As she began to catch on that Tom wasn’t always truthful with her, it didn’t change how she felt about him. Men lied. It’s just the way they were. Neither of them realized at the time that “Tom Luther stories” would ultimately be his downfall.
The tall tales she could accept. But she continued to be troubled about his anger. Luther blamed television and the media.
“Violence is so common that some people fantasize what it would be like to just kill someone to take out all the frustration and anger on them like the movie stars do,” he wrote.
Debrah called him on it. “I know that after nine years prison life has got to have affected you,” she responded, “but I had hoped you would be wanting to start changing the way it has affected you and start thinking in ways that are more aligned with functioning in society rather than a prison population.
“I’m sorry for the lecture ... but I don’t like ‘convict Tom.’ I like and want to have a relationship with Tom who gets lonely and needs to be held and hugged, the Tom who likes hounds, horses, and hiking.... When I get letters from the other Tom, it just sounds like one of the many convicts bitching about an unjust system ... they’re all innocent men kept there by a corrupt justice system.”
Luther waited two weeks to respond. In part to punish and part because he had been moved to Centennial Correctional Facility, a higher security prison. Then he laid a guilt trip on her.
“I’m sorry that’s how you feel,” he wrote on November 3, 1990. “I feel that you are a little unfair.”
He reminded her that, unlike some inmates, he hadn’t used her to bring in dope. He had never asked her for money. “I needed love and friendship from someone with whom I could share intimacy. My impulse was to write and tell you if that’s how you feel to screw yourself.”
In the six months he had known her, he’d written fifteen times; they’d talked by telephone and she’d visited him in the prison at least once a week. She was dependent on him for her happiness. But he decided they better cool the relationship, at least for a time.
Debrah was devastated.
Luther did not write to her again until February 1991. And only after he had learned that she had driven to Canon City, hoping that he hadn’t taken her off his visitors list and she would get a chance to talk to him. She was disappointed and had returned home more depressed than any time since she first met him.
Dennis was estranged. Her eldest son, Chance, had left home to join the service. Her other son, John, hardly paid any attention to her and was getting into minor scrapes with the law. She continued to write to Luther. But as weeks went by with no response, she wondered once more if anyone would even notice if she died.
When at last he wrote, her hands trembled as she opened the envelope with the Department of Corrections return address. He had written “Happy Valentine’s Day” on the envelope and drawn his trademark—a smiling cartoon face topped with a halo. She prayed that he had forgiven her again.
Not quite. He told her that she was a very difficult person to get along with, and not to write to him when she was tired and cranky. He professed to be very sensitive and his feelings got hurt easily.
Still, he was willing to give her another chance. Then he changed the subject. He was sorry to hear that Chance had joined the service and hoped he would not end up in the Gulf War, like his friend Skip’s son, Byron Eerebout.
He wrote her lies about living in Saudi Arabia and wanting to move to Canada or Mexico when he got out.
Luther ended by telling Debrah he cared about her and she could resume writing, although he wasn’t ready to see her again.
In fact, they did not see each other again until April. Then it was as if nothing had ever come between them. His letters were more romantic than ever.
“There is no such thing as a knight in shining armor,” he wrote. “I would, however, love to be yours, even for a day. I want to take you in my arms and carry you to a nice, quite [sic] cabin in the mountains. There we can practice being close and touching ... just for starters.”
As the weeks passed, his letters, which he now signed “Love, Tom,” grew more sexually oriented. He wanted to take showers with her. He hoped he could turn her on enough for her to be the sexual aggressor. “In fact, I hope you can become an animal in the threshold of the intense passion we are going to share one day,” he wrote, “with multiple emotional orgasms before we even make love.”
Whenever his letters stepped over the line, she would write and tell him that she was uncomfortable with his fantasies. He would then apologize, assure her that he was also interested in her as a friend and looked forward to quiet hours spent just cuddling. A few paragraphs later, he’d be right back on the sex track.
However, Luther wasn’t limited to sexual fantasies. He also was going to make the state pay, he wrote, for the additional years they’d tacked onto his sentence as soon as he won a lawsuit he had just filed. He figured two and a half years’ back wages would be enough to buy that ranch in Vermont.
“I have a destiny in this life.... I believe you are going to be part of my destiny,” he wrote. It won’t always be easy, “never in your life will you meet another person close to me in goodness and badness.”
And Debrah replied, “God, I love you. Sometimes I practice detachment, because so many of the things you say bother me; but as soon as I read one of your letters or as soon as you touch me, all my efforts become fruitless.
“I guarantee your relationship with me will not be the same as with any relationship with any other woman from your past.”
Neither of them could have known then just how prophetic their words would be.
That fall, Debrah Snider got a new job as a nurse at the Colorado Corrections Diagnostic Center in Denver. In the meantime, Luther was transferred to the Fremont Correctional Facility. He didn’t tell her and she had no idea that Fremont was where the state sent its most recalcitrant sex offenders.
On Debrah’s first visit, a female guard hinted that Tom “has problems with women,” but there wasn’t time for her to go into detail. “Why would she say something like that?” Debrah asked a few minutes later when he joined her in the visiting room. “You’re in for assault.”
Tom shrugged. They all had it in for him because he demanded that prisoners be respected, he said. Then he changed the subject.
A few days later, Debrah asked a friend at the diagnostic center to punch Tom’s prison identification number into the computer. Her mother was visiting from New Mexico—a reconciliation that Debrah had agreed to at Tom’s urging—and Debrah planned to take her to the prison in two days to meet him. But the Fremont guard’s comments nagged at her.
Debrah’s friend typed the numbers and stood back. Debrah blinked when she looked at the computer screen, and then asked her friend to make sure she’d punched in the correct numbers. It came up the same. According to the information, Tom, her Tom, had been sentenced to prison for assault ... and sexual assault.
A rapist? There had to be a mistake. The next day she drove to the courthouse in Breckenridge where, according to the computer printout, Tom had been tried. She asked to see his file.
It was worse than anything she could have imagined. Mary’s statement was there, as were the police reports of Deputy Morales and Detective Snyder. There was no drug deal, he had picked the poor girl up at a bus stop. Then he had brutally raped her, vaginally and anally with the wooden handle of a hammer. He had beaten the woman so badly that the windows of his truck had been smeared opaque with her blood.
Debrah started crying as she read the statement of Tom’s victim. “I asked if he had done this before,” the woman had written. “He said yes, several times. That’s when he picked up the hammer.... I thought he was going to hit me with it.”
And there was more. After the assault, Tom had gone home to his girlfriend and told her he thought that he had killed someone. Then he had slipped out of his bloody clothes and made love to her. Despite Tom’s confession, this girlfriend had
stuck by him through it all. What kind of woman would do that? Debrah wondered as she paid for copies of his records.
Driving back from the mountains, her eyes brimming with tears, she thought about steering her car off the road to tumble down some precipice, never to be missed. Only the desire to confront him kept her going.
She showed the files to her mother when she got home. “Well, it’s bad,” her mother conceded after she read them. “But it’s also in the past. From what you’ve told me, he’s a changed man.”
Debrah nodded. Yes, the man in the files and the man she had fallen in love with did not seem to be the same. But it wasn’t just the brutality of the rape. He had lied to her. If there was anything she hated, it was a liar. Her father had been a liar, her first son’s father had been a liar, all those men with their wives had been liars. She had been lied to all of her life.
What else had he lied about? His past? The love letters? Their plans? Was it all smoke? She almost didn’t go to the prison.
Almost. He’d later tell her that he knew she’d found out the moment he walked into the visiting room and saw her face. But he only shrugged when she told him that she had discovered his lie.
“I told you I had assaulted someone,” he said. “You’re the one who figured it had to be a man and just an assault.” He denied that he had raped Mary with the hammer; in fact, he said, sex had very little to do with it. The girl had ripped him off in a drug deal and had then attacked him because she thought he was going to rape her.
Debrah didn’t believe him. The woman’s account was too real, too horrifying to be a lie. She had made up her mind to leave when Tom leaned over and touched her hand. There were tears in his eyes. “I love you, Deb,” he said. “I just didn’t know how to tell you without you cutting me out of your life.”
In that moment, she forgave him. She couldn’t help it. Without him, she had nothing to live for—and he wasn’t the same man he had been in 1982. That man had been some sort of uncaring animal. Her Tom was sensitive and loving. He was a little wild, yes. He had a problem controlling his anger. But he was like one of her wolves—don’t push him too far, recognize the two sides of his nature, and encourage the gentle one.
And I’m just the woman, she thought, who can tame Tom Luther.
“I can’t get over how well you took the news about me. I didn’t know what your reaction would be and tried to tell you a little at a time.”
Debrah read the letter from Tom with satisfaction. For once in their relationship, she had the upper hand. With her support, he said, he’d get treatment when he got out of prison.
“You can’t imagine how disappointed I was in myself when I did this crime. I detest, loathe, hate the violence in our society ... being violent isn’t my cup of tea.
“I promise I will never physically or mentally abuse you. I will just shut down and go away first.”
Luther told her that if she saw “the signals”—such as his constant coming and going, flirting with other women, and anger—she was free to call him on it. He confessed that he was “addicted to sex”. But it wasn’t this admission that should have sent a danger signal to that part of her that was a psychiatric nurse, a signal she ignored; it was his next statement.
“I think about sex more when I get mad and aggressive,” he wrote. “When I get angry, I naturally think of sexually demeaning thoughts. That’s part of what happened with Mary.
“I wasn’t intimidating enough when I was kicking the shit out of her. But when I got the idea to sexually abuse her, I had the effect of intimidation that I was seeking.”
In October 1991, Debrah Snider testified before Judge Hart, pleading for a sentence reduction for Luther. Hart noted that he had received a number of letters and telephone calls of support from Luther’s friends and family. But, he said, he also had a statement from Mary Brown urging him not to release her assailant.
In the nearly ten years since the attack, Brown had regained control of her life. She had been the prime mover behind legislation passed by the Colorado legislature that removed the distinction between “foreign object” and a rapist’s body for determining second or first degree sexual assault. Rape was rape.
She had taken self-defense courses that had the added benefit of building her self-esteem, eventually becoming an instructor. And she had fallen in love with an understanding and patient man who held on when she tried to push him away; they had married.
She had been denied her chance to face Luther in court. But she had kept track of him and done everything she could to see that he stayed in prison for as long as possible. She told the judge she was still haunted by him. He already had tried to kill her not once, but twice. She feared he might try again.
In view of Brown’s objections, Hart said he didn’t feel he had enough evidence that would allow him to make a conscientious decision to release Luther. He wanted a psychiatric evaluation, independent of the Department of Corrections, as to whether Luther still posed a risk. He said he would rule later in the month.
Luther held out little hope. “It’s this hammer shit that always comes up,” he wrote. “That just gets their goat so bad that they can’t even act professional.
“They have taken me to a private part of the penitentiary for seven days in a row where nobody could see and kicked the shit out of me. They deny me phone calls to my attorney and throw away my mail.”
But, as always, he saved his most vitriolic abuse for the prison sex offenders program and Gloria Greene. “She deserves to be raped and beaten,” he growled to Debrah as he paced in a corner of the visiting room like a trapped animal. “That’d show her what it’s really like.”
When Luther got that angry, it was as if he didn’t know where he was or who he was talking to. His eyes reminded Debrah of the bull in a bullfight poster on the wall of the office where she worked. Injured and in pain from the sharp, hooked sticks sunk into its shoulders, the bull’s red eyes were mirrors of hate and a desire to kill his tormentors.
“No one deserves that, Tom,” she scolded him. But he didn’t seem to hear her. As a psychology professional who had read the court files regarding his attack on Mary Brown, she recognized that Thomas Luther could be dangerous. But as a woman, she remained convinced that with her love and support, he could make it on the outside without posing a risk to other women. She’d just have to keep him away from temptation so that they could live a quiet, simple life together.
Snider wrote again to Judge Hart. Please, she said, “he’s a changed man who has suffered enough, and we want a chance at building a life together.” She was worried; Tom seemed to be slipping into such a dark depression she feared he wouldn’t come out of it ... at least not alive.
Tom wrote to tell her that if the judge didn’t let him go in January, he was ending their relationship for two reasons. The first was he didn’t want her to suffer with him. He wanted her to find a man that could love her and give her support.
The second reason, he said, was he planned to take a hostage and make the guards kill him. He wasn’t going to let the bastards abuse him for the rest of his life. He intended to go into his hate and combat training so he would be able to hurt and kill those bastards when he got out.
“I’m walking the edge of being a good man or just saying ‘fuck it’ and being worse than they could ever imagine out of spite. I was man enough to take my punishment, but these bastards don’t know when to stop.”
A few days later, he got more bad news. Hart had decided against a sentence reduction. Luther decided to go on a hunger strike and withdraw his visitors list. He wrote Debrah to get his message across, that their deprivation and punishment had gone too far.
Chapter Seven
January 6, 1992—Alma, Colorado
Detective Richard Eaton of the Summit County Sheriff’s Office stood beside Sacramento Creek listening to the silver movement of the water running beneath the thin coating of ice. He was at the spot where the body of Annette Schnee had been found by a boy on a
fishing excursion nearly a decade earlier.
It was a beautiful, if lonely, place for Annette to have died, Eaton thought. The creek wound like a snake from the snow-capped peaks to the west across South Park, a high plain that lay between two arms of the Rocky Mountains, dotted with lonely ranch houses and the occasional small town like Alma. The land lay locked in winter beneath a pale blue sky, much as it had back when Annette was killed. Looking west, he could see the V-shaped cleft in the dark wall of mountains that identified Hoosier Pass, where Bobby Jo Oberholtzer died.
Around him bustled the film crew of the television docudrama Unsolved Mysteries, which he had contacted late in 1991 in the hopes that a re-enactment of the deaths of the two women might generate new information from viewers. Eight years earlier, he had promised their families that he wouldn’t stop until he brought the killer, or killers, to justice. But now, though he would admit it to no one, he was running out of ideas.
Eaton looked at his watch and cleared his throat. “In a couple of hours, it will have been exactly ten years since Annette Schnee was last seen alive,” he announced. The film crew, actors, and private investigator Charlie McCormick stopped what they were doing and stood quietly looking at the surrounding beauty.
Eaton had been working on the Oberholtzer/Schnee cases since 1984, a year after he joined the Summit County Sheriff’s Department. A Navy veteran, he had more or less drifted into law enforcement, working for small-town police departments before moving to the mountains.
A few inches short of six feet, pot-bellied, and laid-back, he didn’t look much like a Hollywood version of a homicide detective. But his looks and demeanor were deceiving. Over the years, Eaton had proved to have the tenacity of fox trying to find a way into the henhouse when on a case. Especially this case.
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