To Love and to Kill

by M. William Phelps

  “What’s this?”

  “Read it,” she said. Then Heather got up and walked away.

  After eating, Ben took the kids and went out to his vehicle without seeing Heather again. He sat for a moment before starting his truck. Then he opened the letter and read.

  Heather wanted him to know that she was sorry for everything. She wished she could come back and live with him. Her life with Josh was a joke. The guy was an animal. That chapter of her life, Heather explained, was over for good. There would never be Josh and Heather again. Regardless of her reconciling with Ben, Heather wrote, she and Josh were finished for good. The guy was toxic; she needed to be rid of him.

  Ben believed her and was taken by the letter. He thought maybe he should reconsider his strict stance on not taking her back once she had left and dropped those charges against Josh. Maybe he was being pigheaded and inconsiderate of Heather’s situation. Giving her another chance might be just what Heather needed.

  So Ben took a ride over to his father’s house. He wanted the old man’s advice on his dilemma.

  “Should I take her back?” Ben asked his father. “What do you think?”

  “Nope, nope ... stick to what you decided and said, you know.”

  Looking back on his relationship with Heather, Ben thought that maybe she couldn’t handle being truly loved. He’d treated her with respect and kindness, like any lady deserved to be treated. He bought her classy clothes and nice things, and she felt like a real woman, an appreciated mother, as though they had a natural relationship devoid of the dysfunction she had lived with her entire life. Heather felt good about herself when she was with Ben. He was good for her. But when Josh watched all of this taking place, it messed with his head, Ben believed. Josh couldn’t fathom that she could move on without him and lead a “normal” life—or Josh didn’t want to let her.

  Not taking her back when his heart told him to, Ben said later, was a decision that both him and his dad later greatly regretted. Also, not doing something about Josh when they had the opportunity was a consequence of that same regret.

  “I should have killed that motherfucker long ago myself,” Ben said as he concluded his thoughts about his life with Heather Strong.

  CHAPTER 55

  ACCORDING TO JOSH’S version (the one he shared with me) of what happened that weekend of February 14 and 15, it all started with a drug and alcohol binge Josh had begun on Saturday morning.

  “I went and bought me a bunch of pills and a bottle of liquor and decided to stay the weekend at Emilia’s house.”

  He rented a “bunch of DVDs . . . watched movies and got fucked up.”

  On Saturday night, Emilia and Josh hit the bedroom and “had hot, wild sex for four hours,” Josh explained. It was so intense, he added, that he woke up the following morning with a severe back issue. Emilia, however, wasn’t hearing any of it.

  “That morning, the little nympho had to have more,” Josh said. This just screwed up his back even more, so he popped whatever pills he had left from the night before. Josh fell asleep, then woke up to his sister calling him.

  “What? What?” Josh said. He was still in a fog.

  “Heather has been calling and calling. You need to come home and talk to her.”

  Josh got dressed and drove to his mother’s house. Michelle Gustafson, Josh’s sister, was there. She talked about how Heather had been at work and calling, looking for him. It sounded urgent. He needed to straighten his ass out and call her back.

  “Okay,” Josh said. His head was pounding. His back was sore. His mind was scattered.

  Josh told me he called Heather at work, but he later told police that Michelle called Heather for him.

  Either way, “Where are the kids?” was the first thing out of Josh’s mouth.

  “Listen to me . . . ,” Heather said.

  “No, you listen to me . . . where are my babies?” Josh had little patience at this point. He knew that Heather was now finished, as was he, with the relationship. And a battle had ensued between them. Both were jockeying for position in what was presumed to be a fight for the kids—one that Josh had to know he would never win.

  The next thing Heather said, however, enraged him. Maybe it was the hangover? Or everything that had been going on? Possibly it was because Josh was now with Emilia—which was not how he had planned to celebrate his recent release from jail. Regardless, Josh said, Heather explained over the phone that the kids were at the house alone with James Acome, who was watching them.

  (To Detective Donald Buie in one interview, Josh claimed Heather “told me the whole deal that was going on with James at home and I told her ... go on and do what you were going to do with putting him out and she told me she was gonna put him out ... and I said go on and do that and call me back.” Thus, from what Josh told Buie, that first phone call was centered on Heather telling Josh she was kicking James out of the house.)

  Hearing and sensing the resentment and sheer disgust in Heather’s voice at his asking where the children were, Josh explained to me later, “I saw nothing but red when she told me that because allegedly [James had had a relationship with an underage girl].” According to how Josh later told it, Heather was throwing it in his face that James was alone with the kids because she knew it would twist and turn the knife already in Josh’s back.

  “Josh, if you do not give me that car back,” Heather supposedly said next, “I am taking the kids back to Mississippi—and you know what happened to me when I was a young girl staying with my mom.”

  (Josh did not mention this to Buie during any of his interviews. But in a letter to me, he explained that Heather was allegedly saying that she was going to put the kids in harm’s way because she had been sexually assaulted by someone in her family back when she was a teen. To Josh, this was the proverbial final nail—something had to be done to protect those kids.)

  While on the phone with Heather, Josh thought back to when they lived in Mississippi with Heather’s mother and what was going on inside Carolyn’s house. Lots of alleged perverted acts were taking place, according to Josh. He did not want his children subjected to this.

  Those thoughts, he told me, made him rage—but still, Josh thought of something other than yelling and screaming and threatening his wife.

  “You’re bluffing, Heather. You wouldn’t do that.”

  “I am not. I’ve already called the station to see when the bus leaves.”

  “You are really going to take them away from me again?”

  “Yes!”

  Josh hung up the phone. He paced. He rubbed the back of his neck. That rage he’d felt in the past—whenever Heather pissed him off and he would strike her—brewed. He was a pressure cooker. He needed a release. Quickly. He needed to do something. Act on that internal rage. He couldn’t allow Heather to have the last word, no less take the kids, leave town and bring them into what he viewed as a devil’s lair.

  After hanging up with Heather, Josh said later, he called Emilia—and claimed to have said: “Do you remember what you was trying to get me to do in December?”

  Josh recalled Emilia responding “yes,” on that night.

  “Well, it’s time,” Josh said, “because she is about to take the kids to Mississippi, and, on top of that, she has gone and left them with [James Acome] alone, all day long.”

  “Get her over here tonight,” Emilia told him—at least according to Josh’s later claims.

  They hung up.

  Josh immediately called Heather back and, acting as though he was giving in, agreed to allow her to have the car back. He said, “Call me when you get off work so you can come and pick it up. I’d bring it over to you now, but I need help with something.” Josh never said what he told Heather he needed help with, but she bought into his scenario, if we are to believe him.

  (This alleged agreement Josh managed to facilitate seems highly suspicious. It is odd that Heather would, without asking what was up, agree to help a guy she was bickering with and, at this point,
absolutely despised. On top of that, the idea that Emilia first came up with this plan to kill Heather, as Josh suggested to me, also has some problems—because during that one recorded phone call from inside the jail weeks before, Josh floated “that thing” for Emilia over the phone and she came across as legitimately not having any clue as to what he was talking about until she figured it out and then went along with it. In addition, in Josh’s first statement to Detective Buie about his role in Heather’s murder, he never mentioned that Emilia had said anything in December about a plan to kill Heather.)

  Josh called Emilia back and they “concocted,” according to what Josh told me, a plan revolving around some money to get Heather into that trailer in the back of Maria Zayas’s house.

  With that part of the plan decided, Josh set things in motion by calling his mother to tell her that he was upset because Heather was going back to Mississippi, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. Josh said Heather was going to leave the kids with him because she needed some time to straighten her head out.

  This gave a reason for Heather turning up missing in the coming days and the kids being left at Judy’s house. Josh involved his mother—without her knowing—in a conspiracy to kill Heather. He laid these details out for me in a letter he sent me.

  “If that is the case, Josh,” his mother told him, “you need to draw up some type of an agreement with Heather over the kids being left with you.”

  “Can you do that, Momma?”

  Judy said she would.

  CHAPTER 56

  “LISTEN, HEATHER, I want you to meet me at Emilia’s house,” Josh told me he explained to his wife over the phone later on that night. “I know where Emilia has fifteen hundred dollars stashed inside a trailer and I want to steal it. You’ll be the lookout while I get it. I’ll give you a cut.”

  Insinuating that she was greedy, Josh said, “Heather jumped all over the deal because she wanted” some of that money.

  In the next breath, “I’ll be by to pick you and the kids up soon,” Josh said he told Heather, contradicting his earlier statement for her to meet him there.

  Heather said she’d be expecting him.

  Josh never told me where he picked Heather and the kids up. But James Acome later told police that Heather took off that night with the kids and it was the last time he ever saw her. According to that first interview Josh gave Detective Buie (postadmission), Josh said he met Heather at a local Subway grinder shop in Sparr, Florida, which is about a twenty-minute, seventeen-mile drive south of Boardman, where Emilia’s mother lived.

  “I pulled over there and backed in front of the store and . . . her and the kids came over,” Josh told Buie.

  They talked, Josh explained to the detective. His son sat in front; his daughter and Heather were in the back.

  “And we were just talking, and . . . she told me, ‘James hadn’t got his shit, but he just left, and he left all his shit in the house.’”

  Josh further stated that he and Heather—again, totally out of character when put into the context of the situation—were “just talking about spending some time together ... and let’s see where we go at that point.”

  Right then, Josh claimed, with Heather and the kids in the car, he had no intention of killing her. In a letter to me, however, Josh said he told Heather how he believed the fifteen hundred dollars was inside the trailer and that all Heather had to do was make sure no one saw him going in or coming out. Heather was to act as his wingman, in other words. But he claimed she had no idea where they were going, other than to a trailer somewhere.

  “Okay,” Heather said after Josh explained, with their children looking on.

  “Let’s go ahead and take the kids out to Momma’s. . . .”

  They pulled up to Judy Chandler’s house and Josh brought the kids in to stay with their grandma. He didn’t say it, but Josh must have reiterated to his mother that he was bringing Heather to the bus depot so she could head back home to Mississippi to get her mind together. That was the supposed ruse he had scripted with Emilia.

  Everything seemed to coalesce as it unfolded.

  From there, Josh drove toward Boardman. During the ride over to Emilia’s, Josh told Heather, “If you help, I’ll give you this car. I got a new title filled out and everything—I’ll sign it over to you.”

  “Where?” Heather asked. She wanted to know where they were going.

  “Emilia’s.”

  “Josh, I’m not going over there. She’s a freaking psycho.” Heather became nervous. She didn’t want anything to do with showing up at Emilia’s with him.

  “Heather, listen, Emilia’s not at home. She’s done gone and seen her brother in Dunnellon. Her mom and them done left, too. If they’re back when we get there, they’ll be asleep.”

  Heather stared out the window. She was thinking about the request. Then she supposedly said: “Okay, I’ll do it. But I don’t want any bullshit, Josh.”

  “There ain’t gonna be. Don’t worry about it.”

  As they pulled into Emilia’s driveway somewhere near eight at night (Josh later told Buie), Emilia was waiting inside the house, watching stealthily from behind a curtain.

  AT SOME POINT while he was alone on that night (probably while inside his mother’s house), Josh called Emilia, he later told Detective Buie.

  “You remember [what] we talked about?” Josh claimed he asked Emilia during that phone call.

  “Yeah.”

  “You still think about that?”

  “We can do it,” Emilia told him. (Josh shared this with Detective Buie, but not with me.) “I told you, I done got a place for her. Got all this yard back there. It’s in the woods.”

  (This, of course, went against the phone call Josh had made to Emilia where he had asked her about the trailer and the backyard and all that land, and if the neighbor could see and if she knew what his plans for the land were. At that time, Emilia sounded as if the subject had been new to her and had never been brought up between them. But then, when explaining to Buie, Josh gave the impression that killing Heather in the trailer and getting rid of her body somewhere on the property was all Emilia’s idea and they discussed it on the night he drove Heather over there.)

  What Josh meant by “what we talked about,” he further clarified for Buie, was something Emilia had initiated during Josh’s stint in jail. There was one night when Emilia was with Heather, Josh told Buie. The women were at Josh and Heather’s place. James Acome was there, too. Emilia came up behind Heather and put a knife to her throat; she threatened to slash her neck if she didn’t drop the charges against Josh. James stepped in and stopped it, but Heather soon after signed the papers to have the charges dropped.

  Josh told Buie his mother “printed up a paper for me on the computer ... saying that we’re gonna keep the kids until she gets her stuff straightened out. . . .”

  They never had Heather sign it. Instead, Emilia filled it out, Josh said.

  AFTER DROPPING OFF the kids at his mother’s, driving and then parking near Emilia’s house and heading into the backyard toward the trailer, Josh asked Heather, “You hungry?”

  “No, I ate already. . . . Let’s just get this over with.”

  Josh thought Heather wanted to get back home as soon as possible. He also claimed to have asked her about Ben and what was going on with that relationship.

  Heather became impatient. She didn’t want to engage in small talk. According to Josh, our only source for this conversation, all she wanted to know was where that money was located so she could help him steal it.

  Josh never said why it never occurred to Heather that he could have gotten just about anybody else to help him. Why her? Why would she fall for this? They had been at odds, fighting and arguing about the kids for weeks. He’d threatened her and Ben. He made it clear he was going to the Department of Children Services to report her and James. Why would Heather agree to go, especially alone, with this man whom she knew to be violent and volatile? Just for a few bucks?
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  Josh’s story doesn’t make much sense.

  Nonetheless, we do know that Josh and Heather entered that trailer at some point shortly after 8:00 P.M. on February 15, 2009—and that only one of them, not long after, would leave alive.

  CHAPTER 57

  IT WAS DARK by the time they got out to the trailer in the backyard of Maria Zayas’s house.

  “You got a flashlight?” Heather asked.

  “No,” Josh said.

  (“So we . . . both went in with cigarette lighters,” Josh told Detective Buie.)

  Josh had Heather walk in first.

  He looked around to make certain no one else was watching—except maybe Emilia peeking at them from a window—and then followed behind.

  They looked around inside the trailer after entering.

  “Damn, it was on these tables somewhere,” Josh said, referring to the money. They were in the living-room portion of the trailer, which was hampered down with garbage and household items, like a hoarder’s home. “I know it was here. She showed it to me just this weekend.”

  When Josh explained this scene to Detective Buie, he put the entire idea and crime on Emilia. “I said, ‘Where do I take [Heather] to?’” Josh explained. “[Emilia] said, ‘Bring her back there in the back trailer.’ And I said all right. I said, ‘What’s the best way to get her back there?’ She said, ‘Well, she knows I had money, Josh.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ll tell her we’re coming over there, you showed me money, and I’m gonna come over there and get it. . . .’ That’s exactly what I told Emilia.”

  In a letter to me explaining this night, Josh never mentioned that Emilia had come up with this plan. Further, again going back to that one phone call from jail where Josh seemed to devise this plan, it all pointed to Josh being the driving force behind this murder, Emilia the subordinate minion, going along and coming up with ideas of her own as the crime unfolded, but not before.