Monster (72 page)

“He was a good friend of my father, yes, Jerry Eerebout. He had a good relationship with me and my brothers. With Mom it was off and on.”

Hall began to relax; they had moved past the most dangerous area, while establishing that Luther was a friend of the family. “Now, did there come a time in the spring of 1993 when Tom Luther began to socialize with you and your brothers down here in the Lakewood/Golden area?”

“Yes, my father was released from prison before Tom was, I believe. I’m—”

A hush had fallen over the courtroom. Eerebout turned red as Hall visibly blanched on his feet. Everyone knew something was wrong, even if they didn’t know what.

The silence lasted only a moment. Then Enwall leaped to his feet. “Your honor, may we approach the bench, please?”

Munch sighed. “Sure.”

Luther smirked and smiled as he leaned over to whisper to Cleaver, who nodded.

After a brief conference, the attorneys returned to their places. Hall tried to salvage the day. “Byron, do you mean that your dad was released from prison before you began to socialize with Tom Luther back in the spring of ’93?”

Eerebout, whose face remained crimson, nodded. “Yes.”

Munch frowned. “Counsel, I take it you’re going to be moving on to another area.”

Hall, who seemed to still not have recovered, blinked. “Yes, judge.”

Then Munch thought better of it. He turned to the jury. “We’re going to go ahead and and break for the evening. Remember what I’ve told you. Don’t discuss the case. Avoid the media. Keep a free and open mind.”

After the jurors were escorted out, an angry judge turned on Byron. “Mr. Eerebout, would you step down and go into the witness waiting room.” He then turned to the attorneys and asked for their responses.

Enwall demanded that Munch declare a mistrial. Eerebout’s statement, he said, had caused “irreparable prejudice” to Luther’s defense. “I’m sure he was repeatedly instructed not to do what he just did. Why he did it, we don’t know, but it was just clear as a bell, and I’m sure it rang a bell for the jury. There’s no unringing that bell.”

Munch turned to Hall, whose color had still not returned to his face. The prosecutor held his hands up. “I specifically told him to avoid that a number of times. I don’t think he did it on purpose.”

Still shaken, Hall retreated to the prosecution table where he buried his face in his hands. Everything to that point had gone perfectly. The defense had made no ground on the witnesses, but he could never expect to do so well again. A mistrial would be a disaster.

Munch said he would take the matter under advisement and hear arguments in the morning before rendering a decision on Enwall’s demand.

Out in the hallway, Cher’s family was in tears. Earl Elder looked dazed, like someone had clubbed him in his sleep. Richardson tried to console them. “If there’s a mistrial, we’ll come back in a few months with even a stronger case,” he said.

Rhonda Edwards blinked back her tears and looked at him hopefully. He prayed she couldn’t see the despair in his eyes. “Hey,” he said putting an arm around her shoulders. “You’ve trusted me this long. We’ll do it, we’ll get him.”

To himself he said,
We’re fucked.

January 26, 1996

The next morning, with the jurors still out, Hall offered to do what he could to mitigate the damage. He, Minor, and Richardson had stayed up the entire night, digging up case law that might apply to unwitting slips by witnesses. Perhaps by asking leading questions that would turn the jurors’ attention away from the previous day, he suggested.

Otherwise, he argued, the slip was unintentional and made after every effort had been taken to see that it didn’t happen. Case law, he pointed out, held that if a witness misstepped but it wasn’t the prosecution’s fault, it would be unfair to hold the prosecution accountable.

Enwall argued that the damage was done. The defense team had worked long and hard to keep Luther’s criminal background out of the trial, and the judge had ruled in their favor.

However, Munch agreed with Hall. It wasn’t the prosecution’s fault. There had been no mention of what sort of crime Luther was in prison for. “We’ll go forward from here.”

First, though, he had Byron Eerebout called to the stand and warned him not to slip up again or face the consequences. The young man swallowed hard and nodded.

Then, rather than pretending the slip had not occurred, Munch brought the jury in and told them to ignore the remark. “It’s only human nature to assume that because a person committed one crime that they will commit another. But that’s simply not true and you can’t rely on that. You’re to consider only the evidence relating to this crime. Is that understood?”

The jurors nodded. “Fine,” Munch said, and nodded for Hall to resume questioning Byron Eerebout. Which he did by asking about the events of March 1993.

Eerebout said he explained to Gina that he and Cher were not boyfriend/girlfriend. She was upset, he added, but it was no big deal.

Early Sunday morning, while it was still dark out, he said he was awakened by a woman yelling in his apartment. “I thought it sounded like Cher. But I just laid there. Then I heard what sounded like my front door and I got up.”

Looking out, Eerebout testified, he saw Tom Luther and Dennis Healey just leaving the apartment. When he got up the next morning, Tom was asleep in the apartment.

He first learned Cher was missing when her family and friends started calling. He wasn’t exactly sure when he first heard from Richardson, but he admitted that he lied about not knowing the man with Cher when the detective showed him the videotape. “I drove straight back to the house, contacted Tom to let him know that they had a picture of him up in Central City with Cher. Tom said, ‘Thanks, I’ll take care of it.’ That was it.”

“When did you first suspect that Tom Luther was involved in her disappearance?” Hall asked.

Eerebout said he overheard a telephone conversation while visiting Luther at Debrah Snider’s ranch. He presumed Luther was talking to Southy when he heard him refer to a body that was stinking and needed to be taken care of.

Then, he wasn’t sure how much later, he said he asked Luther “if he did what they said he did. I just asked him if he killed her.” Luther, he said, responded by making threats and admitting, “I shot her in the head.”

“He said she was yelling. He took her to Central City to calm her down but on the way back she was saying, ‘I’m going to go to the cops and tell them everything about Byron and his brothers.’ And he told me that he pulled off to the side of the road. She got out of the car. He got out of the car. And he shot her in the back of the head, bam, bam, bam.”

“Did he say what he did with her?” Hall asked.

“He said he put her by a monument.”

“What did he do with the gun?”

“He threw it in the river.”

Hall skipped ahead to Eerebout’s arrest in September, when Richardson asked about Cher Elder.

“I said a lot of stuff that night that I shouldn’t have said,” Eerebout recalled. “I told Detective Richardson that I knew what happened to Cher, that I knew who she left with and basically where they went and where Tom went that night. I told him that it was ‘for me to know and you to never find out.’ ”

He said he didn’t take the original deal because he was afraid of Luther. “He made threats to me and my family.” Those threats included giving him Cher’s clothes, as if to prove that what he had said was true. “Later, he told me that he cut off her finger to get the ring off and that he cut off her lips to make an example to snitches. He also said he needed to go back and dig deeper and put rat poison on it so the animals wouldn’t get it and to put rocks on it so it looked like a rock pile.”

Sometime afterward, Luther arrived at Eerebout’s mother’s home and said he was heading to the grave that evening. “He picked up a little folding army shovel. Then later that night, around midnight, he came over to my apartment and said he was ‘going to take care of this thing.’ ” Eerebout said he and J.D. then decided to follow Luther into the mountains.

“Why did you want to do that?” Hall asked.

“This may sound stupid,” Eerebout said, looking at the jury, “but it was so we would know where it was, because me and J.D., we were going to slide a note under Cher’s family’s door of the location so they could have their daughter back.”

In the gallery, Cher’s family gasped. Richardson scowled. This note under the door bit was new. And no one believed it. For two years, the Eerebouts had plenty of time to personally or anonymously give Cher’s body to her family. For two years, they’d done nothing.

Creeping up the hill outside of Empire, Eerebout said he peered through the trees and saw Luther on his hands and knees, digging with the little shovel. “I only watched for a few seconds, then split.”

On cross-examination, Enwall asked why no one in the army, including at Eerebout’s court martial, seemed to have any record of his head injury.

Eerebout shrugged. His friend had reported it, otherwise he didn’t know. However, he noted, he was given an honorable discharge from the army for medical reasons.

But, Enwall said, wasn’t he diagnosed in the army as having an antisocial personality, that he didn’t know right from wrong?

Eerebout retorted that he was only antisocial to people who were rude to him.

Enwall went on to question him about his relationship with Cher Elder. “So it was a just a casual sexual relationship?”

“We had sex once,” Eerebout replied. “In my view we were good friends.”

“But Gina wanted this business with Cher to stop?” Enwall asked.

“She never gave me an order stop seeing Cher,” Eerebout said. “But she was upset about it, yes.”

“You told her that you would take care of the problem?”

“I told Gina that I would talk to Cher and take care of the situation, yes. Not that I would take care of the problem.”

“Did Cher do drugs?”

“No, she did not.”

“Well, you told Richardson that she was going to see a drug dealer in Central City?”

“She had a friend over there who was a drug dealer and that’s how she referred to him. But the guy told Karen that he didn’t see her that night.”

At that point, Munch called a lunch break so that he could rule on an issue in which Enwall wanted to refer to a statement Byron Eerebout had made to Richardson and others about fights he’d been in.

“I want to show that he’s a violent man,” Enwall said when the jurors were gone. “He’s prone to acts of spontaneous violence.”

But the same rule that Munch applied to keep Luther’s past out of the trial applied equally to Eerebout’s, the judge ruled. Enwall could refer to any violence directly related to this case, such as the shooting incident, but nothing else.

With the jurors back, Enwall returned to the night Cher Elder went with Luther to Central City. “Didn’t you say she stuck her head in your door and told you to fuck off?”

“I thought it was her,” Eerebout shrugged.

“But isn’t it a fact that you didn’t tell Richardson that she didn’t come back to the apartment until April 1994, a year later?” Enwall asked.

Eerebout shrugged again. He’d lied about a lot of things.

“Do you know anything about Gina’s cat’s throat being slit and it being stuck to the side of Gina’s trailer?”

“No, I do not.”

“Do you remember telling Gina that she might find herself in a shallow grave?”

“I remember the comment and that it was a warning to her, as in: don’t go to the cops against Tom or you’ll find yourself in a shallow grave.”

“I see,” Enwall replied, rolling his eyes. “So you were just protecting Tom?”

Eerebout nodded. “That’s right.”

As the day wore on, Enwall grew more exasperated. Eerebout, blaming his head injury, couldn’t seem to remember dates or when certain events happened.

Enwall questioned how he and his brother could have followed Luther in the dead of night to Empire. It was easy, came the reply, they had a fast car and there’s only one road leading up into the mountains and then one road in and out of Empire.

“Mr. Eerebout, do you have a quick temper?”

“Yes, I do. It just depends on what it is and who’s saying it.”

“Mr. Eerebout, your habit when the police questioned you about something was to lie.”

“No. I just don’t like police officers.”

“One of the conditions of your deal is that you’re not involved in the killing of Cher Elder isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.”

“So if we could prove to the satisfaction of the district attorney and the police that you killed Cher Elder, you think that you wouldn’t go back to prison on the twenty-four years?”

“Well, I’d go back to prison on the twenty-four years, but I sure wouldn’t go back to prison for killing Cher Elder because I didn’t kill Cher Elder. Tom Luther killed Cher Elder.”

“We know that’s what you say, Mr. Eerebout. And it’s important to you that Tom Luther be convicted for killing Cher Elder?”

“It’s not important to me,” Eerebout retorted. “It’s what’s right. You should be punished for your crimes. Just like I was, he should be.”

“You have no interest in protecting yourself, Mr. Eerebout?”

“If I did something, then I guess I would have to protect myself, yeah.”

“Like if you had killed Cher Elder, one would think you might do a lot of things like tell a lot of different lies to the police, mightn’t you?”

“No. I might have or might not have. I can’t tell you what’s in the future or what could have been or would have been.”

“Are you telling us that if you killed her that you would come into this courtroom and fess up to it?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Can you tell us if you killed her, you’d lie about it?”

“I can’t tell you that either?”

Hall stood to ask Byron Eerebout more questions. He thought it was a mistake for Enwall to have gone so hard after Eerebout as the killer of Cher Elder. Eerebout had an alibi for Saturday and Sunday. Gina Jones, who had already voiced her dislike for her former boyfriend. And Karen Knott, who said she and Cher always got together on Sunday and Monday nights, had pretty much established that Cher disappeared sometime between leaving Central City and Sunday morning.