Roberta Caskey sat on the witness stand Friday in Duluth, facing her estranged husband for the first time since he kidnapped her nearly three years ago.
Caskey spent nearly three hours responding to questions from attorneys, sometimes struggling to recall the details of the three-week ordeal that took her from a Virginia street corner to a small room in Mexico, against her will and under the watchful eye of an abusive husband.
“I didn’t want to stay with him,” she testified. “I’d ask him when I could go home and he kept saying, ‘Soon.’”
Timothy Caskey pleaded guilty in February to kidnapping and bank robbery charges. On Friday, he appeared in U.S. District Court in Duluth for an evidentiary hearing in preparation for sentencing.
Roberta Caskey was the sole witness at the hearing, which will be used to help determine the severity of Timothy Caskey’s offenses before a yet-unscheduled sentencing date.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Michelle Jones asked Roberta Caskey to describe in detail the abuse she endured, while defense attorney John Conard sought to call her credibility into question on several points of her testimony.
Roberta Caskey testified that she recalled receiving several phone calls from her estranged husband on July 14, 2011, the day he was released from jail for a violation of an order for protection she had filed against him.
As she walked down the street with her son, a friend and two other children, Timothy Caskey pulled up and shoved her into his truck, she recalled. They took off, although she said she didn’t know where they were going at the time.
She testified that she recalled Timothy Caskey robbing a bank, and later stealing a new truck from a dealership. He brought her across the border to Mexico, where she was forced to stay in a small room for three weeks.
She said Timothy Caskey beat her with a screwdriver, forced her to get a tattoo on her ankle and occasionally starved her.
“I was scared,” she said when asked why she did not try to escape. “He threatened many, many times to hurt me if I did anything.”
Timothy Caskey eventually was taken into custody by Mexican authorities on Aug. 8, 2011, when he tried to transfer her money to a bank there. Roberta Caskey was safely transported back to the United States by federal officials.
During cross examination, Conard made several allegations that Roberta refuted. He played a tape that Timothy Caskey had recorded of an argument they had in March 2011, the day before she called police and got an order for protection.
In the tape, Roberta Caskey appears to have conceded that Timothy Caskey had not physically assaulted her during the argument. She is also heard to say that she is a “cop-caller” because the cops were on her side.
She disputed his contentions, saying she frequently had been abused by her husband.
“I must have been assaulted (that night),” she said, “or I would not have called the police.”
The defense attorney asserted that evidence suggested she was not just an innocent victim in the incident. Conard contented that she walked freely as they entered stores, helped write the bank robbery note and even counted the proceeds from the heist. She denied all of those allegations.
Roberta Caskey acknowledged that she was aware Timothy Caskey had been abused as a child and was dealing with disorders. She said she helped him with his care, but sometimes needed to call the police when she could no longer deal with him.
The defense did not call any witnesses or present any additional evidence at the hearing.
Judge John Tunheim instructed the attorneys to submit written arguments on offense severity level by July 28, after which they will have two weeks to submit responses. Sentencing will be scheduled after that.
The kidnapping charge carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, while bank robbery carries a maximum of 20 years.
