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I’m a little late in posting this week because I’ve
found myself engrossed in a book that I can’t put down, "Drawn to Injustice."It’s a story in which I
had invested a lot of time and investigative effort during my tenure as editor
in chief of Fort Collins Now, the
newspaper I founded with my friend Joel Dyer in 2002—it’s the story of Tim
Masters’ wrongful conviction for a murder he didn’t commit, written by Tim
himself.
For those who are unfamiliar with the case, it’s inarguably the grossest example of official corruption and prosecutorial misconduct in Fort Collins’ history, which began on Feb. 11, 1987, when Peggy Hettrick was brutally stabbed to death and sexually mutilated, her body dumped in a field on the southern edge of the city. The police immediately zeroed in on a suspect—a gangly 15-year-old who lived in a trailer on the edge of the field and who saw the body when he walked to the school bus stop in the morning. He didn’t report what he saw because he didn’t think Hettrick’s body was real. He thought a group of local kids were playing a prank on him using a CPR mannequin.
That Masters became the focus of a long-running investigation is baffling. The theory was that this young kid crept up on Hettrick as she walked past the field on her way home from a local tavern, stabbed her in the back with enough force to break a rib, dragged her dead weight 100 feet into the field and then, by the light of the moon or a flashlight, performed surgical excisions on her breast and vagina. That not one shred of physical evidence linked Masters to the crime—no hair, fiber, blood, body parts, saliva or anything else was found in Masters’ home or on Hettrick’s body to connect the two—seemed not to matter to investigators. Nor did a collection of footprints around the body and along the drag trail made by someone wearing shoes of a different size and brand than any that Masters wore. What 15-year-old kid wears Thom McAn loafers?
What police were interested in was a large volume of childish doodles, the work of a kid who enjoyed horror and war movies, and some of them were scary and violent. That, apparently, was all the evidence they needed to focus almost exclusively on Masters as a killer, ignoring or downplaying other suspects with far more damning evidence against them.
Covering Masters’ post-conviction attempts to clear his name and watching him walk out of the courtroom as a free man is the hands-down highlight of my career and I’m proud of the investigative work I did to help overturn this grave injustice (several articles are posted here for anyone interested in reading about the case in more detail). Reading about his ordeal in his own words (with help from coauthor Steve Lehto) has been amazing, as even more details about this complex case have fallen into place. But it’s also been frustrating because it isn’t over yet. The man who pursued him with such a singular zeal, Fort Collins Police Lt. Jim Broderick, is still facing trial on several counts of perjury and the case has dragged on for years. Fort Collins is still paying his $104,000 annual salary and has paid about $400,000 for his defense. Until Broderick has his day in court and can face allegations that he withheld evidence and lied under oath to strengthen the case against Masters, many of us who were deep in the weeds of this story will have a hard time putting it to rest.
But more importantly, there’s the matter of who actually did kill Peggy Hettrick. By pursuing the wrong man for the wrong reasons all these years, Fort Collins police have let him (or them) continue to evade justice. Technically, the case is still open and in the hands of the Colorado Attorney General, but few people believe her killer will soon be brought to justice.
Reliving the case through Masters’ book has at times been infuriating, especially because many of those who were involved in this travesty are still in positions of power in this community. But that he is free to write about the ordeal, and to lay bare their actions for all to see, is enormously satisfying.
As his book’s subtitle says, “The truth can’t be erased.”