“Surveillance,” said one of the sergeants in charge, James A’Hearn. “Let’s follow him.” From the moment he met George Fulton, A’Hearn did not like him.
It was a good idea to watch George’s house.
In the meantime Chris Wundrach, who was taking over a pivotal role in the case along with other members of the sheriff ’s department, got in touch with a coworker of Gail’s who seemed to shed some light on a few personal issues. Cops liked to hear several witnesses—who did not know each other and had never met—reveal the same basic facts. There was credibility in numbers and independent, similar facts being corroborated.
It was 8:30
A.M.
, and Wundrach was sitting in the substation across from a woman who had heard about what had happened the previous night and wanted to share a conversation she’d had recently with Gail. Word of her murder had traveled through town like a chain e-mail. Gail’s coworkers began to think about her unstable and tenuous situation at home with George.
“Gail told me about an affair her husband was having with a woman in Florida,” the woman reported to Wundrach. Gail’s coworker made it clear that she was personally appalled by this. Gail was the most loving, caring, kindhearted person this woman had ever met. Everything Gail did, she had done for her family—or for others. Gail was a churchgoing wife who
respected
the sacrament of marriage and did everything possible to work it out with George—even against her better judgment of knowing that a “playa” hardly ever changes his style of play.
“Did she say anything about the affair—any details?” Wundrach asked.
“Well, she did. Gail told me she had even met the woman once at a hotel in Rochester Hills.”
“Did Gail talk about the meeting?”
“Yeah, yeah,” the woman explained. “Gail told me [George’s mistress] had claimed to be terminally ill and she wanted George to move to Florida to take care of her. Gail explained how the woman had looked her in the eyes and said, ‘You’ve had him for twenty-five years. Now it’s
my
turn!’”
Wundrach realized this was something Donna Trapani had left out of her conversation with Alan Whitefield the previous night.
“When was the last time you spoke to Gail?” Wundrach pressed.
“We talked several times.... Um, a few weeks ago was the last time we
really
talked.”
“What’d she say?”
“She said, actually”—the woman thought about it a moment, hesitated, almost embarrassed for Gail to have to admit it, then continued—“. . . she and George were trying to work things out.”
Surveillance on George Fulton and his residence by a detective from the sheriff ’s department started as George arrived home that morning at eleven thirty-eight. George pulled into his driveway on Talon Circle and drove into the garage, unaware that the OCSD was watching him, recording his every move. The neighborhood was a nice middle-class suburb, a cookie-cutter subdivision of new homes owned by good, wholesome, hardworking people, just a twenty-minute ride north of Pontiac. The Fulton house was a 5.4-mile drive from the library where Gail had been murdered, a straight shot north on M-24, then left onto West Clarkston Road, right onto Joslyn. No one disputed the fact that George Fulton worked hard and took care of his family materially and monetarily, giving them the finer things life could offer a middle-class family in suburban America.
“Although my dad,” Emily commented, “made it clear to me that he was
not
paying for college.”
It was George’s character and his behavior that had gotten him to this point and put his actions under a law enforcement microscope.
The surveillance was based on the notion that George had failed to tell investigators he’d had an affair until after he must have figured out that his kids had let the proverbial “cad” out of the bag. Why would he hide that fact? If he had withheld one piece of vital information, the investigators wondered, what else was the guy holding onto?
Cars came and went, in and out of the driveway. People, young and old, walked in and out of the Fulton house all morning long. One might guess friends were stopping by and comforting the family. By early afternoon, however, George was back on the road, and the undercover investigator watching him followed close behind as Gail’s husband took off from the house and traveled north on M-24 toward Broad Street and West Clarkston Road, heading in the direction of the lake.
11
D
R. R. ORTIZ-REYES
was the deputy forensic pathologist with the Oakland County Medical Examiner’s Office on the day Gail Fulton’s body was brought in for autopsy. A doctor since 1976, Ortiz-Reyes had performed, he later estimated, somewhere in the neighborhood of over one thousand autopsies. The man knew his way around an autopsy suite—no doubt about it. Had Gail died of something other than those obvious gunshot wounds, Ortiz-Reyes would find it.
The first thing Ortiz-Reyes did was to conduct an external exam of Gail’s nude body. Ortiz-Reyes noted several “abnormalities” as he found them. Then he got to work opening (his word) Gail’s body to see what, in fact, had caused her death. It would be unethical (not to mention unprofessional) to assume that the shots alone had killed Gail. There were cases, any medical examiner (ME) can say, that baffle the mind after autopsy, whereby an obvious cause of death—i.e., a blast to the head—was a front for something else that had the potential to give away the killer’s identity. So heading into an autopsy, any medical examiner worth his or her weight never presumed anything; he simply allowed the dead to speak from beyond.
Gail was forty-eight years old at the time of her murder. She was a petite woman at five feet four inches, 114 pounds, with a thick mane of dark black hair (a trait she would pass on to her three children with George Fulton). Gail was pretty and beautiful and charming in a Mary Tyler Moore way—circa
The Dick Van Dyke Show
—and her appearance reflected how she had changed over the years from a hopeful, wholesome military wife into a woman struggling to keep a drowning marriage afloat. There were periods during her life with George—and these had taken a toll on her—when Gail refused to take care of herself and would not eat sufficiently. She’d beaten herself up emotionally and starved herself so often that even her hair had fallen out at times. Periodically her eyes had sunk into dark circles, and her skin had become pale and emaciated. She could come across as anorexic, withdrawn, and weak during these episodes. It was generally when George was traveling “for work” that sent Gail into an abyss of self-loathing. Before George had even met Donna Trapani, Gail’s health had gone downhill. It was a gut feeling Gail had, and it had never lied to her over the years, she told friends. A wife of Gail’s caliber—educated and smart and intuitive—listened to that inner voice telling her not to trust the man she had given her life to. It didn’t mean she acted on it; just that there was no denying a feeling that the man she loved was stepping out on her. The fact that she internalized these feelings showed, mostly, on her body: noticed by her kids, her friends, her coworkers. Yet the remarkable aspect of Gail Fulton was that at the time of her death, she looked as though she had come back to life. She had color in her face, a bounce in her step. She understood that sometimes there was no way to plug a sinking ship and a person had to walk away, swim to shore, and start over.
“She was so close to leaving him,” said an old friend. “So,
so
close . . . right before she died. Poor Gail.”
Dr. Ortiz-Reyes recorded his findings as he made them:
Multiple gunshot wounds to the body.
The shot to Gail’s forehead Guy Hubble had seen first was one of two potential life-ending wounds—that much was clear from the moment Ortiz-Reyes peeled back Gail’s scalp and buzz-sawed her skull open.
It (that bullet) went down to the brain separating all the bones of the face and ending on the left side of the cheek . . . ,
Ortiz-Reyes reported.
The good news for investigators was that Ortiz-Reyes had been able to retrieve the bullet from Gail’s head.
The second shot—although Ortiz-Reyes was not certain the shots had been fired in this particular sequence—was to Gail’s upper-right breast. It had gone in through the skin and—not surprisingly, if you understand how projectiles fly at such a high rate of speed—exited an inch away from the entrance wound, reentering the skin and traveling through her stomach, liver, bowels, stopping on the left side of Gail’s pelvis.
This had to have been a painful shot, if it struck Gail first.
Ortiz-Reyes was able to retrieve this projectile also.
The third and final shot Gail took in the back, no doubt because she had turned away instinctively from her murderer, or fell to the ground. This shot entered her upper-left back area, through the soft tissue (muscle), but not penetrating or passing through any organs, exiting through her chest.
Gail’s killer was an accurate shooter. Head and chest are money shots, per se, if murder is the endgame. The anomaly here was that it was likely Gail’s murder had not been a paid hit in the sense of, say, organized crime, the work of a professional hit man. In that respect this murder was far too sloppy. Hit men like to sneak up on their targets (maybe pop a cap into the back of the head just below the ear), or kill from a distance (vis-à-vis a sniper shot). This murder was more or less in the lines of something quite a bit more personal. Gail was shot in the breast and head. This, any armchair profiler could determine, suggested an intimate connection to the victim: anger, hatred, payback. Gail’s murderer knew her or had been told things about her that would, for investigators, place her death under a heading of personal and incidental.
It looked like George Fulton had some explaining to do.
12
T
URNED OUT THAT
George Fulton wasn’t running off to meet Donna Trapani, toss his weapons in the lake, or go pay a tab on a murder he had contracted. At least not at this stage. As George was being followed that morning, the undercover behind him watched as Gail’s hubby pulled into Sparks-Griffin Funeral Home. George was on his way to make arrangements for Gail’s body to be transported to Texas for burial.
No sooner had he parked, run in and out of the funeral home, and then taken back off, did a second car, with four people inside, which George, alone in his car, had met at the funeral home, beckoned to follow him. They drove in a small caravan directly to the library, the employees’ parking area, to be exact, where Gail had been gunned down the previous night. As George parked near the spot where Gail had been killed, “two males and two females” walked out of the building, but did not approach or say anything.
It was 2:00
P.M.
when George got out of his car and hugged the others. They chatted for a few minutes. Then, before walking away, all of them bent down and placed the palms of their hands on the tar where Gail had died, as if reaching out to her spirit.
Gail’s cousin, Pricilla Salanas, had left a message with dispatch for someone at the OCSD to call her as soon as possible. She wanted to know what was happening with the release of Gail’s body back to the family.
The sergeant on duty called Gail’s cousin and explained that Gail was being examined by the medical examiner. “Tell the funeral home to contact the ME’s office and they can work it out.”
“George had called Dora Garza and told her what happened,” Pricilla explained to police.
“Listen, we’re so sorry for your loss. We know this is a difficult time. But we will be calling on you and Gail’s mom later today. We need to ask you some questions.”
They hung up.
A few moments later, Pricilla Salanas called back. “Gail’s mother has some information that she wants you to know about.”
She handed the phone to Dora Garza. “Hello,” Dora said.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“I wanted to tell you about an affair between George and a woman named Donna from Florida,” Dora explained. “But that Gail and George, I was told, were working things out.”
“Thank you for that information, ma’am.”
“Oh, there’s more,” Dora Garza said. “When George finally told Donna it was over, Donna called me several times to tell me that my daughter needed help. She called so often, Officer, that I stopped answering my telephone. When I told George about these phone calls, he didn’t believe me! He said, ‘Oh, Donna would never do something like that.’ Melissa (George and Gail’s oldest daughter, who was living in Texas with Dora at the time, but was now in the navy and living in Virginia Beach) was here and can verify the calls. We even recorded them.”
Dora stopped and took a breath.
Then she said, “Gail once told me that Donna had called and left some horrible—just horrible—messages on the phone machine. My daughter could not believe the mouth on that woman. George should have those tapes.”
Another important point George had failed to mention.
“Do you think George could have been involved?”
“Oh, no.... I don’t think George could ever do anything like this,” Dora said.
“Mrs. Garza, a detective will be in touch with you later today to talk some more.”
“That’s fine.”
“Can we have Melissa’s number and address, please?”
Dora gave the address to the police officer and hung up.
13
T
HE OCSD FOCUSED
its investigation on a few important leads it could confirm without question: There had been no sexual assault and no robbery; George Fulton had an alibi and was now willing (and going) to take a polygraph; and that grainy video, the one cops confiscated on the night of the murder, had produced an important clue—the car used in the murder, a dark-colored Chevy Malibu, had a damaged left taillight. This could potentially be as important as a fingerprint.
Find the car; look at the light.
Detectives had checked with the local airlines and confirmed that there were no direct flights out of Michigan to Florida after ten o’clock on the night of the murder. The airlines would not release manifests of passenger lists without a court order. What stood out to investigators looking into this thread of the case was that although there had not been any direct flights to Florida, Delta Airlines had flights into Atlanta and Cincinnati. So they put in a request with airport security to view the videotapes of the concourse near the time of those flights.