“I was looking out my apartment window and saw her get into her car and go,” he said. “We’d been arguing the day before.”
“Did she come into your apartment before leaving?”
“Nope.”
“Did you talk to her at all before she got in her car?”
“No, I never talked to her again.”
Although only 32 years old, and a self-described “wet behind the ears puppy” compared to some of the other Lakewood detectives, Scott Richardson already had a reputation for his innovative, sometimes off-the-wall methods. Not all of his colleagues appreciated it, either; some even thought he was arrogant and pushy. But good cops recognized that what others took for arrogant and pushy was confidence and determination.
Tenacity was certainly one of Richardson’s attributes as well. But where he truly excelled was in the art of interrogation. Several cases in particular had cemented his reputation for getting confessions out of his subjects.
One became known as “The Crying Tie Episode.” A young Ukrainian immigrant was suspected of killing his aunt. She had not been seen by her neighbors for several days, but the police had no body and no evidence.
Richardson marched into the interrogation room and announced through an interpreter, “You got to understand. I know everything, but you got to tell me the truth.” The young man began crying but wouldn’t talk.
Richardson scooted his chair up close, reached out to touch the suspect’s arm like an understanding brother, and then removed his own tie and handed it to the young man to wipe his tears and blow his nose. Overcome by the gesture, the young man blurted out the whole story of how he had stabbed his aunt over an argument about long-distance telephone bills and then buried her.
Another case involved a double gangland stabbing in a mall parking lot that left one boy dead with sixteen wounds and another in critical condition at a local hospital with six. The chief suspect was the leader of a Latino gang who went by the nickname of Kango.
Richardson had tried every trick he knew to get the boy talking. But Kango, a tough, stocky youth, would have none of it. He just glared at the detective and stuck to his story.
Exasperated, Richardson tried a new ploy. “Ever seen the video camera on top of the building out there?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Kango replied suspiciously.
Gotcha, Richardson thought. There was no video camera, but he kept his face blank as he continued. “Well, not only do we have a videotape of what happened that night, but a security guard was watching the whole thing.”
Richardson stole a look at Kango, who shrugged. The detective went on. “Now in a few minutes, I’m gonna go watch that tape, and if you don’t tell me the truth now, it’s gonna be tough to get a jury to believe that you didn’t mean for it to happen and that you’re remorseful.” To the detective’s disappointment, Kango still did not respond.
Richardson left the room desperate. This gang-banger was one tough nut, and without a confession they weren’t going to be able to make a case. Then he spotted a blank videotape that was lying on a desk outside the interrogation room. He grabbed the tape, placed a white sticker on its side, and wrote “MALL HOMICIDE” in large dark letters.
He waited a few more minutes, then he went back to the interrogation room where Kango sat impassively. Slamming the blank video down on the table, Richardson snarled, “You lied to me. I just watched that tape... and saw you stab those two boys.”
Kango stared at the tape, shaken by the detective’s sudden personality change. Richardson could hardly keep the smile off his face as the boy blurted out his confession.
Only later did Kango learn he had been tricked by a blank tape. His defense lawyers, of course, cried to high heaven about the rights of their client. After Kango was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, his lawyers appealed but lost. Fuss all you want, Richardson thought at the trial, I’ll be damned if I’m going to place the rights of that asshole over those boys he stabbed.
Getting to the truth when it came to solving the murder of another human being was everything to Richardson.
There was no denying that some cases were worse than others. Although no one deserved to be murdered, some victims seemed to be asking for it. They associated with the wrong people, were into criminal activities themselves, or hung out in dangerous places. Then there were the “true victims,” especially kids, who were in the wrong place at the wrong time through no fault of their own.
The sympathy Richardson felt for true victims had escalated a hundredfold after Sabrina gave birth in 1990 to twin boys, Brent and Brandon. He knew how much he loved his family and couldn’t help but put himself into the shoes of a victim’s loved ones. It made solving these homicides a personal thing with him.
A couple days after he talked to Byron Eerebout, Richardson drove to the home of the elderly woman from whom Cher had rented a bedroom. The room was tidy and clean. There was nothing to indicate drug use—no marijuana butts in an ashtray, no hypodermic needles in the trash can, no mirrors smeared with cocaine residue. But what struck him was the stack of neatly arranged school books and supplies on the nightstand next to Cher’s bed. It told him that this was the room of a young woman ready to embark on a new life, a life full of promise, not a runaway.
He had contacted as many of Cher’s friends and family as he could locate and had yet to find one who had seen her using drugs or described her as being particularly wild. She enjoyed going to bars with her friends, but there was nothing to indicate a drinking problem, such as frequent absences from work or unpredictable behavior.
On the evening of April 12, Richardson issued a press release. He disliked involving the media and this was sure to generate a flood of red herrings and false leads. But up to now, all he had was a bunch of dead ends. The boyfriend said Cher left his apartment Sunday morning; her co-worker said she had seen her at the bingo parlor Sunday evening, but she hadn’t shown up for work. There was nothing in between or since. It just didn’t smell right.
The bare bones release gave Cher’s physical description and that of her car. It mentioned that she had been seen at a bingo parlor on Sunday, but not since. Anyone with information was asked to call him.
The office was soon flooded with telephone calls. A woman reported seeing a girl fitting Cher’s description crying in a car being driven by a fortyish man wearing a bulky coat. Another woman called to say her daughter had disappeared along with her car four years earlier and had never been heard from since; she was concerned about what Cher’s family was going through and offered her assistance if needed. Yet another woman claimed to have seen someone resembling Cher being forced into a car in Grand Junction... except the other alleged victim was black.
The Lakewood office also received a teletype message through the National Crime Information Computer that the body of a woman matching the generic description of Cher—5’3”, 130 pounds, dark brown hair—had been found floating in a Texas river. Richardson called, but the body had already been identified as a local woman.
In the meantime, on April 14, Richardson obtained the tape of the dispatch officer’s telephone call to Byron Eerebout. The 23-year-old told the officer that he had been calling everywhere, including all the local hospitals in an attempt to help Cher’s family locate her.
“I understand you were with her Saturday night?” the officer inquired.
“I was with her up to... nine o‘clock,” Byron replied. “Well, actually, ten o’clock on Saturday night. Before she left and she went to Central City.”
“Do you know who she went up there with?”
“Uh, Tom.”
“Tom?”
“Yeah. It’s my brother. Basically. His real name’s Jerald Edward Eerebout II.... And I guess she was up there with some older guy... so I’m not sure if my brother even went up there. I was gone.”
“How did you find out she was there with an older guy?” the officer asked.
“Uh, from Lauren Councilman. I saw Cher Sunday m
orning when she came and picked up her car. And then one of her friends said she saw her at the bingo place, uh, Sunday night.”
Richardson listened to the tape. Who was this older guy? He was immediately concerned that after her fight with Byron, Cher had gone to Central City and met this mystery man.
Central City was an old mining town crammed into a narrow granite canyon. It was famous for its old opera hall, built by miners during the gold rush to bring culture and, hopefully, women of the marrying sort to the location.
Its glory days were long past and it more closely resembled a ghost town when Colorado voters approved legislation in 1991 to legalize casino gambling in the town. Seemingly overnight, the town went from boarded-up businesses and dilapidated clapboard houses occupied by a few hardy souls to Vegas-style casinos and a main street filled with tourists and their money. Gamblers came from all over the state and country.
Richardson feared that Cher’s mystery man could have flown in from some far-off city, stuck around long enough to gamble and maybe kill Cher, and then gone home. If so, the man might be impossible to trace.
The detective was sure the man had something to do with her disappearance. But the more he thought about it, the more he couldn’t see Cher taking up with some stranger. And Eerebout hadn’t mentioned anything about her showing up at his apartment on Sunday morning with a date.
There was something else bothering him about the taped conversation: why had Eerebout told the dispatch officer that his brother, J.D. Eerebout, went by the name “Tom”? Could it have been a slip?
No matter which way he turned this one, he kept coming back to Eerebout. He had no place left to go with the case but back to Byron’s apartment, where he and Heylin arrived on April 16.
The detectives gave each other a knowing glance when they walked in through the open apartment door and saw Eerebout painting the walls. There was no furniture in the apartment and it was evident that the rug had just been steam-cleaned.
“My lease expired, and I’m moving out,” he explained. “If I want my deposit back, I have to paint and clean the carpets.”
Byron was a tall young man, red-haired and blue-eyed—good-looking in a raw-boned sort of way. Richardson noticed he had cut his finger, which still had dried blood on it. The detective also noted that the bathroom’s vanity mirror was broken.
“It happened a couple of weeks ago,” Eerebout explained in response to the detective’s questioning look. “I was pissed off about what’s going on with the army.
“I was in the Gulf War, you know, and got accused of bringing back some rifles and grenades and a couple pistols. I got hurt over there. I was hit in the back of the head by a tent pole. Sometimes I don’t remember things so good. Now, they’re gonna discharge me for medical reasons, ’cause of that accident.”
Eerebout volunteered that he had been arrested by Denver police on several occasions—burglaries, assault, that sort of thing. He quickly shifted the conversation away from his troubles to Cher. “You know she had this good friend, Garfus, that she could talk to, you know, as just a friend. Maybe he knows where she is?”
Richardson had already heard about Garfus from another of Elder’s friends, but for the moment he had other things on his mind. “So tell me about Saturday night?”
Byron nodded as if he had been waiting for the question. “Well, I last seen her about eight o‘clock—that’s when I left with my friend, Adriel, to go to Whiskey Bill’s. We stayed there ’til it closed.
“Cher went to Central City and came back to my place about 6:30 in the morning. She came into my bedroom and said ’bye. Then she left.”
When he got up later that morning, Eerebout said, he found two “sticky notes” on the living room window. “They were from Cher. I ... I don’t remember exactly what they said, something like, ‘Now you know why I haven’t been with a guy in four years,’ something like that. J.D. was awake when she showed, and he saw her leave the notes. I’ll try to find ’em for you.”
Richardson nodded. “So what do you think happened to Cher?”
Byron shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe she went back to Missouri?”
The detectives were getting ready to leave when Byron’s younger brothers, J.D. and Tristan, arrived. The detectives split the boys up and took them aside to talk.
Richardson got J.D. The teenager said he first met Cher a month or so earlier at a party that his older brother, Byron, had also attended.
“Cher left here about seven o’clock and went to Central City to visit her friend, Karen,” J.D. said. He shook his head at the detective’s next question, “No, I didn’t go with her. I went to sleep.
“She came back early in the morning, like four o’clock. I heard this knocking on the door and when I opened it up, there she was. She came in, got her coat, and left.”
“Did she go into Byron’s room?” Richardson asked.
“No,” J.D. answered, then looked up quickly, blushing as if he’d missed something. “Or maybe she did,” he stammered, “I’m not sure.”
“Was anyone with her when she came into the apartment?”
Again, the question seemed to strike a nerve. He shook his head again. “No. No one... she wasn’t with anybody.”
Heylin’s conversation with Tristan revealed nothing of importance. But Richardson left the apartment pleased. Get their lips moving, he repeated to himself. He’d just caught Byron in a lie.
When he interviewed Byron that first time over the telephone, the young man had been absolutely sure that he’d had no contact with Cher on Sunday morning. She hadn’t come into the apartment, he’d said, he’d only watched her leave from his window. Now his story was that she’d not only come into the apartment, but into his bedroom to say goodbye, taking the time to write and place two notes before leaving.
Then there was J.D. He said Cher had come into the apartment, retrieved her coat, and left. The younger brother came across as someone desperately trying to keep a story straight, and not doing very well at it.
Richardson drove back to his office more convinced than ever that the mystery of whatever happened to Cher Elder could be solved by the Eerebout boys. It didn’t bode well for her, he thought sadly. After all, why lie about a missing person case—if that’s all it was?
Still, Richardson wasn’t ready to put on the blinders. He placed a flag on Cher’s credit cards and bank accounts; officials were to notify him immediately if there was any activity. There was nothing. He contacted the border patrol and the airlines. Again, nothing, but he hadn’t expected much—her passport had been left in her room.
Nothing made sense except growing certainty that Cher was more than just missing. If anything, she was an overly responsible kid, staying in contact with mother and father, acting as a surrogate mother to Beth, her half-sister by her father’s failing second marriage. She had called or visited her best friend, Karen, every day until that Sunday.
Everywhere Richardson looked—California, Colorado, Missouri—he never found anyone with anything bad to say about Cher. The deeper he dug, the cleaner she got.
Something had happened to Cher Elder between the time she left Byron’s apartment, showed up in Central City with the mysterious older man, and the next morning. Why else were the Eerebout boys lying if she really had driven away from the apartment and into the blue that morning? The only item in his theory that didn’t make sense was the co-worker who had seen Cher at the bingo hall on Sunday night.
On April 17, he called Carrie Schieffer and asked her again if she was sure of the date she saw Cher. “Well, let me ask my husband,” Carrie replied. A minute later she came back to the telephone, chargrined. “Actually, he says it was Friday, not Sunday.”
A major piece of the puzzle slammed into place. Another piece was added that afternoon when a Lakewood patrol officer called in to report finding Cher’s silver Honda in the parking lot of a grocery store.
The car appeared to have been there for some time, as there was a coat of dust o
n it that had not been disturbed. A taillight had been broken at the scene. The car was locked, but he could see her winter coat lying on the back seat.
The discovery of the car told Richardson several things. For starters, if Elder had run away, why’d she leave her car in a grocery store parking lot? She’d either take it, or sell it, or maybe give it to a family member.
Also, the night Cher disappeared was cold and snowy. If she had picked up her coat at Byron’s, as J.D. had said, she would have worn it to her car, Richardson thought to himself.
The fact the car was locked told him something else—one of those tiny, seemingly insignificant clues about the person he was seeking. If whoever brought her car to this spot was a stranger, he wouldn’t have bothered to lock the doors. However, the act fit the psychological profile of “an associate murder”—the person had known Cher and locked up, probably subconsciously, much as a friend would have. Such profiles weren’t 100 percent infallible, but they were right much more often than they were wrong.
The most important clue regarding the car was the grocery store’s proximity to Eerebout’s apartment. If Cher had met with foul play, the location of the car only four blocks from the apartment meant one of two things: Cher had driven her car there and then was abducted by a stranger in a well-lit parking lot, or someone connected with Eerebout’s apartment was responsible for driving the car to the grocery store.
Added together with the locked doors, he believed the latter scenario. And that meant that whoever he was looking for was clever enough to leave the car in a busy parking lot of an all-night grocery where it wouldn’t be noticed for a long time, but also a lazy son-of-a-bitch who didn’t want to have to walk too far to get back to the apartment.
And that meant that whoever took Cher was probably acting alone, Richardson thought as he drove back to the office. Otherwise, he’d have an accomplice follow him in another car while he abandoned Cher’s car on the other side of the state, or at least downtown Denver.
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