Monster (31 page)

Elder’s physical description was checked against every unidentified female body that resembled her in the least and had turned up on the national crime computer. Even a cynical homicide detective like Richardson was surprised at the dozens of unidentified murder victims there were on the list. But again, Cher wasn’t one of them.

Richardson questioned and requestioned her family and friends hoping to turn up any odd detail that might help solve the mystery. He collected photographs of Cher to go along with the one he had hung on his office wall next to the photographs of his family. He studied them for jewelry she wore which might help identify her body when and if she was found. Among the jewelry was Byron’s ring and a friendship bracelet woven of brightly colored string that her friend Karen Knott said she never took off.

He contacted the Missouri police to see if Elder had some background that might indicate she had a habit of risky behavior. But they reported no arrests, not even a driving offense. Several of the police chiefs of the small towns where she had lived remembered Cher. A nice girl, they said, no trouble at all.

A nice girl. That was Cher. No dirt. No drugs. Nothing in her past right up to the day she disappeared to place her in harm’s way. Except she was perhaps too friendly and trusting.

As he focused on Luther, Richardson didn’t discard the faint possibility that Elder was alive and in hiding. But people need money to survive and there was no activity on her credit cards or bank accounts, which further indicated that robbery was not the motive behind her disappearance.

Finally, he had to tell the family that he believed Elder was more than missing. It was one of the hardest things he’d ever done as a police officer. He had grown to like Cher. She hadn’t deserved this. She came from a broken home, but it was clear that both sides of her family, including her stepparents, had loved her very much. Whatever troubles there had been between Rhonda and Earl, they had not made their daughter a pawn.

On a night in later April, he called the family together. Rhonda and her husband, Van, along with Cher’s maternal grandmother came from Grand Junction. Earl arrived from Golden. “I may be wrong,” he said. “I hope I am, but I believe that Cher’s been killed. I have a suspect. He just got out of the joint from a sexual assault. He was seen with her in Central City the night she disappeared.”

Rhonda and her mother burst into tears. Earl just sat in his chair blinking, stunned. Then he asked for the suspect’s name and address. Maybe there was something he could do that the police could not to get information out of him.

Earl Elder was a big man who worked for the Coors beer company in Golden. In fact, if Luther had parked with Cher on Lookout Mountain as he had said, they could not have helped but notice the brightly lit Coors factory a few miles below. But apparently, Cher had not mentioned it to her “friend” Tom Luther.

Richardson remembered how when he first met Earl and then Luther, he was struck by the physical similarity between the two men. They both had blue eyes, curly graying hair, and pleasant smiles; they could have almost been brothers. It was easy to guess that a girl like Cher, heartbroken over her faithless boyfriend, had found it easy to trust a man who so resembled her father.

Looking at Cher’s tormented family, Richardson thought of his own wife and twin boys and was struck by a bolt of guilt. He had been spending a lot of time on the case and sometimes didn’t see the boys unless it was late at night when he came home and looked in on them as they slept.

When she bore the twins, Richardson had promised his wife that he would never be like his father. His family would come first to him.

Sabrina was sure that however much he brushed off his feelings regarding his father, Scott still felt his absence and guilt for not having been able to do something to save him. Back when they were courting, sitting outside one night on her parent’s porch watching the stars wheel above Texas, he had suddenly blurted out, “You don’t know how lucky you are to have parents like yours. I never really had a dad.”

Sabrina looked at him. She knew he’d had it rough, but it was still unlike him to just come out and say it. She also knew something about what he had gone through because she had gone through a similar situation herself—her birth father also was an abusive alcoholic and he had killed himself when she was 6.

But there was nothing in her memory like the stories Scott told her about his father... like how his father made him and his older brother lug a pile of heavy flagstones from one side of the yard to the other whenever he meant to fight with his wife in the house. Afraid for themselves and their mother, the boys never questioned the purpose of moving the rocks.

One night, just before Scott’s 12th birthday, the boys’ mother took them to the drive-in theatre, a common place of refuge when the old man was on a tear. They returned to a quiet house and figured he had passed out. The next morning, Scott was awakened by his mother, who told him his dad had shot himself while they were gone.

It hadn’t been until much later that his sons learned that their father was a bombardier during World War II and the Korean conflict, tormented into alcoholism by the ghosts from cities he helped destroy. He was a torn man. When sober, he was a counselor for troubled youths known for helping others, a man who wanted to be a good father, even if he never quite got it right.

As his sons grew, he was sober less and less often. Whatever love he might have felt for his sons, he was incapable of showing it. And then he put a gun to his head.

Unaware of what drove his father so desperately, Scott felt he was somehow responsible for his father’s death. Maybe he was too demanding? Maybe he wasn’t a good enough son? He should have seen that his dad was troubled and been able to help.

Scott was left with few pleasant memories of his father and no one but his hardworking mother to tell him how to be a good man. In that regard, Sabrina knew she was more fortunate. Her mother had remarried a wonderful man who had raised Sabrina and her younger siblings as his own.

“I don’t remember a lot of love,” Scott said that night in Texas. The only light was from the stars, but it was enough for her to see the tears running down his face.

It was one of the few times she would ever see him cry—the other would be at the birth of the twins. She had loved him from the moment she laid eyes on him; she admired his courage and thought he was the handsomest man she had ever seen. He was her knight in shining armor, fearless in the defense of others, a good man, and a dedicated cop. She had never so much as kissed another man. Now she loved him even more.

As he promised, Richardson had been the best of fathers. Constantly wrestling with the boys, bathing them, clothing them. He bought them tiny bows and arrows so that they could mimic their bow-hunting father and he talked incessantly about the day he could take them on hunting and fishing trips.

What free time he had, he spent with Sabrina and the boys, with only the occasional motorcycle ride to clear his mind. But then Luther had come into their lives, and now there was no such thing as free time.

“I’m sorry,” he now said to Earl Elder. “I can’t tell you how to find him.” The last thing he needed was for Cher’s father to go kill that son-of-a-bitch Tom Luther.

Rhonda hugged him as she left that night. “Please find her,” she said. “Please find her so that we can bury her. I don’t want her to be alone in some godforsaken spot.”

Richardson nodded and swallowed hard. “I will,” he said. “I won’t give up until I do.”

By late April, the Eerebouts would no longer cooperate with the investigation. Through their mother, Babe, investigators were told that if they wanted to talk to the boys, they’d have to do so in the presence of a lawyer.

Richardson had expected that door to close sooner or later. The Eerebouts were obviously in contact with Thomas Luther, and he was smart enough to tell the boys to keep their mouths shut. Then there was their father, Skip Eerebout, an ex-con who was certain to remind them of the convict code and what happens to snitches.

With the Eerebouts at least temporarily out of the picture, Richardson realized that the key to both finding Cher’s body and convicting her killer might rest with Debrah Snider.

It never ceased to amaze him how basically good women fell for guys in prison. The majority of inmates would never change the traits that had landed them behind bars in the first place. If anything, prison was just a college for furthering their criminal careers. Yet there were always women who felt that they could change the leopard’s spots.

Granted, these guys had a lot of time on their hands to work on the lonely hearts of these women. But he’d done some research and Debrah Snider was no dummy. After doing time for an old theft charge, she had become a regular poster child for prison rehabilitation. She had put herself through school and received degrees in nursing and psychology.

She should have known better, he thought. But she was in love, and he knew that to get Debrah to help him, he would have to drive a wedge between her and her boyfriend.

In the meantime, he might be able to use her in his quest to rattle Luther. Richardson figured she would be a “two-way street”—giving him information, but also relaying what he said back to her lover. He would have to be careful what he told her or it might come back to haunt him at trial, but if used right he might be able to push more of Luther’s buttons.

In late April, he met with the Larimer County Sheriff’s Narcotics Task Force headed by Sgt. Andy Josey. He asked their help in staking out Luther, and they readily agreed. Then on the afternoon of May 7, Richardson completed an affadavit for a search warrant for Luther’s car and telephone records. Then he called Josey to set up an “accidental” meeting with Debrah Snider.

It was 8
P.M.
when Snider arrived at the sheriff’s office and was met by Detective Russell, who began the questioning while Richardson listened from an adjoining room. He wanted Russell to get her talking before he showed up.

With Russell, she would feel some control. After all, she had initiated the contact between herself and Larimer County. But he was the homicide cop she had seen arguing with her boyfriend, and he was sure he was not a popular man in the Luther household.

Richardson listened in until the interview seemed to be stalling and he sensed Debrah’s impatience. It was time to introduce himself.

“I’m Scott Richardson,” he said walking into the interview room. “I was hopin’ maybe you and I could talk.”

Debrah looked frightened.

“I’ll be back soon,” Snider had promised the men in her home. But the interview lasted nearly four hours.

To begin the process of “breaking the girl from the guy,” Richardson repeatedly referred to Luther’s admitted sexual experience with Cher Elder while Snider was out of town. After all, Richardson thought, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

He pointed out that Luther lied to her constantly. And he made it clear that he believed that Mary and Cher were not his first, nor would be his last, victims.

Debrah tried to be objective without giving up Luther. She admitted that she was hurt when Tom asked her to send the tape to Babe for safekeeping. But after awhile, she said, she began to wonder if it was so that Byron and J.D. could listen to the tape “in order to get their stories straight.”

Richardson wanted to know what Luther told her of his trip to Central City. She related Luther’s varying stories: how he said he originally went with the Eerebout boys, and only after it was clear she would eventually hear about Elder, did he admit to going with the girl.

Snider said Luther tried to explain away the sexual incident by claiming he was drunk. They’d picked up a bottle of wine somewhere, she said. She left out the part about finding Luther in bed in the middle of the day when she got back from Washington with his sore and battered hands. The part about her missing shovel and the clothes he’d “lost” after “burying a box of rifles.” She left out Mortho and drug dealers who killed young girls for talking and cut off their lips as a warning. She never mentioned Interstate 70, a stone historical marker, or an unmarked grave. She didn’t know that he had done anything worse than bury Elder. She couldn’t betray him just for trying to stay out of prison.

Richardson asked how Luther had been acting since his visit. He wanted to know if the pressure was having an effect.

“He’s in a panic,” Debrah admitted. “He’s afraid you guys are going to frame him for something.” She said he had been making a lot of calls to the Eerebouts and Southy that seemed to have something to do with Cher.

Richardson’s reply was sarcastic. “What’s he think we’re going to frame him on? A missing girl?”

He moved his chair closer to Snider and brought up the rape in Summit County, how her boyfriend had lied to her about that. “And now he’s out a whole three months and he’s doing narcotic transactions in the mail. I mean, three months is a pretty short time, and now he goes out and has sex with another girl in a car that you bought him and then she disappears.” He let the image of betrayal sink in.

Snider tried desperately to stick by her man. “I’m scared for him,” she conceded. “But I don’t think he’s done anything to that girl. I think if he was that kind of man and as mad as I’ve made him over our arguments... then I think I would have been hurt.”

Richardson shook his head. “Do you understand that there are serial killers who are married with six kids and three grandchildren that go out and kill people at night and come home and are just as charming as you always see on TV? That they’re the best neighbors in the world?”

“Yeah,” Debrah answered weakly. He was hitting too close to thoughts she’d had—and tried unsuccessfully to put out of her mind. “I know that that happens.”

It was obvious that Snider was hurting, but Richardson wasn’t about to let up. He saw a crack and meant to drive the wedge in further. He leaned closer. “There’s obviously two people in Thomas; there’s a Thomas you know, and a Thomas you don’t. I mean, at some point the clouds have gotta break and you gotta sit there and say, ‘Holy shit, this is what I’m in the middle of.’ ”