Kill For Me (18 page)

Near 7:30
A.M
. on August 4, 2003, Ski checked his voice mail. There was a broken, tired voice on the end of the line, a woman who sounded almost ill.

“Please…please call me in reference to your investigation.”

When Ski caught up to Georgia Hiers later that morning, she opened up an entirely new vein in the investigation. Heading over to the house, Ski knew now they were getting hotter. Things were coming together. Ashley’s mother was ready to talk. She had information—something that, obviously, had been bothering her.

Detective Brian Cook accompanied Ski. They arrived at Hiers’s near 9:30
A.M
.

“Thanks for calling,” Ski said, walking in. The experienced detective had a way about him. It was that life in the Northeast that he had left back in New York. Ski knew how to talk to people. When to put the pressure on and, maybe most important, when to leave people alone and allow them to fester in their own guilt and culpability. Everyone—any cop will tell you—has things to hide. Especially when you’re talking about a murder investigation. If you’re connected to a suspect in a murder case in any way, you begin to question everything you’ve done for that person as the details of the alleged crime emerge. Hiers knew her daughter was in way over her head. From going on the Internet and searching, she also knew that Humphrey, her son-in-law, had been in trouble with the law all his life, and was absolute trouble for Ashley. In fact, Hiers had warned her daughter about Humphrey before she had married him.

“Come in now, please,” Georgia Hiers said. She had just turned forty, but she looked much older. Friends, she said, called her “Alice.”

Ski knew Hiers had a rap sheet, too. She had been convicted of accessory to grand theft. In her defense, however, she was sentenced to five years’ probation for the crime and served those years without a violation. Speaking about why the judge had not allowed her to terminate the probation earlier than the five years, Hiers later said, “My probation officer tried. I guess the judge wanted to make an example out of me to other women who go along with their loser boyfriends.” Hiers had been engaged to Abernathy for eight years at the time, but she never married him.

Cook and Ski sat.

“Listen,” Hiers said, running a hand through her hair, “at the end of June, Ash came over here in a rental car and she was
very
upset.”

Rental car? Oh…that’s right. Her VW had burned.

“Okay…and what happened?”

“She stayed the night but left early in the morning, still really upset, and drove to Georgia. She called me from Georgia, and I convinced her to come back home.”

Hiers waited. Four hours later, Ashley walked in through the door. She was still shaking. Still crying. Still not talking about what was bothering her.

“What is going on?” Hiers asked her daughter, concerned.

Ashley sat down, took a deep breath, then told her mother one hell of a story.

By late May, the romance between Ashley Laney and Tracey Humphrey was hot and cold. They’d fight like enemies. Make up. Then fight again. Humphrey was beginning to show his true colors. The courtship was over. He was becoming extremely demanding of Ashley. Totally paranoid that Sandee Rozzo—“with her damn lies”—was going to send him back to prison. Prison was a place, he explained to Ashley, he was not going back to.

No matter what.

Ashley wanted to help her man in any way that she could. She hated seeing him suffer. She was convinced that Sandee was making everything up, and it was all nothing but lies, lies, lies.

Humphrey saw an in. Once he found out that Abernathy was a gun collector, he started putting pressure on Ashley to steal a gun from Abernathy’s house. Humphrey was constantly threatening to kick Ashley out of the apartment if she didn’t step up her efforts to do more for him. He wanted the gun in order to scare Sandee Rozzo, he told Ashley, that was all. In fact, Ashley was going to help him do it, and there was no two ways about it.

“You have an ex-boyfriend whose father has guns, right?” Humphrey said one night, according to Ashley. This was Humphrey’s original plan, before Abernathy’s name became part of it.

“Yeah.”

“Go get a gun from him.”

Ashley went over to the house. Called Humphrey from down the street. “Nobody’s home…,” she said. However, there were cars in the driveway. “I don’t feel comfortable asking him for a gun, Trace.”

She drove back home.

They argued. Humphrey threatened to kick her out of the apartment. She needed to help him get that weapon.

That was when Ashley brought up the idea that she thought her mother’s fiancé, David Abernathy, had a rifle in the house.

“I’ve never seen it…but he talks about an old rifle his brother used in the war, or something.”

Humphrey lit up. That machine in his mind raced as he thought of a way to get his hands on the rifle.

“Perfect. I want it to be a big gun!” he said excitedly.

“Why?”

“So you can shoot her from either a long distance away or shoot her through the windshield, and it will still penetrate the windshield.”

Were they scaring the woman or killing her? Ashley was confused by this statement, but she decided to go along with it—no matter what he wanted.

Ashley went over to Abernathy’s house. Abernathy and her mom were gone, but her brother was home. She couldn’t snoop around, looking for the gun.

Humphrey was pissed when she returned home empty-handed.

“I need that gun! Maybe we can break in and make it look like a robbery?” he suggested. “Let’s go.”

“Where?”

They took off to Lowe’s, Ashley later said, to buy a crowbar.

When they got to Abernathy’s house, Humphrey explained that they were going to break in through the back door. Then they would go in and bust open Abernathy’s bedroom door and anything else that stood in the way of the gun.

But as they got out of the car and approached the back door, Ashley’s brother came out.

Another botched attempt at obtaining a gun.

Their break came not too long after that failed break-in, when Ashley’s mother called the Brandon Athletic Club one day.

By now, Ashley was working with Humphrey, the gym’s head trainer.

“I want to work out,” Hiers said. “I want Tracey to train me. Maybe this will help me like him.” Hiers thought she could get to know Humphrey a little bit better by working out with him. Maybe she had misjudged the man? Perhaps he’d turned over a new leaf?

Ashley went to her beau with a smile on her face. Told him that her mother was on the phone, asking about training.

Humphrey said sure. He had that look in his eye.

Ashley hung up.

It was the perfect opportunity to steal the gun.

Georgia Hiers showed up at the gym a day later.

“Hang your keys up on the Peg-Board,” Ashley said.

The Peg-Board was a couple of yards past the turnstile near the entrance to the club.

Hiers did as she was told.

As Humphrey trained Hiers—he told Ashley he would keep her busy until she returned—Ashley took her mother’s keys and drove to Abernathy’s house. She backed her car into the driveway, popped the trunk, opened the front door, saw that her brother was sleeping, and went into Abernathy’s bedroom.

To her surprise (and delight), the rifle was propped up against the dresser.

Ashley drove back to the gym, signaled Humphrey with a head nod and, one would guess, a broad smile. She had completed the job.

Humphrey reciprocated, and finished Hiers’s training session.

When they got home a little while later, Humphrey’s satisfaction in Ashley’s stealing the gun turned quickly to frustration as he looked it over. Both he and Ashley donned gloves. Humphrey said he didn’t want their fingerprints to get on the weapon.

It was a wooden rifle, with a bayonet on the end of the barrel.

Humphrey picked it up and looked it over.

“It’s missing the clip!” he said. He looked closely at the bayonet. “Is that blood on there?”

Ashley didn’t know.

They went to Wal-Mart and bought a gun-cleaning kit. Humphrey was able to obtain bullets for the weapon by having Ashley call around to local pawnshops until they found a matching weapon and bought the clip. Humphrey explained to Ashley that she could purchase shells for it at the shooting range when she got there.

Shooting range?

“Yes,” Humphrey said, “you need to familiarize yourself with the gun and how it fires.” She had never fired a weapon in her life.

He next made Ashley call around to various shooting ranges to find one where she didn’t have to show identification.

In the days before May 31, 2003—Memorial Day—Ashley found a shooting range. Humphrey sent her there by herself.

“You fire this weapon,” he told her before she left, “as many times as you need to. I want you to get acquainted with it, and try to get control of the shock.”

Ashley nodded. She had no idea what he meant by “shock.”

“It’s going to kick you in the shoulder,” Humphrey continued, according to Ashley, “and you need to try to keep your aim steady and see if the scope is accurate.”

She said okay. Ashley, of course, didn’t realize it, but her boyfriend, a man she was planning on marrying, was turning her into a killer.

While Ashley was at the range training to kill Sandee Rozzo, Humphrey lifted weights back at the gym.

When she returned, Ashley said, “I feel comfortable enough.”

Humphrey smiled coyly. “Are you ready?” he asked.

Ashley didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

She knew what he meant. It was time to kill Sandee Rozzo.

For the next several days, Ashley drove her VW Beetle to the Green Iguana and staked the place out, the rifle leaning against the seat in back—while Humphrey continued to train at the gym and monitor the situation via his cell phone.

However, Sandee Rozzo was nowhere to be found.

Ashley was worried about being identified. Humphrey told her she needed to wear sneakers that were too big, so if she stepped on dirt or sand and her footprints were left behind, no one would be able to ascertain who she was from the prints. Of course, gloves were a must.

“And you need to look like a male,” Humphrey said.

“How?”

“Baggy pants and a sweatshirt.”

On May 31, 2003, Ashley drove to the Green Iguana.

This time she spotted Sandee’s BMW parked near the back entrance.

“She’s here,” Ashley said to Humphrey over her cell phone. He was—again—at the gym, training.

“Good news! Okay. Go get ready.”

Ashley was wearing a T-shirt and shorts when she arrived. It was hotter than heck outside. She needed to get dressed in her disguise, so she drove across the highway to a beach restroom and changed.

Sandee’s killer put on a hat and sunglasses, those baggy pants, a sweatshirt. Then she drove to the back parking lot of the Iguana and, as Ashley later put it, “waited for her to get off work.”

It was somewhere near three in the afternoon.

Ashley was actually parked in a nearby Hampton Inn parking lot, near the exit. She had a clear view of Sandee’s BMW from about 100 to 150 yards away. She had been given specific instructions by Humphrey: “You sit there without the air-conditioning running, because I don’t want someone to see you.”

That drip of water underneath the vehicle, that buzz of the air conditioner motor clicking on and off. It would attract attention, Humphrey said.

Ashley understood.

After several hours of talking back and forth, Humphrey telling her to do this and do that, Ashley called back: “I’m ready.”

“Good. Okay. Do you have a good line of sight?”

“Yes. I believe so.”

“Only do this if you’re
one hundred
percent sure that you’ll hit her.”

“Okay.”

“How far away are you?”

“About one hundred and fifty yards.”

There was silence for a moment. Humphrey was thinking.

“Get out and count your steps,” he said finally, further explaining that he was worried about the distance. He wanted to make sure Ashley was estimating it right.

Running the air-conditioning on a scorching hot day, while sitting in your car wearing a sweatshirt and baggy jeans, was apparently too much. Walking the distance between her car and the car of the woman she was about to kill, however, dressed up like a break-dancer from the 1980s, and wearing a fake beard—well, that was apparently okay. No one would notice.

Ashley knew what most of the women who had ever had any type of relationship with Humphrey knew: You go along with the guy. You never question him.

She got out. Walked about three-quarters of the way, counting her steps.

At pace fifty-two, she later said, she stopped.

“How many?” he wanted to know when she called back.

“Seventy-five,” she lied.

Ashley could hear Humphrey thinking. Mulling it over.

Then: “Is that too far, you think?” he asked. “You have to be sure the bullet will hit her.”

Ashley said she was confident.

“Make sure you put the rifle outside your window, but cover the barrel, and fire from
inside
the car.”

Last thing Humphrey wanted was for her to stand outside the car like the soldier she was, firing a rifle, which was going to make a fairly loud crack.

“Got it,” she answered.

Ashley threaded the barrel through the leg in an extra pair of jeans she had brought with her; then she leaned the barrel on the open passenger-side window.

All she needed now was for Sandee Rozzo to emerge from the Green Iguana’s back door—and the threat to Humphrey was going to be taken out.

Sitting, listening to Georgia Hiers tell this same story, in not so many words, Ski was relieved in one way—he now had strong evidence for at least a search warrant—and totally unnerved in another.

“Tracey told her he could not go back to prison,” Hiers explained. “But she—she just couldn’t bring herself to kill her….”