Crime Immemorial

It was around nine p.m. on the evening of Tuesday, February 10th, 1987 when thirty-seven-year-old Peggy Hettrick left her job at a clothing store called the Fashion Bar at the Foothills Mall in Fort Collins, Colorado, and began walking back to her nearby apartment. Her regular roommate, Barb Kohler, was out of town, but another woman named Sharon Deconick had been staying with her temporarily.

Unfortunately, Sharon had started drinking fairly early, and had passed out inside Peggy’s apartment, leaving the door locked. Peggy didn’t have her keys, and banged on the door to try and get Sharon to wake up and let her in, but all her efforts were in vain. Annoyed, she walked to the Laughing Dog Saloon nearby, where she had a drink and complained to anyone who would listen about being locked out of her own house. Throughout her stay at the Laughing Dog, both she and the bartender phoned her apartment numerous times, but there was never any answer. At last, Peggy gave up and went to another nearby bar, the Prime Minister, where she repeated the same routine for the next fifteen minutes before setting out into the night.

It was about ten o’clock at this point, and it is believed that Peggy next walked to the home of her ex-boyfriend, Matt Zoellner. He wasn’t in, but witnesses later reported seeing Peggy standing around in the parking lot smoking, as though waiting for someone. She also reportedly wrote a note to Matt, telling him that she had been locked out of her apartment and that he shouldn’t get angry if she showed back up at his place later that evening.

At around midnight, Peggy was finally able to get back into her place, where she proceeded to change her clothes and then head back out to the Prime Minister, where she arrived at approximately twelve-thirty. Shortly after walking in, she ran into Matt Zoellner, who was there meeting another woman named Dawn for a date. Apparently all three of them had a friendly discussion for a time, and Matt subsequently offered to give Peggy a ride home. According to Matt and Dawn, she initially agreed, but then later left the bar between one and one-thirty a.m. on her own. She was never seen alive again.

At around seven o’clock on the following morning, a man bicycling to work noticed what appeared to be a mannequin in a field, then realized it was a human body when he saw a trail of blood that led to a large pool on the curb. Police arrived on the scene in short order.

Peggy Hettrick had been murdered by a single stab wound in her upper back that had penetrated and collapsed her left lung. In addition, she had also been gruesomely mutilated; one of her nipples had been removed, perhaps with a scalpel, and she had been subjected to a surgical-level female circumcision as well as a partial vulvectomy, suggesting a killer with some degree of medical training or expertise in butchery. The coroner theorized that the sexual mutilations and the fatal stab wound had been inflicted with two separate implements.

Robbery was clearly not a motive, not only because of the precisely sexual nature of the injuries, but also due to the fact that Peggy’s jewelry was untouched and her purse still contained a checkbook and a few dollars in cash. It was also hypothesized that her killer had stabbed her at the curb, then dragged her body by one arm to the spot where it was eventually found. Several sets of footprints facing the curb were discovered near the body, indicating that the killer had been walking backwards as he dragged his victim. These prints were found to have been left by a pair of Thom McAn casual dress shoes.

Another shoe print that would turn out to have massive significance in the case, though unfortunately for all the wrong reasons, was that of a sneaker, left in the dirt facing the body. This sneaker print was found to belong to a fifteen-year-old boy named Tim Masters, who lived in a trailer just across from the field, and had actually been the first to see Peggy Hettrick’s body on his way to the school bus stop on the morning of February 11th, though he had not reported it to police. This detail would immediately rocket Tim to the top of the suspect list, even though he claimed that he had not reported the murder because he had initially believed that it was not a real corpse, but that someone was playing a prank.

Authorities probed deeply into the teenager’s private life, uncovering a few troubling items during a search of his bedroom. The boy was fond of knives, it seemed, and also enjoyed doing drawings that depicted scenes of bloody violence. Further searches of the Masters home, however, turned up no significant physical evidence, such as blood or fibers, and Tim was not arrested at the time, though police kept him very much on their radar.

In the meantime, a couple of other persons of interest were being investigated. These included a mysterious man named Derrick or Derek, who Peggy had reportedly met at the Laughing Dog Saloon and dated briefly before telling him to get lost. According to friends, Peggy had repeatedly told this man she didn’t want to see him anymore, but that he kept calling her and showing up at her apartment. This individual was described as being in his mid-twenties, standing around five-foot-eleven with slightly long hair that was a light, reddish-brown. Despite a canvass of area bars, however, this person was never identified.

Peggy’s ex-boyfriend Matt Zoellner was also briefly considered a suspect, and indeed, a later DNA test on Peggy’s clothing did find traces of Matt’s DNA on her underwear and some items in her purse. However, the pair had been dating off and on for several years, and it is certainly possible that remnants of Matt’s DNA would have remained on Peggy’s clothing, especially since they were still seeing each other at regular intervals at the time that Peggy was murdered. In addition, Matt was with his date until around three-thirty a.m. on February 11th, and it was estimated that Peggy was most likely killed not long after she was last seen leaving the Prime Minister at approximately one-fifteen. Matt Zoellner was eventually cleared of suspicion.

But a decade after the murder, in 1992, police reverted back to their initial suspect, neighbor Tim Masters, who was now twenty-five years old and serving in the U.S. Navy. Tim had consistently denied having anything to do with the slaying, and there was essentially no physical evidence at all tying him to the crime. There was no blood or hair found in his home or on his person; his fingerprints were not among those recovered from the scene; and he did not own a pair of Thom McCan shoes like those left near the body by the purported killer.

However, Tim had allegedly told a high school friend about the sexual mutilations of Peggy’s body, which were not thought to have been released to the public. Investigators questioned Tim about this suspicious detail, but Tim told them that he knew specifics about the crime because he had been a member of the Explorer Scouts in 1987 and had helped police search the scene at the time. His story was later verified, but it seemed that the authorities were bound and determined to pin the murder of Peggy Hettrick on him one way or another.

A forensic psychologist named Dr. J. Reid Meloy was assigned to the case, and even though he lived in California and never met Tim Masters in person, he nonetheless concluded that Tim must be the killer, simply based on the drawings the fifteen-year-old Tim had done at the time of the homicide. Outrageously, based largely on these drawings, Tim Masters was convicted of first-degree murder in 1999 and sentenced to life in prison.

Tim filed several appeals over the years, but none were successful until 2008, when he was finally released, though he was not officially exonerated until 2011.

The gross miscarriage of justice involving Tim Masters aside, there were later two other far more compelling suspects in the murder of Peggy Hettrick. The first of these was an eye surgeon by the name of Dr. Richard Hammond, who in 1995 was arrested for secretly taking photographs of the genitalia of female family members via hidden cameras in the bathroom of his home. Not only did Dr. Hammond live within sight of the field where Peggy’s body was dumped, but he did not show up for his scheduled surgeries on the morning following her murder. Additionally, he committed suicide a few days after he was arrested, by injecting cyanide into his thigh. He left behind a cryptic note that read, in part, “My death should satisfy the media’s thirst for blood.”

An even more intriguing possibility is that Peggy Hettrick may have been an early victim of serial killer Scott Kimball. In 2003 and 2004, Kimball murdered his uncle and three women, crimes for which he is now serving a seventy-year-sentence. But significantly, it is also thought that Kimball may have killed a woman named Catrina Powell in October of 2004. Though unlike Peggy Hettrick, Catrina Powell was beaten and strangled rather than stabbed, she was subjected to very similar post-mortem mutilations to her breasts and genitals, just as Peggy was. Authorities have strong suspicions that he may also be responsible for up to twenty-one other unsolved murders.

Though Kimball lived in Montana in 1987 and was arrested there three days after Peggy’s murder for knocking over mail boxes, he was known to be in Fort Collins, Colorado later in 1987; in fact, he received a ticket there on August 8th for causing a disturbance at a bowling alley and amusement venue called Whirlyball that was located only about a half mile from the spot where Peggy Hettrick was murdered.

Though it is unclear if Kimball was in Colorado at the time Peggy was slain, he has stated that he committed more murders than he is credited with, and other aspects of his psychological profile seem to jibe with the mutilations seen on Peggy’s body.

The homicide is still one of Colorado’s best-known cold cases, and remains open as of this writing.