Monster (37 page)

Debrah wasn’t sure how she felt about his return. On one hand, there was no denying that she still loved at least that part of him that wrote her the romantic letters. Yet, another side of her found it harder and harder to deny that he might also be a cold-blooded killer. One day she would be telling Richardson that she thought he was capable of murder, the next she would deny that he could have raped and killed Cher.

Another letter arrived assuring her of how much he loved her. The only reference to the investigation was the mention of having found his black book inside a box of letters. Otherwise, he signed off as always, “Kiss me you fox... on my lips, Deb!”

The day after she received his last letter, Luther called. He was in Cheyenne, Wyoming, only seventy miles north of Fort Collins, and wanted to see her. She welcomed him back and let him stay in her van while her husband and sons lived in the house. She hadn’t heard from Richardson in awhile and had begun to hope that maybe the investigation had gone off on another track. Tom was back to his old sweet self and the darker possibilities receded in her mind.

Then one day, Luther got into it with her eldest son, Chance, over a tape deck he had purchased from the boy but couldn’t get to work. He accused Chance of being a thief and then manipulating Debrah when she stuck up for him. “You think you can just manipulate people!” he yelled at the frightened teenager. “I wrote the book on it. You don’t want to fuck with me, I’ve sent grown men out of prison in body bags!”

Angry with Snider for siding with her son, he left saying he had some unfinished business in Colorado Springs. She knew it had to do with drug deals and the drug dealer Mortho. She had never met him, but heard from Luther that he was grossly obese and the same man who had supposedly told him that Elder was killed because she was a snitch. Luther referred to Mortho as “the connection,” and said that Mortho and Southy didn’t get along. In fact, shots had been exchanged between the two over a drug deal.

Luther didn’t show up or call for several days. Snider decided to call the Eerebouts to see if they had heard from him. She was surprised when he answered the telephone. He had always denied that there was anything between him and Babe, but Debrah was angry nevertheless. He ran to Babe whenever he was in trouble.
Well,
she thought,
they’re perfect for each other.
They were both paranoid and constantly looking out windows whenever cars drove by.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call,” Tom apologized. “I just stopped by here before you called.” He wanted to see her again, but it couldn’t be in Fort Collins. “Meet me in Denver.”

Debrah drove to Denver. Sometimes it felt like Tom was just leading her along so he could keep her from the police, but he seemed genuinely happy to see her and they spent the night at a motel in each other’s arms. She was in the bathroom that morning when she overheard a telephone conversation between Luther and Mortho. Luther said something about “the product” and apparently set up a meeting at another motel for the next day. When she came out, he asked her for a favor. He needed to complete a deal but was afraid he was going to be pulled over. “I want you to follow me with this,” he said, handing her a wad of money and a bag of white powder.

Snider objected. She didn’t want to be involved in any of his drug deals and especially didn’t want to carry the white powder. Luther responded angrily, “There’s nothing wrong with you sexually that a little of that wouldn’t take care of.”

At last he persuaded her by promising to give up drug dealing after he had pulled off a couple of last big deals. “If I get stopped, just keep driving,” he said and left.

Snider was getting ready to leave when she turned and dropped the bag of white powder into the trashcan. She’d deliver the cash, but she wasn’t going to ferry his drugs. As she drove down the road to the next motel, she started counting the cash he had handed her. She stopped at $800. When she arrived at the motel, Luther was again on the telephone with Mortho. A few minutes later, a young girl knocked at the door and Luther handed her the money with instructions to bring more of “the product” over the next morning.

Disgusted, Snider said she had to go to work. If he wanted the white powder she had given him, she said as she walked out the door, he would have to go back to the first motel and retrieve it from the trashcan. Tom looked angry, but she left before he could say anything. She drove a few blocks and pulled over at a pay telephone to call Richardson. He wasn’t there, so she left a message that Tom was at a motel room and there would be a drug deal in the morning. She wanted Luther caught before he got into any more trouble.

Nothing ever came of the telephone call. Richardson, who was out of town, didn’t get the message until too late.

For the next couple of weeks, there was nothing to indicate that the police were even interested in Luther. He was staying back at her place in Fort Collins, doing his little drug deals and, she believed, casing houses for burglaries with Southy and the Eerebouts. But instead of finding the silence encouraging, as she had in the past, Debrah kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.

The calm was shattered the evening of July 12 when Byron Eerebout called. “Did I see the evening news?” Tom asked, puzzled. “No.” He listened for a minute, face turning bright red, then he slammed the telephone down.

“Richardson was just on the television,” he shouted at Debrah. “He had my picture and even a picture of my car. He as much as said I killed her.”

Chapter Sixteen

July 12, 1993—Lakewood, Colorado

Scott Richardson was frustrated. The search in Empire had yielded nothing except the feeling that Cher was so close he might have walked past her grave a dozen times.

It wasn’t from a lack of trying. They had scooped out the sludge pits with a front-end loader, carefully sifting through the slop. Hazardous materials divers from Inland Marine Services had volunteered to help and gone into the sewage treatment plant’s aeration tanks.

The area around Empire was littered with old, abandoned mine shafts, some several hundred feet deep. The air emanating from one in particular seemed unusually foul, as if something was decomposing in it, but it held nothing more than old garbage and a refrigerator. At considerable risk, the Gilpin County mine rescue team searched the holes but came up empty.

Even a military jet equipped with Forward-Looking Infrared Radar had been loaned for the investigation. The FLIR jet’s equipment could detect differences in surface temperatures within a few square yards of soil from 30,000 feet. Soil that had been disturbed, as in a grave, gave off a different temperature than undisturbed soil right next to it. And as a body decomposes, it too gives off heat that can be detected by FLIR. This time, however, the FLIR jet detected nothing that helped locate Cher Elder’s grave.

In the meantime, there were dozens of leads to chase down. A cousin of Cher’s thought she had seen her missing relative briefly at an Indiana truck stop, but police there could find no one matching her description. Then there was a report of a body seen floating in Clear Creek near Central City. It turned out to be that of a 3-year-old child who had drowned.

The missing shovel from Luther’s former job had turned up mysteriously, covered with dirt. Richardson asked Josey to take it to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation crime lab to have it tested for body fluids and hair.

On May 25, Detective Heylin called Pam “Babe” Rivinius to arrange a meeting with her boys and their attorney. She demanded to know why Richardson had cancelled the last meeting. He didn’t want to tell her that J.D. had been followed to Empire and been seen picking Luther up, so he explained that they had been short-staffed and were checking out other leads first. “But we’ve come to the point where we need to talk to the boys again.”

“Hopefully you people have, ah, finally come to realize that neither one of the two of these people that you have focused on here lately is involved in this situation,” Babe said, referring Byron and Luther.

“I don’t think your boys are in any danger of that but, ah, due to their relationship with Mr. Luther, we just wanna make sure we have all that down pat,” Heylin replied.

Rivinius said she had no problem with the boys clearing up their involvement, but there was something she wanted the police to understand. “We have absolutely—the boys have absolutely—no question in their minds, and I have absolutely none in mine either, that Tom Luther is not involved in this.”

“Okay,” Heylin responded. “That’s a fair statement on your behalf from what you understand. But we’re working from a little bit different set of information and probably you don’t have as much of the information as we do. But that’s why we wanna talk and get it all out on the table.... If Tom Luther has nothing to do with this, then we’ll certainly go in a different direction.”

“It’s just that we will stand by him,” Babe replied, “because we know where he was all during that time.... I mean, he is ... he is a good person. His background may not be the greatest, but Tom Luther is a good person. There’s just absolutely no way that he is involved in anything to do with her disappearance.”

Heylin said he appreciated her cooperation. “And I know this girl’s parents do also,” he added, hoping to prick her conscience.

Rivinius was quiet for a moment before responding. “Well, the boys really cared a great deal about her,” she said. “They thought she was a super nice girl.”

Later, when Heylin told him about the conversation, Richardson responded angrily. If the Eerebout boys cared so much about Cher Elder why were they lying to protect Tom Luther? The Eerebouts were always looking out for number one. His opinion of them didn’t change a couple days later when Gina Jones called.

Jones was frightened. She had moved out of her apartment and was staying with her mother when she heard from her boyfriend. Somebody had broken into her apartment and vandalized it, but that wasn’t the worst. Whoever it was had also caught her pet cat, slit its throat, and pinned it to a wall with a knife. Then the cat-killer had spray-painted a message on the wall: “Bitch, you’ll be next.” Gina and her boyfriend were convinced that it was a warning from Byron Eerebout or Tom Luther because she had talked to Richardson about the Cher Elder case.

An hour later, Gina’s friend Tina Moore called Richardson to tell him about the cat. She had thought that Jones would be too frightened to call. The spray-painter’s use of the word “next” to her indicated “that there was a first, if you know what I mean.”

Moore shuddered, recalling that Byron Eerebout had once tried to set her up on a date with Luther. “I’ve never met Tom, and I don’t want to,” she said. “I’m really glad it wasn’t me. I mean, not to say that I’m glad it was Cher, but I’m glad I didn’t take that step.”

In the few months since he took the Elder case, Richardson had filled three four-inch thick, black, three-ring notebooks with reports and transcribed conversations. He wondered how many more he would have to fill before it was all over.

From Debrah Snider he heard about Luther’s comings and goings. He worried that Luther would someday leave the state for the last time and disappear. Yet, there was nothing he could do about it. Originally, he had resisted arresting Luther for the stolen tools he and Heylin had spotted in his car. If they had taken him in then, he would have “lawyered up” and stopped any chance of getting him to talk again.

At one point, Snider had mentioned, almost in passing, that she believed that Cher Elder had been murdered because she was a police informant. He had checked with various police agencies including his own, but none had ever received any information from Cher about the Eerebouts, Luther, or anyone else for that matter.

He hadn’t wanted to involve the press, but it was Cher’s family who finally forced his hand. In early July, he was contacted by a television reporter who said Rhonda Edwards had called him about the investigation into the disappearance of her daughter. “I understand you have a suspect who was seen with her in Central City?” the reporter asked.

Richardson made a deal. Running the story now could jeopardize the whole case, he told the reporter, but if he’d wait, Richardson would tell him the particulars of what he knew and then when it broke, the reporter would have the complete story. The reporter agreed.

Still, it was obvious that sooner or later some other newshound would sniff out the story. If so, it would be best to use the press for his own ends. He met with Deputy District Attorney Hall and Sgt. Don Girson, his immediate supervisor.

The FBI’s psychological profile of Luther suggested that he’d respond to something he viewed as a “personal thing” between himself and the detective. They’d already seen some evidence of that.

Right now, however, Luther was Mr. Macho, confident and thumbing his nose at them. Richardson was going to have to take him down a peg or two, teach him who was the hunter and who was the hunted. Remembering Luther’s plea from their first meeting to not run his photograph in the newspapers or television, the detective had an idea.

Denver’s television stations and newspapers were invited to attend the July 12 press conference at the Lakewood Police Department. Richardson went to the podium next to a large screen on which first Cher’s, then Luther’s photographs were shown, as was a photograph of Luther’s car.

Richardson said that Cher Elder had been in an argument with her boyfriend, Byron Eerebout, the night she disappeared and that she had then gone to Central City with Thomas Luther. “Byron Eerebout’s father was on the same cell block as Luther, who was in prison for sexual assault.” Then he ran the casino videotape he had seized, pointing out where Luther was following Cher.

“She was last seen by a friend that evening, getting into Thomas Luther’s vehicle at approximately 1:30
A.M.
in the casino parking lot,” he said. He paused for a moment to make sure his next point was understood by anyone watching. “And there is nothing to indicate that Cher is alive at this time.”

“Is Luther a suspect?” a reporter shouted out.