It was a ten-mile drive to the medical center, during which Mary did her best to answer the police woman’s questions. The pain seemed to start at her head and go down to those areas the monster, as she thought of him, had violated. She wondered if she was going to die and tried to concentrate on the questions, hoping that by helping the police she would remain conscious and therefore alive. “He drove a pickup,” she said. The pain shot through her, and she cried out again, “And he used a hammer.”
The ambulance was met at the medical center by Dr. James Bachman. Mary resisted his attempts to examine her. Smith had to calm the hysterical woman, saying, “He has to look at you to find out about your injuries.” Finally, Mary relented although she continued to sob and whimper from the pain.
Bachman couldn’t believe one human had done this to another; the girl looked like she had been in a head-on car accident. Her head was swollen to the size of a basketball; her left eye was a slit and she was bleeding out of her ears. He feared skull fractures and a concussion, possibly brain hemorrhaging. Just how bad, he couldn’t tell—that sort of equipment was in Denver. But X-rays revealed that the young woman’s assailant had broken the C-7 vertebra at the base of her neck, either from a blow or perhaps when he choked her—the purple bruises from his fingers were already evident around her neck. Another blow might have killed her or left her paralyzed. One of her fingers was broken, as if he had tried to tear it off. And she had been severely lacerated vaginally and anally in a manner that made it clear what she meant when she cried about her assailant using a hammer.
Worried that her injuries might be life-threatening, Bachman left to contact a life-flight helicopter from one of the big Denver trauma hospitals. In the meantime, the police contacted Linda Batura, the county’s rape victim counselor. She arrived at the clinic and hurried into the examination room as the doctor was wrapping up his initial evaluation.
A half hour later, Batura, obviously shaken, emerged from the room to talk to Detective Snyder. Mary Brown had begun to calm down, with the help of a sedative, and was able, though brokenly, to relate the events after she got off the bus. The offer of a ride. The sudden, unprovoked blitz attack. The rage. The hammer.
The girl, Batura told the detective, had been assaulted in a dark, possibly green, pickup truck with firewood in the back. The suspect had light brown hair, blue eyes, and would have scratches on his face because the girl had used her nails to fend him off. “She said the front windshield will be cracked where he pushed her head into it,” Batura said.
In the past two years, much of it at a similar job in Denver, Batura had worked with more than 200 rape victims. “The only other person I had seen that looked so bad and seemed so injured was a female sexual assault victim in the Denver city morgue,” she wrote in her report that morning.
“I am amazed that she is alive. I have seldom seen such injuries sustained by a live victim. She literally ‘fought for her life!’ ”
High winds prevented any life-flight helicopters from flying to Summit County that morning. Brown was loaded into an ambulance for the ride back down from the mountains less than six hours after she arrived.
After Mary Brown was taken away, police officers spread out in the neighborhood to locate any evidence. One found the duffel bag at the empty home across the street; others followed a trail of blood that led to snow-tire tracks in the snow. As a detective left the housing area about 4 A.M., he saw a car driving slowly down a street two blocks away. He pulled the car over. Inside were three young women.
“We’re trying to find a friend of ours. We were supposed to pick her up at the bus station, but she wasn’t there,” one explained. The detective nodded. “There’s been an accident. You better follow me.”
A bulletin went out to all Summit County law enforcement agencies: white male, early twenties, brown hair, blue eyes, driving a dark-green, or dark-colored, pickup truck with wood in the bed. Suspect wanted for sexual assault/attempted homicide, Silverthorne-Frisco area, approximately zero, three hundred hours.
About 5 A.M., Frisco police officer Larry Woetjen was patrolling the town looking for the suspect’s vehicle. He was just passing a trailer home when he noticed a dark blue pickup parked in the driveway.
Trucks in the mountains are about as common as trees, but this one had Woetjen doing a double-take. As clear as if it had been stenciled there, he could see a rusty-red handprint on the vehicle’s back window. The truck wasn’t green, but he could see firewood stacked in the back. He radioed for backup.
The first officer to arrive was Deputy Joe Morales. He and Woetjen met down the block from the trailer park and crept back to the truck. As they grew close, they could see that the passenger-side window was covered with the same rusty-red blood. Shining his flashlight through the driver’s window, Morales noticed that blood had run down the passenger door in a sheet. The seat looked as if someone had spilled a can of red paint; red smears and drops of blood were everywhere, as if someone had dipped a rag in that paint can and whipped it around.
“Jesus,” he whispered, feeling sick to his stomach, “the girl survived this?”
The two young officers went back to their vehicles to wait for more backup. Whover had done this was obviously one vicious son of a bitch, and no one knew if he was armed. The time also gave them a chance to run the truck’s license plate. It came back as a 1977 GMC truck registered to Thomas Edward Luther.
Detective Snyder arrived and the three went back to the trailer. Go around to the back door, the detective signaled Woetjen. With their guns drawn, he and Morales went up to the door and knocked. A woman answered.
“Do you know whose truck that is?” Snyder asked, pointing.
“It’s my boyfriend’s,” the woman replied. Morales looked hard at the woman, surprised to see it was Sue Potter, whom he’d met when she was a police trainee.
“Could we talk to him?”
“Yeah,” she replied. “Come in.”
If Potter didn’t act surprised about the sudden appearance of two police officers, one in uniform and one in plainclothes, it was because she had already been forewarned.
When Luther got home two hours earlier, he found her awake in the dark. “I got in a fight with a couple of guys at the bar,” he said as he undressed and crawled into bed. “They were trying to rip me off for some coke.”
Then his voice cracked. “I ... I think I might have killed one of them. The police will probably be here in the morning.”
Before Potter could ask a question, he added, “All I want to do now is sleep.” But apparently he had some energy left, because they made love before he passed out.
Morales and Snyder followed Potter to a back bedroom, passing another sleepy woman who sat on a couch in the living room. Flicking on a hallway light, Morales could see a man sitting on a bed in the dark and ordered him out. As he walked past the young deputy, the man whispered, “Please don’t say anything to her,” indicating Potter, who had returned to the living room.
As Luther came into the light, Morales and Snyder were stunned. But it wasn’t the glassy blood-shot eyes or the jittery movements of a man coming off some kind of high that shocked them. It was the long bloody scratches that ran down his face and the smeared blood stains on his face and hands. He looked like he had been in a fight with a mountain lion.
Potter stared at her boyfriend as the detective read him his rights. “Do you understand?” Snyder asked when finished.
“Yeah,” Luther muttered. “I know why you’re here.”
Luther was dressed in a bathrobe. Snyder asked Potter if she would get her boyfriend his clothes. She came out of the dark bedroom with a jean jacket, a shirt, and a pair of jeans; they were covered with dried blood.
“Can we take these?” Snyder asked Luther, who responded with a nod.
“Would you be willing to come with me to the Summit County Medical Center?”
“Yes, I want to cooperate.”
“You realize that we have probable cau
se to arrest you for an incident in Silverthorne this morning.”
“I understand.”
As Snyder handcuffed Luther and led him away to his car, Morales had a hard time believing this meek fellow was the same monster who had caused the bloodbath he had seen in the truck. Maybe he’s just that way around women, the deputy thought. If that was the case, he was even more thankful that the arrest had gone off without an incident when Potter, sobbing as she retold her boyfriend’s admission that he might have killed someone, indicated that she had a loaded .38-caliber police revolver under her pillow.
Morales left the trailer for the medical center to pick up and transport the prisoner to the jail in Breckenridge. As he waited at the center, he tried to locate Undersheriff Joe Antonio because, as he would later write in his report, “of other pending assault and homicide cases under investigation.” He was thinking of Oberholtzer and Schnee.
There seemed to him to be a lot of similarities, starting with the fact that Oberholtzer, Schnee, and this new girl were all about the same size and either hitchhiking or looking for a ride. From what he understood, the latest victim was lucky to be alive.
True, this girl had been beaten, raped, and choked, of which there was no evidence in the Oberholtzer case. Then again, Bobby Jo had escaped before she was tracked down and killed, and no one knew what had happened to Annette. And while it was also true that Mary Brown hadn’t been shot like Bobby Jo, Morales knew from his studies at the police academy that serial killers didn’t always use the same method from victim to victim. Some were opportunistic—whatever was handy—and clever. This girl had been attacked in a neighborhood where a shot might have attracted attention, not on some lonely mountain pass.
Morales couldn’t reach Antonio. So he left his concerns on the answering machine for the detective handling the Oberholtzer case.
About 7 A.M., Snyder turned Luther over to Morales, who placed the prisoner in his patrol car. “He’s a strange one. I asked him again if he’d submit voluntarily to tests,” the detective said with Luther out of earshot. “He said, ‘Yes, I want to. I’m really sorry about all this. How’s the girl?’ ”
Snyder shook his head. The suspect had also asked Dr. Bachman to kill him when the doctor was taking a blood sample by putting an air bubble in his vein.
A few minutes later, as Morales was heading to Breckenridge, he noticed his prisoner was suddenly growing restive and breathing hard. He looked into his rearview mirror, just as Luther blurted out, “Why don’t you just kill me? Just pull over and shoot me!” The young deputy kept driving, not knowing that many years later he would wish that he had obliged his prisoner’s request.
Luther was booked into the Summit County Jail on charges of first degree assault and first degree sexual assault—other charges, including attempted murder, would be added later. Soon Snyder showed up at the jail to see if Luther would talk. By now, the young man had calmed down and was smoking a cigarette. He agreed to cooperate but said he would only give an oral statement, nothing in writing.
“Mind if I take notes?” Snyder asked.
“No, go right ahead.”
Luther related how he saw Mary and the family outside the bus station and had asked if they needed a ride. Only the girl had accepted. As they drove to Silverthorne, he said, “She started flirting with me.”
“How do you mean?” the detective asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. You know, looks and little suggestive things she said. ”They drove around for about an hour before he pulled over, him having “picked up on the flirting.” Suddenly, and for no reason, the girl went nuts, shouting “No,” scratching at his eyes and kicking the windshield of his truck, breaking it.
“I lost it,” he said, “and hit her a couple of times to shut her up.” Then he’d ordered her to take off her clothes, after which he’d raped her vaginally and anally with the hammer “to humiliate her.”
“When she wouldn’t stop screaming, I hit her a couple more times ... but that just seemed to make it worse. All of a sudden my head cleared and I realized what was happening.... I told her to get her clothes on.... Then I said I was goin’ to take her somewhere so that I’d have a longer time to get away.”
Luther stamped out his cigarette and sighed. “I told Sue that I thought I had killed someone and that you guys would be comin’ for me.” He started to say something more but stopped and shook his head. “I’m ... I’m too, you know, upset and I don’t want to talk anymore.”
Snyder walked out of the interrogation room and saw Morales talking with another deputy, Derek Wooden, who was working the desk that morning. Morales motioned him over.
“When I brought him in, he said right in front of me and Derek here, ‘Why do I keep doing these things?’ ” Morales said. “Then he looked at us kinda funny and changed it real quick to, ‘Why did I do this thing?’ ”
Chapter Four
Spring 1982—Breckenridge, Colorado
A month after Tom Luther was arrested for rape and attempted murder, a detective walked into the Breckenridge pharmacy and asked for the clerk who had been the last to see Annette Schnee.
“Can I help you?” the young woman asked approaching the detective.
“Yeah. Does this look like the woman you saw with Annette?” the detective asked. He placed a photocopy of Sue Potter’s driver’s license photo on the counter and stood back.
The detective was following up on suggestions that Luther might be involved in the Oberholtzer and Schnee cases. Potter matched the clerk’s general description of the mystery woman—right height, right weight, pretty with dark, shoulder-length hair parted in the middle. But apparently the detective didn’t think much of the theory: the photocopy he brought was badly overexposed; the figure in the photograph was hardly more than a silhouette, except for the smile that stood out from the blackness like the Cheshire Cat’s.
The clerk bent over to look. She frowned. “Could be,” she said, “but it’s too dark to say for sure.”
The detective shrugged; maybe he’d come back with a better copy. It would have been easy, he even could have ordered the original photograph from the Department of Motor Vehicles. But he never returned.
It was typical of the detective work early on in the Oberholtzer and Schnee cases. The investigation was cursory, communication among investigators and between departments poor, and some vital information was ignored or misplaced. Would it have made a difference to future tragedies? No one can say for sure, but it couldn’t have made anything worse.
Sue Potter’s police revolver was confiscated and sent to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation for ballistics testing to determine if the bullet found in Bobby Jo’s body could have been fired from that gun. The results were negative, but the report was lost, a fact that would hinder later attempts to investigate the case.
Luther was himself interviewed briefly by a detective and denied any involvement in the murder of Bobby Jo or the disappearance of Annette. The detective left the jail with no useful information, but wrote in his report, “I got the distinct impression that he had a strong dislike for women.”
Another detective who contacted Summit County Taxi was told that Luther had been one of the company’s best drivers—prompt, reliable, and willing to work a lot of hours, rarely taking two days off in a row. If he sometimes acted like a know-it-all, the company president said, he was still well-liked by the other employees, including the women, who were “shocked” at the accusations against their former colleague. However, the man conceded after checking his records that Luther had not worked on January 6, the evening that Oberholtzer and Schnee disappeared, or on January 7.
However, the investigation centered on Bobby Jo’s husband, Jeff Oberholtzer. Police know that most murders are not committed by strangers, and there was information that pointed in Jeff’s direction.
Jeff had initially denied knowing Annette Schnee, but a witness had seen her in his truck in Breckenridge several months before her disappearance. After being
shown a photograph of Annette, but without being told of the witness’s statement, Jeff Oberholtzer said that he hadn’t recognized the name but knew the face: he’d picked her up hitchhiking one day in Blue River and given her a ride to Frisco.
The witness’s information had drawn the police’s attention to Bobby Jo’s husband like crows to roadkill. Oberholtzer remained the prime suspect, but even there the police failed to thoroughly check out his story.
The mistakes went beyond the haphazard work of the detectives assigned to the cases. During Luther’s incarceration in the Summit County Jail, as well as several other jails to which he transferred as he awaited trial, he proved to be a talkative prisoner. In the coming months, a half-dozen inmates in different jails would come forward with information that Luther had implicated himself in a number of rapes and murders, including the Oberholtzer and Schnee cases.
On the afternoon of April 22, 1982, Dillon John Curtis, a 36-year-old small-time drug dealer, walked into the Summit County Sheriff’s Office. He had been Luther’s cellmate for about six weeks, he said, and had gained his trust. Now a free man, he was troubled.
“I got something to tell you about Luther and that girl what’s been missin.’ What’s her name? Schnee?” he said to a deputy.
Luther had told him that he’d been abused by his mother during childhood and had blamed the assault on Mary Brown on her. Curtis said he’d had a cousin who reminded him of Luther, a cousin who had started by raping and beating women, escalating the violence until he killed one.
“I don’t want that on my conscience, if he did these other girls,” Curtis explained. “And what he did to that girl with the hammer makes me sick.”
Luther had talked about an old, abandoned mine shaft near Frisco where a body could be hidden, Curtis said. The location was known only to Luther and his girlfriend, Sue Potter, who had discovered it while riding their horses.
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