FORT COLLINS — Facing exhausted leads into Peggy Hettrick’s unsolved murder, Fort Collins police embarked on a “risky” plan targeting suspect Tim Masters on the first anniversary of her 1987 death – and promising denials if it publicly backfired, according to police documents disclosed Monday in Larimer County District Court.
The strategy, which a Fort Collins police memo says was advised by the FBI’s behavioral science unit, included round-the-clock surveillance of then 16-year-old Masters and interviewing his sister, Serena.
Then, the memo goes on, the department should send out a series of news releases announcing a “new break” in the languishing case, including that an FBI profile of the killer matches the personality of the suspect.
In the event local media picked up on the news releases, as was expected by police, officers would make sure Masters read the stories by delivering the paper to his home each day and anonymously putting the stories on cars belonging to him and a friend.
It was not clear Monday how much of the plan was implemented. After several weeks of hearings in the ongoing attempt by Masters’ attorneys to win him a new trial partly because of prosecutors’ failure to disclose information favorable to his defense, it also remains unclear whether the FBI ever actually did a profile of the Hettrick killer as a prosecution witness eventually claimed.
But the police memo also shows that Fort Collins detectives had high hopes for getting the evidence they needed on the anniversary of Hettrick’s death.
The “feeling is that the suspect in the case, Tim Masters, may exhibit some behavior near the anniversary date that could be an opportunity to further tie him to the case,” reads the January 1988 memo from Deryle O’Dell, an investigative supervisor. But Masters, who was convicted of Hettrick’s slaying more than a decade later, didn’t break from his normal routine of school attendance, among other activities, that February, police records show. He didn’t visit Hettrick’s grave, where tape-recorders were hidden. He didn’t act out violently, as predicted.
Such detailed records of the operation and its results were never given to Masters’ original legal team, said David Wymore, Masters’ appeals attorney. That nondisclosure violated his client’s constitutional due-process rights, he argued.
From the witness stand Monday, Masters’ initial attorney Nathan Chambers said most of the records Wymore has discovered were never given to him.
“It’s absolutely astounding,” Chambers said.
Special prosecutors appointed to examine Masters’ conviction have not yet questioned Chambers nor had an opportunity to offer an explanation for why the records were not given to the defense. Former Fort Collins investigator Linda Wheeler told The Denver Post on Monday that she gave the binders to prosecutor Terry Gilmore several years before Masters’ trial.
“I can picture the day I did it,” she said.
At trial, prosecution witness and forensic psychologist Reid Meloy referred to an FBI profile as supporting his displaced matricide theory of the Hettrick killing. But no such document was ever provided to defense lawyers.
In recent months, the FBI has contended it has no such document. Wheeler, who helped lead the Masters investigation early on, has said that an FBI profile was never created.
Wymore said he believes that an authentic FBI profile was never created, and that the memo explains why he has never received straight answers about its whereabouts.
The document reads: “It (the overall plan of surveillance and selective news releases) must be considered quite risky in terms of how the community may react if it doesn’t work. In fact it could backfire, and if it does, the FBI will not admit any involvement in its conception.”
