To Love and to Kill Page 5

  It was nothing hot and heavy right away, but it progressed through 2007 after twenty-two-year-old Adam Stover was killed in that car accident. Emilia would “occasionally” even stay with Josh at his trailer. It was a strange relationship in many ways, one that had started on a notion of them going to a hotel to make an amateur porn film and then turning into them laughing about it after Adam was killed, becoming closer after that death, leaning on each other for support.

  “Like I say, me and Heather’s sex life was in the dumps [when I met Emilia],” Josh told me, adding, perhaps without realizing how insulting and chauvinistic it sounded: “Even though Emilia did not have the prettiest face, she had a nice little set of legs and a nice little fat ass. . . .” It was a few weeks after Josh had left his phone number with Emilia in Tennessee that she called. He picked her up. “We shared a twelve-pack of Bud Light”—ah, those early memories of a budding romance—“and just rode around the back roads for a couple of hours.”

  Josh pulled over by the edge of Orange Lake. They stared out into the sparkling water, drinking and talking.

  “What do you want to do?” Josh asked, looking over at Emilia, smiling, taking a pull from his beer.

  Emilia, Josh recalled, straddled him without warning as they were sitting in the car. She sat on his crotch and grinded his penis hard.

  Emilia was feeling those beers.

  “Well, what do you want me to do?” she asked.

  “You already know what I want.”

  Josh drove over to a friend’s house. He and Emilia went into an empty bedroom. Of that first sexual experience with Emilia, Josh remembered: “This woman rocked my world like no other woman ever has.” He recalled “sleeping with twenty-two women” throughout his life, but none “could hold a candle” to Emilia. She knew her way around a body and how to please a man, Josh insisted.

  “Even though she already had three children,” Josh explained, once again not realizing how offensive and narrow-minded he sounded, “she was not hurt in that area. I could not believe she’d had her kids naturally, with everything in as good a shape it was in.”

  Josh had a little taste of Emilia on that night and he was hooked. She had him.

  “It got to the point where every day I got home from work, me and Heather was arguing, I showered and ran to Emilia. . . . I was in lust, like a sixteen-year-old schoolboy.”

  Sex, sex . . . and more sex. Josh could not get enough of Emilia. He had to have her as often as he could. And Emilia was right there, willing and always able to provide him with what he loved.

  According to Josh, it wasn’t until nearly a year after he hooked up with Emilia that Heather confronted him about his leaving the mobile home all the time. Heather had a feeling, he said, that he had been stepping out, but never really said anything. They had been trying to work things out by giving the relationship a chance.

  Still, it wasn’t the dope this time around, menacing the relationship; it was this other woman.

  “Heather didn’t know who it was then, only that I was fucking around on her,” Josh recalled.

  Fed up with Josh and his running off to another woman anytime they fought, Heather packed up her things and her kids and went back to Mississippi to go live with her mother. It didn’t matter who it was that Josh was banging; the fact that he was out and about, sleeping with another woman, was enough.

  Heather was done.

  “Two weeks after she was gone, I ended up quitting my job and heading back up to Mississippi because I could not live without seeing my kids,” Josh told me.

  Once again, he chased what he could not have.

  Josh’s youngest was about to turn one. Josh didn’t want to miss his birthday. He needed to be part of the kids’ lives, regardless of what Heather thought or wanted. Yet, he also hoped to reconcile with Heather.

  It took him a few weeks, but Josh got a job while back in his old stomping grounds. He and Heather hooked up once again and seemed to be getting along. He’d left Emilia kind of high and dry; but according to Josh, he didn’t have any sort of deep connection with Emilia besides that unquenchable thirst she put in him for the best sex of his life. There was no agreement between them that they were exclusive, Josh suggested. The relationship with Emilia was always a rebound, or simply a sexual one.

  Problems between Heather and Josh began again because “I was not making any money whatsoever while back home in Mississippi,” Josh said.

  He had been in Mississippi for about five months and decided it was time to go back to Florida. It was late summer 2008 by then. Josh knew he could make more money in Florida; he had developed contacts and knew where to find steady work. Plus, Emilia was in Florida. All that Josh had thought about since being gone was the sex he had been getting from Emilia before he left. As much as he tried to stay away from her, he later claimed, the sex kept calling him back—especially when he and Heather were not getting along. So Josh drove to Florida and went straight over to Emilia’s mother’s house, looking for her.

  Josh said he knocked and knocked. No one answered the door, even though he could tell people were shuffling around inside.

  So he left.

  A few days later, Josh ran into someone he and Emilia knew.

  “Have you seen her around?” Josh asked.

  His friend could tell Josh was looking to hook up. “Um, you don’t know?” the friend asked.

  “Know what?”

  Josh’s friend laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” Josh wondered. He felt like a fool who had not been let in on the joke.

  “She went and got married, man. You didn’t hear? Emilia and Jamie Carr.”

  Josh knew Jamie. He couldn’t believe this. Never saw it coming.

  As he thought about it, Josh began to feel that Emilia getting married might actually be a blessing in disguise—maybe it was that sign he needed, telling him he was crazy for lusting after this woman when he had Heather and their kids. It was a good reason not to get back with Emilia and destroy any chance he had with Heather and their children for a life together. Josh could tell Heather that he was through with his year-plus “fling.” But now that Emilia was married, the way Josh saw it, their relationship, whatever it was, definitely had come to an end.

  Now Josh was thinking of a way to get back with Heather, who had moved back to Florida that fall of 2008 and had started working at the Petro again. But regardless of what Josh would later say, Heather had no intention of getting back with him. She was done. The history between them was too vast, too violent, too much had happened. It was time both moved on. Sure, they had kids, but Heather didn’t care this time around, she was telling friends. She needed to end things with this guy. It would never work. As many times as they had tried, it always turned out the same.

  Bad.

  As he left that friend after hearing about Emilia’s marriage, Josh ran into Emilia’s uncle, who was riding down the street on his bicycle.

  “Hey, man, can you give me a lift home?” the uncle asked.

  Josh put the bike into his car and drove Emilia’s uncle over to Emilia’s mother’s house. As they pulled into the driveway, Josh saw Emilia’s truck and realized she was home.

  “I’m stopping here,” Josh said he told the uncle as he pulled over, parking up the road from the house. “I don’t want to see her.”

  As the uncle got out of the car, Josh claimed, “Emilia came out in some little booty shorts and so I got out and approached her.”

  “Where’s your husband at, Emilia?” Josh said in a sarcastic manner. He couldn’t believe she went and got married. What the hell!

  “How do you know?”

  “I found out.”

  Emilia seemed surprised. She didn’t tell Josh then, but the marriage was just about over, anyway. She and Jamie had been kidding themselves. They were planning to divorce.

  “Are you happy, Emilia?” Josh asked.

  “I was happy,” Emilia said, “until right now when I seen you. Now I’m confused
.”

  “Where’s your husband?” Josh asked again. Josh knew he was in jail. The uncle had told him.

  “At work,” Emilia said.

  Josh laughed.

  “Okay, so he’s in jail.”

  According to Josh’s recollection, Emilia’s phone rang at that moment. It was Jamie Carr, who explained he had been let out of jail and needed a ride home.

  Emilia hung up and told Josh she had to go get Jamie. Turning and leaving, however, Emilia said, “Why don’t you drop by here tomorrow—come see me.”

  Josh knew it was trouble.

  “Maybe . . . ,” he said. “We’ll see.”

  Who was Josh Fulgham kidding? He drove away counting down the minutes.

  CHAPTER 14

  THE MCSO FINALLY got a lead on Heather’s whereabouts. It was March 18, 2009. Two MCSO detectives took a ride to an Ocala Publix supermarket after receiving information that Heather’s debit card had been used there back on March 3, at 9:11 A.M. It was an exciting bit of evidence for the MCSO. The supermarket’s ATM machines were equipped with video surveillance, so detectives could sit down and watch the video from that transaction and find out if it was Heather withdrawing the money. Who knew—perhaps Heather was hiding out for some strange reason? Ocala didn’t seem like a place she would normally go to use an ATM, so it was possible she was trying to stay under the radar.

  Forty-two dollars had been withdrawn from the work account where Heather’s last paycheck had been deposited automatically. The manager of the supermarket met both detectives and gave them a CD of that entire day. Publix had a camera pointed directly at the ATM machine. When they got back to Major Crimes, the detectives popped in the CD and had a look.

  A male, bald, in good shape, wearing what one detective described as a T-shirt depicting a “commercial type leaf blower on his back” had withdrawn the funds.

  It surely wasn’t Heather. She was nowhere in sight.

  After zooming in on the T-shirt the man wore, they learned the shirt advertised a local lawn service company.

  “The estranged husband, Joshua Fulgham,” said one detective to the other, “he works for that lawn service. . . .”

  The MCSO had who it believed to be Josh Fulgham withdrawing money from Heather’s account more than two weeks after she went missing.

  Huge red flag.

  CHAPTER 15

  WHEN A CASE opens up, sometimes it moves as fast as detectives can absorb the information and run it down. The MCSO had developed another bit of interesting evidence during that same March 18 day. Once they put their focus on Josh Fulgham as a potential suspect in his wife’s disappearance, things started to fall in place. After investigators visited the school where Josh and Heather’s oldest child attended classes, they learned from the principal that Josh had actually withdrawn his child from that school and registered her at another school, closer to his home. Apparently, Josh had shown the school a letter signed by Heather giving Josh full custody of the children. The school had a copy of the letter.

  While that was happening, Detective Donald Buie had interviewed James Acome, Heather’s boyfriend, and a female whom both Josh and Heather knew. During those interviews, Buie heard this from James Acome: “Heather left on a Greyhound bus bound for Mississippi on that last day she was seen around here.”

  Buie grew up in Gainesville, Florida. Gainesville is south of Jacksonville, in the northern part of the state. There was no family plan of going into law enforcement or some tragic event in Buie’s life pushing him toward a career as a cop.

  “I just decided one day to go into law enforcement, and there I was,” he said.

  Buie had been working for Cox Communications when the law enforcement bug bit and he decided to go for it. His first job was at the University of Florida Police Department. From there, Buie found himself working just outside Tallahassee, in a small police department in Perry, where he truly learned the ins and outs of community policing. It was 1998 when Buie took a job at the MCSO and made it into Major Crimes as a detective the old-school way: pounding the pavement, paying his dues. He had eight years in Major Crimes before the Heather Strong case came across his radar and he began to see that it needed further investigation.

  Looking at the reports, Buie had a strong suspicion that Heather had not left town. The case just had that feel. But before he had a chance to develop the gut instinct, Buie later pointed out, it was the system the MCSO had in place that actually began to point out that this was more than your run-of-the-mill missing person case.

  “To give credit where due,” Buie said, “the girls we call ‘Star Operators’ get the cases . . . and they write them up in the computer.” From there, the detectives and other investigators have a look to see where they can help maybe fill in the gaps. Detectives and officers can call into the Star Operator system and dictate a report (instead of sitting down and typing it out), so it gets into the system very quickly. It’s an extremely efficient and fast way to get reports into the system so everyone can have access to them. “The Star Operators see hundreds of cases throughout the year they write up in the computers and begin to develop a sense for them,” Buie added. “They saw this case of Heather Strong going missing and something just didn’t appear to be right. And that’s how the case was brought to my attention.”

  Sometimes it just starts with a cop having a feeling. Buie then had his boss, Brian Spivey, look at it—and that was when he heard Spivey’s feeling that Heather was dead.

  Buie read through the case one day in mid-March. “And I immediately felt something was wrong. Lot of red flags. There was a lot of history between Josh and Heather.... Even if Heather didn’t live a grand lifestyle, she still worked as hard as she could to provide for her and her kids. It was unlike her to disappear. This was obvious right away to me.”

  One thing Buie noticed was that nobody had interviewed Josh and Heather’s oldest child. She was eight at the time. He wrote himself a note to get over to Josh’s mother’s, where the kids were staying, and talk to the child as soon as possible.

  Another interesting dynamic Buie found was that Josh and Heather “had a pretty open relationship.” Meaning, they often involved others in their sexual fun. Whenever that type of fact emerged, Buie knew, anything was possible.

  Love, money, revenge—that’s why people kill one another.

  Buie needed to run down everything that came in, so he contacted Greyhound in Ocala, the only local bus depot around. Its computers did not have any record of Heather (or Josh) purchasing a ticket to Mississippi or anywhere else.

  As investigators were in a meeting that afternoon talking about the case, Sergeant Brian Spivey interrupted.

  “We got some information here about Miss Strong’s debit card being used right now at the Reddick Supermarket.” The MCSO had the equivalent to an all points bulletin (APB) out on the debit card, so any time it was used they’d get a call immediately. “Come on, let’s go. . . .”

  Spivey and another detective took off for Reddick. As they drove, Spivey said, “We think it’s got to be the husband, Josh Fulgham. We’re told he’s driving a maroon four-door Toyota car.”

  As they approached a traffic light after getting off the I-75, then headed east on Highway 318, near Highway 441, they spotted a maroon Toyota traveling through a traffic light heading north in the opposite direction.

  Spivey called it in.

  They followed Josh Fulgham as he drove into the Pine Grove Mobile Home Park, where he now lived, but they held back and observed Josh walk into his home.

  Spivey called for backup. It was time to make a move on Josh and have a more focused chat with him. Put his feet to the flame a little bit and find out what he knew.

  They sat surveillance on Josh’s mobile home. By early evening, they had a warrant for Josh’s arrest on charges of him withdrawing forty-two dollars from Heather’s account at the Publix ATM machine. According to the MCSO, Josh had committed credit/debit card fraud.

  Sergeant Spivey sat
and watched the mobile home as several other detectives arrived to help out. Some were parked near Josh’s home; some waited across the way on Highway 441. The MCSO wanted to get Josh into its Ocala Major Crimes headquarters and sit him down, get him on record, maybe get Josh to tie himself to a signed statement. They could question him about Heather under the guise of a potential fraud charge. After all, the MCSO knew that a fraud charge like this would probably never fly in court. Josh was still Heather’s husband; maybe his name was even on her account. Still, it was a good ruse to get him downtown.

  Detectives Brian Spivey and Donald Buie met down the block from Josh’s mobile home and then drove together. They parked in Josh’s driveway and walked up to his house. A third detective, stationed across the street, kept a close eye on Josh’s maroon Toyota, just in case Josh decided to head out the back door and flee. They kept in contact via radios.

  Buie couldn’t wash one important factor from his mind: an interview he had done earlier in the day with Josh and Heather’s eight-year-old child. Something she had told Buie stuck with the detective. She said that her daddy and mommy were together on that night Heather went missing. Daddy left the house with Mommy and returned many hours later.

  Alone.

  It was the last time the child had seen her mother.

  “During that interview with [Josh’s daughter],” Buie explained, “she puts Josh and her mother together on the night Heather is last seen. This was inconsistent with statements we had that indicated Heather was last seen at the Petro.”

  This didn’t mean Josh killed his wife; but still, the guy had some explaining to do.

  Buie knocked on Josh’s door at 6:04 P.M. Spivey was standing to his left.

  “Come on in,” said a man’s voice. They couldn’t see him.

  “Any dogs or anything in here?” Buie asked.