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Last updated on Thursday, June 11, 2015
(PAOLI) - A psychologist has determined Jeffrey Fulton is competent to stand trial for murder.
According to court records the details of Fulton's psychology report are not available to the public.
A jury is scheduled to begin hearing the case on August 25 in Orange Circuit Court. Judge Larry Blanton will preside over the trial.
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 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 2014. Fulton told police that one of the couple's children had dropped his wife off at the Jasper Kmart on June 18, 2014 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 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, 2014 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 Jeffery and Mitchell had been fighting the day she went missing.
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.
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