Kiss of the She-Devil (26 page)

On September 6, 1999, Gail celebrated her forty-eighth birthday with family. For several days leading up to it, George had been unable to get ahold of Donna and worried something was up. Donna was not returning his pages; she had not sent any e-mails; his concern was that she had gone and done something stupid.

George called one of Donna’s friends. “Hey, was wondering if you’ve seen Donna around? I haven’t heard from her . . . in weeks. This is unlike her.”

“She’s fine, George. In fact, she just threw a party the other night at her house.”

A party?

Finally, near September 15, Donna returned George’s page.

“Just wanted to know how you were, Donna,” George said.

She laughed. The line was quiet for a time.

“I want to tell you what’s going on, but you won’t want to know,” Donna replied.

Immediately George thought—based on the tone Donna used—that she “had moved on with her life” and she had “a new boyfriend.” It was a relief and a shock. George had told Donna some time before this phone conversation that if she ever went out and found a new mate, “I don’t want to know about it.”

George had a feeling after this call that he and Donna, someday, might laugh at this entire episode of their lives. Maybe they could even work together again. All Donna needed was time to get over it. George could forgive and look toward the future. People said things under duress and depression they did not truly mean.

The next day George sent Donna a dozen carnations, wishing her luck with an upcoming audit that her company was going through. It was part of a new sale Donna said she was involved in. If the audit went well, a corporation was going to buy CCHH and dig Donna out of a financial hole.

I wish you luck, love, George,
he wrote on the card accompanying the flowers.

46

D
ONNA WAS WORKING
behind the scenes assembling a team—though not the trio one might have imagined. This was no dream team of businesspeople set to handle the sale. Donna was putting together a squad of killers. She had made a choice: Gail would have to be killed. It was the only way to win George back.

On September 26, 1999, at 10:26
P.M.
, Donna had Sybil Padgett—the team leader—phone George. He wasn’t home—or he wasn’t answering his phone. The answering machine picked up, instead: “Hey . . . George, it’s me, Sybil. I’m just calling because [Donna’s] real upset. I don’t want nuttin’ . . . but please call me back. I just want to talk to ya—just want to find out what’s going on. She’s havin’ a really hard time, and she really cares a lot about ya . . . and I just don’t understand what’s all goin’ on, and I just want to find out . . . because I am concerned for Donna. I just wish you’d return the call . . . and talk to me if you would. I’m out to dinner right now with a friend of mine, and Donna beeped me and she was all upset, crying and crying.” Sybil said she wouldn’t be home until later that night, but she stressed, “You know, please, George, just try to touch base and let’s talk. I really care a lot about Donna, and I don’t like seeing her like this. I’ve been with her a long time . . . and I—I just don’t like seeing her like this. I want to talk to you, George.” Sybil paused. Then: “Please call me.” She left a phone number. “Good night, George. Sweet dreams.”

Donna called George’s home office the next day, over and over, all morning and afternoon long. Emily could hear from upstairs that the phone would not stop ringing.

When Donna finally figured out George was not going to answer, she called incessantly upstairs, the Fultons’ home number.

Sick and tired of a ringing telephone, Emily picked it up: “
What
do you
want
?”

“I need to speak to him, Emily. Where
is
he? There’s an emergency here at the office.... I need to speak with him now!”

“He took my mother to Mackinac Island,” Emily explained. George and Gail were gone on a romantic weekend getaway.

This brought about a long beat of silence. If Emily’s guess was right, Donna was furious.

Donna started screaming at Emily before becoming “very upset.” Then she hung up.

When George returned, he called Donna. Not once during this call did Donna ever mention Emily had told her where Gail and George had gone that weekend. Instead, Donna sounded cheery and upbeat. She talked about CCHH and wondered if George was still willing to do some work for her.

Donna refused to accept that George was more devoted to his wife than her,
said a law enforcement report.
The guilt leverage she placed on George’s conscience had failed.

Donna tried reasoning with George.

Begging.

Lying.

Bullying.

Screaming.

Crying.

The silent treatment.

None of it worked.

But now, that same law enforcement document reported:
[Donna] . . . had a final solution.

III

A VIEW TO A KILL

47

H
ELEN PADGETT AND
her daughter were about as close as could be under the circumstances. Helen had watched Sybil’s children, a little girl (nine years old) and a little boy (four years old), whenever Sybil went out, running around, doing errands for Donna. In late September, Helen was mothering her grandchildren more than their own mother. This greatly troubled Helen. She loved her daughter, but she wondered what Sybil had gotten herself into.

Helen did not like the idea that Sybil invited her nineteen-year-old boyfriend, Patrick Alexander, a skinny, lanky kid with no future, to live with her at the house Sybil rented on East Orange Street in DeFuniak Springs, Florida. Not for nothing, but Sybil was seventeen years older than Patrick. Same as with a previous relationship she had been in (and a husband who had, according to Sybil, beaten her up), the scent of trouble oozed from Patrick. What was a nineteen-year-old unemployed kid doing living with a thirty-six-year-old woman? Sure, he could be using Sybil, but she didn’t have a pot to piss in. On top of that, Sybil’s girlfriend lived in the house. Among them all, they could not afford to keep a landline phone turned on, much less take care of Sybil’s children. The house was a pigsty; the yard was unkempt. Sybil drove around in a green 1999 Malibu that her boss, Donna, had rented under the guise of Sybil needing a vehicle for work.

Helen once asked Sybil, what’s going on? (Although Helen couldn’t recall, when asked by police, the exact day.) Something seemed to be bothering Sybil. She was preoccupied. She hadn’t been herself.

“You
know,
Ma,” Sybil said.

“Don’t get involved in that, Sybil,” Helen responded.

Sybil stared at her mother. What was Helen talking about? Did she truly know what Sybil was planning and what she had been doing for Donna?

Helen had overheard Sybil and Patrick talking about “it.” She wasn’t supposed to hear the conversation. Helen asked Sybil what Donna wanted from her. If what she had eavesdropped on was true, Helen thought Donna was pressuring Sybil to get involved in something dangerous. (“She told me about it one time,” Helen said later, “that Donna wanted her to kill Gail.”)

“Don’t do it, Sybil!” Helen said.

“Ma!”

Her mother wanted to know more.

“George was living with Gail
and
Donna, and George went back to Gail.”

Helen later told police: “And Donna wanted her done away with.”

Helen had no idea who these people were, other than the few details Sybil had given her, and what she had heard Sybil say during her conversations. This included the fact that there was $2,500 up for grabs for the person who completed the job.

“From whom?” Helen asked. Who was putting up the money to have another woman murdered?

“Donna,” Sybil said.

Helen thought she knew her daughter well enough to know she was never going to get involved in something so evil. Donna called the house one night. Helen, who lived four blocks away from Sybil, was there, watching Sybil’s kids while Sybil and Patrick were out. Helen answered, saying, “Leave my daughter alone!”

“Sybil has been talking about committing suicide,” Donna said, as if she had been there for Sybil as a friend, mentoring her, helping her, making sure Sybil didn’t go through with it.

“Now
why
would she do that?” Helen asked. Donna seemed to be trying to take over the mothering role in Sybil’s life. Helen had never seen any signs that Sybil was depressed enough to want to take her own life. What was all this talk about suicide, and Sybil being depressed and down and out?

Donna had a pathological, psychotic way of being able to come up with things on the spot. “Because of
you
and your
son
!” Donna snapped at Helen. “That’s why she’s so damn depressed. Sybil is sick and tired of taking care of y’ all.”

Donna was “calling and calling” the house. “She kept bothering Sybil.” Sybil would come home from work, crying, never wanting to talk about it. That day, after Helen admitted she somewhat knew what Sybil was planning, she pleaded with her daughter: “Don’t do it, honey.”

Sybil left the house and they never discussed it again.

Then Sybil called Helen one morning near the end of September. “I need you to watch the kids, Ma.”

“Sybil . . .”

“Just watch the kids for me next week. I need to go away for a few days with Patrick and some friends.”

48

K
EVIN OUELLETTE WAS
on his way back to Florida from Ohio to meet his girlfriend, Stephanie Bowden, Sybil’s roommate. Kevin had been living in Akron. He and Stephanie decided to get back together after a breakup. Kevin made a decision to ask Stephanie to marry him. This reunion in Florida was something Kevin had been looking forward to. Stephanie was a good woman. He’d been stupid to let her go.

“Hey,” Kevin said over the phone as he rolled into Mobile, Alabama, “can you meet me? . . . I’m stuck. My car broke down.”

Stephanie said sure.

“I done blew the motor, I think,” Kevin reiterated. “Shit.” He had a job lined up in Florida, but he needed his car to get there. Now this.

Kevin stood leaning against a telephone pole as Stephanie pulled up. DeFuniak Springs, Florida, where Stephanie lived with Sybil, was a 125-mile, two-hour trip through Spanish Fort, over Mobile Bay, into Mobile, Alabama, where Kevin left his vehicle. Still, they didn’t have to go that far. Kevin had hitched a ride with a local truck driver into Marianna, Florida, an hour east of DeFuniak, not knowing he overshot the town where Stephanie lived with her roommate.

As they pulled up, Kevin noticed Stephanie had people with her.

“Hey,” Stephanie said, jumping out of the car, embracing her man. Behind her was a large woman with long blond hair and piercing blue eyes. She stepped out of the car, walked over. “This is Sybil,” Stephanie said, introducing her friend. “I’m staying with Sybil.”

Then a tall, frail, punkish-looking young man emerged. He had dirty-blond hair, nearly buzz cut, a bit of peach fuzz for a beard and mustache. He was wiry and jumpy. Kevin didn’t like him.

“This is Patrick,” Stephanie said.

“Hey,” Kevin said, nodding. “What’s up?”

Patrick drove the 1999 green Malibu, which Sybil had been driving, to her rented house. Kevin had nowhere to stay. Sybil had told Stephanie he could live with them at the house if he wanted. There was plenty of room. Kevin had a job waiting for him, he explained, but since he had blown the motor of his car, and had no way of getting there, he was going to be fired before he started.

“Drop Stephanie and me off at a hotel,” Kevin told Patrick.

“Wait,” Sybil said, “just give me that money. . . . You can stay with us.”

Kevin had a few hundred dollars on him. “All right,” he said, trusting Stephanie’s judgment about people.

It wasn’t long after Kevin moved in with Sybil that he and Sybil were out on the porch one night, the sky a pinkish hue of cotton candy before them. Kevin sparked up a cigarette and started talking about not being able to find work without a vehicle. Without a car, he couldn’t find a job, because he couldn’t get there. He added, “I’m running low on money.” He shook his head. Then he ran his hands through his hair and let out a long drag from his cigarette. He didn’t know what to do. He felt like a loser.

“I know a way to make some easy money,” Sybil suggested.

“What are you talking about?”

Sybil looked inside the house to make sure Stephanie wasn’t around. With the coast clear she said, “I know somebody who wants somebody beat up.”

Sybil heard Kevin had a past of beating people up for money, sort of like a bookie’s muscleman. He was a big dude, at six feet, 235 pounds. Kevin had a pierced ear, tattoos, scars, and that rough “prison” look. He had once been a guy who broke flesh and shed blood for a price.

Kevin stared at Sybil, thinking. Then he turned his attention toward the setting sun, squinting, taking pull after pull from his cigarette. “Okay,” he said casually, “I’ll do it.”

“Good,” Sybil said.

Sybil walked into the house and called out to Patrick and Stephanie. “Come on, y’all, we’re takin’ a ride.”

Sybil knocked on Donna’s door, but Donna wasn’t home. Donna had some “young guy” living with her, a boarder. The guy let them in and then went off and stayed to himself. They got comfortable and sat around having a few drinks. It was hours before Donna arrived.

Sybil greeted Donna as she came in and put her purse down on the counter. At first, Donna seemed startled, looking around, as if to imply,
Why the hell are y’all here?

“Donna . . . Donna,” Sybil said, “I want you to meet Mike.” Kevin stood and walked over. Sybil smiled. It was as if she had gone out and found what Donna had been looking for. “This is Mike, Donna. . . . Remember . . .
Mike
!” (Wink-wink!)

Kevin looked at Sybil.
What is she talking about? Mike? What the hell?