Beautifully Cruel Read online

  “Bringing Stephen Komie into it says a lot,” one investigator later told me. “Ask yourself this, would a high-powered attorney from Chicago, like Steve Komie, look to hire a special-needs kid like Dustin Wehde?”

  So that was the end of this strange, short journal, most of which was focused on John Pitman, a man Tracey Roberts had been married to once, but who lived one thousand miles away from Iowa. Moreover, there was nothing in the journal about Dustin’s personal life. School. Home. Work. Parents. Siblings. Beliefs. Girls. Thoughts. It was nothing more than a three-page hit man’s manifesto, promoting one school of thought: John Pitman wanted his ex-wife, Tracey Roberts, and his son, Bert, dead.

  Ben was beyond taken aback by the journal contents. He thought about how a prominent plastic surgeon from Virginia had supposedly hired a twenty-year-old special-needs kid with ADHD and ODD from rural Iowa not only to kill his ex-wife and son, but if that went well, he was going to hire him also to kill his parents and frame his current wife for it. That would be one man whose wives, son, and parents were all murdered.

  Not a freakin’ chance, Ben surmised.

  It had all been made up. How could anyone in his or her right mind believe a kid with Dustin’s intellectual capabilities could scribe such a detailed account, including side notes, in a journal that was found inside the vehicle Dustin used to drive to Tracey’s house on the night he was killed? Beyond that, why would Dustin park his car in the driveway of Tracey and Michael Roberts’s house to go in and commit these murders? And why would a hired killer leave behind a record of his crimes and not bring a weapon into the house with him?

  Ben Smith was now back on board with Trent—all in.

  There was, however, one major problem for Ben Smith and Trent Vileta, if prosecuting Tracey or Michael Roberts was on the agenda. You see, when Mona Wehde, Dustin’s mother, was asked on December 18, 2007, about the handwriting in the notebook/journal (and even in the days just after Dustin’s death), she said it was positively, without a doubt, Dustin’s handwriting. It was extremely distinctive and consistent throughout. There could be no doubt about it for Mona. Dustin’s hand had written those entries.

  “The journal is in Dustin’s handwriting. That was confirmed by his mother,” Ben Smith said.

  “Yes,” Mona told me, “that was definitely my son’s handwriting.”

  Handwriting samples from Dustin would prove as much.

  7

  THE FACT THAT DUSTIN WEHDE likely wrote those journal entries posed a major complication for Ben Smith in his quest with Trent Vileta to see that, in their view, justice was served in the 2001 home invasion resulting in Dustin’s so-called murder.

  “It’s going to be tough, Trent, I cannot lie.”

  “I know, Ben. I realize that.”

  Ben would jump aboard, and then jump off.

  “I was constantly talking him down from a cliff,” Trent recalled.

  When asked about the notebook itself, Mona Wehde said she did not recall purchasing it for her son. It was pink, to begin with. Mona did not recall Dustin ever having a pink notebook. Why would he?

  Dustin could have bought the notebook himself.

  Still, Ben had issues regarding every aspect of its contents. The notebook, by its mere presence alone at the crime scene, had to be significant. There had to be a role for it in this murder—if it was a murder. In addition, there had to be an answer as to why Dustin wrote it. It was too perfect. You have this notebook detailing Dustin supposedly being hired by Dr. Pitman; then you have Tracey Roberts, on the night of the attack, talking about Pitman, painting him in a very bad light, as if she knew the contents of the notebook. It had been found in the front passenger seat of Dustin Wehde’s car, which was parked in Tracey and Michael’s driveway.

  It all smelled of a setup, Ben felt. A scenario designed as an elaborate plot to frame John Pitman for some reason, and make him look like he was the bad guy. But why? Why would Tracey—and/or Michael Roberts, for that matter—do such a thing?

  “Here he (Dustin) is memorializing his being hired by a prominent plastic surgeon from Virginia and the surgeon’s prominent attorney from Chicago to stalk, harass, attack, and kill Tracey and Bert,” Ben explained. “Why?”

  The most significant aspect for Ben as he studied the writing was that as far as special-needs kids go, the writing was too sophisticated and insightful; likewise, “the most astute, careful, detail-oriented hit men” do not keep journals of their nefarious activities, let alone use footnotes or side notes. Right there, in black and white, was all law enforcement needed to find out who was responsible for hiring the hit.

  No matter how many questions Ben had, if he charged Tracey and/or Michael and took either one—or both—to court, how would he explain that Dustin Wehde wrote the journal? And if he did write the journal, why did he do it?

  “The better question or best answer,” Ben speculated, “is what isn’t suspect about the journal. There is not one thing about the journal that has any shred of legitimacy. I think, above all else, what I struggled with the most was Dustin Wehde, the silent assassin, describing Dr. Pitman as not loving his son, Bert.”

  As Ben pored through the case files, one key factor kept rising to the surface: Tracey Roberts’s primary complaint in a custody matter pending at the time of Dustin’s death. Trent had encouraged Ben to look at this closely. In that custody case, Tracey alleged Dr. Pitman to be a very bad guy, a father who had sexually abused Bert and thus should not have custody of the child—this war between them had been ongoing for nearly ten years.

  Yet the flip side of this was that it seemed Dr. Pitman was about to win that custody case and get full custody of Bert just as this home invasion had taken place.

  Suddenly a potential motive revealed itself.

  On February 8, 2001, ten months before Dustin’s death, Dr. Pitman filed for full custody of his son after what he described in documents was nearly ten years of absolute horror the doctor had gone through with Tracey. That custody battle was in full swing and winding down at the time Dustin Wehde was killed.

  Ben asked himself: Why does the hit man, who has accepted a contract to kill multiple people, care whether or not Dr. Pitman doesn’t love his son, Bert?

  “It is so ridiculous,” Ben pointed out. “Talking about it now and thinking how [the killer] got away with it for so long fills me with apoplectic rage.”

  Ben believed Tracey chose Dustin. Groomed him. Built up his trust and then somehow tricked him into writing the journal—trying to make Pitman look like the mastermind so she could regain custody of Bert and keep child support payments coming in.

  How does one prove all of this, however? The previous prosecutor, Ben knew, didn’t want to touch it.

  “It will be a challenge,” Ben told Trent.

  “I know. There’s a lot of work that needs to be done.”

  As Ben thought about the journal, which was unquestionably written by Dustin Wehde, the less of a problem he saw.

  “No, it was never a problem for me,” Ben explained. “There was another small notebook we had belonging to Dustin with identical handwriting inside of it. What was a problem for me was that Mona was shown the journal, or at least the first page of it. That was a problem because law enforcement was said to have never shown it to anyone. Later, Tracey Roberts would accuse Mona of having it and showing it to people, which, if you did not know that Mona had only been shown the first page of the notebook, you would think that was possible. So, if Mona had been shown the journal (in its entirety), it was plausible that Tracey could have knowledge of its contents.”

  Ben studied that other notebook found in Dustin’s room at the Wehde residence. This notebook, written in the same handwriting as the one found in Dustin’s car, had an entry in it that appeared to say the following: IKILLA PITMAN.

  Investigators, Ben had been told, looked at this entry and saw: “I kill a Pitman,” as in Bert Pitman. It was thought that Dustin had written it in some sort of angry moment or ra
ge, promising himself that he was going to go through with the hit.

  “Lieutenant Cessford actually put in one of his reports that Dustin had written ‘I kill a Pitman’ in a notebook,” Ben said.

  This was a huge problem. If Dustin wrote “I kill a Pitman,” and it was proven to be his writing, how was Ben going to prove that Tracey Roberts had planned this entire crime for years and then executed her plan at precisely the right moment?

  Ben needed an answer to the supposed “I kill a Pitman” notebook entry.

  He started searching.

  As he did this, the idea that talking with his investigator about a first-degree murder charge against Tracey Roberts over games of Call of Duty, and obsessing over it in his office without anyone knowing, seemed all well and good. In theory.

  But getting that case into a courtroom after ten years, proving it all to a jury, was definitely going to be another story. Ben knew the obstacles he faced if he was going to drag Tracey and/or Michael Roberts into a courtroom under first-degree murder charges a decade after the fact. He was hot and cold. One day he was all in, pumped up and ready to go; the next he was calling Trent to tell him he was backing off. It was too damn much. The investigation, in Ben’s opinion, had been blown years before. He wasn’t the right guy to clean it up.

  Then another major issue presented itself: Ben was the first to admit he had no idea how to prosecute a murder. He had done traffic tickets and misdemeanors. He had just stepped into office. What in the hell was he trying to do? He wasn’t Matlock, for crying out loud.

  Number two, the prosecutor’s office consisted of Ben and his secretary—no one else. How was Ben going to manage a case of this magnitude? Every time he read through a document, there was another rabbit hole to go down, more people to interview, more phone records to obtain, Internet records to try to get hold of, search warrants, motions. The more he looked into it, the bigger in scope the case became. It was not simply about a woman or a man who had tricked a boy into breaking into her house so she or he could kill him. There had to be a backstory of motive here somewhere. There was more to it all. Tracey and John Pitman’s marriage ended in 1992. Were the answers there? How were Ben Smith and a DCI investigator who wasn’t even allowed to work the case full-time going to unravel all of this?

  8

  BACK IN MILWAUKEE, WHEN HE was on the job, Trent Vileta had learned how to get people to admit to things without them even realizing what they were doing. You work as a detective in a city of half a million and you learn quickly how to get information out of people. A major part of Trent’s strategy was, in his words, “to act like a dumb-ass.” You allow suspects to think they are smarter than you and you have the upper hand, every time. With Tracey Roberts, back in 2008, as Trent first picked up the case file after his boss asked him to have a look, he decided to reach back to his roots in law enforcement and utilize those skills he felt would garner the best results.

  “I’ve always, throughout my career, made cases by getting people to talk,” Trent explained. “The more they talk, the more stupid they get and, more importantly, the more stupid stuff they say.”

  So, in 2008, convinced there was a case of murder inside a few boxes of documents, Trent reached out to Tracey. He needed to get her talking. Feel the pressure a bit. Make her realize that DCI was not allowing the case to collect freezer burn. Let her know, subtly, that there was a cop looking into it. And gauge, in turn, how she would react to such pressure.

  Hi, how are you . . . listen, Trent wrote in an e-mail to Tracey in the best hokey, backcountry tone he could muster, we are heading up a multi-agency unit that is going to review some of the old cases and I am really interested in helping you out.

  One of the major factors in Tracey’s story—something she had always gone back to, no matter whom she spoke to about the case—was the “second man” allegedly with Dustin. She had maintained all along there was another man with Dustin that night (at times she had claimed there were even two others with him), but he had taken off at some point. The drumbeat Tracey had always sustained was simple: find that second man and you’ll find your answers. As far as Ben and Trent were concerned, there was never a second man to find—which became one reason, in their opinions, why Tracey had been so adamant about finding him.

  In that same first e-mail exchange between Trent and Tracey in 2008, after introducing himself and his intent, Trent made a point to say, I really want to find this second man.

  A line had been cast. Trent had thought about it and designed a strategy (the bait) that would appeal to Tracey’s sensibilities. He needed her, at least from the get-go, to think he was on her side.

  Another interesting factor for Trent going into talking to Tracey was that he knew she absolutely despised, utterly hated, her second ex-husband, Michael Roberts. Trent had made just two calls to different agencies about Michael and Tracey Roberts and an ongoing custody fight for their kids and found out all he needed to know.

  “Tracey is bat-shit crazy,” one agency investigator told Trent. “Watch out.”

  “And Michael Roberts is almost as crazy as she is,” said another. “But they hate each other so much, they’ll do whatever they have to do to get each other into trouble.”

  There it was: the opening Trent needed. If Trent played on that hatred, he could easily get Tracey on his side and get her talking, simply by bashing Michael.

  “And look,” Trent commented later, “anytime you have a wife attacked and a husband not around, you have to consider him a major suspect—it would be reckless not to.”

  Thus, Trent was interested in both Tracey and Michael as Dustin’s murderer.

  9

  BEN COULD NOT GET THE case out of his mind. He would go out for lunch in town. Maybe stop for a beer with friends on a Friday night. Work out. Stand in court prosecuting some small-town criminal. And there it was. As he considered it over and over, Ben kept coming to the same conclusion: She got away with murder.

  The more he thought about it, the angrier Ben grew. It was consuming him. This, as Iowa began to experience the first signs of spring 2011, the last frost melting into green pastures and tulip points popping out of the ground.

  She did it.

  “Keep looking,” Trent would call and tell Ben. “Don’t give up.”

  “I’m trying. . . .”

  Ben sat one day searching through Dustin’s high-school yearbook from his senior year. He wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but maybe a name or two to track down and interview. You have to investigate from both sides if you’re going to present truth. What if Dustin had done it? What if, Ben considered, Dustin Wehde had some sort of secret obsession with Tracey that he had told a few friends in school about? Had Dustin confided in people that Dr. Pitman had hired him? Or that he made the entire contents of the journal up just in case he got caught? These were possibilities Ben needed to look into. Even a green prosecutor like Ben knew that surprises while prosecuting any case can have the potential to destroy you.

  If Ben was going to present a case, he needed a more thorough understanding of the players, especially the backstory and history of Tracey and Michael Roberts and Dustin Wehde. Furthermore, if he was going to accuse the former regime he had taken over for of not following up on leads and allowing a murderer to go unprosecuted, he had better do the work himself.

  Ben opened the yearbook and, flipping through, studied each page, hoping something would pop out at him. What he saw was page after page of photos you’d find in any high-school yearbook: kids in the prime of their lives, heading off to college, happy, smiling, goofing around, the local jocks living out their dreams. Looking through the book actually brought a nostalgic feeling up for Ben. He was once the “star” running back in high school, the kid in the jersey tearing up the field on Friday nights. How life changed once you entered college and left home. You became, essentially, just another adult in a world full of peers.

  If there was one thing that scared Ben more than anything, it
was the unknown and failing at whatever he set out to do. Having gone into the military and then making a move back to Iowa with his girl, only to lose her and have his world upended, had taught Ben how malleable life could be. Nothing was certain, no matter how much planning, how much preparation, how much praying, and how much hoping one did. Anything could happen at any time.

  Ben turned to a page in the yearbook and found himself staring at a young girl. But it wasn’t her down-home, Midwestern charm or smile that caught Ben’s eye. It was her name: Ilka Ditmar, a foreign exchange student.

  Something about the way the name looked on the page.

  Ilka Ditmar.

  Ben said the name to himself several times: Ilka Ditmar.

  He slowed it down.

  Il-ka Dit-mar.

  If there was one thing about Dustin Wehde, it was his handwriting. Yes, very distinctive. But also quite sloppy.

  Ben made some calls. Under a hunch, he asked around about Ilka Ditmar.

  “Yeah, Dustin had a crush on her,” Ben was told.

  So Ben called Mona, Dustin’s mother.

  “Yes, he liked her,” Mona explained. “Dustin had once gone to her home and brought her flowers.”

  Ben looked at the entry in Dustin’s journal and put it up to the yearbook: IKILA PITMAN. It could have easily been Ilka Ditmar that Cessford had confused with IKILLA PITMAN, if one is under the impression that the man who wrote it was hired by a guy to kill a Pitman.

  “So,” Ben explained, “I figured out the D in ‘Ditmar,’ in Dustin’s handwriting, looked like a P . . . and the R at the end of ‘Ditmar’ looked like an N.”

  There was his answer: IKILLA PITMAN was actually Ilka Ditmar, a girl from high school Dustin Wehde had a crush on and wrote her name in his notebook.