To Love and to Kill Page 2

  Heather didn’t even have her own cell phone or computer back then, during their early days in Florida. She had been totally cut off from everyone back home.

  Just the way Josh liked it.

  Then, in early 2008, after nearly four years of living with Josh, raising two kids and going through hell and back, Heather showed up in Columbus one day.

  “I’ve finally left him,” she told Misty.

  “Thank God.”

  Misty and Heather’s grandmother was sick at the time. She was actually dying. So they bonded over that family crisis. The two women picked up their “sister” relationship from back in the day and stayed in touch daily. Misty kept telling her cousin it was all going to be okay. There was no need to worry about anything. She’d help with the kids. She’d help Heather start over. The key to it was for Heather to stay the hell away from Josh, who was still in Florida. If Heather could do that, she had a chance. Everyone in her family believed this.

  There was one day when Misty went to see their grandmother, who was on her last days. When Misty returned, Heather was gone.

  And so were her bags.

  Damn.

  “Josh had ... brought her back to Florida,” Misty later recalled. No one knew it, but he snuck into town, convinced Heather she needed him and drove her back.

  Heather had gone willingly, apparently. She wanted to work things out for the kids’ sake. That was Heather—always yearning to find that pristine image of the American family unit on the other side of a dark rainbow. What mother, after all, doesn’t want her children’s father to be a part of their lives? Maybe Josh was changing. He was angry and sometimes violent; but when he was good, he was a nice guy. They got along and loved each other.

  Or was Heather locked in that same fantasy that many abused women see in their dreams?

  I’ll give him just one more chance. He’ll change. You’ll see.

  Things didn’t work out for Heather. Josh didn’t change. So Heather moved out and found someone else to live with in Florida, thinking it would be better for the kids if she stayed in the state this time. The place she found had a computer. Heather now had a cell phone. She and Misty were in contact just about every day, sometimes several times a day.

  “Myspace, cell phone, e-mail,” Misty said.

  But then, suddenly, it stopped. Boom! One day Heather wasn’t communicating anymore. Misty and Heather had been talking for months. Heather was saying that Josh had a girlfriend now. He was letting go. Heather had someone new, too. There had been some issues between Heather and Josh’s new girlfriend, and Josh sometimes seemed to want to reconcile with Heather, but Heather was saying things were beginning to settle down. They finally had figured out that maybe they just weren’t meant to be together. Josh seemed to accept this.

  Now Misty was concerned, however. It was late in the day on February 25, 2009, and she had not heard from Heather in well over a week. Misty knew damn well that something was up. It was so unlike Heather not to call or e-mail for this long a period.

  So Misty called Heather’s brother, Jacob, and asked if he had heard from her.

  “No,” Jacob said.

  “Any idea where she is?”

  Jacob responded, “I got a call from [Heather’s friend]. She was concerned.”

  “Concerned? How so?”

  “Well, Heather had all her belongings over there at her friend’s. Now all of her stuff is gone and she is missing.”

  “Missing?” Misty answered. She felt her stomach turn. Her body now felt numb. Then that life-will-never-be-the-same-after-today feeling came on all at once. Misty felt it.

  “Missing”—the word that no one wants to hear. It sounded so final.

  So dangerous.

  So deadly.

  CHAPTER 3

  MISTY KNEW HER cousin well enough. If Heather had gone off on her own, she would have called Misty, sent her a text or e-mail. She would have said where she was going. Even if Heather wanted to skip away under the radar, she would have told Misty.

  But maybe not? Perhaps Heather was embarrassed, or she just wanted some downtime, alone?

  Misty thought about another possible scenario. Heather had probably gone back to Josh. She didn’t want to admit it. She was ashamed. All this breaking up and getting back together. It went back a decade between them. Heather was locked in that revolving-door cycle with the father of her kids. She and Josh, despite fighting and threatening each other, having each other arrested, seemed to always find their way back into the same bed.

  Misty thought: I better call her work.

  Maybe someone there knew something.

  Within a few minutes, Misty got Heather’s boss on the phone.

  “Have you seen her?”

  “No.”

  “How long?”

  “Over a week ... and I’m deeply concerned.”

  Misty now went back to being seriously worried. That’s how these things go. The emotional seesaw effect: Your gut tells you the worst has happened. Your heart tells you to hang on—there’s a simple explanation for it all. You go back and forth.

  “Go ahead and call the sheriff’s department,” Heather’s boss suggested. It was time someone got law enforcement involved.

  “Yeah . . . ,” Misty agreed.

  Officer Beth Billings from the Marion County Sheriff’s Office (MCSO) responded on February 24, 2009, calling Misty in Mississippi. Billings explained she had gotten a report of a missing person and was following up.

  “Since February fifteenth,” Misty explained to Billings, after the sheriff’s deputy asked when the last time she had heard from Heather actually was. “It’s unusual not to hear from her. We were keeping in touch daily.”

  They spoke about Josh next. Misty said Josh had been arrested in January 2009 for threatening Heather and her then-boyfriend. But they’d reconciled, Misty believed. What neither of them knew then was that Heather had apparently dropped the charges against Josh.

  “They actually just got married [in December 2008], but had separated,” Misty explained, trying to give Billings a bit of background regarding how complicated the relationship had been.

  Billings said the MCSO would look into Heather’s whereabouts. Yet, she warned Misty that this would not be an easy mystery to solve. Missing person cases involving adults are tough to investigate. Nine times out of ten times, the adult chooses to go missing. She takes off, doesn’t tell anyone, moves to another town and starts over. Running is often an easier choice than dealing with the stressors life can sometimes bring. There have been cases of wives returning home from work, husbands doing the same, only to find their spouses gone. Vanished. Nothing afoul. Nothing even missing. But the spouse wanted to start another life, in another town, with another partner, and did not have the guts to say it.

  Although Misty and Heather’s boss felt different here, Heather was her own person. She had dreams. Goals. No one knew her completely. She kept things to herself.

  MCSO SHERIFF’S DEPUTY Beth Billings drove to Lane Road in Reddick, just opposite Orange Lake, where Heather had been shacking up, the sheriff’s deputy had been told, with a guy named James1 Acome, whom Billings described in her report as Heather’s “live-in boyfriend.”

  James had met Heather some years prior, when Heather and Josh first moved into town. They were all friends at one time. James and a junior high school friend of his, Emilia Yera, had actually been part of a group of friends that hung out with Josh and Heather. James had dated Emilia for “a number of years,” he later said, “on and off.” Emilia was young and attractive: thick, curly, shiny dark black hair, bolstering her Latino heritage against perfectly clear olive skin. Emilia was at one time considering a modeling career. Responsibility caught up to her and she abandoned that plan after she and James had a child together.

  The four of them—James, Emilia, Heather and Josh—were tight for a while. They drank. Partied. Watched TV. Went to the movies. Then it was over. Each sort of went his or her separate way, but they st
ill saw each other once in a great while.

  James was at the house he lived in with Heather when Deputy Billings arrived. After being prompted, he explained that back on February 15, Heather came home from work in a frantic state. It was near 3:30 P.M. Her shift that day wasn’t supposed to end until eleven. She was working a double.

  “What was wrong with Miss Strong, Mr. Acome?” Billings asked, sizing up James Acome and the inside of the home he and Heather rented. This area of Florida was populated with locals. There were no snowbirds around these parts, the men and women from the North who flew down for the winter. Mostly, the area was run-down trailers, houses in need of makeovers and repairs, swampland, locals looking for work, which was never going to be available, and young kids hanging out, moving from one part of life to the next. People drank around here. They fished in the lake. Hunted frogs and gators. Sat on their porches bullshitting about their neighbors.

  “Don’t really know for sure,” James explained. He had a wiry look to him. Blazing blue eyes, dark brown—nearly black—hair (tightly cropped), James was about five feet ten inches, but thin at 150 pounds. He sweated a lot. He’d had his share of trouble with the law. “She came home and said that she had received an ‘emergency telephone call’ from Josh while she was at work.” James explained to Billings who Joshua Fulgham was and his relationship with Heather.

  Deputy Billings felt James knew a bit more about the call, but he was holding back for some reason.

  “She didn’t say why? Or what Mr. Fulgham wanted?”

  “Well . . . she did. She said Josh called to tell her he was taking possession of their two kids because of me.”

  “You, sir?”

  “Yeah. Josh told Heather he was pissed off that I’d had a relationship with a sixteen-year-old girl.”

  “Okay, well, what did Heather do?”

  “I’m not sure. I left right after she came home. I had to go somewhere. I assumed she’d be here when I got home. We only have one vehicle. There was no way for her to leave.” James said that when he got home, he searched the house and noticed some of Heather’s belongings, along with the kids’, were gone.

  “Just a few of the kids’ things, and nothing else looked suspicious,” James added.

  “That’s all?”

  “No. A few days went by. I didn’t hear anything. Then Josh called.”

  “What did Mr. Fulgham say?” Billings asked.

  “He told me to pack my shit and get out of the house. That him and Heather were back together. He was moving back in. He told me not to try and contact Heather ever again.”

  “Did you leave?”

  “I waited a day and moved out. I have not returned since today. The electric bill was in my name, so I needed to come back and get that disconnected.”

  “Anything else?” Billings wanted to know.

  That was all James Acome said he could offer.

  CHAPTER 4

  JOSHUA FULGHAM WAS the first to admit that he was not John Q. Public, briefcase in hand, kissing his wife and children on the cheek every weekday morning, before he headed out the door with a steaming cup of coffee in hand, hopping into his Taurus and heading toward another day at the office. Josh was anything but, actually. Joshua Fulgham was a criminal for years: fraud and larceny and assault on the top of his rap sheet. Yet, as he grew up in the down-home country life of Mississippi, it was a time that was mostly devoid of him getting into serious trouble, he explained to me. This was more or less a period of survival for him as his mother raised his sister and him “on her own” and then unwittingly, and unknowingly, brought a monster into their household.

  “For some reason, he liked to beat me,” Josh said of his mother’s boyfriend. “I don’t know why he felt he had to do so, but he did it on a regular basis.”

  Josh pointed out that he was not talking about your average “spanking,” which was maybe popular in other households back then.

  “No,” Josh said, “that son of a bitch would beat me with his fists like I was a grown man. But I was seven years old.”

  Josh reckoned this was one reason why “I turned out so tough and mean myself.”

  Before long, Josh, his mother and sister moved from the Columbus area (where Josh had spent his early youth) to Clarkson, Mississippi. Clarkson had a population then of about three hundred, Josh recalled. It was there that Josh’s mother dropped the abuser and met a man who would soon become Josh’s stepfather. Josh had fond memories of this man, who took him fishing and taught him how to hunt.

  “They had a little girl when I was nine years old,” Josh remembered.

  The family stayed in Clarkson until 2000. Josh had turned nineteen. It was some years before that, Josh explained, when he “gave up on life.” Something happened and, as Josh later put it, he told himself to “fuck it.” He then dropped any dreams he had as a child, thus lacking any motivation to move on toward a better life. His grandmother had died suddenly one day. Josh had been “very close” to his “mamau,” as he called her. “I just gave up hope for everything,” Josh remembered, after losing her. On top of that list was school. Then he started getting into trouble. By the time he was fifteen, Josh recalled, he was already facing an arson charge and had been sent off to a reformatory, the Oakley Training School, in Raymond, Mississippi, a place with a military-style regimen for what the school said was mostly “nonviolent offenders.”

  That first time in, they sent Josh home after eight weeks because of overcrowding. He wasn’t acting up. He had done what he was told. They gave him a chance.

  Home, however, without much discipline and no one looking over his shoulder, Josh found more trouble. He had heard from local kids that a house in the neighborhood had a lot of guns. So Josh decided to kick the door open one night and steal the weapons so he could sell them for “drug money.” By then, Josh was already caught for booze and dope and was not yet old enough to drive a car.

  Needless to say, Josh was sent back to Oakley to complete his program. This time, they said there would be no trouble finding Josh a bed, and overcrowding wouldn’t be a problem for him. He had been given an opportunity to prove he could be rehabilitated and had failed. Josh was now facing hard time.

  He got out just before turning sixteen. It was on that night of his birthday when Josh and a friend went out to a local restaurant in Mathiston, Mississippi, that Josh sat down and looked up from his meal to see a gorgeous, knockout waitress walking by his table.

  Josh took one look. She was perfect in every way. There was chemistry immediately, he recalled.

  “Heather,” the waitress said her name.

  “Hi, Heather ... I’m Josh.”

  The boy lit up as though he had never seen a female before.

  At the time, Heather wore her hair blond, which contrasted nicely against her striking blue eyes and porcelain skin. She was young, naive, not yet ready to take on a boy with the life experiences Josh had accumulated.

  Josh was taken. He couldn’t eat.

  “I knew I had to have her,” Josh remembered. “She was such a pretty girl.”

  They started dating and it got serious right away. Josh had a girlfriend at the time, whom he was “just crazy about,” he said. He’d known her since they were ten years old. “[She] was the love of my life,” Josh claimed. But still, there was something about Heather. It was as if they connected on a deeper level—from the first moment, the energy, Josh felt, could not be denied. He had to act on it.

  Not long after this, Josh was out drinking one night with friends and happened to get into a fight with a local cop, whom Josh made a point to say later, he “pummeled.” That alleged ass-whupping Josh had given to the cop got him tossed back into Oakley, where he stayed for quite some time. With Heather alone on the outside, Josh told her she could always count on his family if she ever needed anything while he was locked up. In fact, according to Josh, Heather took him up on that offer one night when she arrived at Josh’s mother’s house with her bags. She claimed to have been
sexually assaulted by someone she knew and wanted a safe place to stay.

  “Of course,” Josh’s mother said.

  Josh was happy about it because it meant he knew where she was. He didn’t have to worry about Heather stepping out.

  After getting out of Oakley for a third and fourth time, Josh said he realized the way he viewed life was not getting him anywhere. He needed to make changes. He’d gone through a tough time, according to him, leaving that girlfriend he had before Heather, and felt he was giving up the love of his life for the lust he felt for Heather. (Incidentally, this would be a recurring theme in the life and times of Joshua Fulgham. The grass was always greener from where Josh saw it.) But when he returned home, with Heather now living at his house, he felt as though he was lucky to have her. Heather was good-hearted; she had a tender soul. They got along great. A year and a half went by, Josh had gotten a job building and setting up trailer homes while Heather—both of them now considered adults, eighteen years old and over—was now pregnant with their first child.

  Another problem entered their lives, however. As Heather was about to give birth to a daughter, whom they would call Carol-Lynn (pseudonym), Josh said he was then introduced to what become the second love of his life.

  Crystal meth.

  “From the very first time I did it,” Josh said years later, “that is all I cared about and worked for.”

  Even after Carol-Lynn was born, a time when Josh tried desperately to stop doing the drug, he continued.

  Afterward, though, Josh got a job working on a riverboat, “making good money.” He and Heather were still living at his mom’s. Soon Josh was able to purchase a home and he had even stayed away from the meth.

  This fleeting moment of normalcy, however, didn’t last. Within a short period, he was back not only doing the drug, but hanging out with people who were cooking it. Now Josh’s addiction went from zero to one thousand. He was so strung out, Josh took some time off to try and purify his body by going cold turkey. That week turned into two weeks. He was fired from his job. He and Heather now had nothing.