“What’s important to keep in mind with Tracey,” Trent explained, “is what she doesn’t talk about.”
Thus, by the end of July, an arrest warrant on first-degree murder charges was filed and sent to Sheriff Ken McClure for his signature. In it, DCI outlined its belief: [The] defendant, TR, having malice aforethought, willfully, deliberately and with premeditation shot and killed Dustin Wehde with two separate handguns.
Further along, the main source of “new evidence” was outlined: A piece of evidence (the journal) found in Wehde’s car following the murder . . . the existence and/or nature of this piece of evidence was never released by law enforcement . . . TR’s communications with law enforcement and other individuals since the murder strongly indicates TR not only had knowledge this piece of evidence existed, but that she manufactured and planted the same in Wehde’s vehicle after the murder to make it appear as if Wehde was a home invader.
The warrant referenced the latest interview Tracey had given the FBI and mentioned a “new witness” that had “come forward and has stated TR described this piece of evidence (journal) . . . in early 2002.”
Mary Higgins.
The state’s entire arrest warrant, it seemed, hinged on the journal and its contents, all of which were unquestionably written by Dustin Wehde.
Nevertheless, it was time to find Tracey—or, perhaps, Sophie Edwards—and haul her ass off to jail on murder charges.
24
IN OMAHA, TRACEY HAD A housecleaning business she ran herself. It was one in a series of businesses she “owned and operated” under the Sophie Edwards name.
Tracey had been in Omaha since her divorce from Michael. DCI found out through several sources and surveillance that Tracey was living her life in Omaha as a socialite from England.
“She would go and talk to people, prospective clients, in an English accent,” Trent explained. “She would tell them how she was raised in boarding schools in England and how proud she was to be in America, where everyone was so nice and friendly.”
Tracey was essentially living somebody else’s life. She had changed not only her name, but her entire identity.
DCI also found out Tracey had a running bank account of around $25,000 at any given time. When she was arrested years before on a perjury charge for lying to a court about her identity and the fake Iowa driver’s license she had obtained, Tracey sat in jail for ten days. Her bond was $4,500. She had five times that amount in the bank.
“Yeah, with all that money in the bank, we knew then that she could flee,” Trent added. “That’s why she was hanging on to the money then and not bailing herself out.”
The other issue—a major factor the SCSO and DCI were greatly concerned about—was that Tracey, in her series of e-mails to Trent, had indirectly threatened Lieutenant Gentile’s children and Gentile. If you ask Trent and others in DCI and the SCSO, they would not put it past Tracey to use deadly force to get away. In their estimation, she had already pumped nine of eleven bullets into Dustin Wehde and likely had guns in her possession.
Trent and Sheriff Ken McClure got together with the DCSO in Nebraska and put together a “whole bunch” of sheriff’s deputies and several Omaha Police Department officers to make the arrest. The plan was to follow Tracey and wait until she was in her vehicle driving somewhere and then pull her over. This type of arrest is somewhat contained. You know where your suspect is at all times. The only surprise you might encounter is that your suspect is packing a weapon.
Trent got hold of the FBI, who had a relationship in Omaha with Tracey, to devise a strategy.
An agent called Tracey and asked her if she could meet him at a local Omaha Starbucks to have a quick chat about some things they needed to clear up.
Tracey said sure.
Before the FBI had even made the call, Trent and the troops set up around the Starbucks, hiding in plain sight: inside the coffee shop, down the block, and in the parking lot.
As they waited for Tracey to arrive and meet the FBI agent, Trent noticed Tracey pulling up and driving slowly around the immediate area. Tracey made several passes in her vehicle by the Starbucks entrance, looking in all directions with an intense gaze. She then drove across the street, had a look around that parking lot, parked her vehicle out of sight, and stared at the Starbucks for quite a long time.
Done there, she pulled into the Starbucks parking lot and, carefully, got out, creepily looking in all directions, no doubt feeling eyes on her.
“Tracey was doing countersurveillance,” Trent said. “We were set up all over the place, watching her trying to watch us!”
After Tracey realized there was no FBI meeting, she took off.
Everyone followed. Then an Omaha PD cruiser hit its lights and pulled her over.
The troops came out from everywhere and surrounded Tracey’s vehicle.
No one was taking any chances. With Tracey pulled off to the side of the road, law enforcement (over a dozen agents and cops and sheriffs) brandished their weapons and carefully approached her vehicle, circling it.
“I guarantee that if she so much as reached for a weapon,” Trent said, “she would have been shot five hundred times on the spot.”
The sheriff took the lead and approached Tracey as she sat inside her vehicle.
“You are under arrest for the murder of Dustin Wehde.”
“What?” Tracey said in the most surprised voice she could muster.
“I have often wondered about the day we arrested her,” Trent recalled. “When she was stopped . . . I bet she wondered what crime she was being pulled over and arrested for—because there were most likely several other crimes she was committing we hadn’t yet discovered.”
Taking Tracey into custody, law enforcement found all types of IDs on her, all under various names. She also had a notebook with several sheriffs’ and cops’ names and addresses inside.
For what purpose, no one knew.
Almost ten years had gone by and Tracey Roberts was now sitting in jail, facing murder-one charges.
How her life changed.
For Trent and Ben, however, there was a lot of work left to do—namely, explain that journal and figure out how to get Bert Pitman, now an adult, to talk about the case again. With his mother behind bars facing murder charges, perhaps now it would be easier to convince Bert to open up.
25
TRENT NEEDED ONE MORE THREAD tied up as July 2011 was almost in the books and Tracey sat in jail. If they were going to nail her, a good way to put a nicely tied bow on the package was to find out if Bert Pitman had been at all coached into what he had said about that night, how willing he was to share the truth about what had happened, and how different Bert’s narrative was today from when he was a scared eleven-year-old boy.
Trolling around on Bert’s Facebook page, Trent realized Bert was, as Trent put it, “really into the ladies.” The photos Trent viewed showed Bert in various locales, with scores of different females at his side.
That’s his vulnerability, Trent thought.
Long discussions were then had in response to how to approach Bert.
“It was agreed that we needed to . . . gauge how cooperative he was going to be,” Trent explained. “So a couple of things happened.”
One of the aspects of police work Trent preached during any of the presentations or training exercises he conducted was something he called “infrastructure.” Basically, it meant that if you know you are going to work out of state on a case, you call the state agency that was going to be involved and kiss up to them as best you could.
“I send a formal request, synopsis . . . coffee mugs, whatever I can get my hands on in order to secure their help,” Trent added. “Then when it comes time for the interviews, I make sure I have a polygraph examiner on standby, an interview room ready, and extra investigators there to assist.... I don’t use polygraphs much because of their erratic behavior, but because the Richters—Tracey and her mother, Anna—had placed such an emphasis on Bert’s character,
I knew we needed to combat that.”
Bert was twenty-one now and living in Virginia—thus the need for Trent to rely on an outside agency to run any interviews with Bert. In late July, Trent got hold of the Virginia State Police (VSP) and asked for help conducting an interview with Bert. By then, Trent and DCI had already come up with an idea to get Bert talking—a plan, Trent added, that included utilizing DCI SA Laura Myers.
Knowing what he knew about Bert by studying his background and trolling his social media pages, Trent said, “My best bet to get Bert to talk was Laura Myers.”
Extremely attractive, SA Myers had a knack for getting men to open up to her. She grew up, one source said, in a “tough town,” and was known as a “tough girl.” She wasn’t shy about talking to men regarding any topic they chose. SA Myers had gotten scores of men to confess to all types of nasty crimes.
“And she’s smart about how she does it,” added a colleague.
* * *
Trent met with Myers and explained the situation. He handed her airline tickets and sent her on her way to Virginia with a plan to woo Bert into opening up about his mother and the night of the attack.
As an eleven-year-old child, Bert had explained in his first statement that he and his two siblings were inside his room, the door shut, as the attack began. He went on to say how he had acted as the protector of his younger brother and sister. Tracey had even gone on a national television talk show and applauded Bert, calling him her personal hero. In his first statement, Bert said he was able to identify Dustin Wehde as one of the attackers “by his voice,” because Bert had spent so much time with Dustin and his stepdad, Michael, in the days leading up to the attack.
It has come to the attention of law enforcement, VSP agent Garrett Giusto wrote in his August 2011 report of the meeting with Bert at VSP headquarters, that [Bert] Pitman’s statements have not always matched previous ones....
“We studied Bert and knew him,” Trent later said, “Laura Myers is an attractive agent that seems to squeeze . . . confessions out of [people] because they immediately fall in love with her. I was betting Bert would open up. I was right—and then some.”
Trent and the VSP broke the plan into phases. First, they needed to get Bert to voluntarily speak with Myers. Then have Bert go over his previous statements with Myers to see if she could get him to confess to making up any of the information or being coached in any way by Tracey, Michael, or both. If that went well, they would offer Bert a polygraph. Bert was likely feeling that he needed to help his mom, who was in county lockup in Nebraska awaiting extradition to Iowa.
“It went so much better than I thought,” Trent recalled.
Ben and Trent believed Tracey was the ventriloquist, feeding Bert his thoughts about that night, telling him what to say. This interview and subsequent lie detector test—if Bert chose to do it—could clear that up.
Incredibly, Bert agreed to come to the VSP after a cop called him.
“We could not believe that he was coming in,” Trent said.
The only possible conclusion they came to was that since Tracey had been arrested and charged with murder, perhaps Bert felt he could somehow save her.
But later, after the interview, it would become clear that a new scheme, likely put into play by Tracey, had been initiated.
26
ANY LIE DETECTOR TEST IS not about the actual test portion of it, when the subject is hooked up to a machine, like in the movies, and answers questions with sweat pouring from his or her brow. The pretest is the most important part of any lie detector. It sets the tone of the actual test. Sitting strapped to a machine, the subject isn’t encouraged to give a narrative of the events; he or she answers simple yes or no questions based on the context and contents of the pretest interview—something Hollywood always seems to leave out.
Bert Pitman and SA Laura Myers sat down inside the Department of State Police in Williamsburg, Virginia, on July 28, 2011. VSP agent Garrett Giusto was there to facilitate and help. Tall at five feet eleven inches, skinny at 155 pounds, Bert, who had been going by the name Bert Richter (choosing to use Tracey’s maiden name), remarkably resembled his mother: same facial features, eyes, nose, brow. At one time, Bert had a boyish charm about him, and could have passed for an Ivy Leaguer, a rich kid wearing a cardigan, the perfect preppy haircut, million-dollar smile, all-American runner’s frail, lanky frame. He’d been close to Tracey all these years and believed in her. Bert was in college now, living in New Orleans. He was in his sophomore year at the time of the Myers interview.
In describing his mother, Bert once said, “Well, she’s probably the strongest person I know. She’s very intelligent and she somehow always lights up the room, very charismatic.”
Bert was a man, not that eleven-year-old boy holed up in his room while a young man he knew and had played with was being gunned down just feet away. Bert had no doubt been scarred by a man running around his home, shots fired, blood and death as the result.
Like Tracey, since the divorce, Bert did not have many good things to say about his former stepfather. When asked in court later to describe Michael Roberts, Bert said: “Very, very controlling, manipulative. I’d go so far as to say definitely some mental issues, but . . . he was in control of especially me and Mom’s lives all the time.” Bert added that it was hard for him to “have friends come over or, I mean, have a normal childhood” under the “control” of his stepdad. He said Michael had an “underlying plan to everything.”
Myers sat with Bert and conducted the pretest interview. Bert seemed nervous; but at the same time, as he became more comfortable with Myers, he fell into feeling comfortable.
“In reality,” said one law enforcement source, “he was blubbering like a little baby during this interview.”
Myers encouraged Bert to take her back to December 13, 2001.
According to the opinion of those with knowledge of the interview, it took only a few minutes before Bert was entirely smitten with Myers and made no bones about expressing how much he enjoyed being in her company.
Bert broke into his old narrative, which would be rather familiar to Ben and Trent once they got hold of the interview. But the detail Bert recalled—what, ten years later—was nothing short of astonishing. How dark and how light particular rooms were inside the house. How he was watching the film Spy Kids. How his mother had been “grabbed from behind” as she placed Bert’s youngest sibling in his room so he could protect all of them behind the closed door. The way in which Bert had explained that as Tracey hurriedly put the kids into Bert’s room, a man came up from behind and grabbed her, pulling her out into the hallway as the door slammed shut.
After being asked to explain further, Bert told Myers that from behind the closed door he could hear his mother “yelling and being choked.” He remembered meeting up with Dustin in the hallway after the choking portion of the attack and the exact words Dustin had said to Bert: “Your mother is dead.”
After he finished the narrative from memory, Myers provided Bert with the statement he had first given to the sheriff’s department in 2001.
[Bert] Pitman frequently referred to this statement as being the most accurate, SA Garrett Giusto’s report of Myers’s interview said. Giusto was in the room with Myers and also reviewed the first interview Bert had given after the incident.
“Can you read through that for me?” Giusto asked Bert, handing him a copy of that first interview (2001).
“Sure.”
After Bert read it, he shoved the interview back across the table to Giusto and smiled at the agent.
Giusto handed it to Myers. She looked through it.
“Is that the most accurate statement you have given, Mr. Pitman?” Myers then asked Bert.
“A brilliant move on her part,” Trent later said. What it did was put Bert on the spot. It gave him the opportunity to answer “yes” or “no,” when the best answer would be any statement he gave was accurate because it was the truth as he recalled it.
Bert took a moment and thought about how to answer. Then: “It sounds a little different,” he explained. “I know I saw Dustin, but it doesn’t say that in [t] here. . . .”
With that, Bert said there were several other “differences” in the statement, which he didn’t recall being there.
“Can you underline for me the items that do not seem to be correct?” Myers asked.
“Sure.”
“Thanks,” Myers said when Bert finished.
They had gotten Bert to actually point out the discrepancies in the statement he had given to law enforcement in 2001. It was beyond what anyone in law enforcement believed they’d get from Bert. He was saying, essentially, that statement was different from what he recalled.
In a more formal interview setting after they discussed the statements Bert had given over the years, as Myers and Bert were engaged in the actual lie detector, Myers asked Bert, “Is your original statement [from 2001] the most accurate statement, to your knowledge?”
Bert at first stumbled; then, perhaps showing his hand, he said, “It was my version then, and now I have this version. I’m not sure if dreams are altering things that really happened.”
Dreams?
“You see,” Trent commented, “that was maybe why Bert came in . . . to add this ‘dreams’ scenario to the statements—i.e., ‘I don’t know now if I was dreaming or not. . . .’”
“Did anyone at any time coach you or tell you what to say regarding this incident?” Myers asked Bert during the lie detector test.
“No. Me and my mom have talked about the house evasion [sic] and how the dreams have changed things.”
Bert then started crying.
They waited until he calmed down.
“Is all the information you provided to me the truth?”
“To my knowledge,” Bert answered. He was a mess.
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