To Love and to Kill (18 page)

CHAPTER 50

BY JANUARY 15, 2009,
Josh and Emilia were at odds. Josh had said some things to Emilia a few days before and she was still upset with him. He had called her, but she didn't want to talk. He kept telling her how sorry he was and how much stress he had been under in jail. He kept up the “baby this” and “baby that” pillow talk to try and win her back.

But Emilia was clearly feeling like the other woman. It seemed all they ever talked about was Heather. It was never about Emilia or their future together. How was Emilia feeling? What was their plan to be together when Josh got out? Hell, in all of the recorded phone calls, Josh never once asked Emilia how her health was or how the pregnancy was going.

“What's wrong, baby, why aren't you talking?” Josh said at one point.

“Been doing a lot of thinking,” Emilia stoically whispered. “I really get pissed off when you start telling me [what I got to do]. I'm gonna tell you now, Josh.... For some fucking reason, me and you cannot just see each other and be okay.... It's either you are there or you are not.” Emilia used the child she was expecting in order to explain that Josh needed to step up, be a man, and either choose her and the child, or just go away forever. She promised she would never keep the child away from him if he chose to leave her, but “I don't know if I can handle it if you were just coming around to see the baby.” Emilia either loved this guy sincerely, or had become obsessed with him. It was never clearer than during this one conversation that Emilia needed to have all of Josh or none of Josh. There was no way she could share him again. It was no longer an option for her.

“Could you?” she asked Josh, wondering if he would be able to come around on the weekends and spend time with their baby and not be in a relationship with her.

“I could,” Josh said without hesitation.

“Huh?” Emilia responded. She was both shocked and hurt by the answer.

He said it again.

The line went totally silent. Emilia did not respond.

Josh finally broke the silence. “It's not what I
want
to do, but I could. I would not want to leave her without no daddy. You know I'd support her and take care of her. . . .” Then he went on to bad-mouth the two fathers of Emilia's other children. He called these men lazy, deadbeat “m-f'ers,” who had left her high and dry, with kids to fend for by herself.

There was a weird cadence and tone to Emilia's voice during this part of the call. She sounded very different. Quite subdued. Even a little bit crazy. She spoke softly and methodically—though not much. She had become someone else.

“With me and you, it's just ... well, hanging out in limbo, just ain't fun,” Emilia concluded. The impression she left with Josh was that she was finished. It was over.
Don't call again.

But Josh called back later that day. Emilia was in a better mood. Josh had something on his mind, though. He'd heard a rumor in the jail. He wanted to know if it was true and if Emilia was serious about it.

“How you gonna help me out of jail by giving James and [his friend] money?”

There was “that thing” again.

“What are you talking about?” Emilia asked.

“Are you gonna help me out or not? Straight out, baby.”

“Yes,” Emilia said, unable to respond fast enough. “Yes . . . ,” she said again.

“Don't do it like that. I'm not doubting you, and I'm not,
not
believing you. But, baby, I'm . . . I'm scared right now. I really am. I am fucking scared. Just to be stuck here.”

“Look, I gave James ten bucks just to run me to the store, just so I could buy diapers.”

“I don't know. I don't know. All I been told is that James done and gone taken money from [you]. . . .”

Josh then talked about how, if only Emilia could get him out of jail, they would get “it” right, meaning the relationship. There was no doubt in Josh's mind, he claimed. All of that history with Heather, it was enough to send him packing. He was done with her for good. The time in jail had made Josh realize that Heather was poison.

“Baby, I know everything's gonna work out—I don't worry about that,” Emilia said.

Josh put on a domineering tone and said sternly, “You don't do
nothing
as far as
that
goes. You just get me out of here.... That's your main focus right now. And that's kissing ass right there. We got this. We gonna be the motherfucking team we supposed to be. You
got
that?”

“I know.”

CHAPTER 51

ON JANUARY 20,
Josh called Emilia with something very specific on his mind. He wanted to know how close the next-door neighbor to her mother's house was and if the wooded area between the two houses was thickly settled. He came across like a man on a mission, trying to figure out part of a plan.

“Is there people living in the house back there?” Josh asked. He had obviously been thinking about something in particular.

“Uh-huh,” Emilia said, agreeing. “Why? What ... next door?” Emilia was genuinely confused as to why Josh would care about this.

“But listen, it's pretty woody in between by where your momma's is and they's house and where that old trailer is?”

“Yeah . . .”

“. . . And they can't see out through there?”

He meant the neighbors: Could they look from their house windows—any of them—and see through the woods to that trailer?

“No,” Emilia said.

“Okay, okay . . . ,” Josh answered. He had been full of adrenaline, but now realizing no one could see out into the backyard of Emilia's mother's and that trailer, he was suddenly calmer. It was as if the plan he had mapped out in his head had come to fruition right then and there.

“Why?” Emilia wanted to know.

“I was just wondering, baby,” Josh said. He had an unabashed and obvious patronizing tone to his voice, as if he knew something no one else did. “I was just wondering.”

“O . . . kayyyyy,”
Emilia said, stretching out the word. Then she laughed.

“I was just wondering . . . but anyway . . . I been in jail. I been thinking a lot.”

Emilia started cracking up, as though she had just gotten the punch line to a joke.

There was another word for what Josh was suggesting here: “premeditation.”

Without Emilia knowing about it at first, Josh Fulgham was planning the murder of his wife, Heather Strong. At least that much was obvious in this one phone call.

Over the next several days, after they understood perfectly what they were discussing, now both on exactly the same page, Josh began asking questions designed around a definite plan he was concocting. He wanted to know what “the neighbor” was going to do eventually with all that land around Emilia's momma's house, especially the old trailers. Did the owner of the land have any plans that Emilia knew about? Was he going to be excavating or building or selling at any time in the near future?

Emilia explained that she heard the guy was going to be clearing the lot, getting rid of the trailers and turning the land into pasture for some horses.

“All right, all right ... I was just wondering,” Josh said, again with a diabolical, smug, self-assured tone. Her answer seemed to give him great comfort that the land—along with the trailer—would be cleared and taken away. “Because this motherfucker,” he said, referring to himself, “has been doing some
thinking.
”

“About?” Emilia said, laughing.

“This shit.”

She laughed harder. She and Josh were a team now. Working together. Understanding each other. On the same page entirely.

They were coming together.

“We'll talk when I get home.”

“Okay.”

During another call, Emilia asked about Heather and if things didn't work out for Heather and whichever guy she was seeing when Josh got out. What was going to happen then? Was Josh going to drop Emilia again and go running after the sweetheart from his teenage years?

Josh became livid. There was something different in his voice. He had written Heather off—completely. He had wiped her from his mind and his heart. He was finished with her, but there was more to it. He had erased Heather. And one of the only ways he could be certain of never going back was to make sure she wasn't around.

“You don't
ever
worry about that,” Josh scolded Emilia, referring to him getting back with Heather. “Listen to what I am saying—Don't worry about that.”

“Okay, I believe you.”

“You don't be worrying about me and Heather
no
more. I promise you. You'll see when I get out.”

Emilia hung up and stared at the phone. For the first time, she felt Josh was being straight with her.

CHAPTER 52

JOHNNY STRONG GREW
up in Lebanon, Indiana, where his father was a hardworking construction foreman subjected to long, grueling hours out on job sites. As a young boy, Johnny and his family packed it up from Indiana and moved south to Tennessee because his father got a better job offer. The Strong family finally ended up in Mississippi, where life took a turn for the worse. Johnny's dad developed cancer at a young age, so Johnny, his brother and his sisters wound up in foster care after their momma couldn't take care of them.

By the time he was fourteen or fifteen, Johnny said, not quite able, these days, to recall exactly when, he was already working a steady job roofing houses. School wasn't something Johnny thought about much ever since he could swing a hammer and pound nails. Johnny needed to take care of his siblings and get back with Ma. And by the time he was nineteen, Johnny reunited once again with his sisters and aunt and mother. Johnny's brother was in Nashville, staying with family there. It wasn't the ideal situation and some time had passed, but the family was back together again.

During the late 1970s, when Johnny was cutting his teeth as a teenager, he was hanging out at a local bar one night, shooting pool, when a young gal who tickled his fancy walked in.

“We was dranking, you know, and partying like young people do,” Johnny explained later.

“Carolyn,” the young girl said her name was.

Johnny liked what he saw. He had seen Carolyn around town. But here she was right in front of him.

“Johnny, pleasure to meet y'all.”

Johnny said he and Carolyn “wound up getting together that night” and shacked up “together for about six months” before Carolyn demanded that they “go ahead and get married.”

So he proposed.

It was 1980 when Carolyn and Johnny wed and moved to Texas to begin raising a family. For construction workers, like Johnny and his father before him, they followed the work. Johnny had become an all-around laborer, like his old man: roofer, framer, concrete, whatever he could do to earn enough to drink and take care of the family. At the turn of the new decade, the fabulous 1980s, Texas was a booming mecca of construction with all of that oil money floating around and being pumped back into infrastructure and new housing. Johnny wanted his piece of it.

After a year in Houston, however, Johnny saw his work decline sharply and he was getting laid off a lot, so he decided to follow the trail once again. But this time, work was drying up everywhere in Johnny's chosen field. He couldn't find much, so they moved to Mississippi, where Johnny's mother had a house and she could take him and Carolyn in.

Then, on March 23, 1982, Carolyn gave birth to Heather. Now Johnny needed steady work. He had a daughter. He started asking around.

“Dallas,” someone told him. “They're hiring down there.”

Johnny, Carolyn and Heather left for Dallas shortly after Heather was born.

In Dallas, Johnny and Carolyn both found work: security guards for Gateway Bank One. With some cash in their pockets, though, an itch started. They were looking for something to do, something exciting, something fun for once. It seemed to be nothing but a struggle since they married, and now that they were working different shifts, Carolyn and Johnny rarely saw each other. Johnny worked a twelve-hour shift—half a day—and Carolyn the other. It got to the point where they decided they wanted to move back home to Mississippi.

“Big mistake,” Johnny said later.

That excitement and fun they were searching for in Dallas came when they got back home—in the form of partying to excess, at least for him, Johnny explained.

Carolyn and Johnny were equally responsible for drifting apart and leaning on other things to get them through tough times. And Johnny admitted that he was not nearly close to being the father that Heather deserved.

As a young girl, Heather believed life was what you made of it. For some strange reason, later on, she felt connected to Josh Fulgham forever simply because they had kids, even though she knew he was never going to give her what she wanted and, in turn, would likely cause her grief. Maybe it
was
the kids? Perhaps she didn't know any better? Some claimed Heather was raped repeatedly when she was young by someone she knew. If that was the case, well, what chance did she have without any psychological help to cope? Her codependency was placed inside the wiring of her brain long ago as she witnessed her parents slowly begin a struggle with not only each other but with life in general. Heather turned ten, and Johnny and Carolyn were constantly at odds.

“She was a wonderful child,” Johnny said of his daughter. “She was always trying to help around the house. Washing clothes, washing dishes, cleaning. Heather was always there for her mother.”

Heather was your typical teen. She liked having friends over. She liked watching television, playing outside, heading off to the local teen hot spots, laughing under her breath about the neighborhood boys she had a crush on.

“In fact, every birthday she had,” Johnny explained, “Heather didn't like cake. So she had to have her pizza. That was her main food love.”

Heather did well in school, Johnny said. All was fine and her life was going on as any typical teen until Heather, as a fourteen-year-old, put her focus on boys. That was when her studies started to slip.

“Them boys began to come up to the house,” Johnny said. “She had a few boyfriends. I guess my discipline wasn't what it should have been, maybe not enough.” Johnny went on to say he and Carolyn were seriously involved with their own difficulties then, especially Johnny's heavy drinking.

“I was a pretty bad alcoholic myself,” Johnny said. “I drunk a lot.”

As a teen, Heather became pregnant with Josh's baby. Johnny didn't have any problem with Josh before the young man got his daughter pregnant. Josh was a “yes, sir/no, sir” kind of kid, Johnny recalled.

In the beginning.

“He had a steady job, nice pickup, kept his hair nice and clean, dressed nicely, and I thought, ‘Well, he seems to be a pretty nice fella and all. Looks like he's trying.' All the other guys she was going out with or dating didn't have nothing. They didn't even work.”

But maybe, Johnny said, the Josh he knew then was just for show. Johnny understood that maybe Josh wasn't who he appeared to be. Years later, Johnny saw this firsthand as one of the last to find out that Josh and Heather had even gotten married. It wasn't until after Heather was dead and missing that Johnny was told she and Josh had married that previous December.

Heather and her dad lost touch during those years Heather had taken off to Florida with Josh and had more kids of her own. It was just one of those things that happened, Johnny said, clearly disappointed in himself for not pursuing a more intimate father-daughter relationship.

“Heather acted like she was twentysomething from the time she was maybe fifteen or sixteen,” Johnny recalled.

It's always the case: Someone dies unexpectedly and we go back and think what we could have done differently. Johnny recalled a daughter he wished he'd had another chance to raise; a second go of being the dad Heather deserved. There was once, he explained, when he took Heather fishing. She loved to fish. Mississippi had some monster catfish. Well, she and her dad were sitting in the boat talking when Heather hooked herself a whopper.

“And the thing dragged us in the boat around for a time until it broke the line,” Johnny said. “We laughed and laughed.... Heather even done liked to hunt,” Johnny remembered.

The “close time” they shared, Johnny pointed out, was always minimal because of his work and then later he was unavailable because of his own demons. Johnny was quick to point a finger at others, but he realized that when he did that, there were three fingers pointed back at him. He wished like hell that he'd done things very differently, but life was the way it ended up. You can't rewrite it. You have to live with it and accept your mistakes, and he has.

“I just remember my kid as loving and caring and always willing to share with people, and would help you out any time in any way. She always had a smile on her face. I never done seen her upset or angry. It took a lot to get Heather mad.”

All of this made Heather's life in Florida, and what happened, that much harder to take for Johnny. He was at home, much older, much weaker, fighting several health ailments, including the removal of a kidney and two bouts of cancer, when the sad news came. His health had deteriorated after years of excess partying. Johnny lived in Mississippi and saw Heather and his grandchildren whenever Heather came up from Florida and stopped by. But there was one day when Johnny heard that his daughter had turned up missing. He didn't want to believe it, of course. But Heather's brother had called Johnny to tell him how cousin Misty had spoken to the Florida police to report that Heather had not been seen or heard from in a fortnight.

“Missing?” Johnny asked. “Heather?”

Johnny knew Heather's children were her life and she would not leave without them. “She would have given up her own life for her children.” He considered Heather to be streetwise and street-smart. “Missing” and “Heather” did not sound right to Johnny.

Lord, there's
got
to be something going on,
Johnny thought when he heard Heather had vanished. His next thought was
Foul play . . .
Johnny found out that the kids were with Judy and, to him, that could mean only one thing: “I knew [Josh] had to do something with her, either have her put away, or . . . Well, look, I knew she wouldn't leave her kids.”

In the days that followed, Johnny said, “I felt like killing myself. I realized I was not a good daddy. I was not there.”

Those memories (good, but mostly bad) flooded back and made the impact of Heather's disappearance all that more penetrating and powerful. Johnny was helpless.

And then, as Johnny sat one day on his porch enjoying a rather mild Mississippi early spring day, he looked on as two cops pulled into the driveway and got out of the car and walked up to him.

“Florida authorities found your daughter's body,” Johnny recalled the local cops telling him that day. “They have her husband . . .”

Johnny wanted to vomit. He wanted to end his own life right there, he said. But not before, “going down to Florida, and if I could get my hands on Josh, choking him to death!”

Heather's murder was a devastating blow to a guy who didn't see himself as someone who showed her the love he truly felt in his heart.

“Josh took her air,” Johnny said. “He is still down there eating, living and breathing, and my daughter is not. I'm still not over it.” Johnny paused. Then: “I guess it is something you never get over.”