When they reached Longmont, Debrah pulled into a fast-food restaurant parking lot where Luther indicated he was supposed to meet his partner in crime. Snider knew something important having to do with the press conference was up. When Luther went into the restaurant to use the bathroom, she hopped out of the truck and ran across the lot to a pay phone to call Richardson. He wasn’t in.
“Where’d you go?” Luther, who was waiting in the truck, asked when she got back. He was suspicious and looked behind her as if he expected the police to be following.
“I was just requesting a song on the radio,” she replied. A country-western fan who often requested songs, it was a plausible explanation.
Luther went back into the restaurant and again Snider tried to call Richardson. This time when she got back, Luther was angry and was about to confront her when Healey drove up and parked next to the truck. With him was a woman and a barrel-chested man. Debrah recognized the woman as one of Healey’s sisters; in fact, she had once warned her that Luther had buried Cher, but she hadn’t seemed to care. She didn’t know the man except that he was the other woman’s boyfriend.
Ordering Snider to remain in the truck, Luther got out, as did Healey. They huddled near the back of both cars, talking quietly but animatedly. The two men returned to their respective vehicles and left the lot. Luther wouldn’t talk the rest of the way to Fort Collins.
In the meantime, Southy Healey had barely pulled back onto the highway when he exclaimed that Luther was “a fuckin’ asshole punk.” He kept repeating the same thing until the other man, Will Fletcher, asked what he was so angry about. Fletcher had met Luther, who he knew as “Lou,” only a couple of times, including once back in March or April when Luther had come to get Southy at three in the morning.
Southy would not respond to Joe’s inquiry until they got home and were away from his sister. That’s when he explained that Luther had “done something” to a girl.
“What do you mean?” Fletcher asked.
“She’s not around anymore,” Healey replied.
“Were you involved?”
“Nah. I wasn’t even around when he killed her. But—” Healey hesitated. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to say too much to his sister’s boyfriend. “Anyway, he’s worried that the cops are getting close to finding her body.”
Fletcher nodded and let the subject drop. It didn’t pay to be too nosy about killings.
Scott Richardson was struck by how frail Mary Brown seemed as they talked in the interview room. She was a pretty woman with dark, childlike eyes, but nervous and obviously still shaken by the experience more than a decade earlier.
Brown said she was afraid, more than ever now that Luther was out on the streets preying on women again. She wanted her new married identity protected so that he couldn’t track her, but otherwise, she also wanted desperately to tell her story and “help anyway that I can.”
The fact that the Summit County prosecutor had dropped the attempted murder charge had been beyond her comprehension. How could anyone who had seen the photographs of the blood-splattered truck have thought otherwise? Salt was rubbed in her wounds when she was told that Luther could only be charged with second-degree sexual assault because he had used a foreign object instead of his penis.
And after all that, she had been denied her day in court. So she had made it a point to attend Luther’s parole hearings, recounting in horrific detail the unprovoked assault. “He meant to kill me,” she always said. But even though Luther remained in prison after each hearing, it was little consolation for what she continued to suffer.
The first few months after the attack were a nightmare. She couldn’t sleep without a family member in the same room. But even they were too frightened of Luther to be much assurance. Her parents sold their home and moved and had their telephone numbers unlisted. When she learned that Luther had tried to have her killed from his jail cell, she felt like sooner or later he would come after her again.
Therapy had evoked flashbacks of that night, including one in which she remembered looking back over her shoulder at the barrel of a gun pointed at her head. She could only surmise that he hadn’t shot because they were in a neighborhood and someone might have heard.
At last, a friend had recommended that she read a book in which the basic premise was that a person can’t control what happens, only his or her response to it. She grew determined that she would not let Thomas Luther win by ruining the rest of her life. She would watch for him and someday she hoped she would get the chance to stare him in the face and let the world know what a monster he was.
In the meantime, she took self-defense courses in basic street-fighting techniques and was so proficient that she became an instructor. But her proudest moment was when she persuaded the Colorado legislature to change the laws governing rape so that penetration with a foreign object was equal to any other sort of rape.
Months had passed into years, but still she was left with physical reminders of the attack. Nerve damage to her neck that made it impossible to relax the muscles in one shoulder. Debilitating headaches that caused her to vomit and left her too weak to stand.
Yet, the hardest obstacles to overcome were psychological. Never again could she be the naive, friendly girl who had gone to the mountains for a ski trip and accepted a ride from a nice-looking young man. Being near men, even in a group setting, caused her to panic and look for a way to escape.
It was nearly two years before she dated again, and even that caused a setback. First, her date got lost on the way to the restaurant; then he reached down under the seat to retrieve something and she began screaming. Her fear turned into embarrassment when, rather than a hammer or gun, he pulled out a dozen roses.
Little by little, Mary Brown recovered. She met her husband a year after her first date. They were taking classes together and hanging out with the same people. The courtship was slow, but fortunately he was a patient man, willing to be friends long before they were anything else. She had married him and gone on with her life, but there were few days when she was not haunted by the memory of Thomas Luther.
When Sheriff Morales called to warn her that he was out, the old fear had risen in her throat again like bile as she wondered if he would try to find her. There had been no word of Luther for months and she was hoping he had moved to another state when she picked up the July 13 newspaper; there was his photograph included in a story about a missing girl. Suddenly, she was physically ill and barely made it to the bathroom before being overcome with dizziness. When at last she could pull herself together, she had picked up the telephone and called Richardson.
“If he isn’t your prime suspect, he better be,” she told the detective within minutes of when they met.
Richardson had read the report about the attack on Mary Brown and seen the photographs of her taken shortly afterward in which she was wearing a neck brace, her face bruised and swollen. However, what he read did not prepare him for her graphic description of the attack. He felt sorry that she had to relive the experience, but he needed to know how the attack went down, which might give him an idea of how Cher had died.
Luther, she said, crying as she talked, attacked without provocation or warning. She felt certain he wanted to kill her and leave her body in the woods beyond the snowdrifts but had simply run out of steam after beating and raping her.
“I was definitely not his first victim,” she said. “All the cursing was plural, as if he was talking to other women he had done this to.”
Richardson said goodbye to Mary Brown with a better understanding of the man he hoped to bring down. Luther was what was known as a “blitz” attacker, using his superior size and strength to beat down any resistance before and during the sexual assault. He used whatever he had handy: his fists, a hammer. Mary’s recollection of a gun was certainly interesting, considering the homicides over in Breckenridge. Luther took his victims to remote areas for the assault, and then apparently drove elsewhere to dump their bodies.
/> After Luther had worn himself out attacking her, Mary had seized on a moment of doubt or confusion on Luther’s part to jump out of his truck before he reconsidered and took her “somewhere.” Richardson believed that Brown was right to believe that “somewhere” meant somewhere to die. He recalled Shepard’s telephone call claiming that Luther had said the next girl wouldn’t live and the police would never find her body. Apparently, he learned his lesson with Mary Brown.
Luther was any woman’s greatest fear. He didn’t need to be provoked and even giving him what he wanted, as Mary had attempted to do to save her life, only made him angrier.
Richardson knew that his wife and kids feared Luther. Sabrina had grown up to be a tough young woman, as comfortable in the wild hunting big game as he was. But she had never quite gotten over the scare of that day when Luther had threatened to kill her and the boys. Now, in the second trimester of her pregnancy, she still carried a gun in her purse. And the twins often slept in their parents’ bed or curled up on the floor next to it, afraid that Thomas Luther hid in the dark shadows of their room at night.
Richardson was still absorbing the interview with Mary when he was contacted by Bonita Freeburg, a parole officer. Luther, she said, was threatening to kill a friend and colleague of hers. Her friend’s name was Gloria Greene, the woman who had run the sexual offenders program in Colorado prisons and who had kicked Luther out of class. Prison authorities, Freeburg said, had recently found letters to other inmates from Luther stating that he was going to rape and kill Greene.
Richardson called the prison counselor. Yes, Greene replied, she had been contacted by a prison investigator just two weeks earlier, who had relayed the threats made against her life by Luther.
“I’m scared to death,” she said. “He hates me.”
Greene’s comments reiterated what Richardson had been hearing since the press conference. Whether it was prison associates, former jailers, counselors, other cops, or victims, they all thought the same thing: The animal was out of the cage, and it had only been a matter of time before he killed again.
On August 14, Debrah Snider was talking to Deputy Dan Gilliam of Larimer County about Luther’s narcotic transactions and burglaries. She still hoped that if Luther was in prison, Richardson would decide that was good enough, and that maybe, someday, they could be together again. But Gilliam, who was aware of the Elder case, asked if she had anything new to add to that investigation.
“I think he may have killed her,” she told the surprised deputy. She couldn’t lie anymore. Luther seemed to enjoy his new title of “serial killer,” at least when he was angry with her. She’d overheard him bragging to the Eerebouts and Healey that the press conference was Richardson’s last shot.
“You know I have to tell Richardson,” Gilliam said. She looked down and nodded, “Yeah, I know.”
Richardson called Snider the next day. She admitted she had not been “one hundred percent truthful” in their previous conversations. At last, she told him that Luther had admitted burying the body after his first meeting with Richardson. “He said next to a stone historical marker on east Interstate 70.”
The direction didn’t make sense to Richardson. Interstate 70 was on the plains east of Denver. Empire was directly west, well up into the mountains. Then again, maybe Luther had known he was being followed and purposely led them in the wrong direction—or he had lied to Debrah.
But it was what Snider said next that really got his attention. She told him that she was gone the weekend Cher Elder disappeared, but when she returned that Monday, Luther’s hands were covered with cuts and bruises. “And his little finger was broken.
... When I called you that day and said he might be going to visit the body... actually he told me he was worried about animals digging up the grave and he wanted to bury her better. He said the grave was shallow, but he piled two feet of rocks on top. He spent all night doing it and walked ten miles to avoid being followed.”
The day that she and Luther had gone to the public defender’s office in Golden, she said she asked him if he had killed Cher. He hadn’t answered directly, saying instead, “Well, if you were in trouble and someone was going to put you away, I’d do anything to prevent it.”
Richardson told her she needed to come to his office in Lakewood where they could sit down together and “get this straightened out.” She agreed to come to Lakewood.
The next day, Snider had no sooner taken a seat in an interview room than she began to weep. “I don’t know what you want from me,” she cried.
“Well, number one, I want the truth, but I don’t want parts of the truth. I need the whole truth,” Richardson said. “I don’t have to tell ya that we’re talkin’ serious charges. And you don’t wanna end up in the middle of it.”
Debrah looked up. “I am in the middle of it. How can I not be in the middle of it?”
Richardson nodded. “Start with when you got back from Washington.”
“I was surprised ‘cause he was still in bed and, ya know, it’s the middle of the day,” she said. “I can’t remember everything exactly but I know his hands were real sore, they had abrasions on ’em, and his little finger on one hand was so sore he thought it was broken. And when I asked him about it, he told me that somebody had given him a whole bunch of AK-47s and that he had been afraid to drive with ‘em and so he stopped and buried them along I-25. He broke my shovel... and had to finish buryin’ them by hand and that’s how they got hurt.”
Richardson asked about Luther’s missing boots and clothes. “What he told me he’d done is sat them on the top of the car when he changed and forgot them and drove away.”
Debrah repeated the Mortho story, only now she added the part about going to find the body to bury her because he did not want to be connected to the murder. “I asked him why he didn’t go to the police, but he said you’d just use this to hang him and wouldn’t care about the truth. ... And also that he couldn’t snitch on his friends.”
“Who do you honestly feel killed her? Richardson asked.
“I honestly don’t know,” Snider said. “There are times whenever I—”
Richardson interrupted; he was tired of her vacillating. Luther had made up a nice story, he said, the misunderstood outlaw just trying to save his friends. So her boyfriend, who thought cops were constantly watching him, had taken this huge chance of getting caught with a body to help someone else stay out of prison. “It doesn’t make any sense. And what about burying a box of AK-47s the same time she disappears?”
Debrah hung her head and sighed. “It adds up to a bunch of things that points in the direction of ... he probably hurt this girl,” she said. “He probably killed her.”
Finally, Richardson thought, a real breakthrough. “Now I need you to help me find the body.”
“I don’t know where she is,” Snider complained. “I only know he says he walked a long ways because he was suspicious.
... He got angry at me because the backpack I loaned him had detachable pockets, and I guess one came off at the grave and he had to go back for it.”
Richardson said he could not understand why she hadn’t asked Luther more about where the body was located. “I guess curiosity kills the cat, but I would want to know.”
Debrah shook head. “You need to understand that I didn’t wanna be responsible for sending him back to prison. If I could give you information that would help you if he has done something wrong, that wouldn’t be my fault. But, I don’t wanna be responsible for sending him back to prison.”
Richardson waved off her explanation. “Well, Thomas Luther is responsible...”
“I know, ultimately,” Debrah conceded.
But Richardson wouldn’t listen. “I don’t care if you go out there and show us exactly where the body is, that doesn’t make you responsible for putting Thomas Luther back in prison.”
“In his mind it would.”
“Well, Thomas Luther’s puttin’ Thomas Luther back, period. The problem is ..
. this is not the kind of case where you would want in the end to come out that the whole time you knew where the body was.”
“I don’t know where it is,” Snider protested.
Still, he wouldn’t let up. “I mean, because then what you got is, you got Thomas Luther sinking, and he kind of reaches up and grabs Debrah Snider and pulls her right down.”
Debrah reached for a tissue and wiped her eyes. “I think he’s already done that, ya know, but I don’t know where it is. ... At one point when he was real anxious about the coyotes digging her up, I did contemplate going to help him. And then I changed my mind, I didn’t want to know.”
Luther’s paranoia was getting worse, she said, and something else was troubling her. He was coming home with scratches and bruises all over his body. When she asked how he was injured, he told her he’d been hiding out in the mountains, using rough trails so that he couldn’t be followed.
“He’s not sleeping much at night,” Snider said. “And he forgets what story he’s told me. Like sometimes he goes back to the first story. That the last time he saw Cher was when he left her at Byron’s apartment. He forgets he already told me that he buried her. I don’t know what the truth is.”
“What can we do to get him to go back to that body or take you back to the body?” Richardson asked. “The way it’s sounding is, he would if you asked him.”
“Sometimes I think he would,” Debrah replied. “He seems to be pretty grandiose and thinks he’s important and that seems to be part of what makes him important.” Then she shook her head. He was too angry with her, he wasn’t even talking to her, much less trusting her with his darkest secret.
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