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Last updated on Tuesday, April 19, 2016
(PAOLI) - A Paoli man was sentenced to 28 years in prison after he admitted to killing his wife and burning her body.
Orange Circuit Judge Larry Blanton sentenced 50-year-old Jeffrey Fulton on Monday.
Fulton accepted a plea deal in March and admitted to killing his wife, 34-year-old Michelle Fulton, at the couple's home in 2014. Fulton pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of voluntary manslaughter, a Class A felony.
Fulton was arrested in the fall of 2014 and charged with his wife's murder after police found her remains in a wooded area of the couple's home on Valeene Road.
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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