here it was Valentine’s Day and Ben was out with his kids. He hadn’t moved on, as far as finding someone else yet. Ben could tell Heather was still thinking about him. She had that look Ben knew all too well.

  However, she also seemed nervous, Ben thought. Not in an anxious-to-see-him way, but unlike anything he had seen while he was with her. It wasn’t because Ben was there. He felt that. Heather’s anxiety stemmed from something else. Something was going on. Something major was bothering Heather, Ben considered.

  “How are you?” Heather asked.

  “Good, Heather. I’m okay.”

  They had been through so much it seemed that Ben and Heather were destined to meet on this day (which, Ben did not know then, would be the last time he ever saw her).

  Heather sat down. “I have something for you.”

  “What?” Ben asked. He was curious.

  Heather reached into her pocket. She’d happened to have a letter she was about to mail to Ben. With tears in her eyes, she handed it across the table. Ben was feeling the moment himself.