Kevin took one and read.
“You did a good job, Mike—the papers call it a ‘professional’ hit,” Donna said. She had a cocky smile and calm presence about her. Clearly, Donna was very happy with the result.
Donna rifled through the articles, looking for one in particular. She wanted to show Sybil something. Among all the patting on the back and celebrating, there was one little problem. As professional a hit as it might have come across as, there was this teeny-weeny issue of the entire murder being caught on videotape.
“What?” Sybil snapped. “What are you
talking
about?”
Kevin was startled. “Videotape?”
“Yeah. The library has cameras.”
“Son of a bitch,” Sybil said. Breathing heavily, she paced.
Donna calmed her and then headed for the door, saying, “I’ll be back in a few days.”
Kevin sat on the porch as Donna got out of her car and walked up to the door. She stopped before going into the house and took a look inside to make sure no one else could hear. “I have an idea to get the heat off,” Donna said quietly.
“What?” Kevin asked.
By now, it was clear from the newspapers that the OCSD was busily investigating the case and would eventually tie Gail’s murder to George Fulton and Donna Trapani. Undoubtedly, they would soon be in the state of Florida banging on doors. Kevin was no dummy. He understood when dominoes began to fall, names were as good as years shaved off your sentence. Sybil and Patrick would roll over like bloated fish.
Donna sat down. “Listen,” she said in a whisper, “I will type up a note saying something . . . like . . . sometimes people see the wrong people, and the wrong people are taken out. I want you to find some druggie off the street up there [in Michigan], kill him, and plant the note on him.”
The master manipulator wanted Kevin to commit a
second
murder to cover the first, so the cops could pin it all on a street junkie. That’s what Kevin understood Donna to be suggesting.
“I’ll pay you what I owe you,
plus
an additional five thousand dollars,” Donna promised.
Kevin thought about this as he took a pull from his cigarette.
She wants me to drive all the way back to Michigan
—the scene of the crime—
and find some dude and kill him
.
“Yeah,” Kevin said. “Sounds like a good idea.”
Kevin had another plan, however. Take the additional $5,000 and tell Donna to go for a long walk off a nice Florida pier; he wasn’t killing anyone else.
“Really?” she said.
“I want the entire five thousand up front.”
They made plans to meet in a few days.
At some point later, Kevin was out. He paged Donna.
“Yeah?” she said, calling him back.
“Let’s meet up.”
“Where?”
“Tom Thumb.”(This was a convenience store near Sybil’s house.)
Kevin parked near the entrance. He sat and waited for three hours.
Donna never showed up.
“That kind of got me mad,” he later said.
Kevin drove home and found Sybil. “Hey,” he snapped, “you tell your friend that it ain’t too smart to hire someone to kill somebody and
not
pay them! You understand!”
Donna paid Kevin in small amounts, none of it adding up to what she had promised. During one of her trips to Sybil’s, as she walked into the house, Donna noticed the Malibu had a banged-up taillight. She was livid.
“Patrick,” Sybil explained.
“What?” Donna went over and found Kevin. Patrick was gone, out somewhere. “Mike, how much would it cost me to take out Patrick?”
Just then, Patrick walked in. “Hey,” Kevin said, “Donna here wants me to kill you for what you done to that car of hers she rented!” They laughed.
Patrick knew Kevin by now. That wasn’t going to happen. Donna was panicking, falling apart, wanting to kill anyone and everyone who got in the way.
Kevin waited a few weeks and decided it was time to make a move—just not the move anyone would have expected him to make.
Sybil came home one day and Kevin was packing his things.
“What’s up?”
“She’s not paying me, Sib,” Kevin said. “I need to do something. I called my old boss. He’s giving me my job back. Now that I got myself a car, I can get to work.”
It was just before Thanksgiving. The OCSD was closing in on Kevin, Patrick, Sybil, and Donna. Kevin stopped by the house after completing one of his over-the-road driving jobs. There were a few things at Sybil’s house he had forgotten. He wanted them back.
“You seen my photo album and road atlas around?” Kevin asked Sybil.
“I haven’t seen them. How you been?”
Kevin shrugged. Then he left without saying much more.
Driving away from Sybil’s that day, Kevin thought about the past few months. He was preparing for a long-haul job that would take him into New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. Donna was on his mind—how cold and contemplating she had been throughout it all. Kevin had murdered a woman. Yes, he knew how malicious and evil that was, in and of itself. But Donna had truly shown herself to be a merciless, coldhearted woman.
“I can’t remember when it happened,” Kevin later told police, “[but] Sybil and Patrick told me Donna talked to them about trying to poison [Gail] or kidnap her and bring her back. . . .”
That was Donna’s first plan: Sybil and Patrick were to toss Gail into the trunk of the Malibu and drive her back to Florida so Donna Trapani could, in Kevin’s words, “take care of her, herself.”
55
G
EORGE FULTON WAS
home when the doorbell rang. It was October 31, 1999. Gail had been dead three weeks.
It was a delivery driver. The guy had a box in his hand.
George signed and accepted it.
Inside the house George opened the box.
Donna has sent George a dozen red roses. She wanted to celebrate, the card said, their two-year anniversary of meeting.
George took the flowers and drove them down to the church Gail attended; he did not want them in the house.
IV
CARRYING CROSSES
56
H
IS WIFE HAD
been dead for six weeks. For the Fulton family, life had gone on, as tough as it was for George and the kids. Gail was gone. There was nothing anyone could do but honor her memory and make sure her killers were caught and brought to justice.
George was once again corresponding with the woman who had ordered his wife’s murder, although George had no idea at this time that Donna had been behind the crime. In all fairness to George, it was Donna’s relentless obsession that was behind much of the back-and-forth between them.
On November 20, 1999, Donna e-mailed George under the ruse of needing information about several reports he was working on for her. In a postscript to this short e-mail, she added how nice it had been to hear his voice yesterday. (They’d chatted about work issues for a brief time.) She said she “greatly missed” talking to him on a regular basis. She “wanted to cry,” just thinking about his voice over the telephone. She said she “must be crazy” for continuing to want him, even though he didn’t want her. Foolishness, she said, “comes with old age.”
George wrote back immediately. He said his life had been a “roller-coaster ride” since his wife was “brutally murdered.” He mentioned the house being searched (for five and a half hours), burying Gail, and “having all sorts of things said in the paper/TV” about him and his wife. He talked about the media badgering him and driving by the house, his blood pressure being “erratic and high,” his feeling “sick all over,” and here was Donna with the nerve to ask how he felt.
How do you
think
? George wrote bitterly in the e-mail.
There was some indication at the end of the note, however, that George was not yet finished with Donna, although in what capacity was not obvious. He asked Donna to try and understand what he had been through and “what still remains, who knows?” It was clear George wanted space. He needed to focus on his life and rebuilding the relationships he had with his kids—not on the claims that Donna was sending him to work on, as though it was business as usual.
A week later, Donna sent George a “cutie,” as she called it. It was an Internet, holiday-themed joke she believed would make him smile. Bizarrely enough, it dealt with conditions of the mind: schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder, dementia, paranoid delusion, and mania. Later that day she sent a long story she thought might help to lift his spirits. At the end of this e-mail, Donna inserted her own little wish for “my dearest George,” which included thoughts and hopes of all his pain being replaced with mercy, and self-doubt being a precursor to confidence, and all sorts of other self-help advice. To read this and the additional e-mails Donna sent near this period—knowing what she had done—is to look into the mind of a desperate woman who truly thought her plan—as long as she pushed hard enough—was going to come to fruition one day. Gail was gone. Donna was trying the best she could to work her way back into the good graces of her lover and bring George back around. She wanted to make sure her presence was felt; so if he decided he wanted to get back with her, she was there, waiting.
Donna ended the e-mail, saying if she could have just “one wish,” it would be to “ease” George’s “pain and suffering.” She said she’d “give anything” to help. She wanted so bad for George to “get over” it and “calm down” and “get some rest.” She wanted George to know he was forever in her “thoughts and prayers.” If he ever needed anything, all he had to do was ask.
In light of this correspondence, there was an obvious part of Donna that just wasn’t getting it—or wanted to get it. Donna believed that if she persisted enough, that happily ever after she saw with George would happen.
57
W
HEN DONNA’S E-MAILING
campaign failed to win back the heart of her old flame, she tried a different approach, which could be considered more diabolical, maybe even evil. The idea that Donna thought she could do something such as this—and believed she was going to get away with it, or that it would work to her benef it—proved that Donna’s extreme narcissism was growing as each day passed. The longer Donna got away with having Gail murdered, the more brazen she acted.
On November 29, 1999, the fax machine in George Fulton’s Michigan basement office rang. After a few brief chirps, a fax scrolled out from the bottom of the machine addressed to
Dear George.
Within the first few paragraphs, the
anonymous
writer—ahem, giving herself away almost immediately—said she “was a friend of Gail’s,” and there were certain things about Gail that George should know. The writer believed that now was the appropriate time. Enough time had passed since Gail’s death for the truth to be exposed. And this truth about Gail, the fax author warned, was not going to be peachy keen and easy for George to accept. Yet he needed to know.
Much of what was going to be shared, the fax said in its opening paragraphs, had been told to this person “in confidence” by Gail, and it was still difficult for this person to pass it along. There was no way around it anymore. The writer claimed to be a married female, who had discussed with her husband the prospect of sending the info to George, and decided—what the hell—to see what happened after she let it fly.
She couldn’t reveal her identity because her husband didn’t want the authorities to track them down and start asking questions. One day, she said, she would come out from behind the curtain.
For the next few paragraphs, George’s anonymous pen pal said she had known how George felt because she, too, had gone through something similar with her husband. A lifeless marriage, she called it. Needs not being met. Affairs. Falling in love again with someone else. Having a new lease on love. It was all something, she explained, that had saved her from total soul annihilation.
And here was where Donna gave herself away: the fact that the fax was setting up an argument that it had been “the lover” who had made life blissful. And even though George had lost his wife, karma was at play. She intimated that perhaps a celestial plan had opened up the opportunity for him now to pursue his
true
love . . . the woman he had so deeply connected to down in Florida—whom Gail had told the fax writer all about.
This was a weak and rash attempt—maybe even stupid!—to win George back, now that Gail was completely out of the picture. Did Donna think George was an idiot? Did she, for one moment, believe the guy could not figure out it was Donna sending the fax?
It didn’t take long for the fax writer to begin bashing Gail. She explained—in methodical, elliptical prose, pure pathological and psychotic—how Gail had manipulated her children in order to keep George at home. She mentioned how Emily had given Gail trouble, so Gail shied away from her and focused more on Andrew.
Quite brazenly, she wrote that if George had divorced Gail, Gail would have gone home to Texas and “would still be alive.” She couldn’t look away from blaming George for Gail’s murder—another giveaway that Donna was writing the fax. Furthermore, George was rarely attacked in this eighteen-page, single-spaced document.
The fax writer went on to say George was “stupid” to think he could “will” happiness into his life. She warned the only way George would find happiness he had been searching for all his life was to reunite with his “true” love.
This “person” writing to George knew things about him that only Donna (or Gail) could have known. For example, she talked about how Gail would creep down the stairs while George was in his basement office, crying and listening to Celine Dion or Roy Orbison, thinking about Donna.
According to the fax, Gail had all of his phones “bugged.”
Then she scorned George for not getting Gail professional help. If George would have gotten Gail help, the fax stated:
She may still be alive!