Investigators asked Todd to talk about his personal relationship with Donna. A’Hearn wanted to know if he had ever spoken to Donna alone—just the two of them—and what she might have said.
“Numerous occasions,” Todd admitted.
“Who contacted whom?”
“She normally called me. Donna would often talk about how much trouble her boyfriend’s wife was causing her . . . and how much easier it would be if she was out of the picture. She was very casual about having this woman killed and spoke of it often.”
They asked Todd if Donna ever talked about her boyfriend, George Fulton. The thought was that George was maybe the mastermind behind it all; he was there behind the curtain, telling Donna what to do, having Donna go out and find the right people who could give them the freedom Donna had told Todd that she and George had been yearning for since they met.
“I asked her once, ‘This guy, your boyfriend,
he
knows you want to do this?’ Donna’s response was ‘Heavens no!’ She used to ask me all the time if my friend could do ‘the hit’ for
her.
”
“Have you spoken to Donna since the murder?”
“Yeah . . . yeah . . . but every time I mention the murder, she changes the subject and says she has to go, and immediately gets off the phone.”
“When was the last time you spoke to Miss Trapani?”
“Oh, it’s been about a month or so.”
A’Hearn asked Todd Franklin if he knew what happened. Had Sybil told him how it all finally went down, by whom, and how long it took to plan? Was Donna actually there when Gail was murdered? Phone records indicated that George’s telephone and Donna’s telephone were in touch on the night Gail was murdered. But that did not mean Donna and George were on each end of the line. Perhaps George Fulton was covering for his lover?
Todd took a breath. “She did. She told me everything.”
From there, Todd Franklin proceeded to explain to three investigators what had actually happened on the night and preceding days leading up to the murder of Gail Fulton—and yet that deadly narrative, the beginning of the end of Gail Fulton’s life, began on a wintry day in 1996, when George Fulton and his family moved from Texas to Michigan.
II
THE BLACK CLOUD
22
I
T WAS SNOWING
that afternoon when the Fulton family pulled up to their new home on Talon Circle in Lake Orion, Michigan. This was the next chapter in George and Gail Fulton’s lives after leaving the warmth of Corpus Christi, Texas. Everyone was tagging along to live out George’s dream. It was his decision to pack it all up and move. They had arrived in Lake Orion that summer and stayed in an apartment until the house on Talon Circle was finished.
“I would say my mom liked the house because she got to help customize certain features,” Emily Fulton said.
The new house was a fresh start for George and Gail: They had two kids still in high school (their oldest child had stayed in Texas), a devotion to their Catholic faith, and George was beginning a new job. Gail had been reluctant to move, but maybe it could all work?
Gail wasn’t all that thrilled about moving so far away from her mother, but she knew that unfamiliar surroundings and new friends could be a new beginning for her life, wherever it was heading. The house was lovely. It had all the essentials any homemaker could ask for. The neighborhood was a suburban dream: clean yards, plush landscaping, people who waved and said hello while washing cars and shoveling snow.
No sooner had the Fultons settled down, however, when Gail experienced a loneliness—one that would be harder and harder to contend with as each day passed.
Gail didn’t get to know any of her neighbors. There were block parties, but Gail and George—private to begin with—never attended.
“Living [there] was fine,” Emily recalled. “I lived in the house from the time I was sixteen . . . until I was married [at twenty-four]. I think my mom liked the house enough and I know she liked working at the library, but I also know she missed her family and would probably have been happier being closer to her mom and other extended family. . . .”
Gail was friendly at work and while she was out and about in town, but she was not one to hang out afterward or attend social events. Gail was more of the subordinate wife; she enjoyed the role she played in her family’s everyday lives. Home wasn’t a prison to Gail. She didn’t feel confined by her duties as wife and mother. She understood that raising well-adjusted and kind kids took sacrifice.
On the other hand, when Gail’s children look back on her life inside that new house, they see how much Gail had changed and withdrawn from not only society, but also the things she loved.
“When I think back on this,” Emily remembered, “I think how lonely this must have been [for her] to not have anyone to confide in [or] to be able to talk girlfriend stuff with. Everyone needs friends, and females especially need female time. I know me and my brother spent some quality times with my mom taking her out to eat and to the movies, but I can’t help but regret that I did not do more. You never really know how short your time is with someone. Maybe it was good to have my friends come over to eat dinner with us when I was in college. At least this gave my mom other conversation besides me and my brother.”
Emily soon saw a dramatic change in the atmosphere around the house as her mother’s attitude in general deteriorated.
“I must admit that I preferred to not be at home because it was such a sad and lonely place, and it was hard for me to bear it. I mean, I was there for my mom . . . but I still often think I could have done more [household chores]. When I was growing up, I was always helping my mom around the house and I would always help my mom make dinner. I would ask her, ‘What can I help with?’ And she would give me a job. That is how I learned to cook—from watching my mom. I think when I got to high school, I stopped helping as much, since I didn’t get home from after-school activities until dinnertime and was so busy with school stuff. . . . I was my mom’s helper out of the three of us, as my siblings were often off playing with friends or doing something else. Maybe I could sense my mom’s loneliness and that is why I usually [offered] to help her versus playing outside.... I have always needed a purpose, and my purpose was to spend time with my mom to make her job easier. . . . I miss my mom.”
Back in Texas before the move north, according to several of Gail’s friends, George and Gail were unhappy. Their marriage was going through a rough period that literally showed on Gail’s face. There were family photos of Gail taken during this period that captured the suffering she endured. In these pictures her face was emaciated and hollow; her cheekbones were defined. There were definitive bags under her eyes, and her posture spoke of a woman suffering from a depression so encompassing it literally manifested itself into weight and hair loss.
George wore a mustache during these times—a common change, someone close to him later noted, that would become a signature of certain behaviors.
It was during the mid-1990s that George was unable to find a job that, a neighbor said, “he thought was
good
enough for him.” George had been out of work; yet, under his military training and army “mentality,” added that same source, “George believed he should start at the top.”
A friend was trying to help George get a job. They sat together in the friend’s office one day. “What type of job do you want here, George?” His friend figured he might be able to get George into the company at an entry-level position or slighter higher up and George could show his stuff.
“I want
your
job,” George said.
“He didn’t feel he should have to work his way up the corporate ladder,” said the friend.
George thought he deserved it—that he did not have to prove himself.
Out of work George started selling insurance and offering financial planning for couples and families. The first policy he sold was to Gail.
Life insurance.
Gail was extremely upset by his new career path, considering that George had the skills and education to do so many different things that could earn the family more money. As it happened, that previous Christmas before they left Texas, Gail had sacrificed so much and made do on a shoestring budget, getting the kids the bare minimum for holiday gifts. Gail was not happy about it, but she accepted the changes as a bump in the road. During this time, as they struggled to pay bills, George went out and “bought a one-hundred-dollar tie,” Gail told a friend. Thinking back on it, Gail was in tears. She couldn’t believe how selfish George had been. The argument for George was that since he was going to be selling insurance and offering financial planning, he needed to look the part.
“It showed,” said a neighbor, “another little thing about him that was
me, me, me.
It was always what was best for George,
not
the family.”
And then this job in Michigan came along and George jumped on it.
“It was heart-wrenching to see Gail,” said one of her friends, “when the decision was made to move up north, away from her church and family and friends.”
Gail had built her life in that Corpus Christi community. At a time when things in the marriage and the household itself were not going well, it was the only true lifeline she had to cling to. Everything else could fall apart around her, but Gail knew she had her church, her friends, and, especially, her mother there—and now George took all of that away.
Gail’s first thought was with her mother, who was a widow by then and needed Gail around to help her through those latter years. This move halfway across the country came out of left field. There was no discussion; there was no family meeting. No “Honey, what do
you
think? Is it something
you’d
like to do?”
George made up his mind, and that was it.
“But, Gail,” asked a friend when Gail confided they were moving, “what do
you
feel about it all?”
“This is what George wants,” Gail said. “For our family it is right.” One of Gail’s concerns was sending the kids to college and making sure they had enough money for the kids to attend good schools. If she had to move north to accomplish that goal, Gail was ready and willing to—again—to sacrifice.
In that respect, a neighbor said, “George likely dangled the kids’ educational futures in front of Gail. . . .”
(According to Emily, however, her father would later refuse to pay for the girls’ college educations when it came time to apply.)
“She was the most loving and kind mother and wife,” said another friend. “She just wanted her family. She wanted to be close to the church. It was all about being a good Catholic—and George took
total
advantage of that! He blindsided her with her loyalty and with ‘you’re married till death do us part.’”
Gail forgave her husband and accepted the move because that’s who she was. She did not know, of course, it was a decision that would ultimately kill her.
23
D
ONNA TRAPANI OWNED
and operated a home health care business in Florida that catered to elderly clients in need of daily care. They are sometimes called “visiting nurses.” The job George had taken in Michigan wasn’t what he had expected. As the winter of 1996 became the spring of 1997, George found himself looking for work, itching to start his own business. This work history of her father’s seemed to fall into a pattern, Emily later suggested. George dreamt of sitting behind the desk of his own company, calling the shots, controlling every aspect of his financial future—which was where Donna Trapani fit in.
“Donna helped one of my dad’s dreams come true,” Emily observed. “He always wanted to start his own business.”
When they lived in Corpus Christi, George started an electronic medical-claims business. It turned out to be some sort of scam and ended up costing him thousands of dollars, Emily said. She added, “I was too young to understand at the time, but I just remember that my dad got duped.”
Part of the connection George and Donna had stemmed from each coming from similar economic backgrounds.
“Not sure how much of this was lies from Donna,” Emily said, “as I assume that some of it was . . . so that my dad would feel closer to her and to make it seem that only
she
really understood him. I think my dad wanted to marry my mom because she came from a well-to-do family and would make a good officer’s wife to help him with his career. . . . I know for a fact that he resented my mom due to her upbringing because she did not struggle like he did. I firmly believe this because he even resented us kids for having it ‘so easy’ when we were growing up. My dad was too selfish to understand the full impact of how he treated us . . . and even how he handled the affair we knew about, and our mother’s death, as anything bad for us, as it was always about
him.
So when Donna offered him this job in Florida,
along
with the sex, this was all too much for my dad to pass up—as this sort of gave him some of his redemption, I imagine, and made him feel smart again, as he was finally able to have his own business and put his claims idea to good use.”
It was 1997 when George and Donna first met. She was a flirtatious, foul-mouthed, married floozy who liked to go out after work and party at the neighborhood bars and meet men. On October 14, 1997, George was in Florida on business. He happened to be staying at a hotel near the Seagull Bar. Locals called it the “Dirty Bird,” because “it’s a dive,” one regular later said. Donna fit right in with the bar’s clientele. She dressed flashy and trashy. Her clothes were new, but always too tight, too loud, too glittery.
“Trailer trash with some money,” said a former coworker. “That was Donna.”
George was working for a Troy, Michigan–based automotive safety company as its senior operations research analyst. He went out for a drink one night to the Seagull, said one police report, and saw Donna at the bar.