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| Tim Masters Released after 10 years - |
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pausebreak
 Posted:
Tue Jan 22, 2008 2:43 pm |
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Tim Masters Released after 10 years
Richard and Selma Eikelenboom always planned to travel to Colorado to watch Tim Masters be freed - they just never imagined it would happen this quickly.
The couple, who operate a DNA laboratory in Holland, made the first discovery of genetic material on the clothes of murder victim Peggy Hettrick that pointed the finger away from Masters, who is serving a life sentence for her killing.
So when they learned Friday that he was expected to walk out of court a free man today, they booked a flight to the United States.
"This is a very special moment, of course," Richard Eikel enboom said Monday. "It is not that often that they release someone who was convicted for life."
In recent years, a team of people who believed that Masters was innocent worked to win him a new trial. In 2005, the Eikelenbooms agreed to use techniques they developed in an effort to collect DNA from Hettrick's clothing.
They first determined that none of Masters' DNA was on her clothes. Then, more recently, they found that skin-cell DNA on the cuffs of Hettrick's blouse matched the genetic fingerprint of a former boyfriend.
Investigators believe she was dragged by the wrists into the field where her body was found.
On Monday, the Eikelenbooms were shopping and preparing for the court hearing this morning at which Judge Joseph Weatherby is expected to order that Masters be released.
"I can imagine it was difficult for Tim Masters to believe he was going to be set free," Richard Eikelenboom said. "But it was also difficult for us. We couldn't believe it could go so fast after all the work to get him a new trial."
The Eikelenbooms agreed to take on the case after a visit from former Fort Collins police detective Linda Wheeler-Holloway, who believes that Masters is innocent.
After hearing that presentation, Richard Eikelenboom said that he and his wife thought "there's a good probability that this guy is innocent."
They had been working in the DNA field for two decades and had developed new techniques for collecting samples from clothing. Collection is paramount.
"If you don't find it, you never come to the process of DNA profiling," Richard Eikelenboom said
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/jan/22/dna-pros-cheer-convicts-release/
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Soopa Soopa Bitch !!
Joined: 24 Mar 2006
Posts: 5550
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| pausebreak
Posted:
Tue Jan 22, 2008 2:44 pm |
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FORT COLLINS — Timothy Masters is a free man.
The 36-year-old was released from custody late this morning after serving nearly 10 years of a life sentence for the murder of a Fort Collins woman in 1987.
Masters was ordered released on a personal recognizance bond. Prosecutors promised to decide quickly whether to try him again, but a legal analyst has said that’s unlikely, given the DNA evidence. He is due to return to court Feb. 5.
Applause broke out in the courtroom as the hearing ended.
Masters, dressed in a blue suit, white shirt and yellow tie, showed little emotion but hugged members of his defense team.
He later thanked family, friends and members of the media and quipped: "I love this suit and tie."
Masters, 36, spent nearly a decade behind bars for the murder of Peggy Lee Hettrick.
Hettrick, a 37-year-old department manager at a Fort Collins Fashion Bar, went out after work late the night of Feb. 10, 1987. She eventually ended up at the Prime Minister, a bar and restaurant in south Fort Collins, and was last seen walking out the door, apparently heading home.
Early the next morning, a man riding his bicycle to work made a grisly discovery — a splash of blood next to the curb on south Landings Drive, and a trail more than 100 feet long leading to Hettrick’s body.
Her killer had stabbed her in the back with a large knife, then sexually mutilated her, slicing away flesh from her genitalia and left breast with an extremely sharp instrument, such as a scalpel.
The focus of the investigation quickly shifted to Masters, a 15-year-old college student who lived with his widower father in a mobile home that overlooked the field where Hettrick’s body was found.
And he admitted that as he walked to catch the school bus that morning in the pre-sunrise gloom he had seen the corpse in the field but did not report it because he assumed it was a mannequin, perhaps left as some sort of a cruel hoax.
But despite hours of police questioning, Masters held firm, insisting he had nothing to do with Hettrick’s killing. However, investigators were suspicious of his collection of survival knives, some with scalpels secreted in their handles, with hundreds of pages of violent drawings and stories found in his bedroom and school locker, and with some of the statements he made.
In the ensuing years, detectives continued to consider Masters a prime suspect, and traveled to Philadelphia in 1992 with the intent of arresting him. However, after a new round of questioning, the detectives realized they had problems, and they returned to Fort Collins without taking him into custody.
In the next few years, Fort Collins police investigators consulted with forensic experts, and one of them, Dr. Reid Meloy, examined hundreds of the drawings and writings produced by Masters and concluded that he killed Hettrick.
His work allowed police investigators to obtain an arrest warrant in 1998, and in 1999 a jury convicted him, largely on the basis of Meloy’s testimony.
His conviction was upheld by both the Colorado Court of Appeals and the Colorado Supreme Court.
Then a team of attorneys, crime scene experts and former police investigators began working to win him a new trial. In the past year, they have raised numerous questions about the conduct of police and prosecutors — highlighting hundreds of pages of documents that were not turned over to his original defense attorneys.
A separate inquiry into police and prosecutor misconduct is under way by the Weld County District Attorney’s Officehttp://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/jan/22/judge-sets-masters-free/
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Soopa Soopa Bitch !!
Joined: 24 Mar 2006
Posts: 5550
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| Mia
Posted:
Wed Jan 23, 2008 12:47 am |
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I saw this case on one of the CI type programs.
I thought then that he had been railroaded.
There are lots of cases like this.
One that comes to mind is a murder/rape case where three guys got life and one did 8 years for rape.
This was despite the coerced confessions having facts all wrong.
None of their DNA at the scene.
AND the fact they found the guy who's DNA was at the scene and confessed he did it and did it alone.
I can't recall the name of the guys or victim. I know at one point LE had 8 suspects. They couldn't get it to stick with 4 of them.
The prosecutor said in the show that no one person could have committed the crime so the 4 were guilty..
Hello... says me. What about all the other crimes where one guy killed multiple victims. An example is Richard Speck. One guy and 8 nurses at the one location, same day and time.
Mia
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Joined: 24 Mar 2006
Posts: 77
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| SavannahStar
Posted:
Thu Jan 24, 2008 8:10 am |
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Masters: Cop's big ego stole half my life
Story Highlights
NEW: Tim Masters talks with CNN on his first full day of freedom
NEW: Masters says he's angry, especially at lead police officer
Judge ordered Masters released, tossed murder conviction Tuesday
New DNA evidence indicates someone else killed, mutilated Peggy Hettrick in 1987
By Eliott C. McLaughlin
CNN
GREELEY, Colorado (CNN) -- Tim Masters often drank heavily before he was imprisoned for murder in 1999, but he said he's sworn off the stuff in an interview Wednesday, his first full day of freedom in nearly nine years.
"Just because I don't look angry doesn't mean I don't have a whole lot of anger inside," Masters said. "I don't want to get drunk. People get drunk, they have no self control. I don't want to get mad or do anything stupid or say something stupid. I'd rather just stay sober."
The anger he fears unleashing is aimed squarely at the Fort Collins Police Department, which doggedly pursued him for almost 12 years before charging him with the 1987 murder of Peggy Hettrick -- a crime he has always insisted he didn't commit.
Masters, 36, was released Tuesday from prison after new DNA evidence pointed to someone else. He will find out next month if he will stand trial again, but a prosecutor said Monday that charges against Masters could be dismissed. Watch Masters talk about his freedom »
Speaking with CNN about 24 hours after his release, Masters said he is relieved to be out of prison, but he can't shake the feeling this saga might not be over.
He also can't shake his anger at one investigator in particular.
"My opinion is that Jim Broderick, the guy in charge of it, has a very big ego and would not allow anything or anyone to convince him that he was wrong," Masters said.
"He made up his mind in the beginning, from day one when he walked into my bedroom and saw my horror drawings and war stories, that I was guilty. Nothing would change his mind."
Broderick did not return a call Wednesday to his office. His answering machine said he would not be checking messages until the end of the month.
Michael Goodbee, one of the special prosecutors handling the Masters hearings, said in court that Broderick was out of town on a family emergency. Broderick told CNN in November, before the DNA evidence was confirmed, that he still believed Masters was the killer.The key players »
Masters was convicted largely on circumstantial evidence -- a collection of gory sketches and narratives, a few knives and a forensic psychologist's testimony that Masters' stories and artwork indicated he fantasized about sexual homicides.
He was also the first person to find Hettrick's body. He didn't immediately report it, he said, because he thought it was a mannequin and someone was playing a prank.
"It's just unbelievable because here's all these stories and drawings that have no nexus with the crime. There's no one being stabbed in the back. There's no one being sexually mutilated," he said. "The only thing they had in common with this crime is there was violence."
Lots of kids in high school sketch violent scenes and scribe violent stories, Masters said. Go to any high school, he said, and you'll likely find similar artwork and writings.
"They won their case by assassinating my character," he said.
Masters said he's been angry for years. Though his father Clyde, who died while Masters was in prison, taught him to never show his emotions, his fellow inmates were aware of his bitterness, he said.
"My best friend who sat across from me at the chow hall, he used to actually sit there and say, 'Damn, I've got to look across at this surly face every day? Look at your face. You look mad all the time.' "
His frustration began to wane when the media started reporting on his case about six months ago. The letters he received in prison and support from fellow inmates helped, he said, but the anger is "still going to be there. There's no way to get around that. It's still inside."
Masters said he can't thank his family enough for standing by him. And though he spoke with reverence of his father, there was an undertone of resentment in his words. It was his father, he said, who initially told him to cooperate with police, a decision that ultimately would be his undoing.
His father allowed police to search their trailer. He also allowed Masters to be interrogated for hours without an attorney. Police would use the evidence and interrogation to convict Masters in 1999.
"We'll cooperate with them and give them anything they want and then they'll see that you didn't have anything to do with this and they'll move on," Masters recalled his father telling him in 1987. "It turns out that by cooperating with them it just encouraged them, because I was the easiest suspect to go after."
Clyde Masters knew his son hadn't committed the crime, but he thought police were there to help, Masters said. His father was in the Navy for 22 years and felt you should obey authority, he added.
"Well, you know what? You shouldn't always submit to authority. Our country wouldn't exist if everyone submitted to authority," he said. "It's just a shame Dad didn't know how the system was."
In a news conference after his release, Masters said he wanted only to see his family. He was whisked away from the courthouse to the local Elks Lodge, which his aunts and uncles had rented. At the party, he met some of his younger relatives for the first time.
"Everybody didn't get to come up there and visit me over the years, and the cousins, the younger ones, have had kids of their own and I don't know any of them, so I'm trying to learn everyone's name and not succeeding," Masters said.
His first meal was two pieces of grocery store fried chicken -- which he ate simultaneously -- and a glass of lemonade. The chicken was "fantastic," he said.
"I didn't even eat anything else with it. I just had two pieces of chicken there and people are shaking my hand and leaving like, 'Ugh, I got grease on my hand,' " he said with a chuckle. "Sorry."
During visits with family members, he learned how much the world had changed since he was locked up. Everyone had high-tech cell phones with cameras. His cousins and nephews were showing him YouTube and their MySpace pages.
Despite the changes all around him, the changes within him seem negligible, he said.
"I don't feel a whole lot different other than a lot of emotional baggage," he said. "Other people would be able to tell you better than I would how much I've changed."
His freedom still seems like a dream at times, he said. As for trying to recover the years he feels were wrongly taken from him -- the years in high school and in the Navy when he was pegged as a murderer or the decade he spent in a prison cell -- he understands they're gone forever.
"You can't get any time back," he said, quipping, "My youth and my hair, gone."
Though there are strong indications that Masters could be fully exonerated in February, he is not getting his hopes too high -- not after the events of the past two decades.
"For me, it's not over until it's over. They haven't dismissed any charges. I'm out on bond, so I'm not completely free yet," he said.
Masters said he and his legal team are prepared in the event of a new trial.
"Whatever happens, happens. We're ready."
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**SuperStar**
Joined: 24 Mar 2006
Posts: 20841
Location: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
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| victims cry
Posted:
Fri Jan 25, 2008 11:24 am |
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this case was a DISGRACE
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On Vacation!
Joined: 22 Mar 2006
Posts: 9299
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