Monster (32 page)

Debrah sat quietly blinking back her tears. Richardson decided to shift gears, remind her again of what happened on that March night. “What do you think could have made Cher vomit in the car?” he asked.

Debrah shrugged. “Maybe if he forced her to do oral sex.”

Richardson nodded. And how about anal sex? he asked, recalling Luther’s attack on Mary Brown. Was there any indication in Luther’s past of homosexual activity?

Again Snider shrugged. He’d been in prison, she said, and he was always bragging about how he’d saved young guys from “the wolves” who wanted to rape them. But she’d noticed during visits how those young guys fawned all over him, “like they were the girlfriends, not me.”

Snider looked at her watch. She had been gone much longer than it took to buy a Mother’s Day card. “Do you think you’re in danger now?” Detective Russell asked.

“Yeah,” Debrah sighed. “I think I’m in danger of losing him.” She worried, she said, that drunk, Tom might have lost control though she quickly added again that she didn’t believe he would hurt the girl. “I would be really upset if there’s wrong involved. If there’s not wrong involved, then who am I to condemn someone to hell?”

Suddenly, she was angry that Richardson was sitting so close. She understood from her psychology background what he was doing—invading her space, putting her on the defensive.

In a way, she liked this man with the Texas accent and piercing eyes. He seemed honest and up front. His concern for Cher Elder was genuine and beyond what she might expect of a cop just doing his job. But at the same time, she didn’t want him to think he could manipulate her so easily.

“Back off, detective,” she said as he leaned near to ask his next question.

Richardson looked surprised. Then he smiled and backed away. He should have known that a psych nurse would know what he was doing. He liked this woman’s grit if he didn’t understand her choice in men.

“Where do you think Cher is?” he asked. He sensed that Snider knew more than she was telling and was wrestling with her conscience. If he could just ask the right question, it might all come out in a flood.

“I don’t have any idea,” she lied.

Richardson let it pass.
Too soon
, he thought.
She’s not ready.
He decided to paint her more of a picture of the sort of man he believed Luther to be. “Has Tom ever talked to you about being accused of some other crimes before the sex assault?” he asked.

“He told me that he was a suspect in murders in some county,” she nodded, “but he was cleared of that when they investigated.”

“Did he tell you the nature of those murders?”

No, she replied. She just assumed that if Tom was a suspect, the victims had to be females because of what he’d done to Mary Brown.

“What would your thoughts be if I were to tell you that in 1982 in Summit County two females hitchhiking were picked up and murdered and then after Luther was arrested, the murders stopped?” Richardson said

He pointed his finger at her like a gun and said, “It was bam, bam. Then the third person, the arrest, and the homicides stopped. No more murders ever in Summit County. You’re talking a county that has two women killed in a year, which quadrupled their homicide rate for the last fifteen years. And then they immediately stopped when Luther was caught on his assault.”

Snider pointed out weakly that Luther let Mary Brown go. Richardson retorted that she was allowed to run from his truck only after he had hit her so hard it broke her neck and had nearly amputated a finger with the claw hammer. She was dumped, he said, semi-conscious, in sub-zero weather, in the dark. She had survived only through her own will power, not because of any last minute benevolence of Thomas Luther.

“And now you have Luther, who goes up to Central City with this girl—and I’m telling you, I’ve gone all the way back to where she was born and raised in the smallest fucking town you ever saw in your life—and she has disappeared.

“People disappear. And some people are prone to be homicide victims. Cher does not match any of that. She was not the kind of person who dumps her car four blocks from Byron’s apartment and completely disappears, never uses a credit card, never writes a check, never calls her friends, never calls her family, and was never seen again except the last time she was with Luther. And the only way we found that out is because we threatened to put Luther’s picture in the newspapers.”

Now Richardson was angry. “Why all this over a missing girl? Why all these lies and deception and worry about a missing girl?”

Debrah couldn’t answer. She was crying. She knew he might be right about Tom. She’d read enough about serial killers to know he fit the profile. She also knew that she fit the profile of women who fell in love with such men by denying the undeniable, even when they knew that beneath the surface lurked a monster. Such women always believed that they would be able to tame the beast... such women were always wrong.

“What if Luther killed Cher?” Richardson asked.

“Then he belongs in jail,” she said and began to cry again.

Richardson felt sorry for her, but he had to make her understand that if she protected Luther and he killed again, it would be on her head.

“I’m going to tell you something,” he said quietly as he handed Snider a tissue. “If he did the two women in Summit County and then did Cher just two months after he got out of prison, there’ll be another victim, and I’m talking it ain’t going to take long. I’m telling you that the next one’s coming, and it’s coming quick, ’cause there’s no reason to quit. He got away with two, he gets caught on one, is out in three months and he kills another. I don’t want another child’s life on my hands.”

He paused and saw the message hit home. It was time to push the boundaries back just a little bit further. “How do you think he would kill her? Do you think he’d shoot her, strangle her? Do you think he’d beat her to death?”

Snider pictured Luther when he was angry, when his eyes were those of the mad bull. “I think he would beat her to death,” she mumbled, her head down.

“Can you see him strangling her?”

“That’s a possibility.”

“Do you think he would sexually assault her?”

Debrah recalled the constant comments about women’s bodies and what he’d like to do with them. She remembered the violent, demeaning pornography—his fantasy that a raped woman would “learn to like it.”

“Yeah,” she told the detective.

“Do you think he’d bury the body?” Richardson asked, edging nearer to what he wanted to know.

“I know he would,” she blurted out before realizing what she had said.

“You know? How do you know that?” he demanded.

She fumbled to explain. She said she only meant that it seemed the logical thing to do. But then she walked into another mistake. She’d been working in early April as a pool nurse in a town near Central City when she heard a body had been found in a local creek, she said trying to change the direction of the conversation. She said, she thought then that it might be Cher Elder.

“Wait a minute,” Richardson said, “you told me earlier that the first you’d heard of Cher was the day I came to talk to Tom. April 20.”

Maybe she’d mixed up the date, Snider said, panicked. The detective had caught her in a lie. But Richardson let it pass. She wasn’t ready to spill the whole story, and he wasn’t going to force her back to Luther’s side by confronting her.

Debrah changed the subject again. “He took her to Central City but brought her back to Byron’s,” she said, adding hopefully, “Someone saw her at a bingo parlor.”

“No one saw her at a bingo parlor after that night,” the detective responded. “That wasn’t true.”

Richardson allowed the interview to grind to a halt. It was a good start. Debrah Snider knew more than she was saying, of that he was sure, but he could wait and let her conscience work her over. He told her that he had a search warrant for Luther’s car and was going to pick it up now.

Snider looked at her watch again. It was almost 1
A.M.
“I’m in trouble,” she said. “I going to say you pulled me over.”

Richardson nodded. “We’ll back you up. We’ll say we were watching the house and stopped you.” He knew he had placed her in a tough, maybe dangerous, spot. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” Debrah replied. “I mean I’m obviously involved in something, and it’s my choice. I suspected that if this didn’t get cleared up, and Cher didn’t get found, that you guys would be here to talk to me.”

Richardson told her that several police cars and officers would be accompanying him and the tow truck to her property. He hoped the show of force would preclude Luther from resisting.

“He’s not going to cause any problems, is he?” he asked.

Debrah looked worried, but shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

Several officers had come into the room. “No guns, ’cause this is simple,” Richardson said more to comfort her than to the men. “We’re just going to tow the car.”

Thomas Luther didn’t resist. But he was plenty mad, especially when Richardson wouldn’t let him have a small black telephone book he found in the car.

“So that’s what’s happened to this woman,” Luther yelled, pointing to Snider. “You guys couldn’t let her call home and let people know? Her husband’s out lookin’ for her right now. We’ve all been drivin’ around looking on the sides of roads and shit.”

“She’s been with us for the last couple of hours,” Sgt. Don Girson, who had accompanied Richardson from Lakewood, replied. “We stopped her on the road.”

“Thomas, we’re not gonna argue,” Richardson interjected. “Let’s just do this and get out of here, okay? If you wanna talk—”

“No,” Luther said, cutting him off. “I don’t wanna talk to you fuckin’ guys. Man, you’re all fuckin’ assholes, you know what I mean?”

Luther was pacing back and forth, his voice getting louder, and he gestured wildly. Some of the officers nervously moved their hands nearer to their guns.

“I ain’t gonna jack with ya, okay?” Richardson said. “Just settle down.”

But Luther kept ranting. “You ain’t gonna jack with me? You’re jackin’ with me now. It’s goddam bullshit, it’s harrassment is what it is.” He demanded to know when he could get his car back. “How long is it gonna take your forensic people to go through it?”

“I would say that it’ll probably be done around Thursday, maybe Friday of this week,” Richardson replied. “I’ll call ya when we’re done with it, and you can come pick it up.”

The tow truck operator had gone about his business while Richardson occupied Luther and was now ready to leave. “I don’t want to talk to you no more,” Luther said, glaring at Richardson.

“Then don’t,” Richardson replied mildly. With that, he climbed in his car and the fleet of police cars and the tow truck hauling Luther’s blue Geo Metro were off.

Back inside the house, Luther turned to Debrah and demanded to know what the cops had wanted with her. She told him as much about the interview as she could remember, leaving out her own thoughts and responses.

“Richardson said you’re a serial killer,” she said, noting to herself that it was Dennis, not Tom, who was out looking for her. She worried that Tom might burst a vein, he looked so angry.

“Do you believe him?” he asked.

Debrah looked at him, at the angry eyes and the clenched fists. “No,” she said. It wasn’t entirely a lie. She just wasn’t ready to believe it might be true. But she was relieved to hear her husband’s car pull up to the house.

Debrah Snider didn’t sleep that night but lay awake going through everything that had happened since she came back from Washington. She was still thinking about it at work that afternoon when Richardson called. He asked if she was okay, and if Luther had caused any problems.

“No, he was fine.” He hadn’t asked her about the interview, she said, but she had “volunteered some things.”

Snider appreciated the detective’s concern. But in the light of day, she couldn’t believe that Luther was a killer. The doubts Richardson had planted in her mind the night before were just shadows and ghosts.

Richardson wanted to know if Luther was planning to leave for Chicago soon. “He’s got a lot of mixed emotions about it,” Debrah replied. “Part of him says he wants to run. Just bolt for the mountains, and another part of him says he wants to go to Chicago.”

Snider said his paranoia was understandable considering his background. He’d told her before he was even out of prison that “the system” would try to hang him again. But the detective just scoffed. “We didn’t even know Luther existed before two weeks ago.”

Maybe Southy would know more, Debrah volunteered. Tom had called him a lot, and while she hadn’t been able to hear much, it was certainly about “the missing girl.”

“I don’t know why Southy would do anything to her,” Richardson replied, wondering who Southy was and hoping she would say.

Snider had no comeback to that so she volunteered that Luther had called Babe that afternoon just as she was leaving for work. The phone seemed to have been shifted to Byron or J.D. She heard him angrily discussing his car being taken by the police. But at the same time, he didn’t seem too concerned about the cops finding any evidence in his car.

“He said, ‘I don’t have to worry about it. I already told ’em she vomited in my car, that’s all that’s there.... That’s all they’re gonna find.’ He was real confident,” Debrah said.

There was one other thing the detective might want to know, she said. Luther had borrowed a shovel from work—it had been in his car when Richardson and Heylin spotted the stolen tools, but the shovel was gone the next day. He said he returned it to work.

Richardson remembered the shovel. It had a funny scar on the front of what appeared to be a brand new blade. He and Snider hung up, both of them wondering what the other wasn’t saying.

A few days later, Luther asked Debrah Snider to accompany him to the Jefferson County public defender’s office in Golden. On the way, he started talking about “finding” Elder’s body after Richardson’s visit. “It was really stinky,” he said. “It looked horrible.”

It?
Debrah’s conscience tugged at her. “She was not an it!” she snapped. “She was a girl. She not deserve what they did to her.”