To Love and to Kill

by M. William Phelps

  Josh pleaded with Heather to search the trailer for the money. As Heather began to flip over cushions in couches and to dig through boxes, Josh approached her.

  That black chair was in the center of a small room.

  “Sit down,” Josh said, swinging the chair around to face Heather. The look on Josh’s face had changed by now. He meant what he said. He wasn’t in a hurry anymore to find money that was never there to begin with.

  Heather looked at him. She knew this guy well enough to understand that when his expression changed, Josh Fulgham meant business.

  “What?” Heather asked, seemingly confused.

  “Sit down, Heather. I need to talk to you.”

  “No way. Not a chance, Josh. Take me from here.”

  “I’m not doing that. We need to talk. I have some questions I want to ask you.”

  Heather took a look at her husband. He was serious.

  Then, after a pause, without warning, she made a break for the door.

  Josh reached out to grab her.

  Heather broke loose. “Let me go. . . .”

  “No!”

  As Heather went to open the door to leave, Josh told me, Emilia walked in.

  “You need to get quiet,” Emilia told Heather.

  “I’m out of here—fuck this!” Heather said before booking down the narrow hallway toward the back of the trailer.

  (“And that was when Emilia hit her ... hit her with that flashlight,” Josh told Detective Buie, blaming Emilia for striking Heather first, perhaps not recalling that he had already told Buie he didn’t have a flashlight with him on that night—but, in fact, he did, and he actually struck Heather with the flashlight as she went for the door and Emilia walked in.)

  Emilia’s blow with the flashlight to Heather’s head (though he was likely referring to his own assault) was not enough to “knock her out,” Josh recalled. But Heather fell back and used her hand to break the fall and landed on the window as she went down, smashing it into shards.

  On the ground now, Heather was dazed. Josh grabbed her. Then he dragged Heather over to the chair and made her sit down. When Heather resisted, being much bigger than her, Josh held her down in the chair with his body weight.

  “We went back to an old mobile home that was used for storage and after a few moments Emilia came out,” Josh stated, recalling for me these moments leading up to the end of Heather’s life in rather plainspoken, common language. “Heather knew about what time it was, so she tried to run out. I told her to sit down, that we were going to talk about some things.”

  “Sit!” Josh screamed at Heather. “I need to tell you some things and then you can leave.”

  Emilia walked over, Josh explained to Detective Buie, as he held Heather down. Then “Emilia taped her up. She got her hands taped up. I did her feet down at the bottom. I did them with tape. Emilia wrapped tape around her mouth before she even put the bag over her. Well, somehow Heather got the tape loose from her mouth and got it down around her neck. So Emilia used more. She used a whole roll of duct tape. . . .”

  “You have sex with James?” Josh asked Heather after she was secured in the chair. He mentioned to me that Emilia had taped Heather to the chair and tried to tape her mouth shut after he asked these questions. Josh never shared this with Buie, however.

  Heather denied having sex with James, Josh told me, adding—again trivializing the situation with pedestrian language—that he “made Heather sit down in a chair.”

  This becomes hard to believe, because Heather was living with James at this point. Of course she was sleeping with the guy.

  Anyway ... Josh said he then began asking Heather about other guys she’d possibly cheated on him with. Not only men from recent years, but from past years as well. Josh wanted to know all of their names. Each one.

  Heather didn’t respond immediately, so Josh started screaming at her, with the hope of scaring her.

  That was when, he said, she “came clean.”

  “Yes. Yes. Yes,” Heather snapped.

  “Three days after I was put in jail, did you or did you not sleep with James?”

  “Yes,” Heather said.

  “Did you and Ben plan that bullshit [about the shotgun] the day that both of you made that report?”

  “Yes,” Heather answered here, according to Josh, though he failed to tell Buie.

  “Had you been sleeping with Ben after you came back to me?”

  “Yes.”

  Heather tried standing, Josh explained, so “I slammed her back down into the chair.”

  Josh stood directly in front of his wife now. He bent down and looked her square in the eyes. The way he told it, it came across as a scene out of Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs: “Tell me about that mark I saw on [our child’s eye]. . . .”

  “She admitted to slapping him when he would not stop crying . . . ,” Josh explained to me. “I lost it and told Emilia . . . , ‘Do what you have to do.’” The way he explained this was as if Emilia was Josh’s muscle; he left it up to her what to do next and how far to take the situation.

  Josh then sat down on Heather, he said, because he was afraid she “would push back into Emilia and hurt the baby.”

  Indeed, kidnapping, terrorizing and ultimately murdering Heather Strong all went on, mind you, while Emilia was eight months pregnant with Josh’s (supposed) baby. Emilia, a mother-to-be, was involved in the beating and murder of a mother of two—all of this brutality occurred as Emilia carried a child (her fourth) who had been fathered by the same guy as her victim’s children, making her child-to-be the half-sibling to Josh and Heather’s.

  Some would call that more than cold-blooded.

  Maybe even downright evil at its core.

  CHAPTER 58

  JOSH’S VERSION OF killing his wife changed over the course of his interviews with MCSO and his later letters to me. Not major details, but with subtleties. All murderers who confess their crimes minimize their roles, either by design or unconscious regret and guilt. When two or more are involved in a murder, that minimization becomes even greater because the opportunity exists to put things on your codefendant.

  “He said/she said.”

  Josh wrote to me how, at first: Emilia tryed [sic] to break [Heather’s] neck but that did not work out so she took a plastic bag from Dollar General and held it over her head until she suffocated her to death.

  In one swooping, run-on sentence, with a common word misspelled, Josh placed the entire onus of the murder on Emilia.

  Josh added: [I don’t want to make it] sound like Emilia did it all by herself because I am just as guilty, but I am not the one that actually took her life.

  And there we have the minimization effect. Josh was involved, but he was trying to say, maybe without even realizing it, that he was a better human being than Emilia and had more morals, all because he did not commit the act of murder itself.

  Josh explained that he could “never do this” on his own without “coaching from Emilia.”

  The version Josh tried selling to Detective Buie went like this: As Heather loosened that tape and it slipped down to her neck, Emilia used an entire roll of duct tape to secure Heather to the chair so she could not move.

  “That’s when she put the bag over her head,” Josh told Buie. “She taped it around to where it was solid around her, and she had her arm around her neck, she was trying to snap her neck. . . .”

  Buie asked Josh about the claustrophobic comment he had made during one interview, before admitting to the crime, when Josh claimed that Heather was scared of being confined in small spaces. Buie wanted to know when that came up.

  “Please, Josh ... you know I am claustrophobic,” Heather said, according to what Josh told Buie.

  “Yeah, bitch,” Josh said back, “you know I am, too, but you put me in jail for thirty-one days.”

  Josh said Emilia and Heather didn’t say much to each other during the entire process from life to death, which took no longer than thirty minutes.
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  At one point while that bag was over Heather’s head, her body stopped convulsing and went still. She couldn’t breathe. Some claim that there’s a point before death when the body and brain experience a state of euphoria—hence, the autoerotic asphyxiation deaths that sometimes occur. But Heather, we can be certain, was not in any position to be “high” at all while desperately trying to inhale her final breaths. This was a violent, callous, cold way to kill a human being. It takes time. The body becomes weak and defenseless and disoriented from the lack of oxygen and the victim suffers greatly as the body shuts down.

  “She was out,” Josh explained. “I knew ’cause she done got still, she wasn’t, um, like that no more, trying to, when the tape was over her mouth, trying to say something.”

  Emilia then walked over to Heather once again. Placing her arms around Heather’s neck, she was determined to snap it like a cracker, Josh said. However, as Heather struggled for and ran out of oxygen, gasping for life’s vital source, her legs jutted out in front of her. Josh described it as “I heard her make, like, a gurgling noise in her throat or something.”

  Josh reached down and loosened the tape around Heather’s feet after he heard her make that gurgling noise.

  Emilia had brought a flashlight with her, Josh said after the fact, and the batteries wore down and cut out. So it was dark inside the trailer now. They couldn’t see anything.

  Josh struck his cigarette lighter.

  And that’s when he noticed something.

  “[Heather] wasn’t dead yet.”

  CHAPTER 59

  IN HIS LETTERS to me, Josh skipped over the narrative of him and Emilia killing Heather, which he gave to Detective Buie. He, instead, provided a rant—or excuse, really—for killing the mother of his children. According to one of Josh’s letters, the main reason why Heather had to die could be blamed on the justice and family court system that does not listen to a father’s plea regarding the custody of his children. Furthermore, not only would he have never killed Heather without Emilia’s consistent pushing and perseverance, but: I am easily convinced, especially when it comes to a woman doing the talking, Josh wrote, meaning that he was a sucker for a pretty woman and what she wanted, so he gave in.

  I also want it to be known that I tryed [sic] to go about this in a legal way, Josh wrote. He had “contacted” the “proper authorities,” but they just wouldn’t listen to him. In any event, in Josh’s skewed way of looking at the world, these organizations would blame all fathers for bringing allegations against the mothers of their children so they could get out of paying child support.

  Josh talked of how he spoke to “a few people” about taking Heather to court, but he was told, over and over, that a judge would never side with him.

  He left out the part about being an admitted drug abuser, a violent person with no steady job, as well as a man with a record who liked to fight with everybody.

  When he felt all of his legal options were never going to amount to anything (even though he had never pursued any one of them in a courtroom), I turned to the one thing I knew: violence, Josh wrote.

  Indeed, not only violence, but Josh became judge and jury himself, taking Heather’s life in place of having a court sort it out—which was the one thing, besides Emilia’s constant harping, he said tipped him over the edge and into the realm of killing her.

  A little push from Emilia so me and my kids could live together, he wrote.

  Why?

  Because Heather was always going to use the children as “pawns,” Josh concluded.

  CHAPTER 60

  EMILIA LIT A candle after their lighters stopped firing. They needed light. Heather was still breathing. They had to finish the job.

  Looking for a place to put the candle where they could garner the most light, Emilia found the top of the refrigerator to be the best spot.

  As they did this, Josh told Detective Buie, Heather must have breathed her last. When they went back to check on her, she was not moving anymore. Her hair was tousled over her face.

  Heather Strong was finally dead, both Josh and Emilia believed.

  They unstrapped her from the chair and laid her out on the floor. Then Josh walked up, knelt down and reached toward her face.

  “And I pulled ... her hair back out of her face and I seen her eyes.”

  They were “halfway open,” Josh explained, crying as he described this part of the murder to Detective Buie. And in a rare moment of feeling some remorse for his role, Josh added under his breath: “I fucked around on her—she didn’t kill me.”

  Looking at Heather lying there on the floor, her eyes half open, her body still as concrete, Josh said he then knew “she was gone.”

  Josh placed his hand over her nose to make sure. He didn’t feel Heather breathing anymore.

  He looked around the room and realized something else, however.

  Emilia was gone.

  Standing, Josh saw Heather’s sneakers; they must have come off during the scuffle or when they strapped her to the chair. Either way, he needed to get rid of them. But even more than that, what was he going to do with Heather’s body?

  CHAPTER 61

  JOSH CLAIMED THAT after they murdered Heather, he was afraid of Emilia. He had witnessed firsthand “what she was capable of,” and he knew then that he could never double-cross Emilia, trust her with his kids or treat her the way he had in the past.

  I was afraid she would get jealous of me and the kids and end up hurting them, Josh wrote.

  Moreover, in that same missive, Josh talked about Detective Buie, a man he spent a considerable amount of time with during his arrest and confession. Josh even stayed in contact with him afterward. Buie, Josh said, was a man he respected: Very honest . . . He had a job to do and he done a fair and honest job with it all.

  As bizarre as this would later come across, one of the most difficult moments of having murdered Heather, Josh claimed, was realizing how her death would ultimately upset and disappoint his mother, Judy Chandler.

  My mom raised Heather from her teen years up until things started to get crazy between me and Heather. My mom is the one who took Heather to get her driver’s license and my mom was the one who put designer clothes and shoes on the girl, he wrote.

  Josh went on to talk about Heather’s life almost as if it was not going anywhere, and that maybe she’d be better off meeting her Maker. The way it came out—though it’s unclear if Josh meant it this way—was as if Josh believed he was doing Heather a favor by killing her. He said (quite strangely, I might add, while writing about Heather in both the past and present tenses) [Heather] does not even have a GED . . . [and] I am not putting her down or talking about her because Heather cannot help who or what she came from. I miss her every day and regret that any of this shit had even took place....

  Beyond that, Josh made sure to tell me that his sorrow and remorse wasn’t based in the fact that he wound up in prison, but because, he wrote, Heather went through a lot of shit on the night of this murder.

  Being strapped to a chair, beaten, tortured, a bag placed over her head and oxygen taken away from her as she slowly died a horrible death, likely as she thought about her children and never seeing them again—all of this had been boiled down to “a lot of shit.”

  CHAPTER 62

  JOSH EXPLAINED TO Detective Donald Buie that at the moment when he realized Heather was actually dead, Emilia came back into the trailer, but he never said where she had gone, why she had left or how long she was gone. Together, Josh said, he and Emilia placed Heather inside a “bag” and dragged her body over to a table in the room, before shoving her underneath so as to hide her until they decided what to do next. Of course, like most murderers, Josh and Emilia never made a plan for afterward. They (premeditatedly) planned Heather’s murder, right up until the point of her death, but not a damn thing after.

  “I totally covered her face up,” Josh said. “I didn’t want to look at her no more.”

  With Heather underneath th
e table, Josh pulled a big bag of garbage from inside the trailer over and placed it in front of Heather’s body so anybody walking in would not see her. The last thing they needed now was Emilia’s mother, sister or some neighborhood kid stumbling upon the body.

  What Josh meant by placing Heather in a “bag” was made clear later in the interview when he talked about how he “zipped” the bag up, so he must have been referring to that suitcase she was later found in.

  Staring at Heather’s body lodged underneath the table, garbage shielding it from view, Josh told Emilia, “Come on. Let’s get out of here.” The plan was now to come back at some point and move Heather’s body, getting rid of her for good. They just didn’t know where yet.

  They walked out of the trailer and headed to the car, where Heather had left her purse.

  Emilia had an idea.

  “I’ll have everything you need tomorrow,” she told Josh, grabbing Heather’s purse and taking it with her. “When you come back tomorrow, you just bury her.”

  CHAPTER 63

  THAT NEXT DAY Josh worked a little later than usual. But by 3:00 P.M. (he usually got off near two o’clock), he was “hauling ass” over to Emilia’s house.

  “Listen, listen,” Josh said to Emilia when he arrived, “she needs to stay there again—one more day—because I gotta get home right now and cannot bury her. I can’t let my mom know that something is up.” Josh didn’t want to change his behavior at all. He feared by doing so, it might make him look suspicious, once word got out that Heather was missing.

  Emilia said okay. “But wait here a minute.” She walked over to a storage area in the house and came back with Heather’s purse. “Here,” she said, handing Josh several personal items of Heather’s: the kids’ birth certificates, Social Security cards, medical cards, the food stamp card and the ATM card that Josh would later use to withdraw money from Heather’s account.

  Inside Heather’s purse, Josh said, was “a pack of cigarettes,” which he took, “a red lighter and a shitload of change, like seventy dollars’ worth.”