Colorado’s Most DISTURBING Unsolved Case - The Peggy Hettrick Murder

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When they found Peggy Hendrick's body out in that field, a morbid part wasn't that she'd been stabbed, it was what had been done to her after. Because once she was already dead, somebody stayed there with her in the freezing cold, and they took their time using the sort of precision that very few people have the ability to pull off. And that's just the murder itself we're talking about, because what came after, the suspects, the arrests, the people who were actually supposed to solve this thing, will turn one killing into maybe the strangest, most troubling case Colorado has ever seen. It's been almost 40 years now, and nobody's ever been brought to justice for it, and the closer you look at how it all played out, the more you start to wonder if anyone ever really wanted the truth to come out at all. Hey guys, it's Andrew, thanks for tuning in to every town we're today. We've got a rare and disturbing one for you that's hard to believe, a weird murder that should have been solved yet definitely number was. And so, let's head on out to Colorado now. This is for Collins's most disturbing unsolved case, the murder of Peggy Hetray. Maybe you'd have recognized her if you lived in for Collins back then, the woman who walked everywhere, no car at all, never had a one-and-one, and because of that, she knew this town inside and out, the short cuts in the alleyways, which streets stayed lit after dark and which ones went black. And Peggy Hetray was 37 years old, small, just a little over five feet tall with Auburn hair and blue eyes, and she always dressed like she had somewhere to be even when she was just running out for groceries, and I was just part of who she was, and the care she put into how she looked, walking out her own front door, while people remembered her for it. And it was a certain pride she had in knowing that. And that made sense, given where she worked. She was one of the managers over at a place called Fashion Bar at the Foot Hills Mall, local lady's specialty store, medium to high-end items. Now, Peggy kept to herself otherwise though, small circle of friends, her own routine, walking home after it was just part of that routine. To Peggy, it wasn't dangerous, it was ordinary. On February 10, 1987, she clocks out from Fashion Bar. Heads home only, she can't get into her own place. Her temporary roommate has locked the door, so she waits it out, and finally gets inside, chooses her clothes, and heads back out into the evening, down the road to the Prime Minister pub and grill, local bar she hit up off and enough. She's there a few hours, and at some point in the night, she sees them. It's Matt Zolner, her own again, off again, boyfriend, sitting inside only, he's with another woman. And people who were there said Peggy was pretty pissed about it, and Zolner would later tell police that when she got up to leave, he offered her a ride home, but she said no. Around 1.30 a.m., she walked out the door alone, and out into the cold. That bar is less than 500 yards from the spot where Peggy would be found just a few hours later. A walk she had almost certainly made, dozens of times, her own neighborhood, every step of it familiar, and you can relate to that comfortable feeling of being out where you live, as compared to walking around the street for the very first time. It feels like it belongs to you, at least in part. That nothing bad could ever happen there, because you know it so well. And yet somewhere in that short stretch of dark, Peggy crossed paths with the person who killed her. And whatever happened happened fast. The corner found a single stab wound to the upper left back. She'd been struck from behind with a five-inch, serrated blade. That single blow, it tore through her left lung and her left pulmonary artery. She bled out massively, dead within just minutes of the strike. As she died in the early hours of February 11th, and given where that wound was, she most likely never saw the person coming, never knew they were there until it was too late. So, a very tragic and swift death. You may be a deranged person, just hit her with that knife, and maybe killing her wasn't even the intention, but they happened to hit the right spot. That might be a possibility, except that it definitely wasn't. And this is where her case gets extremely strange. A guy biking to work the next day spotted her at first light and called it in. When investigators reached the field where Peggy was lying, the first thing they found was the blood, a trail of it, roughly a hundred feet long, running from her body, back to the curb at the edge of the road. That part made sense. The pool of blood was out at the curb, which told them she had been attacked there at the roadside, and dragged the whole length of that trail out into the field. The field wasn't where she died, it was where she was left, and she was posed there. What didn't really make sense was Peggy herself, for a woman who had been stabbed to death, her body was almost completely clean, barely a trace of blood on her. So, follow that with me for a second. We're talking a fatal wound, a hundred feet of blood on the ground, and a body with almost none on it. And the answer is in the wound, the knife went into her back, and a wound like that bleeds inward and down, into the chest cavity, and into the ground beneath her. As she was lying on her back the whole time, so the blood drained away from her as she was dragged, talking into the dirt instead of pooling on her skin. That trail wasn't dripping off her, it was draining out of her. But the blood was never the main focus here. It was that whoever did this, set her down in the frost, not dropped her dumped, but laid out gently in the open where she'd be found, and then they had taken the time to do one more thing. I'll say it plainly because this single detail changes the whole case, but they removed one of her nipples. And it's the way it was done that is sat with everyone who's ever worked this case. There was nothing frenzy about it, there wasn't someone hacking at her in a panic or tearing at her out of rage, and the cut itself was clean and controlled, and it took a steady hand and a real understanding of human anatomy, the kind of knowledge most people simply don't have. A one does not simply cut into human flesh for the first time and make precision cuts. You need the tools, you need to know the pressure, and you need to also want to do that. And once you realize this, you start to see that that single knife wound doesn't appear to have just hit her in a spot that happened to kill her. Now whoever did this, knew exactly where to hit, with what knife, and with how much force. While detectives were hunting for someone with the steady hands of a surgeon, a different name had already started turning up in their notes. It was a 15-year-old kid. I think our colon's got so kind of visioned on Tim Masters. Tim Masters, a 15-year-old kid at the time. 12 years went by while the detectives built their case around him. - Because before the bicyclist ever found Peggy that morning, before a single officer ever came on the scene, with Tim Masters had already walked right past her body, and he said nothing at all. And he was a high school sophomore who lived with his dad and a trailer that backed right up against that field. Every morning, he cut across the grass to reach his bus stop. On Wednesday, February 11th, he stepped outside, started across the field, and saw a shape lying out in the frost. And he said he figured it was a mannequin. Somebody's idea of a joke, maybe. So he didn't look any closer. He just kept on moving. Caught his bus, went to school, and he never mentioned it to a soul. It wasn't until later that day, when officers started working in the neighborhood that they talked to Tim's dad. And he casually mentioned that his son had wandered off as usual rude across the field that morning, and that was all it took. And he pulled the kid right out of class right away. And what came next was something like nine hours of questioning. 15-year-old kid with no parent in the room, the officers told him flat out that they knew he had done it, that they had proof, and that the smart thing was to confess and be dumb with it. Well, Tim kept giving them the same answers, but he had nothing to do with it. They ran a polygraph, and that came back inconclusive. Eventually, they had to let him go home. But that was the day Tim Masters stopped living his normal life, because the next 21 years, his was connected to this case. His community, and more importantly, the police, never looked at him the same ever again. (gentle music) (soft music) The lead investigator was a Fort Collins detective named Jim Broderick, and he locked on to Tim Masters almost from the very beginning, and not because the evidence actually led him there. Now, once things got examined beyond the surgical precision angle, investigators found a few things. There were two hairs recovered from Peggy's body that didn't match Tim. There were some unidentified prints in her purse, and those weren't Tim's either. They searched his home, his school lockers, clothes, even his knife collection, and all of it came back clean. So, there was simply nothing tying this kid to that field, other than basically living there in the trailer. Well, Broderick had, though, was a theory, and he held on to it very tightly. When investigators went through Tim's bedroom, they came out with more than 2,000 pages of his drawings and his writing, and honestly, it was dark stuff. No question about it. There were pages of monsters and battles and violent bloody death. Kind of notebooks of certain type of teenage boy fills after one too many horror movies. It's unsettling a bit given the circumstances, but far from rare. Broderick, though, didn't see a lonely kid with a morbid streak. Now, he looked at those pages and saw a confession. No charges were filed right then because there was no evidence, but Broderick never let it go. He never seriously looked anywhere else either, which is ultimately the big problem here. In his mind, the case was already closed. They just couldn't prove it. And so, from there, essentially, the investigation simply stopped. Tim eventually finished high school under a suspicion the whole town could feel. He joined the Navy, served honorably, and started putting together something like a normal life. Like Broderick never really let him go. And every so often, quietly, he checked back in. In 1988, a year after the murder, investigators tried something that was a little less like police work and a lot more desperate. They planted a fake story in the local paper for the phony details about the case. All of it deliberately wrong, but it was engineered to make Masters nervous. After all, they were certain it was him, right? Well, then they just watched them around the clock, though nothing happened because there was nothing in him to shake loose. By 1992, well, they thought they had finally found a real thread. A word had reached them that Tim, back in his high school days, had told a friend some very specific things about how Hendrix body had been mutilated, things that supposedly never made the papers. So they found him. He was still in the Navy, station in Philadelphia. They sat him down and asked him all about it. Well, Tim told them exactly how he knew those details. A buddy of his, from our class, had been part of an explorer scout group that helped police search the scene back in '87. And somewhere in there, that kid was told about the mutilation. And then he talked about it and Tim listened. Investigators followed up with the former scout and it checked out, so that was another dead end. Now Tim went back to living and finished out eight years in the Navy, took a job as an aviation mechanic at Lear Jed and let himself believe that maybe finally, the whole thing was behind him. It wasn't. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) In 1997, 10 years after the murder, Broderick reached out to a forensic psychologist in California named Dr. J. Reed Maloy. And he shipped him those 2000 pages of teenage drawings and writing and asked him a simple question, but what does this tell you about the person who made it? Maloy studied the artwork at length and what he came back with was damning. He concluded that some of the drawings showed masters unconsciously reliving the murder. And when he said to pick to the knife, cutting into a woman, another looked to him like a figure dragging a body. He gave the crime and name even, displaced sexual matricide, traced it back to the wound he believed sat at the center of who masters was, the death of his mother and in abandonment, the boy had never gotten past. And it's a hell of a theory, but there are two things about it that don't sit right. The first is that Maloy never once spoke to masters, for this entire psychological case for a man's guilt was built on nothing but the drawings of the boy he used to be. And the second, that's worse. Maloy could only work with what Broderick chose to put in front of him, and he had no idea how much was being held back. Years later, when the full picture finally came out, Maloy said he was appalled and stunned that would have been withheld from him. His own words for what had been done to him was manipulation. And none of that surfaced in time though, and now armed with Maloy's report, the state actually charged Timothy Masters with first degree murder on August 10th, 1998. He was 26 years old by then, and he'd been living in this one man's shadow from more than a decade. The trial came in March of 1999. Surely there wasn't enough to actually convict this guy. The jury sat through the details of the case, the drawings, and ultimately that dark, violent, and strange artwork. Well, it was enough to carry them across the line. Masters was convicted of first degree murder and sentenced the life in prison with no possibility of parole. And Broderick had finally got his guy, but it certainly wasn't the guy who did it. (dramatic music) What was never brought up at the trial, and never really made public till much later on, was that during the course of the investigation, another man had actually landed on the detective's radar years earlier. And his name was Dr. Richard Hammond. In 1987, Hammond was an eye surgeon in Fort Collins, living in a house that sat roughly 100 yards from the field where Peggy's body was found. As a surgeon, Hammond had exactly what the coroner said the killer had, anatomical knowledge and the trained steady hand to make small, precise cuts. For years though, that connection had gotten noted and then quietly set aside. But then, in March of 1995, eight years after the murder and three years before Masters was ever charged, Hammond, the respected eye doctor, was arrested. A house sitter had found a hidden camera tucked behind a fake vent in his downstairs bathroom, aimed right at the toilet. When police searched the place, they carried out with them hundreds of videotapes, plus a stash of explicit images, walked away in his office and a storage shed, all of it pointing to what investigators called a deep and lasting fixation on the female body. So this was way more than just a peeping Tom. Within two days after his arrest, Hammond drove to a motel in North Denver, checked in, and hooked up an IV with cyanide inside it. He left a note behind, and it read, "My death should satisfy the media's thirst for blood, which, if you ask me, will sort us sounds a bit like a guy that had some seriously dark secrets." But now get this. Because Broderick was so fixated on masters, he literally had the Hammond evidence destroyed. Not examined or held up against the Hetric file, burned and hauled off to a landfill. The reasoning was that Hammond was dead, so there was nothing left to investigate. And his name was never given to Dr. Maloy, the man whose profile had become the entire case against masters. And the FBI, which had profiled the murder, was never even told the doctor existed. The arrest, the tapes, the obsession, the proximity, none of it ever reached master's defense before the 1999 trial. And Tim Masters went to prison, the Hammond evidence, and went to a dump. Tim spent nine years in prison. His conviction was appealed more than once, a Colorado court of appeals upheld it in 2001. A Colorado Supreme Court upheld it again in 2002, though they conceded some of the evidence probably never should have been admitted. They called it a harmless error, though, and Tim sat in a cell. And in 2004, Masters got a new defense team and they started digging. What they turned up was a disaster for the prosecution. It's a gone missing, not just any evidence, those hairs from Hedrick's body that didn't match Masters, those were gone. So with a photograph, so the unidentified fingerprints from the purse. The physical proof that pointed away from Tim and the material that should have been preserved no matter what, all of it had simply disappeared. At hearings in 2007, the defense alleged that Broderick had perjured himself the 1999 trial and that prosecutors had buried key evidence, specifically everything tied to Dr. Richard Hammond. In early 2008, the special prosecutors brought in to review the case, reached the same conclusion while critical information had never been handed to the original defense. In 2007, after Masters had already served eight years in prison, DNA is found on Peggy's clothing that didn't belong to him. I had told him clear back then that they were on the wrong track and then we had some DNA. Masters team sent evidence from the original scene to the Netherlands for touch DNA testing, a technique that didn't even exist when Hedrick was killed. When the results came back, well Masters is DNA, it wasn't there at all. When I get a call from them and go, we've got a full match and I went, oh my goodness, the ex-boyfriend, they were breaking up, they were together that night, they had a little spat that night and it's like, they said, well, he's on her and I went, oh my goodness. Matt Zolner, her on again, off again boyfriend, the same man who had been at the bar the night she died offered her a ride home and said he never saw her again and who would take in the stand as a witness at Tim's own trial. Now Zolner have been looked at briefly back in '87 and cleared and that was DNA was sitting on evidence right from the scene. On January 22nd, 2008, Colorado judge finally vacated Timothy Masters conviction and ordered him release that same day and it served nine years for murder he never committed. So Tim Masters was exonerated. Jim Broderick, the detective who fixated on a 15 year old kid for over a decade, ordered Hammond's evidence destroyed and was later found by a grand jury to have made materially false statements under oath, was indicted on felony perjury in 2010 and then re-indicted the next year. Every charge was eventually thrown out though because Colorado's statute of limitations on perjury had already run. He resigned from the four Collins PD in 2013 and the internal investigation into his handling of the case was suspended the moment he left. The city had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in public money just to defend him. The two prosecutors who ran the case, Terry Gilmore and Jolyne Blair, had hidden evidence from Tim's defense and even from their own expert, Maloy, in 2008 the Colorado Supreme Court officially disciplined them both for it by the end they had both been made judges, promoted not long after Masters conviction. But in 2010 the voters in their district got the last word and voted them both off the bench. Some eventually sued, Larimer County settled for 4.1 mil and for Collins for 5.9 mil. So $10 million in all, roughly a million bucks for every year they took from him. As to where this case stands now, well to this day no one has ever been charged with Peggy Hetrick's murder. Matt Zollner, the boyfriend who's DNA turned up on evidence from the scene, was looked at the second time after Masters was freed. But there was reason why his DNA might be on her belongings since he knew her so well. And so, without anything else, no charge could be brought against him. Dr. Richard Hammond is dead, a surgeon with a skill to do exactly what was done to Peggy, a documented obsession with the female body and living close enough to see the feel where she was left. After he died his wife provided a sample of his DNA and it didn't match what was found on Peggy, but that doesn't clear him of anything. In this case, we just don't know and may never know because the rest was burned and dumped on her detective's orders. But if it was Hammond, chances are he stood at his window that morning, coffee in hand and watch the police work to feel below, and close enough to see everything, while every set of eyes they had stayed fixated on a dead woman, and eventually a 15-year-old boy they thought did it. So, that's going to do it for this week's episode of Every Town. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're listening to this podcast, then just a heads up. We have another one called Scary Mysteries that you can check out. We cover creepy stories from various states, from you, the audience, and true crime that's in the news. So, go there for more true crime, and remember to come right back here for another episode of Every Town Next Week that would scary, strange, and mysterious stories, because you never know, maybe your town will be next.