Dora explained that because Gail and George had raised the kids in such a traditional Catholic home, “the children never presented [them] with any typical teenage problems.” They were all good kids, who had worked hard in school and had great futures ahead of them. “It wasn’t,” Dora added, “until George started working in Florida that there was trouble in the marriage. Gail was a very private person and never really spoke to me about any of the problems in the marriage. It wasn’t until I went up there in June 1998 to visit Gail and the kids that Emily and Andrew approached me and said they had reason to believe their father was having an affair with a woman in Florida.”
“What was it they said?”
“They wanted me to speak with George and get him to stop. At that time I didn’t believe George was having an affair . . . because Gail had never mentioned it.”
During that June 1998 trip, Dora sat with George one day. His attitude, Dora realized soon after seating herself, was more telling than if he had come out and admitted his sins.
“What’s wrong with you, George, you don’t seem like yourself ?” Dora asked her son-in-law. “Is something bothering you?”
George never answered; instead, he stared at his mother-in-law “for the longest time without saying a word.” Then he turned and, without speaking, walked out of the house.
“Had George or Gail ever filed for divorce?” Detective Dugan asked.
“As far as I know, they did not. They were separated for a time, but I had assumed that was because George started that job in Florida.”
What struck Dora as strange—in the context of George and Gail having marital problems, and the logistics of George’s job keeping them apart—was that George insisted that while he was in Florida working, Gail could call him only at work. George had never given Gail a contact number for him outside of work (he was living at Donna’s house then).
“He told her that the room he was renting didn’t have a telephone,” Dora explained.
A smart woman, Dora knew better, she said.
“Gail,” Dora asked her daughter when they chatted a day after George took off to Florida, “is he having an affair?”
Gail did not hesitate. “Oh, Mother,” she responded, “you know George would never do that.”
“Wake up, child. Look around. If he won’t give you a phone number where he can be reached at night, he’s probably living with a girlfriend!”
Gail didn’t want to admit it—at least not to her mother.
“Did you know of any marital infidelities that Gail ever had, Mrs. Garza?” Dugan asked.
“No, I was not aware of any. You have to understand something about my daughter. Whatever George did, she was forgiving and wanted to make the marriage work because she was so in love with George. I had asked her on several occasions to leave Michigan and come home, but she always said, ‘I cannot do that. I love George.’”
What did this guy have? George certainly wasn’t all that. It was as if he held Gail under some sort of spell.
“George was a class-A piece of shit,” said one investigator. “He treated his wife like trash.”
Dora Garza explained that Gail and Donna had had a confrontation back on the Fourth of July inside a hotel room (with George), but she did not go into too much detail about it. This was something that had weighed heavily on Gail and had sent her into a deep, suicidal depression. After being prompted by the detectives, Dora also mentioned that she never knew of George hitting Gail. She said George was unstable and acting odd during her visit to the house in 1998. It was the only time she had ever seen George with a “short fuse.” Everything bothered George that weekend, and Dora assumed it was because he had been burning the candle with two women and the pressure was finally getting to him.
“What can you tell us about Donna Trapani?” Dugan asked.
All Dora knew about Donna, she explained, was what Gail and the children had told her: George had met Donna at a bar in Florida as he was getting his own business off the ground. “According to Gail, Donna had traveled to several locations with George as he conducted business around the country and stayed with him. I’m not sure, Gail never told me, whether George had invited Donna on the trips or she showed up on her own.”
The detectives asked questions about George’s weapons. Dora didn’t know much, but she explained that since her husband—“an avid hunter”—died, she had given all of his guns (“many handguns and long guns”) to George.
After a pause Dora said, “He was like a son to me.”
“What about enemies?” Dugan pressed. “Did Gail have any enemies that you know of ?”
“No one I can think of. . . .”
Then Dora mentioned a conversation she’d had with Gail one afternoon over the phone not too long ago.
“Have you ever seen the movie Fatal Attraction, Gail?” Dora asked her daughter.
Gail said she hadn’t.
“Well, you should go to see it. This woman, Donna,” Dora told her daughter, “is doing just what the character in the movie is doing. If you ever come home and find a rabbit cooking on the stove, you had better watch out!”
As much as the detectives had said they weren’t focusing on George, the interview worked its way into pointing directly toward Gail’s cheating husband. They asked Dora what George had said about the murder, if anything.
She thought about that for a moment. “I really haven’t had that much of an opportunity to speak with him since he arrived and we buried my daughter. I can tell you that after the murder he did not call me. He called my son.”
“What did he say?”
“That he had just come from the police station and Gail had been shot. Ultimately a sheriff called me to tell me what happened.”
“Did you call the house?”
“Yes. George told me that Gail had been shot in the parking lot where she worked. He also mentioned that a deputy at the scene told him that just before she died, Gail said something, but the deputy would not tell George what she said. He also told me he thought the police were going to arrest him. . . .”
It had been a long interview. Dora was tired and emotionally exhausted. Before they ended, Meiers and Dugan asked Dora if she had any thoughts about her daughter’s murder and who might have killed Gail.
“In my heart I don’t think George killed my daughter. I feel the responsible party is that Donna in Florida.” She said she didn’t know how Donna might have done it, but “I think she paid someone.”
18
DEEP IN APALACHICOLA country, Okaloosa County, Florida, Okaloosa County Sheriff ’s Office (OCSO) investigator Larry Ashley sat at his desk early on the afternoon of October 11, 1999. Ashley had his phone in his hand; OCSD detective sergeant Gary Miller was on the other end of the line. “Detective,” Ashley said, “I have something you might be interested in. A couple came into the office down here earlier today with some information.”
Miller was interested, surely. Ashley mentioned it might have something to do with a case the OCSD was working on back up in Michigan. The two agencies had been in contact ever since Donna Trapani’s name had become part of the investigation back in Michigan. Donna lived in the county.
“A husband and wife, April and Roger Craspin (pseudonyms), came in,” Ashley explained. “April said she is currently employed by (Donna’s company) in Fort Walton. She talked about last July and another employee she knew, Sybil Padgett, who doesn’t work there anymore. This Sybil person approached April and told her a few things.”
“What’d she say?”
“Well, Sybil said she had a conversation with Donna Trapani, and Donna stated to her that she ‘had twenty thousand dollars to have George Fulton’s wife, Gail, killed.’”
“She say why she was bringing the info to you now?”
“Yeah . . . apparently, on Monday night, Donna called April to tell her that Gail had been killed in a ‘drive-by shooting.’ The husband told me that Donna is a loner . . . that she’s psychotic. Sybil is Donna’s
best friend, they both said. April tried contacting Sybil since the murder, but Sybil’s phone has been disconnected.”
All of this information, as disjointed as it seemed, fit into the matrix of a conspiracy to kill Gail orchestrated by Donna Trapani, and it was certainly a theory that the OCSD had been kicking around over the past week.
“I am doing some background checks on all of them,” Ashley said. “I’ll get back to you when I’m done.”
When Ashley called later that same day, he provided a few stunning details to the OCSD. For one, April and Roger were not married, after all, which could or could not mean something to the investigation. Second, Sybil owned a 1993 Dodge Dynasty, white in color—def initely not the car in the library’s grainy videotape. Sybil was what someone in law enforcement later described as a “thirty-six-year-old, unmarried loser . . . failing at most aspects of her life.” At five feet eleven inches, 165 pounds, Sybil Padgett was no diminutive woman, by stature—and yet, looking at Sybil’s existence, she was often at the painful end of her boyfriend’s iron fist and had not been known to be all that smart about the choices she made in life. Sybil’s boyfriend became of great interest to the OCSD, at least initially. He was not only violent and a convicted woman beater, but he had a record that, in its totality, lent itself to a guy who would be a good candidate to take on a paid hit. According to what Larry Ashley dug up, Sybil’s live-in boyfriend had been convicted of heroin possession and was known to be, at a minimum, a “heroin dealer.” Ashley could not locate a vehicle registered in the boyfriend’s name. The OCSD was hoping to find a Malibu registered to someone connected to the case, which would fit with the video surveillance from the library on the night Gail was murdered. One school of thought was: Find that Malibu with the cracked taillight and its owner would have some answers to the case.
Meanwhile, back in Michigan, George Fulton finally broke down and decided to give his full cooperation. George had hired a lawyer, David Binkley, who contacted John Pietrofesa, the assistant prosecuting attorney (APA) for the County of Oakland, along with prosecuting attorney David Gorcyca, whose office was going to eventually prosecute this case. The drafted agreement between the two parties stipulated that George would submit to interviews and, essentially, “interrogations” by the OCSD, so the agency could clear his name from the case. Until a person could be entirely eliminated, he or she would remain a person of interest. George was saying, in not so many words, that he had nothing to hide and would help as much as he could. On top of that, George finally had agreed to a polygraph examination if the OCSD thought it necessary to eliminate him in that manner.
No sooner had George signed this agreement with the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office did the results come in from a forensic lab test that the state police had completed on several specimens taken from Gail’s body. There had been “no apparent foreign hairs . . . in the head or pubic hair combings” found on Gail. However, chemical tests found that there was blood present on the door frame of Gail’s van. Whose blood this was would be a guess at this point.
19
SOME PEOPLE WILL do whatever possible—regardless of the ramifications or pain it causes others—to fulfill their unquenchable needs and selfishness. Martha Gail Fulton knew those types of people, but Gail herself was not a self-centered egotist, driven to stomp her way through life and take whatever she wanted. Quite to the contrary, Gail was the one to give up whatever she had so others could feel content. Before, perhaps, anything else, Gail believed passionately in sacrifice. Gail felt sacrifice was a gift from God, and all people could choose to ignore or embrace its full potential. Gail understood that having a family meant giving up parts of her life (her private self) and freedoms to meet the needs of her children and husband. Gail wasn’t bitter about this. She did it with a peaceful and loving heart. It wasn’t a choice to Gail; it was part of who she was as a woman, wife, mother, and Catholic.
During their courtship Gail and George spent a lot of time apart. George was stationed at bases across the country and around the world. Gail had no trouble waiting for George.
“They seemed to get along really well,” Jeanette Cantu-Bazar later said. “My [first] husband was in George’s [business] company.”
Gail and Jeanette were together whenever their men took off on official army business. Jeanette’s first husband was George’s best man at his and Gail’s wedding. This was a tight group of friends. They knew one another’s eccentricities and faults, their loves, hopes, and dreams.
It was 1976 through 1977 when George was called to serve in Germany. He was in his mid-twenties. A year later, Jeanette and her then-husband were sent to the same country. This was the way the movie was supposed to play out: marry a serviceman and be a stay-at-home mother who follows her man wherever the army sends him. Gail and Jeanette had dreamt of this life, and here it was coming to them just as they had envisioned.
“What was difficult for Gail was to be away from her mom. She was very close to her mother. So being away in that sense was tough on her.”
Gail was that rare type of person, however, who could make friends anywhere. She was adorable and loveable, and people picked up on her blissful spirit and good nature as soon as they met her. One of the things Gail liked to do more than anything was to bake. She got a kick out of baking something for someone and then seeing their reaction to what she viewed as such a simple, yet warm, gift. If that person liked the recipe, Gail would offer it up. She had all of her recipes in a neat little box, written out on index cards. She’d often bake goods and send them to George’s office, wherever he was working at the time. She also took on the role of mother hen to the other army wives struggling with missing their husbands.
“Gail loved being married. She loved George. She loved having children.”
The excitement of marrying a military man, having a family, and traveling the world was the image Gail and her friends strove to fulfill—a vision of life they perceived would satisfy their every need and desire as stay-at-home moms and wives.
“But, in all of the excitement, you don’t realize what you’re giving up,” one of those friends perceptively commented later. “You go off, and you think you’re going off and seeing what’s out there. Corpus was a small town then. You wondered what was beyond.”
Gail had come from a home where money was never an issue. Her mother and father had always provided well for the kids. When she and George began living on the salary of a serviceman, though, Gail had to learn how to manage money and budget the household. It was not easy. There was not a lot of money.
“Gail would always do without to make sure George had whatever he needed,” said a former military friend. And some later suggested that George, realizing this, took advantage of it. “It might be just music. He would want to buy some music and she would want something different. She would not say anything and make sure that he got whatever he wanted. She was very self-sacrificing. I kind of call it the ‘martyr complex’ of . . . Catholic girls. Always wanting to do for everyone else. Not to complain. It is what it is. Gail went with it.”
Gail was in love with the idea of “forever and ever.” She wanted that picket fence so bad that she was willing to do whatever it took to install it in her life, while sacrificing her own needs and wants. Once she dove into being a wife, Gail gave the marriage every part of herself.
For the OCSD, the month of October did not produce any type of substantial evidence leading to an arrest. Everyone had theories and persons of interest; yet the case had not come together as the end of the month approached. Donna Trapani was a leading suspect, as was George Fulton. The OCSD needed to take a trip south into Florida and see what it could find out; yet there was no reason to head down there when so little was known about Donna Trapani and her potential—if any—involvement in the murder. As hard as it may seem, cops understand that patience is a virtue of police work that must be adhered to in order to solve these types of cases where the trail leads in many different directions. Donna a
nd George had alibis. Sure, they could be covering for each other, but the more likely scenario was that one or both had hired someone to commit the murder. And if that was the case, cops were certain that someone would talk, sooner or later. Two, three, or four people cannot know about a crime so volatile and violent as a murder—grating on the conscience—and keep it secret for long. It goes against all human instinct.
Unless police are dealing with a clinical sociopath.
Then all bets are off.
On October 21, 1999, Donna Trapani sent George an e-mail after he requested that she pay him some of the money she owed him. Donna’s business was just about ready to close its doors for good. George wanted what he deserved.
In response, Donna said she had deposited $140 into George’s account, apologizing that it was so late. She said she was “doing the best” she could to pay the bills, but it was hard. She told George that there were more bills than there was cash, but she hoped that this small amount will help ... somehow, Donna wrote. Donna was still depending on George to do the billing for her, because she hadn’t yet learned how to do it herself, she related, and could not afford to hire anyone. This was one of Donna’s tactics to hang on to a connection to George after he had decided the relationship was over. She’d been manipulating and controlling George for months now. She said she could tell in his voice last night when they spoke on the telephone how “aggravated” George was to still have to do the billing. In a spate of sarcasm, Donna ended the e-mail: I am sorry to inconvenience you.
If George thought he was through with Donna, he was mistaken. This woman was not going to give up. Gail was out of the picture now completely. This was Donna’s moment to step into the lives of George and his children and take over—something Donna had wanted to do for a long time.
Kiss of the She-Devil Page 8