Kill For Me (12 page)

Sandee held her wrists out for Amber and her fiancé to look at.

“What happened?” Amber asked. They were sitting down. Sandee was crying. Shaking. Beginning to feel the impact of what had happened as she described the ordeal. But as she did, that doubt came back—that “blame the victim” guilt that attackers and rapists are experts at putting on their victims. Sandee wondered if, because she had dated Humphrey and had sex with him in the past, if anyone would believe he had raped her? She had been raped and beaten, and Lord knows what else, and she was questioning her role in it all. Perhaps she had led Humphrey on and it
was
her fault? Sandee said she needed to think this through some more before running to the police.

Amber calmed Sandee down. Told her to take it step-by-step. It was not her fault. None of it. Not a chance.

Sandee talked her way through what had happened, sparing no detail, as Amber and her fiancé sat and listened, their jaws on the floor.

When Sandee finished, Amber’s fiancé said, “We need to contact the police. I know someone in the FDLE…. I’ll call him.”

Sandee was still crying. But she agreed. Yes. She needed to report this son of a bitch and have him arrested.

It was decided that the best thing to do was for Sandee to stay at Amber’s overnight and then drive back to Tampa to meet up with law enforcement the following day.

“I’ll follow you,” Amber said.

Sandee nodded.

Sleep did not come easy.

The next morning arrived. They got something to eat, freshened up, and left for Tampa.

By this time Humphrey must have thought Sandee was in Pittsburgh. After an initial lull, a time Sandee believed Humphrey presumed she was traveling, he started calling Sandee on her cell phone, leaving her voice mail messages—over one hundred, a source claimed. All of them had that intimidating tone. There was a threatening, underlying chill to each call. Humphrey was using his manipulation skills to frighten Sandee. He repeated the fact that he knew where everyone in her family lived, and he wouldn’t think
twice
about paying a visit not only to Sandee’s daughter, but to other family members.

Just stick to the car accident story, Humphrey said more than a dozen times, referring to what Sandee should tell her family about the bruises. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

If there was one thing about Sandee Rozzo that her mother, Sandra Pool, could say with unequivocal conviction, it was that Sandee was hung up on how she looked, the clothes she wore, and what she wanted from (and out of) life. These were the things that mattered to Sandee. She dressed her daughter in only the finest clothes and shopped at some of the most prestigious stores. There was one time when Sandra showed up at her daughter’s house and there was an enormous black vase, about four feet tall, in the corner of the room. Sandra noticed it only because of its stunning size and presence. It was hard to overlook.

“How much did you pay for
that
?” Sandra asked.

Sandee told her.

“
What!
Are you crazy?”

“I liked it and I wanted it.”

And that was Sandee’s way: if she wanted it, she went out, earned the cash, and bought it.

Sandra knew that Sandee wasn’t going into debt over a vase; she had worked hard for it. Things like that vase were so much more to Sandee than a material object. Buying an item like that vase gave her a sense of accomplishment, a way for Sandee to prove to herself that all of that hard work paid off. She was self-reliant, self-sufficient. She could—and would—take care of herself.

In Pittsburgh on that weekend Sandee was in Sarasota, Sandra Pool grew increasingly concerned as the hours ticked by. Sandee was all set to show up on that Sunday afternoon, but she never got off the plane. Sandra had tried calling her daughter several times, but Sandee was not answering her cell phone.

Sandee had seen her mother’s number appear on the screen of her cell phone several times that weekend, but she was upset enough as it was. She needed to get her bearings straight and think things through before she spoke to her mother.

Back in Tampa on Tuesday, February 26, 2002, Sandee and Amber entered Sandee’s apartment. The first thing Amber noticed was how tidy the place was, so she asked Sandee what was going on. It looked as though Sandee had hired a maid or had spent an entire day doing housework.

“I cleaned everything,” Sandee said. She sounded subdued, distant. It was as if the simple thought of cleaning her apartment instantly brought her back to those horrific moments with Humphrey.

After a moment Amber understood the need her friend had for getting the reminders out of eyesight. Sandee needed at least some peace in knowing that her apartment was safe, that she could rest and think things through without being constantly reminded of what had happened.

The FDLE showed up. They took photos of Sandee’s face, dusted and fingerprinted the apartment. Then agents sat and interviewed Sandee, getting down on paper everything she could recall.

Sandee held nothing back. As agents interviewed her, in fact, the phone kept ringing and ringing. Sandee walked over to the caller ID at one point. “Look,” she said to one of the agents. “See, that’s him calling now.”

In total, Humphrey called thirteen times while the FDLE was inside Sandee’s apartment.

As the interview went on, two things happened: One, Humphrey got into what Sandee later described as an “altercation” with their boss and got himself fired from Inferno. Two, Sandra Pool was still trying to track down her daughter, calling and calling, but not getting an answer. Sandee was still too afraid to speak with her mother, fearing that her mother would know something was wrong by just hearing her voice. Yet, Sandee realized she was going to have to face her mother sooner or later and explain what had happened.

The FDLE agents left and Amber headed back to Sarasota, telling Sandee to call if she needed anything. Sandra Pool was home in Winter Haven getting resettled after her trip to Pittsburgh. She was still worried that something had happened to Sandee. Why wasn’t she answering her cell phone or calling?

Then the phone rang.

“Mom, I’m sorry for not showing up…. Something came up. I misplaced my cell phone, couldn’t find it….”

Sandra knew her daughter. She could sense something was wrong. “She just wasn’t acting right,” Sandra later said. “I’m thinking, ‘What’s happened?’”

“Sandee, what’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing…”

“Everything all right…?”

Sandee hesitated. “Yes…”

After apologizing again, Sandee said she had to go. She had things to do around the apartment and needed to get ready for work.

It was the next morning that Sandee asked her friend Tony Ponicall to come over. At this time Sandee and Tony were work buddies and good friends. When they got back to Sandee’s, she said, “Tracey beat the shit out of me.”

“Did he rape you?” Tony asked Sandee, shocked by what she had said.

Tears welled up in her eyes. It seemed to Sandee that the tears had not stopped. She wondered how many she had left.

“Yes,” she murmured. “Yes, he did. Repeatedly.”

“You need to call the police….”

Sandee didn’t say anything.

“She was very scared,” Tony recalled.

Tony mentioned that she needed to call the police and then call her mother and tell her what was going on.

Sandee explained she had called the police already.

Tony knew Humphrey because he had stopped at the club once and went in to see Sandee. Humphrey, working the door that night, made him wait, Tony said, before Humphrey went and got her. But he could tell from speaking with Sandee and looking at her face that Humphrey had put the fear of God in her.

“Could you call my mom?” Sandee asked.

Tony said sure.

Sandra Pool answered.

“Mom,” Tony said to Sandra (it was a term of endearment, Sandra later explained, that Tony liked to use when speaking with her), “there’s been some things that went on. Sandee has something to tell you…. Just be easy and listen….” He stumbled a bit through his words, Sandra remembered, then paused. “It’s not good.”

Sandra Pool’s heart fluttered.

Sandee was already crying. She got on the phone after Tony paved the way and told her mother as much as she could manage without totally falling apart. She ended up leaving many of the graphic details out. Yet, she was vivid in describing the fact that she had been beaten, raped, and held hostage.

“She was just a mess,” Sandra said later. “When I saw those pictures of her—taken
four
days later, mind you—I don’t know how she went to work that Saturday night.”

After listening to her daughter describe the hell she had endured, Sandra Pool asked, “What are you going to do?”

“I was mortified,” Sandra recalled. “I mean, believe me, Sandee looked like a sex kitten, but sex was something that was
not
on her mind. Sometimes I used to think she was a cold fish. She was a very energetic, go-getter type of person, and working was her mind. Working was her game. Surviving. She learned that from when she was young. If you want something…and she liked very nice things.”

“Did you report this to the police?” Sandra asked her daughter.

“I wasn’t going to,” Sandee said. “But I—I did….”

The one theme that Humphrey had imprinted into Sandee’s mind during those two days kept coming back up whenever she spoke to someone: “He said, ‘I am not going back to jail—no matter what.’”

This was something that Tracey Humphrey had made clear to Sandee. Beside the fact that she wasn’t supposed to tell anyone what had occurred, the idea of him going back to jail was what mattered more than anything else.

His worst fear.

And as Sandee Rozzo, the one person who could put Humphrey in prison, was about to find out, Humphrey would spare nothing to make sure he never saw the inside of a prison cell again.

Good, bad, or indifferent, Sandee Rozzo’s homicide had been covered very little by the local press as the PPPD continued to investigate on July 8, 2003, now three days after her murder. What detectives were hoping for, obviously, was a break: someone who knew something that could tie things together.

But nothing happened.

Then the PPPD issued a press release—and things started to move.

Detective Paul Andrews got a call from a local television news reporter. The guy sounded uninterested in the Rozzo homicide, essentially, but he wondered what was going on, asking, “Is there anything else to this case?”

“Well,” Paul said, “we’ve got a woman who was shot and killed in her garage.” Paul gave the guy the basic rundown of any details he could give out at the time, without revealing the PPPD’s hand, or certain elements of the crime.

The reporter was in a hurry, he said. He had to go. There had been a terrible accident involving a motorist who had run his car off the road and into a group of bicyclists.

“They had,” Paul said, “probably a dozen or more cyclists who were injured, some really bad.”

This tragedy ended up becoming the top news story, bumping the Sandee Rozzo homicide.

Paul and Ski wanted to be at Sandee’s autopsy. They brought along an officer who had never been to one before. Dr. Noel Azcona Palma was the pathologist for one of the busier counties in Florida, as far as deaths are concerned. His autopsy of Sandee Rozzo explained a lot to the detectives, answering questions that eventually were going to help solve the case.

“This was where I, especially, understood the true brutality behind this crime,” Paul later told me. Ski echoed Paul’s remarks.

Palma found out that one of the wounds to the head had caused “extensive craniocerebral injuries,” which was an overstated medical way of saying that one of the killer’s bullets went through Sandee’s brain.

It was a fatal injury, the doctor said.

According to Palma, Sandee had a heartbeat for approximately an hour after she had been found bleeding to death inside her BMW by Tony Ponicall.

Palma indicated to Paul that he had found “abrasions of the skin” at the area where some of the entrance gunshot wounds to Sandee’s body had been located.

What did that mean?

“This can be due to any object between,” Palma said, “the gun and the target.”

Glass.

The bullet hit the window first, before it penetrated Sandee’s torso. This meant the window was shattered by the bullet, not the perpetrator.

Important info. One of those details that only the killer would know.

Several of the shots, Palma reported, would not have been fatal at the exact time of the shooting. But there was one shot to Sandee’s “lower, upper abdomen” which proved to be fatal.

“The bullet,” the doctor explained, “penetrated or perforated the right lobe of the liver and also the right lung, and it cause[d] a hemorrhage internally.”

Still, Sandee could have survived if she had been treated immediately.

“It all depends how fast is the bleeding,” Palma added in his own dialect. “Sometimes it takes an hour, or minute to minutes. I do not know exactly the exact timing, but not unconscious rapidly or not instantaneous.”

Sandee’s body was riddled with bullets, from her head to the bottom of one foot. Her killer basically had fired willy-nilly, in rapid succession, as Sandee instinctively tried, one would imagine, to shield herself from getting hit. But being such a sitting target inside her vehicle, she had nowhere to hide, or nothing to hide behind.

She was defenseless.

Quite strikingly, forensic photographs taken at the hospital depicted a bloodied and terribly bruised woman. She even had two black eyes.

This was puzzling to Paul Andrews. Had Sandee’s attacker actually beaten her, too?

“That’s ecchymosis,” Palma said. “Blood seepage into the soft tissue.”

Another important factor to the investigation that Palma pointed out for Paul and Ski was the fact that Sandee had been “moving around at the time of the shooting.”

“This is one of the most extensive autopsies I have ever done,” Palma told Paul and Ski as they stood by with the young detective, watching.

The reason for that was because there were so many bullet fragments; each round had broken apart inside Sandee’s body. One round, in fact, had gone into her chest area, hit bone, had come back out, hit another bone, then ricocheted back in.

The frustrating portion of the autopsy was that Palma could see tiny bullet fragments in the X-rays he took, but when he peeled Sandee open, he couldn’t find them.

Leaving the autopsy, Paul Andrews knew now that it was quite clear Sandee Rozzo had pulled into her garage, turned, saw someone come up to the driver’s-side window, and, immediately, reacted. This meant she knew what the person was up to. There was surprise, Paul knew. Sandee had feared she would be killed. Here she was, inside her BMW, in her garage, and that killer she had feared so much stood beside her with a gun.

Just one more minor detail that pointed to Humphrey.

“This was a cold-blooded murder,” Paul recalled. “Sandee’s killer just stood there and fired, round after round, repeatedly into this woman.”