To Love and to Kill

by M. William Phelps

  I also want to extend a big thanks to the fans of Dark Minds on Investigation Discovery: I am honored by your dedication and willingness to watch the series and support it. That work behind the series takes so much out of me emotionally, to have such a large and dedicated audience, week after week, makes me believe the message is being heard.

  My publisher, Laurie Parkin (who retired in 2014 after forty years in the biz!), and the entire team at Kensington Publishing Corp. deserve my utmost respect and gratitude for the passion and confidence each one of them puts into the books I write. These are great people who love what they do. To be part of Kensington’s continued success as an independent publisher is a blessing. I am lucky. I tell myself this every morning as I awake and get to work.

  As I was finishing work on this book, I met Norma Perez-Hernandez, my editor’s personal assistant, at a publishing event in New York City one early spring evening in 2014. Norma and I had a nice conversation and she enthusiastically praised my work, which I was greatly humbled by. I wanted to say thank you to Norma for not only being so excited about books in general, but for taking the time to stop and talk about my work and build so much excitement about it around the Kensington offices. I’m grateful for having a cheerleader like Norma in the business, excited about my books, championing them within the day-to-day grind of the publishing industry—but I feel blessed that I was able to meet Norma and say thanks for the encouragement and support!

  I would like also to give my sincere appreciation to everyone at Investigation Discovery and Beyond Productions involved in making Dark Minds, the best (nonfiction) crime show on television. I’ve said this before many times, but it also needs repeating: It takes an army of devoted people to produce a television series. Among those I want to personally thank: Dark Minds show runner and series producer, by far the best in the biz at what he does, Andrew “Fazz” Farrell, who has been a mentor and blessing in my life. Likewise, each of the following, in his or her own way, has taught me everything I know about making quality-grade, great nonfiction television: Alex Barry, Colette “Coco” Sandstedt, John Mavety, Peter Heap, Mark Middis, Toby Prior, Peter Coleman, Derek Ichilcik, Jared “Jars” Transfield, Jo Telfer, Claire Westerman, Milena Gozzo, Cameron Power, Katie Ryerson, Inneke Smit, Pele Hehea, Jeremy Peek, Jeremy Adair, Geri Berman, Nadine Terens, Samantha Hertz, Lale Teoman, Hayden Anderson, Savino (from Onyx Sound Lab in Manchester, Connecticut), David O’Brien, Ra-ey Saleh, Nathan Brand, Rebecca Clare, Anthony Toy, Mark Wheeler, Mandy Chapman, Jenny O’Shea, Jen Longhurst, Anita Bezjak, Geoff Fitzpatrick, John Luscombe, Debbie Gottschalk, Eugenie “Jeannie” Vink, Sucheta Sachdev, Sara Kozak, Kevin Bennett, Jane Latman and Henry Schleiff.

  For my entertainment lawyer/business manager, Matthew Valentinas, a warm thank-you for embarking on this journey with me. I believe Matthew and I were destined to meet and connect. I appreciate Matthew’s passion for this business, inherent knowledge of television and film, and desire to see me succeed.

  I would also like to thank Deb Allen and everyone at Jupiter Entertainment for helping me with the Carr/Fulgham case, encouraging me to look deeper into it, and providing me with documents and photos.

  Terry Lenamon, Johnny Strong, Donald Buie, Brian Spivey, Staci Winston, Kae Charman, Patricia Ardovino, Captain Linda Vyse, Ben McCollum, and all of my anonymous sources, I appreciate the time and attention you gave to me while I worked on this important project. There are so many others, who asked me not to mention their names. I will respect that request and just give an overall thanks to them all.

  I also want to mention that on June 9, 2014, Ben McCollum died in a “one-vehicle accident in Orange Lake.” Ben was thirty-seven years old. His obituary said he was “talented, outgoing, helpful to those in need and a good friend.” This news was shocking. I had been talking to Ben about creating a reality series based on his garage and his life. We lost touch. All indications, as the sections of this book about Ben implied, prove that Ben McCollum was a wonderful person and respected member of his community—I am sure he is and will be greatly missed. This news made me sad. I want to express my deepest condolences to anyone that knew and loved Ben, especially his family.

  I cannot thank either Josh or Emilia for their participation because they murdered a human being and I detest that crime (and them) at the highest level.

  We all need to thank Heather Strong for her courage to stay with this jackass as long as she did for the sake of her children. My only regret in looking at this case was that she didn’t leave long before he killed her. Going back and looking at the trajectory of their lives and how it played out, I could almost see murder coming down the road. It was inevitable. I am sorry Heather never saw it herself—though, part of me thinks she probably did.

  Lastly, my family: Mathew, Jordon, Regina and April, whose dedication to her schoolwork and sports continues to be a true inspiration. I am lucky to have such wonderful people in my life. I never take this blessing for granted.

  Don’t miss the next exciting real-life thriller by

  M. William Phelps

  ONE BREATH AWAY

  Coming from Kensington Publishing Corp. in 2016!

  Keep reading for a preview excerpt ...

  CHAPTER 1

  IT WAS ONE of those telephone calls in the middle of the night we all fear. The kind that jolts your heart, puts a pit in your gut, startling you awake. Adrenaline pumps through you the moment you open your eyes.

  Somebody has died!

  Quickly roused from REM sleep by that familiar ring, she had no idea that everything, as she knew it, was about to change. Nor would their lives ever be the same again, once she got out of bed and put the phone to her ear.

  “Hello? What is it?” She could barely get the words out.

  That time of night, hell, you’d expect bad news on the other end of the line.

  The day preceding the telephone call, however, had started out like any other Sunday in forty-year-old Rachel Robidoux’s life. Rachel woke up at her usual five in the morning to get ready for work. It was October 24, 2010, the weather rather balmy for this time of the year in St. Petersburg, Florida. As Rachel opened the door to leave, a wall of humid, tropical, almost wet, 75-degree morning air hit her in the face.

  Within Pinellas County, St. Petersburg is a rather large city, a population of about a quarter million, give or take. With Tropicana Field downtown, home to Major League Baseball’s Tampa Bay Rays, St. Pete, as locals call it, still holds on to that resort-town feel its founder had intended back in 1875 when the city was born.

  Rachel Robidoux worked at Denny’s on Thirty-Fourth Street, North, downtown. She’d been there for well over a decade. Normally, on Sundays, Rachel worked the day shift: seven to four. To this mother of five, although she’d gotten used to it by now, St. Pete might as well have been New York City, Rachel herself having been born and raised (mostly) in a one-stop-sign, one-intersection, everybody-knows-everybody, small New England town.

  As the end of her shift on that Sunday approached, Rachel took a call from one of her five daughters, Ashley McCauley, who had turned seventeen that past April.

  “You want to go to Crescent Lake Park with Grandma after you get out?”

  This sounded like a good time, Rachel thought. “I’ll pick you two up soon,” she said.

  Crescent Lake Park is in an area of St. Pete where families and lovers and kids hang out on those seemingly endless, perfect Florida days, with skies that warm robin’s-egg blue color. People flock there and enjoy the ducks and geese and swans, as well as the company they keep. Rachel needed this comforting space in her life. Not that things had been chaotic or all that difficult lately, having been through some rather extremely tough times in her life, same as just about every working-class family in the country. However, she’d had some issues over the past few years with her oldest daughter, Jennifer “Jen” Mee. Jen had turned nineteen in July, and her life, as Rachel later put it, had not gone along a trajectory Rachel and her husband, Chris, Jen
nifer’s stepfather, would have liked. Jen was Rachel’s firstborn, a child from a failed relationship when Rachel was twenty-one. In fact, Jen was just eighteen months old when Rachel met Chris, Ashley three months old—their other children, Kayla, Destiny and McKenzie, Rachel and Chris had together. As far as the oldest girls were concerned, however, Chris Robidoux had always considered himself their father.

  A little over a year ago, Jennifer had moved out of the house and on her own some weeks before her eighteenth birthday. Before that, she had one foot out, anyway, often staying with one friend for a month, or babysitting and staying with other friends for a few weeks here and there, maybe sleeping at a motel or on a park bench. All this happened after Jennifer had garnered international fame in the days surrounding January 23, 2007, for experiencing a bout with the hiccups that lasted for about five weeks. Still, with Jennifer moving out and “changing,” as Rachel liked to say, it wasn’t the major problem between Rachel and her daughter. For Rachel, it was more of the people who flocked to Jennifer after her star rose, on top of the guys Jennifer had been dating now for what was about four years.

  “Thugs,” Rachel called them.

  Although Rachel and Jennifer spoke as much as two to three times per week, their conversations weren’t like they used to be. Definitely not the personal talk mothers and daughters have. These days, Rachel understood (though she later admitted some denial on her part), Jennifer was shielding parts of herself and her chosen lifestyle. Just a look at Jennifer’s Myspace page, back when that gulf between the mom and her daughter began to grow, had given Rachel and Chris an idea of where Jen was headed.

  My love is nt a game im real n dnt wnt a fake lien cheaten azz nigga.

  “I guess I should have known with the signs,” Rachel recalled, “but I didn’t. Jen was into some ‘activities’ and later she [said she] was ashamed of it all.”

  Rachel had no idea the extent to which Jen was involved in that street life, ripping and running with a group of hard-boiled, seasoned ruffians and tough street kids her own age. Jen had become somebody she had actually once said she despised. Maybe some naiveté existed on Rachel’s part, or just a mother struggling to keep up with a middle-class lifestyle and still having three young kids at home, but Rachel lost that close touch with Jen. As they drifted, she felt her daughter was old enough to begin carving out her own life, make her own mistakes and take responsibility. Besides that, Chris and Jen had been at odds for a long time now, butting heads like rams. Both Rachel and Chris knew they couldn’t change Jennifer, or tell her how to live. They had been through so much during Jen’s hiccup period—both parents were tired, frustrated and ready to move on.

  CHAPTER 2

  DOWN AT CRESCENT Lake Park, after Rachel had stopped and picked up her mother and Ashley, they sat and enjoyed the early evening. They fed the ducks, talked and caught up on each other’s lives. That early-morning humidity and warmth had turned into a scorching afternoon sun. During the week, Rachel lived at her mother’s house just outside downtown St. Pete. Rachel and Chris and the kids had a house about ninety minutes out of town in the north, so it was more feasible and less expensive if Rachel stayed with her mother and father during the workweek. Chris collected disability—a stay-at-home dad, watching the kids, tending to the household chores. He had suffered several ailments—some psychological, others medical. The situation of Chris being home with the kids had been by design in some ways, Rachel said. The decision was made after an incident some years back that greatly disturbed the entire family’s trust in anyone else being around their children.

  Throughout that afternoon, Rachel had called Jennifer several times. She hadn’t been able to reach her. Rachel, of course, wanted Jen to join them at the park. But for some reason, Jen wasn’t responding to her phone calls, texts, or voice mails. And although Jen had changed and lived what Rachel and Chris saw as an unhealthy and dangerous lifestyle, they were not estranged. They disagreed about things, but they always talked and saw each other when they could. Not answering her phone and not calling back was out of Jen’s character.

  “I was actually upset that I couldn’t get hold of Jennifer on that day,” Rachel remembered.

  Where the heck is she?

  Something happened during Rachel’s break at work earlier that morning that had upset Rachel, especially now as she thought back on it later in the day.

  Jennifer had called. “Mom?”

  “Yeah? Jennifer, hi. How are you?”

  Jennifer knew her mother had had surgery for a recurring cist a few weeks prior and had been in a lot of pain. She was taking powerful pain medication for it.

  “Do you have any pain pills left from your operation?” Jennifer asked.

  Rachel was alarmed. “Pain pills? Why would you need pain pills, Jennifer?”

  “Mom, listen ... Lamont got hurt. He’s in a lot of pain.” Lamont Newton was Jennifer’s most recent boyfriend; she had been dating the twenty-two-year-old St. Pete native for the past several months. Lamont seemed like a “nice guy,” Rachel said. He was five feet nine inches tall, in great physical shape at 165 pounds. Lamont sported Bob Marley–type dreads down across his shoulders, bushy eyebrows and clean-shaven facial skin. He generally had a calm disposition; he was polite. As Rachel saw it, Lamont was an excellent alternative and the polar opposite to Jen’s previous boyfriend—a pants-down-to-his-knees, boxer-shorts-showing, ball cap tipped to one side, “yo” this, “yo” that, spot-on “thug” and violent abuser—a man who had beaten Jen on more than one occasion. In contrast, at least on the surface, Lamont came across as a guy who was entirely into Jennifer as a partner—not after what he could get from her.

  “We wanted her to date within her own race,” Rachel explained at the risk of coming across as bigoted, claiming she and her husband were anything but racists. “Yet, Jen said she had chosen colored men to date because she had lost faith in—and wanted nothing to do with—white men altogether.” Her decision had stemmed specifically from a very difficult period in her life when Jen was a child.

  “No,” Rachel said to the request for pain pills. “Tell him to go to the hospital, Jennifer. I need my medication.”

  Jennifer didn’t sound frantic or fazed. However, Rachel was quick to point out: “She didn’t sound normal, either. More anxious—I felt like something was wrong, but I was clueless.”

  That request had come from Jen as though she was simply calling and asking her mother for some pain meds to help her boyfriend work through a back issue. And when she couldn’t get the pills, well, that was it. They said their good-byes to one another—will talk to you later—and hung up.

  But something was indeed wrong with Jennifer. Rachel had no idea that within a few hours after that phone call, their lives would take a turn none of them ever saw coming.

  Heather Strong was born and raised in Mississippi. She dreamed of a white-picket-fence life, a beautiful home and children.

  While working as a waitress, Heather met Joshua Fulgham. They moved to Florida to find work and raise a family.

  Joshua and Heather lived in this trailer home in Citra, Florida, outside of Tampa. (Courtesy Marion County Sheriff’s Office)

  Joshua Fulgham, with his son and daughter on his son’s first birthday.

  On February 15, 2009, Heather Strong left this Petro Travel Plaza in Florida, and was never seen alive again. (Courtesy Marion County Sheriff’s Office)

  This house in Boardman, Florida, where Joshua Fulgham’s mistress lived with her mother, became the focus of the search for Heather Strong. (Courtesy Marion County Sheriff’s Office)

  About fifty yards in back of the home, an abandoned trailer contained evidence that suggested something very violent and bloody took place inside. (Courtesy Marion County Sheriff’s Office)

  Joshua’s mistress, Emilia Carr, later told police that this broken window led her to search inside the trailer. (Courtesy Marion County Sheriff’s Office)

  According to Emilia, this chair was used to restr
ain Heather as she was tortured. (Courtesy Marion County Sheriff’s Office)

  The trailer was used as a storage shed and was full of unwanted articles. (Courtesy Marion County Sheriff’s Office)

  A piece of silver duct tape, recovered from the abandoned trailer, was thought to have been used during Heather’s murder.

  (Courtesy Marion County Sheriff’s Office)

  Several yards from the corner of the trailer was a small clearing of land with a pile of debris that appeared to be “staged.”

  (Courtesy Marion County Sheriff’s Office)

  Joshua Fulgham had a long history of arrests, including violent assaults and drug charges.

  (Courtesy Marion County Sheriff’s Office)

  Baby-faced Emilia “Lily” Carr became obsessed with Joshua Fulgham.

  (Courtesy Marion County Sheriff’s Office)

  Marion County Sheriff’s Office investigators excavated the area near the trailer after Joshua Fulgham told them where he believed Heather Strong was buried. (Courtesy Marion County Sheriff’s Office)

  Underneath this overturned chair, crime scene investigators found a board buried about sixteen inches underground.