It was good to have Luther back on the defensive, the cornered animal. “See ya, Luther,” Richardson said smiling.
Luther started to go, then turned back. His blue eyes were filled with bright red rage. “Where do you live?” he asked, then turned and walked away.
Richardson kept smiling, but his eyes were nearly black in anger. He threatened my family, he thought, to my face!
This time there was no chance he was going to lose Luther. Richardson had talked a judge into giving him permission to attach a “bird dog” monitoring device on the bottom of Luther’s car. The high-tech “spy” equipment operated by sending a signal whenever the vehicle it was attached to began to move. That signal was relayed to a terminal that indicated the general direction the car was moving, which could then be translated to a map.
The bird dog was the reason Richardson wasn’t surprised to hear from Snider a few hours later that Luther had arrived at her place in Fort Collins. He already knew it.
What he didn’t know was that Luther had packed his possessions into his little car and was leaving, according to Debrah. Soon the bird dog verified that Luther was on the move, heading east from Fort Collins toward the Nebraska border.
Richardson had to act fast. He had been told by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation that they would need new hair and blood samples from Luther to compare to any that might be found on Cher’s body and the gray, curly hair found in her car. The samples taken from him after his arrest in 1982 were no longer any good: hair color and texture changed with age. The detective had requested and received a Rule 41.1, a search warrant allowing authorities to take such samples involuntarily from Luther.
Richardson contacted the Colorado State Police and asked that they stop Luther. They had to make it quick. If he got across the state line, the Rule 41.1 was no longer valid; more importantly, a Rule 41.1 had to be served in daylight, and the sun was already low in the western sky.
There was an anxious hour before the state patrol radioed in that they had Luther in custody. They had stopped him just short of the state line.
Warned by Richardson that Luther might be armed and should be considered dangerous, they ordered him out of his car at shotgun point and made him lie facedown on the highway with his hands behind his head. Now they were heading back to Fort Collins where they would take him to a hospital to get the samples. Richardson signaled his partner, Mike Heylin, and a few minutes later they were on their way to Fort Collins again.
The Lakewood detectives arrived at the Fort Collins hospital just as the last samples were being taken from Luther. Pubic hair. When he saw Richardson, Luther’s eyes bulged with anger and he began yelling.
“Fuck you, Richardson!” he screamed. “You want pubic hair? Here have as much as you want.” His pants were down, and he began ripping handfuls of the hair out by the roots and offering them to the detective.
“There was more than enough in the first handful,” Richardson later told his colleagues. “It had to have hurt like hell... but I was raised to be polite and never interrupted him.”
Luther stopped pulling out the hair as other police officers moved to restrain him. But he continued to curse Richardson.
“Fuck you! Fuck you, Richardson! You son-of-a-bitch, bustin’ my balls. Where do you live, Richardson? Where do you live?”
Chapter Fifteen
May 19, 1993—Empire, Colorado
Empire was one of those tiny Colorado mining towns that were built on the hopes and fortunes of gold-seekers in the mid-to late-1800s and somehow managed to cling to existence in the high country when the gold played out. Their diggings, some hardly more than pits, others deep shafts blasted and picked far into the mountains entrails, littered the area.
In Empire’s case, a nearby molydenum mine, a mineral used to strengthen and add flexibility to steel, continued as a source of jobs for residents. Otherwise the town relied on tourists in the spring and summer, passing hunters during the fall, and skiers in the winter for revenue.
The town, population 400, consisted of a single avenue of businesses lined up along the highway and maybe a hundred homes, many of them built in the old Victorian gingerbread style. It was a blink-and-you-miss-it sort of place, battered by harsh winters where snow piled up higher than a man could reach.
Empire was situated near the mouth of a narrow valley at an altitude of 8,600 feet above sea level, bordered on the downhill side by snow-fed Clear Creek, a noisy, vigorous stream that makes up in energy what it lacks in depth as it rushes eastward toward Golden. Bald-headed mountains from which some of the snow never melts, even in summer, rise on either side of the town and the highway that passes through it, paralleling the stream. The sides of the mountains are steep as a staircase; the pine-covered slopes interspersed with numerous landslides of granite rock that range in size from a man’s fist to a small car.
After leaving the town, the highway runs for several miles before suddenly veering and climbing to the right, leaving the valley and the stream behind. Up it winds, through a series of U-turns until reaching Berthoud Pass, elevation 11,300 feet; then it drops down the other side to the Winter Park ski area a few miles further on.
Tom Luther and J.D. Eerebout were hardly out of Empire before a team was assembled to begin the search for Cher Elder’s body. Within an hour, bloodhounds were brought in to backtrack Luther’s trail from the point where he was seen jumping into Eerebout’s car. The hounds led their handler and an entourage of detectives along Clear Creek, past the Empire sewage treatment plant and to a point on the highway near a small restaurant a mile beyond the town. But there, the dogs lost the trail.
Losing the scent on the road, the handler explained, was not unusual and it probably meant one of two things. One was that it could have been the spot where Luther got out of the car when J.D. first brought him to the mountains. The other was that it was where Luther crossed the road—busy highways don’t hold scents well because of the passing cars.
As the dogs tried again to pick up the trail, other searchers walked along the creek looking for clothing that might have been discarded. Still others combed the hillside between the highway and the creek at the bottom, looking for any unusual disturbance of the ground that might indicate a grave.
They concentrated their efforts on the downhill side of the highway because as a general rule, most killers are too lazy to haul a body uphill for burial. Usually if a grave is found uphill, the victim was forced to walk to his, or her, execution.
The morning after his confrontation with Luther at the Fort Collins hospital, Scott Richardson was getting ready to go to Empire to help with the second day of the search when Debrah Snider called. “I just want to let you know that Tom has been here and got all his stuff... but I guess you already knew that,” she said.
Richardson thought she sounded tired and hoarse, as if she’d been up all night crying. “Yeah, we picked him up last night,” he acknowledged. “Where’d he say he was going? Chicago?”
“Yeah, he’s goin’ to that area....It sounded like your encounter with him yesterday wasn’t real good. He said somethin’ about wantin’ to whip your ass.”
The pain of betrayal was evident in her voice, and Richardson again felt sorry for her. “He had an opportunity with you that was for a person in his position a deal of a lifetime and he just walked all over it,” he said to make her feel better.
It only made her start crying. “I’ve talked with his mom and I’ve basically told her the same thing, you know. And that I feel real hurt,” she said.
The mention of Luther’s mother raised an issue Richardson had been curious about since viewing Dr. Macdonald’s videotape. “He ever talk to you about her abusing him or anything like that?”
“Yeah,” Snider responded. “And his sister verified that she was very abusive.” Luther had two sisters, she said, Becky, who she described as an alcoholic living in Pennsylvania, and Donna, who still resided in Vermont. It was Donna who told her that while her brother w
as a liar about such things as his prior military service and his two “murdered” children, his stories about their mother were true. Debrah said that she had met Luther’s mother and thought she was nice. “Donna says she’s changed a lot, for the better.”
“What did he ever tell ya about his mom?” Richardson asked. “What kind of abuse?”
“That she just would go crazy and she would rant and rave and, you know, throw things and hit them,” Snider said regaining her composure. “And that his dad was abusive to her and that part of that abuse came from him intervening whenever she was going crazy and abusing them. You know... that his dad would start beating her up to stop her from abusing them.”
Arriving in Empire later that morning, Richardson got out of the car and looked around. She’s here, he thought, I can feel it. But where?
Anyone of the rockslides that reached down the sides of the hills like fingers could have covered a grave. He walked over to the downhill side of the highway. It was so steep that a body thrown from the road would travel twenty yards before it stopped. Then it would be no problem to send a few rocks tumbling over the body that would look like any one of a thousand other piles of rocks in the immediate vicinity.
As he surveyed the area, Richardson was approached by a short, stocky man who identified himself as Jerry Murphy, the Empire town marshall. He’d been notified of the search and had come forward with some information of his own. He said he’d recognized Luther from photographs shown to him by the searchers. “Seen him walking east through town on the nineteenth,” he said. “He was wearing blue jeans and a baseball hat with gold lettering on the front.”
Richardson and Heylin began to canvas the town to see if anyone else had spotted Luther. They met John Poynter III who said he’d seen Luther as he was returning to Empire on the 19th. “He was directly across the road from the sewage plant,” said Poynter, who concurred with Murphy’s description except to add that when he saw him, Luther was carrying a white can.
Eventually, the Lakewood detectives ended up at the Marietta restaurant a mile west of Empire, near where the bloodhounds lost Luther’s trail. Yes, said Linda and Michael Starr, the couple who owned the restaurant, on the morning of the 19th they’d seen a man matching that description walking east in front of their restaurant. He had curly gray hair under his blue baseball hat and was carrying a white can. They’d seen him again two hours later as they were leaving town.
“Down by the Dairy Queen,” Michael said. “I don’t know why I noticed him, guess I thought he was a little odd.”
Richardson drove back to Empire the next day. He was surprised to learn that there were other searchers in the area. A team led by Detective Dave Dauenhauer of the Clear Creek County Sheriff’s Department was looking for another body east of Empire, closer to the interstate.
Richardson walked down the road to meet Dauenhauer, who told him that he was looking for the remains of Beth Ann Miller, a 14-year-old girl from the nearby town of Idaho Springs. She had disappeared while jogging ten years earlier. He now suspected that she had been abducted and killed by Edward Apodaca, an Albuquerque man. A former girlfriend of Apodaca had told people that she was with him the day he buried Beth Ann’s body. But the girlfriend had since disappeared and Apodaca was slain by his wife and mother-in-law in 1990. Dauenhauer believed that the secret of Beth Ann’s grave had gone with him.
Yet, Dauenhauer refused to give up. The Clear Creek detective had spent thousands of hours of his own time hoping he could give the family their daughter’s body for burial.
Richardson felt for his fellow detective, but he couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live with a case for ten years, or even a couple of years for that matter.
The Cher Elder case had been a real eye-opener for Richardson about the number of unsolved murder cases there were every year in the United States. He’d heard that sixty-five percent of all homicides went unsolved. But it wasn’t until he began receiving the calls from police agencies all over the state and the nation, trying to determine if their cases were connected, that the statistics took on a deeper picture of the human misery involved.
Richardson and Dauenhauer agreed to stretch their resources by dividing the search area. The Clear Creek County team would concentrate its efforts from the east edge of Empire to the interstate. The Lakewood team would search the area from the town west to where the bloodhounds had followed Luther. Richardson wished Dauenhauer luck, believing that at least in Cher’s case, his search would soon be over.
When Richardson went to Empire, Heylin stayed behind to chase down a few leads. That included talking to Byron Eerebout’s ex-wife. She said she’d met Byron when he was AWOL from the army in 1991. He’d moved in with her and her mother shortly thereafter and soon they were married. They moved into their own apartment, the apartment where Cher Elder had been the night she disappeared, a few months later.
The marriage was a rocky one, Eerebout’s ex-wife said, they fought frequently and finally split up in early February—about the time Byron started seeing Cher. Their fights had mostly consisted of screaming and slamming doors, she said, but sometimes it involved “pushing and shoving,” and twice he had grabbed her by the throat and choked her. “He got really psycho,” she said, but then he would end up crying and apologizing. He blamed his mood swings on a blow to the head he had suffered in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. “He had a lot of headaches because of it, and he can’t smell or taste.”
She said she had bailed Eerebout out of jail three times since she met him. Mostly petty stuff—stealing a checkbook, forging checks, traffic violations.
“He was pretty nice when you met him—flowers, dinner?” Heylin asked.
“Yeah,” she sighed, “aren’t all men.”
Later, Heylin told Richardson about Eerebout’s violent behavior. They both knew that meant they had two suspects. Two men who didn’t mind slapping women around.
That afternoon Sergeant Josey of the Larimer County Sheriff’s Office showed up in Empire with twenty-three nearly new shovels that he’d seized from Luther’s former employer. With a dozen or so other police officers watching, Richardson placed the shovels next to each other on the ground.
“It ain’t here,” he said after looking them over. His fellow officers rolled their eyes and guffawed about the shovel “lineup.” Josey shrugged and shook his head; the employer had purchased twenty-three shovels “and that’s what I brought... twenty-three shovels.”
It was Richardson’s turn to shake his head. “I’m tellin’ ya, I’d know the shovel if I saw it, and it ain’t here.” He asked Josey to go back and determine if the employer had been correct about the number.
The shovel “line-up” would go down in the history of Lakewood police lore, earning Richardson a lot of teasing long after the fact. But his fellow officers also had to concede that the next day, a chagrined Josey called from Fort Collins. He’d asked the employer for a bill of sale for the shovels and to both their surprise, it stated that twenty-four shovels had been purchased. “One is missing,” said the Fort Collins detective.
It was Friday, May 21. Richardson was again in Empire when he took the call from Josey but there wasn’t much time to lord it over his fellow officers. Yogi had arrived on the scene. Yogi was a small, rather common-looking bloodhound who worked for the Aurora Police Department south of Denver. He was fresh from his latest triumph.
Earlier in May, 5-year-old Alie Berrelez was abducted from her grandfather’s yard. A massive manhunt yielded nothing until Yogi was called in. The dog led his handler for nearly ten miles from the apartment where the girl lived to the mouth of a canyon where searchers found Alie’s body, stuffed in a duffel bag and thrown down a ravine by her killer. It was evident that the killer had transported her to that point in a car, yet Yogi, with one of the most sensitive noses in the animal kingdom, had been able to follow a trail that was several days old.
Now it was hoped that Yogi would pick up where the other dogs had left off on
the trail of Thomas Luther. Yogi followed the same path the other dogs had and seemed to take a special interest in the area around the sanitation plant, especially a large sludge pit. There Richardson noticed a footprint in the mud at the edge of the pit, and a little further out saw that the crust that had formed above the liquid muck beneath was broken—as though something had been thrown through it. He knew then what he was going to have to do, dig out the sludge pits shovelful by slimy shovelful.
But it’d have to wait until after the weekend. In the meantime, Yogi reached the same dead end as had the other hounds near the restaurant.
On Monday, Scott Richardson got another call from Debrah Snider, who wanted to know why she hadn’t seen anything in the newspapers or television about the Cher Elder case. “Why? You think we ought to put it on the news?” Richardson asked, wondering what was really eating at her.
“Well, I just wondered, you know, two months after the fact, chances of finding this girl alive are real, real, real slim but, I thought, how are you going to find her if nobody even knows she’s missing?”
The detective sighed. He’d been asked the same thing by the family. Her mother, Rhonda, in particular worried about the pace of the investigation. Now that she was coming to accept that she would never see her daughter alive again, she fretted about Cher being buried in “some cold, lonely grave.” He’d spent hours trying to help her understand that slow didn’t mean stopped. It was not enough to arrest somebody, he’d tell her; “I want a conviction and to do that I need to be methodical.” Well, how about a press conference to develop new leads, Rhonda suggested.
Richardson didn’t like talking to the press. He worried about the release of information that only the killer would know, but once released also could be used by informants looking for a deal from the police or a district attorney. Media releases also sometimes did more harm than good by drumming up “leads” that led nowhere but used valuable time and manpower to track down. He’d already discussed the advisability of a press conference with Dennis Hall, the Jefferson County deputy district attorney assigned to the case.
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