Beautifully Cruel

by M. William Phelps

  Bert explained to Cessford that “he never saw the other guy.” He said his mother told him later on that night the second man wore a ski mask and gloves. He talked about how, as he listened on the other side of the door to what was going on in the hallway, he yelled, “Mom, are you okay?” And that was when, Bert claimed, “one of them opened the door to the bedroom and said something to the effect of, ‘Shut up or you’re next.’” The man who opened the door, Bert was certain, did not wear gloves. Then Bert heard them discussing something “about [his dad being] killed.”

  “My dad is in Denver,” Bert told Cessford he yelled through the door at the men.

  “He is back from Minneapolis,” Bert said one man responded.

  To which, Bert said, “Okay, Dustin.” (“I called him Dustin,” Bert explained, “because it sounded like Dustin Wehde.”)

  Regarding her so-called blackout, in a 2004 deposition, Tracey changed her story again. She said, “The next thing I remember is waking up on the floor in the guest room bedroom with my head over the threshold. . . .”

  To Cessford, in the hours after the event, Tracey said she was able to break away and head for her bedroom, where she knew Michael kept several guns in a safe. She needed to get to that safe, open it, grab a weapon, and protect her family.

  She never said anything about a blackout.

  In her Times interview, Tracey gave almost a completely different version of how she wound up in the bedroom. She said she “struggled to her feet . . . wobbly” and heard the man with the “dark, wavy hair,” say, “Get the bitch.” Then, as she turned to flee toward the bedroom, she told Art Cullen that she was “yanked” back once again by her ponytail and “grabbed underneath the armpits in a full-nelson hold.”

  Still, the question repeatedly coming up that nobody asked was: How could two male assailants not gain control over one female (two men that allegedly came into the house to attack this woman)? And where was the second assailant during this “struggle”? Tracey never described grappling with the two of them at the same time. It was always one or the other.

  From there, she claimed to have backed the perp up, slamming “him against the wall”—which became “just enough” for her to get away and run into the bedroom.

  Here, to Cessford, she recalled nothing about passing out or being dragged to the stairs or any type of full-nelson hold or slamming men into walls or wavy black hair or waking up on the threshold of the guest room. Yet, in that Times article, Tracey said she came out of the blackout hearing Bert arguing with the men. That is, an eleven-year-old against two adults.

  Bert was screaming obscenities . . . , the article said. Bert claimed to have told his mother later that night how Dustin told him to “shut up or you’re next.” Bert, who had the baseball bat in his hand, was still in his room at the time and claimed Dustin closed the door on him after making the threat.

  Bert recognized Dustin Wehde, but Tracey had not?

  In his first statement to Cessford, Bert said after he grabbed the bat and waited on the opposite side of the door, with the thought it was all a prank, “. . . I heard a shot.”

  Inside Tracey and Michael’s bedroom, according to what Tracey told Cessford, she struggled to get the gun safe open. It was dark. The safe was small, the buttons on the combination lock totally invisible to a woman who wore glasses, to begin with—glasses Tracey claimed had been knocked off her face in the hallway scuffle. She had to push each button in an exact order for it to open.

  She said it wouldn’t open. She said she tried a couple of times, Cessford reported Tracey telling him.

  Reading Cessford’s report, you get the impression that the gun safe is in between the bed and the dresser—another seemingly simple fact. There’s even a hand-drawn diagram of Tracey and Michael’s room (done by Tracey) that puts the gun safe tightly squeezed in between the bed and dresser. Crime scene photos show the gun safe between the bed and the dresser and wall, opened, standing upright on its back. It’s small, about the size of a twelve-pack of canned soda pop. Still, Art Cullen explained in his article—information he could have only gotten from Tracey—how Tracey “dove between her bed and the dresser . . . searching for the gun safe, where handguns were stored under the bed. . . .”

  Another discrepancy regarding simple facts to add to a growing list.

  In addition, where was Dustin Wehde in all of this? This particular area of the house is not big. It might takes seconds, depending on how fast one walks, to get from where they allegedly struggled in the hallway to where Tracey wound up in her bedroom, trying to get that gun safe open. On top of that, Tracey said her attacker was angry because she had pushed him against the wall. He was swearing at her. He was grabbing at her. He was trying to choke her. Where had he gone? How could she manage to get away and get to her bedside without him (or his alleged partner!) maintaining control, the two of them pummeling or stopping her?

  Two grown men, one woman—it was no match. Tracey never reported being punched. Why would two men looking to attack a female in her home never strike her in any way, but instead choke her? What’s more: Where were the attackers’ weapons? Two guys come to a house to attack a female and they bring no weapon of any type?

  None of it added up.

  Tracey claimed by this point she still did not realize it was Dustin Wehde attacking her. She claimed to have smelled and felt leather as she grabbed at her attacker. So she felt things, she heard things, she smelled things—but she did not see anything, even though she reported the hallway light being on.

  To Cessford, Tracey explained how, as she tried to unlock the gun safe, she felt one of the men grab her by the neck from behind. She looked underneath her and Michael’s bed and thought for a brief moment to roll underneath to hide, apparently, or get away; but then she decided to instead try the gun safe one more time.

  And guess what?

  It popped open.

  Now it was pitch black in the room, a man grabbing her neck, Tracey trying to find a weapon inside the safe.

  Grabbing the first weapon she felt, Tracey then “put it over her shoulder,” Cessford wrote. She “pulled the trigger.”

  But it did not fire.

  So Tracey “fumbled” (her word) with the weapon and “heard something snap or pop” and tried to recall, in this tense, dangerous, manic moment, “whether the hammer had to be cocked for it to fire. . . .”

  Again, in these highly tense moments, what was her attacker doing? Where was the second attacker? Why did the attacker(s) not turn the light on in the room so as to see her more clearly? It was almost as if Tracey were describing a film she had just seen—because in real life, well, things do not happen this way.

  She then gave the gun a second try; but this time, she cocked the hammer back, “put it over her right shoulder”—in absolute darkness—“and fired.”

  The sound was loud and the flash was very bright, Cessford reported.

  But Tracey Roberts sustained no ear damage and no redness (flash, it is called technically) on the right side of her face.

  In the Times, Tracey said, “It was Dustin who was pulling on me.” She added how, in this same moment, the man started pulling on her feet because the space between the bed and dresser they were in was so tight. In one of her depositions, Tracey said years later, “I’m avoiding somebody kind of grabbing at me, like I’m squirming and trying to get out from them getting a grip on me.”

  Somebody and them? Later, “the person.” Him. He. She didn’t know who it was; then she claimed it was Dustin. First it was her neck “they” were “pressing and pulling.” Then her feet. Then her torso.

  Then her “waist.”

  Her “lower extremities.”

  Her “foot.”

  “My shirt.”

  “My hair.”

  “The panty hose” (during a deposition).

  Two men were in the room, apparently, trying to manhandle Tracey Roberts as she, in total darkness, struggling to get the combination right, somehow
got that gun safe open and grabbed a weapon, tried it once and had no success, then unlocked the safety, flipped around (according to one deposition), landed on her back, pulled herself up to her knees, and, with the accuracy of Wyatt Earp, fired and struck the man.

  In the Times article, she remembered the gun being the 9mm Beretta, yet gave no indication as to how she could have seen this in total darkness. She remembered firing it and it flashing and being loud. She remembered hearing “breathing” after the shot and then “someone run out of the room” and make it down the stairs—which would indicate two men being in the room when she fired.

  To Cessford, however, Tracey recalled that, after the first shot, “he was still there.” She was on her knees at this point. So she “turned as far as she could to the right,” and because he didn’t back off, “she fired a couple more times.”

  Nothing about flipping around, landing on her knees and firing, stopping him.

  Explaining this same scene from his point of view inside his bedroom, Bert said after that first shot, “he heard a couple more shots. After that, he heard running. A short time later, he said his mom came in and told him, ‘Take [Cassie] downstairs. . . .’”

  So Bert heard bang, a brief pause, one man say “holy fuck,” then bang, bang, bang . . . and there, suddenly, Mom was inside his room, ordering him to take the other kids downstairs.

  Where one of her attackers—both Tracey and Bert had said—had just run off to!

  Tracey had described a kind of struggle going on in her room whereby she fired once, spun around, got herself situated, and, in a good position, fired again and again. And yet while doing this, according to her interview with Cessford, she was “kind of looking toward the door . . . [and] saw a silhouette running and then she saw the [stair] railing. . . .”

  I asked her how many times she fired the gun, Cessford wrote. She thinks she emptied the Beretta but was not sure.

  It was the first time a Beretta had been mentioned in Cessford’s interview.

  Then, Tracey added, after unloading the gun into her attacker, she sat there “listening.” It was dark, she explained, “and [she] couldn’t see clearly.” She spoke of no hurry to get into Bert’s room or even to check on her children.

  Next, she told Cessford, as she was sitting, she saw a “shadow run out of the door area of the room.” She further described hearing running in the hallway and someone hurrying down the steps and stairs.

  Again, why wasn’t Tracey concerned that the attacker had gone into her son’s room to do harm to Bert and his siblings? She had access in this moment to a weapon. She had shot one of the intruders. Why not get up and protect her children? She never mentioned any of this to Cessford in the hours after the incident, nor was she shaken up in the hospital about it, crying out for her kids, asking how they were, where they were and what was happening. You read Cessford’s interview and it feels like Tracey had a narrative to relay and she was rolling it out for law enforcement.

  In the Times article, Tracey described how, after she fired the weapon and heard breathing and someone run from the room, the sound of the kids screaming got her attention. So, in that same area of the bedroom where she told Cessford she saw a shadowy figure take off from, she “climbed over something to get out” of the room, Art Cullen reported. It was then, she told Cullen, that she had a Berretta in one hand and also a “six-shot revolver,” which had also been stored in the gun safe, in her other hand.

  Suddenly Tracey had not one, but two weapons.

  “Tracey ran toward Bert’s room,” the Times reported.1

  Tracey reported to Cullen that the hallway was dark, because she claimed that as she got up and ran toward Bert’s room, he almost hit her with the bat because he didn’t know who she was. Then, Tracey added, she turned and “saw movement in the shadows near her bedroom.”

  First she said the light was on (in the hallway), and then it was off. First she said the kids were in their room, and then Bert was in the hallway with a bat ready to slug her. Moreover, Bert told Cessford that in these same moments, when he returned from going downstairs (where one of the alleged intruders had taken off to), “his mom told him to come back up and untie her.” According to Bert, “Her hands were tied with a nylon . . . [and] his mom had two guns at that time.”

  This was all beyond perplexing (if even possible). Were the panty hose used to strangle her or tie her hands? How could she even fire a weapon with her hands tied? And when were her hands tied?

  “Yes,” Ben Smith said. “She doesn’t remember when her hands were bound, so it had to have been when she ‘lost consciousness.’ This is all bullshit, of course. Her hands were never bound and she never lost consciousness. So, when she regained consciousness and ran to the gun safe in the bedroom, fumbled with the safe, retrieved the gun, fumbled with the gun, fired all those shots, hitting Dustin all those times, grabbed the other gun (in her not dominant hand) and fired the second gun, according to her later testimony in one of her custody cases, she did all of that—all of it—with the panty hose tied loosely around her neck and wrists.”

  Go figure.

  To Cessford, Tracey talked about how she sat on the floor in her bedroom for “thirty seconds or ten minutes,” she didn’t know how long. What she was certain of, however, was that she “listened for a little while.” She was terrified, she explained further, because of the “breathing.”

  Her attacker, in other words, was still alive.

  “[I] couldn’t see anything, but [I] knew someone was still there,” Tracey told Cessford.

  She then added how she stood up once to leave the room, but then scooched back down because she was “so scared.”

  Tracey then told Cessford that when she finally managed to dredge up the nerve to leave the room, she knew someone was still there and that she had no idea when or how, but she left the room with two weapons, one in each hand.

  There was something on the floor, for sure, she said, but she didn’t know if it was a duffel bag or something else because her glasses were not on her face. Without glasses, Tracey maintained, she couldn’t see anything.

  Here, she claimed to have turned the light on in the bedroom—totally contradicting what she later told the Times about leaving the bedroom to check on the kids.

  With the light on, Tracey immediately realized it was a person on the floor. She could not recognize him, she claimed, because he was facing away from her. Yet, looking at the crime scene photos, and even Tracey’s own drawing, if one was to stand where Tracey claimed she was standing, with the light on, one could clearly see the face of the man on the floor.

  So, not knowing who he was or anything about his condition, Tracey “carefully approached” him.

  He moved.

  “Like he was trying to get up or roll over,” she claimed.

  “Stay there,” Tracey warned him, her guns pointed on the man the entire time.

  He “was rocking like he was trying to get up.”

  Then, from the gun in her right hand, Tracey pulled the trigger.

  Click—the chamber was empty.

  45

  TRACEY CALLED DR. KELLNER ONE day at the office. It was after the travel agency/fraud fiasco and the $18,000 loan he had given her. She wanted to return the laser he had rented to a doctor friend of hers recently. She was wondering when she could stop by.

  “I’m on my way back from a conference in Wisconsin with Bert. I’m going to drop him off at home and come by.”

  “Fine,” Dr. Kellner said.

  “Looks like I can be there around four or five,” Tracey told him.

  She wound up arriving at six, perhaps thinking no one else would be around. When she got there, his assistant was at the front desk, someone he had known—and trusted—for a very long time.

  “When you leaving?” Tracey asked the woman as she waited for him to finish up what he was doing in the back office. “I need to talk to him alone.” It was Tracey, the assistant, and the dentist in the office. There were n
o other appointments scheduled for the day.

  “I don’t know,” the assistant said.

  “Look, I need to see him alone.”

  The assistant was a bit concerned and alarmed by the way in which Tracey was dressed. She got up from her desk, walked into the back to tell her boss she was, in fact, done for the day and was leaving. Tracey, she explained, was still out front in the reception area, alone, waiting.

  “Hey, she’s dressed like she’s going out and she smells like a French whore,” the assistant told Dr. Kellner.

  Indeed, on this night, Tracey was dressed beyond provocatively. All made-up. Tight blouse, lots of cleavage showing, short skirt, and lots of leg. The perfume she wore permeated the entire office space. There was an agenda here, no doubt. Tracey was up to something.

  When the assistant left, Tracey went back to see Dr. Kellner.

  “Look, I’m sorry for everything,” she said, perhaps trying to smooth over any feelings of disgust he had for all she had done to him.

  He didn’t respond.

  “I have this fantasy,” Tracey explained further, “and I want to make love to you while we’re under nitrous oxide.”

  Laughing gas. Tracey was saying she wanted to inhale some of the gas and get it on there in the office right on the dentist’s chair.

  Dr. Kellner, in perhaps a moment of total weakness, decided to take her up on the offer. He’d had sex with Tracey a few times already.

  “Let’s go to room number three.” It was down the hall. The doors were locked. No one was expected to come into the office. They were all alone.

  Tracey had Robert Kellner go first. He sat in the chair, put the mask on, and inhaled.

  They waited.

  “Oh,” she said, “you’re not far enough gone.”

  Inside the room, the dentist had a tackle box of meds he used during surgeries. In the box was also supplies needed to administer the drugs. He’d take the box to various appointments when he did surgery elsewhere.

  Tracey mentioned that maybe she should start an IV of something in order to get him to that special place sooner. They had not done anything sexual by this point.