Curtis said he knew more. If the police were interested, he would write them out a “ten-page” statement. But Curtis wasn’t asked to give that statement for more than ten years.
In May, an inmate named John Martin approached a deputy at the Summit County Jail and said he had information about Tom Luther. He would later claim his information regarded the murder of two women, one of whom Luther had left lying face down in a stream.
On the day before the Fourth of July 1982, an eleven-year-old boy was walking along a dead-end road that borders Sacramento Creek between the towns of Alma and Fairplay searching for a good place to fish. He was about two miles from where the creek intersects Highway 9.
Looking through a break in the brush that lined the creek, the boy saw the body of a woman ten feet below. She lay face down in the water. Annette Schnee had been found.
An autopsy revealed that Schnee had been shot once in the back with a hollowpoint bullet fired from a large caliber handgun—a .38 or .357. The bullet, which wasn’t recovered, passed through her body at an angle, suggesting she had escaped, or had been let go to run, and reached the creek just as the killer fired from the road above.
On the night she disappeared, the snow on the lonely Park County road would not have been plowed much past the point where her body was discovered. The chance of any other traffic coming on the scene during the murder, or for the rest of the winter for that matter, would have been very small; the killer had chosen the place well. But was it because he was familiar with the area or just lucky? investigators wondered.
Cold weather and cold water had helped preserve the body. Still, Annette Schnee had been in the creek for a long time and decomposition had progressed to the point that it was impossible to determine if she had been raped. However, it was apparent that Annette’s clothes had been removed and that she’d dressed again in a hurry. Her shirt was on inside out. One foot was wearing a long, blue wool sock; its mate was stuffed in the pocket of Annette’s hooded sweatshirt.
On the other foot was an orange, ankle-high wool sock. Its mate was back in the evidence locker of the Summit County Sheriff’s Office along with the other items gathered on top of Hoosier Pass, where Bobby Jo’s body had been found in January.
The suspected connection between the murders of the two women was futher strengthened in September when Schnee’s daypack was discovered by a hiker in the woods on the Breckenridge side of Hoosier Pass, a few hundred yards from the parking lot. But it was the orange socks that had confirmed what everyone familiar with the case had believed from the beginning: Bobby Jo and Annette had met the same monster on that cold January night.
For a first-time offender, Luther adapted to the role of hardened convict rather easily. In early April, an informant told Deputy Wooden that Luther was planning an escape.
Luther planned to start a fire or beat up another inmate, the informant said, to get moved to a segregation cell away from the prying eyes of guards and inmates. Then he was going to saw his way out through the wire mesh covering the window of his cell with a jeweler’s saw, or maybe pick the door lock with a large paper clip he had secreted. “Or he’s talkin’ about attacking one of the guards at lock down and running out of the building, where his girlfriend will have a car waiting.”
If that failed and he was later convicted of raping Mary Brown, Luther bragged that he had friends who would ambush his transport on the way to prison. “I don’t give a fuck if anybody gets killed because I will get out of here,” the informant quoted Luther.
Two days later, jail clerk Debbie Moe and sheriff’s office secretary Arlene Sharp overheard him talking to his girlfriend. Potter was saying that she couldn’t picture herself living in Mexico. “But if that’s where you think you’ll have to go, I’ll live there with you.
Moe wrote the conversation up in a report because of the escape rumor. Based on the report and the informant’s allegations, guards shook down Luther’s cell and frisked him. A paper clip “key” was discovered in his shoe, which to their surprise actually worked the lock. A decision was made to move Luther to a more secure jail in Arapahoe County just south of Denver.
For his trial, Luther was appointed a young public defender, James Nearen, Jr. The lawyer notified the court that he intended to present an insanity defense, contending that his client was mentally unable to form intent to rape Mary Brown or distinguish between right and wrong at the time of the offense. It would mean a jury trial just to determine the sanity issue.
On June 10, psychologist Marvin H. Firestone met with Luther at the Arapahoe County Jail at the request of Nearen. They started with Luther’s childhood.
“My mother had problems,” Luther told him. “She was real jealous of my dad because we kids wanted to be with him. She never could say, ‘I love you.’ We never got along.”
Luther related one incident as a boy when he came home with a jackknife he had purchased at a store. “She thought I stole it and started beating my head against the stove trying to get me to admit it.” She had finally taken him, bruised and bleeding, to the store where the owner backed Tom’s story. “She just shrugged and said I could have stole it.”
Luther said he left home at 12 to get away from his mother but returned two years later, having fared no better in the outside world. The death of his father at age 47, when Tom was 17, was a significant loss in his life and there had been no reason to remain in Vermont.
The morning of the attack on Mary Brown, Luther told the psychologist, he made love to his girlfriend, but they had later argued and he left to cool off by dealing drugs and drinking at a local bar. He described himself as drunk and “spacy from the cocaine” when the bar closed.
The offer of a ride to Brown was an attempt to do a good deed, Luther told Firestone. It went bad after it was apparent that she was lost and asked him to take her to a police station. He only wanted to talk about her options when, “I turned off my truck and asked, ‘What now?’ But she panicked and started kicking. She broke my windshield.”
Luther said he was trying to calm her by holding her down on the floor of the truck when she found the hammer and struck him in the head. “She was raving mad ... screaming rape. I punched her in the head three or four times.
“I was angry so I made her take her clothes off.” Luther said he wanted to teach Brown a lesson because she had unjustly accused him of rape. “Everything happened so quick,” he said. “I have a bad temper, especially when I’ve been drinking.
“I went home real upset and began to cry.”
Luther said he wasn’t thinking clearly after he let Brown go. “I was trying to figure out why I did those things. I was confused.”
“Her hair, the girl’s,” Luther had stammered, “her hair looked like my mother’s when she was younger, the way they both wore it.”
In his subsequent report, Firestone wrote that Luther had the capacity to know what he was doing when he made his comments to the police and allowed them to seize evidence without a warrant on the morning of February 13, 1982. However, even though blood tests taken within minutes after his arrest revealed no traces of cocaine, Firestone apparently accepted Luther’s claim that he was under the drug’s effects.
“There is a good possibility that, under the influence of cocaine and alcohol, the subject disassociated and acted out many repressed angers which were primarily attached to his relationship with his mother.”
On June 18, 1982, Mary Brown was standing in the hallway of the Summit County courthouse waiting for a pre-trial hearing when she noticed a pretty, dark-haired woman approaching.
Physically, most of the apparent injuries from the attack had healed. She no longer had to wear the neck brace for her broken vertebra, the grotesque swelling and bruising of her face was gone, and time had eased the pain where she had been raped with the hammer handle. However, she’d been left with partial hearing loss in one ear, nerve damage to the muscles around her neck, migraine headaches, and nerve damage to the finger that had been broke
n.
However, the major hurdle she faced was psychological, which was every bit, if not more, debilitating. For months after the attack, Brown had tried to blot it out of her mind. She was strong; she told herself that she could get through it. But instead of getting better, she got worse as repressed memories ate at her subconscious.
The formerly outgoing young woman was terrorized by the mere presence of men. She had been unable to go back to her boyfriend. Even as the weeks turned into months, she was cautious and timid when introduced by friends to a man. She rarely went out, except to work. Any strange man who approached her, no matter how innocently and even in the midst of a crowd in broad daylight, sent her into quaking hysterics.
Then there had been telephone calls from “friends” of Thomas Luther who told her that she must have been mistaken. That she had identified the wrong man in the police line-up. Some anonymously told her that pursuing the conviction of Luther could be hazardous: they had her telephone number and obviously knew where she worked in Denver. She lived in constant fear of monsters who hid in the shadows.
At last, she sought help from Carolyn Agosta, a Denver psychologist who had formed a group for women such as Mary called Ending Violence Effectively. Within five days of her first counseling sessions, Brown began experiencing nightmares and flashbacks of the attack. In one flashback, she recalled looking over her shoulder and seeing a gun pointed at her.
Agosta consoled Mary, telling her that the nightmares and flashbacks were all part of the healing process. She would have to deal with the attack, not blot it out, if she ever wanted to regain her life.
To the court, Agosta testified at a preliminary hearing that the attack could prevent Mary Brown from ever again wanting an intimate relationship with a man. The violence had also impacted her family who, fearing that Luther and his friends might come after them to silence Mary, had moved from their residences. “It is all part of the continuing victimization of [Mary Brown],” Agosta wrote. “It will affect the rest of her life.”
Brown would never be the same naive young woman she had been before that terrible ordeal, but she was determined to go on. She knew that real peace would come only when she had faced Thomas Luther in court and sent him to prison for as long as the law would allow. She promised herself that she wouldn’t let him skate by on the insanity defense; she would testify, and he would stand trial and be found guilty of attempted murder, which carried the possibility of 45 years in prison.
So she went to every hearing, even when the district attorney assured her it was not necessary at that juncture in the proceedings. That’s why she was standing in the hallway when the dark-haired young woman approached.
Sue Potter had remained faithful to Thomas Luther despite the evidence against him. In later years, investigators would wonder why.
Potter walked up to Mary Brown and said, “You got the wrong man. He’s glad you’re doing all right.”
Mary stood stunned, realizing who the woman was from the police reports. How could she still believe in that monster? But she was too frightened to speak. She turned and fled into the courtroom.
In September 1982, Luther was back in the Summit County Jail waiting for another court hearing when he spotted John Martin, who was also back at the jail from the penitentiary for a hearing.
Word was out that Martin was a snitch, the lowest form of life in the convict world—below even child molesters and rapists. When Luther saw him, Martin told jail officials, he walked over and said, “I’m going to kill you just like those girls.”
The younger man then grabbed him, but Martin screamed for help and was rescued by a deputy. Martin told an undersheriff at the jail that Luther wanted to kill him because of something Luther had said the previous spring.
The undersheriff made notes of the conversation. “Luther stated he killed two up here and dumped their bodies in the woods. Luther said he would have killed the third one but something clicked and he didn’t. Luther stated also if he gets out of this deal, he is going to kill this girl.”
Martin said he would testify and was willing to try to remember more details. In exchange, he wanted his current prison term reduced six months.
The undersheriff contacted the Summit County district attorney and was told to make a deal if the information was solid. But as the undersheriff told an investigator many years later, following his retirement, “there wasn’t time” to pursue the matter and the notes ended up in the Oberholtzer/Schnee file. Disregarded.
When Martin returned to the penitentiary in Canon City, he was locked up in segregation away from the general prison population for his own protection. The Corrections Department had received information that Luther was trying to get him killed by another inmate.
In the meantime, rumors were circulating that Luther had bragged to still others about shooting two girls near Breckenridge. In October, a detective was sent to interview a convicted sex offender named Ronald Montoya, who had approached officials at the Adams County Jail, one of many where Luther was held for a period of time as he awaited trial.
Luther had told him that he was being investigated for murdering two girls. Now, according to Montoya, he wanted three more people killed: Mary Brown, Sue Potter, and John Martin.
Luther told him he’d pay Montoya an ounce of cocaine—worth about $2,000—to arrange the death of Brown to prevent her from testifying against him. He knew from his friends that she was working at a restaurant in Denver; he had the restaurant address and her home address—both of which checked out.
“He said he picked her up and tried to rape her, but he couldn’t get it up, so he used the hammer,” Montoya said. “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.”
Montoya said that Luther had laughed about the cops “screwing up” when they arrested him because they hadn’t located two other pistols, a .45 and a .38-caliber, two sawed-off shotguns, 25 pounds of pot, and four ounces of cocaine. His girlfriend, whom Luther called “Lips,” had gotten rid of everything. But now Luther wanted “Lips” dead, too.
According to Montoya, Potter had dumped Luther for another man and removed $500 from his bank account. “He said he would like to be the one to kill her himself, if he could get out. He wanted her face blown off.
“Lips is scared to death of Luther because she knows something.... Every time he talks about her, he gets real wild and crazy-acting.”
As for Martin, Montoya said, Luther told him that the older convict “knows too much and talked too much.... Martin could be a witness against him because of what he told him about the rape and death of a girl.” Luther wanted Montoya to contact the Mexican Mafia at the penitentiary to have Martin killed. He was willing to pay $500.
Montoya said he also had his own, firsthand information incriminating Luther. Three months earlier, he said, he was watching television with Luther when there was a newscast about a missing girl. “He said, ‘They’ll never find the bitch,’ ” Montoya recalled. “After that he got real quiet and wouldn’t talk for three days.”
But Luther had approached him again. He said he’d met a girl at a bar in Breckenridge. They’d left to snort cocaine; afterwards he’d asked her to perform an apparently indecent sexual act. “But she said ‘No,’ and called him a pervert. He flipped out and started choking her.”
Montoya said that Luther had killed the girl—he had only guessed that it was by strangulation because Luther hadn’t mentioned anything else. “He dumped her body up in the mountains, under some brush.”
From what police could ascertain, Martin and Montoya had never met. Yet their stories were amazingly similar. Luther had supposedly told both of them that he had killed other women and dumped their bodies in the woods, which was also close to what Dillon John Curtis had said in his interview. Martin and Montoya also claimed that Luther admitted raping Mary Brown with the hammer handle and said he had considered shooting her before deciding
against it.
If Montoya was telling the truth, Luther now wanted Mary Brown, Sue Potter, and John Martin dead. Killing Mary made a certain amount of twisted sense; without her testimony, he couldn’t be convicted. Maybe he wanted Potter murdered out of jealousy or a feeling of betrayal for dumping him and taking his money—or was it because she knew something that might incriminate him?
But why try to pay to have Martin killed? Unless he had told the old snitch something that could hurt him someday.
A week later, the detective who interviewed Montoya met with Sue Potter. She was now living with another man but refused to disclose his name or where she was working. It was evident she didn’t trust anybody involved with the Luther case and now wanted nothing to do with her old boyfriend.
The detective told her that he had information that Luther was trying to have her killed and that she had gotten rid of several guns for him. “That’s bullshit,” she responded. “The only guns we had were my service revolver and a .22 rifle.”
“Luther’s claiming that he killed two girls,” the detective continued.
“I have no information about that,” Potter said. “I don’t know what he did when he went out by himself ... that was one of the problems we were having—he wouldn’t take me with him.”
The detective asked again about the guns and threatened that if Luther was tied to murder and she had disposed of the guns, she could be charged with being an accessory. Potter was incensed. “There were no other guns!” she yelled.
What about the threats to kill her? the detective asked.
Potter shrugged. “He’s crazy. He’s probably capable of it,” she said. Then she thought again. “I don’t think he’d do it.” Her lips were tight, angry, but the detective thought that her eyes looked frightened.
Monster Page 6