Kill For Me (25 page)

Tobe White was unable to get her printer fixed. She believed, however, that the notes she had written about possibly confronting Ashley had never printed.

Boy, was she wrong.

Tobe had been told that Ski and his team, in accordance with the SAO, had arrest warrants for both Humphrey and his wife ready to go. The plan, Tobe was told, was for her to take Ashley to the mall. While they were shopping, investigators would move in on Humphrey, but it would be timed so that when Tobe was dropping Ashley off at home, they would run into what was happening, turn around, and take off. Everyone had hoped that this scene of Humphrey being taken down might unnerve Ashley enough to convince her to talk.

On Monday, December 15, 2003, Ashley was at Tobe’s house waiting again for that same FedEx package she had not gotten on the day she ended up having that “confrontation” with police in Tobe’s driveway.

Tobe was at the doctor’s office for a routine exam.

Ashley waited inside Tobe’s house this time. The last thing she needed was another brush with police. As she waited, she noticed that Tobe had been fiddling around with her computer printer and, obviously, must have had a problem with it.

So Ashley decided she would try to fix it.

Lo and behold, she got it to work.

And guess what? Out spit that two-page list of questions and notes Tobe had tried to print the previous day.

Ashley pulled the paper out of the printer, sat down, and read.

Tobe came home, but Ashley was gone.

Ashley had left Tobe’s and driven straight to Terrell Therapies to show Humphrey what she had uncovered.

Near 6:00
P.M
., Tobe got her things together and left to go to Terrell for her Monday-night workout with Humphrey. She had been warned to keep on her schedule. She wasn’t about to rock that boat again.

Driving over, she had no idea that Ashley had left her house with the printout of those questions—or what she was about to face when she walked into Terrell Therapies.

With so many lies being tied to Humphrey’s present life—as investigators looked into his background and began to develop a dossier on his prior crimes and life—it became apparent that with each crime Humphrey committed, rage and violence grew inside him like a tumor.

As far back as 1985, when nineteen-year-old Humphrey, then going under his birth name, Timothy Lee Humphrey, was living in Linn County, Iowa, outside Cedar Rapids, he was busted for stealing a 1974 gold-and-white Chevy pickup at Jansen’s Auto Imports, along with a friend he lived with at the time. In addition to that, he was also arrested for stealing the gas to fuel the truck.

Charged with second-and fifth-degree burglary, Humphrey was given a slap—probation—and told to stay out of trouble.

Fewer than twelve months later, however, he was back standing in front of a judge—this time for something quite a bit more violent and emotionally motivated, one would guess, by the monstrous temper inside him.

Armed with intent,
cited one report. Humphrey had struck a man in the face
with a closed fist
before following the guy and threatening him
with the intent to inflict serious injury
using a ten-inch knife. When caught by police after tossing a rock through the guy’s windshield, cops found
another 10[-inch] knife in sheath, a club and a hatchet
inside Humphrey’s vehicle. The guy was obviously not messing around.

Humphrey pleaded not guilty. Then, some time later, his lawyer talked him into a guilty plea.

The court sentenced Humphrey to thirty days, which was deferred to “time served,” because he had been in jail for a previous thirty-day stint.

He had escaped the hand of justice again.

Writing about these crimes two decades later, Humphrey downplayed both, blaming, of course, the victims, saying the same things he was trumpeting while the PPPD put pressure on him: it was all a misunderstanding, and he was being set up.

Given five years’ probation for the assault on the guy, Humphrey completed that sentence on January 27, 1992, and was
restored of his citizenship,
an affidavit said.

From Iowa, Humphrey traveled southeast and soon found himself living in the sun and sand of Miami. It was 1995. The party scene in Miami was booming then, a carefree lifestyle of booze and hard bodies and sex parties and all-night benders—lights flashing, music thumping, Ecstasy around every corner, like Bayer aspirin, and cocaine piled in bowls, like sugar—at the hottest clubs, where Humphrey either hung out or worked as a doorman.

The incident Humphrey was involved in next became a portend of sorts, a crystal ball. But what the crime showed more than anything else, especially when taken into the context of the crimes he had committed in his youth back in Iowa, was that with each crime Humphrey committed—all of them personal—his violent behavior rose, and that anger and rage inside of him became
the
motivating factor driving his behavior.

On August 31, 1995, near 2:00
A.M
., Humphrey was with a woman inside a Miami Beach apartment on Park Avenue.

Humphrey started arguing with her. Presumably, she was his on-and-off girlfriend at the time. As the yelling turned into Humphrey pacing and clenching his fists, he grabbed her
and began punching [her] in the face and head.
It wasn’t a series of light taps. According to a report filed by the woman, Humphrey gave her
two black eyes and scarring on her nose and eyes.
These were Mike Tyson shots—most of which had bruised her so badly, she could hardly see for days.

She was so afraid of Humphrey after the beating, she didn’t call police right away. It was not until about three weeks later—
bruises from the August 25 beating still visible on her face,
one cop’s report noted—when a second incident took place that she felt she had to do something, or Humphrey was going to kill her eventually.

“I want to end the relationship,” she told Humphrey on September 25, 1995. It was the early-morning hours, somewhere between two and five o’clock.

“You what?” He became enraged.

“I want you to leave the apartment,” she said.

Humphrey laughed. “No way…”

A moment later, Humphrey
pulled [out] a silver automatic handgun,
the report stated, and shoved it against the woman’s head. He was seething. “I am going to fucking
kill
you!”

The woman was paralyzed by fear.

For the next half hour, Humphrey
continued to torture
the woman, the report indicated,
by placing the handgun in her mouth, ear and nose, each time telling [her], “I am going to kill you!”

When he was finished doing that, Humphrey threw the woman down on her bed, placed a pillow over her face, stuck the barrel of the gun into the pillow, shoving it hard enough down into her face to let her know it was there, and said, “I am going to fucking kill you!”

Humphrey kept the woman in her apartment for the next twenty-four hours, not allowing her to leave.

When she finally was able to get away, the woman called police.

When cops interviewed her, she reported that through the ordeal, at one point, Humphrey had said, “I told you never to fuck with me…that I will
not
go to jail!”

He was arrested and charged with a litany of offenses, ranging from battery to kidnapping to assault.

Knowing he was going to prison after the court proceedings were concluded, Humphrey took off. He was spotted in New York and North Carolina, finally caught in November 1997, in Charlotte. He had been living under the names Tracey Humphrey and “Stewart Kessler.”

Humphrey ultimately was extradited back to Florida to face charges, which he was found guilty of and sentenced to several years behind bars. Before he was sentenced, Humphrey’s parents wrote to the court, asking for leniency. In that succinct letter, you could sense the pain and anguish they felt for a son whose “troubles” had plagued them, it seemed, for their entire lives. It was clear that there was some conflict between Humphrey and his family, and they had trouble thinking of anything good to say about him. In the letter, his parents said that while he was in Iowa, he had
worked hard to renew family ties.
They believed he was sincere when he asked for
forgiveness, love and understanding
—for what, exactly, they did not say.

Part of the letter mentioned how Humphrey’s parents felt their son was a drug addict who needed rehabilitation instead of prison. And also that Humphrey had written to them and said he had, since his arrest,
established a relationship
with a woman, who had become pregnant with his child. He said he had a desire to be together with her and the child as a family as soon as he was able to clear up all of his legal matters.

Of course, his parents were not aware—and neither was the poor woman bearing his child—that he would move in and marry her, only to show her the same violent rage and extreme behavior that had put him in prison to begin with.

Tobe White had no idea what she was walking into at Terrell Therapies on Monday night, December 15. She believed she was going in for another stressed-filled workout with Mr. Paranoid Intensity. However, the Humphreys were instead waiting to confront Tobe about those notes she thought she had deleted from her computer.

Tobe parked her car, got out, and walked in.

Because of what had happened on the previous Saturday, the day Humphrey tossed Tobe on the ground and jacked her arms, threatening to kill her if she ever went to the police, SA Steve Davenport and a fellow FDLE agent shadowed Tobe. They were going to be arresting the Humphreys soon. They didn’t need anything happening to Tobe now. So Davenport and his partner parked across the street from Terrell Therapies and looked on. Tobe wasn’t wired, however, and law enforcement had no idea Ashley had uncovered those notes.

Tobe set her stuff down inside the workout room. Smiling out of the corner of his mouth, Humphrey was sitting down; Ashley was next to him. They both had a coy look on their faces, as if they had a secret and wanted to share it before the workout.

Ashley stood and pulled out the two pages of notes. Stuffed them into Tobe’s face. Things were much more serious now.

“What the
hell
is this?” Ashley said.

Tobe swallowed her heart, she later said, which seemed to be stuck in her throat. Adrenaline kicked on inside her like a drug. Her body went numb.

Holy shit
…
what do I do now?

Tobe was street-smart. She knew how to react to the Humphreys’ nauseating paranoia when the situation called for it. She had been schooled fairly well by now.

“Look,” Tobe said loudly, snapping at them, “I have not been sleeping in days…. You know how insane you can get when you don’t sleep! All these weird thoughts creep into your mind. You start thinking about all these
strange
things.”

Tobe took a breath. Shockingly, they seemed to be buying it. She could see it on their faces. Ashley, though, would look back at Humphrey every so often, as if to see how she should react, or to wait for directions.

“I was just…just trying to write these ideas down,” Tobe continued. “It was three o’clock in the morning and I just sat down and started rattling off ideas. Don’t be giving me any
bullshit.
Come on. Look at what I am involved in here!”

Humphrey sat there. For once, he had little to say.

“He looked like he had steam coming out of his ears,” Tobe recalled, “but he just sat still. Ashley did all the talking.”

Luckily, there were people roaming around the inside of the gym portion of Terrell. Tobe could breathe a quick sigh of relief, if only for the time being.

Humphrey stood. He finally had something to say.

“Since we’ve wasted your workout time discussing all this shit,” he said, “you need to come back here at seven-thirty tonight to do your workout. Understand me?”

Tobe knew no one would be in the gym then. After all, he couldn’t blow up and threaten her with people around.

“Yeah, Trace. No problem.”

“Yeah,” Humphrey added, “when everyone else is gone.”

Tobe wanted out of there as fast as she could. She grabbed her things and walked out the door.

Driving down the road, now completely away from the building, Tobe called SA Davenport. “You need to meet me behind Kmart. I need to tell you what just happened. Things just took a turn for the
very
bad, and there is a
big
problem.”

After she explained the story, Davenport said, “We need to get you back into hiding until we make the arrests.”

“No!” Tobe said. “I want to go back to the gym to see what he has to say.”

Tobe was worried, but not for herself or her own safety. She believed she had blown the entire operation.

“I needed to fix it,” she later commented to me. “I felt it was all my fault. I needed to fix what I had screwed up.”

“No way,” Davenport replied.

“Please,” Tobe pleaded. “Just let me go back. Put a wire on me. I don’t care. Just let me do this. Let me go back this
one
time.”

Davenport met with the other investigators, and they all agreed there was no way Tobe White could be in the same room with Humphrey and his wife ever again. The stakes were far too high now. She had shown her cards. They were definitely on to her.

Humphrey called Tobe all night.

And the following day.

The FDLE and PPPD had her holed up in a motel with her dogs, and Tobe watched as her cell phone buzzed and buzzed and buzzed.

Humphrey was seething mad, she knew. So was Ashley.

With Tobe nowhere to be found, Humphrey and Ashley had to assume that something was going down. Sooner, more likely than later.

The FDLE and PPPD knew they needed to make the arrests as quickly as they possibly could.

Two days, someone said. The plan was for all of the agencies to get together and take the Humphreys into custody as soon as the indictment came in.

On Wednesday, December 17, 2003, Ski finished testifying in front of the grand jury. Later that day, the SAO called Ski and informed him that the grand jury had handed down what was a true bill.

“Means you can make the arrests,” ASA Fred Schaub told Ski.