Kill For Me (35 page)

It got to the point where Humphrey would not admit to anything the state accused him of, regardless of how significant or insignificant.

By the time Crow finished and Humphrey’s team went in and asked a few redirect questions, the feeling in the courtroom became:
Is this guy actually serious? Does he think the courtroom is full of naïve nineteen-year-olds, like the immature young woman he coaxed into murdering Sandee Rozzo?

Fred Schaub summed up the SAO’s case rather cogently with the opening line of his closing. Holding up a photograph of Sandee Rozzo, staring at it with sincerity and sorrow, Schaub said: “This is not about a love triangle. This case isn’t about a scorned lover. This case isn’t about a girl who’s a killer and the puppet master who controlled her. This case is about Sandee. She was thirty-seven years of age, and she wanted her day in court. She wanted to go into a Hillsborough courthouse on August 4, 2003, as a victim in a case that [Humphrey] was accused of being in, and Sandee
never
got that opportunity.”

The gallery could take a deep, collective breath. Schaub had brought it all back to where the focus of any murder case
should be.

Joe McDermott knew he had a mountain to climb. Maybe the best way to approach this was to argue the law. So McDermott began with quite a different approach from Schaub. He talked about the minutia of the law, and how the charges against Humphrey played into the jury’s ultimate decision. It was the old “burden is on the state to prove guilt” argument that many a defense attorney uses when, honestly, he has little else. A wide swath of legal scholars and pundits will say that this argument generally comes from a defense attorney out of options, a lawyer with a client who has created so many obstacles that the only way around these is to attack the law itself.

“To wave a picture of Sandee Rozzo is emotional appeal,” McDermott said several minutes into his closing. “It is very unfortunate that she was killed. Very unfortunate that she died at the hands of Ashley Humphrey. But that’s not
evidence
of guilt on the part of Mr. Humphrey.”

Further along, McDermott focused on Humphrey’s escape from jail, which had been brought up several times by the state as another sign of his guilt. Innocent men don’t run. They face the music and fight for their freedom.

“The escape…is an embarrassment, of course. That’s an
escape,
however, and I think you can use your
own
common sense about that. Sometimes, if the barn door is open, the horse runs loose, but that doesn’t necessarily require you to think that this is an indication of guilt on the part of the defendant. It can point either which way. I would think that that issue is not connected with the homicide, just because he escaped.”

McDermott motioned for a mistrial.

Denied.

Soon after, the judge gave her instructions—which she referred to as “charges”—to the jury, and sent them on their way to deliberate.

A defendant’s innocence generally takes a jury some time to decide. There are usually arguments across the table and re-reading of the transcripts. Maybe questions for the judge. Undoubtedly, there is always one holdout, undeterred by the evidence, no matter how clear and open-and-shut it seems to be.

Guilt, on the other hand, backed up by the evidence, is obvious and easy to absorb and decide.

That said, the jury took all of two and a half hours to convict Humphrey—two hours and twenty-nine minutes of which they had probably spent twiddling their thumbs and talking about what they were going to do that weekend.

There was going to be no escaping justice for Humphrey any longer. His run from serving real time in prison was over. He had been so fearful of spending ten years in prison for allegedly raping and kidnapping and beating Sandee Rozzo that he had apparently overlooked the idea that first-degree murder could result in the death penalty or, at the least,
life
in prison. As smart as Humphrey thought he was, he was likely consumed with hate for an SAO that had seen to it that his worst fears were realized tenfold.

With her courage to face this monster in court, some had said after the verdict that Sandee Rozzo had essentially stopped a man from harming any more women. Sandee had, in effect, given her life for the sake of others. Sandee Rozzo was a hero. A martyr. And the verdict that the jury handed down in Humphrey’s case spoke to how much those men and women cared about Sandee’s memory and the loss suffered by her family, many of whom sat and cried during the reading of the verdict.

Humphrey bowed his head slightly, curled his lip—a habit that he had developed whenever that anger began to boil inside him—and shook his head slightly.

The jury was now going to make a sentence recommendation, which the judge, who had the ultimate call, would take “great weight” with in making her decision.

It was just after 5:30
P.M
., Friday, February 24, 2006, when the jury announced its verdict. The courthouse was swirling with commotion and emotion. On Monday, when the jury returned, the talk would be on whether they would recommend the death penalty, which many believed Humphrey deserved, or life, which some thought would be a far harsher sentence for a man who had despised the idea of prison so much.

By Monday morning, February 27, 2006, the jury had come back and made a recommendation of life, sparing Humphrey for the moment. The judge, of course, could overrule the jury’s decision.

That afternoon, as news broke of the jury’s recommendation, Candis Maines was on one of the local news websites discussing her feelings. Candis had been one of Humphrey’s victims. She knew how nasty and violent and controlling and evil this man could be. In a post at 3:29
P.M
., Candis spoke of how she had been a witness for the SAO, knew Humphrey personally, and was happy to see that the jury had convicted him. In her opinion, he was “as guilty as they come.” She claimed Humphrey had “orchestrated” Sandee’s murder “from the start.” She thought his crimes were deserving of the death penalty, but something told her he wasn’t going to get it. Candis also said something that had been on a lot of minds as the trial came to a conclusion, and yet no one had articulated it as well. It is a saying that rings true in any murder case, essentially. She was moved by the fact that Sandee’s family—especially her teenage daughter—would never again get to hear Sandee’s voice, see her smile, hold her close, or celebrate birthdays and weddings. Sandee would never see her daughter off for the senior prom, watch her graduate from high school, or hold her grandchildren. But Humphrey would continue living. It seemed unfair and out of balance with the natural world.

The judge affirmed the jury’s recommendation: life.

“If we gave him death,” one juror said outside the courtroom after the sentencing, “we would have given him what he wanted.”

Pinellas circuit judge Nancy Moate Ley didn’t have a lot to say to Humphrey. “The irony of this, of course,” she lamented passionately, “is the murder has resulted in a much longer prison sentence than the ten years.”

Sandra Poole, Sandee Rozzo’s mother, was happy to see that Humphrey was going to spend the rest of his natural life—plus an
additional
fifteen years for the escape—behind bars.

“I think it’s better than him getting the death penalty,” Sandra Poole told me, “because he’s going to suffer every day and think about what he did every day.”

Humphrey, with that red face of rage that many had come to know so well, looked as though he wanted to jump out of his chair and strangle the judge as she commented on his sentence, but he kept his composure.

Ashley Humphrey got her twenty-five years, as promised, and will serve day for day, no time off for good behavior.

Tobe White went to see Ashley after she had been sentenced. The meeting had been long overdue. Tobe had known for some time that she needed to see Ashley once more. There were genuine feelings of unconditional love between the women that could not be denied.

“I just had to see her,” Tobe recalled.

Tobe held her expectations low. She didn’t want to walk in there with the idea that Ashley was going to be redeemed and reformed. She wanted to keep an open mind.

“I probably wouldn’t get the answers I wanted,” Tobe said, “but I needed to see if she could at least tell me
what
could make her do this.”

Tobe had been through so much with Ashley and Humphrey. Now that it was over, she felt perhaps Ashley would want to come clean. It was clear to Tobe that Ashley had been through a rough childhood, and that life had skewed the wiring in her head, setting in motion the idea that violence was one way to solve problems. It wasn’t necessarily an inherent evil inside Ashley’s heart, Tobe felt, although some would later argue that it took the dark soul of a malicious person to murder another human being at point-blank range, regardless of the motivating factors behind it. But Tobe never thought about things as being black and white; there was definitely a gray area to Ashley. She knew Humphrey had picked up on Ashley’s vulnerabilities and, in many ways, triggered that wiring that was already in place.

But how,
Tobe wondered as she trekked down that hallway, steel doors closing behind her,
if a person doesn’t have evil in her, how can she just walk up to somebody, take a gun, and pull the trigger
eight
times?

Tobe needed an answer. There was more to it than a wizard calling the shots from behind the curtain.

They sat across from each other. As they talked, Tobe never got an answer to her burning questions. And perhaps she never would. Still, Ashley said something that shocked Tobe more than anything, but also told her where Ashley was in her healing.

“One of the reasons Ashley told me that she had turned and ended up testifying against Tracey was that [police had told her] that he was a homosexual, and that he had been living with a guy before she met him.”

This revelation had upset Ashley to the point that she wanted to “get him back,” Tobe said. Ashley had been lied to all that time they were together. She truly felt betrayed, like a mark, as though she had been entirely used to fulfill a wish that Humphrey had of Sandee’s demise. In effect, here was, in Ashley’s mind, just one more person in her life who had never loved her.

“That was what finally convinced her,” Tobe recalled, “to testify against him—the fact that he was allegedly gay. She said something like, ‘What I thought I always had with him was not true,’ so there was no reason to protect him anymore.”

I wrote to Tracey Humphrey in March 2009. He responded quickly and delightfully. There is no mistaking Humphrey’s handwriting; his printing is clear and precise and deliberate. Why use this adjective “deliberate”?

Well, let me get to the letter and my response, and you will understand why “deliberate” is the perfect way to describe this man, his motives, and actions—even three years after he had been found guilty of first-degree murder.

In part, in that first letter, I wrote:

I should say this is common language I use to approach criminals in prison. Part of my goal when doing these books is to allow people to tell their own stories—convicted murderer, neighbor, friend, family member, cop, etc. I make this same offer to every perpetrator in every book I write.

Humphrey said he was “flattered” to hear from me. He called me an “esteemed investigative journalist” who had given him “hope.” He sensed I was “honest” and would “tell the truth” instead of “capital[izing] on the hype.”

If he would have stopped there,
I thought while reading his letter for a second time after I had finished writing the book,
well, maybe we could have gotten somewhere.

But he carried on, as he had so many times in the past with so many other people. Humphrey broke into a diatribe next, explaining how others in the media had made him promises but reneged. He chided some of my friends in television at Jupiter Entertainment who had covered the case for Oxygen’s
Snapped,
accusations I knew to be totally untrue and unfounded, before saying he was going to be suing
48 Hours,
which, according to him,
also
lied.

Reading this again later, I could hear the “How can I manipulate Phelps?” wheels spinning in this guy’s head as he wrote. It was so obvious, especially after how much I had learned about him by then. Humphrey was quite noticeably looking at this opportunity not as a chance to tell his side of the story, but as just one more way to try to control the dire situation that had become his life story.

He said he knew convicts who had published books. Four, to be exact. He said he was “disheartened” to hear of my negativity regarding his chances of publishing his own book on his case. He demanded to know who had told me of his plan to write a book, in the first place. He asked me who it was that I had spoken to (from his case) and whom I had planned on speaking to. He had the nerve to write that if I
wasn’t upfront and honest
with him, he did not want to associate with me or correspond any longer.

(My eyes bulged out of my skull as I read that part.)

From there, he went into his claims of everyone lying to keep him in prison, before spending one hundred words or more describing the conditions that he demanded in order to proceed with me. He suggested we write the book together. He wrote that he had a
fictional story based on actual events
that he wanted to sell to me. He said he knew of ways to get ahold of the money he needed to launch his appeal. The sale and coauthoring job were ways for him to get that money, apparently.

It wasn’t until about two-thirds of the way into the letter that Humphrey used an entire paragraph to say, in just four words, that he was
innocent
. No other explanation about this. Just that he was
innocent.
It came across as an afterthought.

He wanted to know if my publisher and/or I was interested in buying his fictional story, for which we (my publisher and I) would then, as a bonus, get his
true story for free.
A package deal, I guess.

The truth was going to be told, he suggested. He hoped that it would be me who told it. Like thousands of other inmates across this vast and great United States, he wrote how he had
unwaivoring
[his misspelling]
confidence
that his appeal would
reveal
his
innocence.

He signed that first letter with an
X.

Now, onto my response and Humphrey’s second letter. In responding to his first letter, I wrote back, in part:

In his first letter to me, Humphrey had droned on about how the media had been all over him for interviews and that there was still a tremendous amount of public interest in his case. In response to that, I wrote:

Humphrey did not like the tone of my letter, obviously, or the candidness in my truth. I got his response almost as quick as he could send it.

He addressed his letter to the…
Egomaniac.
He wrote he wasn’t going to
waste [his] time writing
back to me until he was certain I was
about done with [my] little book project.
But then followed the line by noting that he was
not completely heartless,
so he decided to warn me about a few things before I got too far into the writing process.

Humphrey seemed to be all excited to prove me wrong where my
dumbass comment,
he wrote, regarding no continued media interest was concerned. I could almost picture him smiling and licking the tip of his pencil before putting it to paper. He wrote,
Guess what, asshole…
before explaining to me that another television show had contacted him for an interview. It was Paula Zahn’s new Investigation Discovery channel series, which had begun filming thirteen episodes that summer; they had called me, too.

A cable television show is, apparently, to Tracey Humphrey, his idea of “continued media interest.” I was speaking of the big boys, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS,
Dateline, 48 Hours
,
Primetime,
all of whom had come and gone.

So, Mr. Fucking-Know-It-All,
he wrote before telling me how wrong I was, perhaps relishing the limelight his ego was sunbathing in as visions of Paula Zahn and her crew danced in his head.

He called me a
“jerk-off”
next and then proceeded to write that he had a copyright on his name and
all variations of it,
along with his
real-legal name, too
—whatever the heck that meant. He wrote he had a
secured interest lien on anything related
to him, including photos, videos, and recordings, along with any letters he wrote. All of this, he said, was
governmentally registered
by the
Secretary of State and Secretary of Treasury.
He said he was going to sue me, as he had already sued several others for violating these laws. Fifty thousand dollars, he claimed, per incident, would be the fine, awarded to him, of course. He wrote
not to try
him. But then,
on second thought,
he wrote,
go ahead.

I was a
“dipshit.”
He mocked the last part of my letter to him about sleeping on things, etc. He claimed that I had probably wanted to
take back [my] shit headed remarks
by now. He threatened to
eat [me] alive,
signing the letter,
Tracey Luck Humphrey; Milligan, SPC.

The pure anger at not being in control of his life any longer utterly oozed throughout. The pathetic nature of who Humphrey had become in the years since being sentenced for Sandee Rozzo’s murder was there in every word he wrote. Here was a man who had not learned a thing from the mistakes of his life, but instead chose to wallow in self-preservation, not wanting to man up to his responsibilities, with a belief, undoubtedly, that he would one day walk out of prison a free man.

It’s sad, actually.

I was never able to get to the bottom of why Humphrey turned out the way he did; and I apologize to my readers for not being able to do that.
What is it,
I often thought as I wrote this book,
that happened to this guy in life to lead him down this destructive, evil path?
My hope in writing to Humphrey was that he would answer that question and many more. No one close to him would talk to me. I have my own theory, which was based on my investigation, but it will have to stay with me for now.

I never wrote back to Humphrey after that scathing letter I received. I didn’t see the point, or find any value my readers would gain by such a thing.

It is obvious who Tracey Humphrey is today, years after his crimes. The same person he has always been, only now he has been hardened by more time behind bars.

I wrote to Ashley Humphrey two times, but I received no response. I hear from various sources that she is deeply religious and wants to be left alone to work through the wrongs of her life. Apparently, this does not come into play where television is concerned, because Ashley has agreed to take part in several television interviews since my writing to her.

Whatever the case and wherever she is inside her head today, be it interested in serving vanity and ego or redeeming a life of sin, I believe Ashley has a future beyond prison, if she chooses the right path now. If she looks deep into herself while in prison for the next twenty-two years, I think Ashley can get out and achieve the goals she sets, and will live a productive life.

Ashley wanted someone to love her unconditionally and take care of her. In my opinion, she walked into the arms of the Devil and sold her soul.

Maybe someday she will find that love and the happiness she so much desires.

Humphrey filed an appeal on February 22, 2008. The gist of it was built around the cell phone records introduced at trial by the SAO. Humphrey’s argument was that there was no possible way to discern the actual substance of the conversations, and therefore the evidence should not have been allowed into trial.

Weak doesn’t begin to describe this argument. Nowhere in the appeal did it mention that Ashley Humphrey testified that the calls had, in fact, been between her and Humphrey. Ashley, essentially, validated the calls and proved Humphrey had made them.

Case closed.

Humphrey’s conviction was later affirmed by the Second District Court of Appeals, whose decision is the final word.

“[Humphrey] has exhausted his direct appeal rights,” one of my sources close to the appeals process and the court system in Florida’s Second District told me as I was finishing the book. “However, he can attack the verdict via claims of incompetence of counsel and any other innovative concepts. [But] they are not very successful.”

Humphrey didn’t want to spend ten years in prison—it’s clear that this is why he killed Sandee Lee Rozzo.

“The fact of the matter is,” a source inside the legal system in Florida added, “Humphrey could have pleaded down that ten-year sentence for sexually assaulting and kidnapping Sandee Rozzo to about five and—with good behavior—been out in just over four years.”

Forty-eight months of which would have come and gone by now.

In August 2009, Sandra Poole wrote to Ashley Humphrey. It had been six years by then since Ashley had taken her daughter’s life, and Sandra believed it was time to see about her own peace of mind. Forgive and forget, Sandra wasn’t so sure she could manage; but a letter laying out her feelings would suffice for the time being.

In the letter, which Sandra shared with me, she let it all out. She talked about what had been an “agonizing” six years since Sandee has been taken away from the family. She mentioned how the phone call in the early hours of July 6, 2003, was something she would never forget. That undenying heart-pounding moment when she knew something terrible had happened. She claimed her heart actually had stopped beating for a second or more.

She asked Ashley the very same question we all might be asking ourselves regarding the letter: Why now? Why, after six years, was Sandra Poole so concerned with reaching out to the woman who had murdered her daughter “in cold blood”?

Apparently, Sandra had heard that Ashley was flaunting herself around the prison as some sort of celebrity, telling all who might listen that she had been forgiven for her crimes. Sandra wanted to know, number one, if this was true, and, if so, by whom had she been forgiven? After all, she wrote in all capitals,
I WILL NEVER FORGIVE YOU…,
then added,
get a grip…you heartless woman.