As to who the killer might be, the police had few clues, except for blood on the victim’s sweater. It didn’t match the young woman’s, and it was assumed to be the killer’s. It was blood type A one plus one.
Chapter Eighteen
January 25, 1994—Golden, Colorado
The Jefferson County Courthouse is a massive structure of glass, steel, and tan stone nicknamed the Taj Mahal, both because of what it cost to build in the mid-80s and for its domed middle segment’s slight resemblance to its namesake in India. It sits on a barren hill outside of Golden within the shadow of the range of foothills that mark the eastern edge of the Rockies, including Lookout Mountain, where Luther claimed nearly a year earlier that he and Cher Elder had parked for a “quick little intercourse thing.”
Just down the road from the courthouse were two lesser, but just as modern structures, the Jefferson County Jail and the building housing the district attorneys’ offices. Scott Richardson could see the Taj from the room where he, Deputy District Attorney Mark Minor, who was prosecuting Byron Eerebout for the shooting case, and Byron’s two lawyers were meeting.
Eerebout’s lawyers had asked for the meeting. First degree attempted murder carried the possibility of forty-eight years in prison, and their client was getting nervous. The lawyers knew that even if they could get their client off on the attempted murder charges—after all, he shot up the apartment, not people—it was much less likely that he could beat the felony assault raps. With three counts of assault pending, and eight years a pop possible, that was still a lot of years for a young man.
For Richardson, the timing for the little chat could not have been better. The search around Empire had been called off because of deep snow. It was a good time to wait out Eerebout.
Minor, a large, taciturn young lawyer, told the defense attorneys that the offer was to reduce the charges against Eerebout in exchange for the location of Cher Elder’s body. “What do you got?” Minor asked.
“We have a witness who saw Thomas Luther’s hands bloody and covered with mud, and a broken finger, after Cher Elder disappeared,” one of the attorneys said. “We can also supply a witness who was standing nearby when Thomas Luther buried Cher Elder.”
That was fine and good, Richardson interjected, but he wanted more. What about the night Cher disappeared?
“Byron told us he was with Gina the night Cher Elder was killed,” the other defense attorney said. “They went to a bar while Cher stayed behind with everyone else. About midnight, Byron and Gina returned, and at some point, he heard a woman yelling. She is someone’s sister, though I can’t recall the name right now. Byron also said he saw two people leave in Cher’s car, but neither were Cher.”
Richardson listened intently. The scenario fit with what he knew from talking to Gina Jones. However, the allegation that two people left in Cher’s car was new. But it was the lawyer’s next statement that made him sit up.
“Cher was apparently killed because she did not get along with Thomas Luther and was being ‘mouthy,’ ” the first lawyer said.
In early February, Richardson and his new partner Stan Connally drove to Fort Collins to talk to Debrah Snider. Heylin had decided to go back to patrol where the hours were more humane. Connally was a great replacement, particularly in this case, because he had come over from the sex crimes unit.
Unknown to the detectives, Snider had visited Luther several times in Pennsylvania. The post office romance had renewed itself with a flurry of letter-writing, most of it initiated by Debrah. It was clear, even to her, that the Tom Luther she loved the most was the imprisoned romantic she had originally fallen for. “I miss the visiting room,” she wrote January 6. “I miss the anticipation of seeing you. I miss your phone calls. I miss your letters. I miss you telling me that you want a simple life and that as long as we have each other, that would be enough.”
She told him about the deal that had been offered to Byron, which she had heard about from Babe. However, once the attempted murder charges were dropped, Byron planned to plead guilty to second degree assault, then tell the police “that he’d love to cooperate, but he has no information that can help them.”
Snider was frightened of what an upcoming biopsy of a lump in one of her breasts might turn up. “I’m so plain anyway, I couldn’t handle losing a breast. It’s hard enough to accept my position with you when I see the women you’re really attracted to.”
Luther ignored her health concerns and wrote back that he was moving to Delray, West Virginia, where his sister Becky and her current husband had moved. It was only across the border and still an easy drive to his job in Pennsylvania.
The one subject they never wrote about was Cher Elder. Debrah almost believed that if they didn’t mention it, the “trouble” as she called it, would go away. Then Richardson and his partner showed up.
Snider warned the detectives about Byron Eerebout’s plans to renege once he had the worst of the charges dropped. Babe, she said, also told her that one day before the shooting incident in September Byron got drunk and began crying.
“He said he had witnessed his friend being killed, and he couldn’t do anything about it,” Debrah said. “Byron didn’t tell her who it was he was talking about, but she believes it was Cher Elder. Babe thinks that Cher came back from Central City with Luther and that something happened to her at Byron’s apartment.”
Without warning, Snider began to cry herself. “I’m sorry I ever told you anything about Tom,” she said.
“Why?” Richardson asked, genuinely confused by the sudden turnaround.
“Because I told Babe that Tom confessed to buryin’ Cher,” she said. “And now I’m afraid.”
“Then why’d you tell Babe?” he asked.
“Because I was worried you’d play the tape of my confession to Byron, and I wouldn’t know that Byron and Babe knew what I had done,” she replied.
Snider said she thought she could trace all the misery of the past year to one thing: drugs. “He once told me, ‘That’s why they killed her, over drugs.’ ”
Now death and pain seemed to be everywhere. Byron, she said, got into a heated conversation with his girlfriend’s sister and told her, “You’d better not try that shit around someone we know or you might get buried beside someone else.”
Richardson asked Debrah who among Luther’s acquaintances had a sister who might have been to Eerebout’s former apartment. The only one she could think of was Southy Healey. He had two or three sisters, she said, one of whom he lived with.
Debrah Snider admitted that she told Luther about the deal being offered to Byron. “He said, ‘Byron better not say anything because he can’t do a life sentence.’ ”
Richardson left Snider’s house feeling that he was closer than ever to cracking the case. If so, he needed to keep her on his side. He was therefore alarmed a little more than two weeks later when Debrah’s son, Chance, called. The family was worried, he said. His mother had disappeared shortly after she talked to Richardson the last time.
“She didn’t pack nothing or say nothing,” the boy said. “We came home one day and she wasn’t here. And we haven’t heard from her since.”
Richardson entered Debrah’s name and description on a nationwide alert, stating that she might be in danger. However, the mystery was cleared up on April 2 when Snider called to say she was back home after visiting Luther in West Virginia.
Luther was still working near Newport, she said. But she decided not to tell the detective that she was in the process of looking for a job in West Virginia. However, as the date for her to move approached, Luther again seemed intent on punishing her by not writing or calling.
Richardson had sensed that Debrah was holding something back, but now that she was safe, he was preoccupied with other things. The snow was melting in the high country and soon it would be time to resume the search for Cher Elder.
Warned of Eerebout’s treachery, he and Dennis Hall went back to his lawyers and said they wanted something
more concrete before there would be a deal. Since then, there had been no word. However, other rumors were floating around on the prison grapevine.
Down in the penitentiary in Canon City, inmate Wesley Martin told a guard that another inmate, Rick Hampton, told him that Luther killed and buried Cher Elder. The guard relayed the information to Richardson, who drove down to interview the two men.
Martin had nothing new to add. Hampton at first played the tough guy, shrugging when Richardson tried to appeal to his conscience by describing what Cher’s family was going through. But after a few minutes, he admitted that Luther told him that he killed the girl, “but police will never find the body. He learned his lesson the last time.”
Asked how he thought Luther would have killed her, Hampton said, “He would strangle her.” He thought Luther probably would have buried her at a “favorite place” high in the mountains near Leadville. In their prison days, when Luther talked about killing counselor Gloria Greene, he showed Hampton a photograph of his favorite place and said that’s where he’d dump Greene’s body.
Richardson left the prison not knowing what to think. On one hand, Hampton could have made it all up. But they hadn’t talked about any deals and, in fact, Hampton had clammed up again.
Hampton also couldn’t have known that Richardson was aware of Luther’s homicidal thoughts regarding Gloria Greene. And it wasn’t the first time Richardson had heard about Luther’s promise that the next time he would bury the body so that police couldn’t find her.
Cher Elder had been missing for a year, a long time for the successful prosecution of a homicide case. In the meantime, her family suffered.
Van Edwards confided to Richardson that he was worried about his wife, Rhonda. On holidays, once a cause for large celebrations, she now hid in her room and wouldn’t come out.
She had tried to keep her fears and emotions in check by playing detective, until she kept running into walls. She then threw herself into her work for the City of Grand Junction in the northwest corner of Colorado, burying herself in the troubles of her fellow citizens to ease her own horror. But it wasn’t working anymore.
Van said she would come home from work and cry for hours. “I’ve found her outside at night, looking up at the stars and asking, ‘Where are you? Where are you?’
“Other times I wake up and she’s gone. She’ll be out in the kitchen, staring at a cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette. She doesn’t even notice I’m there, just keeps sayin’, ‘I want to find my baby. I just want to find my baby.’ ”
Cher’s father, Earl, wasn’t doing any better. He’d made independent attempts to find Luther since the press conference but had been unable to locate him. Like his former wife, he was on a wild emotional ride. He’d been in the process of divorcing his second wife when Cher disappeared; Debbie, like Van, had known Cher most of the girl’s life and was also devastated. But, estranged, they couldn’t even lean on each other to get through the tough times.
Earl Elder suffered through days, even weeks, of severe depression when he didn’t want to talk to anyone. He alternated between raging around the house and weeping in a chair. When he saw a young mother with her children, he’d recall how Cher wanted a big family and start crying.
Seeing and hearing all this, Richardson was in no mood to commiserate when he got a call on April 12 from Byron Eerebout, who whined, “Tom’s friends come up to me and say they’re gonna kill me and my family. They had pictures of some girl that they took care of ... that was buried up in the mountains. It wasn’t Cher. She had blond hair. They showed a picture of the grave that was dug and then they showed her in a car being lowered into it by another truck. She was a real rich girl from Summit County, her throat was slashed.”
The photograph had been shown to him by a friend of Luther’s who went by the nickname Mongo, Eerebout said. The message was clear: a snitch’s life wasn’t worth a damn in prison.
Eerebout complained that he wasn’t guilty of the attempted murder in September. “It wasn’t me,” he said. “Everybody keeps comin’ up to me, like the lawyers and stuff. And they say this is all basically being done because of the Cher Elder thing.”
Richardson interrupted. He wouldn’t talk to Byron about the shooting case, but if he wanted to say something about Cher ....
“Okay, well I told my attorney that I have the name of the person that did it. Tom was the one that got rid of it, but this other guy’s the one that did it.”
“We made the offer if you’d give us a location of Cher’s body,” Richardson said.
“See, I don’t know the location, but I know who does.” Byron said.
Eerebout wasn’t sure if Elder had come back to his apartment, but he didn’t think so because the woman he saw briefly that morning had longer hair. He thought the woman might have been Southy’s sister. Southy had been at the apartment that morning wearing a torn and bloody shirt, giving the excuse that he’d been in a fight with police at a local bar. “Him and Tom were supposedly the ones that did it.”
Babe Rivinius had raised the money to get her son out on bond. Now he complained to Richardson that he had recently married Tiffany and didn’t want to be an old man when he got out of prison. But he wanted a new deal before he gave anymore information: no charges in the Elder case and no prison time for the shooting incident. He made an appointment to come in the next afternoon to talk.
But Eerebout never made it to Richardson’s office after telling his mother and lawyers of his plan. They talked him into taking his chances in court.
In June, the jury acquitted him of the attempted murder charges but found him guilty of three counts of first degree assault, each one of which carried a maximum penalty of eight years. The terms would run consecutively. Twenty-four years in all, and he’d have to serve at least two-thirds of it.
Debrah Snider arrived in West Virginia in May determined to put Cher Elder out of her mind. There was nothing more she could do for the missing woman or her family. She had told Richardson everything she knew; he would have to do the rest if he wanted to take Tom away from her. She just wanted to make a life with the man she loved.
However, Luther didn’t allow her to move into his cabin in a remote, wooded area near Delray. She should have seen it coming from a letter he wrote on April 20, exactly one year after his first confrontation with Richardson.
Luther wanted her to stop trying to manipulate him and accept him the way he was. He accused her of wanting to know where he was and who he was with every second, to lock him up in mind and spirit. He felt he should just cut all ties and cease prolonging their agony. She should just stay in Colorado and forget about him.
Snider had gone anyway and rented a space at a campground where she lived in her van. She took a job as a nurse at Rocksbury Correctional Institute in Hagerstown, Maryland, and saw Luther, when he let her, on her days off. His behavior toward her swung back and forth between “Good Tom” and “Bad Tom.”
On July 4, Bad Tom had a few friends over for a cookout. Debrah, who had complained about his other girlfriends and had been put on restriction, was not invited. Miserable, she lay in the weeds near his cabin and watched. At one point, he emerged from his cabin with a rifle and a shotgun, neither of which he was supposed to have as an ex-felon.
On July 12, the West Virginia State Patrol office in Delray received a telephone call from a woman identifying herself as Debrah Snider. She wanted to let them know that her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend, one Thomas Luther, was suspected of murdering a missing female in Colorado. He was now living in their neck of the woods.
She said she moved from Colorado to be with Luther and now they were splitting up. She thought that she better warn them that Luther recently purchased a .12-gauge shotgun and a rifle. And he didn’t like cops, particularly a Colorado detective named Scott Richardson, who they should contact for more information. She said she didn’t care what happened next.
Yet a week later, Debrah and Tom were back together. He was even letting
her stay for longer periods of time at the cabin, and she allowed herself to imagine that life might someday always be so good.
In early August, they went on a small vacation to a nearby campground for the weekend, bringing two cars because they planned to leave from there to go their separate ways: Tom back to Delray, Debrah to her job in Maryland.
Sunday, the day they were to leave the campground, a young woman—athletic, slender, sculpted in her Spandex outfit—sped by on rollerblades. Snider caught Luther watching as the girl raced off around the corner. He had that look in his eyes he got whenever he saw an attractive young woman and thought he wasn’t being noticed. A hungry, predatory look.
As they began to leave the campground a couple of hours later, Luther, who was in the lead, suddenly pulled over and tried to wave her around. Debrah refused to pull ahead. She didn’t know if she was reacting out of jealousy or a premonition, but all she could think of was the girl on rollerblades and the look in her lover’s eyes.
However, he insisted that he had decided to take a nap before going home and so would stay behind. In the end, Snider, who had to get to work, left despite her fears. When she saw him a few days later, he was relaxed and said the nap had done him a lot of good.
A week later, however, Snider was at a the local post office when she noticed a new poster for a missing woman. The poster said the woman was in her 20s and had disappeared the week before.
Snider stared at the poster. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought the fuzzy photograph looked like the young woman at the campground. Suddenly, she couldn’t breathe. She ran out of the post office. It couldn’t be the same girl, she told herself, you’re just imagining the worst. But she didn’t go back in to look again.
A few nights later, while working a late night shift and all alone, Debrah thought she heard a voice. She wondered who was talking before realizing that the voice was inside her own head. The voice was urging her to take Tom Luther to church.
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