“Well, lie to him, if he asks you,” Richardson said and laughed. Debrah laughed, too.
Richardson decided to take another chance. “If I got you a contact visit, would you wear a wire and record it?” He grimaced as he spoke. He was no longer asking her to tape Babe, he was asking her to betray the man she still professed to love.
Snider surprised him. “I guess,” she said after a moment. “Sure. If he says something, it’s his own fault.”
In the months following his arrest, Luther had gone back and forth in his relationship with Debrah Snider. Sometimes, he was good Tom and sometimes he was bad Tom. He wrote that he missed her and then let someone named Pam use up all his visiting time.
Every letter, it seemed, there was a different Tom. There was old “one-track Tom,” focused on sex, and the Tom who had discovered Jesus and wished she would.
Most of the time, though, Luther mostly worried about himself. The guards, he wrote, were tampering with his food and spitting in his juice. He didn’t see how he could take the abuse and handle the court pressure. He advised her to save herself and let him go.
He still blamed the justice system that had “screwed” him for raping Mary Brown. He blamed his mother. “For love and closeness, I used to let a man molest me. Now she tells people things to make herself look like a saint. She’s so two-faced ... she wants me to write but not send the letters from jail so the postman doesn’t see.” He blamed Debrah. It was always someone else’s fault. Only rarely, did he take any of the blame for himself, calling himself stupid for getting into jails and assault incidents. He wanted to know if he hated himself that much that he could be such a “fuck-up and self-destructive?”
Luther said he was what he “detested in a human being.” He was sure Jones would have been more than willing to go to bed with him. It wasn’t sex; it was “assault and anger, pure meanness from a subconcious level” and it scared him. “I grew up being a victim, and now I’m an offender. I think I am insane. Sometimes I do things without even thinking about what I’m doing until I’m already doing it. It’s in the middle of what I’ve done that I come to reality and realize I’ve just ruined my whole life.”
Debrah felt like a swimmer caught in a tide, pulled this way and that, tiring as she tried to keep her head above water. Richardson had been wrong when he thought the break was complete. Some days, she loved Luther more than ever. Other days, she despised him—such as the day he accidently enclosed a love letter from Pam in some paperwork he sent to Debrah. She decided to go confront the other woman who, she discovered, was living with another man.
Pam just laughed at her. “Sure, I fucked him,” she said and let Debrah read the letters she had received from Luther to prove it. “Now get out!”
“You’re just a white trash whore,” Debrah yelled back.
The man living with Pam produced a gun and stuck it in Snider’s face. “Maybe I should just shoot you,” he said as Pam laughed behind him. “And if your boyfriend ever gets out, I’ll probably just shoot him, too.”
Debrah stood there, looking down the barrel. She wasn’t afraid and for a moment she considered doing something to provoke the man. What did it matter anymore? But she turned and walked out of the couple’s cabin, their laughter ringing in her ears.
Debrah Snider hand-delivered her letter, telling Luther she knew the truth about Pam. He read it and shrugged his shoulders. He admitted having sex with Pam. Regretted it, of course, but then again, it was the girl’s fault. She had seduced him.
“I would sooner sit in the electric chair than to admit that I did what I did and that bitch knew that,” he said. “She did that to break us up.”
That evening, she called Richardson’s office and left a message. He called back a few minutes later from his home.
“I had the opportunity to get shot the other night, but I decided to pass it up,” she said and told him about the incident with Pam and her boyfriend. “Tom says it’s your fault he can’t commit to me, that he has this thing in Colorado hanging over his head. I asked him, ‘Why don’t you give them what they want?’ But he said, ‘I can’t do that.’ ”
“Why?” Richardson asked.
“Well, if his only involvement was the fact that he helped dispose of Cher’s body, there would be some consequences to pay, but it wouldn’t be murder,” Snider said. “So, I’m beginning to think that the reason that he can’t possibly give you what you want is ’cause it’s murder.”
Luther also said he was thinking of “making up a story” about what happened in Colorado to “get it over with,” she said. “I don’t know that he would do that, but I don’t think he’d have to make up a story, I’m sure he’s got a good one.”
“What do you think would happen if he heard we found the body?” Richardson asked.
“I think he’d get pretty anxious,” she responded. “There were a couple of times when I was working in Colorado, and they found the body of a girl that was on the news, and he would get anxious about that.”
Debrah asked Richardson if he had been able to set up the contact visit. “I’m working on it,” he said. “You know how important you are to my case, I’m sure.”
They had to be careful, though. Luther’s request for a contact visit had been turned down because Debrah wasn’t his wife. Suddenly granting his request might look suspicious if they didn’t come up with a plausible excuse.
In mid-December, the jail authorities came up with one. They notified Luther that since he had been living with Debrah Snider in Colorado, she was in a sense his common-law wife. And besides, since she worked for another state’s prison system, it would be a professional courtesy.
On December 17, Debrah walked into the visiting room of the jail where Thomas Luther greeted her with a hug and a chaste kiss that he tried to prolong. But conscious of the microphone taped to her skin, she pulled away.
Luther’s appearance had changed a lot in the past month. He had been on a hunger strike about some petty incident at the jail since early November and lost a lot of weight. His hair was grayer and his skin back to its former prison-pallor pale.
They settled at a table in the visiting room furthest away from the guard. Richardson had told Debrah to avoid talking about his current case and concentrate on trying to get him to say something about the Cher Elder case. But Luther’s mind was on his latest problem.
He thought there was a good chance he would beat the rap. Bobby Jo Jones was on probation and not supposed to use drugs or leave the state. She had done both on that day, and there was no way she could testify against him without admitting that. “Skip talked to her,” he said. “He thinks she won’t testify.”
However, if he was convicted, he said, the judge was likely to give him as stiff a sentence as possible. “Richardson’s been on it pretty good. He’s using the opportunity now that I’m in jail to stir the pot and entice everybody to give up on me.”
According to Luther, Richardson was everywhere. He’d seen him in Chicago when he was visiting Skip. And near the construction site where he had worked in Pennsylvania. Now he was sure the detective had been talking to the judge in this case, “filling his head with lies.”
Snider saw this as a good opportunity to get back to the Cher Elder case. “I can’t understand why you don’t just give Richardson what the hell he wants to know,” she said taking one of his hands in both of hers. “If Byron was the person involved, he’s already in jail for half his life.”
Luther shook his head. “You don’t understand. It ain’t Byron that they want. It’s me they want.”
He was suspicious of Babe Rivinius. “I don’t want you women even talking,” he said. “You get together and you talk about stupid things, and you play cop.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Snider pleaded. “Do you know that the very worst they could give you is second degree murder. That’s fifteen years. You’re facing fifteen years.”
Luther looked at her with scorn. “What are you talking about the worst they could give me?”
“There’s no way—there’s no way they could say that it was premeditated murder.”
“I didn’t murder nobody.”
“I know.”
“Why should I be involved in any of this shit? I’m tellin’ ya, you don’t know how it works Deb,” he said, looking over at the guard. “Okay, second degree murder, do you know what second degree murder carries in the state of Colorado?”
“They can’t give you more than fifteen years.”
“Shit,” Luther snorted. “Forty-eight years. That’s for second degree murder.”
“How can they do that if we can give somebody life? That’s almost life.”
“Life is without the possibility of parole now,” Luther said. “If you get convicted for first degree murder in the State of Colorado, you’re gonna die in prison.
“Beside that, Deb, if I did know something, I wouldn’t cooperate with Richardson after the fucking way he did me. Fucking confiscated my car, pulled you in, tried to convince you that I’m a serial killer, gotta kill every three months, you know what I mean.
“They had a fuckin’ SWAT team put me down in the middle of the road and everybody with fuckin’ guns and shit pressed against my head, just so they can take me in and serve a fucking warrant on me for blood samples and shit.
“Like I say, fuck me helping that bastard. He can kiss my fucking ass.”
Luther wouldn’t talk anymore about the Elder case so they spent the rest of their time on small talk. “I miss you,” he said quietly when she got up to leave. They kissed and hugged again briefly. The microphone felt like a hot dagger against her skin. At least he hadn’t said anything incriminating.
“I miss you, too, Tom,” she said as the tears welled up in her eyes. “But you know, it was better when I could be angry about it. Now I just hurt and hurt and hurt. Sometimes loving you sucks, Tom.” She turned and fled down the hallway.
Snider returned to Colorado in time for Christmas. She remembered the letter she wrote to Luther the year before, asking him to promise to spend it with her. He had broken that promise, too.
The next day, Richardson showed up at her ranch in Fort Collins. “Let’s take a walk,” he said. “Show me your property.”
Debrah was surprised. The day was bitterly cold and windy, but the detective had no hat or gloves. It was only after they had walked a bit and she saw him scanning the ground that she realized he had an ulterior motive.
He’s looking for a grave,
she thought.
“I don’t mind working with you, Scott. But I—” she stammered and started over. “I can’t explain my insanity, but you need to understand the little bit of relationship that I have left with him is all that I have.”
“I hear ya,” Richardson replied though his eyes kept looking at the ground around him.
“I’ve talked to two different priests about this and they’ve told me that as long as I’m not lying to you, I’m not committing a sin,” she said. “But it feels really bad for me.”
“Well, I’ll stay outta religion,” Richardson said, apparently giving up his search and turning back toward Snider’s trailer, “but you can’t help but know you’re doing the right thing.”
“I know, religion-wise,” Debrah said. “But relationship-wise, I know I’m betraying him, and I do love him.”
“You’re wastin’ your life on that man, Deb,” he said.
They walked on in silence. The frosted grass crunched beneath their feet. Now it was Debrah’s eyes that focused on the ground. “You may be right,” she said at last as they reached his car. “But he’s the only person who ever took time to make me happy.”
Richardson nodded and patted her on the shoulder. There was a part of Debrah he was never going to be able to separate from Luther. He was just going to have accept that and hope that when it came time to choose between the truth and love, she would opt for the truth.
A few days earlier, he had received a Christmas card from Rhonda Edwards. Enclosed was a photograph of a little girl sitting in a chair, laughing at the camera. “This is Cher when she was three. She was a good kid,” Rhonda wrote. “All I want for Christmas is to find her.”
That’s all I want, too,
Richardson thought, pinning the card and photograph to his office wall below the photograph of Cher at 20 years old. But, he wondered, what Christmas will it be?
“See you this evening?” he asked Debrah. That night was her meeting with Babe Rivinius, in which she had agreed to allow them to record the conversation.
“Yeah,” Debrah said. “I’ll be there.”
A few hours later, they met again, this time at the Lakewood Police Department. Snider thought she could get Rivinius into her van to drink a couple of beers over pizza, which might loosen her tongue. So while police technicians wired her van, she had a chance to sit down with Richardson. She wanted to tell him about an incident she had recalled that might interest him.
Shortly after the press conference in July 1993, she said, Luther got a panicky call from Southy Healey. They drove to Longmont where they met up with Southy, who was in the company of a young woman and a hispanic man, at a McDonald’s. They talked only five minutes or so, and Healey had not seemed real happy when he drove off.
Richardson made a note that he needed to find Healey as soon as possible. Then the technicians came in and said the van was ready.
That evening, Debrah and Babe went out to her van to talk as planned. A few blocks away, Richardson and Sgt. Mike Rose, a specialist in covert operations, sat in a parking lot, listening in.
After a few minutes of small talk, Rivinius started in on Luther. She said she had powerful friends who would see to it that he never walked out of prison if he threatened Byron or one of her other boys.
“I would sell my soul to Satan to protect my children, and that’s the only thing I would do it for,” she said. “If he walks out of prison at my child’s expense, I’ll kill him myself. I’ll pull the trigger myself. All he has to do is keep his mouth off my children, just let life go as it is.”
“But he doesn’t do that,” Debrah said. “He said it’s Byron who better keep his mouth shut ’cause Byron can’t do a life sentence. Tom has maintained through this whole thing that his involvement is secondary to, you know, whatever happened. That he didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Cher.”