Monster (44 page)

“Dear Tom,” she wrote back. “I miss you so much. I know I made you angry by trying to set limits for our relationship, but maybe if you could have accepted those limits just a little better, Byron wouldn’t be in jail and you wouldn’t have had to leave. I don’t know if we would have ever been able to work things out here, but what a waste that we didn’t try harder.

“Well, love, it’s hard to see you as a Walk-Away-Joe. I fought the State of Colorado for you, but you are a wimp when it came to fighting for us. I hope you one day get settled, maybe it can happen in Pennsylvania. I won’t wish you luck or love with another woman, because I will always love you.... Maybe someday you will come home again, when you’re more settled, or if that can never happen, maybe you’ll call and ask me to come to you. I love you, Debrah.”

Luther wrote back, “I know nothing is perfect, and I’m kinda hurt that you accept the fact that I walked away so easy. After fighting Colorado so hard to get me, you couldn’t say that you would rather see me gone a couple days a month than gone forever?” Besides, how could he love her “proper” with her husband around all the time?

“I miss you, Deb. Sometimes I wish I could get you out of my system and just stay out of yours and your family’s lives, but I can’t seem to do that.”

Indeed, Thomas Luther and Debrah Snider would, as Detective Richardson once told her, continue to get back together until something beyond her control separated them once and for all.

In November, Luther, who once told her that God put them together for a purpose, asked her to meet him “halfway” in Iowa for the Thanksgiving holiday. It was a magical four days for Debrah.

Tom was romantic, bringing her flowers, and patient with her as a lover. They hardly left the room except to eat, a fact she found only mildly disappointing because she wanted to go out dancing. The disappointment dissolved when he invited her to join him back east in February.

“I never have had, and may never have a honeymoon,” she wrote to him on December 9. “But if I never do, those few days will always be remembered as just about as good as one can get.”

Two days later, the glow of the “honeymoon” was beginning to wear off. She had been unable to reach him since they parted and hadn’t received any letters. She also was told by Luther’s mother that because Debrah had seen him for Thanksgiving, her son would be spending Christmas with his family in Vermont.

“I don’t think I’m going to make it ’til February,” she wrote to him. “I put up with you because, despite the fact that you’re such a pain in the ass, you’re still the best thing that’s ever happened to me. But I need you, and you’re unavailable.”

She closed her letter saying she understood about Christmas. “This is your first year out and it’s appropriate that you spend it with your family. But promise me that next year, no matter where you are or what you’re doing, you’ll spend Christmas with me.”

With renewed hope for a future with the man she loved, Debrah Snider posted the letter, forgetting Luther’s own warning from prison that he had a heart half good and half bad ... that “there’s death here and pain for many.”

The day after Snider wrote her letter, the nude body of an unidentified white woman, approximately 20 years old, was found on a hillside five miles from Newport, Pennsylvania. She had been raped vaginally and anally, beaten about the face, and then strangled to death.

The young woman had been pretty; petite at 5’4” and 110 pounds. She had shoulder-length hair. Her clothes, except for a sweater. and any identification as to who she might have been, were missing.

The isolated area where the body was found was dense woods with a lot of undergrowth. The fact that she was found at all was happenstance, as two hunters stumbled upon the remains 200 feet from the nearest road or trail.

As to who the killer might be, the police had few clues, except for blood on the victim’s sweater. It didn’t match the young woman’s, and it was assumed to be the killer’s. It was blood type A one plus one.

Chapter Eighteen

January 25, 1994—Golden, Colorado

The Jefferson County Courthouse is a massive structure of glass, steel, and tan stone nicknamed the Taj Mahal, both because of what it cost to build in the mid-80s and for its domed middle segment’s slight resemblance to its namesake in India. It sits on a barren hill outside of Golden within the shadow of the range of foothills that mark the eastern edge of the Rockies, including Lookout Mountain, where Luther claimed nearly a year earlier that he and Cher Elder had parked for a “quick little intercourse thing.”

Just down the road from the courthouse were two lesser, but just as modern structures, the Jefferson County Jail and the building housing the district attorneys’ offices. Scott Richardson could see the Taj from the room where he, Deputy District Attorney Mark Minor, who was prosecuting Byron Eerebout for the shooting case, and Byron’s two lawyers were meeting.

Eerebout’s lawyers had asked for the meeting. First degree attempted murder carried the possibility of forty-eight years in prison, and their client was getting nervous. The lawyers knew that even if they could get their client off on the attempted murder charges—after all, he shot up the apartment, not people—it was much less likely that he could beat the felony assault raps. With three counts of assault pending, and eight years a pop possible, that was still a lot of years for a young man.

For Richardson, the timing for the little chat could not have been better. The search around Empire had been called off because of deep snow. It was a good time to wait out Eerebout.

Minor, a large, taciturn young lawyer, told the defense attorneys that the offer was to reduce the charges against Eerebout in exchange for the location of Cher Elder’s body. “What do you got?” Minor asked.

“We have a witness who saw Thomas Luther’s hands bloody and covered with mud, and a broken finger, after Cher Elder disappeared,” one of the attorneys said. “We can also supply a witness who was standing nearby when Thomas Luther buried Cher Elder.”

That was fine and good, Richardson interjected, but he wanted more. What about the night Cher disappeared?

“Byron told us he was with Gina the night Cher Elder was killed,” the other defense attorney said. “They went to a bar while Cher stayed behind with everyone else. About midnight, Byron and Gina returned, and at some point, he heard a woman yelling. She is someone’s sister, though I can’t recall the name right now. Byron also said he saw two people leave in Cher’s car, but neither were Cher.”

Richardson listened intently. The scenario fit with what he knew from talking to Gina Jones. However, the allegation that two people left in Cher’s car was new. But it was the lawyer’s next statement that made him sit up.

“Cher was apparently killed because she did not get along with Thomas Luther and was being ‘mouthy,’ ” the first lawyer said.

In early February, Richardson and his new partner Stan Connally drove to Fort Collins to talk to Debrah Snider. Heylin had decided to go back to patrol where the hours were more humane. Connally was a great replacement, particularly in this case, because he had come over from the sex crimes unit.

Unknown to the detectives, Snider had visited Luther several times in Pennsylvania. The post office romance had renewed itself with a flurry of letter-writing, most of it initiated by Debrah. It was clear, even to her, that the Tom Luther she loved the most was the imprisoned romantic she had originally fallen for. “I miss the visiting room,” she wrote January 6. “I miss the anticipation of seeing you. I miss your phone calls. I miss your letters. I miss you telling me that you want a simple life and that as long as we have each other, that would be enough.”

She told him about the deal that had been offered to Byron, which she had heard about from Babe. However, once the attempted murder charges were dropped, Byron planned to plead guilty to second degree assault, then tell the police “that he’d love to cooperate, but he has no information that can help them.”

Snider was frightened of what an upcoming biopsy of a lump in one of her breasts might turn up. “I’m so plain anyway, I couldn’t handle losing a breast. It’s hard enough to accept my position with you when I see the women you’re really attracted to.”

Luther ignored her health concerns and wrote back that he was moving to Delray, West Virginia, where his sister Becky and her current husband had moved. It was only across the border and still an easy drive to his job in Pennsylvania.

The one subject they never wrote about was Cher Elder. Debrah almost believed that if they didn’t mention it, the “trouble” as she called it, would go away. Then Richardson and his partner showed up.

Snider warned the detectives about Byron Eerebout’s plans to renege once he had the worst of the charges dropped. Babe, she said, also told her that one day before the shooting incident in September Byron got drunk and began crying.

“He said he had witnessed his friend being killed, and he couldn’t do anything about it,” Debrah said. “Byron didn’t tell her who it was he was talking about, but she believes it was Cher Elder. Babe thinks that Cher came back from Central City with Luther and that something happened to her at Byron’s apartment.”

Without warning, Snider began to cry herself. “I’m sorry I ever told you anything about Tom,” she said.

“Why?” Richardson asked, genuinely confused by the sudden turnaround.

“Because I told Babe that Tom confessed to buryin’ Cher,” she said. “And now I’m afraid.”

“Then why’d you tell Babe?” he asked.

“Because I was worried you’d play the tape of my confession to Byron, and I wouldn’t know that Byron and Babe knew what I had done,” she replied.

Snider said she thought she could trace all the misery of the past year to one thing: drugs. “He once told me, ‘That’s why they killed her, over drugs.’ ”

Now death and pain seemed to be everywhere. Byron, she said, got into a heated conversation with his girlfriend’s sister and told her, “You’d better not try that shit around someone we know or you might get buried beside someone else.”

Richardson asked Debrah who among Luther’s acquaintances had a sister who might have been to Eerebout’s former apartment. The only one she could think of was Southy Healey. He had two or three sisters, she said, one of whom he lived with.

Debrah Snider admitted that she told Luther about the deal being offered to Byron. “He said, ‘Byron better not say anything because he can’t do a life sentence.’ ”

Richardson left Snider’s house feeling that he was closer than ever to cracking the case. If so, he needed to keep her on his side. He was therefore alarmed a little more than two weeks later when Debrah’s son, Chance, called. The family was worried, he said. His mother had disappeared shortly after she talked to Richardson the last time.

“She didn’t pack nothing or say nothing,” the boy said. “We came home one day and she wasn’t here. And we haven’t heard from her since.”

Richardson entered Debrah’s name and description on a nationwide alert, stating that she might be in danger. However, the mystery was cleared up on April 2 when Snider called to say she was back home after visiting Luther in West Virginia.

Luther was still working near Newport, she said. But she decided not to tell the detective that she was in the process of looking for a job in West Virginia. However, as the date for her to move approached, Luther again seemed intent on punishing her by not writing or calling.

Richardson had sensed that Debrah was holding something back, but now that she was safe, he was preoccupied with other things. The snow was melting in the high country and soon it would be time to resume the search for Cher Elder.

Warned of Eerebout’s treachery, he and Dennis Hall went back to his lawyers and said they wanted something more concrete before there would be a deal. Since then, there had been no word. However, other rumors were floating around on the prison grapevine.

Down in the penitentiary in Canon City, inmate Wesley Martin told a guard that another inmate, Rick Hampton, told him that Luther killed and buried Cher Elder. The guard relayed the information to Richardson, who drove down to interview the two men.

Martin had nothing new to add. Hampton at first played the tough guy, shrugging when Richardson tried to appeal to his conscience by describing what Cher’s family was going through. But after a few minutes, he admitted that Luther told him that he killed the girl, “but police will never find the body. He learned his lesson the last time.”

Asked how he thought Luther would have killed her, Hampton said, “He would strangle her.” He thought Luther probably would have buried her at a “favorite place” high in the mountains near Leadville. In their prison days, when Luther talked about killing counselor Gloria Greene, he showed Hampton a photograph of his favorite place and said that’s where he’d dump Greene’s body.

Richardson left the prison not knowing what to think. On one hand, Hampton could have made it all up. But they hadn’t talked about any deals and, in fact, Hampton had clammed up again.

Hampton also couldn’t have known that Richardson was aware of Luther’s homicidal thoughts regarding Gloria Greene. And it wasn’t the first time Richardson had heard about Luther’s promise that the next time he would bury the body so that police couldn’t find her.

Cher Elder had been missing for a year, a long time for the successful prosecution of a homicide case. In the meantime, her family suffered.

Van Edwards confided to Richardson that he was worried about his wife, Rhonda. On holidays, once a cause for large celebrations, she now hid in her room and wouldn’t come out.

She had tried to keep her fears and emotions in check by playing detective, until she kept running into walls. She then threw herself into her work for the City of Grand Junction in the northwest corner of Colorado, burying herself in the troubles of her fellow citizens to ease her own horror. But it wasn’t working anymore.

Van said she would come home from work and cry for hours. “I’ve found her outside at night, looking up at the stars and asking, ‘Where are you? Where are you?’