Monster (82 page)

It was nearly a year before Deputy District Attorney Dennis Hall could bring himself to take on another murder case. Until then, he just didn’t think he could deal with another victim’s family.

Some things about the Tom Luther case he has blocked out. Such as what he was going to say to the jury to convince them to put Luther to death.

For a recent serial arsonist case, he needed the legal terminology for asking a judge to allow similar transactions. He pulled the paperwork he filed in the Luther case for the first time in two years. He read it and when he finished he was still convinced that the statutes were written for a case like Luther’s. Behind the paperwork were the photographs of Mary Brown, Bobby Jo Jones, Betty Luther, and Cher Elder; it looked like a family reunion. How could the judge not have seen?

Cher’s family and friends continue to mourn her death. “Christmas and birthdays are still the hardest,” Rhonda Edwards says. “That’s when I cry. Or when I go through her things and think about all the plans she had for the future and realize there is no future.”

A mile or so along the highway beyond Empire, up a hill from a turn-off, a path turns to the left and a few yards farther breaks through the trees and into a chapel-like clearing. An oblong hole there has been filled with large, gray granite stones. A short distance away, a memorial plaque has been attached to a steel post and anchored a foot above the ground by Van Edwards. It reads simply, “Cher Elder, 1973-1993.” It is surrounded by a small altar of stones on which flowers, real and plastic, are frequently laid, along with items such as a teddy bear and Christmas ornaments. Her family and friends visit frequently. And a week or two before Christmas, Earl Elder takes a tree to the chapel and decorates it for his first daughter.

After the sentencing, Earl joined a support group for parents of murdered children. He doesn’t go as much anymore. The others there still have festering wounds and he’d rather remember his daughter in peace. “We were lucky,” he says. “We had Scott Richardson. I was struck by how many people in the group had bad experiences with, and even blame, the cops and the system.”

The movement to change the unanimous verdict law lost momentum when it made no headway in the 1997 legislative session. But Earl Elder says he’ll keep trying.

“Other than that,” he says, “I’m determined that I will live at least long enough to make sure that Thomas Luther never leaves prison again, except in a box.”

Det. Scott Richardson is one of those who stops frequently at the place where Luther buried Cher. He brings flowers. He’s grateful that he could find her and the peace that gave him and her family. It could have been otherwise.

Det. Dave Dauenhauer of the Clear Creek County Sheriff’s Department has since moved on to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, but he has not forgotten Beth Ann Miller. He hopes that the latest “break” in the case will pan out to be a real one.

In December 1997, a former resident of Idaho Springs was arrested in Ohio on child pornography charges; in his possession were newspaper clippings of Beth Ann’s disappearance and a topographical map of the area on which he had drawn three Xs. So far, he has refused to talk to Clear Creek detectives.

“Betcha after the snow melts that I’ll be up there with NecroSearch,” says Richardson, who was inducted into the elite group and given a hat on which the nickname “Bulldog” had been embroidered.

The photographs of other victims have come and gone from the walls of Richardson’s office. But Cher Elder’s photographs, including her as a 3-year-old, remain next to those of his family. He bought Sabrina a Harley of her own for their wedding anniversary.

A photograph of Luther causes his eyes to grow dark with anger. He points a finger and makes a shooting motion. However, when Luther’s appeals are through and the killer has nothing more to lose, Richardson plans to visit his old arch-enemy in the West Virginia prison. He hopes that then Luther will finally tell the whole truth.

A year ago, on the anniversary of Luther’s conviction for murdering Cher Elder, Debrah Snider wrote Richardson a letter. “I used to think that Tom was my dragon-slayer,” she said. “Now I realize that he was the monster and that you were the dragon-slayer.”

“I would go to trial against the devil with Dennis Hall,” Richardson says. He pauses, then laughs. “I guess I already did.”

Debrah Snider lives in West Virginia with her wolves. She knows she did the right thing—three times, as a matter of fact— but it cost her the love of her life. She tried to write to Tom, but was told by his lawyer to quit.

“There is not much I am afraid of at night, because I know how to take care of myself and avoid most areas where monsters hide,” she wrote instead to this author.

“The monsters who scare me most wear the diguise of ordinary people, so having to deal with ‘good honest people’ during the daylight hours frightens me a lot. At night, for some reason, people seem to be more of their real selves, so it’s easier for me to assess them correctly.

“I know Tom Luther better than he knows himself. I knew when he was lying. I learned to tell when he had the urge to prowl. I’m still torn between wishing Tom could hold me and protect me from my monsters and hating him for the pain he has caused other people.”

There is one dream Debrah still looks forward to in her weaker moments, when the wind is howling outside and she is cold and lonely. Tom, old, mellow, is let out of prison. She stands at the prison gate, waiting for him. The hair on both of their heads has turned white.

“I missed you,” he says. And they leave for a little place in the country with no people around, only animals.

She’d take that as the sign from God that she has waited for all her life. That the little girl who ran away from home, hoping someone would notice she was gone, at last had someone to go home with.

“As good of a world as we are supposed to be living in,” she concluded her letter, “it’s a hard world for Tom Luther and me.

“I don’t understand God’s purpose for either of us.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank Detective Scott Richardson, a true dragon-slayer, and the Lakewood Police Department, Dennis Hall and the Jefferson County District Attorney’s office, Sheriff Joe Morales and Detective Richard Eaton of Summit County, Heather Smith, Deborah Snider, and of course, Rhonda Edwards and Earl Elder, who survived what no parent should have to with dignity and courage. I would also like to thank the editors who’ve helped me along the way—Bill Florence, Jon Franklin, Patty Calhoun—and my agent Mike Hamilburg and his
consigliore,
Joanie Socola, for taking a chance, and Paul Dinas and Karen Haas at Kensington for the opportunity. And, as always, I want to thank my wife, Carla, for her love, faith, and support.

UPDATE 2013

In August 2012, Thomas E. Luther completed his sentence for sexual assault in West Virginia and was then transported to the Sterling Correctional Facility (SCF). Located about 120 miles northeast of Denver, SCF is the largest penitentiary in Colorado, with nearly three thousand inmates. There, the fifty-five-year-old killer and rapist began serving his sentences for the murder of Cher Elder and attempted murder of Heather Smith. He isn’t eligible for parole until 2085, long after he completes what will be, in effect, a life sentence.

In his latest prison mug shot, Luther’s formerly curly brown hair is now shaved short and nearly white. His face is fuller, but the hard blue eyes and thin-lipped mouth remain grimly the same. Several years ago, while still incarcerated in West Virginia, he was questioned by a female Denver police detective about an unsolved murder committed in the city during the time he lived in the area. He refused to answer her questions and instead voiced his hatred for women—as well as for the author of this book—before demanding to be returned to his cell.

Luther remains a “person of interest” in several unsolved murders and disappearances. Among those are the still-unsolved 1982 murders of Bobbie Jo Oberholtzer and Annette Schnee, near Breckenridge, Colorado. As previously noted in the epilogue of the first edition of
Monster,
the blood found on Oberholtzer’s glove and a tissue were not a DNA match with Luther’s, but rather came from some unknown male. However, given the timing and proximity of the murders to the sexual assault and attempted murder of Mary Brown, in nearby Silverthorne, some folks believe that Luther could have been working with an accomplice, so he therefore remains a suspect. In addition, crime watchers point to the similarity that all three women were hitchhiking when abducted by their assailant, or assailants. They also note that it would have been difficult for one assailant to have controlled and then murdered Oberholtzer, who got away briefly, and Schnee, too. Additionally, Luther’s comments regarding the murders, which he made while in jail for the Brown assault, have also been taken into consideration.

In any event the murders of Oberholtzer and Schnee have not been forgotten. Some of the original detectives from 1982 are still working the case as members of the 11th Judicial District Homicide Task Force. The task force, with the support of the 11th Judicial District Attorney’s Office, developed a website devoted to the case. They also committed significant resources to the presentation of the case in late 2011 to the Cold Case Review Board, a group of thirty-eight investigators from around the state organized by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.

One of the presenters was Charlie McCormick, who first as a sheriff’s investigator and now as a private investigator, has worked on the case for more than twenty-three years. In January 2012, the thirtieth anniversary of the case, he wrote about his “mixed feelings” for the
Park County Bulletin,
saying how he was concerned that the case would fade and be forgotten, as happens to many other unsolved murders. He was always hopeful that new information would be brought to the attention of the investigators, who, he believed, have the DNA evidence to prosecute the killer, or killers, successfully.

McCormick told the
Bulletin
that he was concerned that the killer, or killers, along with anyone with information, were all entering the “end stages” of their lives and needed to come forward for their own sakes:
“I truly believe that personal anguish or guilt of this nature is not something with which one should live a life or take to the grave. If you know something, give it up. If not now, when?”

In Pennsylvania, the body of the young woman who had been beaten, strangled, raped, and then left in the woods, back in December 1993, has not been identified. All we still know is that she was a transient often seen hitchhiking near the construction site where Luther worked during that time.

Blood found on her sweater matched Luther’s blood type, but further DNA testing was never completed. Les Freehling, the Pennsylvania state trooper looking into the case in the late 1990s, told Detective Scott Richardson that with Luther sentenced to prison for the rest of his life, Pennsylvania law enforcement was reluctant to spend the money for testing and the investigation necessary to pursue another conviction. The trooper has since retired.

However, Pennsylvania law enforcement authorities regularly revisit the case of Karen Denise Wells, the twenty-four-year-old single mother who disappeared in April 1994 from Middlesex Township, also near the construction site where Luther worked at that time. Wells, who was generally called Denise, lived in Oklahoma. She was in town to visit an old friend and left her suitcase and other belongings in a motel. The car she rented was found out of gas and stopped in a lane on a wooded country road, the driver’s-side and passenger-side doors open. There was no sign of a struggle, but the car had been driven for more than six hundred miles that couldn’t be accounted for.

“Basically, we’re looking for any type of information we can get on this case,” State Trooper Karl Schmidhamer said. “Persons of interest” in Wells’s disappearance have been interviewed through the years, the state trooper said, but he added that they didn’t have enough evidence to name a suspect at this time or at any time.

Wells’s son, a toddler when she disappeared, was raised by her mother, Deorma Wells, who recently pleaded in the media for closure. “I know and feel in my heart, as a mother, there is someone out there that knows something,” she said. “Please come forward for Denise’s son ... and yourself so you do not have to live with the guilt any longer.”

It’s unlikely that Luther, even if guilty of one or more of these other murders, would confess to these crimes. By nature, someone with his diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder lacks a conscience. However, authorities and family members of the slain hope that whoever committed the crimes did say something to someone, or there was a witness, who will decide to come forward.

For this update, the author has been unable to locate Deb Snyder, who was Tom Luther’s prison pen pal when he was incarcerated for the Brown sexual assault, then his girlfriend when he got out, and finally testified against him in the Cher Elder case. In a letter the author received a few years after Luther’s convictions, she said she had continued trying to contact Luther, hoping that he would “forgive” her for testifying against him. She said she hoped that he would allow her to visit him in prison, but up to that time he had ignored her pleas.