It appeared that Heather had carried her entire life inside that purse, and here were two people she despised more than most—two people who had caused her so much grief and anguish and problems over the past year or more, two people who had conspired to kill her—going through her things like a couple of common street thieves robbing a handbag and rifling through it in a back alley somewhere.
Josh took off, telling Emilia he was coming back the following day, hopefully, to finish the job.
BEN WAS AT the petrol station near his shop, gassing up his airboat later on that same afternoon, when Josh speedily pulled into the parking lot.
Josh had the kids with him.
That’s odd, Ben thought. Why does he have both of the kids? Ben knew Heather would never willingly hand the kids over to Josh, especially both at the same time.
“Heather wasn’t one just to let her kids go off with that bastard,” Ben recalled. “She was always pretty protective of her young’uns. Always wanted to be around them.”
Josh was causing a ruckus in the parking lot, messing with someone.
Ben walked over. “You better get your ass out of here, man. Now!”
Josh took off.
CHAPTER 64
JOSH GOT UP the next day and, after making sure nobody was watching, put a shovel in the trunk of his car. He told Detective Buie he took it from his mother’s house (a subtle fact that did not jibe with what Emilia’s mother later told Buie about Josh borrowing a shovel). And again, while telling this part of the murder tale to Buie, Josh relayed a simple fact that seemed to put things into perspective and explained a little bit about the kind of heartless person Josh had become: The shovel, he made clear, was Heather’s. She’d bought it when they were together.
Josh drove to his job.
At the end of the day, he drove directly to Emilia’s.
“Where is the best place to bury her?” Josh asked his girlfriend. He had stewed about this the entire day. He needed to find the right location to dig a hole and put Heather inside it. They needed to be done with this murder.
There was an old railroad track on the west side of Emilia’s house. Emilia talked about carrying Heather’s corpse down those tracks and picking a spot away from everything, adding, “There’s an old tunnel or cave down there.”
It seemed perfect.
Josh thought about it.
“No way,” he told Emilia. “Somebody is liable to be down there looking around one day for things and run into it. I’d rather not do that. I want to put it where I know where it’s at, and it will be safe until I do what I want to do with it.”
That word choice—“it”—as Josh explained this awkward situation he and Emilia were in, postmurder, was a revealing sign to Buie of how Josh had placed Heather into a degrading lexicon of imagery that made him feel better about what he had done, quite brazenly demoralizing Heather in the process. Josh had boiled her life down to her being an it. She was not even a person, a human being, anymore.
“Let’s walk out here by the trailer and look,” Emilia suggested.
The reason they chose that spot in the back of the trailer, Josh explained, was “because we were gonna come out that front door with it,” but they couldn’t get the front door open. The hole was already dug (by Josh), so they had to carry Heather in the bag out into that space in the northeast corner of the trailer by the door they couldn’t open.
Josh said he placed that barn board over the bag and Heather’s head, which had been wrapped in (or covered by) a blue blanket, anyway, after digging the grave: “So I wouldn’t throw dirt in her face . . .”
Throughout those two days when Josh had gone to work after killing his wife, he said, he mainly thought about how much he “regretted” killing her. It was digging the hole, he claimed, that set off a round of remorse inside him. The impetus for killing Heather, Josh was now saying, clearly lying to Buie, took place when Heather admitted to having slept with James Acome three days after Josh was put in jail.
That hurt like hell, Josh said. Once Heather had admitted to this infidelity (as he saw it), there was no turning back.
“It really hit me hard.”
“Let me ask you something,” Buie floated as he interviewed Josh in late March 2009, several days after Josh had admitted killing Heather with Emilia (who was still a free woman then). “So if she didn’t tell you that, do you think you would have went as far as you went?”
“I don’t. I don’t think I would have been able to,” Josh responded.
As they talked more about Josh not being able to kill Heather, had she not slept with James, Josh admitted something he perhaps didn’t realize.
“Emilia told me she didn’t think I’d even go through with it,” Josh told Buie. “She kept calling me on the phone at my mom’s. . . . She’d be like, ‘What are you doing?’ . . .”
The fact that Josh asked Heather about her alleged infidelity—not that he wasn’t sleeping with Emilia any chance he got—which she denied routinely, saying, “I would never do that,” enraged him to the point of violence when he finally realized she was lying. And it was at that moment of betrayal, Josh was now saying, when he decided enough was enough—he had to kill her.
And yet the question left hanging at this point became: How deep was Emilia involved? And would the MCSO ever have enough to arrest her?
Little did Detectives Buie or Spivey know then that there was an unlikely witness about to step courageously forward and blow their entire investigation up, giving them all they needed to take down Emilia Carr.
CHAPTER 65
INDEED, AFTER GETTING Josh to admit his role in Heather’s murder, there was one important job left to do for Detective Donald Buie and the MCSO: get Emilia to cave, or catch Emilia in that one fabrication that would bury her. Thus far, Buie had spoken to the prosecutor’s office and they said he needed more. What the MCSO had on Emilia right now was weak.
Emilia was no Josh Fulgham. Some claimed she had above-average intelligence. But the one thing the MCSO had going for its case was Emilia’s own narcissism, which she had a hard time keeping in check. Emilia just couldn’t keep her nose out of the investigation, nor could she keep her mouth shut. Plus, there was that little issue of a human being growing inside her belly. The child was now just weeks away from being born, and the baby’s daddy was facing felony murder and kidnapping charges, which could land him on death row.
Still, Detective Buie faced an impasse. He was unsure where to take the investigation. Yet, as he thought about it, Buie had one important thought regarding this case, which would ultimately impact everything Emilia did and said: “She loved Josh and hated Heather with the same breath— she knew that Josh would always go back to Heather, and for that reason, Heather had to die.”
That simplified situation told Buie that Emilia had to be involved on a much broader scale and deeper level than any of them imagined. In fact, Buie and Spivey believed Emilia was as involved as Josh, maybe even more. The problem they faced was that they had no evidence against Emilia to prove their theory.
Listening to the tapes from those jailhouse phone calls that Josh had made to Emilia, Buie could hear an underlying theme of a plan to murder Heather. It was bubbling there, Buie believed. For Buie, Emilia was driving (and devising) that plan.
“I think that when Josh was in jail, he was maybe saying those things about Heather out of anger,” Buie commented later. “But I think when he got out, Emilia was persistent and wanted to make sure he kept his word.”
Emilia was not about to allow Josh to back down once again from what he had promised her. The stakes were too high this time around—she was pregnant.
“Because once she got Heather out of the picture,” Buie added, “she could continue with Josh the way she had always wanted.”
Another interesting aside that Buie uncovered was that the engagement ring Josh gave to Heather, and she wore after they got married, had actually been on Emilia’s finger before that. Josh had given the ring to E
milia and asked her to marry him, only to take it back one day and give it to Heather. Buie believed that once Emilia realized she had been replaced for good by Heather, and Josh had even given Heather the same ring, that sealed Heather’s fate in Emilia’s eyes. All Emilia saw then when she looked at Heather was one solution: erasing her completely from the picture. No other solution would work for her.
Still, all of this, Buie knew, was conjecture and speculation of intent to murder. It was his theory. It had no foundation in evidentiary resolve at this time, not to mention the drawbacks to dragging Emilia in and accusing her of it all. They had talked to Emilia a total of nine times since the MCSO had brought her and Josh in for questioning back on March 18. Emilia had always seemed to begin explaining a potential role in the murder, but she would then back off, placing the bag, motive and means in Josh’s hands. She never entirely fingered herself. On top of that, as Buie kept taking the case against Emilia to the prosecutor’s office, they repeatedly told him no. There was not enough.
“Go back and get more.”
Equally complicating things was all the physical and forensic evidence the MCSO was pulling together from the crime scene and Josh’s house, and it all pointed back at Josh.
So Buie sat down one afternoon and thought about a plan to get Emilia to crack. What could he do? He wasn’t about to let it go.
Then an idea hit him.
Buie walked over to his supervisor, sat down in Brian Spivey’s office, and began discussing the case against Emilia and the course Buie wanted to take.
“Nothing short of a confession,” Spivey indicated.
That’s what the MCSO needed from Emilia.
“She’s not going to talk much more,” Buie said. “And the prosecution wants more.”
As they sat talking about a way to charge Emilia, wouldn’t you know, as these things go, luck walked in through the door. Or, rather, it called on the telephone.
Spivey’s phone rang. “Hold it a minute,” he said to Buie, who was talking at the time.
Buie sat and waited.
On the other end of the line was a name out of the blue, a person connected to Josh who had a plan to bury Emilia herself—only she didn’t know it.
CHAPTER 66
JOSH’S SISTER, MICHELLE Gustafson, was on the phone with Detective Brian Spivey, asking him for advice. Donald Buie sat in Spivey’s office, excitedly listening to Spivey’s end of this conversation.
“I don’t know what to do,” Michelle told Spivey.
“How can I help?”
“Well, Emilia is reaching out to me.”
Spivey looked at Buie. He smiled.
Opportunity was knocking.
Big-time.
What the MCSO had done to facilitate this call—without even realizing it—was shut down all of Josh’s contact with everyone on the outside, mainly his family and Emilia. The goal was to make Emilia sweat it out. Force her hand. In not being able to talk to Josh, and also knowing that if she did communicate with Josh what she said had to be limited, Emilia called Michelle and asked to meet and talk. Basically, Emilia wanted to use Michelle to gauge what Josh was saying about her to the police and also to slip him private messages via Michelle.
Spivey explained to Michelle that Josh was in jail and he had admitted responsibility in Heather’s murder, and there was no changing those facts. He was going away for a long, long time. There wasn’t anything anyone could do for him at this point but show him support and encourage him to be truthful in everything he did from this moment on.
Michelle was a down-to-earth, compassionate and understanding person. She lived in the real world. She understood morality. She knew that she could be of great help to the MCSO, not necessarily only to help her brother, but also to honor her sister-in-law, a dead woman with no voice left in anything.
“What we’re asking is that you listen to Emilia, allow her to speak,” Spivey explained to Michelle, “and help us out at the same time.”
Michelle didn’t really think about it before saying yes. Sure, she was scared and anxious, but also willing to do whatever it took to help.
They decided to set up a meeting for the following day. Michelle met with Buie and Spivey at the MCSO beforehand. It was March 24, 2009, early afternoon. Buie wired Michelle up with a recorder and they had her make a phone call to Emilia asking if the two of them could meet. It wouldn’t seem suspicious, because Emilia had been the one to reach out to Michelle the previous day.
Michelle told Emilia she’d pick her up. They could take a ride and have a chat.
Emilia said okay.
What Michelle didn’t tell Emilia, obviously, was that Buie and Spivey would be listening to the entire conversation. Michelle’s goal was to get Emilia to admit her role—if any—in the murder of Heather Strong.
It was 4:03 P.M. when Spivey and Buie met with Michelle by the park where they planned to have her bring Emilia. They wanted to go through what would happen, step-by-step, to make sure Michelle was good with all of it.
Spivey encouraged Michelle to keep Emilia in the car, and to keep her engaged in conversation as long as she could. He coached her on a few things she could say to get Emilia to admit to any crimes.
“We’re going to be inside that building . . . ,” Spivey explained, pointing to a warehouse-type building nearby.
“I’ll pull right up there, under that tree,” Michelle suggested.
“Yes.”
“Any questions?” Spivey asked.
“When this is done, can I go home and puke?”
“You can stick your head out the door and puke whenever you need to.”
“Okay.”
“By the way, what will you say if you have an emergency?” Spivey wanted to be clear on this.
“Bo, bo, bo, bo, bo, bo . . .”
“Okay, good. And we’ll be right there.”
Michelle had a plan—something very specific to bring up in order to get a reaction out of Emilia. And that was it. Michelle got into her car and away she went, on her own, to pick up Emilia.
CHAPTER 67
NINE MINUTES LATER, Emilia and Michelle took off from Emilia’s house in Boardman en route to that park. Along the way, Michelle started the conversation off talking about the kids. She shed tears as she shared with Emilia her thoughts about them having both no mother and now no father. What future did the kids have? Their father had murdered their mother. That was their legacy.
Emilia responded by saying her kids were in foster care. Once social services found out Emilia was being investigated and questioned as part of a murder investigation, her kids were taken out of the home.
“He shouldn’t even be there, I’m telling you right now,” Emilia said, referring to Josh in lockup.
“Emilia, I’ve already spoken to Josh,” Michelle said, letting Emilia know in a subtle way that she had been told that Josh had admitted to everything. There were no secrets here, Michelle suggested.
Emilia was interested in Michelle having spoken with Josh. “When?” she asked.
Michelle could almost hear the gears grinding inside Emilia’s head as she thought about everything.
Fast on her feet, ignoring the “when” question, Michelle changed the subject: “You know he tried to kill himself, right?”
“When?”
“Saturday.”
Emilia was shocked by this. She hadn’t heard.
Michelle shrugged.
“Go this way,” Emilia suggested, as if on cue, pointing out the way Michelle already had wanted to go. “There’s a little park about a mile . . .”
Michelle pulled off to the side of the road near that park where Buie and Spivey were stationed nearby in a warehouse building just around the block, listening. She found a nice spot, with not a lot of people around, and parked. Michelle was definitely nervous, but it didn’t show. Emilia seemed on edge, as if looking over her shoulder. Buie and Spivey were concerned, of course, because they had a suspect who was alleged to have pulled a knife
on Heather and threatened to slash her throat and then tried to snap her neck. What would Emilia try to do if she realized Michelle was baiting and recording her?
After a brief moment of silence between them, Emilia initiated a rant about how bad the cops wanted Josh. Emilia said she tried to tell Josh to keep his mouth shut and everything would be okay, but he just couldn’t listen. The worst thing Josh could do, Emilia said, was to talk, adding, “His story keeps changing—when I know for a fact what happened and who did what.”
Michelle listened carefully, looking for any opportunity to set the hook.
It didn’t take long before Emilia blamed James and his buddy once again, saying how she and Josh needed to stick to that narrative.
Michelle thought on her feet, found a soft opening and decided to take a crack, saying, “Hang on, Emilia! I’m not the cops. I’m not here to hurt you or Josh. I’m just . . . I’m here for those kids and that baby, because I’m its blood aunt, too.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Michelle told Emilia she wanted the truth. “I already heard it from Josh.” She cried more dynamically and it came off as genuine, because it was. Michelle was all at once scared, confused, worried, fearful and unsure of what kind of future her niece and nephew were going to have. “You got to tell me the truth so I can help you and Josh. Don’t tell me James and [his buddy did this]. Don’t lie.”
Emilia stared out the window. Then: “What did he tell you, Michelle?”
“Emilia,” Michelle said through a barrage of tears, “tell me your side.”
“What did he tell you? Did he tell you over a recorded phone?”
Michelle said no, Josh had sat her down the day before they took him in and told her everything. She said she knew about his and Emilia’s role in Heather’s murder. There was no chance Emilia could sit there and bullshit Michelle about anything, because Michelle claimed to know it all. What Michelle demanded from Emilia was the truth in order to help both of them, she explained more than once. Michelle pleaded with Emilia to take her seriously and listen to her. Michelle wanted to hear from Emilia’s mouth that same truth Josh had related, because Michelle was sick to her stomach about all of this and hadn’t eaten for days.
To Love and to Kill Page 20