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Last updated on Monday, March 14, 2016
(PAOLI) - A Paoli man pleaded guilty during his trial in Orange Circuit Court on Thursday afternoon.
50-year-old Jeffrey Fulton withdrew his not guilty murder plea and pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of voluntary manslaughter, a Class A felony.
Fulton was arrested in the fall of 2014 and charged with killing his 34-year-old wife, Michele.
Orange Circuit Court Judge Larry Blanton took the plea agreement under advisement pending a pre-sentence report that will be prepared by the Orange County Probation Department.
A sentencing date was not set.
Under the terms of the plea agreement, Fulton will be sentenced to 28 years with the Department of Correction but will receive credit for time already served.
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 heard from her since. But Michelle's cousin Margarita Weckman told police that 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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