Monster (45 page)

“Other times I wake up and she’s gone. She’ll be out in the kitchen, staring at a cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette. She doesn’t even notice I’m there, just keeps sayin’, ‘I want to find my baby. I just want to find my baby.’ ”

Cher’s father, Earl, wasn’t doing any better. He’d made independent attempts to find Luther since the press conference but had been unable to locate him. Like his former wife, he was on a wild emotional ride. He’d been in the process of divorcing his second wife when Cher disappeared; Debbie, like Van, had known Cher most of the girl’s life and was also devastated. But, estranged, they couldn’t even lean on each other to get through the tough times.

Earl Elder suffered through days, even weeks, of severe depression when he didn’t want to talk to anyone. He alternated between raging around the house and weeping in a chair. When he saw a young mother with her children, he’d recall how Cher wanted a big family and start crying.

Seeing and hearing all this, Richardson was in no mood to commiserate when he got a call on April 12 from Byron Eerebout, who whined, “Tom’s friends come up to me and say they’re gonna kill me and my family. They had pictures of some girl that they took care of ... that was buried up in the mountains. It wasn’t Cher. She had blond hair. They showed a picture of the grave that was dug and then they showed her in a car being lowered into it by another truck. She was a real rich girl from Summit County, her throat was slashed.”

The photograph had been shown to him by a friend of Luther’s who went by the nickname Mongo, Eerebout said. The message was clear: a snitch’s life wasn’t worth a damn in prison.

Eerebout complained that he wasn’t guilty of the attempted murder in September. “It wasn’t me,” he said. “Everybody keeps comin’ up to me, like the lawyers and stuff. And they say this is all basically being done because of the Cher Elder thing.”

Richardson interrupted. He wouldn’t talk to Byron about the shooting case, but if he wanted to say something about Cher ....

“Okay, well I told my attorney that I have the name of the person that did it. Tom was the one that got rid of it, but this other guy’s the one that did it.”

“We made the offer if you’d give us a location of Cher’s body,” Richardson said.

“See, I don’t know the location, but I know who does.” Byron said.

Eerebout wasn’t sure if Elder had come back to his apartment, but he didn’t think so because the woman he saw briefly that morning had longer hair. He thought the woman might have been Southy’s sister. Southy had been at the apartment that morning wearing a torn and bloody shirt, giving the excuse that he’d been in a fight with police at a local bar. “Him and Tom were supposedly the ones that did it.”

Babe Rivinius had raised the money to get her son out on bond. Now he complained to Richardson that he had recently married Tiffany and didn’t want to be an old man when he got out of prison. But he wanted a new deal before he gave anymore information: no charges in the Elder case and no prison time for the shooting incident. He made an appointment to come in the next afternoon to talk.

But Eerebout never made it to Richardson’s office after telling his mother and lawyers of his plan. They talked him into taking his chances in court.

In June, the jury acquitted him of the attempted murder charges but found him guilty of three counts of first degree assault, each one of which carried a maximum penalty of eight years. The terms would run consecutively. Twenty-four years in all, and he’d have to serve at least two-thirds of it.

Debrah Snider arrived in West Virginia in May determined to put Cher Elder out of her mind. There was nothing more she could do for the missing woman or her family. She had told Richardson everything she knew; he would have to do the rest if he wanted to take Tom away from her. She just wanted to make a life with the man she loved.

However, Luther didn’t allow her to move into his cabin in a remote, wooded area near Delray. She should have seen it coming from a letter he wrote on April 20, exactly one year after his first confrontation with Richardson.

Luther wanted her to stop trying to manipulate him and accept him the way he was. He accused her of wanting to know where he was and who he was with every second, to lock him up in mind and spirit. He felt he should just cut all ties and cease prolonging their agony. She should just stay in Colorado and forget about him.

Snider had gone anyway and rented a space at a campground where she lived in her van. She took a job as a nurse at Rocksbury Correctional Institute in Hagerstown, Maryland, and saw Luther, when he let her, on her days off. His behavior toward her swung back and forth between “Good Tom” and “Bad Tom.”

On July 4, Bad Tom had a few friends over for a cookout. Debrah, who had complained about his other girlfriends and had been put on restriction, was not invited. Miserable, she lay in the weeds near his cabin and watched. At one point, he emerged from his cabin with a rifle and a shotgun, neither of which he was supposed to have as an ex-felon.

On July 12, the West Virginia State Patrol office in Delray received a telephone call from a woman identifying herself as Debrah Snider. She wanted to let them know that her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend, one Thomas Luther, was suspected of murdering a missing female in Colorado. He was now living in their neck of the woods.

She said she moved from Colorado to be with Luther and now they were splitting up. She thought that she better warn them that Luther recently purchased a .12-gauge shotgun and a rifle. And he didn’t like cops, particularly a Colorado detective named Scott Richardson, who they should contact for more information. She said she didn’t care what happened next.

Yet a week later, Debrah and Tom were back together. He was even letting her stay for longer periods of time at the cabin, and she allowed herself to imagine that life might someday always be so good.

In early August, they went on a small vacation to a nearby campground for the weekend, bringing two cars because they planned to leave from there to go their separate ways: Tom back to Delray, Debrah to her job in Maryland.

Sunday, the day they were to leave the campground, a young woman—athletic, slender, sculpted in her Spandex outfit—sped by on rollerblades. Snider caught Luther watching as the girl raced off around the corner. He had that look in his eyes he got whenever he saw an attractive young woman and thought he wasn’t being noticed. A hungry, predatory look.

As they began to leave the campground a couple of hours later, Luther, who was in the lead, suddenly pulled over and tried to wave her around. Debrah refused to pull ahead. She didn’t know if she was reacting out of jealousy or a premonition, but all she could think of was the girl on rollerblades and the look in her lover’s eyes.

However, he insisted that he had decided to take a nap before going home and so would stay behind. In the end, Snider, who had to get to work, left despite her fears. When she saw him a few days later, he was relaxed and said the nap had done him a lot of good.

A week later, however, Snider was at a the local post office when she noticed a new poster for a missing woman. The poster said the woman was in her 20s and had disappeared the week before.

Snider stared at the poster. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought the fuzzy photograph looked like the young woman at the campground. Suddenly, she couldn’t breathe. She ran out of the post office.
It couldn’t be the same girl,
she told herself,
you’re just imagining the worst
. But she didn’t go back in to look again.

A few nights later, while working a late night shift and all alone, Debrah thought she heard a voice. She wondered who was talking before realizing that the voice was inside her own head. The voice was urging her to take Tom Luther to church.

Snider worried that the stresses of the past year had finally driven her crazy. But the voice kept insisting and she decided church might not be such a bad idea.

Although she attended irregularly, the church had given her something to cling to in the dark days when she had been in prison. Maybe the beast that sometimes raged in Tom’s soul would be tamed in the presence of God.

But once again, it was too late.

Sgt. Bob Burkhart of the Bureau of Criminal Investigations, West Virginia State Police, wasted no time contacting Scott Richardson in Lakewood, Colorado. If what the Snider woman said was true, he thought he’d best find out everything he could about Luther.

Richardson responded by faxing Burkhart a five-page report on Luther’s “particulars.” Luther, he said, was a suspect in the disappearance and murder of Cher Elder, as well as a suspect in the January 1982 deaths of Bobby Jo Oberholtzer and Annette Schnee in Summit County. A third girl had been raped, beaten, and left for dead a month later, but lived to identify him and send him to prison.

Luther’s victims tended to be petite white females, 19 to 22 years old, with shoulder-length hair, Richardson reported. Luther worked by picking up hitchhikers and watching places like bus stops for likely targets. It was thought that he would beat, strangle, and sexually assault his victims.

Burkhart agreed to find out where Luther lived and check into the information Debrah Snider provided regarding the guns. “We’ll get back to you with what we find,” he said.

Richardson hung up the telephone, relieved. He had lost contact with Snider, who seemed to have abandoned her ranch and family to chase after her man. Now, apparently, she was coming back around again.

The detective was satisfied with the results of Byron Eerebout’s trial. He and Deputy District Attorney Minor talked it over with the judge and told him that they hoped for a stiff sentence to apply pressure to Eerebout in the hopes of solving the Elder case.

Sentencing had been set for September, after which Richardson would play a waiting game. The FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit had suggested waiting sixty days after the sentencing before approaching Eerebout again. It would give him enough time to get a taste of penitentiary life without becoming established in the convict world and deciding to do his time in silence.

A few days after they first talked, Richardson got another call from Burkhart. They had located Luther’s cabin. He was driving a Ford truck and the blue Geo Metro. While he was away one afternoon, detectives got close enough to take photographs of the cabin. They’d also come across information that Luther was buying ammunition for a shotgun and a rifle. “We’re trying to get enough for a search warrant,” Burkhart said.

“Thanks, bud,” Richardson replied. “I’ll send you some recent photographs of him. When you get a minute, you might want to get a notice out to nearby states to see if anyone has any murdered or missin’ women.”

Chapter Nineteen

August 21, 1994—Delray, West Virginia

Unaware that he had already been brought to the attention of the local police, Luther was driving along a rural highway in his Geo Metro when he stopped to pick up two hitchhikers. A man and a 32-year-old woman with dark, shoulder-length hair. Her name was Bobby Jo, an irony that would not be lost on police investigators.

A few miles down the road, they met up with another woman, the man’s girlfriend, who didn’t appreciate that Bobby Jo Jones was there. She suspected that her boyfriend and Bobby Jo were having an affair. While the man and his girlfriend argued, Luther and Bobby Jo left—she wanted to buy some cocaine in nearby Virginia, and Luther agreed to drive.

However, Luther first took her to his cabin where he announced that he wanted to take a shower. “Care to join me?” he said slyly. Bobby Jo declined and went outside to wait. As she left the cabin, she noticed a Colorado license plate hanging on the wall.

Fifteen minutes later, Luther came out of the cabin carrying a backpack. “I might need this,” he said pleasantly, but didn’t elaborate.

The pair drove to Virginia and purchased cocaine from Jones’ connection, most of which they promptly consumed. Bobby Jo later recalled that Luther was a good conversationalist as they drove back to West Virginia. He made no sexual advance, though she sometimes caught him looking at her strangely.

They were getting close to Delray that evening when he suddenly veered off the road into a field. As matter-of-factly as he had previously discussed the weather, he announced, “I’m going to rape you.”

Jones, a single mother of two, tried to reach for the door handle when her head exploded with pain. “Bitches,” he swore and hit her again. “Whores. Sluts.”

As Bobby Jo tried to regain her senses, Luther got out of the car and went around to her side, where he yanked her out by her arm. She felt something pop and screamed in pain. He dragged her over to a tree where he tore her clothes off.

When he began to undress, Jones tried again to escape, but he chased her down. Spinning her around, he punched her repeatedly in the face. “You’re not going anywhere.”

Collapsing to the ground, Bobby Jo cried out, “Why are you doing this?

“ ’Cause you’re a fuckin’ bitch,” he snarled and punched her again.

Jones heard her jaw snap like a piece of wood. He climbed on top and began to choke her. “I’m going to kill you,” he raged. She felt herself begin to lose consciousness.
God,
she prayed,
please don’t let him kill me
.

Luther quit choking her. Turning her over, he attempted to rape her vaginally and anally though he could not maintain an erection. Frustrated, he flipped her over again and demanded that she perform oral sex.

When this too failed, Luther began to strangle her again but stopped just as suddenly. He stood up, panting from the exertion. He passed a hand across his eyes. Wordlessly, he picked up his clothes and began to get dressed.

“Can I put my clothes on?” Jones asked through her broken mouth. The arm Luther dragged her out of the car by hung uselessly at her side, throbbing with pain.

“Yeah,” he mumbled. “Then get back in the car.”

Bobby Jo gathered her torn clothing and dressed as well as she could with her one good arm. She got in the car shivering with fear and wondering what was next.