In April 1993 a man answered a newspaper advertisement for a car that Heather Smith, twenty-one, had for sale, and came to meet her in front of her house near Washington Park in Denver. She would not go for a test drive with him. He attacked her anyway. She was stabbed five times and suffered a blunt-force injury that broke her neck, and she could hear air leaking out of her lung; the police never found the weapon but believed it was a roofing hammer. At the hospital she was given sixty-four units of blood. She lived, and later, seeing Thomas Edward Luther's photograph in the Denver Post, identified him as the man.
Cher Elder, twenty, did get into a car with him, after a night in the casino town of Central City in 1993. She was not seen again until 1995, when her body was found in a shallow grave, shot three times in the back of the head; it was too decomposed for anyone to say whether she had been sexually assaulted. Luther had already served time in Colorado for a 1982 attack in which he beat a woman named Mary so badly that she lost some of her hearing and was left with headaches. Meanwhile he had left for West Virginia, where he was caught and convicted of another sexual assault before being extradited to Colorado.
In prison, awaiting trial, he wrote to a 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." At his trial in January 1996, Judge Christopher Munch refused to let the jury hear the letters or his earlier rape convictions. The defense said he had had consensual sex with Cher Elder and that someone else had killed her, and tried to blame two other men. The jurors quickly agreed he was the killer, and eleven of the twelve decided within seven hours that the murder was premeditated, which would have meant first-degree murder and a possible death sentence. One juror, citing the lack of physical evidence, would not agree.
He was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to forty-eight years, to begin only when he had finished his West Virginia sentence at the Mount Olive Correctional Center. For the attack on Heather Smith he was later sentenced to fifty years more. Cher Elder's family and the other eleven jurors began lobbying to change Colorado's rule requiring a unanimous verdict.
He has been convicted of only one killing. Investigators in Breckenridge have long regarded him as a suspect in the deaths of two women who disappeared while hitchhiking in 1982, Bobbie Jo Oberholtzer, twenty-nine, and Annette Schnee, twenty-one, who were shot; he has never been charged with those killings. Heather Smith, now Heather Callahan, married and had three children.