Hall, handsome in a boy-next-door way with light blue eyes behind round, wire-rim glasses, didn’t look very tough. His quiet demeanor and appearance, however, belied his reputation for surgically dissecting defense cases while stringing together the smallest details into a complete picture for the prosecution. His ability to make complex stories simple for juries had made him the man to take on the most intricate cases.
Hall also ran the county’s grand jury, which meant he was directly responsible for bringing indictments against the county’s worst offenders. Richardson, who had never worked with Hall but was well aware of his reputation, knew he was going to need such a prosecutor if and when an arrest could be made in the Elder case.
They’d even talked about the possibility of prosecuting Luther for the murder of Cher Elder even if her body could not be found. “I’m not sure that’s ever been done successfully,” Hall said. He said he’d research the possibility, but they agreed to wait at least a while longer and to hold off on any press conferences.
“We’ve talked about releasin’ somethin’ to the press but so far things are workin’ pretty well as is,” Richardson answered Snider’s question. He asked if she had seen Luther or knew where he was. It was a test. Actually, he could locate Luther just about any time he wanted because of the bird dog attached to his car.
The device had tracked Luther to Debrah’s place, then south to Denver’s Colfax Avenue, one of the city’s oldest main thoroughfares, now notorious for its adult bookstores, pornographic movies, and sidewalk prostitutes.
In fact, Luther frequented the area so much over a few days Richardson wondered if he was on the hunt again. The truth was, Luther had nowhere to go. He avoided Snider’s place, hinting, she said, that the police had it staked out, and he also stayed away from the Eerebouts. To sleep he tried to find isolated roads where he could pull over and rest in his car. But even then, Richardson allowed him no peace.
When the bird dog stopped sending its signal, indicating the car wasn’t moving, a patrol car would be sent out to roust Luther. It was all handled quite innocently. The officer would act as if he had come upon Luther while making his rounds and tap on the window; “You can’t sleep here.” The idea was to keep Luther moving, make him tired, and increase the feeling of isolation. Richardson wanted to know where he was at all times, just in case they found Cher’s body. That Sunday, they had tracked him back to the Fort Collins area.
Snider admitted that she’d seen him Sunday. He’d called her out of the blue, she said, and they’d spent the day together. When she asked him what he’d been doing, he gave her one excuse and a few minutes later another, as if he couldn’t remember what he’d told her before. “He’s not capable of tellin’ the truth.... The last I heard, he’s been helping J.D. fix his car, and then he’s going to follow him to Chicago.”
Richardson sensed that there was something upsetting Debrah, something to do with her Sunday outing with Luther. She apparently didn’t want to talk about it, but at least she hadn’t tried to lie about seeing him, and that was a good sign.
Richardson was aware that the bird dog had tracked Luther to the Eerebout house in Golden. The detective staking out the house had reported that Luther was currently sitting on the front porch with Babe and her sons.
Richardson got off the telephone and radioed the detective. A minute later, an unmarked police car pulled up in front of the Eerebout house next to Luther’s blue Geo Metro.
As Luther gaped, the detective who’d been watching got out of his car and walked around to the curbside of the Geo Metro. Getting down on his hands and knees, the detective reached under Luther’s car and pulled the bird dog from its hiding place.
If Luther was going to Chicago, the device would have been useless, and Richardson didn’t want him leaving town with it. Removing it as Luther watched was just another opportunity to push his paranoia buttons.
Debrah Snider had not been able to bring herself to tell Richardson everything about the last couple of times she had seen Luther. When he arrived at her house following his confrontation with the detective at the hospital, he was so angry he wouldn’t even speak to her. He had loaded a few last items in his car and reached into his pocket for his keys.
She had watched in tears. All her hopes, all the love letters, all of the moments of happiness she had found in Tom’s arms now seemed like a dream. “I know I may never see you again,” she said, “but I want you to know I still love you. Maybe if you can get this straightened out, you’ll give me a call?”
If she was expecting an answer, she was disappointed. He remained silent. He opened the car door and was about to get in when she cried, “Can I at least get a hug goodbye?” He had looked at her and the anger in his eyes softened. He took her into his arms and in her impending loneliness, her body responded desperately to his. He picked her up and carried her into her trailer where they made love.
Afterward, Luther was talkative again. But now that he had made love, he was back to being the Tom she didn’t like, the bragger and the liar. He was suddenly eager to describe the clever way he’d had J.D. drop him off, exactly where he didn’t say, and then arranged to be picked up the next day. And just in case the police had managed to follow, he said, he walked ten miles out of his way before going to the grave. “I spent the whole night piling rocks on it, two feet deep.”
Luther boasted that if Richardson came for him, he’d give him the slip and head for the mountains where he could run circles around the police; “They’d never catch me.” The cops were so stupid, he said, they had seized all of his shoes, except the ones he had worn to the grave. As proof, he showed her a pair of black, high-topped tennis shoes.
When he left that day, Snider had supposed that he was at long last on his way to Chicago. So she was surprised when he called Sunday morning. He was at a truck stop near Fort Collins and wanted to see her but was afraid he was being followed. He asked her to meet him at Horsetooth Reservoir just west of the city.
Horsetooth was a large man-made lake set in the barren foothills overlooking Fort Collins. It had been named for a rock formation that resembled a horse’s front teeth. The reservoir was a favorite hangout for the town’s youth and students from Colorado State University.
Luther and Debrah didn’t talk about Cher Elder, just the sorts of everyday things a couple on a picnic might—the weather, the beauty of the scenery, his upcoming trip to Chicago. When the conversation petered out, they wandered off separately to contemplate the day and enjoy the clear blue skies.
Debrah was sitting on rock staring at the cold, dark waters of the reservoir when a shadow fell on her from behind, sending a chill up her spine. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw that Luther had come up silently and now stood only a few feet away. With horror, a thought suddenly struck her. He wants to kill me—that’s why he wanted to meet me here. He knows that I know things that put him in danger. The look on his face frightened her, yet at the same time, she found that she didn’t care what happened next. If she couldn’t be with him, she’d just as soon be dead. She turned back toward the water and waited.
Nothing happened. “Do you want to go to Mom’s place?” she asked quietly, thinking perhaps there were too many people walking along the paths for him to carry out his plan. She also sensed that he was torn by love for her, and she wanted to put it to the test. Her mother’s summer cabin was located in a remote spot in the mountains. It was a private place with few potential witnesses where he could bury her and she’d never be found. Like Cher Elder.
Debrah glanced back at Luther, who looked like a boy who’d been caught thinking bad thoughts. “Sure,” he said, giving her a small, strained smile. “You bet.”
They hardly spoke on the drive up to her mother’s cabin. Debrah looked out the window, trying to fathom how it was that she was on her way to quite possibly be killed by the man she loved.
All of her life she had asked God for a sign that she was deserving of love and for a dragon-slayer who wou
ld protect her. For two years she had believed her prayers had been answered with Tom. Damn Cher Elder, she thought, couldn’t she see how dangerous Tom was?
They reached her mother’s cabin and went inside. Luther was edgy, walking around, looking out windows. Snider wondered how long it would take for him to make up his mind. The tension in the cabin seemed to be reaching some sort of boiling point when there was a knock at the door. She and Tom both jumped.
It was a neighbor who was driving by when he saw a car that he didn’t recognize and had stopped to check. Luther seemed almost more relieved by the sudden interruption than Debrah and was his friendly “good Tom” persona. When the neighbor left, so had the feeling of impending danger. “It’s time to go,” he said, giving her a kiss. He was anxious to start for Chicago, where there’d be no more Richardson.
“He’s got nothin’ on me.”
“First of all, I only want to say I love ya and miss you. I got a second alone and I figured I better make good on my promise to write a little.” Debrah devoured the letter from Tom eagerly. Postmarked June 8, 1993, it mostly dealt with the day-to-day business of making a living as a carpenter’s helper, a job Skip had set him up with. “So until next time love ya lots and hope you can smile for me. I’ll try to figure out a way to send you a hug.”
A week later, there was another letter. He said he might be back to Colorado sooner than he had planned. “How would that be? It would be great for me Deb. I don’t know if I’m going to be patient enough to learn all I need to.”
Debrah wasn’t sure how she felt about his return. On one hand, there was no denying that she still loved at least that part of him that wrote her the romantic letters. Yet, another side of her found it harder and harder to deny that he might also be a cold-blooded killer. One day she would be telling Richardson that she thought he was capable of murder, the next she would deny that he could have raped and killed Cher.
Another letter arrived assuring her of how much he loved her. The only reference to the investigation was the mention of having found his black book inside a box of letters. Otherwise, he signed off as always, “Kiss me you fox... on my lips, Deb!”
The day after she received his last letter, Luther called. He was in Cheyenne, Wyoming, only seventy miles north of Fort Collins, and wanted to see her. She welcomed him back and let him stay in her van while her husband and sons lived in the house. She hadn’t heard from Richardson in awhile and had begun to hope that maybe the investigation had gone off on another track. Tom was back to his old sweet self and the darker possibilities receded in her mind.
Then one day, Luther got into it with her eldest son, Chance, over a tape deck he had purchased from the boy but couldn’t get to work. He accused Chance of being a thief and then manipulating Debrah when she stuck up for him. “You think you can just manipulate people!” he yelled at the frightened teenager. “I wrote the book on it. You don’t want to fuck with me, I’ve sent grown men out of prison in body bags!”
Angry with Snider for siding with her son, he left saying he had some unfinished business in Colorado Springs. She knew it had to do with drug deals and the drug dealer Mortho. She had never met him, but heard from Luther that he was grossly obese and the same man who had supposedly told him that Elder was killed because she was a snitch. Luther referred to Mortho as “the connection,” and said that Mortho and Southy didn’t get along. In fact, shots had been exchanged between the two over a drug deal.
Luther didn’t show up or call for several days. Snider decided to call the Eerebouts to see if they had heard from him. She was surprised when he answered the telephone. He had always denied that there was anything between him and Babe, but Debrah was angry nevertheless. He ran to Babe whenever he was in trouble. Well, she thought, they’re perfect for each other. They were both paranoid and constantly looking out windows whenever cars drove by.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call,” Tom apologized. “I just stopped by here before you called.” He wanted to see her again, but it couldn’t be in Fort Collins. “Meet me in Denver.”
Debrah drove to Denver. Sometimes it felt like Tom was just leading her along so he could keep her from the police, but he seemed genuinely happy to see her and they spent the night at a motel in each other’s arms. She was in the bathroom that morning when she overheard a telephone conversation between Luther and Mortho. Luther said something about “the product” and apparently set up a meeting at another motel for the next day. When she came out, he asked her for a favor. He needed to complete a deal but was afraid he was going to be pulled over. “I want you to follow me with this,” he said, handing her a wad of money and a bag of white powder.
Snider objected. She didn’t want to be involved in any of his drug deals and especially didn’t want to carry the white powder. Luther responded angrily, “There’s nothing wrong with you sexually that a little of that wouldn’t take care of.”
At last he persuaded her by promising to give up drug dealing after he had pulled off a couple of last big deals. “If I get stopped, just keep driving,” he said and left.
Snider was getting ready to leave when she turned and dropped the bag of white powder into the trashcan. She’d deliver the cash, but she wasn’t going to ferry his drugs. As she drove down the road to the next motel, she started counting the cash he had handed her. She stopped at $800. When she arrived at the motel, Luther was again on the telephone with Mortho. A few minutes later, a young girl knocked at the door and Luther handed her the money with instructions to bring more of “the product” over the next morning.
Disgusted, Snider said she had to go to work. If he wanted the white powder she had given him, she said as she walked out the door, he would have to go back to the first motel and retrieve it from the trashcan. Tom looked angry, but she left before he could say anything. She drove a few blocks and pulled over at a pay telephone to call Richardson. He wasn’t there, so she left a message that Tom was at a motel room and there would be a drug deal in the morning. She wanted Luther caught before he got into any more trouble.
Nothing ever came of the telephone call. Richardson, who was out of town, didn’t get the message until too late.
For the next couple of weeks, there was nothing to indicate that the police were even interested in Luther. He was staying back at her place in Fort Collins, doing his little drug deals and, she believed, casing houses for burglaries with Southy and the Eerebouts. But instead of finding the silence encouraging, as she had in the past, Debrah kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.
The calm was shattered the evening of July 12 when Byron Eerebout called. “Did I see the evening news?” Tom asked, puzzled. “No.” He listened for a minute, face turning bright red, then he slammed the telephone down.
“Richardson was just on the television,” he shouted at Debrah. “He had my picture and even a picture of my car. He as much as said I killed her.”
Chapter Sixteen
July 12, 1993—Lakewood, Colorado
Scott Richardson was frustrated. The search in Empire had yielded nothing except the feeling that Cher was so close he might have walked past her grave a dozen times.
It wasn’t from a lack of trying. They had scooped out the sludge pits with a front-end loader, carefully sifting through the slop. Hazardous materials divers from Inland Marine Services had volunteered to help and gone into the sewage treatment plant’s aeration tanks.
The area around Empire was littered with old, abandoned mine shafts, some several hundred feet deep. The air emanating from one in particular seemed unusually foul, as if something was decomposing in it, but it held nothing more than old garbage and a refrigerator. At considerable risk, the Gilpin County mine rescue team searched the holes but came up empty.
Even a military jet equipped with Forward-Looking Infrared Radar had been loaned for the investigation. The FLIR jet’s equipment could detect differences in surface temperatures within a few square yards of soil from 30,000 feet. Soil that had been disturbed, as in
a grave, gave off a different temperature than undisturbed soil right next to it. And as a body decomposes, it too gives off heat that can be detected by FLIR. This time, however, the FLIR jet detected nothing that helped locate Cher Elder’s grave.
In the meantime, there were dozens of leads to chase down. A cousin of Cher’s thought she had seen her missing relative briefly at an Indiana truck stop, but police there could find no one matching her description. Then there was a report of a body seen floating in Clear Creek near Central City. It turned out to be that of a 3-year-old child who had drowned.
The missing shovel from Luther’s former job had turned up mysteriously, covered with dirt. Richardson asked Josey to take it to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation crime lab to have it tested for body fluids and hair.
On May 25, Detective Heylin called Pam “Babe” Rivinius to arrange a meeting with her boys and their attorney. She demanded to know why Richardson had cancelled the last meeting. He didn’t want to tell her that J.D. had been followed to Empire and been seen picking Luther up, so he explained that they had been short-staffed and were checking out other leads first. “But we’ve come to the point where we need to talk to the boys again.”
“Hopefully you people have, ah, finally come to realize that neither one of the two of these people that you have focused on here lately is involved in this situation,” Babe said, referring Byron and Luther.
“I don’t think your boys are in any danger of that but, ah, due to their relationship with Mr. Luther, we just wanna make sure we have all that down pat,” Heylin replied.
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