Monster (3 page)

“Okay. What’s her last name, Tom?”

“Snider. S-N-I-D-E-R.”

“Okay,” Richardson said, satisfied that he would soon be meeting the mysterious grey-haired stranger from the videotape. “We wanna make sure that Cher’s okay and everything, um, because Byron pretty much created this unpleasant situation for you, by coverin’ up and lyin’ and everything to us.”

Richardson wanted to sound as if Byron was the focus of his investigation to put Luther at ease. He had no idea if the Eerebouts were lying to protect Luther, if Luther was lying to protect the Eerebouts, or they were all lying to protect each other. But someone was lying, and it was his job to find out who.

The ex-con took the bait and jumped to the defense of his friend’s son. “Well, like I said, you know, in fact, this is the first time he’s said anything to me about it. He just says, ‘Hey, you know, I figured I wouldn’t say nothin’ to you, ‘cause I didn’t want you to be upset about it.’ I am very, you know, paranoid of the cops.”

Richardson ignored the comment. “All right, well, we’ll be out there in a little bit. Thanks a lot, bud.”

He hung up the telephone. The clock was ticking. He had to get to Fort Collins before Luther changed his mind or decided he wanted an attorney. And the longer Luther had to rehearse his story, the harder it’d be to catch him. But Richardson also wanted to know as much as he could about Luther before they met. He alerted his partner to get ready to move. Then he searched for Luther’s records on the Colorado Criminal Information Computer.

There wasn’t a lot of detail, but what there was was interesting as hell. According to the printout, Luther had been arrested in Summit County, Colorado, on February 13, 1982, and charged with attempted murder, kidnapping, and sexual assault. He’d pleaded guilty to assault and second degree sexual assault more than a year later, in July 1983, and served almost eleven years before being released in January.

Out three months and already connected to a missing girl.
Fast work, bud,
Richardson thought shaking his head. He took the printout back to his desk. He looked again at the photograph of Cher then he placed another call, this time to the Summit County Sheriff’s Office in the ski-resort town of Breckenridge. The receptionist passed him to Sheriff Joe Morales.

“What can I do for ya?” Morales asked after the introductions were dispensed with.

“Well, what can you tell me about Thomas Edward Luther?” Richardson asked. There was a long silence, and he wondered if the line had gone dead. He had expected a little confusion, or at least some sort of delay while Morales went to pull an eleven-year-old file. He didn’t expect the reply he got a moment later.

Morales sighed, then asked, “Who’d he kill?”

Chapter Two

January 6, 1982—Breckenridge, Colorado

As Richardson listened, Morales explained how he had been a young deputy sheriff in Summit County eleven years earlier when he first met Thomas Edward Luther. “And what I know about him and what I suspect are two different animals.”

There wasn’t time to tell Richardson the whole story, just the basics. But after they hung up, Morales sat in his office lost in thought, remembering when it all began—January 6, 1982.

It had been a bitterly cold day in Breckenridge, the county seat, but better known for its skiing. The temperature had been hovering around twenty degrees below zero for several days, the sort of cold that made it hurt to breathe and the snow complain underfoot like pieces of styrofoam rubbed together.

About 4:30 that afternoon, Annette Kay Schnee came stomping into the town pharmacy accompanied by an unkempt, but otherwise pretty, woman with dark, shoulder-length hair. The pharmacy clerk recognized Annette, a petite young woman—all of 5’1” and 110 pounds, who also had shoulder-length brown hair—but not her companion.

“They didn’t quite seem to belong together,” the clerk later told police detectives. Still, they acted like good friends. While the pharmacist filled Annette’s prescription they strolled through the store, laughing and commenting about various items.

Annette was only ten weeks shy of her twenty-second birthday. A popular high school cheerleader back in her home town of Sioux City, Iowa, she hadn’t quite figured out what she wanted to do with her life after graduation. So she had shelved plans to go to college and worked in a beauty salon before moving to Breckenridge to ski and have a little fun.

Her mom had fretted about her oldest child moving so far away. “What if you get sick? What if you need me and I’m not there?” But Annette had promised to be careful and called often.

Annette had only lived in the Breckenridge area for eighteen months but was already considered a “townie” by the tight-knit locals. That was in part because the pretty young woman was willing to try almost any crazy stunt, including participating in the annual Outhouse Race, in which contestants mount outhouses on skis and barrel down a ski slope, hopefully, but not always, getting to the bottom in one piece. She supported herself by working part-time as a bartender in Breckenridge at night and full-time as a maid at the Holiday Inn in Frisco, fifteen miles to the north, during the day.

Unlike jet-set Vail and Aspen, Breckenridge was off the beaten track in those days—a small, relatively quiet ski town with a main street of quaint Victorian storefronts, a variety of restaurants for the aprés ski crowd, and a few rowdy bars. The locals were mostly two kinds: young ski buffs, who worked at the resort or in the restaurants, bars, and hotels, and old-timers who loved the surrounding mountains of the Gore Range enough to put up with the tourists and the long winters at 10,000 feet above sea level. Except for the occasional bar brawl or burglary, there wasn’t much in the way of crime—hadn’t been a murder in years—and even young, pretty women like Annette felt safe hitchhiking.

Annette was supposed to work that night at the bar. Her uniform was already laid out neatly on her bed in the cabin she rented in Blue River, a collection of ski chalets and cabins a few miles south of Breckenridge on Highway 9. But she hadn’t been feeling well and went to see a doctor in Frisco.

Later that afternoon, friends saw her hitchhiking along Highway 9 outside of Frisco and gave her a ride to their turnoff a couple miles shy of Breckenridge. She waved goodbye as they drove off and stuck her thumb out again. She was on her way home but wanted to stop first to fill a new prescription. Her friends weren’t worried about her; she was dressed for the weather, including two pairs of wool socks, one long pair that covered her calves and an ankle-high pair over them.

A half hour after her friends dropped her off, Annette walked into the pharmacy with the other woman. At the cash register, she turned to her companion and asked, “Didn’t you want cigarettes?” The other woman smiled and grabbed a pack of Marlboros.

Annette paid for the cigarettes and prescription, which she placed in the daypack she carried. The clerk watched as the two women then walked out of the store and into the fast-approaching winter night.

A few hours later, Bobby Jo Oberholtzer was waiting on the south end of Breckenridge for a ride to her home in Alma, twenty miles to the south on the other side of Hoosier Pass. A dozen Alma residents made the daily commute, preferring the solitude and lower housing costs of their tiny village on the highway between the ski resort and Colorado Springs and Denver.

Bobby Jo was well-known and popular in Alma, to which she and her husband, Jeff, had moved from Racine, Wisconsin, several years earlier. On most workdays, Bobby Jo caught rides with friends to and from Breckenridge where she worked as a secretary for a realty office. When she missed a ride, she stuck out her thumb.

Bobby Jo’s hitchhiking made Jeff nervous, but they only had an old truck and he needed it for his appliance repair business. She wasn’t the sort of woman who could be told what she could and couldn’t do anyway. Although she was only 5’3” and 110 pounds, she’d fight like a cornered wildcat if pushed. So Jeff fashioned a heavy brass key ring for her with which to wallop any attacker. She kept the key ring clipped to the outside top of the daypack she always carried and promised to be careful.

Bobby Jo had just turned 29 that past Christmas, a beautiful woman with blond, shoulder-length hair and merry blue eyes. On January 6, she got up at about 5:30 to get an early start on what began as a great day. She arrived at work to learn that she was getting a substantial pay raise.

A little after 6
P.M.
, Jeff Oberholtzer was outside shoveling snow from the walk in front of their house and watching the traffic on Highway 9 for his wife when the telephone rang. Running inside, he answered. It was Bobby Jo. She told him the good news and said she was going to a Breckenridge bar to celebrate with two friends. The friends, another young couple, lived near Alma and would be giving her a ride home afterwards.

“They’re good people,” Jeff said, relieved that his wife wouldn’t be trying to hitchhike over 11,000-foot Hoosier Pass on such a miserably cold night. They discussed dinner plans and hung up. He went back outside to finish shoveling.

In Breckenridge, Bobby Jo and her friends went to the bar where she had a couple of drinks. By 7:30, it was apparent that her friends had decided to make a night of it, but Bobby Jo wanted to go home.

“No problem,” she said, “I’ll hitchhike. There should still be some late traffic heading over the pass.” So she bundled up and headed for the convenience store at the end of town; its parking lot was used by locals as a pickup spot for hitchhikers headed south.

Shortly before 8
P.M.
, a friend driving a truck spotted Bobby Jo standing in the cold and pulled over. Bobby Jo opened the passenger door and leaned in to warm up.

“I’m going as far as Blue River,” the driver said. But Bobby Jo shook her head. Blue River was only a few miles down the road. Thanks but no thanks, she didn’t want to get stranded on that lonely stretch of the highway on such a night. At least here, she could run into the store to warm up until she got a ride to take her all the way to Alma.

“I’ll see you later,” she said and closed the door. The driver pulled away. He’d later tell detectives that he made it home in time for the start of an 8 o’clock movie on the television, unaware that when he looked into his rearview mirror at Bobby Jo stamping her feet in the snow, it would be the last time anyone saw her alive.

Except for whoever killed her.

An hour earlier in Alma, Joe Urban stopped to see his friend Jeff Oberholtzer, who was just finishing shoveling snow. Times were tough for Urban. He said he was thinking about heading to Denver to hock his watch for gas and oil.

Jeff suggested they go instead to the local gas station and make a trade. “But we’ll have to hurry ’cause they close at seven,” he said. The station owner wasn’t interested in Joe’s watch, so Jeff charged gas and oil for his friend and bought a six-pack of beer from the liquor store next to the gas station. The pair went back to Jeff’s where they drank the beer and watched television.

Urban left about 8 o’clock. Jeff continued watching a movie, although he was getting increasingly upset at his wife for not calling to say she was going to be later than expected. He fell asleep with the television on.

A little after midnight, he was startled out of his slumber by an ambulance siren. His first thought was that something had happened to his wife—maybe she had been struck crossing the dark highway trying to get home. The ambulance continued down the highway. He lay back down to wait but fell asleep again. He woke about 2
A.M.
; Bobby Jo was still not home.

Oberholtzer decided to look for her. About 2:45 that morning, he banged on the door of the couple who were supposed to have given his wife a ride home. Yeah, she had been with them at the bar, said the sleepy man, but she left sometime between seven-thirty and eight.

“She should have been back long before we got home, Jeff,” he said. “But she had three rum and Cokes... maybe she stayed in Breckenridge?”

Jeff nodded. Yeah, maybe that was it ... if so, he was going to give her a piece of his mind for not calling. Climbing into his truck, he drove over Hoosier Pass, the old engine chugging and gasping for air as it crawled past the parking lot at the top.

In Breckenridge he went to the realty office to see if maybe she had decided at the last minute to spend the cold night on the couch. But the office was dark and nobody answered his knock. About 3:30, torn between fear and anger, he contacted the Breckenridge police. The dispatcher took a missing person report and promised he’d get the word out to the patrol officers.

Jeff Oberholtzer spent the rest of the night driving, trying to think of where his wife might have gone. At last he went home, hoping Bobby Jo would be there with a tale about some misadventure she’d had. They’d have a good laugh after he let her know what he thought of her hitchhiking home at night. But the house was cold and empty. He sat down to think about his options.

The telephone startled him out of his stupor; he rushed to pick it up, sure that someone was calling to say his Bobby Jo was in the hospital, but alive. The call was from Donald Hamilton, a rancher who lived near the town of Como, more than ten miles north of Fairplay, an old mining community where the highway now forked—one way to Como and then beyond to Denver, the other towards Colorado Springs. It was another six miles from Fairplay to Alma.