Crime
1982
Serial
killer strikes in Colorado
A 21-year-old woman named
Mary accepts a ride from a man in the ski town of Breckenridge, Colorado, and
is raped and severely beaten with a claw hammer. The attacker, Tom Luther, was
traced through his truck and apprehended.
Luther told a
psychiatrist that Mary reminded him of his mother. The psychiatrist concluded
that the attacks might have resulted from his mother’s physical and extreme
verbal abuse. Whatever the cause, Luther reportedly told an inmate at the time
that “the next girl won’t live. They’ll never find her body.”
Sure enough, within
months of Luther’s release in 1993, a 20-year-old woman, Cher Elder,
disappeared after being last seen leaving a Central City casino with Luther. At
around the same time, another young woman was the victim of a brutal knife
attack. An unidentified man had responded to her advertisement for a used car
and then stabbed her multiple times as she showed him the car.
Luther, the obvious
suspect in Elder’s disappearance, fled east. In West Virginia, Luther raped and
beat a hitchhiker in 1994. He was caught and convicted for that attack and then
returned to Colorado. Cher Elder’s body was finally found in 1995. She had been
shot three times in the back of the head, but her body was so decomposed by the
time it was found that evidence of sexual assault or other trauma could not be
determined.
The victim of the 1993
knife attack saw Luther’s picture in the newspaper which later resulted in
his conviction for that crime. While in prison, Luther wrote to his former
girlfriend, “Strange, isn’t it, that I am what I detest in a human being. It
wasn’t sex at all. It was assault and anger, pure meanest [sic] from a
subconscious level. I can’t deal with the lack of self-control I have. I guess
I really am dangerous if I can hurt people like this.”
Still, the judge refused
to allow the jury to consider these statements, or his previous rape
convictions, at the Cher Elder murder trial. This set off an uproar when a lone
juror refused to vote for first-degree murder. Luther received a 48-year
sentence for second-degree murder. Elder’s family and the other 11 jurors began
to lobby to change one of the fundamental precepts of American criminal
justice–the unanimous verdict.
COURTESY:
HISTORY.com
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