Then the knife: What was so significant about that steak knife on the floor, upstairs, in the bedroom? The crime scene photos show this knife clearly on the floor, by itself.
Trent hypothesized that Tracey planted the knife, which was a knife the Robertses kept upstairs and used as a screwdriver for something that didn’t open, according to Michael Roberts.
“In case she had to later explain how two men did not overpower her . . . or the reason why she felt so threatened, she put the knife up there after she killed Dustin,” added that same law enforcement official.
“She planted it there in haste, but forgot to work it into the story,” Ben Smith said.
The knife was an afterthought.
What is the most significant piece of evidence, from Trent’s point of view, indicative of the knife being planted or staged to appear as though it was left in the position where it was found?
“Look at the crime scene photos,” Trent said. “The knife is pictured in the exact spot—the middle of the crime scene—where Tracey claimed she scuffled with her attacker or attackers. How can that be? She staged that scene after she put the kids downstairs and right before everyone arrived.”
The only way the knife could have wound up where it was photographed was if someone placed it there after the so-called altercation in the bedroom.
There is no other explanation.
56
WHILE FURTHER TALKING TO BERT Pitman in those hours after his mother killed Dustin Wehde, Dennis Cessford heard some rather bewildering things, considering Bert was eleven years old. Bert explained all he knew about what had happened. Near the end of that interview, as he had done with Tracey, Cessford asked Bert if there was anything he could add.
“Dustin had called last Sunday about going paintballing.”
“Okay . . . anything else? Like friends of Dustin’s?”
“I don’t know any of his friends.”
“Whenever we go paintballing, though,” Bert added, “Dustin and my dad [Michael] talk about stuff. Dustin was a kind of lost soul. He fought my dad’s suggestions.”
“If it was Dustin, why would he want to hurt your family, Bert?” Cessford asked.
“He might be trying to get back at my dad. We quit taking him paintballing after he stole [something]. I know he had problems in school. The only friends Dustin would have are bad people.”
“Is there anything else you can recall, Bert?”
Beyond a few inconsequential facts, Bert concluded, “I remember one of them kicking my door. I think one of them left to go get something. Sometime later, I heard him come back.”
“How long would you say the guy was gone?” Cessford asked.
“Maybe twenty to twenty-five minutes.”
There it was. The most compelling part of the interview became Bert telling law enforcement that the incident took at least twenty to twenty-five minutes. Additionally, one of the men supposedly left the house, only to, bizarrely, return. How could that be? What were Tracey and the other intruder doing for all that time?
* * *
Little Tommy, three years old, was interviewed briefly. Cessford used his fatherly touch with the boy. When interviewing somebody so young and fragile, the only thing you can do is ask questions and allow them to speak.
“Can you tell me what happened?” Cessford asked in a nonthreatening manner. The interview would last all of three minutes.
“There was bad guy on the floor and my mom killed him. . . . She had two guns.”
“How many bad guys were there?”
“The other one ran off.”
A three-year-old, who had never come out of the room, had seen Dustin on the floor, Tracey with two guns in her hands?
Incredible.
“I heard the bad guy talking and hurting my mom. Something was tied around her neck.”
It was as if the boy had memorized a script.
“Did you see the other guy?”
“No.”
“Do you know where he went?”
Far as Cessford knew, Tommy was upstairs, in Bert’s room, during the entire ordeal. One would have to assume he hid in the closet or underneath the bed.
“Out of the kitchen door,” Tommy answered.
A three-year-old, this kid knew all of the basic facts of the home invasion?
57
“HEY, ART, CAN YOU COME over?” John Cullen said after his brother picked up the phone.
It was Sunday, December 16, 2001. Art Cullen, editor of the Storm Lake Times, was at home, as was his brother, John, the newspaper‘s publisher. John and Art lived one block from each other.
“What’s going on, John?” Art asked.
“Tracey Roberts is here. She wants to be interviewed about what happened inside her home.”
Odd, Tracey had just shown up at John Cullen’s house demanding to be interviewed.
And that was how that lengthy, front-page news item, with the banner headline—TRACEY ROBERTS TELLS HER STORY: STRANGLED WITH PANTY HOSE SHE WARDED OFF ATTACKERS TO PROTECT HER CHILDREN—came to be. Tracey Roberts got into her vehicle, drove twenty miles out of Early on a Sunday afternoon, and knocked on the publisher’s door.
Why would she do this—expose herself so openly, add more details to a story she had told police already? What was the purpose? Why would she want to instill any animosity in that so-called second intruder, who, according to her, was still at large?
“Simply put, she had to fix all the holes in the story she told to Cessford at the hospital,” prosecutor Ben Smith told me later. “After reflecting for two days on all her mistakes, she concocted a (more) plausible version of events. So, anticipating being ‘called out’ on all the inconsistencies and impossibilities in her upcoming formal interview DCI was going to conduct soon, she preemptively rehabilitated the story. Remember, she later claims she was so traumatized over the whole ordeal that she couldn’t eat or sleep—yet she could give a tell-all to the press?”
58
DAYS AFTER DUSTIN WEHDE WAS killed, as his wife made sure her “story” was told the way she needed it, Michael Roberts went on the defensive. He wanted the entire focus of the investigation on the second intruder: Find the second attacker and you’ll find answers. Michael posted a $10,000 reward offer all over town seeking “information leading to the arrest and conviction of the unidentified man”—the alleged second intruder—that attempted “to murder my wife and best friend Tracey by strangulation.” The flyer went on to explain how the “individual escaped on foot” somewhere near 7:00 p.m., on Thursday, “December 6, 2001.”
Michael had gotten the date wrong on the flyer! The incident had occurred on December 13. Underneath the botched date, he quoted the attacker, saying: The children were told “when we finish with your mom, you’re next.”
At the bottom of the flyer, it was written that the Robertses wished to thank the community as a whole: the Wehde family for their friendship over the past two years; a good friend of theirs “for counseling”; neighbors, friends, and law enforcement, which went “50+ hours without sleep”; Jesus and “Our Father in Heaven.”
No mention of a third intruder was raised on the flyer or even spoken about after the incident. As it turned out, the third intruder might have been something Tracey said in haste by mistake as law enforcement arrived on scene. She would deny ever saying there was a third intruder.
DCI began a canvass of the neighborhood and local businesses, asking questions, talking to anybody who was around on the day Dustin was murdered.
No one had any information.
No one saw a strange man running from the Robertses’ house.
No one could fathom a murder having taken place in such a rural, small community.
On Monday, December 17, 2001, Michael Roberts handed Mona Wehde a eulogy he had written for Dustin’s wake.
Mona took it home and sat down to read it.
Michael opened by thanking the Wehde family for “asking for my thoughts.”
Seemed
kind of strange the husband of the woman who had killed a man she claimed had broken into her house to attack her was writing that dead man’s eulogy.
In his eulogy, Michael talked about how he had been introduced to Dustin “a couple of years ago.” He said Dustin was a “tough kid to love.” He had heard people say things about Dustin: that he was “strange” and “different” and “simply no good.” Then Michael quoted the Lord from Romans 3:10.
From there, he went on to note that it was not right to judge people in the eyes of God, before calling Dustin: without question the loneliness [sic] individual I ever met . . . He said Dustin shared with him his earliest memories of being “rejected, teased and bullied.” He talked about a “brick wall” Dustin had built around “his heart,” with bricks made from “anger, fear, and pain.”
Michael then spoke of how he introduced Dustin to the only true friend a man could have, the Lord. Dustin never accepted this, Michael explained—mainly because of that great brick wall he had so soundly constructed around his heart.
The rest of it was about God, the Lord, and how Michael had tried desperately to reach Dustin on a religious level, but could not.
Michael would never read it aloud at Dustin’s funeral, but instead handed out copies of it to those who came to pay their respects to Dustin and the Wehde family.
59
ON TUESDAY MORNING, DECEMBER 18, DCI SA Dan Moser met with several law enforcement personnel and the county prosecutor, Pam Dettman, to discuss the progress of the investigation. What they knew that the public did not was that a notebook (or “journal”) found in Dustin’s car sketched out what appeared to be a plot to kill Tracey and Bert. According to Dustin’s hand, the crime was set up by Dr. John Pitman and his lawyer, Steve Komie (all the way from Chicago), two men who did not know Dustin Wehde and had zero contact with anyone in town besides Pitman’s ex and his kid, Bert.
Thus, the obvious solution to all of Tracey’s problems—potentially losing custody of Bert and all of that money associated with custody, at a time when her husband’s computer company was hemorrhaging money they did not have—was written in a narrative by a local special-needs kid. If Dr. Pitman was arrested and charged with conspiracy, Tracey’s life—that is, as she saw it—would turn around. Here was motive, opportunity, all of those involved, and how the entire plan was hatched spoon-fed to DCI and the SCSO in a pink notebook (journal) found on the front seat of the dead man’s vehicle.
It was perfect.
During this meeting it was decided the obvious next thing to do was to see if the Wehde family recognized Dustin’s handwriting. If they didn’t, DCI and the SCSO would need a sample of Michael’s, Bert’s, and Tracey’s handwriting.
Moser showed Brett and Mona the first page of the journal later that same day.
Immediately, Mona said, “That’s Dustin’s handwriting.”
Brett agreed. There was no doubt about it.
They dug through Dustin’s room in the basement of the Wehde house and found some “old school papers” of his. After a cursory check, both samples of writing appeared to be identical: Dustin’s papers and the journal.
Beyond the notebook, however, they “found nothing of significance” having to do with Dustin being involved in such violent crime.
Investigators walked away from the Wehde house with Dustin’s computer. After a forensic examination of the entire hard drive, they found nothing: no e-mails between Dustin and Pitman and/or Komie, no writings by Dustin indicating what he was up to, no secret obsession with Tracey, no searches for how to conduct a home invasion or kill someone, or anything else that even remotely suggested he was about to commit a seriously violent home invasion and double murder. One might hazard a guess that if he had taken the time to write what he was going to do on paper—which might be considered a more permanent way to document a life—and leave that journal on the front seat of his car, he would have written at least something inside his computer about it. Further, if Pitman had hired him, where was an e-mail between them? Instead, not one connection between Dustin and his computer, Pitman, Komie, and/or the home invasion Dustin had allegedly committed.
SCSO Bruscher, who had been working with Moser on the investigation, called the James City Police Department (JCPD) in Williamsburg, Virginia, inquiring about Pitman.
“Oh, yeah . . . we’re familiar with Tracey Roberts and her ex, Dr. John Pitman,” JCPD investigator Michael Spearman said. “We investigated an allegation of sexual abuse against Pitman . . . that he had molested his son, Bert Pitman.”
Bruscher asked whatever came of it.
“It was false,” Spearman clarified. “I have a videotape of the interview with Bert. I’ll send it.”
For Moser and the SCSO, after collecting all of this information, they knew the most important thing they could do now was have Tracey come into the SO, sit her down, and get her version of events once more on record.
60
THE ATMOSPHERE IN THE ROOM felt relaxed and casual, though what they were going to discuss was anything but. Late into the afternoon of December 18, 2001, DCI special agent Dan Moser and Lieutenant Dennis Cessford had Tracey come down to the Buena Vista County SO in Storm Lake to sit down for another interview, her second since the attack. (They had no idea at this point she had spoken to the Storm Lake Times two days before.) This conversation would be more intense and focused on details. Within two days of this interview, Tracey would come out in that Times article and, among so many other things, say, “My heart goes out to Mona—she’s lost a child,” adding details to the case she had not given Cessford at Loring Hospital on the night of the attack, even contradicting what she would tell Moser and Cessford on this day. In that same Times interview, Tracey would claim Dustin was never a “welcome guest” in her home and was “not a close friend” of the Robertses, this despite how much Michael had wanted to “save” Dustin.
Dan Moser did most of the questioning. As he began, they discussed the general demeanor of the house prior to the attack. Where was everyone? What were the kids doing?
Tracey seemed to clear up a few things, namely that the kids were watching TV upstairs in Bert’s room because they didn’t have a TV downstairs and the reason why dinner was on the stove was because Marie Friedman (something Marie would later deny) indicated that maybe the men were coming home earlier than expected.
The last time of the night Tracey could recall with any clear memory, she now claimed, was “shortly after six.” She recalled “thinking” they were not going to make basketball practice, though she gave no reason why, and how she considered making brownies—likely not thinking Marie would share a detail later about bringing over cookies. The picture Tracey painted of the house that night was akin to an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show: a doting housewife with her kids waiting on her wonderful husband.
They talked about which lights were on and off.
They talked about laundry hanging from the bannisters.
They talked Bert’s room and Spy Kids.
They talked about how Tracey was walking across the hallway from “the baby’s room” when she heard “the noises.”
They spoke of Tracey seeing “two figures.”
How she made “eye contact” with one of the men and he gave her a “really funny look.”
Odd that she knew Dustin, but she did not recognize him as one of these two men.
Moser pressed Tracey about her story of seeing the men and making it to Bert’s bedroom and getting all the kids into that room, without being controlled by what were two intruders quickly coming up the stairs after her.
“But I went fast,” she said of darting down the hallway toward Bert’s room with Cassie in her arms. “I was not walking, ’cause he had picked up speed and was coming around the corner.”
He.
Not they.
He.
She went back and forth on this.
Whenever Moser pressed for more detail, “Right now, it’s hard for me to remember,”
Tracey said.
Everything that could have gone wrong, as Tracey explained it, happened to go her way at the last possible moment, like in a movie. She was afraid “he” would get into Bert’s room, except just as she was closing the door so Bert could lock it, that’s when she felt the man pull her from behind, just as “I had my hand on the doorknob.”
They moved onto the panty hose. She claimed to be choked right after this with something, she now assumed to be her panty hose. Tracey had no idea, of course, Bert had told Cessford her hands were tied with “nylon.”
She never mentioned her hands being bound.
They discussed brands of panty hose, size, if they were new or old.
As she was being pulled and resisting her attacker, “See, and that’s where I lose time.”
“Okay,” Moser said.
“I cannot remember passing out, but I do remember a time when I was by the guest room getting up . . . and no one was on me.”
So where were they?
She never said.
Tracey told Moser the hallway light was on—though she never saw her attacker’s face.
Moser never asked where the second intruder was during all this. Had he taken the children while she was passed out? Had he gotten into Bert’s room? Had he hidden inside the house? Had he left? Where in the hell was the second man?
Tracey never said she was concerned about the second man hurting her kids.
Cessford chimed in: “We had talked the other night about . . .”
Tracey interrupted: “Right.”
“. . . the possibility of your glasses being knocked off.”
Suddenly Tracey now recalled with exact detail that she was unable to see down the hallway because her vision was so blurry.
She then said the doors into the house were locked.
She blamed Marie for “probably” leaving the door unlocked when she left—though Tracey would have been standing there seeing Marie out.
In her earlier statement, she said she was being strangled while trying to get the gun.
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