The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 2

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Speaker 4 This special two-part edition of 48 Hours continues.

Speaker 5 Drawn to murder.

Speaker 6 February 11th, 1987.

Speaker 6 I was walking through a field on the way to catch a school bus.

Speaker 7 I saw a body.

Speaker 6 I didn't believe it was real. I thought it was a mannequin and that someone was playing some kind of sick joke on me.

Speaker 8 Peggy Hetrick, a woman who lived in Fort Collins, was found brutally murdered in a field. When the Fort Collins police began to investigate the case, they looked at a number of suspects.

Speaker 8 One of those suspects was a 15-year-old Tim Masters who lived next to the field. He had gone up to the body that morning, hadn't reported it.

Speaker 5 Tim was very introverted and very shy and very quiet, didn't have a lot of friends.

Speaker 8 They went to his house and they found very graphic drawings and writings, as well as a large knife collection.

Speaker 10 Would we bring you in here without some kind of proof?

Speaker 6 Right away, they started saying, I know you did this.

Speaker 11 She's dead.

Speaker 6 We thought the right thing to do was to cooperate with the police.

Speaker 5 Tim was branded the lead suspect in a horrific sexual mutilation and murder at age 15.

Speaker 5 Tim has not had a life since age 15.

Speaker 8 Through the years, they focused on Tim Masters.

Speaker 5 I think that the lead detective, Detective Broderick, in this case, was so obsessed and so convinced of Tim Masters' guilt, he was willing to do anything to get a conviction of Tim Masters in this case.

Speaker 13 The real hope was that there'd be some physical evidence. There'd be a fingerprint.
There'd be something that we'd come up with that would match up with him. And that just didn't happen.

Speaker 5 He works for 10, 11 years.

Speaker 11 There are obviously other avenues that should have been explored that were not.

Speaker 8 They got an arrest warrant for Mr. Masters and charged him with the first-degree murder of Peggy Hettrick.

Speaker 5 I really did not think Tim Masters could pull this off and leave not a single shred of physical evidence.

Speaker 7 Much of the prosecution's case is expected to come from a psychologist.

Speaker 15 The doodles are the evidence.

Speaker 6 I never thought there was a chance in the world that they would convict me without evidence, but they did.

Speaker 6 It was just totally surreal.

Speaker 16 How could this happen?

Speaker 6 How could I end up in here for something I didn't even do?

Speaker 11 After being pursued for years, Tim Masters now was in prison for life without parole.

Speaker 6 Geez, how do you describe that to someone who has an experience that is just unbelievable?

Speaker 11 At his lowest point, he says he even considered suicide, but it just seemed too much like giving up.

Speaker 6 I didn't do this. I couldn't let him win that easy.

Speaker 6 I couldn't leave my family like that.

Speaker 11 He appealed his conviction. He lost.
He appealed that. He lost again.

Speaker 11 Finally, in a last-ditch effort, he appealed again, this time claiming ineffective counsel.

Speaker 6 Every day I'd work on it a couple hours a day.

Speaker 6 People would be walking past my cell on the way to chow and there'd be papers and books spread all over my bed. But I didn't expect anything to come from it.
But then Maria got appointed.

Speaker 17 This is actually one of my first post-conviction cases.

Speaker 11 Then 36-year-old court-appointed attorney Maria Liu says that when the gigantic masters file landed on her desk in 2003, she had no idea what to think.

Speaker 17 So you sort of have to work, unravel the mystery, basically, as to whether or not this person deserves a new trial.

Speaker 11 She hunkered down and started reading.

Speaker 17 And I didn't think he was innocent right off the bat.

Speaker 11 Then she watched those police interrogation tapes.

Speaker 10 You shot the hell out of everybody.

Speaker 17 I believe it was five different police officers tag teaming him, doing everything. Good cop, bad cop, military cop, nice cop.

Speaker 10 That's the one that is dead.

Speaker 19 Was she walking by? What happened?

Speaker 5 It was you.

Speaker 12 You did it.

Speaker 14 What happened to him? Oh no, I didn't.

Speaker 19 I didn't do anything.

Speaker 12 I didn't do this.

Speaker 17 That's when I was like, oh my God, he is innocent.

Speaker 17 And then when I met Tim in the prison, he was more focused on us proving his innocence than he was on getting out, which to me says a lot.

Speaker 11 You're pretty much Tim Masters' only hope at that point. Right.
What's that like?

Speaker 11 Stressful.

Speaker 17 It's really overwhelming because you know in your heart that somebody is wrongfully convicted.

Speaker 11 With so much at stake and with little trial experience, Maria called in flamboyant defense attorney David Wymore.

Speaker 15 Usually there's some evidence that indicates somebody, right? There was no evidence in this case.

Speaker 11 Even so, he knew that requests for new trials almost never are granted.

Speaker 15 When you went into this, what did you think the odds were? 100 to 1. Then 100 to 1 I'd lose.

Speaker 11 100 to 1 you'd lose? Yes.

Speaker 11 Wymore nevertheless joined Lou in digging through 10,000 pages of police and court files, some 20 years old.

Speaker 15 It was just a lot of hard work.

Speaker 11 To their amazement, they soon realized that there were important items of evidence never given to Tim's original lawyers, although although by law they were entitled to them.

Speaker 17 Uncovering this stuff, I mean, I don't know how to put it other than just it's an aha moment. You know, it's not, you know, it's like, ah.

Speaker 18 A man claiming he was wrongly convicted of murder fights for a new trial.

Speaker 18 People of the state of Colorado versus Timothy Masters.

Speaker 11 By November 2007, hearings were well underway. Tim Masters' best shot at winning a new trial.

Speaker 20 There was no physical evidence linking Mr.

Speaker 10 Masters to the crime.

Speaker 7 Good afternoon. I'm Don Quick.
I'm the district attorney for NSA.

Speaker 11 Special Prosecutor Don Quick and his team, representing the state of Colorado, were new faces in court, but the original investigator Jim Broderick was there as well to advise.

Speaker 11 He told a local interviewer at the time he had an open mind.

Speaker 13 Hey, if there's evidence out there, let's see it. But there's nobody that's come to me, and I haven't seen yet anybody that can controvert all these facts that point to his guilt.

Speaker 5 It is clearly a concerted effort to hide evidence in order to convict Tim Masters.

Speaker 4 It's mind-boggling.

Speaker 11 On the stand, Tim's original lawyers, Nathan Chambers and Eric Fisher, who lost the case, defended the job they had done, given all they didn't know.

Speaker 5 Roderick knew about Hammond and just ignored it.

Speaker 11 Especially about the existence of Dr. Richard Hammond.

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Speaker 15 when you're looking into dr. Hammond you're looking into a sex offense right yes sir okay dr.

Speaker 11 Hammond a neighbor of tim's was arrested some years after the hetrick murder for secretly videotaping women in his bathroom

Speaker 15 This guy set up a studio

Speaker 15 to get close-up of vaginas and nipples.

Speaker 15 And you have a body in the field missing those parts.

Speaker 11 A great alternate suspect, the defense says, but his name was never mentioned in the original trial.

Speaker 5 Got to give me the biggest sexual pervert in the history of South Fort Collins.

Speaker 21 He is a superb suspect.

Speaker 20 Geez, that's funny. One guy was a doodler and the other guy's a sex offender.

Speaker 15 Did anybody say that?

Speaker 11 And David Wymore argues that Dr. Hammond's very existence,

Speaker 11 so close to the crime scene, defines reasonable doubt.

Speaker 15 They have the same alibi. Tim Masters' dad says that he's home all night in his trailer.
Dr. Hammond's wife says he's home all night in the house.

Speaker 15 The difference is that Tim Masters doesn't have 300 videotapes of people's vaginas and nipples at his house, and he's also not an eye surgeon.

Speaker 15 Court has to impress on the Fort Collins police.

Speaker 11 It's over. In court, Wymore presents a a long list of other crucial evidence he says was withheld from the defense, and as it turns out, from prosecutors as well.

Speaker 11 It includes Broderick's notes on conversations with a former FBI profiler.

Speaker 12 Roy Hazelwood.

Speaker 5 I mean, he's raising the questions we're raising.

Speaker 11 Roy Hazelwood, according to the defense, questioned the very meaning of Tim's drawings.

Speaker 15 Hazelwood looked at these drawings and said, no, these are just doodles and they don't reflect what happened to Peggy Hetrick.

Speaker 13 Extremely important, extremely relevant.

Speaker 5 We should have had it.

Speaker 11 Then there was the testimony of the state's star witness, Dr. Reed Balloy, who analyzed the drawings.

Speaker 4 I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that Tim Masters was the killer.

Speaker 11 But he now says his opinion was based on incomplete information provided by the authorities.

Speaker 11 Dr. Malloy also had written that Peggy Hetrick's wounds appeared to be surgical.

Speaker 11 An opinion the jury never heard because Jim Broderick didn't turn over the doctor's full 300-page report.

Speaker 5 All I know is we should have gotten them. They knew they existed.

Speaker 15 Without question, the wounds to her vagina are surgical.

Speaker 11 And that big question of surgical skill came up with yet another expert police consulted.

Speaker 17 Dr. Choi basically said it would be a hard cut for him to make, and he was a plastic surgeon.

Speaker 11 But the views of Dr. Richard Choi never surfaced in court either.

Speaker 11 Not, says former cop David Michelson, that it takes all these experts to see the obvious.

Speaker 4 It wasn't done by a boy with a D cell flashlight in his mouth and a pocket knife.

Speaker 5 Crawl out of his window, stab a lady,

Speaker 22 circumcise her.

Speaker 22 Didn't happen.

Speaker 12 Impossible.

Speaker 11 The defense says police never revealed to either side exactly how far they went to get Masters to incriminate himself.

Speaker 17 Planting newspapers suggesting that they were close to finding the killer.

Speaker 17 They were actually planting his mom's obituary on his friend's truck.

Speaker 1 They schemed and planned this elaborate psychological experiment on him, and he passed it.

Speaker 5 This is outrageous. Well, I strongly believe that this police department

Speaker 5 framed Tim Masters.

Speaker 11 But this was equal opportunity withholding. Material wasn't turned over to the defense, but not to prosecutors either.
Broderick concedes it may not look very good.

Speaker 11 So you're just sitting there listening to them say there's this, this, this, and this, and this looks like a frame job.

Speaker 13 That's a position and a strategy they took, without a doubt.

Speaker 12 And it wasn't.

Speaker 14 Oh, absolutely not.

Speaker 13 You know, there was no effort to

Speaker 13 pinpoint just Tim Masters on this case.

Speaker 11 He says that while he may not have turned over all his notes, the defense had the same information in reports he did turn over.

Speaker 13 I made detailed, thorough notes, detailed, thorough police reports. My notes were represented inside those police police reports.

Speaker 11 One special prosecutor's report called aspects of the police investigation disturbing.

Speaker 7 We have repeatedly said that we will go where the evidence takes us.

Speaker 11 But Don Quick insists that not only was it not a frame-up, the work of Broderick, a 29-year veteran cop, was meticulous and detailed.

Speaker 11 But all the things that didn't get turned over

Speaker 11 are things things that potentially could have helped the defense. Yes.
I mean, it doesn't seem to be any omission of things that hurt the defense.

Speaker 8 I would agree with your characterization.

Speaker 11 And the question is: why was just exculpatory stuff withheld?

Speaker 13 Well, I mean, obviously, the defense is free to make that argument.

Speaker 11 So, any mistakes that were made here were honest mistakes?

Speaker 9 Sure.

Speaker 15 When you know that you have evidence that indicates it's innocent, and you don't turn it over, you don't get the benefit of doubt from me that it was a mistake.

Speaker 15 I want to draw your attention to page 1242 on a police report.

Speaker 11 Toward the end of the hearing, the sheer volume of Broderick's material became an issue itself.

Speaker 5 David Wymore and Real Lou. They would be questioning a witness and they would see Lieutenant Broderick go over to a box.

Speaker 5 And David Wymore asked one day and says, what is that box and why is he pulling stuff out of that box and why don't I have it?

Speaker 11 Personal files just sitting there in court. Frustrated, the judge decides it all should be turned over immediately.

Speaker 6 Every time I'd come into court, we'd get a new piece of evidence. We just kept finding stuff that's hidden.
Super secret file after super secret file.

Speaker 20 Where was this on April 12, 2006?

Speaker 19 I mean, where did this thing come from?

Speaker 12 And I went and looked.

Speaker 11 But ironically, because Broderick kept everything.

Speaker 15 Footprint number four looks like Tom McCann's shoe.

Speaker 11 The defense is able to produce what it says is the most convincing argument yet that he and the prosecutors had this murder all wrong.

Speaker 13 There was no effort to pinpoint just Tim Masters on this case.

Speaker 13 It just doesn't add up that there was anything other than to just do the best job we could with a case that could have remained unsolved.

Speaker 21 Good morning, Jim. Jim Broderick, how you doing?

Speaker 24 In 1987, Jim Broderick knows in his own mind that Tim Masters committed this homicide.

Speaker 11 Veteran crime scene investigator Barry Goetz, now working for Masters Defense, says he realized the extent of Jim Broderick's tunnel vision only as the hearings to win a new trial for Tim neared an end.

Speaker 15 Do you ever recall ever seeing a photograph of foot impression number four in the ground?

Speaker 24 We're in open court and Dave Wymore is talking to Eric Fisher, one of Tim's original defense attorneys.

Speaker 5 From my understanding, Broderick had these in his file and he didn't give them to us.

Speaker 11 The showstopper emerges from Broderick's box of personal files.

Speaker 19 Where did this thing come from?

Speaker 12 This whole envelope.

Speaker 15 Yeah, the whole envelope. I never saw it, Judge, until today.

Speaker 11 In that envelope, enhanced photographs of footprints from the crime scene, two of which the defense says are consistent with a Tom McCann dress shoe.

Speaker 24 There's two Tom McAnns along the blood trail. One at the curb, and after making several turns, 30 feet in, there's the Tom McCann again.
Next to the blood trail in blood.

Speaker 11 Tim Masters never owned a pair of Tom McCanns. How much of this did the original defense know?

Speaker 21 Well, they'll know this.

Speaker 5 We didn't have a photograph of number three or four where you could see horizontal lines, but the FBI did, and Lieutenant Broderick did, and had they given it to us,

Speaker 5 it might have made a huge difference at trial.

Speaker 14 They got all of that.

Speaker 13 Everything was turned over to them.

Speaker 11 On this point, Lieutenant Broderick is adamant. Fisher, under oath or not, is flat out wrong.
Every enhanced picture there was of every footprint was turned over to them.

Speaker 11 The problem, he says, is that the prints aren't clearly identifiable as Tom McCann's.

Speaker 11 To this, the defense pulls out another note from that treasure trove of documents.

Speaker 24 He definitely knew because he wrote a note to himself that he knew.

Speaker 17 He writes number 105 is messed up. Brand pattern looks like Tom McCann's shoe.

Speaker 16 If the jury saw that, how do you convict him after that?

Speaker 11 Now armed with all this new evidence, Masters lawyers have come up with their own scenario of what they think really happened to Peggy Hedrick.

Speaker 15 Who did this is two people, one of them wearing a Tommy Cannon shoe, doing this.

Speaker 11 David Wymore thinks it all began in a car.

Speaker 15 She's being abducted. Somebody's got a knife to her cheek around her like that.
She knows the gig's up. She opens the car door, starts getting her right foot out.
He grabs her and stabs her.

Speaker 11 Key to Weimore's theory are Peggy Hetrick's boots.

Speaker 15 If you look at these two boots, you'll see that this boot has normal wearer.

Speaker 11 But in this police photo, abrasions are clearly visible on the sole of the right boot.

Speaker 15 What the right boot shows us is that she stuck her foot out of the car.

Speaker 11 In tests, the master's defense team was able to reproduce these abrasions.

Speaker 15 If you have somebody stick their foot out of the car door, putting pressure on it, then you only have to drive like about five or six miles an hour for 10 feet and you'll reproduce that scuff mark on the right foot every time.

Speaker 11 And they believe Peggy Hetrick is stabbed being pulled back into the car because Barry Getz says the holes in her clothing prove it.

Speaker 24 The cut in the coat, the cut in the blouse, and the cut in her body do not line up. You have to move the blouse one inch to her left.

Speaker 24 You have to move the coat two inches to her left in order for that wound to line up.

Speaker 24 You have pulling on your coat and blouse. I stab you one time in the back.

Speaker 11 So she's killed in the car.

Speaker 7 Right, in the car, then it could be anywhere.

Speaker 11 Weimore theorizes that her killer or killers next took her somewhere that gave them privacy, light, and room to work.

Speaker 15 They lay her on a table, they wash her,

Speaker 15 they excise her,

Speaker 15 then they carry her and dump her in the field.

Speaker 11 Back at the field, Barry Goetz says the evidence leads him to conclude that the body was dragged only a short distance down the embankment.

Speaker 24 Where you have drag marks, you have no blood. Where you have blood, you have no drag marks.

Speaker 11 You would expect, were she being dragged, to find heel marks.

Speaker 24 And on her jeans, you would see the marks that the grass makes, and the dirt makes, and the blood makes.

Speaker 11 Marks like these on Goetz's own daughter after she helped him reenact a dragging scenario.

Speaker 24 You don't see those on her because her legs are not in contact with the ground when she goes through there.

Speaker 11 No, Goetz says two people carried Peggy Hetrick's body to its resting place, her bloody coat painting a trail.

Speaker 22 She is carried.

Speaker 24 Her heels are not in contact with the ground except for that run down the slope.

Speaker 15 That's what happened to her. It is as clear as the nose on your face.

Speaker 11 If true, that makes Tim Masters' drag drawing, a linchpin of the prosecution's case, a lot less relevant.

Speaker 24 There's nothing accurate about his drawing.

Speaker 15 I think the footprints alone deserved to give him a new trial. I thought Dr.
Hammond alone deserved to give him a new trial.

Speaker 15 The psychological experiment alone deserved to give him a new trial, the non-disclosure of all these things. But I never count my chickens before they hatch.
You know, I got to hear it from the court.

Speaker 11 Because, as damning as that list sounds, these hearings are far from over. The prosecution has yet to present its answers to the defense's many charges.

Speaker 6 This is, at the end of the day, a search for the truth.

Speaker 11 The bar for granting a new trial is very high.

Speaker 17 It's so hard to undo a conviction. I just want them to confess that they're not.

Speaker 11 Wymore and Liu would love some new evidence to lower that bar a bit, and modern science could provide it.

Speaker 24 The two individuals that carried her would have transferred their DNA onto her clothing as they carried her into the field.

Speaker 11 But can investigators retrieve DNA after all this time?

Speaker 24 We're one month shy of 20 years. Are we still going to find the DNA? We don't know, but we're going to try.

Speaker 11 With Tim Masters' future hanging in the balance, the defense team is about to go halfway around the world and risk everything to find out.

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Speaker 17 This was a very emotional case, I think, for on so many levels.

Speaker 15 You have a woman murdered in a small town,

Speaker 15 some sort of mutilation going on.

Speaker 15 Bad case.

Speaker 11 Lots of pressure to solve it.

Speaker 12 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 11 It wasn't their job to solve it.

Speaker 17 I believed in him and I believed in the case.

Speaker 11 But Tim Masters' attorneys, David Wymore and Maria Liu, knew that new evidence of another killer might be the only way to get their client out of prison.

Speaker 11 So in the winter of 2007, they took a huge gamble, betting that there would be DNA on the clothes Peggy Hetrick wore when she was killed, and that it would help identify her murderer.

Speaker 11 DNA was such an infant science back then that although investigators did analyze hair, blood, and fibers, no DNA tests ever had been done on the clothing.

Speaker 11 But now that testing was possible, was it also smart? Would it help Tim Masters?

Speaker 15 My job was to exclude Tim.

Speaker 11 There's not a moment when you said, yikes. You know, what if

Speaker 11 this DNA comes back and it's Tim's?

Speaker 15 I'm a trial lawyer. There's always a chance and always in the back of your mind is yikes.

Speaker 11 If it's Tim Masters, it's Tim Masters. Former Fort Collins cop Linda Wheeler, by now a firm believer in Tim's innocence, was all for it.
Go where the evidence leads you.

Speaker 23 This is what we got from this location on the panties.

Speaker 11 Plus, she knew just the man to do it. If you compare the numbers, he has developed such an expertise of being able to find the evidence, the trace evidence.
If it's still there on the clothing,

Speaker 11 then Richard can find it.

Speaker 12 Korea?

Speaker 11 Joy. Richard is Richard Eichlenbaum, a DNA expert who, with his wife Selma, a forensic medical examiner, loves nothing more than a chance to use hard science to ferret out the sordid secrets of crime.

Speaker 25 And Linda was very persistent. She says this is a wrongful conviction.

Speaker 23 Pretty uncommon to start a DNA laboratory in a farm, I think.

Speaker 11 Show me around a little bit. The only problem for the defense...
Why did you want to bring this out here?

Speaker 11 They had to travel thousands of miles to, of all places here in the Netherlands, to a tiny lab in this quaint farmhouse some 60 miles from Amsterdam.

Speaker 23 We have our DNA trace recovery in this building. We also have DNA isolation or DNA extraction.

Speaker 11 What's here?

Speaker 23 This is our bloodstain room.

Speaker 11 Is there somebody in there?

Speaker 12 Yeah, we have

Speaker 23 our testing doll. We do training courses for judges and criminal law.

Speaker 11 What is all that?

Speaker 25 What you see there is an arterial gush.

Speaker 11 The Eichlinbaums jokingly call it the crime farm.

Speaker 12 The crime farm.

Speaker 11 The crime farm, yes. What was the biggest challenge as you approached this?

Speaker 23 To get this evidence to Holland, I think this was quite unique.

Speaker 23 I believe it never happened that a case in the States went out the States.

Speaker 11 David Whitemore and Maria Lou said, Linda, they'll never let that evidence out of the United States. Never happened before.
The prosecution fought hard to prevent it happening this time.

Speaker 11 But in the end, Judge Weatherby went, okay, I'm going to allow that. The judge did insist that someone had to escort the clothes to Holland.
Barry Goetz volunteered.

Speaker 11 I assume you didn't check this, right?

Speaker 24 This was carry-on.

Speaker 11 Goetz had been with the Colorado State Crime Lab for 22 years.

Speaker 11 In January of 2007, clutching his priceless suitcase of evidence, he flew to Amsterdam.

Speaker 11 Took the hour-long drive to the Eiklenbaum crime farm.

Speaker 12 Good morning. Good morning.

Speaker 23 You had a good trip?

Speaker 11 I did. That's it.
And began helping Richard carefully unpack Peggy Hetrick's clothes. Jeans, a blouse, underwear.

Speaker 6 This is the victim's clothing.

Speaker 11 Okay. Readying the individual pieces for testing.

Speaker 16 So we've got the bra.

Speaker 7 So the prize, it's JT47.

Speaker 11 As usual, Richard Eichlenbaum would use a most unusual approach.

Speaker 24 What he's looking for is not the blood stains, not the saliva stains, not the semen stains. He's looking for skin cells that are transferred onto clothing when someone uses a lot of force.

Speaker 11 Skin cells and so-called touch DNA are Richard's specialty. He's a pioneer in this approach, the same that finally cleared the parents of John Bonet Ramsey of her murder.

Speaker 23 We finally found skin cells on the

Speaker 23 under the armpits.

Speaker 11 The technique, which they've used in dozens of cases, involves not just being able to retrieve the skin cells, but in knowing exactly where to look. How important is force to this?

Speaker 11 Like if I just reach over and go like that, have I left DNA?

Speaker 23 You will leave DNA. But there's no laboratory in the world who will get a good profile out of that.

Speaker 25 That's very important because the upper skin,

Speaker 25 those cells are dead. The DNA there is not very good.
And by using force, you shed those cell layers and then you come to good layers where the DNA is better.

Speaker 25 And by using force on something, you leave those cells behind. And it are those cells where we get the DNA from.

Speaker 15 The way the Dutch forensic scientists look at it is you have to understand the crime first. Where are the most likely places that a perpetrator or perpetrators would touch her in an aggressive manner?

Speaker 23 And we need as much information as we can get.

Speaker 11 Before he even looks for the DNA, Richard tries to reconstruct the murder, step by step.

Speaker 11 He looks where it's most likely logical that a perpetrator has grabbed and possibly has applied force to clothing or to a victim.

Speaker 11 Richard and Selma often will even reenact the crime as they did here with the help of Barry Goetz.

Speaker 24 Where would I grab somebody? One to stab them, one to carry them, one to pull their pants and panties down, etc. And that's where we collected samples.

Speaker 24 We worked 10 days collecting samples from these clothing and looked at them with different lighting, infrared, UV, normal lighting, etc.

Speaker 23 We did more than 60 samples and we did more than 400 DNA profiles.

Speaker 11 And remarkably, more than 20 years after the murder, it all paid off.

Speaker 11 What exactly did he find? Full profile of a male on the inside of the underpants of Peggy Hedrick, right where he had hypothesized where somebody would with force pull down

Speaker 11 the underwear.

Speaker 11 Not only was there DNA, there was enough to analyze. And the results were,

Speaker 24 it's not Tim on any place.

Speaker 23 His DNA is not on the clothing.

Speaker 11 Just as his supporters expected. But they also knew that not finding Tim's DNA wasn't by itself going to set him free.

Speaker 11 So when the DNA came back and it's not him, Why isn't that alone enough to vacate the conviction?

Speaker 11 Because they could always hang their hat on that Tim Masters, he was such a good murderer that he didn't leave any evidence behind. They've said that's from day one.

Speaker 25 This DNA was on incriminating sites on her clothing. And then if you really want to make it clear that Tim Masters didn't do it, you have to find the one,

Speaker 25 the person who left the DNA, let him tell.

Speaker 11 Was it perhaps from Tim's neighbor, Dr. Richard Hammond, who eight years after Peggy's murder was arrested for videotaping women in his bathroom.

Speaker 23 Everybody was thinking, I think, in the defense side,

Speaker 23 that Dr. Hammond was involved in this, and we thought the same.
You did?

Speaker 24 So, yeah, at that time, I think.

Speaker 11 He looked like a good candidate. Yeah.

Speaker 11 But they didn't have a sample of Dr. Hammond's DNA for comparison.
And without it, the Dutch couldn't rule him in or out.

Speaker 11 The thing is, that was just fine with the master's defense because they needed to keep suspicion of Dr. Hammond alive.
If DNA cleared him, then the spotlight would be right back on Tim.

Speaker 11 Putting Dr. Hammond aside then, the Dutch ran more tests on DNA samples from cops, investigators, even from Matt Zollner.
Remember him? Peggy Hetrick's ex-boyfriend.

Speaker 5 Are you the one who stammered Peggy Hetrick's email?

Speaker 11 Whose date gave him an alibi for the night Peggy was killed. You basically tested the ex-boyfriend's DNA in order to rule him out.

Speaker 23 To exclude him.

Speaker 25 No, we didn't. He was so shocked when he entered the room.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 11 Shocked because the DNA didn't exclude him.

Speaker 25 And I was sitting behind my computer and the door opened and Richard said, it's Zollner.

Speaker 16 It's Solner. And I thought, what is he talking about?

Speaker 11 Matt Zollner, who told police that except for that brief encounter in the parking lot, he'd not even seen Peggy Hetrick for a week.

Speaker 11 Not only was Zollner's DNA on the inside waistband of Peggy's underpants, it also turned up on the cuffs of her blouse, where one might grab if picking up a body.

Speaker 11 There's no question this is the ex-boyfriend's DNA inside the waistband of her underpants.

Speaker 12 Yes.

Speaker 11 Okay, where does that leave him? Explain that one. This is him and only him.
No question, no question.

Speaker 11 Clearly, Zollner has many questions to answer. But what, if anything, does this bombshell mean to Tim Masters in prison for the last nine years?

Speaker 6 To me, it's not over yet.

Speaker 6 I'm still dressed in orange. I'm still in a jail.

Speaker 11 For Tim Masters, that old cliché finally is true. This really could be the first day of the rest of his life.

Speaker 23 What's the word of the day, Tim?

Speaker 12 Real.

Speaker 11 Tim is waiting for word on whether the Dutch DNA findings will persuade the judge to grant him a new trial. Certainly, his excited lawyer thinks they should.

Speaker 15 What they didn't have in 1999 was the DNA evidence. The person who killed her touched her.

Speaker 11 Tim's gigantic family packs the courtroom, joining legions of other supporters.

Speaker 12 If you have a cell phone on, please turn it off.

Speaker 15 Check your cell phones.

Speaker 11 Not on hand is Jim Broderick, called out of town on a family emergency. But from their crime farm in Holland, Selma and Richard Eichlenbaum are here.

Speaker 18 I would ask you to reserve any emotional outbursts.

Speaker 8 There's DNA from an alternate suspect on her body in a couple of places and not Tim Masters. That's evidence that a jury, if it had been available back in 99, a jury should have heard.

Speaker 11 The state confirmed the Dutch DNA results. And with that, the prosecutor takes bold action.

Speaker 11 Instructing his deputy to move for Tim Masters' immediate release.

Speaker 7 And so we would respectfully ask that the court grant this motion.

Speaker 18 The court has reviewed the motion, and the court grants the motion to vacate the conviction and sentence and orders the

Speaker 18 release of the defendant.

Speaker 11 With that, the hearing abruptly ends. The state's witnesses never even testify.
And after more than nine years, Tim Masters is suddenly a free man.

Speaker 11 Tim, what do you think?

Speaker 11 He is almost speechless. Tim, what do you think?

Speaker 18 It's not crowded with the other guys.

Speaker 11 Not so, his delirious family.

Speaker 11 We did it! It's just a great feeling for me today, I'll tell you that. It's a long time coming.

Speaker 6 I just want to

Speaker 6 thank my family and my friends who stuck with me all these years. Without their support, I don't know if I could have made it through this.

Speaker 11 We as a family have stayed together so much to support Tim, and we continue to support Tim and will.

Speaker 17 We never turn our back on Tim, not once.

Speaker 15 We never will.

Speaker 10 Well, guys, boom, boom.

Speaker 19 Thank you.

Speaker 6 Luck, man. Thank you.

Speaker 11 How would you describe what this feeling is like?

Speaker 6 Just imagine, well, I don't even know if you could imagine spending all that time up there in prison and finally being free after all these years.

Speaker 6 Well, I don't even know how to answer that question.

Speaker 11 What has surprised you the most?

Speaker 16 Surprised me the most, the price of everything.

Speaker 19 I was not ready for that.

Speaker 11 Do you avoid sort of thinking about what this cost you?

Speaker 6 No,

Speaker 6 not necessarily.

Speaker 15 How would you quantify it?

Speaker 6 What I've lost,

Speaker 6 geez.

Speaker 6 I mean, damn near 10 years of my life. I don't know how you put a price tag on that.
I mean, what's 10 years of your life worth? Especially 27 to 36.

Speaker 6 All I know is that you can never get those years back.

Speaker 11 But Tim Masters is determined to try.

Speaker 16 HCZ.

Speaker 6 So my vision is actually to the point where I could legally drive.

Speaker 7 You can legally drive.

Speaker 11 Three days after his release in 2008, the state dropped all charges against Tim Masters.

Speaker 11 Do you think we'll ever know who killed Peggy Hetrick?

Speaker 15 God, I don't know. I really don't know.
I know who didn't.

Speaker 15 You know?

Speaker 11 The DNA that freed Tim Masters leaves lingering questions about Peggy's ex-boyfriend, Matt Zollner. He today lives in Fort Collins, keeping a low profile.

Speaker 4 If he did it, he better get out of town.

Speaker 11 Zollner did not respond to repeated attempts to contact him.

Speaker 11 I mean, we're talking about skin cells inside her underpants. This is not just, you know.

Speaker 8 The DNA materials were found in a couple of places on the body that we had tested.

Speaker 12 Exactly.

Speaker 11 And that was enough to get Tim Masters

Speaker 11 It's not enough to get anybody else arrested.

Speaker 8 You would have to ask the Attorney General on where he is on the arrest.

Speaker 11 The Colorado Attorney General now has the Hetrick case, but won't comment on any aspect of it. Do you think realistically anybody absent a confession could be convicted for this crime?

Speaker 17 No, I really don't. Since Richard Hammond is deceased, their defense attorney is going to say, look at this guy, he's the one that did this.

Speaker 17 There's way.

Speaker 11 He still may be the defense's favorite suspect, but using a sample of Dr. Hammond's DNA provided by his wife, the state says he has been ruled out as the killer.

Speaker 8 There is no evidence tying Dr. Hammond.
He just happened to live in the neighborhood.

Speaker 11 The court never ruled on whether the original defense lawyers did their jobs, but Eric Fisher accepts some blame.

Speaker 5 Great day for Tim Masters, not really a great day for me.

Speaker 5 I I am upset that this happened and happened on my watch.

Speaker 11 If the original prosecutors are upset, they're not talking. Both were publicly reprimanded and fined for failing to disclose information to the defense.

Speaker 11 But Tim doesn't blame them for what happened.

Speaker 6 It's pretty obvious who did this to me.

Speaker 6 It's one detective, Jim Broderick.

Speaker 11 If Jim Broderick were sitting where I'm sitting right now, what would you tell him?

Speaker 6 I wouldn't talk talk to Jim Broderick at this point.

Speaker 6 There's not a whole lot of love between him and me, so

Speaker 6 it'd be best if we just didn't speak to each other.

Speaker 11 But what would you like to say to him?

Speaker 6 I'm not going to say on camera.

Speaker 14 What it really comes down to is: I'm accountable to God, and I'm accountable to Peggy Hetrick.

Speaker 11 Looking back, Jim Broderick, the man who pursued Tim Masters across decades, made absolutely no apology for his actions.

Speaker 11 Do you believe he did it?

Speaker 14 Well, I believe that I followed the evidence, okay?

Speaker 13 And the evidence pointed to Tim Masters.

Speaker 11 They find the ex-boyfriend's DNA inside her underpants, on the cuffs of her blouse. Does that not give you any pause?

Speaker 13 Well, you can find DNA evidence

Speaker 13 and it may have an innocent explanation.

Speaker 11 Ironically, Broderick says, Tim's lawyers only had that crucial information because of him and his passion for saving everything.

Speaker 13 That characterological trait of mine of wanting to hang on to information not knowing its future use has helped Tim Masters because had I not done that, it wouldn't have been available to be tested.

Speaker 11 Peggy Hetrick's clothes would have been destroyed?

Speaker 12 Everything.

Speaker 13 Everything would have been destroyed.

Speaker 11 That may not mean much to Tim Masters struggling to put together a new life.

Speaker 11 He's got some unlikely new friends.

Speaker 11 Linda Wheeler, the first cop to ever suspect he was guilty. This young man is going to lead a good, productive life.

Speaker 12 What do you have to do?

Speaker 11 Barry Goetz, who travels with him in Europe, beginning with Amsterdam.

Speaker 11 For an appearance with Richard and Selma on Dutch TV.

Speaker 26 And they helped set them free, the innocent man who was imprisoned for 10 years. Very warm welcome for you, Tim Masters.
Thank you.

Speaker 11 And his lawyer, Maria Liu.

Speaker 16 Hey, what's going on? Hey, what's going on?

Speaker 11 Whose office he still visits regularly.

Speaker 17 What are you guys going to do today?

Speaker 6 I have no idea.

Speaker 17 Without all of these people, there's no way that we would be where we are today.

Speaker 11 He seems to regard you as a really good friend.

Speaker 17 Yeah? All of your stuff is now centralized. He will be dear to me.

Speaker 17 It took an entire village of people to free Tim Masters.

Speaker 6 This is the kitchen of my mansion.

Speaker 11 He found a new apartment.

Speaker 6 Little utility area right here, home sweet home.

Speaker 11 No guards, no orders, no rules.

Speaker 6 For the last two years I was in a six by eight cell, which was about from this wall to that wall

Speaker 6 and about to here.

Speaker 11 Not surprising then that he relishes walks in the great outdoors.

Speaker 6 I always loved this place. I like the mountains, period.

Speaker 6 There's a part of me that doesn't even want to start rebuilding my life because I'm afraid of losing it again.

Speaker 27 I'm glad for him. I'm glad for him that he has his freedom.

Speaker 11 Peggy's brother Tom Hetrick, who has long doubted Tim Masters was his sister's killer, greeted the news of his release with mixed feelings.

Speaker 27 But I'm also measured because

Speaker 27 I want people to realize this is not over yet.

Speaker 27 Peggy is the ultimate victim in this.

Speaker 27 Tim Masters got to go home.

Speaker 27 Peggy's not coming home.

Speaker 27 She's never coming home. She comes home in your heart and in your mind.

Speaker 11 And the murder that so shocked this peaceful town more than 20 years ago seems as big a mystery now as it was back then.

Speaker 10 You've reached the Peggy Hetrick investigation hotline at the Colorado Attorney General's office.

Speaker 15 Please leave any information you wish to provide.

Speaker 28 In 2011, Tim Masters was exonerated by the Colorado Attorney General. He received $10 million in settlements for wrongful imprisonment.