Beautifully Cruel Read online

  “I was getting shot at a lot,” Trent said of his days on patrol for the Milwaukee Police Department. “That last year I was also hit by a drunk driver and was almost killed on duty.” But the real kicker, he added, was that he and his partner had been shot at two times inside two weeks. Trent went home that night of the second shooting, frustrated and disillusioned, and approached his pregnant wife.

  “You know,” she said, “maybe your career path should be with another department back in Iowa, where you might survive.”

  Trent was ready to live closer to home and he felt that he was facing that five-year burnout period a lot of cops working in a busy city beat talk about.

  Back in Iowa, Trent got a job at the Coralville Police Department and went to work as a patrol officer. The job lasted about five years. He was investigating gang activity, served search warrants, developed confidential informants (CIs), testified in state and federal cases. Trent was learning the ropes of becoming an investigator, and he liked it.

  The problem he ran into was that he had come from a city of about eight hundred thousand to a city of about twenty-five to thirty thousand, where things were done differently.

  “Coralville Police was a great department, but I just didn’t fit in all that well,” Trent explained. “I was doing things the department had never done before.”

  The obvious next step for Trent was the state police, the Division of Criminal Investigation, where he could utilize all of the skills he’d mastered thus far.

  His first job in DCI was in the gaming unit focusing on crime at the local casino. Pulling prostitutes out of the casino and busting them for solicitation, Trent explained, was like “shooting fish in a barrel.” All they did was watch the girls early in the day working the streets and make note of what they were wearing. Then spot those same girls on closed-circuit television (CCTV) in the casino, watch them break laws and haul them in.

  So now, Trent was a special agent in DCI and he was investigating major crimes. One day his boss approached him. “Listen, the legislature wants us to work on a certain amount of cold cases every year. Why don’t you grab one when you have time and have a look.”

  Trent walked over to where the cold cases in the office were sitting in files. “There were two,” he remembered. One of them was the death of Dustin Wehde.

  Trent was the kind of investigator, he said, who felt the crime scene (CS) photos were the first thing you looked at when cracking the ice on a cold case. CS photos could explain a lot if you knew what you were looking at.

  He reached into the box and found the photos. The second photo Trent looked at, he said, was an image he would never forget: A photo of the back of Dustin’s head.

  What the hell? Trent said to himself, staring at it.

  He could not believe what he was looking at. What Trent thought immediately was that it could not be, based on the CS photos alone, a home invasion gone wrong. The accuracy of the shots and the amount of shots fired were two of the most telling details, in Trent’s view.

  Trent darted off an e-mail to his old partners in Milwaukee, Phil Hanyard and Dave Larson, explaining several of the crime scene photos he was looking at. Phil and Dave were cops whose opinions Trent relied on. Guys who had seen it all. They could help.

  Trent encouraged them to have a look and get back to him. He gave them no details about the case. Just look at the photos and tell me what you think.

  Sometime later, Trent heard back.

  What’s going on in Iowa? one of his old partners e-mailed. What do you have, some dude executed here or what?

  3

  A FEW WEEKS INTO HIS reign as prosecutor, two years after Trent Vileta first saw the photos himself and had questions, now Ben Smith couldn’t shake the same images: the back of a man’s skull with several bullet entrance wounds. It was on Ben’s mind as he went about his days as Sac County prosecutor.

  To put it into perspective, Ben was not some hayseed lawyer who could be cajoled into taking on some cop’s career case—a case, incidentally, police and the former prosecutor had taken a look at and come to the conclusion, for whatever reason, that Dustin Wehde’s death was justifiable homicide—a rare, albeit deadly, home invasion gone wrong. But while sitting at his computer inside his office, Ben clicked on several additional photos Trent had sent since that first lot a few Fridays back. It was now January 2011. Christmas had come to pass. Ben was in his office and had work to do, traffic tickets to prosecute. He needed to familiarize himself with the county and focus on his job of trying to keep everyone honest. Those photos, however, were beginning to preoccupy Ben’s days and even keep him awake at night. He couldn’t stop thinking about the images and Trent’s comments: Think about that this weekend.

  Staring at a new batch of photos, Ben asked himself what he believed at the time was one of the most important questions about the crime scene: Why nine shots? And how could a housewife, struggling, supposedly panicking, land such deadly, accurate shots into the guy’s head and body? How had she gotten her weapons out of a locked gun safe in the dark? These weren’t willy-nilly shots fired in the chaotic moments of a struggle; they felt perfectly directed, perfectly targeted, and perfectly intended—all from the finger of a housewife with three kids, a husband away on business. You look at it in that manner of speaking and it smelled.

  Ben got up and searched for the Dustin Wehde file in his office. He decided to take it home—without telling anyone—and have a serious look. Trent was a decorated cop. He was a certified emergency medical technician (EMT) and graduated from the U.S. Army Policy School. He had years of investigatory experience in murder cases. He knew his way around serious investigations, having been with DCI now since 2008. He was a cop’s cop, whatever the hell that meant these days. Trent deserved Ben’s attention, if only to take a thoughtful look at the file and come to a conclusion. Cops rely on their gut. They don’t target individuals. They try to answer nagging questions that keep popping up. Maybe a new set of eyes on the case could offer an understanding nobody else had come to.

  Over the course of the next several days, Ben immersed himself in the Wehde file. He studied everything he could about the case. It was three small binders then: police and autopsy reports, interviews, and other documents. As homicide cases go, not that big of a paper trail. But there was enough information, nonetheless, to get an idea of the case and the initial investigation.

  Ben picked up an interview a sheriff had done with the shooter, Tracey Roberts. It felt fairly thorough, about ten pages long, done on the night of the incident, around 10:00 p.m., at Loring Hospital, after she had been brought there from her West South Avenue home in Early. The neighborhood Tracey and her former husband, Michael Roberts, an Australian Tracey had met online, lived in could not have been any more suburban. Farmhouses lined the street next to Victorians, ranches, and red barns. The favorite vehicle was a truck. West South is a two-lane back road. The entire neighborhood and surrounding acreage is flat as a desktop. People out here worry about droughts, floods, and tornadoes. Murder is nowhere on the list of community concerns.

  Settled into his chair, Ben read through that first interview with Tracey Roberts. Here was a woman who, merely three hours before, had pumped a total of eleven rounds from two weapons, many of them hitting the young man, killing him, leaving a large pool of his blood on the wooden floor of her bedroom, with some spatter on the wall nearby. She claimed he had walked into her home with another man, who had booked out the back door once the shooting started. A guess was they were on a mission to rape and kill her. She had used a .40-caliber Beretta semiautomatic handgun, which holds ten rounds, and a six-shot Sturm, Ruger & Co. .357 revolver.

  Two guns? Ben asked himself. Eleven rounds?

  In addition, these weren’t the guns of a novice. These were killing machines. You put one of these weapons next to your nightstand when you knew what the hell you were doing.

  How does a woman, scared for her life, with three small children in the house, get off e
leven rounds from two weapons without the two men who had broken in getting control of the situation? It was not a large house by any means. There was no indication that Tracey Roberts hid or locked herself in a room, got the weapons into her hands and under control, and fired at the victim as he came barging into the room. To the contrary, reports indicated she had fired at will.

  As Ben read through the interview, the way Tracey had fired the weapons stood out. Not to mention another compelling fact that emerged from reading the interview as a whole—one that Ben began to, almost right away, get a sick feeling about.

  A name: Dr. John Pitman.

  * * *

  Years after the shooting, as Trent began to investigate it as a cold case, Tracey would tell him: “I was sedated and a bit loopy” during that first interview, and “have no recollection of” it. Still, on the night of December 13, 2001, Tracey Roberts seemed composed and calmly settled enough to give a full account, with plenty of detail about what had happened inside her home. In that first interview, Tracey talked about her family: kids, mother, father, siblings and her then-husband, Michael, a computer security expert and transplant from Australia who, with Tracey, ran a business out of their Early, Iowa, home office next door to the main house. They’d been married since 1996, Tracey told Sac County Sheriff’s Office (SCSO) lieutenant Dennis Cessford, merely hours after the attack. Her husband, she added, had moved to Early in November 1998 and she had followed in December with Bert (her son from a previous marriage). A year before the shooting occurred, Tracey had told a local newspaper doing a “Meet Your Neighbor” story that they had moved to Early together in February 1999. She stated that they had been lured from Chicago’s big-city culture to small-town life by the house of their dreams. At the time of the shooting, her son Bert Pitman was eleven, her son Tommy (pseudonym) just three, and her daughter, Cassie (pseudonym), one. The two youngest were the offspring of Michael Roberts.

  Lieutenant Cessford asked Tracey about her first marriage to a man she met in college, Dr. John Pitman, Bert’s father.

  “It was an abusive relationship,” she alleged. “I was very young and he was much older. It was a sheltered life for me. I’d had a strict upbringing. My father was a Chicago cop.”

  Without much prompting, Tracey banged on and on about her first marriage, adding, “He was domineering and controlling.”

  “When were you married?” Cessford asked.

  “Um, not sure if it was 1987 or 1988,” Tracey answered. Cessford noted in his report that she likely couldn’t recall exactly when because of “her emotional state” at the time of the interview. The divorce, Tracey was certain, was finalized in 1996, the same year she met Michael Roberts.

  “John abducted Bert in 1992 and I had to get a court order and go get Bert myself,” Tracey then added.

  “Has law enforcement ever been involved?”

  “When we were living in Englewood, Colorado,” she said.

  “Please explain what happened.”

  Tracey talked about how she and her then-husband, Dr. Pitman, had an argument about an alleged affair he’d had and so she gave him an ultimatum: the marriage or the mistress?

  “John walked out of the room and into the bedroom,” she claimed. “When he returned, he laid a handgun on the table and said, ‘That’s the only way out of the marriage.’ And I thought briefly about suicide. . . .”

  Why is all of this relevant to the home invasion? Ben wondered while reading through the interview. Why is she so focused on her ex-husband?

  Continuing with Cessford, who, in all fairness, pressed Tracey for details about her ex-husband, Tracey said she returned the gun, her grandfather’s weapon, to her bedroom after John Pitman walked out of the house. The gun being old, she told Cessford, she wanted to make certain it was unloaded before putting it away. So she began fiddling with it and, while she was making certain it was unloaded, the gun went off—a round went into the ceiling.

  According to Tracey, John Pitman came home awhile later and demanded to know what she had done with the gun.

  “I handed either the gun or the bullets to him, I cannot recall which. I said I was sorry and wanted to work things out.”

  She claimed John gave her a sedative and she lay down.

  “The next thing I knew an Englewood police officer was waking me up.” He was there because of the weapon discharging. A neighbor had called.

  Tracey Roberts continued, covering this story from beginning to end, seemingly leaving no detail, however minor, out.

  It’s so odd, Ben considered. Merely hours before, she is being “attacked” inside her home by two men. She kills one of them. And yet here she is telling this story about her ex-husband.

  Cessford asked about the marriage overall, besides that one incident with the gun.

  Tracey said her life with Pitman was strange, especially the sexual side of it.

  “He would tie me up to the bed and gag me,” she alleged. “He would leave me like that overnight. More than once he opened the windows and I was extremely cold.”

  What? Ben thought. Why mention any of this?

  After leaving Pitman, Tracey said, she moved back to Chicago in 1992 and filed for divorce. It took four more years to finalize the divorce.

  Cessford knew at this point all of what she was saying was one woman’s word against her ex-husband’s—there was no proof here beyond her words that any of it had actually taken place the way she had claimed.

  What was more baffling about the interview so far was its focus: Dr. Pitman. What did her marriage nearly ten years before have to do with a home invasion and homicide? As Ben read through the interview and other documents, puzzled by some of what Tracey Roberts had said, he wrote questions down. Yet he kept coming back to Tracey’s mind-set during the Cessford interview: Dr. Pitman.

  “What really jumped out at me is how seven or eight pages of the interview is her bashing Dr. John Pitman,” Ben commented, adding how this got him interested in the case. Here it was, Tracey Roberts had just been allegedly attacked inside her home by two strangers. She had pumped nine of eleven bullets from two different weapons into one man, blood and brain tissue all over the bedroom floor of her “dream” home: “But when she recounts this horrific life-or-death experience, she spends most of the interview bashing Pitman, providing law enforcement with absolutely irrelevant stories about [his supposed] deviant sexual appetite and other immaterial nonsense.”

  If nothing else, the content of the interview spoke to Ben. While in that hospital room talking to police, Tracey Roberts wasn’t screaming and yelling for her kids, crying, telling the sheriff that she was too emotional to talk. Instead, she launched into a soliloquy about her ex-husband.

  As Ben continued reading the interview with Cessford, a cop Tracey would later refer to as “the boob,” the prosecutor was struck by what happened inside her house during the attack. Right away, as he read through her explanation of the attack, Ben had questions about the validity of Tracey’s story.

  “To me, her statements to Cessford were extraordinarily inculpatory. First, her firing the pistol over her shoulder and hitting Dustin is ridiculous.” Tracey had explained to Cessford that as she was fumbling with one of the guns she had hastily taken out of a gun safe in her bedroom, she ultimately “put it over her right shoulder and fired. . . .”

  “Not only is that an Annie Oakley–type trick shot,” Ben added, “considering how close to her ear it would have been, had she fired from that position she would have blown her eardrum out, which didn’t happen.”

  For Ben, this could have meant only that Tracey Roberts was “wearing earplugs” when she fired those shots. Or she fired the shots in a standing position, like a cop shooting at a target.

  This was just the beginning of questions Tracey Roberts would have to answer soon, at least according to Ben Smith, the new prosecutor in town. The more Ben looked at the case file, the more he believed Dustin Wehde was the victim of a murder whose motive began as far back as 1
992.

  Still, within the evidence that law enforcement had collected in 2001 after the shooting, regardless of what Ben Smith and DCI SA Trent Vileta thought or even felt about the case, there was a strong suggestion, supported by Dustin Wehde’s handwriting, of a conspiracy to kill Tracey Roberts and her son Bert—with Dustin Wehde at the center of it.

  4

  AS THE WEEKS PASSED, TRENT Vileta and Ben Smith talked by phone about the case, their lives, and Sac County in general. The two lawmen were getting to know each other. Ben didn’t need much more selling from Trent; he was on board with the idea that there were more questions than answers and this open cold case obviously needed further investigation. Thus, Ben wanted to learn everything he could about the case and collect every available piece of documentation before he went any further.

  The case of Dustin Wehde/Tracey Roberts became the focal point of Ben and Trent’s relationship. Trent had convinced Ben, simply by pointing him in the direction of the case, that the shooting did not happen the way in which its principal witness, Tracey Roberts, said it had. Moreover, you ask Dustin Wehde’s mother about her son’s death, and she believed from day one that her son was murdered.

  “Not by Tracey, though,” Mona Wehde later told me, “I believed it was Michael Roberts, Tracey’s husband at the time.”