Donna began by saying how his decision to bring his wife to Florida “is one of the lowest-class things you could do.”
As the message began, her voice was calm, though flat and prickly. The officers could tell Donna had been angered by what she had heard, but she was—at least opening the call—holding that anxiety back.
“Why would you want to flaunt something like that in front of me,” Donna said, referring to bringing Gail into town, “knowing how much I am already hurting?” Donna was still in love with George. And their breakup, about six weeks before the call, was still a fresh wound. “Knowing how much pain and anguish I am going through—how could you
do
something so cruel?” Donna had a very distinctive and obvious Southern accent. She spoke like an educated woman when she wanted. There was a noticeable affect to her voice that spoke to how she was getting herself excited with each word by just talking about the situation. “You know,” Donna continued, “I know that she’s cold and she’s cruel, but [Gail is] turning
you
into being someone just like
her
—one cold and cruel heartless person! I cannot believe you would . . . have the audacity to want to bring her down here and flaunt her in front of me and . . . make my pain worse.”
Now there was some excitement creeping into Donna’s voice, and that bipolar behavior, which so many had talked about, was beginning to express its angrier half as she continued.
“Don’t you know how
difficult
it was going to be to see you,
anyway,
” Donna said, finding her rhythm, “and not be able to spend any time with you? But I was willing to do that. And I was willing to give it a try and see if I could stay away from you. . . . But then for you to bring
her
down here—that’s just low class. It’s evil. It’s cruel. It’s very low and bastardly of you to do that. And I hope that God
punishes
you for what you’re doing. It’s bad enough I had to listen to you talk mean and hateful to me this morning. Make up a bunch of damn lies and everything else and all the cruelty. . . .” It was here that Donna began to slip into an honest-to-goodness rant frosted with fury, a virulent rage brewing inside her. “And you want to bring her down here, and you want me to be in my bedroom and know that your ass is out there with this damn bitch, making
love
to her, being in the hot tub with
her,
swimming with
her,
eating with
her,
in my
own
city, in my
own
town!” By now, Donna’s voice was cracking as she spoke faster, with venom and wrath spewing from each syllable. “And I’m here and by myself and all alone. That is
so
damn evil and low class of you. . . . You are not even the man I
thought
you were. And I don’t know
how
you can be so cruel.... That is just like taking a
gun
and sticking it to my brain and my stomach and blowing my brains out.”
Donna paused, then started crying. She was talking faster and more authoritatively.
“I was willing for you to come down and you to do your job and us trying to stay apart. I was willing to
try.
I was not going to
touch
you. I was not going to
kiss
you or hold you. . . . I was not going to do
nothing
to you! ’Cause you done just told me you didn’t want me, and if you didn’t want me, then I didn’t want
you.
But you won’t even give it a try. You got to go ahead and bring that damn
bitch
down here. Well, that
bitch
is not wanted in this city! She can stay her ass up there in Michigan where she belongs. Because she
damn
sure don’t belong here in
my
city. That is her city up there, and this one is mine down here. And that’s the way it
needs
to stay.”
Donna needed a moment to catch her breath. She had worked herself up into a frenzy, ranting and raging into a voice mail machine, not even an actual person. The unease and utter contempt for Gail was implicit in every single word she now spoke.
“I cannot believe you cannot come down here and do your job without having to bring your wife on your
damn
arm to make
sure
that you’re safe! Low class!”
Click . . .
end of message.
After listening, the OCSD knew they were dealing with someone capable of murder—a true live wire. It was there in Donna’s voice: the coldness, the sheer hatred she had harbored for Gail, the absolute pure adrenaline she had worked up, just talking to a man who had, in her mind, left her high and dry and was planning on bringing his wife to Florida to rub in her face. Donna was a desperate woman, no doubt about it, eight days before Gail was executed. And yet, save for the spiritual gift of bilocation, how could Donna Trapani be in two places at the same time? If she was talking to George when Gail was murdered, it meant that if Donna had been behind it, she had to have hired someone. This meant one thing to investigators: There was a paper trail somewhere, along with a few witnesses, outlining a plot to murder Martha Gail Fulton. All they had to do was find it.
21
T
HROUGHOUT THE FIRST
few weeks of November, the investigation moved along at a slow and steady pace. There were more pieces of the puzzle to put together than the picture would lead a layperson to believe by studying it. Smart detectives understand, though, that all it takes is a few solid breaks and a case will come together.
That first break came on November 18, when the OCSD got a hit on a rental car. As part of that Oak Force investigative team, OCSD investigator James Lehtola spoke to a rental-car agency in Okaloosa County, Florida, which had obtained information from its Enterprise Rent-A-Car corporate offices in St. Louis, Missouri. This new lead pointed to a master plan for murder clearly coming into focus. Enterprise “had confirmed,” Lehtola reported, “that a Donna Trapani” had rented a number of automobiles from the Okaloosa Airport/Fort Walton Beach, Florida, location and had one vehicle out on rental currently. That information in and of itself was not so surprising or significant. However, what Lehtola found out next was enough to raise eyebrows.
Lehtola wrote:
Records indicate that the renter [Donna Trapani] prefers Chevrolet Malibu’s and rented that type of vehicle on each occasion.
Enterprise gave Lehtola several dates: May 28, 1999, and July 2, 1999. The car Donna picked up on those dates was a four-door white Malibu, with Florida registration plates. An additional date for a black Malibu Donna had rented on August 25, 1999, juxtaposed with a trip she had taken to meet George. Then on September 10, 1999, just about three weeks prior to Gail’s murder, Donna rented a 1999 jade-colored Malibu—a car she had yet to return to Enterprise.
Bull’s-eye!
“We contacted Miss Trapani,” the Enterprise rep told Lehtola, “and let her know that she had overdue payments related to the vehicle, and she needed to pay and return the car. But she said she was in Louisiana because her mother was having open-heart surgery.”
The company had been leaving messages on Donna’s office voice mail, but she had not returned any of the calls.
“Notify us as soon as she returns that car,” Lehtola said.
Lehtola let the team know what he had found. It seemed to fit into place. Yet, the break the OCSD had been looking for all along—that proverbial knife in Donna Trapani’s back—came hours later in the form of two telephone calls that would send investigators heading straight out the door on that road trip to Florida.
As most agencies do in this situation, the OCSD referred to the caller as “the informant.” His name was Todd Franklin (pseudonym), a Texas native living in Florida, a man who had done some time in a local jail that past summer and had happened to run into Sybil Padgett along the way. As the prisoners were transported and corralled into holding pens, waiting to be sent to various prisons, Todd had a conversation with Sybil, who was also locked up on a drug charge, that sparked a rekindling of an old friendship between them. Todd and Sybil had known each other for ten years, at least.
It was around 8:00
P.M.
on November 19 when Todd Franklin called the OCSD. Sergeant James A’Hearn and several investigators were still in the office, talking about the Fulton case. They were commenting on how it was surely a solvable case; it just needed a bit more shoe-leather police work.
Alan Whitefield took the call.
Todd Franklin sounded drunk, slurring his words, unable to articulate things with any consistent sentence structure. Yet, the basis for the call was unmistakably clear.
“He said something to the effect . . . that he and a woman, Sybil Padgett,” A’Hearn later said, “had had a conversation about her being involved in a homicide in Michigan.”
Apparently, Todd and Sybil had just had sex. They were lying in bed, smoking cigarettes and talking like lovers sometimes do, when Sybil admitted that she had been part of Gail’s murder. OCSD investigators called it “pillow talk”: Sybil thought she could trust the man with whom she’d just been intimate.
A’Hearn called Franklin the following morning; he was more sober—though not completely—and able to orate his story somewhat clearer.
“Based on that information he gave me the following morning,” A’Hearn said, “I arranged to meet him down in Florida.”
Detective John Meiers, Detective Sergeant James A’Hearn, and Special Agent William O’Leary, of the FBI, left for Florida a few days later to interview Todd Franklin face-to-face. That break in the case they had all been waiting for—well, it had just occurred.
Todd insisted on being picked up at his apartment for fear of someone seeing him head into the police department (PD) and talk to cops. So they took him to the FBI’s local bureau in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. The OCSD was now on Donna Trapani’s home turf, in her backyard.
“Tell us how you became involved,” one of the investigators asked.
Todd seemed nervous and agitated. He was shaky, maybe more from drinking too much than being scared to talk about what he knew. He gave no reason why he was coming forward, other than he wanted to help.
“I—I . . . while I was incarcerated in Franklin County Jail this past summer,” he explained, “Sybil, a longtime friend of mine, asked me if I knew anybody that killed people.”
That was the beginning of it, Todd went on to explain; the first time he had heard anything about Sybil being involved in murdering someone. It shocked him. Sybil was a bad girl, sure. She was a little trashy and definitely easy, but she didn’t strike him as the type to be involved in a murder-for-hire plot. So Todd wrote it off as Sybil playing around, trying to be someone she was not: a tough girl trying to play the part.
Todd explained to Sybil over the phone at one point that he had done some time with a dude who had, in fact, killed people. The conversation with Sybil ended there. However, after Todd was released from jail some days later, he ran into Sybil again and the conversation picked up. They even rekindled an intimate relationship and started sleeping together on a regular basis. Todd still wasn’t certain whether Sybil was serious about wanting to hire someone for a hit.
“She said she had someone who wanted it done,” Franklin explained.
Sybil ended up introducing Todd Franklin to Donna Trapani. During that first meeting Donna and Sybil made it clear to Todd that they were looking to get “this woman in Michigan killed,” as Todd explained to A’Hearn and the FBI.
“Put me in touch with someone who can make the hit,” Sybil pleaded with him. Donna stood by, but she didn’t say anything. She certainly knew what was being said and, in many respects, Donna was the “boss lady” behind the scenes who was calling the shots.
“I also had several conversations with Donna about her troubles with this woman in Michigan, but Donna never directly asked me for assistance” at that time, Todd stated.
“Well, what
did
she say?” A’Hearn wanted to know.
“From what Donna told me, her boyfriend’s wife wouldn’t give him a divorce, so she said that she wasn’t going to worry about that, but that she would find somebody to have her killed and the problem would be solved forever, and it wouldn’t cost nearly as much money [as a divorce].”
It sounded an awful lot like a murder plan. This impromptu meeting among Sybil, Donna, and Todd, whether any of them realized it, was a capital felony, punishable—if convicted—by the death penalty in most instances.
“I didn’t take it seriously,” Todd said. “They talked about it a lot. But then it was about a week or two before the woman was killed when Sybil called me.”
“What’d she want?”
“I asked her where she was, because I had not seen her in a while.”
“I can’t tell you where I am,” Sybil told Todd over the phone that night. It was about ten days before Gail’s murder.
“Come on . . . ,” he pleaded. “Why not?”
“Nope. Can’t do it.”
A little later into the conversation, Sybil gave in, saying, “I’m at a pay phone in Michigan.”
“She told me she was with some guy, Patrick something. . . and they had gone to Michigan to check on Donna’s boyfriend’s wife. She said she had been following her [Gail] and knew where she lived. Sybil thought it was funny that she (Sybil) had put a wig on and even followed the woman into her bank one day.”
Sybil and this Patrick person had been stalking Gail, doing Donna’s dirty work, following Donna’s lead all the way.
While they were in the bank, Sybil bumped into Gail, saying, “Oh, excuse me. . . .” It was all a joke to Sybil. She was having fun following around Donna’s archenemy, tracking Gail’s every move, searching for that perfect opportunity to kill her.
“Did Sybil ever say why she was in Michigan?” A’Hearn asked.
“I don’t remember what she said, but
I
knew why she was there. When Sybil returned to Florida, she contacted me again and told me that she was unable to kill the woman because [Gail] always had friends around her and she was going to [different places] . . . where there were always people around.”