Sketchy Evidence Raises Doubt

In March 1999, Tim Masters was convicted for the 1987 Fort Collins, Colorado murder of Peggy Hettrick and given a life sentence based largely on drawings he made when he was 15 years old. There was no physical evidence linking Masters to the crime-scene.

Between the location where Peggy Hettrick was abducted and the field where her body was dumped that early morning on February 11, 1987, her killer should have left pieces of his DNA on her. As the killer dragged her body through the field, skin cells or a strand of  hair from the killer should have fallen onto her clothing.

The law of forensic science: When two people come into contact, they leave cells on each other.

But the Fort Collins Police ignored this fundamental law of forensic science by losing biological evidence found at the crime scene and destroying evidence linked to a prominent doctor they never investigated for the crime.

Jim Broderick, an over zealous Fort Collins police detective, would not waver from his belief that a 15 year old boy committed the murder despite no physical evidence. Larimer County prosecutors opposed saving DNA and testing it.

The result: An innocent man goes to prison for life for a murder he did not commit.

Twenty years after the murder, Masters' case has become one of the most ambitious and expensive bids ever in Colorado to prove a person's innocence.

Nearly $500,000 has been provided by the Colorado legal defense system and the ambitious efforts of Masters' legal team has led them to a cutting-edge DNA testing laboratory in the Netherlands, where the killer's skin cells have been mined from Peggy Hettrick's clothing using the most-advanced DNA techniques available. The tests show it wasn't Tim Masters' skin cells.

The Crime Scene

Hettrick's body was discovered lying in a field along Landings Drive by a bicyclist just after sunrise.

Peggy Hettrick was an aspiring writer and barhopper who worked at the Fashion Bar, a nearby clothing store. She was a petite woman, about 115 pounds with flaming red hair.

Her bra, blouse and coat had been pushed up over her breasts; her panties and bluejeans had been pulled down to her knees. Her eyes were open, her arms outstretched, her purse looped above one elbow.

Blood presumably from a knife wound to her back, trailed 103 feet from her body to a small pool by the street curb. Tiny abrasions marked her right cheek. Her left nipple and areola had been carefully removed and the front of her body was wiped clean. No blood.

The police investigators wrapped paper bags around Hettrick's hands and feet to capture skin or hair she might have scratched off her killer and specimens that might be on her footwear.

They found two hairs on her shoes that weren't hers. Inside her purse, investigators lifted 13 fingerprints that weren't hers. 

Later, Larimer County Medical Examiner Dr. Pat Allen found neatly executed cuts inside her genitalia made by an extremely sharp knife.

She was last seen leaving the Prime Minister, a restaurant only a few blocks from the field, around 1:30 A.M. Earlier, she had seen her on-and-off boyfriend, Matt Zoellner, with another woman. Police ruled Zoellner out as a suspect. He had an alibi.

Maybe Someone Saw Something

The police fanned across Landings Drive to the east and southwest knocking on dozens of doors to find out if someone saw or heard something.

From a mobile home 100 feet south of Hettrick's body, Clyde Masters told Detective Linda Wheeler of the Fort Collins Police Department that his 15 year old son (Tim) had walked through the field to his bus stop, as he did every morning and he may have seen something.

Tim was pulled out of class at Fort Collins High School and was questioned by police. He told police he had seen a body. He thought it was a mannequin, as the bicyclist did. Detective Jim Broderick didn't believe him. Why would anyone not report a body? Why didn't he have any emotion?

But the skinny Tim Masters was known to keep to himself. He was placed in a special-ed class after some of his artwork disturbed a teacher. In his notebook were sketches of dinosaurs with arrows through them, gruesome war scenes and movie horror flicks. Tim loved to write and hoped to be another Stephen King.

Judith Challes, the special-ed teacher who knew Tim best, said, "I'm not at all concerned about Tim's drawings and writings." Most of her students scrawled horrific images. The police asked Tim to come down to the police station the next day, Fenruary 12, for further questioning. He said sure. But I didn't see or hear anything before her death, he said. Just procedure, the police said.

A Big Mistake

Without consulting an attorney, Tim and his father did exactly what police asked. They allowed detectives to search their home and Tim's school locker. The police scooped up Tim's writings and drawings, his survival-knife collection and Army flashight with a red-tinted lens.

Detectives interrogated Tim without his father present. After reading him his rights, detectives prodded Tim to talk about killing. One detective said, "we know that you did it, Tim" and another said, "tell the truth! You did it."

Detective Broderick talked to Tim about his survival-knife collection. Survival knives have saw toothed edges (serrating.) Broderick mentioned that such a knife "does a lot of damage when you stab somebody."

"That'd be kind of hard, though, to pull it back," Tim responded, remembering a scene from a movie, "All Quiet On The Western Front." In it, a character chastices his soldiers for serrating their bayonets because such alteration makes removing the weapon from a body difficult. Tim's remark stuck with Broderick.

Within the next hour, Broderick was in Tim's face, telling him to admit he fulfilled a fantasy by killing Peggy Hettrick.

Sidebar: Even if you are innocent, you should always have an attorney present when you are interrogated by police about a crime. The police might misconstrue anything you say to them, making you look guilty. And you should always consult an attorney or require police to get a search warrant before allowing them to search your home. But the police had no hard evidence against Tim. The police didn't do an interview with Challes, the teacher who said Tim was a normal kid with no violent tendencies.

The police didn't find a trace of forensic evidence at Tim's home or on his belongings - no blood or hairs from Hettrick.

They discovered that the two hairs found on Hettrick did not match Tim. They also discovered that the fingerprints found inside her purse did not match him.

Ruled Out Suspects

--  Matt Zoellner, her on-and-off boyfriend. He had an alibi.

--  Known area sex offenders.

--  The man who showed up at the Prime Minister restaurant two weeks after the murder, making threatening gestures at a red-haired employee resembling Peggy Hettrick. Teresa Safris was selling tickets in the front of the restaurant for an entertainment act inside when she heard a strange voice behind her. A man with a "bodybuilder" physique was glaring at her. He pulled an icicle from behind his back and made several stabbing motions in the air. Then he was gone. She described him as 30-years-old, with green or blue eyes, sandy hair and a square jaw. Police never identified him.

Searching For A Motive

Police called it the "blitz attack." Embraced by Broderick, the theory goes like this: Hettrick was ambushed and stabbed from behind as she walked down Landings Drive. Then she was dragged into the field, where the killer changed knives to sexually mutilate her.

The fact that Tim Masters lived only 100 feet away fit nicely with this theory. It gave him opportunity, Broderick believed. He could have saw her walking along Landings Drive and jumped her. Tim also owned a red-tinted flashlight that, Broderick reasoned, Tim could have held between his teeth as he mutilated Hettrick.

Broderick talked about the strange coincidences surrounding Tim Masters. Why would he have a collection of survival knives? Why, the day after the body was found, would he have a newspaper with the story about Hettrick's murder on his dresser next to the knives? Why would Hettrick's body be found within a day of the fourth anniversary of Tim's mother's death?

A Possible Killer

In 1992, 100 yards east of where Hettrick's body had been found, a college student, Lynn Burkhardt, who was house-sitting for a doctor and his family heard a strange noise in the basement bathroom. She and a friend broke into an adjacent room, a spare office used by Dr. Richard Hammond, a prominent eye surgeon in Fort Collins.

Inside, they found a secret, obsessive world - sophisticated cameras, boxes of computer electronics, massive amounts of pornography, close up pictures of women sitting on the toilet (taken through the vent) or standing in front of his mirror. The police raided Dr. Hammond's residence at 401 Skysail Lane, confiscating everything.

When Dr. Hammond, 44, returned from vacation with his family, he was arrested on sexual-exploitation charges. His wife Rebecca said she had no knowledge of what her husband had been doing.

Friends described Dr. Hammond as the portrait of politeness and professionalism. He led an idylic life as a father of two teenage children and the husband of a CSU architectural student.

Colleagues admired his specialized surgical skills. His partner, Dr. William Schachtman, remembered his deftness with the scalpel.

Dr. Hammond kept rigid daily schedules so he could fit long hours at work and bodybuilding at the gym. He often left town on secretive trips and disappeared for hours. According to his wife, he battled insomnia and he would often work in his office in the basement of  their home in the middle of the night. She said, once, when his basement office flooded, the first thing he did was rush mysterious containers out of the house.

Inside Dr. Hammond's office, police found video after video of highly calibrated shots zooming into the vaginal areas of women on his toilet. "These were extreme close-ups. They were almost microscopic," says Detective David Mickelson of the Fort Collins Police Department. Other hidden cameras captured women's breasts as they stood at the mirror in Dr. Hammond's office.

The Larimer County District Attorney called in an independent prosecutor from Weld County, citing a possible conflict of interest. Their was never a public explaination, although it is believed that relatives of staffers in the D.A.'s office were found on Dr. Hammond's videotapes.

Police discovered a storage unit Dr. Hammond was renting that contained thousands of pornographic materials and containers with sex toys and jewelry. He also had a secret bank account, secret apartment and a secret identity according to police records.

After viewing several of the videotapes found in Dr. Hammond's home office, Detective Mickelson made connections: the doctor's house was only 100 yards east of the Hettrick crime scene, and his obsession with women's genitalia and breasts.

Detective Mickelson told Tony Sanchez, the lead detective in the Dr. Hammond case, that Hammond should be investigated for Hettrick's murder. But Sanchez rejected his request. Sanchez's boss happened to be Jim Broderick.

The evidence that was seized from Dr. Hammond was destroyed August 15, 1995 - all within a six month period. Had Hammond been investigated for Hettrick's murder and the evidence seized from his house preserved, detectives would have saw the parallels with the Hettrick case. Jim Broderick ordered the destruction of the evidence.

Exoneration Bid

Linda Wheeler, now an investigator with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, became part of an exoneration bid for Tim Masters.

Greeley defense attorney Maria Liu appointed by the state to represent Masters was astonished that Masters was convicted on the basis of his doodles.

Among the first steps they took was a motion to preserve all evidence in the Hettrick case.

It was immediately opposed by the DA's office - the first of many motions from the DA's office to prevent the defense team's access to DNA testing.

Later, the defense team learned that the two hairs found in Hettrick's footwear were missing, as well as the fingerprints found inside her purse. Authorities also lost her bracelet, which may have been grabbed by her killer. Fortunately, most of Hettrick's clothing was still in storage.

Liu showed the photos of  Hettrick's wounds to Fort Collins obstetrician-gynecologist Dr. Warren James. Dr. James recognized the cuttings.

"Ms. Hettrick underwent a surgical procedure known as a partial vulvectomy," says Dr. James. The procedure requires a high degree of surgical skill and high-grade surgical instrument, and it is highly unlikely that a 15-year-old could perform such a precise surgical procedure," says Dr. James.

A July 29, 1998, Fort Collins police report shows that Dr. Pat Allen, the Larimer County medical examiner, called the wounds surgical. He made this comment to Broderick.

Barie Goetz, a former CBI lab director and noted crime-scene expert who joined the legal team, and others tried to drag Liu, the same size as Hettrick, through the field but couldn't. "The person would have to be very strong to do it, not the 110-pound weakling that Tim was," says Goetz.

Wheeler persuaded Masters' legal team to hire two forensic scientists in the Netherlands, Richard and Selma Eikelenboom, known for their meticulous crime-scene analyses.

Their goals: To show that Masters' DNA was never on Hettrick and to identify the cellular makeup of the real killer by targeting spots on her clothing where he would have grabbed her, leaving skin, such as the inner band of her panties.

They meticulously cut and taped more than 50 points on her clothing. Throughout the process, no DNA of Masters appeared, says Goetz, who witnessed the process. But Eikelenboom found the skin of an unknown man in the interior of Hettrick's panties.

But it was Tim Masters' sketches that really spooked Broderick. He came to believe that one doodle, featuring a blade tearing into a diamond shape, was a vagina mutilation. Tim says it was simply a knife tearing into an inanimate object.

Broderick was fixated on Tim Masters. He was fitting facts to a hypothesis. That's not the way it's suppose to be done.

Detective Linda Wheeler believed at the time that other suspects should be a major focus and an FBI profile of the killer should be developed, but her supervisors foolishly didn't allow it.

Detective Troy Krenning believed it improbable that a boy could have committed such a sophisticated, fetishistic killing.

Brian Blackwell