“I mean beyond today,” Richardson said, “ ‘cause you two are gonna get back together. You’re gonna be together until somethin’ beyond your control separates ya.”
Debrah swallowed hard. The detective was telling the truth. She and Tom—their fates—were intertwined for good or bad, just like he’d told her in his letters. “You know, there is something goin’ on with him,” she said. “I don’t know whether it’s anxiety, or if in fact what you said is true... maybe he’s showing a pattern of a serial killer.”
“What are your feelings about your personal safety?” Richardson asked.
“Ah, not real good right now, especially when he’s angry,” she replied. It seemed like, at times, he was toying with her, trying to scare her. “Sometimes he says, ‘Maybe they’re just following me because they know I’m a serial killer and it’s time.’ ”
Still, Luther was confident that the police had not found any evidence in his car. “If he killed her, I think he would’ve done it in such a way as it wouldn’t have happened in the car.... I see him as being cunning enough to get her out of the car. I just think he probably learned some things, ya know, from his last situation.”
Snider began to say, “If he killed her ...” but Richardson stopped her again. There was no more room for ifs, he said. If she was still holding back, she needed to talk openly. He brought up Cher’s family again. “They make you look like the happiest person in the world. They’re breaking down, their kids are going through therapy. The father’s broke down ... there’s a difference between breaking and broke.” He got up and began pacing the little interview room.
“The mother is gone to pot. Even the kids. Cher had one brother and one sister. I think the brother’s about twelve and is seeing a pyschologist. It may sound crazy, but there’s a sense of comfort knowing that your daughter is not lying out under a rock pile. It’s that not knowing that actually drives people to suicide.”
Richardson stopped pacing and looked down on Debrah’s tear-streaked face. This wasn’t Interview Technique 101 anymore, this was from his heart.
“All they’re doin’ is they’re begging me to find their daughter’s body so that they can put her to rest. To the point that they will call two, three o’clock in the morning talkin’ on my answering machine crying, sayin’ they just had a dream and they want me to find her. They call me ‘cause I’m workin’ on the case and they just want a voice to talk to. That’s rock bottom, Debbie. You think it’s hard on you ... think about bein’ the mother of Cher Elder or the father of Cher Elder.”
Debrah sobbed, her heart broken. “I’m not protecting anybody. I don’t know anything else I can tell ya. If I could figure out how it happened, get him to show me where the body is, I would certainly do that. I think he’s ready to leave. I think he said something about wanting to go back to Vermont.
“He’s blaming me. It’s all my fault.”
Chapter Seventeen
September 10, 1993—Grand Junction, Colorado
Rhonda Edwards woke in a cold sweat. The room was dark, and she was afraid to move as she lay listening to the silence. The dream that awakened her had been so real—the sounds, the sensations.
In her dream she—or was it Cher? she couldn’t tell—was in a car traveling down a long, dark road through the mountains. She could feel the car sway as it whipped around curves. Her head lay on a seat, her eyes looking up at the full moon rising above the black silhouettes of trees outside the window. But she couldn’t move, it was as if she was being held down by some thick, invisible liquid that made it difficult to breathe and her limbs heavy.
She’d heard gravel crunching beneath the tires as the car rolled to a stop. Then she was outside in the moonlight. There was the sound of a rushing stream. Suddenly she heard an excruciatingly loud noise and felt an immense pressure against the left side of her head, behind her ear ...
In her bed, Rhonda reached behind her head expecting to feel warm, sticky blood. There was nothing. She summoned the nerve to turn on the lamp on her nightstand. The shadows fled as she reached for her diary. Opening to a blank page, she noted the time: 3:05 A.M. and began to write what she could remember of the dream. The car ride. The moon. The sound and the pressure. “Instantly, I close my eyes as the light grows bright and there is a sudden, heavy warmth that runs through my body. I shrink into nothingness.”
The dream had been more vivid than any of the others that had haunted her since Cher disappeared, but it was not the first to disturb her sleep. One of the more frequent involved driving past Victorian gingerbread-style houses of the sort common to mining towns in the mountains. Other details were usually more difficult to recall, except for the vague feeling that the dreams had something to do with her missing daughter. And when she woke from them, the clock almost always stood at 3:05 A.M., each instance dutifully noted in her diary.
Long after Detective Richardson called the family together to say that he believed Cher had been murdered and that he had a suspect, Rhonda and her second husband, Van Edwards, a long-haul trucker, refused to give up hope. Maybe Cher just got fed up and went somewhere to think things through, they told each other. They called all the friends she had in different parts of the country—California, Missouri, Illinois, Colorado. They made posters, some of which Van tacked up in truck stops during his cross-country journeys.
They’d occasionally get calls, but the leads never panned out. Van found it mysterious that at one truck stop near Chicago that summer, the poster he hung of Cher was torn down from a posterboard where dozens of other such posters, some much older than his, remained undisturbed.
As the weeks stretched into months, Rhonda would call Richardson to scream or yell or cry. She knew it wasn’t his fault that the investigation seemed to crawl along, and to his credit, he always let her get it out without interrupting or getting angry. She often called just after three in the morning, following a dream. She knew he wouldn’t be in. “I just wanted to hear your voice,” she’d say to his message machine. “I just wanted to know you’re still out there.”
Rhonda was tormented by guilt. Maybe she had raised Cher to be too trusting, too independent. “Did I contribute to her death?” she asked herself in her diary. “Was I too busy at work? Did I listen enough?” She wondered if things might have worked out differently if she had allowed Cher to marry her high school boyfriend.
Lying in her bed alone, Van somewhere out on the road, Rhonda shuddered with fear recalling the apocalyptic dream and began writing again. “It felt so real ... I wondered if He had come back to earth, and I was witnessing the end of the world.
“Or was I seeing death as Cher saw it?”
After the bars closed on the morning of September 23, 25-year-old Mark Makarov-Junev and his 21-year-old girlfriend, Patty pulled up to the drive-through at a Lakewood fast food restaurant. They just finished ordering when Mark noticed a white Pontiac Firebird pull in behind him. But he wasn’t particularly alarmed when Byron Eerebout got out of the driver’s side door and approached. They’d had some disagreements in the recent past but had since cleared the air. Besides, Mark could see his first cousin, Robert Makarov-Junev, was sitting on the passenger side of the white car.
The disagreement involved about $475 Mark owed Eerebout for cocaine. Byron had flattened two of his tires with an icepick a few days before. Then Makarov-Junev retaliated by locating Eerebout at an apartment and threatening to “kick your ass.” Byron scurried away from Mark, a much larger young man, and ran into the kitchen where he said he was “calling Thomas Luther.”
“Thomas is on the phone,” he yelled at Makarov-Junev who then left, apparently the ex-convict’s reputation impressed the small-time criminals and drug dealers who made up much of Eerebout’s circle of associates. But just the day before, due to Pam Rivinius’s intercession, the pair had shook hands and agreed to work out their differences amicably.
“What’s going on?” Mark asked as Byron walked up.
“Not much,” Eerebout re
plied as he raised a canister of Mace and sprayed Mark in the face. When Mark, blinded, raised his hands to his face, Eerebout began striking him with a wooden dowel about the thickness of a silver dollar and cursing, “You don’t know who you’re fucking with.”
Eerebout ran back to the Firebird yelling, “I’ll be back,” and then sped away. Makarov-Junev and his girlfriend drove to her apartment where he ran to the bathroom to wash the Mace off. She went to check on messages left on her telephone recorder. A moment later, she yelled, “Mark, you better come hear this!”
The first message was from his cousin, Robert, wanting to know where he would be that night. However, it was the next two messages, recorded just a few minutes before they got home, that frightened Patty.
“Yo, this is Byron, guys,” the first one said. “If you don’t answer the phone right now and goddamn give me money, it’s your ass, Mark. I’m not fuckin’ scared of your ass, motherfucker. You asked me the other night who you were dealin’ with. You don’t know who you’re dealin’ with. We’re on our way to her house right now dude. I ain’t no fuckin’ chickenshit. You can ask anybody, dude, I’ll fuckin’ do it. If we go rounds, dude, whoever wins, dude, that’s all it takes. I’m comin’ to get you, bud. You listening to this, motherfucker? Goodbye and good fuckin’ riddance.”
That message was followed by another from Eerebout. “You hear this, Mark,” he said. A gunshot rang out. “I’m coming to get you.”
The sound had hardly stop reverberating in their ears when Patty looked up and pointed out the picture window of her ground-floor apartment. A white Pontiac Firebird was cruising slowly up the street. Makarov-Junev ordered her to close the blinds, but in her panic, she pulled the whole device down. They were exposed in the car headlights.
Byron Eerebout got out of the car. They could see he was carrying a large handgun. “I’m going to kill you, you motherfucker, Mark,” he screamed and raised the gun.
“Get down,” Mark yelled. He and Patty fell to the floor as a bullet crashed through the picture window where they had been standing. As more shots were fired, Patty crawled to her kitchen and, reaching up, grabbed the telephone and called 911. She could hear Eerebout yelling outside, then the yelling stopped and she heard the sound of car tires screeching.
At 2 A.M., police responding to a report of “shots fired” arrived at the apartment. An officer was in the room when Eerebout called again to threaten Makarov-Junev.
After the call, the officer asked if Mark knew where they could find Eerebout, who he had identified as the attacker. Mark thought a minute, then called Mike Coovrey, who went by the nickname Garfus. He knew Garfus was out of town, but several of Byron’s friends were housesitting and might know where to find him. He was surprised when Byron picked up the telephone.
A half hour later, Lakewood police officers and detectives were quietly establishing a perimeter around Coovrey’s house when they saw two figures emerge from the rear of the building and toss two large bundles over a fence. It was too dark to get a good look at the pair, except to note that the shorter of the two was wearing white pants.
A few minutes later, Byron Eerebout and his latest girlfriend, Tiffany Crawford, walked out the front door where they were met by police officers with guns drawn. The couple was forced to lie on the sidewalk with their hands over the backs of the necks while more officers burst into the house and arrested the other occupants, including Robert Makarov-Junev.
Searching Eerebout’s car, the police found a spent shell casing and fifty rounds of .38-caliber ammunition. The two large bundles on the other side of the fence contained more than twenty pounds of marijuana.
Scott Richardson was asleep at home when Detective Mike Powell called at 3:30. “Sorry to call so early,” said Powell, “but thought you’d want to know that we arrested Byron Eerebout an hour ago for felony assault.”
There was no danger that Richardson would be put off by the early morning telephone call. He’d left instructions that if the Eerebout boys turned up on any crime reports, he wanted to be notified as soon as possible. The idea of honor among thieves and convict loyalty usually lasted about as long as it took one of these punks to get in trouble. He knew Byron wasn’t the sort to stay out of trouble long, and when he messed up, Richardson wanted to be there to put the screws to him.
Eerebout was already on probation for forgery. And the Golden Police Department’s drug task force had been working for months to nail him for dealing marijuana and psychedelic mushrooms. An informant, who had sold the white Pontiac to Byron for cash and marijuana, was close to making a buy for the police.
But this was even better, Richardson thought. Felony assault was worth a lot of years in the joint. He was soon dressed and on his way to the house where Byron Eerebout and his friends were in custody. After the frustrations of the past few months, the detective dared hope that at last he was getting a real break.
Following Debrah Snider’s confession, the task force had checked out several possible gravesites east on Interstate 70. In particular, they had searched several suspicious areas near stone historical markers. But there was nothing. More flights over Empire using the FLIR system were just as fruitless.
Cher Elder, 20, shortly before she disappeared in March 1993.
(Photo courtesy Rhonda Edwards)
Thomas Luther, 38, after his extradition to Colorado in April 1995 to face charges of murdering Cher Elder.
(Photo courtesy Lakewood, Colorado Police Department)
On the night of her death, after an argument with former boyfriend Byron Eerebout, Cher Elder left Eerebout’s apartment with Luther.
(Photo courtesy Lakewood, Colorado Police Department)
J.D. Eerebout, one of Byron’s younger brothers, drove Luther to Empire, Colorado to check on Cher Elder’s grave when Luther feared police had discovered it. (Photo courtesy Lakewood, Colorado Police Department)
Police correctly suspected Dennis “Southy” Healey and the Eerebouts knew more about Luther’s connection to Cher Elder’s death than they had originally admitted. Healey testified he drove Luther close to the gravesite so Luther could bury the body deeper.
(Photo courtesy Lakewood, Colorado Police Department)
Nearly two weeks after she disappeared, Cher Elder’s Honda Accord was discovered in a grocery store parking lot within easy walking distance of Byron Eerebout’s apartment.
(Photo courtesy Lakewood, Colorado Police Department)
The interior of Luther’s Blue Geo Metro revealed a stain on the back seat. According to Luther, Elder vomited after sex in the front seat, however police determined the stain’s location was inconsistent with his story. Tests showed the dirt on the shovel was consistent with soil from Elder’s grave, but could not prove it was identical.
(Photo courtesy Lakewood, Colorado Police Department)
Aerial view of Cher Elder’s gravesite near the old mining town of Empire in the mountains west of Denver. Unlike most killers, Luther carried his victim’s body uphill rather than downhill, hindering the police investigation.
(Photo courtesy Lakewood, Colorado Police Department)
The burial site as found by Detective Scott Richardson.
(Photo courtesy Lakewood, Colorado Police Department)
The forensic anthropologists of NecroSearch International were called in to carefully exhume Cher Elder’s remains. Detective Richardson slept next to the snowy site several nights to make sure it was not disturbed by anyone or by animals.
(Photo courtesy Lakewood, Colorado Police Department)
Cher Elder had been shot three times in close proximity behind her left ear, leading investigators to conclude she was either unconscious or being held down when executed.
(Photo courtesy Lakewood, Colorado Police Department)
On February 12, 1982, Mary Brown was sexually assaulted and nearly beaten to death before escaping from Luther’s car a few miles from Breckenridge, Colorado. Luther received a sentence of 15 years after pleading guilty to
first degree assault. (Photo courtesy Summit County, Colorado Sheriff)
Investigators believed Luther attacked women who reminded him of his mother as she looked when he was a child. Her wedding picture shows her as petite, with shoulder-length dark hair.
(Photo courtesy Lakewood, Colorado Police Department)
Debrah Snider and Tom Luther in the visiting room at the Colorado state penitentiary two years before his January 1993 release. Snider, a nurse, met Luther when he was hospitalized for an allergic reaction and began a correspondence with him that led to a serious relationship.
(Photo courtesy Debrah Snider)
Luther (lower right), his mother Betty (top center), and his sisters and brothers. (Photo courtesy Debrah Snider)
21-year-old Annette Schnee’s body was not found until July. Both she and Oberholtzer had disappeared within hours of each other and had been shot in the back as each tried to flee from an attacker. After Luther was arrested for assaulting Mary Brown, he told fellow inmates about killing two other women. The timing and locale of Brown’s attack and the the details of Luther’s remarks, led police to suspect him in both Schnee’s and Oberholtzer’s murders.
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