Kill For Me (17 page)

There came one night when Ashley Humphrey sat down with Tobe and started crying.

Tracey.

“What is it?” Tobe asked. She felt she knew already. Son of a bitch probably cheated on her. Threw it in her face, too.

Ashley wouldn’t answer.

“Ashley, come on, what is it?” The girl was young enough to be Tobe’s daughter. Tobe felt sorry for her at times. She’d had such a rough life—and she was only twenty years old.

The young newlywed dabbed her eyes with a tissue, caught her breath, then explained that she had been sexually abused by someone close to her family. She didn’t know what to do. She was torn. She hated her life.

“You need to report this.”

Ashley shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Then, for the next hour or so, Ashley went into graphic detail, describing what had happened.

Tobe drove Ashley to the police department and walked her in, where she filed a report.

A day later, Ashley was still in a state of fear, crying, shaking. Very upset. The police had told her, according to what she explained to Tobe that night, that maybe she should find another place to stay until things cooled down. Ashley was afraid that the person who had abused her would come around looking to harm her, once he realized she had filed charges against him. The guy had guns. He was crazy, Ashley said. Anything could happen.

Because Ashley had voiced her concerns about going anywhere without her husband by her side, Tobe eased her mind a bit. She suggested that they both move into her house until things blew over.

“You can come stay with me,” Tobe said.

“Really?”

“Yes.”

It would work out. Tobe and Humphrey were meeting fairly frequently to discuss the business venture, anyway. Being in the same house, they could get a lot of the business paperwork done. Discuss the business in depth.

Tobe had no idea what she was getting herself into. Almost from the first moment Humphrey and Ashley were inside her house, it was nerve-wracking and downright strange to have Humphrey walking around. For one, Tobe said, she would get up in the middle of the night to get a glass of water or go to the bathroom and find Humphrey sitting in the living room on the couch, wide awake, not watching television, just staring at every move Tobe made.

“It was as if he was telling me, ‘I know where you are twenty-four/seven. You can never get away from me.’”

By this time the elephant in the room was Sandee Rozzo’s murder. No one wanted to mention it, especially Tobe. It was as if it had never happened and Humphrey never knew the woman. He never talked about it. Tobe never asked. Yet, it was Ashley, Tobe recalled, who seemed upset about something. She was always on edge. A fragile piece of flesh that Humphrey wasn’t comforting in any manner whatsoever.

One morning Tobe got up and walked into the kitchen, and there was Humphrey, she recalled, leaning against the counter, needle and syringe in hand, shooting steroids into his stomach. It was the first time Tobe was ever aware of him doing it. Up until that point, Tobe insisted, she had no idea Humphrey was juicing.

Seeing this, Tobe remembered, “I didn’t want to question him at all at this point.” So she looked away, opened the fridge, got her juice, and walked out of the room as if she hadn’t noticed.

It seemed as though the relationship had taken a 360-degree turn since they had met nearly a year ago. Here she was having the guy live in her home and she was uncomfortable being around him. More than that, Tobe felt she couldn’t do anything about it. She was afraid to tell him to leave. Humphrey was now intimidating Tobe.

Back to square one.

“Something seemed very off,” Tobe recalled.

The other disturbing behavior she began to notice was the way in which Humphrey treated Ashley. He did all the talking for the both of them. He didn’t allow Ashley a voice in anything. There was a time when Tobe believed that Humphrey loved Ashley and allowed her to be her own person, but she realized now that he was controlling her more than anything. And Ashley being so young, naïve, and allegedly abused, well, she didn’t know any better. She had married a man almost twenty years her senior, whom she was attracted to physically when they first met, but she soon realized she knew nothing more about him.

“I was very attracted to his body,” Ashley said later. “He was about two hundred and twenty pounds, very muscular. He was—or seemed—older and more mature, so, you know, I thought he had his act together.”

Their life together had begun with a series of lies.

“I thought he was very smart. He seemed to be a wealth of knowledge about fitness, and he told me he had a lot of careers, as a football player and model and a trainer.”

Humphrey even had told Ashley he played in the Rose Bowl in 1985 for the Ohio State Buckeyes.

“He said he modeled for Milan and Armani in New York.” Others recalled that Humphrey had said he often traveled to Italy for modeling jobs. “He said he was the Golden Gloves boxing champion from four to fourteen [years old], and that his hands were registered lethal weapons at one point.”

More lies.

Still, Ashley was impressed. She never questioned any of it. She was in awe of the guy.

“I never doubted anything he said for a second.”

It was shortly after Detective Scott “Ski” Golczewski and Detective Shannon Rozzi questioned Ashley at the apartment that Humphrey called Tobe to the side one day while they were training in the gym and said he needed to speak with her.

Now.

It was important. Something had happened. Something bad. Something Tobe was going to help them with. “Ashley told the cops we were with you on the night Sandee Rozzo was murdered,” Humphrey said, looking around, making sure nobody else was listening.

Tobe froze. She knew it wasn’t true. And she also knew what he was essentially asking her to do.

“I don’t have a lot of options here, Tobe,” Humphrey continued, “and neither do you. You’re going to be our alibi.”

Tobe was stunned. Scared. She felt herself nodding in agreement without even thinking.

“I knew this was a very bad situation,” Tobe told me later, “but I also knew that I wasn’t going to challenge him.”

“I made an appointment with an attorney for you,” Humphrey said.

He had taken it that far without even talking to her.

Tobe stared into his eyes. Humphrey had that look, a gaze she knew by now that spoke loud and clear. He was going to get his way.

“He looked at me,” Tobe said, “as if to say, ‘Don’t F with me on this.’”

A detective from the PPPD called Tobe White. He said that the PPPD needed to meet with her. Her name had come up in a homicide investigation, and it would be helpful if she could clarify a few things.

Tobe had been expecting the call.

Still.
Shit,
she thought.

“Okay,” she said.

Off the phone with the PPPD, Tobe called Humphrey.

“They want me to come in. I told them I would.”

“No,” Humphrey said. “You are going to call them back and tell them you want to meet with an attorney.”

“Okay.”

“And before that, you are going to come over here and meet with me.”

Tobe’s stomach tightened.

You don’t say no to Tracey Humphrey
.

“Okay.”

The drive to Humphrey’s apartment was torture on Tobe. She was beginning to crumble, slowly. She didn’t even want to think about why Humphrey wanted her to alibi him and Ashley. Nor would she dream of questioning him about any of it.

“You just go along with him,” she said later. “And that’s all you
can
do.”

When she walked in, Humphrey told her to sit down. He was a bit manic. Pacing. Sweating. Mumbling.

He took out a piece of paper.

“I’ve written out what I want you to say. You need to study this and then destroy it. Understood?”

Tobe took the sheet of paper in her hand, looked down at it.

Humphrey had sketched out the entire night of July 5, 2003, detailing exactly what he wanted Tobe to say. Just recently, Tobe had found out that she was going to have to give a deposition at the local district attorney’s office. The district attorney (DA) wanted her statement on record.

Humphrey had written that “Ash” was mad that night of the murder because of another woman who had spoken to Humphrey earlier in the day. But he and Ashley got into a fight. Humphrey wrote that he had dropped Ashley off at the mall between five and five-thirty. That left him home alone with their roommate, Wade Hamilton. Ashley then called Tobe, according to Humphrey’s sketched-out alibi, using the mall’s pay phone so she could save a dying cell phone battery. This was around 8:30
P.M
.

“You understand it?” Humphrey asked as Tobe read.

She nodded her head.

“You get it, right?”

Tobe said, yeah, of course.

Getting back to the alibi, when Tobe showed up at the apartment with Ashley, she was to say that Wade was gone, and it was between 9:45 and 10:00
P.M
.

Near 10:10
P.M
., Ashley supposedly came out of the bedroom, where she had retreated to when she returned home, said nothing to either of them, stormed out of the house, and then left in a huff in Humphrey’s car. Over the course of the next hour or so, Ashley returned to the apartment three to four times and “sat in chairs.” Humphrey decided at that point to order pizza. It was about 11:00
P.M
.

“Called several times” because the pizza delivery was late.

By 12:30
A.M
., Tobe was told, she had left.

It seemed like a lot to remember, but Tobe said she’d do it. What other choice did she have, really?

“Stay with what’s on the paper,” Humphrey insisted. “You hear me?”

“Okay.”

“Listen,” Humphrey concluded, “I don’t want to talk about this anymore or it will sound too overly rehearsed.”

Tobe shrugged, put the paper in her pocketbook, and left.

Meanwhile, Ski was convinced there was an answer to Ashley’s torched car somewhere—and that it was tied to the Rozzo case somehow.

It seemed the only place to begin looking into how Ashley and her car wound up in back of an abandoned building on fire, and the possibility of it being connected to Sandee Rozzo’s murder, was at the shooting range. Ashley and Humphrey’s visit to the range had taken place in the same window of time.

On July 23, 2003, Ski found himself inside the offices of the shooting range going through boxes of receipts, looking for anything that might connect Ashley and her husband to a .22-caliber weapon.

After some searching, Ski found out Ashley had rented a gun again, on July 6, 2003.

The day
after
the murder?

Odd.

The form did not specify the type of weapon, however.

Strange.

From there, on a hunch, Ski drove out to Patriot Arms, a gun dealer in Brandon. It was not far from where Ashley and Humphrey lived with Wade Hamilton in that apartment. Maybe she had purchased a weapon from Patriot—and with any luck, it was a .22-caliber pistol. It had to be in Ashley’s name because Humphrey was a convicted felon; he couldn’t own a gun.

Ski searched for hours, digging through boxes and boxes of receipts.

There was no record of Ashley buying a weapon.

Ski spoke to arson inspector Hector Noyas the next morning and they decided to go visit Ashley’s mother, Georgia Alice Hiers. Noyas was still investigating the car fire and knew that Ashley’s family could perhaps help in that respect. Banking on the theory that the vehicle was never stolen, maybe Ashley’s mother had an answer as to why Ashley would burn a perfectly good 2001 Volkswagen Beetle, which she absolutely adored.

Hiers looked tired, pale, weak.

Hungover.

“My mother,” Ashley would say later in court, “…was addicted to alcohol and drugs….” Ashley didn’t have a good relationship with her mom, a woman, she said, friends and family called “Joey.”

“She was verbally abusive,” Ashley added, “and she was
very
jealous of me during my childhood [and] of [the] men she dated….”

On the other hand, Hiers, who later admitted that she had a record of petty thefts, bad checks, and other crimes, had her own feelings about Ashley and her daughter’s new husband. From the moment Hiers met her future son-in-law, she said, something didn’t seem right.

“For one thing,” Hiers said, “I think [Ashley’s] attitude was kind of different the moment she started hanging around him. And I don’t know, I’m a weird mother. But…the moment I met him, it’s like the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. I just had a really bad feeling. I don’t know. You can call it a mother’s intuition. I don’t know, but I did…I just didn’t like him from the get-go.”

Ski asked Hiers if there was anything that she could recall about Ashley and that weekend, July 5 and 6, that was different. Had she seen her daughter on any of those days?

“Ashley was really upset when she came over here on July sixth.”

The day after the murder.

“Why was that?” Ski asked.

Hiers was concerned about the questions, she said. There was, after all, a “fire marshal” (Noyas) and a detective inside her home. She asked Ski, “What kind of detective are you, anyway?”

“Homicide.”

Hiers swallowed a hard lump.

“And I knew exactly what had happened at that point,” Hiers would recall later, “because of my prior conversations with Ashley.”

“Miss Hiers,” Ski said, “you were saying something about Ashley being upset.”

“Right.” But Hiers was finished talking. “She [Ashley] said she had a fight with
him.
”

“What was it about?” Ski wondered.

Hiers appeared nervous. A certain tone developed in her voice, indicating that she was perhaps saying things she shouldn’t.

“I’d rather wait for my fiancé [David Abernathy] to come home before continuing answering your questions.”

“Understood,” Ski said. “Call me when I can interview you
and
Mr. Abernathy at the same time.”

Ski and Noyas left Hiers’s home that afternoon with one thought:

It was time to speak to David Abernathy.

On July 28, somewhere near nine o’clock in the morning, Ski and Detective Mike Lynch, along with Inspector Noyas, paid David Abernathy a visit. Abernathy was a bit of an enigma in the entire scope of Ashley and Tracey Humphrey’s life together. Georgia Hiers was a difficult person. Ski later said he soon realized, however, that Abernathy, with a little bit of pressure put on him, was someone who seemed like he wanted to help.

“Come on in,” Abernathy said cordially, inviting the three of them into his house.

Since August 2002, Abernathy had been employed as a passenger screener by the Department of Homeland Security at Tampa International Airport. The guy went to work every day. Paid his bills. Had managed to stay out of trouble.

They sat in the living room. Ski and Mike Lynch explained why they were there.

Abernathy said he understood. “How can I help?”

As they first talked, Abernathy gave “short, abrupt answers to our questions related to the vehicle arson and the homicide,” Ski later said. At times, Ski added, it was like trying to pull a donkey that didn’t want to move. “I got the feeling he generally did not like Tracey Humphrey, and he was not happy that Ashley was married to him. Mr. Abernathy was willing to cooperate, because he was concerned he would lose his job as a federal luggage screener at Tampa International Airport if he did not cooperate. I felt as though he would give me truthful answers, but I had to ask him the right questions and try to pull the answers from him.”

There came a point when Ski ran out of questions. In fact, after about a half hour, Ski stood, took a deep breath, and made like it was time to leave. There was nothing else to talk about.

“How ’bout Ashley,” Ski said, almost as an afterthought, “and the shooting range—her sudden interest in guns? Can you offer any insight into that?”

Abernathy seemed to brighten. “Yeah…yeah…I lent Ashley a Ruger pistol of mine.”

Ski turned.
What?

“You have guns? What kind of guns? What caliber?” Ski asked.

“Twenty-two.”

Ski took a deep breath. Now he was getting somewhere.

“No kidding?”

“Yeah…plus a magazine with ten rounds of hollow-point ammunition loaded in it.”

“When was this?”

“Oh, I remember,” Abernathy said, thinking, “around the day after Father’s Day this year. So June.” He recalled the date because he and Ashley had made a deal about when she was going to return the weapon.

As Abernathy spoke, Ski went through a mental list:
Ruger, check. Semiautomatic pistol, check. Twenty-two caliber, check. High-capacity magazine.

No matter how he added it up,
Check!

Then Ski turned, looked at Detective Mike Lynch.

“We both knew, then, right where the murder weapon had come from.”

Ski was a little concerned that a guy as seemingly smart as Abernathy, who had gone through the screening process with Homeland Security for his job, would do such a thing—lend a small handgun to, effectively, a twenty-year-old
kid.

“She tell you why she wanted the gun?” Ski asked. “Why would she need a weapon, I mean?”

Ashley had Humphrey. The guy was hardly ever out of her sight. He was a monster. Could handle himself pretty well, from what Ski knew. Why would she need a weapon?

“Yeah, she told me. She said she was being stalked and needed the gun for protection, and had recently had some of her property stolen from work. Her car keys. Credit cards from her wallet. Stuff like that. She said she needed the gun for maybe one or two weeks. No more.”

Abernathy said it took him a while to be convinced that Ashley could handle the weapon, but after meeting her at a local restaurant and talking to her about it, explaining how it worked, he decided, What the heck. He drove over to his house and got her the gun.

“You ever get that gun back from her?” Lynch wondered.

Noyas sat and listened.

“No,” Abernathy said with a bit of disappointment, shaking his head in frustration.

At times Abernathy had an insouciant manner about him—a gentle, casual way. He spoke of meeting Ashley at the Longhorn Steakhouse in Brandon one afternoon. It was there where she first talked about being stalked. He was scared for her. This was his girlfriend’s daughter. He had been in Ashley’s life for years. In a way she was like a daughter to him.

“‘I’m in fear for my safety’ was what Ashley said,” Abernathy added, talking about that day at Longhorn. Later, a credit card receipt in Ashley’s name, which the PPPD obtained from the restaurant, backed up Abernathy’s story and memory.

“And you just simply went along with this?” Ski asked. He was still a bit taken aback by how a guy like Abernathy could just hand one of his guns to someone.

“I reluctantly agreed,” Abernathy told Ski, Lynch, and Noyas. “I told her I wanted it back after showing her how it worked.”

“And she never returned it, you said.”

“Right. I asked her again at the end of June. This was after already asking her several times.”

“What’d she say? What was her reason for not giving it back to you?”

“She said she left it in her locker at work.”

A few days went by.

Abernathy asked again.

No gun.

The story changed, he said. “I gave it to [a male friend],” Ashley told Abernathy next. “A guy at the gym. I asked him to hold it for me.”

Abernathy explained that he then asked Ashley why. It seemed odd. Why had she not just given it back to him? What was going on?

“She said, ‘Tracey is a convicted felon…. I don’t want him getting into trouble for having a gun around the apartment.’”

That comment still didn’t answer the question, but Abernathy said he bought it—for a while.

“I told Ashley, ‘You have until the end of July; then I am reporting the gun stolen.’”

“Did you ever make out a police report?”

“No.”

Ski asked if Abernathy had any additional ammunition for the gun lying around the house.

“Yeah.” He got up. Left the living room. Came back a few moments later.

Not only did he give Ski approximately five hundred additional rounds of Federal .22-caliber bullets, but also two additional Ruger magazines, which were extras on top of the one in the gun he had given to Ashley.

Abernathy also handed Ski the user manual, along with the receipts from Wal-Mart, where he had bought it.

“Hey, you ever shoot CCI-brand twenty-two-caliber jacketed hollow points?” Ski wanted to know. This, the PPPD had learned, was the type of bullet that had killed Sandee Rozzo. Hollow-point bullets have a hollowed-out tip or point, and are designed, specifically, to wreak devastation on the intended target by expanding at the moment of impact. Some consider hollow points inhumane to hunt with, simply because of the damage the bullets do to flesh.

“I don’t recall what brand of hollow point I shot, to tell you the truth,” Abernathy said after thinking about it. “I bought the bullets around the same time I bought the gun. For protection.”

“You have any spent shell casings in the house?”

“No, I don’t keep shell casings.”

“Do you know when the last time you shot the gun was?”

“Heck, I haven’t shot the gun in five or ten years. Last time was at a phosphate pit in Polk County.”

Ski and Lynch collected the bullets and receipts and headed out, telling Abernathy that they would be back. If he could speak with Georgia Hiers about talking to them more in depth—they knew she had more information—it would be greatly appreciated. After all, they were investigating a murder, and Abernathy had let Ashley and Humphrey, a guy with a motive to murder Sandee, borrow his gun.

Abernathy said he would.