The files on the two unsolved murders had been passed around a lot before he literally pulled them from a trashcan. Both the Summit and Park County sheriff’s departments had worked on the cases. But except for McCormick, an intense, wiry private investigator who worked part-time for the Park County sheriff, all other efforts had ground to a halt.
When Eaton began looking at the files, the first thing that struck him was how disorganized the investigation had been. The files themselves were a mess; bits and pieces of notes and reports had been tossed in haphazardly. Some items were not even dated. But gradually, as he sifted, he came across the names of not only potential witnesses but possible suspects.
One of the latter had been some guy named Tom Luther, who’d pleaded guilty in another case and had been sent to prison the year Eaton arrived in the county. But from what the detective could tell from the files, Luther had been looked at in connection with the two murders and nothing had come of it. Believing that his predecessors had done their jobs, Eaton turned his attention elsewhere.
In particular, he was interested in Jeff Oberholtzer. It was a good thing that Jeff had admitted giving Annette a ride after he was shown her picture. When her backpack was found near the Hoosier Pass parking lot a few months later, Jeff’s business card was in her wallet, which might have been difficult to explain if he had continued pleading ignorance.
Like his predecessors, Eaton had considered Oberholtzer the prime suspect. He wasn’t sure he believed Jeff’s explanation for why he had been seen with Annette and began trying to fit the pieces together to make a case against the young man. But unlike his predecessors, Eaton, with McCormick working the Park County side, was meticulous, leaving no stone unturned.
Eaton and McCormick started by trying to track down and reinterview every witness, concentrating initially on information leading to Jeff Oberholtzer. To their surprise, they discovered that the police in 1982 had never interviewed Joe Urban, the man who had stopped at Jeff’s house a little before 7 P.M. Urban was able to vouch for Jeff’s whereabouts up to 8 P.M.
Suddenly, the detectives realized, Jeff Oberholtzer wasn’t such a good target. Annette was last seen a little after 4:30 P.M. by the pharmacy clerk in the company of the mysterious dark-haired woman. She never made it home to change into her work clothes, which meant she was more than likely abducted between the pharmacy and Blue River where she lived, fifteen minutes away.
On the other hand, Bobby Jo called home and spoke to Jeff before going to the bar with her friends shortly before 6 P.M., a time her friends had later confirmed. Then she had been seen hitching at approximately 7:50 P.M. in Breckenridge.
If Jeff was involved, he would have had to have abducted Annette in Breckenridge sometime after 4:30, driven back over Hoosier Pass to the area of Sacramento Creek and killed her. Somewhere during that time he would have had her undress, possibly raped her, and then let her dress again. All by six o’clock, when he was home to receive his wife’s telephone call. After that he would then have to have calmly shoveled snow until Joe Urban arrived a few minutes before 7 P.M., gone to the gas station, a liquor store, and then back to his house to drink beer and watch television until eight. Then, only after his friend had left, could he have driven to Breckenridge, located his wife, taken her to the Hoosier Pass summit and there murdered her.
Eaton didn’t want to put on blinders. Maybe Jeff’s wife had called when she couldn’t get a ride, and he met her in Breckenridge sometime after eight o’clock with a plan to kill her, he speculated.
Was it all possible? Only with an incredible amount of luck, timing, and cold-blooded precision, the detectives concluded. And what would have been the motive? Breckenridge was a small town and Alma smaller still; there weren’t many secrets. Yet, there was no report from family or friends that the Oberholtzers weren’t getting along and no evidence of a love triangle; in fact, Annette had a live-in boyfriend.
A vital piece of evidence also pointed away from Jeff. The blood on Bobby Jo’s mitten wasn’t his. He would have had to have had an accomplice.
After Eaton and McCormick tried to make the pieces fit every which way, and couldn’t without over-stretching the bounds of reason, they invited Jeff Oberholtzer to meet with them at a Breckenridge restaurant. Jeff arrived not knowing what to expect. For years he had lived under a cloud; frustrated by police efforts and suspicions, he had tried investigating his wife’s murder himself to no avail.
Now Eaton told him the good news. “Technically, you’re still a suspect until I have the guy who did it,” the detective said. “But for all intents and purposes, you’re in the clear.”
Oberholtzer started crying. “Now,” he asked as he wiped his eyes, “can you look for the real killer?”
The news came as a relief to Bobby Jo’s husband, but Eaton was back at square one. Years passed, but he couldn’t let it go, working hundreds of hours on his own time chasing rumors, tracking ten-year-old stories, trying to put the files in order.
As he investigated their murders, he came to know the two women like old friends. He knew what they liked and what they didn’t. He heard from their families about their childhoods and their future aspirations. They were both young and fun-loving, but also good people who didn’t associate with criminals and weren’t involved in drug dealing or anything else that might have pushed them toward their fates.
It had been a mistake to hitchhike. But neither of the women were stupid; if their “benefactor” had seemed odd or dangerous they would have turned down the offer for a ride. He was either someone they knew, or someone who appeared much different than the monster he turned out to be. They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Eaton got particularly close to Annette’s family. If possible, the death of their daughter had been the hardest to deal with.
Months had passed after her disappearance with no word about Annette. At first, there had been dwindling hope that she was being held somewhere alive, or maybe a blow to the head had given her amnesia. But in their hearts, Annette’s parents told Eaton, they had known their daughter was dead. She wasn’t the sort of girl to have run off without telling them and, of course, the other young woman had been murdered the same night she disappeared. But until the young fisherman found her body, the healing could not begin. They could only wait and imagine her body lying in some lonely spot in the mountains, far from her loved ones.
The Schnees knew that Eaton had gone above and beyond what duty called for. Over the years, Annette’s mother telephoned him from time to time, to check in or talk about their families or tell him about a just-remembered anecdote concerning her eldest daughter. She sent him a Christmas card every year and invited him to visit.
Eaton had at last taken her up on the offer, if for no other reason than to lend a shoulder to cry on. He felt badly that he had so little else to give them.
One night during the trip, Annette’s mother had asked to see the photographs of her daughter’s body. The remains had arrived in a sealed coffin, she said, and not being able to see Annette to say goodbye had left her empty.
“It was hard to believe that it was her in there,” she said. “I kept wondering if perhaps there had been a mistake, even though my mind knew better. Please, I have to see her.”
Eaton hesitated. “They’re pretty bad.” But she insisted. “Tell you what,” he offered. “I’ll show you the photographs of the other girl, Bobby Jo. Then, if you still want, I’ll show you Annette.”
Mrs. Schnee nodded. The detective opened one of the heavy black binders into which he had organized papers and photographs of the case. Annette’s mother looked at the photographs of Bobby Jo—a dead woman whose face was frozen into a mask of despair. She swallowed hard. “I still want to see my daughter.”
Sighing, Eaton turned the pages to the photographs taken at Sacramento Creek and later at the morgue. When Mrs. Schnee finished looking, she blinked back her tears. “Thank you,” she said and quietly left the room.
In J
anuary 1992, Annette’s family had come to Colorado for the filming of the Unsolved Mysteries segment. They stood quietly with the others when Eaton made his announcement at the place where Annette, the happy child in their family photo albums, had been found.
The next day, the Schnees and Eaton gathered with everyone else at the top of Hoosier Pass as the film crew prepared to shoot the scene re-enacting Bobby Jo’s final moments. To get the camera angles and lighting right, the director had the actress playing Bobby Jo lie down in the snow where the body had been discovered ten years earlier, almost to the hour.
It took the crew forty-five minutes to get everything just right. By then, the actress was shivering and turning blue from the cold. She was not dressed for the weather; in particular, her boots had been designed for fashion not practicality, and her feet felt like frozen blocks of ice.
The director told her to go warm up and come back for the final take. As the girl stood and moved painfully toward a trailer in the parking lot that had been set up as a dressing room, Annette’s mother rushed forward to cover her with a blanket.
As Eaton watched Mrs. Schnee half-carry the poor girl to warmth and safety, he felt his throat tighten. A mother who had been too far away on the night a monster took her daughter was trying to make up for it the only way she could. When the actress returned to film the scene, he noticed that she was wearing the warm winter boots of Mrs. Schnee.
Luther’s hunger strike lasted all of two weeks. He had hoped to bring the American Civil Liberties Union running to his cause by claiming to be a political prisoner, but was disappointed when the only person who seemed to care was Debrah Snider. And there, she may have cared too much even for his ego.
Debrah, of course, panicked that he would really carry out his death wish. He had been placed into a segregation cell again and not allowed any visitors. Kept from seeing him, her letters were filled with hysterical threats to kill herself. Maybe, she wrote, she’d drive onto railroad tracks and wait until a train came along. She’d make sure she left a note placing the blame on the uncaring attitude of the Department of Corrections.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Luther wrote back. “Just because you can’t see me for a couple of weeks, you’re falling apart at the seams and ready to do something stupid. Get a grip!” He signed the letter, “Tom, the time bomb.”
But Luther wasn’t about to chase her off. Debrah was sending him money orders to pay for their telephone bills and for him to buy himself a few extras at the prison canteen. More significantly, she’d also put up a $10,000 retainer to hire an attorney to look into ways to get him out.
Debrah was hopelessly in love. She was even beginning to accept his ardor and increasingly descriptive accounts of their future love-making.
Yet, Luther wasn’t completely self-assured. In late January, he wrote to tell her that the attorney she hired wasn’t working out because he wouldn’t take directions. Their only hope, he said, might be to hire an independent psychologist to evaluate him in order to put Judge Hart’s mind at ease. Thiret had been released in December 1990, so there was hope. But, he warned, she should be aware that he might have to finish his full sentence.
In their letters and during their visits, Tom and Debrah fantasized about what their lives would be like when he got out. He’d stay for awhile at her mother’s cabin in the mountains near the lake. But he wouldn’t remain in Colorado long, he said. The authorities were sure to harass him and, besides, he had a plan, his “project,” to grow marijuana plants in the mountains of New Mexico.
The money, he said over her objections, would let him buy a ranch somewhere, maybe he’d even buy out Dennis’s share of her place. Then they could quietly live together, raising animals and keeping to themselves. He assured her that he would drop the idea of the project if it looked too risky; he said he wouldn’t do anything if it would cost him more than a couple more years in prison if he got caught.
In March, Luther began talking to psychologist Robert Atwell, whom Debrah hired to perform an evaluation at a cost of $6,000. Luther wrote to her of the initial meeting, that he was trying to be honest, but in the past honesty had always gotten twisted into something negative.
On April 2, he wrote again telling her that he had finished the evaluation. “I don’t know how I did or what he thinks. I just let it all hang out. I hope he don’t think I’m some kinda animal and he can see it clear to let me go to a halfway house of some kind.” He signed off with his usual, “Can I lick you?”
As a month passed and Atwell still had not finished his report, Luther began to grow increasingly pessimistic and paranoid. Even if he got out, he said, the cops would never leave him be.
“They think I’m such a risk, they’ll arrest me for something I didn’t do and convict me on false testimony. They believe they are doing society a favor by getting someone like me off the streets.”
Each week, his outlook grew grimmer. If Atwell’s report was negative and the judge ruled against a sentence reduction, he didn’t want her to visit anymore. He seemed to recognize that a battle was going on within him for what philosophers would have called his soul and psychologists his psyche. A setback would push him farther towards the darker side of either, if it wasn’t already too late.
“I can just get my attitude right for revenge and hate,” he wrote. “I’m driving myself crazy trying to be something for you that I can’t be right now and, to tell you the truth, I probably won’t be for weeks after I get out.
“I’m borderline. I need to retreat and watch myself extra close for awhile. I have a heart half bad and half good.”
In June, Atwell issued his report. It was not encouraging, but certainly shed light on some of the missing elements of Luther’s childhood and subsequent development.
Tom’s sexual experiences began in childhood when he was molested by an adult male. “He reports that his victimization involved mutual masturbation,” Atwell wrote. “He experienced ongoing guilt, shame, and confusion related to his sexuality following that experience.
“He identified lingering feelings of sexual inadequacy associated with the physical differences in size between his own penis and that of the perpetrator.”
Shortly afterward, Atwell reported, Luther began indulging in “sex play” with other children, “in which he described himself as ‘the abuser.’ ” At age 12, Luther was involved in a sexual relationship with a woman, apparently an aunt, Atwell wrote, who treated him as “her little man.”
As an adult, his relationships with women were sexual rather than for emotional intimacy. “He says he has a very strong sex drive and enjoys daily, often repeated, love-making with his girlfriends. He currently masturbates daily.”
By February 1981, Luther’s relationship with Sue Potter was breaking down; they argued frequently, centered around his drug use and the financial burden she presented. During this time, Luther told Atwell, he developed a fantasy about being in control of a relationship that had evolved into a rape fantasy. “His fantasy was of having his position of control validated by a strange woman who would acquiesce after being stalked and confronted, and with whom he would then enjoy consensual sex.
“He denies, however, that he had this fantasy in mind when he picked up his victim at the bus terminal.... He believes that the rape occurred because he was acting out his need to be in control. He is unclear how that need might relate to his childhood conflicts with his mother ... but he denies any current or ongoing rape fantasies.”
Luther told the psychologist that he hoped for a “viable, satisfying relationship” when he got out of prison with Debrah Snider. She was “the only one who had any expectations of him.”
The psychologist had his doubts. “Tom appears to have only limited access to his emotional experiences ... his judgment in highly emotional situations is likely to reflect idiosyncratic interpretations of others’ behavior toward him.
“Thomas Luther’s emotional life is characterized by acute episodes of ragefulness ... emotio
nal storms. While his rage episodes are intense, they are generally short-lived. He denies any ongoing destructive or homicidal ideation related to people he is angry with, but acknowledges being overwhelmed by such feelings in the past.
“He reacts strongly to experience of invalidation and/or confrontation by women with anger and brooding resentment.”
While Luther would prefer to have others think of him as a “hyper-responsible, good person, his vulnerability to psychological injury and his limited capacity to tolerate emotional discomfort without responding with rage, impedes his efforts.”
“Tom frequently protects himself from injury by adopting a tough guy posture,” Atwell reported.
The psychologist diagnosed Luther as having a personality disorder with “features of Sexual Sadism.” “He in many ways appears to be a man continuing to be tormented by his childhood abuse.”
Atwell’s prognosis for Luther dealing with his anger was not encouraging. Tom, he said, continued to express “strong, hostile feelings toward women rooted both in his relationship with his mother and his aunt.”
Luther had significant needs to be addressed in a sex offender treatment program but wasn’t likely to get it through the Department of Corrections because of his hatred of the program’s director, Atwell reported.
On the other hand, Tom’s “history of explosive, violent release of aggression toward women mitigates against treatment in the community without the most stringent of safeguards.” And he would probably fail in any program that demanded the client be confronted with his behavior, the predominant psychotherapy used with sex offenders.
The frightening dilemma, according to Atwell, was that Luther was unlikely to receive adequate treatment but would still complete his sentence in a maximum of four years and be released “without being rehabilitated and without any supervision requirements.”
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