Or so it seemed.
“We believe that reason for Gail’s murder was a love triangle,” Meiers tossed out, looking to see how Donna reacted.
Donna became subdued. She turned “quiet and soft-spoken and began to eat pretzels,” Meiers later explained. She became anxious.
They struck a nerve.
Meiers continued, “We think you went to a group of people to have Gail killed.”
“That’s not true!” Donna said sharply. “I’ve never said that!”
Meiers took out a photo of the redbrick
LAKE ORION TOWNSHIP LIBRARY
sign positioned at the parking lot entrance. He showed it to Donna. Then he took out a newspaper clipping, with a photo of Gail and George sitting on their front porch, smiling. Above the photo was a headline indicating Gail’s murder had been caught on video surveillance, capturing Gail’s final few moments of life. After that, Meiers showed Donna a photograph of the green Malibu that Sybil had been driving around (which Donna herself had admitted to)—the same car, he noted, captured on the video of Gail being shot to death. Then he showed Donna a picture of Gail lying in a pool of blood by her van. The next photo was a close-up of Gail. Meiers’s report stated:
[There were] massive amounts of blood on the ground around her head and an air tube down her throat.... The victim’s eyes and mouth were open and the gunshot to the forehead was very evident.
There in front of Donna was a photo array of the crime she had masterminded.
Donna sat up. She stared at the pictures, but she would not—at first—look at any photos of Gail.
Meiers held up the photos of Gail. Donna indicated she wanted to look at them closer. She held them, one in each hand, and studied each snapshot, close to her eyes.
As Donna peered into these gruesome images, Detective Meiers said, “Look, Miss Trapani, we have arrested Patrick Alexander and Sybil Padgett, and both have confessed to the murder of Gail Fulton.”
Donna didn’t say anything; instead, she stared at the photos and continued to munch on pretzels. It was entertainment to Donna, like a movie she had not only scripted and starred in, but one she was taking pleasure in watching.
“We know about the two trips to Michigan and how you gave Sybil one thousand dollars for the first trip.”
Donna again said nothing,
said Meiers’s report,
but continued to eat pretzels.
There was a long pause. Donna put the photos down. Then: “If this is all true,” she said, using a finger to point to the photos and what detectives had accused her of, “why did I have to sit here and talk into this recorder for the past four hours?”
It was a good question: If they had the proof to make an arrest, why would they waste time interviewing Donna at her home and not inside the confinement of a police station?
Meiers stuck to the focus of the interrogation, saying, “We know about the meetings in your bedroom.... It’s time for you to tell the truth, Miss Trapani.”
“It’s not like how you’re sayin’,” Donna said, shaking her head.
“Then how
did
it happen?”
“I don’t know.”
Meiers’s report explained how Donna reacted next:
She continued to eat pretzels.
Meiers looked down and noticed the tape running low. They had Donna against the ropes. Maybe she was going to cop to the crime and make things easy on everyone. Forgo a long, drawn-out trial and cut a deal.
He put in the fifth tape of the day and quickly hit RECORD.
“You don’t have any remorse, do you?” Meiers asked. “You don’t have
one
ounce of remorse—do you, Miss Trapani?”
Donna didn’t respond.
Pearson said, “You can tell us the truth.”
“I just can’t,” she said. “I don’t know all the truth.”
“Why can’t you?”
“I just can’t. . . . I have never really said that I wanted her dead or out of the picture. I know one thing—”
“This is your opportunity to tell us the truth.”
“And then what?” Donna asked.
Meiers brought his tone down a notch, to give the impression they were not there to quarrel or play good cop/bad cop. There was common ground among the three of them. “Listen,” he said, “I tell you what, you are going to feel a hell of a lot better.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ll be able to sleep at night, and it’s the right thing to do!” Pearson said. “Because I really don’t think—” Pearson tried to say as Donna interrupted.
“But what’s going to happen to
me
? What would happen to
me
?” Donna took on that all-too-familiar role of the narcissist, worrying about herself and how it would affect her. She’d had an opportunity to show some compassion for the victim, but she had waived that direction long ago. She was concerned only for her well-being.
“What’s going to happen to
you
?” Meiers uttered.
“Um-hm. I mean, if I
did
do this, I mean, if I
am
guilty and I did do this, then why can’t I just be killed and put under, too? If I did it, then I need to give my life if I did it! I cannot say what you want me to say. If I sat here for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t be able to explain it to you. I don’t know how to say it.”
If this was a confession, it had to be one of the most unique and obscure these two cops had heard. What was Donna Trapani saying?
Accusations were made by us detectives,
Meiers’s report explained,
and little response was given. It appeared that she was experiencing some guilt but she continued to eat pretzels.
Donna finally said, “I don’t want to talk here. I don’t want to talk into this machine. I want to call my attorney, and I am not sure if I can do that or not.”
The conversation had become, by Meiers’s observation, “frozen.” So he said, “I understand it’s hard for you to say something that would put you in prison for the rest of your life.”
“It would put me in prison for the
rest
of my
life
?” Donna asked as if shocked by the revelation. “I’m having a hard time because some of that . . . like if I say anything like what I want to say, what I’m trying to say, ’cause I don’t know what I’m trying to say, it will make me sound . . . It’s nothing like what was supposed to ever happen.” Donna took a breath.
Was she ready to come clean?
“I got duped,” Donna said, implying she’d been burned by her co-conspirators. “But not by the people you think. It was never supposed to happen.”
Was she admitting her involvement?
Donna started and then stopped. She was finished talking. She had invoked her right to an attorney moments before and meant it. She was done.
So Meiers and Pearson stopped the interview and told Donna they were going to have to take her down to the Okaloosa County Sheriff ’s Office to be booked on charges of murder and conspiracy to commit murder.
Donna did not balk at the proclamation, almost as though she had expected it.
Steve Pearson and John Meiers handed Donna Trapani to Detective Larry Ashley as soon as they got back to the OCSO. In the meantime they’d have to file the paperwork to transport Donna to Michigan so she could be booked there, where the murder had taken place.
Ashley took Donna into the processing area to fingerprint and formally charge her.
“I need to pat you down,” the detective explained, “and check you for weapons.”
Donna looked at the tile floor nervously.
Ashley felt something soft stuffed into Donna front pants as he patted her down.
“What the . . . ?”
Ashley asked Donna to lift up the front of her sweater.
There, stuffed down her pants and around her waistline, Donna had placed several place mats to make it appear as if her belly and midsection had been growing. There was another place mat deeper down into her pants.
“I have another in my pubic area,” Donna admitted.
“Go into the bathroom and take it out,” Ashley ordered.
61
K
EVIN OUELLETTE WAS
taken into custody without incident in Branford, Connecticut, on December 2, 1999, as detectives from the OCSD headed north, from Florida, back to Michigan with Donna Trapani and the others.
Kevin sat inside a cell at Troop G in Bridgeport, Connecticut, awaiting Lieutenant Joseph Quisenberry and Sergeant Michael Elliott, of the OCSD, along with Special Agent Rich Teahan, of the FBI, to question him. Kevin had been arrested at a rest stop along Interstate 95. For all investigators knew, he could have additional information. Were others involved?
As he spoke, Kevin had a defeated tone to his voice. He knew there was no getting out of this now. In fact, maybe he should have thought it through a bit more before committing such a violent crime with three idiots. Kevin considered himself smarter. He never thought himself a killer.
But he was.
That personal demise began, Kevin explained, when his wife died suddenly (he never said how) and he was left to care for their young child.
“I let my sister watch him,” Kevin said of his son. “She got divorced, and the kid ended up being taken by the state and is now in their ward. I don’t know where my son is right now.”
He looked greatly concerned.
They asked him about life in general.
“I graduated high school and did a small stint in the army, but got out with a general discharge. It was mutual. The army wanted me out, and I wanted out.”
No one told Kevin why he had been dragged into Troop G. He had been roused from his truck and asked to take a ride. So he asked: “Why am I here?”
They read him his Miranda rights. They pushed a piece of paper across the table and asked Kevin to initial the questions, which Kevin did without a problem. With that, he had waived his right to an attorney and indicated he wanted to talk.
It took a matter of four questions before Kevin, the report stated,
admitted he knew the facts about the homicide of Martha Gail Fulton . . . and went on laying out the scenario of the killing in a taped statement.
In ninety minutes Kevin told the story from beginning to end. He talked about being broke and living with his girl at Sybil’s, and then the request by Sybil and meeting Donna and being paid by Donna to kill Gail. It really was that simple, he said, when it all came down to it: Donna Trapani had initiated this murder and paid him to commit it with two misfits.
End of story.
62
P
UTTING THIS CASE
together was not that much of a challenge for the OCSD and the Oakland County Prosecutor’s Office—once the pieces were in front of them, that is.
APA Paul Walton, the man in charge of seeking justice for Gail Fulton and her family, knew from experience that if a suspect had three people pointing a finger at her, well, maybe she should try to cop a plea and count her blessings that there was no electric chair in her future. Most murder-for-hire cases included capital felony charges, which generally resulted in a trip to death row. Donna was charged with first-degree murder, a capital offense in Michigan. But what saved her life was that a conviction for a capital offense in Michigan meant life in prison. Michigan does not have a death penalty and was actually the first in the country to abolish the death penalty in the late 1800s.
Regardless, Donna Trapani wasn’t interested—not that Paul Walton was offering, anyway—in rolling over and playing the part of the guilty mastermind. If nothing else, Donna was ready to fight. As she had proven with her past (obsessive) behavior, she wasn’t going down without taking a few good swings.
The public got its first glimpse of the state’s case against Donna and her three criminal cohorts in March 2000 as Paul Walton presented his case before the Honorable Nancy Tolwin Carniak at the 52/3 District Court in Oakland County. Carniak had been appointed to the bench by the governor in January 2000. A beautiful woman by any standard, Carniak’s attractive looks or general greenness to the bench should not have fooled those who might have perceived her to be a bit standoffish. Carniak had attended Michigan State University, where she received a Bachelor of Arts in business administration in 1979; she acquired her Juris Doctor from the Detroit College of Law in 1985. She had served as an associate and partner in private law firms for fifteen years prior to putting on the black robe. According to her bio, the judge’s passion for law and education spread into the community when
[Carniak] initiated the Mock Trial program for fifth-grade students . . . [who] learn about the legal system firsthand by participating in a mock criminal trial . . . [and] take a tour of the Oakland County Sheriff ’s substation and observe actual criminal proceedings in the courtroom.
Paul Walton had his hands full with facing not only Donna Trapani, but also Kevin Ouellette, Sybil Padgett, and Patrick Alexander. This preliminary examination was set to prove that there was sufficient evidence to send all four to trial on felony murder charges. (Some states call it a probable cause hearing; and only under rare circumstances in Michigan is a grand jury summoned.) The preliminary exam is the most efficient way to make certain a defendant is getting his or her fair chance at justice. Each defendant was represented by his or her own attorney. There was some banter about Sybil and Patrick wanting to “talk,” but those discussions had broken down as the preliminary exam began.
For the state’s case the motive and cause of Gail Fulton’s brutal murder was clear-cut: rejection had spurred Donna into a plan to have her rival killed—a plan she had promised to pay $15,000 to see put into action by her three co-conspirators, all of whom rolled over on her as soon as cops put the squeeze on them. It was George Foster’s move back home in April 1999 that pushed Donna over the proverbial cliff—not only to have Gail killed, but to make up that entire pregnancy and terminal illness plot, which culminated in a meeting between Gail and Donna at a Rochester Hills, Michigan, hotel. When that fell apart and Donna realized her chances with George were finished, she decided murder was the only “shot” she had at winning him back. Walton made the state’s argument clear and precise in the accompanying documents and charges, one of which summed up things quite frankly:
This case clearly shows the capabilities of human evil when unchecked.