“Are they saying you killed her?” Josh’s mother, Judy Chandler, asked him as they walked in. She then said something about seeing on television that Josh could get life if he’d had something to do with Heather’s death. “Well, how you going to get life in prison if they killed her?” she asked him. Then she turned her attention toward Buie and Mongeluzzo: “I don’t know how you are going to prove it.”
“Where the babies at?” Buie wanted to know.
“In bed,” Judy said. Judy might have come across as crass and a little bit perturbed; but from her point of view, Judy was a mother whose son was being accused of killing her daughter-in-law. Judy had temporary custody of their children. Two detectives had shown up at her door without warning, her son arrested and shackled. There was a detective standing in her living room, holding a shotgun. Her life had been turned upside down overnight.
Buie and Mongeluzzo told Josh not to wake the kids. They’d allow him to give them a kiss on the cheek, but they gave him strict instructions not to disturb them.
“Why you carrying that shotgun?” Judy asked Mongeluzzo. At first sight, it seemed a bit over the top. But Mongeluzzo was a seasoned investigator—he knew the difference between things getting out of hand or things staying calm was sometimes the presence of power.
“Because my partner’s in here with somebody ... for his own protection,” Mongeluzzo said.
“You got his ankles chained,” Judy responded, clearly alarmed.
“I don’t know who’s here.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I don’t know who’s here—who could jump out of a closet.”
Josh’s mother was frightened and taken aback by the weapon. She felt they were taking things too far.
When Josh came out of the kids’ bedroom, he stared at his mother with a look of utter defeat. It was as if he knew she was never going to see him again inside this house.
“You are not going to prison for something I know [James] and them [did]!” Judy said.
“I love you” was all Josh could muster.
After a short exchange between Josh and Judy, Mongeluzzo called on Josh’s mother to listen to him while Buie escorted Josh outside to the vehicle.
Judy paid attention.
“To let you understand why we’re here in this area, okay,” Mongeluzzo said as Judy watched Josh leave the house with Buie. “He just showed us where she was buried at.” Mongeluzzo allowed the information to settle with Judy.
Judy put her hands over her mouth. Then, surprised, she asked: “Where she’s buried at?”
They talked some more, and Josh’s mother said: “If Emilia told everybody that her and [James] . . . did it—”
Mongeluzzo interrupted: “Emilia didn’t say that.... Emilia put it all on him.”
“We’ll see. That’s what I figure.”
“It’s a ‘he say/she say.’”
Mongeluzzo clarified best he could all of the evidence they had against Josh—as much as they were willing to release (publicly)—and told Judy that her son had done nothing but lie to them. If Josh was telling the truth now, that he had nothing to do with it, those facts would eventually emerge and he had less to be concerned about.
Josh’s mother talked about that February night in question. She said he wasn’t gone that long. How could he possibly have killed Heather?
Mongeluzzo said it didn’t take long to murder someone.
As he began to walk out the door, Mongeluzzo apologized to Judy for the show of force and the intrusion.
Outside, Josh said to Buie and Mongeluzzo, “Sorry my mom got mad.”
They drove away.
A window was down in the car and a nice breeze blew in. Josh could smell the heat of the day just beginning to rise. It had been a long night, he said to the guys as they made their way back to Major Crimes.
Buie told him, yeah, long night, but they still had more questions they needed answers to; the situation was far from over.
The noise of traffic going by was loud.
Josh leaned his head against the door, now thinking about putting the entire murder—the idea, the plan, the crime—on Emilia. If he was going to get out of this, he needed to take drastic measures.
CHAPTER 30
EMILIA COULD BE persuasive, Josh explained to me in a letter. He was referring to that period of their relationship when he returned from Mississippi to find that Emilia had gotten married. Josh said he found out, after speaking with a friend, that her husband was in jail at the time. Emilia came out in those skimpy “booty shorts” that day (because she knew how to tempt Josh) and told him not to worry about her husband. She wanted Josh to stop by the next morning and pay her a visit.
“And I did and we had sex in her mom’s backyard,” Josh explained.
From that day on, Josh insisted, he would tell Heather he was going out to “apply for jobs,” but he was actually stopping by Emilia’s house to “have sex with her in her and her husband’s bed.”
This went on for about “three or four months,” Josh claimed. After that, Emilia would send her husband to his father’s house to stay so Josh could spend the night. As for Emilia, Josh suggested, when she decided to be with him, “she had to have all of me.” As time went on, Emilia would “make comments” about Heather, knowing that Josh was still in love with her, indicating that Heather was consistently and routinely going to come between them. Josh and Heather had kids. The way Emilia saw it, Josh later explained, she and Josh could never have a complete life together unless Heather was totally out of the picture.
By “comments,” Josh implied that Emilia began talking to him about getting rid of Heather at this time.
“I laughed it off,” Josh told me.
He believed she was joking around. He never took her seriously, he said.
Nonetheless, when Heather finally found out what was going on, the relationship—involving the three of them—became unpredictable and insalubrious, if not downright sleazy and salacious. There was one afternoon in late summer 2008 when Josh was on his way home from Emilia’s. At this time, according to Josh, Heather had no idea he was seeing Emilia. (However, I have an issue with that: Heather was smart. She knew damn well what woman Josh was sleeping with.) Nevertheless, as Josh drove home that day after having a sexual escapade with Emilia, his cell phone rang.
“Yeah? What do you want, Emilia?”
“Heather called here,” Emilia said.
“What did she say?” Josh asked quickly. He felt an adrenaline rush. This statement got his attention mighty quick.
“She was pissed.”
“What did you say to her, Emilia?”
Heather was fishing, Emilia explained. She had found her phone number in Josh’s things, but she had no idea who it was. So Heather called and began asking questions.
“I told her we spoke on the phone once before ... but she asked me, ‘Are you fucking Josh?’ I told her she needed to ask you that question.”
Josh became enraged. “What the hell, Emilia!”
Emilia explained further that Heather hung up on her after she said that.
“I’ll talk to you later,” Josh said.
Josh pulled into his driveway. There was Heather, waiting for him. She had her arms on her hips, shaking her head.
“Look, look . . . I don’t know who that was,” Josh pleaded with Heather after he got out of the car and Heather flung the accusation. “It’s just someone trying to stir up some shit with us.”
Heather bought it, Josh claimed.
After he did some additional explaining, calming her down, Josh went to bed that night, thinking the situation was behind them.
Heather got up as Josh slept and went through his phone. Emilia, by then, had left Josh six “crazy-ass text messages,” Josh recalled. Among them, these two:
Did little boy blue get into trouble?
Are you going to be able to come out and play anymore?
After the sarcasm, Emilia asked Josh where he wanted to me
et up for sex the following day. Emilia knew what she was doing, throwing it into Heather’s face.
Reading this, Josh said, Heather now knew for sure they were getting together.
Josh woke up the following morning and looked at his phone. He scrolled through the text messages, both outgoing and incoming, and saw fifty texts between Emilia and Heather from the previous night. They had spoken throughout that entire night. As he scrolled through them, Heather got up and stood behind him.
Several of those texts, Josh later alleged, referred to perhaps the three of them getting together for a “threesome” sometime soon. Heather had told Emilia it “would make Josh happy to do this because he always talks about being with another woman.”
“I knew I had been caught, so there was no way out of it but being honest,” Josh explained.
The three of them got together later on that day—but it certainly wasn’t for a ménage à trois.
CHAPTER 31
SPEAKING WITH EMILIA inside that abandoned trailer, Detective Brian Spivey felt he was finally getting to the truth of what had happened. They’d discussed the duct tape and agreed it was that common silver/gray tape most households had on hand, but Emilia had no idea where it might have come from (Josh had probably brought it with him was Emilia’s feeling).
Emilia said Josh brought Heather into the trailer under the guise of giving Heather some money he owed her; that was how Josh had convinced Heather to meet him at Emilia’s house and walk into the backyard.
Spivey planted his focus on the bag Emilia said she had seen placed over Heather’s head. He wanted specifics.
“I know there was dried blood on her forehead,” Emilia said as they stood, staring at the chair, that black plastic bag on the floor, a piece of silver duct tape nearby. The musty smell of old, wet newspapers, dead animals, cobwebs, dirt and mothballs permeated the air.
“There was blood on her forehead?” Spivey asked, somewhat startled by this new piece of information.
They talked about the bag being pulled over Heather head, but Emilia believed it was “open.”
Spivey wanted to know what kind of bag.
“Garbage bag ... like a black garbage bag.”
Just like the one on the ground by their feet.
Spivey thought: We’re standing in a crime scene.
They agreed that the bag must have been torn open, or Emilia wouldn’t have been able, as she put it, to “see her face.”
If there was any reservation on the MCSO’s part about whether Emilia was giving Josh up, the pregnant mother of three put it to rest when she next said: “[Josh] told me he hit her over the head with something to kind of shut her up. And that she tried to run for the door, and that’s when she hit the window—she broke the glass out of the window and he dragged her back. . . .”
Spivey asked a few more precise questions regarding this new disclosure and then wanted to know if Emilia had any idea what happened next.
“While he was tying her up, she urinated on herself,” Emilia revealed. “And I was told that he tied her up, put a bag over her head”—Emilia took a deep breath and sighed as she explained this—“and suffocated her, and he just ... he just held it there till she stopped moving.”
The way Emilia described Josh killing Heather Strong, his wife of not even eight weeks, he came across as a coldhearted, cold-blooded sociopath, killing the mother of his children without a shred of guilt or mercy, the same woman he had been involved with for eleven years. From what Emilia claimed, Josh murdered Heather, without a second thought, luring her to this trailer under a ruse, indicating premeditation, and sparing Heather no respite from a painful death she knew was coming.
Spivey asked Emilia where she had heard all of this. He wanted Emilia to be clear here in what she was saying.
Emilia said, “Josh.”
The reason why the bag was open, Emilia explained further, was because Josh had torn it open to check if Heather was still alive after he finished suffocating her.
The way Emilia described this scene, with the detail she had added, it seemed as if she had been there and witnessed it all herself.
Heather was fully clothed when Josh killed her, Emilia said. There was no tape over her mouth, but he did use tape to hold the bag in place around her neck. Emilia knew this because she said she had to tuck her fingers in between the tape and Heather’s carotid artery to see if she had a pulse.
A motive came into play when Spivey asked Emilia if she recalled anything else Josh had told her in relation to this terrifying tale of murder. Spivey had reservations about Emilia’s story, but he was keeping them to himself at this point.
“Just that he was going to make sure that she wasn’t going to take her kids from him again. . . .”
There was still an odor in the trailer, Emilia said, for some time after she saw Heather in that chair. She wondered what it was, and she drew the conclusion it must have been Heather’s body. She’d assumed then that Josh had stuffed it somewhere inside the trailer and left it there.
They discussed whether Josh had taken anything from Heather: jewelry, her wallet, any money. Evidence he was maybe hiding, which the MCSO could find and further tie him to the crime.
Emilia said she hadn’t heard anything from him about that.
Then Spivey hit Emilia with the obvious question: “I mean ... everybody else who asked, or everybody else who inquired, I mean, you . . . you knew what happened. But you just went along with—”
Emilia didn’t allow him to finish. She said, “Well, nobody ever asked. Everyone always asked Josh.”
They were outside the trailer now, standing near the door. A slight breeze blew the palms and tall grass easterly, making a calming, oceanic, swoosh sound. Spivey looked around. There was brush and overgrowth everywhere. He was searching for disturbed earth, maybe an area of overturned ground indicating someone had maybe dug a fresh hole recently.
“[James Acome] never talked to you about her?” Spivey asked.
“No,” Emilia said. She hadn’t had any contact with James for quite some time.
Spivey was a bit confused, or, rather, he came across this way. He wanted to know if Emilia was now saying that James and his buddy were not involved. And if so, why were they at the house that night? Spivey had an issue with them being at the home on the same night “that she’s dead, and, all of a sudden, they never come back.”
“Because that night when he came here,” Emilia said, “he (James) had left Sparr (a town’s name) at nine-thirty, and that’s when he had come here drunk to tell me she had stolen his phone. She (Heather) had stolen his necklace, and that he was looking for Josh because he was going to have Josh arrested for stealing property.” She maintained that James’s entire motivation for stopping over that night was to convince Emilia that Josh and Heather were “back together” and also working together to rip him off.
“And then he never came back?” Spivey asked.
“I haven’t had contact with him.”
“You have not talked to him since then?”
“No.”
Spivey paused as they walked back to the front yard.
“Is there anything else?”
Emilia looked at him. She had more.
CHAPTER 32
JOSH WAS STILL tired. As they left his mother’s house on March 19, Josh, Mike Mongeluzzo and Donald Buie continued talking. Josh might have pointed out where he thought Heather’s body was buried, but he had never implicated himself more than having knowledge of the murder. That alone was a serious charge—but not as severe as having actually killed the woman he had been telling cops was “the love of [his] life.”
Josh explained that it was Emilia who had given him Heather’s ATM card, his kids’ Social Security cards and birth certificates on the night Emilia moved in with him. That was right around March 1, just over three weeks prior to Josh’s arrest. Telling that story, Josh said Emilia came home one night and told him: “‘You never have to worry about Heather taking the
kids again.’” She was acting cocky, all high and mighty. There had always been a spiteful rivalry between Heather and Emilia, who could be extremely territorial when it pertained to her men. Heather, too, had not held back her feelings toward Emilia.
One neighbor reported that on the date Heather went missing, somewhere around 10:30 P.M., she heard a vehicle pull up to Emilia’s mother’s house and a “female” voice shout, “Joshua? . . . Joshua!” The house door opened. Josh stepped outside. That same female voice then shouted, “Fuck you, Joshua! Look what you traded me in for!” Then the vehicle took off speedily. It was then that Lily, as the neighbor described Emilia by her common nickname, came outside to find Josh fuming, ranting and raving. Lily yelled: “It’s not worth it. She is not worth it. Why are you even wasting your time?”
“What?” Josh told Buie he asked Emilia that night after she told him he did not have to worry about Heather any longer.
“You don’t have to worry about her ever interfering with our lives again,” Emilia supposedly added.
“Where is she at, Emilia?” Josh asked.
As Josh recalled this tale while they drove back to Major Crimes, Buie piped in: “Josh, let me bring something up. . . . You used that card. You used that card two days after.” The point Buie made was that Josh couldn’t have gotten hold of the card on or near March 1, as he had just claimed, because he had used it to withdraw money before that date.
Josh wrote this off as him being confused about the dates, asking Buie, “When did we move into that trailer over there in Pine Grove, man?”
Buie said they’d check into the date and let him know. But Josh had some explaining to do, Buie made clear. Here he was now trying to push the blame on Emilia when the MCSO had backed him up against a wall with dates.
What had happened?
It’s the smallest details—always—that catch liars.
“Josh, we need to know the truth, bro?” Buie said. His voice was calm. He was pleading more with Josh than trying to bully him. It was clear that Buie was saying there wasn’t much time left for them to discuss particulars of the case—and once the lawyers got involved, it was over. Josh was going to be on his own for good.
To Love and to Kill Page 11
