“. . . [T] hat incident and two others convinced us that, if given the chance, Tracey would kill Michael Roberts without hesitation,” Trent Vileta later told me.
After showing up at the DCSO and sitting with Gentile, Tracey “left . . . visibly upset and angry,” said the FBI’s report. She never explained what that evidence against Michael on the back of the photograph entailed.
Ben Smith read all of this and understood now more than ever that Tracey was in this thing way over her head. Every time she opened her mouth, she revealed something new.
“As she told her story, it kept getting bigger and bigger,” Trent remarked. “She couldn’t keep track of it anymore.”
Since those e-mails and interviews Trent had conducted in 2008 through 2009, Trent had to back off some of the pressure on Tracey. Other, more contemporary cases came up and took him away. That’s why, when Ben came in as prosecutor, it was almost perfect. Trent was now available to have at it once again.
Still, Trent knew he had to keep Ben focused and interested.
Reading deeper into the FBI’s report, a report Ben viewed as one of the most important documents he had read up until that moment, the prosecutor learned that Tracey had actually threatened Lieutenant Gentile after he began questioning her integrity. It was as though whoever went after Tracey, that person became her next target.
Trent had gotten hold of Gentile on April 2, 2009, to tell him that he had received yet another e-mail from Tracey. But this one, Trent explained to Gentile, had DCI worried for Gentile’s safety.
Tracey had written: One day Mike is going to hurt someone.... When he does, I will have the joy of sitting back and saying “I told you so.” This comment was directed to Trent. She was referring to Gentile in the e-mail before making the following statement: Wouldn’t it be great if he hurt that asshole’s (Gentile’s) kids? She added how “fantasying [sic] about” it was one of the only “things” that got her through the day lately: I got nothing more than incompetence and grief from the people who are paid to serve and protect. . . .
She went on to call Gentile, a decorated cop, a “buffoon” and “schmuck.”
In another e-mail sent to Trent hours after that one, Tracey wrote—to a DCI detective, mind you, investigating her for potentially murdering a man—that Gentile “had just made the list.”
List? Ben wondered.
“What list, Trent?” Ben asked next time they chatted.
They both were under the opinion that it was Tracey’s death list.
“After Detective Gentile called her out, she made what I believe to be a threat to kill the detective’s kids,” Ben explained to me later.
But what transpired next, after Tracey sent those threatening e-mails to Trent, took things to an entirely new, even more troublesome level.
Gentile went out to his mailbox one afternoon after returning home from a long day on the job. It was April 13, 2009. Those e-mails and Tracey threatening him and his kids still fresh in the cop’s mind. The DCSO and DCI were now talking about how to obtain a search warrant to maybe check out what else Tracey was planning. She was feeling backed into a corner. And cops, perhaps more than most, know that when you’ve backed a rabid raccoon into an alley without an exit, it snapped at you as it tried to get away.
Inside his mailbox, Gentile paid particular attention to a letter addressed to him. It was from an anonymous sender, but had been postmarked from France on June 4, 2009, sent there via Long Island on April 9, 2009, all before winding up in Gentile’s mailbox.
This is weird.
Gentile opened it.
It was a computer-generated letter, short and sweet: DEAR MARK: I KNOW YOU WERE BANGING MY EX.
Nothing more.
Tracey or Mike, Gentile thought right away.
Law enforcement dusted the letter and envelope for prints, but found nothing. Whoever had sent the letter had wiped it clean.
14
BEN WAS CONFIDENT THAT DIGGING into Tracey Richter Pitman Roberts’s life before the incident in which Dustin Wehde was killed, and after she divorced Michael Roberts, would produce results. Depositions, Ben considered, would perhaps answer some questions and give Ben additional firepower to prosecute. Ben was no seasoned prosecutor, but he knew he needed tangible evidence. By the end of April 2011, Ben had made the decision that he would go to the attorney general’s office (AGO) for help. One of the reasons why he began creating the timeline was to compile all of the evidence into a PowerPoint presentation so he could show it to the AGO with Trent by his side. Ben could explain to the AG’s team what they had uncovered and, hopefully, get them to rally around a prosecution. It was the right thing to do. Ben could not handle a trial of this magnitude on his own.
Digging further into the e-mails between Trent and Tracey, Ben learned that by May 2009 Tracey had admitted to Trent that she had been charged with what she called “felony criminal impersonation.” Trent had been wondering about it and had asked casually if anything had ever come of her changing her name. He wanted to know from Tracey what the details involved. Of course, Trent knew what the charges were, what she had done, and had read all the reports—but he wanted to hear from Tracey what she had to say about it.
“The more she talked, the more she said,” Trent recalled.
Tracey claimed she was set up. It wasn’t her.
“That name change was legal.... She had it done in London,” one of Tracey’s family members later told me during a phone call. “She had to change her name because of Michael and all the things on the Internet [about her]. Michael stole her identity at one point.”
“Supposedly they found something in my house to support this passport claim,” Tracey explained to Trent.
Again with the “they”—who, in this instance, were the DCSO in Omaha, with the FBI right behind them. While a War on Terror was going on, passport fraud was serious business.
Trent knew what they found. He had the search warrant from the DCSO dated May 19, 2009, in front of him. The DCSO more than “found something” in Tracey’s apartment—there was a five-page list of items seized by the DCSO on that day, and among the items was, what one law enforcement source told me, “some rather disturbing ‘murder porn.’” They could not “say for sure it was Tracey’s, but it was found on her computer.”
Ben found this statement from Tracey rather interesting after reading the e-mail, seeing that they had a copy of the passport with Tracey’s photo and the fictitious name deputies had found in her apartment during the search. The passport, issued on February 3, 2009, was in the name of Sophie Corrina Terese Edwards. The photo depicted Tracey in glasses, a scarf jauntily knotted around her neck, and red lipstick. Her hair was different: perfectly parted, perfectly done up. Tracey did not look like the little ole housewife from Early, Iowa; she came across as a more refined, schooled librarian type.
Was she trying to appear to be English?
Here was Tracey in a passport photo, but then in her 2009 e-mail, she said she was set up.
They are fishing, Tracey wrote to Trent.
Ben didn’t need to read any more of these e-mails to draw a conclusion that they were dealing with a manipulating criminal, a pathological liar, a woman trying to backtrack and lead an investigator she considered to be a country-bumpkin idiot down a foul path, trying to trick and fool him.
“In those 2009 e-mails, she’s flaunting all of this in front of Trent,” Ben said.
They also knew Tracey, feeling pressure from DCI, was perhaps thinking of taking off to Europe, and the name change and new passport fell in line with that.
* * *
Since he’d started working on the case with Trent, Ben had combined the sheriff’s office files with the DCI state detective’s files and made one large file of the case he kept in his office. He took home sections of the file to his grandmother’s house every night.
“Believe it or not, before I did this, those files had not been combined,” Ben said. Again, it wasn’t a slight against t
he former regime, but more so that no one had been prepared to investigate such an elaborate murder case—if it even was a murder. So far, as a prosecutorial matter, no one considered the case worthy enough for a court and jury.
In combining the files and going through every single page in each file, “I’ll never forget what I found,” Ben commented later.
It was huge.
Not telling anyone about the new lead, Ben drove two hours from Sac County to Des Moines. Come to find out, Ben’s earlier hunch was spot on: Tracey had given a deposition, but not only in the custody matter—she had also given a deposition in a civil lawsuit Dustin’s family had filed against her. For that civil suit, Tracey had to sit and talk about the case, what happened on the night Dustin was killed, and even some of the events afterward. What’s more, in trying to come up with the funds to defend themselves against the civil lawsuit at the time, Tracey and Michael had tapped their home owners insurance for coverage, filing a claim. Thus, the insurance company sent out an investigator and opened up an investigation into the case, subsequently deposing Tracey and Michael.
Not one deposition, but two, Ben thought he’d find in Des Moines.
After a long drive, talking to Trent by phone most of the way, Ben walked into the attorneys’ office where the insurance files were stored. No one had inquired about them. No one looking into Dustin’s death, beyond the insurance company, had ever seen them. There were three boxes. In one of the boxes, amid tedious legal mumbo-jumbo filings—pleadings and affidavits and insurance figures and statistics—was an interview transcript of Tracey and an insurance investigator.
Ben picked it up and, inside the dusty room, read through it.
In all of these documents, Ben soon found out, Tracey had given accounts of what happened inside her house on the night Dustin was killed—that is, different accounts.
Ben piled the boxes into his car and drove back to his office.
That first night he had the new documents, Ben read inside his office until two o’clock in the morning and passed out from exhaustion on his desk. There would be several nights like this inside the next week or more, on top of nights at home doing the same. He took copious notes. Ben could not believe what Tracey had said in these interviews.
“In one interview with an insurance adjuster in 2003,” Ben explained later, “she tells him how she was leaning over the body, kneeling down by it and looking at it, and then how she describes finding a piece of fluff with a ‘bullet’ on it, which would have been a slug.”
This was, Ben knew, “completely contradictory to anything she had ever said.”
It was new information. Tracey knew more than what she had shared with police.
Was it a Perry Mason TV show moment for the prosecutor?
Perhaps.
If nothing else, Ben had Tracey Roberts contradicting herself on record. And the more he delved into these new documents, the more Ben saw various ways in which Tracey seemed to have a lot more to hide than she had first shared.
There was one instance when Tracey had actually walked into the SCSO, Ben soon uncovered, and asked to speak with someone about Michael. It was not long after they began divorce proceedings and Michael had moved out.
“She tells the sheriff’s office that Michael used to talk in his sleep,” Ben explained, “and he was talking one night about a journal. . . .”
In relation to all this, Trent later made a compelling argument: “In 2001 and 2002, she said Dr. Pitman had the most to gain by her being dead.” This was, indeed, Tracey’s core argument. “In a follow-up with investigators, she would ask how hard Pitman was being looked at.... That narrative changed in 2004 with the divorce from Michael Roberts, however. Even the description of the mystery ‘second attacker’ began to change. She no longer had much of a beef with Pitman and now focused her rage on Michael. The irony of this was that Tracey was Michael’s biggest defender after the murder. . . .”
First it was Pitman who had set up the hit with Dustin—Pitman being the absolute focus of her anger and hatred at the time. But Dr. Pitman was never arrested or charged for the crime. As she and Michael Roberts divorced, however, Michael became the focus of Tracey’s new theory. He was now her new suspect.
15
BEN WAS SITTING IN THE driveway of his grandmother’s house. He had Trent on the phone. Ben was a health conscious person, always had been. But since taking over as prosecutor and latching onto Dustin’s case, he’d stopped exercising and, what’s worse, he’d taken up something for the life of him he thought in a million years he’d never consider: smoking. Sitting in his car, puffing away, reflecting on the case with Trent, Ben had a gloating tone in his voice he had trouble disguising. He had found something that day inside those files, which he had been obsessively going through.
“To Ben, everything he was finding out was a major revelation,” Trent said later. “But I had seen most of it in the years leading up to this.”
Inside one of the files detailing the custody battle, which Ben had found in an assortment of papers, was a letter from one of Tracey’s attorneys to Dr. John Pitman’s attorney, Steve Komie, the same attorney mentioned in the journal as the guy behind paying Dustin to kill Tracey. It seemed to be a simple, courtesy letter, explaining a bit of legal maneuvering that only a lawyer might understand. But there was one sentence at the end that got Ben’s attention. On a day that Tracey was scheduled to be deposed, the letter said, she failed to show up. Tracey had blown it off, not telling anyone she wasn’t coming. Pitman’s lawyer, Steve Komie, was asking in the letter what was going on, wondering if Tracey’s lawyer knew why she had not shown up.
This would not have been significant to Ben; however, when he looked at the date Tracey was supposed to be deposed, it suddenly took on new meaning.
Two days before Dustin was killed.
“She was set to be deposed again over custody of Bert two days prior to Dustin’s death,” Ben explained. “Apparently, she had been caught in yet another lie”—claiming Dr. Pitman was sexually abusing Bert—“and they were deposing her about it.”
Tracey had been fighting tooth and nail with Dr. Pitman for custody of Bert (from 1992 up until 2001) and had been accusing Pitman of the vilest crimes imaginable. Doctors had examined the child and had drawn the same conclusion everyone else always had: There was no evidence to support any of Tracey’s claims. They were bogus accusations, never proven.
“Bert was going to be examined,” Ben continued, “and she was going to be interviewed under oath. Steve Komie had already caught her lying once . . . and here she is about to be deposed on the same subject matter and she doesn’t show up.”
For Ben, this was “huge.” It gave him pause to consider that at the same time Dustin was murdered and Dr. Pitman was labeled the mastermind (in that journal), Tracey was feeling cornered and felt the need to react. She needed to put into action a plan to discredit and bury Dr. Pitman.
Ben blew cigarette smoke out the window. He was exhausted. Totally spent from looking into this case, and here it was he had not even officially decided to take it to trial. Ben knew this deposition she failed to show up for was another nail in a growing list of inconsistencies and strange behavior on Tracey’s part.
A day or two after this deposition, Dustin Wehde is dead, and law enforcement finds a journal in Dustin’s car pointing at Steve Komie and Dr. Pitman as the two men behind the home invasion and murder for hire, Ben thought, shaking his head.
To Ben, it was clear what Tracey Roberts had done.
The problem he had was what to do next. How does one explain all of this and get the right people to stand behind you and understand it all in the same way—after ten years?
Trent had faced the same dilemma with Ben’s predecessor.
“Trent, I cannot prosecute this alone. . . .”
“I know . . . Ben.”
What am I missing? Ben asked himself over and over. He had nine bullets in his body . . . three to the back of the head.
> Ben knew he had to take it to the AGO. It was the only way he felt he could win.
16
BEN SMITH RARELY WORE A suit. Yet on this day he dressed to the nines in a button-up dress shirt, tie, and a pair of new black shoes. He was excited. He felt confident. Entirely focused and optimistic that what he had put together over many months with Trent Vileta was going to convince the AGO that Tracey Richter should be charged with first-degree murder in the death of Dustin Wehde. Ben could picture the course of events: an indictment, trial, guilty verdict, high fives all around. Mona Wehde would have justice for her son.
Ben put it all together in a neat little PowerPoint package and drove to the AGO in Des Moines, where Trent met him. Ben stood before the team and presented his case against Tracey: the journal, the inconsistent stories, the fact that Michael and Tracey knew Dustin and his mother, Mona, before the incident, how Tracey had every reason—motive—to want to set Dr. John Pitman up because they were, at the time of Dustin’s death, fighting a major custody battle and there was a good chance Bert was going to be living with Pitman and his second wife in Virginia. There was more, of course, so much more. And Ben had it all laid out.
At the point in which the journal was put up on the screen, one attorney, an assistant attorney general (AAG), stared at it.
Ben watched him.
“How could anybody believe this?” the AAG said. “How could anyone believe that this was written in a serious way? Who would think this is an actual journal?”
Indeed, thought Ben.
The journal seemed so contrived and scripted. Who chronicles his life experiences in this manner?
The feeling when Ben left was that they’d take a look at it all and follow up with him. The AGO, however, was extremely busy with cases of its own and could not actually spare an attorney. It was going to be a long shot. No doubt about it.
As the weeks passed after Ben’s presentation, the AGO, although they never came out and said it, did not show much interest in the case. The AG had current cases to deal with, and not enough attorneys to go around. Who could blame him for not wanting to take on a ten-year-old cold case of justifiable homicide? It seemed like a loser from day one and still had a feel of incompleteness.
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