Monster

by Steve Jackson

  Cher, he said, would not have willingly had sex with Luther. “She was a total flat-out sweetheart. She never did anything wrong or anything to bother me or Byron. Just that one night she was mad about Gina and took off with Tom.

  “And that was a mistake right there.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  March 13, 1995—Lakewood, Colorado

  In the two years he’d spent investigating the disappearance of Cher Elder, there had been days when Scott Richardson doubted he would ever be able to make enough connections to get a conviction. Then there were days like March 13, when all the pieces seemed drawn together by some invisible force, like iron shavings to a magnet.

  It started in the morning. The Jefferson County Records Division called to say they had a reported theft of a .22 Baretta handgun from a convenience store in Evergreen on March 23, 1993, four days before Elder disappeared. The records clerk gave him the victim’s name and the serial number of the gun.

  An hour later, he was contacted by Trooper Phillips of the West Virginia State Police. Mark Dabbs, an inmate currently in the Federal Correctional Facility in Maryland but who had been housed with Luther in West Virginia, was saying that Luther was telling other inmates he killed a girl in Colorado and buried her body.

  Then Richardson had no sooner hung up with Phillips when Debrah Snider called. Luther, she said, wrote her recently and that “not surprisingly” he was now blaming J.D., Byron, and Southy for Cher’s murder. She read him the letter.

  “I hope Skip hasn’t turned on me. He tells me it’s you and Babe and Southy that has brought this all on. He knows I’ll go to the gas chamber with my mouth closed.”

  Luther was curious about the deal Byron got. He reminded Snider not to interfere with what was happening.

  Luther wrote that he would now allow her to visit, Debrah said. “I went and the lies have gotten really interesting. Supposedly, either Byron or Southy shot Cher and, of course, each is blaming the other, he says. And supposedly J.D. and his friends went up there and dug her up and played with the body and cut that finger off to get the ring. He says he’s innocent.”

  “Of course, he tells you this knowing that you’re going to tell me,” Richardson noted.

  Debrah agreed. “Another interesting thing is that he said the reason they took off her clothes is because that’s how the police determine when somebody got killed. People say the last time they saw this person they were wearing this or that. Supposedly, Byron and Southy took her clothes off so that couldn’t happen. I think those are pretty interesting statements from somebody who’s innocent. But he says he’s ‘educating’ me.”

  “What do you think?” Richardson asked.

  “I don’t know,” Debrah hedged. “I have no doubt that there was an execution.”

  The day ended with a meeting at the Lakewood Police Department among himself and Connally, Detective Scott of the Denver Police, and Detective Eaton of the Summit County Sheriff’s Office.

  Richardson related what he could of his case against Luther and then sat back and listened to the others. Their information could be vital if the judge allowed Dennis Hall to introduce similar transactions.

  Back in November, Richardson let Sheriff Morales and Eaton know that Luther was in prison in West Virginia for rape. They all hoped that Byron Eerebout might know something about the Summit County killings, but he had since refused to discuss anything beyond Elder’s murder. Now, with Luther in jail, Byron might talk.

  At the meeting, Eaton reported the progress he’d made tracking down old leads. There was “Dillon” John Martin, who told deputies in 1973 that Luther bragged about dumping bodies. And Troy Browning, who was living under another name in a different state because he still feared Luther after informing the police of his trying to arrange Mary Brown’s murder. Browning claimed that Luther had also talked about other killings, one in which he used a nylon cord to bind a girl’s wrists.

  Ronald Montoya, who Luther befriended in jail, recalled Luther talking about killing two girls, Eaton said. He’d also tried to have three other people—Mary Brown, Sue Potter, and John Martin—murdered to prevent them from being witnesses against him.

  “He said he picked the one girl up and tried to rape her, but he couldn’t get it up, so he used the hammer,” Montoya had told him. “He said he was going to kill her by shooting her when she got out of the truck, but there were houses nearby, and he was afraid the shot would be heard.”

  Eaton said he’d learned that the detective who showed the pharmacy clerk the dark photocopy of Sue Potter’s driver’s license never bothered to return with a better photograph. Now, the clerk’s recollection was fuzzy. “Could be,” she had said. “Maybe. It’s been so long.”

  He also located the ballistics test on Wagner’s gun. It wasn’t the murder weapon used on Oberholtzer and Schnee, but several of Luther’s former jailmates recalled Luther bragging about the guns he’d owned. Eaton said he still needed to find John Martin and Sue Potter.

  Detective Scott went next. He recounted the attack on Heather Smith, her amazing recovery, and subsequent identification of Luther.

  “Until she saw that photograph, we were at a dead end,” he said. “We looked at her old boyfriend, who we suspected hired somebody to go after her. But he had an alibi and we were never able to make a connection.”

  Richardson perked up when Scott said the former boyfriend once lived in Fort Collins and still had connections there, and also frequented several bars in the Lakewood area known to be hangouts of the Eerebout brothers and their associates. “Maybe he and Luther got together,” he suggested.

  The detectives believed that so far, Luther had attacked at least seven women, four of whom were dead. There were five in Colorado—Bobby Jo Oberholtzer, Annette Schnee, Mary Brown, Cher Elder, and Heather Smith. Bobby Jo Jones in West Virginia. And the blond hitchhiker in Pennsylvania, who still had not been identified.

  And those were just the ones they knew about.

  The car with the dark-tinted windshield drove slowly down the Grand Junction street toward Rhonda Edwards, who sank in fear against the wall of a building. It was a bright, sunny day with many people out and about, and still she felt trapped and frightened.

  She knew it was silly. Thomas Luther was in jail in West Virginia and he’d remain there, Scott Richardson had assured her, “until I go get him.”

  Rhonda was slowly learning the details of her daughter’s death, and they were eerily similar to the nightmare she had in October 1993. Edwards shuddered, convinced that the dream had been a message from her daughter.

  Finding Cher’s body was an immense relief, but it brought new difficulties. Richardson had asked them to keep it secret until after Luther was indicted, which meant that for nearly two weeks they couldn’t share their grief with other family members or friends. So she had busied herself planning Cher’s funeral.

  She knew her daughter would have liked the view of the high red cliffs of the nearby Colorado National Monument and the tall cottonwood trees that bordered the Colorado River that wound past the cemetery. She picked a bronze casket and a pink granite headstone, on which she had Van’s suggestion inscribed: “Until we meet again.” She sent Cher’s high school gown and favorite teddy bear to the funeral home to be placed with her remains.

  The funeral director called asking who would be Cher’s pallbearers. Rhonda Edwards found herself at a loss. She wasn’t sure what relatives were going to be able to make it on short notice. There was Van, of course, and Van’s brother, and Cher’s half-brother, Jacob. But she needed four.

  Suddenly, Scott Richardson’s face popped into her mind. Over the past two years, he had become family. As worn out by the case as she knew he was, he always found time to talk to her, or simply listen as she poured her heart out in the bleak days before he found Cher. He had saved her when she thought she couldn’t hold on any more.

  Once, during one of their late-night conversations, Richardson confided that he knew Cher so well
, it was like investigating the murder of one of his own children. “You know my daughter better than I do,” she’d replied. “You’re the brother I never had.”

  Now, she wondered what he’d say if she asked him to do one more thing for Cher. She called. “I know I have no right to ask this, and please don’t feel obligated, it’s a long ways and you’ve already done so much, but would you consider being one of Cher’s pallbearers?”

  There was silence from the other end of the line, and she feared that she’d overstepped the bounds. Then Richardson, his Texas drawl softer than any other time she’d ever heard him, said, “I was going to ask if you’d mind if I just attended the funeral.”

  After another long pause, his voice was hardly more than a whisper. “You just made me very, very happy.”

  They laid Cher Elder to rest on March 24, 1995. It was a gorgeous Colorado spring day. The sky was turquoise with only a few high, cottonball-white clouds drifting like sheep across a blue pasture. The first green buds were appearing on the branches of the cottonwoods down by the river, which was swift and swollen with melting snow.

  After the ceremony, Scott Richardson went back to Rhonda’s house for the wake. He was the hero, but he couldn’t get past the sadness and the tears to feel much cheered by the heartfelt compliments of Cher’s friends and relatives. They treated him like he walked on water, but all he could think of was what lay ahead. If I don’t convict this guy and he walks, I’ll never be able to look these people in the eyes again, he thought. It ain’t over, not by a long shot.

  Later, he drove back to Denver, slowing down when he reached the exit for Empire. He didn’t turn to go to the grave, but he looked up the narrow Clear Creek valley and wondered where Cher’s spirit lingered. The little clearing in the woods or the cemetery by the Colorado River. He continued on to Lakewood. He still had a job to do and that was make Luther pay for her murder.

  The train of Richardson’s investigation kept picking up speed. The day before the funeral, Tristan Eerebout was arrested for outstanding traffic violations and Richardson, who had been unable to find the boy, was notified.

  The detective went to see the teenager at the jail. “Let me explain something,” Richardson said. “I’m not going to read your rights and that’s because it should give you some comfort. ’Cause if I don’t read you your rights, then I can’t use anything you tell me against you anyway, okay?”

  “That’s cool,” Tristan said. “I’ll answer whatever you ask me.”

  “I think you agree that Cher Elder did not deserve to be killed?” Richardson began.

  Eerebout nodded emphatically. “Cher Elder was the coolest lady I’ve ever met. She was a really cool chick.”

  At Richardson’s prodding, the boy recounted how he stole the .22 Baretta and then, “maybe a day or two later,” asked Luther to take it off his hands. Other than that, he said, he tried to stay out of it.

  “It was none of my business,” he said. “She was a good lady, and as far as I’m concerned, whatever Tom did, he did and it’s a fucking shame.”

  Richardson nodded. “Well, we share that.”

  Tristan said he had never been threatened by Luther. Nor had any member of his family told him not to talk. In fact, he said, they encouraged him to tell the truth.

  “You didn’t think this information about giving the gun to Luther was important when we talked to you two years ago, considering Cher was missing and presumed killed?” Richardson asked.

  Eerebout shrugged. “I didn’t know she was missing at the time you talked to me. I really didn’t think it was important. I didn’t even think about it ’cause Thomas was always such a nice man. I’m glad you found her body simply for the fact that I was good friends with her little sister. It’s a fucking shame that she had to go through what she did and her parents, and I’m glad they get to put Cher to rest. As for the events of what happened, why she was killed, I never even wanted to know about it.”

  “What’s your feeling of Thomas Luther now?” Richardson asked.

  “I still like him a lot,” the teenager admitted. “It’s kind of hard for me to believe that he could have did something like this. But after everything that I’ve read, and your coming to question me, I don’t know, I guess in a way I kind of hate him. What he did, I think is disgusting.”

  “What about testifying?” Richardson asked.

  Eerebout laughed. “I don’t want to get involved in this case.”

  Richardson looked hard at the boy; these Eerebouts were something else, always looking out for themselves. “Well, that’s something else we share,” he said. “I didn’t want to get involved in this case either. I didn’t pick this case. This case picked me.

  “But you’re kind of like me, we are involved. You are directly involved in it because of your specific knowledge about this gun from 7-Eleven. It is our feeling, and it will ultimately be proven, that the gun you stole from 7-Eleven is the gun Luther used to kill Cher. Every case is like a pie; there’s a lot of witnesses that get involved in the cases, and they all have just a little piece of the pie. They can’t do the whole case by themselves. Everybody has a little itty bitty piece of it.”

  Tristan nodded. “I’ll give you my little itty bitty piece.”

  Every day, there seemed to be some new “itty bitty piece.” Cher’s best friend, Karen Knott, remembered seeing her wearing Byron’s ring the night she disappeared. Mortho Brazell was now denying again that Luther gave him a man’s ring. But Southy, Byron, Debrah, and now Karen remembered it.

  Southy Healey took Richardson to the highway outside of Empire where he said Luther had thrown his clothes into the creek. But nothing was recovered from the subsequent search; it had been two years and two spring runoffs. The investigators hadn’t turned up any of Elder’s clothes, either, or her purse and its contents. But Richardson had an idea of what had happened to at least some of her personal effects.

  On a hunch, he contacted a company that pumped the outdoor toilets for the forest service. An employee there remembered that in the spring of 1993, he was pumping the toilet at the Clear Creek Campground near Empire when he saw a bra and panties in the sludge. But those items, and whatever may have been with them, had long ago gone to a landfill, he said.

  Richardson located the woman who had reported her gun stolen. Ann Parson said her ex-husband had given it to her. The theft had occurred just as the Eerebout boys had described.

  Having the serial number of the gun and placing it in Luther’s hands was vital information. They might never recover the weapon, but John O’Neil, an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, had told Richardson that the ATF could try to find the guns made just before and after Parson’s gun.

  “I just testified in a case where the murder weapon couldn’t be found,” O’Neil said. “So we did ballistics tests on the prior gun manufactured. The ballistics between that gun and the bullet recovered from the victim were nearly identical.”

  Even if they never located either gun, knowing the make and model could be critical to the prosecution case. Every gun manufacturer uses a slightly, and sometimes more than slightly, different rifling—called lands and grooves—in its barrels to put a spin on the bullet. The marks on the bullet fragments taken from Cher might rule out some models and narrow it down to others.

  The next day, Richardson got a panicky call from Babe Rivinius. J.D. had been arrested for burglary and was in the Jefferson County Jail with his brother, Byron. But that wasn’t what was worrying her.

  Rivinius said when she went to visit her sons at the jail, she noticed a group of their friends standing outside the building. As she approached the other young men, she heard a loud banging from above.

  Looking up, she saw inmates hitting the windows, trying to get the attention of her boys’ friends. Then one held up a sign that read, “Tristan Byron J.D. KILL!”

  Two years to the day that Cher Elder disappeared, there was a memorial service in a Golden church for those who had been u
nable to attend her burial the week before in Grand Junction. A photograph of Cher, a copy of which hung on Richardson’s office wall, leaned against the altar. The steps and floors leading to the altar were covered with dozens of white roses.

  When everyone was seated, Earl Elder walked up to the altar, turned, and faced the crowd with tears streaming down his face. He expressed his gratitude to the Lakewood Police Department, “especially Scott Richardson.”

  “Cher was our daughter, our sister, our granddaughter, and our friend. She will always have a very special place in all of our hearts,” he said.

  “Cher, all of us who were part of your life, miss you so very much. We are heartsick that we will no longer be able to hug you, or kiss you, or laugh with you, or cry with you, or just spend a moment with you.

  “My darling daughter, we love and miss you—a piece of all of us left with you. We pray you are at the foot of God’s throne and that one day we will rejoice when we meet again.”

  As Earl stooped to pick up several roses to distribute to family members, Richardson walked to the altar and began to speak as the family had requested.

  “It is unnatural for parents to outlive a child,” he said. “You paid the ultimate price, you lived a parent’s worst nightmare. For two years, you have remained silent so as not to hamper her recovery. You gave me your trust to find your daughter’s body. I’m not sure if it was my own child, I could have done the same.

  “The most beautiful things in the world can’t be seen or touched. They must be felt in the heart. And Cher Elder is felt in our hearts today.”

  The next day, Richardson rode to Empire on his motorcycle, leaning into the curves as the interstate coursed around granite walls, past the remains of old mines that dotted the hillsides like the diggings of large gophers. He was still tracking down itty bitty pieces of the case when he stopped in the store where J.D. Eerebout said Luther picked up a box of rat poison. The store carried the poison in a box identical to that described by J.D. He bought one for the evidence locker.