Beautifully Cruel
Page 33
As always, Kensington Publishing—particularly my publicity team, Vida Engstrand and Morgan Elwell, the chairman, president, and CEO Steven Zacharius, general manager Adam Zacharius, and, of course, my wonderfully talented, extraordinary editor now for nearly thirty books, Michaela Hamilton. Plus, there are the countless number of Kensington employees who work on my books in every capacity—they have all had my back for fifteen years. It’s hard to believe I’ve been in this game that long, but there you go.
Time does not stop.
Lastly, to all of those who sell my books, especially all the great people at Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Amazon, the airports, grocery stores, big-box retailers, Walmart, Target, Kmart, and all the indie bookstores across the country. I think often how fortunate I am to be considered part of your family, and I greatly appreciate all of you taking the time to make sure my books get into the hands of readers.
In August 2011, nearly ten years after the killing of Dustin Wehde in her home in Early, Iowa, Tracey Richter Pitman Roberts was arrested on first-degree murder charges. (Courtesy of Sac County Prosecutor’s Office)
Tracey claimed she was home with her three children when neighbor Dustin Wehde broke in and tried to strangle her. (Courtesy of Sac County Prosecutor’s Office)
The injuries on Tracey’s neck, hands, and arm were photographed by law enforcement. (Courtesy of Sac County Prosecutor’s Office)
When investigators entered the home of Tracey and Michael Roberts, they could smell gunpowder and see gun smoke, but saw no sign of forced entry. (Courtesy of Sac County Prosecutor’s Office)
Homicide victim Dustin Wehde was twenty years old, liked to play paintball, and knew the Roberts family. Why would Dustin break into the Roberts’ home and attack Tracey? (Yearbook photo)
This autopsy drawing shows that Dustin Wehde was shot three times in the back of the head—one shot (“#1 Entry”) almost directly behind the ear. (Courtesy of Sac County Prosecutor’s Office)
The Roberts family lived in the Victorian house at right. Michael Roberts operated his business from the adjacent building. (Courtesy of Sac County Prosecutor’s Office)
Dustin Wehde’s car, parked in the Roberts’ driveway where neighbors could easily see it, did not seem consistent with a home invasion. (Courtesy of Sac County Prosecutor’s Office)
Dustin Wehde’s car in the Roberts’ driveway became part of the crime scene. Inside it investigators found a crucial—and controversial—piece of evidence. (Courtesy of Sac County Prosecutor’s Office)
Blood spatter marks the walls of the bedroom where Tracey Roberts shot Dustin Wehde. (Courtesy Sac County Prosecutor’s Office)
A knife was found on the floor inside the room where Dustin Wehde was killed. (Courtesy of Sac County Prosecutor’s Office)
This .357 Magnum was found on the Roberts’ kitchen counter next to a set of car keys. (Courtesy of Sac County Prosecutor’s Office)
Tracey Roberts placed one of the weapons she used to kill Dustin Wehde on the dining room table next to a deck of her child’s flash cards. Courtesy of Sac County Prosecutor’s Office)
The photos on these two pages show the Roberts property from different angles. The photos led law enforcement to question Tracey Roberts’ claim to have seen a man fleeing her home. (Courtesy of Sac County Prosecutor’s Office)
The back of the Roberts’ main house, where Tracey claimed a second intruder ran from the home while Dustin Wehde attacked her inside. (Courtesy of Sac County Prosecutor’s Office)
The back of the house dedicated to a computer business owned by Tracey’s husband, Michael Roberts. (Courtesy of Sac County Prosecutor’s Office)
One of the most important pieces of evidence found inside Dustin Wehde’s vehicle was a pink notebook, containing text apparently written by Dustin. At first it seemed to outline why he was attacking Tracey Roberts and who had hired him to do it. (Courtesy of Sac County Prosecutor’s Office)
A second notebook, found inside Dustin Wehde’s bedroom, seemed to indicate that Dustin planned to kill Tracey Roberts and her eleven-year-old son, Bert Pitman. (Courtesy of Sac County Prosecutor’s Office)
Tracey Roberts changed her name with forged and falsified documents, began speaking in an English accent, and even acquired a valid, however fraudulent, passport and driver’s license under the assumed name Sophie Corrina Terese Edwards. (Courtesy of Sac County Prosecutor’s Office)
Iowa Department of Criminal Investigation (DCI) Special Agent Trent Vileta believed there was more to a 2001 home invasion resulting in a homicide than self-defense when he looked at the “cold” case in 2008. (Courtesy of DCI/Trent Vileta)
Sac County (Iowa) prosecutor Ben Smith—who had never prosecuted a murder case—knew he faced an uphill battle in proving the case Trent Vileta presented to him. (Courtesy of Ben Smith)
Homicide victim Dustin Wehde. (Yearbook photo)
Compounding the tragedy of Dustin’s untimely death, his father committed suicide at Dustin’s grave site. Brett Wehde’s body was found with his arms wrapped around his son’s headstone. (Author photo)
Serial killer expert, lecturer, and acclaimed investigative journalist M. William Phelps is the New York Times best-selling and award-winning author of thirty-four nonfiction books. Winner of 2008 New England Book Festival Award for I’ll Be Watching You, and the Excellence in (Investigative) Journalism award from the Society of Professional Journalists (2013) for his Connecticut Magazine article “Blonde, Blue-eyed & Gone,” Phelps has appeared on CBS’s Early Show, The Discovery Channel, ABC’s Good Morning America, NBC’s Today, The View, TLC, BIO, History Channel, Oxygen’s Snapped, Killer Couples, and Captured, USA Radio Network, Catholic Radio, ABC News Radio, and Radio America, which calls him “the nation’s leading authority on the mind of the female murderer.” Currently, he is associate producer, consultant and onscreen expert for Piers Morgan’s yet-to-be-titled serial killer series on ITV in Great Britain.
Phelps has written for the Providence Journal, Hartford Courant, Connecticut Magazine, and the New London Day. Profiled in such noted publications as Writer’s Digest, the New York Daily News, Newsday, Albany’s Times-Union, Hartford Courant, and the New York Post. He has also consulted for the Showtime cable television series Dexter. He is a member of the Multidisciplinary Collaborative on Sexual Crime and Violence (MCSCV), also known as the Atypical Homicide Research Group (AHRG) at Northeastern University. He lives in a small Connecticut farming community and can be reached at his author website, www.mwilliamphelps.com.
Look for M. William Phelps on Investigation Discovery in reruns of his series, Dark Minds, focusing on his travels investigating unsolved serial killer cases, and in his longtime recurring role as a leading crime expert on the long-running series Deadly Women. In addition, Phelps annually films about twenty different guest spots on various crime series all over the cable dial. You can write to him via his website or by snail mail at PO BOX 3215, Vernon, CT, 06066.
Notes
1 I think it’s important to note something here about the Times article. Please keep in mind that the Times article is published six days after the events. So all of the information in the article is gleaned from Tracey alone—the police reports and documentation and interviews that would become part of the record later would have been unavailable to the Times. Perhaps Tracey thought these documents would never become public.
2 According to the US National Library of Medicine and Health, a “shored gunshot wound of exit is produced when the outstretched skin is impaled, sandwiched, and crushed between the outgoing bullet and the unyielding object over the exit site, thus leaving an abrasion collar on the wound margin.”
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