The fact of the matter was that her dad didn’t think much of females. Those who wore short skirts or showed a little too much cleavage were whores; the rest he placed in a category with Mexicans, who, he said, “are only slightly higher on the ladder than niggers.” Her dad’s critiques ringing in her ears, Debrah was uncomfortable wearing dresses and refused anything except jeans.
Her father was a big man, bigger still in his cowboy boots and the Stetson hat he always wore as the manager of the Belen feed store. If he’d had any hair left, it would have been blond and his eyes were blue. He could be a real charmer in a rough, cowboy way, if he wanted to, usually when he was trying to put some less-than-square business deal over on a customer.
When the customer left, so did the charm, and Debrah often heard him brag to his sons or the few friends that could abide him about how he’d “put one over” on some unsuspecting fool. She wondered how those friends would feel if they knew that he also laughed at them behind their backs.
“It’s survival of the fittest out there,” he’d tell his kids. “Don’t never think you can’t be replaced.”
Debrah often wondered if that meant he was thinking about replacing her or her mother, whom he treated as little more than household help. After all, he’d sometimes point out, his wife was half Mexican.
Debrah skipped school a lot. And she didn’t go to church very often, mostly because her parents rarely took her. Actually, she liked Catholic services and fervently prayed when she did attend that someday she would meet someone who would love her and pay attention to her. She was always on the lookout for some sign from God that her prayers were about to be answered. And so she was constantly disappointed.
Just like she was on that day when she waited in the arroyo for the sun to go down and still no one came to find her. Chilled and hungry, she had at last given up and gone home. When she walked through the door, her mother and father were yelling at each other and at the other kids. They didn’t notice her come in or head to her room.
I could die and no one would even know it, she thought as she laid down on her bed and cried herself to sleep.
I could die and no one would even know it. Debrah Snider awakened from the dream. It was 1990. Her husband, Dennis, snored next to her. She had two sons sleeping in another room. And yet, she thought as she quietly got out of bed, there was still a lot of truth to that final thought before she woke.
No knight in shining armor had ever arrived, although she had plenty of dragons to slay, including dealing with bouts of severe depression since her teenaged years. Her parents had finally divorced when Debrah was 13. Her father had remarried, to a woman who didn’t bother to disguise her dislike for her new stepdaughter.
When she was sixteen, Debrah made her first suicide attempt after an argument with her stepmother. She had walked out of her father’s store and up the embankment to stand in the middle of Route 66 as semi’s roared over the top of the hill and bore down on her.
The first few swerved only just in time as the drivers spotted the girl who stood facing them with her arms at her sides. Hearing the horns and the squeal of air brakes, her younger brother had run out of the store to drag Debrah back to safety. Her father’s response was to say that the effort was only “a stupid way of trying to get attention.”
Soon after, she moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, to work as a horse trainer for a couple who had befriended her. Her second suicide attempt, at age 19, followed the birth of her first son and the subsequent discovery that the baby’s father was already married. He had said that he wanted a son, and she thought that by giving him what he wanted she would at last have someone to love and care for her. But he pushed her and his son away to remain with his wife.
So Debrah Snider swallowed a bottle of painkillers. But they not only didn’t kill her, she ended up having to pay the hospital $100 for getting her stomach pumped.
What followed was a series of affairs with married men. It somehow felt safer to go into a relationship where she knew there would be no future. She didn’t enjoy sex; it made her feel used and cheap. As a teenager she had walked in on her father and stepmother having intercourse, and the hated other woman’s obvious enjoyment of the act had increased Debrah’s distaste for such intimacy. But she desperately wanted to be loved, even if it was for only a few hours. Some of her lovers in the heat of the moment would whisper what she wanted to hear and promised to leave their wives for her, but they always lied. She figured that’s just the way men were.
Nice single guys frightened her. Those were the ones she might accidently fall in love with, only to have her heart broken. Besides, nice guys didn’t fit her image of a dragon-slayer: strong, protective, a little wild, and even a bit dangerous—like the wolf-dog hybrids she liked to raise—someone who would miss her and come looking if she was ever lost. That’s why when she first met Dennis Syznski, a nice guy, at a country-western bar, she passed him off on a girlfriend despite his obvious attraction to her.
Debrah had a job working in a feed lot when she got the idea of buying calves that had been separated from their mothers to raise for a little extra money. One day, she approached the lot foreman, who had let it be known that there was a calf for sale. “How much you want?” she asked.
The foreman, a big, pot-bellied man whose breath smelled of beer even in the middle of the day, fixed his eyes on her chest and said, “Well, now, maybe we could just work something out in trade.”
There was no mistaking what he meant by “in trade,” and Debrah wasn’t interested. “Fuck off,” she told him. A week later, she was out of a job. The cattle market was down, the foreman explained, and the operation had to cut back.
“But I’m better at my job and have more seniority than some of the men you’re keeping on,” she protested. But, he shrugged, “they’re family men, with mouths to feed.” It was no good arguing that she had a young son, Chance, to support as well.
Angry and faced with making payments on a truck she had recently purchased, Debrah decided to get even. One night she crept back to the feed lot and filled the truck with bovine medication. Enough, she figured, to pay off the loan. But she wasn’t much of a criminal. She tried to sell the pharmaceuticals back to the company that had sold them to the feed lot. They recognized the lot numbers, and she was arrested shortly afterward.
Debrah Snider pleaded guilty and was sentenced to “up to 10 years” at the women’s prison in Canon City, Colorado. She left her son in the care of her mother and resigned herself to what she thought might as well be life behind bars.
She was surprised to discover that the Colorado Women’s Correctional Facility wasn’t so bad ... sort of a dormitory with bars on the windows and doors that were locked at night. The matrons, as the female guards were called, and the counselors treated her well and encouraged her to get her high school equivalency diploma and begin working on college courses.
One Catholic matron got her interested in the church again. Debrah was still looking for signs from God and came to believe that her arrest and conviction might have been such a sign to set her on the right road. She was baptized in prison.
Debrah was also starting to soften toward Dennis Syznski. He had been disappointed when she indicated no interest but had been there for her when she went to court and wrote to her often in prison. He loved her, he said, and understood that while she might not love him now, perhaps she could learn to in the future. He was no dragon-slayer, but she knew that if she asked him to fetch her the moon, he’d spend the rest of his days trying to find a way. He wasn’t a liar, nor a braggart either, just a good man.
Debrah said she’d give it some thought. She knew that when she got out of prison she wanted two things: land on which to raise animals and stability. Dennis certainly was the stable sort. So she relented. “Buy me some land where I can keep my animals,” she said when he next came to visit. “And when I get out, we’ll get married.”
It seemed like no time at all when he wrote to tell her that
he’d purchased forty-three acres outside the town of LaPorte just north of Fort Collins. And that’s where he brought her after her release from prison in 1976.
The land was everything she wanted it to be. Away from people, where she could raise a menagerie along with her horses and cattle. There were buffalo and exotic deer, but her favorites were the wolves. She understood their natures—born killers, yet she felt she was safe around them so long as she respected that they were wild animals and needed to be watched carefully.
She soon discovered, however, that other things never change. Sex was still a miserable experience. Her husband didn’t know how to be romantic or patient. She avoided contact with him. He was soon frustrated and accused her of marrying him when she had no intention of trying to be a good wife. Still, she managed to conceive and bore a second son, John, in 1978.
Trapped in a loveless marriage, Debrah Snider turned her attention to getting her nursing degree, followed in 1988 by a master’s in psychology. She’d developed her interest in mental health while working as a nurse on psychiatric wards at various hospitals in northern Colorado. Most of the patients she encountered were simply lost souls who had been overwhelmed by the world. They just need a little love and understanding, she thought, and I know just how they feel.
Recalling her own suicide attempts, Debrah recognized that most such efforts were calls for help from people who didn’t know how else to ask. But not always. She also knew that there were people for whom death would be a welcome release from a life not worth living. She knew because, at times, she was one of those people.
Debrah was thinking about suicide a lot in the spring of 1990 when she took a job at the state hospital in Pueblo, a 150-mile drive south of Fort Collins. If she died, she knew that her husband would take good care of the boys and her animals.
No one would miss me, she thought that morning when she climbed out of bed after the dream of Belen. Her hair was still long, brown, and wavy. She was a plain woman, not homely nor a beauty, who did little to accent her better features and still never wore dresses.
No one would miss me. The words kept repeating themselves in her head as she drove to work and even as she stood outside a hospital room that afternoon reading a patient’s chart.
There was an “alert” notice attached to the chart: “No women admitted unless accompanied by a guard.” The patient was a convict. The state hospital was where they took inmates from the penitentiary in need of special medical attention. She had met quite a few inmates on her rounds, and usually didn’t like them much.
Still, this chart intrigued her. So, they have some real psycho stashed here, she thought. The chart said his name was Thomas Edward Luther. He’d apparently had a violent allergic reaction to some prunes he’d eaten at the penitentiary.
“What’s he going to do, kill me?” she said quietly as she knocked on the door and opened it. “He’d be doing me a favor.”
Tom Luther was propped up on the bed and looking out the window at the sunny April day. He doesn’t look so bad, Debrah thought as he turned his head to face her. In fact, he’s kind of cute.
“Nice day,” she said, nodding toward the window.
The man’s smile, a nice smile, disappeared. “I suppose it’s fine if you’re not locked up.”
Debrah was disappointed. It was a typical response from one of these guys, she thought. She had yet to meet an inmate who didn’t spend most of his time feeling sorry for himself. “Mr. Luther, we all live in prisons of one sort or another,” she replied. “Yours is just the physical kind.”
Instead of getting angry with her as she expected, he laughed and his eyes flashed with appreciation. “Yeah,” he conceded. “You’re right.”
Those blue eyes followed her around the room as she busied herself with little odds and ends, picking up some papers that had fallen to the floor, checking to see if he had any water. Her face burning with embarassment, she hurried from the room as soon as she felt she could without appearing as if she had only visited out of curiosity.
When she drove back to Fort Collins that evening, Debrah thought about the prisoner. He didn’t seem dangerous—at least, she didn’t feel like she was in any danger from him. In fact, he was rather ... charming. She wondered why he was in prison.
The next day, she found an excuse to go back to his room. He was obviously pleased that she had returned.
“You married?” he asked.
The question caught her off guard. She blushed but managed to stammer, “Yes. And I have two children.”
He mimed his disappointment which made her blush an even deeper shade. “You have nice hands,” he said. “Working hands. I like to work with my hands, too. I’m a carpenter.”
Debrah looked down at her hands. She’d never thought of them as “nice.” They were rough and calloused, and both had Band-Aids on them—you didn’t work with horses and wolf pups without getting your hands nicked and bruised.
Before long, she was telling the inmate with the pretty blue eyes and nice smile all about her ranch. He said he liked animals and wished that he could see her place. Fifteen minutes later, they were agreeing that they had a lot in common.
Something else she noticed. Throughout their conversation, Tom had been polite, a real gentleman. He didn’t come on to her with little sexual innuendoes, or cuss, or let his eyes wander over her body like the other convicts did.
Debrah was in her car and driving home before she realized that the subject of his crime had never come up. But it doesn’t really matter, she decided. Everyone deserves a second chance, just like I was given, and I turned out all right.
After that second meeting, Debrah Snider had several days off during which she thought a lot about Tom Luther. When she returned to work, she was disappointed to learn that he had been sent back to prison.
At first she decided that it was for the best. She was married. He was in prison. Getting involved would do neither of them any good, and she wasn’t sure what she might want out of such a star-crossed acquaintance anyway.
Then again, talking to him had been the brightest spot in her month. What would be the harm in just writing to him? she thought. He’d said that he was lonely, too.
She made up her mind to do it, but it was against hospital policy for nurses to fraternize with inmates from the prison. Claiming that she had forgotten to make an entry on “Mr. Luther’s record,” she got his file from the records clerk and secretly copied down his prison identification number.
She had no plans to lead Tom Luther on about some possible future romance. Like her past affairs with married men, this felt safe; he was behind bars and couldn’t expect anything from her. In her very first letter, she let him know that she was sexually inhibited just so that he’d understand and keep any such interests to himself. She said she’d understand if he didn’t want to write back, as he probably had any number of girlfriends. “I can tell you’re a real ladies’ man.”
So she was surprised when she received a letter back from him in May. “I surely don’t recognize myself as being such a ‘charming person that women are frequently enchanted by me.’ I’m very flattered that you thought so.”
Debrah had asked him to tell her about himself. He started with a lie, saying he had been born in Quebec, Canada, and raised on a farm in Vermont. Everything else was exactly what he must have known would appeal to her: he liked the outdoors and working with animals; he wanted a quiet, simple life and gardens. He also told her that he would be getting out at the end of June.
“I liked you also. I remembered your long hair. You’re really kinda cute and well built. What do you want with a convict?” He signed the letter, “Best wishes, Tom.”
In his next letter, Luther described himself as her “knight in shining smiles” who was writing to tell her she wasn’t the only lonely soul in town. Both images struck emotional chords in Debrah.
It broke her heart when he wrote about how his father had died “without getting to see any of his children
grow up.” There was no mention of an abusive mother, only of a woman who had a really tough time when her husband passed away but had kept a chin-up attitude, telling her children crying was for sissies.
In mid-June he wrote to tell her that he’d been “dogged” by the parole board and his release pushed back to January 1991. It was also the first time he had ever mentioned the crime that got him sent to prison, although not the official version.
“You see, I was sent here in February of ’82 for an assault,” he wrote. “I hope you aren’t disappointed that I seem to be this assaultive person. I will tell you this, I have learned my lessons. This standing your ground shit is for fools and muscle heads which I am not anymore.”
Debrah took that to mean that he had gotten into a fight with some other man. Standing his ground. Well, she wasn’t the sort who could like a man who wouldn’t stick up for himself or, she thought, someone he loved, even if it meant prison. When she wrote him back, she said she thought he’d received an unfair sentence; she’d heard of people who had done less time for murder.
She liked him even more when he replied that he accepted his punishment. After all, he said, he’d assaulted somebody with a hammer—over a drug deal gone awry.
All he wanted when he got out of prison, he said, was to leave Colorado for the green hills of Vermont. He would buy a small home on a few acres of land so he could grow beef cattle, have a few horses, fish, and be able to eat out of the garden.
Of course, much of what he wrote wasn’t true. He fed her lies about the horses he’d owned, including a colt he’d supposedly raised since birth but had to sell after his arrest.
Luther seemed just a lonely man who’d made a mistake and paid for it dearly. He was sensitive and open, sharing confidences about his own failed relationships and his yearning for that “one good woman” to spend the rest of his life with.
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