Monster (30 page)

“Which was unusual because Tom normally wouldn’t let anybody else drive his car, even me,” she said.

As she talked, the worries of the past few weeks came out in the form of tears. She was in Washington visiting a friend the weekend that Cher Elder disappeared, she said. No, she hadn’t smelled any vomit in Tom’s car. Then again, she thought to herself, there was that cleanser he borrowed ...

Had he been making any unusual telephone calls?

Well, she replied, wanting to be truthful without hurting Tom, he was calling “Southy” a lot. “He’s planning to move to Chicago. He’s just waiting for the deposit from his apartment and one more telephone bill.”

The detectives left, saying they might want to talk to her again. She said she would be willing without saying she thought she might learn something that would help Tom.

The next night, she, Tom, Dennis, and the two boys were getting ready to watch a movie when the telephone rang. She answered. It was Detective Russell. He wanted to know if she could get away to come to the Larimer County Sheriff’s Office to talk.

“It’s important,” he said, and she agreed.

Snider went back to where the males in her life were gathering in front of the television. “I just remembered I have to get a Mother’s Day card for my mom,” she said. “If I don’t mail it right away, she won’t get it in time. Just go ahead without me. I’ll be back soon.”

Tom and Dennis just nodded and sat down like old friends to watch the movie. She left feeling like she was betraying Tom. It was clear that he wasn’t off the hook for the missing girl and what she knew could implicate him in Cher’s death.

If he was guilty of her death, she believed that he should pay. But she wasn’t convinced that he had done anything more than try to protect himself by burying her, and in that case, she didn’t want to be the one to hand him over to the cops. She loved him, she wanted to be with him for the rest of her life. If he was gone, she saw no point in going on.

Snider drove to the sheriff’s office where she was escorted into an interview room by Detective Russell. The conversation began with the detective asking about the marijuana shipments, but it wasn’t long before the detective asked again about anything she might know regarding Elder’s disappearance.

This went on for several minutes until she began to wonder what was so important that she leave her home in the evening. She couldn’t tell them anything new. Then a door on the side of the room opened and the young detective she’d seen at Tom’s place back in April, the one with the Texas accent, stepped into the room.

“I’m Scott Richardson,” he said. “I was hopin’ maybe you and I could talk.”

Chapter Thirteen

Late April 1993—Lakewood, Colorado

The paranoia Tom Luther was feeling was no accident. Scott Richardson wanted Luther isolated and out of his comfort zone. The ex-con was a cocky son-of-a-bitch and seemed to think he was invulnerable when it came to Cher. So the detective had taken a number of steps to knock his confidence down a bit, including asking the Larimer County lawmen for help staking him out.

Debrah Snider’s driveway was perfect for deputies to turn around on their patrols down the highway that ran past her place. They made sure they turned slowly, as if casing the property, even stopping for a moment at night to let their headlights rest on her trailer. Richardson was gratified to hear that the deputies reported a figure peeking out of the curtains just about every time they made their turns. There was also a little spot across the highway where the deputies parked and did their paperwork at the end of their evening shifts.

“It has to be driving Luther nuts,” Richardson told Sabrina. Ever since they’d married, he had talked over his cases with her at the dinner table. Sometimes it was just the mention of an arrest he felt particularly good about. Other times, he ran the facts of perplexing or particularly interesting cases by her. She had practically grown up with him as a cop, and he trusted her instincts for a second opinion.

This case, however, was different. It wasn’t unusual at the beginning of a homicide case for him to be gone from home for two or three days. The longer a murder investigation went, the harder it was to solve. Those initial hours, when witnesses’ memories were fresh and before the killer had a chance to make up a story or get out of town, were crucial.

But after he met Luther, Richardson was gone from early in the morning until late at night, if he came home at all, instead of working right through the dawn. When he did come home, Luther was on his mind. At the dinner table, it was all he could talk about. As time passed, even the twins, as young as they were, began picking up on the added intensity in the Richardson household and knew from the meal conversations that it had something to do with a bad man named Tom Luther.

Richardson was doing what lawmen referred to as “breaking down the circle of friends.” If Luther left Fort Collins, various police agencies would tail him and then hand him off as he crossed into other jurisdictions on his way south to the Denver area. Then when word came back that Luther had stopped to see one of his old prison friends, Richardson would drive over and introduce himself after Luther left.

“Aren’t you on parole?” he’d ask the nervous former felons, knowing that one of the requirements of parole was to avoid contact with other ex-felons. He was sure word of his visits got back to Luther.

Richardson wanted to make this cat-and-mouse game between him and Luther personal. Richardson—he needed Luther to jump every time he heard his name. To feel hunted. A cornered animal, because a cornered animal, while more dangerous, was also desperate and apt to make mistakes. At this point, Richardson had precious little to go on except a grainy videotape taken in Central City, a series of lies and obvious cover-ups, and his instincts. There was no crime scene, no body, not even any hard evidence that Cher Elder was dead.

In spite of that, he was absolutely sure that Luther had murdered her. Nothing Richardson had learned dissuaded him from his conviction. Some pieces of the puzzle didn’t quite fit, which didn’t surprise him considering the number of conflicting stories he’d heard. He didn’t know why or exactly where and when Cher had been killed. He also didn’t know whether others, like the Eerebouts, or this Southy he’d been hearing about, were directly involved. Yet he believed that Cher and Luther left the casino and never made it back to Byron’s apartment.

If Luther’s old traits held, Cher had probably been beaten and strangled, but not necessarily. It is a myth, inspired by television and the movies, that a serial rapist or killer always follows the exact same pattern. For some, the only common thread is that they will rape or kill again and again until they are stopped.

Richardson believed that Luther was responsible for the two 1982 murders in Summit County. It only made sense. Two women died, then after his arrest for attacking Mary Brown, the attacks stopped.

Lightly populated mountain regions like Summit County were not immune from the unpredictable violence of serial killers. One of the most prolific sex killers in recent history, Ted Bundy, was suspected of killing a half-dozen women in and near the Colorado ski resorts of Aspen and Vail in the late 1970s.

Still, what were the chances that two murderously violent sex predators were in Summit County in January 1982? Not much.

If it was true that Luther shot Oberholtzer and Schnee, then beat Brown nearly to death, then he was an opportunistic killer who used whatever weapon was available. A gun. A hammer. His fists. As far as Richardson knew, the only thing that Luther’s victims, and suspected victims, had in common was that they were all small, pretty young women, easy to overpower, and in need of a ride.

The day after he met with Luther, Richardson had talked again to Summit County Sheriff Joe Morales to learn more about the attack on Mary Brown. He also talked with Detective Eaton of Summit County and Charlie McCormick of Park County about their investigation of the Oberholtzer and Schnee murders. They shared what information they had about the two unsolved murders and what they had connecting the deaths to Luther.

It wasn’t much. Eaton said he’d been reviewing the file concerning Luther and had run into an embarrassing wall of cursory police work by his own department. He had always prided himself on not getting too tunnel-visioned while working any one theory about a case. But the detectives in 1982 had seized upon Jeff Oberholtzer as the prime suspect and failed to check out other leads thoroughly.

There was nothing left to do but start over, Eaton said. And that would mean tracking down a terrified former girlfriend and men who had spent a little time in the Summit County Jail more than ten years earlier. He’d be lucky if they were all still alive.

Richardson commiserated. Every homicide detective worth the gold shield knew that the longer a case went, the harder it would be to solve or at least to get a conviction. But he had his own problems. He was sure he had the right suspect. But where was the body?

Maybe Luther had learned something from his time in prison; maybe he had killed and buried Elder, rather than let her or her body be used against him in court. It would be next to impossible to convict him without a corpse. Richardson knew he had to find Cher.

If this case was going to be solved, Richardson believed it would have to be through the meticulous assembly of bits and pieces. The Eerebouts and Luther were doing their best to blow smoke across the trail. But sometimes he learned a lot from what they weren’t saying or when they confused their stories. He talked to Byron’s youngest brother, Tristan, just 16, who, it turned out, went to high school with Cher’s younger half-sister, Beth Elder. Tristan said he couldn’t remember who had been at the apartment the night Cher disappeared, except for himself, Cher, and Byron. He said he didn’t remember Luther being there or an argument between his brother and the missing girl. It was obvious to Richardson that he was trying to remember what story he was supposed to tell.

One of the Eerebouts’ few acquaintances who seemed to be telling the truth was Gina Jones, the girl Byron was seeing when he had the falling out with Cher. Gina had broken off her short relationship with Byron within a few days of Cher’s disappearance and gone back to her former boyfriend.

Cher Elder, Tom Luther, Byron’s brothers, and a friend were all at the apartment that afternoon, Jones recalled. She said she left in a huff over Cher and came back a few hours later to get Byron. She admitted being angry when she found Elder sitting on Byron’s bed. He showed her a “psycho” note Elder had written and placed on his bathroom mirror.

Jones’ mention of the note interested Richardson. Byron Eerebout said he’d found two notes after he returned that night, indicating Cher had come back to the apartment from Central City and left it after finding him and Gina in bed. But Gina Jones was sure he had showed it to her before they left for the evening. They didn’t return until 4
A.M.
, she said. “Her car was there. I got pissed because I thought she was still there. I said, ‘Bullshit if I’m goin’ in there with that woman!’ ”

“Was Thomas Luther’s car there?” Richardson asked.

“No,” Gina replied, “it was not.”

Eerebout went into the apartment, she said, and came back out to report that only his brother J.D. was still there. Neither Cher nor Luther were present. Mollified, Gina had gone with Eerebout into the apartment where they made love before falling asleep.

About 8
A.M.
, Jones said she was awakened by the sound of a girl’s voice. She didn’t recognize the voice but said she assumed it was Cher’s. “But it might have been another girl,” she said. “I didn’t go out in the living room. I rolled over, and Byron got out of bed and went into the living room. I heard a female voice, and I heard other voices, and then Byron came and got back into bed. He said to forget it.”

Richardson, recalling that Eerebout claimed that Elder had poked her head into the bedroom and cursed him, asked if the unidentified girl’s voice could have come from the doorway of the bedroom. No, Jones said, the other woman was definitely out in the living room.

Gina said she thought she heard Cher’s car, which had been parked outside of Byron’s window, being driven away, and when she got up that morning about eleven, it was gone. The only people around were the Eerebout boys. Several days later, Byron told her that Elder was missing.

“I asked him, ‘Did Tom kill her?’ And he was like, ‘No.’ I asked, ‘Did Tom do something with her?’ and he was like, ‘No.’ So I blew it off.”

However, Byron Eerebout remained unusually agitated. That evening back at his apartment, he smashed the mirror in his bathroom and cut himself. He said it was anger over Gina not being paid by her employer. “It didn’t make sense,” she told the detective; it was none of Byron’s business.

A day or two later, Eerebout made it a big point to tell her that he had been called by somebody who had heard from Cher. The disappearance was just a big hoax, he said, adding that he didn’t know why Cher was “messing with him.”

Richardson asked Jones why she thought the Eerebout boys would lie to protect Luther, who she had described as “well-groomed and nice.” “I have no idea,” Gina replied.

No idea,
Richardson thought, but she had certainly leaped quickly to the conclusion that Luther might have killed Cher. Call it a woman’s intuition.

The Lakewood Police Department and the Larimer County Sheriff’s Office joined forces to assign a twenty-seven-officer task force to keep surveillance on the Eerebouts and Luther. It was generally assumed that it was a homicide case, though officially it remained a missing person.

All the pay telephones in the vicinity where Cher Elder’s car was found were checked; only a few calls had been placed from those phones on the dates in question and none by Cher. Yet Luther had insisted that Cher left him to go to a telephone to call her friend.

Regarding Elder’s car, two interesting facts had surfaced. One was that her coat was still in the car, but a check of the weather revealed that the night she disappeared was bitterly cold. It didn’t make sense that she had gone somewhere voluntarily without it. But more importantly, a single, curly gray hair had been found on the driver’s seat.