29 years later: The cold case that haunts Fort Collins

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EPISODE 2: People v. Masters, Episode 2: The Suspect

EPISODE 3: People vs. Masters, Episode 3: The Trial

EPISODE 4: People v. Masters, Episode 4: The Questions

In 1987, it was a field.

Now it's home to a condo complex in the middle of town — among restaurants and shops and a shiny new mall — but back then it was a far cry from that, an area on the edge of an undeveloped side of town. 

Now Midtown, it was where development, for the most part, stopped. A mix of old and new Fort Collins, the neighborhood was starting to give way to newer development, shopping and the construction of big, beautiful houses built on the shores of Warren Lake. 

Today it is not the same place it was the morning of Feb. 11, 1987, when the body of 37-year-old Peggy Hettrick was found in a Fort Collins field.

Hettrick, an artistic redhead who worked at the nearby Fashion Bar ladies specialty store, was fatally stabbed in the back one time and sexually mutilated. Her body was dragged from the west curb at the 3700 block of Landings Drive through the prairie grass, staining it with her blood. Her purse still hung from her shoulder. Her jewelry was all in place, a wide gold bracelet around her wrist, her nails perfectly manicured with pink polish. 

It was a gruesome crime — one that lingers in the shadows of Fort Collins history. And we still don't know who did it. 

The 29th anniversary of Hettrick's death came and went earlier this month, serving as a reminder of the unknowns that still surround it. 

Where did Peggy go that night? What route would she be taking home? Was she traveling by foot or in someone's car? What about her on-again-off-again boyfriend? Or the guy named Derrick who friends vaguely recalled but police could never track down? The eye surgeon whose house backed up to where her body was found?

What about the shoe prints? The physical evidence that may lead to her killer? The DNA?

COLD CASES:  Detectives, families haunted by unsolved crimes

And how could the system fail two people? Tim Masters was a 15-year-old boy who stumbled across Hettrick's body that winter morning.

He spent most of his life looking over his shoulder, maintaining his innocence and, years later, fighting to get out of prison for a crime he didn't commit.

"It's a nightmare of Western society that you wake up in prison and you're innocent," said Steve Lehto, the author and Michigan attorney who helped Masters write his book, "Drawn to Injustice," after Masters' release and exoneration. 

"Peggy Hettrick's body is mutilated in the field and it's mutilated in a very unusual manner by someone who may have had some sort of surgical or medical training," Lehto continued, going into the police and prosecution's theory that led to Masters' wrongful 1999 conviction more than 10 years after he saw Hettrick's pale, lifeless body, mistook it for a Resusci Anne doll and continued on to his school bus stop.

CATCHING A KILLER:  Remembering of '81 murders of the 'Mad Dog Killer'

Lehto says given the proximity of the mobile home that Masters and his father lived in on the edge of the field, the fact that he didn't report the body, his macabre teenage drawing and stories and his collection of hunting knives, the teenager became a focus of the investigation early on. 

But "the story makes no sense," Lehto continued, speaking of the prosecution's theory, argued in 1999, that Hettrick had been walking home from the Prime Minister bar in the early hours of Feb. 11, 1987 when Masters killed her, dragged her into the field and mutilated her.

"Even if you look at the path from the Prime Minister to where Peggy Hettrick lived, the shortest path was not down that road. And why would a woman, a small woman, walk by herself down a dark, dirt road at night, which is not the shortest distance to her apartment when there's a paved, lit road that goes there faster?" 

"I mean, none of it made any sense, but the police were so intent on getting Tim found guilty that they discarded all of these that pointed away from Tim," he added.

Upon inspection of photos from the scene, it's unclear if Landings was a dirt road, like Lehto says. One photo shows a pool of Hettrick's blood on the paved western curb. 

Other theories, argued by Masters' defense attorneys during his bid for a new trial in the mid-2000s, include that Hettrick was driven to the field in a car after being stabbed and mutilated. They also point to other possible suspects who should have been considered later on, including prominent eye surgeon Dr. Richard Hammond, who was arrested in 1995 after secretly filming women and girls in a bathroom of his home and later killed himself. 

And then, of course, there's the DNA, the kicker in the case that helped secure Masters' release from prison in 2008 and pointed, instead, to Hettrick's on-again-off-again boyfriend.

"This case really laid bare, I think for a lot of people, their worst fears about how the system can get stacked against you," said USA TODAY reporter Trevor Hughes, who reported on Masters' bid for a new trial, release and exoneration for the Coloradoan in the late 2000s. 

In the years that followed, Fort Collins police and the prosecutors from Masters' trial were accused of misconduct.

Lt. James Broderick, the lead investigator on the case for years, was indicted by a grand jury, twice, on felony perjury charges, but they were later dismissed. Broderick resigned, however, and Judges Jolene Blair and Terry Gilmore, the prosecutors from Masters' trial, lost their 8th Judicial District seats in Larimer County in the November 2010 election.

"It's certainly not the poster child for how to conduct a murder investigation," Lehto said. "And that's the real sad upshot of this, you know, whoever killed Peggy Hettrick is still out there."

And with that person, questions. 

Erin Udell covers culture in Fort Collins. Follow her on Twitter: @erinudell

Podcast: Making a Murderer in Fort Collins

If you have a Netflix subscription, you've probably heard of the 10-part docu-series "Making a Murderer." It's compelling stuff, following the doomed life of a Manitowoc County, Wisconsin man through a 1985 wrongful conviction and, more recently, a new legal entanglement and prison sentence. This man, Steven Avery, served 18 years in prison for a 1985 crime he didn't commit before being exonerated through advances in DNA testing. And as this story continued to make headlines, I saw comments from Fort Collins friends. "Sounds a little familiar, huh?" their comments would say, obviously a nod to our own exoneree, Tim Masters, the Fort Collins man who was wrongfully convicted for the murder of Peggy Hettrick more than 10 years after the crime in 1999. Reporters have, of course, covered this story exhaustively. But I thought there would be something to telling it, after 29 years, in a new way. Not through written words, or the lens of a camera, but instead through the voices of those who lived it. Peggy's boss. The biker who found her body. The detective who processed her apartment. An officer who interrogated Masters. Attorneys, authors, investigators, journalists. I wanted to explore this in a way it hadn't been before.

Explore the unsolved 1987 homicide of Peggy Hettrick, and resulting wrongful conviction of Tim Masters, with the Coloradoan's four-episode podcast, "People v. Masters: Making a Murderer in Fort Collins.

The podcast's first episode is now available on Coloradoan.com, with the remaining episodes to be released each subsequent day. The series will also eventually be available on iTunes.