Fred Lorraine Fottler Jr. was a 45-year-old man who had been born in 1955 in Concord, New Hampshire, but by the autumn of 2000 his life was tied to the back roads and drug corridors of the American Southwest. In Arizona he became part of a large-scale marijuana smuggling operation run through a group of traffickers known to the courts as the Pembertons, a ring for whom veteran transporter Homer Ray Roseberry had already hauled multiple loads in his motorhome from Arizona toward the Midwest.
When a new shipment of more than a thousand pounds of marijuana was readied in early October 2000, the Pembertons insisted that Fottler ride along from Phoenix to guard the drugs, placing him directly beside a man who was already plotting to steal the load.
The plan that unfolded in October was crude but dangerous. Roseberry and his friend, Charles Dvoracek, agreed that Dvoracek would drive separately to the Wickenburg area and wait near a Denny’s restaurant along the highway. The idea was that when Roseberry and Fottler stopped to eat, Dvoracek would slip away with the motorhome and the marijuana, leaving Roseberry to explain the loss. Instead, in the early hours of a dark desert morning, Roseberry pulled off along Highway 93 in Yavapai County with Fottler asleep on the couch in the back of the motorhome. Dvoracek, watching from his truck, heard two sharp cracks. Moments later, Roseberry stepped out and calmly said he had just shot “the guy” the traffickers had sent to ride shotgun. Inside, Fottler lay mortally wounded, shot in the back of the head while he slept; when he showed signs of still clinging to life, Roseberry went back inside and fired a third round at close range. Together the two men wrapped the body in a blanket and dragged it into a gully or brushy area off the roadside, leaving him hidden in the weeds beside the lonely highway.
From there the killing turned into a methodical effort to erase evidence and turn the drugs into cash. As Roseberry drove north through Arizona, he threw the murder weapon out of the motorhome and continued toward Kingman. There, he and Dvoracek stopped long enough to strip out anything that might tie the vehicle to the killing: a bloodstained sheet was tossed over a fence, and Fottler’s wallet was buried. One of the heavy duffel bags of marijuana was moved from the motorhome into Dvoracek’s truck, giving him product he could sell quickly in case they needed bail money. The rest of the load, along with the motorhome itself, was stored when the men reached Roseberry’s home in Henderson, Nevada later that day. Within hours, Roseberry was boasting to his wife, Diane, that he had killed Fottler so he could keep the marijuana for himself and sell it. He also rehearsed a false cover story, claiming that armed “Mexicans” had boarded the motorhome and killed Fottler while Roseberry was outside, a lie he expected others to repeat if questioned.
While Roseberry focused on converting the shipment into profit, events back in Arizona began to close in around the desert grave he had left behind. Fottler’s body was discovered along Highway 93 in Yavapai County not long after the murder, still partially wrapped and lying in the roadside depression where the killers had dumped him. The location and condition of the remains told investigators that he had been shot and discarded during a drug-related journey rather than in a spur-of-the-moment street crime. Information from United States Customs agents, who had previously observed Roseberry’s distinctive motorhome while surveilling a stash house in Tucson, pointed Yavapai County deputies toward him as a likely suspect. Those leads, combined with the abandoned crime scene evidence and emerging witness statements, allowed authorities to reconstruct the arc of the trip from Phoenix through Wickenburg and northward, with Fottler’s final stop on the shoulder of Highway 93. An arrest warrant and indictment for Roseberry soon followed.
As investigators tightened the net, the small circle around Roseberry splintered. His wife, Diane, and his friend, Charles Dvoracek, who had helped plan the theft of the load, eventually cooperated to varying degrees and became key witnesses. Their accounts described a scheme in which Roseberry, already familiar with the Pembertons’ operation, deliberately set out to steal approximately a thousand to thirteen hundred pounds of marijuana, needing only to get past the guard the traffickers sent to ride with him. That guard was Fred Fottler. In the aftermath of the killing, Roseberry arranged for Diane’s brother and other drug buyers to fly in, selling hundreds of pounds of marijuana that had been stored with the motorhome. Later summaries of the case note that Diane Roseberry received a seven-year prison sentence and Charles Dvoracek a ten-year sentence for their roles, reflecting their involvement in the narcotics conspiracy and the events surrounding Fottler’s death, even though neither man nor woman pulled the trigger.
For Roseberry, the consequences were far harsher. In Yavapai County Superior Court he was tried for first-degree murder alongside charges of conspiracy to transport marijuana for sale and transportation of more than two pounds of marijuana for sale. The jury convicted him on all counts and, in a separate aggravation phase, found that he had killed for pecuniary gain, accepting prosecutors’ argument that the murder was committed so he could steal the load and reap the full profit. On July 14, 2003, he was sentenced to death for the murder of Fred Fottler, plus consecutive aggravated ten-year prison terms on the drug counts. Over the years that followed, Roseberry’s lawyers challenged his conviction and sentence through direct appeal, federal habeas petitions, and state post-conviction proceedings, arguing issues ranging from jury instructions to ineffective assistance of counsel. The Arizona Supreme Court affirmed his conviction and death sentence in 2005 and later rejected further challenges in 2015, leaving in place the verdict that tied Fottler’s killing to greed and a calculated betrayal on a desert highway.
Today, most of what remains publicly visible of Fred Fottler’s life is a scattering of genealogical records, a brief memorial entry listing him as lost to gun violence in Yavapai, and the dense court opinions that recount his last journey in procedural detail. They describe a man who climbed into a motorhome believing he was there to protect a valuable load, only to be shot in the back of the head by the driver he trusted and left in the weeds beside Highway 93. His death is solved and legally acknowledged, embedded in the story of a drug-rip scheme that ended with a body in a roadside gully, accomplices serving prison terms, and the triggerman condemned to die for what the courts ultimately called a murder for money.
