Trent knew he and Ben were dealing with a pathological liar, career criminal, perhaps even a psychopath capable of anything. Tracey had so many secrets and so many different niches of her life that needed looking into, they wondered what else they were going to find.
“This wasn’t a stone-cold whodunit,” Ben said. “The number and placement of the shots by themselves should have resulted in her immediate arrest—but we wound up getting the job done and, wow, what we found out about her history once we started looking!”
“Let’s dig into it all,” Trent said to Ben as they prepared to build a case against Tracey for murder, knowing full well she was going to trial.
“Yes. All of it.”
So now it was time to find out who Tracey Richter Pitman Roberts—aka Sophie Edwards—was, and what other crimes she had committed. The questions Ben had to contend with ran the spectrum: from Tracey’s childhood to her marriage to John Pitman and how she finally came to live, of all places, in Early, Iowa. Was moving to Early a premeditated plan on Tracey’s part to find a well-intentioned, young, and naïve kid to use as a pawn for a plot to take down John Pitman? Did Dustin Wehde have the unlucky misfortune of being a casualty in Tracey’s elaborate, psychotic, master plan to destroy John Pitman first and then focus on Michael Roberts?
A look into Tracey’s life and background would produce the most incredible results—crimes and behaviors that even Trent and Ben could not fathom.
For Mona Wehde, Dustin’s heartbroken mother, Tracey’s arrest on murder charges was welcoming. Mona was happy something was finally being done in her son’s case. Dustin, who she believed had been murdered from day one, was going to get his day in court. Still, Mona had to contend with the fact that in her opinion Tracey had not only killed her son, but someone else Mona was close to.
If true, that’s two deaths.
Thus, how many additional lives had Tracey Richter destroyed?
PART 2
THE THIRD MAN
29
IT WAS CHRISTMAS MORNING, 1984. Dustin Wehde was just a little over two years old. His all-time favorite toy was a Transformer. Mona and Brett Wehde had purchased for their son the largest, most complicated Transformer they could find at the toy store. Yet they were kicking themselves now, rubbing sleep from their eyes, not even an entire morning cup of coffee down the hatch, after Dustin opened the present to screams of joy and jumping around the living room. As Brett Wehde looked at the directions to put the toy together, he figured he’d need a master’s degree in engineering to figure it out.
“Good luck,” Mona said to her husband. They shared a pleasant laugh.
Brett opened up the booklet and began reading.
But where was Dustin? It was quiet in the house. He’d stopped celebrating and found himself a corner of the room.
Mona walked over. “What are you doing, honey?” She knelt down.
“Look,” Dustin said.
To Mona’s shock, Dustin had the Transformer put together—every last piece of it in its proper place.
“People called my son slow and a special-needs child,” Mona later told me, her voice cracking, “but he was not. He was just special.”
Odebolt, Iowa, where the Wehde family lived back then, was known for its sprawling soybean crops and cornfields amid Sac County, Iowa’s rural northwest acreage. At one time, Odebolt had the distinction of being the “Popcorn Capital of the World.” At about one thousand residents, it was nearly double the population of Early, where the Wehde family wound up in the years to come.
For the Wehdes, moving to Early was more of a convenience for Brett and Mona, who actually met on a farm elevator, slugging grain together. Brett, twelve years older than Mona, had grown up in Early, and became a maintenance mechanic at a local Storm Lake manufacturing plant. Mona, a popular, local real-estate agent, Brett, Dustin, and Dustin’s two sisters lived on a very homey, rural street, Linden Lane, in Early, in a cozy, nondescript, ranch-style home. It was the perfect size for this tight-knit family of Midwesterners.
Dustin grew into being a quiet kid. He didn’t much like to share with his parents what was going on at school or in the neighborhood. How he was feeling on a particular day was not what Dustin wanted to talk about—neither in therapy nor at home around the dinner table. Probably didn’t want to upset anyone in the house. Dustin kept to himself. Didn’t keep many friends and never dated.
“When he was sixteen,” Mona explained to me, “I was finally told that Dustin was labeled ‘the freak boy’ at school.”
That hurt.
It was 1997 then and Mona realized that her kid was being bullied at school—though at the time, she said, bullying wasn’t the issue it is today.
Mona explained that the problem with calling Dustin “special needs” was that “I took him to one hundred different doctors and not one of them would label him in the same way.”
It was frustrating. No one could figure the kid out.
“Two or three of them might have had the same label, but Dustin had over twenty labels. I was, like, you are all full of it.”
Special needs wasn’t a fair assessment, Mona added, “because Dustin was so damn smart. He was so, so smart! He was a nerd.”
One of the issues Dustin had in school was that of being bored with the curriculum because it felt so easy to him.
“He wouldn’t function for people, he wouldn’t work, he wouldn’t do his homework—so he’d get a D-minus on his report card, but he would ace all the tests on the subject. He just refused to do daily work.”
In the third grade, Dustin took a test the teachers did not want to call an IQ test, Mona recalled, but placed it more as an “evaluation.”
“And they told me Dustin had the capabilities of an eleventh grader,” Mona said.
Because he was so smart, Mona insisted, Dustin’s intelligence branded him as “weird” and “strange” and abnormal. At home, it was no different. “Dustin,” Mona would tell him, “unload the dishwasher for me.”
A few days would go by and he wouldn’t do it.
“Dustin, why won’t you do this?”
He’d snap at his mother. Get angry and walk out of the room, sometimes leave the house.
Dustin’s dream was to go to Iowa State University and study computer science.
“He was a computer geek. He wanted to play computer games, test them out, and get all the quirks out of them. That would have been his ultimate dream job.”
To those who didn’t know him, they branded Dustin’s not wanting to cooperate with people as a bit of antisocial anxiety disorder. In reality, it was simply Dustin being bored—his mind worked on a much larger, more detailed scale, sort of like a savant’s.
This, some believed, made Dustin the perfect target for someone looking to manipulate and shape and mold him into whatever she wanted.
30
WITH A STRONG OUTFIELDER’S ARM, you could probably toss a stone and reach Lake Michigan from Northwestern Memorial Hospital in downtown Chicago on the campus of Northwestern University on East Huron Street. The massive lake is about two city blocks and a four-lane interstate away. It was early September 1986; the campus was bustling with returning undergrad students, freshmen, interns, and seasonal hospital employees. The leaves on the trees had not yet turned their fiery colors of fall, but there was a nip in the air blowing in off the lake.
Thirty-year-old John Pitman, in his fourth year of medical school, was working a rotation at the hospital one night as a medical student, when he crossed paths with a woman claiming to be a radiographer, who caught his eye. She was simply breathtaking then: long, dark, thick mane of hair, all teased up into a 1980s metal-band do. She wore loose-fitting hospital scrubs and smelled of the sweetest perfume. She smiled and seemed nice.
“Tracey . . . Tracey Richter,” she said. Tracey was twenty years old; John Pitman nearly ten years her senior. With her perfectly sculpted body and full face, high cheekbones and plump lips some women pay lots of money for, it was cle
ar to John, like many men Tracey had come in contact with, that she could have chosen any guy she wanted.
“John Pitman,” he answered. “Good to meet you.”
At first, John was a bit turned off by this new radiographer he found himself working with so much lately. She was “fairly distant,” John later reported to a psychiatrist that interviewed both John and Tracey as part of their divorce proceedings and custody fight.
John wanted to be a general surgeon. He had worked hard to get where he was, preparing to head into the final phase of becoming a doctor with several years of residency training/work ahead.
There was one night at the hospital when Tracey was “especially irritable” and she lashed out at John after he tried to have a talk with her about something that had happened at work.
“I feel bad about yesterday,” Tracey told John the day after she got nasty with him. “I’m sorry.”
There was definitely some attraction there on John’s part. She might have been a bit crass and abrasive, not quite as urbane as the next girl, but there was also something about Tracey that John liked. She was confident and assertive.
“You want to go out some time?” John asked.
“Sure,” Tracey said.
They decided to double-date with friends. It went okay. They had fun. Yet there was something about Tracey that struck John. He considered her to be “quite unsophisticated.” It was a turnoff. The other thing was that, according to John, they slept together that first night they went out and John had an “odd feeling” about this. Tracey, however, later claimed she went home early that night and “sex would have been an impossibility, since she lived at home with her parents.”
No matter, they went out a few more times and enjoyed each other’s company. John recalled later how, after just the third date, Tracey left him a note: I think I love you. In what would become a familiar disparity of remembrances, Tracey recalled leaving a note that said simply, Love, Tracey.
Whatever the note had said, it sparked a conversation between them about the word “love,” and John thought maybe Tracey was becoming “infatuated” with him.
Tracey resented his use of the term.
Still, problems aside, they began seeing each other routinely. John said he didn’t feel like they were getting to know each other more than Tracey was enjoying being around such an “older, intelligent, in control” man who had his “act together.” John was also attracted to the way in which Tracey understood his surgical residency and the things that interested him. It didn’t hurt that she was easy on the eyes, either.
Later, John would assess the dating portion of their relationship and find that Tracey had represented a picture and persona of a woman who’d had a tough life at home, didn’t get along with her father, and seemed to yearn for the sympathy that narrative would get her.
“She seemed to give me what I wanted . . . as if she were the person I wanted her to be,” John Pitman later told his doctor.
Once Tracey found out there was something about her personality John didn’t like so much, she would adjust it and change that behavior.
John took off for New York in late 1986 and went on to Virginia to complete some of his medical training; Tracey wrote “numerous love letters” while he was gone. John later called the letters mushy, but Tracey, once again, claimed they were sincere.
Regardless, John felt he was falling for her. He asked Tracey to come to Virginia.
She didn’t want to at first, but then relented and moved.
* * *
John and a friend drove out to Chicago to pick Tracey up. She had maintained that her parents, Anna and Bernard Richter, didn’t want her to move, but she was willing to go against their wishes because she was in love.
Shortly before John arrived, he called to let her know they were almost there.
“I’m having cold feet, John,” she said.
“What?”
Tracey didn’t want to move. John was “hurt,” he recalled. “It didn’t make sense.”
John and his friend spent the night in town.
Tracey called the following morning. “Come by.”
When they arrived, Tracey had all her stuff packed and ready to go.
Out of Tracey’s presence, John spoke to Anna, Tracey’s mother. “She’s very ambivalent about leaving home,” Anna said. “But I support her going.”
John was taken aback; this was not how Tracey had explained how her parents felt.
“I even told her,” Anna continued, “that if things don’t work out, I would drive to Virginia in a week and pick her up.”
No sooner did they arrive in Virginia and settle in than Tracey said, “I want to go back home.”
John was baffled and hurt by Tracey’s seesaw of emotions. He spent the following day alone, away from her. The next night, when he walked in, Tracey seemed to “be okay.” She was good with the arrangement. She didn’t want to leave.
From that day on, however, Tracey began to “subtly maneuver to alienate me from my family and friends,” John said.
* * *
John’s parents owned a condo in Vail, one of the more gorgeous and popular places in the United States to spend week vacations skiing. During the spring of 1987, John invited several of his roommates and their girlfriends, many of whom Tracey was already at odds with from hanging around with them back in Virginia. Tracey always had something to say, it seemed. She was never completely happy unless she had total control over a situation and people did what she asked and wanted. She’d pick at each one of John’s friends and their behaviors, calling John’s roommates “sloppy” and their girlfriends moochers for spending nights at the apartment and not contributing any money for rent or food.
Tracey never skied. The first few days in Vail went well. Everyone was relaxed, having a good time. John had even hired an instructor to give everyone lessons. Tracey and John had been discussing moving to Denver, so John could do most of his residency at the university there. Maybe they could even go out one day while they were in Vail and look for a home, John had suggested. Tracey seemed to like the idea.
One morning, about two days into the vacation, John awoke to the sounds of Tracey “wailing.” It was loud and dramatic. One of the girls in the group went into the room and sat with Tracey.
“I feel left out,” Tracey explained to the girl. John was in the other room. “He won’t ski with me.” Tracey further explained that because John was so experienced in skiing, he had left her behind and skied where he wanted without her. She didn’t like it. She felt the entire group was alienating her, pushing her into her own little corner by herself.
So John decided to ski with Tracey the rest of the week. She’d communicated the issue and he felt he could easily accommodate her needs.
As the week went on, John suggested to Tracey that they ski with the group one afternoon. Tracey said okay. But when the time came, she refused to go down that part of the mountain. It was too intimidating, too steep.
When they got back to the condo, Tracey lashed out at everyone for not including her and taking off on her down a section of the mountain that they all knew she would not attempt. The way she came out with it made it sound as though there was some sort of nefarious plan behind it—as if they had all gotten together to spite her.
“She was seething,” John later reported.
“No one wanted to wait for you, Tracey,” John told her.
“I bet John waited on all of you when you were novices,” Tracey hurled at the group. “The least you could do was wait for me.”
Tracey’s attack was targeted specifically at John’s roommate and good friend, the one who drove out to Chicago with him to fetch her.
John encouraged Tracey to get into the car so they could go out and search for some real estate. He wanted to defuse the situation. Tracey could be a handful. When she got herself going, watch out. So they hopped into the rental and left.
When they got back, John and his roommate were in the kitchen t
alking about the incident earlier. The roommate was saying if Tracey, like everyone else, had taken skiing lessons, then the entire situation could have been avoided. But Tracey had refused to take the lessons.
Tracey must have been eavesdropping, because she came storming into the kitchen at that point. She had heard what the roommate said and was clearly pissed. She got right into the roommate’s face. A vile, angry look washed over her.
“It was wrong of you to expect us to wait for you,” the roommate said. “You are acting like a crybaby!”
Tracey became enraged and charged the man, sticking him in the face with her right hand, and then striking him “fairly hard . . . sending” his glasses “flying across the room.”
John grabbed her. “What are you doing?”
Tracey cried.
With Tracey out of the kitchen and inside the bedroom, alone, upset and crying, one of the girls in the group demanded they all leave immediately.
“I cannot spend another night under the same roof with her,” she said. “She’s so unstable.”
Tracey recalled the incident as the roommate and her arguing and him putting his hand in her face and so she pushed it away. Nothing more. It would become a routine signature of Tracey Richter’s: the difference in recalling an incident that several other sources claimed happened an entirely different way.
* * *
When they returned home, Tracey worked night and day to place a wedge between John and his friends and his parents. She made the guy choose between them and her. For John, he was scheduled to begin a residency in Denver, and he asked Tracey to move out there with him. She was reluctant. Things had not been going well.
One behavior John noticed was how Tracey worked “very hard” to play him and his friends against his parents, mainly because John (and the situation) would be easier for her to control then. This would become a popular move on Tracey’s part as she grew older. She became an expert at attacking people she had issues with, mostly from a position of those involved not having a clue that it was going on until it was too late.
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