Kiss of the She-Devil

by M. William Phelps

  She blamed Gail for George’s “failure to progress” in the military.

  She blamed Gail for “never trying to help” George “succeed” at anything he ever did.

  For any “discouragement” George felt in his entire life.

  For “harass[ing] him to death,” to “give up and do nothing.”

  For not being able to “better himself.”

  For never meeting “his needs.”

  For never being able to talk about certain things he had become “ashamed of ” and not been “able to tell anyone” except Donna.

  For never allowing George to “have things” his way.

  For “trapping” him into having children.

  For giving him “no other choice” but to stay with her.

  For keeping quiet and accepting “years of heartache.”

  For stifling “all his dreams.”

  Donna said Gail had not even had 10 percent near “the pain and hurt” George had endured living under the same roof, calling Gail a “poor, pitiful, selfish mother.”

  Then Donna said when George needed his children most, they all turned their backs on him. It made her wonder, listening to George talk about how bad the kids were and how spiteful they had become (like their mother), how “uncaring and ungrateful” they actually were. She asked Andrew—as she was still focused on him as someone who could talk some sense into the other two kids—if by knowing all of the facts now, George’s kids could stand behind him for once and support him through this tough time.

  After this, Donna fell into a discussion about God and how Gail had been lying to God, and that “God knows it.” She said Gail was “so dependent” and “weak” that it drove George “crazy.” This was always the impetus for his “going back” home. She said George had told her he “wished he could die now” so he didn’t have to live in all the pain Gail had been putting him through. It was Donna who brought George the “most happiness” he’d ever had, and here was Gail trying to destroy that.

  She always wins, Donna wrote of Gail, calling her “selfish and self-centered.” She pointed out how Gail used her children as pawns against her rival to make all of their lives hell. The “only reason” Gail wanted George was because, when the kids were grown, Gail wouldn’t be alone. Gail didn’t “care about what” anybody else wanted. It was about her needs. In fact, Gail’s goal in life at the current time, Donna was convinced, was to make George suffer more than any other human being. If she persisted, Donna warned, all she was going to do was put so much pressure on George that he was going to have a heart attack and die. Why not just let him go?

  She wrote to Andrew: Do you hate your dad so much to want him dead?

  The entire Fulton family, Donna said, “fail to realize” how deep George’s love was for her. Something George “never had.” She explained how passionate their love was, how emotionally connected they were, how exciting it all was to George. She wrote to Andrew, putting it into a familiar context: The same way you feel about your girlfriend.

  Whenever Donna dropped George off at the airport to send him on his way back to Gail, she said he’d turn before walking through the catwalk “and have tears in his eyes.”

  One of the most hurtful moments, Donna concluded, was when George took Gail to see the movie Titanic. She said George cried through the entire film—not because he was taken in by James Cameron’s characters, but because all he thought about was Donna and the love they shared.

  Donna ran out of paper while writing, and she finished what was an incredibly disparaging document—written to a kid not yet finished with high school—on several Post-it scraps of paper. The ending to this maddening outburst gave her a certain emotional footing to stand on. Donna warned Andrew that his father loved her, and there was nothing his mother could do to stop it.

  Your mom will never be me . . . , Donna wrote.

  Finally she observed that Gail could “never give” George what she had, saying how marriage was “built on trust, love, and commitment.” She called Gail “insecure” and “hopeless.” Donna encouraged Andrew to talk to his mother so that she might “seek professional help” and “move on with her life.”

  36

  GAIL FULTON SHOWED UP for work in tears one day. It was close to the end of December.

  “What’s wrong, Gail?” one of her colleagues asked. No one could stand to see Gail like this. “Sit down.” Gail was about to lose it. She couldn’t work anymore.

  “Well,” Gail said, “I just found out that George is having an affair with his boss in Florida.”

  Hearing herself say it out loud brought on another round of tears for Gail.

  “I’m so sorry, honey.”

  It was tragic to see such a nice woman suffer so deeply. Gail had been honest with everyone in saying that her marriage was going through a rocky time over the past several months. Many people had suspected George was cheating. Still, something had happened to make Gail announce this affair to her coworkers. George had moved down to Florida, after all, six months prior to Gail having this breakdown at work.

  “Her name is Donna,” Gail continued. “I truly feel this is it—we’re heading for a divorce.”

  Gail had been optimistic and hopeful there was a chance to salvage the marriage, but she felt different now. Here it was days after Christmas and Gail was staring at the end of a two-decades-plus marriage. The New Year celebration was a week away. What was she going to do?

  Gail went about her days as her husband stayed with Donna. She tried to figure out the best way to handle and accept that the marriage was over. Change was not something Gail had experience with. She knew a lot about modifying her life to suit her husband’s needs. Moving to Michigan wasn’t something Gail had been all that shocked by when it happened. Since they married on June 6, 1975, in Corpus Christi, Gail and George had moved nearly a dozen times. That first year after they were married, George was restationed in Georgia. Then it was on to Boulder, Colorado, Mannheim, Germany, and Kettering, Ohio. Each of their three children was born in a different state or country. They spent time in El Paso, Texas, and Fort Amador, Panama (at an army base), the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, and, finally, back to Corpus Christi in 1992. It was shortly after that, with twenty years in the military, when George retired.

  Gail had nothing to do with George leaving the army, as Donna had been so certain of in her letter to Andrew (a letter Andrew later said he never received). It’s highly unlikely George Fulton, a man who made all the decisions in the Fulton household, would allow Gail to convince him to leave the military.

  “Served twenty years on active duty as an infantry officer, an analyst,” George later testified. “Retired in 1993. . . .”

  “My parents were supposed to stay here for good,” Emily said, referring to Corpus Christi. “My dad promised my mom that they would always return to their hometown after he retired.” That was why the move to Lake Orion when Emily was a junior came as such a shock to everyone back home. They were settled in Corpus Christi, set on living out the remaining years of their lives. Family and friends were all around them there.

  “I think my sister mentioned once how she felt abandoned by our family, since we moved [to Michigan] without her and she stayed behind.”

  Life was not easy for Gail and the kids during those years. That much Donna never really quite grasped. As a child growing up, Emily said, “we did not realize we were Hispanic until my dad retired and we started going to public schools in Corpus.”

  It was there, Emily recalled, when some students, “wanted to label me as ‘Mexican’ and put me into a box. We grew up with so many other different people that I just viewed us all as American, despite our various backgrounds. My parents didn’t speak Spanish to us, so maybe that is why, but even if they had, I would not have noticed. Many of my friends spoke other languages. And if they were American, I still simply viewed them as that, as I was too innocent, or naïve, and did not understand what ethnicity was.”

 
; George grew up speaking Spanish (as a second language), but Gail did not.

  “When my mom was raised,” Emily said, “it was not good to have an accent as Hispanics. Along with blacks and any minority, they were discriminated against. My grandmother told me that it would make my grandfather so mad how people treated him as stupid or less of a person because he was Hispanic and had an accent. My grandfather was brilliant, my grandmother says, as he could do math in his head. [He] predicted so many things that would happen in the future, and just had a good sense for business and working with people. He started out as a lawyer and then was appointed as the second Hispanic federal judge position in the United States. Because of the discrimination that my grandparents faced, they decided to raise their kids—my mom and her brother—without speaking Spanish.”

  Gail Fulton pulled herself together. She decided to deal with a husband who had run off on her and the kids. She’d spoken of killing herself. She’d said things weak and submissive, making her attitude about life in general appear worthless. She’d nearly begged her husband to stay—and perhaps that’s what he had wanted—to work things out, to go to their priest, ask for forgiveness, and take refuge in the sacraments. Gail believed with the Church in their corner, Jesus directing them, the Fulton family could move mountains.

  Donna would not give up, however. What made matters worse for Gail was Donna calling the house to harass Gail and make her feel miserable and worthless for forgiving George.

  There was some light here for Gail, however, when, after the first of the year, Gail told a friend, “We’re trying to work through our problems, and George is trying to get out of the relationship with Donna, but the woman is obsessed with him.”

  Whatever George was telling Gail, she perceived it as though they could move on and repair the marriage. Gail would not have said this if she understood completely, without question (as she had just weeks prior), that the marriage was doomed. She had hope now.

  As Donna grew more insecure, sensing Gail wasn’t going to roll over and give up George, she amped up her rhetoric and proceeded to degrade Gail anytime she spoke to her on the telephone. Donna didn’t care about anyone but herself and her own needs. She was in an entirely different place. The cards and letters she sent George throughout that winter and spring were loaded with the same sort of he’s the “love of my life” bombast she had been mind-vomiting all along.

  Strangely, reading these sentimentalities, there was no indication George and Donna were having any problems—at least not from Donna’s point of view.

  Donna’s divorce came through and was finalized in February 1999; her piece of the puzzle now in place. As each day passed, she felt more secure about her relationship with George and their future—which could only mean George was telling Donna they were on.

  If one looks into George’s life back home, a vastly different picture of the relationship emerges. On March 4, for some unknown reason, George and Gail wrote to a Boston, Massachusetts, bank under the subject “Partial Withdrawal Option,” demanding $5,000 of their retirement/investment money.

  Had George and Gail decided to rekindle the marriage and make amends? Asking for this money appeared to be a step in that direction. And then, a few weeks later, on March 23, 1999, George put in his letter of resignation as CFO of CCHH.

  He was quitting.

  Reacting to that, Donna Trapani had some big news. Although she did not share it with George immediately, Donna was telling people she was pregnant with his child.

  37

  GEORGE FULTON LATER said that even before he met Donna, he and Gail were having problems. Yet he framed those problems with a bit of sugary glaze, saying, “Well, we just had—my wife and I had disagreements, but it wasn’t anything that I would call ‘major,’ just an accumulation of things, small things that became.... There were things that needed talking about and sorted out.”

  As George started his own business in 1997—before he met Donna—and traveled to Florida “once a month,” he added, for “three or four days” at a clip, he and Gail got used to the idea that their marriage would involve time away from each other. Gail was cool with the three-day and four-day trips, according to George. After he met Donna, George spent more and more time in Florida, extending four-day trips into weeks. Gail assumed it was business keeping him away. When asked later if he had effectively lied to Gail by not telling her the extended trips were because he had met and bedded down another woman, George said: “I didn’t tell her. I didn’t lie to her. I didn’t have to lie because there wasn’t anything to lie about. It was just not told. There was deception, if you want to classify it as that, but not a lie.”

  He noted that his behavior as an “untruth” wasn’t right.

  “It was incomplete, yes,” George corrected.

  George’s last day with CCHH was April 16, 1999. He agreed to continue processing claims for CCHH, but only from his Michigan home. When he spoke to Donna about this, George said the relationship wasn’t over in his mind. Yes, he had made a decision to work things out with Gail. However, he was still struggling to cope with having made the right choice. In fact, there was still a chance for them, he said.

  For a while Donna didn’t react one way or another—besides, that is, the standard “Why, why, why?” She didn’t—at least not then—call the house and threaten Gail and call George and spew every foul-mouthed name in the book. (She was doing this behind his back in Florida to coworkers.) Donna seemed to accept defeat.

  But then George went out to his post office box (POB) one afternoon in late April—and everything changed.

  Donna Trapani is pregnant . . . , the letter said.

  George’s eyes bulged. His jaw dropped to the ground, one could assume.

  No way . . . how could this be?

  Then another surprise: Donna has terminal cancer, the missive continued.

  It wasn’t written by Donna, but rather by a doctor. Donna must have known that a simple letter from her might have sounded desperate and contrived, but this important information coming from her own doctor—a man George knew—was an entirely different matter.

  Walking away from his POB, George looked at the envelope, which was definitely Donna’s handwriting.

  George had a trip coming up to Las Cruces, New Mexico, something connected to a defense contract he was trying to nail down. Donna knew about it, but George did not in any way want her to go with him. He needed some time to think through the situation and figure out what to do. The stakes had changed. Now that Donna was carrying his child, it was no mere simple decision of choosing marriage over mistress.

  “It was a moral dilemma, what to do,” George later said. “. . . not emotional. Moral . . . what was right by my wife and children and by [Miss] Trapani, who said she was dying and with child?”

  At his hotel one night in New Mexico, George was startled by a knock on the door.

  Donna.

  “I’m here. . . ,” Donna said after George opened the door. She had a bag with her; there was a smile on her face that effectively communicated, You didn’t think you could get rid of me that easy now, did you?

  “What are you doing here?” George asked, letting Donna in.

  “Change your plans,” she said. “Stay with me. . . . Let’s have a vacation.”

  Donna suggested four days. Dinner. Sex. Long walks. Time to think.

  “No,” George said. “I have work to do. I have to be home . . . in two days.”

  Not long after Donna walked in, they had sex. Donna ended up staying.

  “I could have [kicked her out],” George said later in court. “But knowing Miss Trapani, [I felt] she would have created a scene and started cussing and kicking the door in, and it would have been embarrassing. Plus, I was weak for her.”

  On the way to the airport after the weekend, Donna said, “I have cancer.”

  “I know. . . . I got the letter from your doctor.”

  “So you know about the baby, too?”

  “Donna,”
George said, “I will try to be there for you and the baby.”

  In Donna’s view the relationship was back on. George was home with his wife and children, but Donna felt his days in Michigan were numbered. Now that she was having his child and dying, George had no choice.

  Falling in love with you was one of my life’s most perfect moments, said the inscription on a card Donna sent George on May 31. It was a poem, describing how she felt about the rekindling of the bond they once had shared.

  Sometime later, Donna wrote a desperate plea (in the third person), which she had planned on sending to George (although there is no indication she ever sent it). Through a series of questions, she was begging him to stay with her. Sentences along the lines of: Is your wife as pretty as Donna? The questions asked if Gail was as “smart” as Donna? As “unselfish”? What had Gail done to prove her “unselfishness” to George? Was Gail as “vibrant” and “energetic” and “passionate” and “sexy” as Donna? Did Gail please him in the way Donna could? Would she “sacrifice” or make as much “money” as Donna? What was it that George “learned” from his wife? When was it that he last “had a stimulating conversation” with his wife?

  Pathetic didn’t even approach how desperate Donna sounded.

  In that same letter Donna wrote of a divine threat, showing how fast she could turn on someone she supposedly had loved. She wrote that if Gail was George’s ultimate choice: May God bring you all the pain and hell you deserve. She said no man on “the face of the earth” would ever dream of “giving up what you have with Donna” to return to the dark hole in Michigan.

  Concluding this bizarre rant, Donna stated that since she was dying, she had many things “to regret.” But none of those regrets compared to what George would feel if he abandoned her and returned to Gail. She could not figure out why this decision was so tough. The only answer to Donna was his wife was “holding something over your head.” Donna speculated that maybe it was something in George’s past that would all at once “ruin you” and “send you to prison.”