Monster (53 page)

They buried pigs with clothes on and “naked.” They wrapped them in shower curtains and carpets. Then they studied the graves using ground-penetrating radar and FLIR; they looked at how plants grew at a gravesite, the presence of certain bugs, and researched how far scavengers like coyotes and birds would drag bones.

When the graves of humans were discovered, the NecroSearch teams would carefully exhume the bodies like archeologists working on ancient tombs so as not to disturb evidence. Richardson was sure their expertise would soon be needed to recover Cher’s body.

Richardson and Ireland had worked together before. As always, Ireland said when climbing into the detective’s car, “Another Richardson pleasure cruise?” He then pulled his cap down over his eyes and napped.

After looking at the mine entrance, the Gilpin County Mine Rescue team, Ireland, and Richardson agreed it would be better to meet again early the next day. The water would have to be pumped from the shaft and the hole reinforced.

The next morning, Richardson arrived on the scene with Ireland, who had summoned other NecroSearch members, sure that this would be the day he found Cher. However, while the others worked, there was not much for him to do. So he decided to take a walk around the area.

Following a light trail through the woods and snow, he came into a bowl-shaped clearing among the tall pines. On one side was a shelf of gray granite that hid the clearing from the highway seventy-five yards below. The wind whispered through the trees and he could plainly hear Clear Creek tumbling down the valley floor on the other side of the road.

It was a peaceful spot, almost like a chapel beneath the boughs of the trees. But what caught his attention was a pile of large rocks, perhaps two feet tall and the length of a body.

“It’s a grave,” he said to himself. Quickly he returned to the mine shaft and summoned the NecroSearch team members, who waited for the rescue team to finish pumping water from the shaft. They returned to the clearing and removed the rocks from the pile.

A cadaver dog, a bloodhound specially trained to detect dead bodies below the surface and even underwater, was brought to the site. But the dog detected nothing. Using a hand auger, Ireland drilled a hole the diameter of a tennis ball into the hard, cold ground. He sank the auger nineteen inches and still there was no sign of human remains.

Ireland shook his head. “The ground is really compacted,” he said looking at the core removed by the auger. “It doesn’t appear to have been disturbed.”

The excitement Richardson had been feeling turned again to disappointment. The crew wandered back to the mine shaft. As he turned to follow them, the detective cast one more look back at the clearing. Something in him didn’t want to leave. He remembered Southy Healey saying that Luther had covered the grave with rocks. But reluctantly, his boots dragging in the snow, he returned to the mine.

The mine shaft yielded nothing other than the broken spade and the fact that a mountain lion had been using it as a den. The rescue team and NecroSearch members quietly picked up their equipment and left. Richardson took the trail back to the clearing and stood for a moment looking at the cleared space on which the rocks had rested. Then he walked down around the rock shelf, got in his car and left with the pile of rocks etched in his mind.

Richardson drove to the Adams County Jail and had Healey pulled out of his cell. Angrily, he accused him of leading him on a goose chase. But Southy got right back in his face. “That was the place Luther pointed,” he said. The detective left feeling that he was only getting half-truths from the young convict.

However, Healey’s information about Mortho turned out to be accurate. The apartment Healey indicated was rented to a Richard Brazell, who fit the physical description of Mortho and had an extensive criminal history dating back to a 1963 arrest for drug charges. Richardson made a note to visit the fat drug dealer soon.

On January 19, he returned a telephone call from Debrah Snider. While he was in the mountains, she had left a message saying she was frightened. “Tom’s been telling his friends that I’m turning state’s evidence,” she said when he reached her. “I was wondering if I could be escorted to the trial to testify. I think someone might want to try and kill me.”

Richardson said he would contact Trooper Phillips and make the arrangements. “What sort of threats are you getting?”

“Skip called me last week,” she said. “He wanted me to go see an attorney and recant my story. Then he called Monday night. He’s real icy towards me. Tom has also called his family and said that I had told the police that he was thinking of killing that girl.”

Babe Rivinius was also making a lot of threats. However, these were directed at Richardson, who she said she would make “shut up.”

Meanwhile, Snider said, things looked bad enough in West Virginia for Luther that he was talking about taking his chances in Colorado. “He told Skip to tell Byron to go ahead and tell the police everything about the Colorado case. He said, ‘Maybe they’d drop the charges here.’

“He also told me that I’ve got an ‘ass-kicking’ coming when he gets out of jail.”

Luther had smiled when he told Debrah she had an ass-kicking coming. Like it was a joke. But his blue eyes were cold and left her with a chill that wouldn’t go away.

Snider had moved into a cabin in the woods where she could set up pens for her wolves and other animals, such as fallow deer and emus. But she was beginning to regret being so far from other homes. There were noises at night around the cabin, and several times she swore she heard footsteps on her front porch and wondered if Skip or some other of Tom’s friends had come for her.

Luther’s trial started after a delay in which the police had to find Bobby Jo Jones and bring her to court to testify. Reluctantly, she recounted what happened to her, glancing up with fear at Luther, who sat muttering under his breath and shaking his head.

Snider was scheduled to appear on the last day of the prosecution case. The night before, she received two telephone calls. One was from Tom’s lawyer. He hinted that maybe she ought to just “go away for awhile,” at least until the trial was over. The second was from Skip. There was no mistaking the menace in his voice when he said, “I think you should recant.”

All that night, the wind howled. Branches creaked and things slammed about outside the cabin. Snider couldn’t sleep. She had often considered suicide in her darkest moments, but now that death might come at the hands of violent men, she was afraid.

The morning came at last. Angry that she had been made to feel so fearful of someone she loved, Debrah dug through her papers until she found what she wanted and then went to a copying store. Arriving at the courthouse, she walked up to Luther’s lawyer and handed him a sheet of paper.

“Here’s Tom’s resumé,” she said. On the sheet were copies of three newspaper clippings. The first was dated September 8, 1983, the day following Luther’s sentencing for the rape and beating of Mary Brown, also noting that he was still charged with solicitation of first degree murder. The second clipping was dated July 13, 1993, following Richardson’s press conference in which Luther’s photo ran directly beneath that of Cher Elder. The third was dated September 3, 1994, the article announcing his arrest for raping and beating Bobby Jo Jones.

The lawyer read the clippings and looked up, confused. “I’m leaving and won’t testify,” Snider said. “But if he is set free and rapes or kills someone else, understand that you share my guilt in allowing that to happen.”

Debrah then turned and walked away without waiting for his reply. But she didn’t leave fast enough. She hesitated in the courthouse parking lot, hoping for a glimpse of Luther when he was brought from the county jail. She wanted him to know that what she was doing she was doing for love.

However, it was Trooper Phillips who saw her first. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Shouldn’t you be inside?”

Snider didn’t answer and just looked at the ground.

“You know you have to testify, Deb,” Phillips said softly.

“Not just because you’re under subpoena, but because it’s the right thing to do. All you have to do is tell the truth.”

When she looked up, her eyes were filled with tears. She wanted to say to him that telling the truth, especially knowing it would hurt the man she loved, wasn’t as easy as he made it sound. But instead she nodded and wiped away the tears. “I know,” she said. “I know.”

With Trooper Phillips at her side, Debrah Snider walked back into the courthouse. That afternoon, with Tom Luther staring straight down at the defense table in front of him, Debrah testified that he had admitted attacking Bobby Jo Jones. “He said he had done it again.”

When she finished and was excused, she glanced at Tom. He was looking at her and smiled. She smiled back but he turned his head. Nearly blinded by her tears, she walked quickly out of the courtroom.

In the hallway, she began to cry. Trooper Phillips came up and placed a hand on her shoulder. “Can I give you a lift home?” he asked.

Snider shook her head. “No, no thanks. I’ll be okay.”

The defense presented little evidence before closing. Then it took the jury less than two hours to come back with their verdict. They were unanimous: Luther was guilty of sexual assault and assault.

Luther asked to be sentenced immediately, and the judge obliged. He would serve fifteen years minimum with a thirty-five-year maximum.

Phillips drove Luther back to jail. The trooper looked into the rearview mirror and saw his prisoner staring at him with his cold blue eyes.

Luther’s lip curled and his voice came out in a snarl, “You tell Richardson one thing, I’m the only one who can burst that bubble in Colorado.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

January 26, 1995—Lakewood, Colorado

Debrah Snider called Scott Richardson the day after Thomas Luther’s conviction. She said she went to see him at the jail immediately following the trial and he wasn’t angry with her. “He said it was the tape of him talkin’ to Bobby Jo that did it,” she said. “He was more resigned than anything. Said you’d be comin’ for him now.”

If Luther was angry with anyone, it was with Babe Rivinius. “He said something to the effect that if he could talk to her without the conversation being recorded, he would tell her exactly what Byron’s involvement was in this. And that though Byron didn’t kill Cher, that something he did caused these other two people to kill her.”

Luther had also found God, Snider said. At first, she hoped that religion might influence him to do the right thing and reveal where he buried Cher. “But right now, all he wants is to tell lies and more lies.”

Ain’t that the truth,
Richardson thought. But he didn’t believe that any mystery men killed Cher because of something Byron Eerebout did. He still wasn’t sure of the extent of the Eerebout brothers’ involvement, but Luther was the killer. He was sure of that.

“Oh, by the way,” Snider said, “watch out for a new Tom Luther story. He says he’s going to ask Skip to have J.D. tell you that Cher’s body was dumped in a Fort Collins landfill so you’ll waste your time lookin’ there.”

“Thanks, Deb,” Richardson said and hung up. There wasn’t anything he could do about Luther’s lies. And he had a date with a fat drug dealer he meant to keep.

Richardson arrived at Mortho’s apartment to find that the drug dealer’s obesity had not been exaggerated. Mortho wheezed from the exertion of answering the door, his large round face beet red and beaded with sweat. The old, long-haired biker walked only with the use of crutches, the armrests of which disappeared into the folds of his armpits; his tree-trunk-sized legs were almost useless because of diabetes.

Richard Brazell’s living room was littered with drug paraphernalia. Pipes. Partially smoked marijuana cigarettes in the ashtray. Mirrors with white finger smudges from cocaine residue. “MORTHO” was etched into the surface of a mirror on the wall.

“Don’t sweat the drug stuff, Mortho,” Richardson said noticing the drug dealer’s nervousness as he looked around the room. “I ain’t here about drugs. I’m here about Thomas Luther.”

Brazell played dumb. “Mortho?” he said. “Who’s Mortho? And I don’t know no Thomas Luther.”

Richardson gave him a look and pointed to the mirror on the wall. The drug dealer shrugged and admitted to both.

“Tell me about the ring you got from Luther, Mortho,” the detective said. He’d heard that Luther traded a man’s ring with three diamonds in a diagonal row, Byron’s ring, to Brazell for drugs. Snider said she’d overheard a conversation in which Luther was talking about “a girl’s ring.” And Eerebout’s lawyer intimated that Luther cut Cher’s finger off with a pair of bolt-cutters to get it to use as blackmail.

Richardson didn’t describe the ring to Brazell.

“I don’t know about no ring,” Brazell said.

“Then we need to take a little ride over to Lakewood and see if that jogs your memory,” Richardson said. “Anybody who doesn’t cooperate is goin’ down.”

The trip seemed to help Brazell’s memory. In the tight little interview room, he suddenly remembered that Luther once gave him a ring “with three diamonds on it.”

“It was kinda small, I had to wear it on my pinky,” he said, displaying fingers as big as hot dogs. “But I gave it to someone else.”

Brazell also admitted talking to Luther about “taking care of” a snitch. However, he said, the snitch in question was his own daughter, Michelle, who turned on him after an arrest for drugs in Fort Collins in 1993. They’d made up since, he added.

Richardson dropped Brazell back at his apartment building.
Hope he lives long enough to get to trial,
the detective thought as Brazell hobbled and wheezed up to the front door. The ring information was important. It was one thing for a single witness to put Cher’s ring with Luther; it was another thing for several different witnesses, including Luther’s fat drug-dealing pal, to say the same thing.

That evening, Richardson heard from Healey’s sister, Deborah. Southy, she said, asked her to tell the detective everything. She recalled that in March or April of 1993, Luther showed up at her house all nervous, constantly looking out the windows like he was being followed. “He said he had gotten into a deal that had gone bad,” she said. “And that he had to get out of town because he left too many clues.”