Twisted

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I'm Lester Holt, tonight on Dateline. Every family has its story, but few families have one as dark as this.

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I've had so many nightmares about the attack. I remember like, when is this going to end?

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Just make it stop. There was a home invasion. I'm yelling out, Mom, I can see her just getting yanked back by her hair.

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that she reached in for the gun. She fired it. He's on the floor. I could see blood around him.

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So the story is this incredibly brave mama bear protecting her cubs. I was very proud of her.

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It was such a bizarre set of facts. Well said, her story fits the evidence. And I'm just like going, no, it doesn't.

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So it's an execution he walks into. Is that the way you see it? Totally. She killed him.

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I was defending my family, and that's all I could keep thinking about. Here's Dennis Murphy with Twisted.

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Twilight in an Iowa farming town. Darkness presses in at the windows of a Victorian house.

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Downstairs in the kitchen, a crockpot is simmering. Upstairs, a young mother runs a bath for her baby daughter.

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Her two older sons huddle by a TV in a bedroom down the hall. Suddenly, they hear a shout.

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Their mothers cry for help. All of a sudden, you know, I can hear her yelling, and then I can hear her, you know, running towards the door.

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I'm literally, like, standing there like, what's going on? Bert Pittman, then 11 years old, sees his mother running towards him.

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She's in the door jam, like, trying to get in, and I can see all of a sudden her just get yanked back by her hair.

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The mother flings the baby into her son's arms and slams the door shut behind her.

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I can hear just rustling around, moving around, and her yelling for my help again.

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And then it was the sound of her being choked. Nearly 20 years on, the true horror of what happened that December night,

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of what an 11-year-old boy says he heard and then saw, still haunts the town of early Iowa.

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A crime. Sudden, vicious, and inexplicable. And its impact lingered. The fear. I was afraid for myself.

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I was afraid for my family. The pain. Each and every one of us felt alone, lost, confused.

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And the unanswered questions. Just what had happened on that frigid night? Liar is a tough word in American culture.

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Do you think a kid's a liar? Absolutely. The spasm of violence in an unexpected place happened here at the self-proclaimed crossroads of the nation.

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Early Iowa, population 500, stands at the junction of two highways, and most people drive right on through.

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But in 1998, two strangers rolled into town from Chicago, Tracy and Michael Roberts.

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They came off as these, you know, big people. They're from Chicago. He's from Australia.

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Seemed to be a nice family? Oh, yeah. Local realtor Mona Weedy had heard the gossip about the big city transplants.

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It was the second marriage for both of them. Michael was a computer whiz with plans of investing in a home business and more.

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Michael's word to the community is, you know, I want to help the community and we're going to grow this community and we're going to build it up.

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Tracy kept a lower profile around town, but Mary Higgins, a farmer's wife, got to know her extremely well.

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She was great. She was fun. She was beautiful. She seemed very educated. She just was kind of a fun person to be around.

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The two stay-at-home moms carpooled and shared easy confidences. Sometimes they'd play hooky when they were supposed to be in aerobics class together.

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We'd go to the bar, and we'd have a beer, and she'd have a drink, and we'd sit there, and we'd talk and laugh.

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Mary had also met Tracy's husband, Michael, at church. But as much as she liked her friend, she took an instant dislike to the husband.

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She thought the entrepreneur seemed full of himself. He was a huge bragger. He would brag about everything he had and what he was going to get.

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And Tracy would look at him and tell him, you know, don't do that. But he would.

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Someone not put off by Michael's swagger was realtor Mona Weedy. I'd help them buy and sell several homes.

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She was impressed by Michael's go-getter attitude and his strong religious convictions.

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Did you regard them as friends, personal friends? I absolutely did. I would have done anything to help them or assist them.

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The feeling was mutual. Michael Roberts seemed eager to help Mona, too. For instance, when she told him her 20-year-old son Dustin was drifting,

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struggling to hold down a job and at odds with his parents, Michael made a generous offer.

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Michael goes, well, you know, I could take him under my wing, and I could mentor him a little bit

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and see if I can get him off on a good path. and, you know, it just seemed so sincere about it.

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And I'm like, really? Wow, that's special. Okay. Which is why what happened on December 13th, 2001

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and the identity of who had been inside the Roberts home surprised everyone the way it did.

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No light spilled from the windows of the house where the brutal attack was taking place.

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Inside, 11-year-old Bert was frozen, unsure. He had heard his mother being choked,

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but now there was silence. He grabbed a baseball bat, handed his younger brother a pen, told him to use it as a weapon.

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So you the protector and you 11 years old here Yeah the only thing I wanted to do was protect them There Bert stood behind a closed bedroom door clenching the bat ready to fight back

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And I was just like, okay, first person coming through here, I'm hitting. Like, going out fighting, you know, I'm going to try.

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The boy could hear the voices of two men in the hallway. They eventually started banging on the door.

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It felt like they were trying to get in. Bert says he started cursing at the intruders, using every bad word he could think of.

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And then I could hear, all of a sudden, another set of footsteps in the upstairs start running.

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Then eventually I heard, you know, she has a gun. And then the boy heard a series of gunshots.

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A breathless Bert dialed 911. What the boy was saying sounded like something out of a movie.

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A first for this small town police department. What had happened inside the Roberts home?

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Who was alive? And who was dead? When we come back, the picture starts to come together.

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as Tracy's mother gets word of the attack. He said they're working on her, that she couldn't breathe.

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Would Tracy make it? And just who were the mystery intruders? Police cars were racing towards this Victorian home.

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Officers wondering about the fate of the people inside. Tracy Roberts and her three children.

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There had been reports of a violent break-in and a shooting. 20 miles away, Tracy's mother was also wondering about her daughter.

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Tracy was late picking her up for her grandson Bert's basketball practice. Then the phone rang. It was Bert sobbing.

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He just broke out in tears and was crying hysterically on the phone. It was really hard to understand him.

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and he said that someone was shot in the house and someone went running out. Tracy's mother jumped in her car and raced down country roads to the house.

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She says a policeman stopped her from going inside. He said, I can't go in there because it was a crime scene.

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And I said, I want my daughter to see how she is. I'm sorry. And he said, they're working on her, that she couldn't breathe.

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Tracy was alive, but she was gasping for breath. Paramedics loaded her into the ambulance and took her to the hospital.

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Two hours later, another mother came rushing to what was once the home of a friend,

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but was now a crime scene. And there's all these barricades and cars and stuff there,

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and we just go flying through the barricade. Local realtor Mona Weedy was looking for her son, Dustin.

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His car was parked in the driveway of the Roberts' home, secured now behind crime scene tape.

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Mona says police officers wouldn't let her near it. And I looked at them and I said, is my son here?

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And they go, yes. And I go, is he dead? And they go, yes. The body of Dustin Weedy, the young man being mentored by Tracy's husband,

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was sprawled on the couple's bedroom floor. Tracy had shot him to death in what appeared to be a desperate act of self-defense.

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Did they let you see your son, Mona? No. Did they tell you anything about what had happened in the house?

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No. They told us to go home. I said, I want to hold him. And they said, you can't.

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Twelve miles away at the hospital, Tracy was finally safe and breathing on her own.

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Investigators' photos captured the ugly red choke marks on her neck and a look of terror in her eyes.

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What had she endured that night? Tracy told us she couldn't believe it when police told her it had been her friend's son, Dustin, who'd attacked her.

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She hadn't been able to make out his face in the dark. What did you think when you had a name attached to this?

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It was so hard because at that point I thought the worst of it was behind me. You'd killed Mona's boy, the kid that Michael was mentoring.

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Because I cared about Mona, you know, and now she's lost her son. From her hospital bed, Tracy told investigators a little of what she remembered.

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How she'd been running a bath for her daughter Mason when she heard the sounds of the two men at the bottom of the stairs.

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How they had chased her as she ran to Bert's room, her baby in her arms. Bert says, I threw Mason.

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I don't remember throwing her, but at some point she was out of my arms and I was trying to get in the room.

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You were trying to get in there with the children. Yeah. and then I was pulled out.

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That's when one of the men, she said, had started to strangle her with some pantyhose

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that had been left drying on the banister. I was having trouble breathing, and I couldn't get away,

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and I was having trouble even twisting out of it. Tracy says she must have passed out

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because the next thing she remembered was waking up on the floor. She could hear Bert cursing at the intruders.

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This was the moment she knew she had to act to protect her children. She ran for a gun safe tucked next to the bed in the master bedroom.

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I just dove into the room and I just, I went for the safe. She could feel Dustin and the other man grabbing at her as she tried to open the safe.

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Even so, she managed to punch in the code and open it. She grabbed a handgun and pointed it over her shoulder But when she pulled the trigger nothing happened The safety was on There was such relief when I got it open and then nothing

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She pulled the trigger again and this time, she says, the gun fired. The thing I remember the most is that it was so loud and it was so bright.

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Like the flash from the gun was blinding, really. Tracy says she managed to swivel around to face her attackers.

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She kept firing. Are you hearing your assailant scream? I didn't hear anybody scream.

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What she could hear when she stopped shooting was the sound of someone breathing.

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And then sudden footsteps running out the door. Had one of the home invaders fled?

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Tracy edged down the bed. She couldn't see much. The bedroom was hazy with gun smoke.

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But she heard her kids calling for her, she said, and she ran to Bert's room. I opened the door, and Bert almost took my head off with the bat.

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And I don't remember having a conversation with them at the time. I remember just being so happy that they were fine.

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Both of us are on pure adrenaline, just like trying to just grasp of what just happened, you know.

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And, you know, are you okay? Yeah, yeah, we're fine. Tracy says she shepherded Bert and her younger children into the hallway, thinking they were finally safe.

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But according to both Tracy and Bert, their nightmare was far from over. The intruder lying shot on Tracy's floor was still alive.

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Bert could see it was Dustin Weedy, the son of his mother's friend Mona. He's on the floor. I can see blood around him.

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And then I can see him start to get up. He's moving. He started moving. Was he going to attack Tracy again?

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And then I remember that just put me back into like, like, when is this going to end?

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Like, when is it going to stop? Like, just make it stop. Tracy says she ordered the kids back into the bedroom.

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And before she knew it, she had another gun in her hand. And she fired a warning shot telling Dustin to stay down.

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I could hear her yelling at him to stay on the ground. Don't get up. Don't get up.

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And then another shot and then another. and finally Dustin was still. There was no sign of the second intruder.

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Tracy's husband, Michael Roberts, had been out of state on a business trip when the break-in occurred.

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God, the questions that must be turning around in your brain. How is she? How are the kids?

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There were too many questions. Reunited with his family at the hospital, Michael puzzled over what had happened.

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So the story that's settling in is this incredibly brave mama bear is protecting her cubs

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against these two home intruders. Oh, I was very proud of her. and Burt. Yeah, they were my heroes.

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But he simply could not understand why Dustin, the kid he was taking under his wing,

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had apparently turned on him, breaking into his house, attacking his wife and children.

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That night, Michael spoke to Dustin's mother on the phone. Mona called me, apologized,

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and asked me to tell Tracy that she loves her. She believed her son was in the wrong.

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Yeah. She told me to say sorry and that she loves her. It was heartbreaking. Heartbreaking to hear Mona's grief,

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and chilling to think what might have happened if Tracy hadn't fought back the way she did.

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Michael wondered what, or who, had driven Dustin to such violence that night. Coming up, a town on edge as police search for the second intruder.

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Was it someone from Tracy's mysterious past? She said, I'm about to send you a fax, and I hope you'll still love me after I send it to you.

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When Dateline continues. I've had so many nightmares about the attack. Tracy Roberts, in her sleep, relived the terrifying night of the home invasion.

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Her mother says she was falling apart. She did not want to go in the house. She was afraid to go on the house, so he was very uncomfortable in there.

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Uncomfortable and uneasy described a great many residents of tiny early Iowa in the days following.

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I was told there was a second man and that he hadn't been found. Tracy's best friend, like many other people in town, worried about her family's safety.

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Living in early, most of us don't lock our doors. A lot of us, I bet, can't lock our doors.

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We were nervous. Where was the second intruder? Tracy gave an interview to a local TV reporter in the months following the home invasion.

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There's this person who's still out there, and as a mother, I have a natural instinct to want to protect my children.

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She gave a description of the second intruder, but other than that, police didn't have much to go on.

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Crime scene technicians could find no fingerprints at the scene. No one had seen anyone suspicious fleeing the area that winter's night.

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We're still looking at several different areas. Again, we still have no clue who that second party was in the house that night.

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And of course, police knew the identity of the attacker who hadn't gotten away, Dustin Weedy, the son of Tracy's friend, realtor Mona Weedy.

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I was in shock. I couldn't even think. It was all so hard for Mona to hear. Her boy Dustin, the child she'd raised, wasn't a violent young man.

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He was just misunderstood. I felt that my son was labeled at a very young age and really started getting bullied at a very young age.

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He was never invited to a birthday party. He never was invited for a sleepover. Was there a name for what troubled him?

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Mona had taken Dustin from doctor to doctor to get a handle on his social awkwardness, his moodiness.

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Everywhere we went there was always a different diagnosis And I just felt he was very misunderstood as a child Had the troubled young man simply snapped

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Tracy thought so. She says she had never felt safe around Dustin, even when Michael had been mentoring him.

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I told Michael that I didn't like the idea of him being around the kids. Because when I saw him with Michael, his affect was just off.

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Tracy said Dustin's mother had once confided in her that she was scared of her own son.

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She complained about how he was physical with his sisters. Scaring his own sister?

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She specifically said she could not leave him alone with the girls because he would hurt them.

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Physical things? Physically hurt them, yeah. She said Mona had told her that Dustin had hit her, too.

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I can't imagine a boy raising his hand to his mother. And you believe he did that?

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Yeah. I saw her cry over it. In the hours after the attack, Tracy speculated about what had brought the unstable teenager to her home in the first place.

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Had some of Michael's collectible guns caught his eye? Was it a botched robbery?

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Investigators didn't think so. The intruders had shown no interest in grabbing Tracy's expensive jewelry or the cash Michael kept in the safe.

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The one item made off with from the house was an old computer found in the backseat of Dustin's car.

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When I heard that the computer was taken, I did think it was strange that a ring that's a lot smaller and has a lot more value, which could easily fit into somebody's pocket, why didn't someone just slip the ring off my finger?

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But if Dustin and his mysterious co-conspirator hadn't been looking for loot, what had they been doing?

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Had their mission been even more sinister than anyone first imagined? Investigators wondered, did someone want to scare Tracy or maybe even kill her?

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But nobody could picture Dustin Weedy troubled as he was as leading that kind of vicious assault.

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Who then was the other person in the house that night? Finding him could be the key to figuring out who wanted Tracy dead.

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Michael Roberts had a glimmer of a theory involving some sordid personal history with his wife.

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Incredibly, the home invasion wasn't the first time that Tracy had come under attack.

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I was at work and she said, I'm about to send you a fax. Can you make sure you are standing at the fax machine personally?

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And I hope you'll still love me after I send it to you. Four years before, when the Roberts had still been living in Chicago,

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Tracy had sent her husband a troubling document. It appeared to be the typewritten confession of a dentist,

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admitting that he had assaulted Tracy after sedating her during a dental procedure.

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She said she woke up with, she was wearing like red high-heeled shoes that were too small for her, her leg over his shoulder, and he was masturbating over her.

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In the document, the dentist set out the terms for an understanding. He'd agree to seek counseling for his sexual obsessions and pay Tracy $150,000 in damages.

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In turn, Tracy would promise to keep the incident a secret, even from her husband.

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So what do you do? I mean, you're reading this fax in which your wife is documenting her rape by the dentist.

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What do I want to do? I'm a husband. I wanted to kill him. Of course, Michael didn't mean it. He told his wife to call the cops.

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I was just saying she has to call the police. It was rape, you know, and she wouldn't do it.

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Tracy filed a lawsuit against the doctor instead, alleging medical malpractice. And a few days before the home invasion, they were set to go to trial in a Chicago courtroom.

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So your first solution to this home invasion mystery is the dentist did it. Of course, it's the first thing I thought of.

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And I was told that the second guy had a Chicago accent. Investigators now had a solid lead on the identity of the potential mastermind of the home invasion.

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Had Tracy's big city past followed her to rural Iowa? Coming up, the list of possible suspects is about to grow longer as Tracy points the finger at someone else from her past.

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She said he's the one they're going to arrest him. Someone wanted Tracy Roberts dead.

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She said she was sure of it. In a recorded phone call to police, Tracy said fear was taking over her daily life.

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Michael, her husband, was making her wear a panic button outside the house. It's a panic button that piggybacks off the office alarm system.

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And she was racking her brains, trying to figure out who wanted to harm her. There are just like hundreds of possibilities running through my head,

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and right now I'm afraid of all of them. Investigators had a number of possible suspects in their sights.

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Among them, that Chicago dentist who Tracy claimed had assaulted her a few years before.

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But he didn't appear to have any ties to Dustin Weedy. A much more promising lead was someone Tracy told the cops would be happier to see her dead than alive, her ex-husband.

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Did you love her? Yeah, of course I did. Tracy had met her first husband at a Chicago teaching hospital.

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His name was John Pittman. He was a medical student, and she was a radiographer, barely 20 years old.

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He was very much in control, and I really liked that. I grew up in a household with a very domineering, controlling father.

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So to me, that was what I thought was how it's supposed to be. Tracy's mother was not a fan of the doctor husband.

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He never really talked. He was very, very much almost to himself. And it was hard having a conversation with him and trying.

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It almost felt like you were dragging things out. Did he have something to hide?

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Tracy revealed to investigators that her marriage to the doctor had quickly deteriorated.

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He was a philanderer and a bully, she said, even in the bedroom. She described how the doctor enjoyed tying

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her to the bed and gagging her. How one time he'd even left her tied up overnight, uncovered,

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and with the windows open. In 1992, the couple separated. They shared custody of their son,

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baby Bert, until one day she reported to authorities that the three-year-old had blurted

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out something shocking. His father had touched him. Bert is the first one that made a comment,

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and we weren't sure, so she took him to a doctor and it was the doctor who said that it looked like he was abused.

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Had the boy been sexually abused by his own father, Dr. John Pittman, the man who was now Tracy's ex-husband,

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the allegation of abuse became the centerpiece of a toxic, expensive custody battle for the boy,

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a scrap that was still ongoing during Tracy's second marriage to Michael Roberts.

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Husband number two was furious with husband number one in the months preceding the home invasion.

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Do you think, well, she was married to a monster. Look what he did to this boy. I thought somebody, you know, this can't be right. How can he still be practicing medicine?

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And my son, my stepson, had to go through this. Tracy's ex, the doctor, adamantly denied the allegations.

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But when he returned to court once again seeking sole custody of Bert, Michael, husband number two, couldn't believe it.

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I called him and said, John, I have very deep pockets and I'm not going to stop fighting.

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It's going to be very expensive. Why don't you just give up? Had the warning from Tracy's husband go to the doctor into taking a different approach to the custody battle?

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Had he decided to bypass the family courts altogether by hiring two hit men to knock off his ex?

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That was the most likely scenario Tracy told investigators. Her first husband could very well be behind the home invasion.

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The doctor's son, Bert, echoed that theory when he was being interviewed by a social worker.

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They're thinking that John Whitman has something to do with it. To do with those people coming to your house?

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The 11-year-old relived the nightmarish home invasion during the interview. I got the bat out, and I was holding it.

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Somebody ran in my room. I put my bat up, and they opened the door, but it was my mom, and I nearly hit her.

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But we missed. I mean, I didn't. I was like, mm. John Whitman. Bert told it like a story out of a rip-snorting violent comic book, and he and his mom were the heroes.

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She had like paint heels around her, so I let her like head untied. The villain, he said, was his dad, Tracy's first husband, Dr. John Pittman.

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It aided Bert that his own father hadn't even called to see how he was doing after the attack.

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If you were actually a good father, I think if you were, you'd call. Tracy told the cops the indifference of the boy's father was one more reason that they should consider Dr. John Pittman a suspect.

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Investigators chased down Tracy's suspicion of her ex and asked the local police in Virginia where he lived to check out his alibi around the time of the home invasion.

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Mary Higgins, Tracy's good friend, remembers Tracy at the time telling her that husband number one was now the prime suspect.

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She said, well, John Pittman's in a lot of trouble, that he's the one, you know,

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they're going to arrest him, they're after him. But weeks passed without an arrest.

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Tracy was becoming increasingly frustrated, her friend says. Some nights, she would drive past law enforcement offices to see what was going on.

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She would know how late the county attorney was working because she'd come by and look to see if the lights were on on the third floor.

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Tracy feared that if her ex had hired Dustin Weedy and a mysterious second intruder to stage a home invasion and gotten away with it,

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there was nothing to stop him from lashing out again. The custody battle was still raging in the courts.

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But while Tracy brooded, investigators were showing an interest in another suspect, someone much closer to home.

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Coming up, Portrait of a Marriage, the relationship of Tracy and Michael under the microscope.

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It was just that feeling of, this isn't good, this is cold, this is bad. When Dateline continues.

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Tracy Roberts said she'd been attacked in her home by her friend's son, and she had killed him.

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I was defending my family because the worst fear for me was that I would lose one of my kids or someone would die.

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and now she's lost her son. And that's all I could keep thinking about. But who had caused Dustin Weedy to be in that house in the first place?

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The lead investigator called Tracy to fill her in on his progress. We're looking at your ex-husband.

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We're looking at his attorney. You know, those are all, you know, we're looking at everything.

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Tracy had told the cops about that nasty custody battle she was waging with her ex-husband, the Virginia doctor.

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She said her ex certainly had a plausible motive to want her dead, but investigators couldn't find any hard evidence linking him to Dustin Weedy.

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No phone records, no money trail. It was a dead end. As the weeks passed, another name began to crop up around town.

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A lot of speculation. 15 menus today. Speculation that Robin Padgett heard dished up over coffee and eggs at her diner,

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a few blocks from the Roberts' home. A lot of people wondered if Michael had set it up to try to get rid of Tracy.

00:29:36

Michael Roberts, Tracy's second husband. He had always said he was out of state on a business trip that night.

00:29:43

But was he? Could he prove it? Obviously, the husband is always a suspect, in most cases involving an attempt on a wife's life.

00:29:52

Sac County Sheriff Ken McClure who took over the case in 2003 said investigators had been intrigued by Michael Roberts from the get Who was this Australian businessman who moved from Chicago to tiny early Ireland

00:30:05

What is the draw? You know, law enforcement officers with careers that have gone on for a while

00:30:10

have seen, you know, the criminal element move out of the cities and into the rural areas.

00:30:15

So I think you just got to sit back and look at that and say, why are they here?

00:30:20

Tracy was in conflict. The suspect she wanted investigators to get serious about was her ex, that doctor in Virginia.

00:30:27

But they seemed just as interested, if not more interested, in her current husband, Michael Roberts.

00:30:33

Good friend Mary Higgins told Tracy directly what some people in town were starting to believe about her spouse.

00:30:40

She came right out and told me she thought it was Michael. Had set up Dustin and this other guy.

00:30:44

Yeah. And the goal was to do what? To kill me. Mary Higgins says the Roberts' perfect marriage was all an act.

00:30:51

You know the difference between somebody who's in love and mad at them, but still are in love.

00:30:58

And that was gone there. It was just that feeling of, this isn't good. This is cold.

00:31:03

This is bad. And her opinion wasn't just based on a feeling. Mary, who often picked Bert up at school, had heard him tell horrible stories about what was going on at home.

00:31:14

If Bert didn't move fast enough, there was always some sort of a harsh punishment.

00:31:18

Many times Bert would come to school without a coat, and it would be below zero because Bert didn't move fast enough in the morning.

00:31:26

But as the story went, it was an incident in December 2000, a year before the home invasion,

00:31:32

that had really exposed Tracy and Michael's marriage for the facade it was. It began with an argument over finances in the Roberts' home office.

00:31:41

Dustin's mother, Mona, watched it unfold. Tracy comes storming in through the back door and she's just rampaging and yelling and screaming and Michael looked at me and goes, I'm going to have to excuse you and ask you to leave.

00:31:58

And then it went nuts. According to this police report, Tracy said Michael had knocked her down and jumped on her. He'd also pulled her hair.

00:32:06

That's when he put my mom's head through drywall. Through the sheetrock, huh? Her head went through the drywall.

00:32:12

Michael Roberts was arrested and spent the night in jail. He later pleaded no contest to charges of disturbing the peace,

00:32:20

said he was just trying to restrain Tracy for her own protection. But Burt told police there was more they needed to know.

00:32:27

This boy, who had accused his biological dad of sexually abusing him, now said he had horror stories about his stepfather, too.

00:32:35

Is he hitting you, giving you the back of the hand kind of thing? Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, he broke my nose at one point for not cleaning up horse crap, you know, with my bare hands.

00:32:45

And along with the beatings, he said, there was constant humiliation. One of the worst ones was when I was older, just psychologically.

00:32:53

I mean, I was like 13 at the time, you know, and he was beating me. And then, you know, I was crying.

00:33:00

And since I was crying, I was a little baby and the little baby needed its bottle.

00:33:03

So, you know, it made me drink out of a bottle. Are you okay with this? He's your boy.

00:33:08

I wasn't happy with it, but I found that when I objected, it made it worse. Bert says his mother remained blind to something that was becoming clearer and clearer to him.

00:33:19

It wasn't his biological dad, Dr. John Pittman, who had plotted his mother's murder.

00:33:23

He now believed it was his stepfather. So you'd think, Michael, your stepfather, was involved in this, orchestrated it, planned it.

00:33:30

Fully involved. Looking back, Bert thinks Michael gave himself away at the hospital the night of the attack.

00:33:36

Just the way he looked at us or the way he reacted to seeing us alive was off. As though he didn't expect to see you alive?

00:33:48

Yeah. Bert thinks Michael was posing as a loving, concerned husband and pointing fingers at the Chicago dentist and Tracy's ex-husband

00:33:55

just to throw the cops off the trail. He's trying to have everybody look in all these different directions instead of him.

00:34:03

Isn't it counterintuitive, though, that he would stay with your mother? and he does for years.

00:34:07

You'd think he would find a reason to have his pager go off and leave town. I mean, if you paid people to kill your family and they failed,

00:34:16

you don't want to leave because it looks like you did it. I feel like he was waiting for his next opportunity to do it.

00:34:22

And remember, it was Michael Roberts who had begun nurturing Dustin Weedy in the year leading up to the attack.

00:34:29

Dustin's relationship with his own dad had been difficult. There just wasn't a lot of connection between the two of them.

00:34:35

And I think for Dustin, that was painful. Had Michael exploited this void to his advantage,

00:34:42

becoming some kind of father figure to the troubled teen, grooming him to kill Tracy?

00:34:47

The lead investigators confronted Michael in his home office. He looked me in the eye and said,

00:34:54

Michael, how much did you pay Dustin to kill your wife? Michael denied any involvement in the crime,

00:35:01

and police quickly established that his alibi, the out-of-town business trip was rock solid.

00:35:07

There was no way that he'd been in the house that night as the second intruder. But that didn't mean he couldn't have masterminded the attack.

00:35:15

Police asked Tracy's husband to take a polygraph. The results, according to the examiner,

00:35:21

concluded Michael's truthfulness could not be verified, and he could not be cleared in this matter.

00:35:27

The fact that he failed a polygraph, yeah, I had to think, maybe he is involved.

00:35:31

Was Tracy now living with a man who wanted her dead? How much danger was she really in?

00:35:39

Don't make up your mind yet. Turns out the case had more twists to come. Coming up, the other mom in this story has some questions of her own.

00:35:50

Questions about the home invasion story Tracy's been telling. They just plain simple said her story fits the evidence And I just like going no it doesn

00:36:14

It had been nearly a year since the home invasion, but investigators seemed no closer to solving the case.

00:36:20

Michael Roberts persuaded his wife Tracy to go on the Montel Williams show. A last desperate appeal for clues.

00:36:27

He convinced me that if we went on it, because it was taking it to a more national level,

00:36:33

that someone could come forward and it could be a lead. We believe that there's somebody that still knows something.

00:36:40

And so we're appealing to people if they know something to call. On television, with their hands clasped, Michael and Tracy look like a team.

00:36:50

But inside, Tracy says she'd been starting to have her doubts. Someone called and they very kind of snidely said to me,

00:36:58

oh, did your husband tell you he failed his polygraph? Flunked a lie detector? Tracy says she assumed there must be some kind of explanation

00:37:06

and waited for Michael to tell her about the results himself. We get into bed, I'm expecting this is when we're going to talk, right?

00:37:14

He rolls over and goes to sleep. And I'm laying in bed like, what's going on here?

00:37:19

Tracy thought how little she really knew about her second husband and what he was capable of.

00:37:25

They'd met online and then gotten married 18 days after their first face-to-face meeting.

00:37:31

Who is Michael? I don't know. I really don't know. I wish I knew. Because when we were together, when we were having problems,

00:37:41

I honestly still believed that he loved me, you know? Tracy started to grapple with the idea

00:37:47

that it was Michael, her current husband, and not Dr. John Pittman, her ex, who might have been behind the home invasion plot.

00:37:54

And the way Tracy pieced it together, Michael had motive too. In 2001, the Roberts computer business was in trouble.

00:38:02

Had he seen Tracy's death as an easy way to get his hands on some cash? After all, they had millions of dollars worth of life insurance policies.

00:38:11

In 2004, nearly three years after the home invasion, the Roberts marriage imploded.

00:38:17

Michael filed for divorce. Tracy filed for an order of protection against him. The sheriff saw the rift between husband and wife as an opportunity.

00:38:26

When they got divorced, really that's where we figured out we would know if Michael Roberts was involved or not.

00:38:35

But the sheriff would be disappointed. As ugly as the Roberts divorce became, it didn't yield any clues about the home invasion.

00:38:44

The investigation went cold. and then as suddenly as she'd arrived in small town iowa tracy up and left she'd moved with her

00:38:53

children to omaha nebraska new town new job she even changed her name in reality she needed to

00:39:01

get away from michael i mean he still was harassing her all the time he's not past tense

00:39:06

he's still making it life hard for her the other mother in the story dustin's mother

00:39:13

was also long gone from early Iowa. She'd taken Dustin's sisters to live in Minneapolis

00:39:19

after her husband, their father, took his own life in the cemetery where Dustin was buried.

00:39:25

He went there and he put a bullet in his heart and left notes saying, I cried every day since December 13th.

00:39:34

But what a stark world you were looking at on your husband's death. I was buried horrible.

00:39:42

How'd you pull yourself together? I buried stuff. I hid it, put up walls, closed doors, tried to tell myself it's a horrible nightmare and I'm going to wake up.

00:39:56

The worst part of the nightmare that she felt so alone. Mona was consumed with questions she felt no one else cared about.

00:40:03

Instead of wondering about the identity of the mysterious second intruder or who'd masterminded the attack,

00:40:10

She wanted to know what had really happened to her son that night. Was there any way that you could put him in the house up to no good?

00:40:17

No. I just said there's no way, no way possible. For starters, Mona said her son wasn't the scary hair-trigger misfit described by Tracy.

00:40:31

His mother knew a Dustin with a sweet smile masking a little sadness, not a killer.

00:40:36

Sure, this kid who could entertain his family with goofy Elvis impersonations didn't really connect to outsiders.

00:40:43

That's why he treasured his relationship with the Roberts family. No way would he have wished them harm.

00:40:49

They were my friends. They befriended him. Dustin was like, I got a friend. No, he's not going to go down there and go, oh, I think I'll kill you today.

00:41:00

Common Sense told Mona there was something wrong with the very idea that Dustin had been a hitman for hire on that night.

00:41:07

He parked in front of the house. He had no gun. He had no knife. But hadn't Dustin ripped off a Roberts family computer?

00:41:14

They'd found it in his car. You're going to tell me that my son went into the house

00:41:19

that is full of Dells and Gateways, and he went upstairs in the corner of the bedroom

00:41:25

and picked up a Packard Bell obsolete piece of junk. It's an old beater computer.

00:41:30

useless computer, went out, loaded it in his car, packed it in nice and neat, then went back in the

00:41:37

house and went upstairs to get killed. Mona knew there had to be a better explanation.

00:41:44

Maybe Dustin had stumbled in on someone else trying to kill Tracy. Mona peppered investigators

00:41:49

with questions I kept asking questions and I got funny answers and they just plain simple said Her story fits the evidence and I just like going no it doesn Mona knew Tracy story didn add up but it was a conversation with the town

00:42:10

funeral director that made her think Tracy might be deliberately misleading police that she had

00:42:16

something to hide. He told me that Dustin was shot three times in his underarm two times in his

00:42:24

hip and at that point four times in the back of his head and i went what the violence of dustin's

00:42:33

death overwhelmed her mona now believed not only that tracy's story of self-defense was bogus

00:42:39

not only that her son was innocent of any crime the night of the home invasion she now believed dustin had been murdered targeted so it's an execution he walks into is that the way

00:42:49

you see it? Totally. She killed him. She killed him. But years after the attack, she felt as though

00:42:56

there was no one to listen to her. You know, I felt like my hands was tied because I couldn't do

00:43:02

the investigation. I couldn't do anything. And I was so sad because my son's file was just sitting

00:43:07

on a shelf. I'm like, how long is that going to sit there? Will there ever be a day of justice?

00:43:13

Little did she know that a new investigator was about to change everything. Coming up, the investigator tracks down Tracy's first husband.

00:43:23

And boy, does he have a story to tell about his ex. The next thing I know, she disappears in the bedroom and comes out waving a gun.

00:43:29

When Dateline continues. For years, Mona Weedy had quietly watched the woman who'd shot her son give interviews.

00:43:49

I turned around and then fired. A time came when Mona fired back in the local paper.

00:43:55

I did put one small little article in the paper, and I just really asked, why did you kill my son? Tell me why.

00:44:04

The grief and the frustration was taking its toll on Mona's family. I just felt everybody ripping apart from everybody. I didn't know how to pull them back, and I hurt.

00:44:19

but then on christmas eve seven years after dustin's death mona got a surprising phone call

00:44:28

iowa's division of criminal investigation had given the home invasion case file to a cold case

00:44:35

investigator at last she had a reason to hope someone else was suspicious of tracy's story

00:44:41

i had a hard time making sense out of it because i could not get past her original statement

00:44:47

Special Agent Trent Valletta noticed a number of inconsistencies in Tracy's statements to police.

00:44:53

Basic facts she kept changing, like the number of intruders in the house. Another red flag, the crime scene photos.

00:45:00

Why isn't things broken? Why isn't things on the cupboards or dressers laying on the floor?

00:45:05

Didn't make any sense. It looked to me like Dustin just got shot and died. Had Tracy been lying about what really happened in the house? And if so, why?

00:45:14

Agent Valletta came to realize he knew almost nothing about Tracy, the woman at the heart of the crime.

00:45:19

What I did is I slowed down. I went back to the beginning, really, that I could find for her, and that was about 1988.

00:45:28

1988, the year Tracy married John Pittman, the doctor in Virginia. After talking to Tracy's ex and sifting through court documents surrounding their marriage,

00:45:39

the investigator realized that Pittman was nothing like the ogre Tracy had described to investigators.

00:45:44

Bullying incidents? The doctor said it was Tracy, not he, who had been abusive. In one memorable set-to, he said she pulled a gun on him.

00:45:53

She turned to me and said, you're never going to leave this house alive. I was sort of stunned, and next thing I know, she disappears in the bedroom and comes out waving a gun.

00:46:01

Tracy fired the revolver into the ceiling, and Pittman called the cops. Tracy admitted firing the gun, told police she'd been contemplating suicide.

00:46:11

Dr. Pittman told Agent Valletta that wasn't the end of Tracy's bizarre behavior.

00:46:17

Pittman pulled out surveillance logs and photos taken by a private eye that he said proved it was Tracy, not he, who had been unfaithful.

00:46:24

And that was a real shocker because it started to look like she almost had a second life

00:46:28

that I wasn't aware of. and she hung around with male strippers and, you know, just all kinds of unsavory characters.

00:46:37

Tracy later told people that it was her first husband, not she, who'd enjoyed the company of strippers.

00:46:42

She also denied having had affairs. But Dr. Pittman says his private eye warned him he shouldn't take any chances.

00:46:50

His life might be in danger. He said, look, you know, she's already shot at you.

00:46:54

Now, the first one always goes in the air, the second one goes over your head, and the third one hits you.

00:46:58

At the end of the day, Tracy's first husband said it was his flat-out fear of Tracy that it ended the marriage,

00:47:04

not his infidelity and abuse, as she'd claimed. But what about the biggie? Tracy's accusation that Dr. Pittman had sexually abused his own son, Bert.

00:47:14

He said none of it was true, and he had a court finding to prove it. I've never done anything, no inappropriate touching, exposure, grooming, anything.

00:47:25

The cold case investigator believed Tracy's ex was telling the truth. That doctor who'd seen evidence of abuse?

00:47:33

She'd been wrong, said Illinois child abuse investigators who had exonerated Pittman back in the day.

00:47:39

Even more telling, Agent Valletta thought, was the fact that Tracy had let Burt move to Virginia after her separation from Michael Roberts.

00:47:47

If she believed her first husband was an abuser, why would she send her son to live in his care?

00:47:52

Tracy Roberts and the truth Agent Villetta started to suspect That other events in this woman's dramatic

00:48:00

life story might not hold up to examination. Either you have to believe the whole entire world is out to get Tracy, or Tracy's a criminal,

00:48:08

and she just does bad things. Agent Valletta took another look at the story of the Chicago dentist who Tracy claimed had

00:48:15

raped her. He'd signed a confession offering to pay Tracy damages, or so she claimed.

00:48:21

But the dentist told the cold case investigator that the confession was a forgery.

00:48:26

He basically said she extorted him. It all made the agent wonder anew about Tracy's relationship with Michael, husband number two.

00:48:35

Sure, some people around the farming town didn't care much for the businessman, but had he really been abusive to his wife?

00:48:42

Back in 2000, Michael had been arrested for that alleged assault on Tracy. But he told the investigator that he had actually been trying to protect Tracy at the time, not hurt her.

00:48:52

She started kicking holes through both levels of drywall to the other side. where there was a 220-volt heater.

00:49:00

He showed the investigators photos he said he had taken of those holes. He said Tracy had been about to electrocute herself

00:49:07

when he grabbed her and forced her to the floor. As for his stepson's claims that Michael had beaten him...

00:49:13

Did these things happen? Breaking his nose. Did that happen? No. I spanked him quite a few times.

00:49:20

And I made quite a few mistakes as a parent. Michael admitted he was a stern father,

00:49:25

but said he loved his children and had never hurt them. Michael also denied harassing his wife after their breakup,

00:49:31

saying it was the other way around. Tracy was the violent one in the family, he claimed.

00:49:36

He says she tried to kill him more than once. She got me drunk, and she rolled me up in a cotton,

00:49:42

king-size cotton sheet, very, very tight, pinned me with baby safety pins, and reached underneath or behind the bed

00:49:50

and took out a plastic bag and put it over my head. She put a plastic bag over your head?

00:49:54

Yeah. The way Michael tells it, Tracy tried to suffocate him. Tracy said Michael's story was sheer fantasy, but not long after, he filed for divorce.

00:50:05

But what about Michael's polygraph? That had seemed so suspicious to earlier investigators.

00:50:10

Michael had an answer for that, too. He said the lie detector had caught his own squirmish doubt about Tracy's story,

00:50:17

not that he was the brains behind the home invasion. It's hard to answer a question as to do you know the identity of the second intruder

00:50:24

If you don't believe there was a second intruder Agent Valletta had ruled out Michael Roberts as a suspect

00:50:30

And he started to wonder You couldn't get two more poles apart men than Tracy's two ex-husbands

00:50:36

The Australian entrepreneur and the Virginia doctor And yet both had similar horror stories to tell about their ex-wife

00:50:44

He believed he had uncovered Tracy's true character When she got mad at someone, she wasn't mad at them.

00:50:51

She was enraged with them. She didn't want someone to be embarrassed. She wanted them to be destroyed.

00:50:57

Agent Valletta was now convinced that much as she'd fabricated her stories about the dentist and both husbands' abuse,

00:51:04

Tracy had also fabricated her account of what had happened on December 13, 2001.

00:51:10

Her dramatic description of the break-in, of being chased and choked. Her firing deadly shots to protect both herself and her children.

00:51:18

Lies, he thought, but he could not figure out why. The answer, it turned out, was tucked away in the 10-year-old case file, a top-secret

00:51:28

piece of evidence that was going to break the investigation wide open. Coming up, investigators may have just found the smoking gun, if they can figure out what

00:51:39

it means. I stared at that thing for weeks trying to understand it. The look of fear in Tracy's eyes the night of the home invasion.

00:51:59

The concern in her voice weeks after. I don't trust anybody. Had it all been an act, investigators now suspected that Tracy Roberts,

00:52:08

the woman who said she'd been attacked in her home, had staged the whole thing. That she'd shot to death young Dustin Weedy as part of some twisted plan.

00:52:17

Tracy's the suspect. Tracy's the one I know who did it. Tracy had long since left the small town of early Iowa.

00:52:25

She'd moved to Nebraska, where she was living under a new name. But she'd kept in touch with her old friend Mary Higgins back in Iowa.

00:52:32

Mary was spooked. In the back of my calendar, there's like a list of numbers. Every time she changed it, I'd cross it out and move on.

00:52:44

Why, Mary wondered, did Tracy keep changing her contact information? What or who was she running from?

00:52:51

Tracy's best friend was afraid. I feared that I knew something that I didn't know I knew.

00:52:57

And I feared that what would happen when Tracy figured out. Because Tracy had confided in Mary in the months after the attack

00:53:05

and told her all sorts of things. Things that didn't add up. Like the fact that the second intruder had been wearing a ski mask.

00:53:13

Well, if he had, Mary wondered, how had Tracy given police a description of his face?

00:53:18

But it was actually seeing for herself the space where Tracy said she'd fired from that gave Mary pause.

00:53:24

It was just too tight a squeeze for Tracy to have dived for the gun safe, shot over her shoulder, and then turned around to keep firing.

00:53:32

There's no way she could get in between the bed and that wall. Cold case investigator Trent Villetta doubted Tracy's story, too.

00:53:41

After doing a background check on her, he was convinced that the home invasion was just one more lie from a woman who had conned people her entire life.

00:53:50

She was a tornado just wreaking havoc everywhere she went. So had Tracy gotten away with murder by pretending to be a victim It wasn an entirely new idea Investigators had discussed it back in the day But then in 2010 Agent Valletta found someone willing to listen to his wild theory

00:54:09

He would send me little teasers and he would continuously call me. What did you think about that?

00:54:14

The newly elected Sac County prosecutor, Ben Smith, was a captain in the Iowa National Guard and knew his way around guns.

00:54:22

He was immediately skeptical of Tracy's description of the shooting. You're talking somebody that has said every shot she took from that Beretta

00:54:29

was either sitting, kneeling, with her eyes closed, with her glasses off. What's the degree of difficulty here?

00:54:34

Probably, you know, Army Ranger difficulty. But it was something else in the file that really intrigued him.

00:54:41

A top-secret piece of evidence that had baffled investigators for years. I stared at that thing for weeks, just reading it, trying to understand it.

00:54:50

When police had searched Dustin's car back in 2001, they'd found not just a battered old computer, but this, a pink spiral notebook.

00:55:00

Just sitting right in the front seat as if somebody sat up there, you know, nice and neat.

00:55:04

And it was not reported about in the news media. Never. Nope. The secret six-page document, with its scratchy writing, misspellings, and bizarre content, was hard to read.

00:55:14

But the prosecutor quickly realized that it could be the key to the investigation.

00:55:19

It began, one day about 20 years ago, a boy was born into a middle-class life. The author was 20-year-old Dustin Weedy.

00:55:28

And there's no question that this is Dustin's handwriting. It's Dustin's, yeah. He's got very distinct writing.

00:55:33

The heart of the Pink Journal, its core story, outlined a strange plot. A mysterious fellow, Dustin wrote, had contacted him to carry out a shocking mission, kill Tracy Roberts.

00:55:45

And the identity of this mysterious fellow commissioning the crime? It was none other than Tracy's first husband, Dr. John Pittman.

00:55:53

Surely this was the smoking gun that confirmed exactly what Tracy had suggested to investigators so long ago,

00:56:00

that her first husband, angry about that bitter custody battle, had been behind the attack.

00:56:06

But even though Dustin had physically written the journal, investigators didn't believe that he'd authored it.

00:56:12

It contained personal information about Tracy's ex that he would never have known about,

00:56:17

that he'd once wanted to be a psychiatrist, not a plastic surgeon, and another remark that he liked to play mind games.

00:56:24

Why would this 20-year-old kid in early Iowa know any of these details about a doctor named Pittman?

00:56:30

Where's this stuff coming from? I mean, you've got one of two things. He's either clairvoyant or Tracy told him to put it in there.

00:56:38

You think he's being dictated to? Absolutely. I mean, he's a scribe. And the cold case investigator told the prosecutor he had what he thought was proof that Tracy had dictated the journal.

00:56:48

An email Tracy had written him with an eerily similar description of her ex. When that email came through and she described John Pittman the exact same way that Dustin Weedy described John Pittman,

00:57:03

there's no doubt that she was the one that authored the journal. So if the journal was a fake, what did that mean?

00:57:09

Well, this is where this serpentine tale gets really kind of simple. Motive. The prosecutor says Tracy staged the home invasion to frame her ex

00:57:18

and gain the upper hand in the custody battle over Bertie. Here's what Tracy's hoping, okay?

00:57:24

Law enforcement finds this pink spiral notebook, and they find its contents, they read it, and they're thinking,

00:57:28

holy cow, it's going to raise enough suspicion that they have to spend all this time and energy

00:57:34

to go out and interview Dr. Pittman about this murder-for-hire scheme and it's just enough for her to get that into the juvenile court setting

00:57:42

to say, he's being investigated for this attack. He's never going to see that kid again.

00:57:46

It's a golden ticket. And Dustin? Well, according to this new theory, he was no attacker but collateral damage.

00:57:53

One boy dead because of the fight over another. He had no life value to her. And she used him.

00:58:03

And killed him. And killed him. But how could the prosecutor prove his new theory?

00:58:08

It came down to this. Investigators had always kept the journal top secret. But if Tracy had created it, she obviously knew about it.

00:58:17

So if investigators could prove she knew about it, they could prove that she'd created it.

00:58:22

Got it? That's why the prosecutor lost it one night when he was talking to Tracy's old friend, Mary Higgins.

00:58:29

He told her the investigation had been reopened. He said something like, there's more to this than what people know.

00:58:36

and I said, do you mean that stupid notebook? And Ben just, he just turned white.

00:58:48

Should Mary Higgins have known anything about the existence of a notebook in this case?

00:58:51

Nothing about it. And I was leaning against the wall to begin with, but I did get lightheaded because as far as I was concerned, that was it.

00:59:00

It was the final piece of the puzzle. the moment Tracy had slipped up and told someone she knew about the journal,

00:59:07

the journal that was supposed to be top secret. The investigator and prosecutor wondered if they had enough for an arrest,

00:59:14

and they worried what would happen if they didn't move soon, because Tracy, it turned out, had gotten in trouble with the authorities in Nebraska.

00:59:21

She'd been accused of forging documents and lying about her identity. She was ultimately convicted of perjury,

00:59:28

but investigators wondered if Tracy was getting ready to run. Would they be able to arrest her in time?

00:59:36

Coming up, Tracy gets a big surprise. And so does this story's other mom, Mona. I was like, it's unbelievable.

00:59:46

Because I never thought that that day was going to come. When Dateline continues.

00:59:51

A summer day in Omaha Nebraska Tracy was driving down the highway in her fianc truck

01:00:08

She had a new man in her life, a new job, a new name. Had she finally put the home invasion behind her?

01:00:16

Then she noticed the police blue lights in her rearview mirror. The next thing I know, there's a bunch of police cars and there's men pointing guns at me

01:00:24

and telling me to get out of the car. And I kept asking, what's this about? And then a man came over and he said I was under arrest for the murder of Dustin Weedy.

01:00:37

Ten years after she told police she'd been attacked by the teenager, Tracy was charged with Dustin Weedy's murder.

01:00:44

The news was overwhelming to Dustin's mother. It was just like so heavy and I was like, it's unbelievable.

01:00:50

because I never thought that that day was going to come. But that day did come on a mild October morning in Fort Dodge, Iowa.

01:01:00

Tracy standing trial for murder as Tracy Richter, her maiden name. She'd entered a plea of not guilty.

01:01:07

Rookie prosecutor Ben Smith sat at his table next to a recently assigned veteran state's attorney, Doug Hammerand.

01:01:14

It was such a bizarre set of facts. We knew it would be difficult to show that this was a setup versus a home invasion.

01:01:21

At the heart of the prosecution's case was its assertion that Dustin was no home invader.

01:01:27

Mona Weedy testified that Tracy had actually invited Dustin to stop by the house.

01:01:32

She had some odd jobs for him and expressly asked him to come alone. Tracy said, yeah, we have a whole, whole, whole bunch of copies that we want Dustin to make,

01:01:41

send him down on his own the next day or two. And he did go. The prosecutor showed the jury a photo of Dustin's car parked in plain view outside the Roberts home.

01:01:51

If he was going to commit a burglary, it made no sense that he would park his car in the driveway.

01:01:57

Once inside the house, the prosecution argued, Dustin had taken down the dictation for the journal.

01:02:03

Investigators found a black rollerball pen sticking out of Dustin's back pocket, the same type of pen used to make the journal.

01:02:10

Makes no sense why Dustin would go in and commit a home invasion. with a black rollerball pen in his pocket.

01:02:17

It made more sense that the pink spiral notebook was done that day. The Pink Journal, written in Dustin's chicken scratch,

01:02:24

that stated Tracy's first husband, Dr. John Pittman, had hired him to kill Tracy.

01:02:30

The prosecution decided to clear that up for the jury once and for all. Did you ever ask Dustin Weedy to set up a plan to kill T.R., Tracy Richter, or your son, Bert?

01:02:45

God, no. Because the cops had long believed Dr. Pittman was innocent of any murder-for-hire scheme,

01:02:52

they kept the journal implicating him a secret, thinking whoever knew about it was probably behind the home invasion plot.

01:02:59

Enter Mary Higgins, the prosecution's star witness. Even though she was testifying for the prosecution,

01:03:06

she was still desperate to make a connection with a woman who'd once been her friend.

01:03:10

The whole time I'm in the stand, I wanted to look at Tracy. I wanted to see her eyes.

01:03:17

I wanted to see if the Tracy I knew was still in there. She told the jury about the moment Tracy had mentioned to her the journal.

01:03:25

She said that in the car next to the computer was a pink spiral notebook. Did she say anything about the pink spiral notebook would prove anything?

01:03:37

It would prove that John Pittman did this. So there was the foundation of the prosecution's case.

01:03:44

The motive, slime the ex-husband with that pink journal to keep custody of Bert.

01:03:48

The opportunity, lure a naive young Dustin Weedy into her web and then dispose of him.

01:03:54

Now the prosecution was going to take the jury back 10 years to that wintry house and show them how Tracy had done it.

01:04:02

First, they had to clear up what the physical evidence didn't show. Tracy's story of a home invasion did not match the crime scene.

01:04:09

A series of investigators testified there was no sign of a break-in, no signs of ransacking or an attack.

01:04:16

As for her strangulation injuries, this EMT who transported Tracy to the hospital was skeptical.

01:04:22

Are the marks on the front of the defendant's neck consistent with your experience for someone having ligature marks in a strangulation?

01:04:31

No, sir. The prosecution argued that Tracy had made the marks on her neck herself.

01:04:37

It was just one more aspect of her staged home invasion. So what did the physical evidence show had actually happened in the house that night?

01:04:44

The prosecution's last witness was a forensic expert who'd analyzed the blood spatter and bullet trajectories to explain the sequence of events.

01:04:53

Using rookie prosecutor Ben Smith as a stand-in for Dustin, he recreated the shooting in the courtroom.

01:04:59

There's a wound to the right arm, the lower abdomen right here on the side, the shoulder right here.

01:05:05

Just as she told investigators, Tracy had indeed started firing from beside the bed, the expert testified.

01:05:11

But then she tracked Dustin as he tried to turn away, and Tracy had continued shooting as she moved closer and closer to Dustin.

01:05:21

He is down and going down to the floor. There's a shot, number four, in the right neck.

01:05:30

The expert testified about those final shots fired into the back of Dustin's head.

01:05:36

One of them exits out of the left ear. any one of them could have been fatal according to the prosecution and it was highly unlikely that

01:05:44

dustin could have been trying to get up as tracy had told the police over the years i mean unless

01:05:49

he's a you know as a zombie i mean he's got eight bullets in his body he's got two in the back of

01:05:54

his head the prosecution expert then explained what the blood spatter evidence showed about the last shot He testified that Tracy had waited up to 15 minutes before firing a final round into the boy skull

01:06:06

And it was Tracy's best friend once again who had something startling to say about this new evidence.

01:06:12

Mary Higgins testified that she'd overheard something disturbing during a visit to Tracy's house.

01:06:18

Bert, who had always publicly supported his mother's account of that night, was confronting Tracy.

01:06:24

We're sitting at a table and Bert comes in and Bert's extremely agitated. Bert starts to hit his head on the table, not to hurt himself, I didn't feel, but out of frustration.

01:06:35

And he said, why did you go up there? Why did you go back up there? And he said, you didn't have to shoot him, you didn't have to kill him.

01:06:45

Was there something Bert had seen his mother do that terrible night in 2001, which he'd been keeping a secret all these years?

01:06:53

What truths could Burt tell the jury as he took the stand? Coming up, the heart of the defense's case.

01:07:02

What Tracy's son remembers about that night? He told me that my mom was dead and I was next.

01:07:08

But will he stand by his story under cross-examination? When was the last time you saw your children?

01:07:26

Um, the day I was arrested. The stakes were high at Tracy Richter's murder trial.

01:07:33

This mother, who could be looking at a future in a prison cell without her children,

01:07:37

says she was being punished for protecting them. This is an admirable story for a lot of Americans.

01:07:42

This is a woman defending her cubby bears at the risk of her own life, huh? That's exactly what she was doing.

01:07:48

Protecting them from peril. That's certainly what we believe happened that night.

01:07:52

Tracy's defense attorney, Scott Banstra and Carmen Anderson, didn't want the jurors to lose sight of the woman they believed their client to be,

01:08:00

a heroic mother. Her story certainly seemed much easier to believe than the prosecution's theory of an elaborate frame-up to resolve a custody dispute.

01:08:09

Common sense tells you that you don't plot, plan, and execute a murder during this hour time frame when you have three children at home.

01:08:16

As for the journal, the defense argued, forget about it. It may be a good yarn, but it doesn't tell you who killed Dustin and is irrelevant to the case, a red herring.

01:08:26

As far as him going in the home or Tracy having him come into home to author his journal, I mean, there is absolutely no evidence to support that.

01:08:33

Tracy and I wouldn't talk about the attack a lot. And the testimony of Tracy's best friend, Mary Higgins.

01:08:39

garbage, said the defense. When she's interviewed in 2002 and 2003, she makes no reference to

01:08:47

any journal. Mary gave four or five different versions of what she allegedly knew and what

01:08:54

she didn't know. Let's take it back to basics the defense told the jury. The evidence supported

01:09:00

Tracy's story of a home invasion, it argued, but investigators had missed it because of their

01:09:05

incompetent police work. And that was one of our biggest hurdles in the case was we,

01:09:10

they didn't do what they needed to do. The crime scene had been contaminated from the outset,

01:09:14

the defense argued. Paramedics had stepped in Dustin's blood. Evidence had been lost and basic

01:09:20

forensics had been botched. Tracy Richter's clothes were not retrieved after the shooting.

01:09:26

That's correct. The defense argued that Tracy's injuries spoke for themselves. They were the marks of someone who had been strangled.

01:09:34

The doctor who had treated her at the ER said he never doubted her story. But perhaps the investigator's biggest omission, the defense argued,

01:09:41

was in giving up on the hunt for that second intruder. They presented the jury with a possible suspect for that person,

01:09:48

someone who'd been having an affair with Dustin's mother, Mona Weedy, and had left town abruptly after the attack.

01:09:55

And you thought it was suspicious that he broke up with you immediately after Dustin's death.

01:10:01

I did. You believe he's the second man? Well, yes, absolutely. And so it appeared did Tracy.

01:10:08

When the defense's alternate suspect was called to the stand, Tracy wept, her body language gasping in effect.

01:10:15

Yes, this is the man who tried to kill me and got away. Was she acting for the jury, Carmen?

01:10:20

I don't believe so. Absolutely not. No. The man adamantly denied any involvement in the break-in.

01:10:25

Did any time you go with Dustin Weedy and try to attack Tracy Richter? No. The defense then put Dustin Weedy, the alleged perpetrator-turned-victim, on trial.

01:10:37

According to their portrayal of the long-dead boy, he was an unpredictable young man,

01:10:42

perfectly capable of lashing out and committing the crime. You testified yesterday on...

01:10:47

During the cross-examination of Dustin's mother, the defense attorney asked Mona about occasions when Dustin had lost his temper in the Weedy home.

01:10:55

You were afraid to leave your daughters alone with Dustin prior to the death, weren't you?

01:11:01

I wasn't afraid to leave him alone. I didn't like to leave my children alone. Mona told the jury that yes, her son had been difficult, but not violent.

01:11:11

She said she'd never told Tracy that Dustin was a threat to her or her other two children.

01:11:15

They made Dustin look like the bad boy and the violent child and the violent adult.

01:11:20

It was horribly hard for me to listen to that. But what about the other boy at the heart of this crime, Tracy's son, Bert?

01:11:31

He was going to be the defense's trump card. This is a guardian angel right here.

01:11:37

And that right there is the head of a demon. Bert has an elaborate tattoo depicting the home invasion.

01:11:45

And that's my mom. His mother is pictured as the hero. I know for a fact that if my mom didn't do what she did, I would be dead.

01:11:53

Now his mother was relying on him to save her from a life behind bars. Tracy sobbed as her son took the stand.

01:12:00

How do you feel about being here today, Bert? Pretty nervous. Bert walked the jurors through the home invasion.

01:12:07

I heard someone coming towards my door. And what did you do? I still had my bat ready to hit whoever came in first.

01:12:15

Bert told the jury there was no mistaking Dustin's criminal intent. He had a disturbing look on his face.

01:12:21

Angry and threatening. And how did you feel when you saw Dustin? I was very, very, very scared.

01:12:29

And did Dustin say anything to you at that time? Yes, he told me to stay in the room.

01:12:34

My mom was dead and I was next. Burke told the jury how he'd seen Dustin trying to get back up after he'd been shot.

01:12:41

I thought that the threat was back on. Were you afraid you were going to die? Yes.

01:12:50

Were you afraid for your brother and your sister? Absolutely. Were you afraid for your mom?

01:12:55

Absolutely. There was no doubt about it, Burke said. his mother had shot Dustin to protect him and his siblings.

01:13:03

He adamantly denied what Tracy's best friend had told the jury, that he'd been upset with his mother for going back to shoot Dustin again.

01:13:10

Do you have a recollection of that ever occurring? No, sir. Absolutely not. If Bert was telling the truth,

01:13:17

there was no doubt he had experienced something truly terrifying, something unforgettable.

01:13:23

Would his memories be enough to convince the jury his mother was his savior and not a killer?

01:13:29

Coming up, Tracy decides not to take the stand and face prosecutors' questions, but she does answer ours.

01:13:39

When they looked at the injury to your neck, it just seemed to be some kind of sawing back and forth abrasion.

01:13:44

Did you fake it? Did you do that to yourself? And then the jury's verdict when Dateline continues.

01:13:59

When he was 11 years old, Burt Pittman heard something monstrous through his bedroom door.

01:14:06

A struggle. Shots fired. It changed his life forever. Did your mom know that you had the weight of the world on your shoulders?

01:14:13

I mean, she knew. I mean, it was hard. At that point, you either grow up or you fail.

01:14:20

Now age 21, he was up on a witness stand trying to convince a jury that his mother was not a murderer.

01:14:25

If it wasn't for what my mom did, I wouldn't be sitting here today. The prosecutors didn't buy it, and they grilled Bert Pittman on cross-examination.

01:14:34

You may answer that. They wanted the jury to know that Tracy's son was coming up with dramatic new details

01:14:40

he'd never told investigators before. They confronted him with a transcript of his first statement to police from the night of the alleged attack You never said anything about hearing your mom having a choking sound out in the hallway did you

01:14:56

It's not on the, I'm not on this, no. You never told Lieutenant Sessford anything about dusting, starting to move, and was rocking and trying to get up either, did you?

01:15:07

It's not written down. I don't know if I told him that and he didn't write it down.

01:15:11

Tracy sat stony-faced as her son got down from the witness stand, but she mouthed, I love you, across the courtroom.

01:15:18

What would the jury make of it all? Then a moment of decision. Would Tracy testify in her own defense?

01:15:25

She opted not to, but she did agree to talk to us. Did you lure Dustin Weedy over to your house that day

01:15:32

and execute him in cold-blooded fashion? No. As she dabbed at her tears with a washcloth and shook in her chair,

01:15:38

Tracy seemed nothing like a ruthless killer. You fired 11 times, I'd say. That's what I'd say.

01:15:44

And you hit nine times. I don't remember firing that many times. I was surprised.

01:15:49

Tracy didn't waver from her story of that night. She had shot Dustin to protect herself and her family.

01:15:55

He had been attacking her. She'd been a victim, desperate to get away. I was in the corner.

01:16:02

The person had to follow me into the corner to get to me. You couldn't have gotten more further away in the house and been like in a more defensive position than huddled on the ground in a corner.

01:16:16

The forensic reconstruction expert described this person retreating from you and that you're the aggressor.

01:16:23

No, that's not true. And they don't believe you're still about being pulled by the legs either.

01:16:28

They say if you had done this kind of over your shoulder shot, there would have been traces of gunshot residue on the victim.

01:16:33

And they don't see that. So he had to be further away from you as you began shooting.

01:16:37

I know I was in the corner and the person was coming at me. That I know. I mean, I will take that to my grave.

01:16:43

There were other details Tracy was less sure of. Bert says that your hands were loosely bound with pantyhose and you had to untie them.

01:16:51

Is his memory correct? I don't know. Because this would make it very difficult to understand all the things that you say you do.

01:16:59

Manipulate the gun safe. Well, I don't know if... Your arms bound like this, get control of the gun.

01:17:04

I think they were, I don't recall ever, I don't recall ever saying that they were bound.

01:17:10

Well, you know, I mean, were they there or not? I want to say they were more wrapped around my arm.

01:17:16

Pantyhose, such a strange choice of weapon for a burglar or a hitman. But nonetheless, one that caused Tracy to black out, or so she had told police.

01:17:25

When they looked at the injury to your neck, it didn't seem to be the kind of injury that could cause you to pass out.

01:17:30

It just seemed to be some kind of sawing back and forth abrasion Did you fake it Did you do that to yourself No No That ridiculous It hurtful I prone to blacking out I have very low blood pressure but I don know if it was out of fear

01:17:47

I do know I could not breathe. I felt like I could not breathe. Even more ridiculous, Tracy said, was the motive the prosecution had ascribed to her.

01:17:55

that Dustin had been the fall guy in an elaborate scheme that she'd concocted to save her own son, Bert, from her ex-husband, Dr. John Pittman.

01:18:04

Did you think you were going to lose Bert? No, I didn't. I honestly never... It was never a concern.

01:18:11

Tracy said she had no reason to create the Pink Journal to try to frame her first husband.

01:18:16

In our interview, she said that their relationship at the time of the home invasion was nothing but cordial.

01:18:21

But if she hadn't authored the journal, how could she explain those biographical details about her ex contained in the journal?

01:18:29

They were the same details that showed up in an email Tracy later wrote to investigators.

01:18:34

There is language in the diary, Tracy, that is eerily like language that you used phrases in an email to the investigator.

01:18:43

It was the same topic, but not the same words. Isn't that quibbling? No, but... Why would Dustin be picking up on this if this is his journal?

01:18:54

Oh, I agree with you on that 100%. But I'm not the only person that would have known that.

01:19:01

I mean, Michael knew it also. Michael Roberts, Tracy's second husband. Tracy scoffs at her second husband's claims that she tried to kill him.

01:19:10

No, she says, he was the would-be killer. And the journal was part of his grand scheme to kill her and frame her first husband for it.

01:19:18

The only person that benefits is Michael Roberts. And it benefits Michael Roberts because if I died while he was out of town

01:19:27

and he was going to collect, you know, several million dollars in insurance on me,

01:19:32

he was going to be the number one suspect. And you think that today? No matter what. I think it more today than I ever have.

01:19:39

Michael Roberts watched the trial from across the country in California, where he was now taking care of his and Tracy's kids.

01:19:46

struggling with their questions and what he says is his continued fear of his ex-wife.

01:19:51

Neither the prosecution nor the defense called him to testify. Did I conspire with Dustin to kill Tracy

01:19:56

or whatever theory the defense wanted to throw out there? No, I didn't. But there was something Michael said he did feel bad about

01:20:03

all these years later, something he wanted to say to Dustin's mother. My apologies to Mona and Dustin's sisters

01:20:10

to have to go through 10 years, not only knowing that your son or your brother has been murdered, but has then been demonized.

01:20:19

And then I contributed to that when I came to the defense of Tracy You know for any pain any salt that I put on the Wheaties wounds I am so so sorry for that Back in court Dustin mother waited anxiously

01:20:33

After seven long days of testimony, the jury had started its deliberations. What was a few more hours after ten long years of waiting for answers?

01:20:42

What made you keep going forward? Everything you had to endure, the death of your son,

01:20:48

the death of your husband? my girls i'm like they don't have a dad they lost their brother

01:20:55

i tried to give them everything didn't always do a good job but i knew i had to be there for them and her daughters were there for her when the verdict

01:21:10

was read we the jury find the defendant tracy ann richter guilty of the crime of murder in the

01:21:15

first. Tracy buried her head in her hands. When they read the verdict, I thought I misheard it.

01:21:23

I did not expect it. Her son, Bert, sat there stunned, expressionless, until he too dissolved

01:21:30

in tears. A few weeks later, a judge listened to Mona's daughters as they explained the price

01:21:36

they'd paid for Tracy's acts. After all, Dustin had been not just a son, he'd been a brother too.

01:21:42

You cheated my brother Dustin out of his future. As I looked around the room again, I saw my big brother wasn't there.

01:21:52

You're going to take your time, okay? If you need a second. The judge sentenced Tracy Richter to spend the rest of her life in prison.

01:22:02

Mona Weedy finally had justice for her son. And what about that other son at the heart of this story?

01:22:08

once a little boy huddled behind a bedroom door listening to the sounds of a killing on a cold

01:22:15

december night i know the truth and knowing that she's in prison for something she didn't do is

01:22:20

i mean it's it's tough to move on bert denies lying on the witness stand the prosecutor isn't

01:22:27

so sure anytime she was in a pinch he was the alibi he was the piece of evidence and i it's

01:22:34

easy for me to sit on the outside and I see it. It's his mom, man. I would have done the same thing.

01:22:40

So at the end of things, maybe it's really the other way around. For so long, Tracy had told

01:22:46

this story of a mother protecting her children. But perhaps the real story is the tale of a loyal

01:22:51

son protecting his mom, trying and ultimately failing to shield her from herself inside a

01:22:58

Wintry House, long, long ago. That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt. Thanks for joining us.

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