To Love and to Kill (20 page)

CHAPTER 56

“LISTEN, HEATHER, I
want you to meet me at Emilia's house,” Josh told me he explained to his wife over the phone later on that night. “I know where Emilia has fifteen hundred dollars stashed inside a trailer and I want to steal it. You'll be the lookout while I get it. I'll give you a cut.”

Insinuating that she was greedy, Josh said, “Heather jumped all over the deal because she wanted” some of that money.

In the next breath, “I'll be by to pick you and the kids up soon,” Josh said he told Heather, contradicting his earlier statement for her to meet him there.

Heather said she'd be expecting him.

Josh never told me where he picked Heather and the kids up. But James Acome later told police that Heather took off that night with the kids and it was the last time he ever saw her. According to that first interview Josh gave Detective Buie (postadmission), Josh said he met Heather at a local Subway grinder shop in Sparr, Florida, which is about a twenty-minute, seventeen-mile drive south of Boardman, where Emilia's mother lived.

“I pulled over there and backed in front of the store and . . . her and the kids came over,” Josh told Buie.

They talked, Josh explained to the detective. His son sat in front; his daughter and Heather were in the back.

“And we were just talking, and . . . she told me, ‘James hadn't got his shit, but he just left, and he left all his shit in the house.'”

Josh further stated that he and Heather—again, totally out of character when put into the context of the situation—were “just talking about spending some time together ... and let's see where we go at that point.”

Right then, Josh claimed, with Heather and the kids in the car, he had no intention of killing her. In a letter to me, however, Josh said he told Heather how he believed the fifteen hundred dollars was inside the trailer and that all Heather had to do was make sure no one saw him going in or coming out. Heather was to act as his wingman, in other words. But he claimed she had no idea where they were going, other than to a trailer somewhere.

“Okay,” Heather said after Josh explained, with their children looking on.

“Let's go ahead and take the kids out to Momma's. . . .”

They pulled up to Judy Chandler's house and Josh brought the kids in to stay with their grandma. He didn't say it, but Josh must have reiterated to his mother that he was bringing Heather to the bus depot so she could head back home to Mississippi to get her mind together. That was the supposed ruse he had scripted with Emilia.

Everything seemed to coalesce as it unfolded.

From there, Josh drove toward Boardman. During the ride over to Emilia's, Josh told Heather, “If you help, I'll give you this car. I got a new title filled out and everything—I'll sign it over to you.”

“Where?” Heather asked. She wanted to know where they were going.

“Emilia's.”

“Josh, I'm not going over there. She's a freaking psycho.” Heather became nervous. She didn't want anything to do with showing up at Emilia's with him.

“Heather, listen, Emilia's not at home. She's done gone and seen her brother in Dunnellon. Her mom and them done left, too. If they're back when we get there, they'll be asleep.”

Heather stared out the window. She was thinking about the request. Then she supposedly said: “Okay, I'll do it. But I don't want any bullshit, Josh.”

“There ain't gonna be. Don't worry about it.”

As they pulled into Emilia's driveway somewhere near eight at night (Josh later told Buie), Emilia was waiting inside the house, watching stealthily from behind a curtain.

 

 

AT SOME POINT
while he was alone on that night (probably while inside his mother's house), Josh called Emilia, he later told Detective Buie.

“You remember [what] we talked about?” Josh claimed he asked Emilia during that phone call.

“Yeah.”

“You still think about that?”

“We can do it,” Emilia told him. (Josh shared this with Detective Buie, but not with me.) “I told you, I done got a place for her. Got all this yard back there. It's in the woods.”

(This, of course, went against the phone call Josh had made to Emilia where he had asked her about the trailer and the backyard and all that land, and if the neighbor could see and if she knew what his plans for the land were. At that time, Emilia sounded as if the subject had been new to her and had never been brought up between them. But then, when explaining to Buie, Josh gave the impression that killing Heather in the trailer and getting rid of her body somewhere on the property was all Emilia's idea and they discussed it on the night he drove Heather over there.)

What Josh meant by “what we talked about,” he further clarified for Buie, was something Emilia had initiated during Josh's stint in jail. There was one night when Emilia was with Heather, Josh told Buie. The women were at Josh and Heather's place. James Acome was there, too. Emilia came up behind Heather and put a knife to her throat; she threatened to slash her neck if she didn't drop the charges against Josh. James stepped in and stopped it, but Heather soon after signed the papers to have the charges dropped.

Josh told Buie his mother “printed up a paper for me on the computer ... saying that we're gonna keep the kids until she gets her stuff straightened out. . . .”

They never had Heather sign it. Instead, Emilia filled it out, Josh said.

 

 

AFTER DROPPING OFF
the kids at his mother's, driving and then parking near Emilia's house and heading into the backyard toward the trailer, Josh asked Heather, “You hungry?”

“No, I ate already. . . . Let's just get this over with.”

Josh thought Heather wanted to get back home as soon as possible. He also claimed to have asked her about Ben and what was going on with that relationship.

Heather became impatient. She didn't want to engage in small talk. According to Josh, our only source for this conversation, all she wanted to know was where that money was located so she could help him steal it.

Josh never said why it never occurred to Heather that he could have gotten just about anybody else to help him. Why her? Why would she fall for this? They had been at odds, fighting and arguing about the kids for weeks. He'd threatened her and Ben. He made it clear he was going to the Department of Children Services to report her and James. Why would Heather agree to go, especially alone, with this man whom she knew to be violent and volatile? Just for a few bucks?

Josh's story doesn't make much sense.

Nonetheless, we do know that Josh and Heather entered that trailer at some point shortly after 8:00
P.M.
on February 15, 2009—and that only one of them, not long after, would leave alive.

CHAPTER 57

IT WAS DARK
by the time they got out to the trailer in the backyard of Maria Zayas's house.

“You got a flashlight?” Heather asked.

“No,” Josh said.

(“So we . . . both went in with cigarette lighters,” Josh told Detective Buie.)

Josh had Heather walk in first.

He looked around to make certain no one else was watching—except maybe Emilia peeking at them from a window—and then followed behind.

They looked around inside the trailer after entering.

“Damn, it was on these tables somewhere,” Josh said, referring to the money. They were in the living-room portion of the trailer, which was hampered down with garbage and household items, like a hoarder's home. “I know it was here. She showed it to me just this weekend.”

When Josh explained this scene to Detective Buie, he put the entire idea and crime on Emilia. “I said, ‘Where do I take [Heather] to?'” Josh explained. “[Emilia] said, ‘Bring her back there in the back trailer.' And I said all right. I said, ‘What's the best way to get her back there?' She said, ‘Well, she knows I had money, Josh.' I said, ‘Well, I'll tell her we're coming over there, you showed me money, and I'm gonna come over there and get it. . . .' That's exactly what I told Emilia.”

In a letter to me explaining this night, Josh never mentioned that Emilia had come up with this plan. Further, again going back to that one phone call from jail where Josh seemed to devise this plan, it all pointed to Josh being the driving force behind this murder, Emilia the subordinate minion, going along and coming up with ideas of her own as the crime unfolded, but not before.

Josh pleaded with Heather to search the trailer for the money. As Heather began to flip over cushions in couches and to dig through boxes, Josh approached her.

That black chair was in the center of a small room.

“Sit down,” Josh said, swinging the chair around to face Heather. The look on Josh's face had changed by now. He meant what he said. He wasn't in a hurry anymore to find money that was never there to begin with.

Heather looked at him. She knew this guy well enough to understand that when his expression changed, Josh Fulgham meant business.

“What?” Heather asked, seemingly confused.

“Sit
down,
Heather. I need to talk to you.”

“No way. Not a chance, Josh. Take me from here.”

“I'm not doing that. We need to talk. I have some questions I want to ask you.”

Heather took a look at her husband. He was serious.

Then, after a pause, without warning, she made a break for the door.

Josh reached out to grab her.

Heather broke loose. “Let me go. . . .”

“No!”

As Heather went to open the door to leave, Josh told me, Emilia walked in.

“You need to get quiet,” Emilia told Heather.

“I'm out of here—fuck this!” Heather said before booking down the narrow hallway toward the back of the trailer.

(“And that was when Emilia hit her ... hit her with that flashlight,” Josh told Detective Buie, blaming Emilia for striking Heather first, perhaps not recalling that he had already told Buie he didn't have a flashlight with him on that night—but, in fact, he did, and he actually struck Heather with the flashlight as she went for the door and Emilia walked in.)

Emilia's blow with the flashlight to Heather's head (though he was likely referring to his own assault) was not enough to “knock her out,” Josh recalled. But Heather fell back and used her hand to break the fall and landed on the window as she went down, smashing it into shards.

On the ground now, Heather was dazed. Josh grabbed her. Then he dragged Heather over to the chair and made her sit down. When Heather resisted, being much bigger than her, Josh held her down in the chair with his body weight.

“We went back to an old mobile home that was used for storage and after a few moments Emilia came out,” Josh stated, recalling for me these moments leading up to the end of Heather's life in rather plainspoken, common language. “Heather knew about what time it was, so she tried to run out. I told her to sit down, that we were going to talk about some things.”

“Sit!” Josh screamed at Heather. “I need to tell you some things and then you can leave.”

Emilia walked over, Josh explained to Detective Buie, as he held Heather down. Then “Emilia taped her up. She got her hands taped up. I did her feet down at the bottom. I did them with tape. Emilia wrapped tape around her mouth before she even put the bag over her. Well, somehow Heather got the tape loose from her mouth and got it down around her neck. So Emilia used more. She used a whole roll of duct tape. . . .”

“You have sex with James?” Josh asked Heather after she was secured in the chair. He mentioned to me that Emilia had taped Heather to the chair and tried to tape her mouth shut
after
he asked these questions. Josh never shared this with Buie, however.

Heather denied having sex with James, Josh told me, adding—again trivializing the situation with pedestrian language—that he “made Heather sit down in a chair.”

This becomes hard to believe, because Heather was living with James at this point. Of course she was sleeping with the guy.

Anyway ... Josh said he then began asking Heather about other guys she'd possibly cheated on him with. Not only men from recent years, but from past years as well. Josh wanted to know all of their names. Each one.

Heather didn't respond immediately, so Josh started screaming at her, with the hope of scaring her.

That was when, he said, she “came clean.”

“Yes. Yes. Yes,” Heather snapped.

“Three days after I was put in jail, did you or did you not sleep with James?”

“Yes,” Heather said.

“Did you and Ben plan that bullshit [about the shotgun] the day that both of you made that report?”

“Yes,” Heather answered here, according to Josh, though he failed to tell Buie.

“Had you been sleeping with Ben
after
you came back to me?”

“Yes.”

Heather tried standing, Josh explained, so “I slammed her back down into the chair.”

Josh stood directly in front of his wife now. He bent down and looked her square in the eyes. The way he told it, it came across as a scene out of Quentin Tarantino's
Reservoir Dogs:
“Tell me about that mark I saw on [our child's eye]. . . .”

“She admitted to slapping him when he would not stop crying . . . ,” Josh explained to me. “I lost it and told Emilia . . . , ‘Do what you have to do.'” The way he explained this was as if Emilia was Josh's muscle; he left it up to her what to do next and how far to take the situation.

Josh then sat down on Heather, he said, because he was afraid she “would push back into Emilia and hurt the baby.”

Indeed, kidnapping, terrorizing and ultimately murdering Heather Strong all went on, mind you, while Emilia was eight months pregnant with Josh's (supposed) baby. Emilia, a mother-to-be, was involved in the beating and murder of a mother of two—all of this brutality occurred as Emilia carried a child (her fourth) who had been fathered by the same guy as her victim's children, making her child-to-be the half-sibling to Josh and Heather's.

Some would call that more than cold-blooded.

Maybe even downright evil at its core.