2008, the early 2000’s, were a time of great change. The Dark Knight was in cinemas, the Blackberry Storm became the new popular mobile phone to have and yet in Boardman, Florida, a tale as old as time was playing out yet again.
In November of that year, a man named Joshua Damien Fulgham got down on one knee and proposed to his girlfriend, Emilia Lily Carr, but what they shared was far from a dreamy relationship that had just reached the absolute romantic heights.
Joshua and Emilia were the type of couple who were on again and off again, but that didn’t stop Emilia from saying yes to the man that she wanted to become her third husband.
Emilia was around twenty-five years old when Joshua proposed to her, and by then, she’d already lived a very colorful life. There was surely some good mixed in there, but in Emilia’s past there was also a whole lot of bad.
The conditions in her childhood home were notably unstable and neglectful, and just how bad things actually were came to light when Emilia was only fifteen. It happened one day in school when Emilia approached her teacher and said that she was being sexually abused by her own father. Her teacher took Emilia’s claims very seriously and reported the abuse to authorities who, in turn, began investigating and found evidence to suggest that Emilia was not only being sexually abused by her father, but by her grandfather as well.
This could have been the turning point in Emilia’s life, and she could have been removed from a home where she was experiencing terrible abuse, but Emilia was only fifteen and when the investigation began to get serious, Emilia withdrew her statement.
We don’t know for sure why Emilia did this and, unfortunately, this happens in investigations of familial sexual abuse all the time. Children usually don’t want to see their parents get into trouble, or they can easily be pressured into saying the right thing to stop investigators right in their tracks.
Emilia was only a minor herself when she reported her own father for abuse, and it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out why she backed out so suddenly. That statement is doubly true when we know that Emilia’s father was arrested and convicted only a couple of years after Emilia confided in her teacher. This time he wasn’t in trouble with the law for sexually abusing his own daughter, but for another completely wild and traumatic charge that had devastating consequences.
In February 2004, just about four years before Emilia said yes to the man of her dreams, her father was sentenced to four years in prison for attempting to solicit someone else to murder his family.
It looked like her father’s intentions towards Emilia had gone from abusive to down right murderous.
With her father now out of her life and behind bars, at least for the time being, Emilia struck out on her own path, but it was a path with familiar obstacles. She married twice and even filed a restraining order against one of her ex-husbands for domestic abuse and violence. She was also sentenced to two years probation for her involvement in one of his grand theft schemes, which involved stealing exotic birds.
And that brings Emilia’s story up to November 2008. By now, she’s survived abuse, been married twice, has three children and is now staring down at Joshua, who’s asking her to marry him, and Emilia says yes.
It was here that Emilia’s life could have turned again. This could have been the start of a new path for Emilia, a clean break from the cycles of abuse she’d found herself in, and that’s probably what Emilia was thinking it would all turn out to be when Joshua walked down the aisle only a month later.
The only problem was that Joshua was on his way to marry a woman named Heather Strong and not Emilia Carr.
Speaking of off and on and off and on again, Joshua and Heather’s relationship had been up and down for years. They’d first started dating when Heather was only fifteen and Joshua was twenty-two, but they were currently on the outs when Joshua proposed to Emilia in November 2008.
But by December they were very much back on again.
Joshua and Heather already had two children together and when Heather made it clear that she wanted to take the children and move to Mississippi to be closer to her family, Joshua had a change of heart. Not wanting to lose contact with his children, he asked Heather to marry him, and Heather agreed.
What began then was a whirlwind of changes. Emilia, who’d already moved in to live with Joshua, was kicked out of the house and Heather and the children moved back in, but by February 2009, everything had changed again.
Only two months into their marriage and Joshua was back with Emilia and Heather was seeing someone else. She found work at a local Iron Skillet restaurant to support herself and her children while she and Joshua went to court over custody of their children.
And there was also one more child on the way.
In February 2009, Emilia was about seven months pregnant with Joshua’s child, meaning she’d been pregnant when Joshua had proposed to her back in November and when he kicked her out of the house in December 2008.
As far as Heather was concerned, this was the end of things with her and Joshua, especially now that he was having a child with another woman. The only thing that really mattered to Heather now was sorting out custody of the two children she shared with Joshua and moving on.
That was until Heather went missing.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, investigators didn’t have far to look when it came to suspects in Heather’s disappearance. In January 2009, only a month into their marriage, Joshua was arrested for threatening Heather with a shotgun. These were charges that would have come with serious consequences, especially in the middle of a custody battle, so investigators were surprised when Heather dropped them only a few weeks later.
They would later find out that Emilia had shown up at Heather’s home with a knife and threatened Heather into dropping the case against her current husband.
It was only a few weeks after that Heather went missing. When interviewed by the police, both Joshua and Emilia claimed to know nothing about how or why Heather had suddenly vanished, but the investigators were suspicious. They kept tabs on both of them and struck gold when they recorded Emilia talking with Joshua’s sister.
In the taped confession, Emilia admitted that she and Joshua had lured Heather out to a storage trailer owned by Emilia’s mother. There they had done the unthinkable to the twenty-six-year-old mother of two.
First they’d trapped Heather and taped her down to a computer chair so she couldn’t escape, and then Emilia took things a step further. She first tried to kill Heather by breaking her neck, but Emilia wasn’t strong enough to do that with her bare hands and was heavily pregnant at the time. Instead, she found an easier way to get rid of her rival and put a plastic bag over Heather’s head.
Heather was then left to slowly asphyxiate.
Armed with this new information, authorities arrested both Emilia and Joshua, who’d already been picked up on suspicion of fraud for using Heather’s credit cards after she’d been reported as missing.
All that was left then was to find Heather.
On March 19th, about a month after she first went missing, detectives uncovered Heather’s remains in a shallow grave near the storage trailer where she’d been murdered.
Convinced that they could beat the courts despite the evidence against them, both Emilia and Joshua waived their rights to plead guilty and chose to face the jury. The prosecution then warned them that they would be seeking the death penalty.
At trial, both the prosecution and the defense agreed that the motives behind Heather’s killing had been jealousy and betrayal. Emilia’s defense then argued that she’d been confused and traumatized by her terrible upbringing and asked for a more lenient sentencing.
The jury then voted 7-5 for the death penalty.
Emilia Carr became the first woman to be sentenced to death in Florida in over ten years, a sentence she’s been desperate to have overturned. In a later appeal, she claimed that her previous confession to investigators had actually been false. She first claimed that the authorities had threatened her children in order to get a confession out of her, and then she changed her explanation. She then claimed that she had confessed because she believed that it would help her regain custody of her children.
“I was trying to get all these details ‘cuz they kept wanting details before they would go to the State Attorney’s with immunity… Details, details, so I made up stories.” she said in an attempt to invalidate her previous statements, but so far it hasn’t worked.
Emilia still remains on death row, where she awaits execution. Her three older children were taken in by Emilia’s family. Her youngest, a daughter who was born behind bars, has since been adopted.
Joshua received a life sentence without the possibility of parole for his role in Heather’s murder.
