New facts in killing
With a year having passed since Heather Strong was killed in a gruesome fashion in a storage trailer, previously unknown details about the case have emerged and shed new light on the relationships between the victim and her accused killers.
Strong's estranged husband, Joshua Fulgham, and his girlfriend, Emilia Carr, are charged with kidnapping and capital first-degree murder. They have pleaded not guilty; the state is seeking the death penalty.
Authorities knew Strong and Fulgham, who already had two children together, had married in December 2008. But it turns out that, a month earlier, Fulgham had proposed to Carr.
What prompted Fulgham's sudden change of heart is unclear. So is the effect it had on Carr.
"She just couldn't believe it. She was hurt," Carr's mother said in a deposition. "Here he proposed to her, bought the ring for her, and in December, he came and took it and married Heather."
The victim's cousin is less charitable. She said the marriage was a ruse, all part of a plot to deceive Heather Strong so Carr and Fulgham could kill her.
"Why else would Emilia let him marry her?" Misty Strong asked during an interview.
Also coming to light are details of a prior incident when authorities say Carr attacked Heather Strong.
In January 2009, just one month before the murder, Carr allegedly held a knife to Strong's throat, demanding she sign a letter that would lead to a dropped criminal charge against Fulgham and secure his release from jail.
That detail comes from one of the many reports that law officers prepared after the body was found. There is no indication that Strong ever reported the assault to law enforcement.
As the state continues its vigorous prosecution of both defendants, another interesting development has emerged: This marks the first time Marion County prosecutors have sought the death penalty against a woman since Aileen Wuornos in the early 1990s.
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About a year ago, Strong's body was unearthed from a makeshift grave beside an abandoned storage trailer off a property in Boardman, about two miles north of McIntosh.
Through fingerprints, authorities were able to identify the body. Strong, 26, had disappeared a month earlier.
Authorities already had one of their prime suspects - Fulgham - in custody. On March 19, 2009, he led deputies to the spot where the body was buried.
That day, detectives observed the clumsy efforts to dispose of Strong's body. Clad in a T-shirt and jeans, the 5-foot-6-inch corpse had been partially stuffed into a large, zip-up suitcase and placed in a 3-foot-deep hole.
The hole was covered by two pieces of wood and black plastic bags to ward off flies.
If the method of burial was slipshod, the manner of death suggested a cold indifference to human life.
An autopsy concluded that Strong died from suffocation.
She had been bound to a chair with duct tape with a plastic bag placed over her head. Her airway constricted until she blacked out.
"That's one of the cruelest deaths you can experience. Oxygen deprivation is a horrible death," said prosecutor Rock Hooker, who was at the scene when Strong's body was unearthed.
The question is what would drive someone to inflict such a death upon the mother of two.
Fulgham, now 28, had been arrested and accused of fraudulent use of Strong's debit card during the time she was missing. Both he and Carr, now 25, provided statements to detectives implicating themselves and each other, providing details of how they lured Strong to the trailer, attempted to break her neck and, when that didn't work, suffocated her with a bag placed over her head.
According to Fulgham's statement to deputies, Strong was lured to the trailer under the pretense of cash. Carr struck her in the forehead with a flashlight when she attempted to flee.
He said he held Strong down while Carr bound her to the chair with duct tape and placed a bag over her head. Fulgham then sat across Strong's lap as Carr attempted to break her neck.
When that failed, Fulgham told detectives, Carr blocked Strong's airway until she drew her last breath.
A grand jury indicted them in April 2009.
The gruesome crime is made more unusual by the fact that Carr was eight months' pregnant at the time.
She gave birth two months after she was taken into custody. The child is believed to be Fulgham's.
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Fulgham, a native of Mississippi, had a history of domestic violence toward Strong, and his possessive behavior had long been observed by others.
Strong's mother, Carolyn Spence, said three years ago he called her in Mississippi, telling her he had tied Heather up, duct taped her mouth, and stuffed her into the trunk of his car so the "alligators would eat her alive."
Ben McCollum, a mechanic in McIntosh whom Strong had been dating, relayed to authorities that Fulgham once called his house and automobile shop, threatening to kill both him and Heather and burn his shop.
"It was all about control. That's all what it boiled down to," said Misty Strong, a cousin of Heather's who first reported her disappearance on Feb. 24, 2009.
Fulgham and Heather Strong had two children together, now ages 3 and 9. Despite the tempestuous relationship, they married in December 2008, just two months before Strong was killed.
Strong sought at least two domestic violence injunctions against Fulgham - once in September 2008 and again in January 2009, the same month Fulgham was arrested for aggravated assault with a firearm for threatening Strong with a shotgun. He served some jail time, but the charge was later removed at Strong's request.
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What prompted that request is unknown. But after Strong's death, detectives learned that, about that time, Carr had held a knife to Strong's throat and demanded that she drop the charge.
Jamie Acome - one of Carr's ex-boyfriends and father of one of her children - told detectives that Carr wanted Strong "out of the way," because she knew Fulgham would "eventually go back to Heather regardless of what him and Emilia was going through."
While she doesn't recall her cousin ever talking about Carr at length, Misty Strong believes the couple wanted Strong out of the picture, perhaps to get rid of Fulgham's child support payments.
"The only thing that makes sense is money," she said.
In depositions, both Carr's mother and sister said Carr didn't have any obviously strained relationship with Heather Strong. She would even baby-sit her children from time to time.
The only things that mattered to Strong, according to her family, were her two children.
"Those kids went everywhere she went," said her mother, Carolyn Spence. The two children, she added, are now in foster care.
A mother to four children herself, Emilia Carr is not unfamiliar with the criminal justice system.
The second-eldest of three daughters, Emilia Carr was born Emilia Yera. In February 2004, her father pleaded guilty to a charge of solicitation to commit murder against his wife, Carr and one of her sisters. He allegedly tried to prevent them from testifying against him in a criminal case.
He was sentenced to 48 months in prison for solicitation.
Court records show Carr, who has been married twice in the past, filed domestic violence injunctions against both her ex-husbands. She served two years of probation on a grand theft charge in 2004 for her involvement in an ex-husband's theft of a crate of exotic birds.
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A trial date for Fulgham and Carr has been set for August, but prosecutors are almost certain that date will be pushed back to a later date.
Fulgham is now on his third attorney due to conflicts with the Public Defender's Office and Office of Regional Conflict Counsel.
Peter Cannon, an attorney in Tampa now assigned to represent Fulgham, said he plans to challenge the admissibility of Fulgham's statement to detectives.
Carr is represented by Candace Hawthorne, who also has indicated plans to challenge the admissibility of Carr's statement to authorities.
The next status hearing is set for April 9.
Misty Strong, who spoke to her cousin almost every day either by phone or computer prior to her death, believes Heather was too trusting of Fulgham.
"She was just so kind-hearted. She would keep forgiving him," Misty Strong said of her cousin. "She was stuck in that same trap of, 'This is my kids' father.' I guess she felt no one else would want her. She thought it was easier just to deal with him and keep quiet about it."
In June 2009, Fulgham wrote a letter to Strong's mother in which he expressed remorse over Heather's death. "I do want you to know that I didn't want for nothing bad to happen to Heather. You know how much me and her has [sic] been through in 11 years nothing this bad never happened. I loved Heathear [sic] and still do and I have to live with this every day."
Although Carr's mother, Maria Zayas, declined to comment about her daughter's case, she did have one comment when asked whether she believed Carr was guilty.
"It's hard to say."
http://www.ocala.com/article/20100314/articles/3141017&tc=yahoo?p=5&tc=pg
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