10
TRENT SAT ONE EVENING, AFTER a long day’s work on other cases, on his back deck, drinking a beer, staring at an e-mail from Tracey Roberts, trying to figure out the best way to reply. It was mid-2008. He had just made contact with Tracey.
“Keep her talking, keep her thinking I am an idiot,” Trent recalled.
So Trent took a slug from his beer, hit reply, and sent Tracey a brief note, asking her for an address and phone number. This became the mantra Trent worked under from that day forward: keep Tracey engaged in dialogue and keep Tracey talking.
In Trent’s view, as he started corresponding with Tracey, and even later, after he talked to her family members, “The important thing I learned was to focus on the things they did not talk about—these were all things they could not defend.”
As he was communicating with Tracey and believed that either she or Michael Roberts was a murderer, the one nagging question Trent kept going back to as he and Ben reignited the case was “How does anybody get Dustin to do it—to write that journal?”
Trent called Ben one night, “Listen, I know you have the same problem I do with the journal . . . and we can take it to the weeds all day long and try to figure out how she got Dustin to write it, but the one thing we have to consider is, is John Pitman going to call up Dustin Wehde and ask him to become his assassin?”
Ben agreed. Keep the focus there.
Trent added: “But here’s the thing, Ben. How is John Pitman going to even know who Dustin Wehde is?”
In early 2011, as Ben and Trent focused on this question, Trent got into trouble with his boss for logging a total of sixteen hours on his cell phone in one month. All he and Ben did was talk on the phone about the case. During one of those calls, Trent said he had several e-mails he wanted Ben to take a look at—those exchanges between Trent and Tracey back in 2008, when Trent opened a dialogue between him and Tracey.
“What’s up?” Ben wondered.
“Just check your e-mail. Read those e-mails between me and Tracey.”
Trent still felt Ben needed more convincing.
There was a lot of information that Trent was forwarding. He wanted Ben to study it, take his time, and then they could have a conversation about it all. In reopening the investigation into Dustin’s death in 2008 with the focus on Tracey and/or Michael Roberts as the chief suspect(s) in a murder plot that felt so elaborate, so all-consuming, and so big, Trent decided to feed what he knew to his prosecutor in 2010 in small doses so Ben could wrap his mind around the entire case, piece by piece. Trent had been frustrated himself that others had not seen the depth of depravity in the case that he had uncovered, especially after beginning to talk to Tracey. He didn’t want to lose Ben, who was maybe Trent’s last hope to get this thing into a court of law.
One of the e-mails Trent forwarded to Ben from Tracey had been sent to Trent on January 8, 2009. Trent and Tracey had been in contact by then for about seven months. Tracey was replying to a question Trent had asked her after a meeting Trent had with Tracey and Bert the previous holiday, in late 2008, when Trent met them at an airport on Christmas Eve under the guise of Tracey clearing a few things up and giving Trent a few names and addresses and phone numbers. Trent wound up interviewing Bert and Tracey right there in the airport.
By 2011, with Trent and Ben hot on her trail, Tracey lived in Omaha, a straight shot south about two hours from Sac County. She was engaged to be married and now going by the name “Sophie Edwards.” As Ben and Trent had reopened the investigation, Tracey and Mike Roberts were at war, battling over custody of their two children. After becoming interested in the case in mid-2008, intrigued by all the unanswered questions and quite simply doing his job, Trent took a close look at the relationship between Michael and Tracey, with the focus on what had transpired in Tracey’s life since Dustin’s death, her divorce from Michael Roberts, and her move to Omaha. So much had happened before and after Dustin’s death, in order to understand why he was murdered, Trent believed he had to understand the complete history of Tracey’s adult life, and the dynamics of her life pre- and postmurder. So Trent encouraged Ben to take his time, read through the series of e-mails he had sent him, and come up with questions they could discuss. Trent wanted Ben on the same page.
In one e-mail Trent had sent to Tracey, he thanked Tracey for her time and “Bert’s over the holidays.” Trent was referring to that impromptu airport meeting. This was one of the ways Trent kept the door open—by popping random questions at Tracey and others involved in the case. Were the airport interview and the e-mails Trent’s Detective Columbo move? Perhaps. But more so, it was an essential tool in any good investigator’s kit: the spontaneous interview, visit, call, or, in this case, e-mail. You catch people off guard and they reveal things. If they’re lying, they have a hard time putting all the lies together and they make mistakes. Although Trent believed there was plenty enough for a prosecution back in 2001 and the prior regime missed an opportunity, he wasn’t satisfied with the answers the investigation had turned up in the beginning. Trent knew there was more to the case than had been uncovered by the local sheriff’s department, his DCI predecessors, and others.
“To get the right answers, you have to ask the right questions,” Trent explained.
Tracey was never one to dismiss a chance to vent, take on a challenge, pass up an opportunity to lodge accusations against someone, or smear Michael Roberts, number one on her current shit list.
“It was Michael Roberts, from day one, pointing a finger at John Pitman as the person responsible for hiring Dustin,” Anna Richter, Tracey’s mother, later told me during a phone interview.
If she was innocent, Trent considered, Tracey wouldn’t have any trouble answering any question within reason. Why would she?
Another important fact Trent mentioned in one of his first e-mails to Tracey in 2008 was how “upset” Tracey’s ex, Dr. Pitman, had been when Trent had called him before speaking with Tracey during that Christmas holiday. When calling Dr. Pitman, Trent explained, he hadn’t expected such resistance. This fell right into Tracey’s utter hatred for Pitman. Even though Tracey was always ready and willing to bash Michael Roberts, her most current ex-husband, just a mention of Dr. Pitman and Tracey was quick to launch into a diatribe and attack him and his credibility as well.
Ben sat at his desk and read through an e-mail Tracey had sent to Trent that March (2008). In it, she talked about how John Pitman was going through “another divorce” and it was “ugly.” Bert, who was almost eighteen years old by then (2008), had said, according to Tracey’s e-mail, that Mrs. Pitman 2 “must have something on John.” Tracey’s reasoning? She claimed Pitman’s second wife was “getting away with a lot of nonsense” and John “won’t challenge her.” Tracey went on to say Bert claimed Pitman’s soon-to-be-ex had “emptied all their accounts” and “ran up credit cards.” She also noted that Bert claimed the second wife took $300K to buy a “new townhome.”
None of which was true.
Carrying on, Tracey explained she wasn’t sure how much of the history Trent knew about her case, but Dennis Cessford was a “personal friend of Mona and Brett Wehde,” Dustin’s mother and father. That said, she warned Trent to be mindful and careful of this “fact.”
Trent knew she was trying to lead him down a trail.
After that, Tracey latched onto her current ex-husband, Michael, saying he had once been arrested for a domestic abuse allegation. She also maintained that the town of Early was so small, “everyone is related to everyone else,” they all went to school together, but she doubted “that more than a handful” of Early residents “have a college education.” She encouraged Trent to “go their [sic]” to Early and see for himself what she was talking about.
Incredible, Ben thought while reading. The way she tries to manipulate people into her way of thinking. Did she actually think Trent knew nothing about the town of Early?
Next, Tracey started in on Dustin. She made the unconfirmed, erroneous allega
tion that Dustin “was not straight” and she had heard through a friend that Cessford was wondering if Michael and Dustin “were having an affair,” adding: I don’t think it is kosher to be gay in a small town in Iowa.
Tracey said she was “happy” that her immediate family members were all still alive after the ordeal she had gone through, but that it was “really important” Trent not “give up on your search for the other man.” Tracey said she needed to know the “why” behind the home invasion and the second man was the only source for that answer. She ended the e-mail by wishing Trent a “lovely New Year.”
Ben read this e-mail and could not believe what, by his estimation, Tracey was doing. Was anything she told Trent true? Ben asked himself, referring to this first e-mail Tracey and Trent shared. “Not one thing that comes out of her mouth is true. Trent and I came up with the Tracey formula. Whatever she says is a lie and it’s a lie told for a specific reason. So plug that formula in, follow the bread crumbs, and she’s as transparent as the day is long.”
Another part of the formula Trent and Ben soon composed was that “anything [Tracey] accuses someone else of doing, she did it herself.”
There was one instance where Tracey, as Ben put it, “got caught by Dr. Pitman’s private investigators banging some steroid-freak bodybuilder in some sketchy hotel. When confronted, she said, ‘No, that was Dr. Pitman who was in the hotel with the bodybuilder. I have the receipt to the hotel to prove it.’”
Of course she had the receipt, Ben added, “because she was there!”
In another e-mail to Trent, dated January 9, 2009, Tracey talked about Dustin’s “mental-health issues,” before encouraging Trent once again not to “give up” looking for the second man. Then she referred back to the first interview she gave to Cessford—the one inside Loring Hospital on the night of the attack. She brought it up, for some reason. Tracey claimed there was an audiotape of the interview somewhere—which Ben Smith and Trent later said was a lie. There was never any tape. The interview was never recorded. And, according to them, Tracey knew this.
Tracey then accused Dustin of showing up at her door approximately one month before his death. According to Tracey, Dustin claimed he was on his way to a stag party in town and decided to stop by. She said she had no idea who he was when she opened the door—a statement that would be proven false later on.
“I’m Dustin Wehde,” he supposedly said after knocking on the door. “I was hoping I could talk to you.”
As Tracey stood by the door greeting this so-called stranger, she said Michael came to the door to see who it was. When he realized it was Dustin, “Mike chased him off the property and then scolded me for speaking to him.”
“Don’t you tell anyone about this,” Tracey said Michael warned her.
Tracey further told Trent in that January 9 e-mail that Mona Wehde had called her on the day of the attack. She explained the conversation.
“I’m calling on behalf of my assistant,” Tracey claimed Mona, a real estate agent in town, asked over the phone on December 13, 2001. “She was hoping you could give me the name of your handyman.”
Tracey explained why she was relaying this to Trent: I don’t think they ever interviewed the assistant.
While reading the e-mail, Ben went back to Tracey’s first interview at the hospital with Cessford, where she talked about this same phone call. On the third page of Cessford’s report of his bedside interview with Tracey, Tracey had indeed said Mona called the house on the day of the attack. Cessford wrote: She said they (Tracey and Mike) were looking at an investment house in Storm Lake . . . [and] Mona was faxing some documents related to that for her to look over. She said Mona’s secretary later called to ask if the fax came through.
Nothing about a handyman, Ben thought.
He made a note of the inconsistency. Ben now had a growing list of problems with Tracey’s various and varying stories. It appeared every time she talked about a particular event, the story of the night Dustin Wehde died changed in some way. One thing about the truth, Ben and Trent knew, it wasn’t hard to recall if you were being honest. Truth is inherent and absolute. If one is telling it, one doesn’t have to think about it.
Tracey sent Trent another e-mail on January 21, 2009. One of Trent’s hopes was that Tracey would mention the contents of the journal—because it had never been made public. As he read through this e-mail, Ben found it interesting. Not with regard to the journal, but Michael. Tracey broke down in detail who Michael was, his various characteristics and quirks, phone numbers and e-mail addresses where Michael could be reached, and on and on for four, single-spaced pages. Tracey trashed the guy on every level imaginable, from Michael being a “‘born again’ lunatic” to a “doctor shopper” to “charming in a superficial manner” to having a “pathetically high sex drive,” not to mention every flaw in between.
She called her ex-husband a “bully.”
“Snake-like.”
“Manipulative.”
“Impulsive.”
A “showoff.”
She claimed he viewed “life as a game.”
She even went so far as to write: Most dogs don’t like Mike.
Then came a description that stood out to Ben when he read it. Tracey said Mike had “very different types of handwriting” and it changed “with his mood.”
Why mention his handwriting? Was this in reference to the journal? Was Tracey trying to say something subliminally about Michael Roberts and that journal? Was she leaving bread crumbs?
The list was endless. Tracey Richter Pitman Roberts, who had gone back to using—among many other names—her maiden name, Richter, after her divorce from Michael, obviously hated this man with complete passion and wanted law enforcement to view him as a potential suspect. She was pointing a finger directly at Michael, without coming out and saying she believed he set the entire thing up.
Ben sat back after reading through Tracey’s tiring list.
“She is describing herself,” he said in his next phone call to Trent.
“Exactly!”
The next e-mail Ben read was dated February 6, 2009. Tracey began it by taking a poke at Michael. She called him “vindictive” and accused her ex of setting people up. Michael had been involved in information technology (IT) all his adult life. He ran companies and owned companies, even had Tracey (and, sometimes, Dustin Wehde) working for him out of an office in a house next door to their Early dream home. Among other services, Michael sold computer training. Tracey warned Trent that Mike could easily hack into her computers and maybe even the correspondence between them. Also, there was something going on with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Michael and his business, Tracey claimed. She talked about how she had been interviewed by several FBI agents over the years.
Then, surprisingly, she came out with it: Mike was willing to set up John Pitman for a crime he did not commit.... Thus, she surmised, if one believed that to be possible, it had to be easier to believe Michael had set up one of his employees—which was part of the FBI’s reason, according to Tracey, for contacting her.
Set up John Pitman? Ben asked himself.
She was trying to plant seeds.
After that, Tracey told Trent a story about how a conversation about the Tylenol murders came up after a news story while she and Michael were together. He had said that it “had to be the spouse of one of the victims.” She then explained how Michael had told her: [If you] wanted your spouse dead, poisen [sic] several bottles that you purchased with cash but secretly return them to the shelves. She thought his saying this was “creepy,” she wrote to Trent. She gave no context—which Ben and Trent read as Tracey, over a period of months, within her e-mails, arguing a case for Michael being the mastermind behind her attack.
“I was asking too many questions about her,” Trent analyzed later. “In all of these e-mails, she is simply trying to deflect the attention [from] her.”
This e-mail was, same as the previous, single-spaced and four pages
long. Tracey talked repeatedly about Michael and his potential involvement in various nefarious activities. By the time she got to the fifth paragraph, she had a theory about the crime.
I think Mike used Dustin, she wrote. Then she talked about how, after she had looked at Dustin’s mental-health records (giving no explanation as to how she could have acquired medical records in an open case), she was “confident” that nobody would ever “select Dustin as a partner in crime.” She described Dustin as the “perfect solution to Mike’s problem.”
One of the reasons Tracey attacked her ex in such an outward fashion was because she felt people were beginning to accuse her of setting up the crime. Tracey was feeling the pressure. It had been almost a year by then (from 2008 to 2009) since the case had been reopened and it was heating up. Tracey, in Trent and Ben’s view, needed to begin constructing a strategy to cover up the enormous amount of lies she had told.
You see, if you are in my shoes: accused of a crime you did not commit, you tend to get upset with the person doing the accusing, Tracey wrote.
Ben was overwhelmed by how much information Tracey gave away about herself in these e-mails. He studied each one, took careful notes, feeling, in his mind, that whatever she accused Michael of was perhaps something she had probably done herself.
Then, as he read through that same February 8, 2009, e-mail, something jumped out at the prosecutor—something that became a game changer for Ben Smith.
Tracey wrote to Trent, Once when Mike was working with Dustin and supposedly “encouraging” him to write, he had him write about being a hitman [sic].
Here was Tracey, Ben knew, giving law enforcement an answer to a problem they had with the journal: Michael Roberts had convinced Dustin to write it. Tracey was spoon-feeding Trent an answer to that nagging journal question. In turn, however, she was saying she knew the contents of the journal.
She went on to say that Michael and Dustin had been friends for some time before the attack. That Mike had actually taken Dustin to a gun range and to play paintball, adding sarcastically, Let’s encourage him to fantacize [sic] about killing for hire.
Beautifully Cruel Page 5