Trent and Ben knew Mary Higgins was a powerful witness.
“What do you think happened?” Trent asked Mary, with a feeling that perhaps now, all these years later, she had a different outlook.
“I think Tracey planned the incident,” Mary explained to Trent, adding how she remembered Tracey talking about Mona Wehde in those days before the incident. “She said Mona had broken into her office to steal divorce documents relating to Tracey and Dr. Pitman. She also claimed Michael caught Mona with the documents once. I guess Tracey was trying to blame Mona for the journal by saying Mona broke into her office.”
Mary wasn’t finished, however.
“What is it?” Trent asked. He couldn’t help but wonder if Tracey had spent a long time thinking about this crime and planning it.
Mary seemed a bit subdued. “She . . . she told me she stood over Dustin Wehde and shot him in the head until he stopped moving.”
This was quite the contrast to the terrified housewife shooting haphazardly and not remembering how many shots she’d fired.
Mary further explained that Tracey had said Dustin was at the house earlier that same day asking if he could make copies of work papers for her. “He had made copies for us in the past,” Tracey said, according to Mary. “I told him there weren’t any copies to make and he asked if he could mow our lawn.”
The problem Mary had with this statement was that grass doesn’t grow in December.
“I was over to the house right after,” Mary told Trent. “She had me come over to get a cheesecake out of her fridge.” As they were walking into the house, Mary recalled, she noticed something on one of the stairs that “looked like hamburger.” So she asked Tracey about it.
“Oh, that’s Dustin’s brain matter,” Tracey flippantly said.
As Trent and Mary talked, Mary brought up Bert. She explained how she would drop Bert off at the house nearly every day after school. “And he always used the ‘doggie door’”—the small opening in the bottom portion of the back door into the house the dog used to go in and out on his own—“since the door was always locked.... She physically abused Bert. She’s a horrible mother and treated Bert like shit. Bert, I have come to realize, was raised by a wolf and he was bred to lie.”
One time, Tracey showed up at Mary’s house, this after Tracey’s divorce from Michael. She had a new boyfriend. She stopped by to explain something: “I want you to call me Sophie from now on. And tell my boyfriend if you ever meet him that I have only two children, Bert and [Cassie].”
“She was with me one day,” Mary said near the end of her interview with Trent and Ben, “and asked me to look at a ‘kinky’ website with her. She also said, for some reason, the second man ‘took a poop’ in her toilet” before he left the house.
After Mary left, Trent sat back and took a deep breath. Then looked at Ben: “You think you got enough now?”
21
IN APRIL, WHILE AT MORNING mass, Ben sat by himself in one of the back pews and thought about where he was with the case. Having Mary Higgins come forward was significant. Ben would wake up and feel as determined as ever to take Tracey down. Yet, in the next moment, anxiety would grip him and he’d decide he couldn’t go through with it. Not enough resources. Not enough experience. Not even a year in office as prosecutor. It had all been such a merry-go-round—one Ben Smith knew he needed to jump off and make a firm decision.
As the first reading of the daily Mass began, Ben settled into the peaceful appreciation of Christian scripture. How comforting it could be on some days. This morning’s reading was from Jeremiah 20: 10–13:
. . . For I hear many whispering. Terror is on every side! Denounce him! Let us denounce him, say all my familiar friends, watching for my fall. Perhaps he will be deceived, [and] then we can overcome him, and take our revenge on him. . . .
Sometimes the readings made perfect sense. Other times the words sounded like religious mumbo jumbo; archaic ramblings written by white-haired men from an age no one could relate to today. What did it all mean, really, in the scope of a modern life, when people were more worried about their iPhones being fully charged and who had texted than they were the bigger questions of the universe? Ben continued to listen as the reader delivered the words:
But the LORD is with me as a dread warrior; therefore my persecutors will stumble, they will not overcome me.
That passage got Ben’s attention. This was about good versus evil, he felt. In his opinion, a woman had gotten away with murder. How could he, as the prosecutor of the county, the justice seeker, allow that to occur? How could he allow her to get away with killing an innocent man?
They will be greatly shamed, for they will not succeed. Their eternal dishonor will never be forgotten. Lord of hosts, who triest the righteous, who seest the heart and the mind, let me see thy vengeance upon them, for to thee have I committed my case.
Ben looked up: “Case?”
The reader quickly corrected herself: “Oh, I’m sorry, I mean ‘cause.’”
Thus, inside the church while at daily Mass, Ben had heard the answer he had been searching for all along. It was a resounding moment, a turning point. He would stop questioning what he had to do.
The final words of the first reading, in fact, solidified everything:
Sing to the Lord; praise the Lord—for he has delivered the life of the needy from the hand of evildoers.
22
IF THE INVESTIGATION COULD NOT become any more peculiar, Tracey Roberts—i.e., Sophie Edwards—called the FBI’s Omaha office one afternoon and asked to speak to an agent. She claimed to have some rather shocking news about Michael Roberts.
“My ex-husband,” Tracey told an agent, “is working with Julian Assange.”
A computer whiz programmer, Assange cofounded the popular website WikiLeaks, and became known as a public enemy and expert hacker. Some called the guy a hero, while others deplored him as a traitor and charlatan posting government secrets. Assange became even more well-known in 2010 after he published hundreds of thousands of documents from the U.S. military and U.S. government leaked to him by Bradley “Chelsea” Manning, an American soldier who was court-martialed and convicted of violations within the Espionage Act, among other serious offenses. Assange was also accused of two sexual assaults—resulting in four criminal charges—in Sweden (which were later dropped). Facing prosecution there, he emigrated to London, England, seeking out the Ecuador Embassy, where he was granted political asylum. Assange remains there to this day. Assange’s roots, however, are in Australia, his native country.
Tracey claimed she found a shipping label receipt addressed to Assange that her ex-husband, also a native Aussie, had filled out.
The FBI said it wanted to see it.
“Later, it was proven that the label was falsified,” Ben Smith explained.
“Tracey was trying to divert attention from her, and I think she was also fishing to see where she stood with law enforcement,” Trent later observed, referring specifically to the Julian Assange nonsense and Tracey calling into the FBI. “Of course, at the time of this statement, Tracey was so paranoid she was doing countersurveillance and putting locks on closet doors.”
Nonetheless, word had reached the FBI in Omaha that Sac County prosecutor Ben Smith and DCI SA Trent Vileta were investigating Tracey, and the agent who had spoken to Tracey offered the FBI’s help. After all, Tracey had come to them. She was once again placing herself into the investigation. Trent and Ben believed it was all part of Tracey’s master plan, trying to point the investigation toward Michael as the mastermind.
In early April, not long after hearing that “message” during morning Mass, Ben took a trip to his grandfather’s farmhouse in Nebraska for a week’s vacation. He wanted to clear his head, visit with his grandfather, and work on the case against Tracey “in peace,” as he put it. Ben needed to dedicate his undivided attention to the case without interruption.
While at his grandfather’s farm, Ben took a call on his cell phone
: “Special Agent Jonathan Robitaille.”
“Yeah, how can I help?” Ben asked.
“I heard you’re working on a case regarding Tracey Roberts.”
“Yes, yes, I am. . . .”
The agent explained about the Julian Assange postal receipt call and the subsequent interview he conducted with Tracey over the phone.
Ben found this exciting. It seemed Tracey was trying to cover her tracks, backpedal, and come up with stories to perhaps cover up lies. The fact that she was talking, even offering information without being asked, Ben knew, meant she was feeling the pressure and knew they were not letting the case go.
They devised a plan for Agent Robitaille to call Tracey and get her talking—but this time, the agent would steer Tracey away from her wacky, unfounded Julian Assange accusations and attack of Michael Roberts and try to get her to talk, specifically, Ben suggested, “about the notebook.”
Ben needed to figure out this one aspect of the Dustin Wehde/Michael and Tracey Roberts narrative: how in the hell had Dustin Wehde been convinced to write that journal?
Tracey lived in Omaha with her fiancé. To him and everyone else who knew her there, she was Sophie Edwards. When she called the FBI, however, she was Tracey Roberts. SA Robitaille called her at her home on June 7, 2011, after some time spent investigating her life and talking more with Ben and DCI. As a follow-up to their previous conversations about Assange and Michael Roberts, Robitaille asked Tracey to talk about her life with Michael in general; it was a good way to get her heading down a negative road. She’d tear into the guy, for sure. Talking about Michael would have to, the agent understood, at some point include the Dustin Wehde incident, which might lead to the journal.
Sure enough, just the mention of Michael’s name got Tracey going. She ripped into the guy, calling him an abuser, a guy who avoided tax liabilities by routinely changing the name of his computer company, among other disparaging behaviors.
“Dustin Wehde was a friend of Michael’s,” Tracey explained. “I rarely spoke to Dustin. But I would see Michael talking to him all the time. Michael would reload bullets into his guns and take Dustin to the shooting range. He took him to play paintball. . . . I didn’t even know it was Dustin Wehde I had killed in my house until he was later identified.”
Once she got started, it was hard for Tracey to stop.
“Look,” she said at one point, “Trent Vileta asked me several times if my ex-husband, Dr. John Pitman, could have been responsible for the attack . . . and the way he asked me made me believe that somehow he was involved. I also found out that he (Pitman) had conversations with Mona Wehde. Ben Smith was Mona’s and John’s attorney and that’s how they all met.”
Incredible accusations.
Tracey went on to say that because Mona was a real estate agent, John Pitman was likely going through her to buy some land in and around Early, Iowa.
It was ridiculous.
Then the journal came up. Tracey referenced any talk about it by introducing Mary Higgins into the conversation. She said Mary had a friend who knew the pathologist in Dustin’s case.
“Deeper and deeper,” Trent later remarked. “That’s what she does. Every time she opens her mouth and talks about the case, the story becomes more and more elaborate.”
The only reason she likely spoke to the FBI was to get this Mary Higgins narrative into the investigation—because Tracey, one law enforcement source said, probably somehow found out that Mary was talking to Ben and Trent.
“Journal?” SA Jonathan Robitaille asked after Tracey brought it up.
“Yeah. A diary or journal, whatever you call it. Mary Higgins said somebody involved in the investigation told her that the police found a journal. That diary or journal contained personal information, I guess, about me. . . . I wasn’t told where police found the journal. . . .”
All of this was in total contrast to what Tracey had told Mary Higgins in those days after returning from Australia.
What was important to Ben and Trent was that they had gone through all of the documents from the civil trial, the custody cases, divorces, insurance depositions, and all of the “discovery” material that might have ever been turned over to Tracey’s attorneys. Nowhere in any of that paperwork was a journal or diary ever mentioned. This was, since the day of the incident, law enforcement information in an open, unsolved case. Still, Tracey had knowledge of the journal and its contents. She needed to come up with a way to explain that.
Enter the FBI and her call.
Banging on and on, Tracey refocused back on Michael. She told the special agent she believed it was Michael who set up the attack, not John Pitman.
“I find it odd that only an old computer was stolen from the house during the attack,” Tracey said. “We had tens of thousands of dollars in a safe, I wore an expensive ring, and those items were not touched. Michael put Dustin up to it. He had a two-million-dollar life insurance policy on me!”
She claimed not to have “remembered most of the details of shooting Dustin. . . .”
Since they were on the phone, the interview was kept brief. Near the end, Tracey said, “To this day, I cannot wear panty hose or smell leather coats because I was bound by panty hose, and Dustin Wehde wore a leather coat during the attack.”
“She’s bound by panty hose,” Trent commented later, “yet she manages to get off eleven shots, with two weapons, nine of those shots hit Dustin Wehde, several in the back of his head.”
Lastly she told the agent that she and Michael had a dog, a Rottweiler, and Michael knew the dog would protect her. However, the dog became ill just before the attack; and then after the attack, Michael took it to the vet, where he put it to sleep without telling anybody until it was over.
“It made me suspicious that he was trying to get rid of the dog to prevent the dog from protecting me from a future attack.”
SA Robitaille said he’d take her information and look into it. Someone from the FBI would be in touch.
23
AFTER TALKING WITH THE FBI, Ben called Trent and discussed the situation.
“Oh, Tracey,” Trent told Ben, “you just committed a colossal error.”
Ben laughed—one of the few times, he later said, he felt compelled to smile during the entire march to arrest Tracey.
For Trent, interviewing Mary Higgins had been what he called the “final piece” of this complex puzzle, some ten years in the making—twenty if you include the motive and Tracey and John Pitman’s marriage.
“For a while, I had been arguing that number one, three shots to the back of [Dustin’s] head was outrageous,” Trent recalled. “Number two, her story was outrageous. Three, her e-mails to me showed her knowledge of the content of the notebook/journal. Four, Bert’s stories were outrageously inconsistent, to put it kindly. Five, her past behavior outlined her motive.”
Over the course of his investigation, Trent had picked up the journal and put it down. There was an answer in that journal somewhere, Trent knew. One day, while studying all the e-mails Tracey had sent him over the years, an e-mail from December 29, 2008, stood out. This e-mail had been sent just days after Trent met Tracey and Bert at the airport. She was off her game, running, you could say, by then. In the e-mail, after Tracey gave Trent several of Dr. Pitman’s contact numbers, she talked about him. She wrote how “very controlling” Pitman was, how he “enjoys playing mind games,” how he “majored in psychology” and had wanted “to be a psychiatrist but his parents wouldn’t allow it.” She claimed he had been “forced into surgery” study and even called him a “narcissist.”
This sounded familiar to Trent. He couldn’t place it at first. But then it hit him. He went to the journal Dustin had supposedly written on his own—specifically one paragraph:
. . . wanted 2 be a shrink, family disapproved . . . family wished J.P. to follow in his fathers footsteps & take over fathers practice . . .
“In my mind, this was an admission that she authored the journal,” Trent explained.
“I did an experiment with friends asking them to describe people we knew. We either liked or disliked the person, but that was about all we had in common in describing them. For the most part, our perceptions of personality were radically different. But here you have Tracey and Dustin describing Dr. Pitman not only the same way, but with the same damn words.”
It was an impossible coincidence.
There was something else here for Trent. As a cop who had testified in dozens of cases, investigated scores of murders, rapes, burglaries, prostitution rings, and more, he had spent a considerable amount of time inside a courtroom. He had confidence in the system.
“I also had more faith injuries than most. I can’t remember ever having a bad jury and have come to believe that cliché that ‘all juries are dumb’ is fiction.”
With the FBI now involved, Ben could utilize that vast and important resource and maybe wind up with the remainder of what he needed to complete an arrest warrant. Ben and Trent spoke to the FBI and it was decided the Omaha office would conduct a second interview with Tracey. See what else agents could come up with.
SA Robitaille met with Tracey and was able to get yet another narrative of the attack from her. This time, she placed the entire onus on Michael; he was now the cause of all her troubles in life and she believed it was Michael who “sent Dustin . . . and another unknown male to her house while he (Michael) was on his business trip to kill her.”
Now Tracey had a different opinion of John Pitman. She told Robitaille she did not think John Pitman “is involved in the home invasion. . . .” She said Pitman “has many problems . . . but is a nonconfrontational kind of person and would not be involved in a plan to kill her. . . .”
There was plenty more to the interview, but all Ben needed was there in the few details about the attack Tracey had contradicted in previous statements. The facts should never change, Ben knew. But here was Tracey, ever so slightly, letting it slip that she had left things out and changed some of the attack narrative.
Beautifully Cruel Page 9