The Hypocrisy

Hypocrisy is what the whole mess reeks of. Throughout all the years when Broderick was amassing his weapons, the alleged view from Tim's bedroom window was a major big deal. The police did some kind of test with a plank of wood out in the field in the same place as the dead body, which supposedly proved the spot could be seen from Tim's window, although this turned out to be one of the things they lied about in court. The point is, they said it mattered. It mattered a lot. But when an officer noticed that the body's resting place was visible from Dr. Hammond's bedroom window, it was like - so what? This window from which the spot could be seen belonged to a prominent doctor. Suddenly, the bedroom window theory didn't matter at all. In fact, it seems to be a pattern. Theory is proposed; theory is found to not fit with Tim; theory is abandoned.

In the Hammond case, one issue was the delicacy of the situation. The special prosecutor was needed in order to prevent the appearance of impropriety. Everything had to be aboveboard. And the authorities were so thoughtful and considerate toward the feelings of whoever might have been in Hammond's tapes. That's all very nice and politically correct and touchy-feely, but meanwhile, something was going on much worse than mere impropriety. The refusal to consider Hammond as a suspect in the Peggy Hettrick murder is an injustice that could accurately be called monumental.

When Tim was arrested in 1998, three years after the Hammond Affair, it was as if Richard Hammond had never existed. Tim was accused of killing Peggy as if no other suspect ever could or should have been considered. The steamroller of the trial proceeded merrily on its way, preparing to crush Tim with plenty of forensic psychobabble from Dr. Meloy, but nary a mention of the other doctor, the one who lived right across the street from the dead body. There are excellent reasons why Tim should never have been arrested or convicted. In his appeal, excellent legal points were raised. But it looks like the Hammond Affair will be what finally sets him free. That, and the DNA and the fingerprints. And the angel.

An important step was for Tim to prepare a 35c Ineffective Counsel motion and seek a new trial. First, he had to clear the way by making sure the motion wouldn't come before either of two particular District Court judges, because they both were on the prosecution team that convicted him. Not only that, but before his trial in 1999 they knew about evidence that could have turned suspicion away from him, namely the Hammond Affair. The prosecutors withheld that information from the defense lawyers. They claimed that nobody ever told them to look at Hammond as a murder suspect, but their own notes proved them to be liars.

Somewhere along the way, Tim's dire situation attracted the notice of a man who felt called to help. This angel gathered the coalition of people who think Tim was wrongly convicted. He says things like, "What we have to show the court is so overwhelming…the state will realize that they cannot win."

The DNA and Fingerprints

A firm in the Netherlands has developed a way to detect "contact DNA" in epithelial (or skin) cells that remain on objects a person has touched. Tim's attorneys wanted this lab to test Peggy's clothes. It was okayed, but the police department decided to do their own DNA testing first, and used a method involving cotton swabs that pretty much wiped out the possibility of doing the more up-to-date type of testing. Peggy's clothes are being examined by the European lab techs anyway. If contact DNA is found, it won't be Tim's. The FCPD could then produce their samples of Richard Hammond's DNA and compare. Oops! No they can't. After his suicide, they got rid of it.

Well, okay, Hammond's fingerprints are on file, right? Let's compare them with the prints found in Peggy's purse. Around a dozen of them didn't belong to her, or the "boyfriend," or to Tim either. So maybe they are Richard Hammond's, or perhaps they match up with some prints in the national database, to which they were never compared. But wait - the photos and "lifts" that were taken at the time of the murder and sent to the FBI are missing, with more than one story about what happened. First, they said the evidence was signed out from their fingerprint library in 2005 and never returned. Then, they said the evidence never left their lab, but it's gone anyway. One question: If the Federal Bureau of Investigation can't keep track of legal evidence entrusted to their care, then WTF???

When Peggy was found, what appeared to be a partial pubic hair was retrieved from somewhere on the body or clothing. At the time, it was no good for DNA analysis, because the hair root would have been needed. Now, with the advance of technology, the partial hair could be used. Unfortunately, it has been lost as well. It's amazing, how they contrived to hold onto so many other things all these years - knives, shoes, clothing, flashlight, toy guns, books, magazines, and sink drains from the Masters home - but managed to let so much evidence disappear that's important to the defense.

Peggy was wearing a gold bracelet that ended up with somebody's blood on it. The defense would like to have that item for DNA analysis, but it was said to be a family heirloom and given back to her relations, and now they don't know where it is.

At the crime scene, some basic procedures were neglected, such as recording the orientation of various footprints. Granted, there are arguments any good lawyer could make about which way the footprints pointed, and why - but unless the information is recorded in the first place, neither defense nor prosecution can use it. At the trial, such matters as the locations and directions of footprints were established by relying on officers' memories. Maybe it's just that I read too many detective stories, but aren't the measurable, recordable things meant to be measured and recorded?

If Richard Hammond had a safe, or a bank safety deposit box, or anything of the kind, let's hope it was checked for evidence connected to Peggy, such as the missing body parts. One thing's for sure, either Hammond or someone else had the twisted satisfaction of knowing that he got away with it. If Hammond was the killer, imagine him living there for years, in his room with a view of the body dump location, and the home of the young man who would pay the price for murder.

The Pseudo-Hero and the Real Heroes

The case against Tim Masters is emblematic, iconic, prototypical; a textbook illustration of how not to run a murder investigation. Even the little old ladies in cozy British mystery novels know this: you don't solve a case by first deciding who did it, then shaping the facts to fit your theory. Which is what Jim Broderick has done. No matter how many colleagues disagreed, no matter how farfetched the theories he had to weave, no matter how many signs pointing to other suspects he had to overlook, Broderick wasn't going to release Tim from the role of chief suspect, or let anyone else take over that title. Despite having no evidence against Tim, and though it was necessary to put his vendetta on hold for years, Broderick persisted. He was there the day the Colorado Supreme Court heard Tim's case, and affirmed to a reporter that there was "absolutely no doubt in his mind" that Tim killed Peggy.

On the Cold Case Files TV program, Lt. Broderick reminisced about the day in 1998 when they arrested Tim. "This was a 15-year-old kid last time I met him." I wish he hadn't said that - because it sounds an awful lot like a police officer telling a lie. Broderick was one of the cops who flew east in 1992, planning to make an arrest, and he saw Tim then, and Tim wasn't 15. Okay, I understand the need for brevity and simplification in a television script. The story has to fit into a couple of minutes. So the loose ends are snipped off, and the complicated stuff is left out - like the previous, thwarted arrest attempt. And it's easy to see why the cop who thought up the Philadelphia fiasco would want to pretend it never happened.

When a judge green-lighted the defense to take Peggy's clothes for DNA testing, it was Broderick who grabbed them, without permission, and sent them to the DNA lab of his choice, which did its best to destroy the usefulness of the evidence. The defense asked the court to take disciplinary action, but the damage was done.

There's an American myth about the cop who "doesn't mind bending the rules," or whatever nudge-and-wink term they care to use about a rogue officer who's willing to plant evidence, destroy evidence, lie, blackmail, beat suspects, and just generally violate civil rights, and the law, at will. Cops with that mindset have a simplistic, comic-book worldview. The cops are Good and the suspects are Evil, and that's all the excuse they need to completely jump the track. But if the cops are supposed to be the good guys, they should be observing the rules more than anyone, not less.

My fellow countrymen are enamored of the maverick cop who does whatever it takes to lock up his chosen perp, or doer, or animal - whatever the local slang may be. TV viewers love shows about this type. It's One Man Defying Authority to Bring in the Scumbag Who Did This No Matter How Long It Takes. With messianic certainty, the square-jawed lawman makes up his mind about who is guilty, and pursues that person to the ends of the earth. It's the Lone Cop on a Mission from God. Don't get me wrong: dedication to the job, caring about the victims and wanting to avenge their deaths, all that is lovely. But when an investigation becomes a holy war, when it zeroes in on one suspect and excludes all others - well, call me old-fashioned, but isn't that, like, un-American?

And when Officer Studly rushes to judgment, makes the wrong call right from the start, closes his mind to any and all possibilities other than his own cherished suspect - then what? Through the strenuous and unremitting efforts of one pseudo-hero cop, the wrong person is convicted. And if the mistake is ever revealed, Officer Studly is wearing a whole lot of egg on his face. An out-of-control cop is not a hero. The most he can be is a pseudo-hero, someone who attains hero status at another person's expense. A guy who gets books written about his studly law-enforcement feats, and then movies made from the books. Maybe that's what Jim Broderick had in mind.

Now, here's a strange thing. The Hammond Affair occupied an intense month in 1995. Earlier in the same month, a local woman announced that she would file a federal lawsuit against the Fort Collins police department, accusing it of maliciousness and incompetence. Her husband had been murdered a couple of years before, and she was considered the main suspect, although there wasn't evidence enough to do anything about it. They had spent eight months, that's the better part of a year, to determine that one of her shoes had blood on it - and then announced that it wasn't blood after all. Furthermore, one officer point-blank told her if he couldn't prove her guilt, he'd still do his best to ruin her relationships with family and friends. The department was accused of overstepping its bounds, and of conducting a crusade against the woman. Then the Hammond Affair came along and proved crusading, incompetence, and maliciousness to be the very same traits that characterize the official attitude toward Tim.

The real hero of the case is Linda (Wheeler) Holloway, without whose help there might never have been any hope for Tim. In the Philadelphia incident, she refused to carry out the arrest for the simple and sane reason that bringing him in would be the wrong thing to do, and assisted in many other ways since then.

Actually there are several heroes: the angel, the DNA analysts, the new defense team, Tim's family, the journalists who didn't buy into the party line, and seven former detectives who worked on the case. One of them, at the time of the trial, put himself in jeopardy by trying to tip off the Public Defender when they ran into each other at the courthouse. He muttered something like "In the Hettrick case, you should look at Dr. Richard Hammond." This officer assumed a public defender would be handling it. But Tim's family had hired a lawyer, so the tip fell on fallow ground. The whole course of everything might have been different if Tim had had the public defender. His lawyer, of course, had never heard of Dr. Richard Hammond.

One of the original jurors, on hearing that the case had been reopened, attended a hearing where he angrily confronted Jim Broderick about the missing and destroyed evidence and the fact that the jury was not told some very important facts.

Oh - and forget all those mean thoughts about prison guards. (Just kidding.) But - a guard who tossed Tim's cell when he was out at exercise got hold of all his research notes on Donald Long (who Tim then believed to be the killer). The guard copied all the stuff and sent it to a friend in the Fort Collins PD who didn't think Tim did it, to make sure the sympathetic detective was aware of Long. In other words, he was a good guy.

Where It Stands

Recently I noticed that a petition to free a jailed celebrity had garnered 25,000 signatures. Ponder the obscenity of this. Thousands of people will take the trouble to speak up for the famous-for-being-famous blonde. How many will speak up for Tim Masters? Or for that poor bastard who was sentenced to 15 years for being a good neighbor? (He signed for a package when the addressee wasn't home, and the package had cocaine in it.) Or for any of the thousands of other poor bastards who are currently guests of the State, and who shouldn't be?

Why does it matter? It matters because there are issues in this case that could impact my life and fate, and yours too. What difference does it make? In terms of the big picture, maybe not much difference. The sad reality is, injustice has become so rampant that any isolated example of it has to be really egregious, to get any attention at all. The opposite ought to be true. Every time any person is unjustly imprisoned, it should send crowds roaring toward the capitol to kick butt and take names.

The police didn't follow up on a perfectly good suspect, Richard Hammond, because by then the crusade against Tim had gathered too much momentum to be deflected. Despite any number of facts that stared them in the face, all their chips were on Tim as the guilty one. They didn't tell his defense counsel about the other suspect, and that alone ought to be sufficient to put an end to this farce. The momentum now flows in the other direction. Once a few people started paying attention, the inevitable conclusion they had to reach was "This is wrong." When things started to go Tim's way, surprises began to happen, and there could yet be more surprises. The fingerprints might help Tim, and the DNA., and so might some as-yet-unrevealed but decisive piece of information. Having a special prosecutor brought in from outside has got to help. The fact that Tim shouldn't have been arrested, tried, or convicted for Peggy Hettrick's murder in the first place - well, it's too late for anything to help that. When Tim Masters is exonerated, it won't be that justice prevails, only that this particular injustice ends.

Page   Previous   1    2    3    4

For court transcripts, photos, and drawings, see http://www.FreeTimMasters.com

Pat Hartman published 25 issues of the zine Salon: A Journal of Aesthetics and currently is webslave at Virtual Venice.