Beautifully Cruel

by M. William Phelps

In the Times, days hence, that quietness became a total blackout.

  After Cessford pressed Tracey to describe the second intruder, she talked about a guy not very strong, someone who didn’t wear glasses, “average build,” with “dark brown or black wavy hair [and] . . . clean shaven. . . .”

  “Someone you knew, perhaps?”

  “I never saw him before. He wore a black leather jacket.”

  Cessford wanted to know if she could recall the way in which the second man spoke.

  “The only thing I remember is instead of words, one of them used ‘dah.’ My sister does this all the time. It’s like a Chicago expression.”

  Da’Bears.

  Da’Bulls.

  Da’lies.

  “Any problems with anyone?” Cessford wondered.

  “A Chicago dentist,” Tracey said immediately, referring to Robert Kellner, seizing the opportunity to cast suspicion on him. “He messed with me. I filed a civil suit against him long ago.... I believe he has organized-crime connections. We settled the suit for sixty-five hundred dollars.”

  “When was it settled?”

  “December eleventh.”

  Two days prior to Tracey killing Dustin Wehde.

  “Please don’t tell my parents [about the civil suit]—they do not know anything about it. They are unaware of the entire incident.... He was not happy because it means the guarantee of loss of his license to practice in Illinois.”

  Cessford took down the name of the dentist.

  “Tracey, let me ask you, how good of a shot are you?”

  “I have shot some at the range with a handgun . . . but have not been out to the range at all this year. I favor long guns,” she explained before going into a story of how she was out at the range once “with the guys.” They were having a contest. How many plates could you knock down with your handgun?

  “I didn’t plan to shoot, but somebody handed me a gun and told me to try.”

  Tracey said the “first time” she tried, she “knocked all six” plates “down with six rounds.” They asked her to try it again. She then got “only five out of six.”

  “They wouldn’t let me shoot anymore.”

  Cessford asked her a few more questions about guns in the house and concluded the interview.

  Of note: Tracey Roberts, not once during this entire interview in those moments after arriving at the hospital, mentioned panty hose, nylons, or stockings.

  53

  SAC COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINER (ME) investigator Bill McClure met with Mona and Brett Wehde at about 9:45 p.m. to confirm that the license on the dead man upstairs inside the Robertses’ residence proved it was their son, Dustin. McClure explained how he actually bent down on one knee and matched the photo on the license up to the man on the floor. It was then established that Dustin’s car was in the driveway. So he was confident in saying twenty-year-old Dustin Wehde was the man Tracey Roberts had shot and killed.

  Investigator McClure asked Brett about Dustin’s movements that late afternoon and evening. Could Brett recall anything different about his son, plans he had, where he might have been going?

  “He . . . he . . . ,” Brett was shaken to the core. His only boy was dead. Violently shot to death inside a neighbor’s house. Was it an accident? What was Dustin doing inside the Robertses’ residence? What in the hell happened? Brett could not wrap his mind around it all. “He left the house about five-thirty p.m.,” Brett continued after composing himself. “He said he was going out for a walk. A walk! I’m not sure if he took his car then or later. But that is his car in the Robertses’ driveway.”

  McClure wondered if there was anything else they could share.

  Mona was barely able to stand, could hardly speak.

  Brett said, “Dustin and us have been good friends with the Roberts family. I don’t understand why he came here or who could have been with him.”

  “Dustin was a loner,” Mona added, and Brett confirmed. “He did not hang around anybody.”

  Brett and Mona gave McClure the name of a local mortician and told him to have Dustin’s body delivered there when they were finished investigating.

  In talking with Brett at a later time, Bill McClure seemed confused about a few things, as were others in law enforcement. Mainly, why was Dustin at the Robertses’ house? If you ask Tracey, Dustin had shown up earlier, around 4:30 p.m. or so, and then returned, busted in, and had a plan to harm her and the kids. By this point, the journal had been found inside Dustin’s car next to a “junky” computer and a keyboard that proved to be from the Roberts house. (According to Tracey, they kept this particular computer stored, of all places, inside the kids’ room, instead of with several others they had collecting dust inside the business office.) That journal, in Dustin’s handwriting, spelled out a motive on his part: Dr. Pitman (through his lawyer) had hired Dustin to kill his former wife and son.

  Bill McClure wanted to know what Brett thought about Dustin being at the house. No one in law enforcement had shared the contents of the journal.

  “He was good friends with the Robertses,” Brett explained, which gave Dustin good reason to be there. “They had taken him places, and done things with him. Dustin had told us he was going to start working for the Robertses this upcoming week. He said he had been to the house talking to Tracey on the afternoon of the thirteenth.”

  Mona later confirmed all of this; she had spoken to Tracey about Dustin working for them in the days preceding Dustin’s death.

  Investigator McClure concluded his report of the conversation by writing: Mr. and Mrs. Wehde cannot understand why Dustin was at the Roberts’ [sic] house and do not feel he would have been involved with the attack on Tracey Roberts with anyone else....

  Based on all of this, after he came on board in 2008, Trent Vileta took a look at the case file and was baffled. From day one—literally—Trent had questions about those moments just before and right after Dustin’s murder. Specifically for Trent it was the timeline of events Tracey provided, against what was later put together by law enforcement through interviews.

  Number one, Trent said, “It is possible the incident lasted for over forty-five minutes, but when you look at when Dustin left his house and when the 911 call came in, it could have been much longer than that.”

  This alone was a red flag. Home invasions last minutes, not hours.

  “I think between five-thirty and seven p.m. is a possible time frame, although no one ever sees Dustin’s car sitting in the driveway at a certain time,” Trent explained to me. “All kinds of things could have happened. Due to my opinion of the ‘journal’ being incomplete when Marie Friedman came by [with cookies, to sleep over], which forced Dustin to go out the front door carrying the journal or the computer, it is very likely the reason for the return trip was so he could finish the journal entries with Tracey.”

  Additional questions, just as valid, became: Why didn’t anyone in law enforcement think it was important Tracey didn’t take Bert to basketball practice? She and Bert talked about basketball practice in their statements, but no one asked why they never went. Bert even said they would generally leave about 6:45 p.m., which, by Tracey’s timeline, would be before the event would have begun.

  Also, where did Dustin go after he left Tracey’s house (when Marie Friedman showed up)?

  Maybe the most important questions of the entire investigation: Why would a perp—a “hired killer,” no less—go to a murder without a murder weapon? Why would Dustin park in the driveway? Why would Dustin leave a “confession” in the form of a journal on the front seat of his car? If the intent was to kill Tracey, then why didn’t the “intruders” kill her? Why would Dustin steal a computer that was in worse shape than the one he owned? Why were there no signs of a struggle on Dustin’s body? And based on what was in the journal, how would Dr. Pitman even know Dustin?

  “The other great bit of the story is Tracey making dinner for Michael,” Trent concluded. “She knows he isn’t going to make it home in time for dinner, bu
t yet she has it ready. I wonder if she invited Dustin over for dinner.... The important piece of staging during this whole time is the kids being locked up in a room watching a movie. Bert is the only real witness she has to worry about—and Bert never really ‘sees’ anything.”

  In the DCI Criminalistics Laboratory report of the crime scene, several interesting factors emerged—but apparently none of them were found to be at all that alarming until eight years hence, when Trent Vileta opened up this cold case and Tracey was finally arrested and charged with Dustin Wehde’s murder two years after that. For one: At the time of the shooting, the only light on upstairs was the light in the hallway near the stairway, DCI’s lab report noted. Two, Tracey revealed to Cessford, according to a DCI report: One of the intruders wore gloves, the other did not. This would lend itself to a later theory that there was no second intruder. Thus, the only prints DCI would find just happened to be Dustin’s. And the lights were a constant source of confusion. Tracey had said so many different things about lights being on and off, when and which ones.

  Most important, however: No signs of forced entry, the DCI report continued, no signs of a struggle, nor signs of any ransacking activities. The only discovery in the house indicating anything out of the ordinary on the main level was: a pair of panty hose on the kitchen floor. Besides that: [The] only sign of a disturbance upstairs was in the master bedroom. This was where Dustin was murdered.

  In their first statements, Tracey and Bert talked about all of that banging around, tussling with the intruders, Tracey fighting them off her, a kick to Bert’s bedroom door, her shoving one of them into a wall. Yet, not one askew family photo, not one out-of-place throw rug, not one scrape on a wall, not one indication that any sort of a struggle had taken place in the hallway became part of DCI’s report. They found nothing.

  The scientific evidence at the scene told an even more chilling story. What crime scene investigators (CSIs) found should have demolished any story Tracey Roberts told of shooting Dustin in the dark. CSIs found seven shell casings in the southeast corner of the bedroom near the gun safe. Most of these seven shots hit Dustin Wehde, said the report. So, to believe her, Tracey had fired in the dark, on her knees, falling over herself, having gotten the gun safe to pop open after a failed attempt, the hammer jammed, with Dustin supposedly grabbing at her (or choking her with panty hose, one version claimed) and she was able to hit him by blind firing—and all of those shots landed.

  Two more casings were found near the bedroom doorway. Another casing was found—strangely, if one is to accept Tracey’s first version to police—on the staircase landing directly downward from the hallway outside the master bedroom. Regarding these three casings, CSIs found: [They] are believed to be the entrance wounds found to the back of . . . [Dustin’s] head.

  The CSI team conducted a reconstruction of the shots while in the bedroom with Dustin’s body still on site. What they found was incredibly inculpatory. It should have raised several questions about Tracey’s version of the events.

  The trajectory of these wounds, the CSI report read, through the body (head) is consistent with a person shooting from a standing position near the bedroom door while Dustin was lying or nearly lying on the floor.

  From reading that, a horrific picture emerges: Tracey standing over Dustin, firing these rounds into the back of his head. Add to that scenario the smoke and smell of gunpowder reported when the first responders arrived and she must have fired those shots in the moments just before everyone arrived and just after (or while) Bert called 911.

  The blood spatter on the wall and drawers of Tracey’s dresser showed that shots had been fired from “at least two different locations,” spreading already coagulated blood.

  Yet another contradiction was the doctor’s report of treating Tracey at the hospital for her “injuries.” In that narrative, Tracey was quoted as being “scared she was going to die.” She was “scared that her little kids were going to get hurt as well.” She told the doctor she was “not certain” who the two “young individuals” were who attacked her. She was not complaining of any nasal bleeding or ear bleeding, the report continued—injuries one might expect after firing such a large-caliber weapon so close to your ear. She did not have any scratches on her arms or back. (All that grabbing and struggling and not one scratch?)

  Important to note about the “red mark” on Tracey’s neck, which she claimed was from being choked with the panty hose (that is, in one version and in the Times article), was that the doctor did not find any abnormalities in the conjunctiva or sclera of her eyes. Both were “normal.” Her lids were normal. Her range of motion in her neck was normal. There was no bruising to the back of her neck. Her carotids “were clean.”

  All of this contradicts someone being strangled during a violent attack:

  There was not any indentation on the neck.

  I did not see any bruising except the red mark. ...

  The width of the red mark was about “1-cm.”

  Tracey, the doctor noted, after speaking with her for an “extended period of time,” would not “require hospitalization.”

  In an interview he gave to the Sydney Morning Herald after divorcing Tracey and returning to Australia many years after the ordeal, Michael Roberts told a story about Tracey, on the way home from the hospital that night, turning to him and saying, “Pull over.”

  They were not far from Tracey’s parents’ house.

  “Okay,” Michael responded. He knew that look in Tracey’s eye.

  Tracey, unbuttoning her blouse, demanded they have sex inside the car before heading to her mother’s house, where they would stay for a while.

  Michael chalks up the . . . romp to the trauma of the events, the Herald reported.

  “We drove Tracey to our house,” Anna Richter later told me, meaning she and Bernard, Tracey’s father, “after she went to the hospital that night. Michael is lying.”

  A hospital report indicated that Michael Roberts “had arrived” at the hospital “just prior” to DCI “finishing [an] interview with Tracey.”

  54

  AT THE TIME DUSTIN WAS killed, twenty-eight-year-old Jeremy Collins, a married army vet with PTSD and traumatic brain injury (TBI), bad vision, and other problems associated with a bomb going off in the combat zone near him, lived in nearby Ida Grove, Iowa. Jeremy worked for a local frozen-food delivery company—and also (vaguely) fit a description of the so-called second intruder.

  Same age. Size. Build. Hair color.

  Dustin and Jeremy knew each other—sort of.

  During an interview with Brett late into the night of December 13, 2001, Jeremy’s name was first brought into the investigation. DCI detective Dan Moser was over at the Wehde residence talking to Brett, getting his version of the day and evening. After that short interview, Moser asked Brett if he could take a look at the Wehde residence caller ID to see who had called the house.

  Brett said fine. The Wehde family needed to know what happened to Dustin.

  Moser scrolled through and marked down the numbers.

  Mona watched.

  The first number Moser found was for Mona’s daughter’s boyfriend. Two calls to him at 4:13 and 4:14 p.m. on the day Dustin was murdered.

  Then another number.

  Moser looked at Mona. She looked away.

  At 4:34 p.m., a telephone call from Jeremy Collins had come into the Wehde residence. Was somebody in the Wehde house expecting a call from Jeremy in the moments before, after, or while Dustin was over at Tracey’s house? Why would Jeremy be calling?

  Jeremy later said he never did any “activities” with Dustin. He never gave Dustin rides or hung out with him. He knew Dustin by sight only, he said.

  Dustin and Jeremy were not friends.

  So why would Jeremy Collins call the Wehde house on the day Dustin Wehde was said to have been over at the Roberts house with a partner in crime trying to kill Tracey Roberts?

  55

  WHEN TRENT VILETA BEGAN LOOKING
into the murder of Dustin Wehde, he studied the crime scene photos with the cautious eyes of an investigator looking for abnormalities and irregularities: things that might not juxtapose with what the reports and interviews had said. He had Tracey’s statements in hand and needed to match those statements up against what the photos showed and proved, to see if there was any synchronicity between the two: the evidence and Tracey’s story.

  “As you know, the first thing that alarmed me was the bullet wounds in the back of Dustin’s head,” Trent explained.

  But there was also something Trent noticed in Dustin’s back pocket while staring at the crime scene photos one afternoon—something the DCI detective found rather interesting.

  A pen.

  Why did Dustin have a pen in the back pocket of his jeans?

  Dustin, a man who did not write—hated writing!—had a pen in his pocket.

  Trent believed that pen was used to construct that journal under Tracey’s guidance.

  “So when Tracey’s friend, Friedman, comes over with the cookies and Dustin is inside,” Trent theorized, “in my opinion, Tracey has Dustin go out the front door—a door even she later says nobody ever uses.”

  In his hand as he left that afternoon, with plans to come back (Tracey had first to get rid of her friend, who had come to stay the night), was either the journal, the computer later found inside Dustin’s car, or both, Trent believed.

  “When you read the journal, it’s clear that it is unfinished.”

  Indeed. That writing in the journal by Dustin’s hand was done all in one sitting and not yet complete. Something interrupted Dustin as he wrote it.

  Marie Friedman.

  Bert wasn’t home at that time of the day. When Dustin came over to ask about the work Tracey had spoken to Mona about in the days before, that was when, some in law enforcement believed, Tracey had Dustin write the journal.

  “She probably lured him into it with sex,” said one law enforcement official.

  Same as she had done all her life with guys she wanted something from, or guys she would later try to con.