Gail was still alive, though. She was breathing laboriously, and her pulse was weakening.
She had a heartbeat. She was fighting.
Sirens pierced the night as Barb and Cathy did their best to let Gail know she was not alone. They would not let her die out here by herself, in the dark, on her back, lying on the cold parking lot pavement in a pool of her own blood.
3
GUY HUBBLE HAD been with the Oakland County Sheriff’s Department (OCSD) since 1985. As the call came in that a woman was hurt at the Lake Orion Public Library, road patrol officer Hubble, nearing the end to his generally carefree and quiet three-to-eleven shift, realized he was right down the street. The Township of Orion had been under Hubble’s patrol. Looking at his watch—9:14 P.M. on the nose—Hubble sped toward the scene.
“I was already northbound on Joslyn Road, coming up to [West] Clarkston Road,” Hubble recalled. “I was approximately a quarter mile away, maybe half, at the most.”
From his scanner Hubble had gleaned basic details of what was going on: injured party . . . a medical emergency.
The patrol officer hit his lights and siren, passing Square Lake Cemetery on the right, several residential houses on the left. Coming up to the library’s driveway a few moments after receiving the call, Hubble raced into the backward J-shaped entrance toward the employee parking lot and spied “two white females . . . standing above another white female that was [lying] on the ground.”
Hubble parked, flung his door open, and approached the women. Understandably so, they were upset, a bit manic, and did not know what else they could do for Gail.
“What is the nature of the situation?” Hubble asked.
“We think she’s fallen,” Barb said. She held a “paper cloth” to Gail’s forehead. After thinking about it, Barb figured Gail had fallen and hit her head. She was confused and traumatized, not thinking clearly. She didn’t want to believe her friend had been shot in the head.
Hubble walked closer. “Please remove the cloth,” he said, wanting to see the extent of Gail’s injuries, maybe try to discern what had happened, and if he could do anything to help.
As soon as Barb removed the cloth, it was clear to the veteran cop what happened: Gail had not fallen, as the women had now suspected. “I noticed a large hole in the upper part of the forehead,” he explained. It was obvious that Gail had been shot.
Emergency personnel and another officer pulled up at the same time, chirping to a stop. The lights on each vehicle flashed strobes of red and blue, brightening the parking lot, making a scene out of what was, on any other night, a place of peace and quiet, where nothing much of anything happened.
“Back away, please,” the officer said, approaching. “They need to administer help.”
Gail was slipping; that white light approaching fast. She had been shot in the head and torso four times. She had stood, looked into the eyes of her killer, turned away instinctively, knowing, it seemed, the end was near. Anyone who knew Gail would agree that in those crucial moments after she was shot, as she fell to the ground, this pious woman, undoubtedly, began to recite the Catholic prayers she had breathlessly said thousands of times throughout her life. Gail was known to say a rosary every night; maybe tonight she was saying that same prayer as she lay dying.
Hubble noticed Gail was “moaning and moving” slightly. “I was trying to keep her from moving her neck area,” he recalled, “[when] shortly after that, fire [rescue] arrived and [she] took her last breath.”
As he knelt beside her, Hubble heard a whoosh of air from Gail’s lungs, so subtle and unexpected and yet eerily normal. Then there was total quiet.
Gail had given up her fight. She was gone.
With a volunteer emergency medical technician (EMT) now helping, Hubble got to work performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). As they prepared Gail’s body for CPR, undoing her clothing, Hubble noticed “what appeared to be multiple gunshot wounds . . . above and to the left of the right breast, and one below.”
The EMT continued CPR, but Hubble felt Gail wouldn’t respond. There was no bringing her back. While she had moaned previously, Hubble leaned down and asked Gail if she could relate any information about what had happened. It was then that Hubble “could hear the air leaving her lungs. It was just a—all I could hear was a ‘hough’, a deep huff type of sound as the air left.”
This was Gail’s final breath.
Hubble got together with those officers who were now responding to the scene in droves. “Close down the entrance to the township [library],” he ordered, “so nobody can enter.” Hubble wanted the area cordoned off. If Gail had been shot, there must be some sort of trace evidence around, maybe even a few spent projectiles.
“Ladies, go back into the library,” Hubble told Barb and Cathy, who were wandering around in a daze, unaware—in shock, perhaps—of what had actually taken place, yet understanding that something horrible had happened right before their eyes.
More rescue personnel arrived, all of them now working on trying to revive a dead woman.
Hubble saw that Gail held a set of keys in her hand. He walked over and took them. Then he opened the passenger-side door to her vehicle and found her pocketbook, where he quickly located her identification. The bag was sitting on the passenger seat, as though she had just set it down. He took a quick look around the van and did not see anything out of place or disturbed. Then he gave a once-over to the outside of the van. Save for the flat tire, nothing seemed suspicious.
As Hubble walked the scene, surveying what he could, Barb came out and mentioned what she thought might be of some help. “Cameras,” Barb said. “We record what goes on out in the parking lot and around the building.”
“You do?” Hubble said.
“Yes,” Barb reiterated. She pointed to a camera on the building that faced the exact spot in the parking lot where Gail lay dead.
Gail Fulton’s murder has been caught on tape, Hubble thought.
This murder of a local housewife and librarian would send the OCSD to call on Oak Force, a multiagency crime-fighting organization. As luck would have it, that very same week this super police force had been formed as a team of lawmen. Comprised of local Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents, members of the Michigan State Police (MSP), and OCSD—on top of police officers from the nearby towns of Pontiac, Southfield, and Troy—the agency investigated major crimes. Good thing. Because from the moment Hubble and his colleagues arrived and found Gail Fulton—a harmless librarian’s assistant, whose father, Noe Garza, and uncle, Margarito Garza, were former federal judges—it was clear that she had been targeted. Gail’s mother, Dora Garza, was also a well-known figure in the community and a church leader in her native home of Corpus Christi.
These could be people, law enforcement concluded, that others might hold grudges against.
4
PATROL OFFICER HUBBLE asked Barb where the videotapes from the night were kept.
She showed him the closet, saying, “Right in there.”
As Barb further explained, she was unaware of how the “video machines” worked. She suggested they call in the library’s maintenance man.
Not too long after, Hubble followed the guy with all the keys clipped to his belt and watched him take the videotape out of the video player. By now, Hubble had called in his sergeant, Alan Whitefield, who had arrived at the library by nine-thirty to help secure the scene and make sure a chain of custody with regard to the videotape was maintained.
Sergeant Whitefield took control of the scene, directing Hubble to give him the videotape and head back outside, where he could watch over things until the crime scene unit arrived. From there, Whitefield called in the crime lab and dispatched several additional officers to keep watch on the library and its surrounding area. There was a shooter somewhere in town, after all—likely, not too far away. It had, by Barbara’s estimation, been only twenty minutes (at most) since Gail had been shot.
Detective Chris Wundrach (prono
unced Won-Drack) showed up in Whitefield’s wake—the situation extremely fluid by now—and took possession of the videotape, suggesting to Whitefield that they go into the library and have a look at it right away. It could yield an important clue to the killer’s identity, like perhaps a car license plate number.
“Right,” Whitefield said.
The tape contained a view from four different video cameras recording in one-second intervals, so, as Whitefield later explained, “it was very quick.” More than a film of the events, it looked like a bundle of snapshots flipped into action. The cameras were posted over the employees’ entrance, the main entrance, toward the rear of the parking lot, and looking down at a loading dock in the back of the building. At best, the portion of the tape depicting the murder was grainy and blurry and fuzzy. As they sat and watched, a car pulled up to Gail’s van after she walked around to the passenger side; they could see the car’s headlights clearly. Then someone got out from the backseat after the car stopped. Wearing what appeared to be a white shawl, Gail came out toward the car from around the back side of her van. The man from the car (his back to the camera) approached. Without warning, there were several white blasts of light, disturbing in the context of which they now knew. Gail, who was standing in one frame, was on the ground in the next; then the man, her killer, headed back toward the waiting vehicle. It was clear from the video that there were other people in the car. The remainder of the video showed the car pulling out of the driveway and disappearing into the night. Without enhancing the video (zooming in on different sections of each frame), there was no way to make out a license plate number—if, in fact, the license plate itself wasn’t covered up with something. The only fact they could be certain of without sending the video to the lab to be enhanced was that they were dealing with three people inside a contemporary-looking vehicle that had pulled into the parking lot for one reason.
To kill Martha Gail Fulton.
While additional police arrived and the parking lot became an official crime scene, Barb decided she needed to make a call and let Gail’s husband know what was going on.
A young man answered. It was Gail’s son. “Is your father home?” Barb asked. The urgency in her voice was aggressive and apparent.
Moments later, George Fulton said, “Hello? What is it?”
“Something happened to Gail in the parking lot,” Barb said.
“I’ll be right there.”
Barb told one of the officers at the scene that she had called George.
“How long since the time you found Mrs. Fulton, did you call Mr. Fulton?”
“Twenty minutes,” Barb said.
He wrote it down.
“Several weeks ago,” Barb added, “I overheard Gail telling another employee that she was having marital problems. So I asked her later on that day if everything was okay.”
“What’d she say?”
“She told me that she and her husband were going to counseling, and she thought things were going to be all right.”
As Guy Hubble worked the action outside, some time had passed and a colleague notified him that George Fulton and his son had arrived.
“Do not allow them on the scene.”
“What should we tell them?”
“Have them escorted to the Orion substation so we can conduct interviews.”
By 9:27 P.M., the doctor on scene had pronounced Gail Fulton’s death, making it official. All efforts to revive her were stopped. Someone had murdered this devout Catholic housewife and librarian. The police were already suspicious of Gail’s husband. At first, from all outward appearances, George wasn’t the least bit torn up over his wife’s sudden death. No tears. No urgency to find the perp. Either George held his emotional cards close to the vest, or he had things to hide.
5
THE LIBRARY WAS not quite surrounded by woods, but there was a section of thickly settled weeds and pines. As one officer walked the perimeter of the parking lot near this area, flashlight in hand, searching for what he did not know, he “heard movement.”
The officer keyed his radio: “I need another unit . . . for search.”
Two additional officers ran up. They went into the wooded area with flashlights and looked around.
It took about ten minutes, but they found nothing.
Officer Robert Timko, one of the cops conducting this search, was told to give George Fulton and his son a ride to the substation.
“I’m not going anywhere,” George said defiantly, suddenly becoming concerned, “until I find out what happened to my wife.”
Timko told George to relax. He called Sergeant Alan Whitefield over.
Whitefield was busy. He had a crime scene unfolding. There were medics and doctors and cops all over the place. Yellow crime-scene tape was going up. Passersby were beginning to gather at the entrance. Neighbors across from the library were beginning to wonder what in the world was going on.
“What’s up?” Whitefield asked Timko.
They stood out of earshot from George and his son. Timko explained the situation, noting how he believed George had been acting strange, irate and not wanting to cooperate.
Whitefield walked over and told George, “Look, your wife has been shot, and we need your complete cooperation.”
Timko showed George and Andrew Fulton to his patrol car and they left for the substation.
Officers went out and canvassed the neighborhood, both facing the library and in back of the building, through the woods. Just about every neighbor within earshot of the library reported the same thing: gunshots heard at 9:00 P.M. In this part of the country, most are accustomed to what a gun going off sounds like. There’s not too much mistaking a gunshot with a car backfiring or some other noise. People here know the sound of a gun firing because it is a place where residents hunt and fish and participate in all sorts of outdoor activities. The only difference in the five reports neighbors gave was the number of shots heard: Some said three; some said four; one said five.
Sometime after midnight, several library employees, George Fulton and his son, Andrew, along with their youngest daughter, Emily, waited at the OCSD Substation in town. Whitefield had instructed detectives from the sheriff ’s department to head over to Talon Circle, George and Gail’s home, to collect evidence and see what they could figure out about the life and times of George and Gail Fulton. George had already admitted to owning several handguns, but he had said little else. He seemed a bit hostile and uncooperative, even angry—not the response cops generally get from a grieving spouse. Investigators had interviewed George briefly, but nothing of value came out of it.
“George was very unemotional,” said one investigator. “Very hard to read.”
George Fulton’s weapons would have to be confiscated and taken to the lab. Also, police wanted swabs of DNA from George, Emily, and Andrew. Gail’s maroon 1992 Plymouth Grand Voyager van was impounded and towed from the crime scene; the flat tire was removed from the vehicle and sent off to the crime lab for further processing. There was protocol to follow now: steps to take in order to find out if Gail’s murderer had left behind that one clue that could break the case open. It was likely there, investigators knew, somewhere in all of the interviews going on and the evidence collected. No killer is flawless. They all leave behind a mark or clue—no matter how trivial or, conversely, significant. An investigator knows this and follows his training and instincts; sooner or later, that one piece of evidence will emerge.
A man who left the library right about the time of Gail’s murder had heard what happened and came forward to tell police this story: “I think I seen two cars, one larger, maybe a four-door. There may have been two gentlemen, one in each car; but it was unusual because [there’s] always some cars there when I was leaving . . .”
Maybe this was something. Maybe not. The officer took the statement and placed it with what was a growing number of witness testimonials.
The one person, however, investigators were just sitting down with—alone
and away from his father’s grasp—was a boy who could tell police where George was, and what he was doing at the time of his wife’s murder. Spouses are always suspects in murders of one another; but George, with his unusual behavior, inconsistent and erratic as the night progressed, was judged a bit more quickly by police. Something—maybe just a cop’s instinct—told law enforcement to look closely at George.
6
HIS BIRTH NAME is George Andrew Fulton, but everyone in the family called him Andrew. It was near eleven o’clock on the night of his mother’s murder when Andrew sat down with Detective Chris Wundrach at the Lake Orion Township Substation. According to a family member, Andrew was “a very social person . . . and caring [individual], as he will go out of his way to do nice things for the people he cares about.”
Andrew and his mother were close. Her death was devastating to him.
“You’re not under arrest or anything like that,” Wundrach explained. Andrew was going to be turning eighteen in two months. “We’re just looking for your help in our investigation.”
“Okay,” Andrew said.
Start with the basics: “Tell me what you did tonight.”
The boy seemed nervous, which was expected. This was a tense and alarming situation. Still, as one family member recalled, Andrew “can also have a temper on him,” which he acquired from his “papu” (grandfather on his mother’s side). Saying Andrew and his mother were tight was a gross understatement; Andrew was not afraid to tell his mother anything.
“My dad was always very critical of [Andrew] and didn’t have a kind word for him, but my mom was always very loving and understanding of whatever my brother did,” Emily Fulton later observed.
“Near six o’clock,” Andrew said, “me and my girlfriend, Alicia Caldwell (pseudonym), left my house to go over her house for dinner. My dad was just getting home from work as we were leaving.”
Kiss of the She-Devil Page 2