12
Vernon Roberts was a handsome, charming man who had been divorced only a short time. Like many divorced men, he had lost almost all of his assets in the process. He had no money, no reliable means of transportation, and his child support was due. Barbara was immediately smitten with Vernon and she befriended him, helping him with his bills and child-support payments. In the process, she fell hard for him. He became the center of her universe, the love of her life, and she lived her whole life around him, doing whatever she thought would please him. Barbara gladly turned over control of virtually every aspect of her life to Vernon, and they were together for a few years until, on August 31, 1984, in Port Arthur, Texas, they were married.
The marriage lasted for seventeen years, but it grew increasingly turbulent as time passed and Barbara’s psychological problems grew steadily worse. While she was still living in Texas, she began treatment for bipolar disorder. Later, though, she said that she’d had an extremely bad reaction to her medication and for that reason did not continue to take it. Several other drugs were prescribed by many other doctors for Barbara after that time, but none seemed to help without causing unpleasant side effects, which Barbara believed outweighed their benefits. She could not seem to find a long-term treatment that she was willing to continue.
Barbara had a history of various medical problems, along with her psychological difficulties, some quite serious. A series of surgeries, auto accidents, a hysterectomy, and many other problems plagued her for years and placed additional stress on her marriage. After Vernon and Barbara moved from Texas to Alabama, when Vernon was transferred to the Rome, Georgia, plant, Barbara’s problems increased. She sought treatment at a Georgia mental facility in November 1999 because she and Vernon were having problems. Vernon was thinking about a separation, he told her. She claimed he said that he couldn’t cope with her crying, depression, anxiety spells, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms. She also felt that he was embarrassed over her increasing mental problems.
After this course of treatment at the mental facility, her medication was adjusted and she was discharged, but she voluntarily readmitted herself again, a short time later, for another effort to find the right balance of prescriptions. During this time, her medications were changed numerous times while she received therapy, but on one occasion her problems with Vernon continued to plague her, even as she remained in the treatment facility. She stopped cooperating with her doctors and voiced some suicidal feelings. She expressed a great deal of hostility toward Vernon, who claimed that he feared for his safety. With her agreement, Barbara was transferred to another facility with a higher level of security. After discharge from that institution, she continued to receive periodic counseling, and she and Vernon remained married ... at least, for the time being.
Because of her hysterectomy in the early 1990s, Barbara couldn’t have children, and her pets had become her child substitutes, especially her favorite dog, Sheba, whom she loved dearly. A relative said that if Barbara and Vernon were out at a restaurant and Vernon ordered a T-bone steak, the exact same order had to be placed to take home to Sheba. After Vernon and Barbara moved to Alabama, Barbara was even more attached to her dogs, because she felt more alone and isolated than she had in Texas. They were her only friends and confidantes, and they gave her constant and unconditional love and devotion. When she listed her favorite activity on a medical information form, she wrote,
Playing with my dogs.
In September 2000, Barbara once again sought admission to the first treatment facility she had gone to for help. She had been the patient of one of the doctors there since January of that year. She wanted to be admitted, she said, because her beloved twelve-year-old dog, Sheba, had become ill.
Sheba had lost control of her hindquarters, having to drag herself around, with no control over her bladder or bowels. Both her veterinarian and Vernon were pressuring Barbara to put the elderly dog down, to put her out of her misery, since her illness was terminal and could not be treated. Barbara was heartbroken and couldn’t stand the thought of giving up her adored best friend, her beloved pet. Finally, when Vernon was going out of town on a two-week business trip, he issued the ultimatum: Sheba would be euthanized before he returned, or else.
Accompanied by one of her therapists, Barbara took Sheba to the veterinarian on September 27, and Barbara stayed with the dog while Sheba was put to sleep. She then went straight to the treatment facility, tearful and afraid to go home by herself for fear of losing control of her impulses. She felt, she said, as if she had lost a child. After a year’s time, Vernon was still talking divorce, leaving her living every day in a continual state of apprehension. She still loved him, she said, and wanted to continue the marriage, but she said she found it very demoralizing to sit at home, alone, with only the dogs for company. She and Vernon had been happily married, she said, until he was promoted and became a manager at Temple-Inland; then he became very controlling and demanding. She said he liked to “manage” her, as well as manage his employees. He was also ashamed of her, she said, for having problems with depression and for her admission to treatment facilities.
Barbara had become very dependent on Vernon, despite his desire to end the marriage, and she had no social, spiritual, or family support. Her family was far away, she had few friends to confide in, and she had not gone to church regularly, as she had done earlier in life. She felt helpless, hopeless, and worthless, but she gradually became stabilized and was discharged from the facility on October 5, 2000, in a somewhat better state of mind. She had discussed the possibility of moving back to Texas to be nearer to her family, talked about resuming the church attendance, which she had missed, and said that she planned to continue with her therapy.
In February 2001, after endless months of constant threats of separation and ending their marriage, Vernon and Barbara Roberts were divorced.
13
Barbara met Dr. Robert John Schiess III in February 2004 on an Internet dating site called
Kiss.com
, where they both had pages posted. They began an online correspondence until they arranged to meet in person a few days later, and subsequently began dating.
Schiess was a successful neurosurgeon, one of a family that included several generations of medical doctors and surgeons, and aside from that, he was independently wealthy, a millionaire by all accounts. He attended Tulane University and the University of Florida, then attended graduate school at Wake Forest University’s Bowman Gray School of Medicine in 1978, the same medical school his father had graduated from in 1954. Schiess completed his internship in general surgery at the University of Tennessee’s Center for the Health Sciences, City of Memphis Hospital, in 1977 and 1978. His residency was spent at the Baptist Hospital in Memphis, where he was a junior resident in neurosurgery, and at Bowman Gray School of Medicine, where he had a neurological clerkship in 1981. In 1982, he was chief resident of neurosurgery at Baptist Hospital; in 1983, he was chief resident of neurosurgery at Methodist Hospital; and in 1984, he was a senior neurovascular-neurosurgical resident at Le Bonheur Hospital.
During the course of his very distinguished career, Schiess had participated in many research projects, presentations, and professional publications, and had attended quite a large number of scientific meetings and conferences around the country. He had also had scholarly articles published in the
Neurosurgery Online
Internet magazine of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons. His private practices in Atlanta, North Carolina, and Georgia had been very successful, and he was acknowledged to be one of the most knowledgeable and highly respected physicians in his field.
All things considered, Barbara was tremendously impressed by the man and very flattered by his attention, and she quickly established a relationship with the wealthy, intelligent doctor.
During that time, Barbara was attending Coosa Valley Technical College to get her degree in mammography. She lived in Rome; Schiess lived in Conyers. They both occasionally stayed at one another’s homes. “The whole time I was in college, I’d go back and forth,” Barbara said.
After they were together, Barbara had the opportunity to meet Schiess’s parents and stepmother, his three sisters, and his son and daughter. Schiess also had accompanied Barbara on a few occasions when she visited with her family in Texas.
Schiess had been a practicing neurosurgeon up until a serious auto accident he and Barbara had on May 26, 2004, prevented him from being able to work; he had set up his neurosurgery practice and rented an office in Conyers, Georgia, and was still practicing in his office and making rounds at his affiliated hospitals at the time he and Barbara first met. Schiess was very generous with his new lady friend, and set up a checking account for Barbara to use, depositing funds in it as she needed. After their accident, he helped Barbara pay her medical expenses.
The accident—the worst traffic accident of the 2004 Memorial Day weekend—had taken place in Gwinnett County, Georgia, and Schiess was driving at the time of the crash. He and Barbara were returning from the hospital, where Schiess had completed making his rounds for the evening. Barbara had been driving up until around five minutes before the crash, since Schiess was dictating his medical reports from the hospital rounds. As it became darker, Barbara could not see as well as she was comfortable with; so they stopped and changed drivers. Then, within minutes, their trip home came to an abrupt and violent halt.
A woman, traveling in the opposite direction, talking on her cell phone, was intoxicated and impaired by drugs. It was believed she had passed out or had fallen asleep, going across two lanes of traffic. She then hit the median, went airborne, and landed on the driver’s side of Schiess’s vehicle. The woman survived the crash and subsequently went to jail.
Barbara and Schiess both suffered serious injuries and spent quite some time in the hospital. Barbara was taken to DeKalb Hospital in Atlanta, and Schiess was sent to Gwinnett Medical Center in Gwinnett, Georgia, where he was affiliated. Barbara’s left arm and wrist were broken, along with her right foot and big toe. Most of her ribs on both sides were broken, there were other related problems with crushing injuries to her lungs, and she required surgery on her neck and arm. She was in the intensive-care unit (ICU) for almost two weeks, then spent another couple of weeks on a ward.
The accident took off the entire top of the car and pinned Schiess inside. He sustained a blowout fracture of his right eye socket and fractured his left femur. As a result, he had a rod inserted in his left femur from the hip to the knee. His right ankle had to be totally reconstructed, and he, too, had some lung injuries, along with other related problems. The injury that harmed him the most, however, was the permanent tremor in his hands, which marked the end of his neurosurgery practice. He could no longer operate, and it came as a crushing blow to him.
Both Schiess and Barbara experienced much long-term pain following their accident, and their recuperation was slow and difficult. Barbara said that she didn’t remember much about the accident and didn’t recall seeing the other car; she only remembered hearing a huge explosion, the car stopped, and everything went dark.
“Ever since then, if I hear a loud noise, like [thunder], I go into a panic attack,” Barbara said. “It’s truly terrifying, like everything is happening all over again, and I can’t breathe. It’s horrible.”
On their release from the hospital, Schiess hired a private-duty nurse to care for him at home around the clock, and since Barbara could not take care of herself, and could not be alone, he took her in and the nurse cared for her, too.
Barbara would require many more surgeries as time passed, and Schiess eventually closed his private practice in Conyers and began to suffer from a deep depression. He could no longer do what meant the most to him, and it had a tremendous effect on him.
“That accident drastically changed both our lives,” Barbara later said.
14
On November 10, 2005, slightly less than five months prior to Darlene Roberts’s death, Barbara and Schiess were involved in a bizarre incident with a Georgia State Patrol (GSP) trooper. As a result, they found themselves in handcuffs, taken to the Bartow County Jail.
The traffic stop eventually became so involved that the arresting officer’s narrative of the incident took two pages of single-spaced, fine-print type.
That afternoon, as the officer was headed home from the GSP hangar in Kennesaw, Georgia, he was wearing his issued flight suit and had his weapon in a shoulder harness. He was driving his blue-and-gray marked patrol car, but since he was in his flight suit, he had no protective vest and was carrying no handcuffs or radio on his person. He had only his car radio and a pair of handcuffs in his patrol car.
As he traveled west on Georgia 20, he saw a black Mercedes-Benz parked on the opposite side of the median with its passengers—a man and a woman—standing outside the left rear of the vehicle. The officer was immediately alerted to a possible problem by the man’s behavior; he had hold of the woman’s waistline from the rear and was shaking her back and forth. He thought the woman might be in danger, so he turned around and went back to investigate. When he neared the Mercedes, he called the Georgia State Patrol headquarters in Cartersville, Georgia, and notified the radio operator of his location.
As the patrolman approached, he saw that the woman had gotten into the driver’s seat of the Mercedes and the man was sitting in the passenger seat. He had noticed a lot of moving around while he had been talking on the radio, with both people reaching behind the front seats.
“I asked the male subject to step out of the car, and when he got out of the car, I immediately smelled a strong odor of an alcoholic beverage coming from him,” the officer described.
“I wanted to separate the male and female subjects so I could ask the female in private if she was with the male by her own free will.”
As soon as Robert John Schiess III got out of the car, he began cursing the officer and asking him for his name and badge number.
“He demanded to see my identification as I asked him for his. I asked him to step to the rear of the car, and I again asked him for his identification. He advised angrily that it was in the car, and once again demanded my badge number.”
The patrolman went back to the Mercedes and asked the female driver, Barbara Ann Roberts, for her identification and for Schiess’s. She reached over in the car and got a small black case, but Schiess began yelling to her not to show the officer any identification. She stopped and looked back at him, and the officer could see the ID in her hand. He asked once again to let him look at it. She very reluctantly produced her Georgia driver’s license, then Schiess’s, then stated, “But I was driving.”
The patrolman told her that he simply wanted to know to whom he was speaking, but Barbara repeated, “But I was driving,” with Schiess yelling the entire time for her not to show any IDs or give any information. He had noticed earlier, when he had stepped behind the Mercedes, that the car was registered in Rockdale County, Georgia.
At the time of this roadside fracas, Bartow County, Georgia, authorities were using all available personnel in an ongoing search of the nearby area for an escaped felon. Now that he finally had their IDs, the officer went back to his patrol car and called the Cartersville headquarters to let them know that Schiess was becoming increasingly agitated and Barbara was yelling something at him and pointing her finger at him. There was an extra pair of handcuffs in the driver’s side of the patrol car, and the trooper decided it would be a good idea to get them. He saw Barbara was getting more and more upset as she was yelling back to Schiess and talking to someone on her cell phone.
“I was unaware who she might be talking to, but over the yelling of the male, I could hear her yelling for help on the phone.”
The situation had reached a point where the officer felt that he needed to place Schiess into custody quickly so that he could de-escalate the situation, securing him so that he could safely speak to Barbara. As he got out of his patrol car with the handcuffs, he decided that, considering Schiess’s intoxicated state and his refusal to cooperate or follow any of his instructions, the best thing to do would be to place the doctor under arrest for obstruction of a law enforcement officer.
“I went to the man and asked him to place his hands on the hood of my patrol car. He put his right hand on the hood of my car, and as he was about to place his left hand on the hood, he quickly brought it back. I grabbed his arm and asked him to place it on the hood of the car, and he jerked away and yelled at me to take my hands off of him.”
The officer told Schiess two more times to place his hands on the hood of the car, but Schiess continued to yell and began calling the officer a fascist, a Nazi, and shouting several other inflammatory remarks. He started to repeatedly yell, “Name and badge number!”
The patrolman grabbed Schiess, and after a struggle, he cuffed both hands behind his back and attempted to lead him to the front of the patrol car, where he would be able to search him in front of the camera. Schiess was having none of that, and started to pull away. To prevent an escape attempt, the officer grabbed him and took him down to the ground, while Barbara continued to scream for help on the cell phone.
“Once on the ground, I felt he was somewhat secure. I felt he would not be able to get up on his own. I went to the radio to advise Cartersville to have any responding units to slow down because I now had the male subject in custody. While I was on the radio, an eighteen-wheeler pulled in behind me, and the driver asked me if I was all right or if I needed any help. I thanked him and told him I had the man under control now.”
The officer then learned that Barbara was talking to the Cartersville station on her cell phone. The Cartersville operator radioed the other personnel that the trooper now had the male subject under control and told them that he was now talking to the female on the phone.
“I went to her and advised her to calm down and to have a seat in the car,” the trooper said. “I asked her for the keys to the car, and when she gave them to me, I placed them on the roof of the car. When I asked her where she was coming from, she said, ‘Rome.’ I asked her if she had been drinking alcohol, and she said she had not. When I asked if she would provide a sample of her breath for a preliminary breath test, she said she would try.”
While the officer was attempting to talk to Barbara, Schiess continued yelling insults and yelling at Barbara, telling her not to cooperate. After attempting to get a sample a couple of times with no results, the officer decided Barbara was not going to cooperate with the evaluation.
“I now went back to place the male into the backseat of the patrol car. I opened the back door and asked him to stand up, and he refused. I then grabbed him to get him up and put him into the backseat. In doing this, I looked over my shoulder and saw the female reaching for something inside the trunk of the car. I could not see her hands, so I let go of the male and immediately went to the female and grabbed her and put her into the backseat of the patrol car. Then I went back to the male and tried again to get him to his feet. I had to pick him up to get him to the front of my patrol car to finish searching him.”
The officer looked up to see Barbara halfway out the right-hand backseat window of his patrol car. The window lock was obviously unlocked, and she was not handcuffed.
“I hurried back to the back of the car and grabbed her. I got her out of the window and onto the ground. I opened the back door and told her to get into the car.”
Barbara resisted, so the officer placed her into the backseat. At that time, a Bartow County sheriff’s deputy pulled up behind the patrol car, and the patrolman asked the deputy to watch Barbara while he went to the driver’s door and engaged the window lock and rolled up the window.
“I then spoke to the female and informed her why she was in the backseat. She verbally gave her consent to a search of the Mercedes, and the male continued his yelling and ranting as we looked through the trunk of the car. On reviewing the video of the incident, the male was yelling to the female, ‘Call the police on your cell phone!’ and she was yelling back, ‘I don’t have it!’”
Since both officers were in the assigned uniforms of their departments and were in marked patrol cars, the trooper stated later, he felt this was indicative of their condition at the time, since they obviously
were
the police.
After the officers searched the trunk of the Mercedes, the trooper noticed Schiess almost fall off the hood of the patrol car and into traffic.
“I went to him and pulled him to his feet and helped him to his knees in front of my car. In reviewing the video of this incident, the female makes a cell phone call to what I believe to be Bartow County 911. In talking, she gives her location as Georgia 20/US 411, right before the exit to get on I-75. That is seven-point-five miles from where this incident actually happened.”
An investigator with the Floyd County District Attorney’s Office stopped then and asked the trooper if he needed any help. When the officer explained the situation to him, the investigator made a recommendation as to the charge of reckless conduct for the female for going into the trunk while the officer struggled with her boyfriend.
“In reviewing the video, the female yells to the male, ‘You shut up!’ Then she asks him, ‘What’s the name of that road?’ Then the investigator takes the male off to the side to see if he can obtain any information from him, and another trooper arrives at the scene.”
The two troopers conducted a more thorough search of the vehicle; then the arresting officer returned to check on Barbara and asked her if she was okay. She claimed the officer had busted her lip, but when he asked her again if she was okay, she said, “Yeah.” The officer explained to her again why she was put into the backseat of the patrol car. He told her that when he was trying to get Schiess into the backseat, her actions by going into the trunk of the car had presented an officer-safety issue.
The investigator who went to talk to Schiess said that Schiess stated, “She was cold, she was very cold. I only pulled over to put the top up.” Then he retracted that statement and said that Barbara was the one who had been driving.
The Floyd County investigator went to talk to Barbara and explained to her that both she and Schiess were being charged with misdemeanor charges and told her that he had gathered all their medications from the Mercedes. Having completed an impound vehicle inventory, the trooper asked Schiess if he had any preferences for a wrecker service, since he was the registered owner of the vehicle. Schiess said that he did not care who towed the car, so the second trooper called the Cartersville headquarters and requested for the next wrecker service on the rotating list, Bulldog Towing.
During this time, Barbara was busy making more phone calls and said to someone that she would “need Mike’s help.” She then gave her location, then made another call, advising someone that she and Schiess had been en route from Rome to Atlanta, and the trooper had stopped because he thought Schiess was possibly assaulting her.
When the officers were ready to transport Barbara and Schiess to jail, Barbara complained that she was injured and needed medical attention, so the second trooper called and made arrangements to have an ambulance meet them at the jail. The arresting officer took Schiess to the Bartow County Jail for booking, and the other trooper took Barbara to jail. Once there, she was not allowed inside because of her complaint of injuries. The trooper then had to take her to the Cartersville Medical Center.
Schiess was evaluated by the jail’s medical representative and was allowed to be booked; then the arresting trooper performed a state test of his breath. Standard field sobriety tests (SFSTs) were not performed because of the condition of Schiess and officer safety. Once the officer received the results, he released Schiess into the custody of the jail personnel. A short time later, Barbara was delivered to the jail, having been cleared by the medical center. She was then booked, as Schiess had been.
What had started as a simple trip home after work for one Georgia state trooper had turned into unexpected hours of hassle involving several officers from different law enforcement agencies.