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This looks like
the work of professionals.
What they have here
is a cold-blooded m*rder.
But who puts out a hit
on a deeply religious
suburban housewife?
Nobody had any answers.
People were really frightened.
Investigators
have little to work with...
until a scratchy video
and a handwritten note
tell the story of why
this victim was targeted.
They wanted to control
that person.
They wanted to control
their plan.
It looked like
a fairy-tale romance.
George and Gail Fulton met
at a Catholic youth group
when they were in high school
and had been together
ever since.
George Fulton was, in
many ways, the all-American dad.
West Point graduate.
They have three kids.
They begin this
classic American family
white-picket-fence life.
After years as m*llitary nomads,
the Fultons settled
in Lake Orion, Michigan,
a quiet suburb about
an hour north of Detroit.
The Fultons looked like
the perfect family.
He was a retired Army major.
They lived in a very nice home.
They belonged to the local
Catholic church.
George was starting up
his own consulting business.
Gail worked
at the local library.
On an October night in 1999,
Gail and co-workers
closed up the library
at about 9:00.
About 20 minutes later,
two fellow librarians
who were running behind
saw what they thought was a pile
of clothing in the parking lot.
Phelps So, as the librarian
comes upon this bunch of clothing,
she realizes,
"That's Gail Fulton,
one of my co-workers."
And she gets down on her knees,
and there's a pool of blood
around Gail,
and she's still breathing.
The co-workers were horrified.
Gail Fulton had been sh*t.
Paramedics couldn't save her.
Police on the scene
were baffled.
There seemed to be no motive
for this m*rder.
Was it robbery? No.
They found her purse
and her ID at the scene.
Was she sexually assaulted? No.
Was it a carjacking?
Obviously not.
So how many other choices
do we have?
The initial canvass of
the scene prompted even more questions.
Someone had slashed
the tires on Gail's car.
So what it looks like now is,
Gail Fulton got in the vehicle,
started it up,
maybe started to drive,
realized she had a flat,
got out to look at it
in the back,
and somebody came
upon her and m*rder*d her.
Police were coming to
a disturbing conclusion.
It looked like Gail's k*ller
slashed her tires
to keep her from driving away,
which meant this was
no random act.
Gail Fulton appeared to be
the target
of what looked like
an execution-style m*rder.
Police were just
completely perplexed by this.
It was like a Mafia hit.
They had no idea where to go
to try to figure out
who would have done this.
Whoever k*lled Gail
apparently knew where she'd be
and when she'd be there.
They knew the parking lot
was isolated.
No shell casings or any
other physical evidence
were left at the scene.
This appeared to be the work
of professional K*llers.
But that theory,
with this victim, made no sense.
In the m*rder of Gail
Fulton, as in almost all murders,
investigators turned immediately
to the people
closest to the victim.
You have to start
there, at the marriage.
So when you build a house,
you don't start on the roof.
You start at the foundation,
and that's what
law enforcement did.
They started with her husband.
At the moment of
his wife's m*rder,
George Fulton was at home,
on the phone...
a fact confirmed
by his 17-year-old son...
so he was eliminated
as the sh**t,
but that didn't mean
he was cleared.
When investigators first come
into contact with George Fulton,
they're kind of like,
"Whoa. What's going on here?"
He doesn't seem all that upset.
He's not asking
a lot of questions.
He's standoffish.
He's a bit combative even, like,
"Are you accusing me?"
And he doesn't want to
offer much help.
But George soon
admitted that the appearance of
his perfect marriage was a sham,
and had been for years.
George spoke with the police
and told them that he had
been having an affair
with a woman in Florida.
He didn't try to hide it.
George's mistress
was Donna Trapani,
a 43 year-old registered nurse
who owned her own
extremely successful
home-healthcare business.
In what seemed more
than coincidence,
a dive into their phone records
showed George and Donna
were on the phone together
at the exact moment
Gail Fulton was sh*t.
You had George on
one end of the phone
and Donna on the other.
So, "Gosh, neither one of us
could have done this to Gail."
So it sounds really good
on paper, in theory.
George, who admitted
Gail knew of the affair,
said he'd recently ended it
and was trying
to save his marriage.
Detectives weren't so sure.
There's only three
motives behind every m*rder...
love, money, revenge.
Look, that's the mind-set
walking into a crime like this.
It has to be,
if you're an investigator.
Even though the lovers,
whether they were ex-lovers
or not, were alibied,
the possibility of
a m*rder for hire was very real.
And it was amplified
after investigators
got a break of sorts.
Gail's library had
a surveillance camera.
It took quick sh*ts
at 1-second intervals.
The image quality was poor.
The video camera in the
parking lot of the library
was able to record
in a kind of grainy way
what took place.
There was no sound,
so they weren't able to hear
any conversation or any...
the sound of the sh*ts.
These images confirmed
detectives's initial theory
that this was a hit.
You see on the camera, she
comes out and gets in her car.
She realizes that there's
a problem with the tire.
She gets out. A car pulls up.
A man gets out of the car and
sh**t her three or four times,
and she falls and dies there
in the parking lot.
The car was identified
as a Chevy Malibu.
It had a broken back taillight
on the right side.
It wasn't possible to make out
the color or the license plate,
but investigators
were at least able to say
how many people
participated in Gail's m*rder.
So when they were looking
at the surveillance video
and they see
these three shadows,
they obviously observed
the one doing the sh**ting.
And then when he got back
into the car,
by the video,
they were able to determine
that one of those silhouettes
was a female.
But that's all they could tell,
and they couldn't determine
anything about the two people
who were with
the unidentified woman.
They had the K*llers on tape
but had no way to identify them.
The more detectives
learned about the long-time affair
between George Fulton
and Donna Trapani,
the stranger the story seemed.
At one point,
George abandoned his family
and moved to Florida
to be with Donna.
Despite everything,
George's wife, Gail,
stood by her man.
Gail was very devout
in her Catholicism.
I think that she loved George
despite the philandering,
and I think she thought that
if she just held on long enough,
she could put her life
back together.
One year before the m*rder,
Gail's prayers were
finally answered...
or appeared to be.
George said he broke off
the relationship with Donna.
George decided that,
"Hey, I better go home
and square up with my wife,
Gail, and clean up my act."
But as this case progresses,
it appears that it didn't sit
too well with Donna Trapani.
Four months after that breakup,
Donna Trapani
reached out to George
with some stunning news.
She told him she had
terminal cancer,
and that wasn't all.
George is told by Donna
that she's pregnant.
So, what does he do?
He has Donna come up to Michigan
and he puts Donna in a hotel.
And then what does he do?
He drives Gail over
to the hotel and says,
"I need you and Donna
to meet and to talk.
I need my wife to meet
my pregnant mistress
in a hotel room
and have a conversation."
Now, what good could
come out of that?
I don't know.
This meeting took place
over the July 4th weekend.
Gail met with Donna alone
and left the meeting in tears.
But, true to character,
she was determined
to do the right thing.
So, these three people are going
to be adults and work this out
and Gail and George are
going to raise this baby
once Donna dies.
Incredibly, after the meeting,
George spent the night
with Donna,
while his long-suffering wife
went home alone.
George Fulton treated
Gail Fulton like sh*t.
That's all over this story.
Because he knew that she would
stand behind him
because of her faith,
because of her values.
He knew he wouldn't lose her
unless he wanted to.
George was unfaithful
but not dumb,
and soon suspected Donna's
pregnancy story was a lie,
so he did some sleuthing
of his own
and discovered
there was no pregnancy.
When George finds out that
Donna has been lying to him,
that she's not
pregnant... It's over.
And it's over for good now, Donna.
Well, I think that's the cliff,
and George pushed Donna over it.
For detectives,
the pieces of this m*rder,
at least as far as motive,
were falling into place.
But they couldn't prove anything,
and they still
hadn't found a way to identify
the three people
in the so-called m*rder car.
As for Donna Trapani?
She had a possible motive,
but that was about all.
Donna Trapani, on face value,
she seemed like
she was pretty legit.
She wasn't like,
you ran her name up
and she was in prison
for 10 years
or she was a drug dealer
or she was a burglar.
I mean, she didn't have
any of those things
that jumped out at you.
Then,
six weeks after the m*rder,
detectives got a call from a man
in Florida named Todd Franklin
that upended
their investigation.
He hears about this crime
that happened up
in Lake Orion, Michigan,
short-haired blonde woman.
Well, his girlfriend,
Sybil Padgett,
is a short-haired blonde woman,
and now Todd Franklin
recalls her asking him
if he knew anybody
who could do a hit.
Todd Franklin did,
and directed Sybil
to an old friend.
And, so, Todd says, "Yeah,
I can give you this guy,
Kevin Ouellette.
I met him in prison.
He's a badass.
I'm sure he'd do it.
Enough money, he'd do anything."
Todd Franklin's story
was remarkably consistent
with the library
surveillance video
and contained details not
released to the general public.
That one phone call now
sets an evidence chain
of dominoes into motion.
Detectives finally had
some direction in the case,
but the only person who
seemed to have a motive
was Donna Trapani,
and now detectives
discovered a connection
between Donna and the K*llers.
Sybil Padgett was a nurse who
was working for Donna Trapani.
With this news,
Michigan detectives
were on their way to Florida.
Upon arriving in Florida,
Michigan detectives went
to Sybil Padgett's home.
In her driveway was
a Green Chevy Malibu.
And they saw damage
to the taillight
of the particular vehicle,
which is another good clue.
brought in for questioning
and folded within minutes.
Sybil is very distraught.
She's blaming Donna.
She explains how Donna
roped her into it.
A search of Sybil's home
turned up a map of Lake Orion
with key locations
like the Fulton home
and the local library circled.
Critically, there was
a handwritten note
with Gail Fulton's work schedule
and a photograph of Gail.
Clearly, if you're going
to k*ll somebody,
you need to know
what they look like.
Detectives now questioned
Donna Trapani at her home.
She flat-out denied any
involvement in Gail's m*rder.
She was also sticking
to her story
that she was soon going to give
birth to George Fulton's child,
but alert detectives noticed
something not quite right
about Donna's baby bump.
They're watching her
sit on the couch
and the cat jumps up
on her stomach,
and it's clear that this is
not your standard pregnancy.
The indentation of the cat
is left on her belly.
So the police are like, "This is
even weirder than we thought."
What Donna has done is placed
a bunch of place mats
up inside of her blouse in order
to appear to be pregnant.
But police still
needed something more conclusive.
Sybil Padgett told them
Donna hired her
and told her
to hire the K*llers.
Those men, Patrick Alexander
and Kevin Ouellette,
confess to the same story.
But Donna wasn't budging,
so detectives turned to
the handwritten materials
Sybil said were
given to her by Donna.
Donna's fingerprint was on
one of the documents,
but since she worked with Sybil,
a good defense lawyer
could explain this away.
The handwriting, however,
was another matter.
The best thing that
we can say about
handwriting identification is,
handwriting does
not take a side.
I'm not for or against anyone.
Handwriting is handwriting.
A person's handwriting is
almost as distinctive as a fingerprint.
Handwriting is something
most of us learn as children.
Personal quirks appear
in everyone's writing
and are almost impossible
to disguise or imitate.
Handwriting is brain-writing,
so you look for
the unique characteristics
that a person's brain impulse
down to the hand
and would actually
put together to create
a writing, a word, a letter,
or something like that.
Ruth Holmes compared samples
of Donna Trapani's
known handwriting,
which came from love letters
she sent to George Fulton,
to the handwritten note
laying out Gail's work schedule.
Numerous letters showed
nearly identical construction
between both sets
of handwriting samples.
For example,
the capital letter "E"
in the questioned document
was consistent with
the capital letter "e" in
Donna's known writing.
The capital letter "A"
from the questioned document
was consistent with
the capital letter "A"
in Donna's known writing.
The letter "R" was consistent
in both sets of documents,
as was the capital
letter "L."
These were among at least
a dozen letters
that were consistent across
all the writing samples
submitted for analysis.
In this case,
it was an identification.
We weren't authenticating
a check or anything like that.
We were identifying
if a particular person
who wrote this is
the same person who wrote that.
Donna was confronted
with the evidence against her,
including the m*rder
team's confessions.
She still denied
any involvement.
The night she was k*lled,
Gail followed her routine
to the letter.
She got in her car but, because
her tires had been slashed,
thought she had a flat.
As she exited the car,
Kevin Ouellette walked up
and fired
three execution-style sh*ts.
Afterward,
the K*llers disappeared...
or thought they did.
They didn't know they'd been
caught on a security camera.
That tape later
matched up perfectly
with the tipster's story
to the police,
and soon, the plot unraveled.
So one lie leads
to the next lie,
leads to the next lie,
which leads to what?
m*rder-for-hire.
And Donna Trapani
is at the top of it.
At trial, Donna took the stand
and insisted she had no
connection to the m*rder.
Donna, did you hire
anyone to k*ll Gail?
No, I did not.
Did you want Gail dead?
No, I did not.
The judge wasn't buying
her story.
This was a horrible,
despicable crime.
The defendant claims
she is not guilty.
The jury did not believe her,
and neither do I.
In January of 2001,
Sybil Padgett,
the woman who assembled
the m*rder team,
was sentenced to
life without parole.
The sh**t, Kevin Ouellette,
got the same sentence.
Patrick Alexander,
a friend of Sybil's
who was in on the plot
from the start,
got 23 to 40 years.
In December of 2000,
Donna Trapani was found guilty
of first-degree m*rder
and also got
life without parole.
George Fulton,
who had been cleared of
any involvement by police,
testified at Donna's trial
and told the jury
of the sordid affair
that led to the m*rder
of his wife,
a woman who was willing to...
and did...
stand by him
till the bitter and bloody end.
There was a lot of victims
in this case.
I mean, unfortunately, Gail was
the victim, the main victim.
It was a rock-solid case.
I've covered a lot
of these things,
and this one was like,
slam dunk.
The forensics in this case
brought together
the entire prosecution's case.
Forensic science doesn't lie.
People can lie,
forensic science cannot.