Healey looked like someone had just struck him in the face with a board. His brow furrowed and his hands clenched.
So the sisters are the key, Richardson thought. He’s just a big softy when it comes to family. He decided to turn the screw a little more. “Cher’s entire family is fucked up and that’s bein’ polite. Her dad walks like a beat child. Her little sister and brother are only about fifteen or sixteen, and they’re in counseling weekly. They can’t bury Cher.
“I got a picture of Cher that her mother sent me. It’s from when Cher was three years old. And let me tell you, ‘cause I’ll never forget it, it’s a picture of a little girl sittin’ on a chair with a smile. Her mother wrote: ‘This is Cher when she was three. She was a good kid.’ ”
Richardson paused. What he’d just said had hit closer to his own heart than he intended. He thought of his boys, including the infant Brian he’d hardly seen. He missed them and he missed Sabrina. Here it was five in the morning and he probably wouldn’t see any of them that day, at least not when they were awake. He didn’t know why he was talking about this stuff to a junkie, but he found he could not stop.
“Cherish yours while you can ‘cause you never know when you’ll lose ’em.” He looked at Southy, who had tears in his eyes. “All I want for Christmas is for you to find her body,” he said, echoing the words of Rhonda Edwards.
“Cher did not deserve to get killed. Cher Elder is one of the first victims I ever found that the deeper I dug, the cleaner she was. You know, usually a victim on a homicide starts out to be the choir girl and you find out she’s runnin’ dope, prostitutin’, and a hundred other things. But Cher Elder was nothin’ but a twenty-year-old girl gonna start college. Got hooked up with Byron Eerebout and hooked up with that group. She didn’t fit, she didn’t belong, and she wasn’t a snitch, and there was no reason for her to be killed. None. Zero.”
Richardson said he couldn’t understand why the Eerebout brothers seemed to care so little about what happened to Cher. “But Luther is in a category by himself, bud. And I’ll tell ya the difference between Luther and everybody else.
“He gets convicted and he ain’t out two months and he does another girl. Then he leaves Colorado and does another one. Luther don’t need for her to be a snitch. You know what I’m saying? He has a thing for women, and he’s proven it a couple times. And that’s the difference. But people are puttin’ you three—Byron, Luther, and you—in the same book. You don’t belong in the same book as Luther.”
Richardson decided he would feed Healey a little about his theory and see how he reacted. “Luther’s the one that did Cher and buried her. Actually dumped her and went back and buried her. How’s that theory sound? You’re shakin’ your head ‘yes.’ ”
“I’ve heard that,” he conceded.
“Have you ever been told the area she’s buried in? What if I was to say west, would that help you remember?”
“In the mountains.”
“Where?” Richardson demanded. “There’s a misconception that you have to have a body to prosecute and you don’t. We also have enough on this case that if we don’t find the body within a couple of days, we’re gonna take it to court without a body, period. But I’d like to give the Elders their daughter’s body.”
“I’ll give you Cher.”
Richardson blinked. “Don’t promise what you can’t deliver,” he warned.
“I can take you closer than you’ve ever been.”
“How close?”
“Say within a few hundred feet.”
“Do you know how she was killed?”
“Know how?” Healey asked. “I think it was a gun.” Now that was something new. A gun? Luther liked to beat and strangle women. Then again, there were the two homicides in Summit County, both with a gun. “You just guessin’ here?”
“No.”
The way Healey said it, Richardson knew it was true. “What kind of gun?” The more details he could get here, the more he could rule out that Healey was “just guessing” once they found Cher’s body.
“I think a .22.”
Now that he had gone part way, Healey seemed willing to get it all out. “I once heard Byron tell another woman to watch out or he would ‘Put Tom on you like I did that bitch.’ And I heard Luther tell Mortho that he had ‘taken care of business.’ ”
But Southy Healey had saved the best for last. He said he had been in a car with Byron and Luther “just outside a very small town in the mountains” when Eerebout had asked about Cher’s grave. Luther had said it was a shallow grave and pointed at a hillside they were driving past.
“Byron said, ‘Fucking right on, Tom. Fucking crazy, Tom.’ ”
Richardson asked if he would testify to what he knew. “I’m dead if I do and go back to prison. Tom’s got some pretty serious connections inside. And Byron told me not to talk because his dad would have me taken out. But I’ll think about it.”
The conversation ended three hours after it began. Richardson got up to leave.
“Can I ask you a question?” Healey said.
“Sure.”
“What is your opinion as to Luther’s status in this case?”
“He’s in trouble, big trouble.”
“Byron?”
“He’s in trouble.”
“J.D.?”
“He’s in trouble.”
Healey hesitated, although they both knew what he was about to ask. “And me?”
“In the same trouble if you don’t continue to cooperate.”
Three days later, Scott Richardson was called by Healey’s girlfriend. “He really wants to talk to you,” she said. This time, he wasted no time getting over to the Adams County Jail.
Healey wanted to know if he had talked to the district attorney about getting the charges against him dropped in exchange for his information. “Not yet,” Richardson said, hoping that wasn’t the extent of what Southy wanted to talk about.
But the young man shrugged, as if it wasn’t important any more. “I was goin’ to try to use this to my advantage,” he said, “but I want to help you find the body.”
Healey said he had been doing some thinking, “especially what you said about the family wanting Cher’s body for burial and the Christmas card from her mother. I don’t care about the deal no more. I don’t care if my information gets me outta anything.”
Richardson could hardly believe what he was hearing. Out of all these people he’d been dealing with over the past two years, only a junkie and petty thief felt any remorse for what happened to Cher. At least enough to do something about it.
Healey said he’d been at Mortho’s, who he described as a “fat drug dealer,” before he ever met Eerebout, when Mortho and Luther were talking about some girl they suspected of being a police informant. That’s when he first heard Luther talking about “takin’ care of business.” They hadn’t used the girl’s name and only later did he think it must have been Cher Elder they were talking about.
The trip into the mountains had been for a drug deal. But he couldn’t remember the name of the little town. Only that Luther had pulled over near a restaurant. “A little town and the river goes by and on the side where the river is, is this little restaurant.”
Richardson did his best to hide his excitement. Healey had just described the town of Empire, Clear Creek, and the Marietta Restaurant. “Let me ask you this, Dennis. If I came out here, picked you up, and drive you out, would you know this place?”
“Absolutely,” he said. But then he was troubled by a thought. “If you took me up there, man, how would I know I’m not gonna be in any trouble?”
“How are you gonna get in trouble?”
“I don’t know, showing you where the body’s buried.”
“Here’s the deal,” Richardson said. “As long as you didn’t kill her, as long as you didn’t bury her, as long as you didn’t dump her car, I don’t see how you’re gonna get in trouble in this.” It was a test. If Healey was guilty of any of those things,
he would shut down then and there.
But he only nodded. “Well, like I said, I don’t give a fuck even if it does come back on me. I want to help that family.”
Richardson smiled. “I’ll show ya the Christmas card when we go up there.” Then he got back to questions about the trip to the little mountain town. “You sure Byron was talking about Cher?”
“Yeah,” Healey answered. “And Tom said, ‘Business has been taken care of.’ Then Byron asked how deep he had buried her. And Tom said shallow because the ground was frozen and he didn’t have much time. But he had shoved a bunch of rocks on top of the grave.”
Richardson said he’d be back the next day to take him out of jail. The young man said that was okay, but he was worried what the other jail inhabitants would think if he came and went too often.
The detective had an idea. “Go back to your cell real angry and complain that you have to go back to court tomorrow,” he said. “And when we come out, we’ll make it look like we’re transporting you to court. You’re gonna have to wear shackles anyway and that’ll look good.”
Healey smiled. “That’s cool, man,” he said. “Do me one favor, man. Can you bring me a smoke?”
“Yeah,” Richardson said. “I’ll bring you smokes.”
Scott Richardson and his partner, Stan Connally, arrived the next morning to pick up Southy Healey. “Here’s your smokes,” Richardson said after they had placed Healey in the right rear seat of the sedan, which he had indicated was where he was sitting on the ride with Luther and Byron Eerebout.
As anxious as the detectives were to get to the mountains, they first asked Healey to show them the apartment building where Mortho lived. Southy, who said he was high most of the time and couldn’t remember numbers or street names, still took them by a building. “You go up the elevator to the fifth floor and turn right,” he said.
From there, Richardson began driving in seemingly random directions although gradually working his way west. He knew Healey had been talking about Empire, but he needed him to take them there on his own if it was to stand up in court.
Innocently, he took the ramp that placed them westbound on Interstate 70. Suddenly, Healey sat up, “I think this is the right way to get there. There should be a river that comes up on the left-hand side and this road narrows.”
A few miles further into the mountains, he was even more certain. “This is it,” he said, looking out the window, then added, “If I see it, he’s screwed.”
Richardson decided to test Healey. “We think we’re going to find physical evidence at the grave,” he said. If he was involved with killing or transporting Cher, he had just been warned that there might be something on the body to incriminate him.
But Healey just shrugged. “I don’t give a fuck,” he said. “There’s nothin’ around her grave that’s gonna connect me.”
As they approached the intersection with Highway 40 that led to Empire, Healey perked up again. “Isn’t there a town on the right side up here?”
Richardson didn’t say anything. But when they arrived at the exit ramp, Healey told him to take it. “Man, I don’t wanna see this girl,” he muttered.
“Don’t worry, bud,” Richardson replied. “If we find her, you won’t be around.”
They had passed through Empire when Southy Healey spotted the Marietta Restaurant on the left-hand side of the road. He immediately began talking louder. “This is it right here. This is it. Slow down, slow down. It’s right here on the right, slow down.” He pointed to a horseshoe-shaped turn-off on the right side of the highway. “That’s right where it is. That’s where Luther showed us.”
The turn-off was a fifty-foot loop on and off the highway. A man-made rock formation with a wooden pole stuck in the center stood inside the loop. Southy looked at the formation quizzically. “There used to be something hanging on it,” he said, puzzled. He looked up the hillside and shook his head, “But this is where Luther was pointing when he said he had taken care of business.”
Richardson got out of the car. The hillside was steep, which went against all the conventions about killers taking the bodies of their victims downhill. No wonder we missed her, he thought, we were concentrating on the downhill side of the road. He walked about fifty yards up the hill when he discovered an old, partially collapsed mine shaft. Below he could see Healey standing outside the car smoking while Connally stood guard. He walked back to the car and got on the radio to request bloodhounds.
“If he brings that dog up here right now, he’ll find it,” Southy said.
The bloodhounds arrived within the hour and immediately “hit” on decomposing human remains at the edge of the turn-off and again at the mine shaft entrance. Richardson crawled partway into the mine opening with a flashlight. The shaft pitched away from the entrance at a thirty-degree angle and ended in a thick, oily pool of water, next to which he could see a broken spade and a stick that appeared to have been used for digging. Recalling Debrah Snider’s story about Luther having broken one of her shovels, Richardson thought, This is it. This is where he put her.
The mine shaft was unstable and he retreated. They would have to call in the Gilpin County Mine Rescue team to shore it up and pump out the water before it would be safe to proceed. In the meantime, he decided to take Healey back to jail. It would give him a chance to ask a few more questions.
“How do I know you weren’t involved in killing her?” Richardson asked on the return trip.
Southy scowled. “I may be a doper and a petty thief, but I’m no killer.”
Richardson ignored Southy’s anger. “How did Mortho get his nickname?”
“It was in prison,” Healey said. “Everytime he bought drugs and someone asked if it was any good, he would say, ‘Fine, I need more though.’ ” It was such a consistent response that everyone started calling him “More though,” which became Mortho. On the outside, Mortho dealt in a variety of drugs—mostly cocaine, pot, and speed. He sold quite a bit to Luther, who in turn distributed it to the Eerebouts.
Healey said he hardly knew Byron or the other brothers. “They were introduced as the sons of a friend from the joint.”
For awhile, both men were silent, looking out the window, lost in their own thoughts. Then Healey spoke. “You know, I was originally hoping I could get a deal for helping you out. Now I don’t want nothin.’ I’m having a hard time dealing with the fact that I didn’t come forward sooner. I just want her family to be able to bury her, I don’t care what happens to me.”
Richardson looked in the rearview mirror at his prisoner. He was beginning to like Southy. He took the young man into the Adams County Jail and handed him another pack of cigarettes before turning him over to a guard.
As Richardson started to leave, Healey suddenly reached out and grabbed his arm. “Tell Cher’s family,” he said, “that I’m sorry I didn’t say something sooner.”
On the way back to Empire, Scott Richardson picked up Steve Ireland, an archeologist with NecroSearch International.
Started in 1987 in Denver, by a group of law enforcement investigators and scientists who were horrified with conventional grave location methods, like backhoes and bulldozers, NecroSearch had since established an international reputation for finding and exhuming clandestine graves.
Its members were made up of experts in a wide variety of scientific and law enforcement fields—including entomologists, geologists, biologists, anthropologists, and archeologists. They worked only for police agencies. Sometimes affectionately called “the pig people,” they were known for their experiments in burying pigs to study decomposition and other variables that affect gravesites. Pig carcasses most closely resemble the human body as it decomposes.
They buried pigs with clothes on and “naked.” They wrapped them in shower curtains and carpets. Then they studied the graves using ground-penetrating radar and FLIR; they looked at how plants grew at a gravesite, the presence of certain bugs, and researched how far scavengers like coyotes and birds would drag
bones.
When the graves of humans were discovered, the NecroSearch teams would carefully exhume the bodies like archeologists working on ancient tombs so as not to disturb evidence. Richardson was sure their expertise would soon be needed to recover Cher’s body.
Richardson and Ireland had worked together before. As always, Ireland said when climbing into the detective’s car, “Another Richardson pleasure cruise?” He then pulled his cap down over his eyes and napped.
After looking at the mine entrance, the Gilpin County Mine Rescue team, Ireland, and Richardson agreed it would be better to meet again early the next day. The water would have to be pumped from the shaft and the hole reinforced.
The next morning, Richardson arrived on the scene with Ireland, who had summoned other NecroSearch members, sure that this would be the day he found Cher. However, while the others worked, there was not much for him to do. So he decided to take a walk around the area.
Following a light trail through the woods and snow, he came into a bowl-shaped clearing among the tall pines. On one side was a shelf of gray granite that hid the clearing from the highway seventy-five yards below. The wind whispered through the trees and he could plainly hear Clear Creek tumbling down the valley floor on the other side of the road.
It was a peaceful spot, almost like a chapel beneath the boughs of the trees. But what caught his attention was a pile of large rocks, perhaps two feet tall and the length of a body.
“It’s a grave,” he said to himself. Quickly he returned to the mine shaft and summoned the NecroSearch team members, who waited for the rescue team to finish pumping water from the shaft. They returned to the clearing and removed the rocks from the pile.
A cadaver dog, a bloodhound specially trained to detect dead bodies below the surface and even underwater, was brought to the site. But the dog detected nothing. Using a hand auger, Ireland drilled a hole the diameter of a tennis ball into the hard, cold ground. He sank the auger nineteen inches and still there was no sign of human remains.
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