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Last updated on Monday, October 6, 2014
(PAOLI) - Police say 49-year-old Jeffrey Fulton hit his wife Michelle in the head with a frying pan, killed her and then attempted to burn her body.
Fulton was arrested last week and charged with his wife's murder after police found her remains in a wooded area of the couple's home on Valeene Road. He is being held in the Orange County Jail on a $1 million bond.
Michelle Fulton had been missing since June.
Fulton told police that one of the couple's children had dropped his wife off at the Jasper Kmart on June 18 and he hadn't hear from her since.
But Michelle's cousin Margarita Weckman told police she feared Fulton had harmed Michelle.
Orange County police and Indiana State Police detectives spoke with Fulton several times and he stuck to the story that Michelle had been dropped of at the Jasper Kmart and he had not heard from her since.
But officers then uncovered text messages from the couple's children who had since been placed in foster care.
In one of those text messages Fulton says, "if they prove the horrible thing that happened that (the child) would not see him for a long time."
Police then obtained a search warrant for the children's cell phone and discovered other messages warning the children not to tell authorities "anything about anything."
Then on September 24, police received a call from one of the children's foster parents saying the child wanted to speak to police.
The child told police that the story Fulton was telling police was a lie and that on June 18th Jeffery and Mitchell had been fighting before the child left for school.
According to a probable cause affidavit, the child had received a call while at school and was told to go to the Orange County Courthouse later that day in regard to a custody hearing. The child rode home with Jeffrey after the hearing. Michelle did not appear at the hearing, nor was she home after the hearing.
When the child asked where their mother was Fulton refused to answer.
When the child returned home they noticed the kitchen floor had been mopped and the house smelled like Pine Sol. The child told police this was unusual because the floor had not been cleaned since Michelle had disappeared.
Last Wednesday, police obtained a search warrant to search the Fulton home and grounds. In a bedroom, police found a letter addressed to one of the children that had information about digging up the child's mother's body and about him being sent to prison.
While searching the grounds, officers located human bones in a burn pit in the backyard and bones in an overgrown field behind the fire pit.
Anthropologists were called to the scene and determined the bones were a human wrist and foot.
Police also spoke to one of the couple's children on Wednesday, who told police that Fulton had admitted to hitting their mother in the head with a frying pan and that the child believed Fulton had burned their mother's body in a large fire he had built near their pond. Another child told also told police that after the fire they had seen Fulton coming from the field carrying a shovel.
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