The court recessed until nine-thirty the following Monday morning.
Several additional witnesses testified on behalf of the state: crime lab specialists, detectives, experts in ballistics and in handwriting. All of these folks outlined a forensic case for Paul Walton. Each piece of evidence pointed to the one person whom jurors had not heard from, as of yet—Donna Trapani.
And the look on her face as each witness walked in and heaved a shovel filled with dirt into that hole she found herself falling deeper into spoke to the one option she had left.
On December 8, 2000, Larry Kaluzny stood. Walton had rested his case. Kaluzny asked the court if he could call his first witness.
“Your Honor,” Kaluzny said, “we would call Donna Trapani at this time.”
It was Donna’s only shot.
“You may,” the judge instructed.
Before Kaluzny allowed Donna to testify, he put on record something that shocked many in the courtroom—and led several to believe that maybe the entire story had
not
been told. Perhaps Donna should be given the benefit of the doubt?
Donna’s defense attorneys asked if they could put a “stipulation on the record.”
The judge said sure.
“Your Honor, after a discussion with the prosecutor . . . we stipulate that Donna Kaye Trapani’s diagnosis of cancer has been confirmed by Dr. Bruce G. Rudman on November 7, 2000.”
“Thank you,” the court said.
“So stipulated, Your Honor . . . ,” Paul Walton responded.
71
D
ONNA TRAPANI HAD NOT
changed much since her incarceration. The only glaring difference was a recurring problem she’d always had with facial hair. In prison Donna couldn’t get to the spa and have her mustache waxed, so it grew uncontrollably, and she did little to groom herself. Her hair, too, was frayed, a mishmash of split ends. She looked, well, beaten and worn.
While listening to witnesses, Donna had taken notes and whispered to her attorneys and even to Sybil Padgett. And there were times when she’d actually turned around and stared at Gail Fulton’s family: mainly George and Emily.
“Donna would spend long periods looking at us, with almost a blank look in her eyes, and I could not for the life of me think what was going on in her mind,” Emily recalled.
Donna had gawked uncomfortably at Emily, while Emily thought:
Why is she staring? She is sad and creepy, all at the same time
.
According to that stipulation submitted by Larry Kaluzny, Donna had not been lying when she said she’d had cancer. As her trial with Sybil headed into its final phase, a doctor had diagnosed Donna with the disease. And the predominant feeling became: If she’d had cancer, what was there on record to prove Donna hadn’t been pregnant, too? It wasn’t unheard of for a group of criminals to band together, conspire to commit a murder, and drag an innocent person down into the abyss of guilt with them.
Others, though, had different opinions: “My recollection is that she was scanned for cancer,” Paul Walton later said, “but nothing [was] found.”
All that aside, here was the one woman at the center of this double (defendant) murder trial, raising her hand, stating a belief in God and His Truth, ready to sit in the witness-box and explain her role.
As they began, Donna had to be told repeatedly to keep her voice up. She spoke low and slow. The idea was to come across as nonthreatening. The thought that Donna Trapani could not keep her voice at a level where she could be heard was preposterous. Donna was all about being the center of attention—the one that people listened to and took orders from.
After talking about her education, and where she grew up, and how she came to start CCHH, the first opportunity to take a poke at George Fulton came when Donna was asked to talk about the financial situation of her business “before George Fulton,” as if somehow, by his presence, George had disrupted what was a multimillion-dollar business.
“My financial documents,” Donna said nastily, as though she despised George for it, “for 1997 was [for a] one-point-five-million-dollar business!”
“And after?” Kaluzny asked, as if they’d rehearsed it. “Let’s put it that way—until fairly recently, what was the status of the business?”
“It was on the verge of bankruptcy.”
According to Donna, her failure had nothing to do with her incompetent business management, which just about every single one of her employees would later swear to. No. It was hiring George and the shadow of “big government” coming down on the poor woman.
They moved on from her failure in the business world to Donna’s “friendship” with Sybil Padgett. Donna portrayed herself as an intelligent and successful mentor to a more backwoods-type hick, who needed someone to show her how to live a more healthy life. Then Donna mentioned how Sybil falsified records and lab reports and turned in slips for seeing patients she had never visited. Yet, even though George didn’t want to, Donna said, she convinced him they should “give Sybil a second chance”—which was probably a mistake, Donna realized.
As her direct examination moved forward, it appeared Donna Kaye Trapani had an answer for everything. Something juries never want to hear. When a witness can put a shine on every part of her life, she’s obviously hiding the scratches somewhere. When she hit on George, after talking about how they met, not disputing anything he had said in his testimony regarding those days, Donna sounded hurt, adding, “We fell in love with each other. And he eventually left Michigan and came down, came to work for me, and moved in with me.” She paused for effect, hoping to perhaps dredge up a bit of empathy before delivering what was to her the final blow: “He promised to marry me.”
Unsurprisingly, everything Donna said seemed to fit into her theory of the murder.
“To your knowledge,” Kaluzny asked, “did the staff [at CCHH] know that George was married?”
“Only one person.”
“Who was that?”
“Sybil.”
From there, Donna broke into—as if anyone cared—a long, drawn-out conversation with Kaluzny about the computer systems she had purchased for the company under George’s urging. Some $30,000 worth. It was hard to gauge where Donna was going with this. Was she still on the sinking-ship metaphor of a business spiraling out of control and blaming it on George?
Then she talked about those e-mails. “Every day,” Donna admitted, the two of them communicated through e-mails, phone calls, and faxes.
“Were you pregnant at any time during 1999?” Kaluzny asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“When did you become pregnant?”
“March ’99.”
“You have heard some testimony that when you were arrested, some cardboard”—actually, they were dinner place mats—“fell out of your clothing. Can you explain that?”
“Yes, sir. I really didn’t want to have to file bankruptcy. And I had found, by way of a friend, through a management company in Memphis . . . they were trying to find a home-health agency in Florida. And he [my friend], had a potential buyer [for my company]. The potential buyer, the two of them, were dragging their feet. They—and I needed to get it off my hands in a hurry.”
Kaluzny picked up on Donna not making sense and asked: “Donna, excuse me, Donna”—he closed his eyes and put his head down for a moment—“I don’t want you to just ramble. Were you
pregnant
when the officers arrested you?”
“No, sir.”
“Why did you have cardboard in your clothes?”
“Because I was still pretending to be pregnant to try to hurry up and get the sale of the business over with so I wouldn’t have to file bankruptcy.”
She carried on from there, giving jurors an exhausting explanation regarding how being pregnant would affect the sale of CCHH and speed up the process.
“Did you try to deceive George?”
“No, I told him I was pregnant. I showed him the paperwork.”
“In July, did you tell him you lost the baby?”
“When I [came] here in July, I told him that I wasn’t going to share any information about the baby with him anymore.”
That was a lie. Her letters and e-mails after that visit to Michigan were littered with fabrications about this so-called baby.
She was asked if she had “authored” the notes in this case—i.e., some of the e-mails and letters found inside her house under a search warrant. Donna responded, “Those three notes that were showed in here (court) yesterday. The three letters that [were] read . . . on the stand. Those three letters I
did
write. I wrote those right after my miscarriage when I was an emotional wreck.”
She talked about Gail next: how she never wanted anything to happen to Gail, how she wanted to meet Gail and talk to her. She wanted to help the woman. She cared about Gail enough to want to see Gail have a psychological exam.
Nonsense. There was plenty of evidence to the contrary, including Donna’s voice on tape chastising and degrading Gail to the point of calling her vulgar names.
The reason she had left that nasty message about Gail coming down to Florida, Donna had the nerve to tell jurors, was because she did not want Gail around the office if potential buyers were going to be coming in.
“I was very angry,” she said of that phone message. “I didn’t want him to bring her down and flaunt her in front of my potential buyers and cost me the sale of my business.”
She then proceeded to give an explanation for those key pieces of evidence the state had against her.
The map? George gave it to her so she could find her way around Michigan.
Saying she wanted Gail dead? It was a joke, of course—that someone took too far.
The photograph of Gail? She never had one.
“Donna, did you do
anything
at all to assist in killing Gail?”
“No, sir.”
“Did anyone threaten you over Gail’s death?”
“Yes.”
“Who was that?”
“Kevin!”
“And why was that?”
“One reason. . . .”
“Why? . . .”
“He wanted money out of me.”
So Kevin Ouellette came up with this grand plan to drive one thousand miles north, kill George Fulton’s wife, and then blackmail Donna Trapani into paying him off? Seemed as though Donna had been watching too many Lifetime Television movies while waiting for her trial to begin.
“Did you hire him to kill Gail?”
“No, sir, I did not.”
“I have no further questions.”
72
P
ROSECUTOR PAUL WALTON WORKED
from a trial notebook he prepared for each case. The goal was to have all the police reports and exhibits contained in a “murder book,” with an index and easy-to-locate list of bullet points. As he prepared for trial, Walton reduced his notes into an outline. He liked to stand at the lectern with a single sheet of typed bullet points in hand, each one hitting on a different aspect of the evidence. Those points would then be checked off as the trial moved toward a close. In this way Walton could be satisfied he had covered every base.
As Walton approached the lectern to question Donna Trapani, he had his trusty yellow legal pad with notes he had taken during Donna’s direct examination. This court, in particular, did not allow for the lawyers to acquire daily transcripts of testimony, so the attorneys relied heavily on note-taking and memory. Donna had said some pretty crazy things. From the moment she began, she’d had a theory for everything except who shot JFK. As those in the gallery looked on, and Paul Walton got himself ready to ask the first question, Donna Trapani appeared nervous. She shifted in her seat, as if preparing to take a blow.
Walton opened by asking Donna if, when she sat down with detectives from the OCSD, she told them she was pregnant.
“Yes, sir,” she answered.
“Were they buying your business?”
“No, sir.”
“And when you sat down with the [OCSD] and spoke with them in your house, you actually gave them the name of a doctor who was treating you, correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Didn’t you just tell the jury here today that you didn’t have any [Medicaid] or insurance?”
“Insurance, yes, sir.”
“Okay. So you didn’t have a doctor, did you?”
“No, not at that point in time, no.”
“Did you give the sheriff ’s department the name of a doctor?”
“Yes, I did.”
“What was the name?”
It sounded like Donna replied, “Dr. Mats.”
“As in
place mats
?” Walton asked, smiling. The courtroom made some noise, seemingly ready to erupt into laughter. Had Donna had a Freudian slip, caught in a blunder of the mind?
Donna quickly corrected the prosecutor: “Dr. Metz!
M . . . E . . . T . . . Z.
Metz!”
Walton produced hard evidence against Donna—all of which showed, by example, how Donna had not only lied on the stand, but she was at the center of a campaign not just to have Gail Fulton murdered, but also to wreak hell on the woman’s life. Walton showed Donna a note investigators uncovered inside Donna’s home. She had written to Gail as Donna’s ex-husband, Charlie, calling Gail a “stupid, helpless woman.” The note went on to ask Gail why she would stay with a man who didn’t want her.
Donna admitted writing the letter, but not without reason. She made a point to say she had never mailed it—as though if the letter had not been sent, well, it didn’t really exist.
Walton went through several additional notes in which Donna had presented herself as someone else. He smartly used the term “pretended” while questioning her about them.
Donna was forced to admit that, yes, she had written those letters and notes.
One of the notes seized from Donna’s house was, in fact, a suicide letter written from the point of view of Gail Fulton. Donna had written it, the prosecutor was getting at, because she had, at one time, planned and plotted to kill Gail and make it look like a suicide.
Walton wanted to know if Donna had told the police about this story of Kevin Ouellette threatening and blackmailing her, adding, “So you have never told
anyone
this story except for today?”