He admitted “being afraid” of freedom. He wished there was a way he could start with a few day passes and retreat at night to the safety of his cell.
Debrah cautioned him that she wouldn’t start enjoying sex right off the bat. He’d have to be slow and patient with her. Psychologist Sigmund Freud would have had a field day interpreting what it meant when, during this time, Debrah tried to castrate an ornery bull she owned and ended up killing the beast.
The march of time toward Luther’s impending release had the pair alternating between frequent spats and giddy highs—such as his suggestion that they send Judge Hart a Christmas card. They would be married by then. He thought the judge would get a kick out of getting a card from Mr. and Mrs. Tom Luther.
Luther wasn’t happy that Dennis Syznski was still around. He was not going to live in some cage on a mountain at Debrah’s beck and call until she decided if he could take Syznski’s place.
She was still upset that he apparently intended to pursue a life of crime, despite his assurance to make Judge Hart “proud.” He talked about robbing banks so that he could buy her a ranch in New Mexico while he pursued his marijuana project. She didn’t want to stay around to see him mess up again. She wrote that she was considering moving to Alaska.
To which he responded by accusing her of trying to hold him back, “just because I don’t want to be a financial burden to you. ... I’d like to lay my hands on some real cash. But knowing you, you would throw a fit and try to put that stupid suicide trip on me, which pisses me off and makes me feel guilty.”
Reality was getting to be too much, he wrote, he didn’t want to talk about him getting a job or treatment for awhile. “Let’s talk about our first litter of puppies. Or having our first horse foal. Let’s talk about our first walk to your water hole. Hand in hand. Two kids in love. Full of passion.... I love you so much, Deb. I’m going to marry you some day.”
In mid-December, just two weeks from his release date, Luther couldn’t take the pressure anymore. Complaining about stale crackers in the prison cafeteria, he started throwing food, was taken to a segregation cell and charged with attempting to start a riot. He tried to explain the incident to Debrah as refusing to “kiss ass,” and that he’d still “beat the paperwork” regarding the cafeteria incident and get out as scheduled, but she didn’t believe it.
On December 17, she wrote him a letter complaining about his lack of self-control, which he immediately marked up with his own comments and sent back.
“I feel like our relationship has regressed about 730 days,” she wrote. “Last year when you did this I thought it would kill me, this year it doesn’t hurt nearly as much. In fact, it only hurts slightly more than it did in 1990.
“I know that you are not dumb. But there are people who choose not to be involved with criminal activity and I am one of those people. I don’t know what makes you think you should be special and not have to struggle like the rest of us ordinary people. This one thing that you want to do is illegal. You are choosing to make everyone who ever questioned my involvement with you right.”
Alarmed and angry that she was discussing his plan so openly, Luther wrote in the margin: “They read the mail, and I said I’ll give it up!”
Debrah’s letter continued, “I wish you luck and I know now that I can’t ever make you happy. You want things that ordinary people can’t have, and I’m an ordinary person.... Dennis is not going anywhere. He told me that you would take off, and he was right. He may cause me unhappiness from time to time, but he is reliable.”
Luther responded, “Fuck Dennis. You want him, keep him. You’ll wake up someday.”
“Those wonderful endorphin filled moments that we spent together in the visiting room,” she continued, “are just memories that will soon be painful memories because I can’t have the dreams we talked about, that I gambled my life on.
“I don’t believe you will ever come back. If you are successful, you’ll have enough money to buy yourself any place you want and you won’t need to come back to hated Colorado. You won’t need sexually inhibited me who believes in the system you hate.
“I don’t think I regret any involvement with you,” she wrote. “You gave me a taste of life and love that I would never have known without knowing you.”
Luther added, “Want the rest?”
“It’s very painful to have to accept that my Christmas was traded for a tantrum over some crackers and my future is going to be traded for a criminal fantasy involving an easy start. I don’t suppose that you’ll ever understand that there are some places where some behaviors are never okay.”
Debrah concluded by saying her only choices were Alaska or hell. “And I think Hell’s the better choice because it’s warmer. I love you, Debrah.”
Luther also enclosed his own letter. “I don’t think you really love me, Deb. You won’t even give me a chance. I’ll be here Christmas Day waiting to be picked up. If you love me come get me.”
But she was right and he was wrong. The prison paperwork got through, giving him a new discharge date of January 5. He was to remain in segregation with no visitors until January 1.
“I’m sorry that this happened,” he wrote. “I should have been in prerelease or some place to ease back into the world. But no, not Tom Luther. They want to send me out in the dead of winter totally dependent on everybody. They need to fucking die.”
Debrah wrote back that, “I’m always going to do what I think is right or best, not necessarily what you think I should.”
Typical of his light-switch personality, Luther’s next letter was written as if nothing had happened. He was back on the sex track, discussing how he wanted to “mount” her “stallion style ... since you don’t like the term ‘doggie-style.’ I can’t wait to feel your soft pink skin against mine.” She noticed that the “weeks” he had once mentioned wanting to cuddle her in her mother’s cabin were now down to “48 to 72” hours in a motel.
On Christmas Eve, he wrote one last warning. “The stuff in my files is going to follow me and haunt me for the rest of my life and probably the lives of whoever I’m around. That’s why I want a ranch so I can keep to myself.”
He said he had been troubled by a dream in which he beat his brother William’s head in with a rock “because he was going to kill you.”
“There was a lot of rage in the dream,” he wrote. “I hope I’m not turning into a mass murderer.... In the future baby, if I’m doing something wrong, and I’m getting carried away and you can stop me, I would appreciate it. Love ya, Tom.”
Chapter Eight
There is an old children’s fable in which a frog and a scorpion meet at a rain-swollen creek. As the frog prepares to cross, the scorpion begs for a ride on his back.
“I am afraid that you would sting me, and I would die,” the frog says. But the scorpion promises that he has no such intentions, and at last the frog agrees.
However, halfway across the creek, the scorpion suddenly stings the frog. “But why?” asks the frog as he begins to slip beneath the surface of the water. “Now we will both drown!”
“I couldn’t help it,” the scorpion says with a shrug. “It’s my nature. ”
January 4, 1993—Fort Collins, Colorado
The day before Tom Luther was to be released from prison, Debrah Snider received a telephone call from Skip Eerebout. He was in Colorado and wanted to pick Luther up.
Debrah hesitated. She and Tom had another argument the day after he got out of segregation. He was still talking about getting even with “the cops” and going ahead with his marijuana project.
“When you get out, go ahead and call your friend Mongo to come and get you, ’cause I’m not gonna be there,” she said. But he’d been so contrite in the letter he wrote after she left that she had forgiven him. If she didn’t want him to do the project, he said, all she had to do was hold him “and tell me we don’t need that.... I love you the mostest. Kiss me you fox.”
Tomorrow was the day. They
’d be together forever. That’s what he said and she wanted more than anything to believe. She’d laid out the “Indian princess” dress she was going to wear, one Tom always said got him “hot.” She went over in her mind a hundred times that first kiss away from the prying eyes of guards.
“Oh no, you don’t,” she finally told Skip. “After all the work I did to get him out, I’ll be the one picking him up. You can come if you want, but we’re going to want a little time alone after that.”
Debrah wasn’t sure why she had volunteered to let Tom’s former cellmate go along for the ride. She had nothing personal against Skip Eerebout; from what Tom told her, he had a successful construction business in Chicago and led a Christian ministry for ex-convicts. Tom often talked about the Eerebout boys—Byron, J.D. and Tristan—and their mother, Pam Rivinius, who he called “Babe,” like they were family.
It was just nerves about being alone with Tom, she thought. Still, she was relieved when Skip laughed and said, “No, you’re right.... I’ll catch up to him after you two have had a chance to get acquainted.”
So Debrah went by herself on January 5, 1993, to pick up Tom Luther when he walked out of the Colorado penitentiary, a free man for the first time in almost eleven years. On the drive north to Fort Collins, they sat in her car like teenagers on a first date. He kept telling her how great she looked and tentatively put his hand on her thigh while she giggled like a nervous schoolgirl.
They spent the night in a motel. Tom was gentle and patient, and for one of the few times in her life, sex lived up to its billing. As she lay against his chest with his muscular arms around her, he said it was only going to get better. She believed him and silently scolded herself for ever doubting him.
However, the honeymoon lasted only until the next morning. At 8 A.M. there was a knock at the motel room door. It was Skip Eerebout.
“I gotta go,” Luther explained. “One of our old cellies committed suicide in Colorado Springs ... the cops were after him and he wasn’t going to go back to The Walls.
“We’re going to go console his widow,” he said, pointing to Skip, who smiled and shrugged apologetically. “I was sure you’d understand.”
Debrah nodded as she struggled against the tears that had sprung to her eyes. Luther lifted her chin with his right hand and gently kissed her. “I’ll be back tonight, okay?”
Again she nodded and managed a small smile. What was one day when they had the rest of their lives together? “I have some chores to do at the ranch,” she said bravely. “I’ll see you later then?”
Luther smiled and looked at Eerebout. “You bet,” he said. Then they were gone.
It was two days later when Luther returned. He explained to his angry girlfriend that “things” they needed to take care of for the widow had taken longer than expected.
She was just going to have to learn to lighten up, he said. Once before he had warned her that his former lovers had always had trouble adjusting to his “comings and goings.” It was something, he said now, that she was going to have to get used to—it was just his nature.
In the weeks that followed, Debrah Snider learned a lot about Tom Luther’s nature. For one thing, even though he got a job, he had no intention of going straight. So much for washing dishes just to be near her.
Skip Eerebout had gone back to Chicago, but Tom was spending a lot of time with his sons, who lived in the Denver area. It was quickly apparent that the boys were thieves and drug dealers.
Luther would borrow Snider’s truck and disappear for the weekend. When he returned, there’d be tools in the back, obviously stolen. The boys would visit him in Fort Collins and right in front of her brag about shoplifting excursions and burglaries.
Before Tom even had his first paycheck, he was flashing several hundred dollars which he used to rent an apartment a few miles from her ranch. “Won it in a poker game,” he explained.
She knew it was a lie—Tom lied like some men breathe. But he wasn’t even a good liar because he couldn’t remember what story he told her from one day to the next. She knew from talking to members of his family that the whole sad tale about his “children” was made up, as was his claim that he had been in the army. The poker game was just another Tom Luther story.
However, there was something troubling her a lot more than the lies or even the stolen tools. It was the way he acted around women, particularly young, pretty women. He constantly flirted, whether it was with the teenaged clerk at the grocery checkout or a woman on the sidewalk. He considered himself a real ladies’ man, but if they didn’t respond, they were “stuck-up bitches.”
Tom continued being a patient, even romantic, lover as far as she was concerned. But he couldn’t see an attractive female without commenting about her body or what it would be like to have sex with her. He’d tease her about bringing another woman into their relationship.
At first, Debrah thought he was making his comments to hurt her feelings; he was always at his cruelest after they’d had an argument. But it was soon apparent that it simply wasn’t safe for Tom to be around other women. With him it was never just teasing, never just looking. There was something in his eyes when women rejected his advances. Behind the smile was an angry, predatory hunger that needed to be fed.
Snider continued to live at her ranch, but spent as much time as he would allow with Luther. He started bringing pornographic videos back to his place and encouraged her to watch them with him as a sort of “sex therapy.” The movies he picked were violent, rape-oriented fantasies in which a woman would be abducted and then repeatedly raped, often anally and sadistically, until she “learned to like it.”
“Tom, rape is not something women ‘learn to like,’ ” Debrah told him. But he just got mad and said she was no longer “allowed” to watch the movies with him.
She grew increasingly disturbed about his weekend disappearances. He’d leave Friday and come home Monday, even Tuesday, scruffy-looking from not shaving and complaining of exhaustion and sore muscles. He explained that his condition was because he had been playing touch football with the Eerebout boys.
Debrah didn’t believe him. She couldn’t imagine Tom or the Eerebout boys playing football every weekend. He often looked like he had been in a fight and would sleep all day until he had to go to work in the evening, turning down her sexual advances. She put it together—his attitude toward women, the pornography, the Summit County incident, and his weekend disappearances—and worried that he was attacking women.
She didn’t know what to do. She was in love and didn’t want to believe that the dark side of Tom was taking over. He could be so gentle and loving. Picking wildflowers to bring her. Happily helping around the ranch, especially with the wolves. Volunteering to help an elderly neighbor cut down a dead tree and turn it into firewood. Even Dennis accepted him into the family’s life, keeping his thoughts to himself when Luther would come over to eat dinner and watch television.
If something went wrong with Debrah’s day, all he had to do was touch her and it was okay. But the times she loved best were when she and Tom just sat around his place reading books. She loaned him a pair of silver, square-rimmed glasses; they looked a little funny but were serviceable until he could get his own prescription.
As long as I can be near him, she thought, I can protect him when he gets the urge to prowl. She found herself getting angry at young women who encouraged his flirting by smiling good-naturedly. It was more than jealousy. Can’t you see how dangerous he is? she’d think as she glared at Tom and the girls. I’m the only woman who can tame him.
However, she began to wonder if she really could control Tom Luther. He wouldn’t let her go with him on his weekend forays. He said he was planning “something big” that would set them up for life, but he didn’t want to put her at risk if something went wrong.
Luther persuaded officials at a halfway house to release into his custody his prison friend Dennis “Southy” Healey by posing as the younger man’s uncle and pleading tha
t another relative was dying out of state. He explained to Debrah that he needed Southy, a pock-marked junkie and burglar whose arms were covered with strange prison tattoos, for his plan because the Eerebout boys were too young and unreliable.
Debrah tried to talk him out of whatever he was doing. “You can’t be Joe Citizen from Monday to Friday and then a petty thief on the weekends,” she said without voicing her other concerns. “You’re going to get in trouble again.”
“There ain’t nothing petty about me,” Luther replied angrily. If she didn’t like it, she could walk away. After all, he said, he was doing this for the both of them.
Snider should have taken his advice and walked away. Luther was being offered a comfortable life, including a ranch and a woman who loved him. But it wasn’t enough, and she had to suffer for it.
If she pushed too hard about his attitudes or activities, he’d put her on “restriction” and not allow her to visit until he forgave her. In a rare moment of insight, he agreed with her that it was dangerous for him to be alone with other women. But when she tried to get him into therapy, and even paid for a series of sessions, he found a way to sabotage her efforts by not showing up or refusing to participate when he did.
Suddenly, Debrah realized that she was going to lose him. He once wrote to her that he was on the edge of having to spend the rest of his life in prison. “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.” The words haunted her. How could he see the path he was on so clearly and not stop himself?
Feeling helpless, Snider decided to kill herself. This time, she thought, she would be scientific about it. She took into account her height and weight, and then looked into her medical books to determine how much alcohol she would have to consume to die. Then she went to a liquor store and picked up a bottle of 180-proof grain alcohol.
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