Luther Thomas Edward - Monster

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Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank Detective Scott Richardson, a true dragon-slayer, and the Lakewood Police Department, Dennis Hall and the Jefferson County District Attorneys office, Sheriff Joe Morales and Detective Richard Eaton of Summit County, Heather Smith, Deborah Snider, and of course, Rhonda Edwards and Earl Elder, who survived what no parent should have to with dignity and courage. I would also like to thank the editors whove helped me along the wayBill Florence, Jon Franklin, Patty Calhounand my agent Mike Hamilburg and his consigliore, Joanie Socola, for taking a chance, and Paul Dinas and Karen Haas at Kensington for the opportunity. And, as always, I want to thank my wife, Carla, for her love, faith, and support.

Also by Steve Jackson

TRUE CRIME

Rough Trade
No Stone Unturned
Partners in Evil
Love Me To Death
Not Lost Forever

HISTORY/BIOGRAPHY

Lucky Lady: The World War II Heroics
of the USS Franklin and Santa Fe
To The Edge

Epilogue

July 1998Denver, Colorado

In the spring of 1998, Thomas Edward Luthers conviction for the murder of Cher Elder was upheld by the Colorado Court of Appeals. He claimed he didnt get a fair trial. The court said otherwise.

Luther once complained to Debrah Snider that he always gets blamed for more than he does. But if he is not a serial killer, and merely a self-professed angry motherfucker with a heart half good, half bad, and a twice-convicted brutal sexual predator, as well as your run-of-the-mill murderer, then he is certainly dogged by the horrible coincidence that wherever he goes, young women are sexually assaulted in the same manner, disappear, and die. Their bodies are left to rot faceless and nameless in remote wooded areas.

Following Luthers trail, one comes upon a number of police agencies, even friends, who wonder if he is the killer of some young woman in their jurisdiction. Sometimes, it has been too long, the trail too cold to ever know the truth, unless somewhere down the line there is a confession.

In Vermont, police officials can only speculate about the young woman from Stowe who disappeared and died in the woods two decades ago, at a time when Luther was reported to have lived in the ski resort town. And even his former friends in Hardwick still worry about the blond hitchhiker he showed up with in the fall of 1993 after leaving Colorado. He said she left for West Virginia the day before he did; they wonder if she ever left at all.

In Pennsylvania, Les Freehling of the state patrol believes that Luther is his prime suspect for the attacks on two women in his area. The woman whose body was discovered Dec. 10, 1993beaten, strangled, raped vaginally and anallyhas still not been identified. She, like thousands of others across the country, remains a Jane Doe. However, Freehling says, his investigation has revealed that she was a transient often seen hitchhiking near the construction site where Luther and his brother-in-law, Randy Foster, worked during that time.

Neither has the body of Karen Denise Wells, who disappeared from Newport, Pennsylvania, in April 1994, ever been found. Just her car, five miles from where the other girls body was discovered, and her clothes in a motel. Luther was still working in the area and commuting to nearby Delray.

Another unhappy coincidence? Freehling notes that the coincidences stopped after Luther was arrested in September.

And then there was Debrah Sniders recollection of the girl from the West Virginia campground, whose likeness appeared on the missing flyer on the post office wall. But with Luther in prison, apparently for the rest of his life, there has been no urgency to pursue the cases, though Freehling keeps them open and at hand. The task of comparing Luthers blood DNA to the blood on the first victims sweater remains undone.

In Denver, homicide detectives are stymied in the case of the woman found sexually assaulted and stabbed in her apartment, and left under an American flag in June 1994. They have only a single, gray curly hair discovered on the body, and the word of a former Jefferson County inmate who claims Luther told him details about the murder only the killer should have known.

In Summit County, Colorado, the DNA test done on the blood found on Bobby Jo Oberholtzers mitten came back negative for Luther and his girlfriend, Sue Potter, although her blood type initially matched. Was Luther accompanied by someone else that night? Or was he not involved at all in the murders of Bobby Jo and Annette Schnee?

Detectives Richard Eaton and Charlie McCormick keep Luther on the short list of suspects and follow each lead as it appears. They have tried to trace a report that an airline stewardess in California, who sold Luther the truck he was driving in 1982 when he assaulted Mary Brown, was later found beaten to death. But so far, it remains a rumor.

In the meantime, Eaton is looking more closely at another convicted killer from Idaho, who was known for shooting his victims in the back. However, there is no evidence that other killer was ever in the state of Colorado.

Initially, Eaton was troubled that Bobby Jo and Annette were executed with a gun, while Luther attacked his other known victims, Mary Brown and Bobby Jo Jones, with a hammer and his hands. But then Luther was convicted of shooting Cher Elder.

Breckenridge is no longer a stranger to murders and other violent crime. It keeps Eaton too busy to devote much time to the murders of Bobby Jo and Annette. But he still pulls over whenever he reaches the summit of Hoosier Pass and also pauses by the small white cross beside the stream if other matters take him to Alma. No one stops being a suspect until I got the guy who did it, he says.

Although theyre not his cases and he keeps a discreet distance, Richardson remains convinced that Oberholtzer and Schnee are Luthers work. He, like Freehling in Pennsylvania, points out that the murders, rare for the area back then, stopped when Luther was arrested.

Luther is an opportunistic killer, he says. Its only in television and the movies that a serial killer always kills the exact same way. Lutherd take a trashcan and shove it down your throat if thats what he had. On the night Cher died, he just happened to have a gun in the car because numb-nuts, the Eerebout brothers, had given it to him a couple days before.

There are other factors that continue to point the finger at Luther for the murders. He wasnt working the day of or after the murders, though he told investigators that he was. He drove a truck similar to the truck the hitchhiking Breckenridge couple insisted having seen Bobby Jo in. And by his own accounts, he had access to several guns.

Sue Potters photograph was similar enough to the composite sketch of the dark-haired woman seen with Annette Schnee the night she disappeared that a judge in the state where she currently lives believed there was grounds to have her forced to give blood samples at a hospital. The blood on Bobby Jos mitten didnt match. But does that exclude Sue Potter from having been with Luther and Annette at some point during that late afternoon?

Then there are Luthers comments, which still haunt Sheriff Joe Morales. Why do I do these things? What things? How many? When? Morales wonders. It wont be over for me until hes dead, says the sheriff.

Mary Brown insists, as she has for several years, that she recalls Luther pointing a gun at her back during the assault. Her imagination? Or is it only a coincidence that several of Luthers former jailmates, who Mary had no contact with, claim he said he intended to shoot her but feared waking the neighbors?

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