Free Kiss of the She-Devil by M. William Phelps

Wundrach’s description) was significant. Now, A’Hearn knew from experience that all they needed was a break—some sort of witness to come forward and begin talking. Whenever several people were involved in a murder—and the OCSD knew from watching the video that there were at least three people who knew the specifics of this murder—one of them will eventually get drunk, high, or feel safe enough to open his or her mouth.
    It was inevitable.

15
    T HE WOMAN LYING in the casket “did not look like my mother,” Emily Fulton recalled years later, thinking back to that day she and her family had a chance to view her mother’s body for the first time. It was the look on Gail’s face: plastic, stiff, contorted.
    Fake.
    Gail’s lips were pulled taut; her forehead was “furrowed”; her eyes (which had not been shut yet) had, quite shockingly, a look of surprise on them. What was more than obvious to Emily as she stood and stared was the wax the mortician had used to cover the bullet hole in her mother’s forehead.
    “The hole . . . the size of a fifty-cent piece,” Emily recalled, “looked beyond painful and made me cry all the harder. I could not believe that that bastard did this to my mom—my mom that weighed [about] one hundred pounds and was [just over] five feet. Her long beautiful nails were chopped off and were not still quite jagged, [but] the mortician painted them a pinkish color. My mom never wore nail polish.”
    That shell of a person, lying dead before her, “did not look like my mother,” Emily said. More than that, all the lines etched in Gail’s face—that expression frozen by her death—told Emily that “this person went through terrible pain and suffering” as she died.
    “This person” might have seemed an odd choice of words. Yet for Emily, her mother was gone. This body left behind—a cocoon, really—had nothing in common with the woman Gail Fulton was, or the mother she had been to her children. For Emily, regardless of what the body displayed, or the pain and suffering her mother endured while dying in that parking lot, Emily was convinced of something that was more important to her than anything else at this point: “I also believe that God does not want innocent people to suffer and that the soul leaves the body prior to feeling any real pain.” Emily thought later she might have read that theory somewhere, but nevertheless, “I hope [it] is true.”
    After seeing this, “needless to say, we decided to have a closed casket,” Emily recounted.
    It was early evening, October 6, 1999. Emily and her family wanted a private viewing before the funeral home in Michigan readied Gail’s casket for a trip south to Texas.
     
     
    Corpus Christi, Texas, is a 1,500-plus-mile trek south from Lake Orion, Michigan. But that’s where Gail’s mother and her children wanted this wonderful woman laid to rest. The funeral was set for October 8. The funeral mass was held at St. Theresa’s Church in Corpus, the same parish the family had been members of when they lived in Texas.
    “I understand the cultural significance of having funerals, as it helps to make the death of your loved one a reality for the survivors, and I think this is a good thing,” Emily remarked. “However, when the family member who dies is so significant in your life, funerals are draining on so many levels.”
    Hallelujah. Saying a final good-bye to someone close sucks the life out of you.
    From the moment Emily stepped back into the church, the building of St. Theresa’s itself brought on a flood of memories. Masses weren’t generally packed at this parish, but the church had good attendance from week to week. It felt like home to Emily as she entered through the front doors. When they lived in Texas, Emily, George, Andrew, and Gail had been involved in the church on many different levels. Emily and George were lectors. Gail and George were Eucharistic ministers (helping the priest and deacons give out Holy