Probably wouldn’t have the cajones to take on a man, Morales thought as he was wrapping up a late-night shift on the morning of February 13. The deputy’s fantasy of grim justice came abruptly to a halt when a call came over the radio. The police in Silverthorne, a town a few miles north of Frisco, were asking area police agencies for help.
“Be on the lookout for a white male, early twenties, brown hair, blue eyes, driving a dark-green or dark-colored pickup truck with wood in the bed,” said the dispatcher. “Suspect wanted for sexual assault/attempted homicide, Silverthorne-Frisco area, approximately zero, three hundred hours.”
Chapter Three
February 13, 1982—Frisco, Colorado
Three hours before Joe Morales heard the call over his radio, at 2:15 A.M., a Trailways bus pulled into the parking lot of the laundromat that served as the bus depot in Frisco. The bus driver was in a hurry as he unloaded the five passengers—a family of four and a 21-year-old woman—who were getting off before he continued on to California. He was already running thirty-five minutes behind schedule.
The driver handed the young woman, Mary Brown, the duffel bag that held her clothes and other necessities for the ski vacation that had brought her to the mountains. A small woman, her bag was nearly as big as she was.
Mary looked around for her friends who were supposed to meet her. They had come up earlier from Denver, but she had remained behind to finish her second job and caught the last bus out of town. She thought about driving but was afraid her old clunker of a car couldn’t take the seventy-five-mile drive into the mountains, climbing more than 4,000 feet in altitude in the process, and she didn’t want to be stranded alone on the highway at night.
Now, however, Brown’s friends were nowhere in sight. She worried that they had already come and gone due to the bus’s tardiness.
“There’s a police station two blocks that way,” the bus driver said, pointing down the main street. “Or you can stay in the laundromat.” He then climbed back on board and the bus pulled away as Mary searched her purse for the telephone number of the condominium where her friends were staying in Silverthorne. She had written the number on a piece of paper but now couldn’t find it. Then she remembered leaving it on her bureau in her haste to pack.
The air was so cold Mary Brown could already feel her ears burning with the first warnings of frostbite. She shivered. The laundromat was locked despite the “Open” sign in the window. She was trying to decide whether to walk to the police station or call a taxi when a pickup truck swung into the parking lot. The driver rolled down his window.
“Anybody need a ride?” he asked, quickly explaining that he was a driver for Summit County Taxi Service. He was off-duty, he said, but considering the weather, he would be happy to help out.
“No thanks, we only live a couple blocks from here,” said the man as his family trudged off through the squeaking snow.
Mary frowned. If this had been Denver, there was no way she would have accepted a ride from a stranger. She had been raised in a conservative, strait-laced family—hitchhiking was something good girls didn’t do. But this is the mountains, she thought, laid-back, friendly, a place where people helped one another.
She looked her would-be benefactor over. He didn’t appear dangerous. In fact, he was kind of cute, about her age, with curly brown hair, bright blue eyes, and a nice smile. He was smiling now as he said, “My name’s Tom. Come on, hop in, I’ll take you where you want to go.”
Thomas Edward Luther gave the young woman what he considered one of his most winning smiles. He’d been born twenty-five years earlier on June 23, 1957, in the tiny burg of Hardwick, Vermont, the eldest of three boys and two girls.
It was far from a perfect childhood, and he still carried some dangerous emotional baggage from it, though you’d never know it to look at him. His father, Woodrow Luther, worked for the local gas company; his mother, Betty, a pretty, petite woman with dark shoulder-length hair, worked as a nurse’s aide and kept the house. Betty was prone to screaming rages, generally directed at her children, especially Tom. When she “got out of hand,” Woodrow would put her back in her place with his fists. And there were darker secrets in Tom’s childhood, but he kept those to himself.
Luther left home soon after his father died with his mom telling him that he was no good and would never amount to anything. There was a period of living with bums under a bridge in New York City and another hanging out on the beaches of Southern California. But he bought his truck in California and eventually made his way to the Colorado high country in 1978 at the invitation of a friend from his old home town.
In 1981, Luther met his girlfriend, Sue Potter, at a bar in Frisco. She was pretty and dark-haired, six years older than Tom, and had recently taken a job as a police officer trainee for the town. However, she quit that job shortly after meeting him. It seemed that her career choice didn’t mesh well with Luther’s part-time activities of small-time drug dealing and burglaries, which he used to supplement his income as a woodcutter and construction worker. Police work had been a good job, but she was, as she later confided to a detective, “very, very much in love.”
At first everything had gone well between them. They rode her horses, exploring the thousands of acres of surrounding U.S. National Forest lands, checking out long-abandoned mine sites and little-known trails. The sex was good (“Nothing kinky,” she told the same detective). She complained sometimes when she thought that he might be prowling around looking for other women, but he had a way of convincing her that she was the one who was being unreasonable.
Only once had he gotten physical with her, flinging the car keys so hard at her head that, even though he missed, they stuck in the wall. But now, a year after they met, they were arguing a lot. He thought she was clinging and dependent, that she wanted to control him. He wanted to break it off, but was torn by not wanting to hurt her, which only made him feel trapped and resentful.
Lately, he had been entertaining a fantasy. In it he stalked a woman, waited for just the right moment, and then, looking into his victim’s frightened eyes, announced that he was going to rape her. However, in the fantasy, the woman willingly acceded to his demands, and they both enjoyed the sex.
It was a pleasant little diversion whenever he got into it with Sue, as he had that night. He stomped out of the trailer home they shared with another woman on the outskirts of Frisco, feeling like he was owed a night on the town. He went to the Moose Jaw bar, a locals’ hangout, where he downed a half-dozen beers and chased them with shots of peppermint Schnapps.
Luther wasn’t especially large, just 5’11” and 180 pounds, but his work kept him muscular with big, rough workman’s hands. He could hold a lot of liquor and appear reasonably sober. After all, he’d been drinking since childhood, combining it with marijuana, amphetamines, and LSD in his teenaged years. When he was 15, his parents had checked him into the Waterberry State Hospital in Vermont for a thirty-day observation period because of his frequent use of hallucinogens. But that was the extent of any efforts to get him off drugs or alcohol, and he’d been at it ever since—mostly cocaine, pot, and booze by this time.
He had a pretty good buzz going as he sat in his truck across from the laundromat that night and watched the “sweet young thing” get off the bus. Cruising bus depots and picking up hitchhikers were good ways to meet women, he often told his friends.
“Come on, hop in,” he now coaxed the girl. She reminded him of his mother ... her size and the way she wore her hair.
Shrugging, Mary Brown went around to the passenger side. Tossing her duffel bag into the back of the truck on top of some firewood, she opened the door and got in. She explained that she was trying to find her friends who were staying at a condominium in Silverthorne. It was owned by one of the girl’s parents. She told him what she believed to be the name of the owner.
“I’m pretty sure I know someone over in Silverthorne by that name,” he responded. Reassured, Brown tried to recall the direct
ions she had been given as Luther drove from the parking lot and headed out of town, taking the turn toward Silverthorne.
They arrived in Silverthorne and began searching, turning this way and that as she thought she recognized landmarks. But it was dark and every snow-covered street with its dark, unlit homes looked the same. It was soon clear that she was lost. “Why don’t you take me to a police station, and I’ll try to find them from there,” she said.
Luther just kept driving through the quiet neighborhood, saying he had just one more place to check. One more street. He was pissed off that the bitch couldn’t remember simple directions and had him driving around for an hour. He turned onto a street of widely spaced homes surrounded by deep snow. The street dead-ended in a confusion of drifts.
Mary, now nervous as her benefactor grew quiet, his smile tight and hard, asked again to be taken to a police station. “I don’t think the house is down there,” she said indicating the winter wasteland beyond the drifts.
Luther nodded and swung the truck around. But then he pulled over. “I don’t think we’re going to find your friends,” he said matter-of-factly. “But this is as good a place as any. Take off your clothes.”
Brown lunged for the door handle. Suddenly, her head exploded with light and pain as Luther punched her in the left side of her face. He grabbed her hair and slammed her head into the door, then shoved her onto the floor of the truck.
“Take off your clothes, bitch!” he snarled. The smile was gone.
“Please,” Mary begged. “Just take my money and let me go.”
“Shut up!” he yelled, punching her again. “And take off your clothes.”
“I can’t move ...”
“Shut up or I’ll kill you!” he warned. Reaching down he ripped her ski vest off. Shaking and whimpering, Mary made another desperate grab for the door, but he hit her again, knocking her back. She started to cry. “I’m going to die.”
“Shut up, bitch!” Luther demanded as he pulled up her shirt and grabbed a breast, asking if her boyfriend did the same and whether she liked it. When she didn’t answer, his rage boiled over again. “Bitches. Whores.” The curses rained out of his mouth as he hit her again and again. He shoved her against the door and demanded that she remove her pants. Wanting only to survive, she complied.
A moment later, she screamed and grabbed his arm as he shoved his hand inside her. “Let go,” he ordered and hit her in her already bloody face again. Unzipping his pants, he tried unsuccessfully to masturbate. Frustrated, he ordered her to help, but he still could not get an erection, which only made him angrier.
Mary Brown would later write in her police statement: “I asked if he had done this before. He said yes, several times. That’s when he picked up the hammer. I thought he was going to hit me with it.”
Luther had grabbed a wooden-handled carpenter’s hammer. Brown saw it and cried out, “I’m going to die. I know I’m going to die.” He punched her again and pushed her back. He ordered her to insert it into her vagina. She began to do as told, but when her attempts were apparently too tentative for him, he grabbed the handle and rammed it into her body, raping her with the tool.
Mary braced herself—her blood-smeared head against the passenger window, her bloody left hand pressed to the back window. She tried not to scream, aware that her screaming only seemed to incite him to further violence. But he shoved the hammer harder, and she cried out in pain despite her fears. He struck her in the eye with his fist.
“My eye,” she cried. “My eye is gone.”
“No, it isn’t, bitch. Shut up!”
Luther continued raping her with his hammer. Every time he pushed, she screamed and grabbed at his arm, only to be punched. And every time he punched, her blood sprayed onto the windows, the dashboard, the seats.
The torment seemed to last forever, during which she urged herself not to pass out—God only knew what would happen if she did. Then Luther stopped and removed his hammer. “Turn around,” he said. Believing that he was about to kill her, Brown fought back.
“I didn’t want to die,” she later recalled. “I wanted to get out. I remembered reading something about defending yourself and poked my thumbs into his eyes.”
It didn’t work. Instead, it enraged Luther more, and he began beating her over and over with his fists. He grabbed her by the back of her hair and slammed her head into the windshield of his truck hard enough to crack the glass. All the while, Mary, repeated to herself, Don’t pass out. Don’t pass out.
Finally, Luther grabbed her by the throat and began choking her. She could hear her neck bones crunching, but beyond the pain and terror, she suddenly found herself thinking of her family and friends, how much she loved them. She didn’t want to be some nameless, faceless body left to rot somewhere in the Colorado mountains, her loved ones never knowing what had become of her. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. She hadn’t done anything to deserve this.
Angry, Brown reached up and ripped at her attacker’s face with her fingernails. He screamed with pain and rage and stopped choking her, but began hitting her again until she slumped against the door. He picked up the hammer he had dropped and ordered her to turn around.
Resigned to death, Mary complied, turning her beaten and naked body, preferring not to see the hammer as it made its deadly arc toward her head. But he had a final act of terror to perform first; he shoved the handle into her again, this time raping her anally.
Brown found new strength to scream. After what seemed like hours, he finally stopped. She waited for the death blow. But there was nothing.
Hesitantly, fearfully, she looked around. Luther sat motionless, looking down at his bloody hands.
“Can I put my clothes on?” she asked, hoping that, his rage spent, he might let her live.
“Go ahead,” he mumbled.
“Can I get out?”
“No,” he said, “I want to take you somewhere.”
Something in his tone told her that wherever “somewhere” was, she didn’t want to go. Crying as she pulled on her clothes, she blurted out, “I’m not old enough to die. I deserve a chance to live as long as you have.”
His answer was chilling. “I ain’t that much older than you.” But his anger seemed exhausted.
“Can I open a window?” she asked and began to reach for the door. His answer was a fist to her face.
Racked with pain, hardly able to see, she could picture in her mind being taken somewhere to be killed and her body dumped like trash. She knew then that he wasn’t going to let her go ... he’d told her his name, even pointed out the street where he lived as they were driving out of Frisco.
He started the truck as her tears mixed with the blood on her face. But he drove only a few feet before stopping again. His hands came up to grip his head as he started to mumble. She knew he wasn’t speaking to her. He seemed engaged in some internal struggle. Mumbling. Muttering. Rubbing his head with blood-covered hands.
“Can I go?” she asked flinching from the blow she expected.
“Yes, go,” he yelled instead. “Take everything ...” But Mary was already out the door, reaching into the truck’s bed to remove her duffel bag. Then she ran before he could change his mind.
Her left eye was swollen shut and blood poured over her right. Slipping. Falling. Rising only to fall again. Each time she fell she felt she wouldn’t be able to get up again and the thought crossed her mind to just lie down and give in. The cold was numbing and she could feel it sapping her energy.
But something within wouldn’t let her give up; she struggled again to her feet, leaving a bright red trail as she staggered through hip-deep snow that lay between her and the nearest dark house. Any moment she expected to feel the hand of her attacker dragging her back ... back to a lonely grave “somewhere.”
She reached the house, knocked on the door, and screamed for help. The world was a nightmare. Monsters lurked in the black shadows beneath the trees. No one was home.
Abandoning her duf
fel bag, she set off through the snow to a house across the road, only to pull up in terror when she noticed a truck in the driveway. Cautiously, she approached and looked in the back; there was no wood, it wasn’t his truck.
Staggering, she reached the front door but couldn’t raise her hand to knock. Growing dizzy and afraid that she would pass out and freeze to death, she willed herself to try the door handle. It wasn’t locked and gave to the pressure.
“Help me!” she screamed, entering the house. “Please, someone help me!” She walked a few steps into the living room and fell to the floor.
Frightened voices called out in the dark. Lights came on. People were around her. She heard voices but it was all a confused jumble. Then very distinctly she heard a woman’s voice cry out, “... third one in a month.”
It was 3:30 in the morning when Silverthorne police officer Pam Smith arrived at the scene of a 911 emergency call. She found what appeared to be a young woman—it was difficult to assess the victim’s age because of the blood and disfigurement—lying on the living room floor, sobbing hysterically.
Smith tried to assure Mary (she was able to get the girl’s name) and gently asked what had happened. “He used a hammer,” the girl cried. “I hurt—I hurt so bad.”
The ambulance arrived simultaneously with Silverthorne Detective Tom Snyder who assumed the lead in the case. He told Smith to accompany the young woman to the Summit County Medical Center to see if she would say anything about her assailant. On the way to the clinic, a female paramedic began to remove Mary’s shirt but she clutched at the attendant’s hands and, through broken lips, said, “Not with him here.” She indicated the male paramedic. He nodded and moved to the front of the ambulance; the way this girl looked, he didn’t blame her for not wanting any men nearby.
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