Kill For Me (27 page)

Ashley and Tracey Humphrey were finally where the PPPD and FDLE wanted them. The fact that they were behind bars didn’t mean, however, that the investigation was over, or that law enforcement could now put on their complacent caps. In fact, things needed to pick up considerably, now that the Humphreys weren’t going to be meddling in the minutia of the search for more evidence and questioning of witnesses. Law enforcement had to keep Humphrey behind bars. He had a history of running. A history of violence. And a history of obstructing justice. It was time for Timothy “Tracey” Humphrey to be contained.

Assistant State Attorney Fred Schaub was now leading the charge. Schaub had been at just about every position imaginable inside the SAO, from running county courts, to running felony divisions, to being a criminal prosecutor.

The chain of command in Pinellas County worked this way: local law enforcement brought cases to the SAO. “If they bring it to us at arrest,” Schaub told me, “it’s usually in a package. Sometimes what happens is, they’ll bring it to us at an investigative stage. We have our own investigators to help out local law enforcement.”

This case was somewhere in between.

“It’s a lot of directing,” Schaub said. “I let them know—we need this. We need that. We need to do that type of thing. We try to direct the investigation in a way that will make a case successful at prosecution.”

Bob Schock had worked as a police officer for the St. Petersburg Police Department (SPPD) for some twenty-five years, the final thirteen years in Homicide. Born and raised in St. Pete, there is not a lot that Schock has not seen. Just about ready to retire, from the SPPD, anyway, Schock was offered a job with the SAO in its Criminal Investigation division. He jumped at the opportunity.

“I retired from St. Pete,” Schock told me, “and the next day started with the state attorney’s office.”

Schock’s job basically was to act as a liaison between law enforcement agencies under the SAO’s jurisdiction, which in this case included the PPPD and local Tampa FDLE. With the smaller agencies in the lesser populated Florida towns, Schock might even dig his heels in and work the case with them. Here, in the murder of Sandee Rozzo, Schock became Schaub’s go-to man, putting together the puzzle pieces for the SAO so the prosecution end could run as smooth as possible.

Out of high school, Schock had dreams of becoming a lawyer. That was, until he heard how long it was that he needed to go to school. So he decided on a career, instead, in law enforcement. One of his goals in solving crimes, Schock said, was “to speak for the victims.” The role of law enforcement was to make sure victims and their families were protected and had a voice.

There weren’t too many cops or prosecutors around the country who would disagree with Bob Schock on that note.

Schaub and Schock had been aware of the infamous Humphreys since the week Sandee Rozzo had been murdered. Paul Andrews had called Schaub and filled him in on the case. So Schaub basically had been there since day one, which happened to be a little over five months. Schaub had coached both agencies along the way through the wiretaps issued on the Humphreys’ phones, undercover surveillance, the wire Tobe White had worn, and the entire time that the Humphreys had been followed and watched. Now all that work was going to be put to the test.

The problem with arresting Humphrey on murder charges, or conspiracy to commit murder, was that he had that rock-solid alibi of charging pizza, and several witnesses being with him in Brandon at the time of the homicide. Ski and the PPPD knew damn well that Humphrey had planned and sanctioned the murder, and probably had talked Ashley into doing it for him. The dilemma was, without her turning on him, how in the heck were they going to prove that to a jury?

The key to the state’s case was the cell phone records. The great police work here—which was probably the proverbial nail—consisted of the PPPD asking for access to Ashley and Tracey Humphrey’s cell phone and landline records right away. Cell phone records don’t hang around for long. They are generally gone, or deleted by the computers that keep them, after a month or so.

“That was important,” Schaub said. “A person’s cell phone can tell you a lot about that person.”

Cell phones, iPhones, and BlackBerries are, today, along with computers, the first items police seize when serving a search warrant.

“We could actually follow Ashley’s cell phone from the Green Iguana in Tampa,” Schock explained, “and watch as it bounced off cell towers (presumably calling Tracey Humphrey) all the way back to Brandon.”

The reason Humphrey and his wife were indicted before a grand jury centered around the mitigating, aggravated circumstances of the murder.

Which made it a capital crime.

Punishable, in some cases, by the death penalty.

That was not good news for Ashley and Tracey Humphrey—especially in Florida.

Late in the day, December 18, 2003, Ski and Detective Joseph Puglia found Hector Adorno, a hairdresser in Tampa whom Tracey Humphrey had met during his days in Miami.

At four o’clock that afternoon, Ski and Puglia interviewed Adorno in the kitchen of the salon where he worked. It was a busy time of the day, customers coming and going, hairdressers busy cleaning up and getting ready for the next client. Adorno seemed a bit nervous, but not at all unwilling to speak with the police.

“No, I am unaware that Tracey had been arrested,” Adorno said. “But I am not surprised.”

Adorno told them how he had met Humphrey in 1990 at a bar. At the time, Adorno said, to eyebrow raises by Ski and Puglia, it was “fashionable to be bisexual in Tampa.” Humphrey was, Adorno added, “openly bisexual at that time.”

“Did you guys have a relationship?” Ski asked.

Nearly blushing, Adorno said, without any reservation whatsoever, “Yes…yes, we lived together for about six months in 1996 and had a sexual relationship throughout that time.” Humphrey had gone to jail soon after, so Adorno continued the relationship with him, he said, by writing letters and making visits to the prison camp where Humphrey was being housed.

“When he got out of prison, he moved back in, and we continued our sexual relationship for about eight months.”

Humphrey had started to “get into” his workouts then and had developed a passion for personal training. Because he wanted to begin making money at it by training his own clientele, “he didn’t think it would be socially acceptable to be an openly [homosexual] man. So I broke up with him, because he would not openly commit to our relationship—and I also found out he was seeing women!” Adorno stated.

“You never saw him again?”

“We moved to Tampa into separate places but remained friends. I flat-out refused to have an intimate relationship with him, unless he was willing to be open about it.”

Ski asked Adorno if he could talk about Humphrey’s association with women, and if Adorno knew how Humphrey treated the females in his life.

A laugh. “Yeah, Tracey was mean and violent. He made no secret about the way he had treated the women in his past. He did not hide the fact that he intimidated them and was violent with them. We talked about it numerous times. I think he treated women like that because he was so conflicted about his sexuality.”

“He ever hit you?”

“No. Never.
Never
intimidated me, either!” Adorno sounded confident and sure of himself. “I would have
never
tolerated it—and he knew it.”

Ski asked Adorno if he knew (or had ever met) Ashley.

“Not personally, but I have done her hair before. She never knew about our sexual relationship.”

Tracey Humphrey was in Morgan Street Jail in Tampa on December 20, 2003, awaiting arraignment, when he bumped into a guy he had met in lockup two days before. As Thomas Helprin (pseudonym) told it, he and Humphrey hooked up together inside the cell because they were the only two “white guys” among twelve other cellmates. There was a certain fear, Helprin explained, for their safety. Teaming up, they felt they could protect each other.

As they chummed around together, Humphrey and Helprin talked about their lives and paths into prison. Helprin explained how his wife had testified against him in a case and he was pissed off at her.

“Your own wife testified against you?” Humphrey asked with a smart-ass tone. He puffed out his chest. Smiled. “I got married so my wife would
not
testify against me,” Humphrey said.

“She might crack under pressure,” Helprin warned.

“You think? No. Ashley would do
anything
I told her to.”

As they talked, Humphrey told Helprin about Tobe White, how he had been her personal trainer and was responsible for getting her back on a healthy course in life. He said he became good friends with Tobe and they had gone into business together. Humphrey called her “motherly.” He told Helprin, “She’s got twenty-two thousand in the bank and another one hundred and fifty thousand in her house we could have used to go to Aruba.”

Hindsight!

As they talked, Humphrey spoke of that day when Ashley found the notes stuck in Tobe’s printer. “I confronted her about it,” Humphrey said. “I thought we had pulled this thing off,” he added, second-guessing the trust he had put in Tobe. Humphrey shook his head, thinking back over things. Then he got a serious look on his face: “You know anyone?”

“Huh?” Helprin said. He was confused by the question and change of tone in Humphrey’s voice.

“Tobe seems to be a problem for me,” Humphrey said.

Ah…
that.

When Helprin didn’t respond right away, Humphrey abruptly changed the subject to the federal charges hanging over his head. When Helprin didn’t seem interested, he brought up Tobe again, unable, obviously, to let it go. He told Helprin how Tobe had turned on him. Then asked again, in a more direct way: “Do you
know
anyone, you know, for the right price, who could stop someone from talking?”

“Come on, man, you’re joking, right?” Helprin said.

Humphrey turned solemn, Helprin explained later. He had a strange look in his eyes. It was clear he was not kidding around.

“If I get bonded out of here,” Humphrey said, “the next conversation I have with Tobe White will not be so nonconfrontational. I’ll make sure that bitch doesn’t say anything else. And I’ll make
damn
sure she does not change her story. You can be sure she’s going to do a complete one-hundred-eighty-degree turn.”

After they finished talking and were transferred to different cells, Helprin made a call to his wife. “Call the Pinellas Park Police Department for me,” Helprin told her. “Tell them I have some information….”

Within an hour Ski was sitting inside the jail interviewing Helprin about his conversation with Humphrey.

It was clear—maybe now more than ever—that they couldn’t allow Humphrey to get out on bond. If only for the fact of his wanting to hurt Tobe, there was a good chance Humphrey would run if he was given the opportunity.

As much as investigators had hoped Ashley might crack and begin talking, it didn’t seem as though she was interested one bit in turning on her husband. In fact, the letters Humphrey and Ashley were writing to each other, as purple as the prose was written, showed how dedicated and unified they still were. Humphrey was truly laying it all on, “baby” this and “baby” that:
I’m going to get out and take care of you…. Make sure you sign a release for that $6,000 we have in cash so I can use it to help you.

“As far as we knew,” Paul Andrews told me, “she was going to stick to her original statements. I do believe that at that stage of the investigation, we were concerned with Tracy getting out and being a danger to the witnesses in this case….”

On December 30, 2003, Ski received a second message from Helprin’s wife that he wanted to talk again. After his first talk with Ski, Helprin had been transferred—no big surprise!—into an area of the jail where he had complete access to Humphrey. There were other things Humphrey had said that might be of some help, Helprin told his wife to relay to Ski.

Ski had to consider who his source for all this information was—a felon himself. A guy who had been in and out of jail. A career criminal. Jail informants were a tough sell to prosecutors. And an even tougher sell to juries.

It was hit-or-miss, essentially.

Helprin’s previous information had been checked out and verified. The guy was telling the truth, Ski knew. Otherwise, how would he even know such things about Humphrey’s life—like Tobe White’s name, for instance, or the fact that Tobe had written those notes and they had gotten jammed in her printer and Ashley found them? None of what Helprin had told Ski had been published in the newspapers or was public knowledge. The only way the guy could have known these details was if Humphrey had told him.

“Just a day ago,” Helprin explained to Ski, “Tracey asked me to call my wife and do a three-way call with another party.”

Turned out to be a woman Humphrey knew.

“What’d he say?”

“Don’t know. I walked away.”

Helprin didn’t want to look suspicious.

Ski threw up his hands. What was he supposed to do with this?

“But listen,” Helprin continued. “Over the weekend he talked to me about the murder.”

“Go on,” Ski encouraged.

“He mentioned a sexual assault case against the same woman. He said that the case—the sexual battery—was going well until the assistant state attorney resigned from the case. He said that the previous attorney liked him and was going to cut a deal with him. But that the new attorney taking his place didn’t want to cut any deals. So then he says, ‘I had to make a decision about that bitch!’”

Sandee Rozzo.

Now that information, Ski knew, about the state attorney was definitely something no one else could have known. There was no question Helprin was a legit snitch.

Ski asked what else Helprin had.

Nothing.

“After interviewing [Helprin] two times,” Ski said later, “his accounts of what transpired were accurate. I had no problem believing he and Humphrey were discussing the case, because certain things he told me were not common knowledge to the general public.”

In early February 2004, Tobe White checked into the hospital for a planned surgery. She explained to her surgeon and hospital personnel what was going on in her life, and she didn’t want anybody to know she was even in the hospital. Even at the front desk, if you walked in and asked for Tobe’s room, the hospital was informed to say, “No information can be given.”

After her successful surgery, Tobe was recovering well. She was watching television one afternoon when a man walked into the room with flowers.

She was startled by this. Nobody knew where she was.

There was a note:
I’ll always know where you are…Locke.

This terrified Tobe. She had no idea how Humphrey, who had gone by that name in the past, could have known where she was and gotten somebody to send her flowers.