K
EVIN NEEDED TO
make certain some of the people cleared out. So he had Patrick drive around the town of Lake Orion for “about a half hour.” Patrick took a right out of the parking lot onto Joslyn Road; then he headed toward South Newman and Square Lake, just around the corner.
Patrick Alexander originally thought of this plot to kill Gail Fulton as some sort of “crazy idea” Sybil had cooked up with Donna: a revenge-driven pipe dream that would never happen. Sybil was always going on about her wild side, Patrick later said. She was an idealist, easily manipulated by Donna, who knew Sybil’s weaknesses and insecurities better than anyone else, and used them against her. Sybil was her own worst enemy.
Still, Patrick Alexander went along with Sybil’s plan simply because he was having great sex and did not believe half of what she said.
“It blew my mind,” Patrick later told police, “to think that stuff like this—something you usually see on television—and there it was before my own eyes and . . . something that happened in real life.” Not so much a wordsmith, or confident while explaining himself, but Patrick made his point. “That was my exact thought—‘Man, here it is in my life and it’s happening to me!’”
The first time it occurred to Patrick that he was involved in a bona fide conspiracy to commit murder was when he stood by and watched Donna offer Sybil money to find someone to kill Gail, or do it herself. He knew then that they were serious about the plan.
“Here is somebody offering me money to go kill someone and stuff like that.... I used to see this stuff on TV. That’s what blowed my mind.”
According to Patrick, Donna’s first offer was $15,000. She had made the offer to Sybil, but Sybil said she would think about it. Before she agreed to anything, Sybil wanted to discuss it with Patrick and see what he thought.
“I would tell her ‘No, it’s not the right thing. You’ve got kids. You have to think about that kind of thing.’ But as time grew on, it got harder, to where we were having to scratch and scrape to get money to buy the kids food and everything. So we decided to do it.”
“We.”
Patrick admitted he and Sybil were equally culpable, had made this decision together. And yet, same as Kevin and Sybil would soon bullhorn, Patrick was also saying that Donna Trapani was the mastermind behind it all.
Donna had been badgering Patrick and Sybil for a month, Patrick claimed, before they took off to do the job, begging them, frosting the situation with the idea that the money they made (“You won’t get caught . . . trust me. . . .”) would take care of Sybil’s kids for quite a while. Donna kept harping on it and asking them to go through with it, but Sybil couldn’t do it by herself, she said, and certainly didn’t want to have Patrick do it for her. The guy could barely do laundry by himself. So to get Donna off her back, Sybil told Donna about Mike, the biker, explaining how Mike was the right person for the job.
The pressure Donna put on the both of them, Patrick later said, became sweeping and all-consuming. They could not get away from Donna. It was as if Donna had had some sort of hold on Sybil.
“Very much to the point where, see, that was her boss lady, you know, and she (Sybil) couldn’t work nowheres else, so she pressured us to the point, you know, to where . . . I mean, sure, we had other options we could have taken, but we didn’t feel like that, you know, ’cause she had, more or less, had us hanging by a string ... ’cause she
controlled
Sybil’s money and everything.... It was basically a long, drawn-out process.”
So they drove around Lake Orion, near the public library, for a half hour and returned.
“I’ll drive,” Sybil said.
“Yeah,” Patrick said.
“No, I don’t want to now,” Sybil said.
“Come on,” Patrick said. “I’m tired of it.”
“Shut up,” Kevin shouted from the backseat. “Just pull over.” They were a few miles from the library entrance.
Kevin hopped into the front seat and drove. When he got to the entrance, he pulled over and told Patrick to take the wheel. Sybil did not move. She sat in the front seat and kept her trap shut. It was not yet nine o’clock, so they sat on the side of the road until it was a few minutes before the hour.
Then Patrick drove the car into the parking lot.
“Pull over there,” Kevin directed, “to the back end of the parking lot and
park
the damn car.” Tension was taut. Nerves were frayed. Kevin knew the time was coming to play this thing out. He needed to produce. They had come all this way.
Patrick parked. Kevin got out and placed a white T-shirt over the license plate of the Malibu, in case someone heard the shots and came running out. Finished, he walked over to the car, hopped in, and told Patrick, “Go inside and
find
her.” This time (according to Patrick’s recollection), Kevin handed him a photo of Gail, which “Donna had given him.”
“Make sure she’s still working,” Kevin said.
Patrick got out and walked inside the library.
When he came back a few minutes later, he said, “Yup. She’s in there.”
“Pull up and park a few spots away from her van,” Kevin instructed, taking complete control. At times it sounded as though Kevin found himself dealing with two idiots who couldn’t get out of their own way.
Patrick did what he was told. Sybil wasn’t saying much of anything.
“Now we wait for her to come out,” Kevin said, sounding like a boss.
As they sat and watched the employee entrance, workers emerged just past the nine o’clock hour. They walked out of the employee doors and into the parking lot; they all reached into their purses and jackets to fetch car keys.
Then they all got into their cars and left.
“That’s her,” Sybil said, pointing to a woman walking out of the door by herself. The parking lot was clear by now. Gail was alone.
Perfect.
Here was Gail: slowly and unknowingly walking toward her death.
“Stay put . . . ,” Kevin said. They agreed she would get into her van, realize the tire was flat, and then stop. Kevin had the mask Sybil brought for him. He put it on. Sybil coiled her long blond hair up and stuffed it inside a baseball cap.
Gail did exactly what she was supposed to do, right on cue.
“Now you pull up behind her,” Kevin told Patrick, who started the car and drove around one of the islands as Gail pulled back into the same spot she had just pulled out of.
They were now directly behind Gail’s van.
Gail got out. She walked toward the back of her vehicle. She looked down at the back tire. Then she turned to see who was driving up on her.
Kevin stepped out of the car. He walked hurriedly toward Gail.
She realized immediately what was happening.
“I shot four times,” Kevin said later, describing that next moment.
Gail looked directly into his eyes.
The first shot was aimed. “In the head,” Kevin explained. The next three were shot at random. It was over in a matter of seconds.
Kevin jumped back into the car. “Go . . . go . . . go!”
Sybil and Patrick said nothing.
Patrick took a sharp left out of the library’s entrance, chirping the tires, speeding toward Route 24 to make the connection with Interstate 75. The plan was to make it to a truck stop near the Ohio border as soon as possible, head through Toledo, then make a fast track south.
As they sped down the street outside the library, Patrick pulled into an apartment complex and parked.
Kevin jumped out and ripped the T-shirt off the license plate.
“Go, man . . . drive.”
They made it to a truck stop near the border in good time. Kevin was in need of some alcohol to calm his nerves. He sent Patrick into the store to get “some change,” he said, but did not explain further why he did this. Nevertheless, as Patrick walked around the store, Kevin and Sybil spoke outside.
“He can probably keep his mouth shut,” Kevin said to Sybil, meaning Patrick.
“Yeah.”
Patrick returned and gave Kevin his change; then Kevin went in to get some booze.
Kevin took over driving from there. They made it, he said, “all the way down to Kentucky” without stopping much.
“I’m too tired to drive anymore,” Kevin said as they crossed the border. “You want to get a hotel or drive?” he asked Patrick.
“I’ll drive,” Patrick said. He’d had his fill of Sybil by now. As Kevin drove from Ohio down toward Kentucky, Patrick and Sybil had had sex in the backseat several times.
As Patrick drove, Kevin lay down in the backseat and slept.
“You know,” Patrick said a while later, “I think I’d like to stop and get a hotel.”
It was close to five in the morning. They grabbed a room and slept until checkout at ten. Then they got back on the road, grabbed some breakfast, and headed toward Birmingham, Alabama, where Kevin’s car had been parked.
“I had a cooler in there, some CB equipment, and some tools, and various odds and ends,” Kevin later said. He wanted to pick that stuff up before they returned to Florida.
“Find a pay phone,” Kevin said to Patrick after they drove away from his abandoned car.
Patrick spotted a phone up the road and pulled over.
“Page Donna,” Kevin ordered Patrick.
“Okay.”
Kevin went into a nearby convenience store to grab a coffee and some smokes. They all sat in the car, “sitting there, waiting for her (Donna) to call . . . waiting and waiting, and it didn’t seem like she was going to call back.”
Donna knew what the call meant as her pager went off. She had spoken to the police over the phone just a few hours before.
Patrick and Sybil walked back to the car and took a load off. They were tired of waiting for Donna. Kevin waited by the pay phone, smoking cigarettes, thinking about what he had done. There was no turning back now. He had killed a woman. He wanted his money.
The pay phone startled Kevin as it rang.
“Yeah?”
“It’s Donna.”
“It’s all done,” Kevin reported.
“I already
know
that. I got a call from the police. They questioned me about George’s whereabouts—I was on the phone with him when it happened.”
Covering her own self,
Kevin thought.
“Well, we’ll be in town in a few hours—have my money ready. You got that?”
He hung up.
Instead of driving to Sybil’s, Kevin instructed Patrick to drive straight to Donna’s.
“Mike,” Donna said as they all walked in, “how did it go?”
“I just want my money,” Kevin answered.
“She kept on asking me questions about how it—you know, what happened,” Kevin said later. “She wanted
specific
details. And I told her, ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s done. Give me my money.’”
It wasn’t that Kevin did not want to assuage Donna’s demon seed and provide those violent particulars and images of Gail’s final moments, which Donna so deeply craved, but, Kevin explained, “The less she knew, the better.”
Donna realized Kevin wasn’t going to talk. Anyway, she could get the details she wanted from Sybil later on. So Donna took out some cash and counted out $1,000, slapping the bills on the table for Kevin to see.
“What is this?”
“What do you mean?”
“Where’s the rest?”
“I’m waiting on a check to clear,” Donna said. “It’s supposed to come into my business, and I’ll pay you when it comes in and clears.”
Sybil started to say something. Donna cut her off. She had an idea. “Sib, I can write you and a few of your friends personal checks and you can cash them and give the cash to Mike.”
A little bit of a harder paper trail to follow, Donna suggested (but one, she didn’t quite realize, cops would have no trouble figuring out).
Donna flipped open her personal checkbook and started writing.
They left Donna’s and stopped at the Waffle House for something to eat. Then they drove to one of Kevin’s favorite retail outlets these days.
Walmart.
54
K
EVIN OUELLETTE HAD KILLED
a woman whose family was suffering now, and would continue to suffer as the long days and nights of mourning carried on. While Emily and Andrew Fulton wiped tears and learned the specifics of what had happened the night before, Gail’s killers shopped for stereo equipment, hygienic and household items at a local Walmart near Fort Walton, Florida. Kevin had about $1,400 cash on him to spend on whatever he wanted. Donna had promised the remainder in a few days.
“So I picked up a new stereo for my car [that Trans Am he had purchased before the murder] and a couple of other small odds and ends.”
Kevin had ditched the gun the previous night while driving over a bridge in Tennessee, later saying, “We went across a body of water, and I rolled down the window and I threw the gun out.”
The only problem, as Patrick later told it, was that the gun hit one of the pylons or guardrails on the bridge and bounced back onto the busy road.
“It didn’t make it quite over the guardrail,” Kevin added. “It hit the guardrail and came back onto the highway and slid across the bridge.”
“You better go back and grab that,” Sybil had suggested. Patrick agreed with his girlfriend as they watched the gun slide into traffic.
“You kiddin’—no way!” Kevin said. “The road’s too busy.”
So they left it.
After leaving Walmart, Kevin drove to Sybil’s. They were all exhausted, physically and—one would only imagine—emotionally.
It was a few days before Donna came over to the house to see what was going on and deliver some more money.
“She came over,” Kevin recalled, “with a bunch of printouts from the computer from the paper. . . .”
Donna brought the articles and stood inside Sybil’s bedroom, where she talked to her about the content. Kevin was shocked to see Donna had blown right past him without mentioning his money, so he followed her into Sybil’s bedroom.
“What’s going on?” Kevin asked. “You bring my money?” He looked down at the folder in Donna’s hand. It wasn’t one article about the murder Donna had with her, but an entire file.