11
DR. R. ORTIZ-REYES was the deputy forensic pathologist with the Oakland County Medical Examiner’s Office on the day Gail Fulton’s body was brought in for autopsy. A doctor since 1976, Ortiz-Reyes had performed, he later estimated, somewhere in the neighborhood of over one thousand autopsies. The man knew his way around an autopsy suite—no doubt about it. Had Gail died of something other than those obvious gunshot wounds, Ortiz-Reyes would find it.
The first thing Ortiz-Reyes did was to conduct an external exam of Gail’s nude body. Ortiz-Reyes noted several “abnormalities” as he found them. Then he got to work opening (his word) Gail’s body to see what, in fact, had caused her death. It would be unethical (not to mention unprofessional) to assume that the shots alone had killed Gail. There were cases, any medical examiner (ME) can say, that baffle the mind after autopsy, whereby an obvious cause of death—i.e., a blast to the head—was a front for something else that had the potential to give away the killer’s identity. So heading into an autopsy, any medical examiner worth his or her weight never presumed anything; he simply allowed the dead to speak from beyond.
Gail was forty-eight years old at the time of her murder. She was a petite woman at five feet four inches, 114 pounds, with a thick mane of dark black hair (a trait she would pass on to her three children with George Fulton). Gail was pretty and beautiful and charming in a Mary Tyler Moore way—circa The Dick Van Dyke Show—and her appearance reflected how she had changed over the years from a hopeful, wholesome military wife into a woman struggling to keep a drowning marriage afloat. There were periods during her life with George—and these had taken a toll on her—when Gail refused to take care of herself and would not eat sufficiently. She’d beaten herself up emotionally and starved herself so often that even her hair had fallen out at times. Periodically her eyes had sunk into dark circles, and her skin had become pale and emaciated. She could come across as anorexic, withdrawn, and weak during these episodes. It was generally when George was traveling “for work” that sent Gail into an abyss of self-loathing. Before George had even met Donna Trapani, Gail’s health had gone downhill. It was a gut feeling Gail had, and it had never lied to her over the years, she told friends. A wife of Gail’s caliber—educated and smart and intuitive—listened to that inner voice telling her not to trust the man she had given her life to. It didn’t mean she acted on it; just that there was no denying a feeling that the man she loved was stepping out on her. The fact that she internalized these feelings showed, mostly, on her body: noticed by her kids, her friends, her coworkers. Yet the remarkable aspect of Gail Fulton was that at the time of her death, she looked as though she had come back to life. She had color in her face, a bounce in her step. She understood that sometimes there was no way to plug a sinking ship and a person had to walk away, swim to shore, and start over.
“She was so close to leaving him,” said an old friend. “So, so close . . . right before she died. Poor Gail.”
Dr. Ortiz-Reyes recorded his findings as he made them: Multiple gunshot wounds to the body. The shot to Gail’s forehead Guy Hubble had seen first was one of two potential life-ending wounds—that much was clear from the moment Ortiz-Reyes peeled back Gail’s scalp and buzz-sawed her skull open.
It (that bullet) went down to the brain separating all the bones of the face and ending on the left side of the cheek . . . , Ortiz-Reyes reported.
The good news for investigators was that Ortiz-Reyes had been able to retrieve the bullet from Gail’s head.
The second shot—although Ortiz-Reyes was not certain the shots had been fired in this particular sequence—was to Gail’s upper-right breast. It had gone in through the skin and—not surprisingly, if you understand how projectiles fly at such a high rate of speed—exited an inch away from the entrance wound, reentering the skin and traveling through her stomach, liver, bowels, stopping on the left side of Gail’s pelvis.
This had to have been a painful shot, if it struck Gail first.
Ortiz-Reyes was able to retrieve this projectile also.
The third and final shot Gail took in the back, no doubt because she had turned away instinctively from her murderer, or fell to the ground. This shot entered her upper-left back area, through the soft tissue (muscle), but not penetrating or passing through any organs, exiting through her chest.
Gail’s killer was an accurate shooter. Head and chest are money shots, per se, if murder is the endgame. The anomaly here was that it was likely Gail’s murder had not been a paid hit in the sense of, say, organized crime, the work of a professional hit man. In that respect this murder was far too sloppy. Hit men like to sneak up on their targets (maybe pop a cap into the back of the head just below the ear), or kill from a distance (vis-à-vis a sniper shot). This murder was more or less in the lines of something quite a bit more personal. Gail was shot in the breast and head. This, any armchair profiler could determine, suggested an intimate connection to the victim: anger, hatred, payback. Gail’s murderer knew her or had been told things about her that would, for investigators, place her death under a heading of personal and incidental.
It looked like George Fulton had some explaining to do.
12
TURNED OUT THAT George Fulton wasn’t running off to meet Donna Trapani, toss his weapons in the lake, or go pay a tab on a murder he had contracted. At least not at this stage. As George was being followed that morning, the undercover behind him watched as Gail’s hubby pulled into Sparks-Griffin Funeral Home. George was on his way to make arrangements for Gail’s body to be transported to Texas for burial.
No sooner had he parked, run in and out of the funeral home, and then taken back off, did a second car, with four people inside, which George, alone in his car, had met at the funeral home, beckoned to follow him. They drove in a small caravan directly to the library, the employees’ parking area, to be exact, where Gail had been gunned down the previous night. As George parked near the spot where Gail had been killed, “two males and two females” walked out of the building, but did not approach or say anything.
It was 2:00 P.M. when George got out of his car and hugged the others. They chatted for a few minutes. Then, before walking away, all of them bent down and placed the palms of their hands on the tar where Gail had died, as if reaching out to her spirit.
Gail’s cousin, Pricilla Salanas, had left a message with dispatch for someone at the OCSD to call her as soon as possible. She wanted to know what was happening with the release of Gail’s body back to the family.
The sergeant on duty called Gail’s cousin and explained that Gail was being examined by the medical examiner. “Tell the funeral home to contact the ME’s office and they can work it out.”
“George had called Dora Garza and told her what happened,” Pricilla explained to police.
“Listen, we’re so sorry for your loss. We know this is a difficult time. But we will be calling on you and Gail’s mom later today. We need to ask you some questions.”
They hung up.
A few moments later, Pricilla Salanas called back. “Gail’s mother has some information that she wants you to know about.”
She handed the phone to Dora Garza. “Hello,” Dora said.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“I wanted to tell you about an affair between George and a woman named Donna from Florida,” Dora explained. “But that Gail and George, I was told, were working things out.”
“Thank you for that information, ma’am.”
“Oh, there’s more,” Dora Garza said. “When George finally told Donna it was over, Donna called me several times to tell me that my daughter needed help. She called so often, Officer, that I stopped answering my telephone. When I told George about these phone calls, he didn’t believe me! He said, ‘Oh, Donna would never do something like that.’ Melissa (George and Gail’s oldest daughter, who was living in Texas with Dora at the time, but was now in the navy and living in Virginia Beach) was here and can verify the calls. We even recorded them.”
/>
Dora stopped and took a breath.
Then she said, “Gail once told me that Donna had called and left some horrible—just horrible—messages on the phone machine. My daughter could not believe the mouth on that woman. George should have those tapes.”
Another important point George had failed to mention.
“Do you think George could have been involved?”
“Oh, no.... I don’t think George could ever do anything like this,” Dora said.
“Mrs. Garza, a detective will be in touch with you later today to talk some more.”
“That’s fine.”
“Can we have Melissa’s number and address, please?”
Dora gave the address to the police officer and hung up.
13
THE OCSD FOCUSED its investigation on a few important leads it could confirm without question: There had been no sexual assault and no robbery; George Fulton had an alibi and was now willing (and going) to take a polygraph; and that grainy video, the one cops confiscated on the night of the murder, had produced an important clue—the car used in the murder, a dark-colored Chevy Malibu, had a damaged left taillight. This could potentially be as important as a fingerprint.
Find the car; look at the light.
Detectives had checked with the local airlines and confirmed that there were no direct flights out of Michigan to Florida after ten o’clock on the night of the murder. The airlines would not release manifests of passenger lists without a court order. What stood out to investigators looking into this thread of the case was that although there had not been any direct flights to Florida, Delta Airlines had flights into Atlanta and Cincinnati. So they put in a request with airport security to view the videotapes of the concourse near the time of those flights.
“Copies cannot be released,” the airport said, “at this time due to a terrorist threat. . . .”
Another roadblock.
The next step was to check out all the rental-car agencies in the area and see if any familiar names turned up, or if a Chevy Malibu had been rented and returned with a broken taillight.
After a check, no luck there, either.
Another friend of Gail’s came forward and explained that Gail had confided several things about her marriage that seemed significant now that Gail had been murdered: “The woman [Donna] had come here . . . and had met with Gail at a motel in Rochester. She (Donna) told Gail she was terminally ill and she wanted [George] to come and take care of her. She had a letter from a doctor stating this, Gail told me.”
Further, Gail’s friend told police that Gail was certain George had broken off the relationship with Donna by July 1999, and that Donna had then turned around and called Gail’s mother in Texas and told her that Gail was suicidal!
“Anything else?”
“Well, Gail told me that either she or George had contacted the doctor and he said he had never written that letter.”
What it looked like to Sergeant James A’Hearn and Detective Chris Wundrach, the more they studied the interviews the OCSD had conducted, along with the evidence as it presented itself thus far, was that the OCSD needed to put together a team and head down to Florida. There were answers there somewhere, for certain. Donna Trapani needed to be interviewed in person.
After a few days to clear her head and wrap her mind around what was the worst situation life could throw at a person, Emily Fulton was back at the Lake Orion Township Substation sitting with investigators, searching for answers. Emily had had some time to think about things in a more coherent manner. She was somewhat impassive and lucid, now that she’d had nearly two days to process her mother’s untimely, violent death. The past twenty-four hours had been rough, but Emily was determined to convince the police that she knew who had murdered her mother, why, and how it was done. What were they waiting for? Why wasn’t a team of cops heading to Florida to grab Donna Trapani?
“Come in,” the detective said, greeting Emily at the door. “Sit, please. Thank you for coming.”
Emily looked tired and, at the same time, manic. She was determined to get her point across and make some noise about how she felt.
“Donna is responsible for my mother’s death,” Emily said. “She’s a psycho!”
Emily felt she had been saying this for the past twenty-four hours—why wasn’t anyone doing anything about it? The impatience of a college sophomore. It was something Emily knew she had to get a handle on. In the due course of time, she was confident that if she pounded the drum loud enough, the OCSD would hear.
“I really think it was a professional hit,” Emily added.
“Why would you say that?”
“Whoever did this knew what they were doing. They waited for my mother. They knew her schedule. They flattened her tire and shot her in the body and in the head. No kid could have done this. A kid wouldn’t be able to shoot like that!”
It all made sense. But when the “kid” of the victim was telling cops that someone else did it, and she was providing very specific details of the crime, not yet released to the public, she was essentially pointing a finger back at herself—or, in this case, at her brother and father.
“Look, if Donna didn’t do it, she paid someone to.”
The investigators interviewing Emily kept looking at each other.
“She wanted my mother out of the picture.”
It was as simple as that, according to Emily. Donna Trapani was behind this murder.
“I have met this woman,” Emily said, explaining briefly how she and Donna met at the ConCorde Inn back in July. “She told me she wants to be my mother. She told me she had a photo of me she took from my father’s wallet . . . that she showed it to people and told them I was her daughter. My dad even thinks she’s a psycho. He told me.”
The investigator encouraged Emily to talk more about Donna Trapani.
“My mom had the locks changed on the house after Donna came by once, unannounced.... Donna wanted to take my mother’s place.”
Investigators told Emily to stay in touch. If anything else came up, she should get ahold of the police immediately.
Emily left the substation. Getting into her car, she sat for a moment.
That’s it? Why are they not going to Florida right now?
Investigating a murder of this type boils down to checking the obvious off a list, while moving forward on the evidence that the police have in front of them—not on the speculation and advice of family and friends. OCSD investigators took pride in the fact that in order to uncover what happened to Gail Fulton, and by whom, a victimology chart had to be established in the most benign, cautious manner. Part of this investigatory approach involved a search warrant served to George Fulton at his Talon Circle home. It was time to get into the house and have a look at the paper trail and evidence—if any—Gail (and maybe George) had left behind.
George was not thrilled about opening up his home to the cops and allowing them to search through his most intimate possessions. But what could the man do? Investigators had interviewed Barbara Butkis again, Gail’s boss, the woman who had found Gail in the parking lot. Still shaken considerably by the death of her friend and employee, Barb had called the OCSD and reported that George had left “a harassing telephone” message on the library’s answering machine. In her report to police, Barb did not go into detail regarding what George had said, but it had scared her enough to call them. A report of the incident said that Barb thought it was “odd” that Mr. Fulton had called. She had never met the guy before Gail’s death. But here he was, according to her, harassing them at the library for no apparent reason.
It was strange.
Beyond those common domestic items every household has lying around, not much of anything was uncovered inside George’s house that was going to help move the investigation into a checkmate position. George kept meticulous financial records, which was part of what he did for a living. Gail had kept a calendar, which would have to be read through painstakingly. The financial papers would be hel
pful as investigators checked George’s records against withdrawals and deposits. If George had paid someone to whack his wife, he had probably made a few mistakes along the way. Many would-be murder-for-hire masterminds make mistakes financially—money leaves an imprint everywhere in the banking industry. There potentially could be an odd withdrawal here, or a deposit that doesn’t make sense there.
Next, the OCSD Crime Lab came in with its report of the crime scene, which yielded no clues that jumped out at investigators. It did, however, lend a hand to moving the investigation in the right direction. A spent projectile was uncovered underneath Gail’s body; a set of “inked finger impressions” were found on Gail; the lab collected clippings from underneath Gail’s fingernails, hairs, all of Gail’s clothes, which contained blood and additional trace evidence. The lab also had collected three weapons (George’s) from the substation: a Browning 9mm handgun, a Spanish semiautomatic .380/9mm handgun, and a Ruger .22 caliber. These were rounded up, along with a six-shot .22-caliber cartridge and four .380 cartridges, along with—perhaps more important than any other find—one empty gun clip.
Then word came of an interesting discovery, especially here within the first forty-eight hours: a 1998 Honda Accord LX, silver, a vehicle located and photographed inside George’s garage.
The lab report stated: Collected from the vehicle . . . 1—suspected blood from rear driver’s side door frame ; 1—suspected blood from rear quarter near gas tank, driver’s side; [and] 1—disposable camera from front passenger floor.
Why did a car in George’s garage have blood inside it? And whose blood was it? Had George shot his wife, rushed to her side after feeling guilty, gotten blood all over himself, panicked, and then taken off? After all, he had an alibi—his mistress. But that was only a phone call. Couldn’t George and Donna have planned Gail’s murder together? They could have connected via telephone; then George could have left the phone on a desk while he speedily drove to the library, shot his wife, and rushed back home. By reporting that his dad was downstairs during the entire time period Gail had been murdered, Andrew could be either covering for his father—under the duress and threats of dear old dad—or been fooled into thinking George was home.
Kiss of the She-Devil Page 5