Debrah Snider dozed fitfully on the couch, imprisoned by a dream.
She was back in Colorado, on the side of a mountain, on the run with Tom Luther, the man she loved. The man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. The man she believed to be a killer.
In the valley below, a solitary figure walked beside a stream. Even from dream distance, she knew it was Detective Scott Richardson. His bald head turned this way and that as his eyes searched the slope above.
Tom was breathing hard, his own eyes panic-stricken. He and Debrah kept running. But no matter which way they dodged, the detective kept following them. Then Richardson's eyes locked on Debrah's. He took a step up the slope.
It was over.
Debrah woke shivering in her rented cabin in wooded, rural West Virginia. Even though she knew him for what he was, she missed Tom. He was the only man who had ever made her happy; the only one who'd missed her when she was gone. But now he was in Colorado, sitting in a Jefferson County jail cell, waiting to be tried for the murder of Cher Elder. Detective Richardson had taken Tom away from her.
The trial was set to begin January 16, 1996, just two months away. And Debrah was slated to testify...for the prosecution. Once she had believed she could tame the wildness in Tom, the way she used to tame wolf pups. But she now knew there was no taming Thomas Edward Luther. Somewhere along the line, she had finally decided that truth was more important than love.
It should have been me you killed, she told the dark. No one would have cared. I'd never have been missed.
And you'd be free.
The jackrabbit broke from cover, mongrel dogs in hot pursuit across the desert outside of Belen, New Mexico. Hard on their heels was ten-year-old Debrah.
Someday Belen would be surrounded and absorbed by the city of Albuquerque. But in 1962, the town was still in the center of gray alkali flats where a jackrabbit could give his pursuers the slip.
Debrah lay down on a sand dune and watched the clouds drift. She was a skinny tomboy in patchwork jeans, her curly brown hair tied in two braids. She had few friends, preferring the company of her dogs and the family's horses to people. Animals, even the wild ones, could be trusted.
On this day the dogs waited patiently, their tongues lolling in the heat. Debrah was in no hurry. She was "running away from home" for the millionth time, hoping that someone would miss her and come looking.
Not that it had worked in the past. Nor had any other attention-getting stunts, like skipping school, or the time she'd stuffed beans up her nose and into her ears. That one had earned her a visit to the doctor and a whipping back home.
It never occurred to her parents that Debrah could use a hug or a kind word once in a while. Her father, an alcoholic, was a big cowboy of a man who derided public displays of affection as phony. He didn't think much of the female of the species. Those who wore their skirts short or showed a bit of cleavage were "whores"; the rest he held in approximately the same regard as he did Mexicans, who were a step above "niggers." So Debrah acted like a boy, which seemed to suit her father just fine.
"It's survival of the fittest out there," he'd tell his kids. "Don't never think you can't be replaced."
Debrah lay in the sand, wondering if her father meant to replace her and what God would think of that. She was pretty sure parents were supposed to love their kids; on the few occasions when her folks had taken her to church, the only thing she'd prayed for was some love and attention.
She was constantly on the lookout for a sign from God that her prayers were about to be answered. But this day there was no such sign. The sun was on its way down when she finally accepted that no one had even noticed she was gone and went back home.
Almost three decades later Debrah Snider paused outside a door on the med/surg floor at the state hospital in Pueblo. There was an "alert" notice attached to the chart for the patient in the room: No women admitted without a guard present. Debrah, her wavy brown hair now hanging to her waist, was immediately intrigued. So they had some real psycho stashed here, she thought.
Debrah would have preferred working on the psychiatric floor of some other hospital. But after she'd quit a perfectly good job in Greeley to go to work for a private hospital in Fort Collins that went bankrupt, this had been the only job available. Still, she'd come a long way from the little girl who'd skipped school in New Mexico. She was now a registered nurse with another degree in psychology, a married woman with two sons of her own.
Then again, some things hadn't changed. Debrah was still waiting for a man who could make her happy, could show he cared.
She'd had plenty of evidence to the contrary. When she was twenty, the foreman of a Fort Collins feedlot had fired her after she had refused his advances. This was before the days of sexual-harassment lawsuits, and Debrah had tried to get even by stealing a pickup load of medication from the lot. The haul was just enough to pay off her truck, but also enough to land her four years in the Colorado women's prison in Canon City.
Prison hadn't been so bad, though. Debrah had gone on to receive her high school equivalency diploma, started training in computers and was baptized into the Catholic Church. Prison--and her newfound religion--had done what no man had even attempted to do; they made her feel good about herself.
Out in 1976, Debrah married her husband, the father of her second son: a nice, stable guy whom she'd met just prior to her incarceration and who'd visited her faithfully. When he proposed, Debrah replied, "Buy me some land where I can keep my animals, and when I get out, we'll get married." He promptly purchased 43 acres of land near LaPorte, five miles north of Fort Collins; after Debrah was released, they moved there and she started raising all sorts of animals--horses, wolves, buffalo.
She also went back to school, becoming a registered nurse and then getting her degree in psychology from Colorado State University in 1988. She'd developed her interest in psychology while working on the psych units of various hospitals in northern Colorado. Most of the patients she encountered were simply lost souls who had been overwhelmed by the world; they just needed a little love and understanding.
She could empathize with that. Debrah had suffered from depression since she was a teen. When she was sixteen, she made her first suicide attempt--standing on Route 66 in front of her father's store as semis roared over the hill, swerving to avoid the teenager. Hearing the horns and the squeal of air brakes, her younger brother had run out of the building to drag Debrah back to safety. Her second suicide attempt followed the birth of her first son and subsequent discovery that the baby's father was already married.
As a psychiatric nurse, Debrah recognized that most suicide attempts were the ultimate attention-getting stunts. But not all of them: Sometimes it just seemed like it would be easier to be dead.
Debrah had been thinking a lot about that in the spring of 1990 when she took the job at the state hospital. If she died, her husband would take care of the boys. No one would miss her.
Now she looked at the chart and wondered about the patient it belonged to: Thomas Edward Luther, an inmate from the men's penitentiary in Canon City who'd apparently had an allergic reaction to prunes.
What's he going to do, kill me? He'd be doing me a favor. She knocked on the door and entered the room.
Tom Luther was propped up on the bed and looking out the window at the sunny April day. He doesn't look so bad, she thought as he turned to face her. In fact, he was kind of cute.
"Nice day," she said, nodding toward the window.
The man's smile disappeared. "I suppose it's fine if you're not locked up."
Typical response from one of these guys, Debrah thought. She had yet to meet an inmate who didn't spend most of his time feeling sorry for himself. "Mr. Luther, we all live in prisons of one sort or another," she replied. "Yours is just the physical kind."
He laughed, and his blue eyes flashed. "Yeah," he conceded. "You're probably right."
As she drove back to Fort Collins that evening, Debrah thought about Tom Luther. He didn't feel dangerous--at least, she didn't feel like she was in any danger from him. In fact, he was rather...charming. She wondered what he was in prison for.
She found herself back in Tom's room the next day. He was obviously pleased that she had returned.
"You married?" he asked.
The question caught her off guard, so she answered. "Yes. I have two children."
He mimed his disappointment, which made her blush. "You have nice hands," he said. "Working hands. I like to work with my hands, too. I'm a carpenter."
Debrah looked at her hands; she'd never thought of them as "nice." They both had Band-Aids on them; you didn't work with horses and wolf pups without getting nicked and bruised. Again, she blushed.
Before long, she was telling Tom all about her ranch. He said he liked animals, too. Fifteen minutes later, they agreed they had a lot in common. Something else she noticed: Throughout their conversation, Tom had been polite, a real gentleman. He didn't cuss or let his eyes wander over her like the other inmates did.
Debrah was in her car and driving home before she realized the subject of his crime had never come up. But it didn't really matter, she thought. Everyone deserved a second chance, just as she'd been given one. And she'd turned out all right.
After that second meeting, Debrah had several days off. When she returned to work, she was disappointed to learn that Tom had been sent back to prison. Making up an excuse, she asked a records clerk for his patient file, secretly copying down his prisoner identification number so that she could write to him.
What was the harm? She was married, but she liked talking to him and certainly had no intention of leading Mr. Luther on about some future romance. In fact, in her very first letter she let him know that she was "sexually inhibited," just so he'd understand.
"This ought to be interesting," Tom replied. He'd never had a nonsexual relationship with a woman, but he'd enjoyed talking to her, too, and had missed her when she didn't return the next day. And as for her question about what he was in for, well he'd assaulted someone with a hammer...something to do with a drug deal gone bad.
Tom had been in prison since 1982, eight years. That seemed an awful harsh sentence for one assault, Debrah wrote back. After all, she'd heard of people who'd gotten out in less time for murder.
"No," he responded, "what I did was pretty bad." He did not elaborate further.
They had been writing back and forth for a month when Debrah decided to visit. "You must have been eating something," Tom said as he walked up to her in the visiting room. Before she could react, he reached to wipe a bit of mustard from the side of her mouth. He was so gentle, she didn't know what to say.
They talked for the next four hours, mostly about her--about everything from her troubled marriage to her animals. When it was time for Debrah to leave, they stood facing each other. Suddenly, Tom reached out and pulled her to him, hugging her and briefly kissing her cheek.
Debrah flushed angrily. He'd had no right to do that. She left without looking back.
But as the miles passed, her anger dissipated. After all, she'd told Tom things she hadn't even discussed with her husband or any counselor. And in their correspondence, he'd never offered any suggestive remarks or made her feel ashamed of her lack of sexuality. Weren't they friends?
Debrah reached up and touched the place he had kissed. She smiled. Yes, she thought, Tom was one heck of a nice guy.
After that, she visited him nearly every week. Between visits, she wrote letters and spent hours on the telephone. He was always interested in what she was doing, counseling her about her troubles.
Debrah was the one who first mentioned feeling sexually aroused at their visits. Only then did Tom confess that he had been entertaining similar thoughts.
Before meeting him, Debrah didn't even own a dress. Now she bought two at Tom's request. One she modeled for her husband, who told her it looked like she was wearing her bathrobe. She almost threw the thing away, but instead wore it when she next saw Tom. He told her she was beautiful, sexy. She turned him on. For once, she didn't mind that sort of talk.
If there was any flaw to Tom, it was his temper. Female authority figures really seemed to set him off, especially one counselor at the prison named Gloria Greene. "She's a bitch," Tom said.
Debrah didn't like that, and she chastised him. When he badmouthed guards and cops, she told him she didn't approve of that, either.
Tom apologized, then explained. He'd had kids, a boy and a girl, ages sixteen and seventeen. "But the cops killed them" while he was in prison, he told her. "They were on a motorcycle. The cops were chasing them. They fell, and the cops ran them over."
Debrah thought that story revealed a lot about Tom. Still, she said that if they were going to make it on the outside--if they were going to have a future together, as they had begun discussing--he was going to have to learn to control his anger.
Sometimes Tom took her criticism well; his anger, he said, had been his source of energy for so long he sometimes couldn't control it. But as often as not, he'd stop writing in order to punish her. One time he even removed Debrah from his visiting list without notice, sending her home in tears. He'd wait for a little time to pass, then "forgive" her.
Their relationship went on like that for two years. Debrah knew that Tom wasn't perfect, that he needed a lot of therapy. But he was the best thing that had ever happened to her. She no longer thought about suicide; instead, she dreamed of growing old with Tom.
Then in 1992, Tom was sent to Fremont Correctional Facility. Debrah, who'd begun working at the Denver Receiving and Diagnostic Center, the first stop for prisoners on the way to the penitentiary, didn't know that Fremont was where the state sent its most recalcitrant sex offenders. On her first visit there, a female guard hinted that Tom had problems with women.
"Why would she say something like that?" Debrah asked Tom. "You're in for assault."
Tom changed the subject.
A few days later Debrah asked a friend at DRDC to punch Tom's number into the computer. She blinked when she looked at the screen, and asked her friend to make sure she'd gotten the right man. According to this information, Thomas Edward Luther had been sentenced to fifteen years for assault...and sexual assault.
Debrah needed to know more. The next day she drove to the courthouse in Breckenridge and asked to see Tom's file. It was worse than anything she could have imagined. He had brutally raped a young woman, vaginally and anally, using the wooden handle of a carpenter's hammer. He had beaten the woman so badly that the windows of his truck had been smeared opaque with her blood.
Debrah started crying as she read the statement Tom's victim, Mary, had given the police. "I asked if he had done this before," the woman had written. "He said yes, several times. That's when he picked up the hammer...I thought he was going to hit me with it."
And there was more in the file. After the assault, Tom had gone home to his girlfriend, Laurie Wagner, a former reserve police officer, and told her he thought he had killed someone. Then he had slipped out of his bloody clothes and made love to her. Despite Tom's confession, Laurie had stuck by him throughout his trial. What kind of woman would do that?
Driving back down from the mountains, Debrah was tempted to send her car careening off the road. It wasn't just the brutality of Tom's crime, but the fact that he had lied to her about it. Only the desire to confront him kept her going.
"I told you I had assaulted someone with a hammer," Tom said when Debrah saw him the next day. "You're the one who figured it had to be a man and a simple assault." He denied that he had raped Mary with the hammer; in fact, he said, sex had very little to do with it.
Debrah didn't believe him. The woman's account was too real, too horrifying to be a lie. She was making up her mind to leave when Tom leaned over and touched her hand. There were tears in his eyes. And in that moment, she forgave him.
He was not the same man he'd been in 1982, she told herself. He was a little wild, but she was just the woman who could tame Tom Luther.
After that, Debrah devoted herself to getting Tom out of prison. In letter after letter to the Summit County judge who had sentenced him, she begged him to consider an early release. Tom's changed, she said. He has someone to go to out of prison, a real support system. Even her husband and sons wrote the judge, noting that Debrah had never been happier than since she'd met Tom.
But Tom wasn't helping much. His temper kept getting him in trouble with guards and prison authorities. Now that his secret was out, he confided to Debrah that he'd been kicked out of a sex offenders' treatment program, the completion of which might have helped his case, because he had threatened that counselor, Gloria Greene. He hated her still.
"She deserves to be raped and beaten," he growled to Debrah during one visit. "That'd show her what it's really like."
When Tom got that angry, it was as if he didn't know where he was or who he was talking to; his eyes reminded Debrah of the bull on a bullfight poster she had. Injured, in pain, the bull's eyes were mirrors of hate and a desire to kill.
Debrah recognized that Tom could be dangerous. But she remained convinced that with her love and support, the beast could be held in check and the good man would triumph. Hoping for a professional's concurrence, she paid $8,000 for an independent psychiatric evaluation. Robert Atwell, a clinical psychologist working in the Denver area, interviewed Tom and Debrah in June 1992. His report was not encouraging.
According to Atwell, Tom described himself as abused, neglected and miserable in early childhood. His mother was "a real bitch" whose physical abuse caused him to move from home and stay with relatives when he was twelve. His father, though a quiet, nervous man, would stop Tom's mother from abusing her children by "beating her down."
Tom's sexual experiences began in childhood, when he was victimized by an adult male. "He experienced ongoing guilt, shame, and confusion related to his sexuality following that experience," Atwell wrote. At twelve he was involved in a sexual relationship with an aunt. As an adult, his relationships with women were sexual rather than emotionally intimate, Tom told Atwell. His strong sexual drive evolved into rape fantasies, in which the "victim" would ultimately agree to consensual sex that both enjoyed.
Tom told the psychologist he hoped for a "viable, satisfying relationship" when he got out of prison. Debrah Snider, he said, was "the only one who had any expectations of him."
The psychologist had his doubts. Tom's emotional life was characterized by "acute episodes of ragefulness...emotional storms... and he continues to experience strong hostile feelings toward women," Atwell wrote. He diagnosed Tom as having a "borderline personality disorder with features of sexual sadism."
"Tom's history of explosive, violent release of aggression toward women mitigates against treatment in the community without the most stringent safeguards," Atwell concluded.
Debrah wasn't pleased by the report, but she didn't give up. Finally the judge relented and reduced Tom's sentence, giving a release date of December 25, 1992. Home for Christmas. To Debrah, it seemed like a sign from God.
But Tom managed to screw that up, too. A temper tantrum in the chow line got him thrown in the hole. He wasn't let out of prison until January 3, 1993.
When Tom Luther got out, Debrah was waiting. They drove to a motel near Fort Collins and, for the first time in her life, Debrah enjoyed sex. Tom was romantic, patient, understanding. But the honeymoon lasted only 24 hours.
The next day, Tom's former cellmate, Jerald "Skip" Eerebout Sr., arrived and disappeared with Tom for two days. Tom apologized when he returned, and Debrah decided there could be worse influences than Eerebout, who had a construction business in Chicago and said he was involved in Christian ministry to former convicts.
His sons, Byron Powers and J.D. Eerebout, were another story. Over the next couple of months Tom often disappeared with the boys, taking one of Debrah's vehicles from her home a few miles away from his apartment. When Tom returned the car, it would be loaded with stolen tools.
And all of a sudden, Tom had money. "Won it in a poker game," he told her.
Tom always had some excuse, none of which she believed. Little by little she discovered he'd been lying all along. He'd never had any children, much less children killed by the cops. Mary had been hitchhiking when he'd picked her up; there was no drug deal. Debrah started calling the lies "Tom Luther stories."
But there was something more troubling than the lies. It was obvious to her that it wasn't safe for Tom to be around other women. He couldn't see attractive females without commenting on their bodies and talking about wanting to have sex with them. He'd tease that maybe he should bring another woman into their relationship.
At first Debrah thought Tom was doing it to hurt her. But it was never just teasing, never just looking. There was something in his eyes that was almost predatory. A hungry thing that needed to be fed. Tom might smile and laugh it off if a woman didn't respond to his flirting, but there was anger behind the smile.
Tom started bringing home pornographic movies, encouraging Debrah to watch them with him as a sort of sex therapy. The movies he picked often centered on rape fantasies in which the women invariably "learned to like it."
"Tom, rape is not something women learn to like," Debrah told him. But he just got mad and said she was no longer "allowed" to watch them with him.
And sometimes, when he came back from an excursion with the Eerebout boys, Tom would be tired and complaining about sore muscles. He'd say something about playing touch football, but Debrah thought there was more to it.
She was worried enough to call several police agencies, including the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, tipping them off about the tools Tom had stolen, hoping he might get caught for something small.
But she wasn't worried enough to break off their relationship. And on March 17, two and a half months after Tom was released from prison, Debrah put a down payment on a new, blue Geo Metro. It was for Tom.
A few days later Tom suggested she go visit a friend in Washington. Debrah knew something was going on; Tom had come back from his trips to Denver frustrated about some deal or other that "the boys" couldn't seem to handle. Still, she agreed to go. "Do what you have to do," she told him, "but be done when I get back."
Tom looked at her and smiled. "Okay," he said. "By the time you get back, it'll be over."
While she was gone, Tom called every day. He said he missed her and that when she got back, they could really start planning for the future. She let herself hope it was true.
The night before she was set to drive back to Colorado, Debrah and her friend rented The Executioner's Song. It was the story of killer Gary Gilmore, who was executed by a Utah firing squad.
"Tom needs to see this," Debrah told her friend.
Debrah arrived back in Colorado on Monday, March 29. At about noon she headed over to Tom's apartment and was surprised to find him still in bed. Sitting on the edge of the mattress, she picked up his hand.
"Ow!" he exclaimed, pulling back. Then she noticed that both of Tom's hands were cut, bruised and dirty; his little fingers were swollen, and one appeared broken.
"What'd you do to your hands?" she asked.
"A friend gave me a case of AK-47 assault rifles," he replied. "I was afraid I'd get caught, so I buried 'em along I-25."
Debrah looked at him. Oh boy, she thought, here comes another Tom Luther story. He was on a roll.
"I borrowed a pick and shovel from your house," he said, "but I broke the shovel and had to dig with my hands."
"Yeah, right," Debrah interrupted. "Your friends don't have enough money for gas, but one of them gave you a case of rifles." She asked what had happened to the shovel.
"I threw it away," Tom replied. "My clothes were all muddy, and my new boots. I took them off so I wouldn't get my car dirty and drove off with them still on top of the car...They're gone."
Tom was so obviously contrite and upset about the loss of his boots that Debrah laughed it off. But a little while later the phone rang. Debrah listened as Tom spoke. She gathered he was talking to Byron Powers. "Shit, just my kind of luck!" Tom exclaimed, turning to look at Debrah. "But she was seen later at a bingo parlor? Well, that's good."
Tom hung up. It seemed Byron's girlfriend, "Shari," had disappeared. Tom was concerned "because I might have been the last one seen with her."
"Shari and Byron got in a fight...I was just trying to console her and volunteered to take her to Central City to see a friend," he said, adding quickly, "But I brought her back to Byron's apartment." He implied that "Shari" had a drug habit and probably was getting even with Byron by pretending to disappear.
Debrah had heard enough of this Tom Luther story. She knew that if Tom had been alone with a woman, sex was involved. But looking again at his injured hands, she wondered what else might have happened.
end of part 1
