Monster (6 page)

“I didn’t want to die,” she later recalled. “I wanted to get out. I remembered reading something about defending yourself and poked my thumbs into his eyes.”

It didn’t work. Instead, it enraged Luther more, and he began beating her over and over with his fists. He grabbed her by the back of her hair and slammed her head into the windshield of his truck hard enough to crack the glass. All the while, Mary, repeated to herself,
Don’t pass out. Don’t pass out.

Finally, Luther grabbed her by the throat and began choking her. She could hear her neck bones crunching, but beyond the pain and terror, she suddenly found herself thinking of her family and friends, how much she loved them. She didn’t want to be some nameless, faceless body left to rot somewhere in the Colorado mountains, her loved ones never knowing what had become of her. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. She hadn’t done anything to deserve this.

Angry, Brown reached up and ripped at her attacker’s face with her fingernails. He screamed with pain and rage and stopped choking her, but began hitting her again until she slumped against the door. He picked up the hammer he had dropped and ordered her to turn around.

Resigned to death, Mary complied, turning her beaten and naked body, preferring not to see the hammer as it made its deadly arc toward her head. But he had a final act of terror to perform first; he shoved the handle into her again, this time raping her anally.

Brown found new strength to scream. After what seemed like hours, he finally stopped. She waited for the death blow. But there was nothing.

Hesitantly, fearfully, she looked around. Luther sat motionless, looking down at his bloody hands.

“Can I put my clothes on?” she asked, hoping that, his rage spent, he might let her live.

“Go ahead,” he mumbled.

“Can I get out?”

“No,” he said, “I want to take you somewhere.”

Something in his tone told her that wherever “somewhere” was, she didn’t want to go. Crying as she pulled on her clothes, she blurted out, “I’m not old enough to die. I deserve a chance to live as long as you have.”

His answer was chilling. “I ain’t that much older than you.” But his anger seemed exhausted.

“Can I open a window?” she asked and began to reach for the door. His answer was a fist to her face.

Racked with pain, hardly able to see, she could picture in her mind being taken somewhere to be killed and her body dumped like trash. She knew then that he wasn’t going to let her go ... he’d told her his name, even pointed out the street where he lived as they were driving out of Frisco.

He started the truck as her tears mixed with the blood on her face. But he drove only a few feet before stopping again. His hands came up to grip his head as he started to mumble. She knew he wasn’t speaking to her. He seemed engaged in some internal struggle. Mumbling. Muttering. Rubbing his head with blood-covered hands.

“Can I go?” she asked flinching from the blow she expected.

“Yes, go,” he yelled instead. “Take everything ...” But Mary was already out the door, reaching into the truck’s bed to remove her duffel bag. Then she ran before he could change his mind.

Her left eye was swollen shut and blood poured over her right. Slipping. Falling. Rising only to fall again. Each time she fell she felt she wouldn’t be able to get up again and the thought crossed her mind to just lie down and give in. The cold was numbing and she could feel it sapping her energy.

But something within wouldn’t let her give up; she struggled again to her feet, leaving a bright red trail as she staggered through hip-deep snow that lay between her and the nearest dark house. Any moment she expected to feel the hand of her attacker dragging her back ... back to a lonely grave “somewhere.”

She reached the house, knocked on the door, and screamed for help. The world was a nightmare. Monsters lurked in the black shadows beneath the trees. No one was home.

Abandoning her duffel bag, she set off through the snow to a house across the road, only to pull up in terror when she noticed a truck in the driveway. Cautiously, she approached and looked in the back; there was no wood, it wasn’t his truck.

Staggering, she reached the front door but couldn’t raise her hand to knock. Growing dizzy and afraid that she would pass out and freeze to death, she willed herself to try the door handle. It wasn’t locked and gave to the pressure.

“Help me!” she screamed, entering the house. “Please, someone help me!” She walked a few steps into the living room and fell to the floor.

Frightened voices called out in the dark. Lights came on. People were around her. She heard voices but it was all a confused jumble. Then very distinctly she heard a woman’s voice cry out, “... third one in a month.”

It was 3:30 in the morning when Silverthorne police officer Pam Smith arrived at the scene of a 911 emergency call. She found what appeared to be a young woman—it was difficult to assess the victim’s age because of the blood and disfigurement—lying on the living room floor, sobbing hysterically.

Smith tried to assure Mary (she was able to get the girl’s name) and gently asked what had happened. “He used a hammer,” the girl cried. “I hurt—I hurt so bad.”

The ambulance arrived simultaneously with Silverthorne Detective Tom Snyder who assumed the lead in the case. He told Smith to accompany the young woman to the Summit County Medical Center to see if she would say anything about her assailant. On the way to the clinic, a female paramedic began to remove Mary’s shirt but she clutched at the attendant’s hands and, through broken lips, said, “Not with him here.” She indicated the male paramedic. He nodded and moved to the front of the ambulance; the way this girl looked, he didn’t blame her for not wanting any men nearby.

It was a ten-mile drive to the medical center, during which Mary did her best to answer the police woman’s questions. The pain seemed to start at her head and go down to those areas the monster, as she thought of him, had violated. She wondered if she was going to die and tried to concentrate on the questions, hoping that by helping the police she would remain conscious and therefore alive. “He drove a pickup,” she said. The pain shot through her, and she cried out again, “And he used a hammer.”

The ambulance was met at the medical center by Dr. James Bachman. Mary resisted his attempts to examine her. Smith had to calm the hysterical woman, saying, “He has to look at you to find out about your injuries.” Finally, Mary relented although she continued to sob and whimper from the pain.

Bachman couldn’t believe one human had done this to another; the girl looked like she had been in a head-on car accident. Her head was swollen to the size of a basketball; her left eye was a slit and she was bleeding out of her ears. He feared skull fractures and a concussion, possibly brain hemorrhaging. Just how bad, he couldn’t tell—that sort of equipment was in Denver. But X-rays revealed that the young woman’s assailant had broken the C-7 vertebra at the base of her neck, either from a blow or perhaps when he choked her—the purple bruises from his fingers were already evident around her neck. Another blow might have killed her or left her paralyzed. One of her fingers was broken, as if he had tried to tear it off. And she had been severely lacerated vaginally and anally in a manner that made it clear what she meant when she cried about her assailant using a hammer.

Worried that her injuries might be life-threatening, Bachman left to contact a life-flight helicopter from one of the big Denver trauma hospitals. In the meantime, the police contacted Linda Batura, the county’s rape victim counselor. She arrived at the clinic and hurried into the examination room as the doctor was wrapping up his initial evaluation.

A half hour later, Batura, obviously shaken, emerged from the room to talk to Detective Snyder. Mary Brown had begun to calm down, with the help of a sedative, and was able, though brokenly, to relate the events after she got off the bus. The offer of a ride. The sudden, unprovoked blitz attack. The rage. The hammer.

The girl, Batura told the detective, had been assaulted in a dark, possibly green, pickup truck with firewood in the back. The suspect had light brown hair, blue eyes, and would have scratches on his face because the girl had used her nails to fend him off. “She said the front windshield will be cracked where he pushed her head into it,” Batura said.

In the past two years, much of it at a similar job in Denver, Batura had worked with more than 200 rape victims. “The only other person I had seen that looked so bad and seemed so injured was a female sexual assault victim in the Denver city morgue,” she wrote in her report that morning.

“I am amazed that she is alive. I have seldom seen such injuries sustained by a live victim. She literally ‘fought for her life!’ ”

High winds prevented any life-flight helicopters from flying to Summit County that morning. Brown was loaded into an ambulance for the ride back down from the mountains less than six hours after she arrived.

After Mary Brown was taken away, police officers spread out in the neighborhood to locate any evidence. One found the duffel bag at the empty home across the street; others followed a trail of blood that led to snow-tire tracks in the snow. As a detective left the housing area about 4
A.M.
, he saw a car driving slowly down a street two blocks away. He pulled the car over. Inside were three young women.

“We’re trying to find a friend of ours. We were supposed to pick her up at the bus station, but she wasn’t there,” one explained. The detective nodded. “There’s been an accident. You better follow me.”

A bulletin went out to all Summit County law enforcement agencies: white male, early twenties, brown hair, blue eyes, driving a dark-green, or dark-colored, pickup truck with wood in the bed. Suspect wanted for sexual assault/attempted homicide, Silverthorne-Frisco area, approximately zero, three hundred hours.

About 5
A.M.
, Frisco police officer Larry Woetjen was patrolling the town looking for the suspect’s vehicle. He was just passing a trailer home when he noticed a dark blue pickup parked in the driveway.

Trucks in the mountains are about as common as trees, but this one had Woetjen doing a double-take. As clear as if it had been stenciled there, he could see a rusty-red handprint on the vehicle’s back window. The truck wasn’t green, but he could see firewood stacked in the back. He radioed for backup.

The first officer to arrive was Deputy Joe Morales. He and Woetjen met down the block from the trailer park and crept back to the truck. As they grew close, they could see that the passenger-side window was covered with the same rusty-red blood. Shining his flashlight through the driver’s window, Morales noticed that blood had run down the passenger door in a sheet. The seat looked as if someone had spilled a can of red paint; red smears and drops of blood were everywhere, as if someone had dipped a rag in that paint can and whipped it around.

“Jesus,” he whispered, feeling sick to his stomach, “the girl survived this?”

The two young officers went back to their vehicles to wait for more backup. Whover had done this was obviously one vicious son of a bitch, and no one knew if he was armed. The time also gave them a chance to run the truck’s license plate. It came back as a 1977 GMC truck registered to Thomas Edward Luther.

Detective Snyder arrived and the three went back to the trailer.
Go around to the back door,
the detective signaled Woetjen. With their guns drawn, he and Morales went up to the door and knocked. A woman answered.

“Do you know whose truck that is?” Snyder asked, pointing.

“It’s my boyfriend’s,” the woman replied. Morales looked hard at the woman, surprised to see it was Sue Potter, whom he’d met when she was a police trainee.

“Could we talk to him?”

“Yeah,” she replied. “Come in.”

If Potter didn’t act surprised about the sudden appearance of two police officers, one in uniform and one in plainclothes, it was because she had already been forewarned.

When Luther got home two hours earlier, he found her awake in the dark. “I got in a fight with a couple of guys at the bar,” he said as he undressed and crawled into bed. “They were trying to rip me off for some coke.”

Then his voice cracked. “I ... I think I might have killed one of them. The police will probably be here in the morning.”

Before Potter could ask a question, he added, “All I want to do now is sleep.” But apparently he had some energy left, because they made love before he passed out.

Morales and Snyder followed Potter to a back bedroom, passing another sleepy woman who sat on a couch in the living room. Flicking on a hallway light, Morales could see a man sitting on a bed in the dark and ordered him out. As he walked past the young deputy, the man whispered, “Please don’t say anything to her,” indicating Potter, who had returned to the living room.

As Luther came into the light, Morales and Snyder were stunned. But it wasn’t the glassy blood-shot eyes or the jittery movements of a man coming off some kind of high that shocked them. It was the long bloody scratches that ran down his face and the smeared blood stains on his face and hands. He looked like he had been in a fight with a mountain lion.

Potter stared at her boyfriend as the detective read him his rights. “Do you understand?” Snyder asked when finished.

“Yeah,” Luther muttered. “I know why you’re here.”

Luther was dressed in a bathrobe. Snyder asked Potter if she would get her boyfriend his clothes. She came out of the dark bedroom with a jean jacket, a shirt, and a pair of jeans; they were covered with dried blood.

“Can we take these?” Snyder asked Luther, who responded with a nod.

“Would you be willing to come with me to the Summit County Medical Center?”

“Yes, I want to cooperate.”

“You realize that we have probable cause to arrest you for an incident in Silverthorne this morning.”

“I understand.”

As Snyder handcuffed Luther and led him away to his car, Morales had a hard time believing this meek fellow was the same monster who had caused the bloodbath he had seen in the truck.
Maybe he’s just that way around women,
the deputy thought. If that was the case, he was even more thankful that the arrest had gone off without an incident when Potter, sobbing as she retold her boyfriend’s admission that he might have killed someone, indicated that she had a loaded .38-caliber police revolver under her pillow.