Free Tim Masters Because

Unsung Hero: Linda Wheeler Holloway

2010-09-24T07:09:00.000-07:00

(A while back, the local newspaper asked for reader submission on the subject of Unsung Heroes. This is what I sent in.
---Pat Hartman)

It was a long and difficult struggle to get wrongfully convicted Tim Masters out of prison. The victory was due to the combined efforts of many people, none more dedicated than Linda Wheeler-Holloway. Back in the early 1990s, as a member of the Fort Collins Police Department, Linda inherited the Peggy Hettrick homicide case and re-opened it as lead investigator. By declining to carry out an arrest warrant against Masters, she reaped the disapproval of supervisors and colleagues. With a "Masters or nobody" attitude, they refused to let her make a fresh start that would include other suspects. Consequently, the case was shelved for the second time.

Masters was arrested in 1998. Linda, retired by then from FCPD and working for the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, again expressed her doubts to the prosecutors as they prepared for trial, but to no avail. After the conviction, she worked tirelessly and against great opposition to right
the wrong, always keeping in mind that the real murderer of Peggy Hettrick is still at large and unpunished. As an activist in the "Free Tim Masters" cause, she repeatedly risked her career and reputation.

Over the years and through many discouraging setbacks, she persisted, alienating the local law enforcement community of which she had been a respected member, losing friends, even setting aside personal needs and family concerns in order to fight the battle. It was Linda who found the Dutch scientists of the Independent Forensic Services and introduced them to Masters' post-conviction defense team. As we know, the absence of Masters' DNA on the victim's clothing, and the presence of someone else's, ultimately won his freedom.

Linda Wheeler-Holloway is a true hero, and a shining example not only for all women, but for all law enforcement professionals.

Looking Back on Broderick

2010-09-05T00:02:00.000-07:00

Looking Back on Broderick
by Pat Hartman

Here's a 1999 article from the Fort Collins Coloradoan, titled "Fort Collins investigator's diligence helped solve 1987 case." Jenn Farrell reports on the awards given by the Fort Collins Police Department, to Jim Broderick, Terry Gilmore, and Jolene Blair. The awards are for putting Tim Masters away.

Of course, the glory was somewhat dimmed, at award time, because Tim Masters, convicted four months before, was definitely filing an appeal. The prosecutors were worried that the conviction might not hold. The story ended with the line, "And if the case goes back to square one, that's where prosecutors and Broderick will pick it up."

Pretty funny, in a grotesque kind of way. The whole trouble with the case was that Broderick never was willing to start at Square One. He decided immediately that Tim Masters killed Peggy Hettrick, and never wavered, and used all his influence to drag the rest of the police department, and the DA's office, along into his delusion.

Farrell says,

For two months, he pored over thousands of gruesome narratives and sketches seeking evidence, piecing together a case from psychological and circumstantial evidence.

Exactly. Broderick spent googobs of time, not just when he was officially on the case fulltime, but his spare time for years, constructing a story to specifically condemn Tim Masters. The Chief of Police, Dennis Harrison, even said so. "He devoted countless hours of personal time to this investigation in addition to his normal duties…"

There is nothing wrong with a cop being obsessed by a case. Unless he starts out with the wrong suspect, and adamantly refuses to listen to anyone who suggests a different theory. Then it is no longer healthy professional determination, but mania.

"Building a case" is one of this story's subheads, and that is exactly what Broderick did. Starting with the ideas suggested by FBI agents during the first days after the murder, and adding what he read in books written by profiler Roy Hazelwood, Broderick concocted the interlocking cluster of stories about the supposed psychological motivations of Tim Masters.

When he eventually found a compliant forensic psychologist in Reid Meloy, Broderick just handed over to him the whole fairy tale he had invented, and paid Meloy thousands and thousands of dollars to put a stamp of approval on it, because an "expert" was needed for the courtroom.

Here is a very important quotation, regarding Blair and Gilmore. Broderick told the reporter,

For another 2 months, he was holed away in a room, working with prosecutors, and scoured that evidence, looking for ways to tear it down, then at how to defend it when he took it into the courtroom.

It says here that Broderick could never have done it without the help of the prosecutors, who put a lot of time and effort into the case. Translation: a whole team of people were dedicated not to finding the killer of Peggy Hettrick, but to nailing Tim Masters, above all else. Isn't that kind of like a conspiracy? Sure sounds like one.

In more recent days, when questioned by Special Prosecutors and the like, Blair and Gilmore have consistently testified that they never knew this, that, or the other thing, about the case. They would like us to believe that the police withheld information from them, or lied to them. This is not plausible deniability. With two intense months of working together fulltime, as well as all the other collaboration between Broderick and the prosecutors, how could there possibly have been a single thing about the case that Blair and Gilmore did NOT know? What were they doing all that time, holed up in the war room? Playing strip poker?

Broderick told the reporter that the older a case gets, the harder it is to solve, because witnesses move out of town, or die. Yeah, well, the moving away and dying worked out in Broderick's favor, didn't it? Especially when it came to Clyde Masters. Tim's father would have testified that Tim never left his trailer home, the night of the murder. He died in April of 1996. By July, Broderick was pestering Roy Hazelwood to be his expert witness. By October, the investigation was reopened, starring Tim Masters as the one and only suspect.

Broderick also lamented that old cases are difficult because you can't go back and collect new evidence. But as we have learned since then, Broderick didn't let that get in his way. He just manufactured it. Like William Butler Yeats said of poetry, he "made it out of a mouthful of air." Broderick is quoted as saying the team "made the decision that there wasn't likely to be anything else that was going to come forward." Decoded, that sounds like it means something like, "We'll never get any more physical evidence, so let's just make up some complicated, fantastical theory."

Which they proceeded to do. The theory about how Tim Masters must have killed Peggy Hettrick, because she had red hair and his mother had red hair, and his mother died and he was mad at her for dying, so he had to kill a red-haired woman to punish his mother for dying. Or something. And all the convoluted, wacky stuff he invented out of Tim's drawings and writings. Which, truth be told, were pretty unexceptional for that age group. All the stuff about rehearsal fantasy and displaced matricide and how a shy kid was actually a dangerous "loner," and on and on ad nauseum.

It says here that when Broderick's job was changed from supervisor of Crimes Against Persons, and he took over the Drug Task Force, he "took the Hettrick case - and all the work he'd done - with him to see it to the end." Sounds like maybe he wasn't giving his job his full attention, still mooning over this old case. "Developing ownership," as it says here. Not a very good example for the troops.

An interesting detail is that other officers, who at various times expressed ideas about the Hettrick homicide, were told to mind their own business, because they were in Crimes Against Property or out on patrol or whatever. But nobody chastised Jim Broderick for clinging to the case when he was supposedly assigned in a different field.

The reporter duly notes that Broderick "shied away from taking credit." What? He went and made a Cold Case Files TV show about the case, full of disinformation. That statement is just as memorable as the one in Jolene Blair's closing argument, where she said nobody else in the world could have done the murder.

Peggy Hettrick remembered by a friend

2010-08-30T17:31:00.000-07:00

Carol Davy writes of the Peggy Hettrick page, and her memories of Peggy.

You gave light and love to her life, and stated that it could very well have been you or me... that is so true.

and goes on to say,

There in one of the photos was the American Indian, corn-silk raku vase that she just had to have from the store that I managed while she worked at Fashion Bar. We saw each other almost every day.

Peggy put this particular vase on lay-away… she was always short on cash! I had a 90-day program for purchase, however, after 6 months Peggy still hadn't paid for the vase in its entirety. I told her, "don't worry about it, whenever you can is fine. No big deal."

After about 9 months, Peggy came in to pay the remainder off, and she picked up this vase which she adored! I'll tell you , seeing this same vase in the photo stirred memories that were held deep within me. I noticed that she had placed two feathers in the vase. Peggy loved American Indian Art, and she was always in my store looking at the collection that we offered for sale to the public. I was a buyer/manager and had an affinity for American Indian Art as well, so we hit it off right away.

It gave me goose bumps to see this very vase sitting on her shelf! Thank you for that photo and for writing so eloquently about her and her dreams, aspirations, and of her life in general. She was a gem. She is still missed and thought of every day by those who knew her and lover her. I made a protest poster with her photo on it with her in that blue dress.

Timeline

2010-03-23T08:17:00.000-07:00

These dates are from many different sources, and there’s always room for error, so if something inaccurate is listed here, please send in better information.

TIMELINE

This is more for the seriously curious reader, who already has some grasp of the events, and wants to pinpoint when a certain thing happened. If you’re new to this case, don’t try to understand it by reading through the timeline.
Almost all entries refer to events in the life of Tim Masters, before and after the murder of Peggy Hettrick by an unknown person. Some entries are about Donald Long or Richard Hammond, who also come into the story. Please see other posts to understand how. If the item concerns one of those two, it’s clearly marked. Otherwise, it’s about Tim Masters.

1961
Clyde Masters buys an acre of land in south Fort Collins

1978
Clyde Masters family moves to Fort Collins

1982
Nov 30
Clyde Masters retires from the Navy
Lloyd Masters family moves in next door to the Clyde Masters family

1983

Feb 12, 1983
Margaret Masters, wife of Clyde and mother of Tim, is rushed to the hospital

Feb 13, 1983
Margaret Masters dies

Feb 15, 1983
Margaret Masters is buried

1986

Christmas season – Peggy Hettrick’s purse stolen

1987
Feb 2, 1987
Matt Zoellner stated he last spent the evening/night with Peggy

Feb 10, 1987 Tuesday
Peggy Hettrick reports in to work at the Fashion Bar at noon. She checks out for a break around 5, and goes to Banana’s to meet with her temporary roommate.
6:30 – Clyde Masters leaves for tech school class
Around 9 Peggy Hettrick leaves work at the Fashion Bar and starts an evening of wandering.
10 – 10:30 - Clyde Masters gets back from school. He and Tim watch a couple of TV shows before turning in.

Feb 11, 1987 Wednesday
Around 1 a.m. Peggy leaves the Prime Minister by unknown means of transportation.
1:45 – Next door to where Tim lives, his aunt, Bridgette Masters, gets home. Lloyd Masters has been home all evening.
1:00 – 3 a.m. Time span in which Dr. Allen first estimates Peggy died.
Somewhere around 7 a.m., a driver passing by on Landings sees something in the field, but only later becomes aware that it was Peggy’s body.
6:59 – Tim Masters leaves home on foot, for the bus stop.
A few minutes after 7 a.m., Peggy's body is sighted, and reported a few minutes later, by a bicycle rider.
The location of the homicide is 3800 Landings.
8:30 Lab Tech Ruth Shanahan starts shooting video and still photos
Somewhere between 9:00 and 9:30 Clyde Masters is interviewed by police,
At school, Tim Masters is questioned by Det. Gonzales; his locker and backpack are searched. Throughout the day and evening, he is questioned for a total of 7 hours.
FCPD Lead investigators: Jack Taylor and Sherri Wagner. Jim Broderick also involved in the initial stages.
(Richard Hammond) Among the neighbors interviewed by police are the Hammonds of 401 Skysail, who say they were home all night, and neither saw nor heard anything unusual.
3:30 - 3:40         Russell takes Matt Zoellner to Poudre Valley Hospital for rape kit
4:30 Peggy’s body is autopsied
5:00    Russell and Zoellner leave hospital
5:35   Russell drops Zoellner at Foothills Chrysler Plymouth

Feb 12, 1987 Thursday
8:00 FCPD organizational meeting Russell assigned “to conduct a background investigation concerning a person named Timothy Lee Masters.”
Wagner and Taylor met with two detectives from Denver PD and then two FBI Behavioral Sciences agents
Morning: Broderick makes sightline measurements
8:40 a.m. McKibben ,Vincent, Broderick, Tellez on hand ready to search
10:00 One of the FBI agents was given a copy of the videotape of Zoellner's apartment.

10:15 am Broderick and Dean to see Clyde at home. 11:07 got Voluntary Consent to Search signed for 328 Boardwalk and all outbuildings and motor vehicles.

In class, Tim doodles the "drag" drawing.
12:20 pm. Clyde Masters leaves home with Det. Dean to collect Tim from school
about 1:00 is his recollection of what time he was brought to the police station
At the police station, Tim Masters is interviewed for 6 or 7 hours and given a polygraph test. A conversation between Tim and his father Clyde is secretly recorded. Their home is searched and many items seized including, from Tim’s room six survival knives (one with a scalpel in the handle), some adult magazines, and many notebooks full of Tim’s writings and drawings. No evidence linking to the crime is found on the knives, or in the sinks or laundry drains.
6:30 Broderick gets the Consent to Search for TM's lockers at Fort Collins High.

(Richard Hammond) Terry Safris receives first of a series of threatening phone calls.

Feb 13, 1987 Friday
Explorer Scouts assist in searching the field
Tim Masters is interviewed again.
According to news report, by now 100 people have been questioned with no witness found to anything. Local news makes first mention of the "boyfriend"
News report: the FBI behavioral science unit will become involved, to help develop a "profile" of the killer.
Officer Jim Broderick is now the FBI liaison, consults ViCap FBI man Jim Wright, who tells him to look for a burglar/voyeur. But Broderick has already fixated on Tim Masters, and describes him, asking for a prediction of his behavior. Wright advises watching him next year on the anniversary of his mother’s death and Peggy Hettrick’s murder
Police issue a "Confidential Update" memo to the City Council.

Feb 14, 1987 Saturday
By now, 200 people have been questioned. Volunteers have been searching the field where Peggy’s body was found.

Feb. 16, 1987
7:00 pm rosary at Kibbey-Fisher Mortuary

Feb 17, 1987
Peggy Hettrick’s obituary in local newspaper.
9:30am Peggy Hettrick's funeral, attendees photographed by Shanahan. Obituary appears in local newspaper.

Feb 18, 1987
Lt. Bud Reed tells reporter there are "no suspects in custody" for the Peggy Hettrick murder.

Feb 21, 1987
Local paper publishes article by Jim Hawkins, Crime Prevention Coordinator for the police dept., on how to avoid becoming a victim. In another article, a spokesperson repeats that police "did not have any suspects in custody" and the FBI is still helping to develop a psychological profile.

Feb 24, 1987
(Richard Hammond) "Icicle man" menaces Terry Safris at the Prime Minister.

March 10, 1987
Officer Ray Martinez talks to manager of Prime Minister, then learns from Terry Safris of series of threatening phone calls that started the day after Peggy Hettrick was killed.

March 18, 1987
(Donald Long) Linda Holt disappears after work. Police publicly declare there is no connection with Peggy Hettrick’s murder.

March 19, 1987
(Donald Long) Linda Holt’s van found 5 miles away, near Long’s place. Fingerprints taken from van, and semen stains which produced a blood type.

March 24, 1987
(Donald Long) Linda Holt’s body found, through information provided by Donald Long’s girlfriend

April 3, 1987
Police department interoffice memorandum says Tim Masters is not a prime suspect in the Peggy Hettrick murder. Also, a progress report is made by Chief Glasscock to the mayor and city manager and city council. Local newspaper publishes an article of advice from the police on how to be safe.

April 17, 1987 (approximate)
Two months and 6 days after Peggy Hettrick’s murder, police take an indecent exposure report. On Landings Drive, one block from where Hettrick’s body was found, a woman reports a man walking with one leg of his shorts pulled up to expose his erection. The woman turned around to look at him again, "because he might have something to do with the Hettrick murder," as she said when making the police report.

April 30, 1987
Jim Broderick writes letter to Joelle Kohout of FBI's Behavioral Sciences Unit, and Roy Hazelwood

May 1987
Jim Broderick promoted to sergeant, leaves investigations division, goes to patrol.
(District Attorney Ken Buck’s report puts it this way:
"June 15, 1987 – Det. Broderick was promoted to Sergeant and shortly thereafter was reassigned to the patrol division.")

May 87 or after
Jim Broderick talkes to Clyde and Tim Masters about an incident in their neighborhood that was called in.

May 11, 1987
Peggy Hettrick’s cousin commits suicide in Arvada, Colorado

May 13, 1987
The "Kohout Memo" Det.Taylor’s notes on conversation with Joelle Kohout of Behavioral Sciences. (Seems to be input from Roy Hazelwood, too. Relayed through Kohout, or did they talk separately?)

July 15, 1987
(Donald Long) Fort Collins police interview Donald Long for the first time. He talks extensively about another man, who police ultimately question then release in Holt's killing. Long gives blood, hair, saliva and fingerprints that day.

Several months after the Hettrick murder – date unknown:
In another Colorado city, Linda Wheeler Holloway and other law enforcement personnel attempt to interview a man recently released from prison, who had mutilated a woman. He barricades himself in, opens fire on the police, and fatally shoots himself.

Aug 31, 1987
In Tim Masters’s neighborhood, a survival knife is found in a ditch – reportedly with a broken-off tip. (In 2007, David Wymore says it wasn’t broken off but bent back)

Nov 7, 1987
(Donald Long) Mona Hughes disappears after leaving work in Greeley.

Nov. 8, 1987
(Donald Long) Mona Hughes's car is found near

Nov 11, 1987
"Rampant rumors spread that the same person who killed Hettrick also killed Holt. Police say no relation exists between the two murders." News clip

Nov 11, 1987
Local paper reports that a juvenile male has been interviewed about the Peggy Hettrick murder, and released without charges.

Nov 15, 1987
(Donald Long) Long is arrested for killing Linda Holt

Nov 24, 1987
(Donald Long) Newspaper says, according to local woman, Donald Long’s CB radio handle was "Panty Snatcher."

Dec 1, 1987
Body of Mona Hughes is found with 14 stab wounds

Late 1987
Troy Krenning returns to Fort Collins

1988

Jan 8, 1988
Police hold a work session – on the topic of outstanding Hettrick leads.
Lt. Deryle O'Dell. writes a memo regarding the anniversary surveillance plan and psychological warfare plan against Tim Masters. It needs to be okayed by chief Bruce Glasscock

Jan 28, 1988
Richard H. Butler, VP of American Federal Savings, writes to the police dept. and fully okays their plan to park a construction trailer on the bank’s property from Feb 1 – Feb 21
Late Jan or Feb 1988

Lt. Broderick has some kind of contact with Tim Masters, its date and nature unknown, mentioned in notes on Feb. 4 organizational meeting as an event that happened "last week".

Feb 4, 1988
Investigators from FCPD hold a briefing for all officers involved in the surveillance plan.

Feb 8, 1988
Police document says if the surveillance of Tim Masters has no result, they will close books on case.

Feb 8-14, 1988
Surveillance of Tim Masters, the empty field, and Peggy Hettrick’s grave

Feb 11, 1988
Police officer Dean delivers copy of the Coloradoan to the Masters home. It contains a planted story designed to rattle Tim. Channel 14 news is filming in the area.

Feb 16, 1988
Final report on the week-long surveillance is issued.

May 2, 1988
Officers Wagner and Taylor interview Donnegan or Dunnegan

May 1988
(Donald Long) Long confesses to both Linda Holt and Mona Hughes murders.
May 4   Long agrees to guilty plea for both Holt and Hughes. Sentenced to life plus 50 years.

May 1988
(Donald Long) Husband of Mona Hughes sues FCPD, claiming that if they had secured Long after the death of Linda Holt, his wife wouldn’t have been killed.

July 1988
Tim Masters signs up for the Navy

1989

Feb 2 – 11, 1989
Surveillance of Tim Masters, described in Schneeberger memo

Feb 10, 1989
Police officer calls the Masters home, pretending to be Tim’s classmate. Clyde Masters says his son is at the Navy recruiting office.

July 9, 1989
Tim Masters starts boot camp

1990

Lloyd Masters family moves out from residence next door

1991

June 1991
Linda Wheeler-Holloway assigned as lead investigator, to reopen the Peggy Hettrick murder case.

Sept 1991
Tim’s pants and knife sent to California for DNA analysis of blood

December of 1991
Results come back, the blood on Tim’s pants is his own; blood on the knife totally consumed by testing process.

1992
Some time in this year, Linda Wheeler-Holloway organizes files, put them into Records
Some time in this year – Strategies on how to conduct the upcoming interview with Tim Masters, are suggested by Roy Hazelwood
Some time in this year, spurred by FCPD inquiries, Navy intelligence studies Tim Masters’s record and interviews his co-workers and supervisors.

Jul 28, 1992
Warrant to arrest Tim Masters is reviewed by Assistant DA Terry Gilmore and signed by District Judge William Dressel. It includes matter from the nonexistent "profile."

July 31 and Aug. 1
Jim Broderick, Linda Wheeler-Holloway and Hal Dean go to Philadelphia, question Tim Masters for 14 hours, and leave without making an arrest.

Aug 5, 1992
Linda Wheeler-Holloway tells Commander Feldman, Sgt. Vagge, Terry Gilmore and Jolene Blair what happened in Philadelphia.

Oct 11, 1992
At the instigation of Clyde Masters, the local paper prints a story about how his son is being harassed by the police department.

1993

March 15, 1993
letter from Wheeler to Hickson of NCIS about her plan to start from scratch, and Hazelwood agreed to do profile, and she has no plan to contact any member of Masters family ever again.

April 23, 1993
Linda Wheeler-Holloway returns Peggy Hettrick murder to cold case status

April 29, 1993
LWH meets with Hickson, gives latest information on TM, learns that the Navy would probably keep the case active.

August 14, 1993
murder of Michael Gienger

1995
January 1995
Jim Broderick assigned as supervisor, Crimes Against Persons

Some time in this year: the detective bureau of the FCPD is restructured, and the investigators have more time to work on unsolved cases.

Mar 19, 1995 Sunday
(Richard Hammond) In the early morning, police are called by woman house-sitter to the home of Dr. and Mrs. Hammond, where an elaborate setup is found in place to film users of the restroom.

Mar 20, 1995 Monday
(Richard Hammond) Hammond turns himself in, released on bail. Checks in to Mountain View Hospital. Tony Sanchez and other officers notice the view from Hammond’s bedroom window at home is the body dump site.

Mar 21, 1995
Remarks of Jim Broderick regarding the arrest of Richard Hammond are published in the Fort Collins Coloradoan.

Date uncertain
Officer Tony Sanchez writes the "look into Hettrick" note.

Mar 23, 1995 Thursday
(Richard Hammond) Hammond in court to be advised of rights. Scheduled to return April 6

Mar 24, 1995 Friday
(Richard Hammond) After being given immunity, Becky Hammond is interviewed by Tony Sanchez and Marsha Reed. Hammond is discharged from Mountain View Hospital. Hammond checks into a La Quinta motel in Denver and injects sodium cyanide into a vein leaving a suicide note saying "My death should satisfy the media's thirst for blood"

Mar 25, 1995 Saturday
(Richard Hammond) Shortly before noon, Hammond’s body is found by member of motel cleaning staff.

Mar 27(Richard Hammond) District Attorney's office receives Hammond's suicide letter

May 17, 1995
(Richard Hammond) Officers Broderick and Sanchez meet with assistant city attorney John Duval to discuss how to destroy Hammond evidence.

Date unknown
Becky Hammond interviewed by Marsha Reed and Tony Sanchez and granted immunity.

Aug. 15, 1995
(Richard Hammond) Motion for warrant to destroy personal property. Signed by Assistant City Attorney Duval, executed by Judge Dressel

August 1995
Less than 5 months after Hammond’s death, and with only a small fraction of it having been examined, all the evidence from Hammond’s home and storage lockers is burned in a fire that reportedly requires over 8 hours to consume it all.

Nov 30, 1995
Det. Linda Wheeler-Holloway retires from Fort Collins Police Department

1996

Sometime in this year, attorney Erik Fischer moves to Fort Collins

Apr 15, 1996
Clyde Masters dies at age 60, while visiting in California

July 1996
Broderick talks to FBI agent Ron Walker about possibility of getting Hazelwood as expert witness

Oct 1996
FCPD begins to re-investigate the Peggy Hettrick murder,

Oct 24 and 25, 1996
seminar “Behavioral Analysis of Sexually Related Deaths” taught by Hazelwood….Broderick goes over case with Hazelwood

Oct 25, 1996
"Thousands of pages" of Tim Masters’s writings and drawings are conveyed to Roy Hazelwood, now an expert in sexual violence in private consultancy practice.

Nov 22, 1996
Marsha Reed watches "Cipher in the Snow".

Dec 18, 1996
Broderick sends progress report to Hazelwood, discusses with Asst. DA Terry Gilmore what they hope Hazelwood will do.

1997

Feb 14, 1997
Two- page "hinge" letter from Broderick to Hazelwood

Feb 20, 1997
Fax from Broderick to Hazelwood

April 2, 1997
Broderick sends map a more detailed map to Hazelwood

June 6, 1997
Tim Masters leaves military service

June 19, 1997
Fax from Academy Group (Roy Hazelwood) to Broderick, replying to questions that had been put to him about how far he was willing to get involved in the case.
Broderick talks to Hazelwood, who suggests lists of psychologists including Reid Meloy

Oct 21, 1997 Jim Broderick begins reviewing case material and making a plan of action, expecting Det. Marsha Reed back from sick leave.

Nov 3 1997
Jim Broderick promoted from sergeant to lieutenant

Nov. 9, 1997
Dr. Reid Meloy retained

Nov. 14, 1997
Letter agrees to pay Meloy $300/hr. every 30 days

Dec 6, 1997
Meloy calls to say he has received everything from Hazelwood (Tim Masters’s "productions" – writings and drawings, maps, and whatever else they had sent.)

Dec 29, 1997
Holiday Inn meeting of Meloy, Marsha Reed, Terry Gilmore, Jim Broderick, they went to police dept. to view evidence, and visited the scene where Peggy Hettrick’s body was found.

Dec 31, 1997
Det. Marsha Reed writes to plastic surgeon Dr. Christopher Tsoi, sending autopsy report, 7 photos of the surgical wounds inflicted on Peggy Hettrick after her death, and a list of questions.

1998
Jan 1998
Assignments are shifted within FCPD's Crimes Against Persons unit, so Broderick and Reed can go full time on pursuing Tim Masters

Jan 2, 1998
Broderick sends letter to Meloy – enclosing transcript of secret recording made of Feb 12 1987, of a conversation between Tim and his father. All Hettrick evidence is moved to a separate room, with only Broderick and Reed knowing the lock's combination.

Jan 7, 1998
letter from Meloy to Broderick, thanking for visit and enclosing a copy of his notes

Jan 9, 1998
Det. Marsha Reed meets with Dr. Tsoi, but her daily report is blank, and the report she remembers writing about the meeting is never seen again.

Jan 24, 1998 Blood spatter expert Dr. Tom Bevel's report is submitted

January 27, 1998 Marsha Reed, another police officer, and a Sheriff's department detective meet to re-enact dragging scenarios.

Feb 3, 1998Broderick and Reed examine items from Tim Masters' room

Feb 23, 1998Marsha Reed requests a crime analyst to make a flow chart detailing the actions of Hettrick, Masters, and Zoellner in the hours surrounding Peggy Hettrick's death

Feb 27, 1998Broderick theorizes about the note to Matt Zoellner that Peggy had written

March 2, 1998
Broderick sends letter to Meloy about the autobiography that Tim wrote for a class assignment, and how the death certificate of Margaret Masters was lying out in the open.

March 20, 1998
Broderick meets with Chief Deputy District Attorney Terry Gilmore most of the morning, to keep him updated on this case.

April 2, 1998
Broderick and Reed watch horror movies Tim Masters has mentioned, trying to link the plots and characters to the Hettrick homicide

April 9, 1998
Broderick, Gilmore and Blair meet to discuss and plan.

April 14, 1998
Broderick meets with Dr. Allen, who did the autopsy on Peggy Hettrick

May 5 1998
FCPD receives confirmation that Tim Masters still lives in Witchita

May 14, 1998
Peggy Hettrick's body is exhumed to look for knife tip, which wasn’t missing in the first place. No knife tip found.

June 18, 1998Meloy names the so-called "vagina" drawing and the drag drawing as the two most incriminating, in conversation with Broderick.

June 20, 1998
Meloy submits 12-page draft report summarization

June 22, 1998
Meloy sends preliminary finding report to Broderick, having revised it after receiving input from police and prosecutors. Also letter "please note that my entire document extraction has now been sent to you." This is not the same as the report, but a different set of papers.

June 23, 1998
Conference call between Dr. Reid Meloy, Asst. DA Terry Gilmore, Asst. DA Jolene Blair, Officer Marsha Reed

June 29, 1998
Meeting to review affidavit

June 23
Meloy leaves the country till 7/11

June 29, 1998 Broderick, M. Reed, Terry Gilmore, Jolene Blair meet to look at drawings, theorize plan, and review affidavit.

July 2, 1998
Jim Broderick meets with Terry Gilmore and Jolene Blair

July 9, 1998
4-page report from Hazelwood to Broderick, as at this point the prosecutors still contemplate having him testify

July 10, 1998
Broderick’s notes say he conferred with Hazelwood about the arrest warrant. In this conversation, Hazelwood recommended removing all references to the "profile"

July 16, 1998
Conference call between Broderick, Hazelwood and Meloy

July 24, 1998
Broderick send letter to prosecutors stating that Dr. Meloy had been sent a draft of the warrant, and they were awaiting Meloy’s "approval."

July 29, 1998
Fort Collins police report shows that Allen, the medical examiner, called the wounds surgical. The description came in a conversation with Broderick.

August 1998
Broderick sends Hazelwood draft copy of arrest warrant and copies of Meloy’s "extractions."

August 5, 1998Broderick interviews Wayne Lawson

Aug 6, 1998
Police obtain arrest warrant for Tim Masters, from District Judge William Dressel, charging first-degree murder

Aug 9, 1998
Dets. Broderick and Reed and other FCPD travel to Ridgecrest, CA to arrest Tim Masters, who is now 27 and out of the Navy.
FCPD learns that Tim Masters owns a trailer home in Loma, CO

Aug 10, 1998
Det. Broderick and other FCPD travel to Ridgecrest, CA to arrest Tim Masters, who is now 27 and out of the Navy.
Lloyd and Bridget Masters are interviewed at length about Tim

Aug 11, 1998
Masters's home searched again, "purse" is found (camera bag.)
Broderick and Reed return to Colorado

Aug 12, 1998
FCPD search property in Loma, Colorado, where the old trailer home is stored, and Tim rarely visits.

Aug 15, 1998
Invoice from Meloy for 1 hour 15 minutes worth of review and analysis of something, and ¾ hour phone conference on same date

Aug 17, 1998
Police technician Hurst (aka Shanahan) to Loma

Aug 20, 1998
Tim Masters is charged

Aug 25, 1998
Det. Reed inventories the Ridgecrest videotapes.

Aug 27 1998
Abrahamson, Van Meveren file to have Masters tried as an adult

Sept 16, 1998
Preliminary hearing, Broderick testifies

Nov 3, 1998
Erik Fischer reviews evidence from an envelope. Later in the 2007 hearings, the contents and chain of custody of this envelope turn out to be a major point of contention.

Nov 9, 1998
Photos in the evidence envelope returned to FCPD by the FBI lab – so they would not have been included in what Fischer reviewed six days earlier, and weren’t turned over in discovery.

Dec 5, 1998
Meloy sent remaining extractions to Broderick Meloy submits another report

1999

Jan 4, 1999 Judge Dressel rules on some defense motions

January 28 – 8 hours at $300 per hour – prepping Dr. Meloy for motions hearing.

Early in this year
“Suspects in Hettrick homicide” aka "List of 94” created by Officer Marsha Reed, building on list originally compiled by Linda Wheeler-Holloway.

Jan 29, 1999
Dr. Reid Meloy testifies in pretrial motions hearing.

Feb 4, 1999
Meloy sends what was characterized by Wymore as the "hopes and dreams" letter to Stu VanMeveren, Larimer County DA, expressing hope that his work "will result in a successful prosecution" and touting Blair and Gilmore as "superb professionals."

Feb 12, 1999
Re: the evidence envelope (see Nov. 3, 1998) today’s date is the first date on the log. It’s the same day Broderick jotted in his notebook in red that one photo, "#105 is messed up, tread pattern looks like Thom McAn shoe"

March 18, 1999
Tim Masters’s murder trial begins Case # 98CR1149

March 26, 1999
Tim Masters convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison, after jury deliberation of ten hours over two days.

1999 ?
Somewhere in this time frame, the Cold Case Files TV show is made.

Nov 8, 1999
Opening Brief of Defendant-Appellant to Court of Appeals. Attorney Erik Fischer

2000

March 27, 2000
Linda Wheeler-Holloway brings a polygrapher to the Buena Vista correctional facility. The result indicates deception. This changes her whole outlook on the science of polygraphy.

Apr 13, 2000
Attorney Erik Fischer in Fort Collins Coloradoan calls the conviction "character assassination as proof of a crime" and says Tim Masters should get a new trial

Oct 17, 2000
Oral arguments before Colorado Court of Appeals

2001

Feb 15
Appeals Court confirms the conviction. Petition for Writ of Certiorari granted

August 2001
Jolene Blair becomes District Court Judge for 8th Judicial District

2002

Jun 10, 2002
Heard by the Colorado Supreme Court. 99CA896
For the petitioner: Nathan D. Chambers

Jul 12, 2002
Publication on Moving Target blog – "Use a Pencil, Go to Jail, part 1"

Aug 3, 2002
Publication on Moving Target blog – "Use a Pencil, Go to Jail part 2"

Oct 15 16, 2002
Judgment affirmed by Colorado Supreme Court (with three justices dissenting)

Dec 16, 2002
Petition for rehearing denied (although the same 3 Justices would grant it ).

2003

May 1 or possibly 5th, 2003
Tim Masters files 35c Motion for Relief because of ineffective counsel

May 14, 2003
Maria Liu appointed to serve as Tim Masters’s post-conviction attorney

Nov 2003
Linda Wheeler-Holloway retires from Colorado Bureau of Investigation, goes to work in private sector

2004

Apr 5, 2004
The “angel”s first letter to Tim

Nov 2004
"Free Tim Masters" website holds about 1500 pages, mostly trial transcript. Tim Masters Defense fund is set up.

Nov 12, 2004
Defense attorneys try to get the District Attorney to agree to DNA testing.

2005

Jun 17, 2005
Motion is filed to recuse District Court Judges Jolene Blair and Terence Gilmore.

June 30, 2005
David Wymore joins the defense team

Jul 25, 2005
Tim Masters in Larimer County Court with about 20 friends, relatives and supporters. His motion was to recuse District Court Judges Jolene Blair and Terence Gilmore as well as Judge Daniel Kaup, who had worked in the DA’s office at the time of the investigation. Recusal was granted, clearing the way for his 35c Ineffective Counsel Motion to be heard. Defense attorneys are contacted by major media.
Appointment of visiting judge Joseph Weatherby

Jul 26, 2005
"Former Cop Favors New Trial" in Rocky Mountain News report re: Tim Masters, about Linda Wheeler-Holloway

Oct 2005
Linda Wheeler-Holloway visits the Netherlands and learns about new DNA harvesting technique

Nov 2, 2005                   Post-conviction hearing with Judge Weatherby. David Wymore and Maria Liu appear for Tim. Issues are costs and access to evidence.

Some time in 2005
15 fingerprints from inside Peggy Hettrick’s purse are removed from the FBI lab files and never returned.

2006

April 2006
Attorney David Wymore catalogs all evidence. His list doesn’t include the evidence envelope (see Nov. 3, 1998)

Oct 20, 2006
Post-conviction hearing. Issues are access to evidence, DNA testing.

Nov 6, 2006
Post-conviction hearing. Richard Eikelenboom describes his credentials and methods. Judge Weatherby approves testing in the Netherlands of the clothing, and specifies that there should be a written protocol before either side does any testing.

Nov 17, 2006
Broderick is subpoenaed for any profile in any form, and any communications with the FBI, Hazelwood, Behavioral Sciences Unit

Nov 2006
Thanksgiving week Larimer County DA's office and FCPD remove Peggy’s clothing put into evidence during the 1999 trial and take it (without any protocol) to the CBI laboratory. Armed with the knowledge of which segments of fabric the defense wants to lift epithelial cells from, they swab half those areas with their old-fashioned and potentially destructive method.

Nov 27, 2006
Post-conviction hearing. David Wymore denounces the "Oklahoma Land Grab," the removal of the clothing evidence for testing before a protocol had been established. Other issues are the missing 11 fingerprints, and insistence on resolution of the question of whether an FBI profile ever existed.

2007

Jan 21, 2007
Barie Goetz takes evidence to Netherlands

Feb 13, 2007
Court orders Roy Hazelwood to answer questions sent to him and identify materials he was sent and conveyed on to Meloy. No answer.

Mar 20, 2007
Post-conviction hearing where more details are exposed of how the "Oklahoma Land Grab" was engineered; and the woman who found Dr. Hammond's camera describes that occasion; and former Fort Collins police officer Dave Mickelson tells how he never believed Masters was the killer, and his efforts to convince others.

Mar 21, 2007
Post-conviction hearing. Former Fort Collins police officer Troy Krenning testifies that he never believed Masters was the killer, and that he was very vocal about his objections.

Apr 18 2007
Riedel and Lammons of DA’s office file "MOTION TO APPOINTING A SPECIAL PROSECUTOR AND VACATE HEARING" which denies wrongdoing on their part.

Apr 20, 2007
The prosecution quits the case recusing themselves because of a conflict
Judge Weatherby signs order appointing Special Prosecutor Don Quick

April 21 2007
District Attorney's Office for the 8th Judicial District hands over Masters case to prosecutors from Adams County.

May 7, 2007
Special Prosecutor needs more time to review the case

July 31, 2007
Don Quick, Special Prosecutor, sends letter asking for "reports, photos, documents, etc." in other words all discoverable material, to Chief Harrison of FCPD, Sheriff Jim Alderden, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, DA Larry Abrahamson of the 8th Judicial District, and DA Ken Buck of the 19th Judicial District.

August 9 2007
Asst. Chief Investigator interviews Terry Gilmore on behalf of the Special Prosecutor

August ??? 2007
Asst. Chief Investigator interviews Jolene Blair on behalf of the Special Prosecutor

August 23, 2007
Post-conviction hearing. Former Fort Collins police office Tony Sanchez testifies.

Aug 31, 2007
Greg Campbell interviews Tim Masters at Larimer County Detention Center.

Sept 24, 2007
Post-conviction hearing. Tony Sanchez testifies about what was found at Dr. Richard Hammond's house.

Sept 25, 2007
Post-conviction hearing, Nathan Chambers testifies.

Sept 26, 2007
Post-conviction hearing, Nathan Chambers testifies.

Sept 27, 2007
Post-conviction hearing, Nathan Chambers testifies.

Sept 27, 2007
Interview with retired FCPD officer Marsha Reed where she states she prepared a report on her interview with Dr. Tsoi (See Dec. 31, 1997)

Oct 4, 2007
Defense learns of Officer Tony Sanchez’s "Look into Hettrick" note. Marsha Reed says Tony Sanchez told her that Hammond was a suspect in Hettrick murder

Early Oct, 2007
The "angel" of the case dies.

Oct 15, 2007
Defense team gets most but not all of the "McClellan Binders."

Nov 6, 2007
revelations about surveillance, sting operation, planted news story

Nov 8, 2007
Post-conviction hearing, testimony from defense attorney Erik Fischer and former FCPD officer Jack Taylor

Nov 9, 2007
Post-conviction hearing, testimony from former FCPD officers Jack Taylor and Ray Martinez

Nov 16, 2007
Broderick’s notebooks of working notes turned over to special prosecutors

Nov 21, 2007
Informal discovery viewing of what prosecutors have. Half a day spent trying to understand the origin of the "Kohout memo"

Dec 1, 2007
Defense files motion asking court to order Broderick, Neimann, and several other police dept. personnel to answer questions about the discovery process, regarding the items held by the Records Dept.

Dec 3, 2007
Post-conviction hearing, testimony by defense attorney Erik Fischer. Broderick's notebooks given by Quick to the defense. Broderick’s notebooks transferred from Special Prosecutors to defense team

Dec 4, 2007
Post-conviction hearing, testimony by defense attorney Erik Fischer
Dec 6, 2007
Colorado Bureau of Investigation report submitted to Special Prosecutors. Findings: Three partial DNA profiles from Peggy’s clothing, none consistent with Tim Masters.

Dec 7, 2007
Post-conviction hearing. Revealed: Hazelwood disagreed with large parts of Meloy/Broderick theory. Testimony by defense attorney Erik Fischer: "I am so pissed off." Also revealed: some documents may have been destroyed when changing computer records system.
Dec 11, 2007
CBI report turned over to defense team

Dec 16, 2007
Eikelenbooms report that the DNA on Peggy's underpants is a complete match to Matt Zoellner.

Dec 18, 2007
Post-conviction defense team files a Motion for Special Prosecutor to Investigate Possible Criminal Activity by the Fort Collins Police Department and a Motion for Special Prosecutor to Investigate Perjury at the Trial of Tim Masters by Fort Collins Police Lt. James Broderick

Dec 20, 2007
Post-conviction hearing, testimony by defense attorney Erik Fischer

2008

Jan 4, 2008
Larry Abrahamson files motion for Order Appointing Special Prosecutor, granted the same day

Jan 15, 2008
Defense shares its DNA test results with Special Prosecutor

Jan 18, 2008
CBI confirms that DNA is consistent with alternate suspect "the boyfriend", and inconsistent with Tim Masters.
Friday afternoon press conference announces that the conviction of Tim Masters will be vacated and he will be released.
Broderick is out of state on family medical matter

Jan 22, 2008
Happy Freeday, Tim Masters!
Special Prosecutors file Motion to Vacate Judgment of Conviction and Sentence for Tim Masters.

Jan 25, 2008
All charges against Tim Masters dismissed by DA Larry Abrahamson

Jan 29, 2008: Colorado Attorney General John Suthers launches a fresh investigation of Peggy Hettrick's murder.

Feb 15 2008
Adams County District Attorney Don Quick files Special Prosecutor’s Report

The Hartman Report on the District Attorney's Report

2008-07-09T17:26:00.000-07:00

by Pat Hartman

The official document:

District Attorney Kenneth T. Buck's letter to Chief Judge James H. Hiatt

The reaction:

In January of 2008, after the conviction of Tim Masters for the murder of Peggy Hettrick had been vacated, District Attorney Ken Buck of Weld County was assigned as special prosecutor to determine if any criminal laws were violated by Lt. James Broderick of the Fort Collins Police Department. A mere six months later, to the utter astonishment of absolutely no-one, Buck’s report concludes that Broderick won’t have any criminal charges filed against him. Which is not quite the same as not doing anything wrong. On July 8, 2008, DA Buck’s report was released in the form of an 11-page letter, and on the 9th he held a press conference to further elucidate.

Buck notes that his mandate was limited to finding out if Broderick broke any laws, and uses the word again to say, “During my limited investigation several flaws were uncovered….” One might almost think he’s implying that, if he’d been able to investigate more fully, and not been limited, his findings might have been more substantial. But that’s probably wishful thinking on my part.

The Not Fully Informative Timeline

The letter/report includes an abbreviated timeline of the case. Of course, not every little detail of the excruciatingly long history of the case could be included here, but there are a few things it would have been useful to remind us of. For instance, the timeline notes that on February 12, 1987, the day after Peggy Hettrick’s body was found, Tim Masters was interviewed for 6 hours. This was also the day when a conversation between Tim and his father Clyde Masters was recorded, and also the day Tim was given a lie-detector test with inconclusive results, though that isn’t mentioned here.

It also doesn’t mention how, on the very next day, Broderick tells the FBI all about his favorite suspect, Tim Masters. Unfortunately, the Fort Collins Police Department doesn’t have a damn thing on the kid in the way of physical evidence, eyewitness testimony, confession, or any other thing that would make an arrest stick. Supposedly, the 15-year-old boy is so clever and sly, he’s managed to totally outwit the FCPD, despite the fact that they’ve been working on the case for two entire days.

The FBI advises patience: and here, two days after Peggy Hettrick’s murder, the anniversary surveillance is born. This is not a guess, it’s according to testimony in the recent hearings. In this and subsequent conversations with the FBI, Broderick is instructed in how to set up, conduct, and interpret any results of this fantastic, costly, and counterproductive plan. Already, instead of trying to catch the murderer immediately, he is focused on how to catch Tim Masters a year in the future. This alone should be enough to send Broderick to prison. That’s as far as we’ll go right now with the conspiracy theory. It’s a whole separate, and huge, topic.

But wait – it gets better. Broderick asks the FBI to do a profile. Here’s the problem. With them, the whole concept of making a “profile” centers around the fact that there is no suspect. They start with a blank slate, and just make it up as they go along, predicting what kind of person will turn out to have done the crime. Well, Broderick has already provided to them all of the particulars of Tim Masters, which shows a baffling ignorance of FBI procedure, to say the least. And there’s nothing at all in Buck’s report about how, years later, when Tim was finally arrested, the warrant was partially based on the profile that never existed.

The timeline skips ahead to June 15, 1987 when Broderick, having been promoted, was reassigned to patrol and presumably, was off the Masters case. Then, it says in late 1987 the FCPD received suggestions for the anniversary surveillance. This is very oversimplified, as we’ve just seen, because the anniversary surveillance plan had actually been around since Day 3 of the investigation.

And of course in the meantime there had been the whole Donald Long saga. Long was and still is a viable suspect for the Peggy Hettrick murder, but that’s a whole separate subject also, and one not mentioned in the DA’s report.

Buck’s timeline mentions the February 11, 1988 anniversary surveillance, also in an oversimplified fashion, since that surveillance actually lasted a week and covered several locations. The report also neglects to mention that the “surveillance” included a deliberate psychological warfare-type provocation, designed to mess with the head of this teenager by capitalizing on the fact that it was also the anniversary of his mother’s death. Yes, they planted a copy of her obituary where Tim would find it. Also, the report makes no mention of a news story fabricated by the police and foisted on an unsuspecting journalism intern. It also neglects to mention a police document written on February 8, 1988, stating that if the anniversary surveillance had no result, they would close the books on this case. But they didn’t. Some obsessed mind or minds were intent on nailing Tim Masters with this one.

The Changing of the Guard

One of DA Buck’s conclusions is that the multiple errors in the Masters case were compounded by multiple changes in case leadership. Let’s take a look at this. It started out with Sheri Wagner and Jack Taylor as co-lead investigators, which they presumably still were through June of 1991 when Linda Wheeler-Holloway took over. That wasn’t such an abrupt departure. Wheeler-Holloway had been the first officer on the scene at Peggy Hettrick’s murder site, and then was assigned to deal with the victim’s family. She knew all about the case. After the 1992 Philadelphia excursion, during which Wheeler-Holloway refused to arrest Masters because he was the wrong man, the Hettrick murder went to cold case status in 1993.

In 1995 and ‘96, Officer Marsha Reed got busy pulling together elements of the Masters case, but there doesn’t seem to be any mention of her, ever, as lead. She apparently forgot to file a report from a doctor, that would have been exculpatory for Tim, but that was just as one of the officers on the case, and Buck doesn’t mention her part in it at all. After that, the next lead investigator was Jim Broderick, who was also familiar with the case from the beginning, and indeed knew more than too much about it, since he invented most of it.

This doesn’t really add up to a whole lot of leadership change, when you consider the many years the case stretched over. The various leaders were all familiar with the case. In fact, nobody in the entire FCPD was unfamiliar with it, and certainly, none of the lead investigators came into it a virgin. Besides, there was plenty of continuity in the leadership. At any rate, it should not matter if there had been even more changes in leadership. That’s what records and briefings are for. In a hospital, a patient’s chart is a detailed record of everything that happens, readable by each subsequent nurse who cares for the patient. When new nurses come on duty, a verbal report is given by the off-going shift to the oncoming shift. Would it be acceptable for a hospital to claim that nursing changes of shift were responsible for a patient’s death? Geez, let’s hope not.

More weird stuff

So in July of 1992, an arrest warrant was obtained. This report doesn’t mention that the warrant was based on a story from an informant about how Tim supposedly had special knowledge about the crime that, actually, everybody in town knew. Anyhow, Linda Wheeler-Holloway had the good sense not to arrest him at that time.

Then, in 1995, the Richard Hammond mess happened. He was the eye doctor who should have been the prime suspect in the Peggy Hettrick murder. Broderick was instrumental in destroying the massive amount of evidence gathered on Hammond, and Reed granted immunity to Hammond’s wife, who in some circles is considered a pretty good accomplice suspect.

On April 20, 2007, Buck’s timeline says, “The 17th Judicial District Attorney was appointed by the court as special prosecutor.” This, as we will recall, happened because the prosecution had to recuse itself on account of a conflict of interest – only one of the messy details in this entirely SNAFU’d case.

The allegations against Broderick

One of the most shameful things about this is that there were only three allegations against Broderick which DA Buck’s office was tasked with investigating. And, for symmetry, there are three things that office had to decide: Was a crime committed? Did the suspect (in this case, Broderick) commit the crime, if indeed there was one? And – here’s the most important part – is there a “reasonable likelihood of conviction at trial.”?

At his press conference after the 11-page letter was issued, Buck was asked if the standard is different with civilians and police. Buck says, yes, it is. “Our standard,” he said, is “reasonable probability of conviction.” Which isn’t quite the same as answering the question. Doesn’t that hold true with any prosecutor, in deciding whether to bring charges against anyone, civilian or police? Because if they know they can’t get a conviction, it’s a waste of taxpayers’ money and everybody’s time, to charge the person.

The tape and transcript

So, the first allegation is that Broderick recorded the conversation between Tim and his father, the day after Peggy Hettrick’s murder, in violation of the anti-eavesdropping rules. Well, the first thing Buck points out is that the statute of limitations runs out in three years, so in order to stick, a charge would need to have been made before February 1990. So, obviously, there would be no probability of conviction. When it’s a citizen, they call this “getting off on a technicality,” and it’s quite lame. For cops, there shouldn’t even be a statute of limitations. They have so much latitude and so much power, and get away with so much, there ought to be a counterbalance – like, for instance, a requirement to adhere to higher ethical standards than your average mug on the street. Yes, it’s only wishful thinking.

But Buck goes on to say he doesn’t believe that Broderick, personally, engaged in eavesdropping, as defined by law. Because, supposedly, Broderick wasn’t involved in the decision to record the supposedly private conversation between father and son, and didn’t know whether Clyde Masters verbally consented or not. He says he had nothing to do with it, except that his own interrogation of Masters was pre-empted to accommodate the father-son talk.

This recording is problematic for several reasons, the foremost being consent. In 1996, Clyde Masters died, removing from the equation not only Tim’s sole alibi witness, but the only one who could say whether verbal permission was given to record his conversation with his son in the police station back in 1987. Co-lead investigator Wagner says Sgt. Martinez informed Clyde Masters that the conversation would be recorded. Sgt. Martinez says not. It’s a classic he-said-she-said standoff. And, as Buck tells us, there is no written record that Clyde Masters consented on behalf of himself or his son. The DA gives the police a bit of a scolding for this.

Another problem, and here’s where it gets real complicated, is that when Tim went on trial, the father/son portion of the immediate post-murder questioning was left out of the transcript provided to Tim’s defense attorneys. Apparently, they either were given a copy of the tape, or were told they could have a copy if they wanted it. FCPD was betting that the original defense lawyers would not listen to the tape, even if it were possible for them to do so. If the lawyers were doing their job right, they should have listened to it, if indeed it was turned over to them or made available upon request.

On the other hand, ought we to blame the lawyers, who are officers of the court, for trusting the honesty of government officials? Shouldn’t defense attorneys be naturally entitled to assume that the transcript of an interview turned over by the police, will be accurate and complete, and match up with the tape? I mean, shouldn’t they?

Buck says, “…Defense Counsel received notice of the recorded conversation, and Lt. Broderick has a plausible explanation for creating a second transcript.” This seems to mean that a complete transcript already existed, and Broderick himself generated a second, censored and redacted version of the transcript – one that omitted the father/son conversation. And what, pray tell, was his plausible explanation for doing that? It’s not here. Unless this is supposed to be it:

According to Buck’s report, Broderick was listening to the tape and reading along in the transcript, and when he heard the father/son segment, had doubts as to whether it had been recorded with permission. So he called prosecutor Terry Gilmore. “After that conversation Lt. Broderick believed that any information that was of questionable admissibility should not be included….” See what he’s saying? He knew this would be inadmissible because it was obtained illegally – the fruit of the poison tree – and thus the inclusion of that part of the tape in the written transcript would threaten the whole case! Not being a lawyer, I don’t know if it would have been cause to declare a mistrial, or exactly how it would have happened; whether the worst thing would be that it was exculpatory evidence, or whether the worst thing would be that evidence was illegally obtained – either way, there’s no doubt that Broderick was aware that knowledge of this bit of information could lose his case. A bit of information which, had it been known, could have gotten his police department convicted of eavesdropping, if not for that tricky little statute of limitations. If that’s not concealing evidence, I don’t know what is. “This evidence may have been relevant at trial…” Buck says. Yes, it most certainly would have been. And the question is still open – if not Broderick, what individual was responsible for leaving it out?

Buck’s report says, “Lt. Broderick now knows that the transcript with the full conversation between Tim and Clyde Masters was not given to the defense and was stored “off site” from the police department.” Where, exactly, was “off site”? Why? Why don’t we get to know where? The report says, “A tape of Mr. Masters’ interview, including the conversation with his father, was made available to defense attorneys as part of discovery before trial.” What exactly does that mean? Does “made available” mean that the defense team could have had it, if they had known it was important to ask for it? For instance, if they had known that the tape didn’t match the interview transcript?

Okay, the upshot is, according to this report, “Lt. Broderick did not invite Clyde Masters to talk to his son and Lt. Broderick was not responsible for receiving permission to record the conversation.” But somebody did those things. Let’s go after whoever was responsible. Just because one cop had the inspiration to do it, and another one suggested how to do it, and another one invited Clyde Masters into the room and another one opened the door and another one closed the door and another one forgot to turn off the tape recorder….. Spreading out the doing of it doesn’t make it any less wrong. Somebody was responsible – but, thanks to that darn statute of limitations, it doesn’t matter anyway.

The second allegation

Okay, moving on to Allegation #2, namely that Broderick committed perjury by “misstating his involvement in the Hettrick homicide investigation.” The statute of limitations would of course apply again, but there are exceptions: the accused has to be prosecuted within three years of when the act of perjury is discovered, not committed. So, supposedly, Broderick could still be accused and convicted of this. Theoretically, he’s still vulnerable on this front, until December 17, 2010. That’s the good news.

The bad news is, it ain’t gonna happen. What Broderick said in court was that he had nothing to do with the Masters case between interviewing Tim in 1987, and being asked to assist in 1992. However - Masters’s post-conviction defense team says Broderick was involved at least three times between those dates.

First, there was a letter dated April 30, 1987, to FBI Behavioral Sciences agent Joe Kohout, and Roy Hazelwood, who was retired from the FBI. When Hazelwood was active duty FBI, Broderick had tried to involve him in the case, but he wasn’t interested. This 1987 letter seems to have been Broderick’s effort at trying once more to snag the prestigious profiler Hazelwood. Buck doesn’t mention it, but that letter wasn’t given to defense as discovery in the original trial. It was only exposed during the 2007-08 hearings, during which half a day was spent trying to figure out what the “Kohout memo” was (May 13, 1987) and what it concerned. This could have been easily known, if the April 30 letter had been on the table at the time.

But no. It was one of the documents Broderick held onto throughout most of the duration of the hearings, only giving it up at the last minute after having been issued a subpoena, and even then, not immediately. It was also not part of the paperwork forwarded to Dr. Reid Meloy, who later became Broderick’s own expert witness, or to Roy Hazelwood, who he hoped would become his expert witness. What do you do with a guy who withholds stuff not only from the other team, but from his own side as well? Anyway, the “Kohout memo” seems to have concerned officer Jack Taylor’s conversation with Kohout, who had been primed by Broderick’s letter. There seems to have been some input from Hazelwood, too, though whether it was relayed through Kohout or whether Taylor talked with him separately is not clear. At any rate, Broderick’s April 30, 1987 letter certainly negates any claim that he had nothing to do with the Masters case at that time. Being the FCPD liaison with the FBI constitutes involvement.

Second indication of Broderick’s involvement during that time period: February 4, 1988, just four days before the beginning of the week-long anniversary surveillance there’s an official note of “Broderick’s contact with Tim last week.” What was that all about? Supposedly, Broderick, on patrol, just happened to coincidentally be nearby when Clyde Masters called the police about some kind of harassment. So naturally, Broderick hurried right over. It was a total cosmic accident, had nothing to do with Broderick’s determination to nail Tim Masters.

At of the time of the hearings, less that a year ago, no paperwork documentation of this incident had been located. How do we know that some member of the police department didn’t do the harassment? Look at the other things they did in conjunction with the anniversary surveillance. They followed Tim around all week to video arcades and fast-food joints, and called up his guidance counselor at school to ask if he was acting strange. They baited Tim by leaving his mother’s obituary on his friend’s car. To make sure that Clyde and/or Tim would see their planted, lying, fraudulent newspaper story, the FCPD had been delivering the Fort Collins Coloradoan to their home even though they didn’t subscribe. Maybe that was the harassment that Clyde Masters phoned in about. Maybe he complained about some overage paperboy sneaking around, leaving newspapers that he never asked for. It would not be one bit surprising if some kind of annoyance was set up, just to give Broderick an excuse to stop by.

Third: And then there’s the traffic stop of a suspicious character that Broderick made, during the anniversary surveillance – again, just doing his job, no special connection to the whole Masters thing, of course. We don’t have the exact date on which Broderick stopped and questioned Alfredo Denogean and wrote him a ticket for some kind of traffic violation. But on May 2, after the anniversary surveillance was over and the report on it had been submitted, Officers Wagner and Taylor interviewed a Donnegan or Dunnegan – or, quite possibly, Denogean. Why did they go back to him? What was that all about? Just another of dozens of unanswered questions.

The DA’s office interviewed Lt. Hal Dean about whether Broderick had been involved in the anniversary surveillance. It says here, “Lt. Dean stated that if surveillance officers needed a suspicious person checked out, they would have called the patrol division to have a marked unit contact the person.” Of course they would! The detectives in the surveillance trailer, when this guy knocked on the trailer door, presumably to find out if it was inhabited, so he could burglarize it – the surveillance guys aren’t going to come leaping out and blow their cover. Getting a uniform to tackle the intruder is standard operating procedure. This testimony doesn’t prove anything one way or the other.

We’re losing sight of something very important here – that in Buck’s words, “The vast majority of the anniversary surveillance material was not turned over to the defense in discovery.” The negative results of the anniversary surveillance would have been exculpatory, so this was definitely incomplete discovery – but not, we are told, Broderick’s doing. Whose decision was it, then? Never mind the traffic stop – was Broderick responsible for Tim’s defense team not getting this material? Wouldn’t you like to know? I sure would. Too bad, it’s not one of the questions within the scope of this particular investigation.

Buck says “Lt. Broderick’s involvement in the Hettrick homicide investigation between 1987 and 1992 is of little consequence…” Au contraire! It shows Broderick’s continuing obsession, the vendetta, the single-minded devotion to nailing Tim Masters, that is very consequential indeed.

Third allegation

Was Broderick guilty of “testifying falsely at the Masters trial about shoe print evidence found at the Hettrick homicide scene”? There’s way more to this shoe print mess than is suggested in this document. It’s a whole separate subject. But this paragraph of Buck’s report is precious:

“The crime-scene investigators failed to document the location of each individual shoe print, and failed to create a universal marker system for the crime scene. As a result, the casting impressions and shoe print photographs could not be linked to a particular location in the crime scene.” It has been suggested that the state of technology in 1987 was responsible for the muddle with the shoeprints. This is the kind of thing that makes the onlooker want to groan “Oh, please, give me a freakin’ break.” Even Brother Cadfael, the fictitious 12th-century crime-solving monk, knew enough to take careful note of where footprints were found and in what direction they were oriented.

DA Buck does say, “In my opinion, Lt. Broderick should have known that his testimony was incomplete” in regard to the shoe prints. “He was incomplete in his testimony.” Well, there you have it. Isn’t “the whole truth” part of the oath a witness swears with his hand on the Bible? Seems like that should be enough for a perjury indictment, on its own. “Somebody else was there…that would have been important evidence…” This is the kind of statement for which the response, “No shit, Sherlock!” was coined. Understatement of the decade.

Buck goes on to say, “I do not believe that there is a reasonable likelihood of convicting Lt. Broderick of Perjury at trial.” In other words, he didn’t do anything wrong, because we don’t really have a good chance of convicting him. Wow. Is that how it works? It seems not to have worked that way in Masters’s case. Broderick knew there wasn’t a good chance of convicting Tim Masters. But rather than concluding that Masters didn’t do anything wrong, he set out to invent enough bull, in the form of the fake profile and all his amateur forensic psychology suppositions, and by buying Reid Meloy’s “professional” forensic psychology theories, to create the likelihood that Masters did the murder.

This wrapup of Broderick’s involvement is inadequate and unsatisfactory. It’s like watching an elephant be pregnant for months and then give birth to a mouse. Now there’s supposed to be an internal FCPD investigation, which has been held in abeyance until the delivery of DA Buck’s report. With this tepid whitewash as precedent, it’s not difficult to foresee the results of that investigation.

The Hartman Report on the Special Prosecutor's Report

2008-05-26T13:16:00.000-07:00

The Hartman Report on the Special Prosecutor's Report
by Pat Hartman

Originally published at Earthblog.net
March 11, 2008

The still-unsolved murder of a beautiful red-haired woman 21 years ago. A wrongly convicted man, released after nearly a decade of incarceration. A trio of obvious suspects ignored. A cop with a bizarre and unstoppable fixation. A heroic cop who risked her career to do the right thing. A forensic psychologist whose word can lock someone up for life. Four separate investigations of official wrongdoing. The true crime enthusiast who hasn't encountered this case yet will find a story destined to become a classic, as complicated and fascinating as those of Nicole Brown Simpson, JonBenet, or the Black Dahlia. For a complete background on the case see Free Tim Masters Because.

The hearings are over, Tim Masters is free, and the Special Prosecutor's Report (released February 15, 2008) seeks to ease our minds and reset our bullshit detectors to zero. Not so fast, boys.

The report is attributed to Don Quick, undoubtedly with input from team members Mike Goodbee, Thomas Quammen, Frank Spottke and Dan Michals. Perhaps because it is only a quasi-official document, it's written clearly and even with some narrative grace.

Quick's team was assigned in early 2007, after the defense accused the Larimer County bunch of prosecutorial misconduct. The Special Prosecutors were expected to deal only with post-conviction issues having to do with the 35c motion filed by Tim Masters (the one that said he had inadequate lawyering at his trial.) As Quick points out, in this case, the Special Prosecutors played a role different from their usual one. They set out to determine whether Tim got a fair trial. Also, they were called upon to "weigh the merits of his claim of actual innocence."

How many defense lawyers does it take to convict a client?

The report lists the grounds on which Tim Masters filed his 35c motion, a roster of the things he claimed his original trial counsel did wrong or failed to do. This is, after all, the subject matter for which the hearings were created. There's been a lot of talk about what a lousy job Fischer and Chambers did, ranging from not taking certain legal steps before testimony even started, to letting a juror sleep through part of the trial. No doubt, they could have done better. But no matter how much blame anyone feels inclined to place on those two lawyers, they were hobbled and handicapped by the absence of all the things that weren't surrendered as discovery. There's still plenty of blame remaining, to dish out to the prosecution and the police.

The report says, "The defense was not denied access to the evidence section of the police department and, in fact, accessed evidence there during the pendency of the case." About that, there are only two words to say: Thom McAn. Anyone who cares to do a little research will find a close scrutiny of the shoeprint evidence to be rewarding - especially in conjunction with a certain evidence envelope.

When discussing Tim Masters, anyone who says, "Yeah, but the jury convicted him" needs a reality check. No jury can do a good job when they are shown only a fraction of the meaningful evidence, and snowed under with an avalanche of non-evidence, and especially when they are outright lied to.

The Report

At the start, the Special Prosecutors promised to go wherever the evidence took them, which wasn't far enough. We saw tantalizing glimpses of a justice system gone Kafkaesque, but the termination of the hearings left a lot of unslaked curiosity. When the DNA evidence showed up, and Masters was abruptly released, someone was saved by the bell. It's great that Tim got out when he did, absolutely - but it also meant the planned additional hearings were vacated. No doubt this is in line with the law as written. But one thing about the law is, an exception can almost always be found if the motivation is there. Given the revelatory momentum the hearings had gathered, a person can't help wishing they had continued, and wondering if there could have been some way for that to happen.

Reading between the lines, it seems like the Special Prosecutors were disappointed, too. They had planned on "presenting testimony and having a public hearing on several issues." We are told that Jolene Blair and Terry Gilmore, the judges who were deputy DAs back in 1999 when they prosecuted Masters, wanted to testify.

What a coincidence - Tim Masters, wearing civvies for the first time in nearly a decade, walks out the front door on the very day when the two judges were to start answering questions. We'd had every reason to believe they would be heard from, along with Jim Broderick and Becky Hammond. One of the Special Prosecutors said he wanted to bring in Marsha Reed. And we were dying to hear from that quack Reid Meloy. Even Judge Weatherby became impatient with procedural details. After days of testimony from the original trial defense team, Erik Fischer and Nathan Chambers, it was proposed that the judge take charge of some boxes of documents. But he was eager to move forward. "Let's get on with some witnesses," he said, "… the people who know the answers…there is one person in my mind I want to know if is going to testify..."

One of the declared purposes of the report is to give the public some insight into the issues left unaddressed. Which is a nice gesture, though it would have been more edifying to see defense attorney David Wymore dismantle a few witnesses. The other stated reason for the report is to correct media inaccuracies. At the moment, only one inaccuracy is apparent. Some news reports seem to imply that only four problems were found. Actually, there were many. But we'll get to that.

This is incidental, but interesting: If the Special Prosecutor's office had wanted to, it apparently could have avoided ever opening the whole can of worms. A news report in August 2007 said that Quick at that point had the option "to submit a joint request with the defense team for a new trial - or to petition the court to exonerate Masters." It seems that taking one of those courses would have effectively left a lot of things covered up.

Incomplete explanations

In 1992, several years after the murder of Peggy Hettrick, an effort was made to arrest Tim Masters. Quick says the arrest warrant was then withdrawn because of "certain questions." In reality, there was only one question, and it was about the severed nipple, which the police had regarded as holdback information, naively believing that, even after 5 years, it was a confidential detail known only by members of their department. How did Tim know about? Three FCPD officers flew out to Philadelphia to ask him. The answer: he heard it from an Explorer Scout. In the days immediately following the murder, the police had those high school kids out there combing the field looking for - you guessed it: a severed nipple. There probably wasn't a student in the school who didn't know.

Quick goes on to say how in 1997, Dr. Reid Meloy was hired as an "expert witness," and how a new arrest warrant was created, "bolstered" by the expert opinions of the forensic psychologist. In reality, here's how it worked: Officer Broderick fed Meloy information about Tim Masters. Meloy combined Broderick's theories with those of Roy Hazelwood, plus a heaping helping of his own bizarre observations, and came up with the damnedest Rube Goldberg contraption of half-baked notions you ever saw.

One of the things we missed out on was an exploration of the role of an expert witness. Is the expert witness supposed to examine the evidence independently, or be spoon-fed by a cop who does all the homework, marks the (according to him) relevant parts of the evidence, and indicates to the expert exactly what he will be paid to say? Yes, witness preparation is valid, but where does preparation end, and coaching begin? Where does coaching end, and the whole performance become outright theater?

The mood in the courtroom reached absurdity more than once, as documents were unearthed from here, there and everywhere, to defense team exclamations of, "We never saw this stuff!" and Special Prosecutorial cries of "Well, don't blame us, we never saw it either!" Eventually, Judge Weatherby told the two sides to conduct an "omnibus" meeting, and figure out once and for all which documents had not been correctly shared. Of course, this only made matters worse, as another ton of brand-new-to-the-defense documents were disclosed. Although happy to have them, Wymore expressed dismay about the need to recall witnesses he thought he was done with, to question them about these new things.

The Four Stipulated Items

As the Special Prosecutors tell us, "certain police reports and witness statements were not given to the original trial prosecutors" - or, it naturally follows, to the original trial defense attorneys. Consequently, Quick's team filed a paper called "SPECIAL PROSECUTOR'S OFFERED STIPULATIONS" describing a few of the many items that had been withheld from discovery at the 1999 trial. Anyone who sat through those hearing knows we're talking about a multitude of withheld items, not just the four named here.
The Meloy "Extractions"- 274 pages of psychobabble fabricated by the old windbag. Not even the original prosecutors got this, and nobody thought to ask for it, although Meloy's reports referred to his "extractions." Actually, it's possible to see why this was overlooked. It's a weird way of referring to a set of opinions, and sounds more like it would be excerpts from Tim's writings and drawings, used to back up the opinions. One assumes that an "extraction" is extracted from some larger body of work. So the confusion is almost understandable. Another funny thing about these extractions: Broderick gave this material to Roy Hazelwood, but not to his own prosecutorial team.
The Anniversary Surveillance - Information on the week-long, tri-locational, dozens-of-officers-involving, much-overtime-pay-accruing stakeout of Tim Masters. This operation was staged a year after Peggy Hettrick's murder, and featured a psychological experiment where various stimuli were used to try and goad the 16-year-old into a violent response. This was done "at the suggestion of the Federal Bureau of Investigation." Too bad they didn't take some other FBI suggestions, such as (translated from officialese), "Forget that stupid idea. We're not watching your back on this one."
Dr. Tsoi's statement to Officer Reed - A plastic surgeon was asked for his opinion of the wounds to Peggy Hettrick's body. Officer Marsha Reed says she wrote a report, which nobody has seen to this day. Too bad it got lost. The doctor's opinion, not surprisingly, would have been exculpatory of Tim Masters - in other words, indicative that he didn't do it. They got a different guy to testify instead. Further on, the report talks about Dr. Allen, the forensic pathologist who testified at Tim's trial. He said the cuts looked "like a mutilation" not a medical procedure. Dr. Tsoi would have said the cuts were surgical, and made by somebody like a doctor. And Linda Wheeler-Holloway, experienced investigator of both sex crimes and homicide, has said that she wouldn't even class what was done to Peggy as "mutilation," because of the control and deliberation exercised by the wielder of the instrument.
Statements of Roy Hazelwood - The former FBI crime scene expert and "profiler" gave Broderick $2000 worth of good advice that was ignored, and told him some of his theories were bunk. Once Hazelwood understood what a madman he was dealing with, he politely extricated himself from the case.

But there were many more

The report says, "As to the four items described, we found no evidence that the trial prosecutors ever had these items in their possession to turn over to the defense…There was, therefore, no evidence that the trial prosecutors hid or destroyed any of this evidence."

So the Special Prosecutors officially admitted that trial attorneys Fischer and Chambers were not given these four items to work with. Out of the many possibilities, how were the four items picked? The criterion seems to have been that these items were not revealed to Terry Gilmore and Jolene Blair, either. So don't blame them. The purpose seems to be to minimize the wrongness of withholding things from the defense. If the police refuse to honor the discovery requirement, if they don't let the defense have stuff, yeah, sure, that's naughty. But the real message seems to be: refusing to give information to your own side, the guys who are on the same team, that's really messed up. And it is, and somebody needs to be blamed for it.

The legal point of these "discovery" issues is that it matters when evidence isn't shown to the defense, if it could have changed the outcome of the trial. The law also recognizes the cumulative effect. Maybe a little piece of evidence here or there wouldn't have cleared the defendant, but the weight of all of them together adds up to significance. If ever there was a case that illustrates the meaning of "cumulative," we see it here.

This is how a good part of the hearings went: David Wymore would familiarize original defense counsel Fischer or Chambers with a document. He'd ask if they'd ever seen it before. No! He'd ask if knowledge of the thing would have been useful at the 1999 trial. Yes! He'd ask if the thing should have been turned over to them in discovery. Yes! He'd ask if the police and DA were blameworthy for not turning it over Yes! Then on to the next piece of evidence. For a while there, the ambiance was not courtroom, but factory. Document after lost document just kept coming along the conveyor belt.

More than four: let's look at a few of them

*Notes and letters showing that Dr. Reid Meloy did not function as an independent expert, but as a full-fledged member of the prosecution team. His analyses and opinions were constantly adjusted and shaped to fit the needs expressed by Gilmore, Blair and Broderick, whose input to the process of Meloy's cogitations was more than generous. As one hand washes the other, Meloy's input to their processes was also extravagant - for instance, he practically wrote the arrest warrant, and definitely approved it. Legally, this wasn't in his job description.

*A notation that tipped off the defense to the existence of the "McClellan Binders" - a series of notebooks full of information about this snafu'd case that were used (please don't laugh, because this really is not funny) for teaching purposes. We're talking about hundreds of separate documents. Even when this set of ring binders was finally turned over to the defense in the autumn of 2007, several volumes were missing.

*The "Niemann box," a treasure trove of goodies from the FCPD records department which somehow never found their way to the original defense team.

* A scholarly article about mutilation, whose conclusions contradicted the prosecution's theories, and would have pointed more toward Dr. Hammond than toward Tim Masters. This would probably come under the heading of exculpatory evidence.

* A police report, from shortly after the murder, and very close to the crime scene, of a willie-wagger who looked like Richard Hammond.

*Jim Broderick's special cache of notes. Tell you what, when they set that box up on the bench for Judge Weatherby to examine, it was impossible not to think of a kid on Christmas morning.

*A letter from Broderick to the FBI mentioning how a part of Tim Masters's interrogation the day after the murder was accidentally taped over. This may refer to the same incident in which a supposedly private conversation between the 15-year old and his father Clyde Masters was illegally taped. When the transcription of that talk was given to Dr. Meloy, Clyde's lines were removed. One of the FCPD trademarks in this case was to deprive even their own experts of necessary information.

* The "to-do" list of officer Tony Sanchez, who, when working the Richard Hammond case, wrote himself a note that said "Look into Hettrick." Other officers also testified that Hammond was discussed as a potential Hettrick murder suspect. This contradicts the state's position, which is that Hammond was never considered, and never should have been considered.

The List of 94

One important document was turned over to the defense before the original trial - a roster of people who were looked at with varying degrees of attention, whose suspect potential ranged from impossible (for instance, known sex offenders who happened to be locked up when Hettrick was murdered) to improbable. This is good news because, well, it was turned over, making it something of a rarity. Bad news because it was next to useless. Three of the most stellar potential suspects are treated thusly:
*Donald Long is noted with three words. At the time, he was suspected of the murder of Linda Holt. He later confessed to, and was convicted of, killing Holt and another local woman. To this day, no one has explained why Long was not considered in the Peggy Hettrick murder.
*Matt Zoellner: The "List of 94" says he allowed his house to be searched, and he took a lie detector test. It doesn't say whether his results came out as "inconclusive" as those of Tim Masters. It says Zoellner was ruled out by investigators. It doesn't mention that his knife collection, shoes, and car were not tested for Peggy's blood. It doesn't mention how his whereabouts at the time of the murder were verified by a woman who said she spent the night with him. As alibis go, this one rates somewhere between ridiculous and pathetic. The report doesn't explain something a lot of us still puzzle over: Why was Zoellner's candidacy for the position of murderer so readily dismissed? It's well known that most murdered women are killed by husbands or boyfriends. Occam's Razor, the principle of accepting the simplest explanation as the most likely one, should have suggested that this murder was a "domestic." A guy might dispose of a woman who was becoming tedious, and slice off a couple of souvenirs, the parts he liked best, to remember her by. That seems much more feasible than some intricately convoluted scenario involving a stranger whose actions can only be explained by a pricey expert. How did the "boyfriend" slide so effortlessly out of the picture?
And this blindness was not in effect only in 1987, after Peggy was killed. Just a few months ago, when defense team investigator Barie Goetz obtained the DNA "standards" from the Fort Collins Police Department, he was carelessly given the entire DNA sample that had been collected from Zoellner. As Greg Campbell reported, "They had no interest in keeping any standards from another suspect, telling Goetz he could have all of the DNA collected from another person who was investigated for the crime… That DNA belonged to Hettrick's former boyfriend, Matt Zoellner." What's up with that?
* Richard Hammond is not mentioned at all.

The important things to know about Hammond

* In 1987, when Peggy was killed, Dr. Richard Hammond should have been considered, because according to the police department's own theories, he was at least as good a suspect as the 15-year-old boy across the street. Hammond may not have yet entered his body-builder phase, but he was bigger and stronger than the skinny adolescent. Hammond lived no farther from the body dump site than Masters did, and had surgical skills that Masters did not have. Hammond did not have a criminal record, but neither did Masters. Becky Hammond said her husband was home in bed all night. Clyde Masters said his son was home in bed all night.

* In 1995, it became public knowledge that Hammond had been filming women and girls who used the toilet in his downstairs bathroom, and couples who used the spare bed. The scandal brought a week of notoriety for Hammond, followed by his suicide. At that time, he should definitely have been regarded as a suspect in the cold-case Hettrick murder.

* In 1996-1999, the murder case was reinvestigated preparatory to nailing Tim Masters. Knowing what they knew then about Dr. Hammond, with his crimes a very recent memory, there's no way in hell the cops can be forgiven for not making him a suspect. It doesn't matter that he was dead: Hammond should have been promoted to the top of their list. He even matched their bogus "profile" better than Tim did. The thing to remember about Hammond is, even if it turns out that he wasn't the killer, he very well could have been, based on what was known at the time. He should have been a prime suspect, and the very facts of his existence, proclivities, and proximity, had they been known at Tim's trial, would undoubtedly have changed the outcome. The failure to consider him as a Hettrick murder suspect at that point is incomprehensible, and it looks very much like a deliberate crusade to pin it on Masters and nobody but Masters.

Why this matters

The report says, "The People would assert that because Hammond cannot be proven by the defense to qualify as an alternate suspect, as a matter of law, that the failure to disclose information relating to his matters does not warrant the relief sought by the defendant." Some of us People, however, feel that the authorities made it impossible for anything to be proven by anybody.

Here's what it boils down to. If Hammond had officially been named a suspect, then the state would have had to give information about him to the original defense lawyers before Tim's trial, as "discovery." At that time, knowledge of Hammond's dual careers - professional surgeon and DIY pornographer - would have thrown a ton of reasonable doubt on the guilt of Tim Masters - enough doubt to acquit him, probably. Remember, the trial was nearly ten years ago. Hold that thought and…

Fast-forward to 2007, when we all became well-informed Hammondologists, once Tim's post-conviction lawyers and some wide-awake journalists called attention to the doctor. Many people considered him a beaut of an alternative suspect, right up until late 2007, when the DNA revelations were made. Since then, some people have stopped believing that Hammond killed Hettrick. Others are still not convinced. Either way, this is according to what we know, or think we know, now.

Okay, rewind back to the 1999 trial. At that time, knowing what was known then, the twisto doctor should have been in the equation. But the defense was not informed about any possible Hammond relevance, because he wasn't a quote, suspect, unquote. No, he was a "person of interest." It's a matter of semantics. The police were meticulously careful never to deem him a suspect, and because of that fine distinction in terminology, our present-day Special Prosecutor cannot decree that information on Hammond was wrongly withheld. Slick move!

Who was thinking what in '95?

The report says, "Terry Gilmore, Jolene Blair and Investigator Linda Wheeler-Holloway all indicate that they had never, during the course of the pre-trial investigation, considered Dr. Hammond as a suspect in the Hettrick homicide" And we'll get to them. But first, let's consider the people who did see Hammond as a suspect back in 1995 (8 years after the murder) when his filming activities were revealed; when he was taken into custody, released, and then died by his own hand, all within a week.

One of the big breakthroughs for Tim's post-conviction defense team was finding a notebook where FCPD officer Tony Sanchez, lead investigator in the Hammond matter, had written "Look into Hettrick." This is solid proof that the idea had, at the very least, entered Sanchez's mind, whether or not he endorsed it. He might have written the note to oblige another officer, Dave Mickelson, who had watched some portion of Hammond's collection of home-brewed porn videos. Mickelson made the connection between Hammond's obsession with female sex organs, the nearness of the Hammond house to where Hettrick's body was found, and the fact that she had been known to house-sit (which is how Hammond recruited women to secretly film.)

Mickelson suggested that the doctor should be looked at for the murder. He was in Crimes Against Property at the time, and didn't have the standing to influence the Hammond investigation or do much of anything, really, except express his opinion. One of his opinions was that the planned destruction of all the videotapes, both the viewed and the unviewed ones, should not be carried out, because film of Peggy Hettrick might be found among them. Mickelson's concerns were ignored by Sanchez and by the next person up the chain of command, the supervisor of Crimes Against Persons who, not surprisingly, was Jim Broderick. Mickelson was told that the tapes had to be burned for legal reasons. He testified that at one point he was threatened with the loss of his job.

Sanchez also viewed some of the videos and checked Hammond's background, finding only parking violations. After these feeble gestures, it was decided that Hammond couldn't have killed Hettrick because he had no previous criminal record, and besides, no violent acts were seen in his hundreds of home-made videotapes. To know this was an startling feat of clairvoyance, since only a small fraction of the tapes were viewed before being burned.

Amazingly, Sanchez has said that he was working without a complete set of tools. The partial vulvectomy that had been performed on Hettrick's body was "holdback" information, kept even from some police officers, supposedly to prevent leaks to the press, so Sanchez didn't know about it. This is problematic for two reasons. First, the excision of the nipple was known by all, and that alone should have been enough to raise a red flag, regarding the medical man/amateur porn king. Second, a biker who had been questioned soon after Peggy's murder came to police attention because an informant overheard him wondering how anybody could call what was done a mutilation, since it was "just a slice to the chest and a stick to the pussy." (This man, incidentally, also knew Donald Long, and took a polygraph test passing every question except "Do you know who killed Peggy Hettrick?") As with the nipple, it's very difficult to believe that any member of the FCPD, not to mention the DA's office and everybody else in town, didn't know about the other cutting. This kind of information just does not remain secret.

Sanchez testified that Hammond picked up women in bars, but said he didn't know at the time that Hettrick was sometimes picked up by men, especially well-dressed ones, in bars. And Sanchez, nominally the lead investigator, hadn't read the psychological profile of Hammond generated during his evaluation between the arrest and the suicide.

Troy Krenning, another officer involved in the Hammond case, also saw some of the videotapes. He later testified to knowing Mickelson's views about Hammond's possible guilt in the Hettrick murder, and said it wasn't difficult to imagine that Mickelson's theory was known throughout the department. Krenning had also associated Hammond's proximity and pornography with the Hettrick murder. (On the other hand, in January 2008, a comment in response to an online news report said, "Troy… certainly did not feel that way during some of the Masters investigation…he told me face-to-face that Masters was guilty and with a surprising amount of vehemence." But maybe that was early on, before the Hammond thing broke.)

Ray Martinez, who was also an officer in '95, testified that he "knew the geography of where the homicide occurred and where [Hammond] lived." He thought, at least in retrospect, that Hammond "certainly should have been investigated in reference to the Peggy Hettrick homicide." And he was clear that the idea was brought up or suggested at the time. "The thought apparently crossed our mind."

So, as we've seen, at least four FCPD officers did make the Hammond/Hettrick connection and believe it was meaningful, back in 1995, and many more were aware of the connection. Despite all this, Hammond was cleared of any involvement. Whoever let this happen wasn't doing their job, and neither was their boss or their boss's boss.

It was, at best, a major error and, at worst, a deliberate refusal to make a genuine effort to solve the murder. Someone with a suspicious mind could think Hammond was so thoroughly ignored because Peggy Hettrick's real killer was already known to be neither Hammond nor Masters. Perhaps the real killer was someone who needed to be protected at any cost - a valuable drug snitch, for instance. Maybe it wasn't incompetence or "professional courtesy" to a doctor that caused Hammond to go unscrutinized. Maybe, since it had already been decided that the murder would be pinned on Masters, Hammond was truly irrelevant. Hey, why not? We've seen, over and over again, that nothing is too bizarre for this case.

An unexpected exception

Among the FCPD personnel who in 1995 mentally associated Hammond with the murder eight years previous, there was one surprising omission: Linda Wheeler-Holloway. Why surprising? Because back in 1992 she was, as lead investigator on the Hettrick murder, one of the three who flew to Philadelphia. On that trip she not only realized there were no grounds for serving the arrest warrant, but became filled with doubt about Tim as the designated suspect. "I wasn't sure he didn't do it, but I sure wasn't sure he did do it." On returning, she irritated her bosses by wanting start from scratch, with the suspect field wide open. Her position was very well known around the cop shop, and very unpopular.

When the Hammond affair came to light, Wheeler-Holloway was on the scene. She was then a patrol officer, having rotated to that service in accordance with department policy. Assigned to search the Hammonds' bedroom, she was in a position to observe the view from the window - a view that included the spot where Peggy Hettrick's body had been abandoned. It might seem that, as the only known proponent of the Maybe-It-Wasn't-Tim revolution, she'd be the one to go on the alert. But it was not so.

"People are too Monday-Night-quarterbacking this Hammond thing," she says. "If I didn't make the connection, it wasn't obvious." She wasn't thinking it, and wasn't aware of anyone else thinking it. And if she had thought it, there would have been complications. In the back of her mind, Wheeler-Holloway harbored a conviction that if the Hettrick case were ever reopened, even with such a promising suspect as Hammond now in their sights, the rest of the department would veer unswervingly back to Tim Masters, and it would be deja vu all over again. Better to let sleeping dogs lie.

It was only later, when a colleague she ran into at a conference proposed a connection between Hammond and Hettrick, that the penny dropped. "It's like I got hit right between the eyes. That's the first time I really thought, "Duh," about Dr. Hammond, because it just really hadn't crossed my mind." After many years of effort, Linda Wheeler-Holloway became the one person, aside from his defense lawyers, most responsible for Tim Masters attaining freedom in January of 2008. One of the questions she now asks is, "If they really had concerns, why didn't other people stand up and say something louder? It's one thing to tell your buddies or say it over a beer, but it's something else to go do something about it."

The prosecution in '95: what were they thinking?

Appended to Quick's report are the transcripts of interviews conducted in August, 2007, one with Jolene Blair (Exhibit B) and the other with Terry Gilmore (Exhibit C). Sadly, reading them does not lead to an understanding of how the Special Prosecutors reached their conclusions. Based on the same material, other conclusions are possible.

Here's what the team came up with. According to the Special Prosecutor's Report, "The requisite evidence or facts establishing a link of Dr. Hammond to the Hettrick murder that would designate him as an alternate suspect under the law did not and do not exist." The operative phrase here is "under the law." The reason he's not a suspect is because nobody labeled him as such - but they did treat him as such, if only in a very limited way and for a very short time. "There is no evidence of an act directly connecting Dr. Hammond to the stabbing death of Peggy Hettrick," the report goes on to say.

So, let's talk about evidence and facts and acts.

They say "There is no blood or blood spatter evidence connecting Hammond in any way to Peggy's death." and "There is no fingerprint, hairs, fiber or other trace evidence connecting Hammond in any way to Peggy's death." Well of course there isn't, because nobody ever looked for it. If Hammond's car, garage, basement, office, and clothing had been inspected on the day when Peggy's body was found, who knows what might have turned up? But at the time of the murder, he was totally off their radar. He was just that nice doctor across the street from the body dump site, who was in bed with his wife all night.

There were, incidentally, none of these kinds of evidence to connect Tim, either.

They say, "There is no DNA evidence connecting Hammond in any way to Peggy's death." At the time when the Special Prosecutor's Report was written, nobody seems to have been in possession of an indisputable Hammond DNA sample. What they had was a highly questionable envelope the doctor supposedly licked. How could any lab make a match with anything?

There was no DNA evidence to connect Tim, either.

They say, "No person has ever come forward to claim that Hammond admitted any relation to or involvement in Peggy's death." Oh, this is how we solve crimes? We sit around and wait for a snitch put the finger on someone? Because nobody blew him in, he didn't do it? This is so lame. Especially when the one person who could have most effectively snitched him out was given instant immunity. You heard right. Becky Hammond got a lawyer, not the same one her husband had, and, quoting Terry Gilmore, this lawyer "would not allow the police to talk with her unless she was granted some kind of immunity from prosecution." Gilmore says he talked to his superiors and "then if we all agreed that that was appropriate, okayed it."

Wow, it's that easy to avoid prosecution? Who knew? How come everybody's not doing it? The police, by the way, gained nothing from the Hammond Immunity (doesn't that sound like a Robert Ludlum thriller?). If you look up "stonewall" in the dictionary, Becky's picture is there.

Nobody ever claimed that Tim admitted involvement in Peggy's death, either. Except for the police and Dr. Meloy and the DA's office, that is. When it comes to evidence in the form of possessions or productions, Hammond had at least as much, and would have had way more, if it hadn't been destroyed. The effort put forth was very unequal. The police watched every movie that Tim possessed - Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween II, stuff like that - looking for clues. Of the pornographic films Dr. Hammond actually made, they watched a few and burned the rest.

Hammond had a clean record, they say. So what? Everybody starts out with one of those. Hammond's record was clean - until it wasn't. In 1987, the murder year, his record was no cleaner than Tim's. And later, at the time of Tim's trial, it's only in the most technical sense that Hammond had a clean record. True, he escaped having an official record, because he took himself out before they had a chance to charge and convict him. This is not a very impressive argument.

They say, "In sum, there is no act directly connecting Richard Hammond to the stabbing death of Peggy Hettrick." Well, guess what. There was no act directly connecting Tim Masters to it either - yet he served nine and a half years in prison.

Special treatment equals special relationship

The report contains quite a lot of discussion about Hammond, and finds, of course, no evidence of any non-disclosure problem, or of any special relationships. The party line is, Hammond had nothing to do with any of this, and therefore, nobody could have possibly done anything improper on account of him. Terry Gilmore first said he had never been at the Hammonds' house, then after consulting with his wife, said that he had been. His wife knew Becky Hammond from church. But it really doesn't matter if the Gilmores and the Hammonds, or the Blairs and the Hammonds, were bosom buddies, golfing partners, or barely knew each other. All three families were from the upper stratum of society. Admit it or not, we have a class system in America, and the members of the ruling class protect each other.

Gilmore was the screening deputy when Dr. Hammond was arrested and immediately sent off to a hospital for evaluation of his mental health. Charges hadn't even been filed yet, the police didn't even know what they had, at that point. For all they knew, Hammond's oeuvre might have included snuff movies. Concerning his criminal history, Gilmore told the Special Prosecutors, "I don't recall reading any reports prior to signing or okaying the bond." He was let go, because as Gilmore said, "…the concern everybody had was his mental stability." Isn't that all warm and fuzzy! What about his actions? This guy was caught doing some serious pervert stuff, with victims numbering in the hundreds, and the scope of his activities was as yet unknown. But there was no special relationship, no sirree.

Before killing himself, Hammond wrote a nice bread-and-butter letter to Gilmore thanking him for the leniency and expressing how, as Gilmore says, "He was upset about all the publicity and was angry at the police department…." Awwww. "I berated myself for letting him out on bond," Gilmore says, "because maybe he'd of still been alive." Yeah, and maybe he'd have been held accountable for his wrongdoings, but nobody gives much of a shit about that. And Gilmore's vagueness about the whys and wherefores of Becky Hammond's immunity amounts to willful ignorance.

Here's a question: Why didn't the suicide of Richard Hammond suggest, to at least some law-enforcement minds, that he needed to avoid the consequences of something even more sordid than potty pictures, something much worse, that the police might have been on the verge of learning? After all, everyone used plenty of imagination when conjuring up guilt scenarios for Tim Masters. Why not apply a bit of that creativity to Hammond's situation? What was so desperate to avoid, that he killed himself to escape it?

First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain

A mountain of evidence, is what the police had on their hands after Hammond's death. Over 300 self-produced videotapes and a couple of storage sheds full of assorted porn, which flames took over eight hours to consume. Why was it burned? As Gilmore said, "You got a police department that's in possession of all this stuff that they obviously don't want to make public or have disseminated…." Well, if the police can't keep something locked up and undisseminated, who the hell can? That's why they have secure evidence storage facilities. Are we to infer that even if the police locked it up, they couldn't be trusted? Was there a danger that some cops would be selling the dirty movies, or what?

Meanwhile, the case had been "specialed out" - turned over to another jurisdiction. Why? The Jolene Blair interview says, "…people that were on the video tapes might have some relationship to employees of the district attorney's office. I don't know who…." The Terry Gilmore interview says, "I don't think I ever was aware of who they were…." Then who the hell does know? Surely, some living person must still work there now, who worked there then. Why is there a deep, dark mystery about the reason for the removal of the local DA's office from that situation? Aren't these things supposed to be documented? This is the government, right? Gilmore says, "I don't know that I've ever seen that motion." How could he not have seen the paperwork that took away his authority over the case? What was the connection between Dr. Hammond and the DA's office, to cause that office's withdrawal from the case? Why don't we know?

So. The local authorities no longer were officially in charge of Hammond's evidenciary legacy. Yet someone here ordered its destruction. Who? Blair says, "…the City Attorney requested that the District Attorney file a motion for the destruction of those tapes…and I think our office did file a motion to destroy the evidence…" Gilmore says he doesn't remember participating in the decision or signing the request, although he read in the newspaper that he did both. And he acknowledges that involvement by the city attorney's office "wouldn't have happened on a normal basis."

So Quick's report says, in regard to the Hettrick murder, "The defense cannot prove that Richard Hammond 'committed some act directly connecting' him with the crime charged. In fact the weight of the evidence concludes otherwise." The weight of what evidence? Those people destroyed all the evidence. This is, like, so Catch-22. Destruction of evidence in a murder case - isn't that obstruction of justice? Isn't that, like, a crime? What they did here was destroy stuff that should have been evidence in a murder case.

Who was thinking what in '99?

In the four years between March 1995 (Hammond's week of infamy) and March 1999 (Tim's trial), what went on in the minds of the police? In late 1996, the Hettrick case was retrieved from cold storage and reopened in a big way, but still with only one name on the suspect list. Most of the department was deeply engaged in trying, yet again, to build a case against Masters. He was arrested in August of 1998.

After Tim's arrest, Krenning, Mickelson, Sanchez, and Martinez, whatever opinions they might have held, didn't talk to the defense attorneys. Dave Mickelson says he attempted to break the code of silence once, with a passing remark to the Public Defender, tipping him off to look at Hammond. But because Tim wasn't being represented by the Public Defender, the hint fell on sterile ground.

At the recent hearings, Troy Krenning testified that he assumed the defense attorneys knew about Hammond, and knew about Krenning's thoughts about Hammond, and he assumed that they would call if they wanted his take on it.

At the trial, Linda Wheeler-Holloway was a prosecution witness. Only a recognized expert is allowed to give an opinion, but she anticipated that Tim's lawyer might ask her for one anyway, and told the prosecutor "if the defense asked me for my opinion about Master's guilt, that I would tell the truth, which was that I had serious doubts that they were trying the right person. I told Blair that if I was asked the question, that she had better be ready to object to me being asked for an opinion, because I would tell the truth." Although she hadn't yet made the connection between Hammond and Hettrick, frustration with the inadequate investigation of the whole Hammond matter still rankled. There had been more to it than ever got into the papers, and with a little digging, who knows what might have been unearthed?

The point here is: we now know that at least four officers made the connection as far back as 1995. That means the Hammond information should have been part of the discovery material when the trial took place. It's difficult to see how this could be disputed.

Jim Broderick, of course, was still monomaniacally focused on Tim Masters. The report describes him as "meticulous and detailed in his work. He wrote voluminously…" They got that shit right. He wrote so voluminously because he was doing the work we paid Meloy tens of thousands of dollars to supposedly do. One of the documents newly excavated during the hearings is Broderick's chore list from the summer of 1998. The category "For Gilmore - exculpatory covered?" included the item "Take out Meloy ref to doc extractions." This is interpretable as a clear intention to deliberately withhold mention of the Meloy Extractions - one of the four items the Special Prosecutor's office has named in its stipulation list.

Although Lt. Jim Broderick was obviously thinking about how to conceal things, this report emphasizes that there is no evidence of non-disclosure by him, and we are not for a moment to believe that the officer intentionally hid anything, from either the prosecutors or the defense attorneys at trial time. "Our stipulation makes no such finding of intentional hiding," it says. Oh, puh-leeze! (See previous paragraph.) Even if we suspend our disbelief far enough to grant that the trial prosecutors, Gilmore and Blair, were pure as the driven snow, somebody hid and held back stuff. If it was not hid and held back, then where was it, all that time? The Special Prosecutors say, "We found evidence that certain reports and statements were not provided to the trial prosecutors or to the trial defense attorneys…." Well then, who exactly was it that did the "not providing"? If not Broderick, then who? And one issue that no one has even addressed yet is the astonishing number of physical evidence items that have gone missing over the years. That should be a whole separate investigation - which would make, what? Five?

The Special Prosecutors did many things, "including reviewing all of the documents." This is disingenuous. For some time, they were not able to review all the documents, because some documents were kept from them - yes, kept from the Special Prosecutors - until late 2007, when the hearings had already been in progress for weeks. Ever the cowboy, Broderick held on to a plethora of material right up until the very last second and beyond. Not even a subpoena pried the stuff loose until he was darned good and ready to give it up. Even so, we can't know how much relevant paperwork will never see the light of day. He had a lot of years in which to bury it.

The prosecution in '99: What were they thinking?

In his interview, attached to the report, Terry Gilmore is asked about what he was up to during the long re-investigation of the Hettrick murder. He remembers being called and asked questions, chiefly relating to the 1992 Philadelphia trip. Otherwise, he doesn't remember much. No "major events," certainly.

Documents read out during the recent hearings reveal a more active role for the deputy DA. In late 1996, Broderick noted a meeting with Gilmore to discuss what they hoped Roy Hazelwood would do for them. In late 1997, Broderick's notes speak of telling Gilmore to expect a tape from Dr. Meloy. (He had only been retained days before, so this might have been, what, a sample of previous work?) The following month, Broderick, Gilmore, and Marsha Reed got together at the Holiday Inn to welcome Reid Meloy to town (apparently not a memorable "major event" in the life of Terry Gilmore. Sorry, Dr. Meloy.) They visited the scene where Peggy Hettrick's body was found, and the police evidence room. In June '98, there was a conference call between the same four participants, perhaps one of many.

But even all this hobnobbing with world-class experts on sexual homicide didn't ring any bells for Terry Gilmore, who never for a moment thought about Dr. Hammond. "I had absolutely no reason to believe he was involved in any way with Peggy Hettrick's murder," he says. "We had no inkling that [Hammond] was a possible suspect….it just never even occurred to us…."

And Jolene Blair says, "Dr. Hammond….wasn't even a blip on the screen. No one thought of him, no one talked about him." Maybe not around her, but Jack Taylor, another officer, testified at the hearings that in 1999, Hammond was pretty much common knowledge.

But Blair says, "...the crimes that he apparently perpetrated are so different than the Peggy Hettrick homicide…" Is she kidding with this? It's all about crotches, lady. This is the guy who had a camera zeroed in on the pubic area, who had a rating system for various individual components of the female genitalia, who painstakingly edited his productions. Dr. Hammond's hobby is way closer to the Peggy Hettrick homicide than anything Tim ever did. But they say there was no "pairing of sex and violence" in Hammond's productions. You know, the videotapes of which only a small percentage were watched before they were burned. Meanwhile, Tim's trial included such "pairings of sex and violence" as a sketch of a knife on the same school notebook page as a sketch of the cover of a men's magazine.

Alternate suspects? What alternate suspects?

Before charges were filed against Tim, there was a meeting in the DA's large conference room that included, Jolene Blair says, "all of the police officers that had been involved" in the Hettrick case - even some who had since retired from the force. She says, "Nobody voiced any reticence or reluctance or hesitancy or maybe we ought to look at this alternate suspect…" Gilmore was asked, "Did anybody indicate to you that they felt someone else may have done it or we should look into someone else before we file charges?" He said, "Not that I recall. I think we went around to everyone and I just asked them all and, everybody was comfortable…." How nice for them.

In another part of her interview, Blair says, "I think the PD tried very hard to consider all possibilities…" Here's something to wonder about: If nobody ever told this prosecutor anything, how could she measure their dedication to considering all possibilities? Especially when, according to everybody, there were no other possibilities? The most ridiculous thing we are asked to believe is: at the time of Tim's trial, absolutely no word of a possible Hammond-Hettrick connection had trickled through the grapevine to the ears of the prosecutors. Not a hint, not a smidgen of a clue.

Gilmore was specifically asked whether Hammond was mentioned at this meeting. He had "No recollection of any conversations where anyone proposed that he was a suspect in the Hettrick murder case." Blair says "…that investigation of Tim Masters was void of anything related to Dr. Hammond" If we must believe it, then we must. She goes on to say that because the video scandal had happened three or four years earlier, "Dr. Hammond wasn't fresh in our minds."

Hold onto that thought, and fast-forward to late 2007, during the hearings, when this conversation took place between original trial lawyer Erik Fischer and Jolene Blair. These are her words: "We talked about the fact that the defense now was trying to raise Richard Hammond as an alternate suspect. And I told him how ridiculous that was...And I said, 'and the allegation that we somehow kept him a secret is also preposterous.'" She goes on to say the Hammond affair was "all over the media. I mean, everybody knew…what happened with Richard Hammond and his circumstances was no secret." She was scolding Fischer for not being aware of Hammond when preparing for the trial back in 1999. He was supposed to have known all about Hammond, and been equipped to offer him as an alternate suspect. Yet, at the same time, Blair and Gilmore maintain that in 1999, Hammond was a non-factor, such a total non-issue, he was totally off the prosecution's radar. But Judge Blair! Didn't you say the Hammond affair was all over the media? Everybody knew? Everybody, that is, except the prosecutors, who obstinately, mulishly refused to even let him onto their screen.

And what alternate suspect list?

There seems to be some confusion about this. Erik Fischer testified that he asked Terry Gilmore for whatever alternate suspects they might have, and was given a "weak list", which would have been the "List of 94." This is something the prosecution should have turned over, and did turn over; yet for some reason felt compelled to deny having done.

Tom Quammen asks: "Did you give to the defense alternate suspect evidence or information?" Gilmore's answer: "Not that I recall. You mean like a list or anything? No I don't recall ever being any request and I don't recall us ever having any such thing as an alternate suspect list or anything like that." Michael Goodbee asks if there was a specific request made by one the defense trial counsel for information relating to alternate suspects considered in this case. Gilmore's answer: "I have no recollection of that ever occurring." Frank Spottke asks: "You were never asked by the defense lawyers for any alternate suspects or if you had any alternate suspects?" Gilmore's answer: "No. Not that I remember."

If they truly didn't know certain things, why was that?

Who knew what, and when did they know it? That's the gist of all high-profile inquiries. But awareness is one of the most difficult things to prove. There are several different ways of not knowing. One is by causing it to be understood that there are things you don't want to know. By whatever means, you get the idea across to your support staff that plausible deniability will be maintained. "Don't ask, don't tell" is a time-honored and widely-used strategy for the maintenance of blissful ignorance, and there may have been some of that going on. Linda Wheeler-Holloway says not. But that could be because people of very high integrity often don't even realize the evil that goes on around them. They're just not tuned in to the wavelength.

Here's a troubling contradiction: Troy Krenning testified in the hearings that, before the Masters trial, he stated many times that they were going after the wrong guy. "I had plenty of conversations with Jolene Blair about it…It was the beginning of the end of a friendly relationship."

Let's revisit the four areas of non-discovered evidence that were stipulated: the Meloy extractions, the anniversary surveillance, the Tsoi statement, and the Roy Hazelwood material. It seems that out of the many things that weren't given to either side in discovery, it was particularly important for the prosecution to claim ignorance about these.

But surely, the prosecution did know about the overwhelmingly pervasive role played by Meloy. What about all those phone conferences and meetings? The prosecution knew that Meloy practically wrote the arrest warrant, and that he approved it in a later form. His deep involvement at that stage was inappropriate, and the prosecutors were well aware of it.

The prosecutors knew Tim had been under some kind of surveillance in1988, although they may not have been aware of the scale of the operation. But somebody was. It had been a whole year in the planning. Scores of police officers knew about it, as did Lt. Deryle O'Dell, police chief Bruce Glasscock, a vice president at American Federal Savings, and the FBI. If the surveillance/psychological experiment didn't produce results, the police had planned to close the books on the case. It's hard to believe the DA's office didn't know.

Another way to avoid knowing things, is to not ask the right questions. For instance, "What ever happened with that big surveillance?" Apparently neither of the prosecutors asked that one. "What about that Tsoi fellow, the plastic surgeon? Where's the damn report?" Nobody asked that one, either. Back in '92, the failed arrest warrant contained references to the "profile" that never existed. Gilmore reviewed that document. Why didn't he ask for the FBI profile which supposedly backed it up? Because if there never was a profile, it was really much better not to know. Gilmore had been in on the negotiations with Hazelwood. "Where's the Hazelwood report that we paid $2000 for?" he might have asked, but apparently didn't.

As the Bible tells us, those who have ears will hear, and those who have eyes will see. Conversely, those who don't have ears or eyes will neither hear nor see.

Implications

Once again: The Special Prosecutor's Report tells us, "Neither Jolene Blair nor Terry Gilmore contemplated Hammond as a possible suspect in the Hettrick homicide during their time as prosecutors on the Hettrick case." Okay, suppose we take their word for it. For the sake of argument, let's say they never, ever had Hammond in mind. What does this tell us?

Maybe it tells us that Hammond is just one more of the things that should have been turned over to the lawyers on both sides. Another count of misbehavior against the police department. Fine, but just because, like all the other things that weren't turned over, this wasn't turned over, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It exists as much as those already-stipulated items exist.

Hammond should always have been a factor, by their own standards. Here's why. The first time around, when the brand-new murder was investigated in 1987, who was looked at? All known sex offenders in south Fort Collins. The "List of 94" started out with fewer than 94 names. The first version of it was a handwritten roster of known sex offenders in the geographical area, compiled by sex crimes investigator Linda Wheeler-Holloway from the information in her cabinet full of known sex offender files. Granted, Hammond was not then known as a member of that species.

But after he blossomed, when the scandal occurred in 1995, it is unconscionable that his artifacts were not examined for a connection with Peggy, and unforgivable that they were destroyed. That he didn't stick around to be tried and convicted is irrelevant. He was a known sex offender in south Fort Collins. Why, during that whole period of 1995 through 1999, didn't the police or prosecutors look at him? Not a man who doodled little drawings like Tim Masters, but one who had an elaborate studio setup, and who videotaped the genitals of hundreds of women? Why didn't anybody look at this pervert who lived right across the street from where Peggy's body was found - the most notorious sex offender ever to dwell in south Fort Collins? How could they not have? It adds up to more than willful ignorance. It looks very much like a decision was made and adhered to.

A day late and a dollar short, the buck stops here

There's an interesting line in the Special Prosecutor's Report. Even if the trial prosecutors actually never got the things they say they never got, they still "were responsible for discovery of this information because it was in the possession of the investigating agency." And that's as it should be. That means the District Attorney's office is in charge of keeping the cops honest, which it failed to do. The DA is supposed to keep the police in a position where, whether through fear of consequences or respect for the law, they wouldn't dream of withholding evidence.

On learning that the prosecutors are responsible for knowing about all evidence, and for turning over everything to the defense in the discovery process, even if they themselves don't have it, some have cried "Unfair!" Is it right that the prosecutors should be held accountable for not revealing things they themselves didn't know? Let's take a closer look at this.

There's a well-established principle of citizens being held responsible for what they didn't know. If you give someone a ride, and are stopped at a checkpoint, and your passenger's backpack is found to be full of cocaine, you can bet that your car will be seized and you will be charged. People are currently serving time for less. If the principle of responsibility for things they didn't know can be used against citizens, it can damn well apply to the authorities too, who are being paid hefty salaries to know everything.

The principle of people being responsible for the subordinates they control, is well established. If a dog bites someone, the owner is responsible. If a minor commits vandalism, the parents are made to pay. The investigative agency is presumed to be under the control of the DA's office just as surely as your dog is presumed to be under your control. No way should the trial prosecutors be let off easy.

The Special Prosecutor's Report concludes thusly: "Our office has provided information to each of [the three other ongoing investigations.] It would be inappropriate for us to comment on our conclusions until each of these investigations have been completed." So, what was all that stuff in the report, if not commentary? It certainly set the tone. Don't be surprised when the other three investigations all fall into line. Watch for the trial prosecutors to not be disciplined for anything. Watch for Lt. Broderick to be completely let off. As for the investigation of Peggy Hettrick's murder, it's too little, too late. Watch for it to fizzle into oblivion.

Earthblog.net also first published:
Free Tim Masters Because
An Open Letter to Larry Abrahamson
The Meloy Massacre
Is It Mark Fuhrman Time?
Freedom: Day One

Freedom: Day One

2008-05-26T12:49:00.000-07:00

Freedom: Day One

by Pat Hartman

Originally published at Earthblog.net

January 24, 2008

By now, there's probably not a person in America who doesn't know the basic outline of the case:

1987: Peggy Hettrick is murdered in Fort Collins, Colorado. Suspicion immediately fastens on 15-year old Tim Masters. But no physical clues, eyewitness testimony, or anything else commonly recognized as "evidence" link him to the crime.

1998: More than ten years later, after much expert-shopping, after being turned down by more reputable experts, thanks to the collusion of a hired-gun "expert", and still with not a scrap of anything resembling actual evidence, Detective Jim Broderick succeeds in getting Masters convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

2008: Thanks to a whole lot of conscientious people, including superlative lawyers and top-notch investigators and scientists, Masters is freed.

It's Tuesday the 22nd of January, 2008. You go into a store or office, and the person behind the counter, maybe even someone you never met before, says, "Today's the day Tim Masters gets out." It's a great day for America (and this is not said with the irony of a late night talk show host) because the system worked like its supposed to - which gives hope to hundreds, maybe thousands, of wrongfully convicted people. As one friend said, "You witnessed one of the great moments in courtroom history." Yes, it's a thing you don't see every day. What are the chances, after being thumbs-downed by both the appeals court and the state Supreme Court, of somebody writing for himself such an excellent piece of work as the 35c motion Tim put together? Out of all the similar motions filed by all the desperate inmates, this one succeeded in being heard.

At one point, as Judge Weatherby arranged his courtroom, he asked if any more family members were waiting out in the corridor, and a woman called out, "We're all family." That was the feeling. Except for a stray prosecutor or two, we all thought Tim looked a lot better in his blazer and tie than the way we'd been used to seeing him, in the orange jumpsuit, with chains and goofy shoes. And later on, the best party I ever went to - a birthday party extraordinaire, a second birth for a person who's been through the kind of ordeal that would drive a lot of us around the bend. Certainly, no sensation can compare to regaining freedom after nine years' incarceration, but the rush of seeing a loved one set free has got to run a close second. There's nothing like hanging out with a great big clan of ecstatically happy people to brighten up a day. For me as a citizen, and as somebody who's taken a keen interest in this case, it's an overwhelming experience.

Consequently, this piece started out with the intention of being all warm and fuzzy, stuffed with quotes like this one from Tim's uncle Owen Lamb, who said, "We always believed he was innocent - it's such a relief. He's sure welcome at our house, we hope he's watching the Super Bowl with us. I'm just glad he's going to be watching it at all."

So - what's my problem? Well……

We've got a district attorney here, name of Larry Abrahamson, who's now spinning this thing like a top, with the excuse that it's all the fault of inadequate DNA technology at the time of the murder. At this moment, we don't need to review the state of DNA technology in 1987 when Peggy was killed, carved, and dragged around like a leftover turkey carcass. At this moment we don't need to reflect upon the progress of DNA testing in the late 1990s when Tim was arrested and tried. What we now need to remember are the later events, when Mr. Abrahamson spent many months actively blocking the possibility of any DNA testing at all. He then, without permission, against a court order, allowed Peggy's clothes to be subjected to an old-school harvesting method which could very well have destroyed the existence of any remaining evidence on those pathetic scraps of fabric. He released the clothing and let this potentially destructive testing be done - not to put too fine a point on it - illegally. Knowing that his actions might ruin Tim's last chance for exoneration.

Now, there seems to be some soft-pedaling in process. Some equivocation, some backing and filling. The historical revisionism is already setting in, as Abrahamson and his crew assure us that it's all just been a little misunderstanding. Voices are telling us that the only reason Tim was convicted was that appropriate DNA technology wasn't available when Peggy was killed or, even more ridiculous, at the time when Tim went to trial. This is a big, big, big lie. A whopper. It is, in fact, the kind of industrial-grade bullshit that put Herr Goebbels on the map. If the people of Colorado let him get away with it, we're as guilty as he is and deserve everything we get from him and his kind.

The zeal with which Tim Masters was pursued, back at the start, suggests more than just the usual propensity to lock a warm body into a cell so that "justice" can be seen to be done. It suggests a real need to fill that "Peggy Hettrick's killer" vacancy to protect someone else. For a while there, the shocking saga of Richard Hammond had us going - the twisto doctor, etc. But putting somebody else away just to protect the social acquaintance of an assistant DA and his wife, that's kind of a weak rationale even for these guys. And now we are told that the murderer appears not to have been Hammond.

Another, better suspect was being shielded by putting Tim Masters in his place. Who and why? Is this a paranoid fantasy? Is it any more paranoid than the fantasy a 16-year-old might have harbored, that he was being watched for a solid week? Because back in 1988, on the first anniversary of the murder, somebody did follow him for a week. A whole bunch of somebodies, staked out in a construction trailer near his house and following him everywhere, hoping he'd do something indicative of guilt. Is it any more paranoid than believing that a cop planted a copy of Tim's mother's obituary where he'd be sure to find it? Because a cop did do that. Is it any more paranoid than believing that one obsessed lawman would devote almost a decade to bringing about his downfall?

Try watching, first, video from the interrogation at the Fort Collins police station when
Tim was 15; then the interview on Denver's Channel 9 last week, the day after the recommendation was made that his conviction be vacated. Viewing those two pieces of film back-to-back is eerie. More than twenty years have elapsed between these two documentations of a man's life, and for more than nine of those years he's been incarcerated for a crime he didn't commit. It makes you think.

I see Tim Masters as a martyr whose experience and struggle have benefited us all. It's not an ordeal he would have wished for himself, or anybody would have wished for him. He didn't volunteer for the job, he was drafted. Still, he's done us all a great service, because what he went through has succeeded in bringing to light a whole bunch of stuff in the legal system that's been festering and when it finally oozes out, it ain't gonna be pretty at all. Tim Masters should be awarded all the honor due to a POW back from Southeast Asia or the Middle East. Why not? He was deprived of every material possession, as well as the capacity to control his own time and energies. Captured by his own government, he was kept out of circulation and in misery for more than nine years, almost his entire life as a young adult.

Here in Fort Collins, there's another man who has a high media profile, because he was kidnapped in Beirut in 1985 and held hostage for a long time. Dig it: Tom Sutherland and his family sued the Iran government's frozen assets, and came away with $353 million. Well, Sutherland was imprisoned for 2354 days. Tim Masters did 3452 days, and, as if that weren't enough, had his reputation trashed. What's that worth? How much should Tim Masters get, in recompense for his lost years? To what bureaucracy can he now apply for a refund?

I've heard of a freed, wrongly accused man who actually was compensated to the tune of $100 a day for each day of imprisonment. One commentator has even suggested that the state should pay restitution of a million dollars for each year sacrificed to the "justice" machine. I think the time of an exonerated ex-prisoner is worth at least as much as that of the quack who got him locked up, the alleged expert whose big lies put Tim Masters away. I like the figure of $300 an hour, the same rate as was charged by the witch doctor that calls himself a forensic psychologist. How much would that come to? A lot of people's first impulse is to say hell yeah, give it to him. Only problem is, the state doesn't have any money. Or rather, it does - it has the money it takes from the taxpayers. Sorry, but that's the only way there is for a state to get any money. Except for what it gets from the federal government, and where does Washington get it from? Sadly, from the identical source: the taxpayers.

Why should you and I pay for the sins of Lieutenant James Broderick and his band of co-conspirators? Why is the whole monumental expense of this case coming out of our pockets, when we aren't guilty of anything except allowing these jackals to have their way? Are police officers required to carry malpractice insurance, like doctors? If not, why not? Can we at least garnish their wages? And what's the deal with putting bad cops on administrative leave, anyway? For such wickedness, nobody should get a paid vacation. Keep him on the job, preferably on some duty where he can't damage any more citizens, and turn over his paycheck directly to his victims. Him and all the others who construct these Kafkaesque situations.

Why shouldn't Broderick have to sell his house and car and any other assets, in order to pay off this debt? One of the more bizarre outgrowths of the War on Some Drugs is the doctrine that property can be guilty of a crime. In other words, if you transport drugs in a boat, your boat is guilty, and so the government gets to seize it. So, why not let the asset forfeiture concept serve in other ways as well? For instance, Detective Broderick did a great deal of thinking and plotting about how to destroy Tim Masters, while in his house. Therefore, his house is guilty and should be seized to help pay whatever monetary award eventually goes to Masters. If any of Broderick's teeth contain gold, let's have them too.

Now, this may seem like a side issue, but it's not. There's a consumer angle here that needs looking into. Doctor Reid Meloy, the forensic psychologist who testified at such absurd length, was paid a great deal of money - $70,000 is the number I heard. I'm thinking my next art project should be a Photoshop collage of Reid Meloy in leopard-skin hot pants, because he's such a ho. And not even a good one. Many call girls, in fact, possess more integrity. And, get this - in recent months, while some police officers risked censure by taking Tim's side, and while many people spent copious amounts of time at the hearings - including Tim's original defense lawyers, who each testified for many days - while these people jeopardized their livelihoods and relationships to participate in freeing Tim, what did Reid Meloy do? Here's what he did. Rather than provide copies of his reports to the defense team, rather even than sell them the materials at the cost of photocopying, Dr. Meloy charged $1000 for those documents. That's right - the sleazy son of a bitch could not resist wringing one last increment of profit from the situation.

No-one suggests that we should take back the money because some people think Dr. Meloy is a "scam artist with a long history of fraudulent testimony" or "the most ignorant blowhard I have ever seen." It's because he testified at such bounteous and fantastical length about the character of Tim Masters without ever having met or interviewed the subject of his blather, the person about whom he was pontificating. Because he lied in court, which in some jurisdictions is considered perjury. Because he didn't even do the work. Jim Broderick did the work, and told Meloy what to say. He wrote the script. Dr. Meloy was the ventriloquist's dummy who delivered the lines. We merely propose that Dr. Meloy should cheerfully refund to the taxpayers of Colorado his entire fee, plus interest. And that extra thousand to the defense attorneys.

Justice has not been done. One phase of a mighty sizeable injustice has been brought to a halt, but that's not quite the same thing. The person who killed Peggy has been walking the earth for 20 years with impunity and with blood on his hands - hanging out at his favorite pub; hollering for his favorite football team; having a life; possibly even, God forbid, reproducing. Smugly satisfied in the knowledge that he got away with murder, and even more stoked by the certainty that another man was paying for it.

So Tim Masters is finally out of prison. A lot of us are not prepared to say, "Well, that was nice," and go back to whatever we were doing before. Because there are still a couple of judges, a police officer, a forensic psychologist, and a few other co-conspirators whose day of reckoning needs to be put on the calendar, not in pencil, but in ink.

Earthblog.net also first published:

Free Tim Masters Because

An Open Letter to Larry Abrahamson

The Meloy Massacre

Is It Mark Fuhrman Time?

The Hartman Report on the Special Prosecutor's Report

Special Prosecutors Report Feb. 15, 2008

2008-02-18T14:59:00.000-08:00

You need to have Adobe Reader.
Right-click, "open in new window", and wait. It may take a while.

Masters_Special_Prosecutors_Report.pdf

Trial Transcripts and Motion for Relief

2008-02-13T15:25:00.001-08:00

Volume_I.pdf

District Court, Larimer County, Colorado
Case No. 98-CR-1149
Thursday, March 18, 1999

Volume_ II.pdf

Volume_III.pdf

Volume_IV.pdf

Volume _V.pdf

Volume_VI.pdf

Volume_VII.pdf

Motion.pdf

MOTION FOR RELIEF PURSUANT TO CRIM.P.35c
District Court, Larimer County, Colorado
Case No. 98CR1149

Contributions (Archival Page)

2008-01-26T11:49:00.000-08:00

Note: I have no idea whether this information still applies, so you can take it as historical. Somebody should definitely pay back the State of Colorado, the City of Fort Collins, and a few other entities, for all the money this has cost the taxpayers.

A fund to aid Tim Masters as he starts his new life outside of prison has been established in care of his legal defense team.

Contributions to this fund, as well as care packages, other donations, and letters, should be sent to:

Tim Masters

c/o Collins, Liu & Lyons, LLP

812 Eighth Street Plaza

Greeley, CO 80631

Any questions can be directed to attorney Ashley Chase at (970) 336-6499.

Celebration Poem

2008-01-26T11:46:00.000-08:00

Freedom Day (for Timothy Masters)

Green and white balloons are rising
Into the deep winter sky,
The bitter freeze turned back
By the strength of the sun.
On a day wide with triumph,
Freedom is now stepping through the door.

Green and white balloons are rising
One man released from tough walls
Built by rabid insistence.
One woman’s soul now closer to truth;
Her question may finally be answered.
Freedom lifts them both into the frigid open air.

Green and white balloons are rising
They are a message to the world:
Lies must not stand,
Failures must be corrected- now.
This is not about just one woman and man.
Freedom, this day, is more precious for all.

Tim Van Schmidt
1/22/08

(The poet is a member of the performance poetry and sound art group TVS and two fingers, which does some pretty amazing stuff.)
http://www.tvsandtwofingers.com

General Topography of Tim's Home and Surrounding Area in 1987 (map)

2007-12-25T07:35:00.000-08:00

Click on the photo to enlarge it. If this doesn't work, I'm open to suggestions.

South Fort Collins Colorado 1987 (map)

2007-12-25T07:30:00.001-08:00

Click on the map to enlarge it. This works on my computer, but if it doesn't work on yours, let me know and I'll figure out something else. Or better yet, suggest how to make it work.

1987 Police and Interrogation Photos

2007-12-13T13:57:00.000-08:00

Most Important Drawings in the "Scary Doodles Case"

2007-12-13T13:16:00.000-08:00

DRAWINGS or "PRODUCTIONS" in the Scary Doodles Case

2007-12-13T13:03:00.000-08:00

IS IT MARK FUHRMAN TIME?

2007-12-08T21:44:00.000-08:00

IS IT MARK FUHRMAN TIME?
by Pat Hartman
(originally published at Earthblog.net Nov. 27, 2007)

I’m telling a friend about this out-of-control, over-the-top example of judicial, prosecutorial, and three or four other brands of malfeasance, that’s been playing itself out in the local courthouse. Over the past few years, Fort Collins, Colorado has been proclaimed by several glossy magazines as the number one place to live in America. Perhaps so - unless you happen to get crossways of the police department, which an increasing number of blameless citizens have been managing to do for some time now. So, I’m telling my friend how things stand with this Tim Masters case, that dates back twenty years and is currently making national news, and he says, "Maybe it’s Mark Fuhrman time."

Fuhrman, who made a not very good name for himself around the time of the O.J. Simpson trial, has earned a mixed reputation since then, showing up in the midst of various murder investigations to expose screw-ups and cover-ups. Given the proneness of detectives to elect a suspect and then cut the evidence to fit, and how easy it is to convict a defendant without physical evidence, somebody’s got to be minding the store. Considering how tempting it is to give in to the importunities of the rich and powerful, somebody needs to mop up after police departments that are progressive enough to consult with psychics and forensic psychologists, but just plain don’t investigate very well. They say it takes a thief to catch a thief, so why shouldn’t it take an unprincipled cop to nail an unprincipled cop? Fuhrman has been compared with Torquemada, big boss of the Inquisitors. The scourge of police departments everywhere, he won’t let them hide those old decayed, moldering sins. "If you know there was a mistake," he says, "and you leave it that way… then that's a catastrophic mistake."

On the other hand, Fuhrman has his detractors, e.g. Brian Rooney, who considers it a damn shame that "a former law enforcement officer, publicly and criminally exposed as a corrupt fraud, can reinvent himself as a truthseeker and forensics expert." One police chief made the laughable observation that the former Los Angeles cop has done more than any other man in the country to damage the credibility of the police in general. Fuhrman was pretty bad, granted, but if that chief hasn’t known worse, he hasn’t been paying attention. Another critic calls Fuhrman an adept opportunist, apparently because of his knack for making money. Trisha Ready, in one of the more charitable descriptions of him, says he has turned himself "from a perjuring Satan into a sleuthing Good Samaritan."

Be that as it may, no one can deny that when Mark Fuhrman shows up, things get stirred up. His scrutiny of a case tends to focus attention on it and goad the local police to engage their energies more vigorously. And yes, maybe it is Fuhrman Time here – not to imply that things haven’t been thoroughly shaken up already. In this Tim Masters snafu, thanks to a relentlessly dedicated coalition of brilliant post-conviction lawyers, former cops, investigative journalists, relatives, and citizens, revelations have been pouring forth in astonishing plenty. "Catastrophic mistake" doesn’t begin to describe the magnitude of the wickedness.

All we need now is to know who really murdered Peggy Hettrick, as she rambled around in the small hours one night in 1987. Someone killed her, probably in a car, with one knife thrust, and took her body to a place with good lighting and running water, excised one nipple and performed a partial vulvectomy, and washed away a considerable amount of blood. Then this someone, probably with another person’s help, transported the corpse into the middle of a field. Tim Masters, who had the bad luck to be 15 years old and enmeshed in the most superficially damning yet substantially meaningless web of circumstantial evidence ever created, was the chief suspect. Lacking so much as a scintilla of actual evidence, the police were unable to arrest him, though lord knows they tried. For years. Until finally a new player entered the game, an alleged expert in forensic psychology who cooked up a highly imaginative version of events and managed to sell it to a jury. Masters has spent eight years in prison, working toward the completion of a life sentence, and it’s about time he got out.

The current series of hearings, which continues to supply some very exciting reportage, came about because Masters filed paperwork saying his original lawyers didn’t do right by him. In some quarters, there also seems to be a feeling that the pair of them should have proved who really did the murder. It wasn’t, of course, their job, but that doesn’t stop some people from thinking so. Likewise, although this shouldn’t exist either, there seems to be a feeling that the current defense attorneys have an obligation to prove who the actual killer was. Hey, this team has enough on its hands already, just keeping track of the police department’s many lies, and the obstruction practiced by the District Attorney’s office, which in former days of rougher justice would have led the officials concerned to the scaffold or the headsman’s axe.

No doubt, Tim Masters will get a new trial and be exonerated. But just for the aesthetics of the thing, for the sheer closure value, it would be nice to know who killed Peggy Hettrick. As it stands, everybody has a raw deal. The victim, whose murderer may still lurk among us. The victim’s family, who haven’t seen justice done. The falsely convicted prisoner, and his family. The cops who have their heads on straight, but who are tainted by the misdeeds of fellow officers. And of course the public. From the small amount of faith in the system we still clung to, another chunk has been torn away and major hemorrhaging is in progress. Before us is yet more proof, if any were needed, that our public servants are vipers. Mistakes are bad enough, but cover-ups and intentional wrongdoing are unforgivable. Not to mention the squandering of resources. The state is paying half a million dollars to put up a defense for Tim Masters this time around, and who knows how many hundreds of thousands the whole mess has already cost, and guess whose pockets it all came from.

So maybe it is time for Fuhrman to get in here and figure out who killed Peggy Hettrick. Of course, it won’t be easy to prove, because the juiciest evidence seems to have a way of disappearing into some parallel dimension. Still, many more people every day become convinced that Tim Masters didn’t do it. Masters himself has always been certain that he didn’t. So, who did? Was it the part-time boyfriend? The Icicle Man? The local loser who killed two other women the same year? A drifter? A disgruntled barfly? Was it…the twisto doctor?

This mess is at least as complicated and suspect-rich as the other cases where Fuhrman made his post-Simpson reputation. Take Martha Moxley, the teenager killed in a Connecticut neighborhood of multi-million dollar homes, where parents sent their wayward adolescents to pricey "schools" that are actually torture academies. The girl was beaten to death with a golf club, and her mother believed it was done by one of the young wastrels hanging out at the Skakel house. But alas, it has been widely reported that the police did not get much cooperation from the Skakel family. (Why do the police need "cooperation" from Skakels, Ramseys, and their ilk? Why don’t they deploy the SWAT team that’s always itching for action, and simply bust up the place, like they do with the tacky apartments of single mothers and senior citizens in the shabby neighborhoods? Just asking.)

In the Connecticut matter, an official spokesperson said that the local gendarmes, not having met with a homicide case in three decades, made mistakes through inexperience. The hard truth is, no police department anywhere ought to make the elementary blunders that are avoided by little old lady detectives in cozy British murder mysteries. No excuses. An eight-year-old with sub-par IQ knows not to pick up evidence with bare hands; not to glom onto a suspect and then tailor the investigation; not to do any of the baldly unprofessional stunts performed in the kind of police work that ends up under the microscopic gaze of Fuhrman.

So the killing of Martha Moxley went twenty years without an arrest, till Fuhrman arrived on the scene and garnered nearly universal scorn. He solved the case by causing the conviction of a guy with a Kennedy connection. But Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Fuhrman and his backers were full of it. The local police chief said nobody wanted him and he couldn’t do any possible good and yada yada yada, and anyway, the interloper only wanted to make money. Just because he signed a quarter-million dollar book contract? That’s hardly fair, especially since Fuhrman was never reticent about his fondness for projects involving "money, power, celebrity, deceit, corruption."

If Mark Fuhrman did descend upon the "Scary Doodles Case," as the conviction of Tim Masters for killing Peggy Hettrick has come to be called, it would be déjà vu all over again. The similarities between it and the Connecticut case include an eerie conjunction of elements, the same cards shuffled differently and holding different significance. Heavy circumstantial evidence, no witnesses, a 15-year-old technically minor child interrogated for hours without benefit of parent or guardian. Lag time, resulting in a defendant older and more developed than at the time of the crime. Theories positing skinny teenage boys capable of great feats of athleticism when it came to dragging dead women around, and with even more impressive powers of mental agility when it came to eradicating physical evidence. A multiplicity of viable suspects, including some deceased in the interim. Witnesses, too, eliminated by the attrition of time. Lost evidence and compromised evidence. Overconfident and under-motivated defense lawyers. Pornography.

In another re-examined case back East, Fuhrman found that the crucial early days of investigation were skipped because no one acted on a missing person report. The crime scene was examined by only one of the assigned detectives, and the appropriate crime scene log and assignment logs weren’t kept. The officers working the case weren’t told enough, the press found out too much, and one ego-driven lawman was excessively attached to the whole situation. The same problems turn up over and over again. When he looked into a series of prostitute murders in the Pacific Northwest, Fuhrman discovered that the police had had everything they needed to capture the killer a long time ago. He blamed their failure on technological over-reliance and a consequent neglect of traditional, contact-intensive police work. Fuhrman has also chronicled the death of Terry Schiavo and indicted the criminal justice system of Oklahoma, and the intrepid true-crime writer has even taken on the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

There are very important legal issues in this infamous false-conviction case, not to mention the fate of an innocent man who’s already served eight years in prison. The traits Fuhrman finds intriguing in a case - power, deceit, and corruption - are certainly present in abundance here. Celebrity, not so much. The most likely suspect was only a doctor, which, while more prestigious than being a retired military man like the father of Tim Masters, is not like being a Kennedy. Not even close. Although it wasn’t mentioned on the list, respect and an increase in reputation would surely accrue to whoever solved this thing definitively. And what about money – could there be a paycheck in it for Mark Fuhrman? Now, if only some philanthropist would pony up the dough to bring in the freelance detective. It’s not the worst idea we’ve heard this week.

PEGGY HETTRICK: MURDER VICTIM

2007-12-08T21:23:00.000-08:00

PEGGY HETTRICK: MURDER VICTIM

by Pat Hartman

Peggy Hettrick was born in Lovell, Wyoming in 1949, went to school in Casper, and went to high school in Libya, from 1964 to 1967, when her father worked for Oasis Oil. At that time there was a massive American presence in Tripoli, centered around Wheelus Air Force Base, the largest American base in the area. Its high school served, according to an alumna, "military brats, oil company brats and State Department or embassy brats." It was located in the international enclave outside Tripoli where Peggy's family lived. A classmate recalls, "Peggy was one of the girls that was part of the group that waited for the bus to pick us up from Giorgimpopoli (Tripoli suburb) and take us out to Wheelus AFB for school."

Photo: Peggy in high school, 1965, photo by John Templeton

One of Peggy’s classmates says, "We all had some wonderful times in Libya." "We were never bored," another recalls. "The Mediterranean coast was right there, Roman ruins down the road right along the beach - getting together for parties, things going on, on the base, etc." Peggy was part of the popular "in crowd," and particularly close to a family called the Templetons. She even tried learning to surf, inspired by John Templeton, who had picked up the skill in California.

Another of Peggy’s contemporaries elaborates on the social hierarchy at Wheelus High School. "As I recall, neither clothes nor fathers’ ranks had anything to do with being cool. We all wore pretty much the same clothes, as there was a limited selection to choose from either at the PX or in downtown Tripoli. Then there was the dress code instituted by the high school. We all had to wear shirts with collars and no blue jeans. Girls’ dresses could be no more than one inch above the knee, nor could they wear slacks. We could wear the school sweatshirt on Fridays. During my senior year, one of the teachers ran around the quadrangle with a ruler measuring young ladies dress lengths. I am not sure what set the cool clique apart from the nerds, but you just knew who belonged where. The cool kids received all the social accolades while the nerds none. Most of the kids did not flaunt their fathers’ ranks that I remember. I do not think I remember any of the ranks of my class's fathers. Nor did the oil company kids vs. the military kids become a dividing line, either."

Photo: In high school, costumed and made up as a mime troupe member.

Peggy is remembered today by classmates as fun, vivacious, and well-liked, with beautiful blue eyes and gorgeous red hair. Mike Love says this about her: "Peggy was a year ahead of me and was in my circle of friends. She liked music, theater, philosophy, poetry and movies. I had a huge crush on her but we were friends and not an item. A group of us went to Leptis Magna, after which I wrote a poem for her. It took me a long time to get over her. She was beautiful, intelligent, and so gentle. I miss her."

Photo: Leptis Magna

I could have been Peggy Hettrick, or rather, could have been the victim of the crime that took her life. We were almost the same age – she graduated high school a year after I did. By all reports, Peggy was a creative person interested in all the arts, and she aspired to write fiction: another similarity between us. In 1987, when she was killed, I lived in the same area of Fort Collins as she did. Like her, I was car-free and never hesitated to walk around at night. I didn’t do the bar scene at that time, but years earlier, in a different town, I did plenty of nocturnal wandering from club to club, keeping up with a pretty complicated personal life. So please understand that there’s no judgment of Peggy here. Some might say she looked for love in all the wrong places, while others might say she lived like a free woman, with the courage of her convictions. She was independent and self-supporting, which is more than can be said for a lot of people. Although one could wish Peggy had found more stability and happiness, she can’t be faulted for following her own star.

Photo: Peggy's Jewelry Box

Peggy lived for a while in or near Sedona, Arizona, and spent time on a Hopi reservation learning about the culture, and the techniques of making jewelry. In the 1970s she moved to Loveland, Colorado, where her grandmother and uncle also lived, to help care for her mother who was ill with cancer and soon died. Like the teenager who was accused of killing her, Peggy was motherless at the time of the murder. She also had family in Florida and Wyoming, and on the day she died, was supposed to have gone shopping with her grandmother, Ecie.

As an adult, Peggy was still petite, around 5'2" and between 110-120 pounds. She worked at the Fashion Bar, a clothing store at Foothills Fashion Mall, where she was accessories manager. Peggy didn't have a car, but often talked about getting one. There were economic woes. Chronically broke, she cheerfully admitted to spending her last penny on her Christmas party. She pitched in to help her boyfriend clean his vacated apartment, but it didn't look as if he'd get his security deposit back, which was rough on Peggy because he'd said he would share the money with her. She was bored with work. "If I only had GUTS to go out and forage for a new job," she wrote. This was followed by "Argh."

Photo: Peggy in Hawaii with Ernest Borgnine and Pat Morita, year unknown.

The grown-up Peggy, who was 38 when she was killed, was still described as gentle, as well as quiet and creative, by the supervisor she had worked with for five years. She was also remembered as a reader and a gourmet cook, a person with a ready smile. She knew the right things to say to friends with children. I think Peggy is the last person who'd have wanted to see the wrong person punished for killing her.

Peggy actually wrote letters, which even back in the '80s was a vanishing art. In them she was an occasional, but not overzealous, user of the hand-drawn version of the smiley face icon. She was working on a novel, and by mid-November had been 44 pages into a first draft. "Maybe I'll go scribble a few more lines on The Book… the one I've been writing since time began." She took it seriously enough to buy a typewriter that was better than her old one - because it had Spanish and French characters.

Only weeks before her death, Peggy hosted a Christmas party in the clubhouse of her apartment complex - despite a little incident the at the previous year's party. She didn't figure the management would rent her the clubhouse again "after Barbara (notice I made sure I mentioned it was B.) burned a hole in the carpet. We'll see if we can burn a bigger one this year." She'd shared with a friend the menu and entertainment plans for this shindig, intending to have "chicken Dijon fingers, shrimp paté, salmon cream cheese spread (both in fish molds), veggie tray, orange slices, and a pistachio-almond basket. Plus pool (of course) and a craps table. Maybe poker too."

In mid-January, Peggy played with the idea of going in with her father and brother on a rental house, figuring to reduce her rent bill to a manageable $100 a month. Believe it or not, that would have been possible in Fort Collins at the time. I lived in a $300-a-month rental house that could have accommodated three adults, if two shared a bedroom. A woman who scarcely knew Peggy told police that she had asked for relationship advice. A minister who was a neighbor of Peggy’s reported that they had talked more than once about her tendency to be attracted to “men who were “users” and heavy drinkers” and to pick up “rotten guys.”

Photo: Peggy's desk

According to a friend's description, Peggy was attracted to younger men who dressed well or even flashily. There was a nominal "boyfriend," Matt Zoellner. She'd gone to his company Christmas party, and they "saw" each other frequently, but the relationship seems to have been so open as to almost not qualify as one. Apparently they played jealousy games, and Peggy was prone to leaving bars with strangers just to show Matt what was what. On the night she was killed, they had a fight, and Zoellner was the last known person to have seen her alive.

On that Tuesday night in February of 1987, Peggy got off work around 9:00. She walked home, but had given a temporary roommate her key, so she was locked out. There was more wandering - a bar, another bar; a trip to her boyfriend's apartment, a stopoff at her own place where she finally got in; a midnight return to one of the bars where shortly after 11:45, she seemed friendly and happy, playing with someone's birthday balloon bouquet. Then there was the argument with Zoellner. Shortly after 1:00 AM, she left - and it's still not known whether she was on foot or accepted a ride from somebody, or whether some unguessed scenario went down. If she was walking on Landings Drive that night, it's not known how often she took that route. It's still unknown whether she was killed near where her body was found, or killed somewhere else and then brought there. It's not clear whether her body was carried into the field by one person or two. The issue of whose DNA was found in her underpants was the centerpiece of the proceedings that set Tim Masters free after all the years.

It's not known whose fingerprints were on items in Peggy's purse, or whose hairs were found on her body. What became of the bracelet she wore that night remained a mystery for many years. In fact, there are more questions about her death than answers. We were told that all questions had been put to rest when Tim Masters was arrested and convicted, but as it turns out, that's not even within shouting distance of the truth.

Peggy Hettrick's obituary appeared in the local paper on February 17, 1987. Her funeral took place in Loveland, Colorado and she was buried there, next to her mother. Linda Wheeler-Holloway, the Fort Collins police representative who dealt with Peggy's family, also attended the funeral and looked closely at the other mourners. Later that year, a cousin of Peggy's committed suicide, but it was unrelated to her death.
Photo: Peggy's bookcase

Peggy was buried in the blue outfit shown in the portrait here. Eleven years later, her body was exhumed. The police had recovered a knife whose blade appeared to have a broken-off tip, and theorized that perhaps the broken-off tip could be found lodged in one of her bones. If it had been, they would have tried much harder to connect that particular knife with Tim Masters. But it wasn't.

The gentle, artistic, and fondly remembered woman who was Peggy Hettrick is still dead. Tim Masters finally won his freedom in January of 2008, and looks forward to total exoneration when the true murderer is brought in. That's a desirable outcome, into which many good people are pouring their best efforts. The story won't be complete and justice won't be served until the person who really killed Peggy is identified, charged, tried, and locked up. As her brother Tom Hettrick told a reporter, "They owe it to Peggy to get it right this time." She enjoys peace now, but until this is resolved, a lot of other people can't, won't, and shouldn't.

OUTLINE OF THE CASE

2007-12-08T16:46:00.000-08:00

(This introduction or outline was written by the "Angel" of the case and copied from a PDF file housed at FreeTimMasters.com because of doubt about how long that site will be accessible. Since it was written, much progress has been made in clearing up various questions raised here.)

Thank you for your interest in this case. The following is a brief outline detailing the terrible injustice done to this innocent man. After you read this outline, I am sure you will see what I saw when I started researching this case; in short, the Fort Collins Police Department made a terrible mistake. Tim Masters is serving a life sentence in a Colorado prison because in 1998, eleven years after this brutal murder, Fort Collins wanted to close the only open cold case on their books. They decided to do this without regard for right or wrong. Unfortunately, there were several police involved in the case who didn't believe Tim was guilty of this crime, but their opinions were stifled by one overzealous, rogue Detective, James Broderick. Detective Broderick went after Tim to further his own career. This detective believes that Tim does not matter in this world. He believes Tim has a throwaway life. That could not be further from the truth. Tim has a sister sho loves him very much as well as dozens of aunts, uncles and cousins. Tim also has two nephews and a niece who miss him terribly. Those who know him know that he could not have committed such a crime. However, I will not try to persuade you on my opinion. Research this case on your own and form your own opinion.

INTRODUCTION

On the morning of February 11, 1987, at approximately 7:05am 38-year-old Linwood Hodgdon discovered the body of a murder victim who had been left in an open field in Fort Collins, Colorado. The victim was a 36-year-old woman named Peggy Hettrick. Peggy had been stabbed in the back, dragged more than a hundred feet into the field, partially disrobed, and sexually mutilated.

Police conducted a background investigation into Peggy's activities and whereabouts from February 10th to February 11th. They found that Peggy worked at the Fashion Bar from 12:00 to 9:00 pm nightly. Her time card from Feb. 10, 1987 showed that she clocked out of work at 9:01 pm. Peggy was next seen by witnesses between 9:00 and 9:15 pm at the Laughing Dog Saloon, a nearby establishment. She told these witnesses that she was locked out of her apartment because she had given her keys to her temporary roommate Sharon Deconick. She further explained that she was there looking for Sharon at the bar. Apparently, she was only there for about 15 minutes.

Next, Peggy was seen at the Prime Minister bar, where she stayed from about 9:30 until 9:45 pm. The next time that we are certain of Peggy's whereabouts was at approximately midnight, when a neighbor in her apartment building was woken up by Peggy pounding on her door and calling out to her roommate "Sharon, let me in."

Shortly after midnight, witness Leslie Gaines spotted someone matching Peggy's physical description walking southbound in the bicycle lane at the 3700 Block of Landings Drive. At around 12:30 to 12:45, she is seen by boyfriend, Matt Zoellner, in the Prime Minister parking lot. Peggy and Matt had drinks at the bar until Dawn Gilbreath, who was meeting Matt, arrived. Then, Dawn and Matt moved to a table, leaving Peggy at the bar.

Zoellner later offered Peggy a ride home. She at first refused the ride, but later (Zoellner estimated at 1:00, Gilbreath estimated at 1:20) she accepted. He went to use the restroom first and when he came back out, he saw Peggy at the door as she walked out.

During the course of there investigation police learned from Clyde Masters that his 15-year- old son Tim had walked through the field, where Peggy's body was left, at 6:55 that morning. Tim Masters had walked along his usual route, heading northeast, then he suddenly veered due west and looked at something for between 3 and 5 seconds before he went on and caught his school bus.

Police had received no report from Tim, so at 10:00 Det. Frank Gonzales was sent to Tim's school to question him. Tim told Officer Gonzales that he had seen the body that morning, and that he believed it was a mannequin and that someone was playing a sick joke. Tim said that although he thought it was a mannequin, he had doubts about it all morning long and it was bothering him. Because Tim failed to report seeing Peggy's body right away, he became the police's prime suspect.

Over the next few days Tim was interrogated over 12 hours by several police officers. A consensual search of Tim's home and the surrounding property was conducted, revealing Tim's knife collection and a volume of stories and drawings that can generally be classified as war and horror productions.

The investigation of Tim Masters failed to establish any connection between his property and the crime. There was no blood matching Peggy's on any of Tim's clothing or property in his home. There was nothing of Peggy's, including the removed body parts, found on his person or in his home. Although Tim's productions contained many examples of graphic violence, there was not a single instance of a woman being stabbed in the back and/or having sexual body parts removed. Despite the complete lack of physical evidence, in 1999 the State charged and convicted Tim Masters of this horrendous crime of which he is innocent.

The following is a brief synopsis of the State's hypothesis used at Tim's trial, and an outline of this case. All the information in this outline was obtained from police reports, trial transcripts, Tim's trial discovery, and Tim himself.

THE STATE'S HYPOTHESIS

The theory of how this crime was committed that the State presented at Tim Master's trial is that at sometime after 1:20 am, Peggy Hettrick walked from the Prime Minister bar to the 3800 block of Landings Drive. The State claims that 15-year-old Tim Masters "Picked out Peggy Hettrick as a victim" and "left his bedroom that morning through the screen window, to take with him his survival knife, scalpel, and his red-covered flashlight to surprise her, to come up on her from behind, to thrust the knife deep into her back, lower her to the curb, drag her into the field, partially disrobe her, and remove her nipple and vaginal skin."

I. The State claims that sometime after 1:20 am., on Feb. 11, 1987, Peggy Hettrick walked from the Prime Minister bar to the 3800 block of Landings Drive

A. It is unclear what time Peggy Hettrick left the bar. Matt Zoellner said he thought she left at 1:00 am. Dawn Gilbreath thought Peggy left at 1:20 am.

B. We don't know if Peggy walked when she left the bar, it is just assumed that she walked because she had walked to other places that night and that is the only way the State can include Tim Masters in a scenario. No witnesses saw Peggy's mode of travel when she left the bar. No one knows if she left alone or if she met someone outside the bar. Dawn Gilbreath said she saw Peggy talking "to that other gentleman at the bar." Dawn also said that at 1:20 Peggy was talking to some people "which were standing up and talking like they were leaving."

C. Matt Zoellner testified that Peggy had accepted a ride home from him, but when he returned from the restroom she was at the door with, what he described as "I don't know, it was a-not a happy look" and she left. Since Peggy accepted a ride from Zoellner we can surmise she didn't want to walk home at 1:30 in the morning. Peggy's roommate told police that if Matt had another date at the bar she was at, she would sometimes leave with someone else. She also said "Peggy has been picked up in bars before and left with strangers, but this was usually only when she was mad at Matt." At trial, Matt Zoellner first claimed Peggy was not mad at him that night for being there with another woman, but later he admitted that she was upset with him. In fact, Matt told police in 1987 that he and Peggy had had a fight.

D. A shoe impression was found in the dirt somewhere around the 200-300 block of Boardwalk Drive. F.B.I. experts could not say for sure that it was Peggy's shoe impression. The evidence seems to indicate that it was Peggy's footprint. However, police did not record the orientation of the footprint, so if it was Peggy's we don't know what direction she was traveling when she left it. Since Peggy was seen walking south down Landings Drive, and seen a while later in the Prime Minister parking lot, we can confidently say that she walked down Boardwalk Drive sometime between 12:00 and 12:45 am. This print was most likely left at that time.

II The State Claims Peggy was stabbed at the 3800 block of Landings Drive.

A. We don't know if Peggy was stabbed in the Street at 3800 Landings Drive. Several investigators originally thought Peggy had been stabbed elsewhere and transported to the scene. Dr. Allen, the county coroner and bloodstain pattern expert Tom Bevel hypothesized that Peggy was stabbed somewhere near the 3800 block of Landings. The State, at trial, once again, asserted that she was stabbed in the street because that was the only way to implicate Tim Masters. The State's expert witness in bloodstain pattern analysis could only testify that Peggy had been laid down in the street for a short period of time, as evidenced by the large pool of blood at the curb, and that because of the velocity required to make some of the blood drips at the scene she would have had to have been in an upright position. He further testified that she may have been transported to the scene in a car, or running away from an attacker, but he didn't "have any evidence to rule that one way or another." On top of this, the State had also asked the F.B.I. to look at photos of the bloodstains. In a report dated June 3, 1987, the F.B.I. stated, "The submitted photographs and negatives were examined for information of value with regard to incident reconstruction through bloodstain pattern analysis. No conclusion could be reached as to the mechanism by which the bloodstains were deposited on the curb adjacent to the field where the victim's body was found." Officer Jack Taylor stated in his police report, "F.B.I. advised that they were not able to make any definite conclusion on the blood splatter photographs as to whether the incident occurred in a car, on the street, or an exact location."

B. A half-smoked Merit brand cigarette was found in the blood pool at 3800 Landings. The State claims this proves Peggy Hettrick dropped the cigarette after being stabbed at the curbside. Actually, the cigarette does not prove that.

1) Tom Bevel testified "The cigarette that is on the blood flow [the blood pool] appears to have had the blood flow up to it, as opposed to the cigarette falling into an already existing pool of blood." The bottom half of the cigarette had blood on it. So whether it had just been dropped before the blood pool was formed, or it had been dropped hours, days, even weeks before Feb. 11th. I believe they thought she was stabbed nearby because of the amount of blood in the street and along the drag trail. If she were stabbed far away, one would expect her to have bled to death before being deposited in the field. However, she was obviously bleeding when she was deposited in the field.

2) The State said that Merit was the brand of cigarette that Peggy smoked. Police reports show that actually Peggy smoked Merit, Merit Ultra Lights, Newport, and Benson & Hedges. It seems Peggy smoked many brands of cigarettes.

3) Saliva tests performed on the cigarette showed that it had been smoked by someone with a "non-secretor status" and Peggy Hettrick had a non-secretor status. Of course, 25% of the population has a non-secretor status. That means that of the 100,000 or so people who lived in Fort Collins in 1987 only 25,000 could have smoked that cigarette.

4) It is possible that the cigarette was smoked by Peggy Hettrick. Leslie Gaines saw a woman matching Peggy's description walking down Landings Drive at approximately 12:15 am. Ms. Gaines testified that this woman was walking in the bicycle lane on the West side of the street. This is the side of the street where the cigarette was found. If this cigarette belonged to Peggy Hettrick, it may have been discarded then.

C. If you think about the location of the fatal stab wound, scratches on her face, lack of blood splatter from a weapon being inserted and removed, and the blood drips that Tom Bevel testified showed the victim had been held upright sometime after being stabbed, it is all consistent with her having been stabbed in a car. There is no blood splatter at that location to indicate where she was stabbed; it would have all remained inside the car. She was stabbed in the left side of her back, at an upward angle of 10 to 15 degrees that tracked from left to right, consistent with her being stabbed as she attempted to exit the passenger side of a car. Her being dragged out of a carcould cause the low velocity blood drops. She was set down on the ground long enough for a large blood pool to accumulate (possibly so that the assailant(s) could shut off a cars headlights, engine, etc.). This theory makes more sense than the scenario of a 15-year-old kid, who was 5'10" and weighed less than 120 pounds, who didn't know the victim and had never seen her before to have, on a school night, killed her with a single stab wound and with such force that it broke one of her ribs (in the cases I have heard of where a juvenile stabbed someone they stabbed them over and over, not just once), and, despite the fact that this was a bloody crime scene, left absolutely no physical evidence.

III The State claims Tim snuck out through his bedroom window sometime after 1:20 am. to surprise attack Peggy Hettrick.

A. Assuming Peggy walked to Landings Drive, for Tim to have committed this crime, he would have to have known she would be coming by sometime after 1:20 am., lay in waiting or he would have to have seen her going past his house and then quickly get dressed, grab a knife, scalpel and flashlight and egress his home.

1) Somehow he would have to have known that Peggy would be coming past his home at some time after 1:20 am. The State claims that Peggy walked in that area all the time, so Tim must have seen her walk by before. Officer Ray Martinez, when speaking of the 1987 interview with Tim, told jurors "At different times during the interview he said he'd never seen her; but at one point he said well maybe I did, but it might have been in a crowd." His actual words from the 1987 interview follow:
Officer Hal Dean: "Did this lady look familiar to you at all?"
Tim: "Nope."
Dean: "Had you ever seen her before?"
Tim: "Not that I know of. I might have seen her in a crowd or something but..."
Dean: "Not that you can remember?"
Tim: "I didn't recognize her."
Dean: "Had you ever seen her around your home?"
Tim: "No."

Peggy worked from 12:00 to 9:00 pm. Neither Clyde Masters, Bridget and Lloyd Masters, (Tim's Aunt and Uncle who lived next door) or Tim had ever seen Peggy Hettrick. Since she worked until after dark, none of them would have had the opportunity to see her. Apparently, with the exception of Matt Zoellner, no one near Tim's house had ever seen Peggy before. Scott Regan lived in an apartment complex directly north of the field where Peggy's body was left. He stated that he had never seen Peggy. Leslie Gaines said "There's nobody usually walking around there that late" and that she'd "never seen Peggy Hettrick before." Hal Gundlech was a bouncer at the Laughing Dog Saloon, a bar Peggy was said to frequent. When shown a picture of Peggy, he did not recognize her. Jimmie J Defece lived at Foothills Meadows, the same apartment complex as Peggy, and he had never seen her before. If no one in the area has ever seen her before and, as Leslie Gaines said "there's nobody usually walking around there that late" then we can realistically say that it was unusual for Peggy to have been in that area that late at night. If Peggy walked when she left the Prime Minister, there was no way Tim could have known she would be walking by that late and on a school night and stay up late waiting for her. Furthermore, Officer Gonzales testified at Tim's trial that there were no indications of somebody kneeling down in the dirt, as if lying in waiting.

2) If she walked past Tim's house, he would not have been able to see her. There were no streetlights in 1987 near Tim's home. Both Landings Drive and Boardwalk Drive lacked any lighting, making it a very dark area. Bill Becker had walked south on Landings Drive on Feb. 11, 1987 shortly after 6:00 am, and he said that it was dark at that time even though there was a full moon out. Police described Landings Drive as a "dark road" in their affidavit to arrest Tim. You just could not see someone walking in that area at nighttime. To top it off, Tim Masters had, and still has, poor eyesight. In 1988, when he enlisted in the U.S. Navy and was sent to have a physical examination, it was determined that his eyesight was around 50/20 in one eye and 40/20 in the other. He was diagnosed with astigmatism, a refractive defect of the lenses of the eye that prevents focusing of sharp, distinct images. It takes a while for eyesight to deteriorate from 20/20 to 50/20, so this defect in Tim's eyes didn't just occur in one year. He had bad eyesight in 1987. Darkness of nighttime only exacerbates the effects of astigmatism. Had the area been free from obstruction, and minimal light present, Tim still would not have seen Peggy walking by. For the sake of argument, let's say that someone walked past Tim's home in broad daylight. Tim's bedroom window faced due north. Right outside his window was a large Elm tree (see attached maps and diagrams). Along the east property line, at the apex of the hill Tim lived on, stood a 20-foot row of small Elm trees. If someone were walking north on Landings Drive, because of these obstructions, even with 20/20 vision Tim would not have been able to see them until they were near the end of his property line, about 80 yards from his window. For Tim to catch that person to "surprise attack them from behind" he would have to get dressed, grab his "survival knife, scalpel, and his red-covered flashlight" exit the house so quietly that his father (a light sleeper who woke when Tim got up to use the bathroom) would not hear and wake. In order to catch the person before they reached the spot where the blood pool was, Tim would have to sprint all the way, yet be quiet enough not to be heard by the person walking. This is very improbable. Both of these scenarios are unlikely. If Tim had waited for Peggy, there would have been impressions in the dirt. Where were the footprints? Where were the incriminating scents that the K-9 units didn't find? Where was the physical evidence; the bloody clothes, bloody knife, bloody knife sheath, or blood-covered shoes? Why was there no blood on his red covered flashlight, in Tim's house, around Tim's windows or doors? Why was no blood found in any of the sink drains that were taken from Tim's home? Why were no footprints found outside Tim's window? None of these things were found because Tim Masters is innocent of this crime.

B. Tim had to get up for school daily at 6:00 am during the school year. His weekday schedule kept him awake from 6:00 am until 11:00 pm. Tim was never awake past 11:30 on school nights. It is unlikely that Tim would be able to function normally for the next few days if he were to be awake after 1:20 am on a school night. If the States scenario were true, Tim would have been dozing off to sleep during police interviews on Feb. 11, 12, and 13, 1987. States scenario leaves Tim less than four hours and forty minutes of sleep the night of Feb. 10, 1987.

IV The State claims Peggy Hettrick was stabbed with a survival knife by a left handed assailant.

Peggy Hettrick was stabbed with a large, rigid blade. She was stabbed with so much force that the knife went into her 5 inches while simultaneously breaking a rib.

A. Larimer County Coroner Dr. Pat Allen, who testified as the States medical expert at Tim's trial, stated, "It takes a good force, a considerable force to fracture a rib." In 1987 Tim Masters was 15-years-old, 5' 10" tall, and weighed less than 120 pounds. He was very skinny, and not very strong. In an interview with Ben Henderson, a neighbor of Tim's who is two years older than he is, Ben told police he didn't believe Tim could commit this crime. Ben said he didn't believe Masters was strong enough to commit that type of violent act." He described Tim as a "very thin, weak-looking individual." Police tell us that Ben told them he wouldn't have believed Masters if he had said he had done the homicide, and then made a semicircle with his fingers, stating that Masters arms were that big, indicating that Tim was not at all muscular at that time. There was no way that Tim's 15 year old skinny frame could have mustered the force required to drive a knife 5 inches into someone while simultaneously breaking a rib. Tim was just not strong enough.

B. The reason the State claims a survival knife was used is: Tim had six survival knives in his knife collection. Their "evidence" to prove a survival knife killed Peggy is:

1) Dr. Allen, when describing the blunt end of the knife wound said "It has a little bit of an irregularity to it." (see diagram below) When asked his opinion regarding what caused the little irregularity Dr. Allen stated "That could come from a number of things. For instance, an irregular back of a knife, a saw edge on the back of the knife, sometimes it can be caused by some twisting motion of the knife. Now I'm not a knife wound expert, but if a five inch long serrated blade had inflicted the wound I would expect to find more than just a "little bit of an irregularity" on the top, or blunt end of the knife wound. I would think that a 5 inch long serrated edge-would cause extensive damage coming out of the wound.

2) Police asked the F.B.I. to do a Knife Test Cut Comparison. Basically this test consists of making cuts in a victims clothing with various knives and comparing these cuts to the original cut made during a crime. This test failed to eliminate all six of Tim's survival knives as the possible weapon used to stab Peggy. At first look, this sounds like something significant, until you actually look at how different the blades were on the knives that were not eliminated. Tim owned six survival knives in 1987.

This test was worthless. Look at the differences between the three knives. One of them is 10 inches long. This test can't even determine that two of the three very different blades were not the weapon used to kill Peggy. This test just tells us what we already knew from the County Coroner; a large, rigid blade at least 5 inches long killed Peggy.

C. The F.B.I. and C.B.I. crime labs tested all of Tim's knives for blood, skin, DNA, etc. The only thing found on any of Tim's knives was his blood. If one of his knives were the murder weapon, you would expect to find some sort of physical evidence. Blood or skin on the blade or inside the sheath--there would have to be something. The only explanation for the complete lack of physical evidence is that Tim did not commit this crime.

D. In August 1987, a 13-year-old boy named Greg Shade found a survival knife in a ditch that fed water into Warrens Lake. Because it was similar in style to some of Tim's knives, the State claims that it was Tim's knife and the murder weapon. As previously stated, Tim owned six survival knives in 1987. He was such a pack-rat that he still had all six of the corresponding boxes each knife had come packaged in from the manufacturer. Tim had also drawn pictures of his knife collection showing clearly six survival knives. There was no seventh empty box in Tim's home. There were no pictures of Tim's knife collection showing seven survival knives. There was always just the six. Furthermore, the knife Greg Shade found in the lake inlet was never proven to be the murder weapon. Greg said that he found the knife on top of the dirt and it was very clean (i.e. no dirt, mud, rust, etc.) Greg did not think the knife had been there very long because he played there everyday and he felt he would have seen the knife before unless it was just recently placed there. This knife was tested for blood, skin, DNA, etc. and nothing was found on it. Police admitted at Tim's trial that they don't know if that knife is the murder weapon, and they have no evidence to conclude that it was the murder weapon. All they can say is that it could not "be eliminated."

V The State claims that Tim Masters dragged Peggy Hettrick's body 103 feet into the empty field.

Peggy Hettrick's body was dragged over 103 feet from the curb at Landings Drive into an empty field, leaving behind a furrowed drag trail described by some as "the bloody drag trail." At least half of the drag trail had blood in and around it.

A. Peggy Hettrick was never actually weighed. She was 5'2" and the County coroner estimated her body (which had been bled "dry") to weigh about 110-115 pounds. Once again, in 1987 Tim Masters was 5' 10" and weighed less than 120 pounds. At school he was called such names as "Beanstalk" and "Toothpick." People had told him that he was nothing but "skin and bones" and that his arms were the same diameter from wrist to shoulder. Greg Shade was only 13-years-old and in 1987, although he was four inches shorter than Tim, he weighed 130 pounds, or 10 pounds more than Tim. Greg was not considered to be a big kid, yet he weighed more at 13-year-old than Tim Masters did at 15-years--old. Former classmate Wayne Lawson testified that in 1987, he was small and he thought that Tim was little. With Tim's size and strength in 1987, there was no way he could have dragged someone who weighed as much as him over 103 feet into a field. Tim may have been capable of dragging someone who weighed the same as him a few feet at a time, then set them down for a minute before picking them back up and continuing on. In this way by dragging them a few feet at a time, Tim could have dragged someone 103 feet. But that is not what happened to Peggy Hettrick. The drag trail went 103 feet into the field with no pauses, or breaks in the trail. By looking at the drag trail we can see that she was dragged the whole 103 feet without any stops.

B. Officer Jim Broderick implied that Tim Masters was strong by stating that Tim did a lot of exercises every day and was involved in lifting heavy weights. He said this because Tim had a "things to do" chart on his bedroom wall with a list of daily exercises such as "do 10 pushups, do 10 sit ups" etc. As we all know, making a chart of exercises you want to do that you know you should do daily, does not mean you actually do them. Even if Tim was able to do these exercises daily, sets of 10 pushups is not exactly strenuous. It doesn't take much strength to do 10 pushups. When I was in the sixth grade I did sets of 10 pushups in GYM along with my entire class. Even the weakest kids could do 10 pushups. As far as the lifting of heavy weights, Tim's father had just bought him a 90-pound barbell set to try and put some "meat on Tim's bones". Obviously, from other witness statements, Tim had not yet actually "put any meat on his bones."

C. I will go into more detail on this subject later, but it is highly unlikely Tim Masters could drag the bleeding body of Peggy Hettrick over 103 feet yet have none of Peggy's blood on his person or property.

VI The State claims Peggy Hettrick's body was intentionally positioned so that it faced Tim's Home.

A. In their affidavit to arrest Tim and during his trial the State claimed that Peggy Hettrick's body was positioned so that it faced Tim's home in full view from his bedroom window. They claimed the drag trail traveled west and then turned sharply north in order to position the body. I challenge anyone reading this outline to research this for them self. Look at the photographs of Peggy Hettrick's body and the drag trail in the field. Look at the pictures submitted by the State that show the view from Tim's bedroom window.

1) The State claimed Peggy's body faced Tim's home. The truth can be verified through pictures the State submitted into evidence at Tim's trial. Peggy's body did not face Tim's home. Her body had been laid down with her head to the northwest and the feet to the southeast. Tim's home was directly south of her body.

2) Peggy's body was not intentionally positioned anywhere. The drag trail was a meandering S-shape. It did not take any sharp, deliberate turns as the State maintains. Again, pictures entered into evidence at Tim's trial can easily verify this.

3) Pictures showing the view from Tim's bedroom window in 1987 were also entered into evidence by the State. These pictures clearly show a good-sized tree directly outside Tim's window that blocked his view of the field. Before this picture was taken, a 2-foot tall 2 x 2 board was placed in the field where Peggy's body had been the day before. To prove Peggy's body was clearly visible from Tim's window the District Attorney showed Officer Broderick this photo and asked him to describe it. Their testimony follows:

"That's a photograph I directed the lab technician to take from the window from the inside of Timothy Lee Masters bedroom looking north into the field where the body was found the day prior."
"And peoples exhibit 84?"
"That's a photograph of the same field from the fence line... You can barely make out the body."
The District Attorney asked Officer Broderick if he determined whether or not a body in that field could be seen from Tim Masters's window. His answer: "...I took an approximately two foot piece of 2 x 2 and put it where the body was so I'd get some sort of visual marker when I was in his bedroom to see if I could see the body."
"Could you see your visual marker?"
"I could."

Then why wasn't his visual marker clearly visible in exhibit 83 (the photo taken from Tim's Bedroom) You can bet that if it really was visible they would have pointed it out in the photo. Peggy's body was not visible from Tim's home. On February 11, 1987 Detective Wheeler had to bring Clyde Masters all the way to fence at the end of his property line to point out Peggy's body to him.

B. Throughout the course of Tim's trial the State said "Tim knew that area like the back of his hand. He knew every street, and every ditch." If Tim Masters "positioned" Peggy's body in that field so that she faced his home and would be visible from there, why wasn't her body positioned somewhere that actually faced and was visible from his home? Like the State said "Tim knew that area like the back of his hand," so why wasn't her body in one of the many places that were visible from Tim's home?

VII The State alluded there was incriminating footprint evidence in the empty field.

A. During closing arguments at Tim's trial, District Attorneys told the jury there should be a path through the field if Tim walked through it daily. Consider this; from September 1986 to February 1987 Tim had walked through the field daily to catch his school bus. There was no path there when Tim began the school year. When you walk through an empty field (ie: one with no path), do you walk in the same spot every time? No, you might walk close to the same spot, but always to the left or to the right of where you previously walked. This is because there is no path so you don't know where you walked previously. In order to make a path through that field Tim would have to had taken the same exact route, or at least walked within inches of the course he had taken the last few days. Tim did walk through that field everyday. There were hundreds of his footprints in the field coming and going to and from his bus stop. If you take a look at a map of the area (see map) that shows the locations of Tim's home and his bus stop you will see that the most direct--the most logical route--from Tim's home to his bus stop is right through the empty field where Peggy's body was left. It would not make sense for Tim to take any other route to catch his bus.

B. The State spoke in particular of four photographs of footprints. These were labeled exhibit 11 (also called footprint #2), exhibit 12, exhibit 13, and exhibit 14. 1 will briefly detail these photos:

1) Exhibit 11, or as it was most often referred to Footprint #2 was an athletic style shoe print that was on top of the drag trail in the middle of the field, oriented from east to west, and between Peggy's body and the street curb.

2) Exhibit 12 was a photo of a footprint somewhere in the soft dirt. Officer Swihardt said, "As I recall, I believe that was the one that was found toward the sewer lid." The sewer lid was estimated by Officer Swihardt to be 30 feet form the blood pool. He believes exhibit 12 was oriented to the north, or facing towards the drag trail.

3) Exhibit 13 was a photo of a footprint of what appears to be an athletic style shoe. When asked if he was able to "determine, generally" where the print was, he said, "I believe they were to the right side, or the north side of the drag trail." He thought this because "This appears to be the second photograph from the roll - it would have been in this area right here, right around the - fairly close to the beginning of the blood trail."

4) Exhibit 14 was a photo of a footprint in the dirt. Once again, the testimony was that it appeared to be "some type of athletic shoe." Officer Swihardt said "What's significant about this particular photograph is you can see there's some red in the blood----or in the dirt here, which is part of the blood trail which led from the sidewalk to the victim's body." In general, he said, this print was slightly west of the previous photo (exhibit 13). All of these footprints may have been Tim's. We don't know for sure because the F.B.I. was unable to make a positive association between photographs, castings, and Tim's tennis shoes from 1987. Even if all four of these prints were Tim's, none of them are incriminating. Footprint #2 may have been Tim's footprint from when he walked through the field at 6:55 am February I Ith on the way to catch his school bus. Footprint #2 was oriented from East to West, with the toes pointing towards the body, not the other way
around as if it were left by someone running away or dragging a body. Officer Taylor said that because Footprint #2 was on top of the drag trail, his assumption was that it was left after the drag trail was created. If that print had been made by someone dragging Peggy's body, it would not be on top of the drag trail. Peggy's feet would have furrowed right through it, obliterating it. Footprint #2, along with Clyde Masters statement that Tim I veered off' from his usual course proves that Tim did not commit this crime. Had Tim committed this crime, he would have known a body was in the field and walked straight towards it. But Tim only altered his course when he noticed something unusual in the field. We can tell this by the sudden transition from north to west between Footprint #2 and the one before it. If exhibits 12-14 were Tim's prints, they were most likely left when Tim had walked through the field everyday for the past five months. Exhibit 12 was oriented to the north, the direction of Tim's normal daily travel. Unfortunately, we don't know the orientation of exhibits 13 and 14, but a safe assumption would be that they were also headed north, towards Tim's bus stop. When questioned about the footprint evidence, Officer Swihardt testified, "There were some problems as far as determining the exact location of each one because we did not use numbered markers to keep track of the footprints". He goes on to say that "We are not able to precisely document where each footwear impression was." He was also asked "When you look at these photos, you can't say precisely where they are found?" to which he replied, "That's correct." The police did not measure them from a known point of reference nor did they use markers to keep track of which print was which, and they did not document the orientations of the impressions. If we are to rely on Officer Swihardt's memory of where shoe impressions (of which 100's were photographed.) castings, and orientations were, then consider this; when asked if there was a sidewalk along the west curb of Landings Drive he said, "I believe there was." Not 20 minutes before, he had been shown a photo of the area that clearly showed a sidewalk only along the east side of the street. Consider this as well; The State took every pair of shoes that Tim owned and sent them off for analysis. No blood was found on any of Tim's shoes (top or bottom, inside or out). The State used this fact, which should have helped prove Tim's innocence, to bolster their case by claiming that there should have been blood on Tim's shoes, and since there was none, he must have cleaned them and therefore must be guilty. The footprint in exhibit 14 may have had blood in it, but that's because the print was days, weeks or even months old. Tim didn't step in blood, blood dripped into his already existing footprint. Even Footprint #2, the print that was on top of the drag trail that Tim may have made when he walked through the field to catch his bus the morning of February 11, was in a section of the drag trail where there was no blood. There was no blood on Tim's shoes because Tim never stepped anywhere where there was blood. The person(s) who committed this crime most assuredly had blood all over their shoes, top and bottom.

C. The drag trail was over 103 feet long and Tim's footprints do not correspond to the assailants anywhere. His prints were all over that field from where he walked through it daily. There were hundreds of his prints traveling from his house to the north, where his bus stop was. Yet none of his prints were near the soft shoulder dirt by the blood pool, along the drag trail (except for Footprint #2 which I've already discussed), or near the body. There were none of Tim's footprints going from the blood pool to the body, from the body to the blood pool, or from the body to Tim's home.

D. Police did find shoe impressions in the soft dirt at the curb near the pool of blood made by Thom McAn dress shoes. At trial, District Attorney Jolene Blair attempts to downplay the significance of these shoe impressions by saying, "The Thom McAn prints were about six feet away from where Peggy Hettrick was stabbed." She also stated, "Nowhere else on the drag trail do you find the Thom McAn shoes."

1) Officers Gonzales and Wagner, who were actually at the crime scene on February 11, 1987, noted 12 prints made by the Thom McAn shoes. They did not indicate these prints were "At least six feet away." Officer Gonzales said, "When I was reviewing the pictures from the Hettrick homicide I looked at picture #28. It is a picture of a footprint that was taken near the curb line where the blood trail starts from the 3800 block of Landings Drive.

As mentioned previously, we don't know the geographical location where Peggy was stabbed, but we will assume that Ms. Blair meant the blood pool in the street. Officer Wagner said the Thom McAn prints "Started at the roadway near the victim's blood, traveled towards the body, and stopped after going over the crest of the hill where the small berm near the body in the field was." She also said the prints were spaced from 1.1 feet all the way to 5.4 feet apart. These officers' statements seem to imply the Thom McAn prints were very close to where the blood pool in the street was.

2) We only find 12 Thom McAn prints because the dirt in the field farther out than the 12th print becomes hard packed in places. You don't see any prints in and along the drag trail because, most of them, were obliterated by Peggy's feet furrowing through them. There were only two or three prints along the drag trail that were not obliterated, and they were of such poor quality that no match could be made.

Tim Masters never owned a pair of Thom McAn shoes. Tim's father never owned a pair either. Whose were they? Who made those footprint impressions? Whoever it was that made those footprints: got closer to the blood pool than Tim Masters did. By Ms. Blair's account, the Thom McAn prints were "about six feet" from the blood pool. None of the footprints alleged to be Tim's were within six feet of the blood pool. It seems odd to me that someone would run/walk through a dirty field while wearing dress shoes when there was a sidewalk along the east side of Landings Drive. Also odd was the fact that these prints did not run along Landings Drive, but went into the field. They were only in the area of the crime scene. I would think that Thom McAn dress shoes would be the kind of footwear someone would wear if they were dressed up and patronizing a nightclub, such as the Prime Minister. Barb Kohlner said, "Peggy was attracted to good dressers or flashy dressed men- those being younger men." We can assume that someone wearing dress shoes would be "dressed up."

E. Logic would dictate that if there really was footprint evidence that incriminated Tim Masters, the State would have charged him in 1987, rather than waiting until 1998.

VIII The State claims Peggy Hettrick was mutilated with a scalpel.

A. Peggy Hettrick's left nipple and skin from her vaginal area had been excised with a sharp instrument.

1) Dr. Allen testified that the area of the brown skin of her left nipple, approximately 30mm x 26mm had been removed. He further stated "The margins are relatively sharp in most areas, a little bit ragged towards the upper medial ends." He also notes "The knife has been repositioned to take only brown skin."

2) Dr. Allen testified that from Peggy's vaginal area an inverted "Y' shape, approximately 45mm x 25mm had been removed.

He said there were "Several superficial cuts to the crotch." He called these cuts "Tracing" or "Hesitation cuts." Dr. Allen said that to excise the skin in this area "The skin would definitely have to be manipulated and moved around."

Dr. Allen is used to making incisions to the human body using a scalpel. So it stands to reason that the first thing that would come to his mind when examining Peggy's body is a scalpel made the excisions. Dr. Allen said that in 21 years as a coroner he had never observed mutilations like this. How qualified is Dr. Allen to give an opinion regarding the method of mutilation of something he has never seen before? He did admit that Peggy's nipple might have been removed with a knife. However, he felt that a knife could not have removed Peggy's vaginal skin because he did not believe there was enough room to fit a knife between Peggy's legs. Remember that he had testified, "The skin would definitely have to be manipulated and moved around" to make the excision. This means the assailant had to be able to fit at least one hand down there along with a "sharp instrument" to remove her skin. If he could fit a hand between her legs, then he could fit an inch and a half wide blade as well. Perhaps the "tracing" or "hesitation cuts" he spoke of were from the assailant trying to maneuver a large blade in a confined area. One very interesting comment about what Dr. Allen said, If you would have to exert a force on the skin (i.e. pull on it) while cutting, you would need two hands to do so. How could Tim have held his "Red-covered" flashlight that the district Attorneys said Tim used to commit this crime?

B. One of Tim's knives came from the manufacturer with a scalpel included as part of the survival kit. The State argued at Tim's trial that his scalpel excised the body parts. There was no blood, skin, DNA, fiber evidence, etc. on Tim's scalpel blade. The only certain fact in this case is that a sharp tool removed the body parts. I've known many people who kept their knives sharp enough to have accomplished cuts in the clean manner we see in this case. I have a survival knife that I keep today that could easily make these types of cuts. Also, a scalpel blade by itself is fairly small. Would it be capable of making the clean excisions like we see in this case in one pass? How hard would it be to wield a scalpel blade without the handle on a cold February morning? On February 11, 1987, at 8:00 am it was only 39 degrees Fahrenheit outside. How much colder was it outside during the early morning hours before the sun had risen?

C. Forensic Psychologist Reid Meloy states, "It is likely that he [the assailant) would still have the missing body parts as souvenirs." In 1998 a man in his thirty's names Wayne Ford walked into a Kern County Sheriffs office in Bakersfield California and confessed to killing women. He brought with him a Ziploc baggy with a woman's severed breast inside. Over the years he had killed dozens of women and excised their body parts. He still had his victim's body parts at his residence in Northern California. If Wayne Ford fits the profile of a typical sexual murderer we see that:
~ He was in his thirties
~ He began killing in his mid to late twenties
~ He was a serial killer
~ He kept his victims' body parts

Another case involving a sexual homicide is described in John Douglas's book "Mind Hunter." He tells of a 90-pound woman who was found murdered, tied up spread eagle on the roof of her apartment building with her breast eviscerated. Her wallet was found in the apartment stairwell by a 15 year-old boy. Mr. Douglas, a famed Forensic Psychologist, said, "I was willing to rule out the 15 year old boy who found the wallet based solely on this. Based on my experience, I could not imagine someone of that age treating the body this way. This advanced sexual fantasy would take years to develop." What was the profile of the person Mr. Douglas believed committed that crime?
~ White male age 25-30, disheveled appearance
~ Unemployed
~ No military experience
~ High School dropout
~ First murder, but if not caught, not his last

A thorough search of 15- year-old Tim Master's residence was conducted in 1987, and later in 1998. No physical evidence has ever been found to link Tim to this homicide. People don't just murder and mutilate a human being and then go on to live a normal life. Tim is accused of killing and mutilating Peggy Hettrick and then living a normal life for the next 11 years.

D. Despite their own expert's testimony that it would have "required some skill to remove the skin", the State claims a 15-year-old boy who had never skinned and animal and never had sex with a woman, would know enough about a woman's anatomy from seeing 2-dimentional photos in pornographic magazines to be able to commit this mutilation. Whoever did this was not some 15-year-old kid. It had to be someone who had "been around." They made neat, clean excisions. They took just what they wanted and they knew enough about the female body to know just what they wanted.

IX The State says Peggy was "Blitz" attacked from behind by a left handed assailant.

A. The State's "Proof" that Peggy was attacked by a left handed assailant was the location of the wound in Peggy's back, the lack of defensive wounds, and some minor, linear abrasions on Peggy's left check.

1) Peggy Hettrick's fatal stab wound was in her left side, shoulder blade region; 13 3/4 inches from the top of her head. The blade proceeded from back to front, and from 20 degrees left to right at an upward angle of 5 degrees. District Attorney Blair said, "Now if you come square on behind somebody and you try to leave a stab wound in the left shoulder blade that's slightly left to right in a slightly upwards angle, which hand are you going to use?" Well, Ms. Blair, in that particular scenario you would use the left hand. However, the fact that Peggy was stabbed in the left side does not prove a left-handed assailant killed her. There is no evidence that somebody was square behind Peggy when they stabbed her. If Peggy were turning to her left when the assailant struck her, you would have the same knife angle we see here. If the assailant attacked her from sideways, or from her left side, or if she was turned to her right in an attempt to exit the passenger's side of a car when she was stabbed the wound would be consistent with the one in Peggy's back. If we knew where Peggy and the assailant were positioned when she was fatally stabbed, then we could make some inferences as to which hand the assailant used. However, we have no idea where either of them were when the stabbing occurred. Neither the F.B.I. nor the state's privately retained expert Tom Bevel could reconstruct the crime scene.

2) Peggy may have had some defensive wounds. There was a cut on her left finger and a tear in the fabric of her left blouse cuff.

3) There were linear abrasions on her left cheek with the skin plied upwards from chin to head. There was one large abrasion and two smaller ones. These abrasions occurred before Peggy died. We have no idea when or how these abrasions occurred. They may have been made with the assailant's fingernails. Fingernail scrapings were taken from Tim Masters during his 1987 interview. The States case gets a little murky here, but basically Officer Broderick testified that he remembered Tim's fingernails being very short (implying they were clean from having recently been cut). Then, they put a C.B.I. analyst who had analyzed Tim's fingernail scrapings, on the stand. She testified that she found cotton fibers that where microscopically consistent with Peggy Hettrick's jeans. During the 1987 interview while taking fingernail scrapings Tim made the comment, "They look dirty right now," because he was embarrassed about how dirty his fingernails were Officer Broderick responded, "They're all right, but you got stuff up there, make sure it goes in [the bag]." Tim would not have made the embarrassing comment that his fingernails were dirty if they were as clean and short as Jim Broderick implied when he testified in 1999. There is no mention in the 1987 interview transcripts or in Jim Broderick's police reports that Tim's fingernails were short and clean. We are supposed to rely on Jim Broderick's assertion that eleven years later he remembers that Tim had short fingernails. If Tim's fingernails were as short as insinuated, why was a C.B.I. lab technician called to testify about cotton fibers found in Tim's fingernail scrapings? Now I will talk about the cotton fibers found in Tim's fingernail scrapings that the State pretended were somehow incriminating. The C.B.I. lab technician went on to say the cotton fibers in Tim's fingernails "would be consistent with many other blue jeans also". The blue that is used in blue denim is a common dye used by most manufacturers and therefore, would be a fairly common color. The cotton fiber is, likewise, common." Tim Masters wore blue jeans everyday in 1987. These cotton fibers were from the jeans that Tim was wearing during the 1987 interview when they took his fingernail scrapings. It is unlikely that someone could commit this crime without getting any blood, skin, DNA, etc. from the victim on them or under their fingernails and yet, somehow have cotton fibers from the victims jeans. There was blood all over Peggy's jeans. If jean fibers from her were under Tim's fingernails there would be blood there too.

B. The State came up with this "left handed assailant" theory because they believe Tim Masters is left-handed. They say that Tim is left handed but somewhat ambidextrous. That couldn't be farther from the truth. Ambidextrous is defined as, "Capable of using both hands with equal facility." Tim writes with his left hand. When he was five years old he broke his right arm, so while his arm was in a cast he had to learn to write with his left hand for school. Everything else he does right handed. He plays sports right handed. He throws a ball right handed. Police have never found a single pair of left-handed scissors in Tim's home. Tim earned a living working as an Aircraft Mechanic. A commonly used tool of his trade is a pair of tin-snips. Although left- handed tin-snips are available, all of Tim's tools are for a right-handed individual. If Tim really were left-handed, wouldn't it be reasonable to expect him to at least do things left-handed?

X Tim Masters saw Peggy Hettrick's body at 6:55 am and did not tell anyone until 10:00 am.

A. Tim Master's initial reaction was that he saw a mannequin and that someone was playing a sick joke. Linwood Hodgdon, the 3 8 -year-old bicycle rider who reported Peggy's body, thought that he was seeing a mannequin also. He said, "My initial reaction when I looked into the field was that it was a mannequin, there was a mannequin lying in the field." He goes on to say "I glanced down and saw a pool of blood in the street..."

His observation of the pool of blood is what changed his impression from "mannequin" to "body." Linwood Hodgdon was a 38-year-old man, with all of the acquired knowledge that comes with age. At 15-years-old Tim was still just a kid. He did not have Mr. Hodgdon's years of acquired knowledge. The pool of blood that changed Mr. Hodgdon's mind was not visible from the path that Tim took every morning. Furthermore, Tim's not immediately telling somebody about seeing something disturbing was consistent with his personality. In 1984, Tim had been propositioned by a pedophile who, had been masturbating in his car. Tim says this shocked the hell out of him; He never told anyone about the incident until 1987.

B. The State claimed that Tim's reaction to seeing the body was "emotionless" My first question for them would be, "Where were you hiding?" Because Tim says he does not remember seeing any of the District Attorneys out there in the field at 6:55 in the morning when he saw the body. Tim's reaction was not emotionless. He was in a state of shock as he caught his school bus. He says he was thinking, "Did I just see a body? No! There's no way a body would be in a field behind my house. This is Fort Collins Colorado, not L.A. or New York. Things like that don't happen here." And after he was on his school bus he says that all that morning he thought, "Maybe it wasn't a mannequin. Maybe I should go back after school and double check." Tim's reaction to seeing the body and not believing it was real might seem pretty dumb to us, but kids don't believe bad things like murders will happen near them. You can bet that Tim's reaction to seeing something that might be a body would be much different today.

C. The State says Tim "blurred fantasy with reality" because he could not accurately describe Peggy's attire and he did not see her excised breast.

1) Tim was pretty much wrong about all of Peggy's attire. He thought she had been wearing pink boots, blue jeans, and a dark shirt with the number 10 on it. Her boots were actually red (so he was close on the boots), she had blue jeans on, and she had a light colored blouse and a dark denim jacket on. Throughout all of his conversations with police Tim told them he was not sure about Peggy's attire. It was understood in 1987 that Tim was, guessing' about her attire.' When asked to describe what he saw Linwood Hodgdon described her attire as "I noticed that the individual had on some shoes" and "I noticed what I thought was a white sweater or a white blanked." Neither 15-year-old Tim nor 38-year-old Hodgdon were trained police officers. They had not been trained to remember everything they saw at a crime scene. This does not mean either of them blurred fantasy with reality. They just did not pay attention to Peggy's attire.

2) Mr. Hodgdon did not see any breast exposed on Peggy Hettrick's body. Officer Swihardt (the first police officer at the scene) never states that he saw her breasts exposed when he approached Peggy's body. What he does say is he noticed her excised nipple after he checked and found the body cold to the touch. This man was close enough to touch the body before he mentions seeing the left breast. Furthermore, all of the police officers saw Peggy's body later in the morning than Tim did, so the sun was much higher in the sky giving them more light than when Tim saw the body at 6:55 in the morning. They also all approached Peggy's body from the west, while Tim had seen the body from the east. When shown a photo taken from an easterly angle (similar to Tim's approach that morning) Officer Jack Taylor testified "...not visible is the nipple having been removed. The coat kind of covers-or the picture doesn't show it real well from that particular angle."

3) The State claims Tim stood within five feet of Peggy's body and looked at it for 10 seconds. He actually told police the he thought he looked at the body for 1-10 seconds, and estimated he was 4-6 feet away. These were the estimates of a kid. Officer Swihardt said that there were no footprints near Peggy's body when he first approached it. Then he later points out some footprints in a photo taken after other officers had been in the field that showed footprints around her body. So the area around her body was soft enough dirt to see footprints, yet there were none there when Officer Swihardt first approached. So Tim did not get within 5-feet of the body, or footprints would have been near the body.

D. They accuse Tim of being so smart that there was not a single piece of physical evidence to link him to the crime. At the same time they accuse him of killing someone and leaving the body in a field he had to walk through daily to catch his bus. Not immediately reporting having seen the body must be some part of Tim's "master plan." So Tim is so smart as to leave no physical evidence, but the best he could come up with is he thought the body was a mannequin. If Tim was so smart that he left no evidence behind he is not going to leave a body in a field he has to walk through everyday. He is also not going to walk along his usual path to his bus stop and only alter his course after seeing something unusual in the field. As stated before, If Tim killed Peggy Hettrick, he would have known a body was in the field and walked straight to it. This is what a peer of Tim's had to say about his intelligence; Ben Anderson told police Tim "seemed to have an I.Q. of about 70." Tim's grades in school were C's, D's, and F's. He was a below average student.

XI The State claims Peggy Hettrick looked like Tim's mother and this crime was a displaced matricide.

A. It is not debatable that Peggy Hettrick was murdered near the anniversary of Tim's mother's death. Tim lost his mother on Saturday, February 12, 1983. Peggy was murdered (depending on how you look at it) on the night of February 10 or the morning of February 11, 1987. Did Tim even realize the significance of the date, February 12th? During his February 12, 1987 interrogation, Officer Hal Dean asked Tim "When did your mom die?" Tim replied, "About four years ago." Tim's mother had died exactly four years ago to the day, but Tim didn't even realize it. Perhaps, that's because, with the exceptions of birthdays and Christmas, most kids do not pay much attention to dates. Also, Tim always recalled the time of his mother's death as "We took her to the hospital on a Friday, and she died the next Saturday." Tim says that in 1987, neither him nor his father realized any significance about the date until his father brought out and looked at Margaret Masters death certificate.

B. I don't believe I need to go into this much, but the idea that Tim would have known Peggy Hettrick would be near his home, near the anniversary of his mothers death is ludicrous. I've already spoken of this; there is no way Tim could know that Peggy would be in the area that night.

C: The State decided that Tim had anger towards his mother, so he must have killed an innocent woman that they say looked like Margaret Masters (Tim's Mother).

1) Would a 15-year--old boy commit a displaced matricide and/or remove sexual body parts?

2) Peggy Hettrick did not look like Tim's mother. Peggy had red hair, stood 5' 2", weighed somewhere around 115 pounds, and was 36-years-old in 1987. Margaret Masters had brown, graying hair, stood 5' 8", weighed around 150 pounds, and was 43-years-old when she died. These two women looked nothing alike.

3) The State decided Tim had anger towards his mother for dying and leaving him. They have no evidence to support this theory; they just say it is so. One of the States witnesses, Pamela Sachs-Kapp, who was Tim's High School counselor explained to Tim that being angry at the person who died is part of the normal grieving process. She didn't think Tim had properly grieved over his mother's death because Tim was never angry with his mother for dying.

XII The State argued Tim possessed some sort of knowledge of the crime known only to the killer and the Fort Collins police.

A. It is very disturbing to a 15-year-old kid to see the body of a murder victim. As a child, Tim would often draw pictures of things that shocked or frightened him in such a manner as to make light of them. For instance, in October 1986 a former classmate named Nick Mize was hit by a car and killed. Tim was shocked and disturbed over Nick's death. He drew cartoons of a person being hit by a Volkswagen Bug, thereby lessening the impact of his friend's death. Just because Tim drew pictures of a VW Bug hitting someone doesn't mean that Tim killed Nick. A Volkswagen Bug killed Nick, not Tim. The day after seeing the body of Peggy Hettrick, Tim was understandably shocked and disturbed by what he had seen. In class the next day (February 12, 1987), Tim drew a picture of a man with arrows sticking out of his chest being dragged. Twelve years later the State claimed the drawing was some sort of confession because there was no way for Tim to know the victim was dragged into the field.

1) Officer Gonzales spoke to Tim at 10:00 am the day he saw the body. While speaking to Tim he asked if Tim had seen the "drag trail." In fact, several Police Officers spoke of "the drag trail" to Tim that day. The drag trail made by Peggy's feet looked as if someone had plowed the ground. Peggy's feet faced the street. It does not take a genius to see that she was dragged into the field. Once Linwood Hodgdon realized it was a body in the field he says he saw "The blood pool and the drag trail." This civilian had no problem identifying the deep furrow as a drag trail.

2) The drawing Tim made depicted one character dragging another by the armpits. No one is sure what way Peggy was dragged into the field. Most of the original investigating Officers thought that Peggy was dragged by her hands. Both Dr. Allen and Officer Taylor thought Peggy had been dragged by her hands because of the way her arms were positioned above her head. Officer Broderick stated in one of his reports that the dirt on the heal of Peggy's boot was "exactly where you would have it accumulate if you were dragged by the arms with the heals creating furrows in the dirt."

3) Many witnesses testified at Tim's trial as to how detailed his drawings were. In the drag drawing the characters have no knife. There is no "red-covered" flashlight. The character being dragged is a male with arrows sticking out of his chest. The characters do not look even close the Peggy Hettrick or Tim.

B). The State entered into evidence a notebook page with a small, abstract drawing Tim had made of a knife cutting the piece of paper it was drawn on. This drawing is reproduced below. The State claims this is a drawing of a knife cutting a vagina. Consider the following:
~~ The State showed dozens of drawings Tim had made of knife cuts and gunshot wounds.
Witnesses testified as to how detailed Tim's drawings were. His horror and war productions were graphic but there was not s single knife wound or gunshot wound that did not show a detailed body, and blood. The knife cutting paper does not show any blood, pubic hair, skin, does not have a body, and if you look at the size of the hand and the knife you will see they are way out of proportion for the drawing to be what the State says it is (not to mention the States theory that a scalpel was used to excise Peggy's body parts).
~~ This was just a tiny little picture drawn in the middle of a page full of math problems. Of course, we all know that math makes a child think about a vagina!
~~ This page was inside one of Tim's Jr. High School notebooks. It was probably a couple of years old in 1987.

C) On February 12, 1987, Tim's former classmate, Wayne Lawson asked Tim where he had seen the body. Tim drew two maps of the area to show him. The State says that these maps and the fact that Tim knew his area of town well are somehow incriminating.
~~ Wayne testified that Tim drew both maps for him on February 12, 1987 because he was curious about where the murder had taken place.
~~ Of course Tim knew the area well. All of the kids knew that area well. Greg Shade was 13-years-old in 1987 he testified that he knew all the streets and ditches in the area.

D. During his 1987 interrogation Tim made a comment about a serrated blade not being a good weapon because it would stick in somebody if you stabbed them with one. The actual conversation between Tim and Jim Broderick went like this:

Broderick: "... The serrated part of it? I mean, is it for ... ?'
Tim: "For cutting through things like trees and stuff. And they say that some of them are supposed to be capable of cutting through the fuselage of an airplane."
Broderick: "Oh yeah?"
Tim: "That's ... That's one of the main purposes I can think of ... cutting through trees."
Broderick: "Well, the other one obviously does a lot of damage when you stab somebody."
Tim: "That'd be kind of hard, though, to pull it back?" Broderick: "Maybe ... maybe not."

The District Attorney ran with Tim's comment, saying, "Now who would come up with that idea?" (That a serrated blade would be hard to remove from a human body) I'll tell you who would come up with that idea, the author of the book "All Quiet on the Western Front." Tim's sixth grade class watched this movie and read the book. One of the characters in this movie/book showed up at the front lines with his bayonet serrated. He is chastised by the experienced soldiers who claim that a serrated blade would get stuck in the enemy soldier's body.

E. In 1992 police talked to Wayne Lawson who told them he had heard somewhere that the victim's nipples had been removed, and he thought he had heard this from Tim. Immediately police sought and obtained an arrest warrant for Tim based on Wayne's statement. Police went to Philadelphia where Tim was serving in the Navy aboard his ship, The U.S.S Constitution to re- interview and arrest Tim. During the interview police learned that many people had heard about Peggy's nipples having been removed. Young Explorers, who were high school kids, helped in the line search of the empty field where Peggy's body was left. They were instructed to look for Peggy's missing body parts. One of those Young Explorers was a girl named Kelly Charvet who sat at Tim's table in art class. She told the five of them who sat at Tim's table that she had participated in a line search of the field and had been instructed to look for the victim's nipples. Rumors like that spread like wildfire throughout the school. Wayne was spoken to again and admitted that he was not sure when or where he had heard about the removed nipples because rumors had been all over the school. It bears reiterating that in 1987 Tim was tag-team interrogated for over 9-hours, and questioned by other officers on other occasions. If 15- year-old Tim had known about Peggy's body being mutilated he would surely have let something slip during these questionings. Tim didn't know about Peggy's removed nipple until Kelly Charvet told him about it.

F. The Prosecution claims Tim knew Peggy Hettrick had pink socks on. They say since Peggy's socks were not visible Tim must have seen her socks during the commission of this crime. Tim never said Peggy had pink socks on. He said he thought it looked like she had blue pants and pink shoes on." Peggy's shoes were light red. Tim saw them at 6:55 in the morning in the poor light of a winter morning. Since Peggy was still wearing her boots, and her pants had been pulled down to her knees, even the assailant would not have known what color socks she was wearing. Officer Broderick's testimony confirms this:
Blair: "And have you had an opportunity to review all of the crime-scene photos, specifically the ones that show Peggy Hettrick's body as it was found in the field February 11th?"
Broderick: "Yes, I have."
Blair: "Could you see from any of these photos the victim's socks?"
Broderick: "There's no way you could see her socks."

As Broderick said, "There's no way you could see her socks." And let's not forget, they accuse Tim of using a "red-covered" flashlight to see with. What color would pink socks appear if they were illuminated by a "red-covered" flashlight? They certainly wouldn't appear pink.

XIII Because of the complete lack of relevant Physical evidence the State resorted to
character assassination to convict Tim.

A. Since they had no physical evidence the State relied on the opinions of a Forensic Psychologist named Reid Meloy, who dissected about 2200 pages of Tim's stories, drawings, personal productions, and publications seized from his property and attempted to link Tim to the crime. Reid Meloy was hired to compare all of Tim's productions to this crime and see if he could formulate a relationship between Tim and the homicide. All of these comparisons were made with Meloy having never spoken to Tim. Without ever meeting Tim or seeing the inside of Tim's home he accused Tim of being "obsessed" with weapons and sexual violence. As Tim's friends and family can attest, Tim's only true obsession is with things mechanical. He bought his home because of the size of the garage it came with. Tim owns thousands of dollars worth of tools and automotive parts. Tim owns hundreds of books and magazines on cars. Having never met Tim and with little knowledge of his life, Meloy claims, that "Tim Masters lives in a fantasy world." He goes on to state that "I've never seen such a large volume of productions before" to imply that because Tim produced close to 2200 pages of stories and drawings in 15-years it must be an obsession, and Tim must live in a fantasy world.

1) As a 15-year-old kid Tim had aspirations of being a writer. During his 1987 interview Tim told detectives he would like to someday publish his stories.

2) A popular author, Piers Anthony, claims to produce about three novels a year. These are usually 300 to 400 pages long. In 15-years Mr. Anthony produces at least 12,500 pages of productions (this does not include his work that is not published). In 15-years Tim produced only 2200 pages (this figure was tallied by Jim Broderick and includes school notebooks, half of which are filled with school work). In 15-years Tim produced only 15% of the volume of an average writer. If all 2200 pages were filled with story's and drawings Tim would have had to produce 2.7 pages a day to total 2200 pages in 15-years. Tim would have had to spend a half hour to an hour a day to accomplish this. That's not very much time to have spent on an obsession."

3) Most of Tim's time since joining the military in 1989 was devoted to work and his automotive hobbies. Tim routinely worked 12-hour days. Between his automotive hobbies and his military duty Tim did not have much time left to live in a fantasy world." Tim worked on million-dollar E-2/C-2 and F/A-18 aircraft. Had he made mistakes in his work, or in inspecting others work someone could have lost their life. Tim could not afford to "live in a fantasy world".

B. The relationship in Tim's productions that Meloy and the State Claim exists between Tim and Peggy is "explicit examples of Tim's obsession with sex and violence", multiple examples of "piquerism", a "hatred towards older women" and "similarities" to Peggy's homicide.

1) If 2200 pages of productions actually contained examples of hatred towards older women and similarities to the crime, why would the State have to pay a Forensic Psychologist $300.00 an hour for six months to explain them? If Tim's productions had contained such things they would not need a psychologist to explain them, they would be obvious.

2) Meloy claims the perpetrators of sexual homicides routinely engage in violent fantasy. In other words, Tim must have committed this homicide because he created violent productions.

A. Meloy does not have a "Base Rate" of 15-year-olds who created violent productions in 1987.

B. Teachers at Tim's High School stated that 70-80% of students participated in violent drawings.

C. Results of a study by Prently and Burges concluded that violent fantasy was present in only 23% of single murders.

D. A study by MacCullock states: "the significance of the link between prior fantasy and behavior would be more obvious if normals did not engage in sadistic fantasy."

E. Prently also said "It is commonly accepted that "normal" people often have sexually deviant fantasies." Is Stephen King a murderer? Is Wes Craven (the creator of a Nightmare on Elm Street) a killer? Writing stories and drawing pictures does not make someone a killer.

3) Meloy claims the purpose of Tim's productions was to "express deeply felt hostility to women in a very private way." As the States witnesses testified, Tim's productions were made in plain view of everyone. Tim even exchanged them with classmate Wayne Lawson during class. This does not sound very private to me.

4) In 2200 pages of productions that are supposed to be filled with examples of the pairing of sex and violence, putting their best foot forward so to speak, here are the examples the State came up with:
~ A woman being shot
~ Drawing of a Velvet magazine (Velvet is a pornographic magazine) with two knives drawn elsewhere on the same page.
~ One man having sex with another mans wife.
~ A drawing for a horror story where a woman was raped and murdered and now she has risen from the grave to seek revenge. (This is perhaps the closest example to the pairing of sex and violence that we find in Tim's productions, yet, in this story Tim is obviously on the side of the woman who was victimized.)
~ A war story where one soldier shoots enemy soldiers and says, "It gave me a hard-on to see ten reds drop."

If Tim were really obsessed with sex and violence, isn't it reasonable to expect to see some actual pairing of sex and violence? We all have a pretty good idea of what the real pairing of sex and violence is, so I won't waste time here listing graphic details of examples of actual pairings of sex and violence. Suffice to say, there is no real pairing of sex and violence in Tim's productions.

5) Piquerism is a paraphilic behavior in which a cutting instrument is used on a victim for sexual pleasure. The States best examples of this piquerism in Tim's productions follow:
~ Drawing of Freddy Krugger (so Wes Craven must be into piquerism, as he created Freddy Krugger)
~ Drawings of arrows and knives
~ Knife that has cut something
~ Nail through the tongue of an 80's punk rocker
~ Person cut open
~ Sharp blades
~ Knife cutting a throat
Where is the sexual pleasure from these productions? These are not examples of piquerism,
these are examples of horror and war productions.

6) Meloy and the State claim the motive in this case was a hatred towards women. Here are some examples from Tim's productions that the State quoted either in their affidavit or during Tim's trial
~ "Mace figured the best way to get inside was to knock on the door and then the guy in the room opened it, Mace would slice his throat."
~ "I jerked the knife out of the kids throat and slowly lowered him to the ground."
~ "I drove the bayonet into the back of the kids neck and pulled it out."
~ "Klee opened his mouth and blood spilled out."
~ "I stuck the blade in his stomach as far as it would go."
~ ". . heard him scream and watched him hit the ground."
~ "Mace lowered the man's body."
~ "I let him to the ground slowly..."
~ "while he fell he screamed..."
~ "and shot two rounds into his chest. I pulled him out of the drivers seat and got
~ "Blood was coming out of his eyes...'

Admittedly, these productions are graphically violent. Yet, in these productions that are supposed to show hatred towards older women, the victims are all males. The main story the State used against Tim at trial was about a world where all of the adults had disappeared and the children started wars with each other. Officer Broderick briefly described this narrative:
"There were narratives that spoke specifically of a kind of juvenile guerilla warfare, military person named Mace, and his counterpart Ice, who were adolescents and were involved in guerilla warfare with a group of people called the Reds. "

If a person had hatred towards older women, would they write a violent story in which all the older women were gone so that none of the violence happens to any older women? If Tim had hatred towards older women, and the pairing of sex and violence it would seem likely that in 2200 pages of productions there would be violence directed specifically towards older women, and the subsequent removal of their sexual body parts. Yet in all of his productions there is nothing like that.

7) On the subject of so-called "similarities" between Tim's productions and this crime I'll list some quotes from Tim's most recent motion to the courts:

"Neither the defendants productions, nor Dr. Reid Meloy's interpretations of the productions provide any relevant evidence of a crucial element of the offense charged. As the Court of Appeals observed, "There is no single drawing or narrative depicting a woman being stabbed in the back, nor is there any description or illustration of sexual mutilation that matched the injuries to the victim."

Yet, the State would have everyone believe Tim's productions contained fantasies about the exact way, the exact manner that person was killed."

In fact, the State's entire case was based on the assassination of Tim's character. Their entire case relied on painting Tim as a violent person because of the productions he created. The Prosecutors closing arguments are demonstrative of this: hundreds and hundreds of pages of narratives ... about brutal killings and death and dismemberment ... ... a kid who wrote hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages of gory, grizzly death scenes about torture, about killing."

"He fantasized obsessively. He did it in class when he was supposed to be doing other things. Look at the numbers in this case of drawings and pages of narratives." The prosecutor ended his rebuttal closing argument by urging the jury to convict the defendant because his "fantasies" (his story's and drawings) proved he must have committed this crime: "Please take the time to look at these drawings, read the narratives, study this evidence. The evidence is there. Sometimes it's hard to find. Sometimes you have to do a little thinking as to how the defendant could draw something like that unless he knew how it happened. Please look and read, study, dig into the paper bags. The evidence is there." This "evidence" that was there was the normally forbidden propensity or character evidence of Tim Masters. Tim's story's and drawings contained slurs and violent acts committed against people of several races (whites, blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and Jews), both genders, sexual orientations, and people of all ages from little babies to old men. People were killed by stabbings, slicing, bullets, grenades, explosives, hangings, drowning, animal attacks, booby traps and electrocutions. These violent acts transcend to other species, including cats, dogs, birds, horses, pigs, cattle, and even fictional alien creatures. The point is, because of the broad scope of Tim's productions, one could find motive, intent, knowledge, plan, and similarities for any violent crime in Tim's productions. For example, if an Asian man were killed with a firearm, Tim has written stories where an Asian man has been killed with a firearm; there would be the State's motive and similarity. The motive would be hatred towards Asian men. If a child were killed they could find motive and similarities in Tim's productions because Tim has produced stories where all the characters are children. Does this mean Tim has hatred towards children? You could find an example of just about any weapon being used to kill someone in Tim's productions. You could find an alleged "hatred" towards any gender, race, class or type of person in Tim's productions. However, once again, I would like to reiterate that there was not a single instance in Tim's productions of a woman being stabbed in the back and/or sexually mutilated. I believe that disproves the States claim that there were "similarities."

C. The State put witnesses on the stand whose testimony had no relevance to the case. They were used to help assassinate Tim's character.

1) The State put one of Tim's former teachers on the stand because Tim had a confrontation with her when she took a book from him during class and refused to return the same book after class. Any normal person would become angry if someone stole a book from them and, when confronted, refused to return the same book. When she refused to return Tim's book, he was angry, but he did not harm or threaten the teacher. He simply walked away. The State had this teacher describe Tim's drawings as "frightening' and Tim's demeanor as "very scary". Later the same day, Tim was called to his counselor's office to discuss the incident. His counselor, Pamela Sachs-Kapp, was also allowed to assassinate Tim's character by stating, "Tim had a chilling calmness." She elaborated by telling the jury that most students who became angry with a teacher stormed around, ranting and raving, and Tim didn't do this (so there was something wrong with Tim for displaying self control).

2) The State put a young woman on the stand that Tim had not seen since 1982 when he was nine and she was seven. She had lived next door to Tim for a year and then moved away. They never saw or spoke to each other again. She testified that she didn't even remember Tim. This woman told Tim's attorneys that the State told her Tim was stalking her. The State claimed her testimony was relevant because she lived in the same apartment complex where Peggy Hettrick lived. Peggy Hettrick lived in a large apartment complex that housed literally several hundred people. They closed this woman's testimony by asking her what color her hair was to which she responded "Dark brown with red highlights." This was to lead people to conclude that since at one time Tim had known a girl with dark brown hair with red highlights, Tim must have murdered a woman with red hair. In 1987, Tim knew kids who lived in every housing project or apartment complex in that part of town. If someone was killed who lived anywhere in that part of town the State could have found someone that Tim knew or had known that lived there and claim that was a connection.

D. To further assassinate Tim's character the state accused him of several incidents that happened near his home. There was a bridge near his home with graffiti painted on it. Police knew that Tim's drawings were more detailed than the stick figure graffiti that was painted on the bridge.
Yet, at trial, with no evidence to connect the graffiti to Tim, they still alluded Tim was responsible for the graffiti. There was also a small camper trailer that police called a "Quonset hut" down the street from Tim's home. Someone had drawn a picture of a woman and fired 22 caliber bullets through the breasts. Police tested 22 caliber shells recovered from the "Quonset hut." They had not been fired from Tim's father's 22 caliber rifle (the only 22 caliber rifle the Masters owned in 1987). Tim did not fire these 22 caliber rounds, yet the State did all they could to make people believe Tim had.

XIV The State insisted the complete lack of physical evidence is insignificant.

A. Although at least half of the 103-foot long drag trail had blood in and around it, and although there was a large pool of blood in the street, the State claims the assailant wouldn't get blood on them. District Attorney Terry Gilmore said, "The lining of the coat [Peggy's coat] prevents the blood from immediately going to the outside. The blood is going to flow down the back. It pools at the small of her back, or top of her jeans, and then it goes outside the clothes, that's what causes the drag trail." Mr.. Gilmore encouraged Tom Bevel to testify that he wouldn't expect to find much blood on the assailant. In other words, the State claimed this was not a bloody crime and Peggy's lined coat prevented what little blood left Peggy's body from getting all over the assailant. This claim doesn't hold water. If the fact that there was blood in and around over half of a 103-foot long drag trail and a pool of blood in the street doesn't prove this was a bloody crime scene, the testimony by States witnesses does. Officer Jack Taylor said Peggy's pants were bloody and slightly soiled. Her blouse was blood soaked, her panties were blood soaked, her sack had blood on it, and her heavywool jacket had blood soaked through it. Det. Taylor also described the blood pool as a "pretty good pool of blood." Officer Swihardt called the blood pool a "fairly substantial amount of blood" and "a large about of blood near the curb." Tom Bevel said, "Once blood is accumulated in volume we start having blood drips." He goes on to say there was good volume of blood drips and blood runs. There were additional blood drips surrounding low velocity drips. There was "Blood drops consistent with her being in an upright position for a few moments and some amount of blood falling from an approximate location in the middle of the upper part of her back." He said, "Once these blood drops have started, in this case because of the distance they would have tohave fallen, the victim would have had to have been in an upright position still." Peggy Hettrick had an inch and a half wide gash from the knife wound in the back of her coat. The coat was described as being blood soaked. Tom Bevel said blood had dripped from a 'location in the middle of the upper part of her back." The jacket liner could not prevent the amount of blood Peggy lost from immediately going "to the outside."

B. Using a shotgun method, the State also claimed that the assailant might have used a wide-legged stance to drag Peggy's bleeding body to avoid dripping blood. This ruined their theory that Tim's drag drawing was some sort of confession, so they didn't stick with this theory for long. They only brought this theory up on the second day of Tim's trial. They later changed back to their other theory that the assailant dragged Peggy in the manner Tim's drawing depicts.

C. Though early on during the trial they claimed the assailant wouldn't get blood on them self, the State later claimed Tim washed his clothes of any blood. Their evidence of this was a note found in Tim's room that said "Get clothes out of dryer," and Officer Broderick's testimony that Tim had told him the pants he had worn before going to bed the night of February 10th were in his clothes hamper and "There wasn't a hamper in the bedroom." Right here the State intentionally misled the jury to believe Tim did not have a clothes hamper, so was lying about where his jeans were. Tim's room was so small that Tim kept his clothes hamper in the hall just around the corner from his room. Officer Broderick knew exactly where Tim's hamper was. During Tim's 1987 interview when he told Broderick his pants from February 10th were in his hamper Broderick said, "Where was the hamper, just around the corner there?

The note that said "Get clothes out of dryer" was written on an index card that was found in a notebook on Tim's bookshelf. Now if you are making a reminder to yourself to do something where do you leave the note? Hidden in a notebook on a bookshelf or out in the open where you will see it? The notebook the note was found in was full of Tim's Jr. High School work from the previous year. This note was at least six months old. Besides, had Tim washed his clothes, police would have seen Tim or Clyde Masters hanging their clothes up to dry because the heat in their dryer had not worked since 1984. Clyde and Tim Masters hung their clothes outside to dry even in the wintertime. They only used their dryer to tumble soften their clothes after they had dried.

XV Police did not thoroughly investigate this case.

A. Police never investigated this case. Within 24 hours of the discovery of Peggy Hettrick's body they decided that 15-year- old Tim Masters must have committed this crime. Police decided what the result of their investigation should be before they began to investigate and worked towards that end. They never tried to find out who murdered Peggy. They only did a thorough job of investigating Tim. Many leads should have been thoroughly investigated but were not:

1) Matt Zoellner was the last known person to see Peggy alive. Police found knives capable of accomplishing the crime in Zoellner's apartment. They never sent them off to be analyzed.

2) Two people confessed to this crime. Both were briefly interviewed (nothing like the 9- hour tag team marathon they did on Tim) and nothing else. Their houses were not even searched for evidence.

3) Witnesses said a 16-year-old boy that was into Satanism and the occult bragged about killing Peggy. His home was never searched. When interviewed he denied any involvement and said he'd heard rumors at school that a kid named "Tim" was involved. Immediately the focus of the interview changed from his involvement to what he knew about Tim. The police started those rumors at Tim's school when they told Young Explorers to stay away from Tim Masters because he was a suspect. Now they were using the rumors that they started as catalysts for limiting their investigation to Tim.

4) On March 18, 1987, just one month after Peggy Hettrick was stabbed to death, a man named Donald Long abducted Linda Holt from Ft. Collins, Colorado, brought her to a remote location and stabbed her to death. Later that same year, on November 7, Long abducted Mona Hughes from Greeley, Colorado, and stabbed her to death. The similarities between Peggy Hettrick, Linda Holt, and Mona Hughes murders are striking. All three women were in there 30's (Hettrick 36; Holt 39; and Hughes 30). All three were older than Mr. Long who was 24-years old in 1987. All three had been stabbed in the back (Hettrick 1 time; Holt 10 times; and Hughes 11 times). Each woman was stabbed more times than the previous. All three were killed after dark. Further similarities exist between Ms. Hettrick and Ms. Holt's murder. No money was taken from either woman. Both women were "blitz" attacked from behind. Ms. Hettrick had her sexual body parts removed, Ms. Holt's body had semen evidence that matched Longs blood type-- evidence of a fascination with piquerism. As part of Mr. Long's plea bargain agreement, he submitted to interviews with authorities where he discussed what he had done. An excerpt follows:
Long: "I remember ... I remember that I stuck her ... I can't remember. They say that she was stabbed over 10, or 11 times, 12 times ... I can't recall, I remember one ... That was in the lower back."
Gilmore: "...do you remember anything about that? Fast or slow or um."
Long: "Real fast."
Linda Holt was stabbed 10 times in the back. Peggy Hettrick was the only woman to be stabbed just once in the back. Peggy was stabbed so fast, with so much force that a rib broke from the knife's impact. Finally, women continued to be killed by being stabbed in the back in a small geographical radius until the arrest of Donald Long. Despite all of these coincidences, there is no evidence police ever investigated Long for the murder of Peggy Hettrick.

5) In 1987 an informant called the Ft. Collins police and told them of a man who might be a suspect for Peggy's murder. The informant said the man had been discussing a local newspaper article about Peggy's homicide and made the comment "How can they call it mutilation when it was just a slice to the chest and a stick to the pussy." Young Explorer Kelly Charvet had leaked the mutilation to Peggy's breast to the public. But the mutilation to her vaginal area had not been leaked to the public. This man had been seen by the informant, talking with Donald Long in a bar. He took a polygraph test and passed every question except for, "Do you know who killed Peggy Hettrick?"

Victim and Circumstantial Evidence Photos

2007-12-06T20:46:00.001-08:00

Tim and his father had the misfortune to live near where Peggy Hettrick's body was left in a field.

This seems to be a view from the window of the home.

Pack-rat Tim kept all his school notebooks and everything else.

Part of Tim's collection.

The blood pool at the curb.

Peggy Hettrick in death.

Childhood Photos

2007-12-06T19:56:00.000-08:00

If you click on the pictures, they enlarge on a new page.

THE MELOY MASSACRE

2007-12-01T19:49:00.000-08:00

THE MELOY MASSACRE

by Pat Hartman

(first published at Earthblog.net October 19, 2007)

When Tim Masters was arrested more than ten years after the murder of Peggy Hettrick, the paperwork was based on Dr. Reid Meloy’s analysis of Tim’s juvenile writings and drawings, which the police had seized years before and kept. Meloy theorized that during those years when the accused lived in freedom and served in the military, he probably continued to write and draw. So they got a search warrant and, sure enough, found more notebooks, whose existence was pounced on like some kind of deluxe proof of wickedness. Big whoop. Artists draw, writers write. So what?

At trial, the post-crime productions, seized in 1998 when the defendant was an adult, were admitted as evidence. The jury must have been confused, and understandably so, swamped with fictions and pictures from two different batches of seized material, teen and grown-up. If they got the impression that everything was made by the adolescent Tim, how could they not form the mental stereotype of a depraved kid? This is no small detail. It was one of the matters specifically addressed by the appeals court.

So the post-crime creative material was admitted as evidence. The court is to be congratulated for not admitting the forensic psychologist’s second report, which expressed his thoughts on the second batch of productions. And from his first report, comprising 15 “Findings and Opinions,” only seven of those were admitted, while six were excluded. And from the sections of the report that were admitted, Meloy was only supposed to be permitted to discuss certain parts of them. This all sounds extremely well-intentioned, as if the court tried very hard to be fair. Of course, if the situation had really been fair, the first batch of productions would not have been admitted either, and the rationale for employing the expert testimony of Reid Meloy would have vanished.

At trial, Meloy’s theories were pretty much the prosecution’s entire case. He was hired to spin some yarns, supposedly relevant as “framework evidence,” although there is a less polite word for it. Sure, a small amount of his bleep was kept out of the courtroom, but he was allowed to distribute an astonishing variety of bleep into the ears of the judge and jury. The conclusions drawn by this expert witness are stunningly original in their refusal to agree with his own theories. In fact, none of his contentions are free of self-contradiction, as will be seen.

The Productions

As many as 2,200 pages of drawings and narratives were scrutinized by Dr. Meloy, and a big chunk of them were presented to the jury, too. Meloy said, “I’ve never seen such a large volume of productions before.” Which only means he’s never known any artists. Plenty of creative people produce thousands of pages of sketches, notes, scribbles, half-finished works, and so on. DA Jolene Blair practically had an attack of the vapors on camera, overcome with the volume of the stuff. But for any meaningful purpose, the amount is beside the point.

So, now, we not only punish art we don’t like, but measure it by the pound? What does numerical relativity have to do with morality? There’s too much confusion between the two. Remember what Dylan said: "Steal a little and they throw you in jail; steal a lot and they make you king." This is pretty much the same kind of thing. “Make disturbing pictures for money, and you’re a graphic artist; make disturbing pictures for free, and you're a murder suspect.” According to Dr. Meloy, Tim imagined himself as a warrior who killed many people, without empathy or feeling. Arnold Schwarzenegger did the same, and got elected governor.

In his school notebooks, young Tim portrayed annihilation by means of stabbing, slicing, shooting, grenades, explosives, hanging, drowning, animal attack, booby traps and electrocution. And there was blood. This is not meaningful. Scenes of death and dismemberment tend to be bloody in all war narratives. Teachers at Tim’s high school stated that as many as four-fifths of their students made violent drawings. In An American Childhood, award-winning author Annie Dillard says of her troubled teen years, when she drew grotesque people with monstrous deformities, "If I didn't draw I couldn't bear to listen in class; drawing siphoned off some restlessness...” Any tattoo parlor displays pictures equally loathsome. Many art textbooks contain visuals of violent death. Hieronymus Bosch painted gruesome, exquisitely detailed torture scenes, and his priceless works are in museums.

Fairy Tale

Once upon a time there was an eleven-year-old boy whose mother suddenly died. Four years later he was still mad at her. To celebrate the death anniversary, he waited for a woman to walk past who had red hair like his mother, and killed her.

This fairy tale is Dr. Meloy’s “displaced matricide” theory. Prior to the trial, he was warned not to testify that Peggy Hettrick’s murder was a displaced matricide. But he managed to get the idea across anyhow. A government document related to the 2001 appeal states, "The psychologist… opined that defendant had killed the victim and, by doing so, had symbolically killed his own mother."

Savor the absurdity: The prosecution calls a young woman who last saw Tim when he was 9 and she was 7. Her family moved, and the two kids have never met again. On the witness stand she is asked the color of her hair, and replies that it is dark brown with red highlights. The purpose of this pointless testimony? To bolster Meloy’s theory. The jury is supposed to conclude that because Tim once lived next door to a little red-haired girl, he grew into his teens with a lust to kill redheads.

There are some problems with the “displaced matricide” theory. For starters, Tim’s mother didn’t have red hair. In pictures it is brown, and her driver’s license said brown. The moon was nearly full the night Peggy was killed, so there was some light, but certainly not sufficient for long-range hair color identification. And what was this nutty theory based on? Where is the research to show that killers choose victims with the same hair color as their own mothers? Where is the documentation showing a correlation between killers and the anniversaries of their mothers’ deaths?

Photo: Margaret Masters.
Hair: not red.

A copy of Margaret Masters’s death certificate was in a kitchen drawer, said the police. Well, why not? It was her house, inhabited by her widowed husband and orphaned son. She was taken to the hospital on February 11th and died the next day. Peggy Hettrick was killed on February 11, four years later. This coincidence, while striking, and very unlucky for Tim, is no more bizarre than many of the odd things that life throws at us. For example, Tim and Peggy shared the same middle name, Lee. Does that mean he killed her?

Dr. Meloy claimed that Tim’s drawings were “rehearsal fantasies” – in other words, practice for the actual murder. Yet among his drawings there is no victim resembling either Peggy Hettrick or Mrs. Masters. The shrink hypothesized a connection between the fictional productions depicting stranger attacks, and the attack on Peggy, a stranger. He testified that Tim’s preferred victim “would be either a stranger or, at best, a casual acquaintance." Unfortunately, this doesn’t fit with Meloy’s other theory, the one that says Peggy died as a substitute for Tim’s own mother, who was neither a stranger nor a casual acquaintance.

Supposedly, two Mothers Day cards were found in Tim’s backpack when he was questioned and searched. A source within the police department says this was just plain not true. The kid is half an orphan, with an only sibling who grew up and moved away. And now the police show up and accuse him of some really weird stuff, even weirder than the stuff he thinks up in his stories. And they blame it all on his feelings about his dead mother. What a cruel hoax.

An Equal Opportunity Misanthrope

Women were victims in less than 10% of the violence portrayed in Tim’s productions. The imaginary violence was nine times as likely to be aimed at men. Even the Court of Appeals admitted that, amongst the plethora of savagery, there was no picture or fiction where a middle-aged woman was stabbed in the back or mutilated in the way that Peggy was.

The material did contain insulting language and violent deeds committed upon people of the white, black, Jewish, Asian and Hispanic persuasions, people of all ages and genders; also animals and extraterrestrials. Any claim that mature women were picked out as targets in the fictitious productions cannot be validated. All types of people were targets. So, the kid had a bad attitude. That’s not good enough grounds for sending him to prison for life. Here’s the important thing: If the police had wanted to lay at Tim’s door a victim of any age, race or gender, killed with any conceivable weapon, a similar situation could probably be found amongst the more than 2000 pages of creative output. So it wouldn’t signify a heck of a lot.

Sexual Homicide

In his role as expert, Dr. Meloy defined a sexual homicide as one in which "there is sexual activity or evidence of sexual activity." In other words, the guy gets off. It was an audacious move on Meloy’s part to label this a sexual homicide, despite there being no semen found in, on, or near the body. It was a surgical homicide, yes. Who really knows whether it was sexual?

In fact, the forensic psychologist was not allowed, at the trial, to give an opinion that this was a sexual homicide. But instructions of that kind are a nudge-and-wink artifice. He could allude to it, innuendo it, hum it, semaphore it, do anything but come right out and say “This was a sexual homicide.” He was forbidden to say that Tim fit the characteristics of a sexual homicide perpetrator, or that he committed the crime. He was forbidden to say that any single drawing or story was evidence that Tim did the murder. But really, what were the jury members supposed to think was the purpose for all those notebooks being passed around? Either by implication or by ignoring the rules, the state’s shrink managed to get his point across.

Meloy testified about sexual homicide, and why its practitioners mutilate their victims. He talked about rehearsal fantasies and trigger events. He also talked about the modus operandi, which is a criminal’s characteristic pattern of operation, method and style. Question: Since there was not a series of murders, but only one, how could an MO - a pattern - be defined from a single instance?

Dr. Meloy says that in other kinds of murders, the motive may be fairly obvious - but in a sexual homicide the motive is "intrinsic, internal, very psychological." What’s that supposed to mean? That the standard motives of love or money are not intrinsic, internal, and psychological? That would be an awfully stupid claim to make.

Now, get ready for another big contradiction. In one round of theorizing, he says the object of sexual homicide is sexual gratification. Then, he says the motive for sexual homicide is mysterious and hidden. This makes no sense, because if sexual release is the motive, there’s nothing subtle about it. How much more obvious does it get, than a guy whippin’ it out? If, on the other hand, Meloy was having one of his murky motive days, the psychologically intricate dead mother myth would come to the foreground. But these are two totally different things.

If Tim was supposed to have killed Peggy because she reminded him of his mother, and he meant to punish his mother for dying, that’s in a whole different ballpark from sexual homicide. Conversely, if he’s supposed to have killed Peggy for a carnal thrill, that comes from an entirely different place than the intrinsic, internal, psychological diagnosis of “displaced matricide.” Not a problem – just ignore logic. Whenever possible, Meloy would present the jury with two opposite theories and let them pick, didn’t matter which, because both were damning to Tim.

It’s worth noting: at one point Meloy predicted the killer would keep the excised body parts as souvenirs. Again wallowing in contradiction, Meloy remained silent about the fact that no such items were found in Tim’s possession.

Fantasies

At a hearing before the trial, Dr. Meloy explained that fantasy is the motivation for sexual homicide. Now check the definition of “motive” in Black’s Law Dictionary. It’s "an inducement, or that which leads or tempts the mind to indulge a criminal act."

From watching detective stories, we know that motives for homicide come in several flavors, chiefly greed, thwarted love, and jealousy. A potential killer is tempted by an inducement such as money or the satisfaction of revenge. In other words, there is a belief that doing the murder will bring a reward of some kind. But fantasy? As a motive? Getting off is a motive. If the sexual gratification experienced by the killer in a sexual homicide is the motive, why not just say so? Fantasy is not a bleeping motive.

Now, if we’re talking about the desire to live out a fantasy, that’s different. That could be a motive. But fantasy itself is not a motivation, any more than breathing is a motivation. Meloy claimed that the writings and drawings were not only fantasies (which, in his mind, equaled motive), but rehearsals for murder. Furthermore, he postulated five different categories of rehearsal fantasy. This is nonsense on top of foolishness. Any reasonably adept fiction writer could make up fifty categories.

Unbelievably, the Supreme Court bought this ridiculous baloney, solemnly intoning that the drawings plus Meloy’s interpretation of them "explain an otherwise inexplicable act of random violence." In other words, they’re saying we know the kid did the violence because he drew pictures of violence. This is a very dangerous conclusion for citizens to let judges get away with.

Here’s the concept the prosecutors sold the court: Because some of the productions represented stabbing or dragging, then all of them were “logically relevant to defendant's motive, intent, and plan to commit the crime," and should be admitted into evidence. To buy that one, you have to forget that, in all the 2200 pages of Tim’s notebooks, there was not one picture of a woman being stabbed in the back. And if these were “rehearsal fantasies,” as Meloy claims, then where are the enactments of the many unusual fantasies? In one of the drawings, someone nailed a woman’s tongue to a table. But Tim never did such a thing in real life. The person here who seems least capable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality is Dr. Meloy.

Researchers Prently and Burges found that violent fantasy was an element in only 23% of single murders. How can anybody know this stuff, anyway? Another whole study waits to be done: Do convicted murderers who participate in these studies always tell the truth? M. MacCulloch says “the significance of the link between prior fantasy and behavior would be more obvious if normals did not engage in sadistic fantasy.” David M. Buss’s research into homicidal fantasy shows that 91 percent of men and 84 percent of women have entertained a detailed murder fantasy at least once.

Pairing of Sex and Violence

Supposedly, the productions contained frequent pairing of sex and violence. For instance, a drawing of a porno magazine on the same page with two drawings of knives. Huh? (Bear in mind, we’re talking about “evidence” that put a guy away for life.) Like the Bronte sisters, Tim wrote epic sagas for his own amusement. Unlike Charlotte or Emily, Tim had one of his characters say, “It gives me a hard-on to see ten Reds drop.” (Shoot, you can hear worse than that in the country club locker room.) Tim drew a horror story illustration where a woman who has been raped and killed returns as a vengeful zombie. By the prosecutor’s count, the materials in question contained 186 references to knives, 291 references to death, 126 surprise attacks, etc., but it’s all straight violence. Where are the fabled pairings of violence and sex?

There was a 70-word narrative, not from the juvenilia, but one of the adult writings. Apparently inspired by rumors about Hollywood stars and the use they found for gerbils, it concerns a man and a hamster. It’s obviously a satire, as would have been clearly shown if the Navy friend who was the butt of the joke had been called as a witness. This fellow had a pet hamster in the barracks where pets were not allowed, so the other guys ragged him and Tim wrote the gross little “love story.” Meloy said it proved that Tim regarded all women as pieces of bleep, and the Supreme Court called it the “most explicit example of sex/violence pairing in Defendant’s productions.” Such misinterpretations would be funny, if not for the fact that they sent an innocent man to life in prison for murder.

Piquerism

In piquerism, a victim is stabbed or sliced for the attacker’s sexual pleasure. Meloy interpreted many of the productions as symptomatic of that deviation. Some were just the standard drawings of arrows, knives, blades, Freddy Krueger. A knife cutting a throat may be unpleasant to see, but it doesn’t prove the person who drew it stabbed someone in the back. The teenage boy was into horror movies and war stories. So, what else is new?

It was inaccurately reported that one drawing explicitly depicted a mutilation very much like what was done to Peggy’s corpse. The untruth was repeated until even the state Supreme Court believed it. The prosecution focused intently on this drawing. To many eyes, it has an Escher-like quality, as the knife cuts the very paper on which it is drawn. Tim says the knife is ripping the side of a tent. It was in one of his junior high school notebooks, drawn well over a year before Peggy Hettrick was killed. Of course, whether it was a year or a century, somebody like Meloy would simply explain it (weasel word alert!) as a “long-term rehearsal fantasy.”

The Supreme Court judges probably never even saw that picture. They were briefed about “a drawing that could be interpreted as a knife cutting a vaginal opening.” Yeah, but those three words - “could be interpreted” - cover a lot of territory. Consider this: One of Meloy’s areas of expertise is the Rorschach test. The client looks at ink blots. The test is diagnostic. Its purpose is to enable the shrink to select a label for the client. What do the random blobular shapes resemble, to the client’s eyes? Supposedly, the answers reveal everything about the mind. So, dig it: If Dr. Meloy looks at a picture of ripped canvas, and what he sees is genital mutilation - that says more about Dr. Meloy than about anyone else.

What a Drag

Another drawing also captured the prosecution’s attention. It was described to the Supreme Court judges as “a person dragging a body of another by the armpits. Blood drips from the back of the body as it is dragged, leaving a bloody trail.” Most likely these guys never even saw the drawing, but just accepted the prosecutor’s word for it. The official document says, “This is exactly how investigators suppose the victim was moved from the street to the field.”

A very short person drags a tall man, who has arrows sticking out of his chest, as another arrow flies toward him. The victim is already dead, or at least unconscious. This is not murder, but transportation. Dr. Meloy proclaimed it “an accurate and vivid drawing of the homicide as it is occurring,” which is obviously bogus. In the drawing the victim is male, the assailant is a midget, and the weapons are arrows. How does that correlate to stabbing Peggy Hettrick in the back with a knife? It doesn’t. But the police insisted the drawing was equal to a confession, because of the similarities.

What similarities? Actually, only one: the dragging factor. The theory went like this: Tim had no way of knowing Peggy’s body was dragged - nobody had told him that! Well, duh. If tire tracks are absent, the body of someone dumped or killed at a curb, and moved into a field, was either carried or dragged. Okay, it might have been dropped from a helicopter, but if you guess “dragged,” there’s about a 50% chance of being right. And if the trail extends backward from the feet, chances are the body was dragged headfirst. Armpits make natural handles, and the whole process is more aerodynamic. And…while questioning Tim, the police had mentioned a “drag trail” several times. Plus, he had crossed the drag trail on his usual path to the bus stop.

Tim made this picture in class on Feb. 12, the day after the murder, when he had already been questioned for hours. They asked why he drew it. The answer was, to get something out of his system, because it was bothering him. These are the words of a confused kid, not a vicious killer.

Here’s a good one. At the trial, the prosecutor said Tim couldn’t have known just from looking at the body, that it had been dragged from under the arms, just like his picture. Which means, the police couldn’t know either. And actually, the method by which Peggy’s corpse was moved is still in question today.

The Famous Trigger Event(s)

Another of Meloy’s treasured theories, explained at a pre-trial hearing, concerned the “triggering event.” This is like the straw that breaks the camel’s back, the stressor that tips a disturbed personality into acting out. At the trial he was then allowed to testify “hypothetically” (an oxymoron if ever there was one) about “the type of event that might be a trigger for a sexual homicide...”

Once the shrink had prepared the ground, the prosecution theorized that the anniversary of Tim’s mother’s death was the triggering event which caused him to kill. In oversell mode once more, coached by Meloy, they also offered a second possibility for the “trigger event.” A few weeks before the murder, Tim was reading a book of his own in school. The teacher confiscated the book and wouldn’t return it after class. Although Tim accepted this stoically, his non-reaction was characterized as cold-bloodedly malignant. The Supreme Court, asleep at the wheel, later deemed this nonsense to be a properly admitted piece of evidence, proving the teenager’s motive and preparation to do murder! The appeals court had also welcomed the “evidence” as probative, saying it demonstrated how in the weeks leading up to the murder, the defendant showed increased anger and aggression. One incident was barely enough to show a pattern of growing rage, but one incident could be – yes, that’s it! A triggering event!

So, which was it? The anniversary of a death that occurred four years before? Or the confrontation with the teacher the previous month? Neither one is close enough in time to fit any sane definition of a triggering event.

Markings

Peggy had some small cuts on her face, and to this day it hasn’t been established whether they were made on purpose or accidentally. One court document calls the scratches “distinctive,” but in what way? This is not explained. The prosecution tried to say they were intentionally made: in other words, the killer’s “signature”. Supposedly – and this was duly reported by the Supreme Court in the majority opinion – many victims in Tim’s drawings had “distinctive scratch marks on their faces.” In those scribbly little sketches and doodles, how could that possibly be ascertained?

Dr. Meloy opined that the signature in this crime was the mutilation of Ms. Hettrick's sex organs, and – as usual, covering all the bases - possibly the facial scratch marks. Here’s a question: how can anything be called a "signature" when there was only one occurrence of it? “Signature” can’t be a meaningful concept unless applied to a series of two or more murders.

Here’s the real problem. If the marks were made intentionally, that would negate another part of the prosecution’s case. A tenet of the standard profiler’s creed says mutilation of the face implies a relationship: the killer knew the victim well enough to nurture personal hatred. Tim didn’t know Peggy, so if the marks on her face were intentionally made, that would indicate she was killed not by him, but by someone who knew her.

The High-Concept Stuff

Some hairy legal issues come into play here. Justice Rice wrote that the drawings and writings have "substantial probative worth. .. ." A Supreme Court Justice said, "They establish the motive for the crime; they indicate preparation for the crime; they reflect defendant's knowledge of the crime." The productions supposedly had to be admitted to give the jury a basis for evaluating Meloy’s testimony. And that's crucial. To say the stuff helps the jury know what the psychologist is talking about, is to put the cart before the horse. A huge question was not adequately addressed: the question of whether the psychologist, who never even met the defendant, should have been allowed to testify in the first place. This is not a trifle to take for granted or lightly dismiss. The admission of the expert's testimony was a matter the Supreme Court was supposed to look at. Disappointingly, it was swept aside.

Nowhere in Tim’s artwork or writings was a depiction of the exact horror that happened to Peggy. But you know what? It wouldn't matter if there were a hundred pictures of a hundred women stabbed in the back, or if a hundred forensic psychiatrists said those pictures were significant. It wouldn't prove squat. Yet the state based its entire case on character assassination, portraying Tim Masters as a violent person because of the violent writings and drawings he created.

According to many authorities, violent art proves a kid is unbalanced, disturbed, bent out of shape, screwed up, even “at risk” for something or other. The one thing it cannot prove is that the kid killed anybody. When the American justice system functions as intended, doodles, marginalia, graffiti, and even oil paintings are not probative of murder.

USE A PENCIL, GO TO JAIL Part 2

2007-12-01T19:28:00.000-08:00

by Pat Hartman

(Originally published at Moving Target, August 3, 2002)

I call the local newspaper and learn that the Hettrick/Masters chronicle is contained in a "clip file," which can be copied for $40. Or more, if the copying takes longer than an hour. (Do the writers get a slice?) Useful to know, but as it turns out, the copying isn't needed. A couple of people in the news business tell me what to look for and where.

Next stop, the public library. All in all, the micro reading process is fairly grueling. I never do catch on to the logic of the page arrangement, but manage to lurch around and eventually hit paydirt.

One of the reporters who wrote about the investigation is kind enough to answer factual questions and share his insights. That discussion leads to another round of looking up stuff.

As above, so below. On one level, there's research. On another, the soul-search is in progress. Why am I doing this? Do I truly want to spend life-energy pursuing the details of a sordid, bloody crime? Does it matter that a young man, who may or may not have killed a woman, was convicted on evidence that even the most generous assessment can only characterize as slim?

Other writing projects howl for my attention. And if I yearn to explore an injustice, there are many more blatant ones to choose from, affecting thousands or millions of people. So why get all bent out of shape over a murder conviction, however equivocal? We've all seen too many Kennedy assassination buffs, OJ trial aficionados, and Jon-Benet theorists. I doubt there are many other students of this crime, not since the death of Clyde Masters, Timothy's father. The defense attorney, of course, And the police. We're a small but elite group, we Hettrick murder buffs.
While I don't strive for a constant state of righteous anger, every few years a current event (previous examples being the MOVE firebombing and the Mt. Carmel massacre) gets its teeth into me and won't let go.

Of all the constitutional amendments, it is the First of which I am most fond. And this is a First Amendment issue. It's, like, a prior restraint thing. If people can't exercise self-expression in writing and drawing, for fear of being accused of murder when someone happens to be killed in their neighborhood, this definitely, to borrow an elegant phrase, "offends the guarantee of free speech."

But what if Masters actually did kill Hettrick? What if my writing about him contributes in any way to the release of a murderer? How can I live with that? The weak argument is: already there are far worse killers at large, set free for far worse reasons. The return of Timothy Masters to society would mean a statistically negligible danger.

A more satisfying argument is: Overall, the greater good is served when occasionally a miscreant escapes punishment - if the alternative would be wrongful punishment of the innocent. The outrageous notion that an accused can be convicted on the basis of lousy art work is an idea we can't afford to normalize. The greater good requires that it be quashed.

Presently at issue is whether Masters will be granted a new trial. This possibility rests on how the Colorado state supreme court feels about a few nit-picking technicalities (that was sarcasm you just heard). A new trial could free the prisoner, but probably could not, ultimately, bring us any closer to the truth. After all this time it's unlikely that incontrovertible evidence will materialize. Absent a surprise confession, by Masters or someone else, there is little hope that anyone will ever really know what happened that night in 1987.

But suppose it does turn out that he did it? On my mental video monitor, Emily Litella launches a rant and then, once the mistaken premise is brought to her attention: "Never mind." If Timothy Masters is somehow proven to have killed Peggy Hettrick, will I feel like a fool?

Well, no. Because his guilt or innocence is incidental to the substance of the matter. It is the basis for his conviction that sticks in my craw. Sent up for life for drawing scary, ugly pictures: the very concept is beyond repugnant. For my purposes, whether he did the murder or not is beside the point. If he's innocent, that's just the poisonous icing on the already putrescent cake.

USE A PENCIL, GO TO JAIL Part 1

2007-12-01T19:18:00.000-08:00

by Pat Hartman
(first published at Moving Target, July 12, 2002)

If I were an investigative journalist, here's what I'd be obsessing on, right about now.

In 1987, in a city with an astonishingly low homicide rate, Peggy Hettrick was murdered. Timothy Masters is serving a life term in prison for the crime. Apparently, the evidence against him consists of drawings which depict, in the words of an official government press release, "surprise attacks, gruesome death scenes, and scenes of violence and sex, including mutilation." An expert witness testified, in effect, that anybody who would draw such pictures, would undoubtedly slay a stranger just for the thrill of it.

The day after I first heard of Timothy Masters, my mailbox coincidentally received a splendidly comprehensive catalog from a company specializing in the popular visual arts - especially posters, graphic novels, and comics. It describes the work of the currently hottest star: ".....you can see every gory detail...outrageous weaponry...scandalous costuming...every bit of exposed female flesh...." This artist is at risk for being accused of murder, and so are all his peers. If having a sick imagination is an indicator of violent acts, the entertainment industry is rife with potential serial killers.

I don't know if Masters killed Hettrick. The point here is, I prefer it when a murderer is punished for murder, not for antisocial art. Don't say to me that anyone who produces upsetting art is capable of murder. I take it as a slur against me personally and against nearly every painter, musician, and writer I know.

In grade school, my best friend and I went through a phase of drawing elaborate witch dens with jazzy assortments of whips organized on wall racks, beakers full of eyeballs, and so forth. These art sessions happened at her house, with no comment from her mother. It was a more restrained era, and my friend's mom was a woman of mental and emotional sophistication.

If she had panicked and called in some kind of intervention by social services or the like, I dread to think what might have happened. I could still be in the custody of mental health authorities today. Instead, she let it be. Her daughter and I moved on to other mutual interests, and we both turned out fine, never having tortured or dismembered any creature (except in science lab at school.)
I know the world changes, but some precepts remain true. One of them is: a picture of something isn't the thing itself. Drawing a picture of murder is not the same as doing murder.

My interest in this case started a couple weeks ago, when it went to the State Supreme Court. I don't subscribe to the local newspaper, hardly ever see it, don't know why I had one that day, or why I paused to read the small, unobtrusive article. "What?" said I to myself. "They must have left something out. This can't be right."

So I looked it up online. Scoped a couple of government documents that raised my eyebrows even higher. Began a list of the questions that sprang to mind.

Next, I found the description of an A&E network show. "Police solve the murder and sexual mutilation of Peggy Hettrick when they are finally able to link graphic sexual materials found in the home of suspect Timothy Masters, though no hard evidence was ever found." Anxious to learn more details, I dispatched a message:

"Hello, can you please tell me if it is possible to get a transcript of the Cold Case Files episode aired 6/12/2001?"

Came the reply:
"Thank you for your e-mail to Cold Case Files. We carefully review each story idea and appreciate your suggestions. Thanks for watching Cold Case Files with Bill Kurtis. You can see another edition of Cold Case Files every Tuesday evening on A&E."

Right. How carefully do they review a story idea, when incapable of reviewing an e-mail carefully enough to discern that it's not a story idea? It's a request for information, which I'd probably even pay for. And they blow me off. What kind of way is that to do business? I look forward to their debut on FuckedCompany.com.

So I'll just vamp. Who needs facts anyway? This is a rant, not court testimony. If I were really paranoid, I'd think the TV show initiated everything: looked into the murder case first, decided who to blame, and told the police "You had better go reel this guy in, or we'll broadcast it as an unsolved case and make you look like fools. Wouldn't you rather have it publicized as a nice closed Cold Case?"

My confusion may be my fault, though I'm fairly bright in many contexts. It could also mean the major media need to do a better job with clear and lucid reporting. Because plenty of things bug me about this case.

For instance, aren't there some deeds even a hormone-crazed teenager wouldn't do, such as a random killing and carving within sight of his family home? Imagine the Machiavellian deviousness of such a clever adolescent: "Nobody will ever believe I could be stupid enough to bump off some broad right here outside the house. It's the perfect crime."

Here's truly puzzling part: Why the eleven-year hiatus between the murder and the eventual arrest of Timothy Masters?

If I ever wind up behind bars, I hope someone in the free world cares enough to be curious about the circumstances, just as I wonder about the circumstances of this case. Because there just might be something fishy going on here.

(Note added later: This last paragraph in particular caught the attention of the man who became the Angel of the case, and inspired him to persist in his research and, among other things, build the Free Tim Masters website. As of late 2007, that site is still up, but since there's some doubt about its continuing existence, the material from that site is being copied onto this one.)

HOMEGROWN FIASCO

2007-10-21T13:59:00.000-07:00

by Pat Hartman

(written and first published in print September 2007)

Lately, you practically can’t turn around in Fort Collins without bumping into the Tim Masters story – and it’s about time. David Wymore, one of his lawyers, says the District Attorney’s office has “taken every opportunity for 20 years to express their bias and personal beliefs concerning Tim Masters…and sharing their innermost feelings…” If it’s good enough for the DA, it’s good enough for me. (Full disclosure: this writer is on Tim’s side.)

It’s appropriate to feel strongly about a flaw in the law so heinous that it could ruin any one of us. Thanks to crusading reporters, Tim Masters has become a symbol of the system gone wild. Evidence was mishandled, misplaced, misused, misappropriated and messed up, spurring state-wide calls for reform. Thanks to the courage of several police officers, we finally see into matters that highly-placed people hoped would remain hidden. Now, we know about the twisted lifestyle of Dr. Richard Hammond, who was never officially a suspect in the 1987 murder of Peggy Hettrick, but who should have been at the top of the list.

The history of this case is difficult to keep track of, stretching back over so many years and involving so many participants. The hardest part is to count the mind-boggling number of things wrong with it. This is the nitty gritty: we would not now be confronting the DNA evidence scandal, or shaking our heads over Dr. Hammond’s secret life, if the Tim Masters case had been done right in the first place – because there never would have been a Tim Masters case. The authorities made, and may still be making, a series of bad calls that for two decades have multiplied like compound interest.

20 Years of Fubar

Tim became the prime suspect because he didn’t immediately report seeing Peggy’s body in the field. But there are forensic psychologists who swear the prime suspect should be the person who does report finding a body. Where’s the logic? Anyway, a faction of the police department locked in on Tim Masters, developed tunnel vision and, resenting the total lack of evidence to tie him to the crime, simmered with frustration for years.

In early 1995, when Dr. Richard Hammond’s week of disgrace ended in suicide, he was ignored as the possible killer of Peggy Hettrick. By the time Tim Masters was arrested in mid-1998, the Hammond evidence had been destroyed and the Hammond case had been neatly tucked into the memory hole. Everybody in the police department and DA’s office knew about it, but when Tim was arrested, more than 10 years after the murder and 3 years after the Hammond weirdness, they were like, “Dr. who?”

People always ask: Why did it take so long to arrest Tim Masters? The answer is, because there was no evidence to justify doing so. When the warrant was eventually drawn up, there was no new evidence – only a new tactic.

Officer Broderick went to retired FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood, who might not have said what he wanted to hear. Hazelwood has stated publicly that those who commit sex crimes “don’t stop, start, stop and start. They’re never dormant.” Since Tim Masters had gone 11 years without committing any sex crimes, this would, by the profiler’s own reasoning, eliminate him as a suspect. Unable to help, Hazelwood did recommend a colleague.

Dr. Reid Meloy is a forensic psychologist with impressive degrees and credentials, if you’re into being impressed by degrees and credentials. He is recognized as an expert on stalking, violent sex crimes, risk management, and the Rorschach test. His famous quotation is, “Once they start to murder, the act becomes habitual.” Despite this pronouncement, he was able to overlook the clean record of Tim Masters, out in the world for 11 years without killing anybody, in contradiction of his own theory.

The police packed up 2200 pages of writings and drawings they had seized from Tim Masters when he was 15 and sent them off to Dr. Meloy, who was hired to formulate a relationship between Tim and the murder of Petty Hettrick. They didn’t send anybody else’s drawings for analysis, and Meloy never interviewed Tim in person. For a $70,000 paycheck, he constructed a highly imaginative circumstantial case.

The arrest warrant ran to 30 pages, most of it direct quotes from Dr. Meloy. The justification for the arrest consisted of the stale evidence from 1987, which had already proven inadequate, and Dr. Meloy’s professional opinion of a person he had never met. The affidavit included the untrue information that Tim’s mother had red hair, a lie that was maintained throughout the succeeding legal actions, with a negative impact on Tim’s fate.

When the murder charge came to trial, in 1999, some observers thought the big, challengeable issue would be the admission of the “productions.” This did indeed turn out to be one of the questions later brought to the Supreme Court, which ruled that “the drawings and writings were essential to the prosecution’s theory of the case.” In other words, it’s an open admission that, without the notebooks and papers confiscated from Tim, there would have been no case. Basically, they’re saying: When the prosecution has nothing to show but bleep (Meloy’s theories), rather than call the whole thing off, what you do is bring in some more bleep (hundreds of pages of doodles) to throw on top of it.

Legal opinion is also divided on whether Dr. Meloy should have been allowed to testify. The law says, a qualified witness can give an opinion if it helps the jury to “understand the evidence or to determine a fact.” The prosecution needed Dr. Meloy to explain to the jury how and why the drawings and stories made by Tim were relevant to the murder proceedings. And the Supreme Court bought into that too. In the majority opinion, the judges said the “productions” needed to be admitted as evidence, to “give the jury a basis for evaluating testimony by a psychologist who testified.”

It’s a textbook illustration of circular logic. They had to have the notebooks, so the jury would know what Meloy was talking about as he spun his theories. And they had to have Meloy’s testimony, so he could tell the jurors how they were supposed to interpret the notebooks. The absurdity is mind-bending, especially when someone’s life is at stake. Actually, neither the “productions” nor the psychologist should have gotten through the door. The Supreme Court was asked to look at the faulty reasoning, not just take it for granted. The majority judges failed us all, when they let that one slip by.

So, now the bleep is two layers deep, with more on the way.

Everybody’s a forensic psychologist

The day after Peggy’s body was discovered, the news quoted a police officer’s opinion about why it was left in the middle of a field, when there was a nearby ditch it could have been dragged into. "That shows he has a perverted mind and he's showing off." Which doesn’t even make any sense in its own frame of reference. Whether Peggy was killed at the edge of the road, or brought in dead and dropped off at the roadside, in either case it would be more logical for a show-off to leave the body right there - where the public would pass by and see it. The dragging into a field looks more like an attempt, however feeble, to remove the body from sight. So: no showing off. Why didn’t the killer make a good job of it then, and hide the body more effectively, in the ditch? Because he wasn’t familiar enough with the field at ground level to know that if he dragged the body just a little further, there would be a ditch. (Which points away from Tim, who was very familiar with that piece of ground.)

Amateur shrinks are bad enough, but the professionals can be hell. Meet Steven Moss, who wrote “Opinion for Sale: Confessions of an Expert Witness.” He says, “More often than not, only one [side] has the financial resources to get its story heard. Not everyone has access to a top-shelf expert at $600 an hour. The winner is too often the side wealthy enough to purchase the highest-caliber experts.”

In the hard sciences, the expert witness game may not be quite so much of a racket. But when it comes to psychology, expert witnessing is a sanctimonious scam on a grand scale. Psychiatric opinion evidence has been widely accepted in cases where the mental state of the accused needs assessment, and this could be a very bad thing. In the case of Tim Masters, even the appeals court admitted that “the research and theories upon which the prosecution expert relied are relatively new and not universally accepted.” But they went ahead and bought into the whole myth of the red-headed mother, the displaced matricide, etc. etc.

Whether or not Tim gets a new trial, and even though he is innocent, the facts and circumstances of his life will join the authorities’ supposed knowledge about murderers. The drawings will become part of what they fondly think of as their database, but which is miles from being scientific. Profiling is a synonym for guessing, drawing unwarranted conclusions from untrustworthy evidence, and making up bleep. Whether the conviction stands or falls, there’s no doubt the particulars of this case, "victim's hair same color as mother's" and "kills on anniversary of mother's death", will become embedded in the lore of the profilers. The non-existent red hair and the alleged anniversary murder will be added to the curriculum at FBI school, to further confirm the preconceptions and perpetuate the inaccuracies taught to the next generation of acolytes in the necromantic trade. Forensic psychiatry, as a science, is in a league with psychic hotlines and penis enlargement.

Give me a truck to carry away all the papers and books from Reid Meloy’s house and office. Pay me thousands to pore over this stuff for months and formulate a relationship between him and the murder of Peggy Hettrick. On paper, I could prove he killed her. Or maybe the trial judge did it, or just about anyone who reads this. All it takes, to make an elaborate and convincing case against any suspect when there is no real evidence, is a little imagination and a whole lot of chutzpah.

Ancient History Revisited

The many exciting recent developments in this case have an unfortunate side effect. The first cause is delivered with one perfunctory sentence, such as “He was convicted primarily based on an analysis of his violent drawings...” The wrongful conviction of one man, which is costing the taxpayers a ton of money, was accomplished on the word of one man, the forensic psychologist. If people really understood what this means, there would be riots in the streets.

When Tim Masters was tried for murder the jury members, like mushrooms, were kept in the dark and fed manure. The fact that the defendant had grown into a man’s physique must have worked against him. Even if they couldn’t picture a skinny 15-year-old killing a woman with one knife blow and then dragging her body across a field, they could all too easily envision this adult doing so. As we have learned, they were told nothing of Dr. Hammond, who should have been suspect number one. And they had to deal with the confusion between writings and drawings created by a young teenager, and those which issued from the pen of an adult.

As a result, Tim was convicted because, as one juror told a reporter, "He admitted his guilt to us through his pictures." Tim was sentenced to life in prison; took it to the Appeals Court, got shot down; took it to the Supreme Court, which looked at some complex legal angles and let the conviction stand. But – and here’s what a lot of people don’t realize – there are seven judges on the Supreme Court bench. Four of them bought the outright lies which had persisted throughout the case and were never corrected, and also bought Dr. Meloy’s bleep. The majority went against Tim.

, Justice Martinez, Justice Bender, and Chief Justice Mullarkey saw things differently. The dissenting opinion examines at length such legal principles as the admissibility of uncharged acts. These are things the defendant has done or is said to have done, other than what he or she is on trial for. There’s a major debate about whether a jury can know about uncharged previous acts. If there’s so much controversy over actual actions, including previous crimes, then pieces of paper with words and pictures on them should be even less allowable in a trial as evidence. It’s not just me saying this. The dissenting opinion written by the three Supreme Court judges says, “First, the writings and drawings are not even ‘acts.’”

Right. Drawing a picture or writing a description of somebody getting hit over the head with a two-by-four is not the same as actually hitting somebody over the head with a two-by-four. If you don’t believe it, let’s do an experiment. We’ll bring in an artist to draw a picture of hitting you; and a novelist to write a paragraph about hitting you; and a goon to hit you. You tell me, which one hurt the most?

And the whole damn trial was built on this non-evidence, right from the prosecutor’s jury-seducing opening statement: “This case is very different than most murder cases…. It is a case of an individual acting out a fantasy life.”

Again, it isn’t only me. “From the beginning of this case until the verdict, the defendant’s uncharged fantasies dominated.” That’s a direct quote from the dissenting judges. They said the admission of Tim’s productions “cast an irreparable cloud of condemnation over the defendant” and guaranteed that the trial would be unfair. “There exists a substantial risk,” the judges said, “that the defendant was convicted not for what he did, but for who he is.” And this (need it be mentioned?) is not the American way.

(First published in Fort Collins Forum)

SMALL or OBSCURE MEDIA COVERAGE

2007-07-24T13:48:00.000-07:00

GREELEY TRIBUNE

http://www.greeleytrib.com/article/20070715/NEWS/107150120 Greg Campbell July 15, 2007

http://www.greeleytrib.com/article/20070716/NEWS/107150132/0/FRONTPAGE

http://www.greeleytrib.com/article/20070722/READERS/107220111 JULY 22, 2007 District Attorney Abrahamson’s Statement as Guest Commentary

BLOGS & MISC.

http://pranks.com/2007/07/15/the-tim-masters-story/ The Art of the Prank Reprints part of "Revisiting a conviction" by Miles Moffeit, Denver Post, July 14, 2007 Because of the initial misconception that it was a joke

http://www.metafilter.com/62936/Sketchy-Evidence Metafilter discussion

Goes to MetaFilter Community Blog
http://seehere.blogspot.com/2007/07/12-hilarious-tombstones.html

Westword "The Latest Word" by Michael Roberts - praise for Denver Post
http://blogs.westword.com/latestword/2007/07/the_denver_post_finds_strands.php

Court TV Message Boards Old Cases
http://boards.courttv.com/showthread.php?threadid=303949

Carnegie Legal Reporting Program at Newhouse – compliments Moffeit, links to Denver Post
http://newhouse-web.syr.edu/legal/blog_comments.cfm?blogpost=347

http://sensibleerection.com/entry/66015 wild discussion

Strange Justice – copies Campbell entire story with no credit given
http://stju.blogspot.com/2007/07/withheld-evidence-again-colorado-in.html

Innocence Project

Innocence Blog July 20
http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/720.php

Denver DA reexamines 1987 murder; lawmaker calls for better evidence preservation
http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/732.php
Comment and link to "Trashing the Truth"

Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition
Our mission is to reverse the trend of mass incarceration in Colorado. We are a coalition of nearly 5,000 individual members and 112 organizations who have united to stop perpetual prison expansion in Colorado through policy and sentence reform. Our chief areas of interest include drug policy reform, women in prison, racial injustice, the impact of incarceration on children and families, the problems associated with re-entry and stopping the practice of using private prisons in our state.
"Think Outside the Cage"
pointing to Denver Post July 18 "Adams DA takes up 1987 murder"
http://thinkoutsidethecage2.blogspot.com/2007/07/was-this-really-justice.html

http://thinkoutsidethecage2.blogspot.com/2007/07/revisiting-conviction-tim-masters.html

Society of Professional Journalists – Jon Marshall’s News Gems - "Presumed Guilty"

http://www.spj.org/blog/blogs/newsgems/archive/2007/07/19/7960.aspx
Miles Moffeit of the Denver Post has written a searing story about a Colorado boy convicted of murder using dubious circumstantial evidence. Moffeit's "Revisiting a Conviction" masterfully retraces the investigation and prosecution of Tim Masters, who was 15 at the time of the 1987 killing and now sits in a Colorado prison. Moffeit then describes the efforts of people trying to get Masters released and details the DNA samples and other evidence that point toward his innocence. The result is an account that shows how police and prosecutors can go terribly off track. The story has a sharp point of view, which I think makes it stronger.

CONSTITUTION CLUB July 14, 2007 DFV the Scribe
A Gripping Mystery, and an Outrageous Miscarriage of Justice
You’re going to want to read this.
When I was an undergrad at Colorado State in Ft. Collins, the county was prosecuting a man for a previously unsolved murder, 20 years prior. I thought there wasn’t much evidence against him, and I thought he got a raw deal at trial, where he was convicted and sentenced to life.
But only now do I realize that he is completely innocent, and the victim of an injustice at the least, and probably an outright coverup.
http://constitutionclub.wordpress.com/2007/07/16/follow-up-on-tim-masters-wrongful-conviction/