Authors: M. William Phelps
Schaub opened the state’s case where he knew the death sentence Humphrey had handed down on Sandee Rozzo had started. He called Hillsborough assistant state attorney Pam Bondi, who was prosecuting Humphrey on the sexual assault/battery and kidnapping charges. Once Sandee was murdered, however, Bondi testified, a decision was made by her office to drop the felony charges against Humphrey.
“We did not have a victim,” Bondi told Schaub.
Rape cases came down to cross-examination and witness testimony. Once a witness was no longer available, the defendant didn’t have the right to question her on the stand. Thus, Sandee’s deposition, where she had outlined the entire sexual assault and kidnapping, could not be used to prosecute.
With one witness, the jury now had a motive in place.
The following day, Friday, February 17, Humphrey sat properly, with a serious look on his face. He wore a gray suit, a blue shirt, and his trademark librarian glasses. The state began to give the jury a photographic narrative of the murder scene, bringing in Tony Ponicall, who shed tears in his description of finding the woman he thought to be his girlfriend dying in their garage. Then a long line of forensic specialists, Homicide Division detectives, and police officers took the stand to describe the actual physical and forensic evidence collected on the scene, at the hospital, and later, when Ashley and Humphrey became suspects.
Two of the more memorable witnesses of the day were Kelly Terrell (Terrell Therapies) and Candis Maines, Humphrey’s former girlfriend.
Terrell explained how she had met Humphrey when he came around looking for a job. Then she went into how worried Humphrey had become about going back to prison because of the charges Sandee Rozzo had filed.
“He said he would kill himself before he would go back,” Terrell testified.
ASA Douglas Crow walked Terrell through those crucial days and weeks following July 5, 2003. He asked Terrell about a phone call Humphrey had received just a few days after the murder.
“When I walked into the club,” Terrell told the jury with her soft, sincere voice, “he was on the phone and looked very distressed. I wasn’t sure who he was on the phone with. And he’d obviously been given bad news, and when he hung up, I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ He said, ‘Sandee was murdered.’…He looked pale and very distraught by the news.”
“And did he indicate that he needed to tell Ashley, his wife, about the news?”
“Absolutely! I asked him if he had spoken to Ashley, if that was the first he had heard of it, and he said that he had
not
spoken to her, and I told him that he should tell her immediately, obviously, and then they spoke in the aerobics room.”
Terrell was a businesswoman. She had run Terrell Therapies with her mother for years. She was a competent, strong witness, someone who thought about her answers before speaking. The jury, it seemed, was listening intently to what she had to say.
Terrell next explained that she watched the two of them—Humphrey with his new bride—as they discussed the “news” Humphrey had been given by that friend over the telephone.
From there, Terrell said she spoke to the both of them for over an hour about what had happened to Sandee Rozzo.
Terrell was certain: “He said that she had been shot
eight
times….”
This fact had never been made public. Only the murderers could have known it, Crow had seemingly drawn out of Terrell.
“Had you heard any information that she had been shot eight times from any other source other than Mr. Humphrey?”
“No.”
“And did you hear it from anyone else subsequent to that, prior to his arrest?”
“No.”
Crow paused, dropped his head. “No further questions.”
McDermott stood slowly. Then he moseyed over to the witness stand, pulling what could be described only as a Perry Mason move out of his bag of tricks: “Miss Terrell, am I saying that right? Is it Terrell or Tarell?”
“It’s Terrell.”
“Terrell. Okay.” The seasoned trial veteran took a moment. “When you
first
reported this conversation to law enforcement, you did
not
mention anything about the eight times, did you?”
“I had…I said…I believe so, actually,
yes.
”
“Didn’t you call them at a
later
date and say it came back to you that it was eight times?”
“That was two years ago!”
“Okay. You’re not sure, then?”
“I’m not sure if I said it originally, if I was asked that at a later date, or if I spoke to someone at a later date.”
“As far as you know, this was the first occasion Mr. Humphrey learned of the homicide?”
“As far as I knew, yes.”
They went back and forth for some time regarding Humphrey’s demeanor after receiving the news. McDermott wanted more information about how his client was feeling.
“So his—at least—appearance to you,” McDermott said, “as his initial reaction, was upset?”
“Absolutely,” Terrell said quickly, determinedly.
“Did he get sick?”
“He
said
he threw up, yes.”
The remainder of McDermott’s cross-examination was rather pointless. Nothing but meaningless facts that McDermott could not trip Terrell up on. But the idea that Humphrey got sick after that phone call was now imprinted in the jury’s mind.
Next up for the state was Candis Maines, who was on the stand for one reason: to talk about how Humphrey felt about Sandee Rozzo and the idea that she held ten years’ worth of his freedom in her hands.
Maines was obviously a bit frightened of sitting in front of such an intimidating man. Someone who she knew could threaten and intimidate with eye contact alone. Humphrey had smirked at certain witnesses, as if to say,
Watch your tongue!
It was clear from the expression on Maines’s face that she had feared this man at one time, and many of those feelings were now coming back.
The year was 2002, Maines explained. She and Humphrey were talking about the charges he faced regarding Sandee Rozzo. He was pacing and ranting and shouting and breathing heavy, like a wild man, talking about how he was not going back to prison. It was an ugly place, his version of hell. There was no way he could ever do it again.
“He said,” Maines stated without a crack or break in her passionate voice, “that he would
never
go back to prison, that he would either flee or kill himself.”
McDermott broke up the momentum that seemed to be stirring in Maines’s tone and asked if the state could have Maines provide a timeline.
The guy was good.
“The latter part of 2002,” she said without thinking.
Just to be certain, Douglas Crow asked, “And was this in relationship to being afraid of going to prison on the Sandee Rozzo charges?”
“Yes.”
“Did he express his feelings
about
Miss Rozzo?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
“That he
hated
her. That he basically wished ill will toward her. He also stated that if anything were to ever happen to her, he would be the first person that people would look at even if it was not related.”
“No further questions.”
“Did
you
try to kill Mr. Humphrey once?” McDermott said, standing, not wasting any time in attacking Maines’s credibility.
“No.”
“Did you go after him with a knife?”
“No.”
“You didn’t try to break into his apartment and confront him with a knife?”
“No, I did
not
!”
“Did you break his window?”
“We got into an altercation, yes. He also hit me and tried to choke me.”
An attorney has to be very careful with questions when he has a liar for a client. It can all backfire so quickly, your head will spin. McDermott, likely realizing he may have walked into an ambush, toned down his assault.
“At his house?”
“And he held me hostage, yes!”
Same as he had with Sandee Rozzo.
“At
his
house? You really went in there because you knew he had another girl in there, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And you were jealous of [her]?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did you have a knife with you?”
“No!”
“No other questions.”
David Abernathy walked into the courtroom and took his seat on the witness stand after Joe McDermott asked for a second mistrial in as many days. Before that, jurors heard briefly from Detective Sergeant Paul Andrews, Dr. Noel Palma, the medical examiner (ME) who had autopsied Sandee’s body, and a forensic expert’s analysis of ballistics.
Abernathy was there, among other things, to close the deal on the weapon used to mow Sandee down—he confirmed that the weapon that the FDLE had uncovered, buried in the woods, was his. After all, he had loaned Ashley the weapon for protection, so he thought, but he never got it back. Ashley had stolen a rifle from his bedroom, too, which she had used during that botched Memorial Day weekend attempt on Sandee’s life.
The weapons were brought into the room and displayed for jurors to see. Abernathy pointed, and then told the jury he recognized the weapons as those that he had purchased—the pistol, of course, he had loaned to Ashley for “protection.”
Detective Scott “Ski” Golczewski and FDLE SA Steve Davenport were next sworn in and asked to verify how they had uncovered the weapons and a few other miscellaneous items in the woods after Ashley had told them where to look. In addition, Ski explained that the phone records from Ashley’s cell phone were what, at the beginning of the investigation, convinced law enforcement that Humphrey could possibly be the mastermind behind the crime. All told, both officers were on the stand fewer than seven minutes. Their presence in the courtroom was more of a way for the state to introduce the phone records. The jury could later go through the records themselves and see firsthand how many times Ashley’s and Humphrey’s phones had called each other. Ashley would come in soon enough and admit that it was Humphrey on the other end of the line, tying everything together.
Next up was Tobe White, the state’s courageous undercover operative. Tobe had been walked into the courtroom by a law enforcement escort because of the threats she had been receiving. There was also that lingering telephone call right after Humphrey’s arrest that was weighing on Tobe, when the caller had said she’d be shot walking into the courthouse. In fact, right before she was set to testify, Tobe got a phone call, she later claimed, from a man who said, “We are going to shoot you while you’re walking up the courthouse steps.”
Despite all of this, Tobe felt safe. It had been years since she had gotten involved with the case; nothing had happened that led her to believe she was going to be killed.
“It was meant to terrorize me into backing down,” Tobe later recalled, speaking of all the threats she had endured. “Tracey had a definite ability to control people and to get them to do what he wanted. And that was what really scared me. I knew he didn’t have the money to pay for it to be done, but he had the skills to manipulate people.”
Seeing Humphrey this many years later, Tobe said, sitting there in the courtroom, staring up at her as she sauntered into the room, “really,
really
freaked me out. The defense attorney kept standing in front of Tracey, but off to the side enough so I had to stare right at Tracey while I testified.”
Primarily, Tobe talked about how Humphrey had asked her to create an alibi for him and Ashley. After establishing that fact, she walked ASA Crow through the lengths that Humphrey had gone in order to make sure she kept her word. Beyond those two items, Tobe responded to a question Crow asked about Humphrey throwing her on the ground at Terrell Therapies on the day after Ashley found those questions stuck in Tobe’s computer printer.
“He sat on me,” Tobe explained without a touch of fear or intimidation in her voice, “pinned my arms back and twisted them. He said he’d kill me if I was working with them.”
Near the end of her testimony, Tobe said, “Ashley had told detectives that I was with them that night, and if I didn’t go along with it, he didn’t know what he would do. I took that as a threat.”
When Tobe finished, McDermott asked for—you guessed it—a mistrial, which was promptly denied for a third time.
On Monday morning, February 20, 2006, Ashley Humphrey walked into the courtroom and took a seat next to Judge Ley’s higher position in the room. Ashley wore what looked to be hospital blues. Of course, she was dressed in a prison jumpsuit she would spend the next twenty-five years in. From head to toe, Ashley looked completely different. Gone were the hourglass curves of her teenage years, the hard body of an aerobics instructor, and the high cheekbones of a supermodel. Her long, curly hair flowed over her shoulders. Ashley wore gaudy glasses pointed like shark fins at the corners, underneath which there was a noticeable new plumpness to her face and cheeks. She was about thirty pounds heavier than she had ever been. Those days of keeping in shape at the gym were long gone. Another life. Yet, beyond all the psychical changes she had gone through on the outside, the one thing Ashley brought into the courtroom that no one could take from her—certainly not Tracey Humphrey—was obvious maturity and self-confidence. She’d had time to sit and consider her life, without the Devil on her shoulder, screaming in her ear, telling her what to do and when to do it. Funny thing is, Ashley had apparently found that peace she’d been searching for all her life in the last place she’d ever expected.
After she recited her name and vitals, ASA Fred Schaub got right down to business, allowing Ashley to admit up front that she was there to take full responsibility for her crimes.
“Before we begin, let me ask you a couple of questions…. On July 5, 2003, did you shoot Sandee Rozzo eight times as she sat in her car at her home?”
“I did.”
No emotion. No apology. No dramatics. Pure liability.
From that point on, Schaub had Ashley go through her childhood, schooling, family life—“Not good”…“I smoked pot with my mother…”—and several other personal details that were important to the endgame of Ashley now sitting in prison on a murder rap. It seemed her life was headed for destruction the moment she and her mother started to butt heads, disagreeing on just about everything, and her mom fell into a lifestyle Ashley knew wasn’t good for a child to be around. Then, after leaving the house, Ashley bounced around, unsure of where her life was going, or where she would end up.
Humphrey sat calmly while his wife began to drag a knife slowly across his freckled throat. At various intervals he would smile and laugh at something she said, but he mostly kept his composure in check. After all, Humphrey couldn’t sit and shake his head over and over, and expect the jury to believe that everything out of Ashley’s mouth was untrue.
One thing became apparent after Schaub asked Ashley to talk about her childhood and teen years: not having a relationship with her natural father all those years set the stage for her to begin searching for a replacement. Doubt and uncertainty shadowed Ashley like a halo. As she meandered her way through adult life out of high school, Ashley was in need of that fatherly figure she’d never had, someone to help guide her through life’s tough times. She was out of the house, living with anyone who would take her in, before she graduated high school. She was participating in three-way sexual romps and doing drugs. Looking for, one would imagine, somebody or something to fill that void and love her unconditionally. And yet still, during that self-abusive period where she developed low self-esteem, Ashley Christine Laney had managed to get excellent grades. She
did
have a future.
Then she got a job at Planet Smoothie in Brandon, walked into the Athletic Club to sign up for workouts, ran into Humphrey, and her life changed forever. Ashley finally found that man to replace her dad. Older and more balanced (so she thought). Someone who could cuddle her and tell her everything was going to be all right. A protector. Someone who could shelter her from the nasty world, but also, unbeknownst to Ashley, shape and mold her into the killer he needed at the time.
For an hour or so, Ashley explained how the man she met and fell in love with began to impress her, not only with his physique and ability to lift massive amounts of weight and stay on a strict diet, but with all the additional talents he seemed to impute to himself: modeling in Italy, playing NFL football, training celebrities, being in business for himself. Ashley thought she was with the most incredibly savvy, smart, and successful twenty-nine-year-old entrepreneur she could have ever hoped to meet.
But it was all lies. She had naïvely walked into the trap of an experienced charlatan, a career con man and criminal. Someone who was telling her everything she wanted to hear. How pretty she was. How smart and outgoing. How she’d make the perfect wife and homemaker. Maybe even a mother someday.
Almost immediately, that is,
after
they had become serious, Ashley realized that Humphrey was wooing many different women at the same time. By then, she had fallen for him, she said, and had begun to believe that she would eventually get him to settle down, so she stuck it out.
Then, after they started living together with Wade Hamilton, Humphrey began working on Ashley with his Sandee Rozzo problem, waging a campaign to get rid of what had become a nuisance in his life.
“He was talking about it a lot,” Ashley said, “…and saying how this woman was trying to ruin his life.”
About once a week, in the early part of the relationship, Humphrey mentioned there was no way he could ever go back to jail, that he would either kill himself or “go on the run for the rest of his life.”
Ashley worried. She didn’t want to lose her man.
That mantra of running or committing suicide, which Humphrey had pumped into Ashley periodically, slowly manifested itself into “Well, maybe there is something else that could be done.” This was a time when Humphrey dropped subtle hints at first, Ashley claimed. The way she described the dance from one to the other made it sound as if Humphrey would give her the old Groucho Marx eyebrow raise and suggest that if only someone could get rid of Sandee Rozzo, all of his (and her) problems would be solved.
The murder seed took root from there and began to grow.
They would be in bed, after the crazy, wild sex that Ashley craved. Humphrey would turn to her, and “he said if there was any way for her to not show up in court, that would be his best chance to get out of the ten years.”
And for those first few weeks—that period of any new relationship where some are so overwhelmed with bliss in their clouded psyches, when nothing else matters but the ground he or she walks on—they both knew and understood what they were talking about, but neither had mentioned the word “murder.” It was as if they had an unwritten agreement between them.
A sex pact.
Schaub had Ashley identify several pieces of evidence. Mainly, receipts for CyberTracker and other Internet people-search sites. Ashley admitted she had logged on and searched for Sandee Rozzo
only
because Humphrey had asked. Why else would she? She didn’t even know Sandee. And maybe even more important, Sandee was not a threat to Ashley, as far as taking her man away. Ashley didn’t mind, she said, waiting for her man to get out of prison. But to lose him to another woman would have been devastating—and Sandee was completely out of the picture, moving around a lot at the time.
With that, she said Humphrey needed to keep an eye on where Sandee was at all times.
“We would drive by clubs and see if her car was there,” Ashley said.
There was one day, Ashley recalled, when she and Humphrey ate lunch at the Green Iguana in Tampa. She thought it was just another day, a nice meal together at a bar. When they got home, she learned that Humphrey’s roommate, Wade Hamilton, had told him a few days earlier that he—Hamilton—had run into Sandee at the Green Iguana. And that’s why they had gone there to eat.
Things started to make sense to her at that point, Ashley explained. They were essentially stalking Sandee. And from that day on, Ashley said, she participated in finding out everything she could about Sandee’s lifestyle and comings and goings, all for her hubby. She called the Green Iguana numerous times to ask if Sandee was there. When the person who answered the telephone went to fetch Sandee, Ashley would hang up.
Mostly, Ashley said, they drove around in Humphrey’s Lincoln LS.
“Okay, but did there come a point in time,” Schaub asked, “when he
insisted
on you using your car?” The VW Beetle.
“Yes.”
“When was that?”
“When
I
began stalking her.”
She waited for Sandee to come out of work and followed her home—sort of a dry run leading up to “that night.” Every time she did it, Humphrey was on the other end of the telephone line, coaching, asking Ashley questions.
Wherever she went, Sandee carried a black bag. When Humphrey tagged along with Ashley to stalk her, he’d point at the bag, she said, and say, “You must grab that.” He wanted the murder to look like a mugging.
“Did he say why he didn’t want to do the killing himself?”
“He would be the prime suspect.”
“Had you told him at times that you would kill for him?”
“I believe so.”
It was April, heading into May 2003. Ashley talked about the fights they were having fairly regularly. They were violent and aggressive, Humphrey always threatening to leave her and find someone else.
“We had fights often, and he wanted to break up with me, so I decided I was going to leave, and I walked out of the apartment. And he came out behind me and called me a bitch, or something to that effect, and then he turned around to go back to the apartment, and I kind of jumped and hit him on his back, and he swung around and hit me in the face and I passed out.
“When I came to, he was like, ‘Come in the house!’ He was
very
upset. He said, ‘I’m very sorry.’ I was—I was begging to stay with him at this point, and I told him, ‘If you let me stay with you, I’ll kill Sandee for you.’”
“Did he accept that?”
“Yes!”
Another interesting fact Ashley brought up was how Humphrey “wanted to control what I wore and how my hair was styled, and he wanted me to have fake nails and pedicures and wear baggier clothes than I was accustomed to wearing…. And I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere without telling him. I wasn’t allowed to have any friends…so we were just together twenty-four hours a day.”
This went on for months. Humphrey would threaten to throw Ashley out of the apartment on a weekly basis, and she would, in turn, promise to kill Sandee for him. It was a premeditated, carefully thought-out plan on Humphrey’s part, the prosecution was slowly drawing out of Ashley. He was manipulating Ashley into killing for him; he was a master at brainwashing. Once he knew Ashley could not function without him, he laid on the idea to kill Sandee. The more she depended on Humphrey for her happiness, the more he knew he could—like he told fellow inmates after being arrested—get her to do anything he wanted.
Another way Humphrey made sure that she followed through with her promise was to keep Ashley confused and always walking on eggshells.
“Did the defendant ever tell you what he would do to you if you
didn’t
kill Sandee?”
“He said we wouldn’t be together.”
“Did he threaten to throw you out?”
Humphrey leaned over and whispered something into McDermott’s ear.
“Yes.”
“[So you wouldn’t be] living with him?”
“Yes.”
“How often would he say that?”
“Quite often. He always thought I wasn’t serious about doing this for him. So he said I was procrastinating and that I wasn’t pulling through—following through on my promises, and that if I didn’t do this, if I wasn’t serious, that I would be
out.
”
The courtroom went silent. It was chilling, really, to listen to a woman describe how she had been manipulated into murder by a professional con artist. Of course, Ashley would ultimately have to submit and pull the trigger by herself, but there was no doubt that Humphrey had worked hard and tirelessly at getting his girlfriend to the point where she thought the only way she could keep her man was to kill for him.