George received a card from Donna on Halloween. The inscription inside the card referred to Donna being thrilled that George had chosen to “share something so special” and “so meaningful” with her. I love you, the card said, and Donna added “still” to the end of that term of endearment. Happy anniversary, the card continued.
It had been two years to the day they had met.
The note Donna wrote inside said a lot about where her mind was these days. She was “remembering” that night they met so long ago. Thinking back to all they had done together “put a smile” on her face, as well as in her “heart.” She went on to say how meeting and getting involved with George was the most “wonderful time” of her life. She knew he felt the same way. She wanted George to spend just five minutes and think about that night they met. She was certain the memory would warm his heart. She missed not being able to talk to him. She missed his voice. She missed his laughter. She wanted him to know that if he wanted to talk anytime, he could just pick up the telephone and call her. She’d always be there for him to “unload”—an odd choice of words, considering how George’s wife had been murdered—should he need someone to lean on.
Along with the card Donna sent George a dozen red roses.
George took the flowers and dropped them off at his local parish. He wanted no remembrances of Donna Trapani in his house. What she didn’t understand was that when George Fulton—at least this time—said he was done with her, it meant forever. There would be no happily ever after, as Donna Trapani apparently still sought.
20
SERGEANT ALAN WHITEFIELD called George Fulton and asked if he could meet him at the OCSD in Pontiac on November 2, 1999. Whitefield said he wanted to go through the case in more detail. Mainly, the OCSD needed to ask George several additional questions and wanted to know if he had been in contact with Donna Trapani since the murder.
George agreed. He said he had a cassette tape of a message Donna had left on his answering machine just a week before Gail’s murder that might shed some light on the type of person the OCSD was dealing with in Donna Trapani. Also, George wanted to review a few things about Donna’s business and his belief that, after some prudent research and thought, she might be Gail’s killer, after all.
It had taken a month for the guy to open up and come around, but George Fulton was apparently ready to open up and help unconditionally.
George was still his old stiff and unapproachable self. His facial and body expressions told detectives that he did not want to be there.
What was on George’s mind the most was the money Donna owed him. Sure, she had sent him $140, but that was a drop in a large bucket compared to what she still owed him. He took out an invoice he had sent to Donna just recently and provided the OCSD with a copy. It proved that Donna was behind in her payments to George’s company, somewhere in the neighborhood of $13,000. It appeared Donna hadn’t paid George in months. He also provided a letter from Florida’s Workers Compensation addressed to Donna. The letter indicated that Workers Comp owed Donna’s company, Concerned Care Home Health (CCHH), a refund of $6,364 because she had overpaid for a period between August 1998 and August 1999. The letter was dated about three weeks after Gail’s murder.
“I’ve been checking her bank for deposits,” George told Whitefield. “As of right now, [the check] has not been deposited.”
Additionally, George provided some evidence to prove that Donna was due a refund from Medicaid and Medicare in the amount of $5,500.
“This check has not been deposited, either,” George explained. “Donna owes her CPA about eleven thousand dollars,” he added. “The plan was to send him the fifty-five hundred once the check came in” and cleared.
What was George trying to say by handing over this information—that Donna had taken that money and used it to pay off the person who killed his wife?
“Thanks for the information, Mr. Fulton,” Whitefield said. The OCSD was skeptical regarding anything George Fulton did. Many of those investigators working the case felt that anything George Fulton did at this point was done for his own benefit. Was he trying to push the scent of the investigation off himself and onto his former mistress?
George said he had more.
“What’s that?” Whitefield wondered.
“I feel it’s important that you know that Donna’s best friend, Sybil, and her better half, Tom (pseudonym), they have very close connections to the local [Florida] DeFuniak Springs Police Department.” George then went on to describe it as being a very “backwoods type of department,” the police report detailing this interview said.
“How do you know that, Mr. Fulton?”
“Donna told me.”
“Why are you telling us this?”
“Because you should know in case you are ever in contact with the DeFuniak Police Department.”
George was wondering when he could pick up all of his stuff that had been taken from the house during the search warrant.
Right now, the detective told him.
“Would you mind hooking up a tape-recording device to your phone to record any calls Donna makes to your residence?” Whitefield asked.
George thought about this. “Yes, I can do that,” he said, and he took the device home with him.
A day later, George contacted Donna via e-mail, which seemed to be the best way to speak with her and not have to deal with what could be a very unstable woman. Many would later claim that Donna suffered from bipolar mood swings ranging from laughing and joking and happiness one moment, to pure evil-inspired rants that seemed to be borne from a place in a dark heart the next. George was terse and direct in his e-mail: He said he had processed several Medicare claims he had received that week. He asked Donna to send him any additional claims she had left over.
As much as the guy might have wanted to distance himself from Donna Trapani, he was still working for her.
Donna responded by saying she had more claims, indeed. She came across in the e-mail as upset that he had billed the other claims without first checking with her. She thought they had an agreement that George would bill only twice a month.
George responded without getting into why, noting how he had received a book in the mail, which he had left at Donna’s house during his last visit to Florida, and wanted to say thanks to her for sending it.
For the next few days, they spoke of work-related items over several e-mails and faxes. George was careful, as was Donna, not to mix personal issues with work. In one e-mail George asked Donna if she had received his termination letter. He wanted her to acknowledge in writing that she had received and accepted his resignation as of December 18, 1999.
Donna wrote back that she had, and she promised to write him a letter acknowledging such.
George was going back and forth with Donna regarding work-related issues and claims; and with the access he had as the company’s chief financial officer (CFO), he was checking into the company’s movements behind her back. By early winter, George had written a report of what he had uncovered with his investigation, along with anything else he could recall. Donna had been very close with one of her workers, George noted in that report. Sybil Padgett seemed to be totally under Donna’s control. George was under the impression, certainly after studying the documentation he dug up, that Sybil and Donna were running some sort of Medicare and Medicaid scam. There were patients Sybil had made claims for visits that George was certain she had not visited.
That tape of the voice mail message Donna had left on George’s answering machine at his home, eight days before Gail was murdered, gave investigators some insight into the type of person they were dealing with in Donna Trapani.
The call came in at 10:34 P.M. It was in response to Donna hearing that George had planned on bringing Gail down to Florida with him for a final trip to collect some of his things from her house and clean out his desk.
Donna began by saying how his decision to bring his wife to Florida “is one of the lowest-class things you cou
ld do.”
As the message began, her voice was calm, though flat and prickly. The officers could tell Donna had been angered by what she had heard, but she was—at least opening the call—holding that anxiety back.
“Why would you want to flaunt something like that in front of me,” Donna said, referring to bringing Gail into town, “knowing how much I am already hurting?” Donna was still in love with George. And their breakup, about six weeks before the call, was still a fresh wound. “Knowing how much pain and anguish I am going through—how could you do something so cruel?” Donna had a very distinctive and obvious Southern accent. She spoke like an educated woman when she wanted. There was a noticeable affect to her voice that spoke to how she was getting herself excited with each word by just talking about the situation. “You know,” Donna continued, “I know that she’s cold and she’s cruel, but [Gail is] turning you into being someone just like her—one cold and cruel heartless person! I cannot believe you would . . . have the audacity to want to bring her down here and flaunt her in front of me and . . . make my pain worse.”
Now there was some excitement creeping into Donna’s voice, and that bipolar behavior, which so many had talked about, was beginning to express its angrier half as she continued.
“Don’t you know how difficult it was going to be to see you, anyway,” Donna said, finding her rhythm, “and not be able to spend any time with you? But I was willing to do that. And I was willing to give it a try and see if I could stay away from you. . . . But then for you to bring her down here—that’s just low class. It’s evil. It’s cruel. It’s very low and bastardly of you to do that. And I hope that God punishes you for what you’re doing. It’s bad enough I had to listen to you talk mean and hateful to me this morning. Make up a bunch of damn lies and everything else and all the cruelty. . . .” It was here that Donna began to slip into an honest-to-goodness rant frosted with fury, a virulent rage brewing inside her. “And you want to bring her down here, and you want me to be in my bedroom and know that your ass is out there with this damn bitch, making love to her, being in the hot tub with her, swimming with her, eating with her, in my own city, in my own town!” By now, Donna’s voice was cracking as she spoke faster, with venom and wrath spewing from each syllable. “And I’m here and by myself and all alone. That is so damn evil and low class of you. . . . You are not even the man I thought you were. And I don’t know how you can be so cruel.... That is just like taking a gun and sticking it to my brain and my stomach and blowing my brains out.”
Donna paused, then started crying. She was talking faster and more authoritatively.
“I was willing for you to come down and you to do your job and us trying to stay apart. I was willing to try. I was not going to touch you. I was not going to kiss you or hold you. . . . I was not going to do nothing to you! ’Cause you done just told me you didn’t want me, and if you didn’t want me, then I didn’t want you. But you won’t even give it a try. You got to go ahead and bring that damn bitch down here. Well, that bitch is not wanted in this city! She can stay her ass up there in Michigan where she belongs. Because she damn sure don’t belong here in my city. That is her city up there, and this one is mine down here. And that’s the way it needs to stay.”
Donna needed a moment to catch her breath. She had worked herself up into a frenzy, ranting and raging into a voice mail machine, not even an actual person. The unease and utter contempt for Gail was implicit in every single word she now spoke.
“I cannot believe you cannot come down here and do your job without having to bring your wife on your damn arm to make sure that you’re safe! Low class!”
Click . . . end of message.
After listening, the OCSD knew they were dealing with someone capable of murder—a true live wire. It was there in Donna’s voice: the coldness, the sheer hatred she had harbored for Gail, the absolute pure adrenaline she had worked up, just talking to a man who had, in her mind, left her high and dry and was planning on bringing his wife to Florida to rub in her face. Donna was a desperate woman, no doubt about it, eight days before Gail was executed. And yet, save for the spiritual gift of bilocation, how could Donna Trapani be in two places at the same time? If she was talking to George when Gail was murdered, it meant that if Donna had been behind it, she had to have hired someone. This meant one thing to investigators: There was a paper trail somewhere, along with a few witnesses, outlining a plot to murder Martha Gail Fulton. All they had to do was find it.
21
THROUGHOUT THE FIRST few weeks of November, the investigation moved along at a slow and steady pace. There were more pieces of the puzzle to put together than the picture would lead a layperson to believe by studying it. Smart detectives understand, though, that all it takes is a few solid breaks and a case will come together.
That first break came on November 18, when the OCSD got a hit on a rental car. As part of that Oak Force investigative team, OCSD investigator James Lehtola spoke to a rental-car agency in Okaloosa County, Florida, which had obtained information from its Enterprise Rent-A-Car corporate offices in St. Louis, Missouri. This new lead pointed to a master plan for murder clearly coming into focus. Enterprise “had confirmed,” Lehtola reported, “that a Donna Trapani” had rented a number of automobiles from the Okaloosa Airport/Fort Walton Beach, Florida, location and had one vehicle out on rental currently. That information in and of itself was not so surprising or significant. However, what Lehtola found out next was enough to raise eyebrows.
Lehtola wrote: Records indicate that the renter [Donna Trapani] prefers Chevrolet Malibu’s and rented that type of vehicle on each occasion.
Enterprise gave Lehtola several dates: May 28, 1999, and July 2, 1999. The car Donna picked up on those dates was a four-door white Malibu, with Florida registration plates. An additional date for a black Malibu Donna had rented on August 25, 1999, juxtaposed with a trip she had taken to meet George. Then on September 10, 1999, just about three weeks prior to Gail’s murder, Donna rented a 1999 jade-colored Malibu—a car she had yet to return to Enterprise.
Bull’s-eye!
“We contacted Miss Trapani,” the Enterprise rep told Lehtola, “and let her know that she had overdue payments related to the vehicle, and she needed to pay and return the car. But she said she was in Louisiana because her mother was having open-heart surgery.”
The company had been leaving messages on Donna’s office voice mail, but she had not returned any of the calls.
“Notify us as soon as she returns that car,” Lehtola said.
Lehtola let the team know what he had found. It seemed to fit into place. Yet, the break the OCSD had been looking for all along—that proverbial knife in Donna Trapani’s back—came hours later in the form of two telephone calls that would send investigators heading straight out the door on that road trip to Florida.
As most agencies do in this situation, the OCSD referred to the caller as “the informant.” His name was Todd Franklin (pseudonym), a Texas native living in Florida, a man who had done some time in a local jail that past summer and had happened to run into Sybil Padgett along the way. As the prisoners were transported and corralled into holding pens, waiting to be sent to various prisons, Todd had a conversation with Sybil, who was also locked up on a drug charge, that sparked a rekindling of an old friendship between them. Todd and Sybil had known each other for ten years, at least.
It was around 8:00 P.M. on November 19 when Todd Franklin called the OCSD. Sergeant James A’Hearn and several investigators were still in the office, talking about the Fulton case. They were commenting on how it was surely a solvable case; it just needed a bit more shoe-leather police work.
Alan Whitefield took the call.
Todd Franklin sounded drunk, slurring his words, unable to articulate things with any consistent sentence structure. Yet, the basis for the call was unmistakably clear.
“He said something to the effect . . . that he and a woman, Sybil Padgett,” A’Hearn later said, “had had a conve
rsation about her being involved in a homicide in Michigan.”
Apparently, Todd and Sybil had just had sex. They were lying in bed, smoking cigarettes and talking like lovers sometimes do, when Sybil admitted that she had been part of Gail’s murder. OCSD investigators called it “pillow talk”: Sybil thought she could trust the man with whom she’d just been intimate.
A’Hearn called Franklin the following morning; he was more sober—though not completely—and able to orate his story somewhat clearer.
“Based on that information he gave me the following morning,” A’Hearn said, “I arranged to meet him down in Florida.”
Detective John Meiers, Detective Sergeant James A’Hearn, and Special Agent William O’Leary, of the FBI, left for Florida a few days later to interview Todd Franklin face-to-face. That break in the case they had all been waiting for—well, it had just occurred.
Todd insisted on being picked up at his apartment for fear of someone seeing him head into the police department (PD) and talk to cops. So they took him to the FBI’s local bureau in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. The OCSD was now on Donna Trapani’s home turf, in her backyard.
“Tell us how you became involved,” one of the investigators asked.
Todd seemed nervous and agitated. He was shaky, maybe more from drinking too much than being scared to talk about what he knew. He gave no reason why he was coming forward, other than he wanted to help.
“I—I . . . while I was incarcerated in Franklin County Jail this past summer,” he explained, “Sybil, a longtime friend of mine, asked me if I knew anybody that killed people.”
That was the beginning of it, Todd went on to explain; the first time he had heard anything about Sybil being involved in murdering someone. It shocked him. Sybil was a bad girl, sure. She was a little trashy and definitely easy, but she didn’t strike him as the type to be involved in a murder-for-hire plot. So Todd wrote it off as Sybil playing around, trying to be someone she was not: a tough girl trying to play the part.
Kiss of the She-Devil Page 9