It started out with all the ingredients for a real imbroglio, which has grown into a genuine…. rude word that begins with "cluster." This case has everything - murder, suicides, corrupt police, overzealous prosecutors, and bumbling defense lawyers. It has sub-par investigative work, promotion-hungry officials, lost evidence, and purposely destroyed evidence. It's got art, literature, attention whores, and at least one very irate juror who feels that he was conned. It's got glitzy new technology that promises to revolutionize the crime-fighting business. It has a pseudo-hero, several real heroes, an innocent man rotting in prison, his loyal family, and an angel. It exposes the bogosity of the whole forensic psychology scam - but that's another rant. This case was born to be a media magnet, and a prime example of irresponsible so-called journalism as practiced by some. To borrow the title of a great movie, the case has sex, lies and videotape.

"When this story breaks," I was told, "it will be huge. You don't need to keep an eye out for it. It will find you." It had, of course, already found me, by a mysterious process that still can't be accounted for. Back in mid-2002, in a household where the local newspaper was neither subscribed to nor sought, a part of the Fort Collins Coloradoan showed up one day. The way it was folded, a small article showed, and for some reason I read that piece of reportage. Timothy Masters was taking his case to the state Supreme Court, because the appeals court had upheld his conviction for murder.

"Huh?" was my first reaction to this news item, which seemed to be saying that a man was being put away for life, for no better reason than because he made grotesque artwork. It needed looking into.

The sequence of events was gleaned from news stories, press releases, and conversations. The sources don't always agree on details, and do always raise more questions. As Sara L. Knox had observed, "Every tale of murder arises in and on uncertainty, and no definitive tale can exist."

The Background

On a Tuesday night in February of 1987, Peggy Hettrick finished up her evening shift at the Fashion Bar at around 9. She walked home, but couldn't get in because a temporary roommate had her key. She walked to a bar and saw her "boyfriend" with another woman, then went to a different bar, a favorite hangout where the habitues knew each other. Then - maybe - she walked to the boyfriend's apartment - but he wasn't home anyway. Around midnight, she walked back to her own place, and then back to the hangout, where the boyfriend was with the same woman, or perhaps another one. There was a difference of opinion loud enough for others to notice and remember. Between 1:00 and 1:30 in the morning, with a blood alcohol level in the legally drunk range, Peggy left; either alone or with somebody; either on foot or in a car. After that she was seen no more - except, and there's no avoiding this cliche', by her killer.

Don't get me wrong. This is scene-setting, not victim-blaming. Some say a woman shouldn't hang out in taverns or talk to strange men or roam around at night in lonely places. But there's no judgment here. Every heedless thing Peggy did that night, I've done - but in my early twenties; not at 37, her age when she was killed. It takes a lot of staying power to persist in the club lifestyle when you're pushing 40. She was up for it, on a weeknight, after working till 9:00. Impressive.

If an implication is to be made that Peggy was somehow responsible for her fate, let it be made on more generalized, less misogynistic terms. After all, even a woman should be able to move about freely without getting murdered. No, if I were into blaming the victim, it would go like this: "Never give out your only apartment key. Get the damn key copied." No time, no car, no nearby locksmith? No excuse. A responsible adult keeps an extra set of keys to everything, in case of need. If Peggy had done so, she wouldn't have been out wandering around that night. Well, okay, she probably would have - but she might not have ended up in exactly the wrong place at precisely the wrong time. The point is, to say she brought it on herself by being a nocturnal free spirit is just as stupid as saying she asked to be murdered by not providing a spare key ahead of time.

I didn't know Peggy, but I identified with her. We were practically the same age. We had similar tastes: as one of her high school classmates later wrote, "She liked music, theater, philosophy, poetry and movies." This person also described Peggy as "beautiful, intelligent, and so gentle." Maybe we weren't all that similar. But we were both writing novels. We lived in the same part of town, and I walked everywhere, alone, at any hour, just like she did. I could have been the victim, that night or any other.

The Day of the Murder

A few minutes after 7 a.m. on February 11, Peggy's body was discovered in a field and reported to the police. One stab wound in the middle of the back, made by a knife with a five-inch blade, had killed her. She hadn't been raped, but there was some mutilation the police left undescribed, for the sake of the investigation. Because the field adjoined his property, Clyde Masters was one of the first people questioned. He mentioned that he'd been watching that morning as his 15-year-old son Tim walked through the scrub land to the bus stop. He'd seen Tim veer from his usual path and stop for a moment to look at something. At this time, the police were very positive that Peggy had been killed somewhere else, brought to lonely Landings Drive in a car, dumped at the curb (where a blood pool had formed), and then dragged more than a hundred feet into the field. Tim's route to the bus stop intersected this drag trail.

Detectives sped to the high school and pulled Tim out of class. They asked if he knew why they were there. He said it had been bothering him. He'd seen what could have been a dead body, but figured it must be a CPR practice doll or something of the kind, thrown in the field as a joke, maybe even left there by alleged friends to freak him out. The police searched his locker and backpack and found a drawing of one person dragging another, and two sketched maps that depicted the area around near his home. These were later considered some of the strongest pieces of evidence against him. He was questioned that day for six or seven hours, without the presence of his father or a lawyer.

Clyde Masters consented to a search of the home he shared with his son, probably unaware that the police not only would look around, but could remove anything or everything. "They tore the place apart," as one source put it, and took away many items. From Tim's room, the haul included "a large collection of survival knives with long blades" (if you consider a collection of half a dozen to be large), "a fillet knife, a machete, and a ninja sword…and a large number of drawings and narratives." Oh yes, and "a suitcase with pornographic photos of female genitalia..." Gasp! Not female genitalia in a teenage boy's porn collection! Who could believe such a thing! Given their tendency to exaggerate, this might have been nothing more sinister than Playboy.

Over the next couple of days, Tim was questioned extensively in an interrogation room at the police station. He took a polygraph test which the police said he failed, but which was technically termed "inconclusive." None of Peggy's blood was found on any of Tim's clothes or possessions, or in the house. He didn't have any of her property or body parts. There were footprints, but he lived next to the field and walked through it every day, so there would be. There was no fiber evidence, no eyewitness evidence, no motive, and a whole lot of supposition that added up to jack. There was nothing to show that he'd known Peggy in life, or played any part in her death.

Deciding that they didn't have a prosecutable case, the authorities brought no charges against Tim, but continued to keep an eye on him through various means. They would call the school guidance counselor and ask if Tim was acting weird. The year after the murder, an officer sat in a van for 4 or 5 days around the anniversary of Peggy's death, watching Tim. When he was 18, an officer followed him to a video arcade and reported that Tim seemed agitated when playing a game. He remained the only named suspect.

Some Notes

Going by the photo on the Free Tim Masters website, here was a youth whose portrait Caravaggio would have been delighted to paint. I see the same smoldering impatience with the adult world that characterized my own adolescent years. Strangely, the man who became the angel of the case saw himself there, too. Though there is no adult resemblance, he felt Tim could have been him as a teenager. The angel remembers how teenagers think, or rather, don't think. "Tim's reaction to seeing the body and not believing it was real might seem pretty dumb to us, but kids don't believe bad things like murders will happen near them."

There would have been the embarrassment factor. When a mine superintendent found the legendary Cullinan Diamond, he thought it was a big piece of glass placed in the tunnel wall by a practical joker. What if Tim had arrived at school and called the police, and they went to that field and found a doll? He'd be a laughingstock, which any teenager would rather die than be. Also, if this adolescent boy had an involuntary physical reaction to the sight of a woman (whether human or artificial) sprawled on the ground with her jeans yanked down, that alone would be shaming enough to make him want to keep quiet about the whole matter.

It seems that something of the kind may have happened. Years later, when Tim was eventually arrested and a Cold Case Files TV show filmed, they made a big deal out of finding what they termed a "mannequin," a home-brewed sex aid that was basically a stuffed pair of blue jeans. When hormones are rising, a kid can be sexually imprinted by the oddest things, without being given any choice in the matter. It's unfortunate and kinky, but it's not proof of murder. (For once, the court showed some good sense and didn't admit the object as evidence, or any testimony about it.)

Another thing about that TV show: when discussing the home where the Masters father and son lived, the narrator keeps pounding on the word "trailer," suggesting that any family who lives in one must be trash. It was a big, solidly planted mobile home, not unlike the doublewide my parents occupied for years, and they're perfectly respectable people. In the Cold Case Files episode, a cop says when they went to arrest Tim as an adult, they found "his room from years ago - just transplanted." That's not an indictable offense, either. If it were, I'd be in trouble. My room has looked the same in every place I've ever lived: handmade quilts and lots of books. So what? That doesn't make me a murderer. But we're getting ahead of the story.

As long as it's digression time, there were some similarities between Peggy and Tim, also, aside from aspiring to write. Both have the middle name Lee. Both were military brats, both their mothers had died, and both moved to Fort Collins in 1978.

Failed Arrest and Successful Arrest

Out of school, Tim joined the Navy. He was stationed in Philadelphia when, five years after Peggy's murder, the Fort Collins police leaned on an informant, who told them Tim had mentioned one of the crime's unpublicized details. An arrest warrant was obtained, and three officers flew East and questioned him extensively, letting his co-workers and friends know why. As it turned out, there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for Tim's supposedly forbidden knowledge. A high school classmate had been an Explorer Scout, one of the police department interns who helped search the field where the corpse was found, missing one nipple and a sliced-off section of vulva. The students were asked to look for discarded body parts. This girl, of course, told her friends, and pretty soon it was all over the school.

The officers returned home empty-handed, one of them very angry. Sgt. Jim Broderick had decided from Day 1 that Tim was the killer, and did not intend to rest until he was tried and convicted. Broderick's next move was to hire forensic psychologist Reid Meloy. Remember the "large number of drawings and narratives"? The police had never returned this property to Tim. More than two thousand pages of his school notebooks, stories, pictures, and personal writings were now shipped to Dr. Meloy, whose assignment was to find links between this artistic and literary juvenalia, and the murder of Peggy Hettrick.

Over a period of six months and at a cost to the taxpayers of around $70,000, he succeeded in doing so, and compiled a report. He also, according to an insider, "practically wrote the arrest warrant," which ran to some 30 pages. Thanks to Dr. Meloy's vivid imagination, and the fact that he was only shown evidence related to Tim and no other suspect or suspects, the FCPD now had what they needed. Sgt. Broderick and others went to California, where Tim had moved to be near his sister, and arrested him for the murder that was now a decade in the past. They also, to quote a later court document, "seized additional drawings and narratives…created after the crime, as well as other items, from which Dr. Meloy prepared a second report."

The trial, in March of 1999, featured Tim's writings and drawings, as well the testimony of the expert witness who said Tim had drawn "surprise attacks, gruesome death scenes, and scenes of violence and sex, including mutilation." Dr. Meloy, although he was not allowed to come right out and say so, skillfully assured the jury that a boy who would draw such pictures, would undoubtedly slay a stranger just for the thrill of it. It worked - one juror was quoted as saying, "He admitted his guilt to us through his pictures." To their credit, the jury deliberated for several hours, but in the end they convicted Tim Masters of first degree murder, and he was sentenced to life in prison.

The Basis for Conviction

"Hold on," you say. "That's it? Pictures and stories?" Same thing I said. Even though the police claimed to have new evidence that would finally justify an arrest after more than ten years, there was no new evidence. Just the same old adolescent scribblings, the kind found by the thousands in any high school across the land, now interpreted by a pricey "expert." Tim was imprisoned for life on evidence that even the most generous assessment could only call slim. Despite all the intensive study of his productions, no picture was found of a woman being stabbed in the back. And even if there had been a hundred such pictures, and a dozen forensic psychologists to explain their significance, it still wouldn't prove anything. In the American justice system, doodles, marginalia, graffiti, and even oil paintings are not probative of murder. At least not in the America I still thought I lived in.

The notion that anyone who produces upsetting art is capable of murder, is an insult to me personally and to nearly every painter, musician, and writer I know. Some things change in this world, but others remain the same, including this: To depict violence, graphically or in words, is not to do violence. If creative people can't exercise self-expression in writing and drawing, for fear of being accused of murder when someone happens to be killed in their neighborhood, this is a matter of prior restraint, all-encompassing and society-wide. It's a First Amendment issue, my favorite Amendment, and I won't shut up about it. When a life sentence is to be doled out, I prefer that someone receive it for murder proven beyond reasonable doubt, not for antisocial art.

I don't believe Tim Masters killed Peggy Hettrick. Whoever did, it would be better if the killer went free than for us all to live in a society where a person gets a life sentence for making ugly pictures. It's unpopular to say so, but over all, the greater good is served when the occasional miscreant escapes punishment - if the alternative would be wrongful punishment of the innocent. Goddess knows there are plenty of killers on the loose already, all over the world, many of them wearing nice suits or neat uniforms. The outrageous notion that an accused can be convicted on the basis of lousy art work is an idea we can't afford to normalize.

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