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

Episode Date: July 10, 2026

Today we've got a rare and disturbing one for you that’s hard to believe. A weird murder that should've been solved yet definitely never was. 👀 Watch This Episode On Youtube: https://youtu.be/rpAeEaNnpn8 👁 Check out our movie AN ANGRY BOY: https://www.anangryboy.com 💀 MERCH: https://scary-mysteries-merch.dashery.com 💀 Scary Mysteries SECRET VAULT: https://www.patreon.com/c/scarymysteries/collections   🎧 Our Other Podcast Scary Mysteries: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/3ZooEZMoZ421WdsOVJhVkT⁠ 👁 Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg⁠ 👁 TikTok: ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald⁠ 👁 Facebook: ⁠https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial⁠ 👁 X: ⁠https://x.com/ScaryMysteries1⁠  🗣 Business Inquiries, questions and comments hit us up at ⁠[e-mail]⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster. If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep podcast. I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention, and then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster. If you sold somebody a loaded gun who you knew was in a vulnerable state and they shot themselves, I think it is murder.

Just because you're using the internet doesn't mean you get away with murder. I'm Damon Fairless, host of Hunting Warhead. This season, I take you inside the business of suicide, and the places desperate people go when they can't find what they need in the real world. Hunting the Suicide Salesman. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. Every town has a dark side. Today's unsolved story is a cold case from 1987.

It was once considered solved and a man served nearly a decade in prison for a crime he didn't commit. When they found Peggy Hedrick's body out in that field, the morbid part wasn't that she'd been stabbed. It was what had been done to her after. Because once she was already dead, when 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's 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 where 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 never was. So let's head on out to Colorado now. This is Fort Collins' most disturbing unsolved case, the murder of Peggy Hedric. Maybe you'd have recognized her if you lived in Fort Collins back then. A woman who walked everywhere, no car at all, never had or wanted one. And because of that, well, 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 Hattrick was 37 years old, small, just a little over five feet tall with Auburn hair and blue eyes. She always dressed like she had somewhere to be even when she was just running out for groceries. That was just part of who she was. Like here she put into how she looked, walking out her own front door, well 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, a local ladies 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, changes her clothes, and heads back out into the evening, down the road to the Prime Minister Pub and Grill. Local bar she hit up often enough. She's there a few hours, and at some point in the night, she sees him. It's Matt Zolnar, her on again, off again boyfriend, sitting inside, only he's with another woman. And people who were there said Peggy was pretty pissed about it. His ulnar 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., while 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. 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 coroner 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 life. 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. Maybe 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 100 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. And 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. I'll talk to in a fatal wound, a hundred feet of blood on the ground, and a body with almost none on it. 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. She was lying on her back the whole time, so the blood drained away from her as she was dragged, soaking into the dirt instead of pooling on her skin. That trail wasn't dripping off her. It was draining out. It was draining out. of her. And but the blood was never the main focus here. It was that whoever did this set her down

in the frost, not dropped or 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 while they removed one of her nipples. It's the way it was done that that has sat with everyone who's ever worked this case. There was nothing frenzied about it, this wasn't someone hacking at her in a panic or tearing out her out of rage. 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 Fort Collins got so tunnel visioned on Tim Masters. Tim Masters, a 15-year-old kid at the time, 12 years went by while detectives built their case around him. Because before the bicyclist ever found Peggy that morning, before a single officer ever came on the scene,

well, 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 in 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 the neighborhood that they talked to Tim's dad. He casually mentioned that his son had wandered off his usual route across the field that morning, and that was all it took. They pulled the kid right out of class right away. And what came next was something like nine hours of questioning.

A 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 done with it. Well, Tim kept giving it. them the same answers, said he had nothing to do with it. They ran a polygraph, and that came back inconclusive, and eventually they had to let him go home. But that was the day Tim Masters stopped living his normal life, because for 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. 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 was some unidentified prints in her purse,

and those weren't Tim's either. They searched his home, his school locker, his 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. What 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 a 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. But Roderick never really let him go. and every so often, quietly, you'd check 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 full of 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 him around the clock, walk, 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 Hedrick's body had been mutilated, things that supposedly never made the papers. So they found him. He was still in the Navy, stationed in Philadelphia, and 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 Learjet, and let himself believe that maybe, finally, the whole thing was behind him. It wasn't. In 1997, 10 years after the murder, Broderick reached out to a forensic psychologist in California named Dr. J. Reed Malloy. He shipped him those 2,000 pages of teenage drawings and writing and asked him a simple question, but what does this tell you about the person who made it?

Malloy 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. The one, he said, depicted a knife cutting into a woman. Another looked to him like a figure dragging a body. He gave the crime a name even, displaced sexual matricide,

traced it back to the wound he believed sat at the same, center of who Masters was, the death of his mother, and an abandonment the boy had never gotten past. It's a hell of a theory, but there are two things about it that don't sit right. The first is that Malloy never once spoke to Masters. 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. Malloy 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 it 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 Malloy's report, the state actually charged Timothy Masters with first-degree murder on August 10, 1998. He was 26 years old by them, and he'd been living in this one-man's shadow for 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 that. them across the line. Masters was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to 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. 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, the anatomical knowledge and the train steady hand to make small, precise cuts. For years, though, that connection, it got 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, locked away in his house. 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, sort of 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 hetrick 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. Malloy, 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, and the Hammond evidence, it went to a dump. Tim spent nine years in prison. His conviction was appealed more than once. The Colorado Court of Appeals upheld it in 2001. Then, the 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. Then in 2004, Masters got a new defense team, and they started digging. and what they turned up was a disaster for the prosecution. And evidence had gone missing, not just any evidence, those hairs from Hedric's body that didn't match masters, those were gone. So with the photographs of 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 at the 1999 trial, 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. I had told him clear back then that I thought they were on the wrong track and now we had some DNA. Master's 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' 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, that's 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 Zolnar, 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 had taken the stand as a witness at Tim's own trial. Now Zolner had been looked at briefly back in 87 and cleared

and now his 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. He had served nine years for a 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. And he resigned from the Fort 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 Jolene Blair, had hidden evidence from Tim's defense and even from their own expert, Malloy.

In 2008, the Colorado Supreme Court officially disciplined them both for it. By then, they had both been made judges, promoted not long after Master's conviction. But in 2010, the voters, orders in their district got the last word and voted them both off the bench. Tim eventually sued. Larimer County settled for 4.1 mil and 4 Collins for 5.9 mil. So, $10 million in all, roughly a million bucks for every year they took from them. As to where this case stands now, well, to this day, no one has ever been charged with Peggy Hedrick's murder.

Matt Zolnar, the boyfriend whose DNA turned up on evidence from the... the scene was looked at a second time after Masters was freed. But there was reason why his DNA might be on her belonging 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 the 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. I may never know because the rest was burned and dumped on a

detective's orders. But if it was Hammond, chances are he stood at his window that morning, coffee in hand and watched the police work the field 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 Everytown. 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. Remember to come right back here for another episode of Everytown next week, filled with scary, strange and mysterious stories. Because you never know. Maybe your town will be next.