Monster (54 page)

It wasn’t much. But all in all, piece by piece, Richardson thought, it was a good day. He felt like he was on a train that had been heading up a long incline and just crested the hill. Slowly at first, but picking up speed, he was barreling toward a showdown with Thomas Luther.

The train increased speed in February when Byron Eerebout agreed to a deal. “Does a pile of rocks mean anything to you, Richardson?” he said looking sideways at the detective at a meeting to sign off on the details. Byron would have to serve the minimum time for his offense, but he would be allowed to do so in a community corrections program outside the state of Colorado.

In the meantime, Eerebout said he had information to add. Luther killed Cher, he said, and what he then did to her body was “grotesque. And Southy helped transport the body.”

Richardson kept a straight face. Eerebout didn’t know about the trip to Empire with Southy Healey or that he was cooperating. The detective didn’t believe that Healey transported Cher’s body. Otherwise, Healey would have had a lot more concerns about what evidence might turn up when he led them to what he believed to be the gravesite.
Just get his lips movin’,
he reminded himself.

Richardson was a lot more interested in Eerebout’s comment about a “pile of rocks.” His mind immediately pictured the snow-covered pile he discovered on that day at the mine shaft. But he needed Byron to take him there. A witness independent of Healey would be critical in court.

Babe Rivinius was also at the meeting, having insisted. She was still outwardly hostile to the detective; however, she conceded that her sons were more involved than she originally admitted. J.D. took Luther to the grave in the mountains, she said. But what nobody seemed to understand, she complained, was that her family had been threatened by Luther. “And the boys were all just heartbroken over what happened to Cher.”

“I never met her. But I have never heard them talk as highly about anyone as I have about her. And I know that it broke Byron’s heart to know that something this horrendous happened to that girl.

“And I wanna tell you something, it’s important for her family to realize that my family never intended them any harm and that the only reason that things have been the way they have been is because my kids had a lot to face, too. I’m talking about the fact that they had to fear for their lives. It took getting Tom put away on the other end to get it to the point to where the kids were able to deal with it a lot better.”

It took all of Richardson’s self-control not to react to Babe’s comments. Byron Eerebout had been overheard laughing about the family wanting Cher’s body back. The “kids” had done everything they could to protect a killer. Time and again, Rivinius intervened when he was trying to make a deal with Byron, stretching out the heartache for Cher’s family.

Now they were so heartbroken. It made him want to gag. Somehow, he made it through the meeting without letting his feelings be known.

Even so, Babe intervened again. She thought Byron could get a better deal. Fed up, Richardson decided to hell with Eerebout and made arrangements to have him shipped back to the penitentiary. Let him explain to the guys in the joint where he’d been and who he’d been talking to, Richardson thought. He’d find Cher on his own, arrest Luther for murder and Eerebout for being an accomplice.

But when Leslie Hansen heard that her client was about to be returned to Canon City, she called Richardson in a panic. “Is the deal still good?” she asked meekly.

On February 21, Richardson drove to Empire alone. Snow had fallen the day before, blanketing everything. Richardson pulled into the turn-off and stopped next to the man-made rock cairn with the pole jutting out of it. He knew now what had confused Healey, who thought he remembered something was hanging from the post.

Every winter, the National Forest Service took down the sign that said “Welcome to Arapahoe National Forest” and hung it back in its place every March. Healey had remembered the sign.

Two days later, on the morning of February 23, Richardson received a call at home from Deputy District Attorney Dennis Hall. “They’re going to take you to the grave,” he said. “Now.”

An hour later, Richardson, Connally, Leslie Hansen, and Byron Eerebout were on Interstate 70 heading west into the mountains. Sgt. Girson and crime lab technicians followed in a second car.

“Okay, Byron, real quick. We got a recorder goin’, not gonna hide nothin’ from ya. We’re not gonna talk anything about the case at all,” Richardson said. “All we need from you is directions on how to go.”

Eerebout nodded and smiled. Even with the shackles and jail jumpsuit on, he acted like a kid on his way to a picnic. “Okeydoke,” he said, then noted, “You guys are dressed pretty nice. I figured you’d be wearin’ blue jeans.”

Richardson told him that they had coveralls in the trunk. He didn’t feel like making small talk with Byron; it would have been too difficult to disguise the contempt he felt.

Eerebout shrugged. “Take I-70 to the Berthoud Pass exit, go through the little town before we start heading up to Berthoud Pass,” he said. “There’s a horseshoe-shaped turn-off and there’s a national park sign in the middle of it.”

Richardson, of course, knew exactly where they were heading. A former pile of rocks. But it all had to come out of Byron’s mouth. Southy Healey got them partway there; Eerebout had to take them those last few feet.

“When you turn in there, there’ll be two trails that you gotta get out and walk on,” Eerebout said. “There’s one goin’ to the right and there’s one goin’ to the left. Go up to the left and you just start walkin’, and we’ll run into it. I’ll show you.”

They drove through Empire and had just passed the Marietta Restaurant when Eerebout leaned forward and pointed up the road to the right. “It has a national forest service sign.”

Richardson knew the sign was still down, but he wanted to see how Byron would react. They drove up to the turn-off and Eerebout started to point again, but then his finger dropped. He looked confused.

“I’m not sure if it’s this....” He looked anxiously at Richardson, who frowned. “Please don’t get grumpy with me, detective,” he whined. “This is hard enough as it is.”

Richardson shrugged. “Oh, I’m not. I haven’t said a thing.” They continued driving past the turn-off but got only a little farther up the road before Eerebout told them to go back. “I was right the first time,” he said. And when they returned to the turn-off, he added, “This is it. I didn’t recognize it ‘cause the sign’s gone.”

“I’ll tell ya now, Byron,” Richardson said, “they remove signs in the wintertime to keep ‘em from weatherin.’ They put ’em back up in April.”

The ground was covered with another layer of fresh snow, but the sky overhead was clear and blue as a robin’s egg. A lot of traffic was passing by, most of the cars topped with skis and heading for Winter Park. The police officers waited until there was a break in the traffic before jumping out of their cars and pulling on the coveralls. They didn’t want to attract attention; in particular, they didn’t want any media nosing around. In 1993, while searching the area with bloodhounds and dozens of people, they’d told curious onlookers that they were practicing search and rescue techiniques. Most would wander on after a few uneventful minutes.

Byron Eerebout pointed to the path that led up past the grey rock formation. “See, I told you,” he said to Hansen as the detectives dressed.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, this is it. I was standin’ there,” he said, sounding annoyed. “I was lookin’ through the dark, okay.”

“Okay, I believe you, Byron,” Hansen said. “I’m not doubting you, I just wanted to make sure. They said this is a one-shot deal.” Hall had reminded her that Eerebout was to take the detectives directly to the grave, no more games, or he was getting a one-way trip back to prison.

“I know, but I will stay up here all day until I find it. Okay? You can go, I will stay up here until I find it.”

Richardson came up to the car and hauled Eerebout out by his arm. “I’m gonna walk him up into the trees,” he said to the other officers, “so we don’t have people seein’ him.”

The crook and the cop immediately began heading up the trail. When they were joined by the others, Eerebout set off on the left fork. “Right here, my friends,” he said as they came upon the clearing. “I believe this is it.”

The tall redhead stood still for a moment, then moved off the trail and a little behind the rock formation while looking down on the clearing. He seemed to be trying to get his bearings. “I was standing over here lookin’ over the rocks and watching him. It was two in the morning,” he said. “My car was parked on the other side of the road. Tom’s little blue Metro was parked right by the sign.”

He licked his lips nervously. It was dark the last time he was there, he complained. But then he pointed to where the pile of rocks had been. “Yeah, this is it. It wasn’t no further.”

He looked at his lawyer. “Should I say it? I got to say it one time or another.” Hansen nodded.

Eerebout took a deep breath. “He came up here to put rat poison on the body so the dogs and the wild animals wouldn’t dig it up. He said it wasn’t too far down, it wasn’t deep enough, and he wanted to come up here to dig it deeper.

“But then he said to stay out of his fuckin’ business.”

Richardson and Connally took Eerebout and his attorney back to the Jefferson County Jail while Girson and the crime lab technicians stood guard in the clearing. On the way back up, the two detectives stopped to pick up Ireland and Diane France, a NecroSearch forensic anthropologist.

When he got in the car, Ireland stretched out and pulled his cap over his eyes as if to take a nap. “Another Richardson pleasure cruise?” he yawned.

Richardson smiled. “This time we got a body. I guarantee it.”

Ireland looked up skeptically from under his cap. But he said nothing.

They arrived at the site to find that the technicians had already photographed the scene and established a perimeter. France began to drill into the same hole they had created in January. Three inches further down she found adipocere, a whitish, fatty substance produced in decomposing bodies exposed to moisture, such as the snows and spring runoff that pooled in the bowl-shaped clearing.

They knew they had a body. Still, they couldn’t be absolutely certain it was Cher Elder, or how much of the body remained in the grave. She might have been moved. Or it could have been an unknown body that Luther used as a red-herring for the Eerebout boys. There’d been so many lies.

Under the direction of France, the tedious process of exhumation began. The forensic anthropologist was a tiny woman, but Richardson noted that long after a man would grow tired from the digging, she kept going. She and her assistants went about their business like they were unearthing the tomb of some ancient queen.

First, the gravesite was sectioned off into grids, delineated by pieces of string tied to stakes. Every bit of dirt was sifted through a screen and examined. Everything that came out of the excavation went into buckets marked for the appropriate grid space. The process of digging was made more difficult by permafrost—the first six to twelve inches of soil was frozen, which probably explained why the cadaver dog hadn’t detected anything. A special torch system was brought in to warm the ground.

By the end of the first day, they had exposed one of the walls of the original grave. France was so precise, using toothbrushes to clear away dirt, that they could see the tool marks left by the gravedigger’s shovel. The sun was going down behind the nearby hills when they called it a day.

After the others left, Richardson and Connally stayed behind to spend the night in their car. They couldn’t take the chance that some curious local would come on the site now and call the media, or that one of Luther’s associates might have seen them and try to remove the remains. Richardson wasn’t worried about the local mountain lion. Cougars won’t eat decayed flesh. But there were also bears in the area, and they would. Both detectives were exhausted.

“What if it ain’t Cher?” Connally asked as they tried to get comfortable in the cramped vehicle.

“I don’t want to think about that,” Richardson said. It was a good thing, he pointed out, that they hadn’t found Cher when he first stumbled on the grave in January. If they had, they wouldn’t have been able to make a deal with Eerebout, who would have had no reason to come clean, and they were going to need his testimony at trial. And this way, there were two different witnesses—Southy and Byron, who by all accounts hardly knew each other and yet took them to the grave area independent of the other.

However, there remained the issue of which one was lying. Southy Healey said he came up with Byron and Luther in the daytime; Eerebout made no mention of Southy and said he spied on Luther at 2
A.M.
“I don’t want to think about that either,” Richardson said and each detective turned to his own thoughts as he tried to get some rest.

Neither slept much and they both greeted the dawn stiff and cold. They were soon joined by the police and NecroSearch teams, who brought coffee and breakfast.