Authors: M. William Phelps
What the heck was going on?
Sandee, her mouth agape, sat on the couch. Humphrey stood in front of her like some sort of wild man.
“Please let me get you some help. Please, Tracey.”
“I can’t…you can’t call anybody, because I’ll be Baker-Acted.”
The Baker Act is a Florida law that provides “individuals with emergency services and temporary detention for mental-health evaluation and treatment when required—either voluntarily or involuntarily.” If the cops showed up at Sandee’s, in other words, they could immediately detain Humphrey and send him to a mental hospital.
Sandee stood. “Oh, my God, you’re going to die, Tracey!”
If Humphrey had cut his jugular vein, Sandee knew he could bleed to death in a matter of minutes.
“I really thought he cut his jugular vein,” she said later. “I’m no doctor. I don’t know. I just saw a
lot
of blood.”
Humphrey looked at her with an ominous gaze of discontent, like a staggering boxer searching for his footing after a solid shot to the head. He was fading.
Fast.
Or so she thought.
“No,” Humphrey said wearily, referring to cutting his jugular, “just help me.”
Sandee told her attacker they needed to get him into the tub to wash him off so she could see where the wound was bleeding from.
“I didn’t know what to do,” she said later. “I really thought he was going to die. I
truly
believed he was going to die.”
Sandee cleaned herself up and got Humphrey to do the same, all before eight-thirty that Saturday night, February 23, 2002. Both of them had to be at Inferno by nine. Humphrey bandaged his neck with some gauze and medical tape. Sandee sported two black eyes, bruises all about her cheeks, face, arms, and body. Before they left, Humphrey reminded Sandee of the story they were to tell when they got to work. He didn’t need to remind her, she said, that he had all of her personal information and could leave the bar at any moment and head off to Texas to pay her daughter a little visit. Or, if that wasn’t enough to keep her quiet, Humphrey could make a quick call to his friends, the crack-smoking African-Americans, who, he said, would enjoy raping Sandee until she begged for death.
Sandee understood that her silence on the true nature of their injuries was something she should conform to without argument—or else. And Tracey Humphrey had already proven, quite violently, what that “else” involved.
Humphrey drove Sandee’s car. They made it in before nine. Everyone crowded around Humphrey as he began spewing his pack of lies. It made Sandee sick to her stomach to listen to coworkers say how sorry they were that the accident had happened. How utterly worried they were and glad that Humphrey was okay. It was like some sort of bad dream all over again. A crowd of people hovering around the man who had beaten and raped her, while he looked out of the corner of his eye at her, winking.
Unfortunately for Sandee, Humphrey wasn’t scheduled to work downstairs that night; he was set to be a roamer, which meant he was free to walk about the bar anywhere he wanted.
This kept Humphrey mostly upstairs, so he could keep an eye on Sandee. He would raise his eyebrow and nod threateningly every once in a while, letting her know that he could pull her out of the bar and make her disappear at any moment.
When the shift ended, Humphrey drove them back to Sandee’s. It was now the following morning, Sunday. Sandee had stayed true to her promise and not said a word to anyone. Nor had she called the police. She did make one call, but she was certain Humphrey had not seen her.
It was 6:00
A.M
. when they returned to Sandee’s apartment.
“I need to be at the airport,” Sandee told Humphrey, “by seven.” Her plane was leaving for Pittsburgh. She was supposed to be meeting her mother there to help her pick up a new wheelchair for a friend. The trip had been planned long ago. Sandee was going to help her mother. See some old friends and family. She couldn’t just blow it off. They’d all wonder what was going on.
Humphrey thought about this. He looked at his victim as they sat in her car in the parking lot of Sandee’s apartment.
He got out, saying, “Remember what I told you.”
He was just going to allow Sandee to go?
After all, Sandee surmised, he couldn’t keep her hostage forever.
Sandee walked inside her apartment, closed the door, and quickly locked it behind her. She was crying, of course. The apartment was a mess. Blood and towels and reminders of what had happened were everywhere.
She paced. Thinking. What to do…what to do?
Pittsburgh, as planned, was definitely out. There was no way she could face her mother and act like nothing was wrong.
Sandee waited, making sure Humphrey was gone. Being one who needed to have things in order, but also one who wanted to forget what had happened inside her apartment, Sandee began cleaning. Vigorously. Obsessively. Cleaning and cleaning and cleaning. She threw everything and anything that reminded her—even remotely—of the weekend into the Dumpster in the back parking lot.
When she was done, Sandee sat.
Exhausted, she had to decide what to do next.
Ybor City is part of Florida’s Latin Quarter, known as one of the cigar-manufacturing centers of the state. Amber Kellogg had been working full-time in Y bor at a popular nightspot when she and Sandee Rozzo first hit it off. Sandee was working three jobs at the time. It was 1999. The end of a decade. The conclusion of a millennium. An era, essentially.
Amber and Sandee started going out and working promotions for the bar together, which gave them the opportunity, as Amber later put it, to “begin getting to know each other.”
Sandee’s new friend noticed right away that Sandee was one of those go-getters who believed that if you wanted something, you went out and worked your ass off for it. Working three different jobs, Sandee was literally going from one to the next, without much of a break in between.
“Sandee was a very vibrant human being—just her warmth and how much she actually cared about people,” Amber said. “If she really became your friend, she was dedicated. She gave two hundred and twenty percent to anything she did.”
When Amber and Sandee met, Sandee was coming off the breakup of her life. She had been engaged to be married. She was happier than she had ever been. Yet, the guy up and decided one day that he wanted out of the relationship. This, Sandee couldn’t believe, after they had gone out and purchased a home together.
“It was what Sandee had wanted,” Amber explained, “the perfect life…the perfect fairy-tale relationship and marriage.”
White picket fence. Dog. Boat. Two-point-two kids.
She thought this guy was the one who could give it all to her, that happiness she had been searching for her entire life.
Turned out, though, he had broken her heart in more pieces than any other guy she had dated.
From there, Sandee realized she couldn’t rely on anybody but herself. She could trust people, sure. That wasn’t it. She could have friends and one day get herself another man, but nothing could ever replace the happiness that she was now going to give to herself.
The jobs kept her mind off the breakup. Amber and Sandee got to know each other quite well. About a year after they met, Amber met a guy herself and moved an hour away, to Sarasota. She and Sandee remained friends, but, of course, didn’t get a chance to see each other as often as either had wished. They talked, however, at least once a day on the telephone, Amber recalled. Even if it was a simple gesture: “Hey, how’s your day going?” They weren’t about to lose that rare connection of true friends.
“Sandee and I had the type of relationship where there was never that uncomfortable silence on the phone. We always cared enough about each other and our families to wonder how everyone was doing.”
Then came that day in late February 2002 when Amber had tried calling Sandee, but couldn’t get ahold of her. Sandee hadn’t called for two days. The silence started on a Friday. It wasn’t until Saturday night—late, lots of noise in the background—that Amber heard from Sandee.
Amber was out with friends at dinner.
“Hey…”
“Hey.”
“I’m in trouble,” Sandee said matter-of-factly. “Tracey kept me hostage and beat the crap out of me…. I’m in fear for my life…. He has all of my information…my family’s….” Sandee had a hard time talking. She was losing it. It sounded as if she was hiding out, looking in all directions, waiting for Humphrey to come around the corner and catch her.
“My goodness,” Amber said. She walked away from the dinner table to get some privacy.
Watching her, that look of concern on her face, Amber’s fiancé knew something was up.
Sandee explained that she was supposed to get on a plane to Pennsylvania to meet her mother in the morning. She had stepped away from working the bar for a minute during a time when Humphrey wasn’t watching her.
“I don’t know if I should go,” Sandee told Amber. “My plane leaves early.”
“You need to call me tomorrow before you leave, if you go.”
Amber knew who Tracey was; she had met Humphrey a few times back when she lived near Tampa.
“I didn’t know him—only what Sandee told me about him. We had this thing about our relationship that we did not judge the decisions either of us made. We accepted each other as is.”
Weeks after Sandee met Humphrey, she told Amber all about him and the relationship. Sandee felt sorry for Humphrey, she said, when she first met him. He had just walked out of prison, he claimed, and no one would hire him. Sandee wanted to help him get back on his feet. She said Humphrey explained that he had a daughter he wanted to see, but the court wasn’t allowing him to do that until he got a job and appeared to have his life on track.
The relationship, Sandee said, started off great. Humphrey was the type of friend she could run off to the mall with and help pick things out for his daughter and hers. They were like girlfriends, Sandee said. There was always that question of Humphrey’s sexuality in there, Sandee made it clear to Amber.
Amber knew from her conversations with Sandee that Humphrey looked at the relationship from an entirely different viewpoint as time went on.
“She knew Tracey wasn’t boyfriend material,” said one friend, “and she used him for what he was. She was sexually attracted to him, but that was it. She was in a rough period of her life when he came along.”
After sleeping with Humphrey those few times, however, the relationship, that same friend added, “ended up becoming something that Sandee didn’t want.”
Then she felt trapped—as if she couldn’t get out of it.
According to Amber, as Sandee broke the news to Humphrey that even the friends with benefits part of their relationship needed to end, she began to see the real person emerge. The more Sandee removed herself from the situation, the more he became infuriated with her. She was now a possession Humphrey was told he couldn’t have—a piece of flesh—and he didn’t like that.
Working with Humphrey at Inferno, Sandee watched him out of the corner of her eye, she explained to Amber. He was openly flirtatious with women. He’d act differently around different groups of people. Sandee would say something about the behavior to him, and Humphrey would then overindulge her with apologies: “
I’m sorry,
it’ll never happen again.”
What would never happen again? Sandee was confused by his comments. He acted as though they were together, when she was simply pointing out to him that he was a flirt or a player.
Then a host of Humphrey’s friends from the gay community—not that Sandee was homophobic or didn’t like gay people—and from the adult-film and porn industry came into the bar one night. This was when, Sandee told Amber, Humphrey truly became a different person. Someone she didn’t know. There was an entire subset of gay dancers and gay clubgoers that Humphrey hung around with—people whom, Sandee reiterated, she was scared of. She didn’t know what Humphrey was involved in. He seemed to be game for anything. She definitely wanted no part of a guy who was sleeping with men
and
women, if that was true. Moreover, Sandee learned that he was on every type of muscle supplement you could imagine, on top of injecting steroids. Add to that, his criminal record—which Sandee knew very little about—and the guy was a loaded cannon.
Bottom line: the more Sandee got to know the guy, the more she understood that Tracey Humphrey was no one she wanted to hang around with. Sandee had a daughter. A family. She wasn’t going to be bringing around any weirdos or ex-cons. Life was a struggle to begin with for Sandee at the time. She didn’t need to add to it.
“Sandee was that person who always wanted to believe what someone said,” Amber recalled about her best friend. “She always wanted to give a person the benefit of the doubt. She didn’t judge people.”
And then one day, after she trusted Humphrey enough to open up to him and allow him into her life, overlooking all his faults, Humphrey turned around and took advantage of Sandee in every possible way.
After Sandee left her house, finally getting completely away from Humphrey on that Sunday morning, she drove out of the area, crying all the way. She was beyond his reach now, she believed, and could breathe a sigh of relief that he wasn’t going to show up and hurt her anymore.
Confident no one was following her, Sandee pulled over to the side of the road and called Amber for a second time.
The guy Amber was planning on marrying was a lawyer. On the phone that Sunday morning, when Sandee was supposed to be on a plane to Pennsylvania, Amber told Sandee there was no way she should make that flight. After what she had been through, she needed to drive straight to Sarasota, or Amber and her fiancé, Amber said, would drive up to Tampa.
Sandee needed a friend, someone who could help her decide what to do next without making any judgments regarding what had happened. She knew Amber was that person.
Amber suggested they meet for lunch somewhere in the middle. Sandee needed a doctor, the cops, and some protection from that maniac. He had stolen her identity and threatened her life and the lives of her family members, for crying out loud. He could be on his way to grab Sandee’s daughter right now.
Sandee was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt. She wore a ball cap and dark, large-framed glasses. Walking into the restaurant, she looked like a fugitive on the run from the cops. Or a celebrity hiding out from paparazzi. The weight of what had actually happened was quickly sinking in. Sandee was beginning to realize what had transpired between her and Humphrey. There was a fleeting moment there—the same in any rape case—where the victim wants to blame herself, to find a way to rationalize the crimes and believe that she had brought them on.
For Sandee this lasted a split second. She knew what Humphrey had done. Hell, the bruises alone told that story. What woman liked to be beaten to a pulp?
Low-key and subdued, Sandee didn’t want to have a public, detailed discussion of what had happened. Sitting in the restaurant, talking, she was vague. Broken was more like it. She had been held captive for two days inside her apartment by a madman. She had been beaten and raped and threatened. She had the wounds to prove it. Sandee told Amber and her fiancé that the one thing that Humphrey had made a point to say several times throughout the weekend had scared her more than anything else. Beyond the fact that he had her daughter’s address and the phone numbers and addresses and Social Security numbers of family and friends, there was one thing Sandee kept going back to in her mind. She could hear him saying it over and over:
“I’m not going back to jail.”
“His fear of going to jail,” Sandee said later, “it was so…so…I mean, he was so
afraid
of going back to jail that I knew that he would do
anything
to not let himself get put back in jail.”
Amber was terrified for her best friend. Looking at Sandee, she couldn’t believe her eyes. The guy had pummeled her. Her injuries were so pronounced. And here it was, nearly two days later.
“Come on, let’s get out of here,” Amber said.
They agreed that Sandee would follow Amber and her fiancé to Sarasota so Sandee could stay at Amber’s house for as long as she needed to recuperate and get back on her feet. Amber wanted Sandee to file a report with the police—right away. Get things moving on the legal end. Get some protection. Didn’t matter what Humphrey had said or threatened. The police needed to be involved.
Immediately.
When they got to Sarasota and were inside the house, Sandee took off her glasses.
Amber and her fiancé stepped back, took a look at her.
Incredible. It was worse than they had originally thought. Sandee had yellow, black, and blue bruises, shiny and raw, under both eyes. Her arms were all welted up and red where Humphrey had tied her hands together and grabbed at her.
She looked like hell.