The case
On the night of December 13, 2001, Tracey Richter called 911 from her house in Early, Iowa, a town of a few hundred. Two men had broken in, she said, strangled her with pantyhose and threatened her children, and she had shot one of them to save her family. The dead man was Dustin Wehde, a quiet twenty-year-old from up the road. For years she was treated as a mother who had defended her kids.
Two things never fit. Wehde had been shot nine times, with two different guns. And in his car police found a pink spiral notebook in which he seemed to describe being hired by Richter’s ex-husband, Dr. John Pitman III, to kill her and her eldest son — a story worth a great deal to her in a bitter custody fight. A later county attorney, Ben Smith, reopened the file, and review of the blood spatter and bullet paths showed Wehde was face down when the last shots were fired.
Prosecutors argued Richter had drawn Wehde to the house, made him write the notebook, then killed him when a family friend turned up unannounced. A jury convicted her of first-degree murder on November 7, 2011, and on December 5, 2011 she was sentenced to life without parole. The Iowa Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction in 2013 and rejected her ineffective-counsel claim in 2017.
Case photographs
Where it happened
Early, Iowa, where Dustin Wehde was shot in December 2001