Debrah found herself telling him about her problems with Dennis, and men in general. She didn’t trust them, she said. But nevertheless, she was also lonely and “looking for a knight in shining armor ... a dragon-slayer ... who will wrap his arms around me and keep me safe.”
Luther sympathized. He didn’t want to take sides, he wrote, but Dennis seemed overbearing and not very understanding. But he was careful not to squeeze too much as he wound himself closer to her heart.
“I too have been lonely and unloved for many years,” he wrote. “I have been locked up for 8½ years and really miss being hugged and kissed and told sweet things.” The last few years had been particularly tough, he said. “It would be nice to have a love affair going without it being based on the physical act of making love.”
Each of his, at this point weekly, letters edged a little closer to her fragile psyche. She was a good-looking woman, he wrote after she sent him a photograph. Maybe he could visit her place someday and spend a little time with her? They could take moonlight walks down quiet, country roads ... just holding hands and talking.
Debrah found herself wondering what it would be like to be wrapped up in his arms and “just plain cuddling,” as he’d called it. He was so romantic and careful not to mention desiring sex with her, although as he grew bolder, he dropped hints—such as how all his former girlfriends had found him to be a “fantastic lover.”
Debrah worried, but not too much, that she might be falling in love. It was a nice feeling; she certainly no longer thought about suicide and her depression had lifted—jolted only occasionally when hoped-for letters from him didn’t arrive when expected.
Luther was even good to his mother. He said he telephoned her every Sunday. “Boy, I don’t know what I would do without Ma. I guess I’ve learned why men can turn into Ma-ma’s boys.”
He was worried that his mother, who had survived several bouts with cancer, wouldn’t tell him if she was really sick. She thought he might try a prison break in order to see her, so she wouldn’t tell him the worst. “I keep telling her I’m not doing 8 1/2 years to mess it up again. I can’t do another stretch.”
About the only thing that disturbed Debrah Snider about her pen pal was that he seemed to have a lot of anger toward authorities. He told her he hated cops and prison guards. He even asked her to stop using return address stickers that she had received from Mothers Against Drunk Driving on her letters. He felt they had pushed some irresponsible legislation that was ruining good people by sending them to prison.
Debrah responded that she didn’t think his resentment toward the police and other authority figures was good for his rehabilitation. He quickly wrote back that he didn’t hate all cops, just those who had misled him or lied about him. She thought that was understandable.
In August, she decided that maybe it wouldn’t hurt to give into his requests that she actually visit him in the prison. She drove down only to have more misgivings as she approached “The Walls,” as the inmates referred to the maximum security Colorado Territorial Prison in Canon City. The concertina wire and towers with rifle-toting guards in plain view reminded her of what the men behind those walls were like. But then, Tom was also inside.
“You must have been eating something,” he said, walking up to her in the visiting room. Before she could react, he wiped a bit of mustard from the side of her mouth. He was so gentle about it, she didn’t know how to respond.
They talked for the next four hours, mostly about her—every—thing from her troubled marriage to her animals. When it was time for Debrah to leave, they stood facing each other. Suddenly, Tom reached out and pulled her to him, briefly kissing her on the cheek.
Debrah flushed angrily. He’d had no right to do that. She left quickly without looking back. She swore she was never coming back. This had gone too far. But as the miles to Fort Collins passed, her anger dissipated.
After all, they were friends weren’t they? In fact, in the few short months they had been writing, he knew more about her and had provided more thoughtful suggestions than any counselor ever had. In their correspondence, he’d never made her feel ashamed of her lack of sexuality or stated that he even thought of her that way.
Debrah reached up and touched the place on her cheek he had kissed. She smiled. Yes, she thought, Tom was one heck of a nice guy.
The letter she received from him a few days later read like it had been written by a nervous teenager, which she thought was cute. “When I kissed you on the cheek, your skin felt so soft it made me wonder if your lips were even softer. Don’t get mad. It’s just been so long for me.”
As she read, Debrah imagined what kissing his lips would be like. He seemed so vulnerable when he wrote that he wasn’t sure if he was ready to take on the world outside “The Walls” without someone at his side. The whole world seems to be getting very violent and complex.
After that she visited him nearly every week, driving the nearly 200 miles to Canon City from Fort Collins. Between visits, she wrote letters and spent hours on the telephone with him. He was always interested in what she was doing, counseling her about her troubles, making suggestions about animal husbandry.
Before meeting Tom, Debrah didn’t even own a dress. Now she bought two at his request. He wanted other inmates to see that he had a woman friend “with a real cute figure.”
One of the dresses she modeled for Dennis. He had been amazingly accepting of his wife’s developing friendship with a convict. In a way, he was relieved. A “responsible guy,” he could never conceive of running out on his wife and sons, leaving them to handle the ranch work as best they could. But he was disappointed with his marriage and lonely, too. If some other guy was to come along and take his place with Debrah, well, he wouldn’t fight it.
Still, sometimes he felt pangs of jealousy. Maybe if Debrah had ever reached out to him the way she did this Tom Luther, it might have worked out. He felt one of those pangs when she modeled the dress she had purchased for her next visit.
It was a southwestern-style dress that hugged her figure, made out of a red-dyed buckskin material with fringes and a large silver belt buckle. “It looks like your bathrobe,” Dennis said.
Hurt and suddenly self-conscious, she almost threw the dress away. But she summoned her courage and wore it to see Luther. He positively gushed over how beautiful she looked. “Sexy ... if you don’t mind me saying so,” he said. “I have to say, you really turn me on.” He allowed his eyes to wander over her body, stopping here and there. And for once in her life, Debrah didn’t mind.
In September, for the first time, he wrote using the words, “I love you.... You are my only pal in the whole wide world.” For Debrah it was a sign. Yes, she wrote back, she loved him, too.
His only flaw remained his temper, especially when it came to female authorities. There was one counselor of some sort at the prison named Gloria Greene who particularly got to him.
When Debrah next went to visit, she told him she didn’t like him talking like that about women. It offended her, even if it was true. And she wanted him to stop referring to police officers with such hatred. No matter what “lies” they’d told about him, he had to learn to forgive and move on.
Sometimes Tom accepted her criticism. His anger, he said, had been his source of energy for so long he couldn’t always control it. But other times, he didn’t take it so well.
Now that he knew how dependent she was on his letters and visits, he sometimes withheld himself to “punish” her. He wouldn’t write and asked her not to write to him; or, he might remove her name from his visiting list without telling her. She’d show up at the prison, only to leave in tears when told she couldn’t see him.
He’d wait for a little time to pass and then “forgive” her, carefully explaining her transgressions. With each episode, he set the hook a little deeper. He was, as others had noted, skilled at manipulation.
There was a lot about Thomas Luther that Debrah Snider was unaware of besides the crime for whi
ch he had been convicted. He had turned into something of a jailhouse lawyer who kept prison and court officials busy answering, at taxpayer expense, frivolous writs and lawsuits, both on his own case and those of other inmates, as well complaints about conditions at the prison.
Luther’s intelligence and willingness to use the law library on behalf of others earned him a certain amount of safety in prison. And he had continued to explain his crime to other inmates as an assault on a woman who had ripped him off in a drug deal. He didn’t mention that it was a sexual assault, and sometimes he even left off the detail that the victim was a woman.
Luther adapted well to prison life. He made friends, including two young inmates, Charles “Mongo” Kreiner, who was in for assaulting a man, and Dennis “Southy” Healey, a petty thief and small-time drug dealer, as well as an older drug dealer named Richard “Mortho” Brazell. But his best friend was Jerald “Skip” Eerebout, who was doing time for attempted murder. They would all figure prominently in events still far in the future.
Like most inmates, Luther blamed the law and his victim for his imprisonment. It had been a mistake, he said, to let Brown go. “The next one will not live,” he told Mongo. “I’ll bury her in the mountains and they’ll never find her body.”
The thorn in Luther’s side was Gloria Greene, the director of the Corrections Department’s sex offenders programs. In 1985, he’d completed the first phase of the program, mostly an introductory course that hadn’t required much participation. In 1986, however, he discovered that the second phase, under the direction of Greene, was much more difficult. Inmates were required to participate in discussion groups and were confronted about their crimes and their views about women.
At first, Luther simply refused to speak. Then he grew increasingly resentful and belligerent toward Greene and other women counselors who pushed him. He began making veiled threats.
Finally, Greene kicked him out of the program and wrote a damaging report that marked him as a poor candidate for rehabilitation. In the years that followed, as the parole board continued to turn down his efforts for an early release, he realized he’d made a mistake. But Greene wouldn’t let him back into the program. He swore to other inmates that someday if he got the chance, he would rape and kill Greene.
Luther had few visitors. His family never visited. Instead, he “adopted” families and friends of other convicts. In particular, he got to know Skip Eerebout’s boys—Byron, J.D., and Tristan—watching them grow up over the years as they visited their father, and Skip’s wife, Babe.
Friends sent him the occasional card or letter. A couple of women who had been given his name by mutual acquaintances also wrote, but they all soon dropped out of his life for one reason or another.
One such woman was Bernadette Florea, who had been introduced to him by friends after his arrest in 1982. A born-again Christian, Bernadette had taken it upon herself to minister to Luther in an effort to bring faith into his life. She visited him in the various jails to which he was assigned as he awaited his trial. Then she kept up a telephone and letter correspondence with him after he was sent to Canon City until 1984, when she noticed something that frightened her greatly.
Luther hadn’t wanted to talk a great deal about the rape of Mary Brown whenever Bernadette pushed him to confess his sins and purge his conscience. But he did tell her that he beat the girl because she physically resembled his mother.
“I hate my mom,” he had shrugged. “And the girl reminded me of her.”
The conversation had disturbed Bernadette for more than his apparent lack of remorse. Petite with dark, shoulder-length hair parted in the middle, Bernadette realized with a chill that she, too, looked like Luther’s mother when she was young. Afraid to just cut off the relationship—he would, after all, get out someday—she began distancing herself from Luther and eventually stopped responding to his letters.
Time after time, Luther’s requests to have his conviction overturned or his sentence shortened had been turned down. His complaints that “my rights were violated” fell on deaf ears. But the bitterest pill of all for Luther came in late 1988, when he approached his mandatory parole date in 1989.
Luther went to the parole board hearing fully expecting to be told a date in the not-too-distant future when he would be released. He was angry. He had been given a year off the fifteen-year sentence in 1985, but otherwise he’d been made to do every minute of seven years with no early parole. Every time he’d come before the board Mary Brown and the deputy from Summit County, Joe Morales, had been there to recount all the gory details. Gloria Greene’s letter in his file followed him to each hearing, too. Together they slammed the door on his release.
Now, believing the parole board would have no choice but to let him out, he swaggered into the room with a smirk on his face. He’d get his date and tell these bastards what he really thought of them. “Remember my number,” he told the parole board director. “When this is over, you’re going to want to know it.” But he was in for a shock.
The parole board knew that Luther and Robert Thiret, who had raped a 3-year-old girl and then dropped her down an outhouse toilet in the mountains and left her for dead in 1983, were both coming up for mandatory parole.
Many years before, overcrowding in the state’s prisons had caused the Colorado legislature to pass a law giving mandatory parole to any felon who had completed half his sentence. Now, however, the parole board was determined to keep Luther and Thiret, locked up as long as possible.
A weak case due to bad police work had forced the district attorney in Thiret’s case to settle for a ten-year sentence. Neither man had ever shown any real remorse about their crimes or made much of an attempt to get help. The board believed they would remain dangerous when released and asked its lawyers to find a way to keep them in prison.
The answer was found ten hours before Luther was due before the board. There was a loophole in the statutes governing parole board decisions that allowed the board to keep sex offenders beyond their parole dates—if they were deemed to still be a risk. The board’s attorneys felt their statutes took precedence over the mandatory parole legislation (an opinion later upheld by the state Supreme Court).
So when Luther swaggered into the board hearing room, his parole was denied and he was told that they could keep him for another six years. Luther “went off” on the board, swearing that he would someday get out and then he would rape and kill their wives and children.
Luther had another reason to hate. The loophole in the law was all the proof he needed that he was being singled out and persecuted.
Thomas Luther apologized to Debrah. It was time, he said, to explain why he hated the police. They’d killed his children.
He’d met their mother in 1969, when he was in the Army and stationed at Fort Carson, south of Colorado Springs. Soon she was pregnant. His son was born when he was in Vietnam on August 25, 1970. A daughter was born March 11, 1973. They never married because they couldn’t get along. But being with his kids and spending time with them was what kept him coming back to Colorado.
Shortly before he was sent to prison, he bought his son a motorcycle. A few years later his children were both on it when it was struck by an officer who was chasing a 16-year-old boy through a residential area in a car.
“My ex let them buy her with $170,000,” he wrote. “Plus they charged the boy that the cops were running after with two counts of vehicular homicide. They sure didn’t take responsibility for their actions.”
To make matters worse, he said, prison officials hadn’t notified him of the deaths for ten days. Then they took him to “the hole,” stripped him, and only then told him the awful news.
“They kept me like that for five days,” he wrote. “I cried for days and needed to be held and wanted so much to be able to hold my babies just one more time.”
Maybe she could now understand where his anger came from, he said.
It was all, of course, a pack of lies. He’d never had any ch
ildren, been married, or in the military, much less Vietnam. But Debrah, who also believed that he was two years older than her rather than five years younger, bought it.
When she read about the supposed death of his children, Debrah had not yet learned to recognize what she would later think of as harmless “Tom Luther stories”. In fact, she thought the tragic account explained a lot about the man she was falling in love with. His anger. His vulnerability. His toughness. Still, she said as her own tears fell for the “murdered” children on the letter she wrote back, he was going to have to learn to control his anger if they were ever going to have a future together.
Luther agreed. It had taken prison and losing everything he had worked for, especially the kids, but he’d learned his lesson. That’s why he’d forgiven his mother, whom he hadn’t talked to in ten years, and told her he loved her.
Throughout the rest of 1991, and indeed the years beyond, he continued to heap more lies onto their relationship. He said he was a peerless hunter and fisherman with kills and trophies still on the record books. He and his dad had hunted mountain lions for the bounty and raised world-champion hunting dogs. One time, during his buffalo-raising days, he had to jump into a pen to distract an enraged bull “that was goring and stomping a guy.” Only through his daring was his old girlfriend ”Sue“ and the other man’s wife able to carry the man to safety.
Luther was always the hero of his stories, even those taking place in the penitentiary, such as the time he stopped prison hitmen from killing a young inmate over a drug deal: “They’ll have to come through me first.” In another, he wouldn’t allow older inmates to rape a newcomer. And in one letter, he announced that he had been thrown in the hole because he dared stand up to the guards who were hurting his young friend, “Southy” Healey. It was hard, he said, but a price he was willing to pay for justice.
The lies piled up until he couldn’t remember what he had told her and when. Here and there, Debrah would note one of the little inconsistencies. But it took much longer to uncover the big fibs; it was beyond her comprehension that someone would lie about the death of “his” children.
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