Monster (15 page)

Luther had few visitors. His family never visited. Instead, he “adopted” families and friends of other convicts. In particular, he got to know Skip Eerebout’s boys—Byron, J.D., and Tristan—watching them grow up over the years as they visited their father, and Skip’s wife, Babe.

Friends sent him the occasional card or letter. A couple of women who had been given his name by mutual acquaintances also wrote, but they all soon dropped out of his life for one reason or another.

One such woman was Bernadette Florea, who had been introduced to him by friends after his arrest in 1982. A born-again Christian, Bernadette had taken it upon herself to minister to Luther in an effort to bring faith into his life. She visited him in the various jails to which he was assigned as he awaited his trial. Then she kept up a telephone and letter correspondence with him after he was sent to Canon City until 1984, when she noticed something that frightened her greatly.

Luther hadn’t wanted to talk a great deal about the rape of Mary Brown whenever Bernadette pushed him to confess his sins and purge his conscience. But he did tell her that he beat the girl because she physically resembled his mother.

“I hate my mom,” he had shrugged. “And the girl reminded me of her.”

The conversation had disturbed Bernadette for more than his apparent lack of remorse. Petite with dark, shoulder-length hair parted in the middle, Bernadette realized with a chill that she, too, looked like Luther’s mother when she was young. Afraid to just cut off the relationship—he would, after all, get out someday—she began distancing herself from Luther and eventually stopped responding to his letters.

Time after time, Luther’s requests to have his conviction overturned or his sentence shortened had been turned down. His complaints that “my rights were violated” fell on deaf ears. But the bitterest pill of all for Luther came in late 1988, when he approached his mandatory parole date in 1989.

Luther went to the parole board hearing fully expecting to be told a date in the not-too-distant future when he would be released. He was angry. He had been given a year off the fifteen-year sentence in 1985, but otherwise he’d been made to do every minute of seven years with no early parole. Every time he’d come before the board Mary Brown and the deputy from Summit County, Joe Morales, had been there to recount all the gory details. Gloria Greene’s letter in his file followed him to each hearing, too. Together they slammed the door on his release.

Now, believing the parole board would have no choice but to let him out, he swaggered into the room with a smirk on his face. He’d get his date and tell these bastards what he really thought of them. “Remember my number,” he told the parole board director. “When this is over, you’re going to want to know it.” But he was in for a shock.

The parole board knew that Luther and Robert Thiret, who had raped a 3-year-old girl and then dropped her down an outhouse toilet in the mountains and left her for dead in 1983, were both coming up for mandatory parole.

Many years before, overcrowding in the state’s prisons had caused the Colorado legislature to pass a law giving mandatory parole to any felon who had completed half his sentence. Now, however, the parole board was determined to keep Luther and Thiret, locked up as long as possible.

A weak case due to bad police work had forced the district attorney in Thiret’s case to settle for a ten-year sentence. Neither man had ever shown any real remorse about their crimes or made much of an attempt to get help. The board believed they would remain dangerous when released and asked its lawyers to find a way to keep them in prison.

The answer was found ten hours before Luther was due before the board. There was a loophole in the statutes governing parole board decisions that allowed the board to keep sex offenders beyond their parole dates—if they were deemed to still be a risk. The board’s attorneys felt their statutes took precedence over the mandatory parole legislation (an opinion later upheld by the state Supreme Court).

So when Luther swaggered into the board hearing room, his parole was denied and he was told that they could keep him for another six years. Luther “went off” on the board, swearing that he would someday get out and then he would rape and kill their wives and children.

Luther had another reason to hate. The loophole in the law was all the proof he needed that he was being singled out and persecuted.

Thomas Luther apologized to Debrah. It was time, he said, to explain why he hated the police. They’d killed his children.

He’d met their mother in 1969, when he was in the Army and stationed at Fort Carson, south of Colorado Springs. Soon she was pregnant. His son was born when he was in Vietnam on August 25, 1970. A daughter was born March 11, 1973. They never married because they couldn’t get along. But being with his kids and spending time with them was what kept him coming back to Colorado.

Shortly before he was sent to prison, he bought his son a motorcycle. A few years later his children were both on it when it was struck by an officer who was chasing a 16-year-old boy through a residential area in a car.

“My ex let them buy her with $170,000,” he wrote. “Plus they charged the boy that the cops were running after with two counts of vehicular homicide. They sure didn’t take responsibility for their actions.”

To make matters worse, he said, prison officials hadn’t notified him of the deaths for ten days. Then they took him to “the hole,” stripped him, and only then told him the awful news.

“They kept me like that for five days,” he wrote. “I cried for days and needed to be held and wanted so much to be able to hold my babies just one more time.”

Maybe she could now understand where his anger came from, he said.

It was all, of course, a pack of lies. He’d never had any children, been married, or in the military, much less Vietnam. But Debrah, who also believed that he was two years older than her rather than five years younger, bought it.

When she read about the supposed death of his children, Debrah had not yet learned to recognize what she would later think of as harmless “Tom Luther stories”. In fact, she thought the tragic account explained a lot about the man she was falling in love with. His anger. His vulnerability. His toughness. Still, she said as her own tears fell for the “murdered” children on the letter she wrote back, he was going to have to learn to control his anger if they were ever going to have a future together.

Luther agreed. It had taken prison and losing everything he had worked for, especially the kids, but he’d learned his lesson. That’s why he’d forgiven his mother, whom he hadn’t talked to in ten years, and told her he loved her.

Throughout the rest of 1991, and indeed the years beyond, he continued to heap more lies onto their relationship. He said he was a peerless hunter and fisherman with kills and trophies still on the record books. He and his dad had hunted mountain lions for the bounty and raised world-champion hunting dogs. One time, during his buffalo-raising days, he had to jump into a pen to distract an enraged bull “that was goring and stomping a guy.” Only through his daring was his old girlfriend ”Sue“ and the other man’s wife able to carry the man to safety.

Luther was always the hero of his stories, even those taking place in the penitentiary, such as the time he stopped prison hitmen from killing a young inmate over a drug deal: “They’ll have to come through me first.” In another, he wouldn’t allow older inmates to rape a newcomer. And in one letter, he announced that he had been thrown in the hole because he dared stand up to the guards who were hurting his young friend, “Southy” Healey. It was hard, he said, but a price he was willing to pay for justice.

The lies piled up until he couldn’t remember what he had told her and when. Here and there, Debrah would note one of the little inconsistencies. But it took much longer to uncover the big fibs; it was beyond her comprehension that someone would lie about the death of “his” children.

As she began to catch on that Tom wasn’t always truthful with her, it didn’t change how she felt about him. Men lied. It’s just the way they were. Neither of them realized at the time that “Tom Luther stories” would ultimately be his downfall.

The tall tales she could accept. But she continued to be troubled about his anger. Luther blamed television and the media.

“Violence is so common that some people fantasize what it would be like to just kill someone to take out all the frustration and anger on them like the movie stars do,” he wrote.

Debrah called him on it. “I know that after nine years prison life has got to have affected you,” she responded, “but I had hoped you would be wanting to start changing the way it has affected you and start thinking in ways that are more aligned with functioning in society rather than a prison population.

“I’m sorry for the lecture ... but I don’t like ‘convict Tom.’ I like and want to have a relationship with Tom who gets lonely and needs to be held and hugged, the Tom who likes hounds, horses, and hiking.... When I get letters from the other Tom, it just sounds like one of the many convicts bitching about an unjust system ... they’re all innocent men kept there by a corrupt justice system.”

Luther waited two weeks to respond. In part to punish and part because he had been moved to Centennial Correctional Facility, a higher security prison. Then he laid a guilt trip on her.

“I’m sorry that’s how you feel,” he wrote on November 3, 1990. “I feel that you are a little unfair.”

He reminded her that, unlike some inmates, he hadn’t used her to bring in dope. He had never asked her for money. “I needed love and friendship from someone with whom I could share intimacy. My impulse was to write and tell you if that’s how you feel to screw yourself.”

In the six months he had known her, he’d written fifteen times; they’d talked by telephone and she’d visited him in the prison at least once a week. She was dependent on him for her happiness. But he decided they better cool the relationship, at least for a time.

Debrah was devastated.

Luther did not write to her again until February 1991. And only after he had learned that she had driven to Canon City, hoping that he hadn’t taken her off his visitors list and she would get a chance to talk to him. She was disappointed and had returned home more depressed than any time since she first met him.

Dennis was estranged. Her eldest son, Chance, had left home to join the service. Her other son, John, hardly paid any attention to her and was getting into minor scrapes with the law. She continued to write to Luther. But as weeks went by with no response, she wondered once more if anyone would even notice if she died.

When at last he wrote, her hands trembled as she opened the envelope with the Department of Corrections return address. He had written “Happy Valentine’s Day” on the envelope and drawn his trademark—a smiling cartoon face topped with a halo. She prayed that he had forgiven her again.

Not quite. He told her that she was a very difficult person to get along with, and not to write to him when she was tired and cranky. He professed to be very sensitive and his feelings got hurt easily.

Still, he was willing to give her another chance. Then he changed the subject. He was sorry to hear that Chance had joined the service and hoped he would not end up in the Gulf War, like his friend Skip’s son, Byron Eerebout.

He wrote her lies about living in Saudi Arabia and wanting to move to Canada or Mexico when he got out.

Luther ended by telling Debrah he cared about her and she could resume writing, although he wasn’t ready to see her again.

In fact, they did not see each other again until April. Then it was as if nothing had ever come between them. His letters were more romantic than ever.

“There is no such thing as a knight in shining armor,” he wrote. “I would, however, love to be yours, even for a day. I want to take you in my arms and carry you to a nice, quite [sic] cabin in the mountains. There we can practice being close and touching ... just for starters.”

As the weeks passed, his letters, which he now signed “Love, Tom,” grew more sexually oriented. He wanted to take showers with her. He hoped he could turn her on enough for her to be the sexual aggressor. “In fact, I hope you can become an animal in the threshold of the intense passion we are going to share one day,” he wrote, “with multiple emotional orgasms before we even make love.”

Whenever his letters stepped over the line, she would write and tell him that she was uncomfortable with his fantasies. He would then apologize, assure her that he was also interested in her as a friend and looked forward to quiet hours spent just cuddling. A few paragraphs later, he’d be right back on the sex track.

However, Luther wasn’t limited to sexual fantasies. He also was going to make the state pay, he wrote, for the additional years they’d tacked onto his sentence as soon as he won a lawsuit he had just filed. He figured two and a half years’ back wages would be enough to buy that ranch in Vermont.

“I have a destiny in this life.... I believe you are going to be part of my destiny,” he wrote. It won’t always be easy, “never in your life will you meet another person close to me in goodness and badness.”