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The thing about this case is, it never ceases to amaze. The more you study it, the more you bump up against seemingly impossible things. The "Run that by me again?" response is called for, or, often, the WTF??? response. They really did that? They really said that? They really got away with that? There's a tradition of thought where questions are more important and meaningful than answers. What interests me about any topic is the quality and quantity of questions raised by it. The Peggy Hettrick murder is a mother lode.

I wrote about Tim Masters in my blog. Every few months, usually right after Cold Case Files had rerun their highly imaginative episode, e-mails would come. They had a common theme:
"I, too, was struck by several nagging questions."
"It appalls me that someone could be sent to prison for drawing disturbing pictures. I want to think there is more to the case … but I have yet to hear otherwise."
"I am a little disturbed by the lack of evidence….Just having drawings that were inappropriate should not be enough for a conviction."
"I can't believe they convicted someone on the evidence they had."
"I always thought it was the craziest story I ever heard."
"I was floored at the fact that anyone could be convicted on such flimsy evidence."
"We were stunned when we realized that it ended with his conviction on no forensic evidence whatsoever…"
"The thing that got me about Tim Masters is that he was convicted on no evidence at all."

So, it wasn't just me. Over the years, a lot of people sent questions, mysterious hints, and even warnings. They shared what they knew. I heard from a friend of the bicyclist who found the body, from some of Tim's family, and from the general public including a woman who said, "I'd like to think they must have had more info on him other than some drawings….This case makes me sick."

Her nausea was echoed by a former cellmate of Tim's, since released, who wrote: "I get sick to my stomach every time I think of him sitting in his cell. I'm a good judge of character and have known enough criminals in my time not to fall for the old "I'm innocent" thing. I believe in my heart that an innocent man is sitting in prison right now because of a sickening travesty of the justice system."

So there you have it. Incredulity, disturbance, and an urge to vomit. But you ain't heard nothin' yet. Anyone unacquainted with the field of forensic psychology is in for a carnival of astonishment.

The Experts

Almost four years to the day before Peggy was killed, Tim's mother died suddenly. According to one of the theories crafted by Dr. Meloy, Tim was mad at her for dying, so he commemorated the anniversary by choosing a passer-by as a stand-in for Mom, and stabbed this stranger to death. Why did he wait so long? Now, the "triggering event" doctrine comes into play. Several weeks before the murder, Tim had been reading some kind of military manual or magazine in class. The teacher confiscated it and, after class, wouldn't give it back. Tim accepted this situation peacefully, if not happily. But at the murder trial, the teacher was allowed to testify that he was "very scary." (Another staffer testified that Tim "had a chilling calmness." He exercised mature self-control, and they used it against him.) This hassle at school was said to be the "triggering event" that caused the homicidal incident….a month later. That would be quite the delayed reaction. You don't pull the trigger of a gun and expect the bullet to come out in four weeks. By that standard, anything could be the "triggering event" to any other thing that happened at any time subsequent to it.

A government document says of Dr. Meloy, "He opined that defendant had killed the victim and, by doing so, had symbolically killed his own mother. Based on this and the other evidence, defendant was arrested and charged…"

Wait a minute. Back off! Even when a consultant makes $300 an hour, his opinion is not evidence. How can they say "based on this and the other evidence"? Because it's not. No thoughts entertained by Dr. Meloy about who killed whom, and why, are evidence. And when they start talking motive, it gets even worse.

District Attorney Jolene Blair said, "Who else could it possibly be? Nobody else had a motive, nobody else had the opportunity, nobody else had the weapons."

Who else could it possibly be? Aside from around 80,000 local residents, 20,000 university students, and several thousand others who might have cruised through town on the night of the 10th to 11th of February. Two blocks away from where Peggy's body was found is College Ave, aka US 287, which she crossed several times that evening. Any interstate drifter could have sighted her there and followed her to a more secluded area. Lots of people had the opportunity - anyone looking for trouble, anyone who saw Peggy in one of the bars, or followed her epic wanderings of that night.

Nobody else had the weapons? Give me a break. Within a square mile, I don't even want to think about how many hunting knives, scalpels, and other sharp tools could have been collected in a thorough house-by-house, car-by-car and business-by-business search. Hundreds at least.

Nobody else had a motive? This is a textbook example of the logical fallacy called "begging the question." It takes for granted a proposition, as if that proposition had already been accepted as true, and tries to move on to the next step. Well, just slow down a minute. To say "Nobody else had a motive" assumes they had already shown that Tim had a motive, which they never did. What motive was ever demonstrated? Was he the beneficiary of Peggy's insurance policy? No. Was he her jealous husband? No. Was he an old flame who needed her out of his life in a big way? No.

To say "Nobody else had a motive" is just plain ignorant. To hear a public official say such a thing, is to despair. Unless Ms. Blair knew everything about everybody - unless she was, in fact, omniscient - neither she nor anyone else could possibly know that nobody else had a motive.

By Their Own Standards

Careful study of Dr. Meloy's reports on Tim reveals many glaring contradictions. Meloy tends to make a point directly opposite to some other point he has previously made, and thus argue against his own reasoning. Dr. Meloy testified that in Tim's fantasies (as revealed by his writings and drawings), "his preferred victim would be either a stranger or, at best, a casual acquaintance." At the same time, the good doctor wanted the jury to believe that Tim's preferred victim was his own mother - the farthest thing from a casual stranger.

According to the forensic shrink, because some of Tim's drawings were of stabbings, draggings, and so on, they were "logically relevant to defendant's motive, intent, and plan to commit the crime." To buy that one, you have to forget that, in all the 2200 pages of Tim's notebooks, there was not one picture of a woman stabbed in the back. And if these were "rehearsal fantasies," as Meloy claims, then where are the enactments of the many unusual drawings found in Tim's productions? In one of them, someone nailed a woman's tongue to a table. But Tim never did such a thing in real life. It is Dr. Meloy who seems unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality.

The doctor defined a sexual homicide as one in which there is "primary sexual activity usually involving semen or ejaculation." In other words, the killer gets his rocks off. One of Meloy's more audacious moves was to label this a sexual homicide despite there being no semen found in, on, or near the body. He categorized the murder as "generally a disorganized sexual homicide with some organized features." So, the killer was a disorganized psychopath - who managed to pull himself together enough to brilliantly hide or destroy every trace of evidence.

Are there some deeds even a hormone-crazed teenager wouldn't do, such as random killing and carving within sight of his family home? Imagine the Machiavellian deviousness of such a clever adolescent: "Nobody will ever believe I could be stupid enough to bump off some broad right outside the old homestead. It's the perfect crime. Mwah ha ha ha!"

If Tim were so far gone, surely the madness would have broken out again in the following eleven years. Dr. Reid Meloy himself said, "Once they start to murder, the act becomes habitual." If Meloy's theory were correct, and if Tim killed Peggy, then he would have gone on to kill a few more. But he didn't.

Why Tim Didn't Do It

Three reasons why Tim Masters couldn't have killed Peggy Hettrick:
1. To believe he did it, you'd have to accept that a 15-year-old kid outsmarted the whole Fort Collins Police Department by making it look as if there was absolutely no evidence against him.
2. Any 15-year-old who watches MASH is a decent kid who couldn't possibly commit murder.
3. Losing a mother at a tender age automatically transforms any child into God's special angel on earth, incapable of any wrongdoing.

Is it absurd to claim Tim is innocent for those reasons? Yes. But not as absurd as the doozy of a theory the prosecution came up with to supposedly show guilt. Tim killed Peggy because she, like his deceased mother, was a redhead. Get this: they called a witness who hadn't seen Tim since he was 9 and she was 7. When her family moved, the two kids never met again and she didn't even remember him. In court she was asked the color of her hair, and replied that it was dark brown with red highlights. In grade school, Tim lived next door to a little red-haired girl so, naturally, he grew into his teens with a propensity to kill redheads. That's what the jury was supposed to conclude. In photos, the hair of Tim's mother doesn't look very red, anyhow. And on her driver's license, it said "Brown." But even if the ridiculous red hair theory had any validity, here's a question: in the dark, how would any assailant be able to see Peggy's hair color?

The moon was almost full that night, so there was some light - not enough for long-range hair color identification, but some. If you look at pictures of the area, it's all flat and bare, with nothing to hide behind. There doesn't appear to be any place for Tim to lie in wait, on the unlikely chance that a woman with red hair might walk by in the middle of the night. The jury was supposed to believe a teenage boy would be patient enough to wait in his room until a lone pedestrian was sighted. Then, he would have to exit the house without being heard by his father, or by the target. He would have to make his way, fast, across a quite spacious patch of ground without letting the victim hear or see his approach.

At first, the official theory was that Peggy had been killed in a different location and her body unloaded from a car, then dragged the hundred-and-some feet. When the police focused on Tim as the suspect, the car theory was abandoned (he didn't have a car) and it became doctrine that the killing happened right there at the edge of the street. As far as I know, there is still no irrefutable evidence either way. The police version is that the mutilations occurred last, after the body had been moved away from the street, because otherwise there would have been more bleeding. But there also may have been some cleanup - which means a handkerchief or bandanna or piece of clothing with Peggy's blood on it. Which was never found, especially not on Tim.

Despite the thorough searches of anyplace where Tim could have hidden anything, some items never surfaced. For instance, the missing bits of flesh. For a thrill killer, the victim's picture would go nicely with those two souvenirs. It seems like Peggy must have had a photo ID, because she had cashed checks in two places earlier in the day, and rented a videotape at some point. But no photo ID was found in her purse, or anywhere, and certainly not among Tim's belongings.

The marks on Peggy's face are, at this point, considered not conclusive of anything. Several scenarios could explain them. The attacker might have come up from behind and held a knife to her face. If the cuts were accidental, they could have occurred during the dragging. Dr. Meloy called them distinctive scratch marks, and delivered the opinion that they might be part of the murderer's "signature." But as any crime buff knows, a disfigured face implies a relationship. It suggests that the killer knew the victim well enough to develop personal hatred. And that would mean Peggy was killed by someone she knew - someone who wasn't Tim.

Whether or not the sexual mutilations required specialized training or skill could probably be argued vigorously on either side. Actually, it's hard to picture anyone doing precision surgery in the middle of a field, at night. Which hand would hold the light? The more impressive medical feat was the efficiency of the murder. Wouldn't it take a certain amount of anatomical savvy to kill a woman with one knife thrust? Either that, or phenomenal luck? Also impressive is the distance the killer dragged the body. Peggy wasn't very big, maybe 110 or 115 pounds. We don't know for sure, because the coroner appears never to have actually weighed her. (Isn't that, like, routine?) Anyway, Tim might have been a few pounds heavier, but not many. He certainly was no muscle-man. Whoever moved the body left a drag trail without pauses or breaks, so it seems there were no stops for rest or breath-catching.

There is a wealth of information about the knives Tim owned, and here's the bottom line: No blood or DNA, other than Tim's own, was found on any knife. The collection was pretty well documented - he had the same knives before and after the murder, so it doesn't appear that one of his had been used and then disposed of.

At school, Tim told a friend about some part of his early-morning experience, sketching a diagram to illustrate where, in relation to the house and the bus stop, he saw what might have been a body. Somehow this became evidence of major importance to the prosecution, who interpreted it as showing that he had made a plan. No one denies that Tim saw the body or that he neglected, for whatever reason, to report the body. And that's where the significance of the "map" ends.

When Tim was arrested in August '98, copies of his reading matter were displayed to the camera: magazines called Ninja, Guns & Ammo, and Fangoria. This is a "Don't get me started" topic. Reading habits are not symptoms of murderous intent - but thoughtcrime is too big a subject to tackle here.

In 1999 Tim was offered a deal that would have sprung him from prison after 8 years. He refused it because he wanted a trial to prove his innocence. He wanted to go to court and be exonerated. Would a guilty person take that chance?

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