DENVER—A special prosecutor will look into whether a police lieutenant acted improperly when he investigated Timothy Masters, whose murder conviction was overturned this week after DNA evidence pointed to another suspect.
Weld County District Attorney Ken Buck on Wednesday said he will investigate allegations of perjury and illegal eavesdropping by Lt. Jim Broderick, one of the investigators who built the circumstantial case against Masters in the February 1987 slaying of Peggy Hettrick.
No phone number was listed for Broderick and Fort Collins police spokeswoman Rita Davis said he was out of town on a family medical emergency.
Defense attorney Maria Liu filed a motion alleging Broderick’s testimony at the original trial was different from information discovered during weeks of hearings on whether Masters’ should be granted a new trial.
Part of the information discovered during the hearings included transcripts of a recording of Masters repeatedly denying any involvement in the slaying as he spoke to his father during a break in nearly 10 hours of interrogation the day after Hettrick’s slaying. Transcripts of that tape were never turned over to Masters’ original defense team.
Recording a conversation without the knowledge of at least one person involved in that conversation is illegal. It was unclear whether Masters’ father, Clyde, had given investigators permission to record the conversation. He died in 1996, family members said.
“We’ll go where the evidence leads us,” Buck said. “If there are other folks we need to look at, we will as well.”
Masters was convicted in 1999 of stabbing and sexually mutilating Peggy Hettrick 12 years earlier.
Investigators had built a circumstantial case against Masters, based on a psychological analysis, violent pictures he had drawn and the fact that he lived 100 feet from where Hettrick’s body was found. Police said Masters, who was 15 at the time, saw the body but did not report it.
Part of the prosecution’s theory was that a grieving Masters planned the slaying to coincide with the anniversary of his mother’s death, who died four years before the slaying.
Attorneys David Wymore and Liu of Greeley argued that Masters’ conviction and life sentence should be overturned because of withheld evidence that could have been used to prove his innocence.
Don Quick, Adams County district attorney, the special prosecutor representing the county in the review of the conviction, acknowledged that four pieces of evidence had not been given to the original defense attorneys. Those included 274 pages of back-up documents used to form the psychological analysis of Masters, results of a surveillance a year after the slaying where investigators taped a copy of his mother’s obituary to his windshield in the hopes he would react but didn’t, and conversations between experts and police investigators.
Quick said it appeared investigators never gave the information to prosecutors Jolene Blair and Terry Gilmore, both now judges.
“You can never have a thought that the ends justify the means,” Quick said. “That’s the end of any confidence of the justice system if you let that happen.”
Legal experts said investigators and prosecutors are rarely prosecuted for alleged misconduct because of laws protecting public officials and because of the difficulty in proving wrongdoing.
“We have seen time and time again in DNA exonerations that police and prosecutorial misconduct played a role,” said Eric Ferrero of the Innocence Project, a New York-based legal group that works to use DNA to free those wrongly convicted.
“In some of the cases its outright misconduct in hiding eveidence, ignoring evidence of innocence. Other cases we see tunnel vision where we see investigators and prosectuors who become focused on one theory of the crime and don’t see beyond that,” Ferrero said of the 212 cases overturned since 1989 because of DNA evidence.
Quick said Masters’ hearing for a new trial could have continued another two to four years, if it hadn’t been for DNA testing that failed to place Masters at the scene.
Phillip Danielson, professor of forensic genetics at the University of Denver and a science adviser to the National Law and Corrections Technology Center, said the Netherland team that conducted tests for the defense employed the latest DNA testing methods.
Those include using a thread instead of a swab to collect skin cells from Hettrick’s clothing and focusing on areas where her killer would have touched her while committing the crime. That included checking her undergarments and areas under her arms where the killer would have grasped her while dragging her body across the field.
They also used technology that allowed them to focus on a smaller area of DNA, which wasn’t available in 1999. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation lab was able to duplicate the test and confirm there was no DNA from Masters at the scene.
Larimer County District Attorney Larry Abrahamson has declined to discuss any other possible suspects, saying the case is still under investigation. A hearing is scheduled for Feb. 5.
Abrahamson ordered a review of contested convictions where DNA could prove innocence.
