Beautifully Cruel

by M. William Phelps

  Mona looked at Dustin. “Yeah, sure.”

  When it came time to settle the check, Mona reached into her purse; she wanted to pay for her and Dustin.

  “Put your money away,” Tracey said. “Michael is going to get it.”

  “Are you sure? I can pay for us.”

  “No, no, no,” Tracey insisted.

  The entire day—church and the lunch—was “weird.” Mona called herself shy and not at all a people-person around those she did not know. She was familiar with Michael and Tracey, and sitting with them in church was okay, but other people showed up and ate with them and she felt out of place.

  Dustin sat and took it all in, no doubt wondering when the next time he and Michael were going out to the paintball range.

  “You want to go today?” Michael asked Dustin after lunch. “Like right now?”

  Dustin smiled from ear to ear.

  “Tracey went that day,” Mona insisted. “Bert went, too.”

  The way she described this day, Mona gave the impression that it had all been a plan: The reason why Dustin was going to play paintball was so he could be groomed to become a home invader—all part of Tracey’s intricate plan to make Dustin Wehde her pawn. It was as if Tracey wound Dustin up with the paintballing and then would one day call on him and say to come over and play paintball at the house.

  “I know the next time I go, I am going to wear a hell of a lot more layers of clothing,” Dustin told his mother when he returned home later that day.

  “Why? What happened?”

  According to Mona, Dustin was pummeled by Tracey and Michael. “Those paintballs hurt. . . .”

  Bert was rather nonexistent that day, as if he weren’t there. He didn’t say much, or Mona just didn’t notice what he said.

  * * *

  What Mona did recall from this same period of time was that she’d be at home, with her daughter babysitting for Tracey and Michael. The phone would ring: “Mom, there are no pans in this house to cook with . . . no cups.... I gave Bert juice in a bowl.”

  “What?”

  Upon further investigating, according to Mona, Tracey had a three-foot-high gate that she corralled the kids into and kept them all like sheep, confined to one area of the house.

  “Yeah, Bert is asking me to eat and there is no food in the house,” Mona’s daughter said over the phone. The baby was one at the time. Apparently, Tracey didn’t even keep milk in the house.

  Mona hopped into her vehicle and headed to the store and dropped off whatever her daughter needed to care for the kids. It made no sense to her. All the money they made, all those Christian values Tracey espoused, but no cups? No food?

  “It was the most bizarre thing,” Mona recalled.

  Then something else happened. There was a house Tracey wanted to look at one day. She called Mona.

  “Can you come now?”

  Mona said she’d be right over.

  34

  “I’M PREGNANT,” TRACEY SAID WHEN John came home later that day. It was spring 1989. This was the “upsetting” news bothering Tracey since returning from John’s parents’ house in Virginia. Tracey was unhappy, according to her own statements, about the pregnancy. “Her first response,” she said, “was to cry.”

  John was excited. As soon as Tracey was able to “accept” the pregnancy, she was thrilled, too. Maybe this was what they both needed: a family.

  In July 1989, John entered his third year of surgical residency. Tracey’s pregnancy was not without difficulties, most of it brought on because of the “strained” marriage, she claimed in a report. She was always exhausted. Stressed. Anxious and worried about being alone.

  On the other hand, that same report indicated that John believed Tracey was having problems because she just didn’t want to be pregnant.

  It appeared that both members of the couple resented each other, the report said, and their relationship deteriorated even more.

  As Tracey entered her third trimester, she became “highly sexed.” It was all she ever wanted. At this point in the marriage, Tracey painted John as someone who didn’t want her. Tracey said she was “cuddly and affectionate,” but he didn’t want anything to do with it.

  Near her seventh month, in December 1989, John’s parents contacted him about a problem in Vail. Someone had apparently gotten hold of their credit card and charged many items, which were then delivered to the condo address before being stolen in almost one swift move of arriving in one truck, leaving in another.

  Tracey stepped right up and called the Vail Police Department, once John explained the situation, offering to help any way she could. As time moved forward, it seemed unusual how much Tracey wanted to be involved. It was her behavior that made John’s parents curious. Was Tracey’s interest in helping police more to keep an eye on the investigation?

  As an inquiry into the crime commenced over the course of the next few months, in February 1990, Tracey gave birth to Bert. By April, cops in Vail narrowed a pool of suspects for the furniture buy and subsequent theft down to two people: a local decorator and Tracey.

  “Me?” It was one of Tracey’s signature how-dare-you moments.

  John’s parents traveled to Vail that April. John and Tracey had purchased their own condo recently there. John offered his parents the chance to check out the place while they were in Vail.

  There were things [in John and Tracey’s condo], said a report of this incident, that looked like the items that had been ordered through [the Pitmans’] credit card.

  One report later had the amount of the theft in the neighborhood of $15,000.

  John’s parents were livid, specifically at Tracey—it appeared she had stolen the card, charged all those items, and furnished their new condo. Mr. and Mrs. Pitman called John and told him they believed Tracey had swiped the card.

  When John asked Tracey about it, she lashed out and “became belligerent and enraged” with John’s mother and father.

  The family hired a private investigator. After a lengthy investigation, the PI, too, narrowed the case down to two suspects: the decorator and Tracey.

  This caused great friction between John and his parents; perhaps this was what Tracey had wanted from the start. Be it John’s parents, his friends, coworkers, or anyone she did not approve of, Tracey seemed to come between John and those others in his life.

  It took a few years before John was able to get the relationship with his parents back on track. Even so, Tracey remained intractable, said a report. She hated John’s parents. She did not want him to associate with his family. It was never proven she was involved and Tracey was never charged.

  As a baby, Bert required Tracey’s full attention and patience. She demanded to breast-feed the child, but Tracey had a hard time producing enough milk.

  One night, as John lay in bed sleeping, he heard yelling so loud it woke him up. As he got out of bed, the yelling grew louder. He was tired. The hospital was draining him; he had been working close to 120 hours per week by then.

  “Suck . . . suck . . . suck!” John heard as he walked, half-asleep, down the hallway.

  “Tracey?”

  “Damn it all, Bert, suck . . . suck . . .” Tracey was red-faced and screaming at the child.

  After John opened the door to the room, to his alarm and great dismay, Tracey was “shaking” Bert.

  John rushed over and stopped her. “What are you doing?”

  A few days later, Tracey started bottle-feeding Bert.

  35

  MONA SAT IN THE BACKSEAT. Tracey, driving, had called Mona earlier to say she wanted to look at a house. Bert and one of the other children were in the car with them.

  As Tracey backed out of the driveway, Mona looked around the inside of the car.

  “Tracey,” Mona asked, “where is the baby?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Tracey stopped. “Oh, my God . . .”

  She’d left the baby in her car seat inside the house.

  “Things like that, th
e stories I could tell,” Mona recalled. “Who forgets their child?”

  After pulling back into her driveway, Tracey ran in, grabbed the baby, returned to the car, and they continued to go look at the house.

  “And when we got to the house,” Mona added, “Tracey left the baby in the car.”

  “Tracey, you can bring the baby into the house with us to look around,” Mona said.

  “I know. The baby is fine in the car alone, Mona.”

  It was as if the child’s welfare did not matter to Tracey.

  * * *

  Mona was outside of her home one afternoon, smoking a cigarette on the back porch. She liked this time alone, the silence. Dustin had been out with Michael. When he came home, Dustin found his mother. Mona asked: “How’d it go?” They’d played paintball a few times together by then. Dustin was spending more and more time with Michael these days. Mona wanted to understand the relationship and see how things were from Dustin’s point of view.

  “That is one strange guy,” Dustin said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Dustin showed Mona another book Michael had given him.

  “What happened?” Mona asked after Dustin didn’t say much.

  Dustin shook his head. “I’m not a reader” was about all he said, walking away, repeatedly shaking his head, mumbling, “That’s one weird man. . . .”

  “Is everything okay?” Mona asked. She was concerned.

  “Yeah, yeah . . . I’m fine, but he is one weird guy.”

  Michael was always the more assertive, talkative one of the two, between him and Tracey, Mona explained. “He was the one to be out in front, asking me to say prayers with him . . . telling me I was going to be saved . . . while Tracey stayed in the background.”

  When Mona visited the Roberts house and Michael wasn’t around, especially toward the early part of 2001, the summer before Dustin was killed, Tracey would often go off into a rant. She’d scream about them having no money and how Michael was uninterested in paying off any of their debt and how he’d been putting them further into a financial hole. What Mona noticed as she got to know Tracey and Michael separately was that each had said they loved the other. However, “they would always add a ‘but’ to the expression of love.” She found this revealing. It said a lot about how they felt.

  There were conditions.

  * * *

  According to several published reports and several interviews later conducted with an adoption agency and a divorce mediator/therapist, Michael met Tracey in 1996 on an online Christian dating site. He lived in Australia at the time. They spoke online for a little while, talked on the phone for several months, and then Tracey up and flew to Australia.

  Michael proposed to Tracey the first night she was there, an adoption report said.

  Eighteen days after she arrived, Michael and Tracey were husband and wife. Michael had been married once, and Tracey had just been legally divorced from John Pitman. Michael told an Australian journalist he had a “thoroughly unremarkable” childhood. He was one of three kids; his father had been a customs broker; his mother worked as a clerk for a time and then became a stay-at-home mom. An entrepreneur since he could recall, Michael claimed to have created Queensland, Australia’s “first bicycle courier” service. He started that when he was just out of high school and subsequently sold the company so he could focus on his passion: computer and Internet technology. At one time, Michael wanted to attend law school, but the bug of online tech support bit him and he was off and running.

  As for being “saved” by Jesus Christ, Michael told that same reporter, it happened in 1995, the year before he met Tracey. Because of this newfound love for Christ, in fact, Michael began frequenting Christian websites for a mate, where he eventually hooked up with Tracey in a chat room dedicated to Christian singles. One of the first things Tracey told Michael online, he later claimed, was: “I used to be a model. You won’t be disappointed.” There was that Tracey swagger, front and center. She was “flirtatious” and forward in the beginning, Michael added, putting herself out there for the taking.

  When he first started talking to Tracey online, Michael did not appreciate how “secular” and sexual she came across. But as soon as he expressed the slightest disinterest in her “carnal” ways, Tracey changed her entire persona and became the woman Michael wanted her to be. Then one day, out of nowhere, Tracey announced she was flying to Australia.

  Then she was there.

  Then they were married.

  It had all happened so quickly, there wasn’t time to get to know each other. Tracey had landed herself a blue-eyed, dapper, dashing, tall, dark, and handsome Australian.

  Tracey flew alone back to Chicago after they married. She had been living in a house she owned at the time, just a block away from her parents. Tracey’s dad was a Chicago detective. Tracey spent most of her free time at her parents’ house. According to what she later told a reporter, Tracey got her nursing degree in Colorado in 1991. After she and John divorced, she moved back to Chicago, where she began working on a psychology degree at the University of Chicago, but then found herself working in quality assurance at the hospital before meeting Michael.

  Michael followed Tracey to Chicago two weeks later. He quickly realized that without any friends or family in Chicago, it was not the best place for him and his new bride. He wanted to move to a “rural area,” said one report. No sooner had they sold the house in Chicago that Tracey owned did she realize, according to this same report, that Michael had some old debt that needed to be paid off.

  Another surprise, said that report, came shortly before they left Chicago, when Michael told Tracey, “I’m quitting my job. . . .” He’d had a job at a computer company. Tracey soon found out, however, that in January 1998 Michael had been fired for “insubordination.” Tracey was now pregnant with their first child. Michael decided on Early, Iowa, said this report. Tracey claimed she thought the move to be completely “impulsive” and believed Michael was trying to get her away from her parents. To avoid any conflict, however, she didn’t fight him and decided “to let Michael be in control”; off they went to Early.

  The way she played it was that moving to Iowa was all Michael’s idea—yet in an interview she gave to an Iowa newspaper upon moving into Early, Tracey couched the move as both of them deciding Iowa was a great place to raise a family and fulfill a dream they’d both had of owning and restoring an old Victorian home. Once again, when the record presented itself, Tracey’s version became a contradiction: a woman who said and did things to make herself later appear to be sacrificing, or the person on the receiving end of pain and embarrassment, always having to submit to her man.

  Not a year into the marriage, Michael said later, Tracey was screwing around on him, having repeated affairs. This, mind you, fit into her MO; she had done the same to John Pitman. The marriage, almost from the first few months of Michael being in the States, was in shambles.

  * * *

  For Mona, as she would stop by the house and Tracey was by herself, raging about the money they did not have, the breakdown of the marriage was ever present. Incredibly, what Mona didn’t know then was that the law had been involved in the Roberts marriage.

  By Tracey’s account of the events, she took a call one day from their local bank. A banking associate said, “I need to have your signature on the seventy-five-thousand-dollar loan against the house for [the business].”

  Tracey claimed she had not been informed about a loan against their home. She was both shocked by this and furious. Michael was, in her view, trying to take out a loan against the house behind her back to pump more money he didn’t have into the business.

  Sometime later, the same loan associate showed up at the house, looking for the signature. This time Michael was at home.

  “I had no idea he needed your signature,” Michael said, according to Tracey.

  The bank associate, standing in the Robertses’ living room and listening to Michael and Tracey talk about
it, “refuted” Michael’s claim of not knowing.

  The pressure was on, Tracey said, for her to sign the documents and give Michael what he wanted. So she caved.

  This set her off, however. Later that same day, Tracey rushed next door, where Michael was working with Mona in the office.

  “I want to see the books,” Tracey demanded. She was “under the impression” the business was “doing well” all this time. Now she was wondering why Michael needed the loan.

  “It’s none of your business,” Michael said.

  “None of my business?” Tracey seethed.

  Michael had stated his viewpoint. That was it. They were getting the loan.

  After the conversation, Michael walked over, sat at his desk, and turned his back to Tracey—who was standing there shell-shocked and red-faced.

  If we are to believe Tracey’s version, she walked into the business office kitchen and started crying. Then a volcanic rage, which Tracey had been known to express, became too much. She kicked the wall in the kitchen and screamed. One kick, she claimed, out of anger.

  According to a report of the incident, Michael ran into the kitchen when he heard this, grabbed Tracey, and “threw her to the ground” and “held her down.”

  “You fucking bitch,” Michael yelled, according to the report.

  Then he got up and left.

  Tracey said she later called Michael at the office from their home and said she was scared of him. Nothing that physical, she claimed, had ever happened between them and she was wondering where it had come from.

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” Michael said.

  Tracey hung up. Then she called the police.

  After an investigation, Michael was taken away in handcuffs, charged with domestic violence/abuse. Early cops confiscated all the guns Michael and Tracey had in the house.

  Michael’s version was slightly different, though the subtle differences show, once again, how Tracey would portray herself (always) as the victim.

  “According to what Michael told us,” Ben Smith later said, “he restrained her from further damaging the walls.” Tracey didn’t just kick the wall, as she had claimed. She became enraged and was kicking holes all over the walls, which several photos prove. Michael had gone into the kitchen to stop Tracey from further destroying the office.