“Well . . . yes,” she answered.
After a few more questions, Walton asked Donna if she had told anyone else besides her lawyer.
“Sybil,” she answered.
Of course.
Shocking everyone with his brevity, Walton asked Donna a few more inconsequential questions and walked toward his seat, saying, “Nothing further, Your Honor.”
Sitting down, staring at his notes, Paul Walton rethought his decision. He asked if he could have a few more moments with the witness.
“During the pendency of this trial,” Walton said, standing once again, staring at Donna, after the judge had agreed, “while you were in the Oakland County Jail, did you
not
ask another—a number of inmates—to come in and lie for you?”
“I asked a number of people to testify for me, but not to lie for me.”
“Did you promise [an inmate] two hundred dollars to write a letter [for you] and to take care of her when she gets out of jail?”
Donna Trapani could not just say no. Instead, “Not like that. We were planning, if I got sent to prison, that we were going to try to be roommates, and I told her I would help her if we were roommates, and I also told her that I would try to help her get a TV when she got there. That, you know, I had a friend that I was writing that had volunteered to get me a TV, and if we were going to be roommates, obviously, she could share it. . . .”
She went on and on, trying to talk her way out of what amounted to several inmates coming forward to snitch on her. She called all of the inmates “very poorly illiterate” women who needed some sort of “psychiatric medication.”
Walton gave up. He had made his point.
Lawrence Kaluzny had several redirect questions, trying, in all due respect, to plug a hole in a ship that was three-quarters of the way underwater. It was like using a mop and a bucket to bail out the
Titanic.
The situation was beyond repair. Donna had been caught lying so often it was hard to tell if
anything
she had said beyond her name was true.
As Donna Trapani stepped down, the judge asked to see the attorneys in chambers. When they returned a while later, “Would you bring the jury back in?” the judge asked the clerk.
“The court is going to recognize Mr. Walton,” said the judge, “for the purpose of a closing argument.” He paused. Then he looked toward the prosecutor. “Mr. Walton.”
73
P
AUL WALTON BEGAN
his closing where he felt the trial, with all of its drama and media exposure and focus on Donna Trapani and Sybil Padgett, belonged: “Martha Gail Fulton was a loving mother to Melissa, Emily, and Andrew.”
The case came down to the murder of a mother and wife—an innocent woman who had done nothing to deserve the torture she had gone through during the final few months of her life, along with that hail of gunfire she received as a sentence for loving a man she had been with for a quarter century. And it was that love of family, Walton explained, “a dedication and devotion, that ultimately cost [Gail] her life.”
He talked about the law and “the counts” the jury was going to be judging Donna and Sybil on. Then he went through the long lead-up to the murder and the actual crime itself, telling jurors how Donna had committed this vicious crime with the help of Kevin Ouellette, Patrick Alexander, and Sybil Padgett. It all went back to Donna Trapani, however. She had masterminded the entire plot. She had put her pawns in play. It was as if Donna were there herself, in the parking lot of that library, pulling the trigger.
The prosecutor next mentioned the phone messages Donna had left at George and Gail’s house. Then he played the tapes.
It was powerful evidence. Direct. In your face. It showed how Donna could turn from a calm and articulate woman, well-spoken and somewhat intellectual, into an evil, calculating, and angry witch—all within the snap of a finger.
The voice of the killer, in all its rawness and vulgarity, was on that tape. There was the woman scorned—whom Paul Walton had opened his case with—ready to take revenge on the one person she saw standing in her way.
Gail Fulton, Walton said, making a great point, “represented
everything
that Donna Trapani wasn’t!”
After talking about the videotape, Walton keyed on the bullets and how each projectile had entered Gail’s body, where it landed, and how each added to a painful and bloody death.
He talked about the various ways in which Donna had first planned to kill Gail, adding, “When you started this case, you took an oath.... The evidence in this case is overwhelming. The evidence in this case clearly points that this woman”—he turned and directed all of his attention toward Donna, who sat writing something, a smirk of sarcasm on her face—“is a murderess, and that she not only is a murderess, she
planned
the murder. Conspired with others. Brought others into her warped sense of reality. And it is because of this that Gail Fulton is no longer with us.”
Walton used the best that technology had to offer: PowerPoint, with photos and graphics. He put on an illustrated show that jurors could relate to as facts.
The prosecutor took a breath. He stood silent for a brief moment. There was stillness in the courtroom. Then, without another word, he walked back to his seat. It was smart to keep his closing brief and to the point. An attorney never wanted to belabor an issue. Paul Walton had that experience behind him to know the difference between saying too much and the power of leaving certain things unspoken.
The judge took a short recess. Then: “Mr. Kaluzny?”
Donna Trapani’s lawyer stood. He put a hand in his right pocket. He walked toward the jury box, without saying anything, deep in thought. Lawrence Kaluzny was a clever, experienced defense lawyer; he had decades of experience behind him. He knew this case was an uphill battle from the start.
“Good afternoon, everybody,” Kaluzny said, sounding as though a friend to each juror. By no fault of his own, Larry Kaluzny was running up an escalator the opposite way. Backpedaling. Trying to fix not what his client had broken, but rather shattered.
He decided to start by taking a poke at Paul Walton, noting: “I thought I was pretty high-tech when I got a pen that had a soft feel to it, but after
that
presentation, I don’t think it is so high-tech anymore.” He stopped short of laughing. Trying to, one would guess, speak to jurors on their own terms. There would be no PowerPoint presentation for Larry Kaluzny. No gadgets. No “high-tech” computer graphics explaining his case. He was old-school all the way. There would just be the powerful words of a lawyer pleading his case. “Donna did not want Gail dead. The relationship with George, in her mind, was not over. George was still communicating with her. Even after the Fourth of July weekend.”
If Donna Trapani had not killed Gail Fulton, who had? Larry Kaluzny needed to solve this riddle.
“Other people were opportunistic. They preyed upon [Donna’s] vulnerability, thinking they could benefit from a woman who they thought had a lot of money.”
Kaluzny called Donna “a woman who, by all practical purposes, was emotionally destroyed, physically devastated, and financially destroyed.”
He warned jurors against putting “sympathy, pain, anger, [and] outrage” ahead of, or interfering with, “the facts of the law.”
He next went through that common cornucopia of defense attorney reasons for finding his client not guilty: reasonable doubt, of course, being at the top of the list. He couched it as “proof beyond any doubt.” He mentioned how jurors needed to be “one hundred percent” on board with a guilty verdict. And all of this, he realized, for each juror, was “certainly something much greater than the civil test, but . . . the prosecutor has to
prove
the case beyond a reasonable doubt.”
“Matlock” was on fire. For about twenty minutes Kaluzny talked about George Fulton (“He is not to blame here!”) and the relationship between the two lovebirds, noting, “What
does
make sense is, that group that came up here and killed Gail were looking for an
easy
way to make money.”
Then it was on to Sybil Padgett. He called her Donna’s “friend, employee, someone that Donna helped . . . someone Donna trusted . . . someone who cheated on her reports, filed false work claims. . . .” That very person, he stated, could be the same person trying to extort money from Donna and involved in trying to frame her for a murder conspiracy. Kaluzny added that Sybil was “the key” to getting this entire ball of killing Gail Fulton rolling. Sybil had taken out of context a few stray, anger-inspired comments by Donna (for instance, “I wish Gail was dead”). Donna had been mad and had been spouting off at the mouth, Kaluzny insisted, and Sybil put these idle threats into action. Kaluzny called Sybil “not a brilliant person.”
“She is the one that gets the gun. . . .
“She is the one that gets Kevin. . . .
“She used Donna, and she wanted more money. If you’re going to kill somebody, do you say, ‘Give me a few thousand dollars now, and you can pay me the rest later’?”
A pause for a beat.
Then: “Well, maybe if you get enough!”
Kaluzny went on to call Patrick by the wrong name: Brian Alexander. He called him, the “young kid.” The liar. The impish hick who had read the police reports in the case and then fingered the others to get out of serious jail time.
“Is he someone you want to believe?”
Kaluzny went on and on for twenty additional minutes; then Paul Walton stood and rebutted some of what Kaluzny had said.
In that hodgepodge of rebuttal comments, Walton came up with the line of the trial: “This crime was conceived in hell . . . [and] when you are going to conceive a crime in hell, you don’t go to Heaven for the actors.”
Lawrence Kaluzny had rattled Walton’s cage, because Paul Walton felt the need to go on for ten more minutes, arguing many of the weaker points Kaluzny had made.
The bottom line here was fairly obvious as both lawyers finished, and Sybil’s lawyer took a crack at saving her ass: For Donna Trapani, it was all over. For Sybil Padgett, well, that was a different matter. If she was lucky, Sybil was going to see a second-degree murder verdict and maybe, just maybe, she would feel the free light of day on her back again in the distant future.
74
I
T DID NOT
take long for either jury to come back with guilty verdicts. On December 12, 2000, a dreary preholiday Tuesday, as the Bush-Gore fiasco continued in Florida and the presidential race was still up for grabs (and a few new buzzwords—“hanging chads”—were enmeshed into the lexicon of pop culture), Sybil Padgett and Donna Trapani were convicted of first-degree murder, in addition to conspiracy to commit murder.
This meant bad times ahead for the dynamic duo.
When it came to sentencing, there was no other choice for the judge but to hold each woman accountable under the parameters of state law. Thus, Sybil Padgett and Donna Trapani were sentenced to “concurrent terms of life . . . imprisonment without parole for the murder conviction and life imprisonment for the conspiracy conviction.”
Eternity.
“She didn’t say anything,” Larry Kaluzny told reporters after the verdict, referring to Donna’s reaction to hearing the rest of her life spiraling down a prison drain. “I had her pretty well-prepared for the verdict. When she was trying to decide whether to testify, I told her she shouldn’t stick her head in the sand, that there would be a good chance she will be convicted.”
At least the guy was a realist.
Donna might not have said anything to her attorney as the verdicts were read into the record, but her wheels were spinning. She had plenty she wanted to discuss. Just not with Larry Kaluzny or the court.
After her conviction (moments, not days or weeks later), Donna Trapani informed her attorney that she wanted to sit down with Court TV, which had been in the courtroom during proceedings, asking for interviews while filming portions of the case. Donna wanted to give the network an exclusive sit-down.
Given that an appeal in any murder conviction is almost a guarantee, what was Donna doing?
For whatever reason Donna needed to have the last word.
As he was collecting his things to leave court, Paul Walton heard what Donna was up to. For Walton, one-half of the case had ended. He had won. Yet, it wasn’t about jumping up and down, pumping a victorious fist in the air; it was about Gail Fulton. Walton had obtained justice for Gail and her family.
Still, Walton couldn’t believe Donna was sitting down to talk about her case so soon.
“Listen, if she’s going to be in there talking . . . before her appeal comes back,” he told Larry Kaluzny, “I want to be there. I need to hear what she has to say.”
Walton walked into the room. There was Donna. Teasing her hair. Dabbing her lipstick. Asking about her eyeliner. Making sure she looked good for the camera.
Donna Trapani’s big network debut.
The woman had just been told she was going to spend the rest of her life in prison and here she was gearing up for an interview, as though she could talk her way out of it all.
“Donna, don’t do this,” Kaluzny warned her. “This is
not
a good idea.”
The convicted murderer shrugged it off.
“This is surreal to me,” Walton said.
“How is my lipstick?” Donna asked one of Court TV’s crew members (according to Paul Walton). “Does anyone have a mirror?”
At one point during the interview, Donna stopped. She turned to Paul Walton after saying something into the camera and asked, “Can this be used against me later on appeal?”
“I’m sorry, Miss Trapani . . . but . . . um . . . I cannot give you any advice.”
Duh!
Donna asked another question of the APA. By then, Larry Kaluzny had left the room.
“Miss Trapani, I
cannot
answer you.”
In all his years of lawyering, Walton had never seen such a display of ignorance and ego from a defendant whom he had just put away for life.