Kiss of the She-Devil by M. William Phelps Read Free Book Online Page B

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 She could come across as anorexic, withdrawn, and weak during these episodes.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