To Love and to Kill (11 page)

CHAPTER 27

AT SOME POINT
on March 19, Josh Fulgham gave it up.

Sort of.

“He was getting, so to speak, worn down,” Buie said later. “He had let a few things slip out, which he then pointed to Emilia and blamed her.”

Either way, Buie knew they had him. Josh, too, realized he was going to be better off in the end if he told them what they wanted to hear.

Buie explained to Josh that the MCSO was going to go ahead and charge Josh with the flagrant use of Heather's credit card. It wasn't much, but it was enough to hold him.

“Wait,” Josh said.

Buie asked what he wanted.

“Look, if you allow me to take my wallet to my mom and kiss my kids, I'll . . . I'll . . . take you to where Heather is.”

Detective Buie . . . advised that Josh had disclosed to him about an area in the back of the [Maria Zayas, Emilia's mother's] residence that possibly could contain the body of Heather Strong,
said a report filed by the MCSO.

“He told me he was ready to go out there and find her,” Buie explained later.

There was a team of detectives and crime scene investigators (CSIs) assembling to head out to the Boardman property and have a look around. Josh had claimed there was possibly a “freshly” dug grave and some “disturbed” dirt in an area near that abandoned trailer in the back of Maria Zayas's property. And that was where they would “possibly” find Heather's body buried in a shallow grave.

Buie went to Maria and found her underneath the carport on the left side of her home. Maria said she had some information regarding Josh and a shovel.

This, of course, was of great interest to Buie. “Can we go inside that car over there and speak?” Buie asked her. He wanted to get the conversation on tape.

She said sure.

“It was the fifteenth or the sixteenth,” Maria said, referring to February, “around three or four in the afternoon. Josh came by here and asked to borrow a shovel.”

Maria was curious why Josh needed a shovel, so she asked him.

“Oh, damn, wouldn't you know, I just hit a dog on the highway and need to bury it,” Josh had reportedly told her.

Maria gave him a spade shovel and then walked back into her home to finish cooking dinner.

“I didn't see where he went with the shovel,” Maria told Buie.

“I see.”

It was forty minutes later when Josh returned with the shovel. He said thanks and left.

“The next morning,” Maria explained to Buie, “Emilia woke me up and said Josh was banging on her window. I went outside and saw him there. He said he wanted to come by and see Emilia. . . .”

Josh came back later that same day after he got out of work. There was an argument between Emilia and Josh, Maria said, so Josh left and went back to his mother's house.

And that was all Maria Zayas could offer.

CHAPTER 28

WHILE EMILIA AND
Detective Brian Spivey were inside that trailer talking later on during the day, on March 19, Spivey asked Emilia to point out for him exactly which chair she was referring to. Where was it Emilia had seen Heather strapped to a chair? Spivey was beginning to have a problem with Emilia and her sudden revelation of seeing Heather's body inside the trailer.

It all seems like a show she's putting on,
Spivey thought.

Emilia pointed to the black chair closest to them: “Right there.”

“Okay, then tell me what you mean, ‘She was
taped
to it'?”

Emilia said Heather's hands were bound and her body was fastened to the chair with “silver, gray tape.... She was kind of slouched in the chair and her head was leaning back.”

Spivey asked for specifics: Where, exactly, was she taped? On which parts of her body? These facts would become important later. The detective wanted them coming out of Emilia's mouth, into his ears, traveling then onto the pages of a report.

Documented.

That way Emilia would own them.

“The tape was around her neck, where the bag was, and there was tape around her wrists, and there was some tape around her ankles.”

Bag?
Now
there was a bag involved?

This was astonishing information. It seemed to suggest that Heather had been kidnapped, held, and either tortured and murdered, or left to die.

Emilia said she panicked when she saw this. It was startling. She had a tough time registering what she was looking at. It didn't seem real. She then told herself she had to check to see if Heather was still alive. Staring at Heather, Emilia had no idea. So she put her fingers on Heather's wrists to check for a pulse and then tried to find out if she was breathing.

To Emilia's dismay, Heather was dead.

Spivey asked Emilia what she did next. The detective had a few issues with this story. Here it was a month later, for one, and Emilia was just now relating it to the police. Why would she hold on to such a sordid, horrific tale for such a long period of time? To protect Josh? Or had Heather's killer (or killers) threatened Emilia, keeping her quiet?

“I just kind of looked at her and started to cry,” Emilia claimed. “I didn't know what to do, what to think. I turned and started walking out. Then I sat on the back step and I cried and then went inside.”

Emilia needed a breath. She was back there, reliving that moment when she found Heather. It was exhausting and emotionally taxing, she said. She put both her hands on her belly and rubbed softly. The stress was not good for the child.

Spivey needed to know what other information Emilia had been holding on to. He asked if she recognized the tape as coming from somewhere inside the main house or somewhere else. Had she ever seen that tape before?

Emilia said, “Everywhere you can find rolls [of tape like that] . . . .”

“That's all you remember seeing that day?”

Emilia looked down. She knew something. “That he . . . had told her there was money stashed somewhere.”

“And who's ‘he'?” Spivey wondered.

“Josh.”

If Emilia had thrown Josh under a bus earlier, as Detective Buie had suggested, well, now she had invited an eighteen-wheeler to come by and run over him. Because, according to what Emilia Carr was now saying, Joshua Fulgham had strapped his wife to a chair inside this trailer and murdered her.

Yet as Spivey would soon learn as Emilia continued talking, there was more.

Much more.

CHAPTER 29

IT WAS DARK
outside, heading toward the morning sunrise of March 19. Detectives Mike Mongeluzzo, Brian Spivey, Donald Buie, along with Josh Fulgham, traveled down Highway 441 in an unmarked black Crown Vic.

Josh had given it up—mostly. He now said he was willing to take them to Heather's body. He wanted to go see his mother and his kids after escorting the team to where they wanted to go.

Buie said sure.

“Why do you shave your head?” Mongeluzzo asked Josh. This was something investigators did. They were Josh's friends now. They would do what he asked—within reason—and cater to what he wanted while he was providing detailed, truthful information—all of which could help close this case and get Heather's family some answers. Making small talk like this, building on a rapport, was part of being a good cop. It made Josh feel like he was a human being, not just some lunatic killer taking them to see his work.

“It's cooler,” Josh said. He rubbed his bald head.

Spivey and Mongeluzzo talked together about the case as Josh sat, listened and then piped in, apparently wanting to make something clear.

“Man, I'm going to tell you how it is right now.... I
didn't
do this shit. I didn't have it done. But I
know
it was done.”

Mongeluzzo said, “Okay. And you're taking us to her. It's the right thing to do.”

“Where I'm
told
she was,” Josh clarified. “I didn't see her, but from what they tell me, she's dead, man.”

Josh kept saying he didn't have anything to do with Heather's death. He only knew about it from what others had told him. He said this, over and over, without offering any insight or new facts to back it up. Here was a guy taking cops to a dead body—a woman who just happened to be the wife he had been battling with and separated from—and he was saying he had nothing to do with killing her or dumping her body. With that, these cops had to wonder if Josh was blowing smoke up their asses, or was he beginning to come clean?

As they got closer to Maria Zayas's house, Josh said, “A pile of shit in front of the trailer, behind her mother's house.” He was explaining—to the best of his knowledge, he claimed—where he thought Heather was buried, based on what he had been told. As Josh explained it, Heather was underneath a pile of brush and trash, buried in a shallow grave. He started to freak out a bit inside the car as they got closer to where her body was supposedly buried.

Buie asked if Heather had been moved since she had been put out there.

“I don't know, man. I'll tell you what I was told.... Please don't make me see that shit again.”

What did Josh mean by “again”? Had he seen it once already?

The way he explained it, Josh didn't want to view the body. He was getting nervous that they were going to make him stand by as CSIs dug Heather up from out of the ground.

“You just point it out to me and I'll go see it,” Buie said.

They arrived at the trailer and Josh insisted he stay inside the car. In the back of the main house, where Emilia and her mother lived with Emilia's sister, was the trailer. In back of the trailer, heading northeast about ten to twenty paces, was a pile of debris.

After some prodding, Josh got out of the car.

“He walked around the yard,” Buie explained later, “pointing to various places.... ‘Maybe there, or there.... No, it's over here . . . ,' acting like he wasn't sure.”

Buie didn't believe him. He felt Josh was jerking them around, but he kept it to himself for the time being.

Then Josh said it was there (pointing), underneath that pile of garbage, based on what he had been told, that they'd possibly find Heather.

Buie walked out into the yard. He looked around. He saw the pile of debris. Someone had done a poor job of raking leaves over a cleared area to make it look natural. Buie found the spot in the ground where, he believed, the earth had been recently dug. He grabbed a stick and stuck it into the ground—and the stick went down into the earth like a toothpick through a perfectly cooked cake.

“And I knew that's where she was,” Buie said.

Before he walked away, something else struck Buie. There was a chair there, turned over. But it didn't look weathered, like all of the other debris. It appeared to be much newer, as though it had been placed outside only recently.

Buie called in the CSIs to navigate the search. It had to be done delicately. You find a body and that's a win, but there is also evidence that needs to be collected at the same time.

After the team assembled and Spivey went off to speak with other colleagues at the crime scene (he would ultimately stay at the scene), Mongeluzzo and Buie took Josh to his mother's house, as promised, so he could see his “babies” one more time before he and the officers went back to Major Crimes and allowed Josh some sleep before interviewing him again.

Josh was shackled and chained; Mongeluzzo carried a shotgun. There were not going to be any surprises for Buie and Mongeluzzo inside the house. They felt Josh's mother had been hostile when they interviewed her earlier that month and here they were waking her up, her son chained, two detectives escorting him as he told them where to find his wife's body. The situation lent itself to volatility and uncertainty. Buie and Mongeluzzo were not taking any chances.

“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.