Beautifully Cruel

by M. William Phelps

  He allowed Tracey to “start an IV in my arm and give me a little Versed.”

  Versed is a medication given before surgery. It makes patients feel groggy, sleepy, totally out of it. According to the best medical research, Versed is also a drug said to “cause forgetfulness of the surgery or procedure.” You take enough of this stuff and you will totally lose track of the world and not realize you were ever part of it.

  One of the last things Dr. Kellner remembered, when later asked in court what happened next, was Tracey walking toward him with the tackle box in her hand. Yet, as he watched her approach, he realized she had a “napkin wrapped around the handle” of the box—so as not to, he later guessed, leave any fingerprints behind.

  What in the world was she up to now?

  Asked later why he allowed all of this to occur, he said, “Well, I thought we were going to get it on. It happened before.... Let’s just say, I was thinking with my other head.”

  Dr. Kellner was wearing scrubs. He was fully clothed at this point. In fact, habitually, he had tied his bottom scrub pants in a double knot.

  Next thing the dentist recalled, he was waking up at four o’clock the next morning.

  Tracey was gone.

  He looked down at his arm and there was a butterfly bandage where the tube for the IV had been placed. The dentist felt nothing happened sexually, because his scrubs, around the waistline, were still tied in that double knot.

  There were two times, he later testified, when he and Tracey had sex before this strange, botched encounter. He had taken Tracey out to dinner once, took her back to her place, and slept with her. Another time, some months later, he took her out to dinner and she gave him oral sex inside his car in the restaurant parking lot. Dr. Kellner later recalled the oral sex, specifically, because it was raining and it was “right before she went to Australia.”

  So, Tracey had given this guy oral sex in his car and then went off to Australia to marry Michael Roberts on a ticket she fraudulently purchased with the dentist’s credit card. She went and purported herself to Michael Roberts as some sort of devout Christian, living under a strict set of morals and values—which included, apparently, giving blow jobs inside parked cars.

  Tracey wasn’t finished with the doctor, however.

  He received a letter from Tracey the day after he woke up from the induced coma. He’d put the incident with her in the surgery room behind him and wrote it off to bad decision-making, a weak man succumbing to a deranged woman. He was done with Tracey Roberts.

  The letter, in the form of a “contractual agreement,” was written on the doctor’s letterhead and generated by his office. Dr. Kellner had signed it—and so had Tracey: This agreement between [Dr. Kellner] and Tracey Richter Roberts—which meant she was married to Michael when the sexual escapade in the office took place—a patient and occasional contracted employee of [Dr. Kellner], is entered into [in August 1997].

  Dr. Kellner could not believe what he was looking at.

  “That bitch!”

  Whereas, Dr. [Kellner] admits to willfully misrepresenting his ability to resolve TMJ pain that Mrs. Tracey Roberts began to experience, the contractual agreement continued, with the sole intention of getting [her] to consent to a “fictional” procedure that would require conscious sedation.

  The dental surgeon was mortified.

  Further, the contract stated: [Kellner] secretly intended to remove and replace articles of Tracey Roberts’ clothing, fondle her breasts and genitals, take photographs of her, and make subliminal suggestions. It went on to say he admitted to having an “addictive personality . . . from deviant sexual behavior to pharmacological.”

  She wasn’t done.

  The “contract” went on to describe the incident in graphic detail. It claimed Tracey had awoken after the anesthesia mask accidentally slipped off her face during the TMJ surgery to find herself “clad in red thigh-high stockings, no panties, and stiletto heeled pumps that were too small.” It also said her dress had been pulled down below her neckline to expose her breasts and that the dentist was straddling her, one of her legs up on his shoulder.

  He was “masturbating onto her chest,” the contract said.

  The next paragraph was even more nauseating. The contract claimed Tracey, realizing what was going on after coming out of sedation, kicked him in the balls and shoved him off her, before jumping up and pepper-spraying him. From there, she got her bearings and “noticed several Polaroid photographs” of herself on the counter and “began to cry.”

  When Dr. Kellner realized Tracey had caught him, the contract continued, he “begged” Tracey not to go to the police. He then threatened her, claiming he had friends in high places that could fix everything for him.

  After they talked about it, the contract alleged, Dr. Kellner offered to “reach a mutual agreement” with Tracey that might “spare” her the “embarrassment, humiliation, and stress” of pressing charges against him.

  Throughout this negotiation process there in the operating room, the contract said Tracey held Dr. Kellner back by pointing the pepper spray at him as though it was a gun. She then took the Polaroids as the oral surgeon allegedly said he would wait for her proposal to arrive the following day.

  That “proposal” became the next paragraph of the contract.

  Beyond a settlement fee of $150,000, Dr. Kellner was to pay Tracey’s way to a conference and annual meeting, hotel, air fare, expenses, “and purchase two round trip tickets for Mr. and Mrs. Roberts to travel to Australia this Christmas.” He would also pay to replace a “2 carat round diamond ring and 3 carat diamond tennis bracelet,” which Tracey claimed were removed during the sexual assault.

  The last paragraph consisted of a note alleging how Dr. Kellner “initially offered her the sum of $300,000 . . . wich [sic]”—typo included in original contract—“she rejected.”

  The last line of the contract showed how psychotic and devious Tracey truly could be, exposing a plan from as far back as meeting him in that Chicago hospital: [Dr. Kellner] wants to acknowledge that the recent payment of $18,000 to Mrs. Roberts was applied to his outstanding balance and that he had returned her high school, opal and wedding band rings to her.

  “I believe I was set up from day one,” the doctor said later in court.

  This entire plot was beyond Machiavellian.

  Beyond evil.

  Beyond any con Tracey had tried to pull off to date.

  Dr. Kellner called his lawyer: “This broad is fucking nuts. What the hell just happened?”

  Tracey never reported the alleged sexual assault to the police. The dental surgeon, in turn, failed to report what he perceived to be an extortion attempt. He never paid her. Tracey needed to go away, crawl back into the hole she had come from, and disappear.

  When Tracey realized the doctor was not going to pay her shakedown, she turned around and filed a civil lawsuit against him. In it, she claimed the supposed sexual assault was malpractice.

  Dr. Kellner would have to fight Tracey in court at some point.

  It was years before Michael Roberts—not until he was set to be deposed—heard anything about this contractual agreement or lawsuit. In fact, according to Michael later on, the lawsuit ended because Robert Kellner’s attorney sent proof to Tracey’s attorney that Tracey was lying and her credibility would be shredded to pieces during her deposition.

  When Tracey’s attorney discussed this with Michael and Tracey, she dropped the suit.

  “I remember Michael telling me that he said to Tracey that if there was any truth to what [Kellner] was claiming, then Tracey needed to drop the lawsuit,” a source close to the incident recalled. “So they dropped it.”

  A mere two days after that lawsuit was dropped, wouldn’t you know, Dustin Wehde was lying on the bedroom floor of Tracey and Michael’s Early, Iowa, house, bleeding profusely, dying; and that same woman, Tracey Roberts, was standing over him with two weapons in her hands, one of which she had unloaded into Dustin and the other
had just misfired.

  46

  “STAY THERE!” TRACEY SHOUTED.

  There was blood pooling up around Dustin Wehde’s head, making its way into the cracks of the dark wooden floor inside Tracey and Michael’s bedroom.

  Dustin was either already dead or close to it.

  Tracey had fired the weapon (a “revolver” in her left hand, she told Cessford) and it clicked. The man (Dustin) was on the floor of her bedroom, breathing laboriously, and she had turned the light on to better assess the situation—yet she did not know this man was Dustin Wehde.

  After hearing the click, Tracey realized the gun was empty. She had emptied one gun into Dustin, hitting him in the back of the head several times.

  “I thought he was still breathing, but he stopped moving,” Tracey explained to Cessford.

  From there, according to her Cessford interview, Tracey said she yelled out: “Bert, get out!”

  Bert came into the room. “Where is the other one?” Tracey claimed her son asked her at this moment.

  This is an important comment. An eleven-year-old, two men in his house attacking his mother, one of whom had allegedly told him to shut up or he’d be next, a man shot and bleeding on the ground in front of him, and the first thing out of his mouth was supposedly: Where is the other one?

  “Go call 911,” Tracey claimed she told Bert in this moment.

  He took off downstairs with the other kids.

  In the Times article, Tracey described an entirely different scenario. After she ran into Bert’s room and they met in the hallway, Tracey explained to Art Cullen, Bert almost slugged her with his bat because he thought she might be one of the attackers. Then she “saw movement” inside her room and, following her son into his room, told Bert to stay inside his bedroom. From Bert’s room, Tracey claimed to have yelled toward the man on the floor in her bedroom: “Don’t move. Don’t get up.”

  The figure tried to get up, Art Cullen wrote.

  The article then said Tracey tried to “shoot the Beretta held in her right hand.” This is the polar opposite to what she explained to Cessford.

  Left hand, revolver.

  According to the article, this was the moment in which Tracey realized the gun was empty. An eleven-shot cartridge expended. Not one bullet left.

  Tracey told Cullen she fired the revolver with her left hand. It blazed and kicked, Cullen wrote. A pool of blood formed.

  To Cullen, Tracey said she “approached the bedroom” and could still hear the man on the floor, breathing. She walked over and “closed the bedroom,” feeling “safe enough” at this point to take the children downstairs. Her bedroom had a phone, but Tracey did not want to use it to call 911 because she was scared the man might still be able to attack her.

  As they prepared to go downstairs, Tracey told Cullen, Cassie, a one-year-old at the time, picked up her mother’s glasses off the floor (she had just happened to run into them) and handed them to her.

  From there, according to Cullen’s article, they all went downstairs and into the dining room, where Tracey closed the door and Bert—not Tracey—picked up the phone to call 911.

  The line rang two times.

  “Nine-one-one, emergency?”

  “Um, oh, I can’t really hear you . . . ,” a child’s voice said. It was Bert. He sounded rather calm. “Oh, okay . . . My mom . . . Somebody came into the house, and where they tied her up and they were, they were choking her.” As Bert explained the situation, he gradually became overexcited. “My mom got the big gun and shot the other one, and one ran off.”

  The operator asked Bert if she had the address correct: “South Avenue, in Early?”

  “Yes . . . yes,” Bert said. He was now frantic.

  The operator sounded shocked and panicked at the same time. “Ah, I am going to get the police there right away.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Bye,” Bert said.

  Dispatch went into action, calling everyone: “I am not quite sure what’s going on, but there may be a possible shooting.”

  In the Cessford account, Tracey described Bert coming up to the bedroom as she held the weapon on the intruder, a man who was on her floor and bleeding.

  “I called 911, Mom,” Tracey claimed Bert told her upstairs.

  “Are they sending an ambulance?” Tracey asked Bert.

  She said Bert called 911 again to see . . . [and] told her an ambulance was on the way, Cessford reported.

  In the Cessford narrative, Tracey was then downstairs and “pacing” around, waiting for the authorities to arrive, when she looked out her window and saw “the EMTs waiting across the street.” She thought this was strange. She said she still had the revolver in her hand.

  So she walked over to the kitchen counter and unloaded the weapon, before placing it on the dining-room table.

  It was then that “two officers” walked into the house—which never happened.

  In the Cullen article, Tracey skipped over the arrival of law enforcement and went straight to being taken to the hospital and treated for her injuries.

  47

  IT WAS 7:07 P.M. ON December 13, 2001. SCSO deputy sheriff Daniel Bruscher had just left Loring Hospital after a routine call when dispatcher Donna Johnson called to say there was a shooting in Early. She had just spoken to Bert.

  “I wasn’t able to get hold of the police chief in Early,” Donna told Bruscher.

  The reason why Tracey reported EMTs standing by, not going into the Roberts home, was because there was an active shooting going on and perhaps an intruder still on the loose or in the house, and emergency personnel were not permitted to go into the home until it was cleared by law enforcement.

  That’s why Tracey saying “two officers” came in was a lie.

  “I’m en route from Sac City,” Bruscher told Johnson, hitting his lights, taking off.

  Bruscher said in his report he knew the address to be that of “Tracey and Michael Roberts” and they operated a business next door to their home. The SCSO had been called out on more than one or two occasions because of the Robertses’ business alarm going off.

  Bruscher asked Donna Johnson for any details about the incident. What should he expect?

  “The dispatcher stated that an unknown person had been shot in the residence and that two males had ran from the rear door of the residence.”

  Two males.

  Rear door.

  Very specific facts.

  Which made a total of three males, two of whom took off out the back.

  “Safe for us to enter?” Bruscher heard an EMT ask over the radio to Johnson.

  “Police are not at the scene,” she said. “Deputy Sheriff Bruscher is en route.”

  “Yes, tell them to wait until law enforcement arrives,” Bruscher confirmed to dispatch, piping into the radio conversation, “and we can determine if it is safe to enter.”

  Cessford, on his way to the Roberts house himself, then spoke: “Yes . . . have medical personnel wait.”

  “Phone the residence,” Bruscher told Johnson. “Get them on the phone, get us an update as to what is going on, and keep them on the phone until we arrive on scene.”

  Some time passed.

  Johnson was back: “I am being advised there is one subject down at the residence and they are advising also that they are not under any threat at this time.”

  Clearly, Johnson had spoken to Tracey—or somebody inside the house—and was told the situation was nonthreatening. How could Tracey be so sure? How could she know where the second—or third?—man had run off to?

  Bruscher pulled into the Robertses’ driveway at 7:17 p.m. As he got out of his vehicle and approached the back-door area slowly, creeping along various objects to cover him, weapon drawn, Tracey walked out onto the back porch.

  “You and your children,” Bruscher yelled to Tracey, “you all come to me. . . .” Bruscher stood behind a large tree north of the east rear porch and west of the driveway to protect himself in t
he event someone started firing. He kept looking in all directions. There were two vehicles parked in the driveway: a black and a white car. For all law enforcement knew, there were two attackers somewhere in the yard, or in the house, behind a tree, inside one of those cars.

  But as Bruscher noticed, Tracey did not seem at all concerned. In fact, she refused to step out and “come to me,” Bruscher later reported. She even said, “It’s safe inside the house. We’re not under any threat.”

  Weird. Here was a woman who had just been attacked and fired eleven shots, a man down in her house, another who had run away, and she was as calm as an autumn leaf falling to the ground, claiming the threat was over.

  “Come to me, Mrs. Roberts . . . bring your children here,” Bruscher stated several times.

  Tracey would not heed his orders.

  So Bruscher approached her.

  “He’s upstairs,” Tracey said, as if describing her sleeping husband.

  “What about the others?” Bruscher asked.

  Standing on her porch, Tracey pointed to an area between the garage and the Robertses’ business and said, “Two males left . . . on foot running” that way. “I’m not sure if they ran southwest of the garage or between the garage and the business.”

  Two males.

  According to Bruscher’s report, Tracey Roberts said two males. Add Dustin upstairs lying dead on the floor and that made three intruders.

  48

  BACKUP SOON ARRIVED. DEPUTY SHERIFF Dan Bruscher had help. They entered the house through the rear porch area, stepping into the kitchen, as Tracey and her children looked on.

  “Who’s been shot?” Bruscher wanted to know.

  “He’s upstairs,” Tracey said, as if describing a dog she had put down.

  “Who’s upstairs?” Bruscher asked.

  “The one I shot!” Tracey responded. “I do not know who he is.”

  The children began talking over their mother. Bruscher described this later as voices coming at him from all sides. Bruscher and his colleagues were in the middle of clearing the bottom level of the house, going from room to room, while he spoke to Tracey and the kids, making sure that a second or third intruder wasn’t still inside.