BRITTNEY GREGORY AND MURDER SUSPECT JACK FULLER
Mom
recalls kindness to suspect
She recoils to think he is now accused of killing Brittney
Friday, July 23, 2004
BY MARY ANN SPOTO
Star-Ledger Staff
Brittney Gregory once helped save the life of the man who stands accused
of taking hers.
The Brick Township Memorial High School junior was visiting Jack Fuller's
daughter one night a couple of months ago when a taxicab pulled up in
front of the Fullers' Howell Township home, according to Brittney's mother,
Debra Gregory. Fuller was in the back seat of the cab, barely conscious
because of a drug overdose, Gregory said.
Brittney, 16, and Fuller's daughter, Cassie, 20, immediately called 911,
and Fuller was soon revived by the ambulance crew, she said.
The irony of that has gnawed at Brittney's mother since Fuller's arrest.
"How do you take the life of a person who saved your life?"
Debra Gregory asked during an interview yesterday at her Beachwood home.
"How do you do that?"
Fuller, a 38-year-old with a long rap sheet and a history of drug problems,
was charged Sunday with Brittney's murder. He remains at the Ocean County
Jail on $1 million bail.
Brittney's remains have not been found. Police continued to search wooded
areas in Howell, Brick and Lakewood yesterday.
New Jersey State Police crews spent about 45 minutes early in the afternoon
examining the ground in the back yard of the home where Fuller's friend,
Tom Long, lives. Long was reported to have been in a car with Fuller and
Brittney the night she disappeared. The search extended into a neighbor's
yard, too.
The charges against Fuller were the result of the cooperation of a confidential
informant, according to Brittney's mother and law enforcement sources.
The informant, a drug dealer, contacted authorities to say that Fuller
had approached him with a question about how to bury a body. Detectives
from the Ocean County Prosecutor's Office put a wire on the informant
and had him tape a conversation with Fuller, a law enforcement source
said.
Police told Brittney's mother that Fuller implicated himself in Brittney's
murder during that taped conversation, Debra Gregory said yesterday.
The family wants Fuller to tell authorities where he buried Brittney so
they can give her a proper funeral.
"It makes us hate him more the longer this goes on," Brittney's
sister Bryana Gregory said.
Brittney, who lived in Brick with her father Joe Dunn, was home by herself
on July 11, the night she disappeared.
She and her boyfriend, John Fitzgerald, had had a tiff during the day
about him not taking her to the beach, Debra Gregory said. Brittney badly
wanted to go see him.
The last time Gregory talked to her daughter was around 8:30 that night,
when Brittney called from home to ask for a ride to her boyfriend's house.
Brittney would not have called Jack Fuller to ask for a ride, but if he
had been in the area she might have been desperate enough to accept one
if he offered, according to her mother and her sister.
Fuller was well-known to Brittney and her family. He and Brittney's father
were friends, her mother said. Brittney's brother used to date Fuller's
daughter, and Brittney and the daughter remained close.
Gregory said she has run through the events of that evening in her mind
a thousand times since Brittney disappeared, trying to figure out what
might have happened.
"Nothing adds up," she said. "Nothing makes sense. I think
of all those theories, but nothing makes sense."
Her family imagines that whoever killed Brittney had his hands full. She
had two older brothers and two older sisters, after all, and had had her
share of sibling fights.
"She stood her ground until the end," Bryana said.
Debra Gregory remembered Brittney yesterday as "every mother's dream
of a 16-year-old girl."
She said her grades at Brick Memorial were so good that she was exempted
from many of her final exams. She was never a discipline problem, her
mother said. She never had to be told to do her homework or clean her
room, and she loved to read.
Brittney relished her role as the baby of the family, her mother said.
She was spoiled, to be sure, but not vain or arrogant.
She celebrated her 16th birthday in April by holding her mother to a promise
she had made to let her get her bellybutton pierced.
She idolized pop queen Britney Spears and had posters of her tacked up
in her bedroom.
She enjoyed cartoons, especially "SpongeBob SquarePants," and
she couldn't get enough of the TV shows about forensic science, a profession
she wanted to pursue. She and her mother used to tune in to the same shows
and then call each other to talk about them as they watched.
"She thought it was so cool they can tell how you died, when you
died ... She was so intrigued," her mother said. "And now there's
people out there like that looking for her." Staff writers Brian
Donohue and Tom Feeney contributed to this report.
A
menace's rise to murder charge
Accused of killing Brick girl, chronic crook was neighborhood scourge
Thursday, July 22, 2004
BY MARY ANN SPOTO AND TOM FEENEY
Star-Ledger Staff
Jack Fuller Jr.'s neighbors were glad to hear he's locked up once again.
They only wish the charge weren't the murder of Brittney Gregory.
Fuller, 38, the habitual criminal accused of killing the 16-year-old Brick
Township girl, has menaced the neighborhood around his Howell home for
most of his adult life. He has broken into cars, homes and garden sheds,
used and sold drugs, threatened a man with a baseball bat, scuffled with
police and lied to them about his identity after a drunken-driving arrest,
according to court records and interviews.
He has been arrested more than a dozen times in the past 10 years alone.
He has done time in a state prison on charges of theft and parole violations.
Many of his offenses went unreported because people were afraid of him,
neighbors said.
"When Jack Fuller is in jail, everybody around here wants to throw
a party -- they feel safe," said one neighbor, a 24-year-old delicatessen
worker who asked that her name be withheld. "When we hear he's out,
everybody knows to lock everything up."
If Ocean County prosecutors have their way, Fuller won't be out of jail
for a long, long time. They have charged him with Brittney's murder, and
he remains in the Ocean County Jail on $1 million bail.
Brittney, a junior at Brick Township Memorial High School, went missing
11 days ago from her family's home on Greenwood Loop Road in Brick. Her
family searched for her for more than a week, posting her picture on bulletin
boards and utility poles around Brick, Howell and Lakewood.
Fuller was arrested Sunday and charged with murder, though Brittney's
remains have not been recovered. Authorities have not said why they believe
she is dead or why they suspect Fuller.
Fuller was known to Brittney's family. His daughter was a friend of Brittney's
sister. One of Fuller's friends reportedly told police he saw Brittney
in Fuller's car the night she disappeared.
The search for Brittney's body continued for a fourth day yesterday as
police officers used search dogs and helicopters to scour the woods near
the border of Ocean and Monmouth counties, woods Fuller was known to frequent.
He often used a tent in those woods to stash stolen goods and to hide
from the police, neighbors said.
"It was pretty scary to know somebody was camping back there,"
said Iliana Montero, who bought a house across Western Drive from Fuller's
house six years ago.
Because of warnings about Fuller from the person who sold her the home,
she had a burglar alarm installed after she moved in, she said.
"We were told he did try to break in here before we bought the house,"
she said.
Fuller cut a peculiar figure in the neighborhood. The man with the shaved
head and the barbed-wire tattoo around his biceps was never known to work
an honest job, yet always seemed to be nattily dressed , often in an expensive
jogging suit and slip-on sneakers, usually with his baseball cap turned
sideways or backwards, said Ron Thompson, who lived around the corner
from Fuller on Sunset Drive for the past two years.
Sometimes Fuller would walk around the neighborhood, other times he would
ride a bike, Thompson said.
Thompson said people in the neighborhood assumed Fuller made his money
by selling drugs.
"I'm new here, and I knew about him as soon as I moved in,"
Thompson said.
There is plenty in the court records to support the neighbors' beliefs
about Fuller's involvement with drugs.
In fact, he is due to go on trial, along with two co-defendants, in Monmouth
County on Monday on charges he was found to be in possession of cocaine
when he was stopped by police in Asbury Park last October.
He was charged as far back as 1986 with trying to sell marijuana in Howell
Township. He was charged with possession of heroin in Point Pleasant in
1994, and Howell police charged him with using and being under the influence
of heroin after an overdose last year, according to court records.
An Ocean County judge ordered Fuller into drug rehab in 1994 after he
was arrested on a parole violation, but Fuller did not stick with the
program, court records show. A probation report in his file indicates
his attendance was spotty and that he had failed drug tests. He was eventually
kicked out of the program.
In a letter to the court from prison in 2000, he promised to try to stay
clean.
"My commitment is to become a productive and positive figure in my
community and to help others do the same, and of course to stay off drugs,"
he wrote to Superior Court Judge Edward Turnbach.
Aside from the drug offenses, most of the crimes on Fuller's rap sheet
are nonviolent property offenses.
Fuller and a friend named Tom were charged with breaking into a neighbor's
car last year and stealing wedding and engagement rings and a credit card,
according to court records and the alleged victim. They ran up $800 in
charges on the card and sold the rings at an Asbury Park pawnshop, according
to court papers.
The alleged victim, who asked that her name not be published, said the
two men were caught only because Fuller's friend used his real name for
the pawn shop transaction.
Fuller was not convicted of the offense, the woman said. She took two
days off work to testify against him, she said, but his trial was postponed
both times. She told the judge she couldn't afford to take a third day
off. The judge ordered Fuller to pay her for the time she had missed and
to return the stolen property, and the charges were dismissed, she said.
He also appeared in court last year on charges he removed the hinges from
the doors on a garden shed and stole a neighbor's moped. That charge,
too, was eventually dismissed, court records show.
"He's been a problem forever," said a neighbor who claims he
has had some power tools stolen by Fuller. "He's the scourge of the
neighborhood."
Not all of Fuller's offenses were nonviolent. He was indicted on a charge
of assaulting the police officer who had arrested him on the marijuana
charges in 1986. He also was sentenced to two years' probation in 1992
for threatening to harm a woman he had robbed, court records show.
And he appeared in Howell Municipal Court last year on charges he used
a baseball bat to smash a taillight out of a pickup truck and threatened
to use a gun to kill the driver, court records show. The alleged victim
in that case appears to have been a co-defendant in the 1986 marijuana
case, according to court records.
Neighbors said Fuller was immediately suspected whenever something was
stolen.
But even with his long criminal record and propensity for trouble, they
were shocked to learn when he was implicated in Brittney's murder.
Thompson, the neighbor who lives around the corner, said he didn't even
consider that possibility when he saw the police cars outside Fuller's
house last weekend.
"I thought it might be drugs," he said. "We would never
figure it would be something like murder." Staff writer Brian Donohue
contributed to this report.
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