15
In April 2005, Barbara sought treatment at a sports medicine and orthopedic surgery center in Atlanta for pain and weakness of her left forearm as a result of the Memorial Day, 2004, auto accident in which she fractured her left forearm and wrist. The fracture did not mend, and surgery followed on November 30, 2004. After removal of the surgical hardware, Barbara had spent the next five months in a cast.
In addition, Barbara had undergone two cervical fusions, and as a result of all her injuries, surgeries, and lingering problems, during her visit to the surgery center she reported pain that continually woke her up at night. There was constant nagging pain in her left arm and wrist, she said, with weakness and limitations to her wrist motion.
Her neurologic exam confirmed decreased muscle strength in her left forearm musculature, wrist, and decreased grip strength. There were significant limitations in her wrist motion, and there was atrophy noted in the muscles of her left forearm and left hand.
The examining physician reported to Barbara that there was evidence of left median nerve entrapment in the elbow, and exploratory surgery might be needed, and also reported his findings to her treating surgeon and to the doctor who had originally referred her to the clinic for examination.
Barbara’s chronic pain and the medication it required was likely contributing to her increasingly impaired judgment.
16
Barbara Roberts and Bob Schiess were in Bridge City, Texas, to attend Barbara’s mother’s funeral while much of the investigation into Darlene’s murder was beginning to come together. Barbara’s mother had passed away on April 10, 2006, literally dying of a heart attack within minutes of learning that her daughter’s ex-husband’s current wife had been killed, and the Comeaux family had been devastated by such a shocking and unexpected loss. Barbara and Schiess arrived at the funeral home in Bridge City, Texas, and Barbara’s nephew, Jeremy Jay Thomas, noticed that his aunt had shown up in old blue jeans and a T-shirt, which he thought was odd.
“Barbara didn’t go anywhere unless she was dressed up nice,” he said. She and Schiess had a rental car, which her nephew thought they had probably gotten at the Houston Intercontinental Airport when they had arrived in Texas.
“I noticed that Barbara had two black eyes that appeared to be a couple of days old,” Thomas said. “I asked her what happened to her face and she told me she was learning to rollerblade and fell, face-first, into the end of a culvert.”
Thomas didn’t believe that statement for a couple of reasons, he told the authorities. First, the injuries didn’t appear consistent to him with striking a concrete culvert or even a roadway. Second, Barbara had experienced some serious medical problems in the past, in addition to the 2004 car crash when she’d had to be Life-Flighted. Thomas, a deputy sheriff in Texas, based his opinion of the injuries because of his experience on the job as an accident investigator for the Harris County Sheriff’s Office (HCSO). He thought that perhaps Barbara and Schiess had gotten into a fight, but said that he’d mentioned nothing to her about it because there appeared to be no problems at the time. His aunt didn’t seem to be in any danger from Schiess, and they were, after all, gathered for the funeral of Irene Comeaux.
Barbara and Schiess were planning to stay in a nearby hotel, and since she and her nephew had always been close, she arranged for him and his wife to have a room there also—all of which was paid for by Schiess. Later, as Barbara and Thomas were walking around at the funeral home looking at the flowers that had been sent there for her mother’s services, she found a card on one arrangement that said it had been sent by Vernon.
“Barbara looked at it, pointed it out, and said, ‘Isn’t this so sweet? He always loved Mama, and a couple of days after his wife is murdered, he still took time to send flowers to the funeral home for her.’”
Barbara had ordered and paid for the flowers at Wayside Florist herself, saying that Vernon had asked her to do so, but Vernon would later claim that he had never had a discussion with Barbara during which he asked Barbara to order flowers on his behalf or told her what to put on the card.
During that night, several of the family members were discussing Darlene’s murder.
“Everyone knew that Barbara was still in love with Vernon, to the point of almost stalking him,” Thomas said. “Other family members had told me that she would send Vernon e-mails saying that she had found God, and he would want her back, and that she wanted him to be happy.”
On the following day, when the funeral services were held, Schiess did not attend; Barbara said he was supposedly too sick to go. After the funeral, Barbara asked if they could come and spend some time with her nephew and his family, and after staying in Beaumont a couple of days, they arrived at Thomas’s home on April 17. That night, during a conversation about hunting, Thomas’s wife was telling Barbara that she had gone deer hunting and shot her first deer. When describing how they had tracked the blood trail to find the deer, Barbara turned pale and said she’d rather not talk about it because it made her sick to her stomach.
Since several of Barbara’s family were hunters and the whole family fished, it sounded strange to her nephew. Barbara had been around hospitals quite a bit, also, and it was odd that she would be squeamish about blood or about shooting a deer.
Barbara began talking that evening about what she had heard about Darlene’s murder in the newspapers and on TV, and Barbara said that whoever had murdered Darlene had apparently robbed her because they stole all her grocery bags.
“That’s when I told her that whoever did that was stupid to kill someone for groceries, and to take the groceries, because that bumped it up from a murder to a capital murder, and that was a death penalty–eligible case.”
Barbara got really quiet when her nephew told her that, he said.
The following day, after a spa day for the ladies, the two couples went to a restaurant for dinner. The next morning, Barbara and Schiess left early for the airport. After they left, Thomas called his father and told him that he had a gut feeling that maybe his aunt Barbara had something to do with Darlene’s death. His father told him that he had the same impression, and said that he had talked to some of the investigators on the case by phone. When Thomas called Investigator Bo Jolly, he learned that there had already been some major pieces of incriminating evidence pointing to Barbara and Schiess, an arrest was imminent, and there was a “pretty air-tight” case against both of them.
17
In almost all police investigations, a veritable mountain of tedious detail paperwork is involved, far more than the public might expect. As soon as witnesses had reported a suspicious late-model black Dodge Dakota pickup seen in the area when Darlene Roberts was murdered, the search for the truck was on. Thousands of Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) records from both Alabama and Georgia were searched for pickups matching the description of the one that had been seen by several of the witnesses. Investigators were looking for any trucks of a similar type that were registered to anyone who was in any way associated with Darlene Roberts. It took days for the search to begin narrowing down, but it finally paid off, with the investigators locating a 1999 black Dodge Dakota pickup registered in Conyers, Georgia, to Robert John Schiess III. Special Agent (SA) Brent Cameron Thomas, from the Alabama Bureau of Investigation (ABI), had been involved in the case from the start, interviewing and collecting evidence in Georgia. He quickly confirmed that Schiess was currently residing at an apartment complex in Conyers.
Authorities had already learned from both Vernon Roberts and some of Barbara’s family members, who suspected Barbara’s possible involvement in Darlene’s murder, that Schiess and Barbara were at that time in Texas. They had flown there to attend the April 13 funeral of Barbara’s mother and would be flying back into the Atlanta airport soon. A photo lineup was quickly assembled and was shown to the three witnesses who had reported seeing a gray-haired man with the black truck, and they each independently identified Schiess as the man they had seen that day.
The witnesses had also described a white female in the truck with him. When a photo of Barbara Roberts was shown to the witnesses, they all said they believed she was the woman they had seen, and one man identified her as the woman he saw fighting with Schiess on the side of the road. Another of the witnesses had seen her in the truck, red-faced and crying.
An additional new witness had come forward with more information on the black truck. On April 13, two ABI investigators, Jason Brown and Brent Thomas, along with Cherokee County sheriff’s investigator Mark Hicks, interviewed Leah Marie Stoker at her home on County Road 182. She told the officers that she had seen a black Dodge pickup truck, with the hard bed cover raised, on County Road 182, near its intersection with County Road 941, on April 6. Stoker told the officers that she had never seen that truck in the area previously.
The ABI had read the prescription on the broken pair of glasses found near the pond and SA Thomas began checking with optometrists in the Conyers area to see if they could locate the one that Barbara used. When Pearle Vision in Conyers confirmed that Barbara was a customer, Investigator Bo Jolly and SA Thomas obtained a subpoena for Barbara’s records and traveled to Conyers on April 18 to get confirmation that the broken glasses belonged to her.
The trip to Pearle Vision yielded a bonus: When the officers got there, the staff at Pearle told them that Barbara had contacted them on April 7, the day following the murder, to order new contact lenses and glasses. She wanted to order a new eyeglass frame and lenses under warranty, and told them that she only had one side of the frame and one lens.
Andrea Knight, the Pearle employee who took Barbara’s phone call, told her both lenses would be needed in order to cover her under the warranty. When she said she didn’t have the nosepiece, the lost lens, and the missing half of the glasses, Knight asked her if she knew where they were, or had any piece that they could cover under warranty.
“She said that she did not,” Knight reported, “then she started stuttering and getting very upset with me about it. She then went on about having to have them right away, and if we could start on them as soon as possible.”
Knight told Barbara that Pearle would need payment over the phone, or she would need to come in to pay.
“She told me she’d been sick with a headache and stomach problems, so I told her, no problem, we would get the lens started without her. We went over the lens options, then she needed to order contacts. She was starting to get upset with me because she said it was taking too much of her time.”
Knight said that she and Barbara were on the phone for almost forty minutes.
“Once we got the glasses and contacts ordered, she gave me a MasterCard number,” Knight said. “I went to enter the card through, and it declined. I called her right back within two minutes, and she sounded like she was sleeping.”
Knight told Barbara about the card, and she gave her another MasterCard number, which processed through. The next day, Knight had to call Barbara back about what color she wanted her Transitions lenses to be.
“She told me that she wanted to refund the frame and use her boyfriend’s black Silhouette frame, to go with gray lenses. I called her a few days later to let her know her lenses were here and she needed to pick out a new frame or bring us one to use. She said that her mom had died and that she and her boyfriend were in Texas, and said she would be back in a couple of days to get her lens order.”
Barbara then arranged for Knight to ship the new contact lenses overnight to her in Texas.
After taking Knight’s statement, Jolly and Thomas showed her the broken glasses that had been recovered at the crime scene. She and another employee, Danielle Lyn Anderson, positively identified them as being the same pair of eyeglasses that had earlier been made to order at the Conyers Pearle Vision for their customer Barbara Ann Roberts.
18
With a vital piece of evidence now positively placing Barbara Roberts at the scene of Darlene Roberts’s murder, the investigators quickly began the process of obtaining search warrants for the apartment of Bob Schiess in Conyers, Georgia. They had learned that Schiess and Barbara had been in Texas for Barbara’s mother’s funeral and were due to fly home on the following day, so there was no time to lose. Since the officers felt that they had ample justification to request warrants, they immediately presented affidavits and applications for a search warrant in the Magistrate Court of Rockdale County, Georgia.
Special Agent Brian Johnston, of the GBI, prepared the paperwork after being assigned to assist SA Thomas, of the ABI, in the investigation of Darlene Roberts’s murder. In presenting his credentials as part of the warrant application, SA Johnston stated he had spent over ten years in law enforcement and had been with the GBI for over five years. He also gave Thomas’s credentials as part of the warrant, stating that the ABI special agent had been employed by the Alabama Department of Public Safety (ADPS) since 1997. Thomas, Johnston said, was currently assigned to the ABI Area II, which covered Cherokee County, Alabama, and had been involved in the murder investigation since its onset, and had provided the pertinent facts and information to justify the obtaining of the warrant.
Johnston began by outlining the circumstances and details of the murder of Darlene Roberts, including a description of the green plastic film found wrapped around her neck and the white cotton gauze strips lying nearby at the scene. He also told of the three witnesses who had observed the black Dodge Dakota pickup, with a bed cover, in the immediate area of the crime scene, near the time of the murder, and the man and woman they had seen with the truck and had subsequently identified from photo lineups as Robert John Schiess III and Barbara Ann Roberts.
The murder weapon, Johnston said in his warrant application, was a 12-gauge shotgun, which had not yet been recovered, and also missing was Darlene Roberts’s brown Rosetti viscose purse and her cell phone.
The piece of broken eyeglass frame found at the scene was described, as was the phone call Barbara Roberts made on April 7 to reorder her eyeglasses from Pearle Vision in Conyers, Georgia. She told the clerk that she had broken her glasses and only had the right lens and right arm remaining. The warrant application described how SA Thomas presented the left lens, arm, and nosepiece recovered at the crime scene to the Pearle lab tech, who identified them as being the same eyeglasses that had been sold to Barbara Roberts from that store.
The investigators, SA Johnston said, had determined that Schiess and Barbara were currently living on St. Clair Drive, Conyers, Georgia, in the Lake St. James Apartment Homes. Johnston said that based on the information outlined in the warrant application, he believed there was probable likelihood of finding additional evidence within the residence, specifically the missing shotgun, purse, and cell phone, along with additional amounts of green-tinted stretch wrap, cotton gauze, and the 1999 Dodge Dakota pickup truck.
The warrant was approved and granted, and the officers moved quickly to conduct a thorough search of the apartment before Schiess and Barbara were due to arrive at the airport on their return flight from Texas. Investigators headed at top speed to the Lake St. James Apartment Homes and began what would prove to be a very productive search, placing both Barbara Ann Roberts and Robert John Schiess III even more positively at the scene of the murder of Darlene Roberts.
Apartment number 714 was clearly marked with its numbers on the front door. It was located in building seven on the ground level, closest to building six. The officers entered the complex at the second gated entrance, located on St. Clair Drive, and went quickly to the correct residence.
On entering the apartment, the officers saw there were many indications that Schiess and Barbara had packed hurriedly when they left for Texas. Clothing, papers, and open suitcases were lying around on the bed and sofa, and one suitcase held some items that were wrapped together in green plastic stretch film, which appeared to be consistent with the green plastic film wrapped around Darlene Roberts’s neck.
Officers also found the top of a box that had held a collapsible pistol grip butt stock, which included a free tactical butt pad. The picture shown on the box was, again, consistent with the butt stock pad that was recovered from the floorboard of Darlene Roberts’s vehicle.
A digital camera found in the apartment held another key piece of evidence. The last picture on the memory card was a photo of Barbara, which she appeared to have taken of herself in the bathroom mirror of the apartment. It showed Barbara with two black eyes and a cut across the bridge of her nose. The investigators had already learned from Barbara’s nephew, a deputy sheriff and an experienced accident investigator in Texas, that Barbara had arrived in Texas for her mother’s funeral with black eyes and a cut on her nose. He reported that due to his experience in dealing with traumatic injuries, he believed that his aunt’s cut and bruises were consistent with someone who had been hit with a scope while firing a weapon. Barbara had told her family members that she had injured herself when she took a fall while rollerblading, but her nephew had found that hard to believe. Barbara had been involved in two serious traffic accidents in previous years, he had told them, and, as a result, she was disabled.
The investigators found two new pairs of Rollerblades in the apartment, both still in their boxes and appearing to have been unused. They also found the package for a Weaver scope base for a Mossberg shotgun, and inside the package was an instruction booklet for a Tasco Red Dot optical sight.
Among the large amount of paperwork in the apartment were receipts for a Mossberg 500, serial number
R624708,
12-gauge shotgun, purchased on November 7, 2005, from Piedmont Outfitters, located in Covington, Georgia. Piedmont Outfitters also carried in stock the R10 shotgun shells, the same type as those that had been recovered at the crime scene, and the collapsible stock and Tasco optical sight. The shotgun and its accessories, however, were nowhere to be found in the apartment. And neither was the missing purse and cell phone belonging to Darlene Roberts. The black Dodge Dakota pickup truck was not parked at the apartment, nor was it parked anywhere else at the apartment complex.
One of the most damning pieces of evidence recovered during the search was a group of records showing that Schiess had received shooting lessons from the South River Gun Club, based in Conyers. He had paid $395.70 for the lessons on February 27, 2006.
With so much incriminating evidence found in the suspects’ apartment, Cherokee County, Alabama, authorities quickly obtained arrest warrants for Barbara Ann Roberts and Robert John Schiess III and faxed them to the GBI. The investigators had already received the date and time of the couple’s scheduled flight from Texas back to Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. As soon as their plane landed, officers boarded before the passengers began to deplane. They hurried down the aisle, shoving some of the passengers out of their way in their haste to reach Barbara and Schiess and arrest them before they had time to react. The woman sitting next to the aisle beside Schiess was yanked unceremoniously to her feet and pulled out into the aisle. Schiess and Barbara were handcuffed, read their rights, and hustled out of the plane, through the airport, and to the Rockdale County Sheriff’s Office (RCSO).
Once there, Schiess never once uttered a word, refusing to make any statement of any sort without an attorney present. On the other hand, Barbara didn’t wait for her attorney, Steve Lanier, to show up. He had spoken with her by phone before the pair had left the Texas airport, and he had advised her not to give any statements, telling her he would be in touch with her the following morning. She and Schiess had called Lanier because they claimed they had heard some of the details of the murder from Barbara’s family, and they expected that investigators would want to talk to them. Instead of waiting for Lanier, however, Barbara was frightened and disoriented, and she did not remember the importance of having counsel present when any statements were made. She began talking to the investigators without benefit of counsel, making the first of many long, rambling, and highly incriminating statements and admissions, which ultimately would seal her fate.