Many billboards outside Vidor, Texas
True story inspired Oscar-nominated film, but it’s all too real for dad, family
VIDOR — His story may have inspired an Oscars front-runner, but James Fulton is not planning on watching the Sunday night awards show.
He hasn’t seen the movie, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.” He didn’t know it was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including best picture.
And it doesn’t much matter to him if it wins any awards or not, unless it would help him — at last — to find justice in his daughter’s death.
“This is a bigger story than that,” the 87-year-old said in an interview Friday. “My story is.”
Fulton has lived every day for 27 years with the pain of his daughter’s death. He’s struggled for so long to keep it from constantly occupying his thoughts. He still wakes up in the middle of the night thinking about it. About how horrible it would be to be strangled. About how it feels like the local police will never do anything to arrest the alleged suspect.
Fulton for decades has put up billboards along Interstate 10 as it passes through the small city of Vidor, 100 miles east of Houston. They served one purpose: to call out the city’s police department, which Fulton believes let his daughter’s killer go free after she was found dead in 1991.
As he has told it, English writer Martin McDonagh saw a series of billboards just like these on a bus
while touring Texas and the South. He didn’t remember the details of where they were, but the emotional messages he glimpsed had stayed with him.
“Vidor P.D. does not want to solve this case,” one billboard still along the highway states, in black and white letters faded from the sun. “The Attorney General should investigate.”
Many years after seeing the signs, McDonagh wrote and directed his now famous film. Fulton says the creators of the movie, which is fiction, did not reach out to, or perhaps even know of, him. Hundreds of thousands have flocked to see the movie unaware Fulton existed.
The film is set in Missouri, features a mother grieving over her daughter’s killing and is in many plot twists absurd. But it grew from something very much true.
At 75 mph, the city of Vidor can pass by in a blur.
There are some 10,000 residents who call Vidor home. Located just east of Beaumont, not far from the Texas border with Louisiana, it has the swampy feeling of the state next door.
Vidor’s history, like that of its fictional counterpart Ebbing, is one rooted in racism. Today, its main intersection is a long row of fast-food restaurants, nothing like the quaint town center seen in the movie.
The median household income is $39,418, according to the U.S. Census. Ten percent of residents over age 25 reported having at least a college degree.
Fulton lives in a clean, tidy house with a lake behind it in the smaller Rose City, wedged between Beaumont and Vidor. He moved his family to the area in the year after his daughter Kathy was born. He’d been having trouble making ends meet in Mississippi. Here, a neighbor told him, he could get a job in the shipyard.
With hard work, Fulton did well for himself and his family. He got into real estate, buying up land along the highway. But in a day, everything changed.
It was 4 a.m. when Fulton got the call from the police. He doesn’t remember the day. He doesn’t remember Kathy’s age. All he remembers is going to see where her body was found in a car in a ditch, where the family would later install a metal cross with her name.
Kathy, who worked as a waitress, had been married for around a dozen years, her father said. She had five siblings and two children. Her niece recalled her as the fun aunt. Her father said she enjoyed life.
As Fulton recalls it, the police chief told him he suspected Kathy’s husband in the case. But within a week, Fulton said he believed the man’s parents were told by the police chief not to worry.
So Fulton will say again and again, with emotion caught in his throat, what he thinks he knows but cannot prove: “I believe the chief of police took a bribe, and he’s taken care of (her husband), and he’s not solving the murder.”
It’s why Fulton filed lawsuit after lawsuit. It’s why the signs went up, keeping the story alive.
The billboards were inspired by the Burma-Shave ads, which strung together a message on a series of rhyming billboards advertising the shaving cream in 1920s to 1960s. Everyone in town knew about them — and about the case.
One had the same words as those seen in the movie, Kathy’s sister Sherry Valentine recalled. Raped While Dying.
Valentine, 58, did see the film. It made her proud of her dad, of how so many people across the country were now wrestling with the question: What if it were me?
She hopes it will reinvigorate the case they have worked so hard themselves to investigate, constantly, on their own.
“I can’t believe our family has gone through this to the point where my dad had to do something like that,” she said, holding back tears, “but I’m so glad he did. I’m glad he had the foresight to do it. … You can’t just sit back and do nothing.”
Today, there is a new police chief in Vidor, Rod Carroll, who says he wants the case solved. He read the file after he took the job a year ago. He talked about it with the previous chief and with the district attorney.
He hasn’t seen the movie.
There were three murders in Vidor last year, an uncommonly high number. Those and Kathy’s are the only murder cases that remain open. Her case file sits in Carroll’s office, in a box behind his desk.
The billboards, Carroll says, don’t offend him. Kathy has never had justice, nor have her family members.
But Carroll says he needs a witness. There wasn’t enough evidence collected at the time to make the case. He still hopes someone will come forward.
“The movie brought this case back to life,” he said.
Fulton, too, will keep fighting. He wants the Texas Rangers to investigate. He wants it out of the hands of the city of Vidor.
He’s thinking of putting another sign up.
“This is my priority until my death, to try to get something done,” Fulton said. “It’s not over with yet. No. I’m fixing to do a whole lot more than what I’ve already done.”
The experience changed Fulton, said Jayme McGlothin, 36, his granddaughter. But he kept living for them — the kids, grandkids and greatgrandkids he has left.
They had Sunday dinners every week when his first wife was still alive. And Sunday lunches sometimes after church.
McGlothin, who works as an office manager, drives by the billboard every day.
“We’re a family that just wants justice, that’s all,” McGlothin said. “We want closure, especially for my grandpa.”
Fulton’s daughter Valentine hopes everyone will pray for her dad to find peace.
“Whatever that means, wherever that leads,” she said, “just pray that he finds peace.”
“This is all fixing to bust wide open. I just know it is.”