He’s barely unwrapped his taco before the $100 bill tumbles onto the restaurant table, dropped from the hand of a total stranger.
“I want you to have this,” the smiling, middle-age woman says without stopping on her way out of a Fort Collins Taco Bell.
Tim Masters offers a quick “thank you” in the same half-astonished way he’s responded to hundreds of such gestures in the year since a judge threw out his murder conviction and set him free.
People recognize Masters — tall, tight- shouldered, now balding — from newspapers and TV, the man who traded shackles and a tight orange jumpsuit for a proper shirt and bright yellow tie and strode quickly down the back courthouse steps.
Fresh out of a decade in prison, the world is his cheerleader. The applause, the tooting car horns, the clicking cameras, the gifts — they follow him everywhere.
One day, an ’88 BMW, the four-wheel drive he’s always wanted, shows up at his Greeley attorneys’ office. Another day, he’s undergoing a free, $4,000 operation to fix his nearsighted vision.
Then he’s on a plane, tickets paid, to Europe for an appearance on an Amsterdam TV talk show.
The first man in Colorado history freed from a life sentence by DNA evidence is famous. But it’s a fame he would gladly trade to get back the lost years of his life.
The case that put him in prison was always circumstantial: Peggy Hettrick’s naked, mutilated body was found in 1987 in a field near Masters’ childhood home in Fort Collins.
Police quickly zeroed in on the stoic- faced, shaggy-haired 15-year-old as the killer — and for the next 11 years, did not let go. Masters had passed within several feet of the body on his way to school. His notebooks were filled with violent writings and drawings. Surely, authorities speculated, they were the musings of a killer.
He tried to live a normal life, through high school, a stint in the Navy, a house in California near his sister, a job as an aircraft mechanic for Learjet.
Then early one morning in August 1998, the knock came. It was Lt. Jim Broderick. A psychologist had declared that the drawings and writings were the fantasies of a killer. Finally, the evidence Broderick needed.
Even without any physical evidence, it took just 10 hours for jurors to convict Masters of murder.
Cars, money and good wishes can’t make up for that or do what Masters wants most — to bring the real killer to justice.
“How do you give me back my reputation?” says Masters, now 37. “How do you give me back 10 years of my life?”
JANUARY
A free man
Once a week, Aunt Betty pushes her vacuum cleaner into Masters’ bedroom.
There’s not a lot of work to do. His fluffy bed is made, his brand new Jos. A. Bank clothes are folded or hanging, the boxes of gifts piled neatly.
In the bathroom, the toothpaste cap is always placed back on the tube.
He asks whether everything looks orderly.
“Everything looks good,” Betty Schneider, the sister of his late father, Clyde, assures him.
Two weeks into his freedom, Masters finds fulfillment in the simple rituals of daily independence. This feels like home, and Aunt Betty and Uncle Elmer want their north Fort Collins house to be his home.
The unremarkable has turned remarkable. His bedroom is four times the size of his Buena Vista prison cell. The kitchen table abounds with real beef, real dairy, real potatoes, real chicken.
In the mornings, Aunt Betty fries eggs and bacon. “Can I have a fourth fried egg?” Masters asks politely.
“Remember, you can stay as long as you want,” she reminds him.
Masters insists that he won’t overstay his welcome. “I’ve got to get on my own feet soon. I’m not a moocher.”
The basement is a comfort zone. The walls hold echoes of his boyhood roller skates skimming across the concrete floor to outrace his cousins.
His barbells and bench press lie near one wall. Next to them, under a small window, he starts to write again — now that his mind feels less shackled. He wants to publish a memoir. Set the record straight.
He taps out the words on a Dell laptop, purchased with the only payment the state gave him on his way out of prison — $1,600 for labor. The computer makes the writing mechanics easier. But he finds the act of putting down thoughts difficult. So many memories are freighted with sadness and anger.
And fear.
Masters will not easily forget a decade, most of it locked in a 6-by-10 cell wedged into a three-tiered unit between neo-Nazis, gang members and drug addicts.
His fellow inmates branded him a “rapist bastard,” scrawling those words in black ink across one of his shirts while it was in the laundry.
“Politeness to them is a sign of weakness,” he says. “You don’t act weak, or you end up paying rent to other guys.”
Hatred seemed to pervade the place. It was in the guards’ jangling keys and heavy footsteps that jolted him awake every midnight. It was in the smell of pepper spray hanging in the corridors after fights. In the beginning, he imagined an escape. He’d just been handed his prison razor: “I could end it all right here,” he recalls thinking. Thoughts of his family intervened.
He spent hours — three days on, one day off — bulking up on weights until he could press 315 pounds. He turned to the Bible and then turned away. Requests for help and legal appeals were rejected. His life slid into a cycle of deep depression and tedium.
One day, he inexplicably sank to his knees. He started scraping the floor tiles of his cell with his fingernail clippers, peeling the wax off each one.
It took an hour to scrape a 1-by-1-foot section.
There were 60.
“In prison, I battled to maintain my sanity by just not thinking of what had happened to me, where I was and what the future might hold,” Masters writes three weeks into his freedom.
“As a free man, I no longer want to go through life like that. This is both good and bad. The good part is I am aware of people and my surroundings. The bad part is I am also well aware of what I’ve lost.”
FEBRUARY
Getting reacquainted
Masters is back behind the wheel of his red ’96 Trans Am, cranking the Pat Benatar tunes, weaving through noon traffic along Interstate 25.
He’s feeling 26 again, he says. “All those years in the joint don’t count. My clock stopped when I went to prison.”
Of the more than 200 gifts, this means the most. In prison, his dreams often were about driving again, his passion.
But he had sold the Trans Am to a cousin to pay attorney fees and never envisioned this moment. Another aunt, Juanita Craft, had been planning to buy it back for him for months. “You’ve lost almost everything else, so this is the least I could do,” she told him.
On this sunny drive, with the 350 engine humming, the vibes are all good.
Then, out of nowhere, he is worried that someone will think he is doing something wrong. He can’t focus. His mind is flooded with questions. “Will the cops come get me today?” “Do I need alibi witnesses with me today?”
The thoughts, he describes later, are intrusions he can’t control.
They’re a legacy of the distant past and recent past. Even though the Larimer County district attorney dropped the murder charges against him, authorities are unwilling to clear Masters as a suspect.
Now, he rarely ventures out without family or a few close friends. Friends such as Maria Liu, the Greeley attorney who spearheaded his innocence bid. She calls herself his “den mother” and has provided a workspace for him at her office. Barie Goetz, Masters’ crime-scene investigator, rides along with him on his first road trips — so that if a patrol officer pulled Masters over for, say, a burned-out taillight and a crime database still showed him as a Colorado inmate, Goetz could vouch for him.
It’s easier when Masters heads out of town as he did on Feb. 8 to spend a week in Whittier, Calif., with his sister, Serena, and her three children, two of them born while he was in the joint.
It was supposed to be quality time.
Instead, for an entire week, he’s sweating out in the driveway amid loose wrenches and pliers. This time, rewiring from top to bottom his beloved ’69 Chevy pickup truck, purchased new by his dad. The truck is a ghost of itself. Work, lots of it, is needed to undo the damage of lost time.
“Hey, it’s great having you back — even if it’s having you in the driveway the whole time,” Serena says.
The new wires will have to be delivered. This gives him time to inventory the evidence of his former life.
Out back in a steel shed, Serena has stored his stuff in dozens of plastic bins with black and blue tops. His CDs are in good shape. His scrapbook’s intact, and inside is a picture of Serena holding Tim, a smiling baby, in the pickup’s bed. On top of one heap is a special prize, his dad’s anchor-shaped Navy retirement plaque. The plaque always hung on Masters’ living-room wall as a pathmarker of sorts, but it’s water-stained, and its tiny flags are fraying.
Here’s his favorite shirt — a black T commemorating his Navy trip around South America; Masters loved sailing off to faraway countries. When he later pulls a sleeve over his left arm, the threads split apart.
And there’s an unexpected relic — a weekly paycheck stub dated July 1998 for $1,010.50. One day, he plugs the figures into his calculator: $1,010.50 times 52 weeks times 10 years. More than a half million dollars in lost income. Add his former Ridgecrest, Calif., home, just down the highway from Serena’s, which was taken by the bank; his ’46 Harley, sold to pay lawyers; and other stuff hauled away, and the figure climbs.
“Too depressing to keep counting,” Masters says now.
MARCH
Picking up the pieces
Jangle, jangle, scuff, scuff.
Those were the sounds of the midnight guards’ keys and footsteps.
Masters hears them again on a hike into Horsetooth Canyon.
Ahead of him, a set of car keys jangles on his old high school friend Brett’s belt loop. They are punctuated by the sound of their boots.
Masters tenses, loses his focus and his mind returns to those long prison nights.
“The sound of keys will never be the same for me again,” he says later.
On the outside, evidence of his prison life is fading. His skin is tanning. He’s more energetic. He’s got his dry wit back, cracking Homer Simpson lines or poking fun at himself.
But his friends and family wonder how he’s doing on the inside.
This is difficult because he measures his words carefully and is prone to long silences. He keeps a steady expression. He never shows flashes of anger or falls into fits of laughter.
A look back at his prison journal helps explain the reason. In it, he laments “feeling dead inside. . . . I no longer empathize well,” he wrote just 11 months earlier.
The sound of keys aren’t the only reminders of his past. Every Fort Collins street, building and sign can take his mind even further back than prison.
One day, Masters is driving his pickup, sipping his first Coke Slurpee in a decade. He’s nearing the sign to Landings Drive, the street where he grew up and where Hettrick’s body was dumped. Instead of turning down Landings — the quickest route — he keeps his eyes and the truck pointed straight ahead.
He has lived under a shadow of suspicion all the way back to 1987, when police wrapped yellow tape around his street and accused him of committing the crime.
The shadow followed him into his high school classrooms, where the teachers feared him, and down the hallways, where girls moved aside when he walked by.
“To understand this guy’s life back then, you have to understand — who’s going to accept a date to the prom with a murder suspect?” says his appeals attorney, Dave Wymore.
These days, Masters always is on the go. To hit car auctions with his cousins. To fix Aunt Juanita’s sick Toro lawn mower. To help paint a cousin’s tractor.
And one day, to the Capitol to testify in support of a bill requiring police to preserve DNA evidence.
Masters shows up in his gray pressed suit, the one Aunt Betty says makes him look like a “real businessman.”
A folded sheet of paper is tucked inside his blazer pocket. It’s a 2004 court motion filed by the Larimer County district attorney opposing the preservation of Hettrick’s clothing.
“I’d still be locked up,” he testifies, if a judge had approved this motion. Advanced DNA skin-cell tests of her garments found no genetic trace of Masters but identified cells belonging to another suspect.
He grips the paper in front of him. This, he says, is why the state needs a law preventing evidence from being destroyed.
The law passes overwhelmingly.
Talk about another bill to compensate Masters for his losses dies quietly. Twenty states have laws providing compensation for the unjustly convicted. Colorado does not.
APRIL
Keep moving
Movement means freedom, and Tim’s personal odometer registers somewhere near 15,000 miles since he was freed from prison.
Now, he’s in the Netherlands, walking cobblestone sidewalks in a soft mist. Beads of rain collect around the smile on his face.
He’s just appeared on an Amsterdam TV talk show spotlighting the DNA analysis performed by a Dutch forensic team that helped overturn his conviction.
After the show, he slips into the easy vibe of perhaps the least restrictive country in the world. He hears no sirens in this city, sees no threatening shadows.
“This is the freest I’ve felt,” he says, sipping his first beer in 10 years at a small sidewalk cafe.
Later, he finds himself at the Van Gogh Museum, then at Prinsengracht 267, where Anne Frank and her family hid for months until the Nazis took them away. He moves slowly through the movable bookcase that blocked their secret entrance and walks through a tight stairwell. Masters knows the feeling of being dragged out of your home.
“You have an empathy for what they went through,” he says. “Nobody knows but them. But I can empathize with it.”
At nightfall, he finds himself at an amusement park. The rain picks up. He doesn’t care — the attendants beckon for more riders. He climbs into a bucket at the bottom of a towering carousel that whirls its passengers 200 feet into the sky like slingshots.
When he reaches the top, he’s overwhelmed by it all — the amazing view of Amsterdam, the dizziness of his life.
In the mist of Western Europe, he can be a boy again.
MAY
More scars of the past
In Fort Collins, the clouds are darkening and winds whip the trees. Masters is riding in Aunt Betty’s red Oldsmobile. They’ve just had lunch with friends who wanted to hear all about his extended European trip — how he photographed the gargoyles of Notre Dame; made it to the top of the Eiffel Tower; took a cable car through the Swiss Alps; and visited Germany’s Neuschwanstein Castle.
As they drive down Lemay Avenue, Aunt Betty remarks, “I wonder who’s in trouble?”
She points to a long strip of yellow tape blocking off North Lemay near Country Club Road.
Masters locks onto the sight of that tape.
His heart suddenly kicks. Then he feels adrenaline pump through his chest. Is he in trouble?
He says nothing.
Aunt Betty keeps driving.
The next day, he learns the yellow tape isn’t protecting a crime scene; it is there to seal off traffic from a wind-blown telephone pole leaning into the road.
By late May, the steady celebration of Masters’ freedom is drawing to an end. Though he still has plans to see family, he is thinking more about his future. It’s time to make a move into his own place.
The tension he feels in Fort Collins, he often doesn’t feel outside the town.
So he’s got his sights on a spacious townhouse in the leafy center of Greeley, a new comfort zone where his attorney, Liu, works.
The apartment sits next to a park, and there is a sprawling basement where he can write, work and lift weights.
Now he’s sitting in his prospective landlord’s office, prepared to put down cash from his savings account for six months’ rent.
Dijon Dike is the first stranger who wields some influence over his fate in the outside world.
Masters is waiting for the verdict.
She is holding a long sheet of paper covered with upper-case words. It’s his criminal-background report.
“Do you want to see it?” she says.
He scans it from top to bottom, noticing that it mistakenly lists six arrests for murder offenses.
A person unfamiliar with his case could conclude “I slaughtered a family,” he says.
But she knows that he was wrongfully convicted of one murder offense.
“The only word that matters to me is this one right here,” she says. Dike points to the top of the page.
“Dismissed.”
Masters thanks her.
Back at Aunt Betty’s, it takes him a couple of days to box everything up and haul it to Greeley in his truck.
He tells Betty he’s going to try to “make a go” of his own business using eBay. It’s an idea he’s had since prison, when he saw the online marketplace featured on TV.
His aunt and uncle have their doubts. But they’re thrilled he’s keeping himself busy.
“He’s got a way with making things work,” Betty says as he pulls out of the driveway.
JUNE
“Being with family”
Masters is about to add another 2,000 miles to his travel log.
He and 15 family members are caravanning to Bremerton, Wash., where his cousin Pat, a chief machinist mate, is retiring from the Navy after 20 years.
Finally, real family life returns. For once, this gathering is not about Tim.
The public has seen the size of this clan, big enough to take over a bowling alley, as they did in Bremerton.
The day Masters was released from prison, his relatives kept walking, shoulders held high, through the courtroom door as the judge summoned them — 50 strong — to a special spot near the front.
Masters talks of an unspoken family code, burnished through years of coming together through military service and hard economic times.
“Just being with family is what I enjoy,” he says.
Pat stands behind a lectern, choking up as he gives thanks to his wife and his parents, Rose and Owen Lamb, Masters’ aunt and uncle, for their love and support while he was away at sea.
Pat receives his ceremonial American flag. Then, he places it in his father’s hands. “You’re my hero, and I want you to have it.”
Owen Lamb bursts into tears.
Seated directly behind him, Masters stares at the flag with moist eyes.
JULY
Starting over
Job offers have rolled in from business owners who have read about Masters. A trucking company has an opening. So does a quarry. And maybe some aviation firms.
But Masters has his own ideas.
“I spent years in the military taking orders and almost a decade in prison being told what to do, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I am tired of being told what to do by so many people.”
He also dreads the questions about his background. So, he’s working for himself now. He’s turned his apartment basement into an office. His tools of trade: flashlight, truck and laptop. His trade: stuff.
In prison, the stuff of everyday life was minimal, and even that kept disappearing. One day, salt shakers were taken from the prison chow hall; another day, his muscle rub was confiscated from his cell.
“Every week, it seemed they took something away. It’s how they break you down,” Masters says.
Now, he hopes stuff will make him independent again. He’s learned through his cousins about a circuit of auctions. People abandon things in storage units, and the contents go up for bid.
The process is quick. The auctioneer raises the door, and bidders have a minute to scan the vault. Everything must go. But there’s no way of knowing what’s valuable.
On this day, Masters is one of a handful of people who show up. He is the only one carrying a flashlight and a clipboard.
He is shrewd. He avoids the units loaded with boxes whose flaps are sprung open; perhaps someone has already rummaged through them.
He puts in the winning bid for one unit, $100. He packs the boxes into his pickup and takes them back to his apartment, where the haul is cleaned in the garage.
Everything is documented and neatly placed on a row of shelves in the basement. Much of it he’ll put on eBay.
Near his desk, his father’s Navy anchor is back in its rightful place on the wall. He is restoring the finish and the tattered flags.
OCTOBER
Struggling
By October, Masters has sold hundreds of items, practical things, weird things.
He’s sold an ice machine to a California guy who only likes his cubes smooth as cotton balls. He’s sold dozens of War Hammer game figures to a man in Ohio obsessed with medieval objects.
He’s still not making a profit, and he’s not sure whether this venture is going to last, but he’s happy to be selling stuff. In fact, he’ll sell you that shiny vase with the rose design. Who knows, it could be from the Ming Dynasty.
“Make me an offer!” he says.
He’s learning the sales talk from his uncle Frank Dresser, a successful restaurant-equipment dealer in Phoenix.
In recent weeks, he has worked out of Dresser’s office, watching how his business is run. In turn, Masters has helped him sell a pizza oven, popcorn machines and refrigerators, earning some decent cash and Dresser’s respect. Frank wants him to move to Phoenix.
“Who knows, I might do it,” Masters says, noting that his apartment lease is up in December.
Back at home in mid-November, he finds his own sales sliding. He routinely scans eBay postings. Nothing is selling, and there’s only one e-mail inquiry in his inbox. A few hours later, he checks it again. Empty.
So he turns his thoughts to his memoir, tapping out the words on his laptop. “Right now, it is a daily struggle to just survive. I am eking out a living. This keeps me busy sunup to sundown. Thinking of how to pay my bills in the present pretty much keeps me from dwelling on the future, what life might be like down the road. . . . I just have to take life one day at a time.”
And so he does. For most of the fall, Masters is back on the road alone, just driving.
Back to Arizona, to Colorado, back again to Arizona, then Colorado, Minnesota and back to Colorado once more.
By now, he has trekked more than 25,000 miles since walking out of prison.
Still, it’s not easy to distance himself from his past.
His lawyers track him down in Arizona with some important news. His federal lawsuit against Fort Collins police and prosecutors has been filed, and there are some revelations at its core.
Among them: The psychologist, Reid Meloy, who created the theory that landed Masters in prison now says he was manipulated by prosecutors and Broderick, the officer who pursued him. Another suspect better fits the “fantasy” profile, overriding suspicions that Masters committed the crime, Meloy told Tim’s attorneys. The suit also provides documentation that authorities discarded evidence collected from another key suspect.
The revelations are starting points to proving Masters’ constitutional rights were violated and that he should be compensated. But the lawsuit could drag on for years while authorities defend their actions and the case stays cold, preserving the shadow of suspicion over him.
So he keeps driving.
“Look, the system took his life and, in a way, his future,” says Goetz, Masters’ crime-scene investigator. “We all want him to make it. But there’s this guy driving around out there, and he’s got this stigma.
“The truth is that I’ve asked people, ‘Would you hire him?’ ‘Would you let him date your daughter?’ ”
The answer’s always the same.
“You get this pause. . . .”
NEARLY A YEAR AFTER RELEASE
A fragile future
Masters is repairing his life, and his family and friends marvel at his efforts.
But they also can’t help but catalog their worries.
They feel the stares that follow him. They hear the whispers from those who doubt his innocence and can’t help but fear that they won’t be silenced until police arrest Hettrick’s killer. They wonder whether Masters should be getting therapy.
Stories abound of wrongly convicted prisoners who, once released into society, hit the skids.
A 2004 study, published in the Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice, showed two-thirds of a sample group reeled from post-traumatic stress disorder. The symptoms include unpredictable flashbacks or nightmares and efforts to avoid reminders of the past — problems also experienced by rape victims, soldiers and prisoners of war. “How could I not have PTSD?” he says.
His attorneys urge him to see a psychologist. But he’s dubious. “A psychologist helped put me away!”
Those close to Masters worry about how he will make a living if his eBay venture flops and whether the government will pay him for what it took away.
They worry about his lack of health insurance; he plans to go to Mexico to get a cracked tooth fixed.
But these are the concerns of interested onlookers. It is quite another thing to be Tim Masters, to have had a huge chunk of your life summarily taken away and the rest returned, grudgingly, in such a fragile state.
This is a worry that time itself can’t erase.
“It’s always there, the worry about the knock on the door. They say your home is your castle. But mine never will be.”
Miles Moffeit: 303-954-1415 or mmoffeit@denverpost.com
