Healey smiled and tugged on his tie. “Oh yeah. I’d say for the better, you know. How about you?” Again there were smiles and even a few titters from the jurors.
Enwall frowned. “I don’t know, Mr. Healey. We’ll see, I guess.”
The defense attorney dove into Healey’s past. But since he’d already admitted it, the questioning devolved into nit-picking about the exact number of convictions.
“But you do have a habit of lying to police?” Enwall said.
“I’d have to disagree with that,” Healey replied. When he got caught for a crime, he admitted, he’d try to work out a plea bargain. “So I wouldn’t say it was a habit, but I surely have relied upon it on occasion. But I’ve never been convicted, all my time was done on voluntary pleas.”
Enwall was getting nowhere. Healey was an obviously personable young man who didn’t have the usual criminal’s habit of trying to place the blame for his actions on others.
The defense attorney tried to establish a link between Healey and Byron Eerebout. But Healey said he’d only met him a couple of times, both with Luther. And while both sold drugs, they weren’t in business together.
Healey recalled speaking to Eerebout once in jail back in the winter of 1995. “He told me Tom’s in jail.”
Munch realized that Healey had crossed into dangerous territory by mentioning Luther being in jail. At that point, the jury didn’t know that it was for the West Virginia sexual assault and not for the present crime. Still, he told Enwall, “This is going nowhere. Move on.”
Enwall asked if Healey recalled showing up at Byron Eerebout’s house in torn, bloody clothes. He was referring to Eerebout’s statement to Richardson that Healey once came over, claiming to have been in a fight at a bar with police officers.
“I don’t think so,” Healey said, furrowing his brow, confused. “I do believe I’d remember that.”
“I would think so, and you don’t?” Enwall asked sarcastically.
“I don’t because it didn’t happen,” Healey shot back. “There’s no memory lapse. That just never happened. If I’d been in a fight with Lakewood cops, I don’t think I’d be at Byron’s talking about it. I’d probably have been under arrest, sitting in a jail.”
Enwall returned to Healey and Eerebout talking in the jail. “For instance, didn’t you say something about Cher’s dad wanting the body to be found?”
“Yeah, that was said.” Healey scowled.
“What was his reaction to that?”
“Basically, ‘Tough Shit.’ ” Back in the spectator gallery, Rhonda Edwards stifled a sob, while Earl Elder’s head dropped to his chest.
“Was there ever a time when Cher’s body was stored in your sister’s basement?”
“No.”
“You heard that one before?”
“Yes, I did.”
“There’s not even a little bit of truth to it?”
“No.” Now it was his turn to reply sarcastically. “I think we’d have seen it.”
At the prosecution table, Richardson smiled quickly before catching himself. Healey was no dummy when off drugs and was holding his own against Enwall.
Apparently, the defense attorney thought so as well. He told the judge he had reached a good stopping point for the day.
Munch agreed. He admonished the jury to avoid reading or watching anything to do with the trial. “Avoid anyone who wants to talk about it. Don’t go investigate anything on your own. Don’t drive by places you hear mentioned.
“And keep a free and open mind. See you tomorrow morning.”
January 24, 1996
Before the jury was brought into the courtroom on the second day of the trial, Hall announced that the prosecution was releasing Luther’s brother-in-law, Randy Foster, who had been subpoenaed. “He’s a hostile witness,” Hall said, “and has indicated that he won’t answer our questions.” Luther smiled.
With the jurors summoned back to their seats, Dennis Healey was again called to the stand. Now Enwall tried to show that Healey’s story had evolved as he talked to Richardson.
“Did your sister ever tell you that there was a time when Tom made a statement like he had to get out of state because he left too many clues?” Enwall asked.
“She told me that she recalled a conversation between me and Tom in the kitchen of her house when she heard that, yeah.”
“Did you tell her to call the police and tell them?”
“During the investigation?” Healey asked. Enwall nodded. “Yeah, I told her not to hide anything. ‘Just tell the truth.’ ”
“Did you first tell Richardson that Tom Luther never talked to you at all about what happened to Cher Elder?”
“I don’t believe Tom had specifically named anyone at that point. It all kind of came together for me when it was broadcast over the news that she had disappeared and Tom was a suspect.”
“Did Richardson tell you that others were pointing the finger at you, and that his theory was that without a doubt, Cher was killed Saturday night?”
“I don’t remember his words exactly,” Healey said. “I think he told me it was his job to find who killed her. But I don’t remember him saying that Tom killed Cher. He did tell me that the case was broke and anyone that didn’t cooperate, they were going to go after them.”
“And that he had enough to take them down?” Enwall asked.
“I don’t remember,” Healey shrugged. “It wasn’t a big concern.”
“Why wasn’t it a big concern?” Enwall asked.
“I had nothing to hide.”
“But you wanted a deal. No charges and no prison time,” Enwall said accusingly.
“I didn’t want to take a fall for nobody else,” Healey explained. “Deals happen all the time.”
“But you lied to Detective Richardson about how you knew where the grave was. You said you went up there with Byron and Tom,” Enwall said.
Healey nodded. “I was trying to cover my own back. I didn’t want to make it look like me and Tom had been there alone to take care of—”
Enwall interrupted. “So it was okay to lie about it?”
“I’m not saying it was okay, but I did it.”
“Do you believe you have immunity from prosecution in this case?”
“As long as I was not directly involved in the murder of Cher Elder, yes, sir.”
“So it’s imporant for you to not be found to have any involvement with her death?” Enwall asked and looked at the jurors.
“Well ...” Healey began to answer but Enwall angrily cut him off.
“Mr. Healey could you please answer the question, if you wouldn’t mind,” he said. “It’s important for you to be found not to have any involvement in her death, correct?”
“Well, yeah.”
“And Tom Luther did not tell you specifically that he shot Cher Elder in the head?”
“No. He said, ‘I fucked up and killed a broad.’ ”
“What did you mean when you told Detective Richardson that you weren’t going to confess to him on that day, Mr. Healey? That, and I quote, ‘You’re not my priest.’ ”
Healey frowned. “That I’m not going to confess to something I didn’t do.”
Enwall turned his back on the witness and faced the jury. “What you meant was you weren’t going to confess to him your involvement with Byron Eerebout or somebody else in the killing of Cher Elder?”
Healey shook his head. “No. What I wasn’t going to confess to him was something I didn’t do.”
Enwall frowned. He’d lost that round. “No further questions.”
Hall rose for a follow-up question. “Mr. Healy, what’s your understanding of what it is we’ve given you in return for your truthful testimony here?”
“I guess it is the accomplice or accessory to murder or whatnot for the things that I did to help Tom after he’d already killed her,” Healey said. “But I believe I wasn’t going to be charged in the first place because I didn’t have anything to do with the actual murd
er.”
“Was there anything else promised?”
“No,” Healey answered, looking at the jury. Excused, he stood and walked out of the courtroom without looking at Luther.
“Your next witness please,” Munch said.
“We’ll call Bob Ramierez,” Hall responded.
A barrel-chested man walked slowly up the aisle and through the swinging gates to the witness stand. “How long have you known Dennis Healey?” Hall began.
Ramierez looked up for a moment, then said, “A couple of years. In the spring and summer of ‘93 he was living with me and his sister off and on.”
“Do you recall a trip to Longmont?” Hall asked.
Ramierez nodded. “Yeah, we met Lou,” he said pointing to Luther, who sat staring at the witness with his mouth open, “at a McDonald’s.”
“Do you remember when ... what time of year?”
“Summer,” Ramierez said. “I remember it was a real hot day.”
“What do you recall from that meeting?”
“We was driving back and Dennis said Lou had done a number on a broad.”
“Was that all?”
“Some time later, he said Lou did away with some girl and now he had to get out of town.”
Hall sat. This time Cleaver rose to question the witness. “Did Dennis say that Mr. Luther had killed a woman?”
Ramierez shook his head. “He didn’t say killed. But I was high a lot of the time back then, and I wasn’t paying much attention.”
Cleaver nodded. “In fact, that was typical for you. You were high a lot?”
“Yes, sir,” Ramierez replied before catching himself. “I mean, ma’am.”
Richardson put a hand to his mouth to cover a smile. He didn’t like Cleaver and enjoyed her embarrassment.
Cleaver went on. “Dennis never said what was done to the woman?”
Ramierez shook his head. “No. I don’t know. I think I remember she was shot.”
The rest of the morning and into the afternoon was taken up by expert witnesses who testified about efforts to locate forensic evidence.
A crime lab technician testified that a single, curly gray hair was found on the driver’s seat of Cher’s car. Compared to Luther’s hair sample, she said it was in the same class, which meant it had matched seventeen different characteristics of Luther’s hair. Not enough without a bit of blood attached to it, as it might have had if it had been pulled out, to be sure. But very close.
A ballistics expert testified. They had not been able to locate the guns made just before and after the gun stolen by Tristan Eerebout for that comparison. However, the expert said, the bullet fragments taken from Cher Elder’s skull could only have come from a few select handguns. One of them was a .22 Baretta.
Another expert testified about efforts made to look for blood both in Luther’s car and Byron Eerebout’s apartment. Among other techniques, the crime lab had sprayed a chemical called Luminol, which reacts with iron in blood. There was a slight reaction with the stain on the back seat of Luther’s car; however, Luminol will react with other rust, such as that left by tools, and other tests could not determine if the stain contained blood.
Luminol had reacted strongly in Eerebout’s apartment. However, tests proved that the blood causing those reactions had come from a dog and from Eerebout. The expert testified that technicians had even dismantled sink traps to see if blood had been washed down them.
An expert also testified about the samples taken from Luther in May 1993 at the Fort Collins hospital. “Mr. Luther pulled pubic hairs on his own,” the expert, who had been there, dead-panned as Richardson smiled. Luther’s blood type, he said, was “A one plus one.”
Aerial photographs of the gravesite and the town of Empire were introduced into evidence, as was a scale model of the gravesite, including the turn-off. Michael Starr, the owner of the Marietta Restaurant, was called to the stand to describe the day in May 1993 when he saw the defendant walking past his restaurant, wearing a blue shirt, blue jeans, and a blue baseball cap with gold lettering on the front.
Late in the afternoon, after the jury returned from a break, Hall called Scott Richardson. He took the stand, his eyes going from juror to juror before returning to Hall.
Hall took him back to April 20, 1993, and asked what he’d done to verify some of the things Luther had told him about in the taped interview.
“I went to check to see if there was a pay phone where he said Cher went to make a call,” he said. “Then I got the records of all calls made from that telephone after 1:45 A.M. and ran them down. Not one of them knew Cher or any of the other people involved.”
After seizing Luther’s car, did he make arrangements to have the car picked up on May 19 at 9 A.M.? Hall asked.
“Yes.”
“Did he show up on time?”
“No. He showed up late that afternoon,” Richardson responded.
“And what was he wearing?”
“Blue jeans, a blue shirt, and a blue baseball cap with gold lettering that said ‘Navy’ on the front.”
Hall asked about the incident in which Byron Eerebout was arrested for shooting at Mark Makarov-Junev and his girlfriend Patty, and the comment that Eerebout knew what had happened to Cher Elder after she left with Luther. “I had asked him why he continued to lie regarding Cher Elder, and he was very angry at me. He was eventually convicted and sentenced to twenty-four years.”
“I want to direct your attention between May 1993, when you seized Luther’s car, and Byron Eerebout’s sentencing in July 1994,” Hall said. “During all of that time were you still investigating the Cher Elder case?”
“Yes, the whole time,” Richardson said.
“Can you give the jury an idea of how much of your workday would be devoted to Cher Elder?”
“The majority,” he said, and described the scope of the investigation.
“Did a lot of those things turn out to be false leads?”
“Yes,” Richardson replied. He described all the effort. The unidentified bodies. The scuba divers sent into the Empire sewage plant. The mine shaft excavations. The FLIR jets and bloodhounds.
Richardson knew that Hall was establishing that the investigation had not just haphazardly picked Luther as a suspect and then concentrated only on him.
“At the time of Eerebout’s sentencing in July 1994, did it appear to you that you were any closer to finding Cher’s body than you had been a year and a half before?” Hall asked.
“No. We were concentrating that search up in Empire. I felt that she was probably up in that area, but no.”
Richardson explained why he waited to talk to Byron Eerebout after his sentencing. “I wanted Byron to sit in prison long enough to realize that this is going to be the next twenty-four years and get a good taste of what prison life was really going to be like. But I didn’t want him sitting down there long enough to develop friends and get comfortable.”
At the meeting in Buena Vista, “I told him, just be quiet and listen to me. I just explained the facts—twenty-four years in prison and that I felt he had information about the disappearance of Cher Elder. Eventually he said he would cooperate.”
And eventually, Richardson testified, a deal was struck. Eerebout would be granted a sentence reduction and allowed to serve his time in a minimum security facility. He would be required to testify “truthfully” at Luther’s trial. But first, he said, Eerebout had to prove he knew exactly where the grave was.
With his eyes on the jurors, who sat rapt in their seats, Richardson recounted first the trip with Healey and how he discovered the pile of rocks while other searchers worked to make a mine shaft safe.
Then he recalled for the jurors the trip back to the grave with Eerebout, and the resulting discovery of Elder’s body.
“Did you maintain security up there when people weren’t working on the grave?”
“Slept by it,” Richardson said. For the first time in his testimony, his voice wavered. But the jurors seemed to
understand and several nodded their heads.
Hall produced photographs of the excavation. One by one, Richardson described the contents of the photographs and handed them to the grim-faced jurors. As he got to the photographs showing Elder’s remains, Richardson hesitated. He looked back to where Earl Elder and Rhonda Edwards sat. He didn’t want them to hear this. They seemed to get the idea and the family stood and rushed from the courtroom. The detective finished his descriptions.
Under Hall’s questioning, Richardson described how he had searched every turn-off between Golden and Central City. “How long did it take you to drive from those turn-offs to the grave?” Hall asked.
“Driving the speed limit, occasionally slowed by traffic, the trip is about thirty-five minutes,” Richardson answered. “And if you go straight from Central City, twenty-five minutes. And about forty-five minutes from Byron Eerebout’s former apartment.”
“And how long from the grave to where Dennis Healey was staying?”
“About an hour.”
Hall shifted gears. Now, he wanted to know about comments Luther made after his arrest in West Virginia, carefully skirting the fact that it was an extradition from prison.
Richardson described the drive to the airport with the police escorts. “It wasn’t pleasant in any way whatsoever—angry, hostile, yelling.”
In his seat, Luther stared at Richardson, who acted as if his enemy wasn’t even present. “He was yelling at me about things that I didn’t do in the case,” the detective recalled. “Yelling at me about a Colombian. He says, ‘How come you didn’t follow up on the Colombian.’ I wasn’t paying much attention to him. I was trying to avoid a confrontation because I knew this was going to be a long day.
“Finally, I responded, ‘What are you telling me? That the Colombians killed Cher Elder? You’re blaming it on the cartel?’ And he kind of looked at me and smiled, and that was about it with the Colombian.”
Several times on the plane rides back to Colorado, Richardson said, Luther told him he knew he was going to be convicted. “He said he felt like writing down what happened and getting it over with. And he made a comment that he couldn’t believe Byron and J.D. told on him.”
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