To Love and to Kill (5 page)

CHAPTER 11

THE IDEA THAT
Heather Strong took off on her own seemed less likely as the middle of March came. The focus of the MCSO's investigation had taken a turn toward Josh Fulgham and his rather unpredictable and volatile relationship with Heather. Thus far, everyone the MCSO had spoken to regarding Josh and Heather had nothing positive to say about Josh and Heather's marriage. The two of them were like oil and water—where the oil (Josh) was always on fire.

Based on police reports alone, however, another angle emerged—one that didn't quite fit into the MCSO's attention on Josh and his violent tendencies. Back in September 2008, the MCSO had been called out to Josh's home at 3rd Terrace in Citra. Josh and Heather had split up by then and Josh had been hanging out with Emilia for quite some time. It was near 7:15
P.M.
when Josh called into the sheriff's department to report a domestic dispute. He said Heather had come by the trailer to drop off their children and attacked him.

“You get [the child] out of the car, Josh,” Heather had said, according to that report.

As Josh leaned in to pick up the kid, he later told police, Heather came up from behind and “struck him with her hand on the left side of his head.” Josh was Kojak bald, with one of those heads as shiny as a cue ball. The officer noted in his report that Josh's head and ear were “red in color.” This was “consistent with being struck by a hand.”

“You need to leave,” Josh told Heather.

Heather took off.

Emilia was with Josh at the trailer when the incident had occurred. She witnessed it all. She told the officer it happened the way Josh had described it.

“I saw it!”

The officer drove over to Heather's and had a chat with her.

“I did drop off our child[ren],” Heather explained, “but I never struck him. That's bullcrap.”

The officer didn't buy it and arrested Heather, placing her in lockup at the Marion County Jail. Heather was charged with “simple domestic battery,” and the case was later tossed out of court.

CHAPTER 12

THE MSCO TRIED
to track down Josh during that late March period of investigating Heather's disappearance, yet, according to Beth Billings's report, she had met with “negative results” whenever and wherever she went looking for Josh during this time. It seemed Josh was keeping a low profile these days and had either left town or was hiding out and did not want to speak with law enforcement.

On March 18, 2009, Billings found Josh's mother, Judy Chandler. Judy had moved to Citra from Mississippi back in 2002. As Judy viewed the relationship, since Josh and Heather had been a couple as teenagers, they would “stay together for a while” and “split up and then [get] back together. They had problems off and on,” Judy said. And sometimes those problems escalated into violent, “physical altercations.” Throughout it all, however, Judy testified later, “I never seen Joshua hit her.... [But] on one occasion, they got into a fight and Heather did bust his head open with a cement block.”

Judy talked about how the relationship had progressed over the past year. Josh had come to know Emilia in early 2008 and saw her mainly throughout that summer and into the fall. But on December 26, 2008, a day after Christmas, Judy said, likely in the spirit of the holidays, Josh and Heather reconciled by getting married! It was a shock to everyone. As Judy saw it, Emilia was like a thorn in the side of Josh and Heather's relationship and marriage by that time—she was always hanging around, getting in the way. The woman would not give up her fight for Josh. She just wouldn't go away. Judy had even told Emilia once to stay the hell away from her son. Emilia didn't seem to get it: Josh had run to her and had a fling, but it was over now and he was back with his family. Emilia needed to go out and find herself a new man, because Josh was finished with her and back with his girlfriend, whom he had now made his wife.

“Haven't heard from Heather since mid-February,” Judy related to the MCSO when they tracked her down in March 2009 while searching for Josh. She couldn't recall the “exact date,” but had spoken to Heather near that time. Since then, she had not heard a word from the girl.

“What about Josh?” Billings asked.

“Back on February fifteenth, I saw Josh here when I returned home. It was, oh, seven-thirty or so that night. Josh had the kids. We never talked about why he had the kids. I'm not sure how he got possession of them.” Judy was just happy to see her grandchildren, better yet with their father. Josh had just gotten out of jail, actually. He had gone in on charges of threatening Heather with a shotgun in January and had spent about forty days behind bars, being released after Heather dropped all of the charges.

To Beth Billings, Judy came across as “defensive,” and not at all interested in giving out information about her son.

A mother protecting her child, or something else?
Billings wondered.

Changing the subject entirely, Judy told Billings that the MCSO should be looking for a man Josh knew, adding, “He's the one who got my son hooked on drugs!”

“Could you have your son call me as soon as you see him,” Billings said, handing Judy her card.

Deputy Billings next made contact with forty-seven-year-old Carolyn Spence, Heather's mother. Carolyn lived in Sturgis, Mississippi, where Heather had grown up. Carolyn was “extremely concerned” for Heather's well-being, she explained to Billings. This sort of behavior was unlike Heather. Not to call or let the family know where she was, no way, not Heather. And the kids! Heather would “never” leave her children for this long a period—especially with Josh—Carolyn explained. The only way she would not contact her children all this time, she added, was if she couldn't.

“I've tried calling and calling her,” Carolyn said in a voice that spoke of worry, dread and fear, all at once. Billings could feel it through the phone while speaking with Carolyn. Here was a mother greatly concerned about her daughter. A mother whose gut told her something bad had happened. The deputy could sense it. Carolyn had known Josh since he was sixteen. She'd had a front-row seat to their relationship throughout the years. She knew and completely understood what Josh was capable of.

“Well, we're doing what we can to locate your daughter, ma'am . . . ,” Billings said.

“I spoke to Judy,” Carolyn then offered.

“What did she say?”

“I asked where Heather might be and she became very defensive and uncooperative—she didn't want to say anything.”

Billings asked about Josh. Had she heard from him? Had she seen him?

Carolyn had some rather useful information to share, saying Josh had made “numerous threats” to Heather and the Strong family, as a whole, over the years. He was unstable and explosive. “About three years ago, there was one time when Josh called me to tell me he had tied up Heather, duct-taped her mouth shut and placed her in the trunk of his car. . . .” Carolyn began to cry as she told this story. Concluding, “Josh then said, ‘I'm going to feed her to the alligators! They'll eat her live!' I'm not sure what happened, but the cops were called.”

A picture of Josh Fulgham was coming into focus for the MCSO.

“Anything else you can offer?” Billings queried.

“Heather's birthday is coming up on March twenty-third.” Carolyn fought back more tears. This was so hard. Carolyn had not been the mother she'd wanted to be. She had her share of problems. “Heather is very family oriented and would never miss this day or not make contact with us or her kids or friends.” This meant to Carolyn that Heather did not have the capability to contact anyone. She didn't say it, but she feared that Heather was dead. It was the only answer.

They spoke for a short time more and Billings told Carolyn to call if she thought of anything else. Even little details mattered. Think things through. They were going to find Heather, Billings promised. The MCSO was not approaching this any longer as an adult runaway case: some woman who wanted to disappear with all her problems left behind. The MCSO was beyond that by now. There was something wrong and the MCSO was going to find out what it was.

For Beth Billings, however, as a patrol officer, there was little else she could do at this point. She'd exhausted all of her resources.

“Deputy Billings could only do so much because of her regular patrol work,” said a law enforcement source close to the investigation. “She was at a crossroads, essentially.”

With that, the MCSO assigned the case to a detective, Donald Buie, a seasoned investigator with over a decade of experience in solving felony crimes and finding people, both those who didn't want to be found and those who did. If Heather was hiding out for some reason, a scenario that many believed could be true in this case, Detective Buie was the investigator to flush her out.

After Buie had a look at the case file on Heather Strong, he walked over to his supervisor's office and handed Brian Spivey the file.

“Take a look at this and tell me what you think,” Buie suggested.

At some point later, they converged again.

“Yeah?” Buie said, walking back into Spivey's office.

“Sit down.”

“What do you think?”

Spivey took a moment and sat back in his chair. “Regarding Miss Strong,” Spivey said, “she's . . . dead.”

CHAPTER 13

SOME CLAIMED EMILIA
had a strange and subtle “hotness” about her that men flocked to. She knew how to be sexy and used it to her advantage. She understood how to manage what she had, in other words. And if there was one thing Emilia understood without limitation of any kind, it was how to control men with that sexual allure and confidence. Not necessarily in a bad way, but a way that made Emilia stand out in a crowd of other women. Emilia was living with her mother in McIntosh. She had three children by the year 2007, had been married and divorced once. And yet, since reuniting with Josh after his best friend was killed in July 2007 (they were casual acquaintances then), Emilia and Josh had begun an intimate, intense sexual and romantic relationship.

It was nothing hot and heavy right away, but it progressed through 2007 after twenty-two-year-old Adam Stover was killed in that car accident. Emilia would “occasionally” even stay with Josh at his trailer. It was a strange relationship in many ways, one that had started on a notion of them going to a hotel to make an amateur porn film and then turning into them laughing about it after Adam was killed, becoming closer after that death, leaning on each other for support.

“Like I say, me and Heather's sex life was in the dumps [when I met Emilia],” Josh told me, adding, perhaps without realizing how insulting and chauvinistic it sounded: “Even though Emilia did not have the prettiest face, she had a nice little set of legs and a nice little fat ass. . . .” It was a few weeks after Josh had left his phone number with Emilia in Tennessee that she called. He picked her up. “We shared a twelve-pack of Bud Light”—ah, those early memories of a budding romance—“and just rode around the back roads for a couple of hours.”

Josh pulled over by the edge of Orange Lake. They stared out into the sparkling water, drinking and talking.

“What do you want to do?” Josh asked, looking over at Emilia, smiling, taking a pull from his beer.

Emilia, Josh recalled, straddled him without warning as they were sitting in the car. She sat on his crotch and grinded his penis hard.

Emilia was feeling those beers.

“Well, what do
you
want me to do?” she asked.

“You already know what I want.”

Josh drove over to a friend's house. He and Emilia went into an empty bedroom. Of that first sexual experience with Emilia, Josh remembered: “This woman rocked my world like no other woman ever has.” He recalled “sleeping with twenty-two women” throughout his life, but none “could hold a candle” to Emilia. She knew her way around a body and how to please a man, Josh insisted.

“Even though she already had three children,” Josh explained, once again not realizing how offensive and narrow-minded he sounded, “she was not hurt in that area. I could not believe she'd had her kids naturally, with everything in as good a shape it was in.”

Josh had a little taste of Emilia on that night and he was hooked. She had him.

“It got to the point where every day I got home from work, me and Heather was arguing, I showered and ran to Emilia. . . . I was in lust, like a sixteen-year-old schoolboy.”

Sex, sex . . . and more sex. Josh could not get enough of Emilia. He had to have her as often as he could. And Emilia was right there, willing and always able to provide him with what he loved.

According to Josh, it wasn't until nearly a year after he hooked up with Emilia that Heather confronted him about his leaving the mobile home all the time. Heather had a feeling, he said, that he had been stepping out, but never really said anything. They had been trying to work things out by giving the relationship a chance.

Still, it wasn't the dope this time around, menacing the relationship; it was this other woman.

“Heather didn't know who it was then, only that I was fucking around on her,” Josh recalled.

Fed up with Josh and his running off to another woman anytime they fought, Heather packed up her things and her kids and went back to Mississippi to go live with her mother. It didn't matter who it was that Josh was banging; the fact that he was out and about, sleeping with another woman, was enough.

Heather was done.

“Two weeks after she was gone, I ended up quitting my job and heading back up to Mississippi because I could not live without seeing my kids,” Josh told me.

Once again, he chased what he could not have.

Josh's youngest was about to turn one. Josh didn't want to miss his birthday. He needed to be part of the kids' lives, regardless of what Heather thought or wanted. Yet, he also hoped to reconcile with Heather.

It took him a few weeks, but Josh got a job while back in his old stomping grounds. He and Heather hooked up once again and seemed to be getting along. He'd left Emilia kind of high and dry; but according to Josh, he didn't have any sort of deep connection with Emilia besides that unquenchable thirst she put in him for the best sex of his life. There was no agreement between them that they were exclusive, Josh suggested. The relationship with Emilia was always a rebound, or simply a sexual one.

Problems between Heather and Josh began again because “I was not making any money whatsoever while back home in Mississippi,” Josh said.

He had been in Mississippi for about five months and decided it was time to go back to Florida. It was late summer 2008 by then. Josh knew he could make more money in Florida; he had developed contacts and knew where to find steady work. Plus, Emilia was in Florida. All that Josh had thought about since being gone was the sex he had been getting from Emilia before he left. As much as he tried to stay away from her, he later claimed, the sex kept calling him back—especially when he and Heather were not getting along. So Josh drove to Florida and went straight over to Emilia's mother's house, looking for her.

Josh said he knocked and knocked. No one answered the door, even though he could tell people were shuffling around inside.

So he left.

A few days later, Josh ran into someone he and Emilia knew.

“Have you seen her around?” Josh asked.

His friend could tell Josh was looking to hook up. “Um, you don't know?” the friend asked.

“Know what?”

Josh's friend laughed.

“What's so funny?” Josh wondered. He felt like a fool who had not been let in on the joke.

“She went and got married, man. You didn't hear? Emilia and Jamie Carr.”

Josh knew Jamie. He couldn't believe this. Never saw it coming.

As he thought about it, Josh began to feel that Emilia getting married might actually be a blessing in disguise—maybe it was that sign he needed, telling him he was crazy for lusting after this woman when he had Heather and their kids. It was a good reason not to get back with Emilia and destroy any chance he had with Heather and their children for a life together. Josh could tell Heather that he was through with his year-plus “fling.” But now that Emilia was married, the way Josh saw it, their relationship, whatever it was, definitely had come to an end.

Now Josh was thinking of a way to get back with Heather, who had moved back to Florida that fall of 2008 and had started working at the Petro again. But regardless of what Josh would later say, Heather had no intention of getting back with him. She was done. The history between them was too vast, too violent, too much had happened. It was time both moved on. Sure, they had kids, but Heather didn't care this time around, she was telling friends. She needed to end things with this guy. It would never work. As many times as they had tried, it always turned out the same.

As he left that friend after hearing about Emilia's marriage, Josh ran into Emilia's uncle, who was riding down the street on his bicycle.

“Hey, man, can you give me a lift home?” the uncle asked.

Josh put the bike into his car and drove Emilia's uncle over to Emilia's mother's house. As they pulled into the driveway, Josh saw Emilia's truck and realized she was home.

“I'm stopping here,” Josh said he told the uncle as he pulled over, parking up the road from the house. “I don't want to see her.”

As the uncle got out of the car, Josh claimed, “Emilia came out in some little booty shorts and so I got out and approached her.”

“Where's your
husband
at, Emilia?” Josh said in a sarcastic manner. He couldn't believe she went and got married. What the hell!

“How do you know?”

“I found out.”

Emilia seemed surprised. She didn't tell Josh then, but the marriage was just about over, anyway. She and Jamie had been kidding themselves. They were planning to divorce.

“Are you happy, Emilia?” Josh asked.

“I was happy,” Emilia said, “until right now when I seen you. Now I'm confused.”

“Where's your husband?” Josh asked again. Josh knew he was in jail. The uncle had told him.

“At work,” Emilia said.

Josh laughed.

“Okay, so he's in jail.”

According to Josh's recollection, Emilia's phone rang at that moment. It was Jamie Carr, who explained he had been let out of jail and needed a ride home.

Emilia hung up and told Josh she had to go get Jamie. Turning and leaving, however, Emilia said, “Why don't you drop by here tomorrow—come see me.”

Josh knew it was trouble.

“Maybe . . . ,” he said. “We'll see.”

Who was Josh Fulgham kidding? He drove away counting down the minutes.