Monster (12 page)

Luther’s voice grew hard and cruel as he described his effort to gain power and control over his victim. Two years had passed, but it was as if he could still see his frightened quarry cowering beneath him. The thrill of the hunt was in his eyes.

Perhaps realizing that he was revealing more about himself than he intended, Luther made an effort to calm himself, sitting back down in his seat as he knit his fingers together and placed his hands on his lap. He smiled and shrugged as he added, “And, uh, it just got totally out of hand.”

Poor girl,
Macdonald thought. The allusion to predator and prey was an apt one. It must have been terrifying. Rape was about anger and power, not just sex, although it was the mistake of the politically correct to try to remove sex from the equation.

The girl was fortunate to survive. He had run into plenty of cases in which the original intention had been to rape but the woman ended up beaten or stabbed to death before her clothing was even removed. Sometimes orgasm occurred while killing. Then, like any normal man who had just had sex, the killer’s drive to perform the actual act was greatly diminished and he would leave. In Macdonald’s experience, many detectives had made the mistake of ruling out sex as a motive just because the victim had not been raped or disrobed.

Luther said he was angry when he pulled his truck to the side of the road, but he wasn’t thinking about sex. “She assumed I was going to tell her to take her clothes off.... This is what she says I said, but it’s not what happened.”

The girl thought she had to defend herself, he said, and tried to scratch out his eyes. “I punched her. Mostly it was a slap, to try to calm her down. She kicked the windshield and broke it ... that really made me angry and I started to hit her harder.

“She’s really neurotic at this time, and I’m gettin’ madder. I pinned her on the floor and told her, ‘I don’t want to do nothin’, and I don’t want to hurt you. Calm down and I’ll take you where you want to go.’ ”

The girl had agreed, Luther said, but she found the hammer on the floor of the truck and struck him in the head.

“It just made me mad.... She had every opportunity in the world, I felt, to calm down. I pinned her and rained punches that cut her above her eye and the side of her face puffed up.”

As Luther spoke, his eyes narrowed into slits. His voice was tight and mean. “I backed off and said, ‘Go ahead, go ahead and hit me again with that hammer.’ I was daring her to hit me. ‘Hit me and when you do I’m gonna shove it right up your ass.’

“I guess she figured it was her only shot because she tried. I punched her and tried to shove it up her anus.”

As he recounted his version of the events of the night, Luther made no mention of how the attack had somehow gone from a slap and immediate scuffle to a now nude woman he was trying to rape anally. He claimed that he was unable to rape his victim with the hammer handle. “Thank God,” he added for the detectives’ benefit.

“You see, the thing got more demented. At this point, there was a lot of blood on her head and blood all over the side window,” he continued. “I had gotten that rush out of me. But what really brought me to was this girl beggin’ me to let her suck on my penis.”

Luther looked up. “I was trying to reason with it. ‘Is this really happening? I must be sick, really sick.’

“I was thinking about committing suicide at that point. I was going to drive her to a police station and give myself up. She thought I was going to kill her. I stopped. They were going to catch me anyway, so I just let her go.”

Suddenly changing subjects, Luther angrily denounced the prosecution witnesses, such as Dr. Bachman, for “exaggerating” his victim’s injuries. “Essentially, she had a torn ligament in her neck and a broken finger.”

The detectives asked about his arrest by Detective Snyder. “Well, he acted like he wanted to be friends,” Luther replied.

“The other guys . . . they were doing a good cop, bad cop routine on me.... The guy who took me to the jail told me, ‘I should take those fuckin’ handcuffs off and kick you out on the road and watch you run so I can shoot you.’

“He said, ‘When you asked that doctor to put a bubble in your arm, I’d have done it.’

“I was in no shape to hear all this. I was devastated by the whole thing.” He denied confessing; Detective Snyder took notes “that only he could read” and got the story wrong.

“When did you know you were in trouble?” a detective asked.

“About a week after I got locked up,” Luther responded. “I was in a deep depression. I was wandering around that place like a lost puppy who’d been hit by a car and was barely conscious. The cops would talk in front of inmates and lie about what I done.

“The press got into it big-time. They shish-kebabed me. I was front page news for a month every time I went to court. It was all totally inaccurate. The way the police and the press went about it made me bitter. The press sensationalized as much as they could; they called me the ‘hammer handle rapist.’ ”

Luther felt greatly wronged about other accusations as well. “There was these two young ladies who were murdered. They’d been beaten and shot and, I guess, sexually assaulted.

“Instead of checking it out and keeping it quiet, the police told the newspapers I was a damn suspect in those crimes. There was a lynch mob outside the jail; they had to move me to Arapahoe County Jail.”

Luther was lying. Although there was a lot of newspaper coverage of his crime against Mary Brown and, separately, of the Oberholtzer and Schnee cases, the police never connected the two for the newspapers. And there was no lynch mob outside the jail; he was moved because he was an escape risk. But the detectives and Macdonald knew nothing of this.

The detectives let him whine for several minutes about all the injustices that had been done him. Then they had enough. What, one detective asked, should be done with someone who did what he had done?

“Well, the first thing would be to get them extensively evaluated psychologically, so he could learn about his problem and there would be some way to pursue help for him,” Luther answered.

“Do you think fifteen years was fair for what you did?”

Luther thought about the question. “It was fair,” he said, but then amended his answer. “It was fair for someone who did not want to get help and would remain a high risk.”

“Are you a risk?” a detective asked. “If you could get out of here today, would you go or stay for help?”

Luther quickly answered, “Go. I’ve learned to handle my anger. If I was in the same situation and saw the same things happening, I’d go seek help.”

Why didn’t he like the police? another detective asked.

“They lied,” he said, his lips again tight. “They ridiculed me to no end and haunted and heckled me damn near every day”

In the months following his arrest, he confessed, he got so bitter that he came up with an extravagant plan for revenge. He fantasized about going to Peru when he got out of prison to bring back “scads” of cocaine to sell in order to raise “a small army.”

“Then I’d go devastate that entire area and everybody in it. I was gonna blow up Dillon Dam and wipe the place out.” He had gone so far as to draw up little maps noting gas lines and power plants that he had seen as he was driven back and forth from the Summit County Courthouse to other jails.

“You still want to?” a detective asked.

Luther laughed, “Nah. I can’t trip like that no more. What the police did wasn’t right. But two wrongs don’t make a right. I still have little ‘stinges’ [sic] of anger, but I can’t grow personally if I keep trippin’ on how to blow up Summit County.”

“Anything you want to add, Tom? For policemen?”

“Yeah, go find the real criminals,” he said, “and do what you have to do to them instead of some guy who’s a first-time offender and has got a whole bunch of problems. Everybody arrested for a violent crime doesn’t need to go to jail—that’s what the public wants, but you have to look and see what the ‘outcast’ [sic] of that is going to be.”

Macdonald and the detectives left the prison with their videotape not knowing what role it would play in a future investigation.

There wasn’t enough time to do a psychological evaluation of the young “lion” man and that wasn’t why they had come. However, Luther’s comments about wanting to bomb Summit County had interested Macdonald. Bombs and fire-setting, even if they were just fantasies, he placed in the same category. He wondered if there was any childhood history of bed-wetting, cruelty to animals, or sexual abuse.

Thomas Luther fit many of the other qualifications for a potential serial sex offender, maybe a killer. The violence between his mother and father. The physical abuse and lack of affection he had suffered at the hands of his mother. Luther had continued the cycle of violence, at the very least toward the former girlfriend he hit and the girl he raped.

There were certainly elements of sadism in his attack on the Summit County victim. The hammer, the choking, the taunting, and the savagery of the beating, even in what was Luther’s own obviously toned-down version. That part about the girl screaming like his mother ... he must have enjoyed that. After all, he was the lion and weren’t cats famous for tormenting their prey before the kill?

Luther intimated that he had “blacked out,” only “coming to” with his hands around the girl’s throat. Many serial killers reported periods of having lost conscious will during their attacks.

Even the thoughts of suicide afterward weren’t uncommon; these men didn’t totally lack consciences, theirs simply didn’t work very well. Most serial killers he had interviewed said they had felt remorse immediately after their attacks. They often hoped that the latest killing would satiate whatever drove them, only to have the bloodlust return.

Many even left clues or made stupid mistakes, consciously or unconsciously, like throwing their bloody clothes out a car window, as if trying to get caught. They lied to protect themselves, but often they didn’t bother to keep their stories straight and would be caught in traps of their own making. It was as if they wanted someone to stop them from doing what they were powerless to stop themselves.

Luther said he had pointed out the street he lived on as he drove the girl to look for her friends. He said it was to put her at ease. But was he also aware—perhaps in the dark recesses of his mind where he didn’t want to look—of what he might do and laying the groundwork to get caught? Only a lengthy evaluation could determine that, if it was even possible.

If Luther was a serial rapist, or a serial killer, seven years or a hundred years in prison wasn’t going to change him. Young women are safe from lions only so long as the lions are kept in cages. But what would happen when this lion was free to hunt again?

Chapter Six

Summer 1962—Belen, New Mexico

The jackrabbit broke from cover and bolted across the alkali flats of the desert outside of Belen, New Mexico, with two mongrel dogs yipping in hot pursuit. Ten-year-old Debrah Snider, her curly brown hair gathered in two pigtails, ran after the mutts, across the sand, and down into an arroyo where the rabbit gave them all the slip. It didn’t matter; there would soon be a lizard, or maybe a muskrat over by the pond, to occupy a lonely little girl and her dogs.

Someday Belen would be absorbed by the city of Albuquerque, but in 1962, it was still an autonomous village—not much more than a feed store, a greasy spoon, and two service stations, surrounded by ranch lands and patches of desert that nobody wanted. Barren mountains rose to the east and dust devils whirled across the dry land like the restless spirits of the Indians who once lived there.

Debrah was a skinny tomboy in patched jeans who spoke with that peculiar New Mexico accent that was part Old Mexico and part Texas. She didn’t have many friends, preferring the company of her dogs and the family horses, as well as the local wildlife, to that of humans. Animals could be trusted. Their behavior was predictable—even the scorpion was just following its own nature when it stung.

Following the jackrabbit chase, the mutts waited to move on again with their tongues lolling out of their mouths. But Debrah sat down with her back against the side of the arroyo, a Spanish word for the eroded gullies that criss-crossed the land, created by the sudden thunderstorms and flash floods of summer.

Debrah watched the clouds float across the pale blue sky and tried to imagine different figures in them. Knights. Dragons. The sorts of things little girls dream of, especially little girls for whom real life is less than a fairy tale.

The dogs began to fret, but on this day she was in no hurry to go anywhere. She was “running away from home” ... again, hoping that this time someone would actually miss her and come looking. It hadn’t worked yet.

Although born into a large family, her parents weren’t affectionate with their children. They didn’t believe in it. Her father, an alcoholic, sneeringly referred to young boys who clung to their mothers as “mama’s boys.” Public displays of affection between parents and their children he labeled “phony.” And it never seemed to occur to him that Debrah might need the occasional hug or pat on the back.

The fact of the matter was that her dad didn’t think much of females. Those who wore short skirts or showed a little too much cleavage were whores; the rest he placed in a category with Mexicans, who, he said, “are only slightly higher on the ladder than niggers.” Her dad’s critiques ringing in her ears, Debrah was uncomfortable wearing dresses and refused anything except jeans.

Her father was a big man, bigger still in his cowboy boots and the Stetson hat he always wore as the manager of the Belen feed store. If he’d had any hair left, it would have been blond and his eyes were blue. He could be a real charmer in a rough, cowboy way, if he wanted to, usually when he was trying to put some less-than-square business deal over on a customer.

When the customer left, so did the charm, and Debrah often heard him brag to his sons or the few friends that could abide him about how he’d “put one over” on some unsuspecting fool. She wondered how those friends would feel if they knew that he also laughed at them behind their backs.