To Love and to Kill (3 page)

CHAPTER 4

JOSHUA FULGHAM WAS
the first to admit that he was not John Q. Public, briefcase in hand, kissing his wife and children on the cheek every weekday morning, before he headed out the door with a steaming cup of coffee in hand, hopping into his Taurus and heading toward another day at the office. Josh was anything but, actually. Joshua Fulgham was a criminal for years: fraud and larceny and assault on the top of his rap sheet. Yet, as he grew up in the down-home country life of Mississippi, it was a time that was mostly devoid of him getting into serious trouble, he explained to me. This was more or less a period of survival for him as his mother raised his sister and him “on her own” and then unwittingly, and unknowingly, brought a monster into their household.

“For some reason, he liked to beat me,” Josh said of his mother's boyfriend. “I don't know why he felt he had to do so, but he did it on a regular basis.”

Josh pointed out that he was not talking about your average “spanking,” which was maybe popular in other households back then.

“No,” Josh said, “that son of a bitch would beat me with his fists like I was a grown man. But I was seven years old.”

Josh reckoned this was one reason why “I turned out so tough and mean myself.”

Before long, Josh, his mother and sister moved from the Columbus area (where Josh had spent his early youth) to Clarkson, Mississippi. Clarkson had a population then of about three hundred, Josh recalled. It was there that Josh's mother dropped the abuser and met a man who would soon become Josh's stepfather. Josh had fond memories of this man, who took him fishing and taught him how to hunt.

“They had a little girl when I was nine years old,” Josh remembered.

The family stayed in Clarkson until 2000. Josh had turned nineteen. It was some years before that, Josh explained, when he “gave up on life.” Something happened and, as Josh later put it, he told himself to “fuck it.” He then dropped any dreams he had as a child, thus lacking any motivation to move on toward a better life. His grandmother had died suddenly one day. Josh had been “very close” to his “mamau,” as he called her. “I just gave up hope for everything,” Josh remembered, after losing her. On top of that list was school. Then he started getting into trouble. By the time he was fifteen, Josh recalled, he was already facing an arson charge and had been sent off to a reformatory, the Oakley Training School, in Raymond, Mississippi, a place with a military-style regimen for what the school said was mostly “nonviolent offenders.”

That first time in, they sent Josh home after eight weeks because of overcrowding. He wasn't acting up. He had done what he was told. They gave him a chance.

Home, however, without much discipline and no one looking over his shoulder, Josh found more trouble. He had heard from local kids that a house in the neighborhood had a lot of guns. So Josh decided to kick the door open one night and steal the weapons so he could sell them for “drug money.” By then, Josh was already caught for booze and dope and was not yet old enough to drive a car.

Needless to say, Josh was sent back to Oakley to complete his program. This time, they said there would be no trouble finding Josh a bed, and overcrowding wouldn't be a problem for him. He had been given an opportunity to prove he could be rehabilitated and had failed. Josh was now facing hard time.

He got out just before turning sixteen. It was on that night of his birthday when Josh and a friend went out to a local restaurant in Mathiston, Mississippi, that Josh sat down and looked up from his meal to see a gorgeous, knockout waitress walking by his table.

Josh took one look. She was perfect in every way. There was chemistry immediately, he recalled.

“Heather,” the waitress said her name.

“Hi, Heather ... I'm Josh.”

The boy lit up as though he had never seen a female before.

At the time, Heather wore her hair blond, which contrasted nicely against her striking blue eyes and porcelain skin. She was young, naive, not yet ready to take on a boy with the life experiences Josh had accumulated.

Josh was taken. He couldn't eat.

“I knew I had to have her,” Josh remembered. “She was such a pretty girl.”

They started dating and it got serious right away. Josh had a girlfriend at the time, whom he was “just crazy about,” he said. He'd known her since they were ten years old. “[She] was the love of my life,” Josh claimed. But still, there was something about Heather. It was as if they connected on a deeper level—from the first moment, the energy, Josh felt, could not be denied. He had to act on it.

Not long after this, Josh was out drinking one night with friends and happened to get into a fight with a local cop, whom Josh made a point to say later, he “pummeled.” That alleged ass-whupping Josh had given to the cop got him tossed back into Oakley, where he stayed for quite some time. With Heather alone on the outside, Josh told her she could always count on his family if she ever needed anything while he was locked up. In fact, according to Josh, Heather took him up on that offer one night when she arrived at Josh's mother's house with her bags. She claimed to have been sexually assaulted by someone she knew and wanted a safe place to stay.

“Of course,” Josh's mother said.

Josh was happy about it because it meant he knew where she was. He didn't have to worry about Heather stepping out.

After getting out of Oakley for a third and fourth time, Josh said he realized the way he viewed life was not getting him anywhere. He needed to make changes. He'd gone through a tough time, according to him, leaving that girlfriend he had before Heather, and felt he was giving up the love of his life for the lust he felt for Heather. (Incidentally, this would be a recurring theme in the life and times of Joshua Fulgham. The grass was
always
greener from where Josh saw it.) But when he returned home, with Heather now living at his house, he felt as though he was lucky to have her. Heather was good-hearted; she had a tender soul. They got along great. A year and a half went by, Josh had gotten a job building and setting up trailer homes while Heather—both of them now considered adults, eighteen years old and over—was now pregnant with their first child.

Another problem entered their lives, however. As Heather was about to give birth to a daughter, whom they would call Carol-Lynn (pseudonym), Josh said he was then introduced to what become the second love of his life.

Crystal meth.

“From the very first time I did it,” Josh said years later, “that is all I cared about and worked for.”

Even after Carol-Lynn was born, a time when Josh tried desperately to stop doing the drug, he continued.

Afterward, though, Josh got a job working on a riverboat, “making good money.” He and Heather were still living at his mom's. Soon Josh was able to purchase a home and he had even stayed away from the meth.

This fleeting moment of normalcy, however, didn't last. Within a short period, he was back not only doing the drug, but hanging out with people who were cooking it. Now Josh's addiction went from zero to one thousand. He was so strung out, Josh took some time off to try and purify his body by going cold turkey. That week turned into two weeks. He was fired from his job. He and Heather now had nothing.

So Josh decided to go into his own business.

Yet, instead of buying meth and then selling it for a profit, Josh Fulgham decided he was going into the business of cooking up batches of the drug himself.

CHAPTER 5

DEPUTY BETH BILLINGS
needed to track down Josh Fulgham and see what that supposed last call between him and Heather at her work was all about. If it had sparked some sort of reaction from Heather to the point where she packed her bags and took off, it must have been pretty heavy. In addition, maybe Josh knew where she had run off to.

Josh was at a friend's house, where he had been staying. Billings found him and asked if he didn't mind answering a few questions about his wife, Heather.

“Not at all,” Josh said. He seemed sincerely interested in what was going on. Cops don't show up every day asking about your soon-to-be ex-spouse.

“When did you last speak to Miss Strong?”

Josh had difficulty recalling the exact date and time, but he decided it must have been back on February 15. “Yeah, I know it was now ... she called
me
. She wanted me to meet her at Petro, where she works out on the 318.”

“Did you go to meet her?”

“I did. I did, yes. It was, oh, I don't know, somewhere around nine, nine-fifteen that night.”

“What did she want?”

Josh explained that Heather appeared flustered. There was something going on with her that she would not talk about. “She told me she ‘needed time to clear her head' . . . and asked if I could take our children.” Josh further added, “She had two suitcases with her. She was going somewhere, but she wouldn't share where with me.”

“Did she say anything else?”

“I'm not sure when she was set to return, because she wouldn't tell me.”

“Any idea where she is now?”

Josh scratched his bald head. He took a breath. “I do. I think she's with this older dude. I only know him as Wayne. He's helped her with money in the past.” Josh said he had no idea where Wayne lived or how to get hold of him.

Billings told Josh to call the MCSO if he remembered anything else, or if he heard from Heather.

He said no problem.

 

 

LITTLE JOE'S TRAILER
Park was a sparsely spread-out mobile home community on the 13200 block of Jacksonville Road in Citra. From outward appearances, it looked as though the office to Joe's—with a mud-stained and rusted steel mailbox out front, a small wicker bench seat, discolored from dirt and wear, a nearly unreadable sign hanging from a rotting wooden pole—had been abandoned long ago. The beige paint on the building itself was faded, the rust red trim cracking and in need of lots of TLC. In back of that office were mobile homes, those, too, a bit shoddily kept, brush and trees overgrown and camouflaging nearly all of the homes.

Beth Billings found the landlord and had a conversation about one particular trailer, where Heather had lived recently. Billings wanted to know about any movement or people at the mobile home recently. Had the landlord seen anyone?

“Nope,” she said. “I ain't seen nobody there since two weeks ago now. But about four or five days ago, Mr. Fulgham, he called me and, after stating he was Miss Strong's ‘ex-husband, ' asked if he could get into Miss Strong's trailer.”

“Did he say why?”

“Yup. Said he wanted to get the children's clothes and things.”

“What'd you tell him?”

“I told him no.”

Beyond that, the landlord said she knew nothing more.

And so Beth Billings went on her way to the only other place she knew might provide some information about where Heather had run off to, perhaps.

CHAPTER 6

THE FIRST BIT
of information raising the eyebrows of Beth Billings as she searched for Heather Strong—a true missing person case or a woman who had taken off on her own accord—came from a visit to Heather's workplace, the Iron Skillet restaurant inside the Petro center. Billings found the assistant manager and pulled her aside, hoping to clear up a gut instinct the deputy had that Heather had not gone off on her own—that there was more to her disappearance than a woman scared of something, running from her problems.

“She took an ‘emergency phone call' on February fifteenth,” the Iron Skillet manager explained to Billings. “I knew it was from Joshua Fulgham, her ex, because she told me. It was short. When she got off the phone, Heather was visibly upset.”

But Mr. Fulgham said Heather had called
him
?
Beth Billings knew.

“Did she say what Mr. Fulgham said to her?”

“No, she didn't.”

As they talked, Billings got the impression that this type of stressful phone call was not at all out of the norm for Heather Strong.

“She's had ongoing problems with him,” the manager explained. “It was not unusual for her to get a phone call and for her to be upset after speaking with him.”

The manager went on to describe how the last time she saw Heather was at 3:00
P.M.
that day, when Heather's shift ended. This made sense with what James Acome had reported: Heather had shown up at the house at three-thirty, although James had it wrong that Heather was working a double; she was not. “She was supposed to return at eight
A.M.
the following morning, but never showed up and never called. That is very unusual for Heather. She generally shows up, or if not, she
always
calls in.”

“Anything else you can think of, ma'am?”

“Here's the thing,” the manager said, “Heather never picked up her paycheck.”

So she left town, as Joshua Fulgham thought, without any money?

This scenario didn't make much sense to the deputy. Heather would surely want as much money as possible with her if she had run away.

“Is there any other way for her to get that money?”

“Well, yes, now that I think of it. She could still access the money from her bank without actually having the paper check. Our bookkeeper would be the only one who could tell you whether she withdrew that money or not.”

Employees had special debit cards given to them by the company so they could withdraw their paycheck at any time after it was deposited into their account.

“Can I talk to her?”

“She'll be here tomorrow morning at eight.”

Beth Billings headed back to the sheriff's office in Ocala to file her report and issue a BOLO (be on the lookout) order. Then she called Misty Strong to report back what she had found out. It was Misty, after all, who had initiated the search.

“Call us if you have any additional concerns,” Billings told Misty after the deputy explained to Heather's cousin all she could. “Right now, there's not much more we can do.”

By March 2, 2009, the MCSO was growing increasingly concerned about the well-being of Heather Strong. Heather's family kept up the pressure on the sheriff's office. They were firm in their belief that Heather had not left town by her own volition. When an investigator contacted the bookkeeper from the Iron Skillet on that following morning, additional unease emerged as the MCSO learned that Heather's account had been accessed back on February 19, but not at any time after that date. Her most recent paycheck funds had not been withdrawn. Heather had never gone back to the restaurant to pick up her last paycheck and did not withdraw those funds from the bank. Like a lot of people, Heather lived paycheck to paycheck. There was no way, family members told the MCSO, that she would have left town and not contacted family or friends, and not cashed or accessed her last paycheck. But beyond all of that, Heather would have never left town without her children.

Her children were her life.

With all of that, Heather's case went from missing to “missing and endangered.”

It was a simple move by several curious and experienced cops that would change this entire investigation.