Luther was at work so she went to his apartment, where she wrote a note. “You are a liar and a petty thief. It’s been one lie after another, and you’ll never change. My death won’t be so bad, my husband will take care of the children, and you’ll be free to pursue a life of crime. I don’t want to be around when you’re caught. Goodbye. I love you, Debrah.”
Placing the note on the kitchen table, she sat down and poured herself a glass of the liquor. Only she hadn’t counted on the stuff tasting quite so horrible. She had a hard time getting it down without gagging. She took a big drink. Then another. And passed out.
Debrah woke later with her stomach in full revolt. She stumbled to the bathroom and threw up. In a stupor, she crawled into Tom’s bed and fell asleep.
A couple of hours later, she heard Luther unlock the front door. She heard him pause in the kitchen and hoped he would realize how desperate she had been to write the note and come in to comfort her. Instead, he walked back to the bedroom, made a disgusted sound when he saw her on the bed, grabbed a sleeping bag and left.
When it was obvious that he wasn’t going to return, she got up. He was sleeping on the floor in the kitchen.
“I’m sorry, Tom,” she said, crying as she sank to the floor.
“That’s all right, Deb,” he replied. “We’ll talk about it in the morning.”
Tom stood up and bent over to pick her up off the floor. She scolded herself for ever doubting him as she pressed her face against his chest. He wasn’t perfect, but her fears about him attacking women... that was just silly. He was good and gentle and....
She was brought out of her thoughts by a sudden bolt of pain. He had run her hip into a corner of the wall as he carried her toward the bedroom.
“Sorry,” he said. He dropped her on the bed and returned to the kitchen to sleep.
Debrah’s hip hurt bad enough in the morning that he had to drive her to the hospital to have it X-rayed. It was a deep bruise. However what hurt worse was being put on restriction again. She wasn’t to come around his apartment anymore until he’d had time to think.
Luther never asked what was troubling her so much that she would try to kill herself. He was more concerned with what her death might have done to him. “I’d have been in real trouble if you died in my apartment,” he lectured her. “The cops would have been all over me.”
Several days went by before he forgave her. Only this time, the relationship had changed dramatically; from that moment on, he was totally in control. He no longer told her when he was leaving or when he was coming back. He no longer had any compunction about asking her for money. If she complained when the Eerebout boys were visiting and treated her poorly, she was the one he told to leave.
“That’s how important the boys are to me,” he shrugged when she cried. “Skip is the best friend I ever had, and he expects me to look after them.”
Still, Snider was not ready to give up on him. Somewhere was the man who had written nearly 300 love letters over two and a half years. She had to try to save him.
When Debrah learned that Luther, Healey, and one of Healey’s sisters were casing expensive homes in Fort Collins and planning a burglary, she tipped off the police. She thought that if he got caught for something small, something for which he would receive a light sentence, he might realize how close he was to ruining the rest of his life. She would rather have waited for him another couple of years than have him commit a crime that would take him from her forever.
The plan didn’t work after the trio spotted police in the area and gave up for the night. Still, Debrah wanted to believe that would be enough to get him to think twice about his life of crime. But she couldn’t shake a feeling of impending doom.
In mid-March, she gave Luther the down payment and cosigned the loan papers for a new blue Geo Metro, a sporty, two-door coupe. She hoped that he would drive her to Washington to see a friend. Maybe, if she could get him away from the Eerebout boys and Healey, she could straighten him out.
“Can’t,” he said. “Got something big going down.”
Debrah nodded. “Please be done when I get back.”
“Okay, lover,” he said and smiled his old sweet smile. “It’ll be over, and then you and I will have the rest of our lives together.”
In the two weeks that she was gone, Luther gave her even more reason to hope. He called often and wrote her several letters. He missed her. He loved her. It was all going to work out.
The night before she was leaving to return to Colorado, Debrah and her friend rented a movie, Executioner’s Song, based on the book by Norman Mailer about Utah killer Gary Gilmore, who had been executed by a firing squad. Tom ought to see this, she thought, maybe it would scare him straight.
Debrah decided that she would rent the movie again when she got back and ask Tom to watch it with her. It would be too late.
Cher Elder was in love. She’d met her boyfriend, Byron Eerebout, at a party in January when he intervened between her and a former boyfriend who was pushing her around. Byron was kind of wild in a sexy, outlaw sort of way, and she knew he occasionally did drugs, but he was nice, tall and handsome. She was, after all, only 20 years old—a short, pretty girl without a whole lot of experience with men.
Born in Glenwood Springs, Colorado, Cher’s parents had divorced when she was a little girl. She spent a lot of her early years bouncing between the two homes. As a teenager, Cher had lived in California for a time with her mother, Rhonda. When her mother remarried and moved back to Colorado, she had gone with her boyfriend to live in his hometown of Purdy, Missouri. Cher had broken up with the boy soon after they arrived, but she had stayed on, supporting herself by working two jobs while attending Purdy High School.
Purdy was a small, Bible-belt town of less than a thousand people in southwest Missouri. It was home mostly to poultry farmers and factory workers. Nothing much ever happened in Purdy, yet it was there that Cher got what should have been, in a world free of monsters, her fifteen minutes of fame.
Purdy was making national, even international, headlines, for a constitutional battle being waged between town youths and the religious conservatives who ran the school board over its century-old school dance ban. In September 1989, Cher and several of her high school friends were gathered at Hamburger Heaven, a local hangout, when a reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch asked them about the controversy.
“I don’t know what the big deal is,” said Cher, a 17-year-old senior at the time. “You can’t get pregnant by dancing.”
Six months later, Newsday ran its own story about the dance ban along with a photograph of Cher and her friends as they “discuss the upcoming senior prom—a private function to circumvent the rules.” The motion picture Footloose was based on the teenagers’ battle.
In another local matter, Cher reported a teacher for carrying on an affair with her best friend. The accusation forced the teacher’s resignation, as well that of the school board chairman who had tried to sweep the scandal under the rug.
Otherwise, Cher was a well-liked, if somewhat boisterous for local sensibilities, teenager. The good, quiet folks of Purdy chalked up her aggressive nature to the unfortunate circumstance of her having lived in California. She graduated from Purdy High with honors before moving back to Colorado to be near her parents and half-siblings.
In March 1993, Cher was working as a waitress at the Holiday Inn in Golden, Colorado, where her father Earl, half-sister Beth, and half-brother Jacob also lived. But she had bigger plans.
Cher had enrolled at a Denver business college to study accounting and expected to start classes on Monday, March 29. “I’m finally doing something with my life,” she told her best friend Karen Knott during one of their daily chats. Another symbol of the change, Cher had cut her dark, shoulder-length hair into a short, punk style.
She was so excited about school that on Saturday, March 27, she neatly stacked all of her schoolbooks and supplies on a nightstand, and laid out her clothes, like a kindergartner
getting ready for that first day. The only thing that came close to matching the excitement of her new life was her relationship with Byron Eerebout.
There had been other boyfriends in Denver, but nothing serious. Byron, on the other hand, had given her his ring, a gold band with three diamonds set in a diagonal across the face. It was too big for her finger, so she wrapped the band with string so she could wear it. When he mentioned that his apartment was lacking nice furniture, she gave him $700 to buy a waterbed to share with her.
On Saturday afternoon, Cher drove her silver Honda Civic to Byron’s. In the past few days, they’d been having difficulties over a woman named Gina Jones, who had been hanging around the apartment. Byron claimed that Gina was “just a friend,” but Cher wasn’t so sure.
Byron wasn’t home when she arrived, but she was let in by his younger brother, J.D. The youngest brother, Tristan, came out of a back bedroom and joined an older guy who was sitting on the couch, drinking a beer. His name was Tom and had been introduced to her on a couple of other occasions as a friend of Byron’s father.
Byron arrived a few minutes later with Gina and Adriel Borghesi. The girls gave each other dirty looks, and Byron scrambled to keep them apart. Gina left but returned a few hours later to find Cher sitting on Byron’s bed while he took a shower. It sent her through the roof. “Me or her,” Gina told Byron.
When Byron told Cher that he was going to a local bar with Gina and Adriel all hell broke loose. “You bastard!” Cher shouted as he left. “You son of a bitch!”
When Byron was gone and couldn’t hear her anymore, Cher burst into tears. She was left alone in the apartment with J.D., Tristan, and Tom Luther, who offered her a shoulder to cry on. “Let him spin his oats,” he sympathized. “He’ll come back to you, you’re a lot better lookin’ than that girl.”
In the meantime, he suggested, she needed to get her mind off Byron. Maybe she’d like to go get a drink, he said.
No, she replied. She wanted to go to Central City to see her friend Karen, who worked as a bartender in one of the casinos.
“Hey, that’d be great,” he said. “We can take my new car.”
Sniffing back her tears, Cher nodded. Tom seemed like a nice guy. In fact, he looked a lot like her father with his curly gray hair, blue eyes, and pleasant smile. She felt that she could trust him.
Cher had no idea that she would soon be in the newspapers again. Innocently, she climbed into Thomas Luther’s new blue Geo Metro. “And that,” as J.D., who watched them drive off, would one day remark, “was a mistake right there.”
Something pulled Rhonda Edwards out of a deep sleep. She sat upright in bed and looked at the clock: 3:05 A.M. It was Sunday morning, March 28.
She didn’t know what woke her, but she knew that something was terribly wrong. She was suddenly afraid for her family. Her first thought was of her second husband, Van, a long-haul trucker who was out on the road. Had there been an accident?
Then she thought about her only child, Cher. She was so far away. What if she needed her? Rhonda lived in Grand Junction in the northwest corner of the state, a five-hour drive from Denver.
Rhonda thought about calling. But this is silly, she thought. I had a bad dream, and now I want to wake everybody up in the middle of the night.
Instead, she wrote the time down in her diary. She and Van liked to record their dreams when he was on the road and compare notes later to see if they had experienced any psychic connections. Rhonda believed that she had a special sensitivity to such things, especially when it came to her family. She lay back down to sleep but remained awake for the rest of the night, waiting for the telephone to ring.
The sun finally came up and the shadows of the night fled back to their hiding places. Rhonda decided the dream must have been a bit of indigestion or concern for Van.
The telephone call didn’t come for two more days.
Debrah Snider arrived back in Fort Collins, Colorado, a little after noon on Monday, March 29. She stopped at her place only long enough to drop a few things off before heading to Tom’s. She was surprised to find him still in bed with the shades drawn. Sitting on the edge of the mattress, she picked up his hand.
“Ow!” he exclaimed, pulling it back. It was then she noticed that Tom’s hands were cut, bruised, and swollen; one of his pinky fingers stuck out at a weird angle and appeared to be broken.
“What’d you do to your hands?” she asked.
“A friend gave me a case of AK-47 assault rifles,” he replied. “I was afraid I’d get caught, so I buried ’em along I-70.”
Snider looked at his face. His eyes darted away. Oh boy, she thought, here comes another Tom Luther story.
“I borrowed a pick and shovel from your house,” he said, “but I broke the shovel and had to dig with my hands.”
“Yeah, right,” Debrah interrupted. “Your friends don’t have enough money for gas, but one of them gave you a case of rifles?” She asked what had happened to the shovel.
Relieved that she had changed the focus of her questions, Luther answered, “I threw it away.” Then for sympathy he added, “My clothes and my new boots were all muddy. I took them off so I wouldn’t get my car dirty and drove off with them still on top of the car. They’re gone.”
Tom was so contrite about the shovel and upset about the loss of his boots, she laughed. She never thought to ask what he wore home, if anything, or why he happened to have an extra set of clothes in his car.
At the moment, she was more ticked off at him for throwing away her shovel. “I could have replaced the handle, dummy.” She soon relaxed as he was so lovey-dovey and obviously happy to have her back. He said he’d gone to Central City with the Eerebout boys, but wished he could have taken her instead.
Maybe the break had been good for both of them, she thought after they made love. But her joy was interrupted by a telephone call.
It was Byron. Luther listened for a minute, then exclaimed, “Shit, just my kind of luck!” He turned to look at Debrah, then let out a big sigh of relief. “She was later seen at a bingo parlor? Well, that’s good.”
Tom hung up. He said that Byron’s girlfriend, “Shari,” had disappeared. He was concerned “because I might have been the last one seen with her.”
Before Snider could ask, he explained that “Shari and Byron got in a fight. I was just trying to console her and volunteered to take her to Central City to see a friend.
“But I brought her back to Byron’s apartment,” he added quickly and then hinted that “Shari” had a drug habit. “She’s probably getting even with Byron by pretending to disappear.”
Debrah had heard enough of this Tom Luther story; she got out of bed and dressed. The whole telephone call had seemed staged for her benefit. “I thought you said you went with Byron and J.D.,” she said accusingly.
If Luther had been alone with a woman, sex was involved. She looked again at the injuries to his hands and wondered what the dirt under his fingernails had to do with the girl’s “disappearance.”
Chapter Nine
April 1, 1993—Lakewood, Colorado
The first call Scott Richardson placed on the Cher Elder case was to the Holiday Inn in nearby Golden, where she worked as a waitress. Cher picked up her paycheck that Friday, March 26, but hadn’t reported for work on Sunday or since, Cher’s supervisor told him.
“And that’s just not like her,” the man said, shaking his head. “If she wasn’t going to come in, or even be just a little late, she always called.”
Richardson asked the supervisor if he could speak to Carrie Schieffer, a friend and co-worker who had told Cher’s father, Earl, that she saw Cher at a bingo parlor on Sunday evening, March 28.
Schieffer repeated her information. Asked by Richardson if there was anything else she could think of, the girl hesitated, then said, “Cher’s friend, Karen Knott, saw her on Saturday night. She was with some older guy. Karen said that Cher had been fighting with her boyfriend.”
Suddenly, the v
oice that had nagged him into placing the first call grew louder. So it wasn’t just a missing person case anymore, it was a missing person who had been involved in a domestic dispute. Experience told him that was significant.
Still, there was no reason to assume foul play. She could have “run away” after the fight to get even with her boyfriend, Byron Eerebout. He planned to reach out to Byron soon, but first he had other bases to cover. He called the Denver business school where Elder was supposed to have begun classes on Monday, March 29. The college director checked his records: Cher Elder never attended any of her classes.
Another call to Cher’s mother, Rhonda Edwards, confirmed that Cher had not checked in there either. Rhonda told him about the dream she’d had that Sunday morning. “I wrote the time down on a piece of paper,” she said. “It was 3:05 A.M.” She said she had lain awake all night waiting for a call. Two days later her daughter’s landlady in Golden phoned to say that Cher’s boss at the Holiday Inn and her school counselor were looking for her.
Rhonda said she then called her former husband, Earl, who had contacted the Lakewood police. He also began calling her friends, but Cher had disappeared without a trace.
The distraught mother told Richardson that she hadn’t seen her daughter since dropping her off in January after a trip to see Van’s family in Illinois during the Christmas holiday. She spoke to Cher on the telephone two weeks earlier. Her daughter had been her usual bubbly self. She hadn’t mentioned any problems, or even that she had a new boyfriend. She was just excited about starting college.
Richardson thanked Rhonda and hung up. He didn’t know what to think about the woman’s dream or the 3:05 A.M. note. Usually, he didn’t put much stock in that sort of thing, and he had to concentrate on evidence he could use in court.
He tried calling Byron Eerebout but got only a message machine. The next day, April 2, Byron returned his calls. Eerebout was in the army, and was calling from Fitzsimmons Army Medical Center in Denver. He said he had last seen Cher on Sunday morning, about 7:30.
Monster Page 16
