“I heard my father say, ‘Bye, Donna.’”
After being asked, Andrew explained that they had two phone lines in the house: one for George’s business and another for the family, adding, “As my dad was saying, ‘Bye, Donna,’ on one line, the library people were calling on the home line to tell us something had happened.”
How ironic!
Or maybe not.
Were Donna and George discussing Gail’s murder?
“Your dad have any weapons in the house, Andrew?”
“He owns three handguns. One’s a twenty-two—and two are nine millimeters.”
“When was the last time you saw the guns?”
“My dad was cleaning all three of them, just three days ago in his bedroom.”
“Have
you
ever shot the weapons?”
“Yes . . . but when I was in fifth grade.”
“When was the last time—and we’re almost done here, okay—you shot a gun, Andrew? Do you recall?”
“A week ago. I shot my BB gun at a friend’s house.”
“Think about this, son. Is there anyone that you can think of who would want to harm your mother?”
Andrew took a breath. “No.”
7
I
T STARTED FOR
Emily Fulton earlier that morning, October 4, 1999. She called it intuition, a paranormal “ability” of some sort she’d had since childhood.
“I was extremely agitated.”
Of course, she had no idea that her mother was going to be murdered, but there was something tugging at Emily—relating to her mother—all day long. She had a feeling that was nagging and pulling at her emotions.
“I had no reason to be mad at my mother,” Emily added, “but I was mad at her all day long.”
Gail was one of those mothers—wives—who had a meal on the table every night. Didn’t matter if she had to work that night or not. If Gail had a shift at the library, she’d prepare the meal and have it ready in the refrigerator.
Throughout that day Emily had a sense that she needed to go to her mother; yet she felt she wasn’t supposed to intervene in the situation in any way. Whatever was to be would be, and Emily had a strange “knowing” of having to step aside on this one and allow fate to run its course. The feeling became stronger that night—possibly, according to Emily, right around the time Gail was being slain—as Emily sat at a friend’s Pampered Chef party. Not normally someone who needs to be prodded into socializing or talking, Emily wasn’t herself. Her friend walked up and asked why she was so quiet. Emily had sat around during the party; there was something heavy weighing on her mind.
“I didn’t feel right. I had a headache. I kept getting that feeling that I needed to go see my mom and be with her, but that I
wasn’t
supposed to, at the same time.”
Emily had been to several of these sales parties—be it jewelry, food, cooking supplies, Amway, whatever. She always had made purchases, both to support her friend and to get something for her mother.
“But on that day, I knew,” Emily recalled. “I was going to buy something for my mom, but I knew. I needed to wait. I wasn’t going to buy anything for her.”
Why the hesitation?
Because she felt that her mother wasn’t going to need it, she added.
“When she died, the moment she died,” Emily said, “I must have felt it.”
After the Pampered Chef party, Emily should have gone home. It was the thing to do. She’d have to get some sleep so she could get up and go to class in the morning.
“But something told me not to. I didn’t want to face what was there.”
Inside that house, Emily sensed, was bad news. She knew it. She understood that what was waiting for her might change her life in some way. She just didn’t know how.
“I was avoiding going home, at all costs.”
So Emily went over to her boyfriend’s house.
It was near eleven at night when she dredged up the nerve to drive home.
“I put it off as long as I could. Then I showed up and the police are there.”
All those feelings throughout the night—the connection with her mother, the aura of something dark that was hovering around like a ghost following her—were now in her face. She had been right, after all.
“There’s been an accident,” one of the cops at the house told Emily after she walked in. It was late now, well after midnight. “Could you come down to the substation with us?”
Emily had just started her sophomore year of college. Same as her brother, Emily lived at home. (Their older sister had stayed in Texas and lived with Gail’s mother, Dora Garza, and finished up college before marrying and moving to Virginia.) Emily was the outspoken one of the bunch. She had graduated high school in Michigan in 1998. This was after changing schools two years before, in 1996, when George Fulton had decided—against Gail and all the kids’ wishes—that the family was moving north to Michigan from Texas.
“Sure,” Emily said, responding to the OCSD’s request to go down to the substation.
Emily stepped into the police cruiser. They took off.
“What happened?” Emily asked as the cop drove.
“Well, we’ll explain it all when you get to the substation.”
Emily thought about it. “What’s wrong with my mom?” she pressed. “I can’t feel her. Something’s happened to my mom. . . . I cannot feel her with me.”
This statement shocked the police officer. “Why do you think that?”
“Because I have not felt right all day about my mom, so it must be about her.”
“Don’t worry,” the police officer said, “your family is there [at the substation]. We’ll explain when you get there.” Then the cop broke into what Emily described as “small talk,” and the officer started to ask her all sorts of questions.
“What’s wrong?” Emily asked again. “You’re nervous. You’re repeating the same questions over and over. You’re also just saying ‘family.’ You’re not mentioning who’s there at the substation. What’s going on? What happened to my mom?”
Some time passed. “Let’s just not talk,” the cop suggested.
When Emily arrived at the substation, the first family member she spied upon entering the building was Andrew.
“Where’s Dad?” Emily asked. “What happened?”
Cops were standing around everywhere.
“I got into trouble for stealing something,” Andrew said with a troubled, mocking smirk, likely more out of nervousness than trying to be funny. (“Although I do believe that the police told him to say this,” Emily recalled.)
“You didn’t
steal
anything,” Emily said. She was the middle child, the type A of the three, the one willing to speak her mind (her truth) and let the chips fall. Emily was a doer. She got things done. She had been through a lot this past year with her mother and father, and the affair George had had with Donna. There were times when Emily had found herself in the middle of the affair, observing, asking questions, even confronting her father’s lover, and trying to talk her mother into divorcing her father and moving back home to Texas.
“Where’s Dad?” Emily asked for a second time.
“Well,” Andrew said, looking down and away from his sister, “I got into some trouble, and this is why we’re all here.”
“No, you didn’t!” Emily shouted. “You didn’t do
anything
wrong. Now I know something happened to Mom. I need to know
what
!”
They were surrounded by police, who were coming in and out of the room, standing around, listening to the conversation. What Emily meant by “I know” was that she’d had that premonition earlier in the night.
One police officer pulled Emily aside and explained that she needed to go with him into another room. They sat her down in a chair, she said, and the room was “full of cops.” A female police officer, with a look of despair on her face, walked over to Emily. She knelt down on bended knee in front of Gail’s middle daughter. Andrew came in and stood nearby. The room was quiet. “I’m sorry,” the female officer explained somberly, “but your mother . . . She has been in an accident.”
“That bitch! That bitch killed my mom,” Emily blurted out through tears, without another word.
It was as if everyone in the room had frozen. The off icers looked at each other. Andrew put his hand on his sister’s shoulder and squeezed. The world had stopped.
“What was that, Emily?” the cop asked.
Emily looked into the female officer’s eyes. Everything else in the room, Emily recalled, faded. She was focused on this one moment.
“Accident”?
she said to herself.
There was no
accident.
“I knew,” Emily said later, “that was
not
the case.”
Emily felt the police had likely said this—calling it an “accident”—on purpose to see what type of reaction they would get from Emily and Andrew.
She was right. Emily, Andrew, and George were all suspects at this point.
“That bitch murdered my mom!” Emily blurted out again. She was crying more dramatically now. The entire complexity and totality of her day and night had come into focus. Emily knew why she had felt so strange all day long, why she had never bought her mother a Pampered Chef gift. Emily believed she had felt her mother’s presence leave as Gail died in that parking lot.
As news of her mother’s death settled on Emily, she began to make sense of what had occurred.
“I need to tell you what happened,” Emily explained to the police officer.
“What do you mean by that?” an investigator asked.
“I am seeing in my mind what happened.”
There was silence in the room again.
“You are going to blame my father,” Emily added. “I need to tell you what happened. It’s
not
my father.
She
did it with other people.”
She . . .
meaning the lover.
“My sister here, Emily”—Andrew piped in, explaining in a halfhearted fashion, almost to imply that his sister had no idea what she was saying, that it was the trauma of losing their mother—“thinks she’s psychic!”
8
T
HIS SKILL EMILY
Fulton described as intuitive, instinctual, and even supernatural perception hadn’t come to her overnight. It wasn’t something Emily pulled out of the air one day after watching a marathon of
That’s So Raven
(a Disney sitcom for teens with a supernatural slant) episodes, and then decided to take it on as some sort of protection against emotional trauma. It was not a wall she put up to defend against the broken home of dysfunction that she believed to be living in over the past several years. To downplay it all as trickery, or as a Sylvia Browne–inspired “gift,” would not bother Emily. Rather, it would prove to her how much skeptics
didn’t
know. Emily wasn’t about explaining herself. She didn’t need approval from anyone or, for that matter, to prove herself and her ability. It was a gift she knew she had—and that’s all that mattered to her.
“It has served me correctly,” Emily commented, “and saved my life in some instances. So I just go with it.”
Her memories of this celestial insight go back as far as the late 1980s, when Emily was seven years old. Emily’s grandfather died right before she turned seven. At the moment he died, Emily and her family lived in Virginia; her grandfather and grandmother resided in Texas. She was too young, Emily said, to understand the gradual decline a slow death can sometimes bring. She didn’t even know that her grandfather was sick at the time.
While her grandfather endured an illness at home, some 1,400 miles away, Emily began to receive what she described as “visions.”
“I don’t know how else to explain what they were.”
She began to see her grandfather lying on a couch at home, a “very specific afghan blanket” covering him. She didn’t know it then, but her grandmother had crotched this blanket at the time of her grandfather’s illness.
“It was red, gray, and black.” Emily could see this blanket as clear as if it were in front of her. “I saw my grandmother feeding him soup.”
She had no idea the man was dying. She had no idea (or conception, really) of his being sick in any way.
“Mommy,” Emily said to her mother one day, “Grandpa is dying.”
“No, no. Your grandfather is okay, Emily. Nothing’s wrong. He’s okay.”
How many families are afraid of death and shield the youngest members of the clan from the details and ebb and flow of watching a loved one die?
Emily had no way of knowing that her grandfather had been on a list of cardiac patients waiting for a heart.
Not long after she had that vision (her grandmother feeding him, that afghan blanket covering him, keeping the old man warm as he faded), Emily’s grandfather died of a heart attack. There was no way to hide it anymore from the kids.
“I think,” Emily concluded, “that as children, we all have that ability to see
things.
Yet we lose it over time—especially if it’s not developed or cultivated.”
This episode taught Emily a hard lesson—one she didn’t come to understand until much later in life. Still, it was something she often went back to. She never questioned what she saw, or the strong feelings that sometimes came over her. For instance, she would stare at her father and sense a strong presence of turmoil and distrust and darkness brewing inside the man. The stress the guy lived under had manifested itself, according to Emily’s readings and feelings, into an aura that she could see and feel. This was why, when she told police she knew what had happened to her mother, she was saying it with not only a straight face, but with a logic rooted in that “gift” she had developed and learned to embrace over the years. And this ability Emily had would soon help Gail’s youngest daughter cope with this enormous loss and get her through what would become the most shocking and alarming allegations Emily had ever heard.
It was near midnight when George Fulton sat with OCSD investigators David Ross and Chris Wundrach at the Lake Orion Township Substation. George had been interviewed once already, briefly, but he had not said much of anything. Investigators had more information now. They could ask pointed questions. Because George had been acting standoffish and not wanting to talk, not to mention that he failed to tell police at first that he had cheated on Gail, he became a person of interest cops were looking at very closely.