Lawyer: Innocent man paid price for Larimer prosecutors' blunders

Kevin Vaughan, Rocky Mountain News

Published September 27, 2007 at midnight

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FORT COLLINS — Tim Masters would never have been tried for murder if prosecutors had turned over information they were ethically and legally bound to make available, an attorney testified this afternoon.

Nathan Chambers, who represented Masters at his 1999 trial for the murder of Peggy Hettrick, said he would have had a veritable field day with a forensic psychologist whose testimony helped pursuade the jury to return a guilty verdict.

Dr. J. Reid Meloy, for example, wrote in an analysis of Masters' voluminous writings and drawings that the "color red" appeared 269 separate times. The implication — that "red" indicated rage.

But documents that weren't turned over to Chambers, including Meloy's notes of his analysis of Masters' writings, showed that some instances included passages such as the "redwood forest," "reds were the enemy of the army," and "the big, bad wolf wanted to eat Little Red Riding Hood."

Had he known that, Chambers said, he would have shredded Meloy's credibility on cross-examination.

"I would have worn a red tie and asked him if that made me a suspect," Chambers said.

Hettrick was stabbed and sexually mutilated on Feb. 11, 1987. Masters, then 15, was the prime focus of the investigation from its first hours, but he wasn't arrested and charged with the killing until 1998.

He is fighting for a new trial on the grounds that police and prosecutors hid evidence of alternate suspects and other information that would have assisted his defense.

Chambers has spent nearly three full days on the witness stand being questions by Dave Wymore, who is leading the fight to win Masters a new trial.

In other testimony, Chambers said he could have zeroed in on the relationship between Meloy and prosecutors and attacked some of Meloy's conclusions about Masters. For example, in a 278-page analysis, Meloy wrote on the fourth page that "this perpetrator was 15 years old when he committed the sexual homicide." Chambers said that indicated that he'd already made up in mind.

Earlier testimony focused on the fact that Meloy reviewed and approved the arrest warrant.

With that ammunition — which was never given — Chambers said he could have attacked Meloy "as a hired gun, as a person who was engaged not to follow the evidence and come to a conclusion, but was engaged to find evidence to support a conclusion."

At one point, an exasperated Chambers said, "Do you see why I said this case could not be tried?"

"Well," Wymore answered, "yes, I do."

Meloy has not responded to a request for comment from the Rocky Mountain News.

Hettrick, a manager at a Fort Collins Fashion Bar, was stabbed in the back and bled to death on Feb. 11, 1987. Her killer then sexually mutilated her, cutting away flesh from her vagina and left breast.

Meloy testified extensively at the trial about a series of writings and drawings produced by Masters, many containing disturbing images. He told the jury that he concluded some of the drawings represented Masters reliving the crime.

Chambers began his third day on the stand today, answering questions from David Wymore, who is leading the effort to win a new trial for Masters. As in the past two days, Chambers testified extensively about how information unearthed by Wymore might have changed the way he defended Masters.

Today's testimony focused on Meloy's notes about his examination of various evidence in the case.

Chambers testified tht he never got the notes — and asserted that was a clear violation of the ethical and legal obligations of the prosecution team to turn over evidence that could have assisted the defense.

"There's no excuse," Chambers said.

Meloy's notes indicate that he concluded that Masters was guilty, based on a number of factors. In one passage, Meloy noted that Masters used the word "paranoid" in a police interview — and wrote "this is an interesting statement because it is the unusual use of a psychoanalytical term by a high school educated man."

Similarly, Meloy concluded that it was "rather unusual" that in an interview Masters gave police when he was 21 he said he had never had sexual intercourse with a woman.

Finally, Meloy wrote in the notes that Masters' writings and drawings left him with "no sense in my mind that he has a sense of suffering and delayed death."

"Wow," Chambers said. "I'd characterize it as wild speculation couched in the guise of opinion. ... You get opinions, you get reports from him that lay out his opinions, and this stuff would be helpful to show how he arrived at those opinions."

Wymore also produced a letter from Meloy to Fort Collins police Lt. Jim Broderick, dated June 22, 1998: "Please not that my entire document extracation has now been sent to you."

Broderick was the lead investigator in the last years of the Hettrick investigation and is acting as an advisory witness to the prosecution in the current proceedings.

The fact that it was sent to Broderick means it should have been disclosed to the defense, Chambers said.

The testimony followed the disclosure Wednesday that Meloy reviewed and approved the arrest warrant for Masters in 1998.

Mike Goodbee, an assistant district attorney in Adams County who is acting as a special prosecutor in the case, declined to discuss the question of whether the information should have been given to Masters' defense team, except to note that he had not yet had an opportunity to lay out his views on it in court.

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