Kill For Me (10 page)

Sandee Rozzo had good instincts. One could say it was her heart that overruled her head, alerting her to question and step back from a situation she knew to be destructive. She had wanted so badly to believe in Tracey Humphrey. She had wanted so desperately to think he was a “good guy”—someone she could befriend, help, and trust. Humphrey had spent a lot of time and energy making Sandee believe he was repentant and sorry for what he had done in the past. She wanted to think that he was just a guy looking for a break from a life that hadn’t always dealt him a fair hand. But Sandee Rozzo now found herself being held captive by a raging psychopath—a man filled with hatred and insecurity. Humphrey was all over the place, blasting Sandee for not treating him with “respect.” Then, in another fit of rage, he’d turn around, lower his voice, and disparage himself for what he was doing to her, saying how wrong it was. He realized and vocalized several times throughout the ordeal, according to Sandee, that he was committing a crime. He knew that Sandee wanted him out of her apartment. He knew that he was hurting her.

But he continued, anyway.

Humphrey was a monster compared to Sandee and her petite frame. He manhandled her as though he were a child with an action figure. At one point he grabbed Sandee by the arms and dragged her out of bed. It was time to write that statement. If Sandee wasn’t going to do it on her own, Humphrey was going to damn sure make her. It was what
he
wanted. And he had made it perfectly clear to Sandee that on
this
day, Tracey Humphrey was going to get what
he
wanted.

“No!” Sandee screamed, nearly out of breath.

He hit her in the face again. “Yes, you will.”

Sandee was on the floor now. Humphrey was wired and wild, pacing around her, taking deep breaths. His bald head sweaty. His fists clenched.

“Do you know what I did while you were sleeping this afternoon?” Humphrey said.

Uh-oh. Did Sandee want to know?

“I obtained all of your personal information,” Humphrey explained as Sandee looked up at him from the floor, “and phoned my friend and gave him all of your personal information. Let’s see…your cell phone bill, your home phone bill, which had your daughter’s number on there, also your Social Security card number, and your daughter’s Social Security card number…the VIN number to your vehicle, your driver’s license [number], and
all
of your credit card numbers.”

Terror shot through Sandee. He could have all of her money and all of her information, her car, and anything else he wanted. She could replace all of those items. None of that
stuff
really mattered in the scope of life. But her daughter. She was petrified of what Humphrey would do to her daughter now that he knew where the young girl lived.

“This,” Humphrey continued in his sarcastic scowl, nasty and wicked, “is going to keep you within my reach for the rest of our lives! How do you like that,
Sandee
!”

She could do nothing more than cry.

“Listen, if you think about telling
anybody
what is going on here today, I have three crack-smoking niggers that are waiting to gang-rape you until you beg them for death.”

More tears. Sandee was shaking now, too.

Still pacing, Humphrey laughed. Got louder.

In a blast of anger, he grabbed Sandee by the back of the head, kissed her hard and violently on the lips. Then, backing away, he said casually: “Do you want to fuck?”

“No, Tracey…no!”

Humphrey tore her shirt off in one swipe, exposing Sandee’s breasts. Then he ripped her pants down to her ankles and off her body. After that, he reached up on top of the bed and took hold of the sheet, tearing it off and making it into a rope, binding Sandee’s hands and arms up above her head.

She was helpless.

Hopeless.

Certain Sandee was not going to fight back, Humphrey hit her in the face with a closed back fist. Then he groped at her breasts and crotch, fondling her aggressively and harshly.

Sick of using his fists to strike his victim, Humphrey took a pillow, sat on Sandee’s legs so she couldn’t move, and then beat her brutally in the face with the pillow, not allowing Sandee a chance to take a breath.

Tired of that, he picked her up and tossed her on the bed as if she were a doll. Then he jumped on top of her and used his knees to hold her down. With his large hands, Humphrey pinned Sandee’s shoulders to the bed. “Forcing himself on me,” Sandee recalled through a waterfall of tears and anguish, retelling this part of the sexual assault with striking candor.

While Humphrey physically forced her to have intercourse, Sandee said, she screamed as loud as she could as he entered her over and over.

Luckily, Humphrey did not take long; he was done in about five minutes.

He got up, walked away, came back, and sat down on the floor next to the bed as Sandee curled herself up into a ball, crying.

She stared at the ceiling, not knowing what to do. She wondered if he was going to kill her. Or maybe he planned on holding her hostage for as long as he wished. Who knew? The guy had an unsure look about him at this point, Sandee noticed: guilty, eerie, and confused. He probably didn’t know himself what he was going to do next. Yet, whatever it was, Sandee could be certain, it was likely going to involve more of the same pain.

It was somewhere near 8:30
P.M
. and Sandee said she had to use the phone to call work. There was no way she could make it in, even if Humphrey allowed her to leave. Humphrey was scheduled to be at work, too.

“I also have a doctor’s appointment,” Sandee pleaded with her captor, “that I need to cancel for tomorrow—or I am going to be charged. Please allow me to cancel the appointment. Please,” she begged, “please. Please let me just call.”

Humphrey got up from the floor and went to Sandee. He got back in her face, pointing at himself in the chest. He repeated what had become a sort of sick mantra he kept returning to: “This is
my
fucking day! You are going to
give
me respect! It’s
my
day.”

Humphrey thought about it. Walking out of the room, he mentioned something about him calling into work for the both of them.

And he was gone.

Talking to their boss, Humphrey said, “We…we were in a car accident.” He realized he had brutalized Sandee’s face. He would need to come up with an excuse for the beating. An accident seemed like it would work. Sandee, of course, was going to go along with it—or else.

Finished calling them in sick, Humphrey returned to the bedroom.

“I need to use the bathroom,” Sandee said. “Can I get up and use the bathroom?”

Humphrey wasn’t sure.

Thinking about it, he untied Sandee’s arms. “Go ahead….”

Sandee used the bathroom, then walked into the living room. She described what happened next: “I just collapsed and sat…and started crying.”

Humphrey sat “right by [her] side,” Sandee recalled, “making sure that I wasn’t getting on the phone.”

After sitting for a time, Humphrey took a look at Sandee’s face. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “look what I’ve done to your face. I cannot believe I did this to your face.”

The bruises had had time to develop. Sandee had two black eyes, red marks on both cheeks. Dried blood on her lips, inside her mouth. She looked like someone had thrashed her good. As though she had been in a boxing match.

And lost.

Sandee was a well of endless tears. Humphrey kept staring at her face, continually saying he couldn’t believe what he had done.

“That’s when,” Sandee recalled later, “his mood switched from angry to remorseful.”

Sandee didn’t think to ask her kidnapper to leave, or to call the police when she had an opportunity, because, she explained, “I could barely speak.”

Humphrey asked Sandee to lay down on the couch.

She did what he said.

He walked out of the living room for a moment. Sandee heard him rustling about in the kitchen, digging through the freezer. A moment later, he came back into the living room with a few ice packs and a washcloth. He placed them over Sandee’s face.

Humphrey lay down beside her and wept like a child. It was a “What have I done now?” wail that Sandee could not believe she was hearing. She couldn’t see him with her face covered with the washcloth and ice. But here she was, battered and bruised, and beginning to feel the emotional toll of being brutally raped, and the guy was worried about himself.

Narcissist. Mr. It’s-All-About-Me.

“I am so sorry, Sandee, for what I have done to you,” Humphrey said.

Sandee was speechless.

“I want to kill myself,” he added. He had one hand over his forehead, tears streaming down his cheeks.

Sandee’s eyes were swollen so badly by this point, she could hardly see anything, she later said. The ice packs were over her face. All she could do was listen to the pleas of her captor and look out the corner of her eye at shadow images of what he was doing.

For the next few hours, Sandee said, she “dozed” in and out of what could not be called sleep, but became, more or less, rest brought on by the trauma she had suffered through. Humphrey, she said, never slept a wink. Instead, he continued to lie there and apologize. Say how sorry he was. Cry. Curse at himself.

Whenever Sandee went to move, Humphrey told her no. He kept exchanging the ice packs for fresh ones. The swelling had gone down some, but Sandee was a bloody mess, her clothes ripped, dried blood on her neck and breasts, all over her face.

Well into Saturday afternoon, after a night and morning of watching her attacker cry and apologize and claim to want to kill himself, Sandee mentioned that she had to be at work that night and needed to go. She couldn’t blow off their boss again. She needed the job. It was all she had.

“I beg of you, Tracey, let me go to work,” she managed to say at one point. “Please.”

“The only way I can do that is if you agree to my prefabricated story of the car accident we were both in together.”

That was his plan to explain away what he had done to Sandee. The problem Humphrey had with it was that he himself had no visible injuries. How could he pimp such a story to everyone at Inferno without showing signs of injuries himself?

There was a way to fix that, Sandee soon found out. Humphrey, of course, later pawned this portion of his savage attack off on Sandee, as she sat there begging and crying, as a way to kill himself because of what he had done. But a man—especially one as big and powerful and prone to violence as Tracey Humphrey—on a true mission to kill himself would have no problem in completing that task, especially using the way Humphrey was about to go about doing it.

As Sandee lay on the couch, continuing to nurse her injuries, Humphrey went into the bathroom. He took one of Sandee’s razors and, with his teeth, bit off the razor portion of it, a slim, thin sheen of sharp metal. He took one of her toothbrushes, a roll of medical tape, and taped the small piece of razor to the end of the toothbrush.

Humphrey came out of the bathroom and explained to Sandee how he’d learned the procedure in prison. He had built himself a shank. He made no mention why he just didn’t open a kitchen drawer and use a knife. Humphrey said he was going to use the shank to cut his jugular vein and bleed to death in front of Sandee.

It was his way out of the ordeal. He could never go back to prison. Not in a million years.

“Never!”

Sandee was certainly not going to try to talk him out of it.

As she stayed put on the couch, keeping those ice packs on her face, Sandee could hear Humphrey doing something. She was terrified to move or look.

“I was…on the couch with the ice bags on my face and had dozed off,” Sandee explained later. “I was dozing in and out, and at this point I wasn’t sure when he was going to snap back into angry mode again, so I was not doing anything to provoke him in any way.”

With that mind-set, Sandee did whatever it was Humphrey told her to do. No questions asked. No argument. It was about survival now for Sandee Rozzo. He’d taken her soul. He’d beaten her. She sensed an end to the torment coming. If only she could get him to let her go, or she could outlast him.

Sandee felt Humphrey’s hand touch her left arm. He was shaking, crying.

“Do you forgive me?” Humphrey asked.

Sandee could feel his hand vibrating against her arm. It was strange and scary.

“Yes, yes…of course, I forgive you, Tracey,” Sandee said, not hesitating, knowing that she needed to say whatever he wanted, to pacify his needs and to survive.

“I need to know that you forgive me, Sandee,” he said again.

“I do, Tracey.”

He said it again.

Over and over.

Each time Sandee responded with a resounding yes.

After the fifth time, Sandee sat up. She knew something was wrong. Something had changed in Humphrey’s demeanor and attitude. In his voice. The way he spoke. He sounded different.

When she took off the towel and ice packs, Sandee noticed that Humphrey had cut himself on the neck. “A two-to three-inch incision,” she said later, “and the blood was running from his neck all down his chest”—he wasn’t wearing a shirt—“into his navel, into his pants.”

More than that, Sandee realized, Humphrey had “played in it,” as she explained. He had rubbed the blood all over his bald head, all over his face, like some sort of warrior, painting himself up before battle.

“It was just awful. And it was dried. So I knew he had—it had been a while that he had cut himself.”

“And that was when she knew,” a friend of Sandee’s later said, “that Tracey was covered with blood, and she told me that he had made a, I could be wrong with this word, but a ‘switch.’ She said, you know, because he was in prison [before] that he learned how to make a ‘switch’ with a toothbrush and a razor blade, and I guess he had cut his neck or something, and taken blood and like smothered [she meant smeared] his head with the blood, and I think the mirror in the bathroom, if I can remember.”

There was Tracey Humphrey, sitting in Sandee’s living room, next to the room where Sandee had been tied up and raped and beaten, his bald head and face covered with his own blood. It was a scene out of a summer blockbuster horror movie.