Morales left the trailer for the medical center to pick up and transport the prisoner to the jail in Breckenridge. As he waited at the center, he tried to locate Undersheriff Joe Antonio because, as he would later write in his report, “of other pending assault and homicide cases under investigation.” He was thinking of Oberholtzer and Schnee.
There seemed to him to be a lot of similarities, starting with the fact that Oberholtzer, Schnee, and this new girl were all about the same size and either hitchhiking or looking for a ride. From what he understood, the latest victim was lucky to be alive.
True, this girl had been beaten, raped, and choked, of which there was no evidence in the Oberholtzer case. Then again, Bobby Jo had escaped before she was tracked down and killed, and no one knew what had happened to Annette. And while it was also true that Mary Brown hadn’t been shot like Bobby Jo, Morales knew from his studies at the police academy that serial killers didn’t always use the same method from victim to victim. Some were opportunistic—whatever was handy—and clever. This girl had been attacked in a neighborhood where a shot might have attracted attention, not on some lonely mountain pass.
Morales couldn’t reach Antonio. So he left his concerns on the answering machine for the detective handling the Oberholtzer case.
About 7
A.M.
, Snyder turned Luther over to Morales, who placed the prisoner in his patrol car. “He’s a strange one. I asked him again if he’d submit voluntarily to tests,” the detective said with Luther out of earshot. “He said, ‘Yes, I want to. I’m really sorry about all this. How’s the girl?’ ”
Snyder shook his head. The suspect had also asked Dr. Bachman to kill him when the doctor was taking a blood sample by putting an air bubble in his vein.
A few minutes later, as Morales was heading to Breckenridge, he noticed his prisoner was suddenly growing restive and breathing hard. He looked into his rearview mirror, just as Luther blurted out, “Why don’t you just kill me? Just pull over and shoot me!” The young deputy kept driving, not knowing that many years later he would wish that he had obliged his prisoner’s request.
Luther was booked into the Summit County Jail on charges of first degree assault and first degree sexual assault—other charges, including attempted murder, would be added later. Soon Snyder showed up at the jail to see if Luther would talk. By now, the young man had calmed down and was smoking a cigarette. He agreed to cooperate but said he would only give an oral statement, nothing in writing.
“Mind if I take notes?” Snyder asked.
“No, go right ahead.”
Luther related how he saw Mary and the family outside the bus station and had asked if they needed a ride. Only the girl had accepted. As they drove to Silverthorne, he said, “She started flirting with me.”
“How do you mean?” the detective asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. You know, looks and little suggestive things she said. ”They drove around for about an hour before he pulled over, him having “picked up on the flirting.” Suddenly, and for no reason, the girl went nuts, shouting “No,” scratching at his eyes and kicking the windshield of his truck, breaking it.
“I lost it,” he said, “and hit her a couple of times to shut her up.” Then he’d ordered her to take off her clothes, after which he’d raped her vaginally and anally with the hammer “to humiliate her.”
“When she wouldn’t stop screaming, I hit her a couple more times ... but that just seemed to make it worse. All of a sudden my head cleared and I realized what was happening.... I told her to get her clothes on.... Then I said I was goin’ to take her somewhere so that I’d have a longer time to get away.”
Luther stamped out his cigarette and sighed. “I told Sue that I thought I had killed someone and that you guys would be comin’ for me.” He started to say something more but stopped and shook his head. “I’m ... I’m too, you know, upset and I don’t want to talk anymore.”
Snyder walked out of the interrogation room and saw Morales talking with another deputy, Derek Wooden, who was working the desk that morning. Morales motioned him over.
“When I brought him in, he said right in front of me and Derek here, ‘Why do I keep doing these things?’ ” Morales said. “Then he looked at us kinda funny and changed it real quick to, ‘Why did I do this thing?’ ”
Chapter Four
Spring 1982—Breckenridge, Colorado
A month after Tom Luther was arrested for rape and attempted murder, a detective walked into the Breckenridge pharmacy and asked for the clerk who had been the last to see Annette Schnee.
“Can I help you?” the young woman asked approaching the detective.
“Yeah. Does this look like the woman you saw with Annette?” the detective asked. He placed a photocopy of Sue Potter’s driver’s license photo on the counter and stood back.
The detective was following up on suggestions that Luther might be involved in the Oberholtzer and Schnee cases. Potter matched the clerk’s general description of the mystery woman—right height, right weight, pretty with dark, shoulder-length hair parted in the middle. But apparently the detective didn’t think much of the theory: the photocopy he brought was badly overexposed; the figure in the photograph was hardly more than a silhouette, except for the smile that stood out from the blackness like the Cheshire Cat’s.
The clerk bent over to look. She frowned. “Could be,” she said, “but it’s too dark to say for sure.”
The detective shrugged; maybe he’d come back with a better copy. It would have been easy, he even could have ordered the original photograph from the Department of Motor Vehicles. But he never returned.
It was typical of the detective work early on in the Oberholtzer and Schnee cases. The investigation was cursory, communication among investigators and between departments poor, and some vital information was ignored or misplaced. Would it have made a difference to future tragedies? No one can say for sure, but it couldn’t have made anything worse.
Sue Potter’s police revolver was confiscated and sent to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation for ballistics testing to determine if the bullet found in Bobby Jo’s body could have been fired from that gun. The results were negative, but the report was lost, a fact that would hinder later attempts to investigate the case.
Luther was himself interviewed briefly by a detective and denied any involvement in the murder of Bobby Jo or the disappearance of Annette. The detective left the jail with no useful information, but wrote in his report, “I got the distinct impression that he had a strong dislike for women.”
Another detective who contacted Summit County Taxi was told that Luther had been one of the company’s best drivers—prompt, reliable, and willing to work a lot of hours, rarely taking two days off in a row. If he sometimes acted like a know-it-all, the company president said, he was still well-liked by the other employees, including the women, who were “shocked” at the accusations against their former colleague. However, the man conceded after checking his records that Luther had not worked on January 6, the evening that Oberholtzer and Schnee disappeared, or on January 7.
However, the investigation centered on Bobby Jo’s husband, Jeff Oberholtzer. Police know that most murders are not committed by strangers, and there was information that pointed in Jeff’s direction.
Jeff had initially denied knowing Annette Schnee, but a witness had seen her in his truck in Breckenridge several months before her disappearance. After being shown a photograph of Annette, but without being told of the witness’s statement, Jeff Oberholtzer said that he hadn’t recognized the name but knew the face: he’d picked her up hitchhiking one day in Blue River and given her a ride to Frisco.
The witness’s information had drawn the police’s attention to Bobby Jo’s husband like crows to roadkill. Oberholtzer remained the prime suspect, but even there the police failed to thoroughly check out his story.
The mistakes went beyond the haphazard work of the detectives assigned to the cases. During Luther’s incarceration in the Summit County Jail, as well as several other jails to which he transferred as he awaited trial, he proved to be a talkative prisoner. In the coming months, a half-dozen inmates in different jails would come forward with information that Luther had implicated himself in a number of rapes and murders, including the Oberholtzer and Schnee cases.
On the afternoon of April 22, 1982, Dillon John Curtis, a 36-year-old small-time drug dealer, walked into the Summit County Sheriff’s Office. He had been Luther’s cellmate for about six weeks, he said, and had gained his trust. Now a free man, he was troubled.
“I got something to tell you about Luther and that girl what’s been missin.’ What’s her name? Schnee?” he said to a deputy.
Luther had told him that he’d been abused by his mother during childhood and had blamed the assault on Mary Brown on her. Curtis said he’d had a cousin who reminded him of Luther, a cousin who had started by raping and beating women, escalating the violence until he killed one.
“I don’t want that on my conscience, if he did these other girls,” Curtis explained. “And what he did to that girl with the hammer makes me sick.”
Luther had talked about an old, abandoned mine shaft near Frisco where a body could be hidden, Curtis said. The location was known only to Luther and his girlfriend, Sue Potter, who had discovered it while riding their horses.
Curtis said he knew more. If the police were interested, he would write them out a “ten-page” statement. But Curtis wasn’t asked to give that statement for more than ten years.
In May, an inmate named John Martin approached a deputy at the Summit County Jail and said he had information about Tom Luther. He would later claim his information regarded the murder of two women, one of whom Luther had left lying face down in a stream.
On the day before the Fourth of July 1982, an eleven-year-old boy was walking along a dead-end road that borders Sacramento Creek between the towns of Alma and Fairplay searching for a good place to fish. He was about two miles from where the creek intersects Highway 9.
Looking through a break in the brush that lined the creek, the boy saw the body of a woman ten feet below. She lay face down in the water. Annette Schnee had been found.
An autopsy revealed that Schnee had been shot once in the back with a hollowpoint bullet fired from a large caliber handgun—a .38 or .357. The bullet, which wasn’t recovered, passed through her body at an angle, suggesting she had escaped, or had been let go to run, and reached the creek just as the killer fired from the road above.
On the night she disappeared, the snow on the lonely Park County road would not have been plowed much past the point where her body was discovered. The chance of any other traffic coming on the scene during the murder, or for the rest of the winter for that matter, would have been very small; the killer had chosen the place well. But was it because he was familiar with the area or just lucky? investigators wondered.
Cold weather and cold water had helped preserve the body. Still, Annette Schnee had been in the creek for a long time and decomposition had progressed to the point that it was impossible to determine if she had been raped. However, it was apparent that Annette’s clothes had been removed and that she’d dressed again in a hurry. Her shirt was on inside out. One foot was wearing a long, blue wool sock; its mate was stuffed in the pocket of Annette’s hooded sweatshirt.
On the other foot was an orange, ankle-high wool sock. Its mate was back in the evidence locker of the Summit County Sheriff’s Office along with the other items gathered on top of Hoosier Pass, where Bobby Jo’s body had been found in January.
The suspected connection between the murders of the two women was futher strengthened in September when Schnee’s daypack was discovered by a hiker in the woods on the Breckenridge side of Hoosier Pass, a few hundred yards from the parking lot. But it was the orange socks that had confirmed what everyone familiar with the case had believed from the beginning: Bobby Jo and Annette had met the same monster on that cold January night.
For a first-time offender, Luther adapted to the role of hardened convict rather easily. In early April, an informant told Deputy Wooden that Luther was planning an escape.
Luther planned to start a fire or beat up another inmate, the informant said, to get moved to a segregation cell away from the prying eyes of guards and inmates. Then he was going to saw his way out through the wire mesh covering the window of his cell with a jeweler’s saw, or maybe pick the door lock with a large paper clip he had secreted. “Or he’s talkin’ about attacking one of the guards at lock down and running out of the building, where his girlfriend will have a car waiting.”
If that failed and he was later convicted of raping Mary Brown, Luther bragged that he had friends who would ambush his transport on the way to prison. “I don’t give a fuck if anybody gets killed because I will get out of here,” the informant quoted Luther.
Two days later, jail clerk Debbie Moe and sheriff’s office secretary Arlene Sharp overheard him talking to his girlfriend. Potter was saying that she couldn’t picture herself living in Mexico. “But if that’s where you think you’ll have to go, I’ll live there with you.
Moe wrote the conversation up in a report because of the escape rumor. Based on the report and the informant’s allegations, guards shook down Luther’s cell and frisked him. A paper clip “key” was discovered in his shoe, which to their surprise actually worked the lock. A decision was made to move Luther to a more secure jail in Arapahoe County just south of Denver.
For his trial, Luther was appointed a young public defender, James Nearen, Jr. The lawyer notified the court that he intended to present an insanity defense, contending that his client was mentally unable to form intent to rape Mary Brown or distinguish between right and wrong at the time of the offense. It would mean a jury trial just to determine the sanity issue.
On June 10, psychologist Marvin H. Firestone met with Luther at the Arapahoe County Jail at the request of Nearen. They started with Luther’s childhood.