Kill For Me (31 page)

Tobe White was heading off on a cruise. She had been through hell and back. There was no telling how long it would take before Humphrey’s trial got under way. The rest and relaxation of being on a ship in the middle of nowhere just might do Tobe some good. Clear up her head. Rejuvenate her senses.

Before leaving, Tobe decided to head out to the mall to pick up a few things, then stop by the tailor’s to get a dress taken in, and finish off the day with a few last-minute errands. She was in a good place. She had thought long and hard about the past few months. She was certain that if Humphrey had convinced someone on the outside to kill her for him, it would have been done by now. As she went over not only those bizarre, scripted phone threats she had received, but also all the other so-called “messages” Humphrey sent her, there was a “don’t take this too serious” ring to it all. Most killers don’t make empty promises over the telephone. Hit men, especially, don’t call up their victims and threaten; they simply carry out the job without a word. The fact that Tobe hadn’t been harmed was a good indication, at least to her, that Humphrey was more talk than walk.

Yet, as Tobe was walking from her house to her car, heading out to the local strip mall, her attitude changed. As she got near her car, a man came up from behind and stuck what she knew to be the barrel of a pistol into her ribs, Tobe later explained.

“Don’t fucking move,” the man said, leaning in, whispering in her ear.

Tobe thought,
This is the end of the road for me.

How things could change in an instant!

“Get into the car without saying anything—and drive.”

The man hopped in the backseat, keeping the gun pointed at her, as Tobe carefully sat down in the driver’s seat, her hands where the man could see them. As she sat, her cell phone clipped to her side, Tobe felt around for the right button and hit speed dial for Ski or Davenport. She couldn’t tell which, she just knew where the buttons were.

“I figured I was going to die at that point.”

After she was certain it rang on the other end a few times, Tobe hit end, hoping that whoever had picked up the call would call her back, or know that she was in trouble because she hadn’t picked up.

As she started the car, Tobe’s phone rang. She looked down. Saw by the number that it was SA Davenport.

“Drive,” the man with the gun said. He explained that he wanted Tobe to head down the road, away from her house, toward a field.

She couldn’t answer her phone.

“If you testify, you will die,” the man said, clearly indicating that he was there to represent Tracey Humphrey.

Tobe wondered why he was saying this if he was going to kill her. It didn’t make sense. Why now? Why say anything?

He repeated himself several times.

He plans on letting me live,
Tobe considered.

Driving down what was a deserted road, not far from her home, Tobe ran all sorts of situations through her mind.

The man with the gun said, “Pull over into that field.”

There was an open, secluded mass of land off to the right. No one was around.

This is it…. He’s going to shoot me in the head.

Tobe made note of where she was driving, then parked.

“Get the fuck out.”

They walked around to the back of the car.

“Open the trunk,” the man with the gun said.

Tobe did as she was told, thinking he was going to put a cap in the back of her ear and let her lifeless body fall into the trunk.

“Get in,” he ordered.

Tobe stepped up and over the latch, laying on her side inside.

The man closed the trunk. Then, as far as Tobe could tell, he took off.

About a half hour had passed since the abduction back in her driveway. Tobe later said she waited for another half hour and then made a call. Realizing she still had her phone clipped to her side, Tobe dialed Agent Steve Davenport. She gave him a description of where she had driven into the woods, not far from her house, and where the man made her park the car. She told Davenport that after the man locked her in the trunk, she never heard from him or saw him again. He was gone.

The FDLE was able to locate Tobe’s car based on the description of where she had driven before being locked inside the trunk. When the FDLE arrived, the man with the gun was gone.

The man was someone Tobe had never seen before. She did not know him. When she later sat down and spoke to law enforcement about the incident, she said she couldn’t even begin to describe what he had looked like—moreover, because she had never looked directly at him and could not possibly identify him.

“Even if I did recognize him,” Tobe said later, “I would never tell anyone who it was. I got out of there with my life. I was safe. After that, it didn’t matter to me who did it.”

This close call proved to Tobe White how far Tracey Humphrey was willing to go to make sure she kept her mouth shut. Humphrey obviously had people on the outside willing to do things for him.

While waiting for his case to reach trial phase during early February 2005, Humphrey was being escorted to solitary confinement by four deputies. He had once again thought he could do things his way. The entire unit was locked down as two COs walked Humphrey down the hallway. The two-to ten-men cells along the corridor were bustling with inmates looking on as Humphrey was shuffled by.

Andre Talley was in his cell with his eight cellmates, staring through the bars, watching. As Humphrey passed by, Talley was preparing to head out to church.

“He threw the peace sign up…at me, and I threw a peace sign back at him,” Talley later said, speaking of this random encounter.

And a friendship was born.

Talley had some serious charges hanging over his head, but he was no uneducated, transient criminal who hadn’t been given opportunities in life. Talley owned up to attempted murder charges and driving with a suspended license. The forty-year-old college-educated Florida native once had aspirations of becoming a nurse, but he had given up on it after realizing “it wasn’t for me.” One of the main reasons he had wanted to go into nursing was because his parents were sick. Talley wanted to take care of them. But after losing interest in the nurse training (while still taking care of his parents), Talley, instead, ended up working for a funeral home as the crematory operator.

“I did all the cremations,” Talley explained in court later. “I did removers and I was the family counselor service. Basically, I met with families when they came in.”

Two weeks after that peace sign exchange, not seeing much of Humphrey in the jail or speaking with him at all, Talley heard that a guy on another block was looking to trade books. Turned out to be Humphrey, who had sent a message to Talley’s block saying that he was out of reading material and was looking for someone to swap with. A deputy Talley had a good rapport with had come by and asked Talley if he had anything he wanted to exchange.

“I have some spiritual stuff, but that’s all I have,” Talley said. “The other guys might have something different.”

Talley and a couple of his fellow inmates got together and sent some books down to Humphrey. They felt bad for him.

Along with the books, Talley also sent something to eat, saying to the CO, “Tell him, may God bless him. To keep his head. And to
keep
praying.”

“Will do,” the deputy CO said.

Later, the CO returned, and Talley asked him how Humphrey had reacted to the books and food.

“He was overwhelmed. Overjoyed that people had a heart.”

A few days after that, Humphrey was let back into the regular population of the jail. He was walking by Talley’s cell one day when he saw Talley and the other men working out.

Humphrey went back to his cell, sat down, and wrote Talley a letter. He explained how he was a personal trainer and had worked at various Florida gyms for over twenty years. Humphrey said if Talley or any of the other guys had any questions about certain exercises, he could show them how to
stay healthy while in jail.
As it were, Humphrey was in a constant battle with the court to try to get his calorie intake upped. He wasn’t eating enough, he argued, to support his large frame. The court had agreed on a few occasions and had allowed Humphrey to have more food. Most guys just bought whatever extra food they wanted to eat.

Talley sent a bag of potato chips down to Humphrey after reading the letter, and let him know how much he appreciated his advice and willingness to help.

Humphrey reciprocated with a thank-you note of his own.

Talking to his CO friend one afternoon, Talley found out that Humphrey had lost a lot of weight. He was “only eating his trays,” Talley later said, which, to any seasoned con, was jail speak for saying that Humphrey had no money, and no one on the outside was looking out for him. Otherwise, he would be able to afford to buy what he wanted from the commissary.

A God-fearing man to the core, Talley was someone who walked the talk of the Lord. He felt sincere compassion for Humphrey, when it seemed to him that no one else did.

“At that time I had been blessed,” Talley said later, “so I had a little bit extra and didn’t mind sharing.”

Humphrey started writing to Talley. At first, it was once every few weeks. Then once a week. And soon after, twice a week. They still had not yet seen each other or talked face-to-face since that peace sign, and maybe Humphrey passing by with a CO escort. Humphrey was in a different pod, or unit, and pods never commingled.

In Humphrey’s first few letters, he basically told Talley what he believed Talley wanted to hear, mentioning how God had stepped into his life, and so on and so forth. Then Humphrey began writing about his case. Talley didn’t like that. He didn’t want to hear about it. So he asked his CO friend if the CO could arrange for a sit-down meeting between him and Humphrey.

“See what I can do,” the CO answered.

Not long after, the CO came by Talley’s cell and grabbed him.

Speaking about the letters Humphrey had sent to him, Talley later said, “I told him (when we finally met), ‘I don’t care what you’ve done. We all sin and make mistakes. We just turn our lives over to God.’ And that is what I perceived him to be, from the books he sent me, spiritual books, and ‘God bless’ and all that. That we were on the same level. Climbing the same ladder. When I sat down to talk to him, the religion probably lasted on his part, oh, five minutes. Then he started talking about other things, such as his wife and some things that happened….”

Talley didn’t want to get involved in Humphrey’s past. More than that, the conversation on Humphrey’s part went from “God bless you and me and the world” to “F this and F that and the S word.” Talley said, “I don’t curse.”

For Humphrey, he had no trouble easily manipulating women to do what he wanted. It was not hard for him to lie to people on the outside. But in prison Humphrey had a rough time selling his “poor me, the system has come down on me” attitude.

Talley certainly wasn’t buying it.

What made Talley even more uncomfortable during that first sit-down meeting with Humphrey was how Humphrey had referred to Sandee Rozzo.

“The bitch of my life,” Humphrey called her. Talley didn’t even know who she was; but he knew for certain she was a female, and in his devout life of conviction, well, you just don’t insult or judge women in that way. Add a curse to it, and you were on Talley’s bad side now.

Talley kept trying to steer the conversation back to religion, but Humphrey was stuck on Sandee Rozzo. “He had a lot of anger in him,” Talley later said. Talley thought Sandee was “just another woman in his life who had accused him of raping her and tying her up, and the reason he was facing time.”

Still, it didn’t matter. Talley wasn’t interested in any of it. He wanted to help Humphrey achieve grace, redemption, and begin to face the Lord with his problems. And that was something that Talley could definitely help him with.

Talley started going down to talk to Humphrey whenever the CO allowed him a visit. Turned out to be four times in total before the relationship ended.

“He picked up with the conversation right where we would leave off,” Talley explained.

During one of their conversations, Humphrey talked his way through the story of his life—his version, rather—and how he had ended up in prison awaiting trial on murder charges. He told Talley that he and Ashley—together—had developed a plan to murder Sandee so he didn’t have to face the ten years he was certain he was going to get for the alleged rape and kidnapping charge. Humphrey said he brought up the idea to Ashley “in a joking manner” at first.

“If she (Sandee) was out of the picture,” Humphrey told Talley he had explained to Ashley, his fiancée at the time, “there would be nothing—no witness, no victim, no prosecution.”

By this point, Humphrey went on, he knew Ashley had fallen in love with him. In some ways, one could see how Ashley, whose biological father had been out of her life for many years by then, had placed Humphrey in that father role. That love, Humphrey told Talley, was something of a power trip. “She was willing to do
anything
for me. You don’t know what that’s like,” he added, “to have a woman love you
that
much.”

Humphrey was in total control of Ashley, he explained; he realized he could pull her strings and get her to do whatever he wanted, if only he continually proved to her who the boss of the relationship was, and who was in control of her happiness.

“In the back of my mind,” Talley later said, “I am thinking, ‘I don’t want to know what that’s like—to have someone love me enough to kill for me.’ But I never told him that—and that is something I will
never
forget.”

Humphrey told Talley how he came up with the idea to get the guns from David Abernathy. Then he explained how that first attempt on Memorial Day weekend was botched by Ashley.

“After that,” Humphrey said, “Ashley was nervous and scared and didn’t want to go through with it. So I just kept telling her that I was going to go to prison if she didn’t, and that I didn’t want to go to prison.”

These conversations, Talley later said, were supposed to lead to Talley praying with Humphrey. It was the only reason Talley had gone down to talk with Humphrey in the first place—he wanted to evangelize the man. So he listened.

But Humphrey then asked him for a favor.

Humphrey had been pressuring Talley to send Ashley a few letters on his behalf. Humphrey knew that the SAO monitored the letters Ashley received from him. Humphrey had the crazy notion that if Talley sent her a letter, the prison wouldn’t read it first. There was even some question whether Humphrey had asked his lawyers to check into this before he approached Talley with the idea.

“Tell her,” Humphrey told Talley he wanted him to write, “‘It’s not what you say on the witness stand, but how you say it. You can still get your deal if you can be unbelievable on the witness stand, if you can make emotions in the chair.’”

Here was a guy, in and out of solitary, trying to control the lives of the people, he believed, who held the keys to his freedom.

Talley knew that if he wrote Ashley a letter, even if he tried getting messages to her from Humphrey in a roundabout way, he would likely be charged with tampering with a state witness.

Looked like Humphrey’s reign of getting people to do things for him was over.

Talley contacted the Pinellas Park Police Department, instead.