“I know my dad loved me,” she said, “but he was not very expressive. . . .”
The situation inside the house became caustic as the month of May closed. Emily and her dad were at odds; Gail and George were not talking; and Andrew had withdrawn into himself, spending time with friends and his girlfriend. They were a family, but they were living separate lives. They passed one another inside the house, but little was ever said beyond the normal stuff that gets a family through their days. According to Emily, the root cause of it all was Donna.
“Donna would call and tell me that she had a hard childhood,” Emily remembered. “She told me her father had beat her. I don’t know that it’s true. But I know that this is one of the ways that she and my dad identified with each other—that they both had these hard childhoods. . . .”
Justifiable adultery—the point of the relationship at which Donna and George could pivot the sneakiness and pain they were causing others. They made a connection through childhood trauma, Emily said. And as she further pointed out, her father’s dad had passed when he was young. This had caused a great hurt to grow inside George. Whether Donna was beaten as a kid, who knew? But the fact that the two of them felt this became some sort of bond.
After Gail was murdered, there was one day when George went to the kids, according to Emily’s recollection, and said, “You do not know what suffering is—I am the one who knows true suffering.”
Emily and Andrew looked at each other:
Is he crazy? What the heck is he talking about?
With that one statement, Emily felt, her father had invalidated everything Emily and Andrew were going through as they mourned the loss of their mother.
By May 23, 1998, George was living in Florida with Donna. She had made the drive to Michigan in a U-Haul on May 20 to help George pick up his things. George drove the U-Haul trailer over to the house himself that day. Emily and her mother watched him pack.
“What is that? You’re packing and leaving us?” Emily asked.
“You have to stay,” Gail said.
“No . . . I don’t.”
George closed the back of the U-Haul. Andrew came out. Gail went back inside, crying. Emily and Andrew stood in the driveway.
“What are you doing?” Emily pleaded. She was bawling.
“Dad, come on,” Andrew said. “Let’s talk it over.”
“Please, please stay,” Emily said again and again and again. Then she begged. “Don’t leave us, Dad. What can we do? We’ll be
better
kids. What can we do to make you stay? What do you need us to do? Whatever it is, we’ll do it. Just please,
please
stay here.”
As Andrew and Emily looked on, their dad drove off into the Michigan sunset, heading toward Donna, who was waiting for him up the road.
George finally left Gail and the kids. Yet, during this entire time George said he was going south to rent a room in Donna’s house so he could get his business started. Some time and distance between him and Gail might help the marriage. It wasn’t yet over.
When George arrived in DeFuniak Springs, escorted by Donna, there was a surprise party waiting for him, staged around Donna welcoming George officially into the company. Most of the guests were Donna’s employees.
Emily Fulton gave a graduation speech to her class that spring, just a short while after George moved away. During the ceremony she felt that her father “just didn’t want to be there.” George had already let go; Emily knew that his heart was somewhere else. “He resented being there. He was so very angry. He had that dark cloud over his head. . . .” It was suspended above, following him around. Emily could not only feel it, but she could once again
see
it.
Emily could not believe that her dad had come all the way up from Florida, and yet he held on to such hatred and anger for being there, as if his daughter’s graduation was keeping him from something else. Emily graduated at the top of her class with honors. She won awards. She had an incredible future ahead of her.
“And here is my father, and he’s there, and he cannot even
look
at me,” she said, “or acknowledge my existence.. . .”
Here I am doing all this,
Emily thought.
I want so bad for my dad to be proud of me. I want him to acknowledge that I am a
good
person, that I am worthy, and he couldn’t even do
that.
More tears.
“All he could do was slip nasty remarks in here and there.”
Gail beamed. Nothing was going to take away from her daughter’s special day. She was so proud of Emily. It was a remarkable moment for her to see Emily realize her dreams and begin her adult life. Emily had gone through a terrible time at birth. Doctors didn’t really know if she was going to make it. When she had first started to talk, Emily had a speech impediment and teachers wanted to put her in special classes. While George and Gail were in Germany, German doctors wanted to classify Emily as “mentally retarded.” They conducted all sorts of bizarre tests on her. Gail was certain there was nothing significantly wrong with her child. Emily was just slow to develop motor skills. It didn’t mean she had something medically (or genetically) wrong.
“I remember my mom saying they wanted to put a wheelchair-handicap stamp designation on my school record to show that I was disabled in some way,” Emily recalled. “Now, I am not sure if it was my speech alone or maybe it was combined with how I tested on certain standardized tests that drove the school to this conclusion. I have never done well on standardized tests. My sister and brother score in the highest percentiles. . . . My mom was afraid if they labeled me as ‘learning disabled’ early on, then I would never have a chance, as people would always judge me and try to classify me. So my mom fought to keep me in regular classes and said that since she had a speech therapy background, she would personally work with me if they put me into regular classes.... My mom . . . wanted to help me and make me as ‘normal’ as possible, I imagine.”
But here was this same child graduating with honors, heading off to, truthfully, the college of her choice, and Gail could not have been more excited. What’s more, it was happening at a time in Gail’s life when the walls around her were crumbling.
After a terrible day with George at the graduation, they all went out to dinner.
“And he tries to make it all better by handing me fifty dollars,” Emily said.
Despite how she acted and felt, Gail looked horrible. She had lost a lot of weight, which her petite frame could not afford. She wasn’t sleeping. Definitely not eating, as she should have been. And she was not drinking enough water. Like during that period after she and the kids returned from Panama unexpectedly, her eyes were once more sunken and dark and punctuated with sadness, anxiety, and emotional exhaustion. She suffered terrible migraines. It was all, Emily concluded, her father’s fault. He could have stopped all of it. Gail was willing to forgive and move on.
“Why is he so angry?” Dora Garza asked Emily the night after graduation. “What is going on? Why would he ruin this day?”
“He’s having an affair,” Emily said.
It’s funny how self-esteem works within a child’s developing mind. “It didn’t matter what anyone else thought on that day,” Emily later said. Everyone was congratulating her, patting her on the back, telling her how great she was and what a wonderful future she had. “But none of it mattered. It did not matter how good I was, because I felt I could not prove to my dad that I was
good enough.
”
Emily told Andrew and her grandmother she believed her father was having an affair with Donna, his boss. George was out running errands.
Dora Garza said, “No way.... He was an officer in the army. He has too much integrity. He would
never
do that.”
“Nope,” Andrew said. “Not a chance. Not Dad.”
34
N
EITHER GEORGE NOR
Gail Fulton sat down and told the family, “Look, George is leaving and moving to Florida to go be with Donna.” It was one of those slow progressions whereby George allowed everyone to figure it out by themselves, couching his leaving around needing to be closer to his work as the CFO of CCHH. He had always wanted to start his own company. This was going to be George’s big chance to branch out. He and Gail were “having problems.” Some time away from each other might be just what the marriage needed.
But Emily was not one to take no for an answer. Emily convinced her grandmother “with facts,” she said, after laying it all out: the phone calls, the trips to Florida, Donna saying bizarre things to her over the phone, the anger and bitterness between Gail and George, Gail not eating or sleeping. Then there was the fact that George had packed some things and left with Donna! Plus, George had told Emily to take care of her mother. There was a certain finality to that.
Dora still did not want to believe it, so she confronted George.
He denied it.
Dora, however, knew right away he was lying.
Emily said that “a lot of people want to live in denial.” It helps them cope with the situation. Not facing the truth is easier. Humans are nonconfrontational beings. People do not like conflict. This alone was one reason the situation got so out of hand inside the Fulton household, Emily felt.
Still, Emily wasn’t going to stand for it.
George was gone, living in Florida. He was calling the house to talk to the kids. He was also calling his other daughter in Virginia. The house in Michigan did not have caller ID then. So Emily and Andrew never knew from where he was calling. George had phoned down to Virginia and told his daughter he was calling from home. But Emily’s older sister had caller ID and saw the name
Donna Trapani
on the liquid crystal display (LCD) screen.
“Why, if Dad is at home, is his
boss’s
name showing up on the caller ID?”
Emily knew, of course, but here was some tangible proof.
Things blew up, Emily explained, after that. No one could deny George was living with Donna.
George was flying back home less and less as June, July, and August came and went. He and Donna, meanwhile, went down to Panama City for a weekend. Then to Orlando for a three-day Medicare seminar—two days of which they spent on the beach and enjoying fine dining. Then it was Mobile, Alabama, for yet another tryst. Back from there, they traveled to Gulfport, Mississippi, and rented a beach condo.
As they grew closer, George noticed things about Donna that he did not like.
“She talked down to employees of restaurants,” George later told police, “. . . and did not care how she treated people.”
That was Donna all right: Servers were below her, and parking-lot attendants were scummy, uneducated nitwits. Anyone who did not live up to Donna’s standards was no better than the dirt underneath her fingernails.
Throughout that summer George became bored with Donna. Gail’s forty-seventh birthday was coming up on September 6, 1998. So he flew back to Michigan and spent some time with the family to celebrate Gail’s special day.
Donna was livid. She couldn’t let go of Gail. (And neither could George, for that matter.) Donna had her man, but she still wanted—and perhaps by now needed—to take revenge on her rival. On CCHH stationery Donna scribbled some notes for her next conversation (be it a letter or a phone call) with Gail. This short hodgepodge of Donna’s thoughts—scratched out as if having a fit of rage, and having no other way to get it out of her mind—was a prelude to something much more sinister and manipulative Donna would soon put into play.
Hate festered inside Donna like a cancer spreading. Anything Gail said or did now ate at Donna. Her notes were numbered, beginning with
1.) prisoner in his own home.
Donna pointed out how Gail “expected” George to call her at all times of the day and night.
This is selfish . . . ,
she wrote,
mean + hateful....
Donna wanted Gail to know she would never stop George from calling home. She accused Gail of being “very unfair, unfeeling, and cold.” She wanted Gail to know that because of this, George felt guilty.
He pays all the bills for the house . . . ,
she continued, but George felt that
he could not be his own person in his
own
house!
It was “shameful” and “embarrassing” to George; the guy felt like a “stranger in his own home.”
Was George giving Donna the impression he had told his family he had left them and moved in with her? Or was George still playing both sides?
Donna’s notes continued. She started underlining words, writing certain phrases out in all CAPS, and using additional exclamation points to make various points. She claimed George didn’t want to talk to Gail anymore. She accused Gail of calling her house and spewing “hateful remarks” at the both of them:
He’s not the person that did
anything
wrong. . . .
She wrote,
[George]
ran
away from you because he was
sick
of you and your horrible ways!
She wanted Gail to know she had been “killing” George slowly, over a long period of time, and she had never been there for him “like a man needs.” She said all Gail wanted was for George to be the “breadwinner,” the man who brought home the bacon so she could lounge around and take care of kids all day. Donna insisted Gail’s entire focus was to strip away any “happiness” and “peace of mind” George had managed to find with her.
If Donna did say these things to Gail over the phone, or in a long letter, as she had planned, she never recorded Gail’s responses. Donna and Gail talked several times on the telephone and it generally ended with Donna and her truck driver’s foul mouth spitting venom at Gail.
On October 31, 1998, Donna and George celebrated their one-year anniversary by spending the day and night at Bluewater Bay, a gorgeous marina resort along an inlet of Choctawhatchee Bay. They walked hand in hand along the beach, had cute and colorful drinks with little umbrellas at a seaside bar, and spent the night having some of that nasty sex, which former friends said Donna often bragged about.