Monster

by Steve Jackson

  Afterward, Richardson met with Debrah Snider outside the courtroom. She had recently moved back to Colorado, although she wasn’t sure she was going to stay until the trial, which was scheduled for late fall.

  Tom, she said, planned to stick to his story that Cher was killed during a drug deal set up by Byron and Southy. “He still can’t figure out how Byron knew how to find the grave,” she said. “He says he only told him the general area where she was buried.”

  Snider was angry. She’d talked to Deputy District Attorney Dennis Hall who told her she wouldn’t be allowed in the courtroom during the trial. And on the other side, some of Tom’s friends were trying to persuade her to stay out of it all together.

  “I’m sick and tired of tryin’ to do the right thing,” she said.

  “You know I got nothing to gain by testifying against Tom, except keeping the only thing I ever kept in my life, and that’s the truth. But I could sure end all my problems and keep the man I love, if I testified that I lied to you.”

  “You know we recorded all of our conversations,” Richardson reminded her.

  “Yeah, I know,” she replied. “Don’t worry, I’ll tell the truth.”

  Debrah felt like a piece of cloth being ripped in two directions. She was either going to have to betray Tom or the truth. And this time, if she chose the latter, it could cost him his life.

  Luther seemed just as torn in his letters to her. Even when the defense team received some of the investigation reports from the prosecution and he learned exactly what Debrah’s role had been, he still signed his letters, “Love, Tom.”

  Until the last one, the one he sent just after he pleaded not guilty. “I hope you’re as lonely and hurt and full of pain as me. ... Why couldn’t you believe I loved you?”

  When Debrah Snider returned to Colorado she drove Luther’s blue Geo Metro, which she turned over to Richardson for further testing.

  “Thomas told me that he did not want my name on the title in case he got caught doing something illegal in the car,” she said. “You know, we only bought the car ten days before Cher was killed.”

  After he pleaded not guilty, and before the last letter, he’d called. “He’s not happy with me,” she said sarcastically. “He says that every time we had a fight, I gave you information and that his lawyers are going to use that to attack me in court. They’re goin’ to say that I’m just a vindictive bitch.”

  Luther had even called her mother. “Tell Debrah she got what she wanted,” he’d said. “I’m going to just lie down and go to sleep.”

  Snider said Luther was trying to convince her that he injured his hands the week after Elder disappeared. “But I know when it was,” she said. “I got back from my trip and he was in bed.”

  Babe Rivinius called her after she got back to Colorado to tell her J.D. had fled with Skip and wouldn’t be comin’ back to Colorado to testify. Rivinius also said that if anything happened to her family, she planned to kill Richardson.

  After a few moments of awkward silence, Richardson got the feeling that Debrah wanted to ask him something but was having a hard time getting it out. “What is it, Deb?” he probed gently.

  She hesitated, started to say something, then stopped. But finally she asked, “I was wondering if you thought it would be okay for me to visit Cher’s grave? I’m havin’ a hard time dealing with the fact that it took me so long to tell you the whole truth. I won’t bother her folks, but I just thought I’d like to tell her that I’m sorry.”

  Richardson gave her instructions on how to find the grave in Grand Junction, and she drove there the next day. She didn’t know why exactly. She hoped to find an answer, or at least some peace. She wanted to see if she could feel whether Cher was finally at rest.

  However, all she felt as she stood next to the pink granite gravestone was self-loathing. She remembered how she had blamed Cher for going with Tom, for not being able to see how dangerous he was. She remembered how long it had taken her to tell Richardson the whole truth.

  She stared at the fresh flowers recently left on the grave, testament to the family’s still raw grief. “I’m sorry, Cher,” she said as her tears fell on the new grass growing on the grave. “It should have been me.”

  In August, Scott Richardson received a letter from Wesley Cheung, an inmate at the Jefferson County Jail, who he had once arrested for some minor incident. Cheung said he’d heard Richardson’s name come up while talking to another inmate, Thomas Luther.

  “I decided to pass on this information because my conscience calls and because someone else might get the chair for no reason.”

  A few days later, Richardson paid Cheung a visit. The inmate said he’d been housed next to Luther in the jail and the two had talked quite a bit. Luther never told him anything directly related to the murder, but several things he said led Cheung to believe he could be a killer.

  For instance, one day while watching a television cop show that depicted a homicide victim who had been found lying on the ground, Luther said, “He should have buried her.” More interesting, Cheung said, was Luther seemed to know a lot of details about another Denver homicide.

  The woman, Luther reportedly told Cheung, had been picked up and taken to her apartment. There she had been choked and stabbed, her body left lying under an American flag.

  . “Check it out,” Cheung said. “If what I say is true, come back, I have more information. In exchange, I want out of here and into a drug treatment program.”

  Richardson told Cheung that Luther was probably just setting him up to see if he was a snitch. But he called the Denver Police Department anyway. “You guys got a homicide with a female victim, choked, stabbed, and found under an American flag?” he asked a detective.

  “As a matter of fact, I think we do,” the other detective responded. It took him a few minutes to find the report, but it matched Cheung’s description.

  In June 1994, the victim, one Anne Marie Baldauf, was found dead in her apartment. The apartment was in a secured building, and there was no sign of forced entry—she apparently invited her killer in.

  Baldauf was nude except for a bra and a t-shirt, both of which had been pulled up over her breasts but not removed. She was discovered lying on her stomach, stabbed in the back of the neck and three times in her left breast. There were bruises on her neck, indicating she had been choked. And, yes, her body had been covered with an American flag.

  Richardson went back to talk to Cheung, who said he wasn’t going to say anymore until he was out of the Jefferson County Jail. “I’m afraid of Luther,” he admitted.

  “How do we know you didn’t kill her?” Richardson asked.

  “That’s easy,” Cheung said. “I was in jail.”

  At the Denver detective’s request, Richardson asked that some of the blood and hair taken from Luther at the Fort Collins hospital be handed over to compare to a single, curly gray hair found at the crime scene.

  The hair, it turned out, was microscopically “in the same class” as Luther’s. But was Luther back in Colorado in June 1994? No one knew. But like he had in other instances, such as Heather Smith’s, Richardson stayed out of this case. It would be up to the Denver police to work out a deal with Cheung for his information.

  A few days later, Richardson received a call from Detective Scott in Denver. They had filed first degree attempted murder and first degree assault charges against Luther in the Heather Smith case. However, Scott said he’d just received a telephone call from a woman in Vermont that seemed more related to Richardson’s case. “Something about Luther telling her about waking up next to a dead woman.” The caller’s name was Helen Conyers.

  Richardson called and asked Conyers to repeat her information. She said she was a former friend of Luther’s who had stayed in touch with him while he was in prison in Colorado. “He never told me what for,” she said. “Anyway, he showed up that fall after he got out. I was with a couple of friends when he drove up in this little blue car.”

  Lut
her, she said, was good looking and personable, “but he made us nervous. We were sitting at my kitchen table, drinking wine, when he started talking about how he had been partying with this woman and they had gone to bed together. When he woke up the next morning, she was dead.”

  “Did he say how she died?” Richardson asked.

  “No. He didn’t elaborate. He was just strange and weird.”

  Conyers gave Richardson the name of one of the other women who was present during the discussion. That woman repeated the story of Luther waking up next to a dead woman. “But I don’t think he ever told us how she died.”

  In September, one of Healey’s sisters called Richardson to tell him that she’d been contacted by defense investigators. “They asked if I had information, and I told ‘em the only information I got is incriminatin’ against Luther,” she said. “They said that Dennis was involved in the murder, but I told ’em that he might be a thief and a liar, but he is not a murderer.”

  She did recall one thing that might help Richardson, though. Late one night in the spring of 1993, she said, Luther called for her brother who was sleeping on the couch at her house. “Luther showed up, all anxious to get going,” she said. “That’s when I heard him say, ‘A deal went bad, I fucked up, I left too many clues.’ He saw me listening and started whispering to Dennis.”

  Luther and her brother left together. Her brother returned early the next morning, “just when it was starting to get light.” It was only later, Healey’s sister said, that she realized the incident was about the same time Cher Elder disappeared.

  Richardson asked if she recalled going to Longmont with her brother to meet Luther in July 1993. No, she said, but that might have been one of her sisters.

  The detective called the sister. Yes, she said, they made the trip to Longmont, although she didn’t know why. Only that her brother was angry about whatever had been said on the drive home. “My old boyfriend, Bob Ramierez, might remember more,” she added.

  One evening in October, a knock on her front door startled Rebecca Hascall. The arrest of Thomas Luther and the subsequent identification of him by Heather Smith as her attacker had thrown them both for a loop.

  Hascall had come to view the process of healing from violent crime as something akin to piecing together a broken china vase. From a distance, it might look the same, but up close the cracks still showed, and it would never be as strong again. She saw herself, and Heather even more so, as broken vases—appearing whole, but fragile. The arrest of Thomas Luther exposed the cracks.

  Answering the knock by looking out a peephole, Hascall saw a woman standing on her front porch. In the old days before the attack, she would have opened the door, invited the woman in. Now she left her standing there in the yellow porch light. “What do you want?” she asked.

  “I have a book I need to give to Heather,” the woman said. “Does she still live next door?”

  “Heather doesn’t live around here anymore,” Rebecca answered, the hair on the back of her neck standing on end. Heather had moved several blocks away to a different house. “You can leave the book, and when I run into her, I’ll give it to her.”

  The woman seemed to think for a moment, then asked, “Well, could I use your telephone?”

  “No,” Hascall answered. She felt bad, but she was afraid. The man in the green coat had done that to her.

  “Do you have a portable telephone you could hand me?” the woman asked, sounding exasperated.

  “Just leave the book,” Rebecca repeated. “What is it, anyway?”

  “Well,” the woman said. “It’s not really a book. It’s an Avon catalogue Heather ordered.”

  Finally, the woman walked off into the night, without leaving anything. As her fear dissipated, Rebecca rebuked herself for being paranoid. She called Heather.

  “Did you order an Avon catalogue?” she asked.

  “No. Why?”

  Hascall explained what had just occurred. “Some poor Avon lady now thinks I’m crazy as a loon,” she said and they both laughed. But the laughter was followed by an uncomfortable silence. They both knew that Luther had sent girlfriends on his errands before.

  Just a week earlier, Heather Smith and Mary Brown talked for the first time through a mutual friend who knew both women’s stories and their connection to Luther. They met at a restaurant.

  There, Smith heard first hand from Brown about being approached in the Summit County courthouse by Luther’s girlfriend at the time, Sue Potter. And about how he had tried to have Brown killed so she couldn’t testify.

  Smith was surprised at how strong the other woman seemed. She herself had moved from the little home she loved. There were too many dark memories there, and it no longer felt safe.

  She’d recently had another setback, this one physical. The pain in her neck had grown, until she had difficulties holding her head up. Then it was discovered that her doctor had missed a fracture of the C7 vertebra, the same vertebra she later learned Luther had fractured in Brown’s neck. It had required a risky operation that might have left her paralyzed, but once again she had pulled through.

  Ever since, she had worked hard to get herself physically and emotionally fit for the trial, which was tentatively scheduled for after Luther’s murder trial. She trained to enter road races to regain her athlete’s confidence. At home, she read murder mysteries to test the limits of her fears. And she dreamed of revenge. Luther tried to kill her, and she wished she could return the favor—stab him five times and see if he had the courage and strength she had shown.

  Heather Smith was sure she had the right man—his face had never left her memory—but she was afraid that something would go wrong. That someone would come along with an alibi for Luther. And she did not look forward to being interrogated by Luther’s attorney Lauren Cleaver, who at several hearings had intimated that Heather was lying or psychologically impaired. Cleaver even told a newspaper reporter, after Luther pleaded not guilty to charges, that Smith’s accusation was “a bogus case. That’s not what’s exciting in Mr. Luther’s life.”

  Detective Scott had come to her defense, telling the reporter, “I have the best evidence there is. My victim is still alive. There’s a whole lot of credibility when a victim can get up on the witness stand, point to the defendant and say, ‘That’s the man.’ And Heather will be a great witness.”

  At the restaurant, Mary Brown admitted that she feared Luther even when he was in prison, afraid that someday he would decide to get even. Fear had almost overwhelmed her when she saw the press conference about Cher Elder, though it had subsided somewhat when Richardson arrested Luther for the murder.

  Brown was still living with the physical and emotional scars of the attack. The beating cost her some of her hearing and she was tormented by migraine headaches. “But I didn’t let him ruin my life,” she told Heather. “I made a choice to live, just like the choice you made. I met someone, fell in love, and got married. I made a decision to be happy and you can, too. I’ve even learned not to be afraid of the night again.”

  Mary Brown said she’d been told that if Luther was convicted of first degree murder in the death of Cher Elder, she might be called to testify about what he had done to her. After all these years, she might at last get her day in court and face Thomas Luther, the monster. Maybe.

  “In a way,” she told Heather Smith, “I envy you.”

  Hardwick, Vermont, lay in a remote, wooded part of the state known for its hunting. It was the sort of place where strangers stood out.

  Ever since Richardson and prosecution investigator John Newhouse arrived on November 11, heads swiveled to follow their every move. Even pumping gas, the locals in their plaid wool shirts stopped whatever they were doing to watch.

  Richardson drove to the police station where he asked Chief Dimick to direct them to Betty Luther’s home. “Take you there myself,” Dimick volunteered. “She knows me and might be more willin’ to talk.”

  “That’d be great,” Richardson said
. “Only don’t introduce me, just Newhouse here.”

  Betty Luther’s home, a small, yellow clapboard affair, lay on the outskirts of Hardwick. She opened the door and, seeing Dimick, invited them in and offered coffee.

  They were surprised to be so warmly received. Then they found out why. Lauren Cleaver and her investigator were in town and had called. Betty thought they were with the defense team!

  Betty Luther’s mood quickly changed when Dimick introduced Newhouse as being with the prosecution. She stiffened and turned to the detective. “Are you Mr. Richardson?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he answered. Again to their surprise, Betty Luther didn’t ask them to leave, though she remained hostile and kept throwing Richardson hard looks.

  She also didn’t add much to what they already knew. She said she married at 17 and bore Tom a year later. Her husband had worked a lot, but it was not an abusive household, “just the sort of discipline that was common for the time.”

  “If I can ask, what was the color of your hair when your son was young?” Newhouse asked.

  “I’m a brunette, if that’s what you mean,” she said. “But I started turning gray at an early age.” She pointed to a recent photograph of her family on the wall. She used to wear her hair like her daughter, Donna, in that picture, she said, dark and shoulder-length.

  Richardson didn’t say anything. They had agreed beforehand that Newhouse would conduct this interview so as not to antagonize her. But he couldn’t help but note the similarity between the photograph of Donna and those he had of Cher Elder, Mary Brown, and Bobby Jo Jones. Could have been sisters, he thought.

  “Do you have any evidence to help prove that your son did not commit this crime?” Newhouse asked.