Police composite drawing of the man who attacked Heather Smith in April 1993, two weeks after Cher Elder disappeared.
(Photo courtesy Denver, Colorado Police Department)
Heather Smith was attacked and stabbed five times. She identified Luther as her attacker after seeing his photograph in a newspaper reporting his 1995 arrest for Elder’s murder.
(Photo courtesy Heather Weiser)
Luther was sentenced to 35 years for sexually assaulting and beating Bobbi Jo Jones, 32, near Delray, West Virginia in August 1994. Like many of his other victims, she bears a striking resemblance to his mother.
(Photo courtesy West Virginia State Police)
Detective Scott Richardson of the Lakewood, Colorado Police
Department. (Photo courtesy Scott and Sabrina Richardson)
Cher Elder was buried in Grand Junction, Colorado in March 1995, two years after she had been murdered.
(Photo courtesy Rhonda Edwards)
All the while he worried about when Luther would strike again, as he was sure he would. In early September he had been contacted by the Arapahoe County sheriff about the rape and strangulation murder of a 14-year-old girl. She had disappeared August 27 and her body was found in a rural part of the county south of Denver on September 1.
The sheriff called after seeing Richardson’s bulletin stating that Luther had confessed to burying Cher Elder to his girlfriend. “Do you think there’s a connection between Luther and my homicide?” he asked.
“It’s a possibility,” Richardson said. “He’s been in the area.” Whether or not Luther was the killer in this case, Richardson was sure he would attack again unless he was stopped.
Richardson arrived at Garfus’s house and was briefed. He noted that Tiffany Crawford was wearing white pants. The suspects and witnesses were then transported to the Lakewood Police Department and placed in different interview rooms.
Richardson decided to save talking to Eerebout for last and began questioning the others. They all denied knowing about a shooting and the bundles of marijuana. Tiffany swore that Byron had been with her all night, never leaving her side for more than five minutes.
“Well,” said Richardson, “you were either with Byron and are therefore an accomplice in an attempted murder, or you’re lying to give him an alibi.”
Crawford looked scared but stuck to her story. She had no idea of who threw marijuana over a fence, nor did she have any knowledge of a shooting. Yes, she said, she had talked to Byron about the disappearance of Cher Elder. “But it was confidential, and I’m not going to tell you.”
Robert Makarov-Junev admitted that he had been with Byron that night, but denied any incident at the restaurant or any involvement in a shooting. “We went to a bar and then went back to the house,” he said. “I was sleeping on the couch when someone said the cops are here.”
At 8 A.M., Byron Eerebout was sitting alone in an interview room when in walked his worst nightmare, Det. Scott Richardson. Byron was hostile. He waived his Miranda rights but steadfastly denied any involvement in the shooting. “That’s not my dope,” he said of the marijuana.
“Whose was it?” Richardson asked, not that he expected an honest answer.
“Nobody’s,” Eerebout replied. “I’ve never touched it or a gun, and they didn’t see me throw it, and I don’t have a gun.” He then demanded to see his attorneys, which brought the interview to a halt.
However, while being photographed for mugshots, Eerebout admitted that he had Maced Mark, but denied hitting him with a club. He then angrily blamed Richardson for all his recent troubles.
“Why do you keep lying for Thomas Luther about Cher Elder?” Richardson retorted.
Byron’s face flushed a deep red. He nearly spit he was so angry and yelled, “I know where they went that night, and where Luther went afterwards. But it’s for me to know, and you never to find out.”
On a late October afternoon, two women sat in a nice older home in Denver, watching the first snowflakes of an early winter. Heather Smith and her friend Rebecca Hascall had lived with their mothers for a month after the attack before insisting they be allowed to return to their homes. They were together often these days as they tried to pick up the pieces of their lives.
Officially, the case had been declared inactive. Detective Paul Scott kept it going as long as possible, but time ran out. There were plenty of other crimes of violence that needed attention according to his sergeant.
Smith’s former boyfriend had taken a lie-detector test, which had detected no lies about his involvement in the attack. (Then again, Scott mused to himself, the machine detected nothing at all. Heather’s ex hadn’t even responded on the graph to the control questions.)
There was little else to go on. Just the composite picture of the blue-eyed man with the workingman’s hands, and the gray or light-colored curly hair beneath the blue baseball cap with gold lettering. And, of course, the strange, square, silver-rimmed glasses. But there was no suspect. Scott made a copy of the file and tucked it away in his desk while he handed the original over to be filed with other unsolved cases.
Now, as they sat in Heather’s living room, Rebecca complained that the attack had turned her belief system upside down. She had been raised an anti-gun and anti-death penalty liberal. Fear had won the first round when she accepted a gun from her boyfriend.
At first, she had recoiled when he brought it over and laid it on the table. It was ugly. A cold, blue steel .38-caliber revolver.
Then her boyfriend started to cry. “I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to you,” he said. “I can’t be there to protect you all the time.” So she decided to take the gun to make him feel better and find a way to get rid of it later, when they were both stronger.
Hascall picked it up and was surprised by how comforting its weight felt in her hand. It fastened to her like a tick. She had to admit, despite her revulsion at the concept, that it made her feel safe and powerful—the ingredients that had been missing from her personality since the attack. She took the gun home and showed it to her mother who, despite being an even more dyed-in-the-wool liberal, was thrilled.
When she moved back into her own home, Hascall brought the gun with her and kept it under her pillow. Once in awhile she entertained the notion of getting rid of it, and even tried moving it to a hall closet. But it quickly made its way back to her bed following one of her frequent nightmares in which she was sure that someone was breaking into her house.
Heather Smith was another matter. Her friends were outraged when she insisted on moving back into her home. She was being reckless, they said. Her attacker was still out there. He knew where she lived and that she could identify him.
Smith read the newspapers obsessively, looking for cases of assaults and murders that might be related to hers. If she thought something seemed familiar about a suspect in another case, she called Detective Scott. But the suspects were always too short. Or they had an alibi. Or she knew they weren’t the right guy, that she was reaching for straws.
She tried to pretend that she was still the strong one, always asking her friend, Rebecca, how she was feeling. But inside she was as timid as a mouse. He was out there somewhere, lurking in the shadows, haunting her dreams.
She wanted to talk about what had happened to her, to find a reason, but most of her friends grew tired of listening. One even told her that it had been easier to deal with Heather being hurt physically than Heather trying to heal emotionally. Among themselves they knowingly said they would never have put themselves in such a dangerous position. How could Heather have been so foolish?
Hascall heard the comments. It was as if they were blaming Heather for being attacked. Like, she sputtered, Heather had “asked for it.” But the others just learned to talk behind Rebecca’s back as well.
One night at her mother’s house, Rebecca burst into tears over what Smith’s “friends” were saying. Her mother tried explain: “They need a reason why this couldn’t happen to th
em. They’re frightened. We all are. They’re trying to make sense of something that makes no sense.”
Heather knew that she was making her friends uncomfortable and withdrew into her home. She was afraid to go out. Afraid to date. Only another victim could understand and so her relationship with Rebecca had grown. Their lives changed. Even the little things. Neither of them could watch snow falling in the arc of the streetlight without her chest tightening with remembrance.
Rebecca Hascall looked at her friend. The biggest outward change was that once vivacious and carefree, Smith now seemed so fragile. She had lost a lot of weight and was physically shaky, nervous. She knew that Heather was more troubled by the scars, particularly the one down her chest, than she usually let on. Once she’d caught her standing nude in front of a mirror crying. “I’m ugly,” Heather had moaned as tears ran down her cheeks.
They often talked about how trapped they felt simply because they were women. Never safe to walk their dogs at night. At the mercy of whomever might break in. Men were bigger. They were violent and scary.
Winter’s short days only exacerbated the feeling of being prisoners in their homes. “It’s getting dark,” Heather said at last as the streetlights came on, illuminating the snowflakes.
“Yes,” Rebecca conceded hollowly. They both shuddered.
Byron Eerebout called Luther in a panic after his interrogation by Richardson but reached only Debrah Snider. “He’s gone, Byron,” she said, “and I don’t know if he’s comin’ back.”
Luther and Debrah had been fighting more and more often. She was tired of his disappearing for days at a time and suspicious of what he was doing. She also knew that he was getting the younger Eerebout boys—J.D. and Tristan—involved in his drug deals, so she called their father, Skip, and asked him to talk to his friend. “At least for the sake of your younger boys.”
Skip’s response was to call Luther and warn him. “She’s tryin’ to get you sent to prison. Get outta town.”
Tom, of course, was angry with her. He had hardly spoken to her since. But he did return the day after Byron’s arrest.
When she told him about the call, he nodded. “He’s in jail for attempted murder.” Then he was gone again, this time never to return to her home in Fort Collins.
“He’s in Vermont,” Snider told Richardson in early October. “He’s still not talkin’ to me, but his mother told me. He’s going to Chicago and then heading to Pennsylvania to work with his brother-in-law. He’s supposed to be in Pennsylvania on November 1.”
“Do you know where?” Richardson asked. He had Eerebout on the hook for two counts of attempted murder, four counts of assault with a weapon, and another count of possessing narcotics with intent to sell. The detective wanted to know Luther’s whereabouts in case the younger man cracked.
Byron’s alibi had evaporated fairly quickly when Robert Makarov-Junev called and confessed, hoping to get the charges against himself dropped.
“I might as well talk or I could go to prison for motherfuckin’ thirty years for not doin’ a fuckin’ thing,” he said. “What have I got to lose, because I do my time in the joint or he kills me. ... But I’d rather be free and let him come get me.”
Robert said he only showed Eerebout where his cousin was staying with Patty because he thought the two men could talk it out after the assault at the restaurant.
“We come down the street and fuckin’ there’s Mark’s truck and, shit, he goes, ‘There the motherfucker is.’ Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. He fuckin’ threw the gun in the car and says, ‘Let’s get the fuck out of here.’ So we took off and he said, ‘You didn’t see nothin’, dude. You don’t know what happened. Just mind your own business, dude, and everything will be all right, just stay with me.’ Now, the motherfucker’s gonna try to kill me when he gets out of prison.”
With Robert’s help, Richardson had Eerebout right where he wanted him. But Luther was two thousand miles away.
“Let’s see,” Snider said as she checked her address book, “Ah, Newport ... Newport, Pennsylvania.”
Debrah volunteered that Byron’s mother. Babe, had asked her to put up her property to get Byron out of jail on a $170,000 bond. The two women had been talking a lot lately.
However, Debrah told Richardson, she wasn’t about to put up bail for her new friend’s son. “I’ve been tryin’ to get Byron put in jail, not the other way around.”
“Anything else new?” Richardson asked.
Well, Luther, she said, had recently talked to a prison inmate named Rick Hampton about Cher Elder. And she’d just learned that he had gone to Breckenridge after his release from prison to look for his old girlfriend.
“Why is he lookin’ for her?” Richardson asked.
“I don’t have any idea,” Snider responded. “I mean, my guess was that he was tryin’ to find someone to get hooked up with different than me. Which is why he’s not callin’ me. I’m ... I’m the reason that his life isn’t working.”
Debrah said she’d told him all she knew. There was nothing more. For her or the detective. However, she didn’t call to tell him when she received a short letter from Luther a few days later.
The letter was from the nice Tom, the one who got lonely and missed her despite their differences. “It’s great to be home in these little green rolly mountains of Vermont,” he wrote. “I wish there were some way we could get along. I don’t know what to do with you and without you. Well, this is going to be short because I’m not ready to really deal with all my feelings. But I want you to know you’re in my thoughts and in my heart.”
Debrah couldn’t help herself. It seemed that every time she was, however unwilling, ready to accept that he was out of her life, he called or wrote. Good Tom missed her. Good Tom loved her. Good Tom wanted them to be together again someday. Caught up in the almost puppy-dog romance of his letters, it was difficult for Debrah to believe that such a man could be a killer. And so, she found herself in love all over again.
“Dear Tom,” she wrote back. “I miss you so much. I know I made you angry by trying to set limits for our relationship, but maybe if you could have accepted those limits just a little better, Byron wouldn’t be in jail and you wouldn’t have had to leave. I don’t know if we would have ever been able to work things out here, but what a waste that we didn’t try harder.
“Well, love, it’s hard to see you as a Walk-Away-Joe. I fought the State of Colorado for you, but you are a wimp when it came to fighting for us. I hope you one day get settled, maybe it can happen in Pennsylvania. I won’t wish you luck or love with another woman, because I will always love you.... Maybe someday you will come home again, when you’re more settled, or if that can never happen, maybe you’ll call and ask me to come to you. I love you, Debrah.”
Luther wrote back, “I know nothing is perfect, and I’m kinda hurt that you accept the fact that I walked away so easy. After fighting Colorado so hard to get me, you couldn’t say that you would rather see me gone a couple days a month than gone forever?” Besides, how could he love her “proper” with her husband around all the time?
“I miss you, Deb. Sometimes I wish I could get you out of my system and just stay out of yours and your family’s lives, but I can’t seem to do that.”
Indeed, Thomas Luther and Debrah Snider would, as Detective Richardson once told her, continue to get back together until something beyond her control separated them once and for all.
In November, Luther, who once told her that God put them together for a purpose, asked her to meet him “halfway” in Iowa for the Thanksgiving holiday. It was a magical four days for Debrah.
Tom was romantic, bringing her flowers, and patient with her as a lover. They hardly left the room except to eat, a fact she found only mildly disappointing because she wanted to go out dancing. The disappointment dissolved when he invited her to join him back east in February.
“I never have had, and may never have a honeymoon,” she wrote to him on December 9. “But if I never do, t
hose few days will always be remembered as just about as good as one can get.”
Two days later, the glow of the “honeymoon” was beginning to wear off. She had been unable to reach him since they parted and hadn’t received any letters. She also was told by Luther’s mother that because Debrah had seen him for Thanksgiving, her son would be spending Christmas with his family in Vermont.
“I don’t think I’m going to make it ’til February,” she wrote to him. “I put up with you because, despite the fact that you’re such a pain in the ass, you’re still the best thing that’s ever happened to me. But I need you, and you’re unavailable.”
She closed her letter saying she understood about Christmas. “This is your first year out and it’s appropriate that you spend it with your family. But promise me that next year, no matter where you are or what you’re doing, you’ll spend Christmas with me.”
With renewed hope for a future with the man she loved, Debrah Snider posted the letter, forgetting Luther’s own warning from prison that he had a heart half good and half bad ... that “there’s death here and pain for many.”
The day after Snider wrote her letter, the nude body of an unidentified white woman, approximately 20 years old, was found on a hillside five miles from Newport, Pennsylvania. She had been raped vaginally and anally, beaten about the face, and then strangled to death.
The young woman had been pretty; petite at 5’4” and 110 pounds. She had shoulder-length hair. Her clothes, except for a sweater. and any identification as to who she might have been, were missing.
The isolated area where the body was found was dense woods with a lot of undergrowth. The fact that she was found at all was happenstance, as two hunters stumbled upon the remains 200 feet from the nearest road or trail.
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