Kill For Me (20 page)

Ski had an overabundance of new information to verify and to make sense of. The case was coming together in some respects. Yet, in others, some of the pieces still weren’t fitting together. For one, Tobe White had been checked out by now. She was a reputable person, the PPPD had learned. No trouble. No problems. No arrests.

That made her as good a witness as there was. The perfect alibi. Entirely credible and believable.

It wasn’t hard to find out who had interviewed Georgia Hiers from the HCSO. Within a few short moments after arriving at the station house near 8:00
A.M
. on August 5, 2003, Ski had the investigator on the horn.

“Yeah,” he said, “I interviewed Miss Hiers just a few days ago at a Holiday Inn on Grand Regency Boulevard. She told me her daughter took a shot at Miss Rozzo, but missed and hit her own car.”

“Anything else?”

“She said the car was torched to hide any evidence of a shooting.”

“Thanks.”

Ski got ahold of Inspector Noyas later that morning. They took a second ride over to where Georgia Hiers was staying in Hillsborough County, to sit down with her again.

“There were some discrepancies in what she had told [the HCSO],” Ski later said, “so I wanted to clear these up.”

By now, Hiers knew she was involved in this thing up to her neck. She had told two different stories, each one close, but not completely on point with the other. For cops, that meant she was either covering for somebody, or flat-out lying.

Ski had Hiers where he wanted her. Obstruction of justice. Lying to a law enforcement officer. A list of possible charges.

After sitting down, Ski explained that the two stories she had told—one to him and another to the HCSO—were different. In the version Hiers had told Ski, she said she wasn’t sure about the car. That Ashley had never come out and said she and Humphrey torched it. In the story she had told the investigator from the HCSO, Hiers claimed that Ashley had, in fact, said she committed arson. There was also the major issue of Hiers telling Ski that Ashley never
intended
to kill Sandee and pulled back from doing it, shooting out her mirror, instead. Then there was the competing version she had told the HCSO of missing Sandee with the shot and hitting her mirror, instead.

So which was it?

“I don’t now know what Ashley told me in reference to the case,” Hiers said shakily. She was nervous. Upset over being questioned as though she was under suspicion of murdering Sandee. “Look, Ashley told me she could not bring herself to shoot Sandee, so she intentionally missed and shot her own Volkswagen.”

“What about burning the vehicle?” Ski wanted to know.

Hiers hesitated. “I might have
thought
that Ashley said she burned the car, because I later found out the car was burned.”

Ski wasn’t buying it. He cut the interview short, however. Dropped Noyas off. Then drove to the FDLE Crime Lab in Tampa. He and Special Agent (SA) Ray Velboom discussed the recent developments and decided it was time to get the state attorney’s office involved. Ski knew the SAO could subpoena his witnesses and get them to sit inside the SAO and tell their stories on record. They’d take an oath. Swear to tell the truth. That whole deal. It would lock everyone down.

Around Ashley and Tracey Humphrey, if Tobe White brought up the fact that she was going down to the SAO to give her version of events, putting Humphrey’s alibi on the record, “he would just flip out,” Tobe explained to me later. Humphrey didn’t want to talk about it. He had given her a piece of paper, with what he wanted said. She was to stick to the plan. End of story.

“It’s going to be all right,” Humphrey promised.

Tobe knew it wasn’t going to be. It was that sick feeling in her gut. She was lying for the guy. Sooner or later, those lies were going to come back and bite her in the ass. On top of that anxiety, she had no one in whom to confide. She couldn’t tell her family about what was going on—that would involve them.

Still, Tobe made the decision to walk into the SAO and commit perjury—mind you, with her lawyer by her side.

“I didn’t feel like I could even talk to my attorney, because whatever I said was going to get back to Tracey.”

Humphrey had hired the lawyer for Tobe.

In her mind she felt she had no other choice. Yet, without telling anyone, Tobe was carefully covering herself.

“But then, I told myself, ‘How am I going to get out of this, once I do it?’”

Tobe White was subpoenaed to show up at the SAO on September 3, 2003. She had told police that she could verify Tracey and Ashley Humphrey’s whereabouts and movements on the night in question. Neither could have had time, according to Tobe, to murder Sandee Rozzo, because she was with them between the hours of ten o’clock and midnight.

The PPPD, meanwhile, had subsequently subpoenaed Tobe’s cell phone records, which they got their hands on before she sat down in the SAO and went on record. Part of Tobe’s story was based on her speaking to Humphrey and Ashley on that night via her cell phone. Those records would tell the PPPD a story or two about Tobe’s credibility. Ski put his money on the after-the-fact alibi. Meaning, Tobe White was chosen to stand up for the Humphreys after the murder.

Ski already had a feeling that she was lying. Yet, knowing what he knew about Tracey Humphrey, Ski felt there was a good chance that Humphrey was behind it, intimidating Tobe the way he had intimidated females all his life.

While Ski checked into Tobe’s cell phone records, and got busy with several leads that had come in, Tobe started to wonder how far Tracey Humphrey would go to protect himself from going back to prison. Tobe was in fear for her life, she said. Scared beyond anything she could ever recall. The guy seemed to be around every corner she turned. He’d show up at her house unannounced. Constantly ask her where her cell phone was. What she was doing. Where she was heading.

Tobe was forced to be around Ashley and Tracey because they were involved with starting a business together, almost all day, every day. She couldn’t nix the business now. It wouldn’t go over too well with Humphrey.

At one point Tobe noticed that Ashley had closed up. “Got quiet,” as Tobe later explained. Ashley stopped talking to her. Which meant, Tobe knew, that Humphrey had warned Ashley about talking to Tobe.

There was one night when Humphrey was acting particularly odd. He was overly paranoid, certain that Ashley was up to something. At the time Tobe and Humphrey were sharing space in a gym with another gentleman, preparing to set up shop in their own building. Well, on this particular night, Humphrey decided he couldn’t trust Ashley enough to allow her to be out and about on her own. So he locked her inside the building and left her there overnight. A prisoner, essentially, inside the building they had worked in.

“He did that,” Tobe later observed, “because, one, he is evil. And, two, he wanted to continuously show Ashley who was in control.”

Ashley confided in Tobe the next day while Humphrey was training a client.

“He locked me in the gym overnight,” she said.

“He
locked
you in there overnight and
left
you there alone?”

Ashley nodded her head. “Yeah, he was mad at me.”

Tobe was now careful about what she said to Ashley. She knew that whatever she relayed to Ashley—no matter how much Ashley talked about Humphrey and the bad things he did to her—Ashley would go back and tell Humphrey about it, and Tobe would have to answer to him.

Sure enough, at some point later, Humphrey confronted Tobe about what she had said to Ashley, and how upset Tobe was that he had locked Ashley in the gym overnight. Once again, Humphrey displayed that familiar look of steam coming out of his ears. He was red-faced, heated, gritting his teeth.

“Do
not
get in the middle of this!” he warned Tobe.

She took a step back, said she understood.

“It was hard for me,” Tobe later admitted. “I had to get as much [information] as I could out of them without them knowing.” The more she knew, the better off she was, Tobe believed. “[I was]…scared of what he would say or do. Yet, I began to love Ashley like a daughter and didn’t know how to react to what she was going through.”

Ashley and Tobe talked one night. Just the two women. One older than the other, more experienced. Ashley was the young, naïve, scared girl. By now, Tobe had convinced herself that Ashley was involved in Sandee’s murder on a hands-on level, but Ashley was only under the spell of Humphrey. Ashley confided that she felt that her grandmother, a woman she had lived with up until the time she died, was the only person who had truly loved her unconditionally.

“When my grandmother was in the hospital dying,” Ashley explained to Tobe that night, “I was there one day when my mom came into the room. She was drunk. She screamed and yelled at me, saying that it was my fault my grandma was dying.” Ashley cried as she recalled the story to Tobe.

The relationship between Ashley and her mom, and even between Tobe and Ashley’s mom, became so strained that Tobe ended up getting a restraining order against Georgia Hiers after Hiers phoned Tobe one day and, according to Tobe, threatened her. This was at a time, Tobe felt, when she believed that Humphrey and Ashley, together, regardless of those intimate mother-daughter moments she had shared with Ashley, were plotting to kill Tobe and blame it on Ashley’s mother.

At two o’clock in the afternoon on September 3, 2003, Tobe White and her attorney showed up at the SAO, ready to do her part in Humphrey’s scheme to create an alibi for himself and his wife. Tobe, on the inside, was frightened, nervous, and terrified of lying. Yet, she had a fairly good poker face. The flip side of the coin, she knew, was having to face Tracey Humphrey after telling him she couldn’t go through with it. Tobe White did not want to go anywhere near that scenario.

The court reporter placed Tobe under oath; they were officially on the record now. Whatever she said was going to count.

Assistant State Attorney Fred Schaub conducted the interview. Schaub had one of those down-home Southern drawls, a minister’s ability to throw his voice. This was probably from a career’s worth of trial experience. Born and raised in Florida, Schaub did his undergraduate work at Florida State University (FSU). He attended Stetson University College of Law in Gulfport, after working for Shell Oil Company, buying and selling oil and gas leases.

“They called me a petroleum land man,” Schaub said later with a bit of humble pride.

Regardless of what they called him, the job paid enough to pay for law school. Schaub chose Stetson because his father had gone there. He graduated from Stetson in 1984, began his career with the SAO a year later, and never looked back.

Fred Schaub’s call in life was to put bad people—in his mind, ones like Tracey Humphrey—away.

Schaub had been briefed about the case building against Humphrey and Ashley. This interview with Tobe White was, in a sense, one of the more pivotal moments of the case thus far. What Tobe said would determine where the case was headed next, and how the SAO was going to proceed from there.

As Schaub began his questioning, Tobe appeared calm and at ease. She talked about meeting Humphrey at a time in her life when she needed someone with Humphrey’s energy and knowledge of health and fitness to kick her in the ass and set her on the right nutritional and strength-training path. And there was no doubt that Humphrey had filled those voids with fervor and zeal. He had changed her life for the better, Tobe said.

Then Schaub slowly danced his way into the events surrounding July 5, 2003. Where? When? How? Why? It was time for Tobe to put Humphrey’s plan in motion.

“I worked out at the Athletic Club,” she said, “from about three-thirty to five. From five until—oh, I don’t know—about eight or eight-thirty, I was at my brother’s girlfriend’s house for a Fourth of July party.” Her movements up to this point would be easy enough to check out. It was effortless for Tobe to recall this portion of her day, because it was true. “I missed several phone calls from Ashley while I was at my brother’s girlfriend’s house.”

“Did you ever speak to them [the Humphreys] on the phone?”

“Yes,” she said. “I finally made contact with both of them later that night and agreed to go over to their apartment later on.”

Tobe then went into the scripted part of her testimony. She said she got to the Humphreys’ apartment at about 9:30
P.M
., but Ashley wasn’t home. She had walked in at about ten or ten-thirty. It was then that Ashley and Humphrey, Tobe explained under oath, started to argue loudly. The fighting lasted about twenty minutes before Ashley left in a flurry of emotional turmoil. She was gone, Tobe said, for about twenty to forty-five minutes, but she returned again. This time she stayed for approximately fifteen minutes, and left again in another huff. It was after that second argument that she didn’t come back home until around midnight. The implication here was that there was not enough time for Ashley—or Humphrey, for that matter—to drive to Pinellas Park and kill Sandee Rozzo. It was physically impossible to drive that distance inside the timeline Tobe White had provided.

“While Ashley was away from the apartment during those times, they argued over the phone,” Tobe told Schaub.

Schaub wanted to know if Tobe had spoken with Ashley at all that night over her cell phone or from a landline in the apartment. This was the setup question, the one that was going to sink Tobe White.

“Yes,” Tobe said without thinking about it, “I talked with Ashley and convinced her to come back to the apartment that last time, near midnight. I left shortly after that.”

Ski had spoken to one of Tracey Humphrey’s former girlfriends, who had been going out with him while he had been two-timing her with Ashley. There was something in the woman’s voice that struck Ski as he spoke to her. A sense of urgency, maybe. A thread of relief, perhaps. Might have even been a touch of remorse, too.

“If I didn’t catch him cheating on me,” the woman told Ski at one point during the interview, “you would be coming here, most likely, to arrest me for the murder of Sandee Rozzo.”

Ski found out that Humphrey had convinced the woman to look up certain information about Sandee Rozzo on the Internet for him. The woman had Googled Sandee’s name. Went on to various “people find/search” sites and looked up addresses and phone numbers. She had even found out where Sandee was working. Humphrey had the woman call the bar Sandee worked at and ask for her, only to hang up once they discovered she was there.

Because of all this, the woman told Ski, there was no doubt in her mind who had killed Sandee Rozzo. She knew it was Humphrey and Ashley. No one was going to tell her any different.

“When he gets his claws into these girls,” Ski later said, explaining the type of manipulating con man Humphrey was, “they felt there was no way out.”

The way Humphrey worked, Ski began to figure out by talking to Humphrey’s ex-girlfriends and ex-wife, was similar to how other Svengali-like men preyed on the women around them, brainwashing them, getting them to do whatever it was they wanted. Humphrey would ask these girls to do simple things for him at first. Look up an address on their home computer. Call Sandee from their home phone. Do a computer search for Sandee’s address, mapping out where she lived on Google Earth or MapQuest. Then he’d have them drive by the bar. Maybe stalk Sandee at her home. Follow her. While they were doing this, Humphrey was selling them on the premise that it was all research for his upcoming court case against Sandee. That she was this vicious liar who needed to be shut down. And they bought into it.

Once they were suckered in, however, Humphrey threw the things they had done back in their faces: “Now you’re just as involved as I am,” he would say.

“And that’s when they felt trapped,” Ski explained. “‘You’re in this just as deep as me,’ he would tell these girls.”

There came a point when Ski visited with Sandee Rozzo’s daughter. It was an interview that he needed to conduct to see if the young girl knew anything that might be of some help. Sandee’s daughter had spent some time with Sandee shortly before her mother was murdered.

The conversation went well. The child didn’t have much in the form of information, but it was good to talk to her, nonetheless. Ski felt bad. He could see the hurt in her eyes, on her face. She was as confused as she was upset.

What kid wouldn’t be?

“Listen,” Ski said as he prepared to leave, “we are going to get the person who killed your mother. I will not sleep easy until we do. Then they’re going to get put in jail.”

Part of fulfilling that promise would include utilizing Tobe White, Ski knew after hearing about the interview she had just given under oath to the SAO. With a quick check of Tobe’s cell phone records, it wasn’t hard to figure out that she had lied to the SAO. Tobe White had walked into a prosecutor’s office, plain and simple, and committed perjury—which was, incidentally, exactly what detectives from the PPPD had wanted her to do.

The questions that Schaub had asked Tobe, for the most part, were questions that the PPPD had written. Many were designed specifically to see if Tobe was lying. Lying to law enforcement during a homicide investigation in the state of Florida is a felony. Tobe could go to prison. Afterward, the questions became: What had made her do it? What stake did Tobe White have in this case?

“During Tobe White’s interview with the state attorney,” Ski later said, “we pulled Tobe’s lawyer out of the room in the middle of questioning and told [the guy] that we knew Tobe was lying to us. We said to him, ‘You need to confer with your client about what she is saying, because she is lying!’ Tobe stood by her guns, however.”

It was the cell phone records that gave her away.

“In looking at Tobe White,” Ski said, “I knew she would roll over. She had nothing to gain by lying. Other than being afraid of Humphrey, I am thinking to myself, ‘Why else would she want to protect this guy?’ Whereas, on the other hand, Ashley would want to protect him because if she’s not involved herself, he’s her husband.”

Tobe White wanted nothing whatsoever to do with talking to Ski after the interview with the SAO. He reached out to her time and again, and she just didn’t want to talk. He thought for sure she would drop a dime on Humphrey the moment the PPPD asked.

But that was not the case at all.

After having no luck with Tobe, Ski took a ride to see Tobe’s brother at his job. Ski wanted to make it clear that the PPPD was giving his sister a chance to redeem herself. In Florida, if you lie under oath during an interview, you do get a second chance to set the record straight.

A mulligan.

One do-over.

You can raise your hand and say, “I lied. I want to correct the record.” And your wish, as they say, is granted.

Ski had that to dangle in front of Tobe. He introduced himself to Tobe’s brother, saying, “Do you know why I am here? What this is about?”

Her brother listened. “I have no idea.”

“You know Timothy, or Tracey, Humphrey?”

They walked. “No, never heard of him.”

Ski asked again. They talked about menial things, but also about Tobe’s life, the type of person she was. At some point during the conversation, Tobe’s brother said, “I do recognize that name…. I think he’s going into business with my sister.”

“Ever meet him?”

“No.”

“I need to know where you and your sister were on July fifth of this year.”

This startled the guy. Ski had a serious tone to his voice. Cops don’t ask people where they were on specific days and nights unless they’re looking to pin down an alibi. Anybody who has watched even the slightest bit of crime television can understand that.

Still, Tobe’s brother didn’t hesitate, which told Ski something about the guy. “I was at my girlfriend’s. Tobe was there, too.” He gave Ski the girl’s name and address.

“Any idea when your sister left?”

“Oh, I’d say around eight. I asked her where she was going.”

Ski knew this was an important piece of information he had volunteered. “Where?”

“She told me she was going home, and possibly to the gym for a workout.”

Tobe had never mentioned any of this.

“You need to make it clear to your sister who she’s dealing with,” Ski said, meaning Humphrey. He gave Tobe’s brother a little rundown of Humphrey’s past record of arrests. “Look at this piece of garbage she is protecting. She’s not going to listen to me. She’s going to think that I’m the enemy.”

Tobe’s brother’s jaw dropped.

“Please, for the love of God, tell your sister”—Ski handed him his business card—“to contact me right away. If she wants to call me anytime, I will talk to her about anything.”

“Okay…”

“We know she lied to us at the state attorney’s office,” Ski concluded. “But the law gives her one more chance”—he held up a forefinger, making his point stick—“to rectify that mistake. Tell her that. She’s got one free-bee. She can come forward, tell us the truth, and she cannot be legally charged with anything. You give her that message!”