Yes.
As their marriage crumbled, law enforcement explained to me, Tracey went to her husband one day and asked him, “quite plainly,” Michael said, describing her demeanor: “Do you trust me?”
“Yes,” Michael answered. “I want to.”
Tracey said, “Okay.”
She then took a sheet, laid it out on the bed, and asked Michael to lie inside it.
So he did.
Tracey wrapped Michael up in the sheet like a mummy. Only his head was exposed. She then blindfolded Michael and secured the entire sheet tightly with those safety pins, “so I couldn’t move,” Michael said. As he described this scene, Tracey kept interrupting him, at one point saying, “This is too weird. . . .”
The entire incident was Tracey’s idea because, she said, “[Michael] was convinced that I wanted him dead—that I was going to kill him.” The tone in her voice as she said this was stoic, monotone, chilling.
“Can you get out?” Tracey asked her husband after applying the safety pins.
Wrapped snug as a cigar, Michael worked at it. He was able to get his hands free, yet his arms were still pinned to his sides. He couldn’t move his legs at all.
Tracey walked away, leaving him alone and wrapped up. Michael recalled hearing Tracey then go about doing housework, vacuuming and cleaning, while he was entombed in the shroud. As he lay there, waiting, a bout of claustrophobia kicked in.
Forty-five minutes went by.
“Do you want to get out?” Tracey came in and asked.
Michael thought about it. He wanted to “do whatever he had to do,” he later said, “to prove that he trusted” her. This was important to him.
“Tracey, why don’t you wrap ClingWrap around my face?” Michael asked. Later, while telling the story, he acknowledged that he was just joking. Being facetious.
“Actually, I have something better than that,” Tracey said.
She walked out of the room and came back moments later with a plastic bag, same as you’d get at the grocery store.
“I’m going to put this over your head,” Tracey said.
The entire exercise was really “weirding” Michael out by now. He was scared. Something that might have been an exercise in two people looking to rebuild a broken marriage and maybe even turn sexual felt dark and dangerous.
Michael looked at his wife.
“Do you trust me?” Tracey asked, staring down at him, the plastic bag in her hands.
“Yes, I do,” he said. “And I’ll prove it.” He felt forced into saying this. What else could he do? Here was a woman who he believed, in his heart, had been trying to kill him. He needed to convince her that he trusted her, even if he didn’t, so he could get out of the shroud.
Tracey placed the bag over Michael’s head and pulled it tightly around his neck.
Michael Roberts could not breathe.
72
ANY MARITAL HEARTBEAT PULSES BECAUSE of trust. What Tracey Roberts was doing to her husband on this day was not a test of his credulity or faith; it was nothing short of a warning Tracey was giving to her husband not to ever fuck with her. She was in charge. She controlled his life. She held his future in her hands. That’s what she was saying here.
With that bag over Michael’s head, Tracey popped two holes with her fingers into the area of Michael’s mouth so he could get some air into his lungs and breathe.
“Try to get out,” Tracey ordered him.
Michael started “fighting,” as he later put it. He wiggled his feet out of the bottom.
“What it came down to,” Michael said later while explaining the harrowing incident on that recording, “was that I trusted her to do this. . . .”
While Michael was saying that, Tracey is heard on the same recording, butting in, adding, “And look, he’s still alive!”
As he desperately tried to get out of the safety-pinned sheet, that bag over his head, Michael began to see stars. It wasn’t as though she had cut a large hole in the plastic. It was difficult for Michael to take in lots of air at once. He was on the verge of passing out.
“Take the bag off !” he shouted. “Take it off.”
Tracey stood motionless. Stared at him. Said nothing.
“Take it off,” Michael said in a panic. He couldn’t breathe.
“Don’t panic,” Tracey said. “Take shallow breaths.”
Finally Michael tore the pins apart. He was desperate for air. Tracey stood by watching, doing nothing. He was breathing heavily in and out, gasping.
Then, as Michael broke a hand free and went to grab the bag to take it off his head, Tracey reached quickly for the bag first and removed it.
Then she walked away without a word.
Michael now knew where their relationship stood.
There was another strange event.
“The ‘wine incident,’” a source who interviewed Michael about it later told me. “It was recorded by Michael Roberts. He thinks she is actively trying to kill him at this period, so he carries around a small recorder in his pocket.”
The sounds of this recording are chilling when the facts later come to light.
Michael and Tracey were talking while inside the car in their garage. Tracey had fixed Michael a glass of wine just before. But as they chatted in the car, Michael started to feel “woozy and passes out.”
“What’s eerie is that you then hear Tracey get out of the car, close the car door, and then you hear footsteps, and the garage door close,” my source told me.
With the garage door closed, you then hear the car start up.
Michael Roberts was passed out, inside the garage, the car running, the doors in the garage all closed.
He woke up, alone, coughing, later telling law enforcement he believed Tracey was staging his suicide.
73
TRACEY WENT TO LIVE WITH her parents in Rembrandt. The lawsuit filed by the Wehde family involved depositions and court filings and a litany of other maneuvers on both sides. Tracey was on her own now, with her children, preparing to divorce Michael and do battle for custody of Cassie and Tommy.
Bert was fourteen years old (in November 2004) when he was deposed during the course of The Estate of Dustin Wehde v. Tracey Roberts. Bert sat and talked about that night for what was the second time (officially). The deposition is remarkable, if only for what Bert, now three years later, could recall.
The early part of Bert’s story as he told it during this deposition was fairly the same as what he told Lieutenant Cessford on December 13, 2001. There were a few inconsistencies, but nothing too glaring. The one thing Bert said here was that he was certain the person who came to his door and he heard in the hallway was Dustin Wehde. There was no more wondering for Bert; the way he worded his answers, he was confident Dustin was the man attacking his mother.
The first new recollection Bert offered was in the form of: “I could hear the two men walking in the next room. They walked downstairs and back up again. I yelled that they better not touch my mom.”
And this was where Bert’s story changed—or, that is, became far more detailed than it had ever been. He said Dustin came to his door and said: “We already killed your mom and your stepdad, and you are next.”
“I was scared,” Bert explained, “but I said, ‘You could not have killed my stepdad because he is on a business trip.’ Dustin Wehde said, ‘He came back early and we met him in the office and killed him.’”
Interestingly, Bert talked about his “doorknob” being “jammed,” now the reason why the attackers couldn’t get into his room.
He spoke of how they were “walking up and down the stairs.”
He explained how he could hear “fighting in the hallway, some thuds and running.”
How he then “heard” one of them say to the other, “Bitch has a gun.”
Bert gave no explanation as to where Tracey was during this entire time. And, after explaining how his mother came to his room and he opened the door for her, here came the most dubious statement
to date by Bert: “She had panty hose around her arms and she said, ‘Come on.’ Then she said, ‘Wait here,’ and she went out again.” From there, Bert added, he “heard more shots and then she came back in my bedroom, we walked downstairs, and I called the police.”
74
BETWEEN 2001 AND THE TIME of her arrest in 2011, Tracey Richter sent hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of e-mails, faxes, letters, and other documented communications to sheriffs, DCI agents, people involved in her various criminal and custody cases, friends, foes, Dr. Pitman, Michael Roberts, her mother and father, along with scores of others. No one was safe from Tracey’s vicious, revenge-filled, written attacks when she was in the mood.
One of the women Tracey e-mailed in 2004, Sherry Summers, had been somewhat of a friend for a bit of time. They met while Tracey was in the midst of separating and divorcing Michael. In June 2004, when Tracey decided to move out of her house, she asked Sherry to help. Sherry was going to trucking school. She could use the experience.
“I had this dream, Sherry,” Tracey said to her friend as they chatted one afternoon during the move. This was according to an Iowa District Court (Pocahontas County) fact sheet and charging document outlining the alleged events that transpired between the two women. Tracey went on to explain that dream: “Sherry, [you] killed . . . Michael . . . in self-defense.”
Sherry found the dream bizarre, knowing Tracey’s history.
“If you do kill Michael in self-defense,” Tracey then supposedly said to her friend, “I will give you half of the business.”
Sherry was astounded. A woman who had killed a man herself, purportedly in self-defense, was seemingly now asking Sherry to do the same—or worse, setting a murder-for-hire conspiracy in motion.
Was Tracey serious?
Even if she was not, the comments were in terribly poor taste.
The next day, Tracey called Sherry and “made the same offer,” those fact sheet documents claimed.
Sherry was alarmed and disturbed by it all. She decided to back off from her friendship.
That July, Tracey sent Sherry an e-mail. In it, Tracey “alludes to the earlier offer” of Sherry killing Michael.
Sherry called Michael and explained.
“She’s tried to kill me before,” Michael said.
Sherry thought about it all. A precedent had been set—by Tracey. Sherry needed to do something.
She reported it to the local sheriff’s department.
Together, with the local prosecutor’s office and Sac County prosecutor Earl Hardisty, they tried to lure Tracey into a recorded conversation about it, but Tracey never took the bait.
All was quiet for a time. Then, on November 15, 2004, Tracey sent Sherry an e-mail in which she copied several people, including the local sheriff and the man who ran the trucking school where Sherry was a student.
It was another one of those rambling tirades by a lunatic now determined to destroy yet another person’s life. Tracey wanted to know why Sherry was lying, telling people she had tried to hire her to kill Michael, before attacking her professionally (the reason for copying the man who ran the trucking school) and personally (all the other people Tracey copied).
Sherry was embarrassed that the e-mail had been sent to so many people she knew. For one, she had been called into the office of the man who oversaw the trucking school. He was concerned about the idea that one of his students might be involved in “killing someone.”
They had a conversation and Sherry was able to alleviate any concerns the man had.
Still, Tracey was out of her mind. She sent separate e-mails to the sheriff, assailing Sherry, calling into question her integrity and accusing her of making false allegations of the vilest type against her father. Tracey even wrote to the sheriff that Sherry had a “very long history of mental illness” and “attempted an overdose” just recently. She attacked her cleanliness. Said she was desperate for money.
None of this was true.
Sherry demanded Tracey be charged with harassment.
She was.
After a trial in a magistrate court, “Teflon Tracey” was acquitted on all counts.
75
TRACEY RICHTER ONCE TOLD A counselor that being overweight as a child had sent her into the house, in seclusion, where she spent a great deal of her childhood alone. Tracey claimed to have “developed early,” getting her “first period at age ten and a half.” Her childhood experiences caused her a lot of emotional distress and pain from being an outcast and picked on. In the same session, Tracey called herself a “geek” and “the responsible one,” being the oldest of her brother and sister. But as time moved on, between the seventh and eighth grade, Tracey claimed, she went “from a size eighteen to a seven,” and those same kids who were bullying her long ago were now “asking me out.”
When DCI arrested Tracey on murder charges during the summer of 2011 and went through all of her belongings, the hard drive on Tracey’s PC was found to contain some of the most violent pornography those cops involved had ever seen. These were images, one cop told me, that you cannot unsee once they are in your head. How bad? According to one source, beyond several “snuff films,” where girls were brutally raped and then murdered, the hard drive contained films of “teenagers” being violently sexually assaulted and “raped at gunpoint,” in addition to films about “mutilation fetishists.”
Tracey, of course, given the opportunity to explain, said somebody had planted those files on her hard drive.
On an IQ test, Tracey scored 116. She was smart, a “bright and capable woman,” said one doctor. In this same report, however, whenever Tracey was shown “projective material evocative of paternal provoking imagery or sexual imagery,” Tracey displayed “internally feelings of anxiety and neediness.”
Although this information would trickle out in various media reports later, none of it would become part of Tracey’s trial, which was under way as the fall of 2011 commenced. Tracey’s character, in many ways a large part of the Dustin Wehde execution, would somewhat stay intact. Thus, after several pretrial hearings through September, on October 24, Tracey, who had turned forty-five that May, walked into the Webster County District Court, in Fort Dodge, to start hearing testimony in the State of Iowa v. Tracey Ann Richter.
Tracey was now engaged to a man who sat in the courtroom every day. She “blew kisses at him” and signed the words “I love you,” a courtroom source recalled. As for her dress, Tracey tried her best to come across more as a librarian—probably by design—than a hard-nosed killer. It was clear she had lost that youthful luster of beauty she once held. Tracey was more tired-looking, beaten, and aged beyond her years. Her skin, a near-emo white, showed signs of the stress she had been under. She wore a white dress shirt, skintight black sweater, black slacks, black-framed, hipster-type glasses, and carried a full plastic shopping bag into the courtroom with her as she sat down. Tracey’s hair was thick and long and flowing, as tightly curled as fusilli pasta, lightning-bolt streaks of whitish gray, like the Bride of Frankenstein, a bit off-center on each side, above her forehead. She did not embody that “geek” she claimed to be in childhood, but one could make an argument for a woman trying to come across as maternal and sophisticated and cerebral. At times, the look on her face as she sat, watched, and listened to proceedings personified disgust and rage. How dare all of you accuse me of such a thing! Tracey, the perpetual narcissistic psychopath, never thought for a moment she would be forced to sit in a courtroom facing murder charges. For ten long years, she had gotten away with murder.
But here they were, set to begin.
* * *
Ben Smith acted as co-counsel and supported AAG Doug Hammerand, who would lead the fight to see that Tracey got what she deserved for all the pain she had caused throughout her life, before finally committing the ultimate act of evil.
Defending Tracey was lead defense attorney Scott Bandstra, supported by Karmen Anderson and R. W. Powers.
After several court matters on
October 24 were discussed among the lawyers and the Honorable Kurt Wilke, it wasn’t until 9:01 a.m., October 25, that a pool of twelve jurors (and two alternates), honed down from thirty-two the previous day, sat and heard testimony. It had taken some time to get to this place and the judge thanked every juror for his or her commitment, acknowledging how grateful he was for such honest, dedicated citizens.
As murder trials go, it did not get any bigger than the one Webster County staged inside what was a whitewashed, stone, legal-looking building with immense concrete columns and a clock tower. Both sides delivered their opening statements with an expected amount of zeal and rhetoric: self-defense versus aggravated, premeditated murder. There were no surprises in either opening, other than perhaps the defense pushing an agenda of Dustin being a highly dysfunctional problem child, who might have become a bit obsessed with the new family in town.
“Dustin gave Tracey Roberts the creeps,” Scott Bandstra said early into his opening.
Clearly, this was going to be, for the defense, a bad guy/good girl argument all the way through—and everything Bandstra spoke of during the opening fell in line with that villain versus superhero metaphor, with a band of Keystone Cops stepping in to sort it all out.
“You’ll hear they contaminated the scene . . . stepped in blood. . . .”
The bombast in Tracey’s tale was more sustained than it had ever been, with Tracey having “problems breathing” after the attack and how Dustin once “raised a gun to his father” and “cornered his mother. . . .”
Of course, it did not take long for Jeremy Collins’s name to come up—setting the alleged “second man” theory, Dustin’s co-conspirator, into motion.
“Jeremy Collins . . . quits his job . . . on December 11 of 2001,” Bandstra said. “He pays off his truck on December 11, 2001. He’s having an affair with Mona Wehde. . . . They’ve spent time in a hotel in November of 2001 . . . and they talk the morning when the shooting occurs. . . .”
The call Jeremy made to the Wehde home late in the afternoon on December 13, 2001, at 4:34 p.m., came up as Bandstra seized upon the notion that Jeremy made the call knowing Mona was “not at home. . . .”
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