Beautifully Cruel

by M. William Phelps

  When he finished, satisfied the lower level of the house was clear, Bruscher asked, “Where upstairs did the shooting take place?”

  Bert and Tracey explained that it happened inside Tracey’s bedroom.

  “One of the boys,” Bruscher detailed in his report (he didn’t say which one, but it must have been Bert), pointed to a pair of panty hose on the floor inside the kitchen: [He] then started telling me about the panty hose.

  As soon as the child began talking about the panty hose, however, Tracey interrupted abruptly, changing the subject entirely, stating, “Oh, God . . . is it my husband?”

  Bert said immediately, “No. I think it’s Dustin Wehde.”

  This was an odd statement on Tracey’s part. She would have known if it was Michael upstairs, lying on the floor, dead. In fact, in all of what she later said pertaining to that moment when the intruder(s) came into the house, she knew it wasn’t Michael as she stood on top of the stairs staring down at the men coming up. Then later after she killed the man. Why now would she ask if it was Michael?

  So many contradictions.

  So many missteps.

  So many lies.

  Bruscher told one of the responding officers to start interviewing Tracey and the children, while he cleared the rest of the house. A deputy told Bert to sit down at the dining-room table. He wanted to discuss with him what happened. Tracey and the other kids followed.

  Before he could get started talking to Bert, however, Tracey interrupted the conversation, indicating she was having trouble swallowing, diverting any attention from Bert talking to officers.

  Bruscher allowed EMS to come into the house and have a look at Tracey.

  * * *

  As that took place behind him, Bruscher headed for the stairs. He walked creepily up each step, weapon out in front of himself like a television cop. He loudly announced who he was, and if someone was upstairs, he had better slowly come forward with his hands up.

  Or else.

  But no one answered.

  As he entered Tracey’s bedroom, Bruscher saw the dead man on the floor “in a fetal position,” a pool of blood “coagulating already,” Bruscher noted, around his head. The stench of gunpowder was “unusually strong” in the air. “I could still see smoke” from the firing of a weapon, Bruscher added. “It was heavy and dense.”

  Bruscher bent down and checked for a pulse.

  Nothing.

  He secured the rest of the upstairs, making sure no one was hiding out.

  Around the doorway into Tracey’s bedroom were “numerous empty shell casings” on the floor. It told Bruscher clearly the area where Tracey stood as she fired the weapon—that is, unless she had moved the casings.

  As he looked around the bedroom, a dead man at his feet, Bruscher noticed something else: “I could also see a large spatter area on the north wall and floor northeast of the body.”

  Also, there was a kitchen steak knife on the floor by the foot of the bed.

  From downstairs, Bruscher heard a voice: “This is Early police chief Roger Ray—is it safe?”

  “Residence is secure,” Bruscher yelled from upstairs.

  * * *

  By 7:22 p.m., Bruscher was instructing everyone to stay out of the bedroom. “This is a crime scene,” he said—and then made a request for DCI and the “lab team” to come out to the residence and process the scene.

  Downstairs, as Bruscher worked his way toward Tracey, she asked him “twice” more if the dead man was Michael. She was becoming hysterical, breathing heavily, as if hyperventilating.

  “No, Mrs. Roberts, it is not your husband,” Bruscher clarified.

  While speaking to Tracey, Bruscher noticed a “red mark around her neck,” this as Bert kept saying it was Dustin Wehde upstairs on the floor.

  Bert knew; Tracey did not.

  “Is Michael involved? Is Michael involved?” Tracey kept asking, becoming more animated. By “involved,” they all assumed she meant dead.

  Bert walked over and motioned toward picking up the panty hose, but Bruscher said, “Hey, son, don’t touch that! Don’t touch anything.”

  Tracey then offered: “I shot him while he was choking me with the panty hose.... I made my way to the gun cabinet . . . was able to get the gun out and I shot him in an upward motion.”

  Bruscher later wrote in his report: Mrs. Roberts then repeated this, making sure I knew that the gun cabinet was locked.

  “Where is your husband?” Bruscher asked Tracey.

  “He should have been home by now. He’s on a business trip to Minneapolis. Is he here yet? He should have been home by now.... He should have been home by now.”

  Michael wasn’t expected, by one account, until about 2:00 a.m. Tracey knew this.

  The alarm inside the Robertses’ business next door sounded off. A captain with the SCSO arrived and made sure his officers secured the basement of the house. Cessford arrived and explained that the Robertses’ business alarm was notorious for popping off.

  “Is my husband next door?” Tracey asked several times.

  “I do not know,” Bruscher answered.

  “Has he been found shot dead next door?” Tracey asked.

  Tracey never said why such a thought occurred to her. How could Michael have been shot, even if he met up with the so-called intruder(s) next door? Tracey never once said any of the alleged two or (now) three men had a weapon.

  “Every time she opened her mouth, the lie became bigger and bigger,” Trent Vileta later told me. “Even though she had Michael Roberts arrested (for domestic violence), I am sure she blamed him for the entire chain of events which caused Dr. Pitman to begin more civil action”—the entire motivation, law enforcement believed, for Dustin’s murder. “Additionally, Michael was becoming less useful to her each day because he wasn’t nearly as successful as she needed him to be in order to counter Pitman. The easy solution to her problems would have been to stage a Dustin/Michael shoot-out.”

  Had Tracey actually done this? If Michael had come home early, with Tracey asking whether he was alive or dead so many times, was she trying to steer law enforcement next door to the office to find his body?

  49

  DIRECTLY NEXT DOOR TO THE Robertses’ house, a neighbor, a local volunteer firefighter, was trying to go to sleep when his pager went off and he heard all of the commotion going on outside his bedroom window.

  He got up, got dressed, and walked over to the window to get a closer look at the Roberts house to see what was happening.

  “I could see Bert [and the other two children] in the kitchen,” the man later said.

  Fully dressed, he then walked outside toward the front of the house and waited. The scene was just then unfolding, cops and emergency arriving in droves.

  As EMTs filed into the house after it was cleared, the neighbor followed behind. He met up with Tracey, a neighbor he knew rather well. She was in the kitchen.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, maybe more as a neighbor than a firefighter. According to his account later, Tracey was “pretty shook up.”

  “I . . . I . . . fired shots at someone,” the neighbor reported Tracey telling him. “I hope it wasn’t Brandon . . . I think there were two or three of them.”

  Here was yet another account of Tracey claiming there were two and then three intruders. By “Brandon,” many on scene later believed, she meant Dustin.

  “How did they get in, Tracey?” the neighbor asked.

  “The back door,” she said, “which we usually leave open.”

  The neighbor said a few more words and then went back home. While he was inside his garage about forty-five minutes later, watching his son feed the dog, his phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Michael,” a man with a noticeable Australian accent said.

  “Michael . . . geez, hi . . .”

  “What is going on? I am in Minnesota. . . .”

  “Someone got into the house and Tracey shot him,” the neighbor explained to Michae
l. “Tracey and the kids are all okay, Michael.”

  “Where is she?”

  “They’re getting ready to take her to the hospital.... Her parents are here and they are going to follow the ambulance. Let me get you the phone number to the hospital.”

  Michael was alive and well—and still in Minnesota.

  50

  DENNIS CESSFORD CHECKED OUT MICHAEL’S business next door to the main house and found that the alarm had gone off accidentally. Back a few moments later, Cessford explained there was no need to be concerned. All was cleared inside the office.

  Cessford then went upstairs, where EMTs had unofficially declared Dustin Wehde deceased. It was clear Dustin had been dead for some time, though that smoky aroma of steel and gunpowder smoke still subtly lingered. Moreover, the blood around Dustin’s head—it had a dark, almost black color to it, as though he had been shot in the head some time ago and the blood had time to drain out of him and coagulate. This does not happen quickly.

  “The last shot she fired,” Trent Vileta later explained to me, “blew the coagulated blood around Dustin’s head onto the wall. So the blood had time to clot, which is several minutes. Thus, when she said he was rocking to his feet, Dustin had already been shot twice in the back of the head and the blood from his head had pooled and clotted on the floor.”

  Dustin had never, by Trent’s estimation, tried to get up.

  Bruscher said he’d wait inside Tracey’s house while everyone left. Emergency personnel explained it would be best if Tracey went to Loring Hospital to be checked out.

  51

  MONA WEHDE WAS ON HER way home from a Sioux City Christmas shopping trip she had gone on earlier that day when she took a call on her cell phone. It was her nephew.

  “Never, ever, ever,” Mona later recalled, “have I received a phone call from my nephew on my cell phone.”

  “Auntie, something really, really bad has happened at your friend’s house.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Something really bad has happened at your friend’s house,” he repeated.

  “Who’s my friend? What? . . . Where? What is going on?”

  “Down the street . . . your friend . . .”

  “The Robertses?” Mona asked. It was the only “friend” she could think of.

  “Yes, I heard it on the scanner. There’s been a fatality.. . .”

  Oh, dear Lord, God, Mona thought. Michael must have shot Tracey. Or Tracey must have shot Michael.

  “They had guns all over their house,” Mona recalled. Coupled with the volatility of their marriage, she figured they got into a heated argument and one of them snapped.

  The nephew explained more of what he had heard over the scanner: cops had approached the house carefully, guns drawn, and then an ambulance left the scene.

  “Okay, I’ll be back soon,” Mona said.

  She drove toward home.

  A bit of anxiety crept up as Mona drove. So she called Brett, her husband, who had just retired as a volunteer fireman.

  “Brett, did you hear anything about the Roberts house and something really bad that’s happened? There’s been a fatality or something.”

  Brett was about ten blocks away from the Roberts house at the time, inside his workshop. It was loud inside the garage. He’d been out of touch with what was going on around him.

  “No, no, I haven’t heard nothing,” Brett said.

  “Okay. I’ll be home in about a half hour. I’ll pop into the shop and say hello, drop off Christmas presents.”

  Mona made it to the shop, said hello to her husband, who didn’t have any more information, and then went home.

  When Mona walked in, her daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend were sitting in the living room. Mona sat down and they talked about their day.

  Twenty minutes went by.

  Brett “came flying through the back door,” Mona recalled. He had a somber look on his face. He was frantic and in a hurry to say something.

  “Is Dustin here?” Brett asked breathlessly. “Is Dustin here?”

  “How in the hell would I know?” Mona answered. Dustin liked to “hibernate” in the basement of the house (his bedroom), playing his video games and reading and hanging out by himself. Neither Mona nor her daughter had been downstairs since Mona walked through the door.

  Brett went silent. A pallid look of dread washed over him.

  That paternal instinct took over.

  “What is it?” Mona asked. She stood from her seat on the couch. “Brett . . . what is it?”

  “I think Dustin’s car is parked at the Robertses’.”

  They looked at each other.

  Mona and Brett hopped into her vehicle and “flew” down to the Roberts house, just a few miles away. They said nothing more to each other.

  Moments later, they parked quickly in front of the Roberts house. Mona and Brett shot out of the car and ran toward her son’s vehicle, parked there for all the neighbors to see, in the driveway of the Robertses’ business. Not down the block, or behind a tree, or hidden somewhere. Yellow crime-scene tape was placed around it by now. It was parked maybe ten feet from the corner of the Robertses’ business house, a white picket fence thirty feet in front, acres upon acres of flat-as-a-tabletop farmland for miles just beyond a basketball hoop in the driveway. In fact, through that farm field and just around the corner was the Wehde household. If Dustin was truly sneaking into the Robertses’ house and wanted to kill Tracey and Bert for John Pitman—as he wrote in that journal—the best way to stealthily go about the job would have been to walk through the field from his house and return the same way after the deed.

  Mona noticed a Suburban parked behind her son’s vehicle. Four cops surrounded Dustin’s car.

  She ran over and broke down—a mother who knew, at the core of her soul, something terrible had happened to her child.

  “Is my son in there?” Mona screamed.

  The men walked over.

  “Yes, he is,” one of the cops explained. It was preliminary, of course. But Dustin had his driver’s license on him.

  Mona cried. “Is he dead?”

  There was a hesitation, a grand pause, and, likely, a look toward the ground. Then one cop said: “Yes. I am so sorry, Mrs. Wehde.”

  52

  THE STORM LAKE TIMES ARTICLE talked a bit about Tracey at the hospital. Tracey looked at herself in the mirror when she got there, Art Cullen reported. It was then, according to Tracey, when she realized for the first time her neck was “swollen and scarred red.” She was having problems swallowing, several reports claimed. There were what appeared to be fingerprint bruises, however subtle, on her left arm.

  After doctors checked her out, Tracey sat with Dennis Cessford and began to tell that first story of what happened. After she relayed to Cessford all she could about the events of the night, he asked follow-up questions. He also had Tracey draw a diagram of the bedroom and point things out: what, where, when, and how. She took her time with the task and then signed the document.

  “Can you recall anything else?” Cessford asked, trying to wrap things up. Doctors had said she’d be going home. There was no reason to keep her overnight. The physical wounds would soon heal. She needed some rest. By then, her parents had arrived and said they’d take her to their house in Rembrandt, about thirty minutes due north of Early.

  “I remember hearing noises while waiting for help to arrive,” Tracey explained—adding yet another piece of fabric to the quilt. “But I’m not sure where they were coming from.”

  Then, as she was crouched near her bed, Tracey explained, “during the scuffle,” she thought she heard “yelling going on.... I recall someone pulling at my legs and grabbing me. . . . I thought I heard Bert yelling at them and them yelling at Bert.”

  “Do you remember hearing any names?” Cessford asked.

  “Um . . . I think I heard either ‘Boss’ or ‘Ross.’ Maybe one called the other ‘Vinnie.’”

  Then a rather bizarr
e, unsolicited statement: Tracey offered to Cessford out of the blue how she believed one of the intruders had used the bathroom upstairs to take a dump.

  “I heard the toilet flush.”

  “When in the time frame did this occur?” Cessford wanted to know.

  Tracey couldn’t say. She thought maybe it was “early in the incident.”

  Why is this statement from Tracey Roberts about the bathroom important to examine? Beyond being totally unbelievable and preposterous on the surface (that a home invader would stop in the middle of a violent, usually sexually motivated crime, to use the toilet), the fact that Tracey recalled this so-called “fact” while in the hospital, during the end of her interview, says a lot. Remember, supposedly Tracey had been viciously attacked in her home by two and then it was three men. She fought those men. Her children were at great risk of being harmed. One of the intruders, according to Tracey’s account, strangled her with a set of panty hose. She then shot (eleven rounds) and killed that man. Yet, here she is, while in the hospital being interviewed by police, presenting this awkward comment (at the very end of the interview) about one of these intruders using the toilet in her house and, on top of that, flushing it.

  “Because when she was having Dustin write the journal, in my opinion,” Ben Smith later analyzed, drawing the only conclusion he could come to for Tracey making such a flawed, incredible statement to Cessford at the eleventh hour of her interview, “Dustin probably took a shit in her house, upstairs.... Later, she probably thought evidence of Dustin having recently taken a shit in her house (fecal DNA or fingerprints on the toilet upstairs) would probably tend to show he was a guest in the house, not an intruder.”

  Made sense.

  Cessford asked Tracey if she had ever lost consciousness.

  “I remember being on the floor outside the guest room and everything being real quiet,” she told Cessford.