Thomas Luther

Victims

9 attributed - 1 MURDER CONVICTION, and it was for SECOND-degree murder, of Cher Elder, 20. Three further convictions for violence against women that were not homicides: the 1982 assault on Mary Brown, the 1995 West Virginia sexual assault, and the attempted murder of Heather Smith, who survived a stabbing. He was a suspect in a December 1993 Pennsylvania murder and an April 1994 disappearance and was charged with neither. None of the further killings was proved in court

Years active

1970s - 1994

Location

Vermont/Colorado/West Virginia/Pennsylvania, USA

Method

Shooting - Stabbing with knife

Status

Convicted in 1982 of the assault on Mary Brown, who had accepted a lift from him, and imprisoned in Colorado until his release in 1993. Within months Cher Elder disappeared after leaving a Central City casino with him, and Heather Smith was stabbed and survived. He fled to West Virginia, where on January 26, 1995 he was convicted of first-degree sexual assault on a hitchhiker and sentenced at his own request to fifteen to thirty-five years. Extradited to Colorado, he was tried for Cher Elder’s murder in January 1996; the judge refused to admit his prior convictions or his prison letters, and one juror would not vote for first degree. CONVICTED OF SECOND-DEGREE MURDER AND SENTENCED TO FORTY-EIGHT YEARS, not life, the term to run consecutively with the West Virginia sentence and to begin only when that one ends. He was later convicted of the attempted murder of Heather Smith and sentenced to fifty years. He blamed the police, the district attorney and the sons of a former cellmate for the killing. Eleven of the twelve jurors afterwards joined the victim’s family in campaigning to change the law that had spared him a capital sentence.

Luther was born in 1957 in Vermont. He had a conviction for a violent rape there in the 1980s and served a sentence for it before moving west.

In March 1993 Cher Elder, twenty, disappeared after being seen with him at a casino in Central City, Colorado. Her body was found in 1995, buried in a shallow grave in the mountains near Empire, after a long investigation by a Lakewood detective who pursued him for two years and eventually persuaded an associate to give up the location.

He was convicted of her murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in Colorado in 1996.

Killings and disappearances in Vermont, West Virginia and Pennsylvania have been attributed to him, and the range of one to nine and more reflects that. None has produced a charge. Some of the attributions rest on his own remarks in custody and some on the coincidence of his movements.

The Elder investigation is the substance of the entry: a single conviction obtained years after the disappearance, on a body recovered only because someone who knew where it was could be persuaded to say.