Kill For Me (16 page)

In any homicide investigation that leads detectives in various directions as the days peel off the calendar, with information coming in frequently, there comes a point where, as a detective, you keep hoping that the next overturned stone provides that notorious missing link. That certain piece of the puzzle that becomes an
ah-ha
moment when added to what you already have. For Ski, he didn’t know it yet, but as the sun rose on July 17, 2003, this day and those following would provide quite a few of these high-five moments.

The first was not as big a surprise to the PPPD. Tony Ponicall phoned to say that a friend of his had found another spent shell casing inside the garage. It was a brass reminder for the guy of what had happened inside their townhome to the woman he loved.

Ski headed over.

As luck would have it, in the mail that day, Sandee’s phone bill had come, Tony said. He gave it to Ski, along with receipts from Lowe’s and Publix, a grocery store.

Ski took them back to the station house and reviewed the receipts and the bill against Tony’s prior written statements.

Everything added up. Despite what anyone thought, Tony Ponicall could be scratched off the list of suspects. Not one thing the guy had told police had
not
been backed up by an alibi or evidence.

Ski heard from Tampa Fire Department (TFD) headquarters that one of its arson investigators, Hector Noyas, had been investigating a fire that involved none other than Ashley Humphrey back on June 1, 2003.

“Fire?” Ski wondered. “How was she involved in a fire?”

“It was a supposed theft of her vehicle that caught fire,” Noyas reported. “But when I was speaking with her, trying to find out her whereabouts on the day of the supposed theft and arson, she told me she and Humphrey were at a gun show in Tampa, and that they had also gone to the firing range later that same day.”

Wait a minute here. Firing range? Gun show?

“She give you a name?”

“Yeah,” he said, scouring through his report, “right here…Shooting Sports shooting range, on Dale Mabry in Tampa.”

Ski decided to team up with Noyas and head over there.

At the shooting range they spoke with one of the people responsible for renting the guns. The woman said that according to the paperwork she had, it was Ashley, in particular, who had rented a gun to shoot at the range. They couldn’t speak to the person who had rented Ashley the gun because the woman had since passed away.

The paperwork Ski got his hands on didn’t specify the type of weapon Ashley had rented.

“I can tell you,” the woman said, “that she probably rented a twenty-two caliber, due to the fact”—she picked up the paperwork, flipped through a few pages—“that she had told us that she had never shot a gun before.”

The .22 caliber was the weapon of choice for the novice shooter.

Or killer!
Ski thought.

Ski wanted to learn more about the car fire. Noyas had investigated the case; it was still considered open, although it was clear from a deposition Noyas later gave what he believed had happened.

Noyas had been called out to a scene on June 1, 2003, just over a month ago. It was an abandoned parking lot behind a business outside Brandon. Ashley’s name came up only when they discovered that she owned the vehicle, which had been burned, top to bottom. Ashley’s future stepfather, a man by the name of David Abernathy, was on the loan and the title as a cosigner.

When Noyas found this out, he went out to speak with Ashley, who was living with Humphrey and his roommate, Wade Hamilton, who drove that Cadillac the Pizza Hut delivery driver had reported seeing in the parking space in front of Humphrey’s apartment on the night of the murder. Humphrey drove one of those old-school Lincoln Town Cars, dark navy blue, almost black.

“He [Humphrey],” Noyas said, “made it quite clear that he didn’t want to talk to me. He didn’t want Ashley to talk to me, and that I was asking too many questions.”

Ski understood.

“This aroused my suspicions,” Noyas said, “even more.”

All Noyas wanted was a statement; after all, Ashley’s car had been stolen, supposedly, and burned. They would need to explain this to the insurance company if they wanted to get the thing paid off.

“I offered to bring Ashley into the office so that I could have a taped conversation made on her behalf…,” Noyas said. “She did not want to do that!” Humphrey had even butted in and said he didn’t want her going down to fire department headquarters. His statement was “I don’t want her talking to
anyone
in authority.”

Noyas found a homeless man who had been sleeping in the backyard of a house near the parking lot where the VW had burned. He saw the whole thing, he said. A woman, he explained, “a young lady, rather thin, with long hair, maybe shoulder-length,” drove the VW into the parking lot. It was just getting dark. A male, “probably tall, over six feet,” waited in a “black luxury car, very shiny,” on the street. The young lady drove in, got out of the VW, got into the shiny car, and they took off.

Sometime “…later the vehicle was on fire.”

The insurance company never released payment for the car. The funny thing was, Noyas told Ski, both Ashley and Humphrey didn’t have any trouble going into the insurance company to give a deposition about what had happened.

After hearing Noyas tell it, Ski had one question: Why? What was it about that car—basically a brand-new VW Beetle, which Ashley adored, according to all of her friends—that she and Humphrey wanted destroyed?

Paul Andrews got ahold of Ski and explained that they needed to travel into Daphne, Alabama, to interview Sandee Rozzo’s ex-fiancé, Jonathan Barton (pseudonym). They agreed to meet Barton at the Daphne Police Department (DPD). They wanted a “brief history,” as Ski later put it, of Barton’s relationship with Sandee. Barton was, essentially, one more viable, but not all that probable, suspect who needed to be checked off a suspect list that was getting shorter by the day.

Barton explained that he and Sandee had met fifteen years before her death. Within a few months, he and Sandee moved in together and she got pregnant with their daughter.

“We were engaged,” he said, “but never got married.”

After the birth of their daughter, Barton moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Sandee moved in with him a few months later. But it wasn’t long before she found herself back in Florida after a falling-out between them.

Then the custody battle began.

Barton won.

“There were no bitter feelings,” Barton told Paul Andrews and Ski. “She came here to visit with [the child], and I sent her to Florida…on birthdays and holidays and other special occasions.”

Sandee had seen her daughter only days before she was murdered.

“I picked her up at Pensacola Airport on July third and called Sandee to tell her that she had arrived safely.”

From there, Ski and Andrews got a complete alibi from Barton, detailed and thoroughly checked out. The guy was nowhere near Pinellas Park on the night the mother of his daughter had been murdered. More than that, Barton had absolutely no reason to want Sandee dead. He had custody of the child, and Sandee didn’t mind.

“You know of anyone who wanted to harm Sandee, [Jonathan]?” Ski asked.

“I’m aware of a situation between Sandee and a male acquaintance,” he said. “Someone who she said had raped and kidnapped her.”

Tracey and Ashley Humphrey were becoming increasingly paranoid as detectives dug their heels in and began interviewing scores of their friends, family members, and acquaintances. Regardless of whether either Ashley or Humphrey had had anything to do with the murder of Sandee Rozzo, Humphrey knew from dealing with cops all his life that problems were going to arise from this, one way or another. With that, Humphrey decided that he needed to put together not only an alibi for the night in question, but a plan. The problem was that whenever Humphrey grew suspicious and fearful that people were beginning to close in around him and his activities—especially cops—and the sweat began to drizzle down his brow, it made him angry. And anger threw his game off considerably.

“I’ll do whatever I need to…. I am not going back to jail.”

Tobe White was one friend in particular who saw how badly Ashley and Humphrey were reacting to the pressure put on them by the authorities. Tobe had met Humphrey in 2002, and Ashley, later on, in early 2003.

Closing in on fifty, Tobe had that golden blond, shiny hair that Florida residents seem to acquire after living in the state for a long time. Although she had spent some time in Michigan as a child, Tobe had lived in the Sunshine State since she could remember. Married for ten years, she had been divorced for twenty years at the time she started hanging around Ashley and Tracey Humphrey. She had worked as an accountant for thirty years—that is, until a terrible accident sidelined her.

One of the problems plaguing Tobe for years had been her weight. Like a lot of women, Tobe was constantly monitoring her weight gain and trying to lose poundage. Due to that accident in the late 1990s, when she shattered both of her legs during a slip on concrete, Tobe had put on some serious weight.

“I ended up with six compound open fractures, on both legs,” Tobe told me.

She was overweight at the time of the accident—and quickly became obese, she said, after not being able to move around much, on top of totally giving up.

“I needed to change my lifestyle,” Tobe admitted. “I wanted to walk right again. I needed to make some
big
changes, so I started working out.”

On her own, for years, Tobe had exercised, but nothing too extreme or with any tangible results she could hang on the wall. Then she moved to the Riverview area and ended up walking into the Athletic Club in Brandon one day, where she was assigned none other than Tracey Humphrey as her personal trainer.

The guy was good at what he did, Tobe said. With a lot of hard work, under Humphrey’s advice and direction, she lost over 115 pounds. Almost an entire person.

Tobe and Humphrey became friends. Then after he met Ashley and they started to date, Ashley began to “sit in” on the sessions Humphrey had with Tobe.

The first time Tobe met Humphrey, she said, she actually had hoped it would be the last.

“I was creeped out by him. He gave me an eerie feeling. I just felt uncomfortable around him.” So much so, she called the club after that first session and asked the manager if she could have another trainer.

The manager said no. Humphrey was all he had at the time.

Tobe decided to give the guy a second chance, maybe she was overreacting.

“It was during that second workout with him that Tracey made me feel more relaxed.”

Humphrey was adamant about Tobe’s health. He was her biggest supporter—that coach, with the clipboard and whistle, standing over her shoulder, screaming in her ear, telling her that she could do whatever she wanted
if
she only believed in herself enough.

“You need to eat healthier,” Humphrey said during one of their first few sessions. “You need to change your lifestyle.”

Tobe understood. “Okay,” she agreed. She was beginning to like this guy.

“I want you to start keeping track of what you eat,” Humphrey suggested, “and begin drinking more water. Lots and lots of water.”

At first, Tobe saw Humphrey twice a week. Things had gone so well during those sessions, she increased their workouts to three or sometimes four times a week.

As time went by, she lost weight. Gained strength. Felt motivated and good about herself for the first time in years. She’d look in the mirror and see big changes.

“He was good.”

But then she tore her rotator cuff one day and had to stop working out altogether. It was a devastating blow to what had been some serious momentum.

Yet what could she do?

After surgery Tobe needed rehab. Her workouts had gone so well—and she had gained so much in body, mind, and spirit through Humphrey’s weight loss and fitness training philosophies—that she went back to Humphrey and asked him to rehab her back to health.

“We started working out five to six days a week,” Tobe said. “I got excellent results working with him.”

Part of what Tobe loved so much about working out with Humphrey was that—same as maybe a hairstylist—he became her sounding board. The two swapped stories about what was going on in their lives. Humphrey would talk about his girlfriends with Tobe; she would talk about her previous marriage and the perils of single life. She asked him what he thought about her getting back into the dating scene.

“He told me he was getting involved with a lot of dancers, strippers, and girls that were very jealous. This was before he met Ashley.”

Tobe said, “Why don’t you get involved with someone nice, who isn’t a nut or jealous?” Seemed like a simple fix to what had become a major problem for the guy. Tobe didn’t truly understand how Humphrey could dole out all of this great advice about toning and training the body, but he could not relate that to his own situation.

Humphrey smiled, shrugged. It was as if he enjoyed the challenge of trying to tame the wild ones. Either that, Tobe presumed, or he enjoyed the chaos those relationships offered him. The excitement. The instability and manic outbursts.

“You’ll have to stop cheating, though,” Tobe added.

Humphrey had admitted to Tobe that he was a serial cheater—that there was not a girlfriend or wife, he could recall, that he had not stepped out on.

The problem with Humphrey and women, Tobe soon realized, was that Humphrey never “took a relationship seriously.” It seemed to her at first as though Humphrey was one of those men who liked to pride himself in being a player.

“But I began to see, over time,” she added, “that he definitely had a problem with women in general.”

“Problem”…such a relative term. It went deeper than that in Humphrey’s case. Much more ingrained in his psyche. He had issues with women, some claimed. Deep-seated resentments and confusion he just could not resolve on his own, and flat-out refused to get help for.

Tobe asked Humphrey one day why he felt the need to cheat on every girlfriend he ever had.

“I don’t know,” Humphrey said.

“He had a habit of teasing women, too,” she added, “…dating them…then making it obvious to them that he was cheating.”

Throwing it in their faces, in other words. Like with Ashley and Candis Maines. There was even one incident when Candis Maines, Tobe said, tossed a brick through a window in response to finding out he was cheating on her.

Tobe got the same stories from Humphrey that many others had heard.

“He said he grew up in Iowa. That he played college football, then played for the Buccaneers. He said his father hit him, physically abused him badly.”

“I remember once,” Humphrey told Tobe, “when my dad kicked me so hard in the kidney that I lost the kidney.”

As the relationship of Ashley, Tobe, and Humphrey tightened over the course of early 2003, Humphrey and Tobe started talking about going into business together. Humphrey knew that Tobe had some money socked away. She had made the suggestion that they could team up and open a rehab/training center of their own. She had been an accountant for three decades; she knew how to manage a business. Humphrey had the knowledge, the muscle, and certainly the contacts to get things moving on his end.

Soon Tobe was showing up in ads for Humphrey as a testimonial, like you’d see on an infomercial. In one ad she held up a pair of pants big enough for two women her size to fit into.

So when the opportunity knocked, Tobe told Humphrey, “Why not? You’ve done so much for me.”

There was good money in health and fitness, if done right. Humphrey was well-known around Miami and Tampa as a health-conscious, somewhat crazy muscle head, but he was also one of the better trainers in the region.

Tobe was gung ho. “Yes! Let’s do it!” It was a great idea.

So they started meeting outside the gym to discuss the business. Generally, two nights a week.

The first item was to form a corporation. Body Logics, LLC, was the name. It was smart-sounding. Healthy. Trendy. All those ideas about eating healthier and drinking more water and working out, which Humphrey had been preaching inside the Brandon Athletic Club, were going to be the soul of the business.

As the days went by and they started talking about loans and applying for leases (the credit part of the business), it came up that Humphrey had a pending court case—not to mention he was a convicted felon—that Sandee Rozzo, whom he described to Tobe as one of those former “crazy girlfriends” he had cheated on and dumped, had leveled against him.

“I didn’t do it,” he told Tobe. “She made it all up.” He referred to the case as “trumped-up charges” against him.

Tobe was under Humphrey’s complete spell by this point. “I believed him,” she recalled, “because I knew the type of women he had dated. He seemed to choose these women that had mental-health issues. I had seen it myself. One woman hit herself with the door in the face and said she was going to blame him for it. So he starts playing that in my head—and tells me that he was set up by Sandee Rozzo.”

“What happened, anyway?” Tobe asked one night. Humphrey had mentioned that he spoke to his lawyer earlier that day, that his lawyer told him things were going good.

“I have nothing to worry about, [my lawyer] told me.”

“Well, that’s great,” Tobe responded. “What happened between you and Sandee Rozzo?”

“She punched herself in the face. I was getting ready to leave her. She told me she’d have me arrested.”

A few weeks after that conversation, Tobe heard and read in the newspaper that Sandee Rozzo had turned up dead. Shot to death in her garage—and that creep meter, which had gone off the charts when she first met Humphrey over a year before, began registering once again.