Something had seemed to be wrong with her mother, earlier on the day of the murder, Heidi also told the investigators. She said that she did not know what the problem might have been, though.
Heidi and her mother had gone shopping together on the afternoon of Monday, April 3, to Goody’s Family Clothing store, located in Rome, when Darlene had bought shoes, clothing, and the Rosetti viscose purse, which was, at that time, still missing. It was being sought as important evidence in the murder investigation.
Heidi mentioned Darlene’s ex-husband, Ronnie Deems, and claimed that his marriage to her mother was abusive. During the years they were married, Heidi said, he had pulled Darlene’s hair, beaten her, and attempted to run her over with his vehicle.
Heidi said Deems kept pictures of Darlene, Heidi, and Benji hanging on the walls of his home, but she said he had been told by the family not to come to Darlene’s funeral.
The phone conversations between Vernon and Barbara were also brought up by Heidi during the interview, with her confirming Benji’s statement that she did not like Vernon talking on the phone with Barbara. Heidi told the investigators about Barbara’s alleged incidents of vandalism and harassment that had been directed toward Darlene and Vernon, and she told them that her mother had been seeing Vernon while he and Barbara were separated.
As far as she knew, no one had ever confronted Barbara about threatening letters she had allegedly written to Darlene, Heidi said, or about the vandalism that had been done to Darlene’s vehicle.
The interviews with Darlene’s son and daughter had brought up several points that caught the interest of the investigators, like the allegations of physical abuse they had made against both Darlene’s former husbands. But they also had both mentioned Vernon’s ex-wife, Barbara Roberts, in a way that immediately placed her prominently on the list of persons of interest. When Vernon Roberts came in for his scheduled interview that morning at 11:45 A.M., there were several new lines of questioning that the investigators planned to pursue.
As for the “best friend” of Darlene’s who, Heidi had claimed, was very jealous of her mother, she and Darlene were, indeed, the best of friends, Vernon said. He said he had known the woman for many years, when he lived in Texas, where they had worked together at a Temple-Inland plant there.
Vernon said that Darlene had recently taken him to her father’s grave and told him, “That is where I want to be buried.” He also said that Darlene had told her sister about dreaming that she had been shot. He also told the officers that Benji Langford had broken into his sister Heidi’s house at some point, but his statement did not indicate the reason for the break-in or what connection, if any, he thought it might have to the case.
When the investigators brought up the subject of Barbara Roberts, Vernon’s first statement was that he did not see Barbara as being the one who killed Darlene. He then told the officers that Barbara and her boyfriend, Dr. Robert John Schiess III, had gone to Texas to attend her mother’s funeral.
Since his first statements made on the night of the murder, Vernon’s memory seemed to have improved somewhat concerning his activities after he left work on the day his wife was killed. A few minutes away from his home, he said, he had received a phone call from Barbara on his cell phone. He wasn’t getting good reception and couldn’t understand what she was saying, so he told her to call him back in around five minutes on the phone in his house. When he got home, the house phone was ringing, and it was Barbara, he said, who was calling him to give him some information on a place for one of his daughters to live. The girl was looking for a place in Georgia, but Vernon said he told Barbara it was too late in the evening, and not to worry about it. He’d take care of it himself the next day.
Barbara had told him on many occasions, Vernon said, that she was going to make arrangements for him to be her beneficiary when she died, and he told the investigators that she was not currently married. When they questioned him about the alleged vandalism and stalking incidents, he claimed that he and Darlene were not yet married when Barbara had come to the house dressed in a disguise to spy on them in the hot tub.
With both Benji and Heidi remarking on Vernon’s recent regularly occurring phone contact with Barbara during their interviews, and with both of them saying that Darlene’s family felt that it was “not a good idea,” the investigators began to focus more closely on Barbara Ann Roberts and her boyfriend, Dr. Robert “Bob” John Schiess III.
11
Barbara Ann Comeaux was born on April 18, 1956, as the fourth child of a middle-class strict Catholic family in an all-American small town in southeast Texas. There would be three more children born into the family after her, which made her the middle child of a group of seven brothers and sisters.
Barbara’s parents were said to be very well respected in the community, hardworking and very family-oriented, and they put a very high priority on providing their children with the best possible education that they could afford and building a strong foundation of faith in their lives. They raised their children according to their own values and standards. They expected that the children would maintain those values and standards when they reached adulthood, and, with the possible exception of Barbara, they were, for the most part, not disappointed.
In school Barbara was a high achiever who regularly made excellent grades and was very successful in many extracurricular activities. Learning came very easily to her, and she was talented in many areas, winning awards and contests frequently. Despite her accomplishments, however, she had very low self-esteem. In her elementary and middle-school pictures, there are few smiles to be seen on her solemn little face, despite her many achievements.
Barbara always loved animals and cherished all of her many childhood pets. And as she grew older, she was in demand as a much-requested babysitter, and she adored her little nieces and nephews, spoiling them at every opportunity. Barbara’s teachers and other adults liked her quite a lot, but she didn’t have much of a social life among her peers, having very few close friends apart from her sisters. She tended to have one-at-a-time “best friends” that she felt very possessive toward, which eventually became off-putting and caused the object of her attention to become uncomfortable and gradually begin to drift away.
Barbara didn’t feel that she was very attractive or interesting to boys during her high-school years, and consequently she spent much of her time with activities like choir, where she won many state awards and contests. Her family members said she had a beautiful singing voice, and she was a self-taught guitarist, who spent countless hours sitting in her bedroom, practicing and improving her playing skills.
Acknowledged by her siblings to be the brightest one of the family, Barbara graduated at the top of her class from the Bridge City High School in 1974; then she attended college at Lamar University, Beaumont, Texas, where she completed a three-year course of training as a radiology technician, finishing the course with honors. She went on to work as a radiology technician at Doctors Hospital in Groves, Texas; Mid-Jefferson Hospital in Nederland, Texas; as a physician’s assistant for Dr. Harvey Randolph in Groves, Texas, and as a technician at Bone Scanners Associates in Port Arthur, Texas.
After Barbara graduated from high school, she had worked and paid her own way through college. She had also paid for dance lessons, something she had always dreamed of and had wanted to take, but was an “extra” that the family budget just couldn’t stretch far enough to afford. By all accounts, she was an excellent dancer, performing in public recitals and programs, and as her self-confidence grew to match her other abilities, her appearance began to change. Gone were the heavy glasses and prominent overbite—stylish clothes, makeup, beautifully styled hair, contact lenses, and braces transformed Barbara into the girl that all the men wanted to dance with when she went back to her high-school class reunion.
But the attention of those boys who now noticed and admired her seemed to make Barbara uncomfortable; she remembered all too well how they had ignored her througho
ut her earlier years. Despite all the outward changes and the seeming increase in her self-confidence, Barbara was still plagued by the same old deep-seated insecurities. Her photos from that period of her life show an absolutely glamorous young woman who is smiling, but the smile still does not show in her eyes, despite her obvious beauty.
There had been clues that Barbara was gradually developing psychological problems for years, but around this time, her family began realizing that Barbara needed help—more help than they could give her. They urged her to talk to professionals and get the appropriate medical care, but she chose not to follow her family’s advice. They were disappointed with the choices she made for herself concerning her treatment. Barbara was beginning to slip closer and closer to the bipolar disorder that would come to rule her life for the next several decades.
Then Barbara met Vernon Roberts, and her world changed overnight.
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Vernon Roberts was a handsome, charming man who had been divorced only a short time. Like many divorced men, he had lost almost all of his assets in the process. He had no money, no reliable means of transportation, and his child support was due. Barbara was immediately smitten with Vernon and she befriended him, helping him with his bills and child-support payments. In the process, she fell hard for him. He became the center of her universe, the love of her life, and she lived her whole life around him, doing whatever she thought would please him. Barbara gladly turned over control of virtually every aspect of her life to Vernon, and they were together for a few years until, on August 31, 1984, in Port Arthur, Texas, they were married.
The marriage lasted for seventeen years, but it grew increasingly turbulent as time passed and Barbara’s psychological problems grew steadily worse. While she was still living in Texas, she began treatment for bipolar disorder. Later, though, she said that she’d had an extremely bad reaction to her medication and for that reason did not continue to take it. Several other drugs were prescribed by many other doctors for Barbara after that time, but none seemed to help without causing unpleasant side effects, which Barbara believed outweighed their benefits. She could not seem to find a long-term treatment that she was willing to continue.
Barbara had a history of various medical problems, along with her psychological difficulties, some quite serious. A series of surgeries, auto accidents, a hysterectomy, and many other problems plagued her for years and placed additional stress on her marriage. After Vernon and Barbara moved from Texas to Alabama, when Vernon was transferred to the Rome, Georgia, plant, Barbara’s problems increased. She sought treatment at a Georgia mental facility in November 1999 because she and Vernon were having problems. Vernon was thinking about a separation, he told her. She claimed he said that he couldn’t cope with her crying, depression, anxiety spells, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. She also felt that he was embarrassed over her increasing mental problems.
After this course of treatment at the mental facility, her medication was adjusted and she was discharged, but she voluntarily readmitted herself again, a short time later, for another effort to find the right balance of prescriptions. During this time, her medications were changed numerous times while she received therapy, but on one occasion her problems with Vernon continued to plague her, even as she remained in the treatment facility. She stopped cooperating with her doctors and voiced some suicidal feelings. She expressed a great deal of hostility toward Vernon, who claimed that he feared for his safety. With her agreement, Barbara was transferred to another facility with a higher level of security. After discharge from that institution, she continued to receive periodic counseling, and she and Vernon remained married ... at least, for the time being.
Because of her hysterectomy in the early 1990s, Barbara couldn’t have children, and her pets had become her child substitutes, especially her favorite dog, Sheba, whom she loved dearly. A relative said that if Barbara and Vernon were out at a restaurant and Vernon ordered a T-bone steak, the exact same order had to be placed to take home to Sheba. After Vernon and Barbara moved to Alabama, Barbara was even more attached to her dogs, because she felt more alone and isolated than she had in Texas. They were her only friends and confidantes, and they gave her constant and unconditional love and devotion. When she listed her favorite activity on a medical information form, she wrote, Playing with my dogs.
In September 2000, Barbara once again sought admission to the first treatment facility she had gone to for help. She had been the patient of one of the doctors there since January of that year. She wanted to be admitted, she said, because her beloved twelve-year-old dog, Sheba, had become ill.
Sheba had lost control of her hindquarters, having to drag herself around, with no control over her bladder or bowels. Both her veterinarian and Vernon were pressuring Barbara to put the elderly dog down, to put her out of her misery, since her illness was terminal and could not be treated. Barbara was heartbroken and couldn’t stand the thought of giving up her adored best friend, her beloved pet. Finally, when Vernon was going out of town on a two-week business trip, he issued the ultimatum: Sheba would be euthanized before he returned, or else.
Accompanied by one of her therapists, Barbara took Sheba to the veterinarian on September 27, and Barbara stayed with the dog while Sheba was put to sleep. She then went straight to the treatment facility, tearful and afraid to go home by herself for fear of losing control of her impulses. She felt, she said, as if she had lost a child. After a year’s time, Vernon was still talking divorce, leaving her living every day in a continual state of apprehension. She still loved him, she said, and wanted to continue the marriage, but she said she found it very demoralizing to sit at home, alone, with only the dogs for company. She and Vernon had been happily married, she said, until he was promoted and became a manager at Temple-Inland; then he became very controlling and demanding. She said he liked to “manage” her, as well as manage his employees. He was also ashamed of her, she said, for having problems with depression and for her admission to treatment facilities.
Barbara had become very dependent on Vernon, despite his desire to end the marriage, and she had no social, spiritual, or family support. Her family was far away, she had few friends to confide in, and she had not gone to church regularly, as she had done earlier in life. She felt helpless, hopeless, and worthless, but she gradually became stabilized and was discharged from the facility on October 5, 2000, in a somewhat better state of mind. She had discussed the possibility of moving back to Texas to be nearer to her family, talked about resuming the church attendance, which she had missed, and said that she planned to continue with her therapy.
In February 2001, after endless months of constant threats of separation and ending their marriage, Vernon and Barbara Roberts were divorced.
13
Barbara met Dr. Robert John Schiess III in February 2004 on an Internet dating site called Kiss.com, where they both had pages posted. They began an online correspondence until they arranged to meet in person a few days later, and subsequently began dating.
Schiess was a successful neurosurgeon, one of a family that included several generations of medical doctors and surgeons, and aside from that, he was independently wealthy, a millionaire by all accounts. He attended Tulane University and the University of Florida, then attended graduate school at Wake Forest University’s Bowman Gray School of Medicine in 1978, the same medical school his father had graduated from in 1954. Schiess completed his internship in general surgery at the University of Tennessee’s Center for the Health Sciences, City of Memphis Hospital, in 1977 and 1978. His residency was spent at the Baptist Hospital in Memphis, where he was a junior resident in neurosurgery, and at Bowman Gray School of Medicine, where he had a neurological clerkship in 1981. In 1982, he was chief resident of neurosurgery at Baptist Hospital; in 1983, he was chief resident of neurosurgery at Methodist Hospital; and in 1984, he was a senior neurovascular-neurosurgical resident at Le Bonheur Hospital.
During the course of his very distinguishe
d career, Schiess had participated in many research projects, presentations, and professional publications, and had attended quite a large number of scientific meetings and conferences around the country. He had also had scholarly articles published in the Neurosurgery Online Internet magazine of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. His private practices in Atlanta, North Carolina, and Georgia had been very successful, and he was acknowledged to be one of the most knowledgeable and highly respected physicians in his field.
All things considered, Barbara was tremendously impressed by the man and very flattered by his attention, and she quickly established a relationship with the wealthy, intelligent doctor.
During that time, Barbara was attending Coosa Valley Technical College to get her degree in mammography. She lived in Rome; Schiess lived in Conyers. They both occasionally stayed at one another’s homes. “The whole time I was in college, I’d go back and forth,” Barbara said.
After they were together, Barbara had the opportunity to meet Schiess’s parents and stepmother, his three sisters, and his son and daughter. Schiess also had accompanied Barbara on a few occasions when she visited with her family in Texas.
Schiess had been a practicing neurosurgeon up until a serious auto accident he and Barbara had on May 26, 2004, prevented him from being able to work; he had set up his neurosurgery practice and rented an office in Conyers, Georgia, and was still practicing in his office and making rounds at his affiliated hospitals at the time he and Barbara first met. Schiess was very generous with his new lady friend, and set up a checking account for Barbara to use, depositing funds in it as she needed. After their accident, he helped Barbara pay her medical expenses.
The accident—the worst traffic accident of the 2004 Memorial Day weekend—had taken place in Gwinnett County, Georgia, and Schiess was driving at the time of the crash. He and Barbara were returning from the hospital, where Schiess had completed making his rounds for the evening. Barbara had been driving up until around five minutes before the crash, since Schiess was dictating his medical reports from the hospital rounds. As it became darker, Barbara could not see as well as she was comfortable with; so they stopped and changed drivers. Then, within minutes, their trip home came to an abrupt and violent halt.
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