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 by one account; Westword, writing in 1995, put the figure at eighty-seven, from the Belle Bonfils Blood Center where she later went to work. She lived. Nearly two years later her psychiatrist handed her a newspaper story about the Cher Elder case, and she turned the page to a photograph of Thomas Edward Luther. "It's him," she said. The Denver detective on her case, Scott, found that the composite drawn from her description looked as though the artist had worked with Luther in the room; he built a photo lineup around a newer picture of Luther, without the beard, glasses and hat, and she picked him out at once.
Cher Elder, twenty, did get into a car with him, after a night in the casino town of Central City in March 1993. She was a waitress at the Holiday Inn, a graduate of Purdy High School in Missouri, and in the words of her obituary she enjoyed cross-stitch, reading, art, photography and writing poetry. Her body was not found for nearly two years. On February 23, 1995, her former boyfriend, Byron Powers, who had made a deal with prosecutors whose terms were never disclosed, led Detective Scott Richardson of Lakewood up the road from Empire toward Berthoud Pass to a pile of rocks. Beneath it, in a grave two feet deep, lay her body; dental records identified her. Most accounts say she had been shot three times in the back of the head; Westword, describing the autopsy in 1995, reported two shots to the back left side of her head from a .22 held about three inches away. The body was too decomposed for anyone to say whether she had been sexually assaulted, and contrary to what Luther had claimed, there was no sign of drugs. In his statement to Richardson, Powers said Luther told him he had shot her at an overlook above Golden because she was threatening to go to the police, and had thrown the gun in a river. On March 7, 1995, a Jefferson County grand jury indicted Luther for her murder, sexual assault and robbery. 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." In a ruling of December 8, 1995, Judge Christopher Munch barred the prosecution from presenting his rapes in Summit County and West Virginia; the women, he wrote, bore a striking resemblance to one another, but the state had not shown enough beyond Luther's bad character to tie those attacks to Elder's death. At his trial in January 1996, the jury heard neither those convictions nor the letters. His lawyer, Lauren Cleaver, had another line of attack: several of the state's chief witnesses, Powers among them, were criminals who had made deals, and five people, Powers included, had at first said they saw or heard from Cher Elder after the time the police said she died. 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.
Part of what kept him under suspicion was a jailhouse informant, John Martin, who told Summit County investigators that in 1982 Luther had boasted of killing two local women. For years investigators in Breckenridge regarded him as a suspect in the deaths of two women who disappeared while hitchhiking out of town on the evening of January 6, 1982: Annette Schnee, twenty-one, and Barbara "Bobbi Jo" Oberholtzer, twenty-nine. That suspicion did not survive the evidence. Blood found on Oberholtzer's glove and on a tissue near her body was tested and was neither hers nor Luther's. In 2021 genetic genealogy led investigators to Alan Lee Phillips, a mechanic and miner who had lived in the area all along, and DNA from his garbage, and then from him, matched the blood. On September 15, 2022, a Park County jury convicted Phillips of both murders, and he was sentenced to two life terms. Luther has been convicted of one killing, Cher Elder's. Heather Smith, now Heather Callahan, married and had three children.
January 6, 1982: Annette Schnee and Barbara Oberholtzer disappear while hitchhiking out of Breckenridge; Luther is long suspected, but the evidence later points to another man.
1982: Luther beats a woman named Mary, an attack for which he serves time in Colorado.
March 1993: Cher Elder, twenty, gets into his car after a night in Central City.
April 1993: he attacks Heather Smith, twenty-one, outside her Denver home; she is stabbed five times and survives.
February 23, 1995: Byron Powers leads Detective Scott Richardson to Cher Elder's grave near Berthoud Pass.
March 7, 1995: a Jefferson County grand jury indicts Luther for her murder, sexual assault and robbery.
December 8, 1995: Judge Christopher Munch bars the prosecution from presenting his rapes in Summit County and West Virginia.
January 1996: his trial for Cher Elder's murder begins.
1996: with one juror holding out against premeditation, he is convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to forty-eight years.
2021: genetic genealogy leads investigators to Alan Lee Phillips in the Schnee and Oberholtzer case.
September 15, 2022: a Park County jury convicts Phillips of both murders.