True Crime Campfire - Fury By Proxy: The Murder of Sandee Rozzo

Episode Date: January 19, 2024

Some of the scariest people we’ve covered on this show were cursed with a grandiose sense of entitlement—the sense that if they see something they want, they should be allowed to just take it, whether that something is a new watch or a fellow human being. The self-centeredness is bad enough, but when you couple it with rage…especially the kind brought on by copious amounts of steroids…you’ve got the setting for a perfect storm. The problem is, the grandiose people can sometimes be the shiniest, sparkliest, most engaging ones in the room. They’re skilled at wearin’ that good-guy mask. And sometimes, by the time they rip it off, you’re already in the hole too deep to find your way back to daylight. Join us for a story of bullying, rage, blind love and bravery in the face of terror.Sources:Kill For Me by M. William PhelpsCBS's "48 Hours," episode Dangerous LiaisonsInvestigation Discovery's "On the Case with Paula Zahn," episode "Honeymoon Hit"Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. Some of the scariest people we've covered on this show were cursed with a grandiose sense of entitlement. The sense that if they see something they want, they should be allowed to just take it. whether that something is a new watch or a fellow human being. The self-centeredness is bad enough, but when you couple it with rage,

especially the kind brought on by copious amounts of steroids, you've got the setting for a perfect storm. The problem is the grandiose people can sometimes be the shiniest, sparkliest, most engaging ones in the room. They're skilled at wearing that good guy mask. And sometimes, by the time they rip it off, you're already in the hole too deep to find your way back to the daylight. Join us for a story of bullying, rage, blind love, and bravery in the face of terror.

This is Fury by Proxy, the murder of Sandy Razzo. So, campers, for this one, we're in Pinellas Park, Florida, July 5, 2003. It was about 11 o'clock at night. when Sandy Razzo pulled into the driveway of her townhouse after a long day bartending at the green iguana. Her music was still playing as she steered her BMW into the garage. I'm not sure if she noticed the car sliding to a stop in front of her next door neighbor's house just a few seconds later, but I do know this. As she was getting her stuff together to get out of her car, Sandy saw a dark figure running up to her driver's side window, pistol in hand. The figure was

dressed in black from head to toe, must have been a terrifying sight. Maybe they made eye contact for a second. Then the intruder bashed on Sandy's car window, trying to shatter it with the butt of the gun. The figure soon gave up trying to break the window and just shot through it instead. By now, Sandy was screaming, trying frantically to scramble away from the shooter. One of the bullets went through her foot as she put it up on the window to try and push herself back. The shooter kept firing, eight shots and all. By the last shot, Sandy was no longer screaming. One of the bullets had gone right through the center of her forehead. The silence after eight gunshots is startling. The killer stood for a second, looking at the carnage all over the front seat of

Sandy Razzo's car, then turned and ran, disappearing into the warm summer night. Inside the townhouse, Sandy's boyfriend, Tony, startled awake at the sound of loud pops, one after another. fireworks, he figured. It was July 5th, but it was so loud, and it sounded like it was coming from his front yard, which was weird. Tony hopped out of bed and went downstairs. He looked out the front window. Nope, nobody was out there shooting off firecrackers. His next thought was that maybe something might have fallen or exploded in the garage, like a paint can or something. So he went out to check. Huh, Sandy's cars here, he noticed, and the garage doors open, but he didn't see any sign of Sandy, until he took a few steps toward the BMW. First, he realized he'd just put his

bare foot down on a pile of shattered glass. Then he thought he heard a whisper, just barely audible, coming from the front seat of Sandy's car. Her driver's side window was gone, and there she was, crumpled up in a growing pool of blood. Tony leapt into the front seat and tried to pull Sandy into a sitting position, but she was limp, and it didn't seem like she was breathing now. He found her phone lying on the floorboard and called 911. In between answering the dispatcher's questions, Tony just kept repeating, Sandy, honey, honey, wake up. But Sandy didn't wake up. She would never wake up again. As detectives would soon find out, at the time of her murder, Sandy Razzo had been in the process of taking her life back after a major trauma. A little over

a year before, Sandy had been violently beaten and sexually assaulted by a guy she was sort of friends with at the time. It was horrific. This guy had beaten her and forced himself on her multiple times over the course of a whole day and night. It was torture. And before he finally let her go, he'd threatened to hurt Sandy and her teenage daughter if she told on him. The guy had been to prison before, he told her, and he was not going to go back, ever. It had taken about a week for Sandy to work up to reporting the attack, but she'd done it. Her rapist had been arrested and charged with felony assault. And the day after the murder, reeling from grief and shock,

both Sandy's boyfriend Tony and her mom, Sandy Poole, told detectives the same thing. Sandy had been afraid of this happening. She'd even told them, if anything happens to me, you'll know it was him. The hymn in question was a 36-year-old personal trainer named Timothy Humphrey, but he went by Tracy. And his trial for the attack on Sandy Razzo was scheduled to start in just four weeks. A trial that wasn't going to happen now. because the complaining witness was dead, and a dead woman can't take the stand and testify.

A lot of women seemed to have the same reaction to Tracy Humphrey. The first time they met him, he gave them a creepy, uneasy feeling, but then after a while, he grew on them, charmed them. And they ended up under his spell. Tracy had a wide circle of friends, a lot of them women. He met some of them through his work as a trainer. By all accounts, he was great at it. He could motivate you without being a hard,

asked about it, and God knows he had plenty of cred as a fitness expert. Tracy told everybody he used to play pro football. You could believe it to look at him. He was six foot two and built like something Michelangelo might have sculpted in his spare time. Of course, he was roided up out the wazoo, took human growth hormone too. But hey, whatever you got to do to be pretty, right? When he met Sandy Razo in 2001, Tracy was working as a bouncer at a club where Sandy was bartending. And like most women were, at first, she was impressed by him. But there were some important things she didn't know. Tracy had a bit of a checkered past, a criminal past, in and out of jail and prison, multiple times for thefts and assaults. He'd been married years earlier,

had a little girl with his ex-wife. And when his wife decided to leave him, Tracy didn't take it well. So not well that a SWAT team ended up having to show up at his ex-wife's house one night after a domestic dispute. And Tracy ended up serving three years in prison for assault, kidnapping, and grand theft auto. Damn. Another time, he flew into a rage in the middle of the night and attacked his girlfriend when she was sleeping. She tried to break up with him earlier in the night. He punched her, put a pillow over her face, and held a gun to her head, told her he was going to kill her.

She felt lucky to get out alive. Several women had restraining orders out on him. His emma was, once a woman got a look at his true color, a.k.a. steroid rage plus narcissism, and tried to kick him to the curb, he'd flip his shit on them. You don't get to leave me. I decide when it's over, not you. And if she tried to assert herself, he'd threaten her, and or physically attack. This was a man who did not like to hear the word no. So he was as massive a loser as ever loosed, but of course he kept that stuff under wraps. Tracy had created a whole mythology around himself. He told all kinds of big, sparkly life,

about his past, glamorous stories to stand in for the years he spent in the clink. One of his favorite lies was that he'd been an underwear model in Paris. Another was that he'd been a bodyguard for everybody's favorite Scientologist, Tom Cruise. He told at least one friend he'd been Vin Diesel's stunt double. He told others he'd won a Heisman trophy in college. And then there was the pro football story that he'd played for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. That was the Tracy Humphrey who introduced himself to Sandy Razzo in 2000. Sandy was a ray of Florida sunshine. Platinum blonde hair, great tan, in peak physical shape.

She was super into weightlifting, so picture of the quintessential Florida girl, the kind you'd see in an ad for swimsuits or sunscreen. She'd grown up in Pennsylvania, worked as a flight attendant for a while that's a modeling. She got married and had a little girl, but the marriage didn't work out. And when they divorced, Sandy agreed to let her ex-husband have custody of their daughter. She was young and she needed to figure out where she was going with her life, but she adored her daughter and stayed very involved in her life. By 2001, Sandy's daughter was in her teens, and Sandy found herself in Florida, bartending and modeling and hoping to break into the movie biz.

She hit it off with Tracy Humphrey, just as friends, really, or at least that's all Sandy really wanted to be. They were good friends for a while. She felt like she could talk to him like she talked to her girlfriends. It was nice. But Tracy wanted more than friendship, and he was persistent. Irritatingly persistent. Hitting on her all the time and calling her a tease when she wouldn't go home with him.

That old trick. Gross. Eich. He'd say, one of these days you're going to have to pay up for the way you act. Ew, dude. Eventually, one night Tracy pressured her so hard that Sandy just gave in. Coercive sex, I think you call it. She didn't want to do it, but she did it because she was feeling incredibly uncomfortable. She was alone with him.

He wasn't backing off, and she wasn't sure what would happen if she said no in a forceful way. She'd seen his anger flare up before, and it was scary. She didn't want to set him off. It's an awful situation one many, many of us have found ourselves in. After that, Sandy tried to dial their relationship way back, just be casual friends and coworkers. But Tracy didn't like that idea. He was always pushing, pushing, trying to get her alone. Sandy tried to avoid that, but she did what so many women did.

and do with men like this. She tried to let him down easy. If he asked her for a ride to or from work, she'd say, okay. They worked at the same place, remember, so she had to work with him every day. And then one night she went home from work a little early when Tracy had apparently been expecting her to give him a ride home, and he left her an unhinged voicemail, said, I'm going to kill you. You're probably going to need to start dating a plastic surgeon by the time I'm finished with your face. Yikes. After that, Sandy avoided him for a while. but eventually he showed up on her doorstep and made puppy eyes at her, apologized and apologized that he'd just been going through some stuff,

and it had never happened again, and blah, blah, blah. He just wormed his way back in. He was really good at that. Sandy was still a little uncomfortable around him alone, so she tried not to be, but she tried not to show it overtly because she figured it would make things worse. They got worse anyway.

On Friday, February 22nd, 2002, Tracy talked her into giving him a ride after work. In the car, he started pestering her again about wanting to have a relationship, and Sandy had had enough. She told him straight up, dude, I'm sorry, but I just don't see you that way. And I think we'd better spend less time together from here on out. They argued. I forget exactly why they ended up in front of Sandy's apartment building.

I think maybe Tracy left his car near there earlier in the day and she was going to give him a ride to it or something, but instead of going to his car and heading home, Tracy pushed his way into Sandy's place and slammed the door behind them. And this was the beginning of Sandy's two days in hell. I'm not going to go into a lot of detail here, but if you're sensitive to discussion of sexual assault or physical battery, you might want to skip the next minute or so.

He tied Sandy up on her bed and sexually assaulted her, violently leaving her with horrible bruises on her face. This went on and on, with few breaks in between, for a whole night and most of a day. and he was in a full-blown rage. He kept saying, Today is my day, and I'm finally going to get some damn respect.

Respect. Right. At one point, he told Sandy he'd copied down all her personal information. Social security number, bank details, info on her car, which he demanded she sign over to him, addresses in her address book, too, including the house where her teenage daughter lived.

That part made her blood run cold. And he told her, I'm not going back to prison. If I have to, I'll send a couple crackheads to kill you and your kid. Actually, he threw the N-word in there, too. This guy's a real peach. And then, inexplicably, he changed tone. Burst into tears and started apologizing, begging her to forgive him.

He went into her bathroom and pressed a razor blade against his neck threatening to kill himself. I'm sure Sandy was rooting for it at that point. I wouldn't blame her. She was desperate to get away from him. Finally, Sandy reminded Tracy. that they were both scheduled to work that night at the bar, and it would look weird if they both didn't show. Tracy thought about it for a long moment.

Then he made a little nick on his throat with the razor. We'll tell everybody we were in a car accident to explain your bruises, he said. And Sandy agreed. She'd have agreed to anything at that point. And Tracy was a good talker. Their co-workers bought it. Finally, Sandy was able to slip away from the man who had tortured her for almost two days. She was traumatized like any survivor would be.

She felt humiliated. She looked for ways to blame herself, like a lot of people do after an assault like this. She cleaned her apartment from top to bottom to scrub every trace of him out of her space. She threw away the bedding he touched, and then she called her best friend and asked if she could stay at her house for a few days.

The friend and her husband finally got the story out of her, and after about a week, Sandy finally decided she couldn't move on with her life until she told on this asshole. She'd done some digging onto his background by now, and she knew she wasn't the first woman to suffer violence at Tracy Humphrey's hands. But she hoped if she went to the police,

she would be the last. So that's what she did. It had been too long for a rape kit to yield any physical evidence of sexual assault, but there was plenty of evidence of battery. Sandy's face was still all bruised, so Tracy Humphrey was arrested for felony assault. Not his first felony, as I'm sure you recall.

I'm sure Tracy figured his intimidation tactics had worked on Sandy as they had on other women in the past. But Sandy wasn't playing ball. She turned him in any way. And our boy knew he was in some deep shit. If he got convicted of this, he'd end up back in prison, possibly for a long time. Now, nobody likes prison. Nobody wants to go. But for whatever reason, if we had to give out a trophy for most of the same,

soul-crushingly terrified of prison, that trophy would go to Tracy Humphrey. Dude was petrified of getting locked up again. Anybody close to him who knew his criminal past knew this. Tracy would rather die than go back to prison, which you'd think if you have that, like, fear, you'd just stop being such a shit stain. Avoid committing crimes. There you go, right? Yeah.

I feel like we've tapped into the secret here. I think it all goes back with Tracy to what derives him, period, is wanting to have control over everybody and everything. And you can't have that in prison. I think that's why he was so terrified of it. And also probably why he couldn't manage to stay out. Very true. Very, very good point.

Now, with Sandy Razzo murdered, investigators figured this was a pretty solid lead. And they went to Tracy's gym to try and talk to him. dude said he wished he could help but unfortunately his attorney had advised him not to say anything so their prime suspect had lawyered up and decided to keep his mouth shut damn but before they left the gym they learned something interesting from one of tracy's co-workers he had a brand new wife a much younger woman he'd married just a day before sandy's murder her name was ashley and it just so happened she'd called into work at the gym that day which meant she was home alone and maybe more willing to talk than her new husband was. They zipped over to Tracy's place as fast as they could, hoping to get Ashley before her hubs could get to the phone. Ashley seemed nervous, but she invited them in. It didn't take the detectives more than a couple questions. Where were you and Tracy on the night of July 5th to realize that Ashley Humphrey was scared shitless?

She actually ran to the bathroom to throw up a couple times during the conversation. Wow. In between vomits, though, she told the investigators her story about the night of the murder. She and Tracy had been home that night. They had a friend over for pizza. They hadn't gotten much more than that out of her before they heard a key in the front door. And suddenly, all six foot two of Tracy Humphrey burst into the apartment, looking like he wanted to rip somebody's face off.

And that was pretty much the end of that. Tracy informed the detectives that he and his wife were represented by counsel and told them to get out. So the impression they got from this encounter was she knows what happened and she's trying to cover for him. But of course they couldn't prove that yet. Like a lot of women, Ashley Laney wasn't that into Tracy at first the day she and a friend walked into his gym to sign up for some personal training sessions. She thought he was handsome and she liked his washboard abs though and they flirted a little bit. He said, let me train you. And Ashley was like, no way. He was way too buff. He'd be way too intimidating to work with. But Tracy smiled at her. Come on, he said, I'll train you for free. Wow. She couldn't turn that down. Money was tight. Ashley had, as Tracy said later in a 48 hours interview, a sweet girl next door vibe around her. A pretty girl with big blue eyes, but her childhood was rough. Her mom drank a lot and had been in some scrapes with the law and her dad was in prison. Ashley's grandma had pretty much raised her, and she'd done really well in school.

But there was always that tension between her and her mom, and she didn't get along with her mom's boyfriend. Ashley's friends say she was always kind of hungry for love and acceptance, like a lot of kids from troubled backgrounds are. And that made her a sitting duck for Tracy Humphrey. Rapping Ashley around his grubby little finger was going to be easy, and I suspect he knew it from day one. She was only 19 at this point, and Tracy was 36. but when she asked him his age, he lied and said he was 29. He asked her out, and she said, sure. Ashley had been getting her feet under her,

working at a frozen yogurt place and enrolling in community college, going out with different dudes and hanging out with friends. She was starting to find her way in life until she met Tracy Humphrey. See, the thing is, finding your way in the world at 19 is exciting, but it's scary, too. You like the freedom, but you've also got adulthood coming at you full force, and it's a lot to put on a brain that's not even. done developing yet. So although Ashley was working hard to make a go of it on her own, she was feeling overwhelmed. And it just so happened that on the day she met Tracy, she was in a mood like,

nope, screw this, I want somebody to scoop me up and take care of me. Or so she told reporter Paul is on in a 2009 interview. And Tracy seemed like somebody who could take care of her. He was older. He had a good job. He seemed to have his shit together, which is hilarious knowing what we know about this dips shit. I mean, you can understand how Ashley would get this impression. Tracy was a very practiced liar. Even so, at first, Ashley wasn't really interested in anything serious, but Tracy kept at her, working his mojo on her, pursuing her as if she were the only woman in the world. After a while, not too long a while either, she was smitten.

Before long, Tracy had lured Ashley into a situation where he controlled pretty much every part of her life. He told her what to wear, how to do her hair and makeup, what to eat, and how much. He put her down a lot. He even resented her having her own car, a cute VW bug she was proud of. He often talked her into doing stuff she didn't want to do, like going with him to a foam party, which I've heard of him. I never went to one of those because, ew, like the foam would literally have had to be made of like penicillin and lysol for me to go anywhere near it. But basically, this was a party where a club filled the dance floor with foam,

and people danced around in it in very skimpy clothes, and then they had sex. in a big, foamy pile of human bacteria. Fun. Yeah, I'm going to pass, right? It didn't take long for Tracy to enlist Ashley in his hatred of Sandy Razo. Of course, he told her Sandy's allegations were a total lie, just a false accusation by a scorned woman, furious that he didn't want to date her anymore. He convinced me that this woman lied on him, Ashley told Pauluson. When he told her it was over, she flipped out and just went completely psychotic and injured herself.

Yeah, of course, we know better, but Ashley was a teenager in love, and she bought it. At one point, Tracy drove Ashley to Sandy's new job, and they sat at the bar and glared at her as she tried to work. Finally, while Tracy stayed put and sipped his drink, Ashley went up to Sandy and confronted her. Got in her face and yelled at her about the lie Sandy was telling about Tracy and the bullshit charges she'd filed on him. Sandy was freaked out, and of course, that was Tracy's goal. get the new girl to do the pick-me dance at the old girl. Oh, that's so nauseating. Mm-hmm.

Tracy worked on Ashley nonstop. If he got convicted of these bogus charges, he'd go to prison and then they wouldn't be together anymore. Not for years. Tracy had the classic royd rage when he'd be fine for a while, then just burst into explosive anger for no apparent reason. But Ashley didn't know he'd always been like that. To her, it seemed like Sandy Razzo's devious,

tricks were driving her boyfriend out of his mind. The conversations started as a joke, as these things often do. If Sandy wasn't around, you know, we wouldn't have to worry about me going to prison. Maybe you could take care of her for me. But after a while, it wasn't a joke anymore. Tracy was talking frankly about murdering Sandy, specifically about Ashley doing it for him. It was the perfect plan, see? He could set up an ironclad alibi for himself,

make sure people saw him at the time of the murder. Sandy's friends and family didn't even know Ashley. Nobody would suspect her, a sweet teenage girl. And Tracy could skate on the assault charge. And then he and Ashley could start a new life together. He painted a beautiful picture of that new life. Tracy was in the process of starting a business, a training in physical therapy center with his friend and client, a woman named Toby White.

Toby felt indebted to Tracy because he'd helped her lose like 150 pounds a few years earlier, and they'd been friends ever since. He told Ashley she could help run the business with them. They'd make it a huge success. They'd have money, a beautiful house, everything she could possibly want. But they had to take care of this little Sandy problem first. Now, obviously Ashley wasn't into this idea. I mean, she liked the Tracy not going to prison part and the business part and the money and pretty house part. But the killing part, not so much. But the thing was, if there's one thing everybody agreed on about Tracy Humphrey, it was this.

You didn't say no to him. You could try, but he'd wear you down. Either with a sob story in puppy dog eyes or threats of violence or actual violence or some combination of all three. And Ashley had been falling more and more under Tracy's control anyway. She had already reached a point where she was deferring to him about almost everything. And finally, one night, Tracy laid his cards on the table. I'll kill myself before I go back to prison, he said. If you don't help me get rid of Sandy, I don't want you around anymore. And he kicked her out of the apartment. Ashley was devastated. She loved him, despite his hair trigger temper.

When he wasn't putting her down, he was love bombing the ever-loving shit out of her. And he'd followed the classic abuser playbook, isolating her from her family and friends, anybody who might act as a support system for her or try to get her to see reason. She felt like Tracy was the only one who loved her. She couldn't stand the thought of him taking that love away or taking his own life. So she caved. Okay, she told him. I'll kill her for you.

By now, Sandy had changed jobs and apartments. She'd started dating a close friend of hers, Tony Ponicle, and they were living together in a nice townhouse they bought. jointly. Tony, along with everybody else close to her, was worried sick about the upcoming trial of Tracy Humphrey. Everybody was scared for Sandy, and they were right to be. Tracy and Ashley were in full murder plot mode. Tracy, of course, had it all figured out. First, Ashley would stalk Sandy for a while, get a sense of her daily routine. He got her to find out everything she could about Sandy online, using her own credit card to use a service called CyberTracker to try and

find her new address. When the time came to carry out the hit, Tracy said, she'd have to wear a disguise to make her look like a man, a black man, specifically. He wanted her to look like the black crackhead he'd always threatened to send after Sandy. Ugh, I just fucking hate this guy. So Ashley went to Party City and bought herself a fake beard and some dark makeup so she could blackface it up, which girl, for God's sake, you know, blackface is bad enough for any reason, but this is just off the damn planet. Ugh. She got a pair of brown contacts for extra realism and decked herself out in a hoodie in sweatpants. She looked, I'm sure, completely bizarre, and she knew it, but there was no arguing with Tracy at this point. As Ashley would later tell a jury, she felt like, quote,

the consequences of not doing it would be worse than the murder itself. If it occurred to her that Tracy was carefully making sure she was the only one getting her hands dirty, that he had her using her own credit card to look stuff up and that she was the only one taking any real risks, she didn't dare say anything about it. There was one failed murder attempt before the actual murder, with a rifle Ashley stole from her mom's boyfriend. Tracy took her to a shooting range to practice with it. She'd never even fired a gun before that day. Under Tracy's direction, Ashley had put on her absurd disguise and driven in her VW bug to the green iguana to wait for Sandy to get off work. She'd slipped the leg

of an old pair of pants over the barrel of the rifle, so it wouldn't be so obvious when she aimed it out the car window. She was on the phone with Tracy the whole time. When Sandy came out to her car, he yelled at Ashley, do it, do it now. And Ashley did. She fired the gun, but she missed. The bullet hit Sandy's passenger side mirror, and it didn't seem like Sandy realized what had happened. She startled at the noise, but it didn't look like she realized somebody was shooting at her. Tracy, on the other end of the phone, was furious that Ashley had missed. Get rid of the evidence, he screamed at her, and then get your ass home. Tracy made Ashley go back and pick up every little broken piece of Sandy's side mirror,

then bury them all out in the country along with a stolen rifle. Then he made her torch her beloved VW. They'd report it stolen, he said, get some insurance money out of it. Of course, this was a dipshit move, because of that stolen car report, plus a report of a torched out VW bug found outside a town shortly before Sandy Rosso's murder would eventually raise the investigator's eyebrows

even more. So attempt number one was a dud and now they needed another gun. Couldn't use the same one, obviously. So Ashley went to her mom's boyfriend, David Abernathy, with a story. She was being stalked, she told him. She was scared for her life.

Could she maybe borrow a gun for a few days? David was hesitant, but Ashley was able to prove to him that she'd been to a gun range recently and she knew about gun safety, so he gave her the gun. He'd come to regret that soon when he realized what she really used it for. Tracy's assault trial was only a month away now. He was dialing up the pressure on Ashley. They had to make a move. Now they couldn't wait any longer. She almost didn't do it. Desperate, Ashley came up with a plan B. She was going to take out all the money she had in her bank account, drive around for a while and have some fun, eat a big last meal, leave the waiter a huge tip,

maybe go look at the ocean, and then she was going to use the gun to shoot herself. But she couldn't go through with it. She went back home to Tracy instead. Ashley had made her choice. It was time to pay the piper. And on July 4th, Tracy announced a new detail of the plan. They were going to get married. See, if they were married, then they couldn't be forced to testify against each other in court. it would be a safeguard. Oh, and super romantic, too, of course. Oh, yeah, a beautiful story for the grandkids someday, right?

Hey, spousal of unity is as good a reason as any to make it official, right? They had the wedding that day at the courthouse on their lunch break from the gym. I know, I'm wiping a tear away, too. So beautiful. I think these two crazy kids are really going to make it. But there was no time for a reception or a honeymoon. The next night, it was time to put the murder plot into action. Ashley put on her costume again, the brown contacts, the baggy sweats, the fake beard, and the blackface makeup.

She sprayed her hair into a shiny helmet with hairspray so she wouldn't shed any and leave DNA behind. She put on a pair of shoes a couple sizes too big. And then she went back to the green iguana in a rental car this time and waited for Sandy to get off work. She was on the phone with Tracy almost constantly that night while she waited for Sandy in the parking lot while she followed her home to the Pinellas Park townhouse. Make sure she's dead, Tracy told her. Look into her eyes.

And of course we know what happened next. After she'd emptied the gun into Sandy and run back to the car, Ashley called Tracy again to let him know it was done. I want pizza, she said. Double cheese, chicken and tomatoes. No double cheese, Tracy said, too fattening. The guy wouldn't even let her have the pizza she wanted, after she just carried out a hit for him.

Ugh. He'd already ordered the pizza anyway, right around the time of the murder, and he made sure the pizza hut guy would remember delivering it to him. When the guy got there, Tracy invited him into the apartment. He paid with his credit card, then gave the guy a big tip. $20 in cash. Alibi established. But if Tracy... had the brain power, the good lord, gave a flatworm, he'd have realized this was another

dumb-ass move. Because when the investigator spoke to that pizza guy later, he would remember Tracy, and he'd remember very clearly that he was the only one home. No Ashley and no friend either. This, as I'm sure y'all remember, was the story Ashley told the detectives the day they interviewed her after Sandy's murder, that she and Tracy spent the whole night at home, eating pizza and hanging out with a friend. That friend was Toby White, the woman Tracy was starting a business with. And it's time to talk about her because Toby is an absolute badass. Oh, Queen. Queen! A day or so after Sandy's murderer, Tracy cornered Toby at the gym and told her he needed her to be his and Ashley's alibi with the cops. His whole manner was freaking Toby out. He was

staring lasers into her and he said, if you don't go along with this, I don't know what I'm going to have to do. Toby took this as a threat, and she was horrified. I mean, she knew Tracy had a temper, but he'd always been a friend to her until this. She didn't know what else to do, but agree. Oh, yeah. I mean, M. William Phelps heard it a dozen times from various people as he was researching his book on the case. You didn't say no to Tracy Humphrey. I got some stuff I'd like to say to him.

Like, why don't you step off a cliff, Vin Sleasel? You busted sack of medical waste. That's one of the things I'd like to say. But Toby, bless her heart, said, okay, whatever you need. And I should point out, she didn't think at this point that, like, they were guilty. Like, she thought this was her friend and, like, he was just freaking out. Tracy drilled her on what he wanted her to say over and over again, wrote it out for her on a sheet of paper. And from that point onward, Tracy and Ashley barely let Toby out of their sight.

They practically moved into her house. If she had to go somewhere alone, Tracy would call her 10,000 times. Where are you? What are you doing? Who are you with? Our boy was not doing okay upstairs. He was spiraling, bad, paranoid 24-7. At one point he got so bad that he started writing out notes instead of talking because he was convinced Toby's house was bugged. Toby initially went in and stuck to the plan, lied to the cops about being with Tracy and Ashley all night on July 5th, eating pizza. But it didn't take long for her to realize something's bad wrong here. She knew it. her gut that her two friends were involved in this murder and she couldn't have that on her conscience. So, scared to death, she went to the detectives and told him she wanted to tell them

the truth. They convinced her to wear a wire for them and try to get Ashley and Tracy to talk about the murder. And that was the beginning of Toby White's personal hill. Tracy's paranoia was getting worse by the day as the investigation wore on. He was super cagey whenever they talked about the case. He'd insist on talking outside or in the car. He never admitted that he or Ashley killed Sandy Razzo, but the way he was acting, it was obvious. From her conversations with the detectives, Toby knew it couldn't have been Tracy who pulled the trigger, so she assumed it had to be Ashley. But Ashley seemed defiant, like she wasn't too worried about the police having anything on her.

The detectives tried to up the pressure, feeding Toby info about the evidence they were gathering. One Piece was especially damning for Ashley, her cell phone records. This was 2003, and your average Joe didn't know yet about how investigators could ping your phone's location. But the forensic tech guys looking into Ashley's records had her cell phone all the way from the green iguana parking lot to the area right around Sandy's townhouse right at the time of the murder. Tracy's demand that Ashley stay in constant contact with him during the crime had come back to bite him both in the ass. The cell phone pings were probably enough to arrest her right then, especially when you put them together with the torch. car and David Abernathy's story about Ashley borrowing a gun for protection. But the investigators didn't just want Ashley. They wanted Tracy, too. They were sure he was

the driving force behind Sandy's murder. They needed the newlyweds to say something incriminating on tape, and they pressured Toby to make it happen. And it was hell on that poor woman for months at a time. Tracy didn't trust anybody, and he was especially squirrely about the possibility of Toby conspiring with the cops against him. He'd get suspicious of her on an almost daily basis, and she'd have to talk her way out of it again and again, which she was really damn good at. The woman deserves an Oscar, honestly. There's loads more info in the M. William Phelps book about Toby's badassery and, like, the absolute nightmare Tracy put her through during this time. And for that alone, if nothing else, I would highly suggest you read this book.

It's called I'll Kill for You, and it's great. But I'll just go through a few examples here of what this woman went through. at one point while she was wearing the wire he and ashley drove her way the fuck out to this like desolate beach to interrogate her about whether she was working with the cops what they'd asked her and you know all the stuff they talked about when she went in for questioning and toby knew that they were out of range of where the detectives could actually pick up on the wire so she was on her own and the undercover cops they couldn't follow them out there without blowing their cover because it was so desolate if tracy had decided to search her for a wire at this point she didn't have been six kinds of done. Like, I think he might have actually just killed her right there. Another time, Tracy called Toby into the gym and accused her of working with the cops again. He knocked her to the floor, held her down, got in her face, and said, if you betray me, I will kill you, and it'll be slow and painful. Toby was terrified, as anybody would be, but she was determined to keep helping the investigators. Ashley and Tracy needed to be in jail, and she was their best

shot at getting one of them to confess on tape. This woman is, an absolute bad mamma jama. We can't say enough about her. Braver than I am, that's for damn sure. Me too. There's this absolutely nail-biting part in the M. William Phelps book where Toby makes some notes to herself about how she might get Ashley to confess. I saw a bunch of stuff that she would never want Tracy or Ashley to see thinking she'd print it out and then delete the word document off her computer and she'd keep the print out hidden. But when she went to print it, her printer jammed and she figured, shit, printer's bus. I'll have to get a new one to do this.

But a day or so later, Ashley was over at Toby's house, and she noticed Toby messing around with the printer. When Toby left the room to go to the bathroom, Ashley went over and fiddled with it herself, and she fixed the jam and out popped this two-page document that Toby never wanted her to see in a million years. Ashley, good little soldier that she was, ran right to Tracy with it. Toby had no idea either of them had seen it when she showed up to the gym for a scheduled workout later that day. So scary. Yeah, and somehow she was actually able to talk her way out of this.

Like, thank God. And she hadn't written anything like that explicitly said she was working with the cops, but like it was really suspicious. Like if you were Tracy or Ashley and you saw that, that's exactly what you would think. And I about shit my pants reading that part of the book. Even though I'd already seen her on a show and I knew she lived through it, I was still just like, oh God, oh God, it's so stressful. At this point, the detectives realized, okay, we've dictated. ground long enough. This man is going to kill our informant if we don't arrest him. And they had enough by now. They'd collected all kinds of circumstantial stuff, plus some highly incriminating statements Ashley and Tracy had made on Toby's wire. And the coup de

gras, Ashley's cell phone records. So finally, it was time to put the habeas grabbiz on the newlyweds, Ashley for first-degree murder and Tracy, for now, for a parole violation. He was a felon and he wasn't supposed to have guns. But the detectives had uncovered plenty of proof that he'd been playing with the Pupu's. Records of him and Ashley at the firing range practicing for her big day. Ashley was furious about being arrested, and she didn't try to hide it. It was all crossed arms and get me my lawyer. They didn't get anything out of her that day.

As for Tracy, and I know this is going to shock you, he made friends with his cellmate early on and tried to get the guy to find him a hitman. to kill Toby White. I mean, it's not funny, but it just, why do they all do it? He's exactly the type to do it and he did it. And I knew he would. It's like our brains are wired the exact same way. Like these dipshit's brains are wired.

They do the exact same thing. They come to the conclusion. They're like, why has no one ever come up with this before? I'm a genius. It's the narcissism. It's a hell of a drug. It's like, come on. God.

He confessed to the guy, too, because prison friends are the bestest friends. BFFs for life. Literal pen pals. Penitentiary pals, get it? And of course, the dude went right to the investigators and told on him. Toby, who was finally breathing a sigh of relief, checked into a hospital for surgery and had strict security. and had strict security enforced. The hospital wasn't to tell anybody where she was,

but Tracy still found her. From jail, he had somebody, who knows who, sent her a bouquet of flowers that said, I'll always be able to find you. Yikes. Oh, cheese and crackers. While Tracy sat in jail, plotting and scheming and writing Ashley

love bombing missives for his friends on the outside to smuggle into her, the detectives were working on getting Ashley to flip on her hubs. She wasn't phased much when the detectives spilled the beans about all Tracy's lies, that he hadn't been a Tampa Bay Buccaneers football star, and that he'd never modeled undies in Paris, never worked as Tom Cruise's bodyguard. She didn't even seem all that surprised, like she figured that, you know. And when the detectives told her that Tracy had planned all along for her to take the fall for him and was only using her, she just kind of shrugged.

Even when they told her about what he'd said to Toby White, after finding out about the cell phone pinged evidence the investigators had, He'd told Toby to change her story a little, they said. Tell the cops that while you and I were at the apartment all night eating pizza, Ashley was in and out, and you don't know exactly where she went or where she was at the exact time Sandy got shot. No, that wasn't what swayed Ashley. What finally tipped the scales was finding out after the detectives interviewed Hector Adorno, Tracy's best friend, and Ashley's hairstylist that Tracy was gay.

Well, that's what Hector said anyway, specifically what he said, well, that man's gay. Like, just like that. It's likely he was by, but anyway, he and Hector had been in a full-blown relationship years earlier, live together and everything like boyfriends. Hector dumped him when he wouldn't be open about his sexuality. Hector didn't want to live in the closet, and Tracy did. And Hector's theory was that Tracy hated women because he was conflicted about his sexual orientation, so he just used them for whatever he could get and got violent with him when they tried to stand up to him. He used to brag about it, Hector said.

Gross. Why would you want to hang out with that guy, Hector? Ew. This was the final straw for Ashley. Well, that and the fact that the death penalty was on the table. She had no loyalty left for her husband. She agreed to tell the whole story to the investigators and then on the witness stand at Tracy's murder trial. And she agreed to take a plea deal, 25 years in prison in exchange for her testimony. She'd avoid the death penalty and have a release date someday. Not good news for Tracy.

And boy, he knew it. Because y'all, this man actually had the audacity to make a run for it. Like, he's like everything on the bingo card, this man. He's our entire bingo card. There's CCTV footage of him hauling ass out the door and away from the county jail. Now, the book gets into the specifics of how he pulled this off. But suffice it to say, basically, it was a whole like Rube Goldbergian series of fuck-ups by the jail staff. okay, it's nothing impressive by Tracy. It was just lots of lax security practices, a whole

bunch in a row, and our boy just saw it and took his shot. He was AWOL for about three hours total. Not great compared to how it's gone for some of the previous jail escapees that we've covered on the show, like remember Marie Hilly? That girl stayed out for years. Our boy, Stephen J. Russell, remember the I Love You Philip Morris guy? He was a master escape artist, did it multiple times, but our boy Tracy didn't have their skills or their cool heads. He pretty much just ran frantically around town, probably whimpering to himself until eventually deputies found him, in the words of William Phelps, cowering under a bush. And it was a lady out with her horse that found him. A horse found him.

He was like cowering under there. He saw them and tried to run. Then he tried to fight, but the sheriff was actually bigger and badder than Tracy was, and the fight didn't last long. Within an hour or so, he was getting booked back into the jail with a fresh black eye to show. off in his mugshot. Join me in a ha-ha, will you? After Tracy's brief escape from jail, Toby White was walking to her car one afternoon to do some pre-vacation shopping. She wanted to just get the hell away from everything for a while, so she'd booked a cruise, and she deserved it. But just before she reached her car door, she felt the barrel of a gun in her back, and a man's voice said,

get in the car and drive. Toby had really started to think she was safe, that Tracy Humphrey wasn't going to be able to get to her. Now she felt like this was probably it. This was how she was going to die. Toby didn't recognize the man who was holding her at gunpoint, but she knew why he was there. Tracy sent him. And as she got behind the wheel of her car and started it, the man confirmed it. If you testify, you'll die, he said. Then in silence, the man made her drive way out into the country and parked the car by the side of the road. Then, holding the gun on her the whole time, he made her get into the trunk. And then he just left her there. After a few minutes, Toby remembered she had her cell phone on her and she called for help. Tracy had managed to send a very clear message. He had

people out in the world who were willing to commit crimes for him. She wasn't safe. And she knew she wouldn't be, not until he was convicted of Sandy Rosso's murder. Tracy's trial started on Valentine's Day 2006. How's that for irony? No kidding. Tracy took the stand. because, of course, he did. Jail hadn't been kind to him so far. He looked like he'd lost about 70 pounds, and yet the prison pallor going on. But he was still convinced he could get up on that witness stand and charm the jurors, convince them that Ashley did all this on her own. He was wrong. The jury didn't buy his bullshit. A big part of that was Ashley, who, to her small credit, didn't try to duck responsibility. She accepted her part in the murder, and she told the truth about

his and it was obvious. Tracy was found guilty after just two and a half hours of deliberation. That's lightning quick. Yeah. The jury had two options for sentencing. Life without parole or the death penalty. Florida juries aren't usually shy about giving out death sentences, but while they were deliberating, the jurors kept coming back to something Tracy had said to Ashley when they were planning Sandy's murder, that he'd rather die than go back to prison. So they tossed the death penalty right out the window. Why give the asshole what he wants? Life without parole, they figured, would be a much better punishment. And that's what they gave him. Oh, man, I wish I'd been there to see his face when they read that sentence, don't you? Mr. I'll never go back to prison. As for Ashley, her estimated

release date is in 2008. She'll be 46 years old. She's on interviews, and she seems remorseful, unlike Tracy, who went on 48 hours shortly before his trial and spun a big ball of bullshit. Oh, I'm sure she sees him now for the Hieronymus Boschian slime demon he is. Talk about learning the hard way. Yep. And meanwhile, Sandy's loved ones

have had to go on without her. Her daughter, her mom, her boyfriend, Tony, her huge circle of friends. They've all had to spend the last 20 years minus the light Sandy would have brought to their lives. All because one man, and I use the term loosely, refuse to take the slightest crumb of responsibility for his own disgusting behavior.

I'm glad he'll never see daylight again. Me too. So that was a wild one, right campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Herbie the cat, who is an actual cat,

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