20
At 6:30
P.M.
, on April 19, Barbara Roberts was interviewed for the first time concerning her knowledge of the murder of Darlene Roberts and her possible role in that murder.
A large group of agents and investigators from both Georgia and Alabama had assembled in a room adjacent to the interview room so that they could listen to and view the questioning session. ABI agent Jason Brown, Cherokee County investigator Bo Jolly, and GBI agents Carter Brank, Jack Vickery, Wesley Horney, Boykin Jones, and Brian Johnston packed into the observation room, while ABI agent Brent Thomas and Cherokee County investigator Mark Hicks conducted the interview. For reasons not stated, this initial questioning session was neither filmed nor recorded, and the report was written from the officers’ notes.
After being read her rights and signing a rights waiver, Barbara began to talk. And talk, and talk.
On April 6, 2006, the day of the murder of Darlene Roberts, Barbara said, she drove her Buick Riviera to Rome, Georgia, in the afternoon, then went to the South Trust Bank. She claimed that she learned about Darlene’s murder on the day of Darlene’s funeral. When she was asked if she knew the whereabouts of the black pickup truck belonging to Schiess, she replied, “I have no idea.”
The officers then showed her the pair of broken eyeglasses, and she claimed she did not know if they were hers or not. She had broken her pair, she claimed, by trying to in-line skate, and she said she had called Pearle Vision to have them replaced.
When she was asked if she had ever fired a shotgun, Barbara told the investigators that she could not hold or fire a shotgun because of injuries she had received in an automobile accident. As the questions became more and more direct, Barbara was asked if she had ever been in the field where Darlene was murdered. She denied that, but admitted that she had talked to Vernon Roberts on the phone that afternoon, and said they had talked about his daughter, Angela, and places that she might stay in Georgia.
When asked if her fingerprints would be on any of the shotgun shells that were found at the scene, she said they would not, because she was not strong enough to load the shells in the shotgun. That statement cast a bad light on her earlier claim never to have been at the scene, and Barbara said that she was not sure if she needed to talk to an attorney or not.
That put an end to the questions for the time being, while Barbara decided if she wanted an attorney, but after a few moments, she decided to continue talking. Since she had contradicted herself, and now seemed to be acknowledging that she had indeed been at the murder scene, the admissions began coming more frequently.
Barbara continued to claim that she really didn’t know where the pickup truck was located, but she then said that she and Schiess did not go back to her house after the murder. She admitted that she was at the scene of the crime, but she said that she did not kill Darlene. She didn’t want to be there at the murder location, she said, and claimed to be afraid for Schiess to find out that she had talked to law enforcement. Barbara asked the officers if she would still be charged with murder if she cooperated with their investigation.
There should not be anything at the murder scene with her fingerprints on it, Barbara told the officers, then contradicted her earlier statements once again by saying that she did not know the name of the storage buildings where Schiess had taken the Dodge Dakota pickup, but she would lead law enforcement to the location.
Barbara admitted that she was afraid of Schiess, who had anger management problems, she claimed.
“He starts drinking as soon as he gets up in the morning and doesn’t stop,” she told the officers. She also said she was afraid he would not be able to see his children anymore.
When the questioning turned toward the motive for the murder, Barbara said that in October 2005, Darlene had to go on a business trip to Texas. While she was out of town, Barbara said she went to visit Vernon Roberts at home and had sex with him while she was there. Later, she confessed to Schiess that she’d had sex with Vernon, and Schiess became furious. Barbara said that when she and Schiess went to Cherokee County on April 6, she thought Schiess was only going to talk to Darlene, but soon learned differently. His real plan, she said, was to have sex with Darlene to repay Vernon for committing adultery with Barbara.
The questioning had begun to more closely resemble a narrative at this point, with Barbara doing most of the talking. She had definitely warmed to her subject, and the details flowed freely as a picture of her version of the events of April 6 began to emerge.
Barbara admitted that she and Schiess had gone to Cherokee County, Alabama, on April 6, in his black Dodge Dakota pickup truck, stopping on County Road 941, only a short distance from Vernon and Darlene Roberts’s residence. They pulled off on the left side of the road in front of a blue pasture gate. Schiess got out and raised the hood of the truck to make it look as though they were having trouble and had broken down beside the road, needing help.
When Darlene drove up to where they were stopped, Barbara said, Schiess waved for her to stop and Darlene pulled up to see if she could help him. According to Barbara, Schiess then pulled Darlene out of the car and made her lie facedown on the ground. He tried to use plastic cable ties to secure her hands, but he could not get them to work. Barbara said that Schiess then took some heavy cotton gauze to tie Darlene’s hands and feet, then stuck some rolled-up gauze in her mouth. She said that he then used some of the green-tinted stretch wrap, wrapped around her head, to hold the gauze in place. When asked about where the shotgun was at this point, Barbara claimed that Schiess had it with him.
“I was freaking out at that point,” Barbara said. “I thought that he was only going to talk to her.”
Darlene then managed to work free of her bindings and jumped up and began to run into the pasture, and Schiess made Barbara get into Darlene’s vehicle with him, she said. They drove into the pasture after Darlene, who ran down the fence line away from where her vehicle had been parked, until she got close to the back of the pasture and another fence.
Barbara said she and Schiess followed Darlene when she turned and started running toward the pond in the pasture. Darlene ran into the pond, then ran along the edge of the pond until she got to a place where some tall grass was growing along the edge. Barbara told the officers that Darlene lay down in the water to hide behind the grass, but Schiess followed her, pointed the shotgun at her, and shot her three times, point-blank, as she lay facedown in the pond.
“I was really freaking out,” Barbara claimed, and said that Schiess hit her in the face with the stock of the shotgun, trying to quiet her and breaking her glasses in the process.
After the shooting, Barbara said, she couldn’t remember where they had parked Darlene’s vehicle. She remembered that she and Schiess got back into his truck and started driving back to Georgia. They threw Darlene’s cell phone out the window of the truck somewhere on the side of the road along the way, and Barbara said that she threw Darlene’s purse into a Dumpster behind a Texaco station in Rome, Georgia. The shotgun, she claimed, had been thrown into the Etowah River, on US 411 and Georgia Highway 20, as she and Schiess drove over the bridge. At first she said it had been wrapped in plastic and cement, then later said they didn’t use any cement.
After they got back to Conyers, Barbara claimed, Schiess cleaned the inside of the pickup and later parked it in a new rental storage building in town. They threw away the clothes they wore during the murder in the Dumpster at the apartment complex.
Barbara admitted to the officers that she had worn a disguise during the crime, pulling her hair up and stuffing it under a black baseball cap, then wearing a big sweater with a hood pulled over the cap. She was also wearing a surgical mask over her face. Schiess, she said, didn’t wear any sort of disguise.
She had wanted to tell Vernon what had happened, and that they hadn’t meant to hurt Darlene, she claimed. Then she said that she had asked Schiess after the murder if he was worried that they would be caught by law enforcement, and he said that he wasn’t.
“He said that he has a genius IQ, and that lawyers made Cs in college and police made Cs in high school.”
It was a great deal of satisfaction to the “C-student” police officers present at the interview to know they had been given so much incriminating testimony against their two suspects, due to Barbara’s making such a detailed and lengthy statement.
21
After the conclusion of her first interview, at around 7:50
P.M.
, Barbara Roberts told the officers she knew where the missing black Dodge Dakota had been hidden. She voluntarily agreed to escort the GBI agents to the location of Schiess’s pickup truck. Thanks to the papers found in Schiess’s satchel that had been confiscated at the airport at the time of their arrest, the investigators already were relatively certain they knew where the truck was parked, but corroboration from one of the suspects would add greatly to the importance of the evidence.
Barbara told the investigators that the truck was, indeed, located at Aaron & Montana Self Storage, and Barbara gave them the gate code and storage unit number. When the officers checked with the manager of the storage facilities, they were provided with records to the unit in question, A-66, which indicated that it had been leased to Robert John Schiess on April 8. The key to the lock on the unit, Barbara told them, was on a key ring that was inside the Schiess apartment, and she gave SA Jack Vickery her verbal consent to retrieve the key. Vickery went to the apartment and quickly found the key ring Barbara had described.
That night, at around eleven forty-five, SA Brian Johnston went to the home of Rockdale County Superior Court judge David Irwin to get his approval for a search warrant for the Aaron & Montana Self Storage Unit A-66, and the seizure of a black Dodge Dakota pickup truck, bearing VIN number
1B7GL22X7SS236977
and registered to Dr. Robert John Schiess III, which was believed to be parked inside the unit. After reviewing Johnston’s affidavit giving information on the case and the investigators’ reasons for believing the truck to be inside the storage unit in question, Judge Irwin signed the search warrant order and the warrant was executed at midnight.
After trying all the keys on the key ring that SA Vickery had brought from the apartment, police saw that none of them opened the storage unit. The Rockdale County Fire Department had to be contacted to come to the facility and cut the lock off the unit before it could be opened. When the door to the unit was finally rolled up that evening after midnight, and the waiting group of officers got their first look inside, the 1999 black Dodge Dakota pickup truck sat there—just as they had suspected, and as Barbara Roberts had told them it would be.
The investigators moved in and began photographing the truck from every angle and doing a preliminary check for evidence, and Milstead Wrecker Service was called to move the truck from Aaron & Montana Self Storage to a secure storage area at the Rockdale County Sheriff’s Office. There, it would undergo crime scene processing, and would yield even more evidence in the murder of Darlene Roberts.
22
The news of the two arrests in the Darlene Roberts murder case was the big story in all the area media, when it was confirmed that the ex-wife of Vernon Roberts and her boyfriend, a wealthy neurosurgeon, had been taken into custody. Investigator Mark Hicks confirmed to the
Post,
a Cherokee County newspaper, that the arrests had been made, and Sheriff Larry Wilson said the murder warrant had been executed on the couple by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation as they were deplaning at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Wilson said that according to initial indications, Darlene Roberts had died of a single gunshot wound to the head, but he had no further details for the media.
Hicks would not comment on what kind of evidence had led to the arrests, and would not disclose any information as to the motive for the murder, but the hard work of all the agencies involved was continuing to pay off.
While some of the officers assigned to the case were interviewing Barbara Roberts and locating the pickup truck belonging to Robert John Schiess, other agents were actively pursuing other avenues of investigation. The GBI was working to assist the ABI and the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office (CCSO) in gathering information related to some of the paperwork found in the Schiess apartment and in the black leather satchel confiscated from Schiess at the airport. On April 20, ABI agents Jason Brown and Brent Thomas, along with Cherokee County investigators Mark Hicks and Bo Jolly, received information from the GBI on the South River Gun Club memberships of Bob Schiess and Barbara Roberts.
The South River Gun Club is a very popular, upscale organization, with facilities for all sorts of shooting sports. Large, well-maintained areas for trap and skeet shooting, target ranges, competitions, special events, and more are included in the benefits of club membership, and Schiess and Barbara had joined.
Several documents from the gun club had been found in Schiess’s possession, along with applications and waivers of liability for both Schiess and Barbara, and a copy of the South River Gun Club shooting roster and the club’s membership roster. There was also a copy of the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives form that had been filled out by Schiess at the time he bought a Mossberg 500 12-gauge pump shotgun at JH Piedmont Outdoors in Covington, Georgia, and a receipt from the South River Gun Club for $395.70 for club membership fees for Schiess and Barbara, paid for with Schiess’s Visa card.
The gun club was able to provide the investigators with the dates and times of all the occasions when Schiess signed in at the shooting ranges; on a couple of occasions, Barbara had also occasionally signed in for practice, but more often had merely accompanied Schiess to the club. Club staff reported that Barbara, due to her disabilities from her auto accidents, did not appear to have been able to lift and hold the shotgun comfortably.