No answer.
Meiers left his business card in the door.
The investigators parked down the block and “established a position to observe activity” at Donna’s house. Was she dissing them? Or was Donna out with someone?
Nothing happened for quite some time.
At 12:40
P.M.
, Donna phoned Meiers. She wanted to know what he wanted. Why had he left his card in her door?
“We’re here from Michigan investigating the murder of Gail Fulton—we’d like to talk to you,” Meiers said. “Can we stop by?”
“Oh, geez. So sorry I missed y’all earlier. I had an OB/GYN doctor’s appointment. Sure, you’re welcome to come to my home and talk with me.”
An open invitation. Just what they’d hoped for.
“Okay, then.”
Donna opened the door. “Come on into the family room,” she said, leading the way. “We’ll be more comfortable in here.”
Meiers didn’t notice Donna had a baby bump of any sort; she wasn’t showing in the least. Maybe she wasn’t pregnant? She didn’t seem like a terminally ill patient, either.
They sat down on the couch.
Meiers introduced himself and Pearson. “Would it be okay if we tape-record this conversation?” Meiers asked. “You’re not under arrest or anything like that . . . and you can ask us to leave anytime you want to.”
“I understand, sure,” Donna said obligingly. “Yes, you can record. I don’t have a problem with that.”
Meiers did a brief sound check to make sure everything was working right. As he did that, Pearson took a Miranda rights card from his wallet and read from it.
Donna came across as comfortable and natural. She said she had spoken to her lawyer and he advised her to “see what y’all had to say. Look, I’m an adult. I understand my rights and certainly know how serious this interview is. I’d be more than happy to answer your questions.” She paused, but then she made a bizarre statement: “Besides, attorneys are expensive—and I ain’t about to pay one to just sit here.” She laughed.
“Right,” one of the detectives said.
They talked. Donna went through her vitals: where she was born, raised, schooling, marriage, how she came to Florida.
“Hold on,” Meiers said. He looked down and noticed the spindles on the tape recorder not spinning. “Would you mind if we start over?”
“Sure, sure,” Donna said. And she went through it again.
For the next ten minutes, Donna talked about her life in general terms. There was a “poor me” tone to it all, Donna trying to draw as much empathy as she could. After she finished, Meiers asked about George and how they met.
Donna was frank. She talked about the Seagull Bar, how they had sex after that second meeting, and how the affair went from zero to one hundred overnight.
“He fell in love with me, and I fell in love with him.”
No one said it, but the thought was there between the detectives:
And now his wife is dead.
Donna couldn’t help herself, apparently. She started in on Gail and even Gail’s mother.
“[George] said his mother-in-law was a well-respected member of her community in Corpus Christi and knew lots of influential people,” Donna explained, after telling the investigators how she and George discussed business and how George had expected to be rolling in money from clients provided by Dora Garza. “He said he thought his wife would get her mother to give him some connections in Texas with doctors and lawyers, and that he would be well on his way. He said help never came, and that he never got any help from his wife or her mother.”
Donna said she had given George the opportunity to duck out of the relationship whenever he wanted. The way she made it sound was that she had never put any pressure on him.
“George went home for Thanksgiving [that November 1997] and went to confession and said he wanted to cut off the relationship that [we] had. I told him if that’s what he wanted . . .”
Then George returned to Florida, Donna claimed, after Thanksgiving. He told her he couldn’t forget her and they started up again. The line George gave Donna that won her over, she said, was “‘I’ve never had these feelings for my wife.’”
As Meiers flipped over the tape, and Donna continued to talk openly about the affair, it seemed George was the one begging her to come back, after repeatedly going back to Gail. The way Donna framed it was that she could not have cared one way or another if George came back to her every time he took off for Michigan and into Gail’s arms. It was as if it had never bothered her. She didn’t realize, of course, the OCSD was working on a search warrant as they sat and spoke—a warrant that included her computers, eventually revealing all those e-mails between her and George. At this time she carried on about how nonchalantly she viewed the affair.
“I used to have to force him to call home,” she said, explaining how George never wanted to talk to his kids or Gail while he was in Florida. “He even said to me once, ‘It’s almost as if they don’t exist up there [in Michigan].’ He said the whole time he was in Florida, he didn’t even think too much about up there. He said being down in Florida was almost like a dream . . . that it was like a fantasy.”
“Did Gail ever find out about you two?”
“Sure. George called his oldest daughter and she checked on the number, as it showed up on her caller ID. [Melissa] didn’t waste any time calling her momma!” Donna laughed at that. “Gail called almost immediately and asked George if he was living with somebody. I gave him his privacy while they talked. Then he came to the back of the house and told me, ‘Gail knows.... She knows that I am living with you. . . . She’s crying, talking about ending her life, talking about leaving, talking about me coming home right now.... She wants to know what I want to do. I’m moving out. I knew she would someday find out. Gail is devastated.’ So I began to cry—but I was, you know, not crying for me. I was crying for Gail.”
Donna said the entire Fourth of July fiasco was George’s idea. The version of what happened inside the hotel room Donna gave police was incredible. Donna said that after George left the room, she and Gail talked, but Gail “went into a rage.”
Donna blocked the door so Gail couldn’t get out of the room and “hurt herself.” Donna said she put her arms “around Gail tenderly and calmed her. Gail was crying, and I was trying to soothe her by stroking her hair. I then told Gail, ‘George has had other affairs,’ and she ran from the room.”
The next morning, July 5, George showed up at the hotel with his bags and claimed, “‘Gail threw me out,’” Donna told officers.
She told the investigators that she said to him, “‘I don’t want you—get out of here.’” And so George left the hotel and went back to Gail.
At one point during the interview, Donna said she realized a while later that she was going to have to break off the relationship for good—it was just too chaotic. Gail and George Fulton were too crazy for her.
Then Donna brought Sybil into the scenario. She came across as Sybil Padgett’s mentor and savior, telling detectives Sybil had been abused by her husband and kicked out of her home. She said that Sybil had trouble taking care of her children. But Donna was there for her, loaning her money, giving her and the kids a place to stay, bringing her to a women’s shelter for counseling.
“I gave her a job, and she always had a job with me. And then I started telling her about my problems with George and our relationship,” Donna stated.
Over the due course of time, Donna said, she turned to Sybil because she was there: a person to confide in. They were two girlfriends helping each other through life’s bumps. As she talked with Sybil about George, Donna told investigators, and involved Sybil in the day-to-day problems and arguments more, Sybil became another person—someone who was full of revenge and wanted to help her friend make the man who had hurt her pay for it.
Donna returned once more to the subject of George Fulton and his family. “George loved his kids,” Donna said, “but he never said, he
never
loved Gail. He said some bad things, but never said that he
didn’t
love her.”
Donna said that when cops called her on the night Gail was murdered, she “thought he said shootings” (with an
s
on the end), and assumed that there was more than one. “I just figured it must have been drugs or something. I wondered what had happened.”
Eventually, while talking to police that night, she considered it “might have been a prank.... I asked how George and the kids were doing. I wasn’t really concerned with George so much that I was more concerned with the kids.”
They asked her when she next heard from George.
“After Gail’s death I never heard from him. I would have liked to have offered my condolences to Emily. I did call George a few weeks ago about business, and I realized what I said must sound like, and I asked him how he was doing. We e-mailed things back and forth,” she said, “but it was all business-related material. I could detect anger in George’s e-mails directed at me or my company. I sent George some roses and told him that roses represented beauty and that I hoped that the flowers and the card would bring a smile to his face and brighten his day.”
60
D
ETECTIVE JOHN MEIERS
popped in “tape #4” as Donna continued talking. They could not shut her up, actually. She wanted to talk about everything and anything, including her sex life with George, which she described as “wonderful.” Yet, Donna added for no obvious reason, that “the sexual relationship George had with Gail was
not
good. I hope this doesn’t come out in court because it will embarrass him, but he told me that in twenty-five years of marriage to Gail . . . [she] would not touch him. We had dated only a month or two, and George said that I had touched him more in that time than Gail had in twenty-five years.”
Donna was proud of that badge, telling her tales with a smile.
“Can you give us a list of the problems in the Fulton marriage, as you saw them?” Pearson asked.
“Sure,” Donna said. “The main problem was that Gail should have gone back to school and gotten herself a job. She needed a job. She needed to get out and socialize and meet people. Then there were the kids. Gail always seemed to have time for her kids, but
never
[for] George. Her whole life was as a mother,
not
a wife.”
“Did you ever tell George you were pregnant?” Meiers asked.
“Um-hm.”
“Are you pregnant?”
“Um-hm.”
They assumed she meant yes.
“How far along are you?”
Donna hesitated. Then: “Almost there . . . almost there! To be perfectly honest, though, they don’t think I am going to make it. I was in the ER last Monday night. I’m probably going to lose the baby. I should have had an abortion, according to my doctor. I’m bleeding a lot. They’ve been packing me.”
“When was the last time you went to the doctor and had an ultrasound, Miss Trapani?”
“I saw my doctor this morning. I’ve had
many
ultrasounds.”
The interview had crossed a threshold. Donna shifted in her seat and became progressively more uncomfortable. There was an accusatory tone to some of the questions and Donna picked up on it.
“What did your doctor say about the baby this morning—is the baby okay?”
“I don’t think so,” Donna answered, drooping her shoulders, dropping her head, lowering her voice. “I don’t think she has a left kidney.”
“How does George feel?”
“Huh! He doesn’t believe me and hasn’t done
anything
for the baby.”
“What’s your due date?” Meiers asked.
“Three weeks,” Donna said, holding up three fingers. “December thirteenth. I’m in that phase right now . . . and they’re trying to get me to hang on.”
Meiers and Pearson carefully observed Donna as she spoke, later noting,
It did not appear . . . that Donna was pregnant. Certainly not since she indicated that she got pregnant in January or February.
The math alone didn’t add up. As she sat there, Donna would have been ten or even eleven months into her pregnancy.
As they talked, Donna’s cat jumped up on the couch and walked across her midsection. Both detectives noticed the cat had left footprints, as if walking on sand, on Donna’s stomach.
Indentations were left by the cat,
said Meiers’s report, as if the animal had walked across a Posturepedic mattress.
The detectives looked at each other.
Donna had packed something underneath her clothing to make it appear that she had a bump. And even then, she wasn’t showing the same way a woman about to give birth any day would have been. Plus, her face was not puffy. She had not appeared to have gained any weight, and she had no trouble moving around easily.
“Do you know anyone who would want to kill Gail?” Meiers asked.
“I don’t know anyone that would want to have her killed,” Donna said.
Pearson and Meiers thought this to be an odd response.
“What type of person would kill a woman like that?” Donna said next. She paused for a moment and then answered her own question, as if thinking out loud: “I don’t know.... Somebody that . . . I don’t know. . . . A drug addict, alcoholic, criminal? . . . I think she was killed by mistake or something. Or she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or something was going on.”
But that first reply: “want to have her killed.” Donna had let out a Freudian slip without realizing it. She had said, “want to have her killed,” both detectives realized. They had asked about someone
killing
Gail.
Donna opened a door.
So they asked about rental cars and if Donna had rented a car for one of her employees.
“Sybil Padgett, yes, but I took the fees out of her paycheck. The last time Sybil worked for me was October, but she still has the car. . . . In fact, I wanted to ask you, why [was] the car recently impounded and taken to Pensacola? I got a call from the rental company.”
There was a bowl of pretzels on the table in front of them, which Donna had not touched since they sat down, almost three hours before. It had been a long conversation. Donna had weathered it well, stood up to each question, and had an answer for everything.