Moments into the interview, Emilia started to cry. She talked about how she was the “only one” who could take care of her and her sister’s children, because within her “family . . . I’m the only one that’s educated—and I’m in here because of a man.”
“She is damn good at lying and making people believe her,” Josh Fulgham said. He was behind bars, awaiting a date with the SA. Josh had sat back and watched Emilia’s trial unfold. He was satisfied that Emilia had been unable to manipulate the system to her benefit. That’s what had worried Josh the most, he said, that Emilia would be able to talk her way out of it all.
According to Josh, Emilia had once written to him and asked that he write a letter to the governor of Florida, asking for her “emergency rush release” because she was an “innocent mother of four.” Josh said that he was “supposed to tell [the governor] if he didn’t set her free that I was going to go public and tell on television that he has left [an] innocent woman [heading for] ... death row, after I had done told him she was innocent.”
The bottom line within all of this was that it didn’t matter. Emilia’s fate was in the hands of a judge, who was just about to make his final decision.
CHAPTER 95
ANY PLAN SHE might have had from behind bars to escape final justice, if Emilia had one at all, did not work. As promised, on February 22, 2011, after assembling all of the parties involved once again, Judge Willard Pope sat behind his bench. With a dreadful look about his face, he announced to the courtroom how much thought he had put into his decision. In the end, though, the judge said it wasn’t a tough decision to make after all—that is, legally speaking. Once he sat down and took everything into account, Judge Willard Pope realized there was only one result he could come to.
Death.
With utter silence inside the courtroom, Emilia faced Judge Pope. Her expression was bleak and defiant. Pope looked at Emilia and said, “‘This court is compelled to conclude that the actions of Emilia Carr in this case, and the manner, means and circumstances by which those actions were taken, require the imposition of the ultimate penalty.’”
Death.
Pope was reading aloud from what was a detailed, passionate, well-written, well-thought-out, twenty-nine-page order.
Emilia dropped her head when she realized her fight was over. She was heading to death row. But then, suddenly, she looked up and seemed to face the judge’s conclusion with a modicum of acceptance.
Judge Pope allowed Emilia to speak. In a short statement, Emilia gave the impression that she was not going to back down from the story she had been trying to sell everyone. She viewed the entire process as unfair and biased. She said she had been erroneously “convicted of telling a lie.” Nothing more. She was heading to death row, essentially, for lying to the police.
It was outrageous. It was wrong. It was unjust.
Emilia’s case would be filed under automatic review. An appeal was due process in all death penalty cases. That would be the place from this point on where Emilia could argue through her attorneys against the judge’s sentence and the jury’s decision.
Pope continued, explaining to the court how he “assigned great weight” to “three aggravating circumstances” in the case where his decision to affirm the jury’s recommended sentence was concerned. Legally, this fact was vital to his decision. Heather Strong, Pope said, had been brutally murdered during the commission of the “separate felony offense of kidnapping.” He explained the crimes were “especially heinous, atrocious and cruel.” He referred to the murder as “cold, calculated and premeditated.”
Alternatively, Pope had given Emilia’s “lack of criminal history” the most weight out of much of what he looked at. The argument that she’d had a tough upbringing, was sexually assaulted and didn’t have many chances in life played zero part in the judge’s decision, he explained. He said he placed “little or no weight” on those sad, mitigating factors. In addition, Pope said there was “no evidence” presented to him that Emilia was ever manipulated by Joshua Fulgham. Plus, effectively, testimony from a clinical psychologist proved that she was, and still is, “in control of her own faculties.”
Lastly, in the case he listened to inside his courtroom, Pope agreed with just about everyone else besides Emilia and her attorneys that the state presented “overwhelming evidence” of Emilia’s guilt.
There was a brief moment of pause and reflection from the well-liked judge. It was clear he took this matter seriously; deciding to send a young mother of four young children to death row was not easy. Then, in carefully chosen language, as he had throughout the entire trial, Judge Pope ended with a word of hope (depending on which way one looked at things) while staring directly at Emilia: “May God have mercy on your soul.”
In confirming the jury’s decision, sending Emilia Carr to death row, Judge Willard Pope made a bit of history as Emilia Carr became the first woman to receive the death penalty in Marion County since famed serial killer Aileen Wuornos, convicted in the same county and executed in October 2002. Emilia would join one other woman, Tiffany Cole, on Florida’s death row. Cole, also in her late twenties, was sentenced in March 2008 for her role in the vicious and cruel double murder of a Jacksonville, Florida, couple.
This case was far from over, however. The way Candace Hawthorne felt after the latest decision indicated anything but finality. Outside the courtroom, Hawthorne spoke to various reporters hovering around her. “I’d be interested to see if the Florida Supreme Court affirms the judge’s decision,” Hawthorne said with a bit of tailored cynicism in her voice. “I don’t think they will.”
Brad King was not celebrating. One did not jump for joy at the prospect of placing a young woman on death row in a state where the punishment, after all the appeals were exhausted, was often carried out . Even if Emilia spent twenty years on death row, it would still make her a young woman at forty-plus when the state of Florida summoned her to the death chamber for execution. King, instead, took the high road and called Pope’s affirmation of the jury’s recommendation an “appropriate” decision to make from the bench, before adding how he believed the Florida Supreme Court would agree.
“Looking through other cases,” King told reporters, “the Florida Supreme Court regularly has upheld cases” with comparable aggravating factors.
For Emilia’s mother, a woman who had worked hard all her life to give her kids the best she could, seeing Emilia on death row was, she said, this mother’s “worst nightmare.” She was “shocked” by the judge’s ruling and needed some time to go home and process the road ahead.
Heather’s family was nowhere in sight.
CHAPTER 96
JOSHUA FULGHAM WAS ready to face whatever fate had in store for him. He was thirty years old. He’d been behind bars now for almost three years. He had wanted to cut a deal with the SAO, but they still weren’t offering. Ready and willing to accept a plea deal, the issue at hand for King was that the state had gotten a conviction in Emilia’s case and she had been sentenced to death. The SAO couldn’t roll over now and allow the mastermind, essentially, to take life.
“Brad King takes his responsibilities very seriously,” said Terry Lenamon, Josh’s lawyer. “He looks to the victim’s family and proportionality on some levels. He had gotten a death sentence on Emilia, and because he believed that was an appropriate sentence, he didn’t want to risk any appellate issues. . . .”
The idea was that if Josh was given a plea offer and took it, Emilia’s attorneys could argue what is called “proportionality” in her appeal: What this means is that the “government and private actions should not be demonstrably excessive, relative to their moral and practical justifications.”
What’s good for one, in other words, has to be good for the other.
So Josh was now in a position to battle it out in court against the SAO. To that end, Josh said later, holding little back, “The prosecutor in my case was a sick, obsessed fuck . . . and I hope he burns in hell.”
&nb
sp; There was certainly another way to put what was resentment for not cutting a deal, and maybe Josh’s reaction was a good indication why the SA had not wanted to deal with him in the first place.
According to what Josh told me later, he had wanted to plead out mainly for the sake of not putting everyone through the rigorous, expensive, emotional roller-coaster ride of a capital murder trial all over again, adding, “So Heather could be put to rest.”
As his trial approached, Josh was conducting a bit of a life review, especially regarding all the time he spent with Heather. Hindsight is always 20/20, especially as a man is about to face a noose on his way to the gallows. He begins to look at things differently.
But Josh said he didn’t care what people thought about him, how genuine anyone believed he was or wasn’t about his remorse. He was truly sorry for the things he had done to Heather throughout their lives. The bad behavior and the way he had treated Heather—this, despite murdering her!—had been weighing on his soul. He wanted now to do what was best for her memory by admitting to killing her and accepting a death sentence.
“Like I have said, over and over, since my arrest, I am not proud of any of this stuff and how I treated Heather. . . .”
Josh felt the prosecutor had a “grand slam” (though he probably meant slam dunk) with his case, “only because of my confession, which was done out of remorse for Heather.”
In his heart, Josh said, he believed Brad King would have never “challenged the case,” had Detective Buie been unable to get that final confession from Josh.
“They would never get a conviction if I didn’t give them a confession, because Emilia was damn sure never going to talk until she found out I had.”
Josh said he realized Emilia was going to “always blame” him and there were people who would “feed into her bullshit . . . but this shit happened and we went to jail.”
Because they did not take his plea deal, Josh said, he was now resigned to fight. Why not? What did he have to lose?
His life.
Because if a jury in the same county had given a mother of four the death penalty, Josh knew his days were numbered if (and when) he was found guilty. So the state, he claimed, gave him no choice but to fight the charges, which he was now preparing to do with one of the top death penalty defense lawyers in the state representing him.
CHAPTER 97
ON APRIL 4, 2012, one minute after 9:00 A.M., SA Brad King took to the courtroom floor to give his opening statement. Right out of the gate, King stated that the state’s burden was to follow the indictment charging Josh with the crimes of murder in the first degree and kidnapping. King called that indictment a “road map” that the state was bound by law to navigate through. He couldn’t deviate from it, even if he wanted. His witnesses, he said, numbering in the twenty-person range, would walk in and testify to those facts supporting the indictment. Quite surprisingly, King noted a few moments into his opening, “I can tell you that for certainty before we ever start ... you will not see Emilia Carr get on that witness stand and testify. It will not happen from my side.”
Brad King gave no reason why.
After that, King talked about what the jury would hear. He said his witnesses were regular people “like y’all.” Each one would walk into the courtroom, sit down and explain what they knew about this case as it pertained to the indictment. The state’s focus would be on facts and evidence. In this case, unlike Emilia’s, King mentioned, there was plenty of DNA and forensic evidence, not to mention a complete confession tying the defendant to the murder. And for a prosecutor, those three items amounted to a hat trick, or triple play, on the way toward a win.
The extra weapon the SAO had were the audio recordings of interviews with the defendant and his co-conspirator. Those would tell a story, King promised: a story of how two people lured an innocent woman into a trailer with the intention of taking her life, strapped that woman to a chair, scolded her, called her names, hit her in the head with a flashlight—and all before murdering her by asphyxiation.
And then King delivered, same as he had during Emilia’s trial, a bit of dialogue that summed up his case and, by placing the relationship (or love triangle) at the center, the SA put a perfect little bow around his indictment package: “Now, not only was this relationship kind of tumultuous in the sense of people moving from person to person over time ... through the years between these two in particular, [it] was a violent relationship. And you’re going to hear, I believe, that on January the sixth, [nearly] two weeks after they get married, Heather Strong makes a complaint to the sheriff’s office, which causes Joshua Fulgham to be arrested and taken to jail.”
For Heather, King said, that was the death knell, the tolling bells in Joshua’s head that became the beginning of the end of her life.
A murder plan was born.
Josh sat, staring at this man he utterly and angrily despised, a prosecutor he hated with fanatical passion. Josh’s head was cleanly shaven, smooth as a bowling ball, shiny as a set of military shoes. He was dressed nicely in slacks, a striped dress shirt and a dark-colored tie.
As King got into talking about those phone calls between Emilia and Josh, while Josh was in jail on those trumped-up threatening charges, Terry Lenamon, a lawyer who had behind him some 120 jury trials and was considered one of Florida’s most respected and skilled defense attorneys, especially when the death penalty was involved, objected repeatedly. Lenamon claimed those conversations had been discussed during a pretrial motion and not yet made open fodder to talk about in the courtroom.
Circuit judge Brian Lambert, however, overruled each objection.
So King continued.
If there was one advantage Terry Lenamon, who had handled more than eighty first-degree murder cases heading into representing Josh, had over Candace Hawthorne, who had arguably been in the same position with Emilia, it was that there was no need to focus on trying to get Josh off. Lenamon knew Josh was going to be found guilty. Anybody in that courtroom who might have believed otherwise was kidding himself or herself. The evidence was beyond overwhelming here. What Lenamon could instead channel his focus on was the death penalty phase of this trial and make sure that he saved Josh’s life—and that began within the guilt/innocence stage of the trial.
The one piece of conversation jurors would hear that was going to bury Josh came out of his own mouth to Emilia’ ears: “I should have killed that bitch when I had the chance.” It was as good as an eyewitness account of this murder, maybe better, considering what happened weeks after Josh made that statement.
With some words, you speak them, and they cannot be taken back. This was one of those instances.
After spending about thirty minutes going through the same case he had during Emilia’s trial, Brad King pulled it all together with some rather chilling final remarks, reminding jurors why they were in this courtroom and had been chosen to hear this case.
“[Heather is] put in a chair.... She’s duct-taped to [it], and Joshua Fulgham . . . leans on her, and Emilia Carr was behind her, suffocating her to death. Then a bag was taped over her head and ... she was killed. And that during that”—King paused briefly, not because he was so good at generating emotion within his pleadings to the seven male, seven female jury (there were two alternates present), but because he felt every word he was speaking personally—“she begged them not to kill her.”
The images King was able to conjure up were alarming and chilling. Everyone in the courtroom could picture this crime having taken place, Josh and Emilia as the designers and executors.
King finally called the idea of Emilia and Josh luring Heather into the trailer exactly what it was: the “intent to terrorize or do bodily harm.”
CHAPTER 98
TERRY LENAMON BEGAN addressing jurors at 11:00 A.M., not long after Brad King finished. Lenamon, who had never faced off against King before in a courtroom, presented the look of the man he was: an imposing figure. Lenamon was tall and heavyset, balding and flashy. He wor
e expensive suits and had a look of utter (and quite genuine) seriousness written all over his face. His voice carried with it the experience Lenamon had earned and the respect the man deserved. Beyond law school, Lenamon had graduated from famed attorney Gerry Spence’s Trial Lawyers College and had become somewhat of an expert at case preparation and mitigation investigation—two aspects of defending the indefensible that would come in handy here. If there was a lawyer appointed to defend those who could not afford a credible defense, Terry Lenamon was that attorney. Joshua Fulgham could not have hired better counsel, even if he had a million dollars to do so. Lenamon had been known to call the death penalty “heinous, atrocious and cruel.” He was prepared to fight for Josh’s life, no matter how difficult the path, simply because he did not believe the government had the right to choose when someone lived or died.
Married to a prosecutor, Lenamon was one of only a handful of lawyers statewide that met the qualifications to accept capital work. How he ended up with Josh’s case was nothing short of a lucky break for Josh. The original lawyer appointed to the case had some problems with the state bar association, so the state called on local Ocala attorney Tania Alavi, who had worked with Lenamon on cases. She called Lenamon and he became lead counsel.
Lenamon believed unfalteringly that the government shouldn’t “be in the business of killing people.” He saw the death penalty as extremely “problematic when dealing with issues of race and minorities, social economics and other factors” that don’t allow everyone to have a fair shake. What would help Josh tremendously in his case was that Lenamon lived by a quote that celebrated trial attorney Clarence Darrow stated long ago: “The only real lawyers are trial lawyers—and trial lawyers try cases to juries.”
Terry Lenamon understood that he needed to focus his opening on that jury—reach each juror not by trying to make him or her believe Josh was somebody he wasn’t, but by using the truth to humanize Josh, a man who had said repeatedly that he was sorry for what he had done. However, Lenamon knew from his years of addressing juries in such cases that this part of the job was a hell of a lot easier said than done. Many jurors had made up their minds, Lenamon knew, by the time they sat down. His job was to try and reach those who hadn’t yet judged Josh, and change the minds of those who had. If there was one lawyer who could do this, it was Lenamon, who, as a member of Casey Anthony’s legal “dream team,” successfully argued against the state seeking the death penalty in the most-hated-mother-in-America trial of the century, thus persuading the state of Florida to seek life against Anthony, accused (and acquitted) of murdering her daughter, Caylee.
To Love and to Kill Page 29