“What do you think would happen if he heard we found the body?” Richardson asked.
“I think he’d get pretty anxious,” she responded. “There were a couple of times when I was working in Colorado, and they found the body of a girl that was on the news, and he would get anxious about that.”
Debrah asked Richardson if he had been able to set up the contact visit. “I’m working on it,” he said. “You know how important you are to my case, I’m sure.”
They had to be careful, though. Luther’s request for a contact visit had been turned down because Debrah wasn’t his wife. Suddenly granting his request might look suspicious if they didn’t come up with a plausible excuse.
In mid-December, the jail authorities came up with one. They notified Luther that since he had been living with Debrah Snider in Colorado, she was in a sense his common-law wife. And besides, since she worked for another state’s prison system, it would be a professional courtesy.
On December 17, Debrah walked into the visiting room of the jail where Thomas Luther greeted her with a hug and a chaste kiss that he tried to prolong. But conscious of the microphone taped to her skin, she pulled away.
Luther’s appearance had changed a lot in the past month. He had been on a hunger strike about some petty incident at the jail since early November and lost a lot of weight. His hair was grayer and his skin back to its former prison-pallor pale.
They settled at a table in the visiting room furthest away from the guard. Richardson had told Debrah to avoid talking about his current case and concentrate on trying to get him to say something about the Cher Elder case. But Luther’s mind was on his latest problem.
He thought there was a good chance he would beat the rap. Bobby Jo Jones was on probation and not supposed to use drugs or leave the state. She had done both on that day, and there was no way she could testify against him without admitting that. “Skip talked to her,” he said. “He thinks she won’t testify.”
However, if he was convicted, he said, the judge was likely to give him as stiff a sentence as possible. “Richardson’s been on it pretty good. He’s using the opportunity now that I’m in jail to stir the pot and entice everybody to give up on me.”
According to Luther, Richardson was everywhere. He’d seen him in Chicago when he was visiting Skip. And near the construction site where he had worked in Pennsylvania. Now he was sure the detective had been talking to the judge in this case, “filling his head with lies.”
Snider saw this as a good opportunity to get back to the Cher Elder case. “I can’t understand why you don’t just give Richardson what the hell he wants to know,” she said taking one of his hands in both of hers. “If Byron was the person involved, he’s already in jail for half his life.”
Luther shook his head. “You don’t understand. It ain’t Byron that they want. It’s me they want.”
He was suspicious of Babe Rivinius. “I don’t want you women even talking,” he said. “You get together and you talk about stupid things, and you play cop.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Snider pleaded. “Do you know that the very worst they could give you is second degree murder. That’s fifteen years. You’re facing fifteen years.”
Luther looked at her with scorn. “What are you talking about the worst they could give me?”
“There’s no way—there’s no way they could say that it was premeditated murder.”
“I didn’t murder nobody.”
“I know.”
“Why should I be involved in any of this shit? I’m tellin’ ya, you don’t know how it works Deb,” he said, looking over at the guard. “Okay, second degree murder, do you know what second degree murder carries in the state of Colorado?”
“They can’t give you more than fifteen years.”
“Shit,” Luther snorted. “Forty-eight years. That’s for second degree murder.”
“How can they do that if we can give somebody life? That’s almost life.”
“Life is without the possibility of parole now,” Luther said. “If you get convicted for first degree murder in the State of Colorado, you’re gonna die in prison.
“Beside that, Deb, if I did know something, I wouldn’t cooperate with Richardson after the fucking way he did me. Fucking confiscated my car, pulled you in, tried to convince you that I’m a serial killer, gotta kill every three months, you know what I mean.
“They had a fuckin’ SWAT team put me down in the middle of the road and everybody with fuckin’ guns and shit pressed against my head, just so they can take me in and serve a fucking warrant on me for blood samples and shit.
“Like I say, fuck me helping that bastard. He can kiss my fucking ass.”
Luther wouldn’t talk anymore about the Elder case so they spent the rest of their time on small talk. “I miss you,” he said quietly when she got up to leave. They kissed and hugged again briefly. The microphone felt like a hot dagger against her skin. At least he hadn’t said anything incriminating.
“I miss you, too, Tom,” she said as the tears welled up in her eyes. “But you know, it was better when I could be angry about it. Now I just hurt and hurt and hurt. Sometimes loving you sucks, Tom.” She turned and fled down the hallway.
Snider returned to Colorado in time for Christmas. She remembered the letter she wrote to Luther the year before, asking him to promise to spend it with her. He had broken that promise, too.
The next day, Richardson showed up at her ranch in Fort Collins. “Let’s take a walk,” he said. “Show me your property.”
Debrah was surprised. The day was bitterly cold and windy, but the detective had no hat or gloves. It was only after they had walked a bit and she saw him scanning the ground that she realized he had an ulterior motive. He’s looking for a grave, she thought.
“I don’t mind working with you, Scott. But I—” she stammered and started over. “I can’t explain my insanity, but you need to understand the little bit of relationship that I have left with him is all that I have.”
“I hear ya,” Richardson replied though his eyes kept looking at the ground around him.
“I’ve talked to two different priests about this and they’ve told me that as long as I’m not lying to you, I’m not committing a sin,” she said. “But it feels really bad for me.”
“Well, I’ll stay outta religion,” Richardson said, apparently giving up his search and turning back toward Snider’s trailer, “but you can’t help but know you’re doing the right thing.”
“I know, religion-wise,” Debrah said. “But relationship-wise, I know I’m betraying him, and I do love him.”
“You’re wastin’ your life on that man, Deb,” he said.
They walked on in silence. The frosted grass crunched beneath their feet. Now it was Debrah’s eyes that focused on the ground. “You may be right,” she said at last as they reached his car. “But he’s the only person who ever took time to make me happy.”
Richardson nodded and patted her on the shoulder. There was a part of Debrah he was never going to be able to separate from Luther. He was just going to have accept that and hope that when it came time to choose between the truth and love, she would opt for the truth.
A few days earlier, he had received a Christmas card from Rhonda Edwards. Enclosed was a photograph of a little girl sitting in a chair, laughing at the camera. “This is Cher when she was three. She was a good kid,” Rhonda wrote. “All I want for Christmas is to find her.”
That’s all I want, too, Richardson thought, pinning the card and photograph to his office wall below the photograph of Cher at 20 years old. But, he wondered, what Christmas will it be?
“See you this evening?” he asked Debrah. That night was her meeting with Babe Rivinius, in which she had agreed to allow them to record the conversation.
“Yeah,” Debrah said. “I’ll be there.”
A few hours later, they met again, this time at the Lakewood Police Department. Snider thought she could get Rivinius into her van to dri
nk a couple of beers over pizza, which might loosen her tongue. So while police technicians wired her van, she had a chance to sit down with Richardson. She wanted to tell him about an incident she had recalled that might interest him.
Shortly after the press conference in July 1993, she said, Luther got a panicky call from Southy Healey. They drove to Longmont where they met up with Southy, who was in the company of a young woman and a hispanic man, at a McDonald’s. They talked only five minutes or so, and Healey had not seemed real happy when he drove off.
Richardson made a note that he needed to find Healey as soon as possible. Then the technicians came in and said the van was ready.
That evening, Debrah and Babe went out to her van to talk as planned. A few blocks away, Richardson and Sgt. Mike Rose, a specialist in covert operations, sat in a parking lot, listening in.
After a few minutes of small talk, Rivinius started in on Luther. She said she had powerful friends who would see to it that he never walked out of prison if he threatened Byron or one of her other boys.
“I would sell my soul to Satan to protect my children, and that’s the only thing I would do it for,” she said. “If he walks out of prison at my child’s expense, I’ll kill him myself. I’ll pull the trigger myself. All he has to do is keep his mouth off my children, just let life go as it is.”
“But he doesn’t do that,” Debrah said. “He said it’s Byron who better keep his mouth shut ’cause Byron can’t do a life sentence. Tom has maintained through this whole thing that his involvement is secondary to, you know, whatever happened. That he didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Cher.”
Babe snorted derisively. “Nobody believes that, Deb.” But it wouldn’t matter, she added; she was sure Byron was going to win his appeal and get out of prison. As long as Tom didn’t talk, everything would be fine. “If he does,” she added, “he’s gonna dig himself a grave.”
Snider said that Luther considered Byron “a loose end.”
“Byron ain’t doing nothing to Tom.”
“Well, I know that but Tom is scared. You know, you’ve seen his paranoia. I mean, he looked out the kitchen window at every goddamn car that drove down the road because he thought the cops were watchin’ him.”
Babe Rivinius said it was all Richardson’s fault. Now he was trying to pressure Byron. “He showed up at Buena Vista out of the blue,” she said. “He says ‘If you don’t cooperate, we’re gonna bust J.D. We’re gonna charge him with murder.’ He knew that he was putting the needles in the right place.”
It wasn’t fair that Byron was in prison, Babe said. It was Luther who shot at Makarov-Junev to set her son up to take the fall on Cher Elder. “If the cops thought it was Byron with the violent tendencies, it would take the heat off himself. And for that, I cannot forgive him. If Tom ever shows up here again, he’s gonna be six foot under pushing daisies.”
The conversation turned back to the West Virginia assault case. Luther’s trial was coming up in a few weeks. Neither woman could figure out why he had taken Jones to his cabin if he planned to rape her later.
“Unless he’d wanted to kill,” Snider said.
“He never intended for her to live to tell the story,” Rivinius agreed.
But then why, Debrah asked, if he intended to kill Cher, why did he take her to Central City where he knew he would be seen with her? “He’s not stupid.”
“The person that you know took her up there, isn’t the person who came back with her,” Babe replied. “Something happened in his head. Something goes wrong and it’s a response to something she does. Something, something, something happens in his head that changes him.
“Now, he has never threatened me. I think, telling the truth, he’s scared of me. He could not look me in the eyes. And I’m telling you right now the reason he couldn’t look me in the eye is a killer can’t look another killer in the eye. You see yourself in their eyes and that is what frightens you.”
Back in the car, Richardson thought the women sounded as if they were getting drunk. Especially Rivinius, who was becoming just plain weird. He had suggested to Snider they have a couple of beers, but now as their conversation continued, their voices had grown slurred and there were large gaps of silence—one so long that he worried that they had passed out.
Then Babe snapped out of it and told Debrah, “If you need anything, tell me, and I’ll help you.”
“I want this bullshit with Cher Elder settled.”
Richardson and Rose sat up. This might be it.
“There’s only one way we’re gonna be able to do that. We have two choices,” Babe slurred. “Our first choice is that we get really stupid and we say now let’s go dig Richardson and tell him all these little details.”
“Babe, I already told you that I did that.”
But Rivinius wasn’t listening. “Let’s put ’em all together and let’s say they possibly charge Tom and they rake things through the mud and whatever. Maybe they get lucky and they get a conviction, but I’m sure they won’t. What have we accomplished? Nothing. Now, it’s never really gonna go away, because you got a cop with a hard-on and they don’t go away.”
Thinking of Richardson sitting in a car listening, Debrah laughed. Encouraged, Babe continued, “They’re crooked. They’re macho. They stick together like freakin’ glue, and they cover for each other all the damn time. You just can’t get rid of him. So what’s the next best thing? You go away someday.”
Babe said that when Byron won his appeal, she planned to get her boys out of the state, then they wouldn’t care about “Richardson’s bullshit. I don’t mean this to sound crass and crude because obviously somebody’s daughter is missing or dead, but I’m not responsible for somebody else’s daughter.
“Richardson is scared of me. He says, ‘Yes ma’am’ and ‘No ma‘am’ when he sees me. He’s a bald-headed fucking bastard, and he makes me sick. I can’t stand being in the same vicinity with him. God, he gives me the willies. I just wanna rip his heart out.”
“Why?” Debrah liked Richardson and while Babe’s descriptions were somewhat humorous, she thought it was Babe who was afraid of the detective, not the other way around.
“Because he didn’t do his job. Detective Richardson did not follow procedures. Richardson followed a vendetta.”
Snider was suddenly tired of it all. Of Babe. Of Tom. Of Richardson. “I just wanna know the truth,” she said. “I want the truth to come out. If that means Tom needs to take a fall, then Tom needs to take a fall. If that means your sons need to take a fall, then they need to take a fall.”
Babe looked at her bleary-eyed. She leaned closer. “I’m gonna tell you the truth,” she said quietly, as if she knew someone else was trying to listen. “I asked Byron if he or his brother had anything to do with Cher Elder’s disappearance, and I know he was telling me the truth when he said no.
“I asked him if Tom had anything to do with Cher Elder’s disappearance, and he said, ‘Mom, you’ve got to stop asking these questions.’ He never said yes or no. If it’s not Tom, Tom knows who did.”
The conversation lasted five hours. Little of it was any use to the investigation. Richardson went home disappointed. The next morning, he called Debrah and asked if she would try again. Maybe this time with a little less beer and more direct questions. She agreed.
Three evenings later, he and Rose were sitting in a van in another parking lot, this time listening to the women who had gone to a pizza parlor.
Rivinius was bragging again that Richardson was scared of her. “Byron’s attorney is going to kick his ass in court,” she said. “Leslie Hansen told him, ‘Don’t ever talk to my client again or I’ll slap you with a lawsuit. I called District Attorney Dave Thomas and told him he better distance himself from that rogue cop Richardson and to leave Byron alone.”
Debrah was her friend, Babe said. And that’s why she wanted to warn her that her son, J.D., was saying she better keep her mouth shut “because all they’re trying to do at this poin
t in time is a find a way to get rid of you.”
Debrah nodded. She knew everyone, except maybe Richardson, would be happier if she just went away or disappeared like Cher. “I know how you feel about Tom,” she said to Babe, “but more than the way I feel about Tom is the way I feel about life. I have a greater understanding of what happened with Cher than I had whenever I first got involved in this. And what happened to Cher shouldn’t happen to anybody, and I want it stopped. And I think anybody that’s involved with it, including Tom, needs to pay the price.”
“I agree,” Babe said. “I think Tom would do anything he could to cover his own ass. I think he’d sell his mother to the devil.”
“He wouldn’t even ask much for her,” Snider said. They both laughed.
Debrah was curious about the ring. She had overheard a conversation a long time ago between Tom and Mortho Kreiner about a ring. Kreiner wanted to know where he got it from and Tom had said he got it from a girl.
Richardson almost spilled his coffee on himself with Babe’s next comment. “The fact of the matter is, I know exactly what Byron saw to the letter. And Tom knows, or suspects, that Byron could implicate him. They told Byron that they cut one of her fingers off that had a ring that he gave her and that they were gonna place it in a conspicuous spot to frame him if he talked.”
Snider sighed. “I don’t know why I’ve stayed with him so long.”
“You love him,” Babe shrugged. “The thing is, Deb, your problem is that you love the other one and there’s two of ’em. You love Tom, the Tom that you wanna believe in, the Tom you fell in love with. But you don’t know the other one. You’ve never been maybe beat half to death. The point is he has everybody fooled.”
“Yeah, they see the charming, do-all-I-can-for-you guy.”
“I hate Richardson but not because of what he’s doin’ with Tom,” Rivinius said, “but because of what he’s doing to my family. Because to me that makes Richardson as bad as Tom. Not because he’s trying to help Cher’s family but because he’s helped destroy my whole damn family in the process.”
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