Richardson nodded. Until the day before at the prison, they hadn’t seen each other since May 1993 at the Fort Collins hospital, when Luther ripped out his pubic hair as he demanded to know where Richardson lived, but they’d rarely been out of each other’s thoughts in the intervening two years. The detective had lost thirty pounds; there were dark circles beneath his eyes and he often looked as tired as he felt.
“Yeah, Luther,” he admitted, “thanks to you.” He looked at Luther. Well, at least I’m not the only one, he thought. His prisoner had also lost a significant amount of weight and all of his hair had turned gray. He had wanted to make this personal between him and Luther, and he had succeeded more than he bargained.
“Jesus,” the detective said, “you sure got old and gray.”
“Yeah,” Luther said, then laughed. “Thanks to you.”
As it turned out, the first pilot wouldn’t let them board. “This man isn’t getting on my plane,” he said, looking at the shackled prisoner.
The airline apologized and gave Richardson three $25 certificates good at airport restaurants while they waited. They soon put them to good use.
Richardson offered to buy Luther, who didn’t know about the certificates, “anything you want” at the airport McDonald’s if he’d promise to behave the rest of the trip.
“Yeah, the fuck you will,” Luther said, eyeing him suspiciously.
“No really, even throw in french fries and a strawberry shake,” the detective replied. “Deal?”
“Sure,” Luther nodded. “No more trouble.”
Leaving their prisoner in the airport security lockup, Richardson and Anderson then treated themselves to the biggest steaks they could find at the airport using the gift certificates. When they were finished, Richardson went to the McDonald’s and got Luther a hamburger, fries, and a shake. It felt good to put one over on him.
They were finally allowed to board a flight to Chicago, though not without apprehension on the part of the flight crew and passengers. Luther’s extradition took place right after the Oklahoma City bombing, and the plane was soon buzzing with the rumor that Luther was the bomber.
“Let’s tell ’em he is,” Anderson dead-panned. “And let the crowd have at him.”
It was a joke, but they didn’t forget their prisoner was dangerous. Both men noticed that every time they moved, Luther’s eyes flicked over their holstered guns, as if weighing his chances. They’d already discussed that if Luther somehow managed to get a gun and had to be shot while the plane was in the air, they would aim low so that any stray bullets would go into the cargo hold, not a passenger or through the fuselage.
They were met on the taxiway at the Chicago airport by city police. “So is this the hammer man?” one officer asked as they unloaded Luther.
How the hell did they know about that, Richardson wondered. But he didn’t get a chance to ask as Luther was whisked off to a holding cell at the airport to await the next plane.
Boarding the plane to Denver, they were met at the door by the pilot, who wanted to know what security measures had been taken. As he talked to the pilot, Richardson noticed that Luther was sidling away from him. He looked and saw that Luther was trying to get to a small opening between the loading ramp and the plane.
Knee braces, shackles and all, Luther was thinking about jumping the twelve feet to the ground and running for it. Richardson put an arm on his prisoner and guided him back to his seat.
After they were seated, a late-arriving woman passenger came down the aisle and started to take a seat in the aisle across from them. Seeing the three men, she smiled and asked if they were going to Denver on business.
“Yeah,” Luther said.
“What for?” she asked.
“Court,” Luther responded.
“Oh,” she said, addressing Richardson. “Are you lawyers?”
“No, ma’am,” Richardson replied. “Police.”
She looked at Luther. “You’re all police officers?”
“No, ma’am,” Luther replied and smiled wide. “I’m a convict.”
The woman suddenly noticed the handcuffs and shackles. She screamed and ran down the aisle. A couple of minutes later, she returned. “I’m so embarrassed,” she apologized. “I can’t believe I did that.”
Luther leaned over toward Richardson and whispered, “Wait ‘til she sees who I am on the five o’clock news.”
Luther was talkative on the remainder of the flight. “Did you ever talk to the Colombian?” he asked.
“So now you’re blaming Cher’s death on a drug cartel?” Richardson asked.
Luther just smiled and looked out the window. A few minutes later, he turned back to Richardson and said, “I feel like writing it all out. I know I’m going to be convicted.” He sighed. “I can’t believe Byron and J.D. talked.”
He looked out the window again for several minutes before speaking anymore. Then he said he regretted never having made it to Mexico. “If I ever get a chance to escape,” he said, “that’s where I’m goin’.”
“Hold on,” Richardson said, “let me get a map so you can put an ‘X’ at the place where I can find you.”
They arrived in Denver without further incident. Richardson took Luther to the jail to have him photographed and locked up.
As Luther was being led away by deputies, he looked back at Richardson. “You know, I’m kinda glad it’s over,” he said. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life lookin’ over my shoulder for you.”
The next day, Denver’s two daily newspapers ran Cher Elder’s obituary. There was no mention of how she died, only the date: March 28, 1993.
Next to obituaries of people who’d had the chance to live long full lives, the few lines dedicated to Cher noted that she was “a 20-year-old waitress at a Holiday Inn, a graduate of Purdy High School in Missouri, who enjoyed cross-stitch, reading, art, photography and writing poetry.” The obituary closed with the notation that her parents, grandparents, and siblings grieved for her.
At home in Lakewood, Colorado, after putting his boys to bed, so did a detective.
Chapter Twenty-Six
July 12, 1995—New Jersey State Penitentiary
John Martin didn’t look so good. His skin, pulled taut over the bones of his face, looked waxy; his hands shook as he took a proffered cigarette and put it to his lips. “Got cancer,” he explained to Det. Richard Eaton, and lit the cigarette. “They tell me it’s terminal. It’s a good thing you found me, I probably won’t be around much longer.”
Martin nodded when Eaton asked if he remembered Thomas Luther. “So somebody finally wants to talk about that son of a bitch,” the 55-year-old convict said. “What took you so long?”
It was Eaton’s turn to nod. It had taken a long time to work his way back to what was essentially the beginning.
In May, Eaton, with the help of the Colorado Bureau of Investigations, found Luther’s old girlfriend, Sue Potter. She was living a thousand miles away in another state with her husband. And she was still afraid of Tom Luther.
“I don’t want to talk about him,” she said when he reached her on the phone. “Even if he is facing charges, I know how the system works and he could get out.” Potter said she hadn’t talked to Luther since his conviction in 1983.
A few days later, Eaton talked to the detective, since retired, who had submitted Potter’s service revolver for testing. “Sure, I knew the test was negative,” the retired cop said. “Guess we must have lost the results.”
Eaton was curious why the detectives at the time had dropped Luther as a suspect in the murders of Barbara “Bobby Jo” Oberholtzer and Annette Schnee. “Because,” the retired detective shrugged, “we couldn’t determine he was around here at the time of the murders.”
It was nonsense. Luther had a 1978 arrest record for a simple assault in Summit County. And he’d told investigators that he had been living with Potter in Frisco since 1981. Eaton found Luther’s work record with the taxi cab company which showed he
didn’t work the day of the murders or the day after. His predecessors simply hadn’t done a thorough enough job.
They apparently hadn’t paid any attention to claims of other Summit County Jail inmates like Martin, who Eaton had finally tracked to the New Jersey prison where he was serving time for embezzlement.
Luther picked him out his first day in jail, Martin told Eaton, “because I was wearing a Colorado penitentiary uniform. I was already in the joint. But they brought me to Summit County on another charge. Luther must have thought I’d make a good ally ’cause I told him I was in for assaulting a cop.”
Trying to impress the older inmate, Luther liked to brag. The second night, he told Martin that he had “beat and fucked” a girl with a hammer and now she was afraid for her life and wouldn’t testify. “He was confident he wouldn’t be convicted.”
“He said he got off on hurting women—that it was better than drugs or booze. ‘Fuck them and then kill them,’ that’s what he said. He said he had assaulted a lot of women and killed a few. He thought he was a real ladies’ man. Said he could always talk to them and make them feel safe. He said, ‘They drop their defenses and I have them at my mercy.’ ”
Martin claimed that Luther boasted about killing a woman he met in a Breckenridge bar after she declined his advances. “Buried her in the woods by a stream. Thirty, forty miles over a mountain away from Breckenridge.”
Except for the part about meeting her in a bar, Eaton wondered, recalling the image of Annette lying facedown in a stream, if Luther was talking about the Schnee homicide.
Luther, Martin continued, talked often about killing two Summit County women. “A ‘sweet young thing’ named Ann or Anna and a second older one who put up a hell of a fight. The second woman’s name was ... Babs ... or Jackie O.” Martin scrunched his face trying to remember, then he brightened. The second woman’s name was similar to a female judge who had once sentenced him in Pennsylvania, Barbara Obelinas.
Martin said Luther claimed to have killed the younger woman first, then drove the older woman around for awhile before killing her, too. Luther, he said, also claimed to have killed a woman at a Vermont ski area.
“He doesn’t think of himself as a bad person,” Martin said.
“He was usually doing drugs or drinkin’ when the violent urges came over him.”
Martin said that in May 1982, he took his information to a Summit County deputy at the jail but was told there were no unsolved murders or missing women that fit his description. He offered to wear a wire, Martin said, but nothing came of it.
Eaton was thinking. He had a note written by a former deputy at the jail regarding Martin’s information. But consistent with the sloppiness that defined the whole investigation at that time, the note was not dated. And that was significant because Annette Schnee’s body wasn’t found until that July.
In September 1982, Martin said, he was back at the Summit County Jail for another hearing when he ran into Luther again. This time, Luther wasn’t friendly—word was out that Martin was a snitch.
When Luther saw him, he walked over and grabbed Martin. “He said, ‘I’m going to kill you just like those girls,’ ” Martin told Eaton. “I yelled for help and was rescued by a deputy.”
When he was returned to the penitentiary, Martin said, he was locked up in maximum security. “They said there was a contract out on my life.” He was later released from prison for his testimony against another inmate in a Pueblo murder trial.
Eaton left the New Jersey prison excited, but cautious, about Martin’s recollections. Inmates were always trying to strike a deal in exchange for information, he reminded himself. They were born liars, and the Oberholtzer and Schnee cases had gotten a lot of publicity. But the part about Luther attacking Martin in September had been documented, as was his being placed in protective custody because of an alleged hit planned by Luther.
Why would Luther have wanted to kill Martin unless something he’d told the older inmate could hurt him? From what he had been able to ascertain, Martin and Montoya had never met. Yet their stories were amazingly similar. As were the recollections of Troy Browning, who had proved that Luther thought nothing of killing witnesses to protect himself.
Luther supposedly told all three that he had killed other women and dumped their bodies in the woods, which was also what Dillon John Curtis had said in his interview. Martin and Montoya also claimed that Luther considered shooting Mary Brown before deciding against it because he thought a shot might be heard.
Before leaving for Colorado, Eaton contacted Special Agent Bruce Kammerman of the FBI in New York, whom Martin claimed to have helped with several cases. “How reliable is Martin?” Eaton asked the agent.
“Outstanding,” Kammerman said. “Unbelievable.”
Apparently, Martin had a real knack for winning the confidence of his fellow inmates and getting them to brag about their crimes. He’d helped the feds solve a series of bank and armored car robberies in New Jersey. “And he just put a killer away for the state.”
“Heck,” Kammerman said and laughed, “for all the help he’s been to us, I’d let him marry my daughter.”
Southy Healey told Richardson that he wasn’t concerned that Luther was trying to pin the murder on him. “Luther’s the one that fucked her, he is the one that killed her, he is the one that buried her, and your physical evidence will prove all of that,” he said.
The ballistics report on the .22-caliber Healey was carrying following his arrest came back from the CBI. It was not the gun used to killed Cher Elder.
The crime lab had also narrowed the possible murder weapon down to just three models from the markings on the largest bullet fragment from Elder’s skull. One of the three was a .22 Baretta, the same weapon stolen from the Evergreen 7-Eleven.
In the meantime, Richardson began contacting people Luther knew in Vermont. If Luther was convicted of first degree murder and faced the death penalty phase of the trial, these people might be called upon by either side to testify for or against his character. He had to know what they would say.
One of the first he reached was Rick Gutzman, a former boyfriend of Luther’s mother.
“She was always defending her kids. They could do no wrong,” Gutzman said. “I didn’t know Tom very well, he was in prison most of the time I was with his mother.”
Gutzman was unaware of the West Virginia conviction and the murder charges in Colorado. “I’m not surprised,” he said. “I don’t know why they ever let him out. He always had a big chip on his shoulder. He was a big-partier, into drugs, and a real ‘sweet-talker.’ ”
Sometime in the fall of 1993, Luther arrived in Vermont with a girl, Gutzman recalled. “No, it wasn’t Deb Snider,” he said in answer to the detective’s next question. “But I don’t remember her name.”
Richardson also talked to Luther’s brother, William, who was reluctant to say anything. They’d had a good family life, he said, but all the kids had gone their separate ways as adults. He knew Tom had been arrested in West Virginia, “but I never heard the outcome, and he never said nothin’ about a missin’ girl in Colorado.”
After a minute, William decided he wasn’t going to answer anymore questions. But just as he was beginning to hang up, he blurted out, “If he done what you say he has, he should pay for it.”
It took several attempts for Richardson to reach Luther’s mother, Betty. When he did, she also didn’t want to talk. “I love him and don’t believe that he did these things,” she said. “Thomas told me you are a very smart man and an intelligent investigator. I’m only hoping and praying that you turn up something in his favor.”
Tommy had visited her several times after his release from prison, she said, but never mentioned he was a suspect in a Colorado case until after his arrest. “I don’t want to talk about him,” she repeated. “He was always a nice boy. His troubles began when he got involved with drugs. But I love him very much.”
Richardson then talked to Police Chief Leslie Dim
ick of the Hardwick, Vermont, police department. Dimick said he grew up with Tom Luther and knew most of the family.
“He was a pretty normal kid,” Dimick said. “I do remember his brother, William, shot a woman with a shotgun and his sister, Becky had some trouble over the years. She was married to a guy up here, had a couple of children, left him, then she married some other guy, and had another kid.
“Anything else?” Richardson asked.
Well, Dimick said, there was some talk about Tom Luther being involved in an unsolved homicide over in Stowe, Vermont, a ski resort town. Way back in the 1970s, a girl came up missing and then what was left of her body was found in the woods. They knew Luther had worked at Stowe about the same period of time. He’d gone on to Southern California after that, but that was as far as it went.
A female friend of Luther’s from Vermont, called Richardson, having heard that he was asking questions about Tom’s past relationships. She remembered when Luther was much younger, before he’d left Vermont, he had a girlfriend who called her several times complaining that he had “gotten rough with her. She’d say stuff like, ‘Tom’s acting crazy and abusive.’ ”
Richardson’s attention was soon directed to another part of the country when Detective Eaton called and gave him Sue Potter’s telephone number. She, too, was reluctant to talk but answered a few questions.
No, she said, she didn’t have any “flex” cuffs of the sort found on Bobby Jo Oberholtzer. Yes, Tom had a strong sex drive, “but nothing weird.”
“He was always gone a lot,” she said. “He came and went pretty much as he pleased. I knew the good side of Thomas, not the other side.”
Then she clammed up. “I don’t need that guy or his twisted mind,” she said. “He don’t need to be out to get me hurt. All he has to do on the inside is contact someone on the outside.”
In late July, Luther appeared in Jefferson County District Court before Judge Christopher Munch. With him was defense attorney Lauren Cleaver. Formally apprised of the charges, he stood and entered his plea: “Not guilty.”
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