Kill For Me (34 page)

After a lunch break, Fred Schaub continued with his direct examination of Ashley Humphrey. He moved through details about the guns, more Internet searching on Peoplefind.com, how often Humphrey asked his soon-to-be wife to kill Sandee Rozzo, and how many times she had driven to the Green Iguana by herself to sit and stalk Sandee while Humphrey sat on the other end of the telephone line like a puppet master pulling those strings.

The answer to the latter two questions: “Once a week.”

As far as the guns were concerned, it was Humphrey, she said, who had come up with the idea to tell David Abernathy that she was scared that someone was after her.

Well into late-afternoon Monday, Ashley described on the stand how she and Humphrey had gone over to Abernathy’s house, but she ultimately stole the shotgun from his bedroom herself; how she had botched that first attempt to kill Sandee on Memorial Day weekend; how she and Humphrey were, essentially, forced into burning her VW Beetle. She spared no detail—and, to Ashley Humphrey’s credit, she accepted the blame as much as she piled it onto Humphrey.

The way she talked about torching her VW sounded like a scene from a Quentin Tarantino movie: “I opened up the doors and poured gasoline inside of it and covered the [seats], and then I poured it all over the top of the car and the hood and every surface of it, and then I left a trail of gas down the driveway of the business, and I lit the end of the trail and watched my car go up in flames.”

“Okay, and whose idea was it to torch your Volkswagen?”

“It was
his
idea.” There was resentment in that statement.

From that point on, Ashley talked about going to the shooting range—after all, Humphrey was angry, she said, that she had missed Sandee that first time. That one bungled murder attempt had resulted in so many contingencies, it made Humphrey change his plans. So he wanted to make sure she didn’t miss when she set out to kill Sandee for a second time. And Humphrey knew the answer to all their problems was in training Ashley to kill Sandee at close range.

When the subject of their day-to-day marriage relationship came up, Ashley seemed to get a bit giddy. It was as though she couldn’t believe she had married the guy—after all he had done to her up until that point, one had to wonder if, by then, she liked pain.

According to Ashley, the way they decided to get married was brought on by a joke. She had gone into a convenience store to buy a few things, and Humphrey, who had gone into the store with her, walked out to wait in the car. Making small talk, the clerk asked Ashley if Humphrey was her husband. Ashley laughed. “No.” But when she saw Humphrey moments later in the car, she told him the story; to which he responded, “Would you marry me if I bought you some…implants?”

Ashley said, hell yeah!

A marital union was born.

But then as the subject of marriage became a central part of their daily discussions, Humphrey took it a few steps further, telling Ashley that if they did go through with it, the benefits were twofold. Their marriage would affect any legal action against her in relation to killing Sandee. Essentially, Ashley read it as: marrying Humphrey would protect her from testifying against him—and Humphrey against her—if they ever got arrested for the murder.

“He had some idea that we wouldn’t be able to testify against each other if we were ever arrested for the crime. And he didn’t know the details of it, so he hired an attorney for me, so I could talk to him about the extent of the law.”

Ashley, in fact, had a meeting with that attorney and asked the guy about the laws revolving around a wife testifying against her husband.

Considering the end result, she must have liked what she had heard.

As she continued testifying, Ashley explained how Humphrey had told her to dress “like a black man” on the day she killed Sandee, and so that’s what she did. She went out to Party City and bought a fake beard and black face paint and even brown contact lenses to change her eye color. But she was nervous, she said, because “I was a white girl trying to look like a black man.”

It wasn’t working.

She next explained how Sandee Rozzo’s murder actually went down. As the gallery and the jury sat in stunned silence, Ashley talked through those final moments of Sandee’s life, and how close Ashley had come to abandoning the entire crime, but then realized the “consequences of not doing it” far outweighed the reality of carrying it out.

“What do you mean?” Schaub asked.

“What he would say. I thought he would kick me out, and we wouldn’t be together anymore. So I decided to go ahead with it, and I pulled up in front of her driveway. I just stopped in front of it and left the car running. I went into the garage. She had her window up. So I slammed with the butt of the gun on her window, and she saw me and she started screaming.” Ashley had tears in her eyes now, reliving that moment when she took this woman’s life because of a man. “I tried to shoot at the window to break it, and the safety was on, and so I turned the safety off and I shot her repeatedly, until I thought she was dead, and I looked in her eyes as—”

“Why did you look into her eyes?” Schaub asked, interrupting.

“He told me that when I finally went through with it, to make sure I looked at her because there was a look about somebody who had just died that was hollow about them, and that I would know that she was dead. So I did as he said and I looked into her eyes, and she was dead….”

Ashley called her new husband after the murder and asked him if he would order a pizza. She wanted double cheese, but Humphrey, sticking to their disciplined diet plan, said no, adding, “Get rid of everything and call me when you’re finished.”

Over the next few hours, Ashley spoke of how Humphrey had come up with the idea to ask Tobe White to lie for them, where she had hid most of the evidence, and how all of the plans they had talked about began to fall apart—little by little—crumbling down into a series of lies they couldn’t keep track of any longer.

“Did you make a false allegation…concerning David Abernathy?” Schaub asked at one point, referring to the time when Ashley reported to the police that Abernathy had sexually abused her—the allegation coming, of course, after Abernathy started to question her about his guns and wanted them back.

“I’d been molested in my past, and Tracey knew this. In order to refute what David was saying about me having a gun, [Tracey] said that I should go and make a false report saying that I had been raped and molested during the entire time I was living with David.”

Schaub left no stone unturned. He had Ashley talk her way through every aspect of her life with Humphrey, and every detail of the crimes she had committed for him, under his direction, before and after murdering Sandee Rozzo. By the time he was finished, and McDermott stood with a look of quiet resolve on his face, ready to dig into Ashley’s stories and rip them apart, Schaub had covered every possible base. Nothing was left for the jury to assume or to question. Ashley had put it all out there.

McDermott, for whatever reason, began by asking Ashley about her sexual behavior during the period when she had first met Humphrey. If, in fact, she was having sex with Humphrey exclusively.

Ashley didn’t cut any corners. She knew exactly what McDermott was referring to, saying, “Tracey and I weren’t dating at the time. That was December [2002]. And yes—on New Year’s Eve, [a girlfriend of mine] and I got drunk and we had a threesome with her boyfriend.”

Next question.

It was a strange way to begin a cross-examination, especially one as important as this. Did Humphrey think that a ménage à trois usurped a homicide of such violent magnitude and somehow erased the credibility of an admitted murderer? Jurors certainly didn’t care about Ashley’s sex life. She was nineteen back then. Just out of high school.

McDermott asked Ashley to explain how she had fallen in love with Humphrey, and how quickly her feelings had become obsessive. Several times McDermott said “controlling.” He was turning the tables. Trying to point out that Ashley was the one in control of the relationship.

This strategy failed. The argument sounded as hollow as it was—then again, what, truly, did Joe McDermott have to work with?

“Everything that happened here is Tracey’s fault, right?” McDermott asked at one point, making the assumption that in exchange for a lighter sentence, Ashley was pushing the blame on her hubby.

“Some of the—no! I mean, I take
complete
responsibility for what I did. But I would
never
have done this if I hadn’t ever met him.”

And it was that statement, so pure and so intellectually uncomplicated, that McDermott continued to chase during his entire cross-examination. Whatever he asked Ashley, whatever answer she provided, there was the DNA of this crime, the core truth that the jury wanted to hear, out in the open, as if it were some sort of fog hovering over everyone. Ashley was accountable for her crimes, plain and simple.

McDermott tried to make a point out of the fact that Ashley was alone during nearly all of the time she committed any crimes, be it hiding evidence, attempting to shoot Sandee that first time, finally murdering her, and everything else she had done, which either covered up the crime or led to it. Yet in all of Ashley’s answers was the truth that Humphrey was the man behind the curtain, staging each scene, pulling the strings, telling Ashley what to do and when to do it.

“According to you,” McDermott said, “everything was under
his
direction, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Including the idea to shoot her?”

“He was the mastermind, yes.”

“Pardon me?”

“
He
was the mastermind.”

Although McDermott could be given an A for effort as he tried to find that one hole in Ashley’s testimony, the statements she had given to police, or her depositions, it just wasn’t there. No matter how hard he pushed, McDermott ran into a woman who was solid on the stand and honest in her recollections. The problem was, when you’re telling the truth, you really do not have to remember what to say. And Ashley Humphrey, despite the fact that she had committed a terribly violent act of evil, was not going to be caught in any more lies. If she didn’t recall something, Ashley said she couldn’t remember. If she had lied to the police, she admitted it.

Surprisingly, McDermott’s cross-examination was short, considering. It lasted about ninety minutes. McDermott must have known that the best way to counter Ashley’s stories was to put his client on the stand and have him tell his version of this complicated, abusive relationship and marriage that was headed for destruction from almost the moment they had tied the knot. Make this into a knock-down, drag-out, honest-to-goodness he said/she said.

The question everyone was thinking as Ashley was led out of the courtroom back to her cell:
Would Humphrey, being the narcissist that he certainly was, the guy who had to have the last word—no matter what—take the stand and roll the dice?

Before the gallery would learn if Humphrey was going to stand up, Joe McDermott stayed true to his prior convictions and asked again for a mistrial.

Denied. The SAO called a few more witnesses to the stand.

As part of the SAO’s unremarkable, yet fact-filled denouement, on Tuesday, February 21, 2006, Andre Talley was brought in to give jurors a taste of how Humphrey acted—and what he asked for—while behind bars during those days after his arrest, leading up to trial.

“‘It’s not what you say,’” Talley testified, describing for jurors what Humphrey had dictated to him to write to Ashley, “‘it’s how you say it…. Take the deal,’” Talley said Humphrey told him to tell Ashley. “‘Take it. But do the right thing on the witness stand.’”

Talley explained how he would take that walk down to Humphrey’s cell, sit outside with pad and pen, and write down what Humphrey uttered aloud to him.

In calling Andre Talley to the stand, the SAO wrapped up its case, putting an exclamation point on how far Humphrey had gone to control his wife. Sadly, not long after Talley testified, authorities found him hanging in his cell by a bedsheet. He died on the way to the hospital. It was an apparent, although highly suspicious, suicide. Talley had been placed in protective custody at the time, “but prison authorities did not consider him a suicide risk,” sheriff’s officials told reporters. Talley, it turned out, was an informant who had reportedly provided information on “nine inmates” during his three years behinds bars awaiting sentencing for admitting to attacking his wife with a steak knife and stabbing her while their five-year-old child looked on. Talley was undoubtedly hoping the information he had provided to police would buy him a lesser sentence—and yet he had never gone to police and asked for anything in return for his testimony. A week before he supposedly killed himself, a judge had sentenced Talley to thirty years, not giving him that break he had perhaps hoped for. Marianne Pasha, a spokeswoman for the PCSO, told the
St. Petersburg Times
the day after Talley’s death that there was no suspicion of anything other than suicide. Talley’s family felt different and blamed the
St. Petersburg Times
for publishing two different articles about Talley, each of which reported that Andre Talley was a jailhouse snitch.

After the state rested its case, Joe McDermott, true to form, motioned for a judgment of acquittal, which was quickly denied.

McDermott and co-counsels Richard Watts and J. Andrew Crawford called a total of six witnesses, many of whom were there to vouch for Humphrey’s terribly low character ranking and credibility score. The testimony was quick; the SAO’s cross-examinations, moreover, save for David Abernathy, all but nil. Schaub and Crow knew they had put together a great case. Badgering defense witnesses wasn’t going to prove anything more. It was best to step aside, allow them to speak their piece and go home.

Then, as the courtroom was suffering from a bit of restlessness and perhaps even boredom, Richard Watts stood and—to the amazement of some and expectation of others—said, “The defense calls Timothy Humphrey.”

The man of the hour stood.

Finally the jury was going to hear from Humphrey himself. It was one thing to accuse your wife of killing another woman by her own will, quite another to provide evidence of it in the form of testimony.

Yes, he
was
guilty until he proved himself innocent.

Humphrey wore a white shirt, one button undone at the top, a dark suit coat, his now signature black-framed glasses, and an Opie-inspired haircut, carrot red and shortly cropped, same as the
Andy Griffith Show
kid who had caused ole Andy a whole lot of mischief. Humphrey’s face was noticeably skinnier than it had been in times past. He appeared more gaunt and tired. Regardless of how much he had changed, on top of the fact that he tried so hard to come across as a pastor or bank manager, this was Humphrey’s one chance to explain himself, to sit and convince the jury that his wife had acted alone, by her own volition. He needed to prove that he—a career criminal with extreme violent tendencies and a record of abusing and hurting women—had had nothing whatsoever to do with the murder of a woman who had filed charges of sexual battery and kidnapping against him, and was taking him into court a mere month after she was murdered. It was going to be a task of gargantuan proportions, Humphrey and McDermott had to realize. But it needed to be done, nonetheless. The last thing McDermott—and probably Humphrey—wanted was to lose the case, then turn around and see and hear jurors on
Dateline
or
48 Hours
saying, if only they had heard from the defendant, they would have voted for an acquittal.

No matter how you sold it, Humphrey was taking a huge risk. On face value alone, Humphrey’s argument against the backdrop of his life was a joke. However, he sat as patient and seemingly confident as an innocent man, while Watts talked his client through how he had first heard that Ashley killed Sandee. In an extremely low and perhaps effeminate voice (for which the SAO had to keep asking the court to make Humphrey speak up), he said it was a week after the murder. Seven days. Humphrey remembered this, he said, because he was with Ashley at David Abernathy’s house. Humphrey sat next to his new bride as Abernathy asked Ashley if she had his pistol. He wanted it back. Humphrey claimed to be “immediately shocked” and alarmed by this statement. It was then, at that moment, when he began to suspect that the woman he had married might have had something to do with Sandee’s murder. It was, according to Humphrey, an
aha
moment for him, when the murder began to make sense.

Humphrey’s answers became long, tedious, and winded. He spoke of details that shared little to no importance to the case, and he carried on and on at times, making hardly any sense at all. He blamed the mention of Tobe White as their alibi on Ashley. He talked about the entire time after the murder as though he learned new things every day. His account of the facts as the PPPD had uncovered them came across as pathetic and empty. According to Humphrey’s account, it was Ashley’s doing—all of it—from the beginning. After he found out, he went along in order to protect his wife, whom he desperately loved.

“Why didn’t you go to authorities?” Watts asked. It was a question that, obviously, needed to be answered if the jury was to believe Humphrey’s explanation.

“I just couldn’t,” Humphrey testified. “I couldn’t bring myself to do that to her. There was more to it than that. It was also people would joke about anything ever happening to Sandee because they knew (we had a lot—a lot of mutual friends), so people would make light sometimes, and they’d say things about something happening to her. And I would always tell people, and it was kind of lighthearted, but it was also legitimate—”

“Your Honor, I don’t think this is responsive. He’s relating hearsay,” Crow interrupted.

The judge allowed Humphrey to finish.

“So I would tell people,” Humphrey continued, “‘Don’t joke about anything happening to Sandee.’ I would say that quite often in front of Ashley. This was—this was my worst fear coming true. I didn’t”—he hesitated, almost as if he were going to dredge up a tear or two, but he probably thought it would come across as being over-the-top—“I didn’t believe that anybody would believe I was uninvolved completely, so I didn’t say anything.”

No fewer than four witnesses had testified for the state that Humphrey had routinely talked about the hope he had that Sandee Rozzo would be swept away by a tsunami or suddenly vanish from the face of the earth. If only she were gone, his life would be all better. More than that, the guy had told just about everyone he knew that his one major fear in life was going back to prison. Was he now expecting a jury to believe that he was
worried
about
jokes
being said regarding Sandee’s murder? His answers seemed to fall apart on common sense alone. Humphrey was coming across as a contradiction. He was saying whatever it was that supported his innocence, not necessarily thinking that he was being swallowed up by his own hubris.

He called Tobe White a liar.

He called Ashley a liar.

In fact, anybody who didn’t back up Humphrey’s story was out to get him and lying about nearly everything he did postmurder.

It was a conspiracy.

All against Tracey Humphrey.

The stories he told were so far removed from reality, and the truth as the facts had been uncovered by investigators, that it was a wonder Humphrey didn’t laugh or crack a smile while reciting them. He said, for example, that the reason Ashley torched her car was because she didn’t want to pay for it anymore. Instead of reneging on the loan, which David Abernathy had cosigned, she chose to torch it and collect the insurance. He said the idea that Tobe White received those flowers while in the hospital from someone named Locke was merely a coincidence. He’d had nothing to do with it. This, of course, after the SAO proved that Locke and Luck were once aliases that Humphrey had used.

He said he was reading the Bible a lot while in prison these days—and that Andre Talley learned the details of his case from reading the newspapers and then made up some things so he could argue later for a lighter sentence after coming forward. He failed to mention, however, that Talley had backed up just about every claim he had made by facts, sharing details with law enforcement that no one but Humphrey could have known.

Within only thirty minutes, Watts was finished. Humphrey was beginning to sound full of himself and, honestly, unbelievable. Pompous and arrogant were more like it, some later said. It seemed the guy wouldn’t take responsibility for
anything
—which many jurors tend to feel is a direct sign of guilt. No one is perfect. No one is totally inculpable. He was either totally innocent of every charge, or was the most naïve person on the face of the earth.

The court took a recess and was back in action at 3:00
P.M
.

Humphrey took his seat in the witness chair once again. This time he appeared to be a bit more fidgety as he put on his armor. It was time to dig his heels in and put a shine on all those lies. With any luck, the SAO would fall hard.

After a lengthy discussion among all the attorneys (with the jury not present) regarding what could be used, ASA Douglas Crow stood and approached Humphrey.

Crow mentioned how Humphrey had failed to reach out to police once he supposedly found out Ashley had murdered Sandee, quick to point out that Humphrey had had multiple opportunities to talk to the police and tell them what he knew, but he never did. This was not a man who was scared of being accused of a crime, Crow seemed to suggest with his line of questioning. This was a man who was as guilty as his wife. If Humphrey was so scared of going back to jail, in other words, why not toss Ashley under the bus? He had known her—what?—eight, nine months at the time.

Humphrey didn’t seem to have an answer for that.

In quite a contrast to his long-winded explanations on direct, Humphrey simply answered, “Yes, I did” and “No, I didn’t” to many of the ASA’s questions, depending on where Humphrey came in. Once in a while, he’d change it up and say, “That’s correct.” But rarely—if ever—did he consider adding any detail.

The absence of any elucidation to a question that is broad and open-ended seems, in and of itself, an indication that the witness is hiding something. Juries are well aware of this tactic. Human instinct encourages the mind to explain itself; while guilt pushes those feelings back, stuffing them away. The idea that Humphrey didn’t have anything to say when someone pointed a finger in his face and accused him of such an egregious crime was laughable—the guy had a history of threatening and intimidating people, not to mention having the final word on
any
subject.

The best cross-examinations allow the defendant to bury himself or herself. Good trial attorneys walk a witness down a road and stealthily steer the witness into a corner from which there is no escape. Crow was a master of this chess move.

“Did you tell [your wife] that you wanted harm to come to Sandee Rozzo?”

Humphrey thought about the question. “No, I did not.”

“Did you tell her you
disliked
Sandee Rozzo?”

“I”—Humphrey thought about it a bit more (where was the ASA going with this?)—“I…may have said that.”

“Did you dislike Sandee Rozzo?”

“On a whole, no.”

The back-and-forth momentum had a
Law & Order
feel to it, as if a bombshell were about to explode.

“So you would not have said that?”

“Not in that context, no.”

Before that set of questions, Crow had asked Humphrey if he had ever told
anyone
that he hated Sandee and wanted her dead.

Humphrey had answered no.

“Then where did your wife,” Crow asked smartly, “get the idea, if you know, that she was complying with your wishes or satisfying some desire of yours by killing [Sandee Rozzo]?”

Checkmate!

In short, this was Humphrey’s defense: Ashley acting as a Stepford wife, who had taken it upon herself to protect her man from a woman who was going to put him in prison for a decade, a loss that would be too much for her to bear, and so she took Sandee down, instead.

“I would not know that,” Humphrey answered.

As Crow continued with his cross, it was clear to anyone sitting in the courtroom, with even the slightest bit of trial experience, that Humphrey was in big trouble; that the guy had an answer for every possible question of his guilt. The fact that he had such an ironclad alibi on the night of the murder, so well documented—and had given Tobe White not only his Pizza Hut receipts, but a photograph of his cell phone records and other items to prove where he was, and what he was doing at the time of Sandee’s murder—seemed staged and premeditated.

The major problem with all of this, Crow so astutely made obvious, was that all of these items Humphrey had mentioned on direct were collected days
before
he supposedly knew that his wife had taken it upon herself to kill Sandee Rozzo. Humphrey had testified that he didn’t uncover his wife’s guilt until one week
after
the murder.