Beautifully Cruel Page 11

  Later on in the interview, Bert was asked again, “Has anyone coached you . . . ?”

  “No.”

  “Regarding this case, has anyone ever coached you as to what to say?” Myers asked Bert again.

  “No.”

  When all was said and done, the lie detector analysis came back saying “deception [was] indicated,” SA Garrett Giusto reported. A post-test interview, furthermore, produced similar, “negative results,” Giusto concluded.

  According to the VSP’s analysis of the lie detector test, Bert Pitman was lying about being coached and some of what he had said in the statements he had given law enforcement over the years. Lie detectors, everyone knew, were not permissible in a court of law, but the state could question Bert Pitman all day long on the witness stand and, with any luck, get him to basically say the same thing he said here.

  Bert agreeing to the polygraph and interview, Trent later said, “was a disaster for the Richters.”

  27

  AT 7:59 P.M. ON AUGUST 5, 2011, Tracey called Bert from lockup in Omaha. Bert was in Chicago. After an “I love you” from his mom and an “I love you, too” back, Bert asked his mother how she was holding up.

  “I am struggling, but I am trying to be strong. I am just . . . I am sorry that you guys are having to go through all this, you know.”

  This was Tracey the martyr. All apologies for having to put her loved ones through such an ordeal—an ordeal, mind you, that had been going on for nearly a decade.

  Bert told his mother, “Don’t even apologize.”

  “I know. I didn’t do anything wrong . . . ,” Tracey said.

  “Yeah,” Bert concurred.

  Then: “I don’t want to put pressure on you,” Tracey said, “but I need you to, like, really just man-up—okay?” Tracey said, adding further how she wanted Bert to return to Iowa immediately and get a part-time job and finish college in state. He should be close to her and his siblings. They needed him.

  Bert didn’t say much in response to this.

  Tracey said: “[Anna] Mom told you about John Pitman, right?” Strange that Tracey would not refer to John as “your father.”

  “What about him?” Bert asked.

  “Supposedly, he is one of their star witnesses against me,” Tracey said. “And I don’t know how on earth that could be, because, like, he wasn’t there. And I have never even discussed the attack with him. And you’ve told me that you’ve never even discussed, like, anything with him, either.”

  It was clear Tracey was fishing or planting seeds more than she was making a statement or giving a direct order to her son. She was trying to see what Bert had told whom without coming out and asking.

  “Mom, no. I already talked to him. Me and him had a good, actually, heart-to-heart for the first time in my life.” Bert seemed excited about this, as though a new beginning between him and his dad had sprung from all the madness.

  Tracey realized she wasn’t getting anywhere. So she changed subjects and talked about how “they” were going to be giving her some paperwork that explained the case against her, but she didn’t want Bert reading any of it. “Because I know you have trouble with depression and stuff . . .”

  The truth was that she didn’t want Bert to know what law enforcement had on her.

  Next, Tracey told Bert to come out and “be helpful” to her fiancé and Bert’s half sister and half brother, which then led to Michael. Tracey warned Bert that Michael had an alias on Facebook. Bert needed to watch out for it. Then she mentioned how the state’s second “big” witness, she believed, was Mary Higgins, adding, “I don’t get that. . . .”

  Bert wanted to talk about the chat he’d had with his father, however. And it was clear from the way in which he spoke about their conversation that neither John Pitman nor Bert knew the contents of the journal. Bert said at one point, “You know, he [Dad] said the only reason why he, you know, answered any questions with them in the past is because they were accusing him and his lawyer, Steve Komie. . . .”

  “Yeah,” Tracey said, not going anywhere near the comment.

  Bert continued, adding, “You know, they said that . . . they accused him of paying Dustin or having a relationship with Dustin and all this. And you know, he was, like, ‘The only person that I knew was [Dustin’s sister],’ because [she was my] babysitter a couple times.”

  Tracey saw an opening here. But anytime she referenced any of the information she wanted to share, she prefaced it by saying “that’s what Mama said” or “like Mama said,” placing the burden of where she was getting the information on Anna.

  Bert continued: “And, you know, he said . . . someone is saying something to them . . . trying to implicate him and his lawyer. And, you know, he is like, you know, it’s obviously bullshit. And I was, like, it’s obviously Michael. And, you know, and if he is investigating or trying to say Mom accused you of paying them, that’s bullshit. It was always Michael. You know, after the house invasion, Michael . . . the first thing he is saying is, ‘Oh, this is your dad. You know it’s your dad. It had to have been your dad. . . .’”

  “I know that,” Tracey said, before trying to plant more information: “And I . . . remember I had arguments with Mike about that. I said, ‘You can’t say that if you don’t have proof. One, you can get sued. Two, have some sense. Poor Bert is right here. You can’t be saying that in front of him. . . . ’” Then, as if to remind Bert he needed to share it with law enforcement, Tracey said: “Like when he took you to the gun range and [told] you he wants you to shoot a picture of your dad.”

  “Yeah, exactly,” Bert answered.

  It was obvious Tracey was once again planting information in Bert, just by the tone of her voice and the words she chose. For example, “Neither of us,” she said at one point, “you and I have never actually discussed it since it happened.... We don’t want to remember it. You know what I mean? Like, if I had to talk to law enforcement about it, I would. But I don’t want to sit there and bring back those memories.”

  Bert said, “Yeah,” knowing, of course, just days before this call he had explained to DCI that he and his mother had recently discussed the attack and if Bert was mixing dreams with facts.

  From there, Bert broke into the interview he had just given to DCI in Virginia, propping himself up as a tough guy while answering their questions, trying to make his mother think he had, basically, told DCI to go screw itself. Here on the phone with his mother, his assessment of the interview and subsequent lie detector test was in total contrast to the reports filed about the same events.

  “No . . . not at all,” Bert said in response to Tracey commenting on how investigators were not going into the case with an “open mind” because “whenever I brought up Michael . . . they’re like, ‘I don’t know anything about that.’ But whenever, you know, the whole time I can tell they didn’t believe there was a second person. And they gave me a polygraph . . . they asked me three questions. Two of them were the same question, and all,” he said before fumbling a bit. “None of them had anything to do with the house invasion other than the fact of ‘Were you coached?’ That’s what they were asking.”

  Tracey laughed.

  “They never . . . [asked], ‘Was there a second person?’”

  More laughter from Tracey. The wheels were spinning. She was nervous.

  Bert seemed to have a different recollection of the SA Myers interview and polygraph, telling his mother at one point, “I was there for, like, seven hours, you know, and they’re sitting there, you know, accusing me of lying, accusing me of all this shit. And it pretty much got to the point where I was so pissed, I didn’t give a fuck, and I was, like, you know, all right.”

  “None of that is true,” Ben Smith later said of this comment by Bert. “He cried like a baby.”

  But Bert never mentioned that he was in tears for most of the interview.

  The rest of the conversation focused on Michael and how Tracey’s life had never been the same after “the attack.�
�� It was obvious to Trent and Ben, after they listened to this tape, that Tracey was deliberately trying to plant ideas in her son’s mind for future use. At one point, Tracey told Bert, “Mike was the only one that had insurance on me at the time” and “Mike was so quickly pointing fingers at everyone else.”

  Near the end, Tracey piled on the guilt, telling her son, “I am taken away from my family. I can’t have panties. I can’t have underwear. I have to have milk three times a day. You know [how] I feel about that. They’re serving me cottage cheese.... I had to sleep with the lights on, which is impossible. . . .”

  Tracey ended the call with “I love you” after mentioning the two worst things about being in jail: “peeing on camera” and “Miracle Whip.”

  Strange it wasn’t missing her two youngest children or leaving them without a mother or being locked up behind bars, maybe a warm bed, or even the devastating and potentially life-behind-bars ordeal of facing first-degree murder charges.

  She mentioned none of that. Instead, sandwich spread and being recorded while urinating.

  “To be perfectly honest,” Trent later concluded, “I think Bert was happy she was in jail.”

  28

  TRENT VILETA FELT HE NEEDED to pursue and complete one more angle on the name change/identity fraud portion of Tracey’s life. According to the information DCI had, Tracey was not only running around talking in a British accent, calling herself Sophie Edwards, operating a business under that name and living her life as Sophie, she was purporting it all to be legal. Proving she had done this illegally and had lied explained a lot about Tracey’s character and the lengths she was willing to go. It would show jurors, if Tracey decided to take her murder case to trial, the narcissistic nature of her motives. Everything Tracey did, she did for a purpose. This was the mantra the investigation had taken on. Trent had a suspicion there was much more to the Sophie Edwards story than simply a name change. So he dove in.

  One of the first things Trent did was contact the Kansas City Field Office Criminal Investigative Division, London resident’s office. Since Tracey had changed her name in England, it was likely she had stolen the identity of the person she now was, Sophie. Trent had found out there was a woman in England by the name of Sophie Corrina Edwards. He believed Tracey had “fraudulently assumed the identity” of this woman, a Secret Service report later explained.

  While looking into that, Trent learned Tracey had a second name on her PO Box in Omaha: “Julie Brooks.”

  Sure enough, that same Secret Service report noted, Tracey had stolen that identity, too. Julia Mary Brooks was a United Kingdom resident. There was a third name she also had tried to take on, on top of Brooks and Edwards, but she hadn’t filed the paperwork as of yet. Turns out, when Tracey was arrested on the murder charge in late July 2011, she had a name-change document in her possession all prepared. She was going to change her name yet again, this time to Heidi Johanna Forsbacka, which law enforcement knew was the name of Michael Roberts’s current wife.

  Both of these women, Julia Brooks and Sophie Edwards, had once attended university at Cambridge, Trent found out. So he contacted the administration office and confirmed the women had obtained degrees in 1991 and 1996, when Tracey was living in Denver, Colorado.

  In an August 2011 hearing, the Secret Service report that Trent later received said, Richter asserted in an Iowa District Court that her name was Sophie Edwards and, in support of her claim, submitted a Deed of Change of Name purportedly filed in London, England.

  That Deed of Change of Name, all of the agencies investigating discovered, had been forged. After speaking on the telephone with Eileen Dunne, from the British Consulate-General’s office in Chicago, asking what she could tell him about Tracey being investigated in England for assuming these identities, Trent and Eileen exchanged a few e-mails. In one, Dunne explained what the consulate came across while investigating:

  Dear Special Agent Vileta,

  Further to our phone conversation today regarding Sophie Edwards, I can confirm that I have spoken with . . . [her] at Sac County Jail and can confirm she is not a British National, repeat not a British National.

  With regards to the name change document, there is no such citizenship as a Commonwealth Citizen. Anybody can create a name change document and have it notarized by an attorney. . . .

  This was exactly what Tracey had done while in England.

  Remarkably, Tracey had a copy of the actual Deed of Change of Name, signed by her (in her new name, Sophie Corrina Terese Edwards), Bert Pitman as her witness, and a notary in London, when they searched her Omaha apartment during a May 2009 warrant.

  “The petition for name change document found in her apartment . . . was before she got busted with all the name-changing business in Iowa,” Ben Smith explained to me. “My theory is she was in the process of converting the Nebraska version of Tracey Richter Roberts, who had a nondriver’s ID in Nebraska . . . into Heidi Forsbacka. She had changed her name (illegally) to Sophie in Iowa. Why waste an opportunity to forge the Nebraska Tracey Richter Roberts identity into something she could use to screw over Michael Roberts some more?”

  The odd part of it was that Tracey had brought it all on herself by calling 911 to say her car had been broken into and a crime scene photo had been left on the front seat. During that subsequent investigation, the DCSO discovered that Tracey had been “utilizing an Iowa driver’s license . . . under the name Sophia Corrina Terese Baronin Edwards” and had used an invalid address in Iowa to obtain the license. One interesting finding was that when Tracey tried to buy a Lexus in 2008 under Sophie’s name, she was denied credit. But during that process, the warrant for her arrest indicated, Tracey produced a divorce decree, her warrant on fraud charges explained: Therefore . . . the following information was deceitfully added to the original court document [the divorce decree] . . . “The Respondent, Tracey Richter-Roberts. . . may resume use of her maiden name, Sophie Corrina Terese von Richterhausen Edwards.”

  Tracey had presented a document that claimed her maiden name was Sophie . . . Edwards. It was a fabrication, a total forgery. The DCSO had taken the divorce decree Tracey had shared with the Lexus dealer and, in an expert investigatory move, matched it up to the one they retrieved from the actual court and found out she had forged/added information to it. What’s more, she had hidden a fake ID in Sophie’s name inside a picture frame in her child’s bedroom.

  During that same DCSO search of Tracey’s apartment, investigators found the forged name-changing deed, the forged divorce decree, along with several other items—including a stamp of Michael Roberts’s signature, a “binder containing forged court documents, birth cert[ificate] . . . Social Security card” for Sophie C. Edwards, and two passports: one for Sophie, one for Tracey. There was also a Cambridge in America alumni handbook and a file with various documents labeled “burn”—some of which had been discovered underneath the false bottom of a medicine cabinet. Tracey had also saved a Walmart receipt. The front of it—what she purchased, when and at which location—was not important, but while staring at the back of it, Ben Smith discovered something significant. Tracey had written several things, but it was an online account user name that alarmed Ben: December 13, 2001.

  Tracey had chosen to use the day she killed Dustin Wehde as a user name for an online account.

  It was bizarre, because Tracey had been bullhorning the notion that she had been forever devastated by the incident. She had even said she wanted to talk about it as little as possible because it had been such a traumatic experience. Yet, here she was using the date as a user name for an online account, something that would continually remind her of that day?

  “It was the same thing as her giving a tell-all interview to the local newspaper just days after the attack,” Ben added.

  In the photos accompanying the search, the detective holding open a notebook that police discovered wore rubber gloves. According to one law enforcement source, the reason he donned the gloves was because “he
was afraid she was going to somehow lift his fingerprint or DNA and frame him for something.”

  “What a horrible criminal she is,” Ben observed later. “Who keeps the instruments of her crimes?”

  The forged change of name document was dated July 4, 2006. It stated that the undersigned “Sophie Corrina Terese Baronin von Richterhausen Edwards . . . lately known as Tracey Ann Richter” was a “Commonwealth Citizen of the British Nationality Act 1981.”

  The tip-off to the consulate was that there was no such thing as a “Commonwealth Citizen.” But more important to Trent and Ben, Tracey hadn’t just started calling herself Sophie Edwards when she got back to the United States; she had changed her name with fraudulent documents in England, then came home, had a passport and driver’s license issued using those same documents, along with other personal accounts, in her “new name.”

  Interestingly, in an exchange that would lead to a new charge, during a divorce hearing in Iowa, Tracey was asked if she had ever obtained a passport in “her new name, Sophie Edwards.”

  “No,” Tracey replied. “I think my passport is still in my old name.”

  This was actually correct—because she had two passports, one for Sophie, one for Tracey.

  “Are you planning on getting a passport in your new name?” Tracey was asked.

  “No,” Tracey testified under oath.

  She also denied she had ever obtained bank accounts or a new Social Security card in Sophie’s name.

  A charging document detailing Tracey’s lies stated: Whereas the Respondent committed perjury as evidenced by the fact that Sophie Edwards has been an active account holder at Wells Fargo Bank as of July 22, 2008, and with an Iowa driver’s license . . . a social security number . . . an active checking account . . . an active savings account . . . and an active debit card.

  Further along in the Iowa District Court divorce decree, a document written by the court under its “Findings of Fact Conclusions of Law and Decree” banner, in number 19 of the decree, the court stated, Tracey is very deviceful; she usually has a plan or scheme to effect a purpose.