During their courtship Gail and George spent a lot of time apart. George was stationed at bases across the country and around the world. Gail had no trouble waiting for George.
“They seemed to get along really well,” Jeanette Cantu-Bazar later said. “My [first] husband was in George’s [business] company.”
Gail and Jeanette were together whenever their men took off on official army business. Jeanette’s first husband was George’s best man at his and Gail’s wedding. This was a tight group of friends. They knew one another’s eccentricities and faults, their loves, hopes, and dreams.
It was 1976 through 1977 when George was called to serve in Germany. He was in his mid-twenties. A year later, Jeanette and her then-husband were sent to the same country. This was the way the movie was supposed to play out: marry a serviceman and be a stay-at-home mother who follows her man wherever the army sends him. Gail and Jeanette had dreamt of this life, and here it was coming to them just as they had envisioned.
“What was difficult for Gail was to be away from her mom. She was very close to her mother. So being away in that sense was tough on her.”
Gail was that rare type of person, however, who could make friends anywhere. She was adorable and loveable, and people picked up on her blissful spirit and good nature as soon as they met her. One of the things Gail liked to do more than anything was to bake. She got a kick out of baking something for someone and then seeing their reaction to what she viewed as such a simple, yet warm, gift. If that person liked the recipe, Gail would offer it up. She had all of her recipes in a neat little box, written out on index cards. She’d often bake goods and send them to George’s office, wherever he was working at the time. She also took on the role of mother hen to the other army wives struggling with missing their husbands.
“Gail loved being married. She loved George. She loved having children.”
The excitement of marrying a military man, having a family, and traveling the world was the image Gail and her friends strove to fulfill—a vision of life they perceived would satisfy their every need and desire as stay-at-home moms and wives.
“But, in all of the excitement, you don’t realize what you’re giving up,” one of those friends perceptively commented later. “You go off, and you think you’re going off and seeing what’s out there. Corpus was a small town then. You wondered what was beyond.”
Gail had come from a home where money was never an issue. Her mother and father had always provided well for the kids. When she and George began living on the salary of a serviceman, though, Gail had to learn how to manage money and budget the household. It was not easy. There was not a lot of money.
“Gail would always do without to make sure George had whatever he needed,” said a former military friend. And some later suggested that George, realizing this, took advantage of it. “It might be just music. He would want to buy some music and she would want something different. She would not say anything and make sure that he got whatever he wanted. She was very self-sacrificing. I kind of call it the ‘martyr complex’ of . . . Catholic girls. Always wanting to do for everyone else. Not to complain. It is what it is. Gail went with it.”
Gail was in love with the idea of “forever and ever.” She wanted that picket fence so bad that she was willing to do whatever it took to install it in her life, while sacrificing her own needs and wants. Once she dove into being a wife, Gail gave the marriage every part of herself.
For the OCSD, the month of October did not produce any type of substantial evidence leading to an arrest. Everyone had theories and persons of interest; yet the case had not come together as the end of the month approached. Donna Trapani was a leading suspect, as was George Fulton. The OCSD needed to take a trip south into Florida and see what it could find out; yet there was no reason to head down there when so little was known about Donna Trapani and her potential—if any—involvement in the murder. As hard as it may seem, cops understand that patience is a virtue of police work that must be adhered to in order to solve these types of cases where the trail leads in many different directions. Donna and George had alibis. Sure, they could be covering for each other, but the more likely scenario was that one or both had hired someone to commit the murder. And if that was the case, cops were certain that someone would talk, sooner or later. Two, three, or four people cannot know about a crime so volatile and violent as a murder—grating on the conscience—and keep it secret for long. It goes against all human instinct.
Unless police are dealing with a clinical sociopath.
Then all bets are off.
On October 21, 1999, Donna Trapani sent George an e-mail after he requested that she pay him some of the money she owed him. Donna’s business was just about ready to close its doors for good. George wanted what he deserved.
In response, Donna said she had deposited $140 into George’s account, apologizing that it was so late. She said she was “doing the best” she could to pay the bills, but it was hard. She told George that there were more bills than there was cash, but she hoped that this small amount will help ... somehow, Donna wrote. Donna was still depending on George to do the billing for her, because she hadn’t yet learned how to do it herself, she related, and could not afford to hire anyone. This was one of Donna’s tactics to hang on to a connection to George after he had decided the relationship was over. She’d been manipulating and controlling George for months now. She said she could tell in his voice last night when they spoke on the telephone how “aggravated” George was to still have to do the billing. In a spate of sarcasm, Donna ended the e-mail: I am sorry to inconvenience you.
If George thought he was through with Donna, he was mistaken. This woman was not going to give up. Gail was out of the picture now completely. This was Donna’s moment to step into the lives of George and his children and take over—something Donna had wanted to do for a long time.
George received a card from Donna on Halloween. The inscription inside the card referred to Donna being thrilled that George had chosen to “share something so special” and “so meaningful” with her.
I love you,
the card said, and Donna added “still” to the end of that term of endearment.
Happy anniversary,
the card continued.
It had been two years to the day they had met.
The note Donna wrote inside said a lot about where her mind was these days. She was “remembering” that night they met so long ago. Thinking back to all they had done together “put a smile” on her face, as well as in her “heart.” She went on to say how meeting and getting involved with George was the most “wonderful time” of her life. She knew he felt the same way. She wanted George to spend just five minutes and think about that night they met. She was certain the memory would warm his heart. She missed not being able to talk to him. She missed his voice. She missed his laughter. She wanted him to know that if he wanted to talk anytime, he could just pick up the telephone and call her. She’d always be there for him to “unload”—an odd choice of words, considering how George’s wife had been murdered—should he need someone to lean on.
Along with the card Donna sent George a dozen red roses.
George took the flowers and dropped them off at his local parish. He wanted no remembrances of Donna Trapani in his house. What she didn’t understand was that when George Fulton—at least this time—said he was done with her, it meant forever. There would be no happily ever after, as Donna Trapani apparently still sought.
20
S
ERGEANT ALAN WHITEFIELD
called George Fulton and asked if he could meet him at the OCSD in Pontiac on November 2, 1999. Whitefield said he wanted to go through the case in more detail. Mainly, the OCSD needed to ask George several additional questions and wanted to know if he had been in contact with Donna Trapani since the murder.
George agreed. He said he had a cassette tape of a message Donna had left on his answering machine just a week before Gail’s murder that might shed some light on the type of person the OCSD was dealing with in Donna Trapani. Also, George wanted to review a few things about Donna’s business and his belief that, after some prudent research and thought, she might be Gail’s killer, after all.
It had taken a month for the guy to open up and come around, but George Fulton was apparently ready to open up and help unconditionally.
George was still his old stiff and unapproachable self. His facial and body expressions told detectives that he did not want to be there.
What was on George’s mind the most was the money Donna owed him. Sure, she had sent him $140, but that was a drop in a large bucket compared to what she still owed him. He took out an invoice he had sent to Donna just recently and provided the OCSD with a copy. It proved that Donna was behind in her payments to George’s company, somewhere in the neighborhood of $13,000. It appeared Donna hadn’t paid George in months. He also provided a letter from Florida’s Workers Compensation addressed to Donna. The letter indicated that Workers Comp owed Donna’s company, Concerned Care Home Health (CCHH), a refund of $6,364 because she had overpaid for a period between August 1998 and August 1999. The letter was dated about three weeks
after
Gail’s murder.
“I’ve been checking her bank for deposits,” George told Whitefield. “As of right now, [the check] has not been deposited.”
Additionally, George provided some evidence to prove that Donna was due a refund from Medicaid and Medicare in the amount of $5,500.
“This check has not been deposited,
either,
” George explained. “Donna owes her CPA about eleven thousand dollars,” he added. “The plan was to send him the fifty-five hundred once the check came in” and cleared.
What was George trying to say by handing over this information—that Donna had taken that money and used it to pay off the person who killed his wife?
“Thanks for the information, Mr. Fulton,” Whitefield said. The OCSD was skeptical regarding anything George Fulton did. Many of those investigators working the case felt that anything George Fulton did at this point was done for his own benefit. Was he trying to push the scent of the investigation off himself and onto his former mistress?
George said he had more.
“What’s that?” Whitefield wondered.
“I feel it’s important that you know that Donna’s best friend, Sybil, and her better half, Tom (pseudonym), they have very close connections to the local [Florida] DeFuniak Springs Police Department.” George then went on to describe it as being a very “backwoods type of department,” the police report detailing this interview said.
“How do you know that, Mr. Fulton?”
“Donna told me.”
“Why are you telling us this?”
“Because you should know in case you are ever in contact with the DeFuniak Police Department.”
George was wondering when he could pick up all of his stuff that had been taken from the house during the search warrant.
Right now, the detective told him.
“Would you mind hooking up a tape-recording device to your phone to record any calls Donna makes to your residence?” Whitefield asked.
George thought about this. “Yes, I can do that,” he said, and he took the device home with him.
A day later, George contacted Donna via e-mail, which seemed to be the best way to speak with her and not have to deal with what could be a very unstable woman. Many would later claim that Donna suffered from bipolar mood swings ranging from laughing and joking and happiness one moment, to pure evil-inspired rants that seemed to be borne from a place in a dark heart the next. George was terse and direct in his e-mail: He said he had processed several Medicare claims he had received that week. He asked Donna to send him any additional claims she had left over.
As much as the guy might have wanted to distance himself from Donna Trapani, he was still working for her.
Donna responded by saying she had more claims, indeed. She came across in the e-mail as upset that he had billed the other claims without first checking with her. She thought they had an agreement that George would bill only twice a month.
George responded without getting into why, noting how he had received a book in the mail, which he had left at Donna’s house during his last visit to Florida, and wanted to say thanks to her for sending it.
For the next few days, they spoke of work-related items over several e-mails and faxes. George was careful, as was Donna, not to mix personal issues with work. In one e-mail George asked Donna if she had received his termination letter. He wanted her to acknowledge in writing that she had received and accepted his resignation as of December 18, 1999.
Donna wrote back that she had, and she promised to write him a letter acknowledging such.
George was going back and forth with Donna regarding work-related issues and claims; and with the access he had as the company’s chief financial officer (CFO), he was checking into the company’s movements behind her back. By early winter, George had written a report of what he had uncovered with his investigation, along with anything else he could recall. Donna had been very close with one of her workers, George noted in that report. Sybil Padgett seemed to be totally under Donna’s control. George was under the impression, certainly after studying the documentation he dug up, that Sybil and Donna were running some sort of Medicare and Medicaid scam. There were patients Sybil had made claims for visits that George was certain she had not visited.
That tape of the voice mail message Donna had left on George’s answering machine at his home, eight days before Gail was murdered, gave investigators some insight into the type of person they were dealing with in Donna Trapani.
The call came in at 10:34
P.M.
It was in response to Donna hearing that George had planned on bringing Gail down to Florida with him for a final trip to collect some of his things from her house and clean out his desk.