“You didn’t even ask me,” she complained.
“The defense attorney and I thought it would save you the trauma of a trial,” the prosecutor offered lamely.
“You had no right,” she cried. But there was nothing she could do; the attorneys, Judge Richard Hart, and Luther had already signed off on it.
On September 1, Luther was sentenced to fifteen years in the state penitentiary for second degree sexual assault and twelve years for first degree assault. He was allowed to serve the sentences concurrently and was given credit for the 563 days he had already spent in jail. With good time, Nearen told him, he’d be out in seven years.
A short time later, after his attorney vainly attempted to suppress the tape made by Troy Browning, Luther pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder and was sentenced to another three years in exchange for that sentence also running concurrently with the others. Browning may as well not have even gone through the effort of taping Luther; other than many years later, it was more proof to Luther’s hunters that he would rather kill innocent women than pay for his crimes.
In Denver, Mary Brown was left with her nightmares. For the sake of expediency, she had been denied her chance to face her attacker and describe to a jury the sort of monster they had before them. Now, she would have to pick up the pieces of her life without the catharsis of a trial.
In Breckenridge, Deputy Morales, who in ten years would win election as the sheriff of Summit County, was angry at the prosecution for not insisting that Luther plead guilty to attempted murder or go to trial. Never would have been too early to let that monster out of prison as far as he was concerned.
The words “why do I do these things” echoed in his mind. And in his heart he knew that someday he would hear the name Thomas Edward Luther again—and it would be in connection with another young woman in trouble.
Chapter Five
June 15, 1984—Buena Vista, Colorado
When Dr. John Macdonald, a native of New Zealand, arrived at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Hospital in 1950, all faculty members were required to spend some time on the “security ward,” evaluating prisoners sent to them by the courts. It was their responsibility to determine sanity questions before the trial and then afterward, a convicted felon’s potential “dangerousness” for the pre-sentence report given to the judge.
At the time, Macdonald had not specialized in forensic psychiatry, but he soon found that the world of sex offenders, killers, and robbers was infinitely more interesting work from a psychiatric point of view than the routine complaints of the mostly middle-aged good citizens who constituted the majority of his colleagues’ practices.
Whatever else they might be, criminals were men of action—if they were poor, they got a gun and robbed a store—and compelling fodder for study. He was soon in charge of the ward and by 1960 was the director of psychiatry for the teaching hospital, responsible for the training of young psychiatric residents in the delicate arts of interviewing and diagnosing criminals.
Sometimes it was easy. Under the stress of facing heavy prison sentences, even the death penalty, the psychological defenses of many criminals were impinged. They often said more than they intended or made offhand remarks without realizing what the words revealed. Invariably, criminals believed that they were smarter than the rest of society, particularly the police; being apprehended was always a matter of bad luck, carelessness, “snitches,” or unfair police tactics. Many had over-inflated egos and/or insecurities that made it almost necessary for them to brag about their exploits.
Others however, especially the sociopaths, were clever and manipulative, always trying to read their evaluators’ minds and adapt their answers accordingly. “Bear in mind,” Macdonald would tell the residents who accompanied him on his rounds, “while you’re making your psychiatric evaluations that they’re making a psychiatric evaluation of you and probably much quicker.”
Most criminals could be counted on to lie, exaggerate, and misinform—especially if they thought that by doing so, they might get something for themselves. But over the years, Macdonald had refined his interview techniques to sift through the chaff and get to the kernels of truth. He believed that his work helped society in general, and the police in particular, understand why criminals acted as they did, how their thought processes worked and, particularly in the case of serial rapists and serial killers, how best to catch and convict them.
Yet Macdonald was not content to just talk to inmates and review official records of their crimes. Criminals altered their stories about as often as most people changed socks. And much of what he was interested in might never make it into the official records or have anything to do with a suspect’s guilt or innocence.
So to gather his information, Macdonald began “hanging out” in 1970 with various units of the Denver Police Department. Robbery. Homicide. Sex offenses. Many officers were at first suspicious of what the eccentric little man with the funny accent who looked like some village librarian might be up to, but they gradually came to trust him to the point that he was given his own desk at police headquarters.
Every Friday evening, he rode with police officers and detectives until dawn. He interviewed perpetrators, victims (if they lived), witnesses, even the officers at the scene while the body was—figuratively and sometimes literally—still warm, in his quest to understand the nature of crime.
As one of the top forensic psychiatrists in the country, he had written a half-dozen books on topics from rape to robbery to murder. He lectured at police academies around the country and the world. He had appeared more than 200 times in court as an expert witness, sometimes for the defense, but mostly for the prosecution.
Since 1951, he had interviewed more than 290 murderers, several of them serial killers. Serial rapists and serial killers, he found, tended to have a number of common factors in their backgrounds. Other than “the triad”—a concept he had helped define and then championed—high percentages had also been sexually abused as children and had witnessed violence in the home between genders or abnormal sexual behavior, such as incest. The most dangerous of all had sadistic qualities to their crimes.
Macdonald was careful to make distinctions, such as the man who got too drunk at an office party and assaulted an unwilling female. Chances were such a man, if caught and punished, wouldn’t be a repeat offender. But serial rapists and killers were not likely to stop until caught and put away. Forever.
Macdonald also believed that almost all serial murders of women were sexual in nature, even if the victim wasn’t actually raped or her clothing removed. For many of the killers (nearly always men because there are few recorded cases of female serial killers), he knew that sexual release or pleasure often occurred when hurting or killing the victim, not necessarily during the act of rape itself.
In June 1984, he wasn’t actually working on a study. But when two police detectives with the Denver sex offenders unit asked if he wanted to accompany them to interview convicted rapists for a training tape, he quickly agreed. He was constantly testing his theories and profiles of criminal archetypes to see how they held up.
The detectives and Macdonald drove the 150 miles from Denver to the Buena Vista Correctional Facility, a medium-security Colorado prison located a few miles south of the town of Buena Vista in the Arkansas Valley. The plan was to spend two days interviewing a half-dozen or so sex offenders to create a training tape to teach police officers what to watch for in these men, as well as interview techniques. The first day, the interviews were short and sweet, as the detectives and Macdonald sifted for the most interesting candidates to talk to at length the next day.
They had little time to review the records of the inmates they interviewed and therefore knew little more about them than that the men had been convicted for sex crimes. The detectives and psychiatrist were looking for those who seemed bright and willing to talk about their experiences. One of those selected was Thomas Edward Luther.
Every prisoner who
goes into the Colorado correctional system is first evaluated to determine such things as their tendency for violence, likelihood of escape attempts, and their potential as victims in the general population. At the Colorado Correctional Diagnostic Center, a team of psychologists, social workers, and corrections personnel also develops a personality profile of the incoming prisoners, noting quirks (including psychoses and personality disorders) and watching for signs—like genuine remorse and interest in prison mental health programs—that the prisoner is a good candidate for rehabilitation.
When Luther arrived at the center in September 1983, he complained that while what he did to Mary Brown was “terrible,” he considered himself to be a victim of the criminal justice system. “The police and press made me out to be some kind of ogre and heinous person. The facts were not truly portrayed.”
The evaluators noted that Luther “tends to display an excessive amount of tact and skill at manipulation.” They agreed with the earlier psychological profiles that labeled him antisocial with other “borderline” personality disorders. “He is a neurotic person whose defense mechanisms interfere with his adjustment,” noted one report. “He has difficulty being himself. He’s a bullshitter, a brown-noser, and a braggart.
“He has a strong drive to avoid discomfort ... He feels the need to assert himself but behaves meekly and self-effacing around men.... Elements of bizarre thinking are also shown.”
Luther, they said, had above-average intelligence. They reported that he experienced intermittent crying spells and needed medicine to stabilize his moods. “His behavior undergoes rapid swings from passivity to loud threats of violence.”
Discrepancies in Luther’s various accounts of his drug use, particularly on the night of the assault, “suggests a tendency to overemphasize the effects of substance abuse on his behavior,” one report stated. “The lack of consistencies in stories given by Thomas suggest a poor prognosis at dealing honestly with substance abuse.”
The reports noted that Luther had said that the victim looked like his mother and that he had first established a position of trust—the Good Samaritan—with his victim before his sudden blitz attack. And that later he had attempted to have his victim killed so that she couldn’t testify against him in exchange for his murdering another woman. Not exactly the sort of thing to get him high points for remorse.
When Macdonald and the two detectives arrived to talk to him, Luther had been in the Department of Corrections system for nearly twenty months. He had put on twenty pounds of muscle since he’d raped Mary Brown, working out with other inmates on the prison weight room equipment. He was getting bigger, stronger, and if possible, more bitter and dangerous.
There was nothing physically intimidating about the young man who entered the interview room. He wasn’t huge, though he was muscular. He didn’t look dangerous.
In fact, Macdonald thought, he is a rather a nice-looking, if unremarkable, chap. Clean shaven. Blue eyes. A mane of curly brown hair.
Then again, Macdonald knew that the worst of these men, the serial killers, often didn’t stand out in a crowd and went out of their way to appear normal. It was often this ability to be chameleons, changing to blend into the environment and appear non-threatening, that made them so dangerous. They were usually above average in intelligence, and generally described as good-looking and good-natured—the sort of guy whose friends, family, and neighbors were always quoted in newspapers as saying they had no idea he was capable of such heinous crimes or flatly denying the possibility.
Charming, intelligent Ted Bundy had been such a man. John Gacey, who dressed up like a clown for children’s parties and murdered boys, was another. Monsters in sheep’s clothing. A ladies’ man and a funny fat guy. But Macdonald and the detectives knew little about Luther, only that he had raped a young woman in Summit County two years earlier.
The room where the interviews took place was essentially empty except for the chairs they sat on. Luther perched on the edge of his seat across from his questioners with his back toward a wall of beige bricks. He was in a good mood. Joking with the cops, he nodded at Macdonald. “Hey, how you doing today, doc? He’s the one wants me to draw pictures of women.”
The detectives and Macdonald laughed; it was a good opening. “How long you in for?” a detective asked.
For some reason, Luther laughed again before answering. “Fourteen years on second degree sexual assault and fifteen years on first degree assault. I gotta serve half of the biggest number. I’ll be out in 1989.”
They began by talking about his childhood, his troubles with his mother and the loss of his father. As Luther spoke, he tended to cup his chin in one hand with a finger across his mouth or he clasped his hands in front on his lap as if he didn’t trust them not to betray him.
He said he’d been born and raised in Vermont, which is where he hoped to go when released from prison. Although he’d only been through the ninth grade, he proudly announced that he’d received his high school equivalency diploma in prison and had recently completed an accounting class.
One of the detectives asked, “What do you want to do when you get out besides go to Vermont?”
“I’d like to be a social worker. Work with abused children with noplace to go to vent their anger,” Luther said, looking at his questioners as if he expected them to laugh. “If that’s possible.”
The answer seemed to take the detectives by surprise. “This isn’t a sex thing with kids is it?” one asked suspiciously.
Luther smiled. Of course they’d ask that question. He shook his head and said, “I have no sexual preferences for children.”
Did he have any other convictions? “No,” Luther began, then changed his mind. “Well, when I was young, me and a friend stole pumpkins and smashed them on the road. We were arrested for criminal mischief and fined $50—which was a lot back then. My dad took it out on my rear end.”
What did he think of his father and mother?
His father was a fair man, sensible, Luther replied. His mom was another story. “She had a lot of ups and downs, a lot of problems growing up with us kids.
“She was real young when she got married and to be honest, I believe she was quite bitter about having to be a mother at such a young age and not be able to go out in the world and do what she wanted to do.”
Luther paused and looked down at his hands, his fingers interlaced, before continuing. “She took her frustrations out on her children.”
Macdonald noted the young man’s demeanor when talking about his mother. While trying to determine the root causes behind why a man rapes a woman, it was always important to find out who they were really attacking. Who was he truly mad at? It usually wasn’t the victim, but a former girlfriend, a mother, even a certain type of woman for a perceived slight years ago.
The detectives wanted to know if anybody else in Luther’s family had ever been in trouble with the law. “Well, my brother—there was an incident that happened to him,” Luther said. “He shot a girl. He was in a drunken stupor.
“I don’t really know what it was about, but obviously he was embittered about something and stepped out of a car and shot a girl pumpin’ gas into her car—” here Luther chuckled “—with a shotgun.”
The girl had survived and even gone to the judge to testify on behalf of his brother. “Me and a cousin went and talked to the girl, and she found it in her heart to have pity on him.”
“You threaten her?” a detective asked.
Luther was ready for that one, too. “No,” he said and smiled.
The conversation moved to the rape of Mary Brown. Luther said he didn’t want to talk about it but agreed to answer specific questions.
He remembered the night as being so cold that even with the heater running full blast in his pickup, he couldn’t get the windows to defrost. He saw the people at the bus depot and went over to ask if he could call a cab for them. “I wasn’t on duty, but I got commissions for finding customers.”
The fa
mily didn’t need help. The girl said she didn’t have the money and would just wait for her friends. “She had limited cash for her ski weekend,” he said. “I been there myself, hitchhiked across the country a half-dozen times. I offered to help if I could.”
Luther described how they drove around for forty-five minutes without being able to locate the residence. “She had no idea where she was going. I could feel myself getting aggressive and perturbed.”
“What kind of person was she?” a detective asked.
The question seemed to stump Luther. He had to think about it before he answered. “She was very friendly, saying how nice I was for driving her.” He laughed bitterly. “At least until I started getting perturbed and she backed off on the ego strokes.”
He grew angrier, his voice harder. “She was a little stuffy, acted like a princess type, a little rich girl pullin’ a game or somethin’.”
“She remind you of your mother?” a detective asked.
Luther laughed. “Yeah. She did remind me of my mom ... when she started screamin’.”
He began to mention a similarity in hair styles when it was time to switch videotapes. After the conversation picked up again, one of the detectives asked if Luther had any trouble getting along in prison. They all knew what he meant. The men in a penitentiary all had mothers or wives or sisters or girlfriends on the outside; rapists were often dealt with harshly.
“Other inmates mess with you,” Luther shrugged. “Oh, I might take a guy into the shower and punch him in the nose. Them’s the breaks. You have to do it every once in awhile.”
The detectives let Luther have his macho moment before turning the conversation back to the connection between his mother and the assault on Brown. “You were saying something about hairdos?”
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