If the prosecution team could prove any one of the three, Thomas Luther would face a second phase of the trial to determine if he deserved the death penalty. Then, if there was any justice in the world, Richardson thought as he left the courthouse that night, Luther would one day be strapped to a steel table at the Colorado State Penitentiary and given a lethal injection for what he had done to Cher Elder.
The next morning, Jefferson County District Attorney Dave Thomas held a press conference announcing that the body of Cher Elder had been found and that Thomas Luther had been indicted for her murder. “We have decided to seek the death penalty and have filed the necessary papers,” he added.
In closing, Thomas praised the “dogged determination” of Lakewood detective Scott Richardson. Lakewood Police Chief Charles Johnston added that “the discovery of the body was the result of the sheer determination on the part of the detective assigned to the case ... making it possible to bring this case to a conclusion.”
Richardson stood next to the podium, the praise barely registering. Everyone was talking like the conviction of Luther was a foregone conclusion. This ain’t over, he thought, not by a long shot. But he dutifully stepped to the podium when it was his turn and said, “The family is grateful to have recovered her body and very grateful to be able to give her the Christian burial she deserves.”
The detective paused a moment. He suddenly felt weary, not just from the thirty pounds he’d lost, but emotionally drained. Cher’s death had struck him like the death of one of his own. His voice cracked when he concluded, “In a case like this, you come to know your victim very well. Cher was more like a friend. She fell in with the wrong crowd. But the more you dig into her background, the cleaner she is. She’s a true victim. So there is a feeling of victory, but a sad ending.”
Richardson thanked his fellow officers and other task force members who, he said, refused to give up, and his superiors, who gave him the time and resources. But, he added, the pursuit of Thomas Luther wasn’t over. “In some ways, it’s just beginning.”
Television stations covering the press conference noted that Byron Eerebout had “been persuaded” to lead Lakewood detectives to a wooded area north of Empire where Cher’s body was discovered. Luther, they reported, met Byron’s father in prison while serving time for a 1982 sexual assault. “In prison,” according to the indictment read on the air, “Luther said the next girl would not live and the police would never find her body.”
When he got back to the office, Richardson called Debrah Snider in West Virginia. She still had not moved back to Colorado. She couldn’t break clean from Thomas Luther.
“You sittin’ down?” Richardson asked when she answered the telephone. “I got some news.”
At first she didn’t say anything. Then, weakly, she asked, “Bad?”
Richardson knew what she meant; it was bad news for her and Luther if for no one else. “We found Cher’s body.”
“Well, that’s good,” she said, sounding relieved; at least there would be time.
“Thomas Luther has been indicted by a grand jury.”
Again there was silence. Finally, Debrah said, “Okay. Where was Cher at?”
“He had her buried up by Empire, along I-70.” At last he could now tell her that her information had been a help. “We’ve been searchin’ up there for about a year and a half and we finally found the grave.” He asked if she was all right.
Snider said yes. In fact, she had been expecting something of the sort. Tom told her in a letter that Skip had called him and said he was going to be charged in Colorado. “He heard it from Byron’s lawyer.”
“He’s mostly just maintaining that we’re gonna, you know, send somebody to hell for somethin’ he didn’t do. I don’t know if he’s delusional or he ...” She let her thought trail off. “I hate to have to apologize, but I still have real strong feelings for him. I’m real sorry that this had to happen. I don’t know if he’s crazy, but I don’t think people needed to pay for it with their lives. That’s why I’ve been willin’ to work with you.”
Richardson said he understood. He didn’t, not really, but he felt sorry for her. Luther had ruined a lot of lives for which he would never be charged. Debrah’s was one of those lives. She had offered him a real chance to make it out of prison—a place in the country, a hard-working, faithful woman as his companion—and he had thrown it all away. To hear her so devoted still made him angry, but he wanted her to feel better.
“Well, I’m gonna tell ya somthin’ right now. I couldn’t have done it without ya, and you should feel good about that if nothing else. The information you gave throughout the case was critical. And without your assistance, I’ll tell you right now, I don’t think we would have been able to give Cher’s family her body back.”
Debrah was sobbing, but she managed to say, “I’m glad that justice was done for Cher. I mean, she deserved that. It’s too bad though, ’cause part of him is real good. It’s too bad that part has to be punished with the part of him that’s horrible.”
Richardson tried again to thank her. “Please,” she interrupted. “Don’t compliment me too much. I have real mixed feelings about this.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
March 7, 1995—Delray, West Virginia
As she told Richardson, Debrah Snider wasn’t surprised by his telephone call letting her know that Tom had been charged with murder. She was only surprised at the swiftness with which justice now seemed to be moving after two years at a snail’s pace.
In a way, it was a relief. Her relationship with Tom since his rape conviction was like riding on a manic rollercoaster that wouldn’t stop. One moment, she was the most important person in his world. The next, she was a black-hearted traitor. She suspected he was still getting visits from Pam, while keeping her on the hook, fearful of what she might say about the Cher Elder case and afraid of being left alone.
Some of his letters were written in pure anger, especially when he was getting ready to punish her for some remark. She often wondered who his words were really intended to reach.
He had stopped writing for a couple of weeks in February, and removed her from his visiting list. Then he wrote but only, he said, because he had received a letter from Debrah’s mother, who’d heard about him threatening her daughter with an “ass-kicking” when he got out of prison. He reminded her that he loved her.
The letter Snider received the day before Luther’s indictment was bitter. He was sure she had been talking to the cops. He was cutting her off, she’d betrayed him for the last time. It tore her heart out. She hardly heard Richardson when he called and asked if she was sitting down. There was a roaring in her ears and a veil before her eyes. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of an abyss and found herself wanting very much to fall into it.
She was happy he found Cher’s body. She wanted it for the family. And she wanted it for Richardson, who she realized was the knight in shining armor she had waited for all her life. But he hadn’t come to rescue her, he’d come to defeat a monster who happened to be the man she loved.
Once before, when Luther was still in the Colorado penitentiary what seemed ages ago, she had warned him that “your relationship with me will be different than with any other woman from your past.” That certainly turned out to be true.
She wondered sometimes why he hadn’t killed her when he had the chance. The public defender once warned him that she was the major threat to his freedom. He could have killed her at Horsetooth Reservoir, and she had sensed he wanted to. Then again, he told her once that before he hurt her, “I will shut down and go away first.”
Tom had done wrong, and she had stopped him, but she felt ashamed for betraying him to his enemy.
“Please,” she told Richardson. “Don’t compliment me too much. I have real mixed feelings about this.” She hung up the telephone, understanding vaguely that Richardson would be coming soon to West Virginia. Then the room began to spin as she fell into blackness.
The little girl forced herself to remain still in her bed. Otherwise, he, the thing that waited somewhere in the dark of her room, might pounce.
She took all the usual precautions before climbing under the covers that evening: she made doubly sure to close her closet doors and then removed any items from the backs of chairs, as well as the floor, that might later cast a shadow. Now she lay in the exact middle of her mattress, beyond the reach of any clawing hands that might come from under the bed, and curled up so that her toes would not hang over the edge.
Seven years old, Heather Smith was afraid of monsters that hid in the dark—no matter how many times her mother told her that there were no such things. Saying didn’t make it so. He was there that night. She knew it. She could almost hear him breathing. The only question was whether to scream for her mother or stay quiet. There was always the possibility that if she screamed he would get her before her mother could come to the rescue. She took a chance. “Mommy! Mommy!”
As always, her mother arrived in time to turn on the lights and keep the monster at bay. “Shhhh, Heather,” Mrs. Smith said softly, stroking her whimpering daughter’s auburn hair. “There’s no such thing as monsters.”
She was wrong. Twenty-two years later, waking from the dream, Heather Smith knew it. There were monsters, and the one who hurt her was still out there somewhere.
Heather lay awake, envying her friend, Rebecca. She, at least, seemed to be moving on with her life, even though she knew it had taken what amounted to a nervous breakdown.
A little more than a year after the attack, Rebecca Hascall had been driving home late one night when she’d looked down and seen that her blouse was bright red with blood. “In my mind,” she later told Heather, “I knew it wasn’t real and when I looked down again, the blood was gone.”
Still, she was shaken. Pulling up in front of her house, she was too terrified to get out of the car. Monsters hid in the dark shadows and bushes around her home. She sat in her car and cried for an hour before she worked up the courage to make a mad dash for her front door. Inside, she checked to make sure her gun was tucked safely beneath her pillow, and then cried herself to sleep.
“The next day, on the way to work, the same thing happened,” Hascall said. “I looked down and my chest was covered with blood. I thought, ‘I’m cracking up.’ ”
Fortunately, the two young women were attending counseling sessions at the Denver Victims Assistance Service Center. At Smith’s urging, Hascall related her experiences to the counselor, who explained that she was also a victim of the violence against her friend.
“Hallucinations are all part of post-traumatic stress syndrome,” the counselor said. “You may be suppressing something that needs to come out for you to heal.”
The counselor persuaded Rebecca to undergo hypnosis to see if she could recall something about that night which lay hidden in her mind. Under hypnosis, Rebecca remembered the man crouching in the street, looking at her. “I was afraid,” she said, “but my friend needed me.” She recalled dialing 911 and then rushing back to Heather’s side with a towel to place on the wounds.
Then Hascall stopped talking. Her memory had run into a wall. Gently, the counselor asked her to look behind that wall.
Only then did she remember the paramedics rolling Heather over onto her back and the sight of Heather’s bloody chest. She had blocked it out.
“I was holding all the wrong places,” Rebecca cried. “I thought I had killed her.” She was living with the guilt that she’d almost let her friend die.
Waking Rebecca, the counselor told the young woman that the first thing she had to do was forgive herself. She had done the best she could, and it had been the right thing. “Heather survived because of you, not despite you,” the counselor said.
It was a major breakthrough. Rebecca Hascall wasn’t healed overnight, but from that day, she felt herself getting stronger. She even got rid of the gun; however, she replaced it with an electronic security system. Some things would never be the same.
But there were no such breakthroughs for Heather Smith. Physically, she was much better except for a nagging pain in her neck, which her doctor told her was in her imagination.
On good days, she felt emotionally strong, more like her old self. She would make an effort to see old friends or force herself to wear clothing that revealed the scar on her chest. When people asked about it, she told them her story. Talking helped.
Wanting to do something that made a statement to her attacker, whoever he was, Smith started working as a blood-drive coordinator at the Denver blood center that had supplied the eighty-seven units of blood that kept her alive. Once a week, she volunteered at the Denver Victims Assistance Service Center, talking other women through their pain and suffering.
It was a brave front and friends and family marveled at her strength. But she couldn’t fool herself. No place seemed safe, even in daylight. Some days she cowered in her house, afraid to go out. But nights were worse. Her old house creaked and rattled with the slightest breeze. She particularly hated winter with its short days and long nights.
She was afraid of men she didn’t know. She would cross a street to avoid passing a stranger on a sidewalk. She finally started seeing a man and began to hope for a future, but some nights she’d wake up next to him, terrified that he was about to wake and attack her.
At times, her fears reduced her to tears and hysteria and she’d curl up into a ball unable to stop sobbing. Once, her boyfriend, trying to console her, stroked her back, but when his fingers touched the scars on her side, she suddenly recalled the pain of the weapon that had pierced her. His fingers felt like knives and she screamed.
Adding insult to injury, her insurance company was fighting her medical and psychiatric counseling bills. They put her through a three-hour interrogation in which the insurance company investigator, a woman who should have known better, implied that it was Heather who had done something wrong.
Maybe she knew her attacker, the woman suggested, and didn’t want to admit it. Maybe it was her old boyfriend and this was just another domestic violence case. It seemed to Smith that she was being victimized over and over again.
Listening for monsters in the dark of her room that night, she wondered if the terror would ever end. It was March 1995 and if anything, the dreams were getting worse. She fell back asleep and dreamed again.
She was at a party with her dog, Heidi. The dog began barking and wanted Heather to leave. There was a feeling of unseen danger.
Then she was outside, walking down a sidewalk next to a retaining wall. It was dark, but she could see the man who stabbed her standing behind the wall. He was wearing the green jacket, the square, silver wire-rimmed glasses, and the blue baseball cap with the gold lettering. She saw his face vividly. At first his face seemed normal, then she realized it was a just a mask hiding something evil that lurked underneath.
The man made no move. In her dream she told herself that if she could just get by him, she’d be okay. He seemed to let her pass. But as she began to believe that she was safe, she looked down. Her chest was covered with blood.
Smith woke up from the dream in terror, the memory of the man’s face burning in her mind. She knew it was a face she would never forget, no matter how many years went by, no matter how he tried to disguise himself.
The day after Thomas Edward Luther was indicted for the murder of Cher Elder, the Denver Post ran a front-page newspaper article under the headline: “Dogged work, nets body, key suspect.
“Nearly two years after a young Lakewood woman disappeared, her body has been unearthed from a shallow mountain grave, and the man with whom she was last seen has been indicted for her murder.”
“Elder’s grief-stricken mother said yesterday, ‘I’m glad the search is over. Even though it may not be what you wanted to find, at least you can start dealing with something. You can’t start a grieving process until you know for sure.’ ”
The story jumped to an inside page where there
was also a photograph of Luther taken after his arrest in West Virginia. In it, he had a few days’ beard growth and was wearing square-rimmed, tortoise-shell glasses.
That afternoon, Heather Smith had just walked into her psychiatrist’s office when the doctor handed her the newspaper. “Did you see this?” Reading the story earlier, the psychiatrist noted the date of Cher’s disappearance and wondered if there could be a connection to the attack on Heather two weeks later.
Smith sighed. People were always handing her newspaper clippings, asking her if she had seen the news about the latest violent attack on a woman. She had grown tired of such stories.
Heather Smith followed the story of Thomas Luther to the inside page of the newspaper. She knew the moment she saw the photograph that she’d found her monster. She felt blood rush to her face and for a moment was nearly overcome with dizziness. “It’s him,” she said quietly. “It’s him.”
The day the newspapers ran the story about the indictment, Scott Richardson got a call from a young woman who identified herself as Heather Smith. She told him she’d been stabbed and left for dead two weeks after Cher Elder disappeared. She thought Luther was her attacker. “As soon as I saw his picture in the paper, I said, ‘That’s him,’ ” she recalled.
Heather Smith sounded desperate. But the detective knew he couldn’t afford to associate himself with another case involving Luther; defense attorneys would jump all over that. He advised her to contact the detective in her case, then he called the Denver police and told them about the call.
Richardson didn’t doubt the possibility that Smith was yet another victim of Luther. He recalled Snider’s statements about how Luther would leave for days at a time, and then come home looking beat-up and sleep for an entire day.
“I bet that’s why he begged me not to put his picture in the paper or on television way back when I first talked to him,” Richardson told Connally. “He didn’t want any of his other victims identifyin’ him.”
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