To Love and to Kill (31 page)

CHAPTER 93

THE JUDGE ORDERED
a short recess after King and Hawthorne closed their cases, brought everyone back, and gave the penalty phase of this trial over to the jury for its review and vote.

It was important to Judge Pope how the jury felt about life or death. In the end, though, it was not up to the jury to decide Emilia's ultimate fate; all they were doing here was giving the judge a recommendation. Pope would be the final judge, literally, deciding at a later date whether Emilia lived or died. Legally, he could agree or disagree with the jury's recommendation.

It took two hours for the jury to come back. Shocking everyone in the courtroom, they had voted to put Emilia Carr on death row, by a margin of seven to five.

Effectively, one vote had decided the jury's recommendation of death.

Judge Pope announced that it would be some time before he made his concluding voice heard in the matter of the
State of Florida
v.
Emilia Carr.
The jury's opinion was important, Emilia and her attorney knew. By law, however, Candace Hawthorne explained to Emilia and her family, the judge was bound to give the jury's recommendation “great weight.” He could decide either way, however. And in Florida, judges were known to impose life without parole sentences instead of death. With the vote being so close here, many assumed, Emilia had a good chance—unlike Heather Strong—of escaping death.

The judge set a hearing date for February 22, 2011.

CHAPTER 94

FROM BEHIND BARS,
after the penalty phase of her trial was over, Emilia Carr spoke. Local reporter Natalia Martinez, who had covered the trial for WCJB-TV, the northern Florida affiliate of ABC News, interviewed Emilia on December 13, 2010. Emilia was waiting in Marion County Jail for her orders to be shipped off to one of Florida's maximum-security prisons for women.

The fact that the jury had recommended death for Emilia had perhaps sobered her thinking. Looking dumpy and deprived of sleep, Emilia wore white-and-red candy-cane-striped prison jumpers. Her hair was a bit disheveled and noticeably dry; there was a strange, obvious gap between her two front, upper teeth.

“I thought when people saw the trial they would know that I had nothing to do with this,” Emilia proclaimed to Martinez.

Here she was facing the hour of death and Emilia was still shouting from behind a bullhorn the notion that she was never inside that trailer while Josh was murdering Heather. Detectives Buie and Spivey, Emilia added, as soon as they started “questioning me, first thing they started doing was threatening me with my kids.”

It was an old, tired argument—one that Emilia had tried already and failed. But she bantered on and on. The entire time she spoke to the police, Emilia explained to Martinez, she was making things up. Emilia had been totally convinced Josh was “trying to put it all on me from the beginning.”

Most everyone had heard this all before. Emilia sounded desperate. What did she think would happen if she continued? The jury had spoken. All she was doing now was adding additional shovels full of dirt on a grave Judge Pope was perhaps preparing.

Moments into the interview, Emilia started to cry. She talked about how she was the “only one” who could take care of her and her sister's children, because within her “family . . . I'm the only one that's educated—and I'm in here because of a man.”

“She is damn good at lying and making people believe her,” Josh Fulgham said. He was behind bars, awaiting a date with the SA. Josh had sat back and watched Emilia's trial unfold. He was satisfied that Emilia had been unable to manipulate the system to her benefit. That's what had worried Josh the most, he said, that Emilia would be able to talk her way out of it all.

According to Josh, Emilia had once written to him and asked that he write a letter to the governor of Florida, asking for her “emergency rush release” because she was an “innocent mother of four.” Josh said that he was “supposed to tell [the governor] if he didn't set her free that I was going to go public and tell on television that he has left [an] innocent woman [heading for] ... death row, after I had done told him she was innocent.”

The bottom line within all of this was that it didn't matter. Emilia's fate was in the hands of a judge, who was just about to make his final decision.

CHAPTER 95

ANY PLAN SHE
might have had from behind bars to escape final justice, if Emilia had one at all, did not work. As promised, on February 22, 2011, after assembling all of the parties involved once again, Judge Willard Pope sat behind his bench. With a dreadful look about his face, he announced to the courtroom how much thought he had put into his decision. In the end, though, the judge said it wasn't a tough decision to make after all—that is, legally speaking. Once he sat down and took everything into account, Judge Willard Pope realized there was only one result he could come to.

With utter silence inside the courtroom, Emilia faced Judge Pope. Her expression was bleak and defiant. Pope looked at Emilia and said, “‘This court is compelled to conclude that the actions of Emilia Carr in this case, and the manner, means and circumstances by which those actions were taken, require the imposition of the ultimate penalty.'”

Pope was reading aloud from what was a detailed, passionate, well-written, well-thought-out, twenty-nine-page order.

Emilia dropped her head when she realized her fight was over. She was heading to death row. But then, suddenly, she looked up and seemed to face the judge's conclusion with a modicum of acceptance.

Judge Pope allowed Emilia to speak. In a short statement, Emilia gave the impression that she was not going to back down from the story she had been trying to sell everyone. She viewed the entire process as unfair and biased. She said she had been erroneously “convicted of telling a lie.” Nothing more. She was heading to death row, essentially, for lying to the police.

It was outrageous. It was wrong. It was unjust.

Emilia's case would be filed under automatic review. An appeal was due process in all death penalty cases. That would be the place from this point on where Emilia could argue through her attorneys against the judge's sentence and the jury's decision.

Pope continued, explaining to the court how he “assigned great weight” to “three aggravating circumstances” in the case where his decision to affirm the jury's recommended sentence was concerned. Legally, this fact was vital to his decision. Heather Strong, Pope said, had been brutally murdered during the commission of the “separate felony offense of kidnapping.” He explained the crimes were “especially heinous, atrocious and cruel.” He referred to the murder as “cold, calculated and premeditated.”

Alternatively, Pope had given Emilia's “lack of criminal history” the most weight out of much of what he looked at. The argument that she'd had a tough upbringing, was sexually assaulted and didn't have many chances in life played zero part in the judge's decision, he explained. He said he placed “little or no weight” on those sad, mitigating factors. In addition, Pope said there was “no evidence” presented to him that Emilia was ever manipulated by Joshua Fulgham. Plus, effectively, testimony from a clinical psychologist proved that she was, and still is, “in control of her own faculties.”

Lastly, in the case he listened to inside his courtroom, Pope agreed with just about everyone else besides Emilia and her attorneys that the state presented “overwhelming evidence” of Emilia's guilt.

There was a brief moment of pause and reflection from the well-liked judge. It was clear he took this matter seriously; deciding to send a young mother of four young children to death row was not easy. Then, in carefully chosen language, as he had throughout the entire trial, Judge Pope ended with a word of hope (depending on which way one looked at things) while staring directly at Emilia: “May God have mercy on your soul.”

In confirming the jury's decision, sending Emilia Carr to death row, Judge Willard Pope made a bit of history as Emilia Carr became the first woman to receive the death penalty in Marion County since famed serial killer Aileen Wuornos, convicted in the same county and executed in October 2002. Emilia would join one other woman, Tiffany Cole, on Florida's death row. Cole, also in her late twenties, was sentenced in March 2008 for her role in the vicious and cruel double murder of a Jacksonville, Florida, couple.

This case was far from over, however. The way Candace Hawthorne felt after the latest decision indicated anything but finality. Outside the courtroom, Hawthorne spoke to various reporters hovering around her. “I'd be interested to see if the Florida Supreme Court affirms the judge's decision,” Hawthorne said with a bit of tailored cynicism in her voice. “I don't think they will.”

Brad King was not celebrating. One did not jump for joy at the prospect of placing a young woman on death row in a state where the punishment, after all the appeals were exhausted, was often carried out . Even if Emilia spent twenty years on death row, it would still make her a young woman at forty-plus when the state of Florida summoned her to the death chamber for execution. King, instead, took the high road and called Pope's affirmation of the jury's recommendation an “appropriate” decision to make from the bench, before adding how he believed the Florida Supreme Court would agree.

“Looking through other cases,” King told reporters, “the Florida Supreme Court regularly has upheld cases” with comparable aggravating factors.

For Emilia's mother, a woman who had worked hard all her life to give her kids the best she could, seeing Emilia on death row was, she said, this mother's “worst nightmare.” She was “shocked” by the judge's ruling and needed some time to go home and process the road ahead.

Heather's family was nowhere in sight.

CHAPTER 96

JOSHUA FULGHAM WAS
ready to face whatever fate had in store for him. He was thirty years old. He'd been behind bars now for almost three years. He had wanted to cut a deal with the SAO, but they still weren't offering. Ready and willing to accept a plea deal, the issue at hand for King was that the state had gotten a conviction in Emilia's case and she had been sentenced to death. The SAO couldn't roll over now and allow the mastermind, essentially, to take life.

“Brad King takes his responsibilities very seriously,” said Terry Lenamon, Josh's lawyer. “He looks to the victim's family and proportionality on some levels. He had gotten a death sentence on Emilia, and because he believed that was an appropriate sentence, he didn't want to risk any appellate issues. . . .”

The idea was that if Josh was given a plea offer and took it, Emilia's attorneys could argue what is called “proportionality” in her appeal: What this means is that the “government and private actions should not be demonstrably excessive, relative to their moral and practical justifications.”

What's good for one, in other words, has to be good for the other.

So Josh was now in a position to battle it out in court against the SAO. To that end, Josh said later, holding little back, “The prosecutor in my case was a sick, obsessed fuck . . . and I hope he burns in hell.”

There was certainly another way to put what was resentment for not cutting a deal, and maybe Josh's reaction was a good indication why the SA had not wanted to deal with him in the first place.

According to what Josh told me later, he had wanted to plead out mainly for the sake of
not
putting everyone through the rigorous, expensive, emotional roller-coaster ride of a capital murder trial all over again, adding, “So Heather could be put to rest.”

As his trial approached, Josh was conducting a bit of a life review, especially regarding all the time he spent with Heather. Hindsight is always 20/20, especially as a man is about to face a noose on his way to the gallows. He begins to look at things differently.

But Josh said he didn't care what people thought about him, how genuine anyone believed he was or wasn't about his remorse. He was truly sorry for the things he had done to Heather throughout their lives. The bad behavior and the way he had treated Heather—this, despite murdering her!—had been weighing on his soul. He wanted now to do what was best for her memory by admitting to killing her and accepting a death sentence.

“Like I have said, over and over, since my arrest, I am not proud of any of this stuff and how I treated Heather. . . .”

Josh felt the prosecutor had a “grand slam” (though he probably meant slam dunk) with his case, “
only
because of my confession, which was done out of remorse for Heather.”

In his heart, Josh said, he believed Brad King would have never “challenged the case,” had Detective Buie been unable to get that final confession from Josh.

“They would never get a conviction if I didn't give them a confession, because Emilia was damn sure never going to talk until she found out I had.”

Josh said he realized Emilia was going to “always blame” him and there were people who would “feed into her bullshit . . . but this shit happened and we went to jail.”

Because they did not take his plea deal, Josh said, he was now resigned to fight. Why not? What did he have to lose?

His life.

Because if a jury in the same county had given a mother of four the death penalty, Josh knew his days were numbered if (and when) he was found guilty. So the state, he claimed, gave him no choice but to fight the charges, which he was now preparing to do with one of the top death penalty defense lawyers in the state representing him.