“Do you think he would sexually assault her?”
Debrah recalled the constant comments about women’s bodies and what he’d like to do with them. She remembered the violent, demeaning pornography—his fantasy that a raped woman would “learn to like it.”
“Yeah,” she told the detective.
“Do you think he’d bury the body?” Richardson asked, edging nearer to what he wanted to know.
“I know he would,” she blurted out before realizing what she had said.
“You know? How do you know that?” he demanded.
She fumbled to explain. She said she only meant that it seemed the logical thing to do. But then she walked into another mistake. She’d been working in early April as a pool nurse in a town near Central City when she heard a body had been found in a local creek, she said trying to change the direction of the conversation. She said, she thought then that it might be Cher Elder.
“Wait a minute,” Richardson said, “you told me earlier that the first you’d heard of Cher was the day I came to talk to Tom. April 20.”
Maybe she’d mixed up the date, Snider said, panicked. The detective had caught her in a lie. But Richardson let it pass. She wasn’t ready to spill the whole story, and he wasn’t going to force her back to Luther’s side by confronting her.
Debrah changed the subject again. “He took her to Central City but brought her back to Byron’s,” she said, adding hopefully, “Someone saw her at a bingo parlor.”
“No one saw her at a bingo parlor after that night,” the detective responded. “That wasn’t true.”
Richardson allowed the interview to grind to a halt. It was a good start. Debrah Snider knew more than she was saying, of that he was sure, but he could wait and let her conscience work her over. He told her that he had a search warrant for Luther’s car and was going to pick it up now.
Snider looked at her watch again. It was almost 1 A.M. “I’m in trouble,” she said. “I going to say you pulled me over.”
Richardson nodded. “We’ll back you up. We’ll say we were watching the house and stopped you.” He knew he had placed her in a tough, maybe dangerous, spot. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault,” Debrah replied. “I mean I’m obviously involved in something, and it’s my choice. I suspected that if this didn’t get cleared up, and Cher didn’t get found, that you guys would be here to talk to me.”
Richardson told her that several police cars and officers would be accompanying him and the tow truck to her property. He hoped the show of force would preclude Luther from resisting.
“He’s not going to cause any problems, is he?” he asked.
Debrah looked worried, but shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
Several officers had come into the room. “No guns, ’cause this is simple,” Richardson said more to comfort her than to the men. “We’re just going to tow the car.”
Thomas Luther didn’t resist. But he was plenty mad, especially when Richardson wouldn’t let him have a small black telephone book he found in the car.
“So that’s what’s happened to this woman,” Luther yelled, pointing to Snider. “You guys couldn’t let her call home and let people know? Her husband’s out lookin’ for her right now. We’ve all been drivin’ around looking on the sides of roads and shit.”
“She’s been with us for the last couple of hours,” Sgt. Don Girson, who had accompanied Richardson from Lakewood, replied. “We stopped her on the road.”
“Thomas, we’re not gonna argue,” Richardson interjected. “Let’s just do this and get out of here, okay? If you wanna talk—”
“No,” Luther said, cutting him off. “I don’t wanna talk to you fuckin’ guys. Man, you’re all fuckin’ assholes, you know what I mean?”
Luther was pacing back and forth, his voice getting louder, and he gestured wildly. Some of the officers nervously moved their hands nearer to their guns.
“I ain’t gonna jack with ya, okay?” Richardson said. “Just settle down.”
But Luther kept ranting. “You ain’t gonna jack with me? You’re jackin’ with me now. It’s goddam bullshit, it’s harrassment is what it is.” He demanded to know when he could get his car back. “How long is it gonna take your forensic people to go through it?”
“I would say that it’ll probably be done around Thursday, maybe Friday of this week,” Richardson replied. “I’ll call ya when we’re done with it, and you can come pick it up.”
The tow truck operator had gone about his business while Richardson occupied Luther and was now ready to leave. “I don’t want to talk to you no more,” Luther said, glaring at Richardson.
“Then don’t,” Richardson replied mildly. With that, he climbed in his car and the fleet of police cars and the tow truck hauling Luther’s blue Geo Metro were off.
Back inside the house, Luther turned to Debrah and demanded to know what the cops had wanted with her. She told him as much about the interview as she could remember, leaving out her own thoughts and responses.
“Richardson said you’re a serial killer,” she said, noting to herself that it was Dennis, not Tom, who was out looking for her. She worried that Tom might burst a vein, he looked so angry.
“Do you believe him?” he asked.
Debrah looked at him, at the angry eyes and the clenched fists. “No,” she said. It wasn’t entirely a lie. She just wasn’t ready to believe it might be true. But she was relieved to hear her husband’s car pull up to the house.
Debrah Snider didn’t sleep that night but lay awake going through everything that had happened since she came back from Washington. She was still thinking about it at work that afternoon when Richardson called. He asked if she was okay, and if Luther had caused any problems.
“No, he was fine.” He hadn’t asked her about the interview, she said, but she had “volunteered some things.”
Snider appreciated the detective’s concern. But in the light of day, she couldn’t believe that Luther was a killer. The doubts Richardson had planted in her mind the night before were just shadows and ghosts.
Richardson wanted to know if Luther was planning to leave for Chicago soon. “He’s got a lot of mixed emotions about it,” Debrah replied. “Part of him says he wants to run. Just bolt for the mountains, and another part of him says he wants to go to Chicago.”
Snider said his paranoia was understandable considering his background. He’d told her before he was even out of prison that “the system” would try to hang him again. But the detective just scoffed. “We didn’t even know Luther existed before two weeks ago.”
Maybe Southy would know more, Debrah volunteered. Tom had called him a lot, and while she hadn’t been able to hear much, it was certainly about “the missing girl.”
“I don’t know why Southy would do anything to her,” Richardson replied, wondering who Southy was and hoping she would say.
Snider had no comeback to that so she volunteered that Luther had called Babe that afternoon just as she was leaving for work. The phone seemed to have been shifted to Byron or J.D. She heard him angrily discussing his car being taken by the police. But at the same time, he didn’t seem too concerned about the cops finding any evidence in his car.
“He said, ‘I don’t have to worry about it. I already told ’em she vomited in my car, that’s all that’s there.... That’s all they’re gonna find.’ He was real confident,” Debrah said.
There was one other thing the detective might want to know, she said. Luther had borrowed a shovel from work—it had been in his car when Richardson and Heylin spotted the stolen tools, but the shovel was gone the next day. He said he returned it to work.
Richardson remembered the shovel. It had a funny scar on the front of what appeared to be a brand new blade. He and Snider hung up, both of them wondering what the other wasn’t saying.
A few days later, Luther asked Debrah Snider to accompany him to the Jefferson County public defender’s office in Golden. On the way, he started talking about “f
inding” Elder’s body after Richardson’s visit. “It was really stinky,” he said. “It looked horrible.”
It? Debrah’s conscience tugged at her. “She was not an it!” she snapped. “She was a girl. She not deserve what they did to her.”
Luther shrugged. What happened to Cher was not his fault. What he had done, he had done out of self-protection. Did she want him to go to prison for it?
“I don’t believe that she was killed because she was an informant,” Debrah said. “Did Skip pay you to kill her for Byron?”
Instead of answering her directly, Luther said, “Well, if you were in trouble and someone was going to put you away, I’d do anything to prevent it.”
Angry now, he wouldn’t talk to her anymore and insisted that she stay in the car when they arrived at the public defender’s office. When he came back out, he said, “They told me you’d be my greatest threat. You know that I buried her.” It was an accusation.
“That’s not true,” she said quietly. “I love you and will stand by you.”
Her answer seemed to satisfy him for the moment. He knew she had already talked to the police and apparently not given him up. But that night, as she was cooking dinner, the conversation again turned to Cher.
“Cher Elder was a vindictive bitch who was going to snitch on Byron,” Luther said. “She deserved what she got.”
His tone made Debrah shiver. She thought about her attempts to turn him into the police for the marijuana and stolen tools.
“Tom, no one deserves to die,” she said as evenly as she could. “I talked to the cops. That makes me a snitch.... So who’s gonna kill me?”
Debrah knew she was walking on dangerous ground, but she was angry and dealing with a conscience that would not shut up. It. Vindictive bitch. Where was the man she had fallen in love with? This Tom was always making himself out to be the victim. Not Mary. Not Cher. It was always the girls’ fault they got hurt.
She looked up when he didn’t answer. He was staring at her with those angry blue eyes.
Chapter Fourteen
Early May 1993—Lakewood, Colorado
The technicians in the crime lab hadn’t found much of anything in Luther’s car, except the “vomit” stain. However, there was one important fact about the stain: it was directly behind the driver’s seat. When the seat was laid back, as Luther had claimed it was during sex with Elder, there was no way the stain could have reached that spot. The seat prevented it. It made more sense that she had been laid on the backseat and then thrown up, or bled.
There was little other evidence—just some dirt, light-tan in color in the back. The dirt wouldn’t be of any use unless Richardson could find the grave and compare it against the soil there. But he wasn’t about to tell Luther that; he wanted him to think that the forensic lab was finding all sorts of things. And he also had no intention of returning the car right away... just to aggravate Luther.
In the meantime, there were a million small bits of information to run down. He called up Sgt. Josey and asked him to check with Luther’s former employer about any missing shovels.
Byron Eerebout contacted Richardson’s partner, Heylin, and said that Cher had called him at his old number at the army base. Heylin had checked it out; somebody claiming to be “Byron’s girlfriend” had called but not left a name.
Richardson also talked to Babe and asked why the boys had lied about knowing Tom Luther. “Because they were tryin’ to protect him, knowing his background and all,” she replied. “Nobody feels Tom is guilty of anything, and especially not me.”
A meeting had been arranged between the detective and the boys who, their mother said, would be accompanied by her and an attorney. The day of the meeting, Richardson called and canceled. “The boys had their chance to tell the truth,” he told Babe. “We have their statements and if we need anything else, we’ll holler.” The Eerebouts knew that he knew they had lied to him; he wanted that hanging over their heads.
On May 12, Richardson contacted the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences unit—the agency had specialists in serial killers and he wanted their opinion on Luther. The agents listened and looked at what he had so far and came up with a profile. The suspect’s modus operandi could have changed with experience, they said. And if the attack had not been planned ahead, he might use any weapon available.
They cautioned that Luther wasn’t the type to confess. However, working on his paranoia might reap rewards. The stakeouts and isolation efforts were a good start, they said. Make him think that the cops had something on him and were just working to put all their ducks in a row. It might worry him enough to go check out the grave.
The FBI evaluation reaffirmed Richardson’s own game plan. He had copied the pages from the little black book in Luther’s car and used the numbers in it to contact Luther’s friends. Whenever he talked to Debrah Snider, Richardson casually mentioned that if Tom had buried Cher, coyotes or dogs were likely to dig up the body.
A few days after he talked to the FBI agents, Richardson received a telephone call from Gina Jones, who told him about a recent conversation she had with Byron Eerebout. During the conversation, she said, she asked her former boyfriend why he had lied to the police about Elder. “He said, ‘I didn’t lie. I don’t know what the hell you’re talkin’ about.’ I said, ‘Well, you know, the police just came here and they questioned me and I couldn’t lie....’ ”
Jones said she could hear J.D. yelling in the background. “Then I heard Byron tell J.D., ‘No, she can lie to me, but she can’t fuckin’ lie to the cops. She can just fuckin’ only tell the truth to the cops,’ ” Gina said. “He told me never to call back there again.”
“Do you think he had somethin’ to do with her death?” Richardson asked.
“I don’t think Byron would,” she replied. She didn’t like him much, but he wasn’t a killer.
“Do you think Thomas killed her?” Richardson continued.
“Honestly?” she replied. “Yeah.”
“Okay, I do, too.”
It was just his opinion, one he couldn’t prove, but a few days later, there was an unexpected bit of information that further reinforced his belief. It happened at a meeting of Denver-area police agencies on sex crimes. In attendance was Dr. John Macdonald, a noted forensic psychiatrist.
Macdonald was officially retired but still went on the occasional rides with his friends with the Denver police department, who kept his desk reserved for him out of respect and fondness. The psychiatrist had retained a particular interest in sex crimes and frequently attended these meetings. He was listening to Richardson present his case when the detective mentioned a prior crime in which his suspect had brutally raped a young woman in Summit County with a hammer. Macdonald suddenly recalled the young man he had interviewed many years earlier in the Buena Vista prison.
“I believe I once talked to Mr. Luther,” he told Richardson after the meeting. “I think I have it on videotape. I’ll try to find it for you.”
Macdonald found the tape and had it delivered to the Lakewood Police Department. There Richardson watched and listened to a younger Tom Luther describe the girl he had attacked, and imagined what happened to Cher.
“She was very friendly, saying how nice I was for driving her,” Luther said.
In his mind, Richardson heard Cher thank Luther for giving her a shoulder to cry on. For being so nice and taking her to see her friend Karen in Central City.
“She remind you of your mother?” a detective asked.
Luther had laughed on the video, setting Richardson’s teeth on edge. “Yeah. She did remind me of my mom... when she started screamin’.”
Richardson wondered about Luther’s mother. Was she a key to this case?
“I didn’t get real violent with the young lady until she started screaming,” Luther said on the video. “Mostly that was out of fear, I believe, just my paranoia of the cops: ‘Oh my God, they’re gonna catch me with coke in my pocket and pot under my seat.’ ”
So, Ric
hardson thought, he’d rather kill than face arrest. His attention was brought back to the television screen when Macdonald asked Luther what had triggered the rage.
“I don’t know what triggered it,” Luther shrugged. “I guess it got to a point where I just didn’t want to have control or didn’t feel I should have control or—” Richardson recalled Snider’s fears that her lover had lost control that night. “—I was completely in a rage. I should have left. But I needed to overpower the area. It was my domain. I’m the lion. This is my kingdom that you’re in right now.”
Richardson turned off the video seething with anger. So this asshole saw himself as a predator. He was no lion, he was a mad dog who attacked small, defenseless women who trusted him. He didn’t want to get caught by the police, so he tried to silence his potential accusers—forever.
Later, Richardson called Macdonald to see if there was anything else he could tell him about Luther. The psychiatrist recalled that Luther’s victim in Summit County, Mary, had physically resembled his mother, whom he claimed had abused him as a child. A pretty, petite woman with dark hair worn to her shoulders.
Richardson remembered that among the photographs he had collected of Cher Elder, there was one in which her dark hair was shoulder-length. She had it cut shortly before she disappeared, according to her friends, but after she had been introduced to Luther.
“He feels sexually inadequate,” Macdonald continued. “And is very bitter toward the police. Be careful.”
With the video still fresh in his mind, Richardson found it difficult to contain his feelings when Luther called Thursday, May 13, wanting his car. “Probably tomorrow,” he replied. “Hopin’ we’ll get it done tomorrow. What stalled us is we got some body fluids and stuff like that, some forensic things, that we had to call the state lab in on. So it took a little longer than expected.”
There was silence, then Luther responded, “Well, you knew that stuff was there ’cause I told you it was there.”
Richardson tried to sound cocky. “Yeah, so I’ll give you a call as soon as it’s done. You’ll be the first to know.” He hung up the telephone convinced that Luther was close to the point where he would make a move.
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