Was this justice real?

Kevin Vaughan, Rocky Mountain News

Published July 13, 2007 at midnight

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FORT COLLINS - Lawyers for Timothy Lee Masters, convicted of the 1987 stabbing death of Peggy Lee Hettrick, continue to press for a new trial, claiming alleged gross irregularities by prosecutors.

A fight to win a new trial for a man convicted in one of the city's most notorious killings has spawned allegations that evidence was lost and destroyed and assertions that police officers and prosecutors colluded to hide information from defense attorneys.

The controversy revolves around the 1999 conviction of Timothy Lee Masters in the murder of Peggy Lee Hettrick, who was stabbed to death in 1987 as she walked home on a moonlit night in south Fort Collins. Masters was 15 at the time, and though he was a prime focus of the investigation from its first hours, it took detectives more than a decade to assemble a circumstantial case against him and file charges.

And when they took the case to a jury, they did not have a single piece of physical evidence tying him to the killing - no murder weapon, no blood, no hair, no fingerprints, no DNA. What they had was circumstantial evidence - he owned knives like the one that killed her, he talked about the difficulty of stabbing someone and he produced hundreds of pages of writings, drawings and doodles, many of them containing disturbing images.

After the trial, one of the officers who helped build the case against him came to believe that she might have sent an innocent man to prison and began work to get Masters a new trial. That effort has led to a flurry of court filings by attorneys working for Masters, laying out a series of allegations:

• That prosecutors and police deliberately tried to destroy evidence in 2006 so that it would be useless for highly specialized DNA testing.

• That investigators ignored evidence that a Fort Collins doctor, arrested in a sexual exploitation case, could be a potential suspect in Hettrick's death and "burned" all the evidence in that case.

• That prosecutors at Masters' trial committed professional misconduct by failing to disclose information about the doctor to the defense.

• That prosecutors and police lost evidence - including two hairs found at the crime scene and a bracelet Hettrick was wearing when she was killed.

Already in the case, attorneys for Masters have succeeded in having a new judge appointed and in having the Larimer County district attorney's office removed from the proceedings.

Mike Goodbee and Tom Quammen of the Adams County District Attorney's Office are acting as special prosecutors in the case, and a hearing is scheduled for Aug. 27 that could address at least some of the questions raised by Masters' attorneys.

Ultimately, attorneys David Wymore and Maria Liu hope to win a new trial for Masters, whose conviction was upheld by both the Colorado Court of Appeals and the Colorado Supreme Court.

Erik Fischer, one of the attorneys who represented Masters at his trial in 1999, said his doubts about the conviction have intensified in the past eight years.

Doubts 'gotten stronger'

"They've gotten stronger as we've learned through the public defender's office that a substantial amount of exculpatory evidence was withheld," Fischer said.

On the other side of the table is Larimer County District Attorney Larry Abrahamson.

"I think the one thing that we can state without reservation is that we're interested in one thing in this case, and that is that the truth be known," he said. "Whether the truth be that Masters continued to spend the rest of his life in jail, as the jury had determined, or whether or not there was some error that needs to be corrected."

Peggy Hettrick, a red-headed 36-year-old manager at a Fashion Bar store in Fort Collins, punched out at 9:01 p.m. Feb. 10, 1997, and walked to her apartment a few blocks away. When she got there, she was locked out and began an odyssey that ended hours later in her death.

She walked to a bar, then to a restaurant and lounge called the Prime Minister, where she drank three vodka tonics and left. She walked to a boyfriend's apartment, back to her own apartment around midnight and, finally, back to the Prime Minister, arriving about 12:30 a.m.

At 1:20 a.m., she left again, alone, beginning the walk to her apartment.

In those days, south Fort Collins was a mishmash of development - open fields next to new businesses. Hettrick crossed College Avenue, passed a mobile home that sat at the top of a small hill, and turned onto Landings Drive, which skirted a wide, undeveloped field. No street lights existed in the area, and the only illumination that night came from an almost-full moon.

Body found in field

Early the next day, a bicyclist pedaling along Landings Drive saw a pool of blood along the curb and Hettrick's body out in the field, at the end of a long "drag" trail that looked like a backward question mark. She lay on her back, with her hands over her head, her black sweater pushed up over her breasts, and her blue jeans pulled down around her knees.

She had been stabbed in the back with a large knife - a wound that broke a rib - and her killer had sliced off a portion of her left breast and a piece of flesh near her vagina, cuts that a pathologist later concluded were almost surgical in nature.

Among the investigators who converged on the scene that morning were Jim Broderick and Linda Wheeler, two Fort Collins police investigators.

The investigation quickly focused on the mobile home overlooking the field, where a former Navy man, Clyde Masters, lived with his 15-year-old son, Tim.

And though Clyde Masters said he hadn't seen or heard anything unusual during the night, he told the officers that Tim had taken an unusual route through the field on his way to school and had even paused to look at something in the field.

That something was Hettrick's body.

By 10:30 a.m., less than 3 1/2 hours after Hettrick's body was discovered, a detective was at Fort Collins High School, questioning Masters.

Masters acknowledged that he'd seen the body, but told officers he thought it was a mannequin left in the field as a prank.

Over the next two days, detectives questioned Masters for hours and searched his home, backpack and school locker. They found nothing that physically tied the teenager to the crime, none of his hair on Hettrick's body, none of her blood in his home.

But they found other evidence that convinced them he was likely the killer. Pornographic pictures. Seven knives on his dresser, six of them "Rambo" style survival knives, one with a scalpel concealed in its handle. And thousands of pages of writings and drawings, including one that they would study repeatedly for the next decade. It appeared to depict a person dragging a body backward, the corpse's feet digging a trail in the ground, blood dripping from its back.

Some of the statements the boy made also aroused suspicion. During an autopsy, a pathologist determined that the killer had broken one of Hettrick's ribs with the knife, perhaps when he tried to pull it out of her back.

When Masters was asked about his survival knives and the serrated edge on the backs of them, he said they "wouldn't be very good for stabbing somebody."

"Once you get 'em in, you'd have a hard time getting them out, wouldn't you?" he said.

Problems with their case

As time passed, investigators continued to look at Masters, conducting surveillance for several days each year around the anniversary of the killing. Investigators nearly arrested him in 1992, but two days of questioning by Broderick and Wheeler convinced them there were problems with their case.

In 1996, Broderick and other detectives started a new push to solve Hettrick's murder, enlisting the help of a former FBI agent and J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist from San Diego who specialized in violent sex crimes.

Meloy studied Masters' writings and drawings and other evidence. He found many that fit into the characteristics of sexual killers.

One passage spoke of an attack in which "I wanted to take her by surprise." Meloy concluded that the drawing that appeared to show a person dragging a body was "an accurate and vivid drawing of the homicide as it is occurring."

In 1998, investigators obtained an arrest warrant, and in March 1999, a jury convicted Masters of first-degree murder, based largely on the testimony of Meloy.

But after the conviction, Wheeler began to have doubts, and after the Colorado Supreme Court upheld Masters' conviction in a 4-3 ruling, she began actively working to get him a new trial.

She declined to discuss the case Thursday. Broderick, on the other hand, said he remains confident that Masters killed Hettrick but said he's also "open to all the possibilities."

"I'd be crazy not to be if somebody can come forward with some great compelling piece of information, but that hasn't happened," he said.

Instead, attorneys for Masters have leveled a number of allegations at police officers and prosecutors.

For example, his attorneys alleged that prosecutors have been "stonewalling, delaying and obstructing" their effort to investigate, and have "deliberately attempted to destroy exculpatory evidence in violation of court orders and due process clauses."

The charges came after prosecutors sent Hettrick's jeans, blouse, jacket and underwear to a lab in November for the retrieval of any samples that could yield DNA - work that defense attorneys contend was a deliberate effort to "destroy or minimize any exculpatory evidence."

However, Broderick said the work merely preserved the samples while a judge decides how the testing should take place.

Not told of doctor

Masters' attorneys also contend that police and prosecutors failed to tell the defense about Dr. Richard Hammond, a Fort Collins ophthalmologist arrested in 1995 after an elaborate taping system was discovered in his home. Along with the system, investigators found hundreds of videotapes that depicted women using a bathroom in his home - showing he had an "extreme, perverse obsession" with women's genitals. Hammond's house was only about 100 yards from the field where Hettrick's body was found, and as a doctor he had the "rare, highly specialized technical knowledge and ability to perform the surgical dissections which occurred."

However, Hammond committed suicide shortly after his arrest, and all the evidence in the case was ordered destroyed by a judge.

Broderick acknowledged that one detective, during the investigation of Hammond, jotted a note about "Hettrick" on the top of one of his reports - evidence that could indicate that at least some police officers suspected the doctor in the stabbing. But Broderick said he never considered -Hamond a suspect.

Attorneys for Masters see it differently.

They contend that prosecutors Terry Gilmore and Jolene Blair - both of whom are now district court judges - had a duty to turn over evidence about Hammond to the defense before Masters' 1999 trial.

"When the district attorney stands up in closing arguments and says nobody else could have done it, all the while knowing that that is absolutely not true, and in fact, there's another great suspect out there, that's very disturbing," said Nathan Chambers, another attorney who represented Masters at his trial.

Gilmore declined through his clerk to comment, saying it would be unethical while the case is still going on, and Blair was out of the office Thursday and could not be reached. Masters' attorneys have declined to allow him to be interviewed.

Former District Attorney Stu VanMeveren, one of the most well-respected attorneys in Colorado, defended Gilmore and Blair, saying "they're of the highest integrity."

Other filings by Masters' attorneys have asserted that police lost a bracelet Hettrick was wearing when she was killed and two hairs that were recovered from her body.

Broderick said the bracelet was apparently returned to Hettrick's family. And the hairs, which were analyzed by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, may be in a box of materials that have already been turned over to Masters' lawyers, he said.

Ultimately, Goodbee, one of the special prosecutors in the case, said he is confident that, in the end, the right thing will be done.

"I think we need to allow the process to take its course, with kind of the sense that if an injustice occurred, that will be righted," Goodbee said.

Timeline of the case

• Feb. 11, 1987: A bicyclist finds Hettrick's body in a field in south Fort Collins. Investigators quickly identify 15-year-old Tim Masters as a potential suspect. He admits seeing the body, but he repeatedly denies killing Hettrick.

• Feb. 12, 1987: Police search Masters' home, finding six survival knives in his bedroom, one with a scalpel concealed in its handle. Investigators cannot find any blood or other evidence to link any of the knives to the crime. They also find no blood in the sink or laundry drains in the home.

• Aug. 31, 1987: A boy finds a survival knife in a ditch north of the crime scene. The tip of the knife is broken off.

• July 28, 1992: Larimer County District Judge William Dressel signs an arrest warrant for Tim Masters on a murder charge.

• July 31 and Aug. 1, 1992: Fort Collins police investigators question Masters, who is serving in the Navy, about statements he had made the day after Hettrick's body was found that part of her breast had been cut off. Investigators had believed that only the killer could know that. But Masters told them he'd heard it from a classmate who was a volunteer at the police department, and after investigators determined that she had been at the crime scene, they decide not to serve the arrest warrant.

• Oct. 25, 1996: Investigators take thousands of pages of drawings and writings by Masters to Roy Hazelwood, an expert in sexual violence.

• November 1997: Fort Collins police ask Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist, to review the documents.

• May 14, 1998: Hettrick's body is exhumed so investigators can look for metal fragments that could link it to the knife found in the ditch 11 years earlier. No fragments are found.

• June 1998: Meloy completes his review, concluding that the drawings and writings point to Masters as Hettrick's killer. Among Meloy's conclusions is his determination that one drawing, apparently showing a figure dragging another person, is "an accurate and vivid drawing of the homicide as it is occurring" and "that he was drawing the crime to rekindle his memory of the sexual homicide he committed . . . "

• Aug. 6, 1998: Judge Dressel signs a new arrest warrant for Tim Masters on a charge of first-degree murder.

• Aug. 10, 1998: Police arrest Masters in Ridgecrest, Calif.

• Aug. 20, 1998: Masters is charged with first-degree murder.

• March 18, 1999: Masters goes on trial.

• March 26, 1999: After deliberating 10 hours, a jury finds Masters guilty. He is sentenced to life in prison.

• Feb. 15, 2001: The Colorado Court of Appeals affirms the conviction.

• Oct. 15, 2002: The Colorado Supreme Court, in a 4-3 ruling, upholds the conviction.

The case against Masters

In 1987 police collected evidence from Timothy Masters that was used against him in the killing of Peggy Lee Hettrick:

• A drawing shows a figure dragging another person, which Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist who reviewed the documents, said was "an accurate and vivid drawing of the homicide as it is occurring."

• A hand-drawn map shows the route Masters took from his home on the way to a school bus. The X marks the spot where he claimed to see the body and told police he thought it was a mannequin.

• Some of the survival knives police found in Masters' bedroom. One of the knives had a scalpel concealed in its handle.

Kari Craig contributed to this report.

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