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SOMETIME AFTER THE COMPOSITE-DRAWING debacle, Tracey began what only could be described, effectively, as a nearly nine-year campaign (phone calls, letters, faxes, e-mails, conversations, threats) against DCI and the SCSO, periodically trying to do what most psychopaths will do when a situation they created crumbles before their eyes.
Control it.
So scared that her plan had failed on all levels, Tracey wrote an e-mail to Mona (that was ultimately never sent but had been saved) in mid-February 2002, admitting that she knew the contents of the journal. In that e-mail (which Michael intercepted and saved “for a cooling-off period” because it was so vitriolic and unsympathetic), Tracey explained her “conversations with authorities” had “confirmed” there was a “connection” between Mona’s “household and two men, Mr. Komie and Dr. Pitman.” Further, she wrote: Now it is a safe assumption that your son was involved with them. Attacking Mona personally, Tracey asked: [T]he only question is: were you involved also?
Throughout this e-mail, it’s clear Tracey was trying to feed information to police through Mona: It is likely that you lost your child because these men influenced Dustin into a situation. Tracey was further spilling her knowledge of the journal contents.
The desperation on Tracey’s part was profound: If you know these guys were involved with your son and you go to the authorities . . . I will agree in writing not to take any legal action against you.
By the end of the e-mail, Tracey threatened Mona: Enough is enough. 60 Minutes here I come! When this goes national . . . Tracey warned Mona that she could become one of two people: [A] caring grieving mother that tried to protect her disabled son . . . OR a co-conspirator in an attempted murder.
It was vicious, heartless, and insensitive. Michael Roberts was smart enough to see this and put it away—though Tracey had always assumed the e-mail had been sent.
Tracey next wrote a scathing letter to Cessford, making demands to see photos of suspects. On top of attacking Pitman, Tracey sketched out Pitman’s entire history of sexual abuse allegations for Cessford. She was trying to make sure law enforcement focused on Pitman; but, in turn, she was revealing her knowledge of the journal.
After she sent the letter, Tracey initiated an e-mail crusade aimed at Cessford. This time, she was trying to get Cessford to agree to allow her to investigate Pitman on her own and report back to the SCSO what she found. She then chipped away at what she knew to be various versions of what happened she had given to police and the newspaper, hoping to fill in the holes with an “I don’t know if I was dreaming” argument, now blaming PTSD on her evolving stories.
After Cessford received the letter, the e-mails, and several faxes from Tracey and Michael, he decided to call Tracey—and record it.
“Hello?” she said.
“Just to let you know, I did get your e-mails and . . .”
“Oh! Okay . . .”
“. . . you know we’ll look into that.”
“Okay.” Tracey sounded manic, almost out of breath.
Cessford explained that police reports and other investigatory items Michael had requested via fax were off-limits and not public information.
Tracey just kept saying, “Okay. Okay.”
At one point, Tracey mentioned that Michael had purchased a “panic button” for her, one of those “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” necklaces.
Cessford came across comforting. He was easy to talk to. He had one of those warm Wilford Brimley voices. Just as they seemed to be hanging up, Cessford said, “Can I ask you one question?”
“Yeah.”
“Why is it that you think you are being lied to?” Tracey had gone on and on about this in her e-mails, especially where SA Moser was concerned.
“I’m kind of real sensitive right now.... When I had kind of broken down after you mentioned Stephen Komie’s name and asked well, why, why are they asking about him? . . .”
Cessford clarified something: “We’re looking at you. We’re looking at Michael. We’re looking at your ex-husband, and we’re looking at his attorney . . . because you guys,” Cessford stressed, “. . . you and Michael had mentioned . . . this attorney . . . and we’re looking at the dentist. We are looking at everything.”
Tracey had tried to claim Cessford and the DCI had brought Komie into the narrative, when it was actually she who had done that.
“I don’t know if we mentioned this,” Tracey added, interrupting the lieutenant, “but we have, I have a complaint against that one attorney in Illinois, back from November. I kind of forgot about it till the other day. . . .” Then she went so far as to ask a rhetorical question: “How would Dustin know, well, your ex-husband’s attorney’s name . . . ?”
Cessford didn’t answer.
They agreed to stay in touch.
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TRACEY AND MICHAEL WERE GUESTS on The Montel Williams Show in October 2002. She was there to tell her tale of surviving an attack. By now, Tracey had refined her version of that night into a chronicle that placed her in the role as a hero mom who had saved her children from two violent men looking to do all sorts of nasty things.
Part of the reason why Tracey went on Montel was to have the same effect banging on John and Art Cullen’s door had when she asked for that interview in the days just after she executed Dustin: The more people who heard Tracey’s amended version of the “attack,” the safer she would ultimately feel. Tracey was still plugging holes she had left back at Loring Hospital when speaking to Cessford.
“She’s building a coalition of supporters, which ultimately would draw a handful of cultlike followers,” a source in law enforcement commented.
By this time, Tracey was pretty much panicking because law enforcement hadn’t come out to say they had uncovered a so-called journal detailing motive.
“She’s waiting for the hammer to drop,” said that same source. “She’s waking up every day, plotting how to further obfuscate her culpability for Dustin’s murder.”
“She’s continuing to build a brand with this Montel appearance,” Ben Smith said. “Someone please show me the nursing and radiography tech degrees she supposedly has? Save for scrubbing floors in Omaha with a British accent, she hasn’t had a real job since she was fired from the one she purportedly had in Chicago when she met Dr. Pitman. And you know what, that Omaha job, I’m sure, was her way of casing the home she was cleaning.”
Thus, the Montel appearance was one more way to polish the Tracey Roberts image.
The title of the episode was “True Crime: An Invitation to Kill.” While Michael spoke of forgiveness and moving on, Tracey laid out her case. It was far more dramatic now. She had been “strangled” and “passed out.” She said she fired without knowing who was in her house. Here, in the televised version, she claimed to know Dustin personally, calling him a “troubled youth.”
Tracey talked of “kicking” and “thrashing” and “fighting” with the intruders. She said she checked the house at one point for the second intruder—the first time she ever mentioned this.
The main reason for appearing on the show, however, Michael explained, was to try and quash any rumors floating around the small town of Early. Michael was there to say don’t believe the rumors. All of it was hurting the investigation and the search for the second intruder.
In the end, “I applaud you,” Montel Williams told Tracey, before he said the case was “justifiable homicide,” in his opinion. He viewed Tracey as a hero for protecting her family.
The appearance was a farce—just one more way for Tracey to thumb her nose in the face of the Wehde family. She had murdered Dustin Wehde. The evidence was piling up against her. Yet no arrest was imminent and many were wondering why. Tracey was able to go on national television and say, in no uncertain language, that everyone and anyone in town questioning her story was a liar. She came across as pretentious and superior, behaving like she was smarter than everyone else. She was acting like someone who thought she could outplay the W
ehde family, which was preparing to launch a civil suit against Tracey for killing Dustin.
No doubt, Dustin’s dad, Brett Wehde, sat at home, disgusted, watching this circus on television. Brett was in a bad place these days, and had been for some time. His only son was dead. His wife had moved out of the house with their two daughters. He was alone and depressed and drinking. He was having trouble moving forward—and what Brett was planning as he sat and stared at his television would compound and magnify the tragedy the Wehde family had experienced ever since the day Dustin was murdered.
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“THERE’S A PERSON LYING ON the ground,” the 911 caller said. It was Thanksgiving Day, 2002, 3:59 p.m. The caller had stopped on the side of the road near Holstein Cemetery, in Holstein, Iowa, to make a phone call. While on the phone, the caller just happened to look out into the cemetery and saw someone lying on the ground near a tombstone.
The local sheriff’s office responded to the call.
Holstein, Iowa, is twenty-five miles west of Early. Dustin was buried in the Holstein Cemetery. A large black marble stone, his high-school photo etched on one side, DUSTIN BRETT WEHDE across the middle, musical bars underneath his birth and death dates, a skimobile and a computer etched on the bottom, alongside a golf cart, all displayed his favorite things.
This was the first Thanksgiving Brett Wehde and the rest of Dustin’s family, his sisters, Ashley and Briana, and his mother, Mona, spent without him. It had been difficult for everyone. But Brett had taken his only son’s death especially hard, this after separating from Mona, who had moved to Sioux Rapids, Iowa, with the girls.
Before leaving to visit his son’s grave on that Thanksgiving morning, Brett left four letters on his kitchen table. Basically, Brett said in the letters that he’d “cried every day” since Dustin’s death and could not take it anymore. With Mona and the kids now gone, his entire family—hell, his entire life—had been torn apart by tragedy. More than that, nothing was being done about it. There were still no answers. Nobody was paying for Dustin’s murder.
So Brett drove to Holstein, parked his vehicle, walked to his son’s grave, sat down, put his arms around his child’s headstone—and then placed the barrel of a. 22-caliber pistol up against his chest and pulled the trigger.
Fifty-two-year-old Brett Wehde had one arm still wrapped around his son’s headstone when sheriffs arrived to find him dead.
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EVER SINCE SHE’D MOVED INTO Early, Iowa, Tracey had used the e-mail address Tracey @ the name of Michael’s company. All throughout 2002, specifically, Tracey used this account to contact Cessford, Moser, the SCSO, her lawyers, doctors, and just about any other person she reached out to—that is, until December 30, 2002, at 6:30 p.m., when Tracey sent Mona Wehde a scathing, five-page, single-spaced e-mail from a different account. In this e-mail, Tracey ripped into Mona, accusing Mona of the most egregious behaviors fathomable. The e-mail was in response to a “Letter to the Editor” that Brett’s brother had written asking questions about the investigation and death of his nephew, an article that truly enraged Tracey Roberts.
On this day alone, writing to Mona, Tracey used the e-mail address “supermom” @ something dot net.
Imagine: Supermom.
What kind of message was Tracey trying to send to Mona?
The subject of the diatribe was “this has been long overdue.”
Here was yet one more attempt by Tracey to set forth the contents of the journal into public domain. She carried on about so-called “rumors” she claimed Mona was spreading around town. Then hammered Mona’s “theories” that “completely contradict one another”—for which, Tracey wrote (with no way of knowing) “none of the forensic evidence collected” supported.
She verbally assaulted Mona for not believing the police that Dustin’s “criminal intent” and “involvement in the attack” were “clear” and “convincing.”
Tracey talked about her only objective and motive for speaking to the press: to “refute” the “ridiculous rumors” and “slander” that Mona had been “spreading.”
Anyone familiar with Tracey’s life and behaviors would say that Tracey was speaking about herself here. She stated, for example, that Mona’s stories seem to “evolve and change from week to week,” adding an outright lie, saying: My account of the event has never changed.
Then she alleged that Mona “must be involved in some manner.”
The woman’s son was killed, her estranged husband had killed himself, and here was Dustin’s killer blaming the mother. It was beyond heartless and premeditated and psychotic. Tracey called Mona a liar. Then, getting into the contents of the journal, Tracey alleged that Mona had lied about knowing Dr. Pitman, saying how the authorities claim to have a “link between the Wehde household and John prior to December 13, 2001.”
Giving her complete hand away, Tracey wanted to know from Mona why law enforcement would “specifically” ask Tracey if Dustin “could have come to know John’s attorney through Mona.” She added how the police told her they “clearly had a connection” between Stephen Komie and Dustin.
Tracey even attacked Brett. Then, trying to quash rumors spreading through town, Tracey wrote: I was not having an affair with your son. By the logic Trent Vileta and Ben Smith would go by later, if Tracey mentioned it, there must have been some truth to it.
I never claimed Dustin strangled me with panty hose.
After that, Tracey put forth a bizarre theory of Mona convincing Dustin to murder Tracey so Mona could have Michael Roberts all to herself.
If I really speculate, I might suspect that you arranged this with my ex-husband.
This unleashed yet another one of Tracey’s by-now classic attacks on Dr. Pitman.
By the end, Tracey was blabbering on about God, the Lord, and how she was trying to forgive, but not before threatening Mona, saying she had met with her Christian attorney to talk about taking legal action.
Not for “revenge,” Tracey emphasized—but for “vindication and answers.”
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TRACEY MUST HAVE FELT FLUSH with an immense sense of relief on Wednesday, August 20, 2003, when she woke up and opened the morning paper as she sipped her first cup of coffee. There it was in black ink, extremely large font across the top of the fold, just underneath the Storm Lake Times banner: Sac County Attorney Says: NO CHARGES AGAINST ROBERTS.
Sac County prosecutor Earl Hardisty (Ben Smith’s predecessor) explained to the Times in an exclusive interview that he had zero interest in charging Tracey with any crime relating to Dustin’s death.
Now or ever, Art Cullen wrote.
By the time the case was ready for an attorney to look at, things in the prosecutor’s office were in a downward spiral, an insider explained to me, putting Hardisty’s decision here into some context.
“It was as if Earl Hardisty was trying to find every reason in the world not to prosecute Tracey,” said that same source.
The county attorney is the chief law enforcement officer in and for the county. When Dustin was murdered, the Sac County prosecutor was Pam Dettman. Dettman resigned and left that position, which she had just been reelected to three months after Tracey murdered Dustin Wehde. To fill the void, because there was no attorney in the county who actually wanted the job, the Board of Supervisors hired a local, private attorney to do the work part-time.
Enter Earl Hardisty.
“You see,” that insider explained, “up until Earl . . . arrived, the position was part-time. It’s like this in many counties in Iowa. There isn’t enough work for them to do to justify a full-time county attorney’s position.”
Earl Hardisty was the prosecutor in Adams County in 2001, a small county near the Iowa-Missouri border. Earl lost the 2002 election in Adams County to a local attorney who was reluctant to take on the duties.
So, bereft of any employment opportunities, knowing Pam Dettman had left the Sac County job and a temporary private attorney had taken on duties, Earl bought land in Sac County. Then
he went to the Board of Supervisors and asked them to seat him as county attorney.
And they did. They had no choice. They had nobody else.
Thus, Early Hardisty became the Sac County prosecutor in early 2002—at one of the most critical points in the Wehde killing investigation. One could argue that Hardisty did not want to step into the job and then point a finger at a local woman and charge her with premeditated murder.
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YEARS PASSED. WITH THAT, TRACEY and Michael’s marriage dissolved into a repellent mixture of oil and water. One of the main catalysts driving the separation and divorce later on was, of course, Tracey’s psychotic behavior. When authorities failed to follow Tracey’s lead of the journal contents and arrest and prosecute Dr. Pitman, Tracey pointed a finger at Michael.
Michael had once said he had a “suspicious mind” based on what Tracey and others had done to him over the years. In 2004, Michael later told law enforcement, before he and Tracey separated, there were several instances with Tracey in which Michael became scared for his personal safety. As it were, they fought all the time. By now, Tracey and her supporters were confident Michael was the mastermind behind the killing of Dustin Wehde.
“Tracey had Michael so convinced that he was going to prison by this point,” Ben Smith later observed, “Michael started working out and running to ready himself for prison life.”
It’s clear, though, if what Michael said was true, that Tracey had other plans for her soon-to-be ex-husband—which included Michael Roberts meeting his Maker.
Michael provided law enforcement with a receipt from Walmart, which he said Tracey produced after buying boxes of safety pins one day. He also handed DCI a recording of him and Tracey talking about the strange incident, in which she admitted her involvement.
Safety pins? you might ask.
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