To Love and to Kill

by M. William Phelps

  Emilia stared at her.

  Buie walked up to the window. “You okay?”

  Emilia had a worried look about her. She sensed trouble.

  “I’m just taking her home . . . ,” Michelle said to Buie. “And then I’m gonna go home.”

  Buie told Michelle to sit tight while he went and spoke to Spivey.

  “It’s nothing.... It’s nothing she done,” Michelle said, looking at Emilia, who had gone church silent. “I just think I’m having a heart attack.”

  Buie returned quickly. He asked Emilia to step out of the car, indicating that he and Spivey would take her to her mom’s and then downtown.

  Emilia did not resist.

  CHAPTER 70

  JOSH EXPLAINED TO me what happened on the day of his arrest on charges of threatening Heather with a gun. That day seemed to be a turning point for Josh Fulgham—a line in the sand that Heather had crossed. They had just been married in December. And here it was, a few weeks later, and Heather was having him tossed in jail for something he didn’t do.

  Josh was waiting at work for Heather to come and pick him up. As he stood by the roadside, “two cops pulled up,” Josh revealed. One asked if he was Joshua Fulgham.

  “What’s up?” Josh wondered.

  The cop explained that his wife had reported him pulling a gun on her, and Ben McCollum had reported witnessing the same thing. But it was a day after Josh had done this, allegedly, so Josh was curious as to why they had waited.

  Josh said the cop agreed; the charges were likely bogus, but Josh needed to answer to them, nonetheless.

  It was at that exact moment that Josh realized there would never be a relationship between him and Heather again. It was over—for good. He never had any intention to kill her, Josh insisted. But while in jail, once he started talking to Emilia, and then when he got out, he discovered that the thought to get rid of Heather was something they could not let go of. It was as though once they put the plan out into the universe, it needed to take place. At least that was how they felt.

  Three people knew what happened inside that trailer when Heather was murdered—one of them is dead. According to Josh, he and Emilia were equally responsible. He claimed the situation escalated while they were inside the trailer. When Heather went for the door to get out, Josh, Emilia and Heather “wrestled around on the floor,” Josh informed me. And it was at that time when Josh told himself, Screw it. He got up off the ground and decided to let Heather go.

  But Emilia said, “Hell no!” So I made Heather get in that chair. She kept trying to get up, so I [sat] down on her and let Emilia tape her to the chair so she could not get up, Josh wrote.

  Josh was clear that it was at this moment that he began to question Heather about her alleged infidelities. Heather didn’t want to answer at first, Josh said. She was terrified.

  Josh recalled Heather saying, “You’ll kill me,” as she sat there, strapped to the chair. Emilia was right in her face, screaming at her to come clean, and Josh was behind Emilia, doing the same.

  “Tell him what you told me while he was in jail,” Emilia said to Heather.

  “Answer the damn questions, Heather!” Josh yelled.

  “No, no . . . you will kill me.”

  “Tell him!” Emilia yelled.

  And then Heather mentioned sleeping with Josh’s “best friend,” which sent him off into a place of frenzy and rage to the point where he began striking her.

  “I hit her,” Josh told me. He didn’t know how many times he hit her, “but it was a lot.”

  Heather would not stop pleading with them to stop. She was scared for her life. The situation became chaotic and seemed to build on its own. Josh became angrier as each moment passed and each blow struck Heather somewhere on her body. And because Heather would not stop talking, Josh said, he had “Emilia tape her mouth up. . . .”

  What happened next, Josh wrote: Emilia tryed [sic] to break her neck and that did not work so she decided to suffocate her with a bag over her face.

  What’s troubling and terrifying about this scenario is that Heather Strong, for perhaps as long as twenty minutes or more, knew she was going to die. In that context, Heather suffered twice: the emotional agony of thinking about leaving her children motherless, missing their smiles, their sweet smells, their laughter; and second, the actual pain of being tortured and then executed by two people who she knew and thought would never take things as far as they did.

  And therein lies the greatest tragedy: The same man Heather loved and married—and to whom she’d borne three children—stood in front of her playing God, promising her that she was not leaving that trailer alive.

  CHAPTER 71

  EMILIA CARR WAS not the type to roll over and play nice with the police. In this situation, ever since she and Josh had been brought in, Emilia believed she’d had the upper hand all along. And, in many ways, she actually had—until she went and opened her mouth and put herself at the scene of a brutal murder, not only watching it unfold, but participating. If Emilia would have just kept her mouth shut—the same as she was asking Michelle to get across to Josh—she’d never be sitting back inside the MCSO answering questions.

  This time, Buie had Emilia brought into the hard room. The conversation wasn’t going to be as cordial as those others. Buie was ready to confront Emilia and tell her what he had developed over the course of his investigation.

  Emilia asked if Michelle was okay.

  After they got situated and Buie re-read Emilia her Miranda rights, he said, “Michelle is fine.” He added how he appreciated that Emilia was concerned about Michelle “’cause she is going through a lot.”

  Emilia brought up the baby and they discussed this for a brief period of time. Then Buie got right into it, asking Emilia to explain once again what she found when she went out to the trailer on that day and saw Heather sitting in the chair, dead.

  “We’ve already done this,” Emilia said rather impatiently.

  Buie pressed her on a few specific issues related to that same topic, indicating that he wanted her to share it all again.

  “Okay, is this off the record?” Emilia asked. “Just you and me talking?”

  It was not, Buie made clear. They were completely on the record.

  Emilia had no choice. She explained the entire scene again—as she had painted it during other interviews—putting the burden of the crime on Josh, making the claim once again that she was not inside the trailer when Heather was killed.

  This, Buie knew (and purposely had aimed to set up in his questioning today), was in total contradiction to what Emilia had just told Michelle on tape.

  Now they had her contradicting herself.

  Buie said the way in which Emilia had explained the scene inside the trailer sounded an awful lot like it was coming from someone witnessing the scene, not hearing about it secondhand. He was giving Emilia one more chance to come clean.

  “Now you see why I want to talk to the state attorney’s office,” Emilia mentioned.

  “’Cause you saw it, didn’t you?” Buie pressed.

  Emilia told Buie there was “so much more to this” and that she wanted to talk, but she needed to make sure certain things were in her favor before she said anything more—hence her bringing up the state attorney’s office (SAO).

  Buie tried to appeal to whatever morsel of morality might have existed within Emilia, or maybe he was fishing to see if she even had one, hoping to build a rapport with her so she would feel comfortable and open up.

  But Emilia kept saying she couldn’t talk openly on the record. Then, in the next breath, she announced that there were “two other people” involved “that are huge parts of this case ... and I mean huge. . . .”

  Not getting anywhere honorably, Buie then told Emilia to stop kidding herself. He said Josh had told them everything. It was time to fess up. “You were right there, darling, and I’m not sitting here playing a game with you,” Buie added.

  “I know. I know.”

&nbs
p; “I know you were there on the night she took her last breath.... I need you to be honest with yourself and get this burden off you. Show me something as a person, that you have some compassion in you.”

  “I do.”

  “People make mistakes.”

  “I do.”

  “Love is blinding, and I know you love Josh. . . .”

  “Don’t love him enough to kill somebody for.”

  They went back and forth: Emilia, not yet ready to admit her role; Buie, thinking for a minute that perhaps he’d cracked her. But she repeatedly insisted that she wasn’t involved on any level other than knowing about the murder after the fact.

  Watching things from another room, Brian Spivey decided to go in and have a seat. Emilia had always felt more comfortable around Spivey. Yet, Spivey made it clear almost immediately that he was not there as her listening friend anymore, same as he had played Mr. Neutral in those other interviews. Now he wanted answers, same as Buie.

  Spivey first talked about the concern they had for Emilia not showing any remorse. This was alarming and troubling to them. The idea that she was not sorry for anything that had happened, murder aside, was shocking, especially seeing that she was an expectant mother.

  Emilia said that not everyone shows remorse in the same way. Then she brought up James Acome and his buddy again.

  Spivey and Buie mentioned how they didn’t want to go down that road anymore.

  Buie looked at Spivey. It was time. They were running in circles. So Buie put it out there to see what kind of reaction they’d get.

  “Today you had a conversation with Josh’s sister,” Buie said slowly. “That conversation was recorded totally.”

  The blood drained from Emilia’s face. She looked at Spivey, then at Buie.

  “You, out of your own mouth, admitted to being there,” Buie explained.

  “We just didn’t stumble across that car sitting in the park . . . ,” Spivey added.

  “Yeah, I know,” Emilia answered.

  “So far, you have shown me that you’re acting like a coldhearted, hateful person who killed the mother of [your] children,” Spivey said.

  “Because I don’t cry?” Emilia wondered. This was the first time she had heard Spivey speak to her with that sort of tone.

  “No,” he said. It was, more or less, because of all the lying. “You told that girl today that you tried to break her neck, and it didn’t work!”

  Now, faced with these new facts, Emilia changed her role dramatically: “I did what I was told to do,” she claimed.

  Buie asked Emilia to explain what she meant by that.

  She said it again: “I did what I was told to do.”

  Spivey said Josh was claiming that Emilia had suffocated and killed Heather, not him.

  “I did not kill her.”

  Buie became impatient. He was more direct with Emilia, demanding that she respect the both of them and the badge itself. Emilia had started to nod “yes” and “no” to their questions, and Buie wasn’t going to have that in his interview suite. He asked Emilia if she understood what he meant by giving them the respect they deserved.

  Softly she answered yes.

  “I can’t hear you!” Buie demanded.

  “Yes!”

  “What did you guys do after she took her last breath?” Buie wanted to know.

  “Can I ask you something?” Emilia countered.

  “Can you answer that for me?”

  Emilia said it didn’t matter what her answers were: If she talked or didn’t, weren’t they going to arrest her, anyway? So, what did she have to lose by not saying anything else at this point?

  Buie and Spivey didn’t know how to respond to that. They knew Emilia’s game was to try and talk her way out of things and she would continue doing that.

  And they were right: Over and over, Emilia said, “I did not kill her.”

  Spivey and Buie humored Emilia and said they wanted to know how had Heather died—if Emilia had not killed her?

  “He held a bag over her face,” Emilia said.

  He taped Heather’s face and hands and neck.

  He hit her.

  He cleaned everything up.

  He saved Heather’s shoes.

  He. He. He.

  And because of Josh’s anger issues and the way he acted on that day in front of her, Emilia said, she was “scared shitless” throughout the entire murder and after, worried Josh would hurt her if she ever talked about it.

  They confronted Emilia with everything she had told Michelle.

  Her reaction was quite baffling. Not exactly agreeing with the totality of what she had said, Emilia eased her way into admitting her role, the entire time still placing the blame on Josh. She maintained that she never thought he was serious; that is, up until the moment he struck Heather that first time. Emilia might have been there and watched it, but she did not plan or participate in Heather’s murder until Josh made her do so.

  Buie explained that she was going to be charged with first-degree murder. He said he was sorry for how it all turned out. However, Emilia could have made it a lot easier on herself and others if she had been forthcoming with true information from the start, instead of telling all those lies they had listened to for the past week.

  Emilia wasn’t happy with that. She claimed others had put her in a position to lie. It wasn’t her fault.

  “You did it, baby,” Buie clarified, patronizing Emilia.

  “I didn’t kill that girl,” she repeated.

  “You did!”

  “I didn’t kill her.”

  “Yes. You. Did.”

  Spivey asked Emilia to tell them what happened, then, if she hadn’t done what Josh claimed she had done (and so did she, by her own admission to Michelle).

  “He held her down, because he was stronger,” she said, before finally admitting to taping Heather’s hands and feet.

  Buie asked what Heather was saying specifically to Emilia at that moment.

  “She was just crying.”

  Realizing they were perhaps getting some of the truth out of her, Buie listened as Emilia then talked about Heather telling Josh she was claustrophobic, and Josh saying to her that he felt the same as he sat in the jail for all those sleepless nights. This, of course, was something Josh had said, too.

  The one point Emilia seemed to make several times—and it was clear that this was something she believed to be true—was that Josh had become this other person with “glazed-over eyes,” which she had never seen before, as he stepped into the role of killer. She said that once he reached that place inside himself, there was no turning back and no stopping him. It was a look, Emilia could tell, that Heather had recognized, too, on that day. When she had, Heather urinated on herself, knowing that she was not going to leave the trailer alive. Josh had turned into a monster. He was going to kill Heather, and there was nothing Emilia could say to change the outcome of this.

  Nothing.

  For twenty additional minutes, they talked details: the glass breaking, the door jamming, the burial site, whether Emilia ever pulled a knife on Heather (she said she didn’t), where they got the blanket to cover her head inside the hole Josh had dumped her body in (a storage shed).

  Josh had “dragged” Heather around the trailer to that grave he had dug, while Emilia stayed inside the trailer, she said. The only time she went out to the grave site was when Josh asked her to see if she thought it was deep enough. Emilia also said Josh “disposed” of Heather’s purse in a Dumpster. She had no idea where it was located.

  She admitted to bringing a candle out there for light.

  She admitted to watching Josh break a flashlight over Heather’s head.

  She admitted to walking into the trailer with the flashlight.

  She admitted to “standing back” after taping Heather up so Josh could yell at her.

  She admitted to “a lot of it” being a “blur.”

  She admitted to trying to snap Heather’s neck—not because she w
anted Heather’s death to be quick and painless, but because she “was scared” of not doing what Josh told her to do and the ramifications that would ensue from not following his orders.

  Like Josh, Emilia tried to minimize her role in the entire plan, execution and cleanup afterward, but Buie and Spivey were not allowing her that excuse. Every time Emilia tried to play down her role in a specific moment of the murder, Spivey or Buie reminded her of the fact that she stood by, watched it all, helped Josh all the way through the process, even spoke to him over the phone about it and then never said anything to anyone afterward. She even knew that there was a corpse in her backyard all that time. Emilia slept comfortably inside the house yards away from it, and she had never mentioned it to anyone—never shared how scared she was of Josh. In other words, Emilia had plenty of opportunity after the murder to run to police for help, explaining how frightened she was of this madman, but she never did. Even after he was locked away and could certainly not hurt her, she didn’t reach out.

  “Tell me what you think you’re guilty of?” Buie asked.

  “Helping a monster.”

  “I’m sorry, of being a monster?”

  “Helping a monster!”

  Emilia took a few steps back and claimed that what she had told Michelle amounted to nothing, and they were never going to be able to use it against her. All she was guilty of was “trying to comfort” Michelle during a time of need.

  Laughable. Buie stopped himself from busting up right there inside the interview suite.

  “She didn’t need comfort. She knew her brother did it,” Buie finally said, explaining Michelle’s position.

  Emilia said that at one point while she was in the trailer watching Josh commit murder, she was “standing up against the table, shaking.”

  They ignored that comment.

  It deserved to be.

  The remainder of the interview was simple law enforcement mechanics: questions of what, when, where? Emilia stumbled her way through most of it. She was completely stuck on the personal attack that the detectives had waged because she failed to show any remorse or emotion. It bothered Emilia that they thought this about her, so she tried to explain that she was someone who didn’t wear her heart on her sleeve. She felt she was being judged for that.