To Love and to Kill (16 page)

CHAPTER 41

SO WHAT HAPPENED
to Heather Strong, the twenty-six-year-old mother of two? The MCSO had so many versions of what they now believed to be one truth: Heather Strong was lured to Emilia's house under a ruse of some sort and brought back into that abandoned trailer. (Probably, it happened forcibly, not under a guise of being paid money she was owed.) From there, she was bound to a chair, likely asphyxiated, and dumped in a hole about ten paces in back of the trailer. They had Josh and Emilia both pointing fingers at each other, a “he said/she said” farce. At one time, both of them had also made it sound as though James Acome and his friend had killed Heather.

But as the evening sun of Friday, March 20, 2009, set on Ocala, Florida, the MCSO investigation into this murder took a turn. That space in between—from the time Heather left work and met up with Josh—was now the MCSO's central focus.

It had taken a night in solitary confinement for Josh to think about what had happened to his wife and to come clean.

“We put him in there (solitary) to limit his use of the telephone,” Buie explained. “We didn't want him having contact with anyone else or him causing harm to himself. It also gives him a lot of time to think about what he has done.”

It was a Saturday, the following morning, when Josh called for Buie.

When Buie walked into the room, Josh looked up at him—and Buie knew.

“He wanted to wipe his slate clean,” the detective later said. “He was ready to tell us everything that had happened.”

What happened to Heather did not actually begin when Heather left work on that day, Buie and Spivey learned—it actually had started back in 2008, as the love triangle of Heather, Josh and Emilia turned into something Heather never really saw coming. And in a not-so-surprising twist to these cops, they now had a new suspect on the radar: the orchestrator and mastermind behind what they believed to be a terribly violent murder.

CHAPTER 42

AFTER SPENDING THAT
week in a motel, Josh, Heather and the kids returned to their trailer in Citra. Josh had made it clear to Emilia that she needed to pack her belongings and be out of the house by the time he showed up a week later with Heather and the kids. They were a family once again. He'd tried calling Emilia to see if she was gone, but she wouldn't answer her phone.

“Josh always went back to Heather,” said a source close to this case. “Emilia would always play second fiddle. She knew that.”

But this time Emilia was taking charge.

Josh talked about how he was splitting his time, at least for a while, between the two women. Buie asked him: “You always went back to Heather?”

Josh responded, “Look at Emilia and look at Heather.”

The implication from Josh was that Emilia could not hold a candle to Heather as far as beauty.

Hearing this, Buie shook his head. How superficial. How shallow. And yet, that was how Josh thought.

Emilia simply wasn't about to allow Josh and Heather to ride off into the Florida sunset together on their high horse, leaving her in the dust once again. After all, Emilia was carrying Josh's baby (or so she claimed).

When Josh and Heather pulled into the driveway after that week at the motel, the first thing Josh looked for was Emilia's truck. She hadn't responded to his calls, maybe she was still there.

He didn't see it.

She's gone
. . . , Josh told himself.
Good!

Josh got out of his car and told Heather and the kids to wait. He tried the front door.

It was locked. He didn't have his keys on him.

He had always left a window in the back unlocked for this reason. He told Heather he was going around to the back in order to crawl in through the window.

Josh fell onto the kitchen floor after going through the window. He got up and brushed himself off. He walked into the living room to go open the door for Heather and there was Emilia. She was sitting on his recliner, a blanket over her legs, smiling. “Like everything was fine,” Josh recalled.

Josh walked over. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Emilia started laughing.

“You need to pack your shit and get the hell out, Emilia. I told you that a week ago.”

Apparently, the situation was funny to Emilia. According to Josh's recollection, she sat there, not moving, not saying much of anything immediately, and laughing this strange sort of giggle underneath her breath.

Then, after some time, Emilia said, “I'm not leaving.”

Josh put two fingers on his temples and thought for a moment. His carotid artery was throbbing, adrenaline pumping. Anger rose in his body. In the past, Josh would react to these situations by blowing his top, screaming at Emilia (or Heather) and threatening violence. Instead, he later recalled, he looked at Emilia and said, “I'm going back to the motel for a night. You had better be gone by the time I get back tomorrow.”

As he was leaving, Emilia said, “Josh, you don't want her! You just want your kids. So, why don't you just bring her back over here tonight and we can get rid of her? Then we can be a big family and have all of our kids here.” (This chilling statement actually occurred, according to a letter Josh sent me. Emilia, of course, denies that she ever said this—and there is reason to believe her. The only source beyond Emilia is Josh.)

“Me and Heather are going to work on our relationship,” Josh said. “We
want
to be together again, Emilia.”

Josh said he left. And throughout that day, after “raising hell” with Emilia on the phone, badgering her to get the heck out of his house, she finally left. The last thing she said to him on that day: “It does not have to be this way, Josh.”

Josh said he “stayed away from Emilia after that day” and he did not have contact with her until the day he and Heather were married, December 26, 2008. He couldn't help himself, he claimed. Emilia had been calling Judy Chandler, Josh's mother, the entire time and telling her that she needed to be with her son. She also said she'd found out the sex of their child and wanted to share it with Josh.

So, not exactly saying why he chose of all the days to call Emilia back, just moments before he married Heather, Josh humored the woman and dialed her up.

“What do you want?” Josh asked.

“It doesn't have to be this way,” Emilia said again (according to Josh).

“I have to try this,” Josh responded. “I need to see if the marriage will work out.”

Emilia knew Josh would come back. He always did.

CHAPTER 43

IT WAS TEN
days later, Josh explained, when Heather's true intentions came to light. This marriage, claimed Josh, the so-called reconciliation Heather wanted, the idea of being a family once again with her and the kids, was nothing but a ploy by Heather, with the help of Ben McCollum, who was still together with her at this time, according to Josh. In fact, Josh explained, Heather and Ben had devised some sort of diabolical plot to get rid of him for good.

“Ten days after we were married,” Josh told me, “Ben and Heather concocted this plan to ... put me in jail.”

“That's not true,” Ben explained to me. “But let me tell you, Heather pawned that ring Josh gave her when they married.”

She did it, Ben added, because she had nothing. Josh gave her nothing, and Heather needed to take care of her children.

Josh had Emilia's father's shotgun in the house because he had told the old man long ago he would clean it for him. It was the same gun Josh waved at Ben once before. The way Josh told it, Heather called the cops on him one day in early January, saying he was threatening her with that shotgun.

Josh was arrested immediately and held in jail without bond.

“I did tell her to go down and press charges against him,” Ben said. “Because, hell, he pointed that same shotgun at me one day while we were riding down the road. I reported it a day after it happened, because I told the cops that, basically, I wasn't worried about him. I could take care of him on my own.”

“Three days after I was put in jail,” Josh said, “Ben told her ... that it wasn't going to work out.” Ben bailed on Heather, according to Josh. Yet, while Josh was in jail, he said, James Acome stopped by the house and “had sex with Heather ... while the kids were [there]. . . .” And James and Heather became a couple then.

As soon as Josh was locked up, he began leaning on Emilia, calling her from the jail, asking her to keep an eye on things at his house. During these recorded phone calls, Emilia sounded—as she always did—as though she and Josh had always been together and never separated. Emilia came across as though she and Josh would continue their relationship when he got out of jail.

“Do you want me to find out if [Heather] is going to leave [the house]?” Emilia asked Josh during one phone call.

Josh wasn't sure. He was curious what Heather was now saying (since she'd gone and had him arrested and tossed in jail). It was clear Josh was pissed, even enraged by this. He felt a tremendous betrayal on Heather's part. Just the idea—which wasn't true—that Heather had married him as part of a plan with Ben to set him up made Josh fuming mad to the point of fury. He felt demeaned and scorned and played. He could not (nor was he psychologically equipped to) deal with the emotions that followed.

Emilia explained how she'd spoken to Heather: “She said she was now scared that you'd kill her, that she'd gone and had you arrested.”

“She's so crazy . . . ,” Josh said in his noticeable Southern accent. He came across as relaxed and calm.

“You want me to see what she's gonna do—if she's gonna stay or she's gonna go?”

“She can stay there,” Josh said. But now there was a touch of possible retribution—a hint that Heather would get hers, later on—in his voice. “She can have that house. Ain't no problem.” Then, with sarcasm, as if he had ulterior motives: “Ain't no problem at all.”

Emilia sounded desperate. Josh cared only what Heather was thinking and saying. The call was all about Heather. It was obvious he was using Emilia. Playing her. Laying on that old-school charm, telling Emilia what she wanted to hear.

“Will you come and sign a bond [for] me?” Josh asked.

Emilia sighed. “Yeah,” she said, but there was an uncertain tone to her voice, a subtle reluctance indicating she was perhaps going against her better judgment.

Josh knew how to reel her in, though. He laughed coyly, then: “I love you.”

“I love
you,
” Emilia responded.

They were officially back on.

Next they talked some more about what they should have done so Josh could have avoided jail altogether. What became obvious from this first conversation while Josh was locked up was that they had been talking and seeing each other for quite some time. Josh might have married Heather in December, but he was still keeping Emilia on the side. He'd never really let her go.

Emilia said she had approached Heather and asked her what she was going to do: Was she going to press charges, drop the charges? What was her plan?

“Heather told me, ‘I don't know. . . . If he gets out, he's gonna kill me.' And I told her, no, he's not. ‘Heather, I mean, he wouldn't hurt you because of them kids, and if you don't know that by now, well, then, you are really fucking stupid.'”

Again playing “Mr. Smooth,” Josh said, “Anyway, I don't even care about her.... I want to talk to
you.
What have
you
been doing, baby? What things been going on?”

On January 6, 2009, Josh and Emilia spoke several times throughout the day. Josh kept calling her back when the line went dead or their time limit had expired.

“Baby, what's going on?” he asked once. Remember, Josh had married “the love of his life” eleven days prior to this.

“Okay,” Emilia explained, “now she's saying to
me
—this is fucking retarded—if I want to hang out with her!” Emilia further explained that she had spoken to Heather before talking with Josh, and Heather supposedly had told her that she could get a babysitter that coming weekend if Emilia wanted to come over and hang out.

“We did hear from sources that there might have been a relationship between Heather and Emilia,” one law enforcement official told me. The information was that Heather and Emilia, after getting involved in that threesome with Josh, continued fooling around on the side without Josh knowing. The extent of this supposed lesbian relationship was never known, but several sources close to the case agreed it was something that went on from time to time between the women.

On that day Emilia spoke to her, Heather said she “needed someone to talk to.” According to Ben, he later recalled Heather being frightened of Emilia. “She told me once she went over to Emilia's mother's house to see Emilia,” Ben remembered. “And Emilia held her down, put a knife to her throat and threatened her. I told her to call the cops.”

Emilia told Josh she would pick Heather up and take her out.

There was a pause. Josh was listening.

“Is that okay with you?” Emilia finally asked when Josh didn't respond immediately.

“For what!” he snapped. “Look where she's done put me. You wanna go hang out with someone who put me in here ... and I might be here for seven days?”

“Listen, you know why I would hang out with her,” Emilia said. “Right?”

“No,” Josh responded, laughing nervously, as though something was being kept from him. “I don't know.”

Emilia talked about her “cousin” being around town, a fictional person she had made up to try and disguise herself. There was an unspoken agreement between them that they were trying to hide from whoever might be listening to the call.

“Unless you don't want me to,” Emilia said.

The idea seemed to make sense to Josh now—it clicked. He said, “I don't care.” Then he talked about being locked up for the next week. Seven long days behind bars. Plus, when he got out, he was going to have to go stay with his mother. On top of that, Heather had his car, which he didn't think she'd give back.

Emilia reminded him that she had a set of keys to the car. “Like I'm saying, if I get invited to hang out, I might just go. Baby, you know I'm not stupid.”

“Oh, I know.”

Emilia could get dropped off, in other words, and, with her set of keys, drive away with Josh's car at the end of the night.

When Josh called again later on, he sounded depressed and alone. “Baby, I'm gonna tell you, go ahead now and move on.” He wanted Emilia to let go and find someone else. He was finished.

“You are so damn dumb.”

“No, I'm not. I'm not gonna keep dragging you the fuck around. I already have for a month now. I want you to do that, okay?”

“Why do you keep telling me that?” Emilia asked. Her voice spoke of a woman who knew now she had the upper hand in this relationship. She had Josh where she needed him: crawling on his hands and knees, desperate, behind bars, needing her. Emilia embraced the sense of power she manipulated through her relationships. She embodied the idea of controlling the relationship anyway she could. Here she was now driving the bus.

“This is the first time I have ever told you to move on,” Josh said.

“Nope. You told me that when you went to Mississippi last year. . . .”

“And you did.”

“No. I did what I had to do to get the fuck out of my momma's house,” Emilia said. She was fired up, defending herself.

“Well, you may have to do that now.”

When they connected again, Josh was crying. “All I ever wanted was my babies and you,” he said, sounding more distressed than ever—though Emilia did not pick up on it.

“What?” she asked.

He said it again.

“You know we could have had that,” she said. “But you had to do shit
your
way. Right?”

“I tried to keep from ending up here and look what's happened?” Josh said, again complaining about being locked up. He was still crying.

“I know,” Emilia said. “But like I told you, no matter what, I got everything under control. You
know
that.”

They talked about how Heather was responsible for him being locked up because she wanted to be with Ben, but Ben had since run from the situation and wanted nothing to do with Heather any longer. Josh was too terrifying, too volatile and too damn fly-off-the-handle; Heather was too unpredictable for a more stable guy like Ben.

Emilia explained further how she'd just had a conversation with Heather. Heather was going around to mutual friends, acting big and bad, bragging about being the person who had put Josh in jail. She was telling people how she could get Josh's “ass locked up in prison” if she really wanted to. Not just the town pokey, where he was, but serious prison time. Emilia said she had suggested to Heather that she go back to Mississippi if she had felt so scared and threatened by Josh. Then Emilia implored Josh to “do some serious thinking about a lot of things” while he was locked up. They'd have to make a few decisions when he got out. She never alluded to what, exactly, but there was an unspoken implication in Emilia's voice that drastic measures were going to be called for.

Josh interrupted Emilia's little rant. He sounded confused: “
What
do I need to think about?”

“You better kiss a lot of ass when you get out, buddy,” Emilia said, making her point heard.

“To who?” he asked, surprised by this.

“To
me.
You put me through some shit this last year and a half.”

Josh grew defensive. “You've done the same to me.”

Emilia laughed. “How? What did I do to you except be there
every
time you wanted me?”

“I know ... I know,” Josh said. A sense of defeat came over him. White flag. There was nothing he could say to counter or argue that statement ... and he knew it.

“
Every
time,” Emilia slowly repeated.

Josh realized he needed to conduct a bit of damage control. “I ain't never had nobody done love me like you,” he said in his best homage to Billy Dee Williams. “Never. I really don't know how to deal with it.”

“I know—you just keep running from it.”

Emilia wanted Josh to understand that she was going to “handle things” out in the world while he sat in jail. There was no need to worry about Heather. Emilia encouraged Josh to trust her. She had everything under control. She said “right now,” Heather was “kissing [her] ass,” and she had no idea why, but she was going to use it to their advantage.

“I'm gonna milk it,” Emilia said, meaning Heather's ass kissing. “You know I'm not stupid. I know how to play games, Josh.”

Josh was quiet. He was thinking, listening.

Emilia came up with a plan. She suggested that if the judge asked Josh about the gun and why he hadn't registered it, “Why don't you just tell him you bought it off of a friend—and if that judge asks for a name, you just tell him [James's buddy]. And you're just using it for skeet shooting.”

“Okay,” Josh said as Emilia laughed at her suggestion.

The conversation then shifted to Josh wondering what Heather “really, really planned on doing.” Josh said he desperately needed her to drop the charges so he could walk out of the jail. Josh was also concerned about Heather packing up her things and taking off with the kids somewhere. He feared this. The time to do it would be while he was in jail. He couldn't imagine her leaving without saying a word, getting a few weeks' head start, leaving him to do the time before he could even try and track her down.

Emilia said she didn't really know what Heather was planning, but she did mention to Heather that she loved Josh's kids. And Emilia had also recently told Heather, “‘Look, whether you believe it, [Josh's kids] have a sister on the way. . . . I'm tired of all the bullshit. But I want to know where you stand.' And she's just like, ‘I don't want to leave.'” Heather said something about getting another job in order to pay her bills. Emilia then offered to drive her around so she could fill out job applications; and if Heather needed, Emilia would even watch the kids while Heather went out and looked for work.