Kill For Me (30 page)

It happened almost at the moment Humphrey was loaded into the transport van by sheriffs’ deputies. As he got into the sheriff’s van on April 16, 2004, Humphrey noticed an opportunity he could not ignore. As he was placed inside the van, along with other inmates, male and female, who were being shipped to various jails or going to court, two vital mistakes were made by those transportation guards escorting Humphrey: For one, he wasn’t searched; two, no one padlocked the van’s doors on the outside. The transportation deputies driving Humphrey and the other inmates had thirty-three years of experience combined.

Many major crimes are opportunistic. Criminals are always looking for that one opening to take advantage of. Humphrey was smarter than many of his criminal counterparts. He saw this breach of procedure and knew right away it was going to play an important role in his escape.

Even more startling, Humphrey must have been elatedly amazed that neither deputy had shackled him (another breach of policy) to the floor of the transport van. The only security in place holding Humphrey down inside that van was a set of cuffs on his wrists—wherein lies another mistake, perhaps: Humphrey, a convicted violent felon facing murder and assault charges, was handcuffed in front of himself. With two closed fists raised above his head, wasn’t it possible that Humphrey could have clubbed one of the deputies and at least knocked him or her down?

But he didn’t even need to do that in order to escape.

Later, when asked why procedure had not been followed, one of the deputies said, “Just being in a hurry. Just bad judgment.” This, when the deputies later told Internal Affairs (IA) that they
knew
Humphrey was suspected of murder.

When they arrived at the Pinellas County Jail, one of the deputies went to go park a second vehicle following the van, while the other drove the transport van into the garage. Another guard there on the scene was supposed to close the gate behind the van after it entered the garage.

But that was never done.

Inside the van Humphrey was watching, looking for that one moment when he could get out through the cage and onto the garage floor and make a run for it. From there, with the gate open, he would be a free man. The only obstacles in his way now were the cage he was locked into inside the van, which separated inmates, and the van’s doors, once he got out of the cage.

The driver of the van then violated another policy. She walked into the booking area of the garage—intake—and left the van, with its convicts, unattended. She was dropping off the prisoners’ personal property and paperwork before getting help to escort them into the same area for booking photos and contraband checks.

Inside the van Humphrey worked on a pregnant female inmate on the opposite side of the cage, who sat between him and the van door. According to her, Humphrey threatened bodily harm if she did not help him with the cage. She was the only thing in between Humphrey and his freedom. Humphrey told the woman—who had gotten caught writing bad checks—that he would harm her if she didn’t help him. All she needed to do was loosen the bolt on the cage so he could slip by. He could then reach through the small slit in the van’s side doors (where paperwork or keys might be passed through), up and around, and then open the van doors.

The woman later said she was afraid, so she loosened the bolt.

Humphrey slipped through.

There were officers outside the van as Humphrey maneuvered inside, but they were, according to reports, talking amongst themselves. Humphrey simply waited until they were finished, and out of sight, to make his move. Opening the van’s side doors, which should have been padlocked on the outside for this very reason, was as simple as reaching from the inside slot in the door and popping the outside handle lock (there were no handles inside the van for obvious reasons).

The deputy responsible for locking the van later said, “I didn’t think that anybody could get out of my van…. Every one of us, I guess, dropped the ball in some way.”

That must have been a big ball.

No matter whose fault it was, Humphrey was now out of the van, inside the garage, running for the gate. Videotape caught him making his break for freedom.

The guard at the gate saw him coming, reached for his radio, but it failed to work.

Humphrey was in the outside parking lot, running toward the swampy area off to the right.

The guard watching Humphrey run away screwed around with his radio, desperately trying to get it to work—that is, instead of immediately running into the port or over to a nearby window and alerting personnel, or any number of cops within a hundred yards of where he stood, that an inmate was escaping right under everyone’s nose.

Forty-five crucial seconds elapsed before anyone realized that Humphrey had gotten out of the gate and was at large.

Upstairs in the criminal complex building, after the sirens went off, alerting the building that a prisoner had escaped, Fred Schaub sent his investigators out onto the street to help in the search.

“The mother of Humphrey’s daughter worked at a local business,” Schaub said, “not too far from our building. We were a little concerned that he might be heading in that direction.”

Dogs, cops, sheriffs, deputies, helicopters, and the like scattered around the immediate area of the criminal complex building and Pinellas County Jail. The Coast Guard and St. Petersburg-Clearwater International Airport were about one kilometer away, to the north. Rural, green-grass suburban neighborhoods were more to the west, where schools and kids and businesses were in the process of locking down.

By 2:00
P.M
., law enforcement set up a perimeter down the block.

Still, there was no sign of Humphrey.

Another problem authorities and searchers realized was that Humphrey wasn’t wearing one of those pumpkin-orange jumpsuits that prisoners collecting trash and that inmates in transit usually wear. For some strange reason, which no one could later account for, he was wearing street clothes. Besides the handcuffs, if they were still on, Humphrey probably looked like any other Joe walking down the street.

And then, as the public began to react to the escape, the calls started flooding dispatch—it seemed Humphrey was being spotted all over the place.

Tobe White just happened to get up from where she was sitting with her date by the pool and walk into the house for some ice water. It was a hot day. Scorching sun. Great early-spring weather.

Just as Tobe breezed into the house, she heard her phone ring. Then she took a look at her beeper and noticed there were several unheard messages.

What the heck?

It was SA Davenport. “Leave your house right now and come to our office,” he said, a bit of urgency in his voice, according to Tobe.

“What’s going on?”

“We’ve been trying to reach you. Humphrey has escaped from custody.”

Silence.

“We need you to come down to the office immediately.”

Tobe was horrified.

“I was totally freaked out,” Tobe recalled. “I could not believe they had let him get away.”

Tobe ran outside. “Listen, you are going to have to leave. I have to get going. It’s an emergency.”

Her date stood up slowly. “What’s going—”

“I’ll call you later on. I have to go
right
now,” Tobe said.

Her date, who would likely not forget the afternoon, said no problem.

When she got down to the FDLE office in Tampa and found out that not only had Humphrey escaped from the Pinellas County Jail complex, with arguably dozens of law enforcement and guards standing around, but was dressed in civilian clothes, she was horrified and concerned by the incompetence.

Tobe stayed inside the FDLE offices. She wasn’t going to be leaving until Humphrey was locked up again.

“I had left my dogs home,” Tobe said, “because I had to run out of there so fast. I was really nervous.”

Tobe had always been afraid that Humphrey would retaliate against her by hurting her dogs, simply because she had given him the power by telling him how important the dogs were to her.

When Tracey Humphrey bolted from the Pinellas County Jail complex, he went northwest, toward Largo, a traditional suburban Florida neighborhood, set up in a grid fashion. It just so happened that near 3:30
P.M
., one of the calls to 911 reported seeing a man fitting Humphrey’s description in that area of the city. He was heading into a wooded area by a horse patch.

Throughout that late afternoon, Sierra, a national champion cow horse, a typically calm and peaceful mare, began acting a bit strange as she made her way around a small pasture. Sierra’s owner was gone, but his girlfriend was watching the horse.

As the woman tried to calm Sierra down, wondering what was going on, she noticed sheriff’s deputies and all sorts of law enforcement converging on a location out in the back of the yard by a large tree.

Sierra had been circling in that same region. It was so unlike her. She sensed something, for sure.

There were trees and deep underbrush over by where the horse had started acting up. The woman babysitting the horse stopped a sheriff as he passed by.

“She’s been acting weird. Maybe she knows someone is hiding in that area.”

An animal and its instincts—where do they come from?

As law enforcement moved in toward a tree, its trunk deeply camouflaged by underbrush, someone saw movement.

They circled the tree, weapons pointed.

And there was Tracey Humphrey, coiled, like the snake he was, around the bottom portion of the tree trunk. He was trying to wiggle his way deeper and deeper underneath the underbrush, hiding out.

From there came a chorus of “don’t move” and “hold it.” Soon the place was swarming with law enforcement and dogs and all types of firepower that Humphrey was going to have a hard time running from. Not to mention the size of the deputies surrounding the tree—massive men whom few would want to tangle with.

Humphrey wasn’t getting out of this one. Yet, he did appear to get up, in a quick move, as if he was going to make a break for it, but was told—numerous times—to stay down. As they did this, law enforcement realized Humphrey had managed to slip one of his wrists out of the handcuffs. His hands and arms were free.

“Stay down,” yelled a sheriff, who was not about to be intimidated.

Humphrey went to get up and run, said one report. But, as it was later explained to me, “he fought the sheriff, and the sheriff won. The guy who arrested Humphrey makes Humphrey look small.”

“His shoe size,” one cop told me, “is a thirteen—which Humphrey would see very close up.”

As big and strong as Humphrey was, the deputies and sheriffs arresting him were bigger. The guy just wouldn’t listen. He didn’t fight, but he resisted arrest.

Big mistake.

He made a run for it and was stopped. Considering the mug shot taken of Humphrey after he was brought back to the jail, he was given a good pummeling by those sheriffs who took him down.

When it was all over, a deputy walked over to the woman who was watching the horse and, according to the
St. Petersburg Times,
said, “You and the horse were dead-on.”

An ambulance was called in after Humphrey complained of leg and head injuries; he was bleeding from the top of his head, where he had a long scratch, and his right eye. A nice, old-school shiner was beginning to form around that same eye, puffing up and ballooning like a blood blister.

Inside the ambulance, which would take Humphrey to Northside Hospital in Tampa, a deputy hopped in to go along for the ride. Humphrey was on the stretcher, his hands handcuffed, and yet he repeatedly refused to unclench one of his fists. He had something in his hand, it appeared, which he did not want to give up.

The deputy told him to let it go.

He wouldn’t.

Finally, after convincing Humphrey that there was no way he was going to be able to keep whatever it was he had hidden, he let go.

It was one of the earpieces to his eyeglasses, which he had broken off and made into a tool of some sort, much like a screwdriver. It was probably what he had used to slip the handcuff off one of his wrists.

Local news cameras caught Humphrey as he was being escorted into the hospital. He was beat up and had grass all over him and looked pretty much like he had just gotten finished rolling around on the floor of the woods.

“Humphrey definitely thought he was a tough guy,” Fred Schaub said. “But he didn’t look so tough after he was rearrested.”

Being led in, Humphrey turned toward the local news cameras, sneered a bit, and yelled, “I’m innocent….”

Escaping from custody while facing murder charges is probably not the best way to convince a jury of your peers that you are innocent of the charges. If Humphrey was planning on a defense of “Ashley did it on her own,” the fact that he had gone through so much trouble to avoid prosecution was an indication that he perhaps had a lot more to hide than he wanted to admit.

Humphrey was back behind bars—secure and safe. Still, like a rabid animal when put into a confined space, he could not simply sit still and allow the due process of the legal system to run its course. He had to keep tightening that noose around his neck that the PPPD, with the help of the FDLE, had put over his head and secured.

For Ski, Paul Andrews, SA Davenport, and those investigators working the case, as the summer of 2004 approached, their job was to put all the pieces of the puzzle together for Fred Schaub, Bob Schock, and the SAO, and to make sure that Humphrey was convicted.

Unlike in a lot of states and federal courts, where depositions in criminal felony cases are generally rarely done, defense attorneys in Florida have a right to depose any and all witnesses the prosecution has interviewed. Not just those the prosecution will use during trial—but anyone. If your name appeared anywhere on a report, the defense has the right to drag you in and ask you questions under oath.

With that said, Humphrey’s defense team went to work deposing just about every single witness the PPPD and FDLE had ever spoken to. It was endless. One person after the next was sworn in and asked pointed questions.

“Our obligation as prosecutors,” Schaub later told me, “is to give the defense the names of anyone who may know anything about the case. Our witness list isn’t necessarily made up of people we intend to call at trial. So we gave them the list.”

It is a process that can sometimes bog down the judicial road to adjudication. Before the case can be scheduled for trial, all of this preliminary work needs to be done. And if there was one thing about Humphrey that some might have underestimated it was that he was not going to lie down and accept these murder charges. He had thrown his fist in the air and was determined to fight on and prove his innocence—no matter how long it took, or how much of the state’s money he spent.

The trial, Schaub knew from experience, could be a year, two, or even three away. All they could do was prepare and wait.

Corroborating Ashley Humphrey’s criminal tales of misadventures with Tracey Humphrey was something the SAO needed to work hard at. One story Ashley told Bob Schock during his interviews with her was that Humphrey had sent her out one day to where she had buried the rifle and handgun so she could dig them back up. Apparently, David Abernathy wanted the guns back, and he was going to report them stolen if he didn’t get them. As a result, Humphrey became aggressively agitated and paranoid and sent Ashley out, alone, with an ice-cream scoop to dig for the weapons. Of course, she had no idea where she had buried them. The forest looked all the same to her. She had an idea of the general location, but nothing that she could pinpoint.

Humphrey could fix that, he said, and instructed Ashley to rent a metal detector. The SAO, in turn, went out and found the rental agency and the receipt for the purchase.

“That told us that she was telling the truth,” Bob Schock later said.

Even when it came to minor details.

Then there was the time Humphrey had kicked her out of the apartment, saying, according to Ashley, “If you won’t help me (get rid of Sandee), I don’t want you around anymore.”

It was another one of Humphrey’s control tactics. He knew Ashley was young and had no one to turn to. Not to mention she was borderline obsessed with him and would do anything to keep him, so he used it against her.

Ashley was so distraught over being kicked out, and in fear of losing Humphrey to another woman, she decided to kill herself. Beforehand, however, she wanted to have one last meal. She went out and had breakfast. It was a small check, she said, somewhere near $5. But Ashley told the SAO that the waitress would remember her because she had left a huge tip (all the money that she had in her debit account at the time), based on the fact that she was going to be killing herself and didn’t think she’d need the money.

The SAO found the restaurant and the waitress, and, sure enough, the waitress recalled a $25 tip on a bill under five bucks. Ashley later testified that the tip was $50, which a receipt from her bank account—she paid with a debit card—backed up.

These small things—along with all the other evidence Ashley described that the SAO backed up with documentation or proof—led Schaub and Schock to believe that Ashley was speaking the truth.

“We told her up front,” Schaub recounted, “‘If we catch you in one lie, we cannot use you. You’re no good to us. So everything you tell us, no matter how shameful it might be,
must
be the truth.’” Which meant that Ashley wouldn’t be able to fulfill her obligation and might lose the deal she had in place. “And, you know, everything she told us, we were able to corroborate.”