Beautifully Cruel

by M. William Phelps

  John finished medical school in June 1987. The University of Colorado was up next.

  “I’m going back to Chicago, John,” Tracey said one night before they were scheduled to leave. She’d made up her mind. “I’ll decide while in Chicago whether I’m coming out to Denver or not.”

  What could he do?

  They packed and left for Chicago. John told Tracey he would drop her off and head to Denver. If she wanted to come out, great; if not, was there anything he could do to change her mind? It seemed as though they had been through so much. Tracey was a lot to deal with. Very needy. Very sensitive. Very dramatic.

  Tracey had always wanted dogs, as did John. They both wanted a home. As they were driving out to Chicago, John indicated he had something to say. He wanted to give the relationship one more shot.

  “Will you marry me?”

  Tracey accepted.

  “My internship started and life was great,” John said later.

  Tracey had a different view of life then, saying, “It might have been great for him, but I wanted to go back to Chicago.”

  31

  MONA WEHDE WENT TO THE school administration at one point during Dustin’s youth and told them she believed he should be in the “talented and gifted” classes. A label was not something she wanted to put on her kid, but if it was a label everyone wanted to stick on Dustin’s forehead, well, this was how she saw it.

  “No,” they told her. “We feel he is special ed, Mrs. Wehde.”

  “I struggled,” Mona recalled. “I struggled for the entire twenty years I had my son. Why? Because everybody thought there was something wrong with him. But I was like, ‘No, he’s too damn smart for all of you and you cannot figure it out.’”

  The thing about living in Iowa during the winter is that it is so flat in some areas, when enough snow falls, it leaves behind the perfect snowmobile track for as far as the eye can see. In his younger years, Dustin enjoyed riding a snowmobile and hunting and fishing, mainly with his father, Brett. He was an outdoorsman, not a child into sports like football, baseball, and the like—although he did favor golfing with his dad. For Dustin, it was about being outside. As he grew older, though, and into a homebody, Dustin’s focus became what many kids his age gravitate toward: computer and Internet/video games.

  Most people were a bit standoffish with Dustin because, Mona said, “Dustin had a strange demeanor, mannerisms . . . confusing to people.”

  Indeed, whatever “normal” is these days, Dustin was not included in that mix.

  Dustin was Brett and Mona’s firstborn; then Dustin’s two sisters, Ashley and Briana, came along. Dustin didn’t adjust well, having always been Mona’s “little shadow”; now, with competition for Mom’s attention, he somewhat resented his siblings. Still, after a few bumps in the road, arguments, and one altercation with his second-born sibling, Dustin found his way.

  “You know, Dustin had no friends. So when the girls grew and they had birthday parties and sleepovers, he hung out with girls. Dustin had been invited to only one birthday party as a child and that was my friend’s child.”

  Being a “one hundred percent homebody,” Mona explained, a kid who later went nowhere and did not do much of anything, Dustin was always around when Mona had real estate business to attend to. Thus, when Michael and Tracey Roberts moved into town and Michael sought out Mona to find them a house, Dustin was often right there by her side.

  “I did not sell the Robertses their first house,” Mona said, referring to when Tracey and Michael arrived in town. “But I sold them the house next door, a second home they converted into an office.”

  Michael and Tracey Roberts realized Early was home after finding out in 1997 that Iowa was considered the “best state to raise children,” according to what they told local Early reporter Barbara Ann Derksen. That was why they chose the state, and, after finding what was a 130-year-old home “previously owned by a family who owned the Early Lumber Company,” Derksen wrote, they’d found their dream home.

  To Mona, upon first meeting Michael and Tracey in 1999, they came across as sophisticated, fairly normal, more city-proper, businesslike people. Mona called them “calm” and said they were mostly laidback and cordial, attitudes that fit into rural Iowa.

  “They had an Arabian horse, so we looked for a farm,” Mona said. “Tracey’s parents decided to move from Chicago to Rembrandt, and so we found them a farm. . . .” Rembrandt is directly north of Early, about twenty-six miles, a thirty-minute drive.

  As time went on, and the Robertses grew their computer business, Mona added, “[Michael] had employees that needed homes and so we went shopping for their homes.”

  Then came a time when Michael approached Mona one day with an offer: “You want to come work for us?”

  Real estate was up and down. Not always dependable. Mona hated the idea of refusing work.

  “Sure,” she said.

  It was 2000. While Mona worked for Michael around the office, doing various secretarial and computer jobs, she brought up Dustin. There was an ethanol plant in the area Dustin had been working at. He’d had his share of problems, Mona told Michael, with employees teasing and making fun of him.

  “Well, he went and got himself fired,” Mona said. She was upset. It was a job—something consistent for Dustin. Routine was good for the boy.

  Michael stood up from his desk. Walked over to Mona. He could tell she was sad. Dustin needed a friend, not people picking on him.

  “Why don’t I take Dustin under my wing,” Michael said in his rather heavy Australian accent. “He needs a mentor. I can do that for him.”

  Mona didn’t know what to say. Dustin and his father, she explained, had not seen eye-to-eye in recent years. They loved each other deeply; that’s not what Mona was saying. Brett worked hard, and he didn’t have the patience Mona had, or the energy to help Dustin in the ways he needed.

  “High-class, well-off, nice people,” Mona said she believed the Robertses to be when she “first, first, first met them. New people in town . . . Michael is from Australia. I love, love, love accents, and I was one hundred percent infatuated with that Victorian house [they bought] . . . and I have always wanted to buy that home.”

  Mona’s in-laws, Brett’s family, lived close to the Robertses. Mona had, for years, dreamed of buying the Victorian and restoring it, and when the Robertses bought it, she figured a good family had wound up with it.

  Still, when she looked back, Mona thought it odd that, as she put it, “they found me. There were all these Realtors around then . . . and all of these people were trying to connect with them, and Michael, I learned, told every single one of those Realtors, ‘I want to work with Mona.’ The only reason I considered this was that I lived in Early and they wanted to buy a home in Early. Nobody could get anywhere with them. Michael wanted me.”

  As she started to work for Michael and spent time around the office and the Roberts house, Mona noticed that Tracey “was always in the background. Michael was up front and forward.”

  Mona’s daughter started babysitting for Tracey. And now Michael was standing at her desk, saying he wanted to mentor her boy. Here was a guy, seemingly wealthy, pleasant, with a solid family, a very vocal Christian, asking to become a teacher to her special son.

  “They were the picture-perfect family,” Mona said. “Wow! A religious man, no less. This is great. It’s all good. They were always mellow people.”

  Who was Mona to say “no” to a man like Michael Roberts wanting to take her child under his wing?

  32

  JUST LIKE THAT, DESPITE ALL the strange behavior she had displayed, alongside her aggressive nature, John Pitman asked Tracey Richter to marry him and she agreed. By July 1987 they were living in Denver, happily engaged, planning a wedding. They bought a house, got a dog—just a happy little family starting a life for themselves in the Mile High city.

  No sooner had their lives begun than Tracey approached John one day and said, “I’m lonely.” John said la
ter Tracey didn’t want anything to do with being a part of the social scene he kept: other residents and their wives. She was “hungry to go out and meet people.” According to Tracey’s version, John became a burden at home with regard to not picking up after himself. On top of that, John was on call at the hospital every other night and was gone all the time. When he was home, all he did, if you ask Tracey, was work on the house. They were at odds.

  “You’re emotionally unavailable to me,” Tracey told John.

  They had blowups about pets when Tracey, apparently trying to fill the void with animals, wound up taking in a total of three dogs and two cats. One pet she named “Annie.”

  “It’s too much for you,” John said. He meant all the dogs, plus Tracey working herself, him being gone, fulfilling his residency duties—a lifestyle she had signed off on, mind you, when she married the guy—and working incredibly long, exhausting hours.

  Tracey had a hard time keeping up with the house.

  They even argued over the dog training because John was “so inconsistent” with his share of it, Tracey claimed.

  John would go out, according to Tracey, and play poker on his off nights and wouldn’t come home sometimes. This angered her. She said he did it routinely, week in, week out.

  “Two or three times in one year,” John clarified, talking about how often he played poker.

  Like she often did, Tracey had blown it entirely out of proportion so the situation favored her side of the argument.

  “Sometimes, when he slept, I would vacuum on purpose just to wake him up,” Tracey once said.

  Sex became a scheduled “thing” to do on a list. Back in Virginia, they were spontaneous lovers; in Denver, “there were rules, specific times,” according to one report. Tracey used the “I’m too tired” excuse.

  Tracey claimed she was a virgin when she met John—and later insisted this was the truth to Michael Roberts. Many would dispute this, however. Here was a woman, after all, one law enforcement source claimed, who had later set out to meet married men online, take them to hotels, sleep with them, and then wait until they fell asleep to work her extortion muscles out. Tracey would position herself in the bed, her breasts exposed, the guy sound asleep next to her, and snap a selfie. She’d then meet the guy again, have sex with him, and leave an envelope on the nightstand with the photo and note inside: If you don’t want your wife to see this photo, send me $2500.

  Despite their differences, by August 1988, they were man and wife. Tracey would later claim John’s parents didn’t want him to marry her, a combination of her “being too young,” the fact that she “was not a doctor or a socialite and . . . I am part Jewish.”

  It was all nonsense. More fabrications made by a woman who felt the need to manipulate any situation in order to show favor toward herself. The latter was a particularly strange comment, seeing that the Richter family, John knew, was Catholic.

  As they settled into the marriage after a honeymoon in Hawaii, Tracey kept up with the same complaints: not enough attention, the dogs were more important to her husband than she was, John spent too much time working on the house when he was home, and too much time out of the house on call. As the months went by, John realized Tracey wasn’t adjusting to the situation of begin married to a resident. Although John wanted to be a general surgeon, he decided that becoming a plastic surgeon would allow him to spend more time at home. The hours, he knew, would be much more manageable.

  Arguments turned into “verbal attacks.” The one thing Michael and John would have in common later was that when Tracey got into it and went after you verbally—or “more vicious,” as John called it—her “cursing was unbelievable.” The mouth she had was beyond the gutter. She’d drop F-bombs and MF-bombs and everything in between.

  “Eggshells” was how Tracey described walking around the house during this early portion of their marriage. The sex was nonexistent, she claimed in a report. Once a month, at best—and John only wanted sex after an argument.

  “His way of making up to me,” she claimed.

  During the summer of 1989, as John ended his second year of residency, the Pitmans decided to visit his parents in South Carolina. Tracey said she wanted John to “be more romantic,” to have more of an “elaborate seduction” in his routine. The trip was, one might reckon, away for the two to reconcile romantically and start fresh.

  After the visit, according to Tracey’s version, she found herself at home one day, huddled in a corner, alone, crying. She was distressed by a piece of news she had just gotten. It was devastating, she claimed in a report. John wasn’t home. But as soon as he walked through the door that night, he was going to hear about it.

  33

  AS MONA WEHDE WORKED FOR Michael and Tracey Roberts into the year 2000, she experienced the lives of the new couple in town from a personal perspective. In those early days, as Mona went about her part-time work for Michael’s computer company, the Robertses seemed like your average couple: 2.2 kids, animals, nice home, weekends spent together. However, there were some signs that the stability of the marital structure was beginning to buckle.

  “They had small children. I loved kids,” Mona said. She viewed the Robertses as a family that needed her help, she being a neighbor more than willing to be there any way she could.

  If there was one off-putting trait about Michael, Mona further explained, it was how he would “always brag about ‘we got this and we got that, and we bought this and we bought that.’”

  His staunch Christian views, Mona added, were a bit radical for her tastes. He came across as a Bible thumper. Michael made no bones about telling the world it needed to be saved and that he was there for anyone who needed the Lord’s rescue. Mona would roll her eyes when he banged on about Jesus and His suffering for our sins and how repenting was the only path.

  “He talked like he was going to save me, save the town, and save all of these low-life losers,” Mona recalled.

  Mona said she didn’t have enough Christianity in her background to challenge the guy or even understand where he was coming from. It just felt over the top, but not scary in any way. Yes, Michael was a bit preachy and pushy with his Christian values. He was always espousing the teachings of Jesus, quoting scripture and talking about saving the world. But he wasn’t hurting anyone.

  Still, Mona would walk away from doing work for Michael on some afternoons thinking, Wow . . . he’s really religious . . . but that’s okay—it’s all good.

  What harm could come to Dustin if Mona allowed Michael to mentor him, being schooled in Jesus’ teachings?

  Michael didn’t want Dustin to work for them, Mona soon learned. He wanted to “take him to do activities, to church, things like paintballing.”

  Michael wanted to be Dustin’s friend. His sensei. Show the kid a broader picture of life and what the world (and Jesus) could offer. Dustin had been described as “socially awkward” and, by choice, antisocial in a way. Michael aimed to change that.

  * * *

  The paintballing adventures of Michael and Dustin would later become a point of contention for those involved. One claim was that Michael and Tracey took Dustin paintballing on several occasions. Whereas another source said Tracey never went; it was something Michael and Dustin did only by themselves. Mona later told me Dustin and Michael went paintballing “many times.” In court later, she remembered two times specifically. Others said Dustin and Michael had gone with a large group, which included the ten- and eleven-year-old Bert.

  After the first time Michael took Dustin paintballing, it was all Dustin talked about, Mona recalled.

  “When am I going again?” Dustin would ask his mother, bugging her repeatedly to call Michael and ask him.

  “I don’t know, Dustin.”

  “Ma, when am I going again?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Whatever Dustin got out of it had thrilled him. He loved it.

  One day, Michael picked Dustin up for paintballing. Hearing Michael’s car pull
up, Mona looked out the window. She watched as they sat inside the car in the driveway for a long period of time, talking.

  When Dustin came in later on, he said something about Michael preaching endlessly about Jesus. Dustin tossed a book on the counter Michael had given him. He wasn’t interested.

  “Dustin loved paintball,” Mona reiterated. “I went out and bought him all the supplies, everything he needed for paintball.”

  This only added to Dustin’s anxiety about when he was going again.

  “When will Michael call, Ma?”

  “I don’t know. When he calls, he calls.”

  The feeling was that Dustin wouldn’t mind sitting for literally hours listening to Michael talk about his church, Jesus, being saved, as long as he knew there was paintball involved somewhere at the end of the conversation.

  It got to a point where Mona and Dustin actually went to Michael’s church for services one Sunday. Tracey and the kids were there by Michael’s side.

  “It was weird,” Mona said.

  What stood out to her first was how Tracey dressed. Tracey was someone who dressed elegantly most of the time. She took pride in doing up her hair, her makeup, picking nice clothes to wear around town and the house and Michael’s office. But when they went to church that day, Mona remembered, “here was Tracey wearing sweatpants, hiking boots, and a sweater. I’m in a dress, and Dustin wore dress pants. We were going to church.”

  For some reason, Tracey had dressed for church as though she was lounging around the house watching football or heading out for a hike—or to play paintball—in the woods.

  The service itself was “very tense and uncomfortable,” Mona said, same as the energy among them all. There was an unspoken, bizarre feeling. It felt cultish.

  “You want to go out to get something to eat with us?” Michael asked afterward.