Monster (40 page)

“In his mind it would.”

“Well, Thomas Luther’s puttin’ Thomas Luther back, period. The problem is ... this is not the kind of case where you would want in the end to come out that the whole time you knew where the body was.”

“I don’t know where it is,” Snider protested.

Still, he wouldn’t let up. “I mean, because then what you got is, you got Thomas Luther sinking, and he kind of reaches up and grabs Debrah Snider and pulls her right down.”

Debrah reached for a tissue and wiped her eyes. “I think he’s already done that, ya know, but I don’t know where it is. ... At one point when he was real anxious about the coyotes digging her up, I did contemplate going to help him. And then I changed my mind, I didn’t want to know.”

Luther’s paranoia was getting worse, she said, and something else was troubling her. He was coming home with scratches and bruises all over his body. When she asked how he was injured, he told her he’d been hiding out in the mountains, using rough trails so that he couldn’t be followed.

“He’s not sleeping much at night,” Snider said. “And he forgets what story he’s told me. Like sometimes he goes back to the first story. That the last time he saw Cher was when he left her at Byron’s apartment. He forgets he already told me that he buried her. I don’t know what the truth is.”

“What can we do to get him to go back to that body or take you back to the body?” Richardson asked. “The way it’s sounding is, he would if you asked him.”

“Sometimes I think he would,” Debrah replied. “He seems to be pretty grandiose and thinks he’s important and that seems to be part of what makes him important.” Then she shook her head. He was too angry with her, he wasn’t even talking to her, much less trusting her with his darkest secret.

“I mean beyond today,” Richardson said, “ ‘cause you two are gonna get back together. You’re gonna be together until somethin’ beyond your control separates ya.”

Debrah swallowed hard. The detective was telling the truth. She and Tom—their fates—were intertwined for good or bad, just like he’d told her in his letters. “You know, there is something goin’ on with him,” she said. “I don’t know whether it’s anxiety, or if in fact what you said is true... maybe he’s showing a pattern of a serial killer.”

“What are your feelings about your personal safety?” Richardson asked.

“Ah, not real good right now, especially when he’s angry,” she replied. It seemed like, at times, he was toying with her, trying to scare her. “Sometimes he says, ‘Maybe they’re just following me because they know I’m a serial killer and it’s time.’ ”

Still, Luther was confident that the police had not found any evidence in his car. “If he killed her, I think he would’ve done it in such a way as it wouldn’t have happened in the car.... I see him as being cunning enough to get her out of the car. I just think he probably learned some things, ya know, from his last situation.”

Snider began to say, “If he killed her ...” but Richardson stopped her again. There was no more room for ifs, he said. If she was still holding back, she needed to talk openly. He brought up Cher’s family again. “They make you look like the happiest person in the world. They’re breaking down, their kids are going through therapy. The father’s broke down ... there’s a difference between breaking and broke.” He got up and began pacing the little interview room.

“The mother is gone to pot. Even the kids. Cher had one brother and one sister. I think the brother’s about twelve and is seeing a pyschologist. It may sound crazy, but there’s a sense of comfort knowing that your daughter is not lying out under a rock pile. It’s that not knowing that actually drives people to suicide.”

Richardson stopped pacing and looked down on Debrah’s tear-streaked face. This wasn’t Interview Technique 101 anymore, this was from his heart.

“All they’re doin’ is they’re begging me to find their daughter’s body so that they can put her to rest. To the point that they will call two, three o’clock in the morning talkin’ on my answering machine crying, sayin’ they just had a dream and they want me to find her. They call me ‘cause I’m workin’ on the case and they just want a voice to talk to. That’s rock bottom, Debbie. You think it’s hard on you ... think about bein’ the mother of Cher Elder or the father of Cher Elder.”

Debrah sobbed, her heart broken. “I’m not protecting anybody. I don’t know anything else I can tell ya. If I could figure out how it happened, get him to show me where the body is, I would certainly do that. I think he’s ready to leave. I think he said something about wanting to go back to Vermont.

“He’s blaming me. It’s all my fault.”

Chapter Seventeen

September 10, 1993—Grand Junction, Colorado

Rhonda Edwards woke in a cold sweat. The room was dark, and she was afraid to move as she lay listening to the silence. The dream that awakened her had been so real—the sounds, the sensations.

In her dream she—or was it Cher? she couldn’t tell—was in a car traveling down a long, dark road through the mountains. She could feel the car sway as it whipped around curves. Her head lay on a seat, her eyes looking up at the full moon rising above the black silhouettes of trees outside the window. But she couldn’t move, it was as if she was being held down by some thick, invisible liquid that made it difficult to breathe and her limbs heavy.

She’d heard gravel crunching beneath the tires as the car rolled to a stop. Then she was outside in the moonlight. There was the sound of a rushing stream. Suddenly she heard an excruciatingly loud noise and felt an immense pressure against the left side of her head, behind her ear ...

In her bed, Rhonda reached behind her head expecting to feel warm, sticky blood. There was nothing. She summoned the nerve to turn on the lamp on her nightstand. The shadows fled as she reached for her diary. Opening to a blank page, she noted the time: 3:05
A.M.
and began to write what she could remember of the dream. The car ride. The moon. The sound and the pressure. “Instantly, I close my eyes as the light grows bright and there is a sudden, heavy warmth that runs through my body. I shrink into nothingness.”

The dream had been more vivid than any of the others that had haunted her since Cher disappeared, but it was not the first to disturb her sleep. One of the more frequent involved driving past Victorian gingerbread-style houses of the sort common to mining towns in the mountains. Other details were usually more difficult to recall, except for the vague feeling that the dreams had something to do with her missing daughter. And when she woke from them, the clock almost always stood at 3:05
A.M.
, each instance dutifully noted in her diary.

Long after Detective Richardson called the family together to say that he believed Cher had been murdered and that he had a suspect, Rhonda and her second husband, Van Edwards, a long-haul trucker, refused to give up hope. Maybe Cher just got fed up and went somewhere to think things through, they told each other. They called all the friends she had in different parts of the country—California, Missouri, Illinois, Colorado. They made posters, some of which Van tacked up in truck stops during his cross-country journeys.

They’d occasionally get calls, but the leads never panned out. Van found it mysterious that at one truck stop near Chicago that summer, the poster he hung of Cher was torn down from a posterboard where dozens of other such posters, some much older than his, remained undisturbed.

As the weeks stretched into months, Rhonda would call Richardson to scream or yell or cry. She knew it wasn’t his fault that the investigation seemed to crawl along, and to his credit, he always let her get it out without interrupting or getting angry. She often called just after three in the morning, following a dream. She knew he wouldn’t be in. “I just wanted to hear your voice,” she’d say to his message machine. “I just wanted to know you’re still out there.”

Rhonda was tormented by guilt. Maybe she had raised Cher to be too trusting, too independent. “Did I contribute to her death?” she asked herself in her diary. “Was I too busy at work? Did I listen enough?” She wondered if things might have worked out differently if she had allowed Cher to marry her high school boyfriend.

Lying in her bed alone, Van somewhere out on the road, Rhonda shuddered with fear recalling the apocalyptic dream and began writing again. “It felt so real ... I wondered if He had come back to earth, and I was witnessing the end of the world.

“Or was I seeing death as Cher saw it?”

After the bars closed on the morning of September 23, 25-year-old Mark Makarov-Junev and his 21-year-old girlfriend, Patty pulled up to the drive-through at a Lakewood fast food restaurant. They just finished ordering when Mark noticed a white Pontiac Firebird pull in behind him. But he wasn’t particularly alarmed when Byron Eerebout got out of the driver’s side door and approached. They’d had some disagreements in the recent past but had since cleared the air. Besides, Mark could see his first cousin, Robert Makarov-Junev, was sitting on the passenger side of the white car.

The disagreement involved about $475 Mark owed Eerebout for cocaine. Byron had flattened two of his tires with an icepick a few days before. Then Makarov-Junev retaliated by locating Eerebout at an apartment and threatening to “kick your ass.” Byron scurried away from Mark, a much larger young man, and ran into the kitchen where he said he was “calling Thomas Luther.”

“Thomas is on the phone,” he yelled at Makarov-Junev who then left, apparently the ex-convict’s reputation impressed the small-time criminals and drug dealers who made up much of Eerebout’s circle of associates. But just the day before, due to Pam Rivinius’s intercession, the pair had shook hands and agreed to work out their differences amicably.

“What’s going on?” Mark asked as Byron walked up.

“Not much,” Eerebout replied as he raised a canister of Mace and sprayed Mark in the face. When Mark, blinded, raised his hands to his face, Eerebout began striking him with a wooden dowel about the thickness of a silver dollar and cursing, “You don’t know who you’re fucking with.”

Eerebout ran back to the Firebird yelling, “I’ll be back,” and then sped away. Makarov-Junev and his girlfriend drove to her apartment where he ran to the bathroom to wash the Mace off. She went to check on messages left on her telephone recorder. A moment later, she yelled, “Mark, you better come hear this!”

The first message was from his cousin, Robert, wanting to know where he would be that night. However, it was the next two messages, recorded just a few minutes before they got home, that frightened Patty.

“Yo, this is Byron, guys,” the first one said. “If you don’t answer the phone right now and goddamn give me money, it’s your ass, Mark. I’m not fuckin’ scared of your ass, motherfucker. You asked me the other night who you were dealin’ with. You don’t know who you’re dealin’ with. We’re on our way to her house right now dude. I ain’t no fuckin’ chickenshit. You can ask anybody, dude, I’ll fuckin’ do it. If we go rounds, dude, whoever wins, dude, that’s all it takes. I’m comin’ to get you, bud. You listening to this, motherfucker? Goodbye and good fuckin’ riddance.”

That message was followed by another from Eerebout. “You hear this, Mark,” he said. A gunshot rang out. “I’m coming to get you.”

The sound had hardly stop reverberating in their ears when Patty looked up and pointed out the picture window of her ground-floor apartment. A white Pontiac Firebird was cruising slowly up the street. Makarov-Junev ordered her to close the blinds, but in her panic, she pulled the whole device down. They were exposed in the car headlights.

Byron Eerebout got out of the car. They could see he was carrying a large handgun. “I’m going to kill you, you motherfucker, Mark,” he screamed and raised the gun.

“Get down,” Mark yelled. He and Patty fell to the floor as a bullet crashed through the picture window where they had been standing. As more shots were fired, Patty crawled to her kitchen and, reaching up, grabbed the telephone and called 911. She could hear Eerebout yelling outside, then the yelling stopped and she heard the sound of car tires screeching.

At 2
A.M.
, police responding to a report of “shots fired” arrived at the apartment. An officer was in the room when Eerebout called again to threaten Makarov-Junev.

After the call, the officer asked if Mark knew where they could find Eerebout, who he had identified as the attacker. Mark thought a minute, then called Mike Coovrey, who went by the nickname Garfus. He knew Garfus was out of town, but several of Byron’s friends were housesitting and might know where to find him. He was surprised when Byron picked up the telephone.

A half hour later, Lakewood police officers and detectives were quietly establishing a perimeter around Coovrey’s house when they saw two figures emerge from the rear of the building and toss two large bundles over a fence. It was too dark to get a good look at the pair, except to note that the shorter of the two was wearing white pants.

A few minutes later, Byron Eerebout and his latest girlfriend, Tiffany Crawford, walked out the front door where they were met by police officers with guns drawn. The couple was forced to lie on the sidewalk with their hands over the backs of the necks while more officers burst into the house and arrested the other occupants, including Robert Makarov-Junev.