Smith apparently followed his advice. The next day, Detective Paul Scott from the Denver Police Department called and told him about Heather’s case and requested photographs of Luther.
Scott said that after Heather called, he’d taken a look at the photograph in the newspaper. It was almost two years since he had last seen her file, a copy of which he kept in his desk. But when he opened the file and looked at the composite drawing of her attacker, “I was shocked,” he told Richardson. “It was like our artist sat down and drew the composite with Luther sitting in the room with him.”
Still, Paul Scott was not satisfied and wanted to see if Heather could pick out a different picture of Luther from a photo lineup. Richardson sent a photograph of Luther in which he was clean shaven and wasn’t wearing glasses.
It didn’t make any difference. “The average guy on the streets wouldn’t have looked at the two photographs and thought they were of the same man,” Scott said. But when Heather Smith came down to the police station and looked at a photo line-up of a dozen similar-looking men, she didn’t hesitate for a moment and picked Luther out from the others. “She said, ‘It’s him.’ ”
Richardson wished him luck, said he’d help anyway he could, and hung up. He was concerned about a message he got from Debrah Snider. Babe, she said, was warning her that Byron believed that she was “in grave danger.”
There was a lot riding on Snider’s safety. Without her binding the seams, the case would fall apart like an old book. He had discussed with Dennis Hall on more than one occasion his concerns about her safety. “I wonder why Luther didn’t kill her when he had the chance.”
He got off the telephone with Debrah Snider and called the West Virginia State Police, asking them to bump up patrols around her place and be on the look out for strangers in the area. Burkhart assured him they would.
The West Virginia prison authorities were having their own problems with Luther, he said. They had just received information from an informant that Luther was planning a prison escape, when a semi- truck crashed through an outer fence while Luther was in the prison yard exercising.
Fortunately, it had rained the night before, and the truck got mired in the mud and fencing, never making it through a second perimeter fence. The inmates, including Luther, were hustled inside, and the driver, who claimed he was drunk and that the truck “got away from me,” was arrested. It turned out he stole the truck, but they couldn’t prove a connection to Luther.
Still, Luther was deemed a security risk and placed in maximum security. The informant’s warning, as well as information provided by Debrah Snider that Luther had told her to save her money and be ready to run to Australia, made the truck accident too convenient to have been a coincidence.
Trooper Phillips told Richardson that Luther had buddied up with an inmate named Randy McBee, who was in prison for a violent crime spree that included raping an 80-year-old woman and twenty other felonies.
“McBee hasn’t even been tried on all the charges and he’s already got three-hundred twenty-one years,” Phillips said. “He’s a real bad one. When they asked him about the old lady, he just laughed and said, ‘Best pussy I ever had.’ Guess those two have a lot in common and nothing to lose by tryin’ to escape.”
Byron Eerebout was steamed. He thought the deal was that his name wouldn’t be mentioned in Luther’s indictment. Now he was getting threats in the jail, he said.
“I have no control over public records,” Richardson shrugged. No one actually named Eerebout at the press conference, but the media had done its homework and obtained copies of the indictment.
“If you would’ve told me this, I would have been back up at Buena and none of this would be goin’ on,” Byron said.
Babe Rivinius jumped in. “We could have all been killed. There was no warning this would happen. Something should have been arranged with the grand jury to keep his name out of the indictment.”
Richardson waved her off. “I’m not gonna sit here and argue this.” He was tired of the Eerebouts’ whining, and a lot of other things were taking his attention since the press conference. He was about to say so when Hall suddenly raised his voice, his blue eyes blazing at Byron and Babe.
“What I’d like you all to do is just be quiet,” Hall said. Babe Rivinius started to protest, but his look shut her up.
Satisfied that he had everyone’s attention, Hall continued. “I’m gonna tell you why it came out this way. You need to understand that I am the person in this county who knows the grand jury. Okay? I have written a lot of indictments. I have probably written more indictments than about anybody in this whole entire state system. I know how to do it.
“This case presented a very, very difficult problem because an indictment has to explain how a crime was committed. Usually all I do when I write an indictment is to explain that and say this person did this, this, this, and this. This is a crime, and then I sign it. Okay?” He looked around and everybody nodded.
“So the question comes up: what happens when somebody lies to the grand jury? That makes it almost impossible for me to write a decent indictment. And—” here he looked hard at Eerebout and his mother “—I think Byron lied. And I think J.D. lied.”
Leslie Hansen began to defend her client, “Well ...”
But Hall turned on her in a flash; the anger on his face surprised even Richardson. “Shut up,” Hall spat out. “Just wait ’til I finish.” Hansen slumped back into her seat, her mouth hanging open.
“How can I keep a person’s name out of it when I think the person lied?” Hall asked, then explained, “Instead of saying what happened, I have to say what people testified to. You put me in an impossible position, Byron, and your brother did, too.”
Hall was seething. He didn’t believe the Eerebouts’ story about following Luther. But that didn’t matter as much as J.D. lying to the grand jury about picking Luther up in Empire.
“I am in a jam because I presented perjured testimony to the grand jury,” he said. “I’m going to take a little time and figure out what I’m going to do about that. In the meantime, I suggest you stop complaining and start listening.” With that, he handed the meeting back to Richardson.
The detective smiled. The outburst was out of character, but the more he got to know Hall, the more he liked him. He turned to Byron, who sat in stunned silence. For once, I get to play good cop, he thought, and offered a concilatory gesture.
“Ah, it’s my understanding that you were told to keep quiet, you would be all right as long as you kept quiet,” he said. “And that if you did testify or presented the body, you would be killed. Let’s get this on the table so we know who we are dealing with so we can protect you. Go back to the beginning of when Cher was killed.”
Eerebout tore his eyes from Hall and nodded. “Just like I said for the grand jury, the first was from Tom, when I confronted him after hearing him on the telephone,” he said. “That was maybe a couple of weeks after Cher disappeared. He told me point blank right then and there. He said, ‘I’ll kill your girlfriend. I’ll kill her mom. Don’t say anything or they get hurt.’ He knew where they lived; he followed them around.”
“Okay,” Richardson said. “And when he gave you the sweater, what were the threats?”
“Just that he cut off her finger,” Byron replied. “And he said he had that ring. He says, ‘I have the stuff to make sure that you guys pay for this.’ The ‘pee-ons will pay’ is what his exact words were. And who’s the pee-ons in this? We are. He said to other people that him and Southy would make sure that the pee-ons pay.”
Eerebout said that after he was arrested for the shooting incident, he was approached by Mongo, who said that if he kept his mouth shut Mongo’s father owned a lot of land in Montana, some of which would be given to Byron, along with a house, a car, and a thousand dollars a month. “Everything would be taken care of, but if I did open my mouth, I would be killed.”
Then when he was sent to prison in Buena Vista, several inmates
approached him, telling him they were friends of Luther and he knew what that meant. Once an “Indian guy” sidled up to him and said he’d overheard the other inmates talking about Byron. “He said I better watch my back. That’s when I got myself placed in protective custody.”
“Skip called me last night,” Rivinius interjected, “and said Byron was not in danger from Luther personally, but someone else might get to him. He said, ‘He’ll never make it out of there. He’ll either be shanked or he’ll be beaten to death. Some way or somehow, they will get to him.’ And I said, ‘Are you talking about Tom?’ And he said, ‘Byron ... Byron has been labeled a snitch.’
“Skip told me, ‘This is all you and that bitch in West Virginia’s fault.’ ”
Eerebout stuck to his story that the gun Luther used to kill Cher Elder was stolen from a convenience store by a friend of his brother, J.D. The friend, whose name he couldn’t recall, then sold it to Luther. The gun, he said, was in a woman’s purse, left in a storage closet next to the bathroom. The boy didn’t know a gun was in the purse when he took it. “I guess you’d call it a lucky find.”
“Did J.D. ever give you a map on how to find the body?” Richardson asked.
“No, I got strip-searched every time I went back to my cell, so I couldn’t have unless I stuck it up my ass, which I was not about to do.”
“How about over the telephone?” Richardson asked. He didn’t believe Eerebout could have been told so exactly over the telephone. There wasn’t even a pile of rocks at the grave to help him identify it. But he had to ask.
“Nope,” Byron replied. “We talked a little to refresh my memory, but that was it.”
“Luther ever talk to you about other cases, unsolved homicides or attempted homicides?” Richardson asked. He was thinking about the Heather Smith case and so was surprised by Byron’s answer.
“That isn’t part of the deal,” Eerebout said. “I will not discuss that with you. But I’ll give you the inclination it was something that’s up in Breckenridge.”
As she left the meeting, Babe Rivinius told Richardson that her son, J.D., would “clear up certain issues” that afternoon.
Soon afterward, Dennis Hall was contacted by J.D.’s attorney, who wanted a meeting as soon as possible. J.D. lied about not bringing Luther back from Empire, the attorney admitted. And he had some new information about the gun.
Hall contacted Richardson and the two soon found themselves talking to a sheepish J.D. Eerebout. He began by repeating that after Luther left with Cher, he didn’t see Luther again until the following morning.
“When he come in, he had this look on his face that I’ve never seen on anyone’s face before,” Eerebout said. “Kind of a real wide-eyed, like ‘I been up all night on adrenaline’ kind of look. He had on the same clothes he had been wearing the day before.”
Some time later—now J.D. thought it might have been some time after Cher’s disappearance—Luther showed up one evening and, after talking quietly to Byron, left. Byron immediately turned to him and said, “Let’s go for a ride.”
“I think we both knew what was going on,” Eerebout said. “I assumed that Byron wanted to get somethin’ on Tom. I thought it was a good idea.” So they followed Luther to Empire. “That’s the first time I had any clue as to where she might be. Byron got out, did his thing, and we went home.”
J.D. admitted that he took Luther to Empire and dropped him off that May. On the way there, they stopped in a store off Interstate 70 and purchased a box of rat poison, he said. “I assumed this was to cover her up so dogs couldn’t smell her.”
“What about the gun?” Richardson asked.
Eerebout swallowed hard. The gun was stolen from a clerk’s purse at a convenience store located in Evergreen, a small town in the mountains just west of Denver. “My younger brother, Tristan, went in there and took a lady’s purse.
“He brought it out to the car and there was a gun in it. It was a .22, a little nine-shooter or something. We went home with the gun, and Tom was at the house, and we didn’t have anything to do with the gun, so Tom just took it.”
Richardson wanted to know when the theft took place. “No more than a week or so before Cher got killed,” J.D. replied.
“Where’s the gun now?” Richardson asked.
“I have no idea.”
“Were there any bullets in it?”
“Yes. Little .22’s. They weren’t hollowpoints.”
Richardson nodded, the bullet fragments taken from Elder’s skull weren’t hollowpoints either. “You ever heard of Cher Elder bein’ a snitch or threatenin’ to testify?”
“No.” Nor did Luther give him any real information about the murder, he said.
“I don’t think that I flat-out ever asked him, but I think he knew that I thought I knew. When we were goin’ back up there, he said somethin’ about he had to do a better job burying her and that the rat poison was to keep dogs or other animals from diggin’ her up.”
“There’s no doubt he’s talkin’ about Cher Elder?” Richardson asked.
“No doubt.”
“Who dumped Cher’s car?”
“I assume Tom did it that morning,” Eerebout said. He was sure that Southy did not come to the apartment that morning.
Which, Richardson thought, is why Luther didn’t dump the car farther from the apartment. Noting that he had just talked to Byron and his attorney, he pretended that something was said about a map to the grave.
J.D. took the bait. “I’ll tell you exactly what’s goin’ on with that,” he said. “I did not supply him with a map. Now on the phone we went over kinda ... You see, when all this came out we wanted to make sure we had our stories straight because he told me he was gonna plan on doin’ this. So on the phone, we kind of, you know, went back and forth.
“We were reminiscing, you know what I’m sayin’, trying to get it down straight. I know what you’re talkin’ about on that map because he mentioned something about drawin’ it out, but that never happened because he took you guys up there and, I guess, you found it right away.”
Richardson told Eerebout that the conversations between him and his brother had been recorded. “So you better be tellin’ the truth or we’ll know,” he said. “Why did Byron say he needed your help to find the body?”
J.D. shrugged. “Maybe that’s why he was askin’ me on the phone because he didn’t really remember where we went. But I can’t believe he wouldn’t remember ’cause we went up there specifically to find out so we’d have somethin’ on Tom.”
“Then why does it take you to describe exactly where the grave is to your own brother if he’s been there?” Richardson asked.
Eerebout’s face was the picture of concentration. “I’m tryin’ to think of what you guys would have heard us say that would lead you to believe this,” he said.
“Don’t worry about what I know,” Richardson said. “You just worry about the truth and my questions.”
“Well, when we drove up there together it was the middle of the night,” J.D. said. “But when I went up there again, it was daylight. So I went there three times and Byron only once.”
During that second trip, Luther seemed to be going over what he needed to do. He needed to get rat poison. He got rid of the gun. “He threw it in the river or something,” J.D. said. But Luther never said where he killed her, how he killed her, or why.
“I heard somethin’ about that she was raped,” Eerebout said. “So my instant assumption was that they went up there, got drunk, and it was a rape thing.”
“Have you been threatened by your dad not to talk?” Richardson asked.
J.D. scowled. “Of course not,” he said. “I’m very, very close with my dad.”
In fact, he said he still had a hard time believing Luther had killed Cher. “It’s kind of like, you know, let’s say your friend went out and did some heinous thing. He comes back and, you know, you can’t believe what’s happened but what are you gonna do? You gonna have your friend go burn
for it? Or are you just gonna try and stay away from it?”
Now there’s a convict’s kid talking, Richardson said. “Have you been threatened at all?”
“I haven’t really been flat-out threatened. But I’ve been told many a time what happens to snitches, let’s put it that way.”
“By who?” asked the detective.
“By Luther.”
“Since this homicide or before this homicide?”
“Before, since. A snitch is a snitch. They’re the lowest on the bracket.”
“Did you ever feel that he might be talkin’ about you because you knew about the homicide?”
“Kind of, yeah,” Eerebout said. “He never flat out threatened me. But when he’d say things, I’d catch them and he knew I would.”
“Did Luther ever talk about what he was going to do if the body was found?”
“No,” J.D. replied. “He knew that it was just me, Byron, and him that knew generally where it was unless he told Southy. I’ve heard a rumor that he called Southy to do somethin.’ Maybe he called him to move the body.”
“When you followed Luther up to the mountains, did Byron tell you where you were goin’?”
“He kind of directed me a little,” Eerebout acknowledged. “I’m assumin’ that Tom told him that he was goin’ somewhere. I assumed that Byron didn’t know exactly, but he knew generally.
“So I assumed Tom maybe said, ‘Well, I’m goin’ for a ride up to Winter Park.’ Because Byron said, ‘We’re goin’ to Winter Park.’ So that’s where I get my assumption. And then Tom’s car was parked right on the side of the road.”
“Did he ever mention Cher threatening to snitch on you?” Richardson asked.
“No,” J.D. said, then thought for a moment and changed his mind. “It does seems like there was a time he was tryin’ to justify what he done, when I asked him what could have possibly brought that on, and he said, ‘Yeah, well she was gonna snitch you guys off.’ My reaction was, ‘That’s a little extreme.’ So I think it was just a bullshit excuse, and now I’ve heard that she was raped, I think it was just that.”
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