Kiss of the She-Devil

by M. William Phelps

  As he spoke, Kevin had a defeated tone to his voice. He knew there was no getting out of this now. In fact, maybe he should have thought it through a bit more before committing such a violent crime with three idiots. Kevin considered himself smarter. He never thought himself a killer.

  But he was.

  That personal demise began, Kevin explained, when his wife died suddenly (he never said how) and he was left to care for their young child.

  “I let my sister watch him,” Kevin said of his son. “She got divorced, and the kid ended up being taken by the state and is now in their ward. I don’t know where my son is right now.”

  He looked greatly concerned.

  They asked him about life in general.

  “I graduated high school and did a small stint in the army, but got out with a general discharge. It was mutual. The army wanted me out, and I wanted out.”

  No one told Kevin why he had been dragged into Troop G. He had been roused from his truck and asked to take a ride. So he asked: “Why am I here?”

  They read him his Miranda rights. They pushed a piece of paper across the table and asked Kevin to initial the questions, which Kevin did without a problem. With that, he had waived his right to an attorney and indicated he wanted to talk.

  It took a matter of four questions before Kevin, the report stated, admitted he knew the facts about the homicide of Martha Gail Fulton . . . and went on laying out the scenario of the killing in a taped statement.

  In ninety minutes Kevin told the story from beginning to end. He talked about being broke and living with his girl at Sybil’s, and then the request by Sybil and meeting Donna and being paid by Donna to kill Gail. It really was that simple, he said, when it all came down to it: Donna Trapani had initiated this murder and paid him to commit it with two misfits.

  End of story.

  62

  PUTTING THIS CASE together was not that much of a challenge for the OCSD and the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office—once the pieces were in front of them, that is.

  APA Paul Walton, the man in charge of seeking justice for Gail Fulton and her family, knew from experience that if a suspect had three people pointing a finger at her, well, maybe she should try to cop a plea and count her blessings that there was no electric chair in her future. Most murder-for-hire cases included capital felony charges, which generally resulted in a trip to death row. Donna was charged with first-degree murder, a capital offense in Michigan. But what saved her life was that a conviction for a capital offense in Michigan meant life in prison. Michigan does not have a death penalty and was actually the first in the country to abolish the death penalty in the late 1800s.

  Regardless, Donna Trapani wasn’t interested—not that Paul Walton was offering, anyway—in rolling over and playing the part of the guilty mastermind. If nothing else, Donna was ready to fight. As she had proven with her past (obsessive) behavior, she wasn’t going down without taking a few good swings.

  The public got its first glimpse of the state’s case against Donna and her three criminal cohorts in March 2000 as Paul Walton presented his case before the Honorable Nancy Tolwin Carniak at the 52/3 District Court in Oakland County. Carniak had been appointed to the bench by the governor in January 2000. A beautiful woman by any standard, Carniak’s attractive looks or general greenness to the bench should not have fooled those who might have perceived her to be a bit standoffish. Carniak had attended Michigan State University, where she received a Bachelor of Arts in business administration in 1979; she acquired her Juris Doctor from the Detroit College of Law in 1985. She had served as an associate and partner in private law firms for fifteen years prior to putting on the black robe. According to her bio, the judge’s passion for law and education spread into the community when [Carniak] initiated the Mock Trial program for fifth-grade students . . . [who] learn about the legal system firsthand by participating in a mock criminal trial . . . [and] take a tour of the Oakland County Sheriff ’s substation and observe actual criminal proceedings in the courtroom.

  Paul Walton had his hands full with facing not only Donna Trapani, but also Kevin Ouellette, Sybil Padgett, and Patrick Alexander. This preliminary examination was set to prove that there was sufficient evidence to send all four to trial on felony murder charges. (Some states call it a probable cause hearing; and only under rare circumstances in Michigan is a grand jury summoned.) The preliminary exam is the most efficient way to make certain a defendant is getting his or her fair chance at justice. Each defendant was represented by his or her own attorney. There was some banter about Sybil and Patrick wanting to “talk,” but those discussions had broken down as the preliminary exam began.

  For the state’s case the motive and cause of Gail Fulton’s brutal murder was clear-cut: rejection had spurred Donna into a plan to have her rival killed—a plan she had promised to pay $15,000 to see put into action by her three co-conspirators, all of whom rolled over on her as soon as cops put the squeeze on them. It was George Foster’s move back home in April 1999 that pushed Donna over the proverbial cliff—not only to have Gail killed, but to make up that entire pregnancy and terminal illness plot, which culminated in a meeting between Gail and Donna at a Rochester Hills, Michigan, hotel. When that fell apart and Donna realized her chances with George were finished, she decided murder was the only “shot” she had at winning him back. Walton made the state’s argument clear and precise in the accompanying documents and charges, one of which summed up things quite frankly: This case clearly shows the capabilities of human evil when unchecked.

  Walton graduated from Detroit College in 1991 and passed the bar that same year. His first real job, which he had started while in law school, was with the United States Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Michigan. Then he moved on to the St. Clair County Prosecutor’s Office and was shortly thereafter working for the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office, a job he had stepped into and had not left. Walton had experience in major crimes and felony trials, including numerous jury trials involving murder.

  Part of winning at trial began with hitting hard and fast within this preliminary hearing atmosphere. It was a lawyer knowing his weaknesses and understanding that although he may walk into a courtroom certain of a conviction—with evidence as taut and obvious as he could ever hope—there were always surprises. As a trial lawyer, an attorney can never underestimate the value of having too many witnesses and too much information at his disposal. For Paul Walton, he had a stellar team of investigators in the OCSD who had worked this case, covered every possible aspect of it, documented it about as well as it could have been, and had never once—as far as he could see—headed down a road that might have put additional suspects outside the confines of a biased set of blinders. These cops seemed to have left no stone unturned.

  Or had they?

  When a person looked at it on paper, this seemed to be nothing short of a blowout for Paul Walton and the state. After all, he had suspects’ confessions; the crime—appearing grainy and blurry—was captured on video surveillance; a map of the Michigan area where Gail had lived, worked—and was actually murdered—was marked up by the alleged murderers and full of fingerprints; these pieces of evidence sketched out the crime. There was a detailed affair between the victim’s husband and the purported mastermind and, perhaps more important (which prosecutors are not required to prove), a clear and present motive, the oldest one on record: love, obsession, revenge. When blended together, these three are all potential deadly poisons.

  Opening the preliminary hearing, the first responding officers to the crime scene testified about how they received the call to head out to the library and found Gail Fulton barely breathing, fighting for her last breaths, a pool of blood all around her head. The drama and heartache these two police officers brought to the courtroom was humbling for most, terrifying for Gail’s family, but important to the scope of the tragedy and how four people conspired to murder an innocent woman. For the mastermind in murder-for-hire schemes, the cri
me becomes almost like a dream, a fantasy, simply because the person sanctioning the murder is not usually there to see it happen. This takes the architect out of it and allows the person to convince himself or herself that he or she either played a lesser role in the murder, or none at all. Nearly everyone has seen those “exclusive” surveillance tapes on Dateline, 48 Hours, or 20/20 of men or women paying off undercover agents for murders that never happen. Viewers have seen how those people react to being shown the tapes: They almost give off the sense that they might have been kidding, or that they really didn’t mean what they suggested. And then they are brought into a court of law, and all this evidence is placed in front of them, and they still don’t get it—they still want to convince themselves it was all some sort of misunderstanding. That’s what Donna Trapani had tried to tell detectives Meiers and Pearson in her living room. She could talk until she was blue in the face, but they would never understand what she meant.

  Paul Walton was a smart prosecutor, and he had reviewed the case and knew how to combat Donna’s argument. With old-fashioned circumstantial evidence, as well as state-of-the-art forensic evidence, Walton was going to prove how Donna Trapani knew damn well what she was doing, what she was asking of her co-conspirators, and the results she was hoping to achieve by paying that money.

  With the murder scene set, Walton called the one witness who could put the entire motive and affair into context. For the first time the public was going to hear from the one man who had not spoken to anyone, save for cops, since the time of his wife’s murder.

  George Fulton.

  63

  GEORGE FULTON WALKED into the courtroom; he was wearing a crucifix hanging from his neck (outside his shirt, over his necktie) to show that he had his convictions and his mind back on the cross, where they belonged. This definitely was what Gail would have wanted. This symbol of Christ crucified seemed to suggest that George’s faith might have been tested, but it had not been shattered.

  Some viewed the cross as a feeble attempt to conjure images of a still-grieving husband who wanted the public to think he was a God-fearing man who had stumbled.

  Either way, George was here to tell his side of the story.

  After George gave Paul Walton his vitals, the prosecutor introduced the dynamic of Gail and the crumbling Fulton marriage. Gail’s last day on earth—October 4, 1999—became known between the witness and the prosecutor as “that day.”

  A life and marriage of twenty-five years boiled down to that day. . . .

  Within minutes Walton asked George about the phone call he received from Donna Trapani on that night.

  “How do you know Miss Trapani?” Walton asked.

  “I used to work with her as her chief financial officer, chief operations officer for her business, Concerned Care Home Health in Fort Walton Beach, Florida,” George said, adding, “And I also had a business where I processed her claims for her health care company.”

  Where was the unbridled affair he had with Donna in all of that?

  But George never mentioned the affair without being prodded. Maybe he assumed the court knew already and he didn’t need to get into it any further?

  Walton encouraged George to talk about how he and Donna met.

  George discussed October 1997.

  That bar. That first glance. All the chitchat. Donna’s Lincoln. The kiss. The hotel room. The sex. The sex. The sex.

  Of course, George never mentioned any of it. He gave generic responses.

  “Sir, at the time that you met Miss Trapani, were you . . . married?”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “When you first met Miss Trapani, what type of relationship did you have with her?”

  “Physical and emotional.” Straight answers. Light on detail. Heavy on snappiness.

  A few questions later: “You indicated that you had a romantic relationship with her, correct?”

  “Correct,” George said.

  “How long did the relationship with her continue?”

  “Until July 1999.”

  One year, nine months.

  Walton pushed his witness and got him to talk about how he ended up living with Donna. George said he eventually told Gail about the move.

  Then the assistant prosecutor asked about the pregnancy. When was it George first heard about it?

  “Around the end of March 1999,” he said. “Maybe [the] first of April.”

  “At that point, sir, what was going on with your relationship with Miss Trapani?”

  “I was fixing to leave. I’d given my letter of resignation [to CCHH], because I was not getting paid. So I’d accepted another job in Michigan.... So I was leaving because I wasn’t getting paid.”

  “What was your relationship with Miss Trapani at that point?”

  “It was ending” was all George said.

  “Had you discussed it with her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, sir, did she indicate to you who had fathered the child?”

  “Yes.”

  “And who’d she say fathered the child?”

  “Well, we both knew it was me. I accepted it.”

  Then came a rather interesting exchange, offering an intimate look into the way in which George viewed his marriage and how much control he had over his wife. Walton asked if he had decided, after Donna made it known that she was pregnant, to “remain married, or . . . go through divorce proceedings?”

  “I had a change of heart initially. I thought I wanted a divorce, but I changed my mind. Even though I still continued seeing Miss Trapani, I changed my mind, and I fluctuated back and forth. But basically, it ended several times . . . finally in July 1999.”

  There was no mention of what Gail wanted, or how Gail felt. Or how much this back-and-forth had weighed on poor Gail’s emotional well-being. It was as if whatever George Fulton decided, George Fulton got. George called the shots.

  They talked about the letter “allegedly written,” George said, “by our [CCHH] medical director, Dr. Bevins, that said Donna . . . had stage-four lymphoma, was terminal, and had less than a year to live, and she was also pregnant.” George explained how he showed the letter to Gail when he got back from Florida one day, and the contents of the letter became, essentially, the impetus for that meeting between Gail and Donna, which George had facilitated. Yet buried inside his explanation was a heaping amount of vanity. Even as he sat in the courtroom as a prosecution witness against four people who had conspired to murder his wife—that day—George Fulton continued to talk about his own needs and wants: “I was struggling with what my responsibilities were to [Donna] and my family. . . .” Because of this moral struggle, George implied, he decided it would be best for his lover to meet his wife and, apparently, allow the two of them to work things out between themselves. The goal, he decided by that point, was to have Donna move to Michigan down the street from where he lived with Gail and the kids.

  George explained how the debacle at the hotel turned out.

  Then Paul Walton brought in some of the actual evidence. One particular piece was a photograph. Gail had made a photo album for George to keep by his side while he was in Florida; it was sort of a keepsake so he could look at it and think of his family back home. There was one photo in particular of George and Gail together, sitting. They looked happy. They looked like a couple. They looked as if life had dealt a few blows, but they had weathered it well. But there came a time, Walton explained during his questioning—“Am I right, Mr. Fulton?”—when that photo had been cut in half; Gail’s part of the picture went missing. The implication was that Donna had cut Gail out and had given it to her hired killers so they could identify Gail Fulton and not end up killing the wrong person.

  George said yes. He explained Donna was the only person to have a key to his apartment in Florida, where the photo album had been stored.

  Another important factor Walton needed to establish was how George’s fingerprints ended up on the same map the killing team used to find the library and track
Gail’s movements. It was the same map Sybil and Patrick used to find Gail’s home and stalk her during their first trip north.

  George admitted he had circled several locations on the map for Donna. He told the court he and Donna had purchased the map together.

  Throughout his answers here, however, George never once mentioned why he circled all those places, including the exit ramp leading into an area of Lake Orion where he lived and where the library was. He never said why Donna wanted to know these things.

  Walton moved on in his questioning.

  They talked about how George discussed the schedule Gail kept, where she worked, the type of vehicle Gail drove, her habits, how Gail liked to watch television and read.

  By the end of his direct testimony, there was a strange feeling in the courtroom that George Fulton had unknowingly helped Donna Trapani—his lover—plan that day.

  64

  DONNA TRAPANI’S LAWYER, Lawrence “Larry” Kaluzny, was a sharp-dressed, experienced trial attorney. Kaluzny knew he needed to approach George Fulton with the white-glove touch, a smooth hand of locking George down to his story and finding out if there were any holes that could help his client. The only defense available to Donna was to scream ignorance and claim her co-conspirators had done this horrible deed on their own after she made a few snide, off-the-cuff remarks about her archenemy, Gail Fulton. White-haired Kaluzny knew this was not going to be an easy task, suffice it to say his client was sitting in a courtroom with three disloyal codefendants, who had thrown her under the bus. Kaluzny had to be careful: George Fulton, regardless of how he had treated his wife, was not on trial. The guy’s moral turpitude was not in question. No matter how one framed this picture, calling George a cad, a Lothario, or a serial cheater, who had made promises to Donna he had not fulfilled, did not take the onus off Donna Trapani and the overwhelming evidence against her.