Monster (59 page)

She was wrong. Twenty-two years later, waking from the dream, Heather Smith knew it. There were monsters, and the one who hurt her was still out there somewhere.

Heather lay awake, envying her friend, Rebecca. She, at least, seemed to be moving on with her life, even though she knew it had taken what amounted to a nervous breakdown.

A little more than a year after the attack, Rebecca Hascall had been driving home late one night when she’d looked down and seen that her blouse was bright red with blood. “In my mind,” she later told Heather, “I knew it wasn’t real and when I looked down again, the blood was gone.”

Still, she was shaken. Pulling up in front of her house, she was too terrified to get out of the car. Monsters hid in the dark shadows and bushes around her home. She sat in her car and cried for an hour before she worked up the courage to make a mad dash for her front door. Inside, she checked to make sure her gun was tucked safely beneath her pillow, and then cried herself to sleep.

“The next day, on the way to work, the same thing happened,” Hascall said. “I looked down and my chest was covered with blood. I thought, ‘I’m cracking up.’ ”

Fortunately, the two young women were attending counseling sessions at the Denver Victims Assistance Service Center. At Smith’s urging, Hascall related her experiences to the counselor, who explained that she was also a victim of the violence against her friend.

“Hallucinations are all part of post-traumatic stress syndrome,” the counselor said. “You may be suppressing something that needs to come out for you to heal.”

The counselor persuaded Rebecca to undergo hypnosis to see if she could recall something about that night which lay hidden in her mind. Under hypnosis, Rebecca remembered the man crouching in the street, looking at her. “I was afraid,” she said, “but my friend needed me.” She recalled dialing 911 and then rushing back to Heather’s side with a towel to place on the wounds.

Then Hascall stopped talking. Her memory had run into a wall. Gently, the counselor asked her to look behind that wall.

Only then did she remember the paramedics rolling Heather over onto her back and the sight of Heather’s bloody chest. She had blocked it out.

“I was holding all the wrong places,” Rebecca cried. “I thought I had killed her.” She was living with the guilt that she’d almost let her friend die.

Waking Rebecca, the counselor told the young woman that the first thing she had to do was forgive herself. She had done the best she could, and it had been the right thing. “Heather survived because of you, not despite you,” the counselor said.

It was a major breakthrough. Rebecca Hascall wasn’t healed overnight, but from that day, she felt herself getting stronger. She even got rid of the gun; however, she replaced it with an electronic security system. Some things would never be the same.

But there were no such breakthroughs for Heather Smith. Physically, she was much better except for a nagging pain in her neck, which her doctor told her was in her imagination.

On good days, she felt emotionally strong, more like her old self. She would make an effort to see old friends or force herself to wear clothing that revealed the scar on her chest. When people asked about it, she told them her story. Talking helped.

Wanting to do something that made a statement to her attacker, whoever he was, Smith started working as a blood-drive coordinator at the Denver blood center that had supplied the eighty-seven units of blood that kept her alive. Once a week, she volunteered at the Denver Victims Assistance Service Center, talking other women through their pain and suffering.

It was a brave front and friends and family marveled at her strength. But she couldn’t fool herself. No place seemed safe, even in daylight. Some days she cowered in her house, afraid to go out. But nights were worse. Her old house creaked and rattled with the slightest breeze. She particularly hated winter with its short days and long nights.

She was afraid of men she didn’t know. She would cross a street to avoid passing a stranger on a sidewalk. She finally started seeing a man and began to hope for a future, but some nights she’d wake up next to him, terrified that he was about to wake and attack her.

At times, her fears reduced her to tears and hysteria and she’d curl up into a ball unable to stop sobbing. Once, her boyfriend, trying to console her, stroked her back, but when his fingers touched the scars on her side, she suddenly recalled the pain of the weapon that had pierced her. His fingers felt like knives and she screamed.

Adding insult to injury, her insurance company was fighting her medical and psychiatric counseling bills. They put her through a three-hour interrogation in which the insurance company investigator, a woman who should have known better, implied that it was Heather who had done something wrong.

Maybe she knew her attacker, the woman suggested, and didn’t want to admit it. Maybe it was her old boyfriend and this was just another domestic violence case. It seemed to Smith that she was being victimized over and over again.

Listening for monsters in the dark of her room that night, she wondered if the terror would ever end. It was March 1995 and if anything, the dreams were getting worse. She fell back asleep and dreamed again.

She was at a party with her dog, Heidi. The dog began barking and wanted Heather to leave. There was a feeling of unseen danger.

Then she was outside, walking down a sidewalk next to a retaining wall. It was dark, but she could see the man who stabbed her standing behind the wall. He was wearing the green jacket, the square, silver wire-rimmed glasses, and the blue baseball cap with the gold lettering. She saw his face vividly. At first his face seemed normal, then she realized it was a just a mask hiding something evil that lurked underneath.

The man made no move. In her dream she told herself that if she could just get by him, she’d be okay. He seemed to let her pass. But as she began to believe that she was safe, she looked down. Her chest was covered with blood.

Smith woke up from the dream in terror, the memory of the man’s face burning in her mind. She knew it was a face she would never forget, no matter how many years went by, no matter how he tried to disguise himself.

The day after Thomas Edward Luther was indicted for the murder of Cher Elder, the
Denver Post
ran a front-page newspaper article under the headline: “Dogged work, nets body, key suspect.

“Nearly two years after a young Lakewood woman disappeared, her body has been unearthed from a shallow mountain grave, and the man with whom she was last seen has been indicted for her murder.”

“Elder’s grief-stricken mother said yesterday, ‘I’m glad the search is over. Even though it may not be what you wanted to find, at least you can start dealing with something. You can’t start a grieving process until you know for sure.’ ”

The story jumped to an inside page where there was also a photograph of Luther taken after his arrest in West Virginia. In it, he had a few days’ beard growth and was wearing square-rimmed, tortoise-shell glasses.

That afternoon, Heather Smith had just walked into her psychiatrist’s office when the doctor handed her the newspaper. “Did you see this?” Reading the story earlier, the psychiatrist noted the date of Cher’s disappearance and wondered if there could be a connection to the attack on Heather two weeks later.

Smith sighed. People were always handing her newspaper clippings, asking her if she had seen the news about the latest violent attack on a woman. She had grown tired of such stories.

Heather Smith followed the story of Thomas Luther to the inside page of the newspaper. She knew the moment she saw the photograph that she’d found her monster. She felt blood rush to her face and for a moment was nearly overcome with dizziness. “It’s him,” she said quietly. “It’s him.”

The day the newspapers ran the story about the indictment, Scott Richardson got a call from a young woman who identified herself as Heather Smith. She told him she’d been stabbed and left for dead two weeks after Cher Elder disappeared. She thought Luther was her attacker. “As soon as I saw his picture in the paper, I said, ‘That’s him,’ ” she recalled.

Heather Smith sounded desperate. But the detective knew he couldn’t afford to associate himself with another case involving Luther; defense attorneys would jump all over that. He advised her to contact the detective in her case, then he called the Denver police and told them about the call.

Richardson didn’t doubt the possibility that Smith was yet another victim of Luther. He recalled Snider’s statements about how Luther would leave for days at a time, and then come home looking beat-up and sleep for an entire day.

“I bet that’s why he begged me not to put his picture in the paper or on television way back when I first talked to him,” Richardson told Connally. “He didn’t want any of his other victims identifyin’ him.”

Smith apparently followed his advice. The next day, Detective Paul Scott from the Denver Police Department called and told him about Heather’s case and requested photographs of Luther.

Scott said that after Heather called, he’d taken a look at the photograph in the newspaper. It was almost two years since he had last seen her file, a copy of which he kept in his desk. But when he opened the file and looked at the composite drawing of her attacker, “I was shocked,” he told Richardson. “It was like our artist sat down and drew the composite with Luther sitting in the room with him.”

Still, Paul Scott was not satisfied and wanted to see if Heather could pick out a different picture of Luther from a photo lineup. Richardson sent a photograph of Luther in which he was clean shaven and wasn’t wearing glasses.

It didn’t make any difference. “The average guy on the streets wouldn’t have looked at the two photographs and thought they were of the same man,” Scott said. But when Heather Smith came down to the police station and looked at a photo line-up of a dozen similar-looking men, she didn’t hesitate for a moment and picked Luther out from the others. “She said, ‘It’s him.’ ”

Richardson wished him luck, said he’d help anyway he could, and hung up. He was concerned about a message he got from Debrah Snider. Babe, she said, was warning her that Byron believed that she was “in grave danger.”

There was a lot riding on Snider’s safety. Without her binding the seams, the case would fall apart like an old book. He had discussed with Dennis Hall on more than one occasion his concerns about her safety. “I wonder why Luther didn’t kill her when he had the chance.”

He got off the telephone with Debrah Snider and called the West Virginia State Police, asking them to bump up patrols around her place and be on the look out for strangers in the area. Burkhart assured him they would.

The West Virginia prison authorities were having their own problems with Luther, he said. They had just received information from an informant that Luther was planning a prison escape, when a semi- truck crashed through an outer fence while Luther was in the prison yard exercising.

Fortunately, it had rained the night before, and the truck got mired in the mud and fencing, never making it through a second perimeter fence. The inmates, including Luther, were hustled inside, and the driver, who claimed he was drunk and that the truck “got away from me,” was arrested. It turned out he stole the truck, but they couldn’t prove a connection to Luther.

Still, Luther was deemed a security risk and placed in maximum security. The informant’s warning, as well as information provided by Debrah Snider that Luther had told her to save her money and be ready to run to Australia, made the truck accident too convenient to have been a coincidence.

Trooper Phillips told Richardson that Luther had buddied up with an inmate named Randy McBee, who was in prison for a violent crime spree that included raping an 80-year-old woman and twenty other felonies.

“McBee hasn’t even been tried on all the charges and he’s already got three-hundred twenty-one years,” Phillips said. “He’s a real bad one. When they asked him about the old lady, he just laughed and said, ‘Best pussy I ever had.’ Guess those two have a lot in common and nothing to lose by tryin’ to escape.”

Byron Eerebout was steamed. He thought the deal was that his name wouldn’t be mentioned in Luther’s indictment. Now he was getting threats in the jail, he said.

“I have no control over public records,” Richardson shrugged. No one actually named Eerebout at the press conference, but the media had done its homework and obtained copies of the indictment.

“If you would’ve told me this, I would have been back up at Buena and none of this would be goin’ on,” Byron said.

Babe Rivinius jumped in. “We could have all been killed. There was no warning this would happen. Something should have been arranged with the grand jury to keep his name out of the indictment.”

Richardson waved her off. “I’m not gonna sit here and argue this.” He was tired of the Eerebouts’ whining, and a lot of other things were taking his attention since the press conference. He was about to say so when Hall suddenly raised his voice, his blue eyes blazing at Byron and Babe.

“What I’d like you all to do is just be quiet,” Hall said. Babe Rivinius started to protest, but his look shut her up.

Satisfied that he had everyone’s attention, Hall continued. “I’m gonna tell you why it came out this way. You need to understand that I am the person in this county who knows the grand jury. Okay? I have written a lot of indictments. I have probably written more indictments than about anybody in this whole entire state system. I know how to do it.

“This case presented a very, very difficult problem because an indictment has to explain how a crime was committed. Usually all I do when I write an indictment is to explain that and say this person did this, this, this, and this. This is a crime, and then I sign it. Okay?” He looked around and everybody nodded.

“So the question comes up: what happens when somebody lies to the grand jury? That makes it almost impossible for me to write a decent indictment. And—” here he looked hard at Eerebout and his mother “—I think Byron lied. And I think J.D. lied.”