“George was the first guy Gail was really attracted to,” said a friend. But he wasn’t the first guy she’d ever dated. “Definitely the first serious relationship, though.”
Gail had heard that Jeanette had dated George once. “But it was more like we went to a movie together,” Jeanette corrected. George and Jeanette had been like brother and sister because George had spent so much time at Jeanette’s house. Yet before Gail could ever consider a serious relationship with George—and this showed the type of person Gail was—she approached Jeanette and asked her if she was still interested. It bothered Gail that perhaps she was stealing her friend’s man.
“Oh, my,” Jeanette responded, “if you want him, Gail, you can
have
him!”
And they laughed about it.
Jeanette had been at the funeral home the night before the funeral mass, “arranging flowers, setting chairs straight . . . just hanging around, paying my last respects to Gail.” It was her way of spending a final few moments alone with her onetime best friend.
As she was doing this, George happened to “burst into the viewing room.” Jeanette could tell he was not in a good mood. He had fire in his eyes. Something was on George’s mind, and it had everything to do with Jeanette.
“Get out of here,” George said loudly, according to Jeanette.
Jeanette was appalled. The mouth on the guy—in front of his dead wife!
The nerve.
“What is your
problem,
George?”
“I need some time
alone
with my wife!” George snapped.
Jeanette was about to say something (“Well, if you hadn’t been screwing around, this would have never happened to begin with. . . .”), but her husband gave her that bite-your-tongue look and told her to come on, it was time to leave.
“This is
not
the time—out of respect for Gail,” Jeanette’s husband whispered.
They all thought George was involved in Gail’s death on some level, and here he was demanding to spend some quality time with her dead body, as if he had been the most loving husband and partner to her all along.
“He was definitely
playing the part
of the grieving spouse,” a friend in town for the mass and funeral later said of George. “No doubt about it.”
16
E
MILY WORE WATERPROOF
mascara as she sat in a front pew inside St. Theresa’s Church, listening to a family member sing Bette Midler’s “Wind Beneath My Wings.” Gail’s casket was draped in a traditional Catholic vanilla-colored blanket with a gold band. The coffin stood in front of the altar; the Paschal candle in front of the casket, burning brightly, represented Gail’s resurrection in Heaven. The tears had started as soon as Emily sat down, and continued for just about the entire mass. It was standing room only. People were lined up along the sidewalls of the church, looking toward the altar, the Stations of the Cross plaques to their backs. Someone had given Gail’s kids several boxes of tissues as they walked in. Good thing. Because those “never-ending tears,” as Emily described them later, kept coming. The constant flowing of tears turned much of what was taking place on the altar into a fog, as if the past few days had all been a dream.
Or, rather, a nightmare.
Emily closed her eyes. She folded her hands on her lap. Then the stinking thinking started:
I am so sorry that I could not stop this.... I feel so guilty over what happened. I tipped Donna over the edge because I had told her to back off—leave us alone.
It had been a phone call between Emily and Donna, in which Donna was extremely mad at Emily and hung up on her.
These were the prayers Emily offered to God as she sat, silently whispering, the entire parish around her, full of mourners, blocked out. Her focus centered entirely on these terrible thoughts of what
could
have been, what Emily
could
have done, and how guilt was now penetrating any sense of relief she might have had that her mother—who had the faith of a child—was at rest, being comforted in the arms of Jesus.
Please let me feel what my mom felt when she died,
Emily pleaded with God.
Please let me feel her pain so that I may know how she suffered, and this will make me feel better.
On the way out of the church after mass, Emily was shocked (and horrified) to be greeted by the media snapping photos and taking video of her and her family exiting the church. Emily felt violated. Her privacy stripped from her during this vulnerable moment. She wondered why these people, who did not know her mother, were so interested in the final good-byes of a suffering flock.
“It was such an invasion of privacy to have strangers watch us grieve and [take part in] that personal moment we were having,” Emily said later.
“It’s news in Texas,” Gail’s mother explained to her granddaughter. “Your mother, Emily, was the daughter of a federal judge—this is a big story for this area.”
After it was all over and Emily settled down later that night with her thoughts, something happened. Something altogether strange. Something prophetic.
Something divine?
Be careful what you wish for. . . .
Emily felt the immensity of the day and previous night. “I got so sick,” Emily recalled. “I came down with a migraine, and looking at lights just pierced my brain. My chest hurt so bad, I felt like I had this hole in my chest and my back was so crippled with pain that I was walking around hunched over and couldn’t even stand straight. My skin was supersensitive to the touch, and I just started shaking and got feverish and had to lie down in a dark room away from everyone and every sound.... This was before that I knew my mom [had been] shot in the places that she was. . . .”
While everyone grieved the loss of Gail Fulton on this day and into the night, George Fulton was receiving e-mails from Donna Trapani, his former boss and lover. One came in just as the family buried Gail. Under the subject “Condolences,” Donna claimed she wanted to send George her deepest sympathies for the loss of his wife—a woman Donna had, in many ways, terrorized that previous summer. Here was Donna now saying she was “sorry” for what George and his family were going through. She said she was “worried” about George, his heart and his “BP” (blood pressure—George was on high blood pressure meds then). She considered how “devastated beyond belief ” George must have been by Gail’s murder.
Gail wasn’t even in the ground yet, and here was Donna, as she had once promised, trying to wiggle her way into the lives of her former lover and his family.
What was this woman thinking?
Without explaining exactly what she meant, Donna said she “didn’t know much,” which seemed to refer to what had happened to Gail and the scant details the media had been reporting. Then she went on to tell George how the police had called her in the middle of the night “asking me when I spoke to you last” and “when I saw you last.” She said the cops had not given her any particulars of the murder, but she hoped George would call and fill her in. Donna wanted George to know, also, that “my prayers are with y’all.” And then, strangely, she broke into a long explanation of an illness she had been suffering from all that week, telling George she had strep throat, an ear infection, and bronchitis. She told how she had spent most of the week in bed with Vicks on her chest and a heating pad. She claimed to be “aching and hurting all over.” She said she had been “having severe chest pains and coughing up green phlegm.” She reminded George that she had begun to explain this to him as they talked the other night (the night Gail was murdered), but she didn’t think it was all that important then. Apparently, now that Gail was dead and her family in the midst of trying to pull their hearts back together after just burying her, Donna thought this to be the appropriate time to share her ailments.
After trying to draw some sympathy from George, Donna offered a bit of advice, as if she knew George better than anyone else, encouraging him: Whatever you do, don’t hold things inside. . . . Let it all out. . . . Take care of yourself.... She wished she knew what to say to him to make everything all better, but she could not find those mindful words. She spoke of how “mad” George used to get with her when she talked about the old adage that bad things always happened to good people, and she didn’t understand how this could be right in a world God had created. God was supposed to take care of the good people, Donna wrote at one point in her e-mail. It was those “bad people” God should be hurting; as though, Donna suggested, there should be some sort of reward for being a morally decent person.
When she finished with her good/bad people diatribe, Donna Trapani asked George if he could e-mail her about the billing inquiries she had made to him recently. She needed the information so she could gauge how to respond to her employees and vendors, all of whom were looking for money. Donna’s company was in the midst of going belly-up. If you never want to do our billing or talk to me again, Donna wrote, she wanted George to know that she was fine with that. But she needed to find out one way or another where George stood. She continued, telling George how much she appreciated what he had done for her company. However, she realized George’s family needed him now, not her company. And that was okay, Donna seemed to imply. There was an indication at the end of the e-mail that George had been working for Donna for quite some time without being paid and she wanted him to know that she “felt bad” about his working “so hard” and not receiving proper reimbursement. She wondered why he hadn’t quit a long time ago.
In her second e-mail that same night, sent just a few moments after the first, this one much shorter, Donna pleaded with George for his help regarding a job that, apparently, only he and another employee (who had walked out on Donna for not being paid) knew how to do.
George’s responses to these e-mails, if he ever wrote back, do not exist.
The OCSD sent several detectives down to Corpus Christi to work with members of the FBI and the Corpus Christi Criminal Intelligence Unit, including the local police and several other officers assigned to the case while George and his children were in town. After setting up and filming all of what went on inside and outside of St. Theresa’s Catholic Church and Rose Hill Memorial Park—the Garden of Prayer section, where Gail was interred—there came a time when a photograph of Donna Trapani, which law enforcement had distributed, turned into a discussion among investigators. No one had seen anyone at the church service that looked like Donna, but that changed at Rose Hill. A motorcycle police officer was roaming through the large crowd on his bike when he called in.
“Yeah, we got female here in a beige dress that seemed to want to approach the grave site, but then withdrew.”
The cop was told to follow the woman.
“She closely resembles the photograph. . . .”
“Stick with her.”
Two detectives set out on foot from a nearby cruiser and ran to track the woman down, but the motorcycle officer lost sight of her.
Could it have been Donna? If so, why in the world would she be roaming around the grave site of a woman she had loathed and wished only bad things upon for so long? Did Donna Trapani
want
to draw attention to herself as a suspect, or was she relishing in victory?
17
P
ART OF THE
trip south for two OCSD investigators, Detectives John E. Meiers and William Dugan, was a planned sit-down with Dora Garza, Gail’s articulate and delightful mother. Additionally, the OCSD needed to get a better picture of Gail’s life and complete a victimology report.
Dora had some important issues she needed to discuss; she felt she knew exactly who had murdered her daughter and why. This was a strong woman, whose husband had died many years prior. Raising two kids had been one of the most rewarding experiences of Dora’s life. To think that a child of hers had been murdered was traumatic and devastating. Dora had brought her children up in a devout Catholic household that emphasized morality, justice, and taking care of one’s neighbors. Faith. Hope. Charity. These were everyday expressions that Dora and Noe Garza had spent their lives instilling in their children. Gail was the perfect child in many ways, Dora felt. She had been a passive, compassionate, dedicated wife and mother, with not an enemy in the world.
Or so Dora thought.
Dora met Meiers and Dugan at an undisclosed hotel outside Corpus Christi. They surely didn’t want George to know about the interview. Investigators still weren’t sure that George had not masterminded the murder himself and was playing the part of grieving husband, going through the motions of misery and loss, waiting for the appropriate time to pass, so he could run off with Donna Trapani and, as one former friend of Donna’s later said, “play house together.”
As the two detectives led Dora to an empty conference room inside the hotel, Dora asked if they had a suspect in her daughter’s murder, or that quintessential and evermore-popular term propelled into the mainstream media, person of interest.
“We don’t have a suspect right now,” one of the detectives explained. It was early in the game. They were still in the information-gathering stage of the case. “We’re going to be asking personal questions about Gail and George,” the detective added, “but we don’t want [you] to
infer
that we are doing this because George is the main focus of our investigation. Our purpose in coming here is to talk to you with the hope of anything you might know assisting us in the investigation to help locate your daughter’s killer or killers.”
Dora said she understood. She’d do everything she could to help.
As they got settled in the spacious room, Dora presented an audiotape. Emily had given the tape to Dora that morning.
“Your investigators missed this tape when they searched the house in Michigan,” Dora said.
“Oh . . .”
“It contains a message left on the answering machine at my daughter’s house on July fourth. The message is from Donna Trapani, the woman George was having an affair with.”