Patrick, one law enforcement document stated, knew Donna’s plan was idiotic . . . but surrendered . . . so he could keep Sybil’s sexual pleasures coming his way and please Sybil in general. Patrick had no direction in life other than what Sybil gave him. Patrick was having the most incredible sex of his life, and nothing was going to stand in the way of it. He didn’t care that Donna’s plan, with all of these people knowing about it, would be figured out eventually. He was a victim of Sybil’s manipulation, who, herself, was victimized and manipulated by Donna. Shit did roll downhill—Patrick Alexander’s life was a good definition of the old cliché.
On the other hand, Kevin Ouellette, law enforcement explained, “had recent financial woes,” which put Kevin in a position of weakness: By nature, [Kevin] had a cold streak, which permitted him to engage in violence without much consideration for [the] reality of his conduct. The guy was considering killing another human being for the price of a used car. Plus, he and Donna did not, for one moment, take into consideration the ramifications of their actions—the inevitable ripple effect of one murder affecting generations of Gail Fulton’s family and friends. Additionally, this was nothing more than a job to Kevin. Employment. He didn’t know what Gail looked like or, better yet, anything about her.
Kevin agreed to Donna’s plan—with one hitch. “I’ll do it,” he explained after she made the offer, “so long as Sybil and Patrick help me.”
Kevin was the solution to Donna’s warped desires to maintain control of George Fulton, law enforcement reported. Donna would not be denied.
When they returned to Sybil’s house, Kevin analyzed the crime in his head. Then he started asking questions.
“Yeah,” Sybil said to one, “I went up to Michigan a couple of times already to case everything out and know the routine . . . the plan for everything.” Sybil appeared confident. She knew Gail’s schedule and could direct Kevin as to the best way to kill the woman. Sybil said she had a few ideas of her own.
“What are you thinking?” Kevin asked.
“The only time she’s consistent,” Sybil explained, going through Gail’s week, “is Monday nights.”
“What do you mean?”
“She works every Monday night and gets out at the same time.”
Kevin liked the sound of that.
“It’s a library,” Sybil said.
On the following day Donna, Sybil, Patrick, Stephanie, and Kevin went out to eat. Then they went back to Donna’s house to discuss the murder in more detail. Donna seemed to enjoy this part of the process, methodically going through it, focusing on specific aspects of the crime, as though getting off on how it would play out. Kevin had made it clear that he did not want Stephanie (who would later refer to Donna as “the boss lady”) to know what they were doing. As far as she knew, Kevin was going to beat up someone.
Donna still thought she was dealing with a biker named Mike. No one had told her Kevin’s real name. When they got back to the house after dinner, in fact, Sybil called Todd Franklin. Todd was that bed friend of Sybil’s with whom she had first initiated the conversation about killing Gail.
“I’m sitting here with Mike,” Sybil said, appeasing Donna, who was listening.
“What . . . Mike?” Todd asked.
“Your Mike.”
Todd knew this couldn’t be. He had never introduced Sybil to Mike.
“Well, let me talk to him, then.”
Sybil laughed. She walked outside, away from Donna and the others. Whispering into the telephone, she said, “It’s not your Mike. It’s somebody I found—but Donna thinks it’s your Mike.”
Todd Franklin understood. He’d play along.
After the call Donna motioned for everyone to walk back into her bedroom; she had something she wanted to talk about with Mike.
Sybil, Patrick, Kevin, and Donna trekked into the murder room. Donna closed the door and walked toward Kevin slowly. Her eyes were on the ground, a hand on her chin.
“What’s up?” Kevin asked. Patrick and Sybil sat on the bed and horsed around, as usual. They behaved as though this whole thing was like some sort of prank they were planning on a friend.
Quiet for a time, Donna finally spoke. She had something she wanted “Mike” to do while he was in Michigan. It was important. “I want you to kill everybody who comes out of that library with her—you understand me? It will look like a random thing, then. It won’t look like you’re targeting just the one person.” Donna had thought long and hard about this part of the murder plan; she was willing to take out a slew of people—maybe four or five—just to claim her man. Donna, a woman running a business designed to help people and care for those who were sick, a nurse herself, wanted a mass murder so she and George could be together. She was willing to sacrifice a crowd of human beings for the sake of her passion.
“No way I’m doing that,” Kevin said. No amount of money would change his mind. “Look here . . . I agreed to kill one you have this problem with”—he held up an index finger, even later recalling how he might have pointed it in Donna’s face—“but I am not going to kill everyone that walks out of that library with her! No way.”
“I’ll throw in another twenty-five hundred,” Donna promised, driving the total up to $7,500. She figured the guy was a killer. Every man had his price.
Kevin shook his head. “No . . . no . . . I am not agreeing to killing everyone that comes out of that library.”
Donna changed the subject, talking about when, saying, “She gets off work every Monday at the same time.”
Sybil listened, nodding in agreement.
“Okay,” Kevin acknowledged.
“So the best day to do it would be on a Monday night,” Donna said.
“Sounds good.”
“Nine o’clock is probably, like, the best time,” Sybil offered.
They decided Patrick would drive, Sybil would ride shotgun next to him, and Kevin, sitting in the back, would act as triggerman.
“We all good on that?” Donna asked, looking around the room.
A resounding “yes” echoed.
49
THEY ALL SLEPT at Donna’s house that night. Kevin realized the following morning that there was a major problem that needed to be addressed immediately. He had been thinking about it ever since taking the job. He went to Sybil, who was just waking up.
“What is it?” Sybil asked. Kevin had this look on his face.
“A gun! I don’t have a gun.”
“Ah, I’ll take care of that. I know someone.”
“We’ll talk later on about it.”
“At home,” Sybil said.
“Yeah.”
That night Kevin walked out to the back porch, where Sybil sat, smoking a cigarette. Patrick wasn’t home. He had gone out to a party.
“I got a problem,” Kevin said. “I don’t want Patrick involved.”
“What? Why?”
“He’s too young, Sib,” Kevin answered, using Sybil’s diminutive nickname. “He’ll go out drinking, run his mouth some night, and get us all caught.”
“I know,” Sybil said. “I agree. But . . . you know, he already knows too much. Doesn’t matter now.”
Kevin had accepted $2,500 from Donna. She had paid him in cash. He gave Sybil $150 and told her that was the weapon budget.
Kevin had always wanted a fast car. It was a dream. After Donna fronted him half the money, he went and put a down payment on a 1974 Trans Am, which he had found in the newspaper.
Then the morning came—October 3, 1999, a Sunday.
“You guys ready?” Kevin asked.
“You bet,” Sybil said. The night before, a “black guy,” as Kevin later described him, “showed up at the house and brought a thirty-eight Smith and Wesson revolver.” Kevin had been in the military. He grew up around hunters and guns. He knew his way around a weapon. This was a solid gun. It could do tremendous damage if fired at the right distance.
As they walked out to the car, Kevin spotted something. He asked out loud
if anyone knew what happened to the back taillight.
“Shit,” Patrick said. He explained how he had taken the car out the previous night to a party and backed into a tree on the way out of the driveway. “I put some tape over it. It’ll be fine.”
“Get in,” he told them. “Let’s go.”
Kevin dressed in the mood of the crime he was about to commit: black leather jacket, black jeans, black boots, black do-rag. Sybil took an old winter wool ski mask (black) she had found inside her house and tossed it in the trunk. “Maybe you can use this?” she asked Kevin.
Kevin drove first. Patrick and Sybil sat in the backseat. They stopped in Birmingham, Alabama, so Kevin could grab a few things from his car. (“Some clothes . . . and a couple of photo albums,” Kevin remarked later.)
From Alabama, Patrick took over. They drove into Ohio. Kevin had a friend he wanted to meet up with so Patrick and Sybil could get some weed. It was a good place to stop and grab a hotel. Eat. Sleep. Then drive on to Michigan. Akron, where his friend lived, was not far from the library where Gail worked—they could make the drive in half a day. Plus, there was something else Kevin needed that he could get only in Akron.
50
IT WAS LATE that same Sunday, October 3. Cathy Baxter (pseudonym) was on her way out the door with her father, heading for the corner bar. She wasn’t expecting the call.
“Hey,” said a familiar voice from the past, “me and two friends are here in Toledo. Was wondering if we could come through Akron and hang out overnight?” It was a lie, obviously. Kevin, Sybil, and Patrick were not far from Akron, but heading north from the south. Toledo was northwest of Akron, right there at the western tip of Lake Erie.
“Kevin . . . my gosh,” Cathy said, a bit startled. “How are you? Yes, sure. Come on over.”
Cathy and Kevin had been friends for about three and a half years. At the time Cathy lived in Akron, which, arguably, was the tire capital of the world. It was a big city, with lots of nightlife and action.
When Kevin pulled up, Cathy could not, she later said, tell what type of car he was driving, because it was—literally—a “dark, rainy night. . . .” The car was a rental. That much she knew, because Kevin had told her. “It was a four-door and wrecked in the rear quarter panel. That’s all I remember.”
Kevin wasn’t alone. He had two other people Cathy didn’t recognize with him. “This is Sybil,” Kevin told Cathy. Sybil smiled and waved from inside the car. “That’s Patrick,” Kevin said, pointing to the skinny dude sitting next to Sybil.
Originally they had made plans to meet at Cathy’s house. However, Cathy had gone down the block to a local gin mill with her father and ended up leaving Kevin a note at the house. The introductions between them took place inside the car after Kevin had gone into the bar and asked Cathy to take a ride. By now, it was “lights out” time in the bar, around 1:30 A.M.
“Last call. . . .”
As the four of them took off from the bar, Kevin asked Cathy if she could point them in the direction of a cheap hotel in the area, where they could park it for the night.
“Just down the road,” Cathy said. “Go straight, make a right at the corner.”
Kevin drove down Newton Street, then made his way closer to the main highway, Route 76. They stopped at a “couple different motels, trying to find the cheapest rate,” Cathy explained, but they didn’t have any luck. The Best Western on Gilchrist “was too expensive” for Kevin’s tastes, Cathy said. So Kevin drove toward South Arlington under Cathy’s direction, heading into the center of Akron.
“There’s a Red Roof Inn there,” Cathy said.
Kevin agreed that a Red Roof Inn was probably more within his budget.
“So what brings you guys out this way?” Cathy asked. “Wow, all the way from Florida!” They were getting out of the car, heading into the lobby of the Red Roof Inn. Cathy was thinking, Geez, a thousand-mile trip, almost sixteen hours—why here? Why now?
“Sybil works in the geriatric field and, um . . . her boss . . . she sent her to Toledo for some classes,” Kevin, doing most of the talking, said. “Sybil done lost her damn license, so she paid me to drive her out here.”
“Why come all the way to Ohio, though?” This seemed strange to Cathy.
Were there not any classes closer?
“I don’t know,” Kevin said.
(“He just kind of blew it off, and I took him for his word. I figured that’s what they were doing.”)
“Okay,” Cathy responded.
“Hey, listen, you mind putting the room in your name?” Kevin asked his old friend. They were almost at the lobby desk.
“What? No. . . . Why, Kevin? What’s going on?”
“If anything happens, you know . . . I don’t want anything left behind that would put me being here.”
Cathy thought this to be an odd statement. Why would he say such a thing? What in the heck is Kevin talking about?
Approaching the desk clerk, Kevin reached into his pocket, pulled out a roll of cash, and paid for the room—probably not the smartest thing he’d ever done—and put it in his own name.
Sybil and Patrick unloaded the luggage. They all went up to the room. After unpacking, they sat around for a short time and chitchatted.
“You need to take me back to the bar,” Cathy said at one point. “I left my purse in my dad’s truck.” Cathy and her father had gone to the bar together. She had taken off with Kevin and the others. “I didn’t think we’d be gone this long,” she added, looking at the LCD clock on the nightstand.
Kevin nodded. “No problem.”
Cathy and Kevin took off.
After they stopped and picked up Cathy’s purse back at the bar, Kevin said, “Hey, is there a Walmart round here?”
“Yup . . . right next to your hotel.”
The store was one of those twenty-four-hour outlets. Kevin walked in. Cathy followed. He headed directly back to the “hunting area” of the store, as Cathy later put it, but “they were closed.”
“When y’all opening up again here?” Kevin asked a store employee.
“In the morning,” the guy said. “Six o’clock.”
“What do you need back here?” Cathy asked.
“Bullets.”
(“I never thought anything of it,” Cathy later said, “because he drove a truck, and it seemed logical to me.” At times Kevin worked as an over-the-road trucker, hauling loads in one of those big eighteen-wheelers, or smaller box trucks, with sleepers. Having a gun meant getting a good night’s sleep in his rig. And what good was a gun without any bullets?)
“Come on,” Kevin said, “I need something else.”
Cathy followed.
Kevin walked over to the medicine aisle and picked up some rubbing alcohol.
When they got back to the hotel room, Kevin, Patrick, Sybil, and Cathy were “all just sitting around” shooting the shit. Patrick and Sybil had some leftover food they ate. Kevin got up at one point, put on a pair of what Cathy described as “baseball batting gloves”—those stretchy latex types that golfers use, too—and pulled “something wrapped in a towel and T-shirt out of his coat.”
What in the world?
At first, Cathy didn’t know what it was; but then, as Kevin presented it in a proud gesture, as if displaying a prized fish he had just caught, she realized, “It was the biggest handgun I had ever seen.”
There were two beds in the room. Cathy sat on one by herself. Patrick and Sybil, playing around like teen lovers, giggling and talking sexy, tickling each other, laughing and whispering, sat on the other bed. Kevin positioned himself at the desk chair, a mirror in front of him, marveling at this enormous weapon in his gloved hands.
As Cathy looked on, Kevin took out that rubbing alcohol he purchased back at Walmart and placed it on the desk in front of him. Then he removed “three or four bullets” from the chambers of the gun, wiped each bullet down with rubbing alcohol and a tissue, wiped the entire gun off, put each bullet back into its respective chamber,
stared at the weapon admiringly for a beat, wrapped it back up in his T-shirt, and put it back in his coat pocket.
Kevin was ready—and so was his gun.
Cathy later talked about the utter look of fascination on Kevin’s face as he sat and methodically went about cleaning the gun, bullets, and then wrapping them back up. It was as if he had entered into another realm. Kevin had that rebel-without-a-cause look, to begin with: searing blue eyes, dark hair, a bit of a boy-band beard and goatee, hair slicked back like Elvis. But with that gun in his hand, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, a look of darkness on his face, he resembled a young Marlon Brando—a “wild one” on a mission. Someone hired to do a job he loved.
“Does anyone want a soda?” Patrick asked. He jumped up from the bed, putting his hand on the doorknob.
They all said, hell yeah.
Patrick left. Sybil stayed.
“Too bad we had to bring him, huh, Sib?” Kevin said out loud. Patrick was out of the room by then, on his way to the vending machine.
“Uh-huh,” Sybil answered.
“He’s just in the way, ain’t he, Sib?”
“He sure is, Kev.”
Sybil turned to Cathy at that point and said, “We had to bring him, though, ultimately, because he knows too much.” She smiled.
What? Cathy thought. Knows what?
Cathy had no idea what they were talking about. Still, she knew whatever it was, she didn’t need to know, so she never asked or pushed the issue. Instead, Cathy Baxter nodded, playing along, as though she knew what they were referring to.
51
CATHY WOKE UP first the following morning, October 4, 1999. She had slept with Kevin, but she didn’t “sleep” with him. Kevin had been a friend of the Baxter family for a long time. He even lived with Cathy’s family for a brief period.
Cathy needed to rustle everyone up and get them moving so they could check out. While getting their stuff together, Patrick asked Cathy, “Hey, you know anyone round here who can sell us some weed?”
“I do,” Cathy said.
Patrick looked at Kevin, the de facto leader of the group, almost as if to ask for permission.
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