Monster

by Steve Jackson

  Richardson’s father, an alcoholic who had abused his wife and two sons, shot and killed himself shortly before Scott’s 13th birthday. Doyle Richardson had drilled a heightened sense of moral duty into his boys (“There’s right and there’s wrong, and you gotta choose where you stand”), but along the way forgot to tell them that he loved them.

  Richardson’s teenaged years had been spent hell-bent for leather, and those who knew him, including his mother, had wondered which side of the law he would wind up on. He’d been on his own at 16 with a fast car and not much else to his name except a reputation for wildness. But then he had gone to Gladewater to visit his father’s grave, and met Sabrina.

  So he’d stayed and, working two jobs, put himself through community college as a criminal justice major. He was a cop by 19, so young that his partners had to buy his bullets for him, the same year Sabrina’s parents finally let them go out on a date.

  Everything he had, everything he was, he got by working hard and patience; nobody had handed him anything. So Richardson didn’t put much stock in the stories of criminals who whined that they’d had a rough childhood. l somehow managed to stay out of prison, he thought when Luther began complaining about the police hounding him, and no one’s lookin’ at me now ’cause some girl’s missin’.

  Out loud, he sympathized, which seemed to encourage Luther. The ex-con repeated himself. “You know, they said I made a confession, which I never made.”

  Now, Richardson thought, get him while he’s on the defensive. “Let’s break the ice right off the bat,” he interrupted. “I’m not gonna jack with you, I’m not gonna jack with anybody. All we’re concerned about is findin’ Cher and makin’ sure Cher’s okay.”

  Luther relented a little. “Now I can understand that, you know what I mean, but like I say, now the boys, you know, see I just—I just did ten years, ten months, twenty-three days. All on an assault.” Luther paused. “On a sexual assault case,” he finally added. “That’s why they were bein’ protective of my identification.”

  Bells and sirens began going off in Richardson’s head. A sexual assault? No sense getting caught hiding that skeleton in the closet, eh Luther? The questions were popping up in his mind so quick, he could hardly keep up with the other man’s explanation of how he’d met the Eerebout boys through their father, Jerald “Skip” Eerebout. Skip had been his cellmate and best friend in prison, he said.

  “All I wanted to know,” Richardson interjected, “was more about what Cher was doing the night of March 27.”

  Luther was prepared for the question. “What happened was, you know, she was at Byron’s house. Okay? And Byron came over with this other girl named Gina. Well Cher, she thought she and him, Byron and her, had a little more of a thing goin’, you know what I mean?”

  Richardson grunted affirmatively. He’d already heard that Byron and Cher had been fighting over Gina Jones. That much he figured was true. Now, where was the truth going to make a U-turn into fiction?

  “So what I tried to do, is I tried to calm the situation. I tried talkin’ to her, tellin’ her, you know, ‘Just hold off,’ you know, ‘Let him spin his oats. He’ll come back to you.’ I wanted to get her away from the apartment. I made several suggestions. ‘Well, let’s go to a bar.’ ”

  But Cher, he said, who he’d met at Byron’s on a couple other occasions, wanted to go see a friend who worked in a Central City casino in the mountains northwest of Denver. So he had offered to go along for company.

  In fact, he let her drive his new car, a sporty blue Geo Metro, he said, while he sat back in the passenger seat and downed a few beers. They got to the casinos, met up with Cher’s friend, drank a couple more beers, played the slot machines.

  “We closed the place down. Then she drove us back to Byron’s. She went in to talk to him, but he was in bed with Gina. So, you know, she leaves very upset. So I follow her out of the apartment. I’m tryin’ to talk to her, you know, she’s cryin’ and stuff.”

  Cher told him she was going to call an old high school buddy named Gary. “That was the only guy that she ever could trust. You know what I mean?” She left, and he went back into the apartment. “I slept for three hours on the floor then got up and drove home to Fort Collins.”

  When Luther ran out of steam, Richardson asked if he could meet with him. Experience taught him that it was harder to lie face-to-face and man-to-man, and easier for him to judge a suspect’s reactions. But the ex-con danced away from the question by saying he’d be happy to answer any questions—over the telephone.

  To give himself more time to find a way to set up a meeting, Richardson asked Luther for the registration number on his car. He heard Luther speak to someone else in the room before responding.

  “Who you talkin’ to there?” Richardson asked. He wanted to know as many of Luther’s associates as possible; no telling who would be the key to this thing.

  “My lady friend, Debrah,” Luther replied.

  Richardson made a quick note. “So when was the last time you saw Cher?” he asked. He didn’t want Luther guessing at which things he might think were important—like girlfriends.

  “When she left that morning ...”

  “Did you stop anywhere on the way back?”

  Luther hesitated before replying. “Yeah. We did.”

  “Where’d you stop?”

  “Um, in Golden,” Luther replied nervously.

  Golden. Richardson pictured the little town to the north of Lakewood and just off the highway that ran up into the mountains to Central City. He noticed the reluctance in Luther’s voice. Got to be the girlfriend, he thought. Ol’ Tom doesn’t want to talk in front of her about stopping to park with Cher Elder.

  It was the opening he was looking for. “Is your lady friend sittin’ right there?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Luther laughed. He sounded relieved that the detective had finally caught on.

  Richardson laughed, too, just like they were best friends pulling one over on their wives. “Let’s stop that conversation. That’s gonna get you in a tight spot, isn’t it?”

  “I think so,” was the good-humored reply.

  The moment was ripe. Richardson again pressed for a meeting. Just one good ol’ boy who knew how to keep a secret from the women to another. This time Luther was agreeable. But with a caveat. “Like I say, I don’t trust cops ...”

  “I’m not gonna jack with ya, Tom,” Richardson interrupted as he felt his fish trying to wriggle off the hook.

  Quick as a bullet, Luther was angry. “That’s what everybody says. ‘I’m not gonna jack with ya, I’m not gonna give you the runaround.’ But as soon as you run my, you know, my credentials

  ... I’m gonna be like a suspect on your missing person.”

  Richardson was surprised by the suddenness of the change. Cool one moment, hot the next. He noticed that as Luther’s temper rose, so did his prison-speak. He had to head this off quick before Luther remembered that convicts aren’t supposed to talk to cops.

  “I don’t care what the background is,” the detective interjected. It was a white lie; he actually cared a lot, but he said, “I care about today.”

  Luther turned his anger off as quickly as he had turned it on. He said that Richardson could come meet him in Fort Collins if he could get there before he had to go to work that evening.

  But maybe it wasn’t even necessary? he ventured. After all, he’d told the detective everything he could think of. But had Richardson checked out a former boyfriend of Cher’s, went by a funny name, a guy named Garfus? “She had quite a lot of trouble with him. He wanted to be physical with her.” He suggested turning up the heat on Garfus.

  Richardson recognized the deflection attempt. This had to be another part of the story they’d rehearsed, he thought. He’d already heard about Garfus from Byron, but Garfus had an airtight alibi—he’d been out of the state when Cher disappeared. He turned the conversation back to Luther’s girlfriend. “How’d you meet Debbie?”

&nb
sp; “I’ve been with Debrah,” Luther corrected him on the name, “for about two and a half years. I met her while I was locked up at the state hospital in Pueblo, Colorado. She was a nurse there on their surgical unit.”

  “Okay. What’s her last name, Tom?”

  “Snider. S-N-I-D-E-R.”

  “Okay,” Richardson said, satisfied that he would soon be meeting the mysterious grey-haired stranger from the videotape. “We wanna make sure that Cher’s okay and everything, um, because Byron pretty much created this unpleasant situation for you, by coverin’ up and lyin’ and everything to us.”

  Richardson wanted to sound as if Byron was the focus of his investigation to put Luther at ease. He had no idea if the Eerebouts were lying to protect Luther, if Luther was lying to protect the Eerebouts, or they were all lying to protect each other. But someone was lying, and it was his job to find out who.

  The ex-con took the bait and jumped to the defense of his friend’s son. “Well, like I said, you know, in fact, this is the first time he’s said anything to me about it. He just says, ‘Hey, you know, I figured I wouldn’t say nothin’ to you, ‘cause I didn’t want you to be upset about it.’ I am very, you know, paranoid of the cops.”

  Richardson ignored the comment. “All right, well, we’ll be out there in a little bit. Thanks a lot, bud.”

  He hung up the telephone. The clock was ticking. He had to get to Fort Collins before Luther changed his mind or decided he wanted an attorney. And the longer Luther had to rehearse his story, the harder it’d be to catch him. But Richardson also wanted to know as much as he could about Luther before they met. He alerted his partner to get ready to move. Then he searched for Luther’s records on the Colorado Criminal Information Computer.

  There wasn’t a lot of detail, but what there was was interesting as hell. According to the printout, Luther had been arrested in Summit County, Colorado, on February 13, 1982, and charged with attempted murder, kidnapping, and sexual assault. He’d pleaded guilty to assault and second degree sexual assault more than a year later, in July 1983, and served almost eleven years before being released in January.

  Out three months and already connected to a missing girl. Fast work, bud, Richardson thought shaking his head. He took the printout back to his desk. He looked again at the photograph of Cher then he placed another call, this time to the Summit County Sheriff’s Office in the ski-resort town of Breckenridge. The receptionist passed him to Sheriff Joe Morales.

  “What can I do for ya?” Morales asked after the introductions were dispensed with.

  “Well, what can you tell me about Thomas Edward Luther?” Richardson asked. There was a long silence, and he wondered if the line had gone dead. He had expected a little confusion, or at least some sort of delay while Morales went to pull an eleven-year-old file. He didn’t expect the reply he got a moment later.

  Morales sighed, then asked, “Who’d he kill?”

  Chapter Two

  January 6, 1982—Breckenridge, Colorado

  As Richardson listened, Morales explained how he had been a young deputy sheriff in Summit County eleven years earlier when he first met Thomas Edward Luther. “And what I know about him and what I suspect are two different animals.”

  There wasn’t time to tell Richardson the whole story, just the basics. But after they hung up, Morales sat in his office lost in thought, remembering when it all began—January 6, 1982.

  It had been a bitterly cold day in Breckenridge, the county seat, but better known for its skiing. The temperature had been hovering around twenty degrees below zero for several days, the sort of cold that made it hurt to breathe and the snow complain underfoot like pieces of styrofoam rubbed together.

  About 4:30 that afternoon, Annette Kay Schnee came stomping into the town pharmacy accompanied by an unkempt, but otherwise pretty, woman with dark, shoulder-length hair. The pharmacy clerk recognized Annette, a petite young woman—all of 5’1” and 110 pounds, who also had shoulder-length brown hair—but not her companion.

  “They didn’t quite seem to belong together,” the clerk later told police detectives. Still, they acted like good friends. While the pharmacist filled Annette’s prescription they strolled through the store, laughing and commenting about various items.

  Annette was only ten weeks shy of her twenty-second birthday. A popular high school cheerleader back in her home town of Sioux City, Iowa, she hadn’t quite figured out what she wanted to do with her life after graduation. So she had shelved plans to go to college and worked in a beauty salon before moving to Breckenridge to ski and have a little fun.

  Her mom had fretted about her oldest child moving so far away. “What if you get sick? What if you need me and I’m not there?” But Annette had promised to be careful and called often.

  Annette had only lived in the Breckenridge area for eighteen months but was already considered a “townie” by the tight-knit locals. That was in part because the pretty young woman was willing to try almost any crazy stunt, including participating in the annual Outhouse Race, in which contestants mount outhouses on skis and barrel down a ski slope, hopefully, but not always, getting to the bottom in one piece. She supported herself by working part-time as a bartender in Breckenridge at night and full-time as a maid at the Holiday Inn in Frisco, fifteen miles to the north, during the day.

  Unlike jet-set Vail and Aspen, Breckenridge was off the beaten track in those days—a small, relatively quiet ski town with a main street of quaint Victorian storefronts, a variety of restaurants for the aprés ski crowd, and a few rowdy bars. The locals were mostly two kinds: young ski buffs, who worked at the resort or in the restaurants, bars, and hotels, and old-timers who loved the surrounding mountains of the Gore Range enough to put up with the tourists and the long winters at 10,000 feet above sea level. Except for the occasional bar brawl or burglary, there wasn’t much in the way of crime—hadn’t been a murder in years—and even young, pretty women like Annette felt safe hitchhiking.

  Annette was supposed to work that night at the bar. Her uniform was already laid out neatly on her bed in the cabin she rented in Blue River, a collection of ski chalets and cabins a few miles south of Breckenridge on Highway 9. But she hadn’t been feeling well and went to see a doctor in Frisco.

  Later that afternoon, friends saw her hitchhiking along Highway 9 outside of Frisco and gave her a ride to their turnoff a couple miles shy of Breckenridge. She waved goodbye as they drove off and stuck her thumb out again. She was on her way home but wanted to stop first to fill a new prescription. Her friends weren’t worried about her; she was dressed for the weather, including two pairs of wool socks, one long pair that covered her calves and an ankle-high pair over them.

  A half hour after her friends dropped her off, Annette walked into the pharmacy with the other woman. At the cash register, she turned to her companion and asked, “Didn’t you want cigarettes?” The other woman smiled and grabbed a pack of Marlboros.

  Annette paid for the cigarettes and prescription, which she placed in the daypack she carried. The clerk watched as the two women then walked out of the store and into the fast-approaching winter night.

  A few hours later, Bobby Jo Oberholtzer was waiting on the south end of Breckenridge for a ride to her home in Alma, twenty miles to the south on the other side of Hoosier Pass. A dozen Alma residents made the daily commute, preferring the solitude and lower housing costs of their tiny village on the highway between the ski resort and Colorado Springs and Denver.

  Bobby Jo was well-known and popular in Alma, to which she and her husband, Jeff, had moved from Racine, Wisconsin, several years earlier. On most workdays, Bobby Jo caught rides with friends to and from Breckenridge where she worked as a secretary for a realty office. When she missed a ride, she stuck out her thumb.

  Bobby Jo’s hitchhiking made Jeff nervous, but they only had an old truck and he needed it for his appliance repair business. She wasn’t the sort of woman who could be told what she could and couldn’t do anyway. Although
she was only 5’3” and 110 pounds, she’d fight like a cornered wildcat if pushed. So Jeff fashioned a heavy brass key ring for her with which to wallop any attacker. She kept the key ring clipped to the outside top of the daypack she always carried and promised to be careful.

  Bobby Jo had just turned 29 that past Christmas, a beautiful woman with blond, shoulder-length hair and merry blue eyes. On January 6, she got up at about 5:30 to get an early start on what began as a great day. She arrived at work to learn that she was getting a substantial pay raise.

  A little after 6 P.M., Jeff Oberholtzer was outside shoveling snow from the walk in front of their house and watching the traffic on Highway 9 for his wife when the telephone rang. Running inside, he answered. It was Bobby Jo. She told him the good news and said she was going to a Breckenridge bar to celebrate with two friends. The friends, another young couple, lived near Alma and would be giving her a ride home afterwards.

  “They’re good people,” Jeff said, relieved that his wife wouldn’t be trying to hitchhike over 11,000-foot Hoosier Pass on such a miserably cold night. They discussed dinner plans and hung up. He went back outside to finish shoveling.

  In Breckenridge, Bobby Jo and her friends went to the bar where she had a couple of drinks. By 7:30, it was apparent that her friends had decided to make a night of it, but Bobby Jo wanted to go home.

  “No problem,” she said, “I’ll hitchhike. There should still be some late traffic heading over the pass.” So she bundled up and headed for the convenience store at the end of town; its parking lot was used by locals as a pickup spot for hitchhikers headed south.

  Shortly before 8 P.M., a friend driving a truck spotted Bobby Jo standing in the cold and pulled over. Bobby Jo opened the passenger door and leaned in to warm up.

  “I’m going as far as Blue River,” the driver said. But Bobby Jo shook her head. Blue River was only a few miles down the road. Thanks but no thanks, she didn’t want to get stranded on that lonely stretch of the highway on such a night. At least here, she could run into the store to warm up until she got a ride to take her all the way to Alma.