“What happened next?”
“Andrew came down the stairs about nine-thirty and told me I had a phone call. It was Barbara Butkis from the library. She said Gail was hurt . . . that I should come down to the library. Andrew and I left immediately. When I got there, no one would tell me anything.”
George was getting excited and antsy as he felt a lingering finger being pointed directly at him.
“Relax, Mr. Fulton,” one of the investigators said. This was not an interrogation; they were trying to develop information and see if George knew anything that might be helpful in finding his wife’s killer.
After a brief pause Wundrach asked, “Are you and your wife having any marital problems, Mr. Fulton?”
“No!” George answered quickly.
“Did you have an affair with your boss?”
“I did have an affair, and at one point wanted a divorce. But I am Catholic. I wanted to work things out. Gail and I were counseling with a priest from our parish. We went twice. I said I didn’t want to go anymore. I counseled personnel in the military, and counseling is not something that would work on me.”
“What is your relationship with your boss currently?”
“I still work for Donna Trapani.” He gave the name of the company. “But the company is going under and I am not getting paid for my work.”
“Okay, when did you end your relationship with Miss . . . What was her name again? . . . Oh, yeah, Trapani?”
“I was living with her in Florida and moved out in October 1998 to my own apartment. I moved back in with Gail in April of... let me see . . . 1999. Donna took that very hard. She came here during the weekend of July 4, 1999. I set up a meeting between Donna and Gail at a hotel—the ConCorde Inn in Rochester Hills. I left the room.... Gail soon left.... I stayed . . . with Donna and talked to her.”
Things were getting more interesting as George Fulton talked through it: How many guys would set up a sit-down with his mistress and his wife? There had to be more to it than just the two of them getting together to talk things out.
“Do you think that Donna could be responsible for your wife’s shooting?” Wundrach asked, quite curious about this new fact.
“No!” George said. “She could never do anything like that.”
“Did Gail have any enemies?”
“Gail had no enemies. . . .” For George, it was ridiculous even to say something like that. “I have no idea who could have done this.” George had a tone that indicated he wanted to leave.
“When was the last time you spoke to Donna?”
“I talked to Donna about four or five times today because of my work. I was on the phone with Donna when my son came down the stairs to tell me something happened at the library and Barbara was on the phone.”
David Ross asked George, who might have killed Gail?
“I. Don’t. Know.” He said these words angrily. “She was a sweet person and had no enemies.”
“Did you have any knowledge or involvement in your wife’s death?” Ross asked.
“No.”
“Listen, Mr. Fulton, would you be willing to take a polygraph—you know, a lie detector test—to help clear your name from our investigation?”
George became even angrier. He stood up. “No! I will not. I do not believe in polygraphs! And you know what,” he added, heading toward the door, “I’m all done talking here. I need to leave.”
Ross and Wundrach looked at each other.
They had rattled George Fulton’s cage.
But how?
9
THE SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT kept Emily and Andrew at the substation for quite some time that night and well into the next morning. It wasn’t until the sun seemed to be peeking its shine over the nearest mountain range, casting a hue of banana yellow across the lake, that Andrew and Emily finally went home. That statement Emily had given regarding knowing who did it, accusing “that woman”—on top of Emily talking about seeing how “it” happened—sparked some interest within the rank and file of the sheriff ’s department. Before taking Gail’s kids back to the house on Talon Circle, investigators separated Andrew and Emily and checked their hands and clothes for gun residue, a common galvanic skin response (GSR) test sometimes referred to by cops as the “invisible clue.” If either had shot a weapon within the past twenty-four hours (and had not been wearing gloves), this test would show traces of blow-back powder and residue from the gun going off in their hands.
Both Emily and Andrew tested negative.
“I’m sure they thought I was cuckoo,” Emily said later, referring to her paranormal statements.
Before they were taken home, Emily said, “I want to see my dad.” An investigator was taking a complete statement from her. “Where is he?”
“You cannot see your father until you’re finished here,” Emily claimed the investigator told her.
When they returned to the house, Emily and Andrew were emotionally and physically exhausted. What a night. As the fog of what had happened began to clear, the impact of Gail’s death settled. Their mother was gone. Gail was the kids’ rock, the anchor of the household. She was the go-to parent—the person they could depend on to be there for whatever the reason. Now she was gone. They’d have to call family and friends. Make arrangements. What a word—“arrangements”—to describe a death, as if you were setting up a dinner or meeting with school officials. There’d be a funeral. A mass. Tears. Questions. Anger. It was coming in waves, Emily felt, like a car heading into a busy intersection.
A collision course.
Yet, for Emily, when she speaks about that night and the following days, one gets a sense that it was almost as if days or weeks before it had occurred, she had seen a film of this night—and she had been expecting it.
“He was crying,” Emily said, discussing her father’s response. “He seemed really upset.” The magnitude of his wife’s murder had, apparently, just hit George Fulton.
After they had a moment together, Emily, with Andrew by her side, sat down next to George and said, “Dad, you know Donna did this, right?”
“What! No way! Not a chance.”
“How can you say that? That was the first thought that came to my mind without even thinking! How can you deny otherwise, Dad?”
George had his head in his hands. “No way. . . .”
Emily had a background with Donna Trapani, George’s boss and former mistress. They had spoken on several occasions over the phone and even met once at a nearby hotel. Emily felt she knew Donna. It all seemed to fit. Donna came up to Michigan—as she had in the past—from her home in Florida and took out the competition. The woman was crazy and insane. According to one former coworker, Donna Trapani was “extremely bipolar.” This was it. Donna had snapped and Gail paid the price. Gail had expressed an issue with Donna that might lead to one of them killing the other. Emily thought about this as George tried to talk her out of blaming Donna. Now it had come to pass. Mom was dead. What additional proof did any of them actually need?
“No, no . . . no!” George repeated, as if speaking from some sort of firsthand knowledge. “Not a chance. No, she didn’t, Emily.”
“I know my mom, with her own mouth, had talked about knowing what would happen to her.”
Gail’s exact words to Emily—spoken just a few months before her murder—stung Emily’s thoughts as she listened to her father protect his former lover: “This will not end until one of us is dead,” Gail had said, speaking about the tension and hostility between her and her husband’s mistress.
Back at the OCSD in Pontiac, the main hub of the investigation, Sergeant Alan Whitefield called Donna Trapani, the woman George said he had worked for, and the kids said—George later admitting reluctantly—he had also had a tumultuous affair with at one time. It was near one o’clock on the morning after Gail’s murder. Now was as good a time as any to get an idea, if possible, from “the other woman” regarding where she stood in the relationship with George, and, maybe most important, w
here she was at nine o’clock the night before. Logistically speaking, it was probably impossible—if Donna was in Florida—for her to fly into Pontiac, kill Gail, and fly back home (especially without leaving a paper trail). Still, Whitefield needed to find out what Donna was doing at the time of Gail’s murder, and if she was, in fact, in Florida. Anyone can feign where they’re calling from and roll over calls to another line. Just because George had said Donna was calling from Florida, it didn’t mean it was so. Donna Trapani could have been at a nearby hotel, for all the OCSD knew.
Donna lived in the Panhandle of Florida, outside Panama City. During his second interview George had claimed to be talking to Donna between the hour of nine and nine-thirty that night—that’s why he had been so adamant about Donna having had nothing to do with killing Gail.
But then maybe the guy just didn’t want to believe it.
Whitefield needed to verify George’s “alibi.” Maybe they were covering for each other? After all, George had had the opportunity to kill his wife. And the wife in the way of an affair was one of the oldest motives for murder. Phone records would take some time, so the next best thing was an interview.
“Mrs. Trapani, this is Sergeant Alan Whitefield with the Oakland County Sheriff ’s Department in Michigan.”
“Yes . . . yes,” Donna said in her scratchy I-just-woke-up voice. She sounded groggy and tired. It was late, about 1:00 A.M., Panama City, Florida, time. Donna claimed to have been awoken by the ringing telephone. “What is it—who is this?”
“Do you know George Fulton?” Whitefield asked right out of the box.
“Yes . . . yes. He works for me.”
“When was the last time you spoke with Mr. Fulton, ma’am?”
Donna thought about it a moment. “Earlier tonight. He paged me and I returned the call.” Then she added— without being asked, Whitefield wrote in his report of the phone call—“I spoke to him maybe four to six times last night all together.”
“What is the nature of your relationship with Mr. Fulton?”
“We work together in the health care business. I own the company. It’s about to go bankrupt. George is helping me with the books.”
Whitefield asked when they had last spoken.
Donna didn’t hesitate: “Between eight and eight-thirty.” (That meant nine to nine-thirty in Michigan because of the time difference.) “He paged me about seven forty-five and I called him back as soon as I could.”
As they spoke, it was clear to Whitefield that there still may have been more to the relationship than employee and employer. When he broached the subject, Donna said flat out: “Yes, I had an affair with George. Hell, we even lived together for three months!”
“What happened?”
“He left me and got his own apartment [in Florida]. He wanted to save his marriage, so he then moved back to Michigan in April [1999]. We have remained close friends.”
But there was more—plenty. Whitefield asked Donna to explain.
“Well, he asked me to come to Michigan in July. The Fourth [of July]. He wanted me to talk to Gail.” Donna didn’t explain why George had requested Donna fly up to Michigan, meet him and Gail at a hotel, and have a little powwow: the mistress, the wife, and the husband. It seemed odd if the affair was over. (Donna didn’t mention it here, but this meeting involved a baby and a terminal illness.) “I told George to get Gail some counseling. He told me she would talk to a priest if she needed to speak with someone.”
“When was the last time you were with George?” Whitefield asked, meaning sexually.
“August seventeenth,” Donna said. How could she forget? “It was my birthday. He broke it off with me that night.” She never mentioned if they had started up the relationship again or why; but it was clear that the affair was reignited after that Fourth of July meeting with Gail—if only for that one birthday night celebration in August.
Whitefield knew there would come a time when the sheriff ’s department conducted a formal, longer, much more detailed interview with Donna, likely in person. Talking to Donna, nearing the end of their conversation, Whitefield realized she had not once asked why the sheriff ’s department in Michigan was asking her such pointed questions in the middle of the night. It was as if Donna knew something she wasn’t sharing.
“Thanks,” Whitefield said. He didn’t want to broach the subject now.
Then Donna spoke up, suddenly, as if she’d had a second thought: “What is this about, anyway?”
“George’s wife has been killed.”
“Oh, no . . . not Gail,” Donna said. “How are George and the kids doing?”
Whitefield didn’t know how to answer.
“Well,” Donna said, “thank you for calling.”
10
THE MORNING OF October 5, 1999, now almost twelve hours after police had found Martha Gail Fulton barely breathing in the parking lot of the Orion Township Library, investigators were certain of a few things: One, George Fulton had several reasons to want his wife taken out; and two, George, whom investigators knew to be a smart man, West Point–educated and a military officer at one time, had left out the crucial fact that he had a mistress in Florida during their first conversations with him. It wasn’t until Andrew Fulton, George and Gail’s son, dropped that bombshell that investigators knew about Donna. George had been interviewed at the substation briefly, but he had failed to talk about his relationship with Donna Trapani. Investigators saw this as a sign of George hiding something.
“Surveillance,” said one of the sergeants in charge, James A’Hearn. “Let’s follow him.” From the moment he met George Fulton, A’Hearn did not like him.
It was a good idea to watch George’s house.
In the meantime Chris Wundrach, who was taking over a pivotal role in the case along with other members of the sheriff ’s department, got in touch with a coworker of Gail’s who seemed to shed some light on a few personal issues. Cops liked to hear several witnesses—who did not know each other and had never met—reveal the same basic facts. There was credibility in numbers and independent, similar facts being corroborated.
It was 8:30 A.M., and Wundrach was sitting in the substation across from a woman who had heard about what had happened the previous night and wanted to share a conversation she’d had recently with Gail. Word of her murder had traveled through town like a chain e-mail. Gail’s coworkers began to think about her unstable and tenuous situation at home with George.
“Gail told me about an affair her husband was having with a woman in Florida,” the woman reported to Wundrach. Gail’s coworker made it clear that she was personally appalled by this. Gail was the most loving, caring, kindhearted person this woman had ever met. Everything Gail did, she had done for her family—or for others. Gail was a churchgoing wife who respected the sacrament of marriage and did everything possible to work it out with George—even against her better judgment of knowing that a “playa” hardly ever changes his style of play.
“Did she say anything about the affair—any details?” Wundrach asked.
“Well, she did. Gail told me she had even met the woman once at a hotel in Rochester Hills.”
“Did Gail talk about the meeting?”
“Yeah, yeah,” the woman explained. “Gail told me [George’s mistress] had claimed to be terminally ill and she wanted George to move to Florida to take care of her. Gail explained how the woman had looked her in the eyes and said, ‘You’ve had him for twenty-five years. Now it’s my turn!’”
Wundrach realized this was something Donna Trapani had left out of her conversation with Alan Whitefield the previous night.
“When was the last time you spoke to Gail?” Wundrach pressed.
“We talked several times.... Um, a few weeks ago was the last time we really talked.”
“What’d she say?”
“She said, actually”—the woman thought about it a moment, hesitated, almost embarrassed for Gail to have to admit it, then continued—“. . . she and George were trying
to work things out.”
Surveillance on George Fulton and his residence by a detective from the sheriff ’s department started as George arrived home that morning at eleven thirty-eight. George pulled into his driveway on Talon Circle and drove into the garage, unaware that the OCSD was watching him, recording his every move. The neighborhood was a nice middle-class suburb, a cookie-cutter subdivision of new homes owned by good, wholesome, hardworking people, just a twenty-minute ride north of Pontiac. The Fulton house was a 5.4-mile drive from the library where Gail had been murdered, a straight shot north on M-24, then left onto West Clarkston Road, right onto Joslyn. No one disputed the fact that George Fulton worked hard and took care of his family materially and monetarily, giving them the finer things life could offer a middle-class family in suburban America.
“Although my dad,” Emily commented, “made it clear to me that he was not paying for college.”
It was George’s character and his behavior that had gotten him to this point and put his actions under a law enforcement microscope.
The surveillance was based on the notion that George had failed to tell investigators he’d had an affair until after he must have figured out that his kids had let the proverbial “cad” out of the bag. Why would he hide that fact? If he had withheld one piece of vital information, the investigators wondered, what else was the guy holding onto?
Cars came and went, in and out of the driveway. People, young and old, walked in and out of the Fulton house all morning long. One might guess friends were stopping by and comforting the family. By early afternoon, however, George was back on the road, and the undercover investigator watching him followed close behind as Gail’s husband took off from the house and traveled north on M-24 toward Broad Street and West Clarkston Road, heading in the direction of the lake.
Kiss of the She-Devil Page 4
