To Love and to Kill (8 page)

Buie explained later that Wayne was a guy Josh knew Heather would get with at times and have some fun. Wayne was a Santa Claus–looking truck-driver type that came around once in a while. He was old and fat and smelly. He liked Heather. He spent money on her.

Buie left the room. He called Wayne.

Wayne actually answered and gave his full name after having no trouble admitting he knew Heather. “I have no idea where Heather is,” Wayne said. “She's not with me.”

“When was the last time you saw her?” Buie asked.

“Probably like the middle of January. She was working at Petro. I stopped in.”

“Do you know the whereabouts of Heather Strong?” Buie asked again, more professionally.

“No, man. I have no idea.”

It seemed to Buie that the MCSO was getting the runaround from Josh Fulgham, the husband of a missing wife. He was tossing information out and hoping something stuck. Was Josh's story about Emilia part of his plan to drag her into whatever game he was playing with cops?

Buie didn't care at this point. He was tired of the nonsense.

He wanted answers.

CHAPTER 19

DETECTIVE DONALD BUIE
went back to the soft room, where Emilia was waiting, after going over several pieces of evidence he had developed overnight in the case. It was 5:31
A.M.
, on March 19, when Buie entered the soft interview suite for what was, officially speaking, his fourth interview with Emilia.

The first thing out of Emilia's mouth gave the increasingly impatient detective an indication that maybe Emilia was ready to share some of her secrets.

“Where is he?” Emilia asked. She was referring to Josh.

“He's . . . out there,” Buie said.

“Out
there
?” Emilia was taken aback by how close Josh was to where she sat with Buie. “Can you make sure nothing happens to me?” Emilia said next. She was obviously scared of Josh, shaken by the idea of him being just outside the door.

“Okay.” Buie wanted her to get on with what she had to say. There wasn't a chance Josh could get to her. Enough with the drama!

“I'm serious,” Emilia said. She looked toward the door. She gave the impression that she was terrified of this man. There was no telling what he could do to her. If Josh had taken it upon himself to implicate Emilia, she believed he was prepared to do anything at this point.

Buie told Emilia that he was under the impression after speaking to Detective Spivey, who had spoken to Emilia between her previous interviews, that she had “new” information she was now willing to share. Buie didn't want her to worry about Josh. He was in no position to get to her. She needn't be concerned for her safety. She should feel free to talk as openly as possible. Buie was a little upset at Emilia because she had told Spivey she had something to say, and yet it felt to Buie as if she was wasting their time.

What Emilia wasn't telling Buie, just yet, was that she didn't trust him. She felt more comfortable talking to Spivey. Emilia knew Spivey outside of the police department. They had a history of sorts. Spivey's former wife was an instructor at the technical college where Emilia had gotten her massage certificate. His ex-wife had taught Emilia, and Spivey had met Emilia at the graduation ceremony. Within that relationship, Emilia felt that Spivey, unlike Buie, was not one to go about making accusations against her, or using an accusatory tone, which Emilia clearly did not like. Spivey was more of a listener. He sat and took in whatever Emilia wanted to say without coming back at her, wagging a finger. Spivey took in the information—and Emilia appreciated that.

“You understand your rights still apply,” Buie explained as they again acclimated themselves to the soft room. “Okay. You've got to tell me the truth from point A to Z. Okay? Tell me.”

Emilia said she had been thinking about everything they had discussed and something “hit” her as she thought about her mother's trailer the last time she and Buie had talked.

Trailer?

That much was new.

Buie encouraged Emilia to tell him the story. Get on with it. Let's hear what you have to say.

Emilia took a deep breath. She got comfortable in her chair. This was tougher than she thought. It was as though figuring this revelation out herself for the first time scared the hell out of her.

Nevertheless, deciding to come clean with what she knew, Emilia Carr cleared her throat and told her story to Detective Donald Buie.

CHAPTER 20

IT WAS FIVE-THIRTY,
the morning of February 16, 2009—the night of February 15 was the last time anyone had seen Heather Strong. Josh generally called Emilia when he wanted to come over. But on this morning, as the sun was just edging its way up over the Atlantic horizon, Emilia was asleep, in bed, when she was startled by a knock on her bedroom window.

Who's that
? Emilia thought as she woke up, still partially asleep, and looked toward her window.

“Josh?”

According to Emilia, Josh was standing outside her window.

“What are you doing here?” Emilia asked. Josh looked disheveled, out of breath, spooked and wired, as though someone had been chasing him. “It's cold out there.... Come around to the door so I can let you in.”

“I just came by to tell you that I love you and I am on my way to work,” Josh said.

This was a bit strange, even for Josh. He had suddenly turned into Romeo, showing up at Emilia's bedroom window just to say, “I love you”? Emilia was used to Josh calling her every morning to share this intimacy, but he had never come to her window before this day.

Emilia wondered,
Why is he here? It's so early.

“Okay . . . Josh,” Emilia said.

“I thought he was kind of weird,” Emilia told Detective Buie as she told this story on the morning of March 19. Things had been “really, really tense” between them, Emilia later said. She had told Josh on more than one occasion that they needed to stop arguing so much. If all they did was fight, the relationship needed to end.

The gulf growing between them, Emilia recalled for Buie, was centered on Heather and the kids. According to what she explained during her March 19 interview, Josh kept telling Emilia, “I will not let Heather take the kids.” Heather had taken them back to Mississippi once and Josh had followed. He wasn't about to allow that to happen again. He was constantly in fear of Heather moving the kids away and him never seeing them again. “What are you talking about?” Emilia said she asked Josh whenever he mentioned not allowing Heather to take the kids. Was Josh planning on taking her to court?

While at Emilia's bedroom window, Josh said, “I cannot come in. You
don't
want to help me.”

Emilia wanted to know what was going on. What did he mean by that? Why was Josh at her window? Why was he saying he didn't want her help? Emilia couldn't understand what was happening—it all seemed so foreign to her. Josh wasn't himself.

“Where's Heather, Josh?” Emilia asked after Josh again referred to the fact that Heather was gone. “She back in Mississippi?”

Josh looked down. Then he whispered: “She's closer than you think.”

They argued about this comment later. Emilia saw Josh that evening and she asked him again, “Where is Heather?”

She wondered, why was he being so mysterious? All this business about “she's closer than you think.” What was he talking about?

“That's when he told me,” Emilia explained to Detective Buie. “I don't know if he said he strangled her or he choked her or whatever, but he said he did that.”

The reason Josh was at her window on that morning soon became obvious to Emilia, she said. Josh carried on in the days following that visit, telling her one night, “She's in the back trailer.”

There was an old trailer home in the back of the main house in Boardman. It was abandoned and nobody generally went near it. Weeds and brush had grown up around it. They sometimes used it for storage; but for the most part, the trailer was full of junk nobody used.

“Now, see, what I don't understand,” Emilia continued telling Buie, “is when he told me that he killed her, I don't know where at. But I know he had her in my momma's back trailer is what he told me.” Emilia stopped. She thought about it. “Look, she wouldn't come there willingly. There's no way that girl would come there willingly.”

Emilia said the trailer didn't lock. The door had no latch. Josh knew all of this. He even offered to clear all the brush and clean up the area surrounding the trailer. Emilia's mother told him not to worry about it, but Josh had made a pile of odd junk in back of the trailer one day. No one wondered why. They just assumed Josh wanted to help clean up the yard.

Buie wanted to know exactly what Josh had said. It was important to get the language correct. Buie wondered: Why was Emilia just coming out with this now? Why had she waited so long? Why hold back a potential admission of murder spoken by the father of her child? Was it to protect Josh?

“He told me that he choked her, strangled her, whatever. He told me, ‘I choked the bitch out. . . .'”

Emilia explained that when Buie had mentioned the trailer earlier, it all began to click for her. This was not something she had come to easily. She couldn't believe what she was hearing from Buie as he explained some of what Josh had said. She told herself,
Oh, my God, he wasn't playing. 'Cause he says things to try to scare [me] a little bit sometimes.
Emilia claimed she didn't tell Buie this from the start because she “didn't put two and two together. I thought he was full of crap. Then when you said something about my mom's back trailer is when it clicked in my head and that's when I asked to talk to Detective Spivey.”

Though he didn't express it just then, Buie had a tough time with the fact that her boyfriend told her he had killed Heather, and Heather had been missing for weeks, and Emilia didn't want to believe it.

There was a sense here that Emilia might have been protecting Josh. Yet, Emilia came across sincere in her explanations regarding what she knew and when. She appeared to be the eight months pregnant girlfriend of a guy who was explosive and had exhibited on many occasions an unstable, unpredictable, even violent temper. There was also a bona fide threat on the table from Josh, Emilia explained further—and that had played in the back of her mind, keeping her from revealing all she knew right away.

“He said if I was ever to pull anything with our baby”—meaning taking off so he couldn't see the child—“that he was going to do to me what he did to her.”

When Josh told Emilia that he had killed Heather, she asked him, “Where is she?”

“Well, you know the gators in Orange Lake and you know they digest bones,” Emilia recalled Josh telling her. This now gave Emilia the impression that Josh was telling stories to frighten her—because he had said already that Heather was “closer than you think,” meaning inside the trailer. Not in Orange Lake.

“Where is she, Josh?” Emilia asked, not sure what to believe. The guy was acting insane, as if something had come over him.

Josh looked her in the eyes, becoming very serious. He said for the third time since Heather went missing: “Closer than you think.”

It was then that Emilia thought how she “hoped [Heather] wasn't in my mom's backyard—because that is sick. . . .”

As she told Detective Buie this part of her story, Emilia added, “I'm scared. His mother is crazy. She will hurt me if I testify.”

There had been several run-ins that she'd had with Josh's mother, Emilia explained. She was clearly afraid of the woman.

It was later during that night of February 16, Emilia said, that Josh called her.

“Heather left,” Josh explained. “I have the kids.”

Josh showed up at Emilia's at eleven that night. He was wasted, Emilia recalled, drunk and talking out of his mind. Stumbling around, mumbling things like, “I'm gonna burn [his] house down.... Get all those motherfuckers back for making me look like a fool.” Emilia didn't know what people he was referring to.

Because they had split up—by February 16—Emilia said Josh would stop by her mother's house, where she was living after leaving Josh, to drop off some of her belongings. It was during those times, Emilia explained to Buie, when Josh would disappear into the backyard of the house for ten or fifteen minutes and then return. She had no idea what he was doing. She had no reason, she claimed, to question what he was doing. At the time, Heather had not been reported missing.

But as time went on, Emilia told Buie, it was beginning to sound as though Josh took Heather back into that trailer and did bad things to her. What, exactly, she did not have a clue, and she never asked.

Anytime they fought after that day Heather disappeared, Emilia continued, even up until March 12, threats would easily roll off Josh's tongue, as if he could keep Emilia in check by mentioning Heather's disappearance. The guy was paranoid that Emilia was going to leave, she claimed. And when he got really angry, he'd say something like, “Well, you know Heather
ain't
coming home, Emilia.”

“What are you talking about, Josh? I thought she was in Mississippi,” Emilia would answer. Up until that week of March 12, she was still under the impression that Josh was making it all up, acting like a big shot, tough guy, as he sometimes did. Emilia claimed she had no notion that maybe Josh had done something to Heather, other than what he had said.

Josh would repeat himself: “She's closer than you think.”

Buie and Emilia had a heated exchange over when Emilia knew what she knew and why she didn't divulge any of it to the MCSO when she first sat down with Buie. Detective Buie was definitely annoyed that she had kept these things from him. And because of that, Buie believed Emilia was hiding even more.

Emilia said she was “intimidated” by Buie (Josh aside), a cop who had put some pressure on her, maybe a little too much. And according to Emilia, it wasn't until she sat down with the MCSO that she began to believe that Josh might have really done something to Heather. Emilia was always under the impression that Heather, scared of Josh, had run off to Mississippi or somewhere else. And Josh had used her not being around as a means to intimidate and threaten Emilia. Josh had even shown Emilia a letter allegedly signed by Heather in which Heather, Emilia said, had supposedly given him complete custody of the kids. Josh had brought the letter to the kids' school. So as far as Emilia saw things up until this day she had sat down with Buie, Heather had abandoned her children and had taken off.

Buie wanted to know one thing from Emilia: “If you
saw
her in that trailer?” Had Emilia ever ventured out into the trailer herself to check things out?

“I haven't seen her,” Emilia said, a touch of
how-dare-you
in her voice. Emilia was getting tired of being bullied by this cop. All she did, she told Buie, was lie by omission. Big deal. She didn't tell the MCSO everything she knew. Was it any reason to be badgered like this?

“I'm terrified,” Emilia told Buie.

“
You're
scared?” Buie asked.

“I'm scared of that man. I thought he was full of crap.”

Buie took a breath. “He said
you
gave him the cards!” Buie shared with Emilia.

She was struck by this. Heather's debit cards? That's what Josh was now claiming?

It felt like Buie was fishing. He wanted Emilia to know that he was not going to let up. The suggestion to Emilia, again, was that she was trying to hide things to protect the father of the child in her belly. But by now, it seemed Emilia was done with Josh. He'd shown her who he was and what he was capable of; she wanted no part of it.

“He said
you
gave him the cards ... ,” Buie repeated.

“Why would she (Heather) come to my mom's house?” Emilia asked, posing a hypothetical question. “Let me ask you that—these are the things that don't add up. Why would she come there?”

“I didn't say she came there alive,” Buie countered.