Meiers and Dugan were curious. What an interesting development.
The tape was of Donna Trapani telling Emily that Gail “really needed her mother right now because [she] was suicidal.” Donna went on to say that since she was a nurse, she understood these matters and this was why she felt it her duty to inform Emily of the situation. Donna claimed to be scared for Gail.
Emily, in turn, told her grandmother what was going on. Dora never believed Gail wanted to kill herself; she thought it was something Gail was doing to get George’s attention.
Emily felt different: “My mom talked about it enough where it was very real and scary for me and my brother.”
As the interview continued with the detectives, Dora appeared relaxed and calm, soft-spoken and eloquent, a report that accompanied the interview noted. She was there to talk about what she knew. Getting the facts as she understood them into the hands of investigators was important to this wife of a former federal judge.
“Our family was very close,” Dora explained. “Even though Gail moved to Michigan, I spoke to her on the telephone several times per week.”
“What type of person was your daughter, ma’am?” one of the detectives asked. “Tell us about her.”
“Gail was wonderful. She was an excellent mother and wife. She became a stay-at-home mom after her first year of marriage to George. She was an excellent housekeeper and always saw to it that a nutritious meal was on the table and that her children were clean and loved.”
Harriet Nelson with a few hang-ups—that was Gail Fulton. Yet the man she lived with, Dora found out as Gail and George settled in Michigan, was not the Cliff Huxtable that Dora had thought he was for all those years Gail and George had been together.
Dora was under the impression that George and Gail met at church. But it was a culmination, essentially, of community activities and hanging around with Jeanette Cantu-Bazar, Gail’s best friend. Dora mentioned how religious Gail was and “very true to her faith.” Gail was a believer. There was no question about her desire to serve God. The indication from just about everyone who truly knew Gail was that she might have stayed in a dead marriage because of her strong Catholic beliefs that marriage was sacred, and she was going to do everything possible to fix what was broken and move on within the bonds of marriage.
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
D
EEP 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
S
OME 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.