Before Snider could ask, he explained that “Shari and Byron got in a fight. I was just trying to console her and volunteered to take her to Central City to see a friend.
“But I brought her back to Byron’s apartment,” he added quickly and then hinted that “Shari” had a drug habit. “She’s probably getting even with Byron by pretending to disappear.”
Debrah had heard enough of this Tom Luther story; she got out of bed and dressed. The whole telephone call had seemed staged for her benefit. “I thought you said you went with Byron and J.D.,” she said accusingly.
If Luther had been alone with a woman, sex was involved. She looked again at the injuries to his hands and wondered what the dirt under his fingernails had to do with the girl’s “disappearance.”
Chapter Nine
April 1, 1993—Lakewood, Colorado
The first call Scott Richardson placed on the Cher Elder case was to the Holiday Inn in nearby Golden, where she worked as a waitress. Cher picked up her paycheck that Friday, March 26, but hadn’t reported for work on Sunday or since, Cher’s supervisor told him.
“And that’s just not like her,” the man said, shaking his head. “If she wasn’t going to come in, or even be just a little late, she always called.”
Richardson asked the supervisor if he could speak to Carrie Schieffer, a friend and co-worker who had told Cher’s father, Earl, that she saw Cher at a bingo parlor on Sunday evening, March 28.
Schieffer repeated her information. Asked by Richardson if there was anything else she could think of, the girl hesitated, then said, “Cher’s friend, Karen Knott, saw her on Saturday night. She was with some older guy. Karen said that Cher had been fighting with her boyfriend.”
Suddenly, the voice that had nagged him into placing the first call grew louder. So it wasn’t just a missing person case anymore, it was a missing person who had been involved in a domestic dispute. Experience told him that was significant.
Still, there was no reason to assume foul play. She could have “run away” after the fight to get even with her boyfriend, Byron Eerebout. He planned to reach out to Byron soon, but first he had other bases to cover. He called the Denver business school where Elder was supposed to have begun classes on Monday, March 29. The college director checked his records: Cher Elder never attended any of her classes.
Another call to Cher’s mother, Rhonda Edwards, confirmed that Cher had not checked in there either. Rhonda told him about the dream she’d had that Sunday morning. “I wrote the time down on a piece of paper,” she said. “It was 3:05
A.M.
” She said she had lain awake all night waiting for a call. Two days later her daughter’s landlady in Golden phoned to say that Cher’s boss at the Holiday Inn and her school counselor were looking for her.
Rhonda said she then called her former husband, Earl, who had contacted the Lakewood police. He also began calling her friends, but Cher had disappeared without a trace.
The distraught mother told Richardson that she hadn’t seen her daughter since dropping her off in January after a trip to see Van’s family in Illinois during the Christmas holiday. She spoke to Cher on the telephone two weeks earlier. Her daughter had been her usual bubbly self. She hadn’t mentioned any problems, or even that she had a new boyfriend. She was just excited about starting college.
Richardson thanked Rhonda and hung up. He didn’t know what to think about the woman’s dream or the 3:05
A.M.
note. Usually, he didn’t put much stock in that sort of thing, and he had to concentrate on evidence he could use in court.
He tried calling Byron Eerebout but got only a message machine. The next day, April 2, Byron returned his calls. Eerebout was in the army, and was calling from Fitzsimmons Army Medical Center in Denver. He said he had last seen Cher on Sunday morning, about 7:30.
“I was looking out my apartment window and saw her get into her car and go,” he said. “We’d been arguing the day before.”
“Did she come into your apartment before leaving?”
“Nope.”
“Did you talk to her at all before she got in her car?”
“No, I never talked to her again.”
Although only 32 years old, and a self-described “wet behind the ears puppy” compared to some of the other Lakewood detectives, Scott Richardson already had a reputation for his innovative, sometimes off-the-wall methods. Not all of his colleagues appreciated it, either; some even thought he was arrogant and pushy. But good cops recognized that what others took for arrogant and pushy was confidence and determination.
Tenacity was certainly one of Richardson’s attributes as well. But where he truly excelled was in the art of interrogation. Several cases in particular had cemented his reputation for getting confessions out of his subjects.
One became known as “The Crying Tie Episode.” A young Ukrainian immigrant was suspected of killing his aunt. She had not been seen by her neighbors for several days, but the police had no body and no evidence.
Richardson marched into the interrogation room and announced through an interpreter, “You got to understand. I know
everything,
but you got to tell me the truth.” The young man began crying but wouldn’t talk.
Richardson scooted his chair up close, reached out to touch the suspect’s arm like an understanding brother, and then removed his own tie and handed it to the young man to wipe his tears and blow his nose. Overcome by the gesture, the young man blurted out the whole story of how he had stabbed his aunt over an argument about long-distance telephone bills and then buried her.
Another case involved a double gangland stabbing in a mall parking lot that left one boy dead with sixteen wounds and another in critical condition at a local hospital with six. The chief suspect was the leader of a Latino gang who went by the nickname of Kango.
Richardson had tried every trick he knew to get the boy talking. But Kango, a tough, stocky youth, would have none of it. He just glared at the detective and stuck to his story.
Exasperated, Richardson tried a new ploy. “Ever seen the video camera on top of the building out there?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Kango replied suspiciously.
Gotcha,
Richardson thought. There was no video camera, but he kept his face blank as he continued. “Well, not only do we have a videotape of what happened that night, but a security guard was watching the whole thing.”
Richardson stole a look at Kango, who shrugged. The detective went on. “Now in a few minutes, I’m gonna go watch that tape, and if you don’t tell me the truth now, it’s gonna be tough to get a jury to believe that you didn’t mean for it to happen and that you’re remorseful.” To the detective’s disappointment, Kango still did not respond.
Richardson left the room desperate. This gang-banger was one tough nut, and without a confession they weren’t going to be able to make a case. Then he spotted a blank videotape that was lying on a desk outside the interrogation room. He grabbed the tape, placed a white sticker on its side, and wrote “MALL HOMICIDE” in large dark letters.
He waited a few more minutes, then he went back to the interrogation room where Kango sat impassively. Slamming the blank video down on the table, Richardson snarled, “You lied to me. I just watched that tape... and saw you stab those two boys.”
Kango stared at the tape, shaken by the detective’s sudden personality change. Richardson could hardly keep the smile off his face as the boy blurted out his confession.
Only later did Kango learn he had been tricked by a blank tape. His defense lawyers, of course, cried to high heaven about the rights of their client. After Kango was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, his lawyers appealed but lost.
Fuss all you want,
Richardson thought at the trial,
I’ll be damned if I’m going to place the rights of that asshole over those boys he stabbed.
Getting to the truth when it came to solving the murder of another human being was everything to Richardson.
There was no denying that some cases were worse than others. Although no one deserved to be murdered, some victims seemed to be asking for it. They associated with the wrong people, were into criminal activities themselves, or hung out in dangerous places. Then there were the “true victims,” especially kids, who were in the wrong place at the wrong time through no fault of their own.
The sympathy Richardson felt for true victims had escalated a hundredfold after Sabrina gave birth in 1990 to twin boys, Brent and Brandon. He knew how much he loved his family and couldn’t help but put himself into the shoes of a victim’s loved ones. It made solving these homicides a personal thing with him.
A couple days after he talked to Byron Eerebout, Richardson drove to the home of the elderly woman from whom Cher had rented a bedroom. The room was tidy and clean. There was nothing to indicate drug use—no marijuana butts in an ashtray, no hypodermic needles in the trash can, no mirrors smeared with cocaine residue. But what struck him was the stack of neatly arranged school books and supplies on the nightstand next to Cher’s bed. It told him that this was the room of a young woman ready to embark on a new life, a life full of promise, not a runaway.
He had contacted as many of Cher’s friends and family as he could locate and had yet to find one who had seen her using drugs or described her as being particularly wild. She enjoyed going to bars with her friends, but there was nothing to indicate a drinking problem, such as frequent absences from work or unpredictable behavior.
On the evening of April 12, Richardson issued a press release. He disliked involving the media and this was sure to generate a flood of red herrings and false leads. But up to now, all he had was a bunch of dead ends. The boyfriend said Cher left his apartment Sunday morning; her co-worker said she had seen her at the bingo parlor Sunday evening, but she hadn’t shown up for work. There was nothing in between or since. It just didn’t smell right.
The bare bones release gave Cher’s physical description and that of her car. It mentioned that she had been seen at a bingo parlor on Sunday, but not since. Anyone with information was asked to call him.
The office was soon flooded with telephone calls. A woman reported seeing a girl fitting Cher’s description crying in a car being driven by a fortyish man wearing a bulky coat. Another woman called to say her daughter had disappeared along with her car four years earlier and had never been heard from since; she was concerned about what Cher’s family was going through and offered her assistance if needed. Yet another woman claimed to have seen someone resembling Cher being forced into a car in Grand Junction... except the other alleged victim was black.
The Lakewood office also received a teletype message through the National Crime Information Computer that the body of a woman matching the generic description of Cher—5’3”, 130 pounds, dark brown hair—had been found floating in a Texas river. Richardson called, but the body had already been identified as a local woman.
In the meantime, on April 14, Richardson obtained the tape of the dispatch officer’s telephone call to Byron Eerebout. The 23-year-old told the officer that he had been calling everywhere, including all the local hospitals in an attempt to help Cher’s family locate her.
“I understand you were with her Saturday night?” the officer inquired.
“I was with her up to... nine o‘clock,” Byron replied. “Well, actually, ten o’clock on Saturday night. Before she left and she went to Central City.”
“Do you know who she went up there with?”
“Uh, Tom.”
“Tom?”
“Yeah. It’s my brother. Basically. His real name’s Jerald Edward Eerebout II.... And I guess she was up there with some older guy... so I’m not sure if my brother even went up there. I was gone.”
“How did you find out she was there with an older guy?” the officer asked.
“Uh, from Lauren Councilman. I saw Cher Sunday morning when she came and picked up her car. And then one of her friends said she saw her at the bingo place, uh, Sunday night.”
Richardson listened to the tape. Who was this older guy? He was immediately concerned that after her fight with Byron, Cher had gone to Central City and met this mystery man.
Central City was an old mining town crammed into a narrow granite canyon. It was famous for its old opera hall, built by miners during the gold rush to bring culture and, hopefully, women of the marrying sort to the location.
Its glory days were long past and it more closely resembled a ghost town when Colorado voters approved legislation in 1991 to legalize casino gambling in the town. Seemingly overnight, the town went from boarded-up businesses and dilapidated clapboard houses occupied by a few hardy souls to Vegas-style casinos and a main street filled with tourists and their money. Gamblers came from all over the state and country.
Richardson feared that Cher’s mystery man could have flown in from some far-off city, stuck around long enough to gamble and maybe kill Cher, and then gone home. If so, the man might be impossible to trace.
The detective was sure the man had something to do with her disappearance. But the more he thought about it, the more he couldn’t see Cher taking up with some stranger. And Eerebout hadn’t mentioned anything about her showing up at his apartment on Sunday morning with a date.
There was something else bothering him about the taped conversation: why had Eerebout told the dispatch officer that his brother, J.D. Eerebout, went by the name “Tom”? Could it have been a slip?
No matter which way he turned this one, he kept coming back to Eerebout. He had no place left to go with the case but back to Byron’s apartment, where he and Heylin arrived on April 16.
The detectives gave each other a knowing glance when they walked in through the open apartment door and saw Eerebout painting the walls. There was no furniture in the apartment and it was evident that the rug had just been steam-cleaned.
“My lease expired, and I’m moving out,” he explained. “If I want my deposit back, I have to paint and clean the carpets.”