Ten years passed. The town of Breckenridge changed and not always for the better, Morales sometimes thought. New ski trails had been opened on the mountains next to the original ski hill; million-dollar winter homes for the jet-setters were becoming more common; crime had grown along with the population.
Neighbors no longer knew their neighbors, and no one left their doors open anymore. Few in the community had lived there when Bobby Jo Oberholtzer and Annette Schnee were murdered or when Luther was arrested for the attack on Mary Brown a month later.
For Morales, 1982 was the year he and his town lost their innocence. Now he was a little heavier, although still built like the Marine tanks he once commanded. He’d earned respect in the community and they had elected him sheriff. His strong Latin features and wide smile were a hit with women, but he was always the gentleman. Their protector.
As such, he never forgot the blood-splattered interior of Luther’s truck or the rusty-red imprint of Mary Brown’s hand pressed desperately against the rear window. When his enemy was released in January, Morales called to warn Mary, who had since married, changed her name, and moved. The fear in her voice was palpable as she thanked him and hung up.
Then he made copies of Luther’s most recent mugshot and distributed them throughout Summit County. “If you see him, call us,” his officers requested as they handed out the fliers.
The receptionist at the sheriff’s office taped one below the counter and facing her so that she could compare it to any man who walked through the doors requesting to see Morales. He didn’t think Luther would have the balls to come gunning for him, or any man for that matter, but he wanted a warning just in case.
Shortly after the fliers were distributed, Morales got a call from Sandy, the woman who was staying with Luther and his girlfriend, Sue Potter, at the trailer on the night of his 1982 arrest. Luther had shown up at her home, she said, and after a little polite talk, he asked where Potter was now living.
Sandy knew that Potter was married and living in another state. She also knew that her friend was terrified of her former lover.
With good reason, Morales thought, recalling the reports that Luther tried to pay fellow inmates with drugs and money to have her face “blown off.” And only because he couldn’t get out of jail to kill “Lips” himself.
“I said I didn’t know where she was,” Sandy told Morales. He nodded. Potter was safe, but knew in his heart that it wouldn’t be long before he heard about Luther attacking some other woman. And so it was only natural for Morales to ask Richardson when he called, “Who’d he kill?”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “We have a missing girl.” the Lakewood detective replied.
“Was he the last one seen with her?” Morales interrupted. He knew the answer. Feared the answer. But still he had to ask.
“Yep. We got them together on a videotape from a casino up in Central City.”
Morales sighed, then added, “I’m sorry. But she’s toast.”
After his short conversation with Richardson, Morales asked Det. Richard Eaton to come into his office to discuss the possibility of the Oberholtzer and Schnee murders being tied to Luther. He could hear as if it were yesterday, Luther’s comment, “Why do I do these things?” and recalled his suspicions about Luther and the murdered women.
Like Eaton, Morales believed that the detectives working on the Oberholtzer/Schnee cases in 1982 had done their jobs. Still, Luther’s name came up again from tips telephoned in after the Unsolved Mysteries segment aired two years earlier. He was only one of several possible suspects mentioned, but Richardson’s case reinforced what Morales already knew—wherever Tom Luther went, young women were in danger.
“Maybe we ought to look at Luther again,” Morales suggested and told him about the conversation with Richardson.
When his boss finished, Eaton agreed that they should reopen that area of the investigation. Despite the passage of time, he was just as determined to catch the killer of Bobby Jo and Annette and fulfill his promise to their families. Every year he received Christmas cards from Annette’s family to go with the letters of encouragement and thanks; occasionally he saw Jeff Oberholtzer and could only shake his head when the young man asked if there was any news of his wife’s killer.
Other cases came and went. Some went unsolved. Some were worse than others—such as the woman who gave birth, then drowned the infant in a bathtub and disposed of the tiny body by placing it in a paper bag along with an empty oil can and a half-eaten McDonald’s fish sandwich. It brought tears to his eyes whenever he thought of the child who was thrown out with the trash, and he openly rejoiced in the courtroom when the jury convicted her. But there were all kinds of monsters, and the one he wanted most was still out there. The killer of Bobby Jo and Annette.
The case consumed him awake or asleep. He couldn’t drive over Hoosier Pass without pulling into the parking lot at the summit to retrace Oberholtzer’s flight toward the trees. If he was near Fairplay, he’d go check on the small cross he erected at the spot where Schnee died and assure the restless spirit who rustled the willows along the bank that he was still on the case.
He dreamed about the women’s deaths, saw the bullets hit and their bodies fall. He could see the fear and bewilderment in Bobby Jo’s eyes as she lay in the crime scene photographs, staring up at the sky. And Annette’s body facedown in the stream.
But he couldn’t see the face of the monster who killed them.
After the Lakewood detectives pulled out of Tom’s driveway, a troubled Debrah Snider walked back into his apartment. Only a missing girl? Like hell, she thought. Richardson’s business card was still lying on the kitchen table. It said he was a homicide detective.
A moment later, Tom came in, slamming the door behind him. “They’re going to try to frame me,” he snarled.
Debrah’s mind was racing. In the past few weeks, he’d made a number of calls to his mother and sisters, all insisting that he was going to be a scapegoat for the disappearance of the woman he now referred to as Cher Elder. He made sure Debrah was somewhere within hearing for each telephone call—loudly protesting his innocence, saying his only saving grace was that the girl was seen at a bingo hall the day after he’d brought her back to Byron’s apartment.
Then that afternoon, she came home from work to find him pacing about in her kitchen. “What’s the matter, Tom?” she asked.
“Byron called. The police have a video from Central City. I’m on it with Cher,” he replied. “But the boys screwed up and said they didn’t know me. I called the cops, and now they want to come and talk to me.”
“I want to be there,” Snider said. She had to know the truth. Luther agreed. But he wanted her to wait fifteen minutes after the police arrived and then walk in as if she didn’t know anything. He left for his place.
When she arrived as planned, the two Lakewood police detectives were there. One of the detectives, the young one with the Texas drawl, said something to Tom.
“Honey, take a walk around the block would ya?” Tom responded.
She had hesitated. Taking a walk wasn’t part of their agreement, and she desperately wanted to know what was going on. If she was going to lose the man she loved, she had to understand why... and support him if she could.
However, the conversation between Luther and the detectives was cordial enough... kind of like men sharing secrets they didn’t want a woman to overhear. She noted Tom was recording the discussion, which seemed like a smart idea. He had repeatedly told her that the cops would try to pin something on him. He was always coming home with outlandish stories about cops pulling him over or following him just to yank his chain.
“They want to push me into doing something stupid, like maybe punching one of them out, so they can put me back behind the walls.” But he was too smart for them, he’d brag; his little marijuana operation was going to set him up for life and the cops were too stupid to catch him.
The macho posturing and lying
were the two main aspects of Luther’s personality that Snider disliked. That and the way he thought of women.
It was as if two men lived under the same skin, struggling for control. She hoped that with her love and commitment, the “good Tom” would win over “bad Tom,” as she had come to think of his different sides.
So she did her best to ignore the bragging and dismissed the tales of police harassment as more “Tom Luther stories,” mixed in with a dash of prison paranoia. But who knew? The cops were here now. Maybe he wasn’t just blowing smoke?
Deep inside, a voice was telling her that she was being blind, but she wouldn’t listen. Couldn’t. She’d thrown her lot in with this man, and their fates, good or bad, were twisted together like strands of a rope.
When Tom asked her to go take a walk, she went out and sat in her car. A few minutes later, Tom and the detectives walked outside. They seemed friendly enough. Then the detectives went over to Tom’s car, and the older cop remarked about the stolen tools.
Debrah suddenly realized that the detective’s comment wasn’t out of the blue. She had called various police agencies telling them about packages of marijuana he was getting from Skip Eerebout in Chicago and the stolen tools, which she suspected came from burglaries with the Eerebout boys. She hoped her information would lead to Tom getting caught for something small, before it was too big and too late. These detectives were obviously aware of her telephone calls.
Suddenly, the tenor of the conversation between the men changed dramatically. Tom accused them of setting him up for a burglary fall. But everyone knew it was about the missing girl.
Richardson said he’d want to talk again. Tom replied that he’d want a lawyer present if he did.
Then Tom started yelling about vomit on the backseat of his car. She remembered that after she got back from Washington, he asked to borrow an industrial cleanser he’d seen her use on a stain in her car, blood from a package of steaks that had leaked onto her seat. She’d seen him use the cleanser on his backseat repeatedly over a period of weeks, though she couldn’t remember ever smelling vomit, even before he used the cleanser.
Debrah was startled by the hatred now obvious on the faces of her lover and the younger detective. They were like a couple of the male wolves she raised, facing off all stiff-legged with their hackles up. She half expected to see their lips curl back to reveal fangs. Then the cops were gone.
An hour later, Tom was still ranting about “frame jobs.” Debrah sat at the kitchen table with her head in her hands, hoping that was all there was to it.
The next morning Tom left, saying he needed to find out what really happened to Cher Elder. To do that, he had to call someone named Mortho, a Denver drug dealer who apparently knew everything that went on in the area’s criminal underworld.
“I gotta go find a pay phone,” Luther said. “They probably got this one tapped.”
As he left, he handed her a cassette tape. “It’s the interview with the cops,” he said. “Mail it to Babe for me so I know it’s somewhere safe.”
Snider frowned but didn’t say anything. She wondered if he was leaving to make his telephone call because he was worried about the cops listening in or her. And why not leave the tape with her for safekeeping?
Pam “Babe” Rivinius was the mother of the Eerebout boys and Skip Eerebout’s former wife. Thin and buxom, Babe was once, years before, a Playboy bunny. Debrah couldn’t help but feel jealous when Tom would go visit her, even though Babe had remarried and he promised that they were just friends.
Before the dust settled from Luther’s rapid departure that morning, Snider stuck the cassette in her tape recorder. If he was going to send the tape to Babe, she felt that she at least had a right to know what the detectives were asking.
As much as she suspected that Luther had sex with Cher Elder, she wasn’t ready to hear him confess to “a quick little intercourse thing” with the missing girl. When the interview ended, she angrily packaged the tape, fumbling at the wrapping through her tears, and walked it out to the mailbox.
She was still steaming when Luther got back a little while later. But before she could say anything, he blurted out, “They killed her. She was a snitch, so they cut off her lips and dumped her body along a road as a warning to other snitches.”
Luther apparently didn’t notice Debrah’s grim expression as he continued. “Now I’ve got to find her and dispose of the body. With my record, they’ll be coming after me.”
For a moment, Snider wondered if he was telling her all the gruesome details as a warning of what could happen if she talked to the police. But she was too angry to let it trouble her for long. All her hopes and dreams were evaporating because Tom couldn’t control himself around pretty young women. She told him that she listened to the tape.
“You had no right to do that,” Luther yelled. “It was mine.”
But Snider wasn’t backing off. “You had no right to be with that woman, Tom,” she replied. “You were supposed to be in a relationship with me!”
Perhaps surprised by her vehemence, Luther backed down first. He explained that he had been drunk and that the girl, despondent over her relationship with Byron, used him for sex to get even. He was sorry. He loved only her. The thing with Cher was “a mistake” for both of them.
Debrah wanted to believe him. If she couldn’t, then everything she had lived for since they’d met meant nothing. She wanted to believe that this girl, Cher Elder, was mixed up in the drug trade and paid a horrible price. That Tom was only in the wrong place at the wrong time. But he should have kept his zipper zipped.
That night they made love. When they finished, he began to cry. “I wish I never got involved with Cher,” he sobbed. “I ain’t going back to prison, I’d rather kill myself. I want to be buried in Vermont.”
Snider noticed that he apparently felt nothing for what happened to Elder, just like she’d never heard him express any remorse for what he’d done to Mary Brown. Still, she loved him—at least that part of him who had written her hundreds of love letters, the Tom who brought her wildflowers and walked hand in hand with her and talked about an idyllic future they would create together, away from people. That man was not a killer.
So she held him until he talked and cried himself out. When he fell asleep, she turned her anger and frustration on Cher Elder. You had no business going anywhere with my boyfriend, she thought, struggling not to cry and wake the man who snored next to her. If you got killed, it’s your own goddamn fault!
The next morning, she asked Tom, “What do you need?” She’d decided that if there was any hope for a future with him, she was going to have to trust that this time, he was telling the truth.
Luther smiled; she was his girl again. He said that he would need camping equipment so that he could go find and bury the body. They went to her place, a double-wide trailer parked on the dry, open bit of prairie that was her ranch, where she loaned him a red backpack.
The next two days seemed to pass as slowly as cold honey off a spoon for Debrah. Tom didn’t call or send word. She imagined the worst: that he had been arrested or hurt. Finally, his car turned into her driveway.
“Did you get it taken care of?” she asked.
“Yes, she’s buried,” he replied. He said he found Elder’s body and took her to a spot east on Interstate 70 where he’d placed her in a shallow grave. It was near a historical marker of some sort... a turnoff where travelers stopped to stretch their legs and walk their dogs.
He didn’t mention that before his expedition to “find” Elder’s body he stopped first to see Babe and then talk to the Eerebout boys, a detour with enormous future consequences.
Over the next few days, Debrah Snider couldn’t think straight. She was torn between doing what she knew was right, telling the police what she knew about a missing girl, and trying to protect Luther.
Even if he only buried Cher, he assured her that the cops would pin the murder on him. He grew more secretive. There were clandestine meet
ings with the Eerebout boys and repeated calls to Southy. She’d never liked Southy. He was dirty, with long, unkempt red hair, an obvious drug user, and she blamed him and the Eerebout boys for getting Tom involved with crimes. If only they’d left him alone to her.
Ten days after the blowup with the detectives, Luther quit his job working for the janitorial service and moved out of his apartment. He packed his few possessions into his car and moved onto Debrah’s property, living in an old van she owned with a bed in the back.
Skip Eerebout had work for him in Chicago, he said; he needed to get out of Colorado and get a fresh start. He was more paranoid by the day. He wouldn’t call from the house anymore but insisted on going to pay phones. He was constantly peeking out windows whenever cars passed the long drive that led to the ranch trailer. If they went somewhere in a car, Luther drove and frequently pulled to the side of the road to watch the cars that passed. Several times he said he thought a driver looked like Detective Richardson.
Luther complained that whenever he visited one of his old penitentiary buddies in Denver, the Lakewood detective would show up soon after he left. Most of his friends were on parole and the detective’s visits would leave them rattled.
“Stay the fuck away, man,” they told him. “Everytime you show up, so does that cop. And don’t call. I don’t want to get revoked!” She knew he was feeling isolated and cornered. He blamed and hated Richardson for it.
She had to admit that in the past few days, it seemed like the county sheriff’s vehicles were using her drive a lot to turn around and go back down the highway. And on a few occasions, she noted police cars parked across the highway for a long time. But nothing happened. Richardson didn’t show up with an arrest warrant. Life just went on, though uneasily.
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