Over the next couple of days, he made sure to mention the coyotes again to Snider and that the state crime lab was still working on the car. It was a gamble. Luther might just decide to run. But the FBI profile and his own instincts told Richardson that “the lion” would return to his kill.
On May 18, Richardson got the call from Debrah Snider that he had been hoping for: Luther was on the move. She said he’d told her that he needed to go for a hike in the mountains to clear his mind. Then he’d called J.D. Eerebout and said, “I think it’s time for a road trip. Pick me up at twelve-thirty. I need you to drive me to a couple of places.”
Luther threw a few things and a sleeping bag into a backpack, Debrah said. Then he’d asked to borrow her truck so that he could get money from an ATM machine. Her horse trailer was attached to the truck, but he insisted that there wasn’t time to unhitch it. He got behind the wheel.
“He was driving like a madman,” Snider said. He swerved across lanes of traffic, the tires squealing and the trailer tipping dangerously from side to side. He honked and shouted at other drivers, and when a woman wouldn’t let him cut into her lane, it really set him off.
“You fuckin’ bitch,” he screamed out the window at the startled woman. “Get off the road!”
Debrah had seen him angry before, but not like this. His eyes truly resembled those of the wounded bull on her poster. Afraid that he’d turn her trailer over, she demanded that he stop and let her drive. “I said, ‘You’re too angry.’ ”
Luther slammed on the brakes in the middle of traffic and jumped out. He grabbed the backpack that was in the bed of the truck and took off without looking back.
Snider tried to find J.D. at the highway exit where Luther asked to be picked up so that J.D. would know where to look for his friend. But the boy wasn’t there yet. That’s when she went to a telephone booth and called Richardson.
“I think he’s going to the grave,” she said.
“You think he’s goin’ to move the body?” Richardson asked.
“At least, you know, bury it better or somethin,’ ” she replied.
“Okay,” Richardson said, “just go ahead and tell me why you think that.”
Snider realized that she had all but conceded that she knew Luther had buried Elder. The fact was, that morning he told her he wanted to place rocks on the grave to keep animals from digging up the body. But how could she explain without becoming a witness against Tom? “Well, I just do,” she told Richardson. “I mean, I can’t tell ya why. I don’t know why, I just.. I just do.”
Luther was real angry, she said. “He’s tired of you jackin’ him around. He says that if somebody was to take and, uh, kill your wife and family, it’d teach you a lesson.”
There was a pause, then Richardson asked what sort of weapons he was carrying. Nothing that she knew of, Debrah responded, but he might stop at the Eerebouts, and they probably had guns.
“Do you feel safe?” Richardson asked.
Debrah sighed. Again, she appreciated the detective’s concern. But what did it matter if Tom was gone? “I don’t value my life a whole lot, Mr. Richardson,” she said.
“You think he’s gonna try to kill ya?”
“I don’t.... I don’t know,” Snider replied. She wanted to cry. How could it have come to this, that the man she loved could conceivably want her dead? She didn’t want to believe it. “I don’t think I’m in that much danger, but this man’s real paranoid.”
“What do you think he’s gonna do if a cop stops him?” Richardson asked.
“If he has somethin’, he would kill ’em.”
“You think he’d kill ’em?”
“Absolutely.”
“Without a doubt?”
“Without a doubt.... ’Cause he hates cops.”
“Do you think he buried her up there?” Richardson asked.
“I don’t know if he buried her at all,” she lied, but she was damned if she’d be a witness against Tom. “You know, I don’t know if he did this. I think it’s a possibility.”
“Do you think he’s capable of killin’ her?”
She paused. In this case, the truth could not be used against Luther in court, but it might help Richardson. “Yeah, I do,” she said. “I think he’s capable of killin’ her.”
“Why is he makin’ these threats against my family?” Richardson asked. “Why is he so stuck on me?”
“Well,” she replied, “ ’cause he sees you as tryin’ to pin something on him he didn’t do.... At least that’s the excuse he tells me.”
A half hour after hanging up with Snider, Richardson got another call from her. She had gone home and found Luther there with J.D. He wouldn’t talk to her as he stomped around gathering a few last items for his trip. She slipped off to a back bedroom and called the detective again.
Richardson told her to hang up. He would call back and ask for Tom. Luther’s threats against his family had set off alarms in his mind. He wasn’t worried about himself, Luther probably didn’t have the balls to take on a man—but Sabrina and the boys were another story. That was right up Luther’s alley.
Richardson wanted to make this personal, and Debrah had just told him that he had succeeded. But threatening his family was taking it a step further. The stakes had increased in the last couple of weeks; Sabrina had told him she was pregnant with their third child.
Still, there was time. Luther was in Fort Collins and his family was in Lakewood, more than an hour away. He called the Larimer County Sheriff’s Office and asked that an unmarked car, part of the task force, get ready to follow Luther from Snider’s. Then he alerted other members of the state police and Lakewood task forces to be ready to intercept and follow Luther once he hit the interstate.
Finally, he called Luther. “Listen,” he said, trying to sound smugly confident, “we just got done with your car. Can you come in tomorrow morning... nine o’clock?”
Luther seemed taken back by the detective’s tone. “Okay,” he said. “So are your people satisfied now that the story that I told you was true?”
Richardson kept up the bluff. “Well, we still got some questions. If you wanna talk to me, I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“Yeah, you’ve been bustin’ my chops,” Luther spat. “You fuckin’ told my girl that I’m a serial killer and all kinds of crazy shit.”
Richardson ignored the outburst. “You wanna come in tomorrow, nine o’clock, to pick up your car?”
“I’ll be there,” Luther said and slammed the phone down.
A few minutes later, Snider called back. Luther had rushed out of the house with J.D. Eerebout. Whatever Richardson had said, it had pushed him into action.
“He said you’re acting too cocky,” she told him. “He thinks you found the body... he said he has to go find out for himself.” That was about all he’d say to her. He was punishing her again, but this time she hadn’t just accepted it. “I told him, ‘You know, you had a shot. Somebody gave you a shot, and if you have screwed your life up, that’s not my fault. You can’t punish me for that.” But he just glared at her and jumped into J.D.’s car, a big red Mercury sedan.
“If you want a body, you guys need to find out where he’s going,” she said.
Richardson tried once more to get Snider to tell him everything she knew. But she wouldn’t do it. “He’s got so much rope, and if he gets caught and hangs himself, that’s nobody’s fault but his own.”
The detective better watch out for his family, though, she said, Luther was on his way. And he might very well be coming to kill.
The first sign of trouble was when Larimer County lost Luther before he got out of Fort Collins. Richardson, directing the pursuit from the Lakewood headquarters, was starting to worry when the Colorado State Patrol picked him up again. Luther and Eerebout were headed south on Interstate 25 at a high rate of speed. But they were making it difficult on their pursuers by suddenly pulling over onto the shoulder of the highway to let cars pass. Then they were off again at sp
eeds close to 100 MPH.
Twice the pursuit lost contact with Luther after being forced to continue past J.D.’s parked car. Each time, the pair were picked up again just as Richardson was about to reach for the telephone to call Sabrina.
Then Luther hit the Denver area and his pursuers lost him again. “We can’t find Luther,” they warned.
There was no more time. Richardson hadn’t wanted to alarm Sabrina; Luther was already a source of fear in his house, but a woman-killer who had just threatened to murder his family was loose in Denver.
Richardson called the patrol desk. “Get some cars over to my house, now!” Then he called his wife.
“Listen,” he said, “Luther’s in Denver and he’s been talking about how he is going to smoke our family. I want you to get your things together. There’s a patrol car on the way—and stay at your brother’s tonight.”
It was a bright, sunny afternoon, but suddenly Sabrina felt chilled. Her husband was in a dangerous business, but he knew how to take care of himself. He’d been nearly killed in a bar brawl in Gladewater, but bloody and barely conscious he’d still managed to arrest his man. Then there was the time in a Texas jail when an inmate grabbed another officer’s gun and shot Scott at point-blank range. The bullet had passed between his arm and chest, close enough to leave burn marks, but Scott had taken that man down, too.
Only once had the danger extended to her. In Texas, an informant passed on that Houston drug dealers had put a hit out on Scott. Not finding their targets at home, they blasted the hell out of Scott’s truck. If it had been up to Scott, he would have stayed until he busted up the drug ring or died in the attempt. But he wouldn’t take that chance with Sabrina. They’d left Texas and moved to Colorado. Sabrina had been afraid of the drug dealers. But it was nothing like the dread she now had of Luther.
The case consumed her husband. There was no escaping Luther. And that had led to arguments. Lately, she had begun to not only resent Luther, but fear him. Debrah Snider said he was angry and wanted to hurt Scott. Her husband knew what Luther was and what he had done. Anybody who’d ever met Scott realized that he saw through lies the way some men saw through binoculars. Luther had to be afraid of her husband, and fear made him dangerous.
Even the boys were terrified that Luther would someday come to get them. Too late, Sabrina and Scott realized that the twins were gleaning more from the dinner-table conversation than they had given them credit for. Once, passing a billboard with the huge, distorted photograph of a rock star—a promotion for a local radio station—they had started screaming, “That’s Luther. That’s the monster.”
Now Scott was telling her that the police had lost Luther less than fifteen minutes from her home. It was like he was already in the house, stalking her.
Sabrina looked out the window and her heart nearly stopped at the sight of a dark figure standing on her front porch. It took a moment for her to realize that the figure was a uniformed police officer. “The patrol car’s here already,” she said, hanging up.
The officer repeated that she was to gather a few things as quickly as she could. No, there wasn’t time to call her brother. She could call from the car. They didn’t know where Luther was and they weren’t taking any chances.
The twins saw the police officer and immediately picked up on their mother’s fear. They cried in the patrol car all the way to their uncle’s house.
Sabrina did her best to comfort them. “Daddy will protect us,” she said, wishing she’d never heard of Luther. “He’ll get the bad guy.”
With Sabrina and the boys safe, Richardson returned his attention to trying to find Luther. The unmarked cars sitting on Babe’s place reported no sign of him, although the two other Eerebout boys were seen running in and out to use local pay telephones. Another unmarked car had been stationed at Richardson’s house in case Luther tried to carry out his threat, but he didn’t show there either. He had disappeared at a spot where major interstates met and ran off in every direction. He could have gone anywhere.
All night, Richardson sat at his desk but there was no word. In the morning, he called Debrah Snider. “I was just checkin’ on ya,” he said.
“Why?”
She sounded like she had been crying, and he felt sorry for her. “Just to make sure you’re all right.”
Debrah seemed to appreciate the call even though they both knew that her welfare wasn’t his chief worry. “Yeah, I’m okay,” she said.
“Have you seen him or heard from him?” Richardson asked.
“He called this morning, but I didn’t answer the phone, and it was on the recorder. All he said was, ‘Bye.’ ”
Richardson told her that Luther hadn’t been by to pick up his car. He wanted to know if all his stuff was still at her place.
“Pretty much,” she said, “except what was in his backpack.”
“Do you think he’ll come and get it since he called?” He didn’t want to admit that they’d lost Luther after she’d had the courage to alert them to his movements.
“It’s hard for me to know exactly,” Debrah said. “I mean, it sounded like, you know, good-bye forever. But I called Babe and she said that J.D. was gonna take him for a hike. She acted like she expected him to be back today. But I don’t think this was a recreational hike that we’re talking about.”
Richardson thanked her and hung up. The fact that Babe thought Luther was due back that day seemed to indicate that he wasn’t fleeing the state. At least not yet. With a little luck, they might find Tom Luther again.
A little luck is exactly what he got. That afternoon, one of the surveillance cars on Interstate 70 in the mountains west of Denver spotted J.D. Eerebout’s car. The curious thing is that it was traveling westbound away from Denver and, though it was hard to say for sure, the pursuit team didn’t think Luther was in the car.
This time, the pursuers were able to stay with Eerebout as he exited off the interstate near the little town of Empire. Just before he got to the town, he turned onto an isolated dirt road and, as the police team watched, flipped a U-turn. Suddenly, Luther leaped out from behind a large boulder and ran to where J.D. waited. He jumped in and the car sped back along the road and onto the interstate, heading east towards Denver.
Again Eerebout was hitting speeds of more than 100 MPH as he roared down the snaking six-lane interstate dodging in and out of the traffic lanes. Only once he stopped—at a gas station where Luther got out and ran into the bathroom. As soon as they were off again, detectives in one of the pursuing vehicles went into the bathroom and grabbed the trashcan and its contents for evidence. The other car stayed after J.D., trying to keep up without being spotted.
It proved too difficult. As Eerebout arrived in Denver, the pursuit lost him again.
“Dammit!” Richardson exclaimed when none of the police surveillance teams were able to re-establish contact. Where in the hell was Luther going?
The answer arrived ten minutes later when the perplexed officer at the front desk paged him. “Thomas Luther is here to get his car.”
Whatever insecurity Luther had been feeling before his trip to the mountains, it had evaporated by the time Richardson met him in the lobby. The detective noted that Luther’s jeans were dirty on the front; he was also wearing a dark blue work shirt and a blue baseball cap with the word “Navy” in gold on its front.
Luther was cocky; he was strutting around with his arms akimbo like a prison weightlifter, a half-smile playing on his lips. Richardson knew why. They both did. He had been to the grave and seen that it was undiscovered. Richardson didn’t have the body after all, and without it he had squat.
Richardson had to bite his tongue as Luther smirked at him. Even as they talked, a massive search was beginning in Empire. He hadn’t lost this hand yet. At least they had a place to start looking.
“We’re concerned with Cher because there’s nothin’ that indicates she’s alive at all,” Richardson said, hoping to draw Luther out.
“Nothin’ indicate
s she’s dead though either, is there?” Luther shot back.
“Well, yeah, as a matter of fact there is,” Richardson retorted. “So we’re kind of steppin’ up the investigation and, of course, not all of our crime lab results are back yet.”
Luther shrugged it off. “You’re tryin’ to bust my balls. You fuckin’ went up there and told Debrah that I was a fuckin’ serial killer and made me a fuckin’ bunch of problems at home. You know what I mean?”
“Listen,” Richardson interrupted, “I’m not gonna sit here and argue with ya.”
Luther nodded. “We’re not even gonna talk, as a matter of fact. We ain’t askin’ nothin’, we ain’t talkin’ nothin’, just give me my fuckin’ paperwork so I can get out of here.”
The two men glared at each other as Richardson handed him the papers. Richardson didn’t care if Luther knew he was the suspect in Cher’s death. He asked him if he had someone who could verify that he was home in Fort Collins on Sunday morning after dropping Elder off at Byron’s. Luther shook his head; he had no alibi.
Luther was looking at the paperwork on the search warrant for his car. He noticed that the crime lab had been done with the car for a week. He flushed red in anger.
“You sound pissed,” Richardson taunted.
“Yeah, well, when she shows up in two or three months in a treatment center,” Luther spat, “or some fucking thing, or out in California, you can come back and fuckin’ kiss my ass, pal.”
Richardson laughed, which made Luther flush more. “Well, I don’t think I’ll be kissin’ your ass, pal,” the detective said, then dismissed Luther. “You’re free to go, bud. You can go anywhere you want. And if you hear from Cher, let us know.”
Luther sputtered, he was so angry. “If I did hear from her, I wouldn’t tell ya a goddamn thing, pal.”
Monster Page 26
