Sergeant Whitefield took control of the scene, directing Hubble to give him the videotape and head back outside, where he could watch over things until the crime scene unit arrived. From there, Whitefield called in the crime lab and dispatched several additional officers to keep watch on the library and its surrounding area. There was a shooter somewhere in town, after all—likely, not too far away. It had, by Barbara’s estimation, been only twenty minutes (at most) since Gail had been shot.
Detective Chris Wundrach (pronounced Won-Drack) showed up in Whitefield’s wake—the situation extremely fluid by now—and took possession of the videotape, suggesting to Whitefield that they go into the library and have a look at it right away. It could yield an important clue to the killer’s identity, like perhaps a car license plate number.
“Right,” Whitefield said.
The tape contained a view from four different video cameras recording in one-second intervals, so, as Whitefield later explained, “it was very quick.” More than a film of the events, it looked like a bundle of snapshots flipped into action. The cameras were posted over the employees’ entrance, the main entrance, toward the rear of the parking lot, and looking down at a loading dock in the back of the building. At best, the portion of the tape depicting the murder was grainy and blurry and fuzzy. As they sat and watched, a car pulled up to Gail’s van after she walked around to the passenger side; they could see the car’s headlights clearly. Then someone got out from the backseat after the car stopped. Wearing what appeared to be a white shawl, Gail came out toward the car from around the back side of her van. The man from the car (his back to the camera) approached. Without warning, there were several white blasts of light, disturbing in the context of which they now knew. Gail, who was standing in one frame, was on the ground in the next; then the man, her killer, headed back toward the waiting vehicle. It was clear from the video that there were other people in the car. The remainder of the video showed the car pulling out of the driveway and disappearing into the night. Without enhancing the video (zooming in on different sections of each frame), there was no way to make out a license plate number—if, in fact, the license plate itself wasn’t covered up with something. The only fact they could be certain of without sending the video to the lab to be enhanced was that they were dealing with three people inside a contemporary-looking vehicle that had pulled into the parking lot for one reason.
To kill Martha Gail Fulton.
While additional police arrived and the parking lot became an official crime scene, Barb decided she needed to make a call and let Gail’s husband know what was going on.
A young man answered. It was Gail’s son. “Is your father home?” Barb asked. The urgency in her voice was aggressive and apparent.
Moments later, George Fulton said, “Hello? What is it?”
“Something happened to Gail in the parking lot,” Barb said.
“I’ll be right there.”
Barb told one of the officers at the scene that she had called George.
“How long since the time you found Mrs. Fulton, did you call Mr. Fulton?”
“Twenty minutes,” Barb said.
He wrote it down.
“Several weeks ago,” Barb added, “I overheard Gail telling another employee that she was having marital problems. So I asked her later on that day if everything was okay.”
“What’d she say?”
“She told me that she and her husband were going to counseling, and she thought things were going to be all right.”
As Guy Hubble worked the action outside, some time had passed and a colleague notified him that George Fulton and his son had arrived.
“Do not allow them on the scene.”
“What should we tell them?”
“Have them escorted to the Orion substation so we can conduct interviews.”
By 9:27
P.M.
, the doctor on scene had pronounced Gail Fulton’s death, making it official. All efforts to revive her were stopped. Someone had murdered this devout Catholic housewife and librarian. The police were already suspicious of Gail’s husband. At first, from all outward appearances, George wasn’t the least bit torn up over his wife’s sudden death. No tears. No urgency to find the perp. Either George held his emotional cards close to the vest, or he had things to hide.
5
T
HE LIBRARY WAS
not quite surrounded by woods, but there was a section of thickly settled weeds and pines. As one officer walked the perimeter of the parking lot near this area, flashlight in hand, searching for what he did not know, he “heard movement.”
The officer keyed his radio: “I need another unit . . . for search.”
Two additional officers ran up. They went into the wooded area with flashlights and looked around.
It took about ten minutes, but they found nothing.
Officer Robert Timko, one of the cops conducting this search, was told to give George Fulton and his son a ride to the substation.
“I’m not going anywhere,” George said defiantly, suddenly becoming concerned, “until I find out what happened to my wife.”
Timko told George to relax. He called Sergeant Alan Whitefield over.
Whitefield was busy. He had a crime scene unfolding. There were medics and doctors and cops all over the place. Yellow crime-scene tape was going up. Passersby were beginning to gather at the entrance. Neighbors across from the library were beginning to wonder what in the world was going on.
“What’s up?” Whitefield asked Timko.
They stood out of earshot from George and his son. Timko explained the situation, noting how he believed George had been acting strange, irate and not wanting to cooperate.
Whitefield walked over and told George, “Look, your wife has been shot, and we need your complete cooperation.”
Timko showed George and Andrew Fulton to his patrol car and they left for the substation.
Officers went out and canvassed the neighborhood, both facing the library and in back of the building, through the woods. Just about every neighbor within earshot of the library reported the same thing: gunshots heard at 9:00
P.M.
In this part of the country, most are accustomed to what a gun going off sounds like. There’s not too much mistaking a gunshot with a car backfiring or some other noise. People here know the sound of a gun firing because it is a place where residents hunt and fish and participate in all sorts of outdoor activities. The only difference in the five reports neighbors gave was the number of shots heard: Some said three; some said four; one said five.
Sometime after midnight, several library employees, George Fulton and his son, Andrew, along with their youngest daughter, Emily, waited at the OCSD Substation in town. Whitefield had instructed detectives from the sheriff ’s department to head over to Talon Circle, George and Gail’s home, to collect evidence and see what they could figure out about the life and times of George and Gail Fulton. George had already admitted to owning several handguns, but he had said little else. He seemed a bit hostile and uncooperative, even angry—not the response cops generally get from a grieving spouse. Investigators had interviewed George briefly, but nothing of value came out of it.
“George was very unemotional,” said one investigator. “
Very
hard to read.”
George Fulton’s weapons would have to be confiscated and taken to the lab. Also, police wanted swabs of DNA from George, Emily, and Andrew. Gail’s maroon 1992 Plymouth Grand Voyager van was impounded and towed from the crime scene; the flat tire was removed from the vehicle and sent off to the crime lab for further processing. There was protocol to follow now: steps to take in order to find out if Gail’s murderer had left behind that one clue that could break the case open. It was likely there, investigators knew, somewhere in all of the interviews going on and the evidence collected. No killer is flawless. They all leave behind a mark or clue—no matter how trivial or, conversely, significant. An investigator knows this and follows his training and instincts; sooner or later, that one piece of evidence will emerge.
A man who left the library right about the time of Gail’s murder had heard what happened and came forward to tell police this story: “I think I seen two cars, one larger, maybe a four-door. There may have been two gentlemen, one in each car; but it was unusual because [there’s] always some cars there when I was leaving . . .”
Maybe this was something. Maybe not. The officer took the statement and placed it with what was a growing number of witness testimonials.
The one person, however, investigators were just sitting down with—alone and away from his father’s grasp—was a boy who could tell police where George was, and what he was doing at the time of his wife’s murder. Spouses are always suspects in murders of one another; but George, with his unusual behavior, inconsistent and erratic as the night progressed, was judged a bit more quickly by police. Something—maybe just a cop’s instinct—told law enforcement to look closely at George.
6
H
IS BIRTH NAME
is George Andrew Fulton, but everyone in the family called him Andrew. It was near eleven o’clock on the night of his mother’s murder when Andrew sat down with Detective Chris Wundrach at the Lake Orion Township Substation. According to a family member, Andrew was “a very social person . . . and caring [individual], as he will go out of his way to do nice things for the people he cares about.”
Andrew and his mother were close. Her death was devastating to him.
“You’re not under arrest or anything like that,” Wundrach explained. Andrew was going to be turning eighteen in two months. “We’re just looking for your help in our investigation.”
“Okay,” Andrew said.
Start with the basics: “Tell me what you did tonight.”
The boy seemed nervous, which was expected. This was a tense and alarming situation. Still, as one family member recalled, Andrew “can also have a temper on him,” which he acquired from his
“papu”
(grandfather on his mother’s side). Saying Andrew and his mother were tight was a gross understatement; Andrew was not afraid to tell his mother anything.
“My dad was always very critical of [Andrew] and didn’t have a kind word for him, but my mom was always very loving and understanding of whatever my brother did,” Emily Fulton later observed.
“Near six o’clock,” Andrew said, “me and my girlfriend, Alicia Caldwell (pseudonym), left my house to go over her house for dinner. My dad was just getting home from work as we were leaving.”
Andrew spent much of the night over at Alicia’s, which Wundrach would soon verify. Alicia dropped her boyfriend back off at home around eight-thirty that night. The library, Wundrach knew, was about a ten-minute ride—at most—from home.
“How did you know your dad was home, Andrew?”
“I heard him working in the basement.”
“Did your father leave the house at any time that you know of?” It was not hard to tell where this line of questioning was headed.
“No,” he said.
“How do you
know
that?”
“I was watching television in our den, so I would have seen him come up from the basement and leave.”
There was always the possibility—and as a cop, Wundrach had to consider every potential scenario plausible—that Andrew was covering for his father, or for himself. And the way to get that out of the boy, Wundrach knew, was to dig into the day-to-day dynamics of the family.
Sins and secrets. Every family walked casually around them every day. Some emerge and cause a breakdown within the unit, while others are able to work through them.
“Tell me how your mom and dad’s relationship was?” Wundrach asked.
Andrew looked down at his hands. This was not a tough question, and he was upfront: “It was stressed.”
“How so?”
“My dad had an affair last year with his boss, while he was working in Florida.”
This interested Wundrach, of course. Love, money, and revenge were three potential reasons behind
any
murder. More than that, why hadn’t George mentioned anything about his mistress while being interviewed at the substation earlier? Why was George holding this fact back?
“Can you tell me anything about it?” Wundrach pressed.
Andrew said the affair dated to “last December 1998,” as far as he knew. “My dad ended the affair and was going to counseling with my mom to work on their marriage.” Gail was a firm believer in the sacrament of marriage and saw it as a vocation, as she had been taught since childhood through Catholic school and church teaching. She was a devoted parish member of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, on the north side of Lake Orion, where Barb Butkis had explained that she saw Gail at mass often. So working on the marriage, although it had suffered the hammering blow of adultery, was something Gail had been bred to do, an observer could say. There had been times—
boy, had there ever
—when Gail was ready to pack it in and head to divorce court, but she was willing to forgive George and move on, especially since he had broken it off with his mistress.
“Do you know your father’s boss’s name, Andrew?”
“Donna,” he said. “She lives in Florida.” He didn’t have a last name.
“You ever see Donna?”
“No.”
“Andrew, let me ask you, have you
ever
heard of any threats made against your mom?”
Andrew thought about this. “My mom told me once that Donna had threatened her, telling her she was going to ‘drag her out in the street and beat her.’”
That was pretty significant. There wasn’t a lot of wiggle room there to speculate what this Donna person wanted to do.
“When was that?” Wundrach asked.
“It was a few months ago that [my mom] told me. Donna came here to Michigan to see my dad.”
“Donna ever call your house?”
“Yeah, of course. My dad still works for her.”
“When was the last time she called?”
“Around nine-twenty—tonight.”
“Really. How’d you know it was her?”