A month later, George was in Michigan, carving the turkey, playing the Norman Rockwell role of dad at the Thanksgiving table. As much as Donna wanted to think she had George all to herself, he was still invested in his marriage, making promises to Gail and the kids.
A week later, George was back in Florida, and he and Donna were on a plane to Las Vegas to spend a week partying, gambling, having sex, and acting out that fantasy of being the couple they were telling each other they were.
Arriving back in Florida from the Las Vegas trip, George went to work for a week and then explained to Donna he was heading home for Christmas.
On December 22, 1998, George boarded a plane for Detroit. His return home, however, would be cut short after Donna, stewing back in Florida, came up with a plan to get him back into her bed.
“Donna tried every conceivable method to keep control of George,” law enforcement said. “When George denied Donna this control, she resorted to the classic method of guilt.”
35
D
ONNA COULD NOT
allow George to spend the holidays with his family. It just wasn’t in her to step back and allow the due course of time to dictate how her relationship with George ebbed and flowed. If Donna didn’t know by now that George made decisions like a scientific researcher working for the government—slowly and meticulously—she was fooling herself. Bottom line: If the man had been that head over heels, he would have dropped everything, divorced Gail, and married Donna. That whole “he’s just not into you” was playing out in front of Donna, but she wasn’t getting it. Sure, George could charm his way into convincing Donna that going home for the holidays was his way of letting the family down slowly, and it had to be done in order for him to proceed with a divorce. However, George was at home, documentation later proved, playing Gail, too, trying to do whatever he could to get her to fulfill his voracious sexual appetite.
“You are needed back here in Florida,” Donna said one night near the end of December.
George asked what was happening.
“Cut it short, George, the company needs you!” Donna insisted.
George was able to book a flight the following day.
Donna took meticulous notes in a journal, detailing the next few weeks. George’s lover was waiting for him at the airport. Anticipating his arrival, Donna was gratified to see the expression on his face when he spotted her:
joy and love when he looked at me.
When they got back to her place, Donna helped him unpack. At one point George stopped, hugged her tightly, and said, “Everything is going to be okay. I missed you so much.”
Donna smiled. “I need to go back to the office for a few hours.”
“I’ll meet you there around five-thirty.”
George sat down. Donna started walking out of the room.
“Hey?” George said.
“Yeah,” Donna answered, stopping.
“You are the reason I look forward to coming back.”
Donna embraced George and they ended up on the floor,
and he held and cuddled me, rubbed my hair. . . .
Touching her face lightly, George said, “I missed you
so
much.... I thought of you all the time, every day, and longed to see you and hold you.”
“I know, honey,” Donna responded.
George cried, according to Donna’s journal. Then said:
“According to Gail, I am not supposed to feel this way. . . . [She] says I am not supposed to love you, want you, or need you—but I do, Donna. I do.”
Donna tried to speak, but George kissed her. It was at that moment, she wrote, when she
knew where his heart was
and they
laid on the floor holding each other, telling each other how much we loved and missed each other. . . .
“Gail just doesn’t understand how much we mean to each other, Donna,” George said. “She doesn’t want me to be ‘me’ anymore.”
“What’s your biggest reason for not divorcing Gail?” Donna asked.
George thought it through. “You know, I am afraid she’d hurt herself. She’d go off the deep end. On top of that, I don’t want the kids to hate me, Donna. Gail tells me they will.”
Donna thought:
It’s really sad and unfair that he is being blackmailed to stay with that bitch!
As they sat talking, a fury built inside Donna. Blackmail was the “worst kind of crime,” she concluded while listening to George bellyache about the hold Gail had on him.
To me,
she wrote,
it’s worse than being a prostitute or murderer.
A blackmailer is a lowly person . . .
[with]
no better thoughts than their own wants.... Nobody else matters.
She was mortified and made angrier by the fact that Gail was “forcing” George to stay at home. Donna put the entire onus on Gail. And this was where it became clear how good at playing one against the other George had become. Donna pressured him to make a choice, and George came back to Florida with this sob story of Gail chaining his hands and feet together, using the kids as a means to make him feel guilty. Donna was certain Gail was threatening to commit suicide if he left. This riled her. She felt Gail was lying about the suicide, solely because of the kids. She never thought that maybe George was making it up, even as she observed in her writings that Gail could never justify suicide as a Catholic. Moreover, Donna believed that Gail would “never give him” to her “so easily.”
She called Gail “selfish” and a “prison warden” for keeping George contained.
George was able to turn the tears on and off in front of Donna, gaining tremendous amounts of sympathy. Donna bantered on and on, blaming Gail for every personal defect George expressed, on top of depriving him of any “excitement, passion, fulfillment, and enjoyment.”
As she wrote through her feelings, Donna turned the rant into a letter addressed to Andrew. She claimed that at the time George married Andrew’s mother, George was depressed and a young West Point grad who just “wanted to get married.” It could have been anyone, Donna implied. Gail was just, well, there.
He thought she would get better,
Donna wrote,
after [you] kids came.
Poor George. According to what he was telling Donna, he had lived a life of hell with Gail. All twenty-four years of it.
She went on to say that right before Melissa (Andrew and Emily’s sister) was born, George wanted to divorce Gail, but he couldn’t because of the pregnancy.
(He was so unhappy that he and Gail had two more kids after that! A fact Donna chose to ignore.)
Donna wrote that after Emily came along,
The marriage even became
worse
.
Gail turned into “only a mother.” She had never been a wife, Donna maintained. The only part of Gail’s life she “ever cared about” was the kids. Gail was “never, never, never” a wife. George was treated as though “he didn’t matter.” No one in the household—Donna was certain about this because George had explained it many times—knew “how much pain and hurt” George had had to “endure” for all these years. Gail “deserved every bit” of what she was “now feeling” for the torturous years she had put him through.
She blamed Gail for George’s “failure to progress” in the military.
She blamed Gail for “never trying to help” George “succeed” at anything he ever did.
For any “discouragement” George felt in his entire life.
For “harass[ing] him to death,” to “give up and do nothing.”
For not being able to “better himself.”
For never meeting “his needs.”
For never being able to talk about certain things he had become “ashamed of ” and not been “able to tell anyone” except Donna.
For never allowing George to “have things” his way.
For “trapping” him into having children.
For giving him “no other choice” but to stay with her.
For keeping quiet and accepting “years of heartache.”
For stifling “all his dreams.”
Donna said Gail had not even had 10 percent near “the pain and hurt” George had endured living under the same roof, calling Gail a “poor, pitiful, selfish mother.”
Then Donna said when George needed his children most,
they all turned their backs on him
. It made her wonder, listening to George talk about how bad the kids were and how spiteful they had become (like their mother), how “uncaring and ungrateful” they actually were. She asked Andrew—as she was still focused on him as someone who could talk some sense into the other two kids—if by knowing all of the facts now, George’s kids could stand behind him for once and support him through this tough time.
After this, Donna fell into a discussion about God and how Gail had been lying to God, and that “God knows it.” She said Gail was “so dependent” and “weak” that it drove George “crazy.” This was always the impetus for his “going back” home. She said George had told her he “wished he could die now” so he didn’t have to live in all the pain Gail had been putting him through. It was Donna who brought George the “most happiness” he’d ever had, and here was Gail trying to destroy
that.
She always wins,
Donna wrote of Gail, calling her “selfish and self-centered.” She pointed out how Gail used her children as pawns against her rival to make all of their lives hell. The “only reason” Gail wanted George was because, when the kids were grown, Gail wouldn’t be alone. Gail didn’t “care about what” anybody else wanted. It was about
her
needs. In fact, Gail’s goal in life at the current time, Donna was convinced, was to make George suffer more than any other human being. If she persisted, Donna warned, all she was going to do was put so much pressure on George that he was going to have a heart attack and die. Why not just let him go?
She wrote to Andrew:
Do you hate your dad so much to want him dead?
The entire Fulton family, Donna said, “fail to realize” how deep George’s love was for her. Something George “never had.” She explained how passionate their love was, how emotionally connected they were, how exciting it all was to George. She wrote to Andrew, putting it into a familiar context:
The same way you feel about
your
girlfriend
.
Whenever Donna dropped George off at the airport to send him on his way back to Gail, she said he’d turn before walking through the catwalk “and have tears in his eyes.”
One of the most hurtful moments, Donna concluded, was when George took Gail to see the movie
Titanic.
She said George cried through the entire film—not because he was taken in by James Cameron’s characters, but because all he thought about was Donna and the love they shared.
Donna ran out of paper while writing, and she finished what was an incredibly disparaging document—written to a kid not yet finished with high school—on several Post-it scraps of paper. The ending to this maddening outburst gave her a certain emotional footing to stand on. Donna warned Andrew that his father loved her, and there was nothing his mother could do to stop it.
Your mom will never be me . . . ,
Donna wrote.
Finally she observed that Gail could “never give” George what she had, saying how marriage was “built on trust, love, and commitment.” She called Gail “insecure” and “hopeless.” Donna encouraged Andrew to talk to his mother so that she might “seek professional help” and “move on with her life.”
36
G
AIL FULTON SHOWED UP
for work in tears one day. It was close to the end of December.
“What’s wrong, Gail?” one of her colleagues asked. No one could stand to see Gail like this. “Sit down.” Gail was about to lose it. She couldn’t work anymore.
“Well,” Gail said, “I just found out that George is having an affair with his boss in Florida.”
Hearing herself say it out loud brought on another round of tears for Gail.
“I’m so sorry, honey.”
It was tragic to see such a nice woman suffer so deeply. Gail had been honest with everyone in saying that her marriage was going through a rocky time over the past several months. Many people had suspected George was cheating. Still, something had happened to make Gail announce this affair to her coworkers. George had moved down to Florida, after all, six months prior to Gail having this breakdown at work.
“Her name is Donna,” Gail continued. “I truly feel this is it—we’re heading for a divorce.”
Gail had been optimistic and hopeful there was a chance to salvage the marriage, but she felt different now. Here it was days after Christmas and Gail was staring at the end of a two-decades-plus marriage. The New Year celebration was a week away. What was she going to do?
Gail went about her days as her husband stayed with Donna. She tried to figure out the best way to handle and accept that the marriage was over. Change was not something Gail had experience with. She knew a lot about modifying her life to suit her husband’s needs. Moving to Michigan wasn’t something Gail had been all that shocked by when it happened. Since they married on June 6, 1975, in Corpus Christi, Gail and George had moved nearly a dozen times. That first year after they were married, George was restationed in Georgia. Then it was on to Boulder, Colorado, Mannheim, Germany, and Kettering, Ohio. Each of their three children was born in a different state or country. They spent time in El Paso, Texas, and Fort Amador, Panama (at an army base), the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, and, finally, back to Corpus Christi in 1992. It was shortly after that, with twenty years in the military, when George retired.
Gail had nothing to do with George leaving the army, as Donna had been so certain of in her letter to Andrew (a letter Andrew later said he never received). It’s highly unlikely George Fulton, a man who made all the decisions in the Fulton household, would allow Gail to convince him to leave the military.
“Served twenty years on active duty as an infantry officer, an analyst,” George later testified. “Retired in 1993. . . .”
“My parents were supposed to stay here for good,” Emily said, referring to Corpus Christi. “My dad promised my mom that they would
always
return to their hometown after he retired.” That was why the move to Lake Orion when Emily was a junior came as such a shock to everyone back home. They were settled in Corpus Christi, set on living out the remaining years of their lives. Family and friends were all around them there.