Erin Udell

erinudell@coloradoan.com

Editor's note: The story was originally published February 8, 2017.

In the early morning hours of Feb. 11, 1987, Peggy Hettrick became a headline.

When a cyclist on his way to work spotted the ghost white, murdered and mutilated body of a woman in an otherwise empty field, police, reporters and camera crews descended on the spot.

Bodies just didn’t turn up like that in Fort Collins.

Investigators working with bare hands took casts of tire tracks and footprints as officers with "Magnum, P.I." mustaches paced the scene, snapping photographs and collecting evidence.

A FoCo cold case: Introducing Hettrick podcast update

Cameras panned the new housing developments and apartment complexes that bordered the gruesome scene in the affluent Warren Lake area.

“I’ve never felt bad about walking around in Fort Collins,” a woman, caught briefly outside her nearby apartment, told a reporter.

The body lying in the field shattered that illusion of unquestioned safety in a growing Front Range city. But as officers lifted her from blood-stained prairie grasses, who could have known that 30 years later Fort Collins would still be asking the question that troubled the city on that day:

Who killed Peggy Hettrick?

On the 30th anniversary of her death, The Coloradoan also asks "who was she?" — the dreamy 37-year-old redhead whose untimely death was ultimately lost in a tale of tunnel vision, politics and allegations of police and prosecutorial misconduct.

Through interviews with Hettrick's close friends, acquaintances and a detective who calls this the case she can't forget, we hope to paint a picture of a lively woman known to most by her grisly end.

The crime

Tammy Witt still looks over her shoulder.

“(I’m) very vigilant, no matter where I go, of my surroundings and who’s around me, who’s across the street,” Witt, now 58, told the Coloradoan last month.

A former Fort Collins resident, Witt had worked with Hettrick at the Fashion Bar, a department store that sold ladies’ and men’s apparel at The Square at the corner of College Avenue and Horsetooth Road.

“I was about six months pregnant and we had an appointment that day to go to lunch, so I called the Fashion Bar to talk to her,” Witt said, adding that the co-worker who answered the phone asked her to sit down.

Peggy had been murdered.

After working a shift at The Fashion Bar the night of Feb. 10, 1987 — and bar hopping briefly while she was locked out of her apartment — Hettrick walked to her Stover Street residence, changed clothes and headed back out to the watering holes she frequented. She was last seen alive about 1:30 a.m., leaving the Prime Minister at the corner of College Avenue and Boardwalk Drive.

29 years later: The cold case that haunts Fort Collins

Hours later, her body was found in the middle of a field at the 3500 block of Landings Drive, less than 500 yards from the Prime Minister. Her purse was still slung around her shoulder with her belongings inside. A half-smoked cigarette sat in a pool of blood that had gathered at the nearby curb. A red trail led through the grasses to Hettrick’s body.

She had been stabbed in the back and sexually mutilated.

It wasn't unusual for Hettrick to walk from her job to her apartment and then to the neighborhood bars. It's something Debi Flamio, one of her close friends, said they did together the last time she saw Hettrick. Living in Denver at the time of the murder, Flamio said she spent a weekend in Fort Collins with Hettrick in late 1986.

"Then ... I got a phone call a couple months later," Flamio said. She drove right to Fort Collins.

"It was especially hard for me," Flamio said. "I was a hairdresser and her family had asked me if I would do her makeup and her hair in her casket."

"It was kind of my time with her alone," she added. "(I) wanted to make her look pretty because she always had to have her makeup and hair done ... so it was pretty tough, but I kind of looked at that as our goodbye. I was able to have closure even though they hadn't found anybody yet."

Thirty years later, Flamio is left to speculate about what happened, who killed Hettrick and what could have been if things transpired differently that night.

"If she had just stayed there (at the Prime Minister) or gone to another public place," Flamio said. "I think, you know, what would we be doing? Would she still be in Fort Collins? ... Would she be married now?"

"It's just such a travesty that something like that had to happen to somebody like her."

Going cold

Of Fort Collins’ cold cases, Hettrick's murder is one of the oldest and most well-known. Statewide, it’s one of 1,343 unsolved homicides, according to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.

"Back in the 80s, you just didn't have the technology that you have today," Steve Conner, a cold case detective with the Aurora Police Department, said about the difference between investigating a cold case versus an incident that happened recently. But now, he said, investigators can use the latest technology to examine evidence from decades ago.

And that's what is paramount in solving a case that's gone cold: evidence.

"Personally, I've had no one ever come in and confess to a case," Conner said. "I wish I had it like television where they came in and confessed or, you know, you find the weapon or the evidence 20 or 30 years later in the possession of the guy you're looking at."

Mostly, Conner said he looks at what evidence is available in a case before pursuing it — making sure that nothing has degraded over time or has been disposed of. Then he looks to see if any witnesses are still alive or able to be tracked down.

"To be honest with you, the biggest hurdle for me in even getting some buy-in to the case is (that) a lot of times, the family members have moved on," Conner said. "I've had several cases where they go, you know, 'Do whatever you want. We're not interested.'"

While she's not family, that's not the case for Linda Wheeler-Holloway.

“Out of all of (the cases) I’ve seen and worked, this is the one that stays with me, that haunts me, that doesn’t seem to go anywhere,” said Wheeler-Holloway, who worked as a detective with the Fort Collins Police Department at the time of the murder.

Hettrick was described by friends as a fun-loving woman — an artistic, well-traveled "Annie Hall" type — but Wheeler-Holloway said she didn’t get to know Hettrick until she was sorting through her apartment on the morning her body was found.

The way Hettrick lived was reflected in the things she left behind: clothes were laid out in her tidy unit at the AspenLeaf Apartment complex, books filled her shelves and a typewriter — which she was using to write her own novel, a fiction piece about diamond smugglers — sat on her desk.

“She had a lot of ambitions,” Wheeler-Holloway said, adding that Hettrick was close to her family, then made up of her father, brother, uncle and grandmother. “I think it was someone that had I known her in life, I probably would have liked her and befriended her.”

Working on the case in different capacities at different turns, Holloway went from processing Hettrick’s apartment to connecting the crime to Tim Masters, a teen who lived nearby, in those early days. Eventually, she inherited the case and reopened it as lead investigator in the early-1990s before she left Fort Collins for the Colorado Bureau of Investigations.

When a conviction came through against Masters more than 10 years later, Holloway took on the cause of freeing the young man whose guilt she had doubted for years.

A 15-year-old high school sophomore when Hettrick was murdered, Masters intrigued investigators after his father, Clyde Masters, told Wheeler-Holloway during a neighborhood canvass that Tim had seemed to stop at something in the field that morning before returning to his usual path to his school bus stop.

Though he later told investigators he thought Hettrick’s body was a mannequin or Resusci-Anne doll when he first saw it, Masters' failure to immediately report the body catapulted him to the top of the suspect list. Masters spent 11 years in the crime’s shadow before being arrested for Hettrick’s murder in 1998 and being found guilty based on macabre drawings from his youth and testimony from a forensic psychologist.

After mounting several appeals, and with Wheeler-Holloway now on his side with post-conviction attorneys Maria Liu and David Wymore, DNA test results of skin cells left on Hettrick's clothing cleared Masters and instead pointed to Hettrick’s on-again-off-again boyfriend, who she had seen the night she was killed.

A judge subsequently vacated Masters’ conviction and ordered him to be released after a decade in prison in 2008.

The Colorado Attorney General's Office has handled the case since.

"Peggy Hettrick's murder remains a Colorado tragedy 30 years later," reads a statement released by the office this month. "Her case is very important to the Attorney General's Office and our goal is to find justice for Ms. Hettrick, her family and friends. Given that this is an ongoing investigation, and out of respect for her loved ones, it would be inappropriate to comment further at this time."

“I think the getting off track with Tim Masters for so many years really did damage the prosecutibility of this case,” Wheeler-Holloway said.

Though 30 years have passed and memories have become fallible, Wheeler-Holloway said the strongest evidence in the case is the physical evidence.

“DNA has really moved from being just about nonexistent in 1987 to changing the world and changing the judicial system,” Wheeler-Holloway said. “I really think that’s still where our best possibility of solving this is.”

“I think there’s people who really believe that this is solvable and I’m not one to ever give up.”

People v. Masters: The Update

To hear newly-conducted interviews on Peggy Hettrick's life, murder and possible suspects, stayed tuned for the Coloradoan's updated episodes of "People v. Masters," a podcast that examines the case through the people who lived it. The episodes will be available for download on iTunes this week. Until then, listen to the original, four-episode "People v. Masters" podcast.

Northern Colorado cold cases

Steven Kirk, 28, was found dead in a camping trailer parked at a Fort Collins hotel on June 25, 1977. No suspects were ever named.

Morton S. Rosenfeld, 43, was found beaten to death in a basement apartment in Estes Park on May 19, 1979. There is a suspect in the case, but charges have never been filed.

Walter, 29, and Kimmo Perry, 9 months, were found burned to death in a Loveland home on March 12, 1979.

Jessica Arredondo, 21, was found along U.S. Highway 36 near Estes Park on Nov. 26, 1988. Witnesses say she was abducted after being involved in a car crash a few blocks away from a Denver bar where she had been seen.

"Baby Faith," an unidentified newborn, was found on the shores of Horsetooth Reservoir on Aug. 24, 1996, after suffocating on the plastic garbage bag in which she was wrapped.

Mary Lou Vickerman, 61, died Sept. 13, 1999, after being struck while riding her bicycle along U.S. Highway 287 in Loveland. A white male in his late 30s or early 40s driving a 1970s red Ford pickup truck hit her and did not stop.

Renee Bina Munshi, 19, was tending to her dog, which had just been hit by a car, when she was struck herself on S. Taft Hill Road. She died at Poudre Valley Hospital eight hours later on Oct. 6, 1999.

John Robert Miller, a 56-year-old hit-and-run victim, was found lying in the 4300 block of U.S. Highway 287 in Loveland on Aug. 15, 2003.