Monster (66 page)

“That’d be great,” Richardson said. “Only don’t introduce me, just Newhouse here.”

Betty Luther’s home, a small, yellow clapboard affair, lay on the outskirts of Hardwick. She opened the door and, seeing Dimick, invited them in and offered coffee.

They were surprised to be so warmly received. Then they found out why. Lauren Cleaver and her investigator were in town and had called. Betty thought they were with the defense team!

Betty Luther’s mood quickly changed when Dimick introduced Newhouse as being with the prosecution. She stiffened and turned to the detective. “Are you Mr. Richardson?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” he answered. Again to their surprise, Betty Luther didn’t ask them to leave, though she remained hostile and kept throwing Richardson hard looks.

She also didn’t add much to what they already knew. She said she married at 17 and bore Tom a year later. Her husband had worked a lot, but it was not an abusive household, “just the sort of discipline that was common for the time.”

“If I can ask, what was the color of your hair when your son was young?” Newhouse asked.

“I’m a brunette, if that’s what you mean,” she said. “But I started turning gray at an early age.” She pointed to a recent photograph of her family on the wall. She used to wear her hair like her daughter, Donna, in that picture, she said, dark and shoulder-length.

Richardson didn’t say anything. They had agreed beforehand that Newhouse would conduct this interview so as not to antagonize her. But he couldn’t help but note the similarity between the photograph of Donna and those he had of Cher Elder, Mary Brown, and Bobby Jo Jones.
Could have been sisters,
he thought.

“Do you have any evidence to help prove that your son did not commit this crime?” Newhouse asked.

“No,” she replied. “But I know he’s innocent.”

The investigators left Betty Luther’s home and drove to the home of Gary Powers, whose sons were said to be good friends of Thomas Luther. “Hey,” he said, “you’re my second visitors. A coupla’ gals from the defense were just here.”

Powers said he didn’t know Luther well. “Just met him two years ago,” he said. “He showed up in a blue Geo with a woman named Kathy. She was about, I’d say, thirty-five, dirty blond hair. Said they were on their way to West Virginia. My son might know more if you want to check back.”

Next, they went to talk to Luther’s sister, Donna, who also mistook them for the defense team. “I know you guys are trying to build a defense that Tom was abused,” she said. “But it’s not true.”

When they explained who they were, she shrugged. She had nothing to hide. At Richardson’s request, she showed them a photograph of her mother taken on her wedding day. In it, Betty Luther had dark shoulder-length hair. She gave them the photograph when Richardson promised to return it.

Donna, too, remembered Luther bringing a woman named Kathy with him when he visited in the fall of 1993. He never said anything about a missing girl in Colorado, however. Then again, they weren’t very close.

Donna’s husband, Ted, came home and was introduced to the investigators. He clearly did not like his brother-in-law, who he described as “a blowhard with a chip on his shoulder. He was with some girl named Kathy and bragging that he had a lot of land and was raising wolves.”

From Donna’s house, the detectives went to see George Luther, the youngest brother. Tom had moved out, he said, when he was still very young and they weren’t close.

“He was always hot-tempered,” George said.

“How would he show that?” Newhouse asked.

“Well, he’s a strong guy, you know,” Luther replied. His sister, Becky, had told him some things about the murder case. “It had something to do with drug deals, and the girl was a heavy user,” he said. “Tom took her out and brought her back, then she was killed.”

William Luther was waiting for them when Richardson and Newhouse arrived. George had called to warn him.

Tom left home at an early age, William said, and he never knew him to have serious relationships with a woman. “He was used to getting his way one way or another, though,” he said.

“Any idea why Tom might commit this offense?” Newhouse asked.

William Luther eyed them suspiciously. “Well, what kind of stories have you guys heard? You aren’t going to help him are you?”

Newhouse ignored the questions and asked his own. “Think it had anything to do with your mother?”

Luther paused, then said slowly, “I don’t think so. He never said why he attacked women, like that girl he went to prison for.

“I heard this Cher was working undercover drugs and her boyfriend had shot her,” he said, but wouldn’t reveal who he heard it from. “But if he did what they say he did, he deserves to be punished.”

The next interview was with Jennie Ross, who surprised Richardson by asking “Do you and Lauren Cleaver have a personal or business relationship?”

Richardson responded that he only knew Cleaver because of the case. “I never met her before. Why?”

Well, Ross said, Cleaver had already been by, and she wasn’t exactly kind in her description of the detective. “She said this is an ego trip for you, another notch in your belt. She used really offensive language about you, really harsh, and to tell you the truth, I was offended. I thought maybe you two had lived together or something and had a falling out.”

Richardson nodded. The defense team had already shown they meant to play hard ball. Twice a defense investigator had come by his office and dropped off what the investigator called “evidence” —two .22-caliber shell casings and a leather jacket—but without saying where the evidence was found or how it related to the case. Cleaver also refused to say anything about the so-called evidence.

Cleaver had called Debrah Snider and said she knew who killed Cher Elder because Luther told her. The defense lawyer claimed that they had the clothes Luther wore that night, which Southy Healey said had been thrown in the creek. And they were going to portray Snider as “a vindictive bitch” at the trial.

“She told me that Luther was abused by his family,” Ross said. “I never heard that until she said it. I’ve known him since he was seventeen and thought he was a pretty good kid.”

Two years ago, she said, in the fall, Luther showed up with a hitchhiker who looked about 25. “The next morning she was gone, and nobody’s seen her since.”

The investigators returned to the Powers’ home and found Gary’s son, Nelson, who said he’d visited his friend in jail after his arrest in Summit County. “He said he wished the girl was gone and out of his life,” Nelson recalled. “I think he wanted me to do something to her. I told him not to talk like that or I wouldn’t be back to visit.”

As the sun began to set in Hardwick, Richardson and Newhouse located one last person they hoped could shed some light on Luther. Becky’s former husband, Carl.

Carl said he started living with Becky, who he described as having an drinking problem and cocaine habit, after she abandoned her first husband and child. “I remember Tom as being pretty good with his fists,” he said. “Becky told me once that Tom killed a man over a $50,000 dope deal back in the ’eighties, before his first arrest out there in Colorado.”

After Luther showed up with the hitchhiker, the two of them had stayed in an isolated hunting cabin owned by his mother. “The girl just disappeared one day,” Carl said. “When I asked him about it, he said he gave her some money to go on to West Virginia, which I always thought was kind of funny ’cause he left for there the next day.

“We been kind of worried, figurin’ a body’s goin’ to turn up somewhere around that cabin.”

After Vermont, Richardson and Newhouse flew to West Virginia. The first person they stopped to see was Debrah Snider, who had moved back when Luther stopped writing or allowing her to visit that past summer.

The visit to Snider’s was mostly a social call. She did say Cleaver’s investigator called and asked if she had ever known Luther to wear a green jacket, a blue baseball cap, or facial hair.

“I remembered he had a green nylon windbreaker and a blue cap with the word ‘Navy’ on it,” she said. “He never really kept a beard, but he’d go for days without shaving when he would go on his little excursions, and he has pretty heavy facial hair.”

Richardson recognized the defense investigator’s questions as pertaining to the Heather Smith case. They couldn’t have been too happy with Deb’s answers, he thought to himself. Too bad. He recalled that one of Southy’s sisters and her boyfriend, Matt Marlar, said that Luther showed up to get his gun wearing a beard and farmer’s clothes as a disguise.

Leaving Snider’s, they drove to see Randy Foster. He was angry with Richardson. Cleaver was saying that Foster told Richardson that Luther had confessed to killing and burying Cher Elder. “I never told you that. I said Luther told me Byron strangled Cher,” Foster said. “Now it’s caused all sorts of problems between me and Becky.”

More lawyers’ tricks,
Richardson thought. “That’s not in any of my reports,” he told Foster. “I never said you told me he confessed. She’s makin’ that up.”

Didn’t matter, Foster said, he wasn’t going to come back to Colorado and testify against his brother-in-law. “You can arrest me and put me in jail,” he said. “But I won’t help you.”

“Well, you got any evidence to prove Luther’s innocence?” Richardson responded.

Foster laughed. “If I had anything like that, I would have given it to everybody a long time ago. All I can say is there’s a lot of lying going on around here.”

On November 14, Richardson and Newhouse made their last stop. This time in Purdy, Missouri. Richardson was sure the defense would try to attack Cher Elder’s character, accuse her of being into drugs and sexually promiscuous to explain her “quick little intercourse thing” with Luther.

However, like he once told Southy Healey, the more Richardson dug into Elder’s background, the cleaner she got. Friends described her as boisterous, especially for a small southern town not used to teenagers speaking out. But no one knew her to ever do anything to harm someone else.

Neither were there any indications that she used drugs or drank much, according to friends and the local police. She was described as a hard worker, who paid her own bills while attending high school, where she was a straight-A student.

No one knew her to be sexually active. In fact, she had turned in a high school coach who was having an affair with a friend of hers. The coach and a member of the school board who supported him had been forced to resign.

No one could think of a single bad thing to say about Cher Elder. She was a bubbly, outspoken teenager who loved to talk and was well-liked.

Richardson was proud of her.

After granting a continuance to the defense, the trial of Thomas Luther for the murder of Cher Elder was rescheduled by Judge Munch to begin January 16. It would be a death penalty case—if Luther was convicted he would go through a second trial to determine if he should be put to death by lethal injection.

Deputy District Attorney Dennis Hall filed the required paperwork indicating that he intended to introduce as evidence “similar transactions”—the attacks on Mary Brown and Bobby Jo Jones. In general, evidence of other crimes or actions is not admissible to prove the character of a suspect. However, in Colorado, the limitations are relaxed in certain cases, especially felony-murder involving first a sexual assault, and the prosecution, Hall wrote, “may introduce evidence of other similar acts or transactions of the defendant for the purpose of showing a common plan, scheme, design, identity, modus operandi, motive, guilty knowledge, or intent.”

Hall said he needed the similar transactions evidence for two reasons. One was identity—that there were significantly distinctive features to the three crimes as to identify Luther as the offender. Those features were: each victim was a young woman of similar height and weight with collar-length dark hair; each victim voluntarily entered Luther’s car, and spent some time in the car with him; after a period of ordinary conversation in the car, and without warning or provocation, Luther announced his attention to sexually assault his victims; Luther then physically and sexually assaulted the victims.

The second reason was motive—that Luther felt anger and hostility towards women because, as several psychiatrists had noted through the years, of the abuse he perceived he suffered at the hands of his mother. “Defendant expanded upon the similarities between Mary Brown and his mother in an interview with Dr. John Macdonald and several Denver detectives in 1985. In this interview, defendant described similarities between Ms. Brown’s hair and defendant’s mother’s hair when defendant’s mother was young, and stated that Ms. Brown ‘reminded him’ of his mother, ‘especially when she began screaming.’ ”

Hall noted that in both the assault on Mary Brown and then eleven years later on Bobby Jo Jones, Luther made statements reflecting his subconscious motivation. “Why do I do these things?” to the Summit County deputies. And then “What is ailing me? I don’t know what causes this to happen,” to his brother-in-law.

The prosecutor included the photographs of Brown, Jones, Elder, and Betty Luther. “It is the People’s theory that defendant’s motive for assaulting and murdering Ms. Elder is that Ms. Elder, like Ms. Brown and Ms. Jones, physically resembles defendant’s mother; and that, after spending some period of time in close physical proximity with persons like defendant’s mother, defendant without warning or provocation physically and sexually assaults them.”

Dennis Hall knew that the case might very well hang on whether the judge allowed the evidence of similar transactions. Otherwise, there was very little evidence against Luther, except the testimony of admittedly poor witnesses and a single, curly gray hair found in Elder’s car that was “in the same class” as Luther’s, though the science could not say for certain it was his. Everything else—the vomit on the back seat, the “quick, little intercourse thing”—Luther had explained away in his first meeting with Richardson.

The similar transactions hearing was heated. Cleaver, who had been joined at the defense table by the more experienced attorney Mike Enwall, a former judge, opposed their introduction saying, “The lack of similarity between Cher Elder’s death and the two sexual assaults in Summit County and West Virginia are striking.”