The boy sounded like he was crying and it cut Richardson to the core. He looked at Cher’s photograph on the wall. A few hours that night wasn’t going to bring her back.
“You’re right,” he said. “I’ll be right home.”
The next day did not start off well. Scott Richardson arrived at the office to find a faxed message from Hansen telling him that his contact with her client had been improper and unethical. Byron Eerebout would not be talking to him again.
Richardson crumpled the fax and tossed it into the wastebasket. Unethical? Hansen was Eerebout’s attorney for the shooting case, which he had been careful to avoid talking about at the prison the day before. He had every right to talk to Eerebout about any other subject.
Richardson went to the apartment Charles “Mongo” Kreiner occupied with his girlfriend. The former convict opened the door.
Being told that Mongo was “stocky” had not prepared Richardson. Mongo was huge, not fat, but the sort of guy who had muscles on top of his muscles, all of them bulging. He seemed to fill the entire doorway. Hell, if he attacks me, Richardson thought, I ain’t gonna shoot. It’d only piss him off.
There was only one way to deal with a guy like Kreiner, who invited him in, and that was to get right in his face. “I’m going to be up front with you, Chuck,” he said after explaining why he was there. “You’re about the last person to be interviewed in this whole case. And who ain’t cooperating is goin’ down hard.”
Kreiner nodded. He’d known Luther since 1989, when they were in the joint together. They were pretty tight, but the last time he talked to him had been March 1994. “I figured he was in Canada.”
“Try prison in West Virginia,” Richardson said. “Guess what he did?”
Kreiner laughed. “I have no idea.”
“Just guess, Mongo, guess,” Richardson pressed. But Kreiner just laughed again, only a little more nervously.
“It involves a girl, and it involves a sex assault, and it involves strangulation, broken jaw, broken shoulder, in the mountains.”
Kriener listened as Richardson went through his spiel about the trail of broken, even dead, women Luther had left in his wake. And as he listened, he grew angry.
In the joint, Luther had always talked like a big man. He said he was in for beating up a woman over a drug deal. “The story I heard was he was dealing coke. This girl owed him a lot of money and she had a Corvette. He told her the wanted the car or his money, $6,000. She wouldn’t give him either one.”
Kreiner said he and Luther had become friends. But now he was hearing that Luther was nothing more than a rapist and a woman killer. “You know, the way he talked in the joint was, whenever he got out, he wanted to kill some people who ran the counseling. But I always just kind of thought it was all talk.” Kreiner recalled that he’d once left his girlfriend with Luther in the apartment; the thought of what might have happened made him angrier still.
Richardson saw it as a good time to check on a rumor he’d been told about a time when Luther went beserk in front of the parole board. “I heard he went into the parole board and says, ‘Fuck you. Hide your women and hide your girls ’cause I’m gonna fuckin’ kill them all.’ ”
Kreiner nodded; he was there when it happened. When Luther was taken to the auditorium where the parole board hearings were held, he said, Luther, who still thought he would have a mandatory release date assigned that day, had walked up to the chairman of the board and handed him a piece of paper. “He says, ‘This is my name and number.’ ”
“The chairman said, ‘What the hell is this for?’ And Tom says, ‘By the time this is over, you’re gonna want to know who I am.’ Right then I should have known, ‘Hey, this ain’t the place to be with Tom Luther.’ ” Then when Luther heard that the law had been changed and he wasn’t getting out, it had taken Kreiner and several other inmates to drag him, raving all the way about killing the families of the parole board members, out of the auditorium.
Richardson asked if Kreiner had threatened Byron Eerebout if he talked about the case or mentioned Southy Healey or Luther. “I don’t know any ‘Southy,’ ” he said. “And I never heard of Cher Elder until we saw about it on television back in the summer of ’93.
“I’m nobody’s muscle man,” Kreiner said, upset that Eerebout was identifying him as such. He’d only met the younger man once when he went to his apartment with Luther.
“Did Luther ever talk about getting out and what he was going to do?” Richardson asked.
“He was going to make people pay.”
“Did he ever talk about what he was going to do to women or anything like that?”
“Yeah,” Kreiner nodded. It wasn’t in the context of a sexual assault, Luther knew his friend wouldn’t like that, but “if he had to do it over again, there would be no bodies and there would be no witnesses. That’s exactly what he said.”
Chapter Twenty-One
October 24, 1994—Carlisle, Pennsylvania
Cpl. Les Freehling of the Pennsylvania State Patrol reread the nationwide inquiry from Colorado regarding missing or murdered women and possible connections to a Thomas Edward Luther. The report said that Luther was known to have traveled through California, Colorado, Illinois, Vermont, West Virginia, Virginia and Newport, Pennsylvania.
According to the report, Luther had been arrested in September for beating and raping a young woman near Delray, West Virginia, right across the border from the Newport area.
Freehling had something that sounded like it might be connected to Luther. In fact, he had two somethings.
They still had not been able to identify the young woman found in December 1993. But everything about what happened to her—strangulation, the beating, raped vaginally and anally—fit Luther’s style as described in Richardson’s report. He thought about the blood on the victim’s sweater and wondered about Luther’s blood type.
There was also the case of a young woman reported missing from Newport in April. Karen Denise Wells was a 20-year-old model who had been driving from her home in Oklahoma to New Jersey. She got as far as Newport where she called a friend back home, but that was the last time anyone ever heard from her.
After her family reported Wells missing, the call was traced to a Newport restaurant. Her clothes were discovered in a motel. Her car was discovered five miles as the crow flies from where the other girl’s body had been found five months earlier. She had vanished into thin air or, more likely, Freehling thought, into the dense woods that covered the area.
The whole thing smacked of a single killer on the loose in his jurisdiction. He called Richardson and asked if Luther had been in Newport between December 1993 and April 1994.
“As a matter of fact,” the Colorado detective responded, “I believe he was.”
Richardson also believed that the Pennsylvania cases only added to what he already thought about Luther. The blood on the first victim’s sweater matched Luther’s, A one plus one. It wasn’t an uncommon blood type, but if it looked like a duck and quacked like a duck, to Richardson, it was a duck. Or in this case, a serial killer.
The West Virginia rape case sounded solid, but nothing was certain. Debrah Snider had talked about Luther trying to have the victim paid off or killed. Juries were undependable. He might escape.
Richardson thanked Freehling for the call and said he’d be happy to send them whatever information he could. He had to stay out of their case, he warned, otherwise a defense attorney might try to claim he had a vendetta against Luther and was drumming up incidents.
He no sooner got off the telephone with Freehling than Debrah Snider called from West Virginia to tell him Luther was aware that the authorities were trying to work out a new deal with Byron Eerebout. Skip, who apparently got the information from J.D. or Babe, had told him. “Tom doesn’t seem worried that you’re going to find the body,” she said. “But other than that, he won’t talk about it.”
Snider said she appreciated Richardson reaching out to the West Virgin
ia authorities for her. Trooper Phillips assured her that they weren’t going to bring up her turning Luther in for the guns or that she was talking to Richardson. In the meantime, she had been thinking a lot about Cher’s family. “It haunts me,” she said. “I imagine that it haunts you.”
“Yep,” was all he said. He didn’t want to talk about the sleepless nights, or how he would stare at the photograph of Cher on his wall for hours, asking, “Where are you?” Debrah was trying hard to do the right thing, but at the same time she had withheld information that might have brought Cher back to her family a lot sooner.
The whole case had been a real eye-opener to him about the number of murders involving unidentified people across the country. In his reports, he had noted a dozen or more, but they were only those who bore some resemblance to Cher. There were dozens more—too young, too old, too big, too small—that came over the teletype that never made it into his reports. And those were just the females. He felt for all the families who wondered what had become of their daughters, wives, and mothers, sons, brothers, and fathers. They could only hope their loved ones weren’t lying in some morgue or pauper’s cemetery, known only as John or Jane Doe.
Meanwhile, Byron Eerebout and his attorney were playing games. Hansen now said her client was willing to work out a deal: in exchange for Cher’s body and testifying against Luther in court, Byron wanted his sentence reduced and served in a community corrections facility.
Shortly after Richardson’s unannounced prison visit, Eerebout had written an impassioned plea to the judge to reconsider his sentence. He was a disabled war veteran with three bronze stars, he wrote, recently married, and had been taking business classes so that he could lead “the straight life” when he got out. He had also been studying the Bible through a prison ministries program.
“I’m just sorry I did not read his word sooner,” he wrote. Now, he just wanted a second chance to start a family and “lead a respectable life and teach my children the right way of life by explaining to them what happens when a person does wrong and does not abide by the law ... This is the worst place on Earth and I am very unhappy here. I know I have done wrong, but also your honor, I have done a lot of good.”
Another prison conversion, Richardson scoffed when he heard about the plea; there was nothing like the thought of spending hard time in prison to make a man find religion. But for all his new-found morals and whatever past “good” he may have been referring to, for two years Eerebout had been keeping the whereabouts of Cher Elder’s body from her family.
Six days after sending the judge his letter, his request for reconsideration was denied. He was looking at least a decade in prison or spilling his guts.
Now, Hansen was saying he had chosen the latter. However, there was a major hurdle to get past and that was Byron didn’t want his brother J.D. to get in trouble for whatever involvement he might have in the case. Richardson said he’d contact District Attorney Hall and get back to her. Let ’em sweat, he thought to himself.
By early December, everything was set. Eerebout was ready to go through with it. Luther was in prison, so he felt safer. He’d even put it in writing so that he couldn’t back out or later claim he had no new information.
Richardson was waiting to hear from Hansen as to the time and place for the trip to find Cher’s body, when Debrah Snider called again. Byron’s mother, Babe, had taken a job in Blackhawk, she said. Blackhawk was another former mining town that had capitalized on the legalized gambling, like its nearby neighbor Central City. She had also told Luther the news and he had written her back, hinting that Babe knew something about slavery rings.
Luther was initimating that Byron and some mystery man they were “all protecting” had something to do with Cher’s disappearance. “Slavery rings. It sounds like another Tom Luther story to me,” Debrah said. “I wondered if Tom wasn’t just telling me this, you know, to see how quickly you’d get the information, and then it would get back to him. A lot of Tom’s friends have told him that I’m not safe, that I’m workin’ with the cops.”
Snider suddenly changed the subject. She complained that West Virginia authorities wouldn’t allow her to have contact visits with Luther. “You have to be family, or married, or have a child with his name on the birth certificate as the father.”
When Debrah mentioned that she was coming back to Colorado for Christmas, Richardson had an idea. Did she think she could get Babe to talk in private about whatever secrets she claimed to know but wouldn’t discuss on the telephone? “What I’m talkin’ about is, uh, wiring you so we can monitor or record the conversation. It’ll show your credibility, that you aren’t just fabricatin’ all this stuff that Babe is sayin’, and I guess that’s what I’m trying to say.”
Richardson was taking a chance. He was asking her to betray a friend, even if it was a friend like Babe. “I’m gonna be honest with you, you’re probably my best shot.”
Snider wasn’t sure. In fact, she was frightened of the whole idea. What if Richardson used it against her with Tom?
“Geez,” he said, “I mean, if you can’t trust me. Hey, have I ever lied to you?”
She sighed. There was lying and there was lying, she said at last. “Tom has never asked me directly: are you talking with the cops? So I haven’t lied to him either.”
“Well, lie to him, if he asks you,” Richardson said and laughed. Debrah laughed, too.
Richardson decided to take another chance. “If I got you a contact visit, would you wear a wire and record it?” He grimaced as he spoke. He was no longer asking her to tape Babe, he was asking her to betray the man she still professed to love.
Snider surprised him. “I guess,” she said after a moment. “Sure. If he says something, it’s his own fault.”
In the months following his arrest, Luther had gone back and forth in his relationship with Debrah Snider. Sometimes, he was good Tom and sometimes he was bad Tom. He wrote that he missed her and then let someone named Pam use up all his visiting time.
Every letter, it seemed, there was a different Tom. There was old “one-track Tom,” focused on sex, and the Tom who had discovered Jesus and wished she would.
Most of the time, though, Luther mostly worried about himself. The guards, he wrote, were tampering with his food and spitting in his juice. He didn’t see how he could take the abuse and handle the court pressure. He advised her to save herself and let him go.
He still blamed the justice system that had “screwed” him for raping Mary Brown. He blamed his mother. “For love and closeness, I used to let a man molest me. Now she tells people things to make herself look like a saint. She’s so two-faced ... she wants me to write but not send the letters from jail so the postman doesn’t see.” He blamed Debrah. It was always someone else’s fault. Only rarely, did he take any of the blame for himself, calling himself stupid for getting into jails and assault incidents. He wanted to know if he hated himself that much that he could be such a “fuck-up and self-destructive?”
Luther said he was what he “detested in a human being.” He was sure Jones would have been more than willing to go to bed with him. It wasn’t sex; it was “assault and anger, pure meanness from a subconcious level” and it scared him. “I grew up being a victim, and now I’m an offender. I think I am insane. Sometimes I do things without even thinking about what I’m doing until I’m already doing it. It’s in the middle of what I’ve done that I come to reality and realize I’ve just ruined my whole life.”
Debrah felt like a swimmer caught in a tide, pulled this way and that, tiring as she tried to keep her head above water. Richardson had been wrong when he thought the break was complete. Some days, she loved Luther more than ever. Other days, she despised him—such as the day he accidently enclosed a love letter from Pam in some paperwork he sent to Debrah. She decided to go confront the other woman who, she discovered, was living with another man.
Pam just laughed at her. “Sure, I fucked him,” she said and let Debrah read the letters s
he had received from Luther to prove it. “Now get out!”
“You’re just a white trash whore,” Debrah yelled back.
The man living with Pam produced a gun and stuck it in Snider’s face. “Maybe I should just shoot you,” he said as Pam laughed behind him. “And if your boyfriend ever gets out, I’ll probably just shoot him, too.”
Debrah stood there, looking down the barrel. She wasn’t afraid and for a moment she considered doing something to provoke the man. What did it matter anymore? But she turned and walked out of the couple’s cabin, their laughter ringing in her ears.
Debrah Snider hand-delivered her letter, telling Luther she knew the truth about Pam. He read it and shrugged his shoulders. He admitted having sex with Pam. Regretted it, of course, but then again, it was the girl’s fault. She had seduced him.
“I would sooner sit in the electric chair than to admit that I did what I did and that bitch knew that,” he said. “She did that to break us up.”
That evening, she called Richardson’s office and left a message. He called back a few minutes later from his home.
“I had the opportunity to get shot the other night, but I decided to pass it up,” she said and told him about the incident with Pam and her boyfriend. “Tom says it’s your fault he can’t commit to me, that he has this thing in Colorado hanging over his head. I asked him, ‘Why don’t you give them what they want?’ But he said, ‘I can’t do that.’ ”
“Why?” Richardson asked.
“Well, if his only involvement was the fact that he helped dispose of Cher’s body, there would be some consequences to pay, but it wouldn’t be murder,” Snider said. “So, I’m beginning to think that the reason that he can’t possibly give you what you want is ’cause it’s murder.”
Luther also said he was thinking of “making up a story” about what happened in Colorado to “get it over with,” she said. “I don’t know that he would do that, but I don’t think he’d have to make up a story, I’m sure he’s got a good one.”
Monster Page 36
