The Peggy Hettrick Case - Part 1
To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Press play and read along
Transcript
Speaker 1
Don't let the holidays derail your fitness. Stay on track with hydro.
20 minutes rowing on a hydro targets 86% of your muscles as Olympians guide you from incredible locations worldwide.
Speaker 1
Running can't compete. That's why 90% stick with hydro a year later.
GQ named the hydro arc the best rower of 2025. And every hydro comes with free shipping, a 30-day trial, and warranty.
Speaker 1 Go to hydro.com code fit and save up to 600 bucks on your next hydro. Hydro.com code fit.
Speaker 3 Now, a special two-part edition of 48 Hours.
Speaker 4 I think he'd seen her quite a bit before this night.
Speaker 4 It had been building up for a long time.
Speaker 4
It was late at night. Coming home probably one o'clock in the morning or later.
She was walking down the curb line.
Speaker 4 she had no clue that the attack was coming he circled around came up behind her stabbed her
Speaker 5 one deep stab by a long knife into her back
Speaker 5 which killed her very quickly
Speaker 4 you could see a bloody drag trail in the furrows
Speaker 4 the body had been displayed and there was sexual mutilation.
Speaker 5 Fort Collins in 1987 very much had a small town feeling. So when Peggy Hedrick was killed, it was shocking to this community.
Speaker 6
She was a highly intelligent person, very artistic. Peggy was my older sister.
She traveled all over the world, just an amazing person, really an amazing person.
Speaker 9 A bicyclist spotted the body early this morning in a field on the south side of Fort Collins.
Speaker 5 I was called on the case within the first hour that it occurred.
Speaker 5 I was the one who tied Tim Masters to this case.
Speaker 4 This is just a 15-year-old kid. He lives right next to the crime scene.
Speaker 4 He discovered the body
Speaker 4 and never reported it.
Speaker 6 The investigation basically centered around Tim Masters.
Speaker 11 It's important to tell the truth. I have told the truth.
Speaker 12 I'm in the dude of it.
Speaker 11 Would we bring you in here without some kind of proof?
Speaker 4 This was a kid when we searched his residence that had all kinds of graphic drawings. Mutilation, dismemberment.
Speaker 8
I remember being overwhelmed with a sense of, oh my god, this is the guy that killed Peggy Hedrick. This was more than just a passing fancy of a teenage boy.
This is a window into his mind.
Speaker 5 There was not enough evidence to make an arrest.
Speaker 14 Through the years, they focused on Tim Masters.
Speaker 2 The Hedrick homicide was opened and closed, went cold.
Speaker 2 It was Lieutenant Broderick that reopened the case.
Speaker 4 He was a suspect in my mind from the very first day, and nothing ever changed.
Speaker 2 This was a single-minded investigation. There was one man after one suspect.
Speaker 13 Year after year, it was like a personal vendetta for him to come after me.
Speaker 4 He was told it wouldn't end, that we'd continue working this case.
Speaker 13 I didn't think it was possible to be convicted for something I didn't do when there's not even any physical evidence.
Speaker 2 There was evidence at the crime scene that eliminated Tim Masters, and it was not told to the jury.
Speaker 16 Every single piece of exculpatory evidence is withheld.
Speaker 13 I've been locked up for 10 years.
Speaker 5
I'm a police officer. I'm a homicide investigator.
And all of a sudden, I went, the system failed.
Speaker 3 Drawn to murder, tonight's 48 Hours Mystery.
Speaker 13 Nine years, four months, 21 days so far.
Speaker 17 Tim Masters went to prison in 1999 and for much of that time lived in this cramped, dreary cell.
Speaker 17 Sentenced to life for a grisly murder he swears he did not commit.
Speaker 13 I'd be lay in my bunk bunkets and it still astounded me that I was there. I couldn't believe it.
Speaker 17 It just didn't seem real. No.
Speaker 17 Nor does any of this seem real.
Speaker 7 The court calls police, you don't have a secret file. It's over.
Speaker 13 That's their assertion.
Speaker 2 They're in that position.
Speaker 17 Because after years of hearings and petitions and unsuccessful appeals...
Speaker 4 It is clearly a concerted effort to hide evidence.
Speaker 17 It's mind-boggling. A judge at last is about to make a ruling that could set Masters free.
Speaker 9 People of the state of Colorado versus Timothy Masters.
Speaker 13 To me, it's not over yet.
Speaker 13 I'm still dressed in orange. I'm still in a jail.
Speaker 13 It'll be over when I walk out the door.
Speaker 17 If he does, he'll have a small army of unlikely supporters to thank.
Speaker 19 He's been innocent, and then they put an innocent man in jail.
Speaker 17 Not just his gigantic extended family.
Speaker 8 I couldn't find that piece of evidence that told me how this kid got convicted, but also lawyers.
Speaker 19 I'm convinced in my mind Tim Masters didn't do this.
Speaker 17 Even former cops, all of them claiming they've been sure for years now. Tim Masters didn't do it.
Speaker 3 Nine and a half years he spent in prison. He's been under this cloud of suspicion for 20 years.
Speaker 17 Masters, 37, has walked in the shadow of this murder since he was 15 years old.
Speaker 17 On the morning of February 11th of 1987, the half-naked body of a 37-year-old woman named Peggy Hetrick was found in a field in Fort Collins, Colorado, a stone's throw from Tim Masters' house.
Speaker 5 There were a lot of people who really felt strongly that Tim Masters was a very viable suspect.
Speaker 17 And among them, back in 1987, was veteran cop Linda Wheeler.
Speaker 5 I think it was like 7.13 in the the morning. The body had just been discovered.
Speaker 17 The passerby who spotted it first mistook it for a mannequin.
Speaker 5 The body was very clean to look at it. I mean, there was no blood on the body.
Speaker 17 There was a deep stab wound to Peggy Hedrick's upper back.
Speaker 4 You could see a bloody drag trail in the furrows. It was pretty apparent that the victim was dragged out to
Speaker 20 the final resting point.
Speaker 17 When Officer Jim Broderick arrived at the scene, he was struck by footprints along that trail,
Speaker 17 leading back to a pool of blood by the curb.
Speaker 17 And he was struck by the body itself.
Speaker 4 The positioning of the body is something to pay attention to.
Speaker 17 Her pants were pulled down to her knees, her shirt pushed up to her chin. Part of one of her breasts had been removed.
Speaker 4 It was, in fact, a sexual homicide.
Speaker 17 The prospect of a madman sexually mutilating his victims created near panic.
Speaker 17 And Jim Broderick and the Fort Collins police went into overdrive.
Speaker 17 Among the early persons of interest, Peggy Hetrick's one-time boyfriend, Matt Zollner.
Speaker 9 I think she was seeing somebody else.
Speaker 17 She had mentioned it. Zollner was questioned for hours, even even took a polygraph.
Speaker 2 Are you the one who stand pinky henry?
Speaker 17 Then was released.
Speaker 17 Police, meanwhile, were canvassing every house near the crime scene, talking with businessmen, housewives, even with a prominent eye surgeon, Dr. Richard Hammond.
Speaker 17 Years later, Dr. Hammond would figure in this case, but back then, he was just another neighbor who'd seen nothing suspicious.
Speaker 17 But Linda Wheeler Wheeler was sure someone must have seen something.
Speaker 5 And the first house I went to on the corner was Clyde Masters.
Speaker 17 Home to Clyde and his 15-year-old son Tim, who had few friends but no history of trouble.
Speaker 5 He's a very quiet kid, a very introverted kid.
Speaker 17 Tim's mother had died four years earlier when he was only 11 years old.
Speaker 17 Usually, Tim cuts straight through the fields to catch the school bus, but his father told police that on that morning, he'd seen his son hesitate.
Speaker 5 And had veered to the left as he was walking through the field and had stopped for a few moments.
Speaker 5 It became very obvious to me that his son must have seen the body.
Speaker 17 Tim's footprints were in the field, but he hadn't reported a thing.
Speaker 4 We need to focus on him.
Speaker 17 A few hours later, police appeared at Tim's high school and yanked him out of class class for questioning, as Broderick recalled in this interview in 2000.
Speaker 4 His explanation for not reporting it was that he thought it was just a mannequin and somebody was playing a trick.
Speaker 13
I didn't believe it was real because it was a 15-year-old kid. But all morning long as I'm at school, I was thinking about it.
Well, what if it was a real body?
Speaker 17 The passerby who called in the crime also first thought he'd seen a mannequin.
Speaker 17 But police weren't buying that story from Tim.
Speaker 17 Broderick searched the master's trailer and hit pay dirt.
Speaker 4 And there on his dresser, he's got seven knives, six of them survival knives, all sequentially displayed.
Speaker 17 And one of them, Broderick assumed, could be the murder weapon.
Speaker 4 This is a similar size knife as the knife that killed Peggy Hetrick.
Speaker 13 Tim, Klein, I wondered if either one of you would have any problems if I talked with Tim alone.
Speaker 15 No, I don't know.
Speaker 17 With Tim's father's permission, Roderick and a team of cops interrogated the 15-year-old for more than 10 hours without a lawyer. Can you tell me what happened?
Speaker 15 I don't know what happened, but I think you know some more than what you're telling right now.
Speaker 12 Do you think that I did it? Well,
Speaker 20 everything's pretty much looking that way, Tim.
Speaker 13 Right away, they started saying, I know you did this.
Speaker 13 Just fess up to it.
Speaker 13 Asking the same questions over and over.
Speaker 22 You sure you've never seen this lady before?
Speaker 11 You feel sorry for that girl?
Speaker 23 Yeah.
Speaker 15 Huh?
Speaker 23 Yeah.
Speaker 22 That girl I blood?
Speaker 18 I don't know. Was she walking by? Was she driving by? What happened?
Speaker 15 I don't know.
Speaker 11 She's dead.
Speaker 11 That chick died. Thank God we got you here.
Speaker 4 You know, I have a hard time believing that you didn't know it was a body.
Speaker 11 Where did you fall?
Speaker 22 Did you trip in the night?
Speaker 15 What happened, Tim?
Speaker 24 I don't know, Nathan. Do you guys arrive?
Speaker 17 Yeah, you do.
Speaker 12 I don't know. Yeah, you do.
Speaker 20 It was you. I didn't do it, Elvis.
Speaker 20 I didn't do it.
Speaker 12 I didn't do it. I told you.
Speaker 15 You did it.
Speaker 17 They gave him a lie detector test.
Speaker 11 Yesterday, did you murder that girl?
Speaker 23 No.
Speaker 2 Are you the one who stabbed that girl?
Speaker 3 No.
Speaker 17 The official report of the test results is lost today, but Broderick says Tim failed.
Speaker 17 He definitely needed to be looked at.
Speaker 5 Yes, definitely he did. And it was very easy for everybody, kind of a PAC mentality, to start focusing on him.
Speaker 17 And leading the pack was Jim Broderick.
Speaker 4 The victim's going to pass right there where he lives. Perfect opportunity under the cover of darkness to go out there and commit the crime.
Speaker 17 And Broderick was about to find evidence that for him erased all doubt. Tim Masters killed Peggy Hedrick.
Speaker 4 Every single notebook had some sort of horrific drawing in it.
Speaker 1
Don't let the holidays derail your fitness. Stay on track with hydro.
20 minutes rowing on a hydro targets 86% of your muscles as Olympians guide you from incredible locations worldwide.
Speaker 1
Running can't compete. That's why 90% stick with hydro a year later.
GQ named the hydro arc the best rower of 2025. And every hydro comes with free shipping, a 30-day trial, and warranty.
Speaker 1 Go to hydro.com code fit and save up to 600 bucks on your next hydro. Hydro.com code fit.
Speaker 11 She's dead.
Speaker 17 Fort Collins police began their intense interrogation of Tim Masters the very day Peggy Hetrick's body was found.
Speaker 12 You guys think that I did it?
Speaker 15 It's past that guy.
Speaker 15 It's past that.
Speaker 15 You know what you did.
Speaker 17 And that evening, another officer, miles away in Florida, quietly made his way to the Hetrick family home.
Speaker 9 The gentleman looked real somber.
Speaker 6 I mean, he, a big guy.
Speaker 24 He had to have been all of 6'4 or 6'2 ⁇ . I remember him, huge, towering.
Speaker 17 There to break the terrible news to her father and brother, Tom.
Speaker 6 And he looked down and he
Speaker 6 took a moment and he looked up and he said,
Speaker 6 your daughter is expired.
Speaker 17 At those words he says, time stopped.
Speaker 6 You think, no,
Speaker 6 we can maneuver this back and have him say something else.
Speaker 6 Because you think in that moment of time, that second of time, you have the power to maybe change something. That this is not, this can't be happening to you.
Speaker 17 The gruesome details were doubly hard to grasp, he says, because his older sister had been such a force of nature.
Speaker 9 Yep, that was her prom night.
Speaker 17 And this is in Libya?
Speaker 6 That's in Libya, yes.
Speaker 17 The Hedricks had lived all over the world, moving as Mr. Hedrick's job in the oil business required.
Speaker 5 How many different countries did you live in?
Speaker 6 Oh my goodness,
Speaker 6 Libya, Malta, for a short time in Spain, Hawaii, just everywhere.
Speaker 17 Peggy was red-haired, independent, and he says, delightfully eccentric.
Speaker 17 Out west, she developed a keen interest in Native American culture, especially the Hopi Indians, and she really lived and breathed it.
Speaker 17 What she was not interested in, he says, was getting married, although she'd had boyfriends, among them her ex, Matt Zollner.
Speaker 6 I remember asking the policeman,
Speaker 6 do they have the boyfriend?
Speaker 17 Zollner's on-again, off-again relationship with Peggy had been stormy at times.
Speaker 19 You think immediately that it may be somebody close.
Speaker 6 That's the first thing that my dad and I both thought. We suspected the boyfriend right off the bat.
Speaker 9 Your whole evening, baby.
Speaker 17 Police did question Zollner. His date confirmed his story, that he'd been with her until around 3 a.m.
Speaker 17 However, he was among the last people to see Peggy alive. He'd run into her in a bar parking lot at around 12.30, he said, the first time he'd seen her since they'd broken up a week before.
Speaker 17 And she'd not been happy to see him on a date.
Speaker 15 And then I offered to give her a ride home.
Speaker 15 And she's on foot.
Speaker 15 She says, no, I'm just going to wash it.
Speaker 17 Police believe it was on that walk in the early morning hours that Peggy Hetrick's murderer struck.
Speaker 17
And despite hours of denials from Tim Masters, it's important you tell the truth. I have to tell the truth.
Detective Broderick was growing more certain Masters did it.
Speaker 4 Dragged her into the adjacent field, and then there was sexual mutilation to her body.
Speaker 17 Police were shocked to learn at autopsy that that mutilation also included what amounted to a female circumcision. All part of Master's deliberate plan, Broderick thought.
Speaker 4 But you can actually see the body laying out there in the field by viewing through his window. And I think he positioned the body so he could then see it from his bedroom window.
Speaker 17 The knives police found lay on the dresser. One had a scalpel inside the handle, and there was another scalpel on a table nearby.
Speaker 17
But there was no trace of Peggy's blood on any of them, nor did they find her blood on any of Tim's clothes or shoes. They even searched the drains.
Nothing.
Speaker 4 There's a misconception by a lot of people that because there's a lot of blood at a scene, it means the suspect's going to get a lot of blood on them. And that just isn't in the case.
Speaker 17 By contrast, there was no lack of blood in the ghoulish drawings in Masters high school notebooks found in his room, backpack, and school locker.
Speaker 4 Had all kinds of graphic drawings and narratives about murders, violence against women. And we find a drawing where a body is being dragged from under the arms with blood dripping from the back.
Speaker 17
Much as Peggy had been dragged, he thought. But as incriminating as the drawing seemed, the case was completely circumstantial.
Weeks, then months passed, with no arrest.
Speaker 17 The evidence consisted essentially of the drawings and the fact that he hadn't reported the body?
Speaker 5 Exactly.
Speaker 17 Anything else? No.
Speaker 17 Any hairs, fibers, fingerprints, blood?
Speaker 5 Nothing?
Speaker 5 There was never anything that ever tied him to it.
Speaker 17 Nothing at all. Not a smidgen of forensic evidence that tied him to it.
Speaker 5 No, there was nothing.
Speaker 17 Police finally ginned up a plan to get the evidence they lacked. Peggy Hettrick had been murdered almost exactly four years after Tim's mother died.
Speaker 17 The theory was that Tim had killed out of rage at losing his mother. And so, the cops thought when that day rolls around again, maybe he can be goaded into doing something incriminating.
Speaker 3 Expectations were that Timothy Masters would go berserk, go crazy, if you will.
Speaker 17 Then patrolman Troy Krenning was among the dozen or so officers on the 92 member force assigned to watch Tim Masters. He was not pleased.
Speaker 3 It was a 24-7 operation that lasted for about a week.
Speaker 3 We're out chasing these
Speaker 3 goofball theories that a 15-year-old kid's going to go berserk and start killing people.
Speaker 17 They first scouted out vantage points at neighboring houses, including that of the eye surgeon whose home overlooked the crime scene.
Speaker 3 It's pathetic, it's embarrassing.
Speaker 17 Krenning watched Tim's house from a construction trailer.
Speaker 3 Most of the time he wasn't there. He would get up and go to school, come home, go to bed.
Speaker 17 Others staked out Peggy Hettrick's grave.
Speaker 3 I remember at this briefing, one of the things that was talked about was that he might go down to the grave and revisit Peggy Hetrick's grave and maybe even lay on the grave.
Speaker 20 What?
Speaker 21 Lay on the grave?
Speaker 16 You know, what kind of silliness is that?
Speaker 17 But the plan went still further. At one point, police duped a newspaper reporter into writing a phony story saying an arrest was imminent.
Speaker 3 Looking back, you almost have to be ashamed to admit that you participated.
Speaker 17 They even left a copy of Tim's mother's obituary on the windshield of a friend's truck.
Speaker 16 That's torture.
Speaker 17 Tim's former attorney, Eric Fisher.
Speaker 16 They're trying to get this poor kid to relive his mother's death. They're trying to make him snap.
Speaker 16 It's a psychological experiment to try to make him snap.
Speaker 17 And what did this elaborate psychological experiment produce? Zero.
Speaker 5 He didn't do anything.
Speaker 13 I still remember to this day them planning the newspaper articles on my friend's truck and in my driveway, but I didn't know they were watching me when they did it.
Speaker 17 At that point, it wouldn't have mattered, he says. The investigation already had wrecked his life.
Speaker 13
So now everyone in the school thinks I'm a murderer. I only had one friend that stuck with me the whole time.
I mean, I had lots of people come up to me and say, I don't think you did it.
Speaker 13 But they still weren't going to go to the prom with me.
Speaker 17 He remembers thinking that someday, surely, everyone would understand that this had been a terrible mistake. But he'd not counted on one very determined cop.
Speaker 25
Your perfect style is more than a fit. It's a feeling.
When you step into Maurice's, our stylists are dedicated to helping you find the perfect outfit.
Speaker 25 Shop in store or Maurice's.com for new items arriving daily in holiday flash deals. Maurice's, that styled feeling.
Speaker 26 Hey, Ryan Reynolds here, wishing you a very happy, half-off holiday because right now, Mint Mobile is offering you the gift of 50% off unlimited. To be clear, that's half price, not half the service.
Speaker 26
And Mint is still premium unlimited wireless for a great price. So that means a half day.
Yeah? Give it a try at mintmobile.com/slash switch.
Speaker 27
Upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required. New customer offers for first three months only.
Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of networks busy. Taxes and fees extra.
Speaker 26 See mintmobile.com.
Speaker 17 Four years after the Hetrick murder, Tim Masters thought he had finally rescued his reputation.
Speaker 13 When I joined the Navy, I figured it was all behind me.
Speaker 13 I was going on with my career.
Speaker 13 I thought my life was going well. I'd just gotten a promotion.
Speaker 3 I thought it was over.
Speaker 17 But back in Fort Collins, the case had gone cold.
Speaker 5 It sat there until 1991.
Speaker 17 Linda Wheeler learned she'd been picked to reopen the case and her marching orders were clear.
Speaker 5 See if you can't put enough of the puzzle together to arrest Tim Masters.
Speaker 17 She worked for a year with Masters in her sights before she stumbled on that apparent missing piece of the puzzle.
Speaker 17 Something Tim had mentioned to a friend.
Speaker 5 Tim Asters had told him that he knew that Peggy Hetrick's nipple had been either cut off or bitten off.
Speaker 17 She was sure it was a detail police never had made public.
Speaker 5 And I went, all right, we got him.
Speaker 17 In July of 1992, armed with an arrest warrant, Jim Broderick and Linda Wheeler hopped a flight to Philadelphia, where Tim's ship was in port.
Speaker 17 They grilled him again for a day and a half.
Speaker 13 So when they were interrogating me, I told them how I knew what I knew, and they called me.
Speaker 17 He told them that their big secret was, in fact, common knowledge at the high school because, incredibly, police had enlisted the help of students, explorer scouts, to search the field for body parts.
Speaker 13 And one of them scouts just happened to sit at my table in our class, and one day she says that they had been looking for Peggy Hetrick's nipples.
Speaker 17 To the detectives' complete shock, the former scout confirmed Tim's story.
Speaker 4 What was thought to be a nice, incriminating piece of information really was pretty diluted.
Speaker 5 My key piece of the puzzle had got blown out of the water.
Speaker 17 For Linda Wheeler, that was it.
Speaker 5 I started having my doubts.
Speaker 17 The cop who'd been first to tie Tim Masters to the crime now was the first to think she'd been wrong.
Speaker 5 I was very verbal about, I'm not sure we're on the right track. I am not comfortable with Tim Masters as a suspect anymore.
Speaker 17 Okay, when you said that, what did your superiors say?
Speaker 5 I wasn't very popular with that opinion.
Speaker 17 Wheeler wanted to reinvestigate, start from square one, enlist the help of the FBI.
Speaker 5 I was told I could not take it to the FBI. I was not able to
Speaker 5 look at other alternate suspects. By the end of 93, I was back on patrol.
Speaker 17 She says she was fed up and ostracized. She quit the Fort Collins Police in 1995.
Speaker 17 Jim Broderick, meanwhile, had been freshly promoted to supervisor, and he soon reopened the case, focusing on his favorite suspect.
Speaker 4 It always been an interest of mine anyway, and now I was in a position to actually do something about it.
Speaker 17 He had no new evidence, but in 1997, he found an ally.
Speaker 17 Someone who who put a new spin on the best evidence he did have, Tim's eerie drawings and what they meant.
Speaker 21 He was preoccupied with violence, with sexually sadistic images, with images of domination and degradation of women.
Speaker 17 Dr. Reed Malloy is an internationally known expert on sexual homicide, interviewed here in 2000.
Speaker 21 In my
Speaker 21 18 years of doing this kind of work, I have never seen such voluminous productions by a suspect.
Speaker 17 A 15-year-old's twisted musings, bizarre artwork, and stories about violence, torture, and death.
Speaker 17 Disturbing? Sure, Tim said, for a nerdy kid trying to get attention, that was the point.
Speaker 13 My peers seemed to approve of them.
Speaker 13 They liked those drawings. They would offer suggestions, so that encouraged me to draw even more.
Speaker 13 And we would draw horrible, gruesome scenes and share it with the guy, and they go, oh, that's cool, and pass it back.
Speaker 17 That's all this was.
Speaker 17 But Dr. Reed Malloy saw much more.
Speaker 21 I look for specificity of links between
Speaker 21 Tim Masters and the facts of the homicide itself.
Speaker 17 He says he found hundreds of links, but two drawings stood out.
Speaker 17 One shows how he believes Tim Masters moved Peggy's body.
Speaker 21 In this particular particular drawing, we have what appears to be a person
Speaker 21 dragging another person under their arms from behind, and we also have what appears to be blood dripping down from the person.
Speaker 17 And the other graphically depicts what Dr. Malloy thinks Tim did to her.
Speaker 21 Immediately, I thought that it was an image of a vagina being cut.
Speaker 21 The knife appears to be like the one that was used in the crime.
Speaker 17 Malloy concluded that this was a textbook sexual homicide.
Speaker 17 An outgrowth of Tim's fury at being abandoned at 11 when his mother died.
Speaker 21 Timothy Masters is symbolically killing his mother.
Speaker 21 I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that Tim Masters was the killer.
Speaker 17 Jim Broderick felt that finally he had his man.
Speaker 4 Well, I actually felt really good.
Speaker 17 He headed for California where Tim was working, honorably discharged from the Navy and now 27 years old.
Speaker 13 And I get a pounding on my door early in the morning on a Monday morning.
Speaker 13 A guy shows up there at the door with a suit and tie on and he says, Tim Masters, you're under the arrest for the murder of Peggy Hetrick.
Speaker 13 This is unreal, unbelievable.
Speaker 17 When Broderick searched the house, he found guns, knives, and drawings similar to what he'd found in 1987.
Speaker 17 A few months later, police brought Tim back to Colorado.
Speaker 4 To me, I think it all came together really nice.
Speaker 17 He went on trial for the murder of Peggy Hetrick in March 1999.
Speaker 4 We had all sorts of theories at the beginning.
Speaker 17 Theories, but no physical evidence. Prosecutors Terry Gilmore and Jolene Blair admitted soon after the trial they thought their case was pretty thin.
Speaker 8 There were times when Terry and I I were looking at each other like, oh,
Speaker 8
what are we doing? There's no way we're going to prove this crime. We got nothing.
And that's when Broderick would say, wait a minute, come on, guys.
Speaker 8 This is what we needed to do and it was the right thing. And there was never any doubt in his mind.
Speaker 17 Tim's changed appearance helped their cause.
Speaker 8 The jurors didn't see the skinny little 15-year-old kid.
Speaker 17
He'd grown into an imposing figure. looking fully capable of the crime.
Have you ever had any doubt that Tim Masters was innocent?
Speaker 16 No, I've always felt he was innocent.
Speaker 17 Eric Fisher defended Tim at trial.
Speaker 16 I really did not think Tim Masters could pull this off and leave not a single shred of physical evidence.
Speaker 8 The most compelling argument for me was: who else could it possibly be?
Speaker 8 Nobody else had a motive, nobody else had the opportunity,
Speaker 8 nobody else had the weapons.
Speaker 12 This is the guy.
Speaker 17 Their best evidence, those incriminating drawings, and star expert witness Molloy's interpretation of what they meant.
Speaker 8 We drew a lot of similarities between the drawings and our crime scene, to such an extent that the defense thought that we were crazy.
Speaker 13 My stories and drawings were gruesome, violent. But no one was stabbed in the back, no one was sexually mutilated.
Speaker 17 As for that one incriminating drag drawing, Tim has always said he made it after seeing the body.
Speaker 19
She didn't get a nail driven through her tongue. She wasn't a skeleton.
She wasn't Friggie Krueger. She wasn't a dinosaur.
Speaker 17 David Wymore, who represented Masters, said the state built its case not around evidence, but around fear.
Speaker 19
You bring in the psychologist to basically just scare them to death with these drawings that Tim did. You know, oh, this is evidence of a sexual homicide and be scared.
And they were scared.
Speaker 8 Terry Gilmore, in his rebuttal clothes, held up the photograph that we had of Peggy Hetrick's vaginal area that showed the mutilation to it.
Speaker 8
And then we blew up the little drawing that he did. and put them side by side and the resemblance was uncanny.
I mean the jurors were just bowled over.
Speaker 17 More than a decade after the crime, it took the jury just a day and a half to convict Tim Masters of first-degree murder.
Speaker 13 I didn't think for a minute that I would lose a trial. I didn't think it was possible to be convicted for something I didn't do.
Speaker 17 He was sentenced to life behind bars without parole.
Speaker 13 There's no holidays in prison.
Speaker 13 No birthdays, no Christmas.
Speaker 17 But many birthdays would go by before a startling revelation that would challenge Tim's conviction.
Speaker 7 You have a full-blown sex offender who lived 200 yards directly across from where the body was found.
Speaker 18 He's a pervert, he's a voyeur.
Speaker 17 Was there a much more likely suspect?
Speaker 8
Nobody else had a motive. Nobody else had the opportunity.
Nobody else had the weapons.
Speaker 17 Prosecutors were delighted with the guilty verdict in the Tim Masters case.
Speaker 15 Which way are we going?
Speaker 8 Who else could it possibly be?
Speaker 17 The answer to that was right under their noses, according to Tim's lawyers, at a house in Tim's old neighborhood, also bordering the field where Peggy Hetrick's body was found.
Speaker 17 Four years before Tim's arrest, police were summoned there to another mind-boggling crime scene.
Speaker 5 I saw what had gone on inside the Hammond house and saw what he did, and I was shocked.
Speaker 17 Then patrol officer Linda Wheeler helped search the home of a prominent eye surgeon, Dr. Richard Hammond.
Speaker 5 Highly educated man with a very sick perversion that I just don't understand.
Speaker 17 A perversion with some eerie similarities to the Peggy Hetrick case secretly played out in the guest bathroom of the Hammond house.
Speaker 5 There was a young college student who was house-sitting, and as she's sitting on the potty, she thought that it was strange that there was a lot of lights in there.
Speaker 5 She thought she could see something in the vent right in front of the toilet.
Speaker 17
She was right. Behind that vent and two others, Dr.
Hammond's bathroom video cameras were whirring away.
Speaker 19 When you walk in the bathroom and hit the light, it activates the camera.
Speaker 17 Each of them, says masters lawyer David Wymore, positioned with loving care.
Speaker 19 It shows shower cam and toilet cam. So you sit on the toilet and this camera is directly across from your crotch.
Speaker 19 And he would calibrate this so that he could actually read the fine print on a Lysol camera.
Speaker 17 You mean when he was trying to set it up?
Speaker 19 Yeah, setting it so that he could get a really good close-up.
Speaker 17 Why did he put the toilet roll there?
Speaker 19 He couldn't really figure out who's on it unless he could get you to lean over to go for the toilet roll and stick your face in the camera.
Speaker 17 Apparently, auto focus was the doctor's undoing.
Speaker 2 I was a policeman in Fort Collins when it happened.
Speaker 17 David Michelson says that when the puzzled house sitter heard an unmistakable sound,
Speaker 17 she started investigating.
Speaker 2 She moved her hand
Speaker 2 and she heard it go zz.
Speaker 2 And then she moved it back and it was zzz.
Speaker 2 And then when she got down on the floor and looked in the louvers of the false heat duct, then the camera would go zzzzzzzzz to focus in on because she's so close. Then she knew it was a camera.
Speaker 17 Aghast, she called the police.
Speaker 19 This is the inside of that secret room.
Speaker 17 In a locked room next to the bathroom, they found an elaborate taping system. In a nearby storage locker, an estimated $13,000 worth of pornographic material.
Speaker 19 Yeah, he had kept the receipts.
Speaker 17 And everywhere, detailed files and stacks of videotapes.
Speaker 19 These are some of the 300 tapes of these victims.
Speaker 5 He's keeping records of every single one of them. Meticulous records.
Speaker 19
He would rate them. He would make a compilation tape so that if you came over to the house, he would splice on.
You would have your own tape. So as you grew, he could follow you.
Speaker 17 A file for each victim. House sitters, family, friends.
Speaker 17 78 victims in all, Wymore says, among them this woman.
Speaker 28 His daughter and I went to high school together.
Speaker 17 Who asked us to obscure her face?
Speaker 28 I felt sick. I felt physically sick.
Speaker 28 And I just thought, oh my God.
Speaker 17 I'm not over it.
Speaker 5 I don't know that I ever
Speaker 8 will be over it.
Speaker 17 After his arrest, Dr. Hammond spent several days in a psychiatric unit and then was released on bond.
Speaker 17 Days later, he checked into this Denver motel, hooked himself up to an IV filled with cyanide, and committed suicide.
Speaker 17 Have you ever seen anything like this?
Speaker 10 I mean, you've been doing this for a long time.
Speaker 19 No, this guy's an
Speaker 19 over-the-top obsessive voyeur pervert.
Speaker 17
But the most astonishing thing, Masters lawyers say, is that police never investigated Dr. Hammond in connection with the Hetrick murder.
So could Dr.
Speaker 17 Hammond see the location of the body from his house? You could oversee the field where Peggy Hetrick's body was.
Speaker 17 Dr. Hammond, a voyeur with surgical skills obsessed with female body parts who lived as close to the crime scene as Masters did.
Speaker 17 Despite this handwritten note in the Hammond file, look into Hetrick, Broderick was running the show.
Speaker 2 I talked to Broderick in the house because we looked out the master bedroom.
Speaker 17 And did you say the words, Peggy Hetrick, and my God, this is, look at this, how can this not be related? Numerous times.
Speaker 2 And he said, no answer.
Speaker 17 Special prosecutor Don Quick, who years later would review this entire case, says that camera receipts provided by Hammond's wife show he'd started the taping years after the Hetrick murder.
Speaker 17 No reason police should have linked the two.
Speaker 14 There's no physical evidence tying Dr. Hammond to the crime.
Speaker 17 The same could be said about Tim Masters, but when it came to circumstantial evidence.
Speaker 14 Dr. Hammond wasn't standing next to the body the morning that she was killed.
Speaker 14 Dr. Hammond didn't then go to work and not call the authorities.
Speaker 14
Dr. Hammond's briefcase wasn't opened up in a picture of a person being dragged with blood coming from their back and heels on the ground, much like the victim was dragged.
Dr.
Speaker 14 Hammond, when you go back to his house, they didn't find grisly drawings of people being stabbed and slashed.
Speaker 19 You have a full-blown sex offender lived right across the street from where her body is found, who has an obsession.
Speaker 19 with the most intimate parts of the vagina and breasts, and you have a body in the field missing those parts, and he's an eye surgeon, and you're acting like it doesn't connect.
Speaker 17 Whether or not Dr.
Speaker 17 Hammond really had anything to do with Peggy Hedrick's murder probably never will be known, in part because of what police did here at the Larimer County landfill just six months after Dr.
Speaker 17 Hammond's suicide.
Speaker 3 They're out at the landfill. mashing up with a grater, all these tapes.
Speaker 4 They destroyed all the evidence. Every bit of it.
Speaker 17 Why?
Speaker 3 Passed Broderick. He's the one that ordered it.
Speaker 4 They were destroyed and we should talk about why they were destroyed.
Speaker 4 You've got all these victims that are on those tapes that were calling us and had legitimate concerns about the transfer of those images, which is a real issue in today's digital world.
Speaker 4 It had nothing to do with the Masters case or the murder of Peggy Hetrick. There's no connection between the two of them.
Speaker 2 When I found out they were going to destroy them, I just, I lost it.
Speaker 17 Because Detective Michelson wondered: what if Dr. Hammond had been secretly videotaping years earlier than police thought?
Speaker 17 What if, in all those hours of stored videotapes.
Speaker 17 You thought Peggy Hetrick might be on those tapes?
Speaker 2 Yes. I wanted to watch every one of the tapes seized
Speaker 2 because I thought she could have been there.
Speaker 17 Anyone do that?
Speaker 2 No.
Speaker 17 Why not?
Speaker 15 I don't know.
Speaker 2 He was taking pictures of what was removed from Hetrick.
Speaker 17
But at the time of Tim's trial, his lawyers had never even heard of Dr. Hammond.
And Eric Fisher isn't surprised that prosecutors didn't enlighten him.
Speaker 16 If we have a pervert living across the street, their complete argument that nobody else could have done this, which is their whole closing argument, goes away.
Speaker 16 They cannot make that argument, and their case falls apart.
Speaker 17
Fort Collins Police kept the specifics of Dr. Hammond's activities from the public.
His name never was brought up in court. That alone, Tim's outraged attorneys say, justifies a new trial.
Speaker 7 Comparing Tim Masters to Dr.
Speaker 19 Richard Hammond, Dr. Richard Hammond would be a
Speaker 7 super suspect.
Speaker 3 Tim Masters would be a ridiculous suspect.
Speaker 17 Convincing a judge of that is Tim Masters' only hope for freedom.
Speaker 20 Stay tuned for part two, tomorrow.
Speaker 29 This is the story of the one. As a custodial supervisor at a high school, he knows that during cold and flu season, germs spread fast.
Speaker 29 It's why he partners with Granger to stay fully stocked on the products and supplies he needs, from tissues to disinfectants to floor scrubbers.
Speaker 29
Also, that he can help students, staff, and teachers stay healthy and focused. Call 1-800GRANGER, clickgranger.com, or just stop by.
Granger for the ones who get it done.