The tip came in just after midnight. Officers responding to a call in a seedy part of town, just west of the Las Vegas Strip, found a man’s body in a bank parking lot, dumped behind a trash dumpster. The victim, 44-year-old Duran Bailey, a homeless man and alleged drug dealer, had been brutally attacked. There were scratches and gouge marks around his eyes, stab wounds to the head, neck, rib cage, and groin, a fractured skull.
His penis had been cut off, and there were further mutilations. The scene was littered with cigarette butts and wads of chewing gum, but the weapon was gone and there were no witnesses. Two weeks passed. Then a juvenile probation officer named Laura Johnson called the police.
She asked if they had found a man without a penis. Johnson had heard a disturbing story from a teacher friend about a former student. That student had told her teacher that she was outside a strip club when a man came out with his pants down, and she had cut off his penis. The former student’s name was Kirsten Blaise Lobato.
Lobato was 18 years old, a meth user who had stripped for money and battled depression. Detectives traveled north to interview her at her home in Panaca, a tiny farming town about 200 miles from Las Vegas. Lobato waived her rights and agreed to talk. She told them she had been on a three-day meth binge and had parked her car in a Vegas parking lot one night when a man attacked her.
She described him as a giant. She said she had stabbed him in the groin. “What did you end up cutting? ” the lead detective asked.
“I cut his penis. I remember that. ”
“Do you remember how you cut it? ”
“I think I was trying to cut it off, but I don’t know if I actually did.
”
After the attack, she said, she had tossed her bloody clothes, driven away naked, and gotten rid of the knife so she couldn’t remember how. She was arrested for murder. But the investigation uncovered something else. A Las Vegas woman named Diane Parker told police she had recently been raped by a black man.
Shown a photo of Duran Bailey, she confirmed he was her attacker. The wounds Bailey had suffered were remarkably similar to the ones he had inflicted on Diane Parker. But authorities insisted they had enough evidence to prove Lobato was guilty. Lobato refused to take a plea deal.
She insisted she was innocent and wanted a jury trial. The case against her, police said, was her confession. She was on tape admitting she had cut a man’s penis when he tried to rape her. But her defense attorneys argued she had been talking about a different attack—an encounter that happened in a budget hotel miles from where Bailey’s body was found—and she had been nearly 200 miles away in her hometown at the time Bailey was killed.
There was no fingerprint, blood, or DNA evidence linking her to the crime scene. The defense also suggested Bailey’s rape of Diane Parker could have led to his murder, that his wounds were revenge wounds. The first trial ended in a guilty verdict for first-degree murder, and a judge sentenced Lobato to 40 to 100 years in prison. Her family and friends were stunned.
Two years later, the conviction was overturned. The judge had erred by not allowing the defense to attack the credibility of a jailhouse informant used by the prosecution. Lobato was retried in the fall of 2006, and this time the jury was less convinced. She was convicted again, but on a lesser charge: voluntary manslaughter.
She was sentenced to 13 to 45 years in prison. From behind bars, Lobato maintained her innocence. Her family hoped she would one day get another day in court. For 26-year-old Heather Strong, love was blind.
Despite years of tension, the young mother of two couldn’t seem to leave her on-and-off boyfriend, Joshua Fulgum, the father of her kids. Born and raised in Sturgis, Mississippi, she had met her “prince charming” as a teenager, and the two became parents almost immediately. In 2007, they moved to Marion County, Florida, with their two children. Heather’s family was worried.
Carolyn Strong said Fulgum was violent, and there had been allegations of abuse. But Heather kept forgiving him, saying, “I don’t think anybody else would have me. ” She stayed for the kids. Then Joshua began an affair with a local massage therapist named Amelia Carr.
Carr was about 25, twice married, with three children, and had been sexually abused as a child. In 2008, she and Joshua began seeing each other, and she became pregnant. Joshua proposed in November, but then dumped her and went back to Heather. Despite being devastated, Amelia remained friends with the couple and even babysat their kids.
In 2009, Joshua was arrested for threatening Heather with a shotgun. Amelia came to his defense, threatening Heather with a knife, saying, “If you testify against Joshua, I’m going to hurt you. ” The charges were dropped. Fulgum seemed turned on by Carr’s devotion, and he started dating her again.
Heather wanted nothing more to do with it, began seeing someone else, and was fighting for custody of her children. On February 15, 2009, the day after Valentine’s Day, Heather Strong went missing. It took almost two weeks before her cousin reported her missing. Following her disappearance, Joshua began using her credit cards.
He was immediately arrested for fraud. He initially denied it, but admitted it when investigators told him he was caught on video surveillance. He told police he had no idea where Heather was, and hinted that Amelia Carr might know something. Detectives brought Carr in for questioning, and she downplayed her relationship with Joshua.
Finally, on March 19, more than a month after Heather disappeared, Fulgum led authorities to where her body was buried, in a three-foot grave behind a storage container behind Amelia’s mother’s house. She was in a half-zipped suitcase. Wood was placed on top, and plastic was put over it to keep the flies off. An office chair with duct tape was also found.
A fingerprint on the tape was a match for Fulgum. During their interrogations, both Joshua and Amelia confessed and gave details on each other. Heather’s family was horrified to learn how she had died. They had lured her to the storage facility, taped her to a chair, and tried to break her neck.
When that didn’t work, they placed a plastic bag over her head and suffocated her. The two were both charged with kidnapping and capital first-degree murder. In March 2009, Carr gave birth to Fulgum’s child while in custody. All four of her children were put into foster care.
In December 2010, Carr took the stand in her own defense, pinning the murder squarely on Fulgum. The jury didn’t buy it. They voted to sentence her to death. In April 2012, Fulgum was finally tried.
He was convicted of first-degree murder and kidnapping and given two consecutive life sentences. It never mattered that Heather had tried to forgive him, that she had said nobody else would have her. She was gone, leaving behind two children, and the two people who took her life were now paying for it in very different ways.
