Monster (10 page)

“It seemed worth talkin’ about,” Browning said, but he put Luther off. Then he decided against it, but Luther had approached him several more times. “And he said if I took this to the DA, he’d see to it that I was killed, too.”

The deputy district attorney asked if Browning would be willing to wear a hidden microphone and try to get Luther to talk again. Browning replied that he was “shaky” about the idea. If he got caught, Luther’s reaction would be swift and violent, and Browning would have a “snitch jacket” following him to prison, which could be deadly. But at last he agreed.

The next day, Browning was summoned to the Summit County Courthouse as if to attend a hearing on his case. In the men’s room, he was stripped to his shorts and a microphone was taped to him by a detective. With the tape machine turned on, Browning affirmed that he had not been coerced or promised anything in return for his cooperation.

Fifteen minutes later, Browning was back in the jail trying to wake Tom Luther, who was napping in his cell. “Hey Tom. Tom. Tom. I hate to bother you right now, man,” he said as the deputy in another part of the jail recorded the conversation. “I hate to bother you right now. Okay?”

There was the sound of rustling as Luther woke up. “I gotta get the details,” Browning said. “I’ll be going to court here pretty quick, and then they’ll be taking me out of the county as soon as court’s over with.”

“Okay,” Luther replied. “She’s five foot, four inches in height. Dark hair, dark eyes, weighs a hundred and ten pounds. Acts real skittish and scared when she’s around strangers—a little weird—like a crazy woman.”

“Okay,” Browning responded. “Now what is it you’re gonna want done?”

At that point, Luther said nothing. He just pointed his finger to his head like it was the barrel of a gun and his thumb the hammer. Browning knew he needed to get Luther to say more so he asked, “Yeah, but how? If she’s skittish around strangers, how?”

Luther, sounding exasperated, said, “Just sit back in a fuckin’ hole somewhere and blow her fuckin’ head off. Then get the hell out of there. That’d do just fine.”

“Okay,” Browning said. “If I do this then we still got our deal?”

“For your arrest?” Luther asked. “Oh yeah. Guaranteed. Definitely. That was the deal that was made.”

Browning wondered if he had enough and decided to press further. “What do you think would be the easiest way?”

Luther pulled out a piece of paper and wrote the address of a mortgage company where Brown worked during the day near downtown Denver. Or, he said, Browning could get her new home address. He knew through his spies that Mary had recently moved out of the home of a friend.

“The best thing to do is call up the Department of Motor Vehicles when you get out of here, you know, and say that you found an abandoned car,” Luther explained. “Say that it ain’t got no license plates on it but you found a couple names on some papers and want to check them out.

“One is Frank Brown, that’s her father, and check Mary Brown. Since she moved out, she’s probably got a brand new license with her new home address right on it.”

“Just go there?” Browning asked. “Should I go to her house?”

Luther said Browning could follow Mary from her home to work and decide where the best opportunity to kill her would be. “All right,” Browning agreed. “I’ll take care of it.”

Luther smiled and nodded. “Then I’ll call you up as soon as I get on that black top.”

A few minutes later, Browning was back with the detective. “I think I got more than enough for what you need,” the inmate said. And he did indeed. The next day, a charge of conspiracy to commit murder was added to the other charges Luther faced: two counts of attempted murder, two counts of first degree assault, second degree sexual assault, and kidnapping.

The prosecution now had an airtight case. Luther’s confessions to the psychiatrists for the insanity trial couldn’t be used, but the state had a living witness who could point to her attacker in court and describe the horrific nature of the assault to a jury. The prosecutor also had Luther’s own statements to the arresting officers, and his statements made to other inmates, including Browning, that he had committed the rape and that he had considered killing her that night with a gun. There wasn’t a jury in the land who wouldn’t have convicted him as charged.

But on June 23, 1983, the deputy district attorney, who had only assumed the case a few weeks earlier, announced a plea agreement to the press. Luther had agreed to first degree assault and second degree sexual assault in exchange for the other charges from February 13 being dropped.

It was a done deal before Mary Brown even heard about it. She was outraged when told. It was bad enough that Luther had only been charged with second degree sexual assault, rather than first degree (because, according to Colorado law, he had used a “foreign instrument” rather than his body). Now she felt betrayed.

“You didn’t even ask me,” she complained.

“The defense attorney and I thought it would save you the trauma of a trial,” the prosecutor offered lamely.

“You had no right,” she cried. But there was nothing she could do; the attorneys, Judge Richard Hart, and Luther had already signed off on it.

On September 1, Luther was sentenced to fifteen years in the state penitentiary for second degree sexual assault and twelve years for first degree assault. He was allowed to serve the sentences concurrently and was given credit for the 563 days he had already spent in jail. With good time, Nearen told him, he’d be out in seven years.

A short time later, after his attorney vainly attempted to suppress the tape made by Troy Browning, Luther pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder and was sentenced to another three years in exchange for that sentence also running concurrently with the others. Browning may as well not have even gone through the effort of taping Luther; other than many years later, it was more proof to Luther’s hunters that he would rather kill innocent women than pay for his crimes.

In Denver, Mary Brown was left with her nightmares. For the sake of expediency, she had been denied her chance to face her attacker and describe to a jury the sort of monster they had before them. Now, she would have to pick up the pieces of her life without the catharsis of a trial.

In Breckenridge, Deputy Morales, who in ten years would win election as the sheriff of Summit County, was angry at the prosecution for not insisting that Luther plead guilty to attempted murder or go to trial. Never would have been too early to let that monster out of prison as far as he was concerned.

The words “why do I do these things” echoed in his mind. And in his heart he knew that someday he would hear the name Thomas Edward Luther again—and it would be in connection with another young woman in trouble.

Chapter Five

June 15, 1984—Buena Vista, Colorado

When Dr. John Macdonald, a native of New Zealand, arrived at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Hospital in 1950, all faculty members were required to spend some time on the “security ward,” evaluating prisoners sent to them by the courts. It was their responsibility to determine sanity questions before the trial and then afterward, a convicted felon’s potential “dangerousness” for the pre-sentence report given to the judge.

At the time, Macdonald had not specialized in forensic psychiatry, but he soon found that the world of sex offenders, killers, and robbers was infinitely more interesting work from a psychiatric point of view than the routine complaints of the mostly middle-aged good citizens who constituted the majority of his colleagues’ practices.

Whatever else they might be, criminals were men of action—if they were poor, they got a gun and robbed a store—and compelling fodder for study. He was soon in charge of the ward and by 1960 was the director of psychiatry for the teaching hospital, responsible for the training of young psychiatric residents in the delicate arts of interviewing and diagnosing criminals.

Sometimes it was easy. Under the stress of facing heavy prison sentences, even the death penalty, the psychological defenses of many criminals were impinged. They often said more than they intended or made offhand remarks without realizing what the words revealed. Invariably, criminals believed that they were smarter than the rest of society, particularly the police; being apprehended was always a matter of bad luck, carelessness, “snitches,” or unfair police tactics. Many had over-inflated egos and/or insecurities that made it almost necessary for them to brag about their exploits.

Others however, especially the sociopaths, were clever and manipulative, always trying to read their evaluators’ minds and adapt their answers accordingly. “Bear in mind,” Macdonald would tell the residents who accompanied him on his rounds, “while you’re making your psychiatric evaluations that they’re making a psychiatric evaluation of you and probably much quicker.”

Most criminals could be counted on to lie, exaggerate, and misinform—especially if they thought that by doing so, they might get something for themselves. But over the years, Macdonald had refined his interview techniques to sift through the chaff and get to the kernels of truth. He believed that his work helped society in general, and the police in particular, understand why criminals acted as they did, how their thought processes worked and, particularly in the case of serial rapists and serial killers, how best to catch and convict them.

Yet Macdonald was not content to just talk to inmates and review official records of their crimes. Criminals altered their stories about as often as most people changed socks. And much of what he was interested in might never make it into the official records or have anything to do with a suspect’s guilt or innocence.

So to gather his information, Macdonald began “hanging out” in 1970 with various units of the Denver Police Department. Robbery. Homicide. Sex offenses. Many officers were at first suspicious of what the eccentric little man with the funny accent who looked like some village librarian might be up to, but they gradually came to trust him to the point that he was given his own desk at police headquarters.

Every Friday evening, he rode with police officers and detectives until dawn. He interviewed perpetrators, victims (if they lived), witnesses, even the officers at the scene while the body was—figuratively and sometimes literally—still warm, in his quest to understand the nature of crime.

As one of the top forensic psychiatrists in the country, he had written a half-dozen books on topics from rape to robbery to murder. He lectured at police academies around the country and the world. He had appeared more than 200 times in court as an expert witness, sometimes for the defense, but mostly for the prosecution.

Since 1951, he had interviewed more than 290 murderers, several of them serial killers. Serial rapists and serial killers, he found, tended to have a number of common factors in their backgrounds. Other than “the triad”—a concept he had helped define and then championed—high percentages had also been sexually abused as children and had witnessed violence in the home between genders or abnormal sexual behavior, such as incest. The most dangerous of all had sadistic qualities to their crimes.

Macdonald was careful to make distinctions, such as the man who got too drunk at an office party and assaulted an unwilling female. Chances were such a man, if caught and punished, wouldn’t be a repeat offender. But serial rapists and killers were not likely to stop until caught and put away. Forever.

Macdonald also believed that almost all serial murders of women were sexual in nature, even if the victim wasn’t actually raped or her clothing removed. For many of the killers (nearly always men because there are few recorded cases of female serial killers), he knew that sexual release or pleasure often occurred when hurting or killing the victim, not necessarily during the act of rape itself.

In June 1984, he wasn’t actually working on a study. But when two police detectives with the Denver sex offenders unit asked if he wanted to accompany them to interview convicted rapists for a training tape, he quickly agreed. He was constantly testing his theories and profiles of criminal archetypes to see how they held up.

The detectives and Macdonald drove the 150 miles from Denver to the Buena Vista Correctional Facility, a medium-security Colorado prison located a few miles south of the town of Buena Vista in the Arkansas Valley. The plan was to spend two days interviewing a half-dozen or so sex offenders to create a training tape to teach police officers what to watch for in these men, as well as interview techniques. The first day, the interviews were short and sweet, as the detectives and Macdonald sifted for the most interesting candidates to talk to at length the next day.

They had little time to review the records of the inmates they interviewed and therefore knew little more about them than that the men had been convicted for sex crimes. The detectives and psychiatrist were looking for those who seemed bright and willing to talk about their experiences. One of those selected was Thomas Edward Luther.

Every prisoner who goes into the Colorado correctional system is first evaluated to determine such things as their tendency for violence, likelihood of escape attempts, and their potential as victims in the general population. At the Colorado Correctional Diagnostic Center, a team of psychologists, social workers, and corrections personnel also develops a personality profile of the incoming prisoners, noting quirks (including psychoses and personality disorders) and watching for signs—like genuine remorse and interest in prison mental health programs—that the prisoner is a good candidate for rehabilitation.