True Crime Campfire - Artful Conviction: The Murder of Peggy Hettrick

Episode Date: June 26, 2020

Pride. When it’s channeled right, it’s a good thing. Pride in our accomplishments, or those of our loved ones, is great. But it’s not for nothin’ that pride is one of the seven deadly sins. When it goes unchecked, ya see, it tends to create a particular kind of tunnel vision. A lens through which you can only see what you want to see, and anything that doesn’t fit within that view becomes too threatening. Gets ignored, or denied…or covered up. Apply that to a homicide investigation, and you’ve got a disaster in the making. We’re about to hear about a case like that, where justice fell victim to pride. A case where one detective’s arrogant one-sightedness stole ten years of a young man’s life, and left a grieving family without answers. Sources:https://www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2017/02/08/peggy-hettrick-murder-cold-case-fort-collins/97378070/https://www.5280.com/2011/12/presumed-guilty/https://www.greeleytribune.com/windsor/the-two-lives-of-dr-richard-hammond/http://freetimmastersbecause.blogspot.com/search/label/Matt%20ZoellnerCBS' "48 Hours Mystery," episode "Drawn to Murder"Drawn to Injustice by Steve Lehto and Tim MastersFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. Pride. When it's channeled right, it's a good thing. Pride in our accomplishments or those of our loved ones is great. but it's not for nothing that pride is one of the seven deadly sins. When it goes unchecked, you see, it tends to create a particular kind of tunnel vision, a lens through which you can only see what you want to see, and anything that doesn't fit within that view becomes too threatening, gets ignored or denied, or covered up, apply that to a homicide investigation, and you've got a disaster in the making.

We're about to hear about a case like that where justice fell victim to pride, a case where one detective's arrogant one-sidedness stole ten years of a young man's life and left a grieving family without answers. This is artful conviction, the murder of Peggy Hedrick. So campers were in Fort Collins, Colorado, February 10, 1987. A skinny 15-year-old kid named Timothy Masters stepped out of the trailer he shared with his dad on his way to catch the school bus. To get there, he had to cross an empty field, and as he was walking, he suddenly caught sight of something out of place. There was something lying on the grass in the field. It looked like a mannequin.

or like a recess a annie doll. Tim stopped short. Three years prior, his mother had died from a respiratory illness, and in that charming way teenage kids so often do, the bullies at school had zeroed in on that as a way to get under Tim's skin. So, looking across the field at this mannequin or whatever it was, Tim thought this must be some kind of prank, a cruel taunt since the anniversary of his mom's death was approaching.

So instead of moving in for a closer look, he just turned around and took the long way to the bus stop and continued on to school. It wasn't until he was on the bus that he realized that he may have actually seen a corpse. About an hour later, a biker rode by and realized what Tim hadn't. The mannequin was actually a woman's bloody body, with her pants pushed down and her shirt pushed up around her neck. The biker called the police, and the body was quickly identified as Peggy Hedrick. Soon, the empty field was swarming with investigators who were trying to unravel how this woman had gotten there. But let's put a pin in that for a moment and talk a little bit about

the victim. Peggy Hedrick was 37 years old when she died. She's been described as a vivacious redhead, which I'd argue as a fair description of me, too. Although I'm not entirely sure vivacious is an accurate enough descriptor for me. Can you still be vivacious if you're like real grumpy and swear a lot? How about pugnacious redhead? Okay, I like pugs because they're super cute, so that works for me. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Peggy was vivacious and her friends adored her. She was a dreamer, kind of delightfully eccentric and artsy type. She'd lived all over the world with her family because her dad was in the oil business. And she was ambitious.

She'd recently moved from Florida to Colorado, and she'd developed an interest in writing and Native American art. And she was so excited to be in this new place, kind of striking out on her own. Peggy worked at a store in the mall called the Fashion Bar, and I totally remember those. I hadn't thought about Fashion Bar in, like, decades. But there was one in the mall that I used to go to as a kid, and I remember it. The night before the murder, Peggy had worked the evening shift there and walked home to her apartment as she often did. She got home around 9 p.m. only to find that her new roommate, to whom she lent her keys, had locked her out of the apartment. Her roommate had already been partying and was just passed out cold, so she didn't hear Peggy knocking.

So she realized she was locked out, and Peggy, who was always the kind of person to make the best of a bad situation, just kind of shrugged and walked over to the Prime Minister bar. There, she could use the pay phone to call her house every so often, while also staying warm and having a few drinks. But her roommate didn't answer the phone. So eventually Peggy left to go to the home of her on-again-off-again boyfriend, Matthew Zellner. But Matthew wasn't home. Hours later, a note addressed to him was found on her body,

reading, Don't be surprised if I show up around two, locked out. It's not clear why the note was still in her possession. It was around 11 p.m. when Peggy made her way back to the bar. There, she finally got through to her roommate who let her back in the apartment where Peggy changed into a red pair of boots, a brown blouse, jeans, and a coat, and despite having just had the most exhausting two hours ever, returned to the prime minister bar at around 12.30 a.m. Back at the bar, she promptly ran into Matthew Zellner, who was on a date with another

woman. Oh. Ouch. They had just broken up about a week before, and Peggy, wasn't pleased to see him out on a date. Yeah, no joke, right? It's been a week. It's like, well, you moved on quickly, Matthew. Don't waste any of your precious time grieving over our relationship or anything. Just go right ahead. Yeah, in fact, why don't you come to the bar that I am a regular at? I know. That seems like hostile. Yeah. Yeah. Now, according to Matthew Zellner, they spoke for some time, and he even magnanimously offered to give her a ride home because it was freezing outside. Zellner then went to the restroom, and as he was walking back to the table, he said Peggy shot him a dirty look and just flounced out the door. I cannot say I blame her.

Matthew's date confirmed that they both went back to his place at 1.30 a.m. and she drove home to her place around 3 a.m. As for Peggy, she was never seen alive again. Now, campers, you know we don't usually go into a lot of gory detail about the murders we cover, but sometimes the details are important, even though they're upsetting. So we're going to give you a little bit of a content warning on the next part, because there is some pretty graphic information. The medical examiner quickly determined that the cause of death was a stab wound to the back. In fact, she'd been stabbed with so much force it had broken one of her ribs.

And here comes the really upsetting part. So fast forward 30 seconds or so if you don't want to hear it. Peggy's genitals had been mutilated with a scalpel or some other very sharp implement, and her right nipple had been removed. Oh my God. That is so disturbing. Yikes. And in a town like Fort Collins, a sleepy cow town turned college row, this kind of murder is most

definitely not common. It wasn't a drunken brawl or a domestic dispute that turned fatal. This was the kind of murder that rocks a town to its foundations, scares the ever-loving shit out of people and puts a lot of pressure on investigators to make an arrest and quickly. The crime scene was gruesome. Not only had Peggy been disfigured, there was a bloody drag mark leading from the body to the curb where a pool of blood dripped down to the road. And I mean, that drag mark is, it's like paint. I mean, it's really, it's like somebody took paint and just painted the grass. It's really gross. It appeared that Peggy'd been stabbed, then dragged

to the middle of the field where she'd been mutilated post-mortem. And the way, the way, and the one tiny, tiny flicker of comfort in this case is that this poor woman didn't suffer that horrible desecration while she was still alive, so bless her heart. And interestingly, too, there wasn't much blood on Peggy's body, like at all. So she'd been mutilated in the field, but not killed there. The investigator's first move was to talk to all the people who owned houses that bordered the field, including Tim Master's father Clyde. Clyde told the police that he and his son had been home all night, hadn't heard anything or seen anything, weird the night before. But when they pushed him a little bit more, Clyde said, you know, I think

Tim saw something. He usually cuts through the field to his bus stop, but today he hesitated and went around. Later that day, a uniformed officer showed up to Fort Collins High School while Tim Masters was in computer class and pulled him out for an interview. And Tim readily admitted that he'd seen the body, but he said that it didn't occur to him until he was already almost at school that it might have been real. Yeah, every dead body that I've ever seen looks fake. Oh, for sure. I mean, why do you think people's first reaction always seems to be it's a mannequin? Like, every true crime show, it's a mannequin. There's this unearthly stillness about a dead body.

And I don't know. It just doesn't look like right. Once the life has gone out of us, we just don't look right at all. So it doesn't surprise me. So Tim explained to the cop about how he initially thought that Peggy's body might be a prank by the bullies because they like to torment him about his mom's death and stuff. And I know it isn't awful. It's the worst.

And the officer left. And police also spoke to a woman named Becky Hammond, the wife of a local eye surgeon, Dr. Richard Hammond, who confirmed that she and her husband had been home all night. So police thanked her for her time and moved on. Wonder why I'm telling you that. Is that going to be important later? Eh, probably not, right? The next day, February 11th, two detectives showed backup at the master's residence,

one of whom was described by the magazine 528 as a rising star, bright, personable, tireless, and as observant and detailed as the department had ever seen. His name was Detective Jim Broderick, and campers, his butthole's going to be sore by the time we're done with him in this episode. So just giving you all fair warning. Probably going to hurt a little. Anywho, so Broderick asked Clyde if he'd consent to a search of the home, and Clyde said, sure, no problem, you know, he wanted to help. He had no way of knowing at that point how much he would come to regret that decision. Now, why were they zeroing in on this 15-year-old kid?

Well, according to Detective Broderick, the main reason they suspected him was because he had seen the body first but hadn't reported it, which is fair enough. I mean, that's a legit reason to look into the kid. So, surely, they're going to do so carefully and with open minds, guarding against tunnel vision and misguided assumptions, right? And keeping in mind that this is a child. Yeah, it's going to work out great. Yeah, once inside, the police made quick work of Tim's room. On the dresser, they found a collection of knives, two of which were Swiss army types with scalples built into the handles. They found a red-tinted headlamp.

A headlamp like coal miners and cavers and stuff? Where? Yep. Okay. Those are the ones. Gotcha. They also found some, quote, disturbing drawings, as they put it. Animals being stabbed, a woman being dragged, the way Peggy Hedrick had been, a sketched map of the field, and two Mother's Day cards.

Tim had made for his mom years before. They also searched the drains in the house and found no signs of blood. They didn't find blood or human remains on any of Tim's clothes or on any of the knives they discovered. So basically, at this point, they've got the following. Tim saw Peggy's body and didn't report it. Tim likes to draw creepy pictures. Tim drew a map of the field where Peggy's body was found.

Tim has some knives. Well, case closed, right? Mm-hmm, right. Yeah, throw the book at him. Armed with this information, Broderick asked Tim's dad Clyde if he could take Tim in for an interview. Clyde said, okay, and for some bizarre reason, he didn't go with his son to the station. Campers, I don't have kids. But, for the love of God, do not let your children talk to a police officer without representation.

God, no. You are throwing your child to the wolves, especially with these cops, as you're about to see. Now, we watched clips of this interview for research, and it is brutal. They sent in, like, four or five different interrogators, and they threw everything they had at this kid. They did good cop, bad cop, matronly cop, military cop, sad cop, slightly creepy creepy cop, existential crisis cop, giggly cop, angry cop, angry cop, cop who occasionally burst into song. Cop who makes balloon animals and cop who likes to wear frilly dresses. I don't know. What other combinations can we come up with? They tried all of those, apparently. Okay, I'm done. I'm sorry. This part just really makes me upset, so I'm putting it off. Oh, my heart is pounding, y'all. I am angry. It's an awful thing to watch. So they told Tim that they had evidence that he did it, which of course wasn't true. They told him that someone saw him. They told him that they had him dead to rights. They asked him if she maybe fell on his knife. You really see how small Tim is in this interrogation, shrinking back,

while these grown-ass adults are looming over him. Yeah, he's a really small kid, like, at this stage of his life, really skinny. And we want to be clear, by the way, a lot of these interrogation techniques are very standard practice, and we're not saying they're wrong. I mean, detectives are allowed to lie to suspects. They're allowed to say stuff like, we have a witness who saw you do it. They're allowed to say they have evidence they don't have. And they often do try to give suspects kind of a face saving out.

Like, was it an accident? Did she just fall into the knife? That's all standard. That's all fine when it's done right. What we're saying is this was a 15-year-old kid. And even if you believe he's guilty, he's a minor. He doesn't have a parent present. He doesn't have an attorney.

You have to treat kids differently. Their brains are different. And there's a whole other constellation of reasons for that as well. And they did not do that, to say the least. Yeah, they didn't. And this case is very similar to the Brendan Dassey interrogation as well as, yeah. Yeah, the Central Park Five interrogation. I'm actually surprised he didn't confess because this is right.

out of the false confession playbook some of these tactics. So I'm actually surprised he didn't crack and he didn't. No. And it should be said by now, by the way, that we believe Tim the Masters is innocent if you couldn't tell. Yeah. And we think by the end of this episode, you will too. And like you said, Tim's interview lasted nine fucking hours. And the entire time, his story never changed. He just kept repeating, I didn't do it. Now, I know some stone cold sociopaths that wouldn't stay that cool for nine hours. Especially at 15. No. Yeah. Okay. Here is an excerpt of the interview taken from the website 528. We're going to act this out for you to make it easier to visualize. Now, I'm going to play Tim and Whitney is going to be Broderick. Okay, imagine I am a cocky, smug asshole. Okay.

Okay, Tim, I just found something, and this may be what we're looking for. You see that? And he shows him a drawing that Tim did of, like, somebody dragging what looks to be a bleeding body on the ground, and there's arrows being shot at him. I don't know where if the arrows we're supposed to represent in this case, but whatever. So he says, now, if you're man enough to do this, and I know you really did plan all this, be man enough to talk about it. I would if I would have done it. No, no, no, you did do it. And you need to start getting that in your mind. okay I was trying to show my classmate what maybe happened wait a minute now let me finish let me finish nobody is this preoccupied unless they did it you were preoccupied with what happened because you did it and when he talks about being preoccupied campers he means the drawings like he fixated on those drawings like

they were a smoking gun it's unbelievable I've never seen anybody get so excited about such a bizarre piece of evidence a 15 year old kid has drawings that look like the covers of a heavy metal album and that means he's a murderer. It's just bonkers. And all Tim could say to that was, I didn't. You fantasized about this all this time. The fantasy finally came to an end the other night. It wasn't a fantasy anymore you could think about.

You got to do it. You got to be part of it. You got to do it for a change instead of reading about it, instead of drawing about it. And it was very self-fulfilling. It was what it was all about. Are you going to have to do it again now? Do you feel compelled to do it again? I told you I didn't do it.

This is not going to end. It's not going to end. It's not going to end for me. I know you did do it. It's not going to end for me. Yeah. The tone of the interview is really harsh. Like, Broderick just can't believe Tim has the audacity to exist in his presence.

At one point, Broderick asked Tim why he liked collecting knives. And Tim was just like, I just do. And Broderick just scoffed. Yeah, it's super far-fetched that a 15-year-old kid might collect things. just because he likes them. Okay. Yeah, that's way out there. So Tim admitted that the drawings of Peggy were his, but he said that he'd drawn them that day at school because the other kids had heard about the murder and they were asking him about it because they knew he lived, you know, near the crime scene and everything. And that's the fact that has been confirmed since, by the way,

that he drew them that day. Tim has always insisted that the gruesome drawings were just a way for him to get attention from his classmates. And he was an introverted kid. He was a kid who had trouble interacting with others, this completely fits for me that he would do something like that. In fact, we contacted a social worker friend of mine who specializes in working with kids with mental health and behavioral struggles. She said that drawings like Tim's aren't out of the ordinary for a kid who recently lost a parent. It also made sense to her that a child who is having problems fitting in with his peers would be drawn to behaviors that would shock or get a reaction out of his classmates. She said she wouldn't be worried about a kid who did quote unquote dark or

even violent drawings, unless the kid was also showing other concerning behaviors. Yeah, which Tim wasn't at all. She said, as we grow up in our brain develops, it's very natural to explore all the weird shit that exists in the world and figure out where ourselves fall in it. Dark interests are a natural thing to be drawn to because it gets you attention. It's a kid's natural desire to rebel against the norm. And she said, if Tim were a client of hers and she saw these drawings, she would talk to him, you know, to figure out what was going on.

but she said she doesn't see anything in them that just inherently makes her think, oh, that kid is messed up, like, at all. And in fact, she pointed out art is a great way for kids to process trauma and tough emotions, so therapists and social workers actually encourage that, which I thought was a really valuable perspective to bring to this case, because it doesn't seem like they bothered to consult anybody with expertise in minors in particular, right? Now, because there was nothing linking him to the actual crime, No blood, no fibers, no hairs, no fingerprints, no witnesses, no physical evidence of any kind.

Broderick had to let him go, and man, it just chapped his ass. He had it bad for Tim as a suspect, and he was determined to get his man, or boy, as the case may be. His running theory was that because Peggy's death happened so close to the anniversary of Tim's mom's death, Tim must have been full of rage, presumably at his mom for dying, I guess, and killed a woman to get back at her, or something. I don't know. This is all over some drawings, y'all.

Pretty thin, if you ask me, especially since, and I think this is really important. The post-mortem on Peggy showed that the mutilation done on her body was practically surgical. Perfect, clean, precise cuts. Not the kind of ragged stuff you'd expect from a 15-year-old kid who's in the adrenaline rush of. killing for the first time.

So a year later, they still had no evidence of Tim's involvement and they still had no other suspects because, you know, they didn't look for any other suspects. Broderick pretty much decided it was Tim and that was that as far as he was concerned. So Broderick, bless his heart, he set up a surveillance team, a team campers of a dozen officers. Now, keep in mind that Fort Collins is not what you'd call a sprawling metropolis. So a dozen cops was more than 10% of their... entire force at this time. And their plan was to monitor Tim 24-7 the whole anniversary week of Peggy's death to see if he did anything suspicious, which I assume means something like

doing a blood ritual over where her body was found or something. Who the hell knows? One officer on the team was Troy Crenning, who's now a lawyer, and he was really, really not happy about this assignment. In fact, he called it ridiculous, pathetic, and embarrassing that they were wasting police resources on such an obviously bad suspect. Boy, could I not agree more with that. According to Kenning, the police were trying to bait him into going, quote, berserk.

I swear to God, y'all. I mean, again, this is the kind of technique that can be really useful getting inside a suspect's head so they might confess or make a mistake, but to use it on a 15-year-old kid against whom the only evidence is a pile of heavy metal-looking drawings.

Just, oof. So, anyway, they say, set up scouting points at some of the neighboring properties, one of which was the home of Dr. Hammond, the eye surgeon, remember we talked about how his wife said, yeah, we were home all night. They posted up at his house. And they quickly found that Tim Masters was a pretty boring kid. He would wake up, go to school, come home, stay home, wake up, go to school, come home, stay home. They even put surveillance at Peggy Hedrick's grave because they thought that Tim might show up to lay on her grave like you do.

It's, I mean, it really, it's, it's, it is laughable. It's insane. It's, yeah, it's just so ridiculous. I can't help but laugh. It's just, I've never heard of a suspect going to a grave to just lay on it. This is what we call going off half-cocked. Yeah. Yeah. So, using a technique recommended by FBI handbooks and good for them for looking at the FBI handbooks. I mean, you know, you've got to give them that, but they got a newspaper reporter to write a fake story about how an arrest was eminence. and made sure it ran in the news that week.

They also made sure to hand-deliver it to the master's home. Now, again, this is the kind of stuff that FBI profilers recommend in order to psych out a suspect. It can be really, really effective. So it's not so much the technique we're making fun of here. It's the use of it in this particular case. And campers, are you ready for the most disgusting thing that the Fort Collins police did?

Because I'm still not ready, and I've known it for almost a decade. These motherfuckers got a copy of Tim's mother's obituary and put it on one of his friend's vehicles for him to find. I've literally never heard of a police department doing this. That's just bullying. I guess their goal was to push him into doing or saying something incriminating, but instead they look like fucking monsters. Yeah, that's pretty gross. Yeah. It's one of the most reprehensible things I've ever heard of.

it's one thing to use tactics to make a suspect nervous, of course, but it's an entirely different thing to use this kind of thing on a child with the express purpose of making them go, quote, berserk. And I mean, what if he did go berserk? Like, did they think this through? What if he killed his father or something? I mean, presumably they weren't watching him inside the house at night. What if he had a girl over and killed her?

Yeah. I mean, they would have no way of knowing. They were just watching the trailer. So that just seems incredibly irresponsible to me to say, we want to see if we can just make him go berserk. Oh, great idea. You're really lucky that didn't blow up in your face. That's bully mentality.

Oh, yeah. It's, I want to get a reaction out of you. They did the same thing on the second anniversary, by the way, because, you know, if it didn't work the first time, it was definitely going to work the second time. Sure. According to the long-form article from 5280, the most unusual activity they observed was Tim skipping school one afternoon

to play video games at a pizza player. God, call the FBI. He's ordering extra pepperoni. Yeah, unless they're truancy officers, I don't really see this being a good use of manpower. By the way, I was once threatened with truancy court. Damn. Yeah, I was in middle school and I hadn't missed too much school. Now, keep in mind, my parents were very liberal with, you don't feel like going to school today? Okay, you don't have to.

Oh, my God. I was forced to go to school if I was bleeding out my face. my mom would be like oh I miss you just stay home today oh my god can I like be adopted by your family maybe yeah of course and um so we were at parent teacher conferences and this vice principal walks up with my picture on a piece of paper and says like she's missed too much school my parents I think my dad specifically was like fuck off and die pretty much she was literally like she has good grades we are here at parent-teacher conferences, if she was a problem child, like, this would not be an issue. Like, she's not a problem child. We're going to continue to keep her home. She makes up all her work.

Shut up. Damn, truancy court wasn't messing around in your town. No. They were, they were for real, for real. Now, of course, nothing came of this little investigation because, you know, Tim didn't do anything. So life went on for a while. Tim graduated high school and decided to the Navy, like his father, where he absolutely excelled. By 1992, he was stationed in Philly. So the Hetrick case was dead in the water as far as the Fort Collins cops were concerned, but then Linda Wheeler, who was a patrol officer and one of the investigators on the case years prior, was told to take a look at cold cases. Specifically, she was told to see if she could put more of the puzzle pieces together to arrest Tim Masters, which is just

great directive. Yeah, you know, you might consider just looking into the case and saying if you can find out what happened. Mm-hmm. No. No. Fuck Tim Masters specifically. Yeah, go get this kid. So she took another look at all the evidence and started re-interviewing witnesses, and she caught a break. One of Tim's former classmates mentioned that Tim told him that Peggy's nipple was missing. Now, that was a detail that the cops had never made public. This was a fact that only the killer would know. Didn't look too good for Tim Masters. So, Detective Wheeler and Broderick got on a plane to Philly to question the now adult Timothy Masters again for a day and a half this time. And right away, Detective Wheeler was

impressed by the consistency of his responses to her questions, which is always a good way, or one of the many, many ways, that you can kind of get a handle on whether somebody's telling you the truth. If the story doesn't change, and his didn't. His story from 1987 hadn't changed a bit. And she was starting to get the feeling that she was wasting her time. But then there was that whole nipple thing. So she said, okay, Tim, can you explain how you knew about the missing nipple? And Tim said, look, one of my buddies was in the Explorer Scouts. Now, if you're not familiar with that, that's a program that some police departments run for, like, high school age kids to teach them some basic crime scene investigation techniques and stuff. Sounds like fun.

I would have loved that in high school. And apparently, the Fort Collins Police Department had enlisted some of these explorer scouts to comb the field to help look for evidence and body parts including peggy's nipple which they never found oh my god can we can we take a moment and discuss i can't i literally cannot imagine what they were thinking the just gross incompetency that went into being like hey children yeah do you know what a nipple looks like go look for it Oh, my God. And then not marking it in the file, so they thought, like, oh, we have this great secret to catch the killer. Yeah, what badge do you get for that, do you think?

Yeah, I think you get your lifelong trauma badge for that, actually. It's very screwed up right there. Do not ask kids to look for severed body parts, y'all, in case you need to tell. Jesus. So, anyway, Tim's friend told him about it. And Tim, who was still basking and all the attention from his curious classmates, passed it on. so Detective Wheeler looked into it she was very easily able to verify all this

from the former Explorer Scout and her hot lead suddenly went ice cold ironically Wheeler was the officer that Clyde Masters had first talked to the one that actually got the testimony that Tim had seen the body early that morning so she was really kind of the one that was responsible for getting them to look at Tim Masters

in the first place but now she wasn't so sure they had the right guy and she was vocal about it she told her superiors I'm not comfortable with Tim as a suspect anymore. She wanted to start the case fresh. Look at other suspects. Maybe get the FBI to consult. But, predictably, she was shot down by her superiors.

And according to her, by 1993, she was back on patrol. And she left the department in 1995 completely disillusioned. Yeah. Yeah. So now, our boy Jim Broderick had nothing holding him back. In 1995, he attended a lecture on sexually motivated homicides, put on by former FBI profiler, founder of the Behavioral Analysis Unit, along with Daddy John Douglas, and certified badass Roy Hazelwood.

Part of Hazelwood's lecture was a class on how fantasy plays a role in sexually motivated crimes. Something started screeching at the back of Broderick's mind. The key to solving Peggy Hedrick's murder, at least according to Broderick, was Tim's drawings. Back to the flipping drawings. He thought maybe a good consultant would be able to help him nail down what the drawings represented. So he asked Hazelwood for a reference. and in 1997, Roy Hazelwood pointed him in the direction of a consultant. This was Dr. J. Reed Malloy, a forensic psychologist who specialized in sexual homicides.

Now, this guy has a CV a mile long. He's been brought in on some very high-profile cases, including the trial of David Parker Ray, the toy box killer. Do not look into that case unless you have a strong stomach. Oh, my God. Even if you have a strong stomach, just don't look into it. It is a dark, dark, dark case. So, anywho, Broderick gave Malloy the copies of Tim's Child and,

his primary focus was two drawings in particular the one that we mentioned earlier with a body being dragged and another that maloy said was undoubtedly a drawing of a female circumcision okay okay okay i i have seen this photo and i will post it on our facebook to me it looks like a close-up of like a slashing wound to a gut or something which wasn't out of place among tim's other drawings I don't see genitalia at all, but that's just my professional opinion. But Malloy, without speaking to Timothy Masters, ever, classified this crime as a, quote, classic case of displaced sexual matricide. He said, again, again, without ever speaking to Masters,

I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that Timothy Masters was the killer. after seven months of work for which he earned $42,000. Dr. Malloy returned a report to Detective Broderick. And here is an excerpt. Tim Masters had an enormous amount of personal productions, both writings and drawings that indicate a preoccupation with violence,

various modes of death and sexuality. I have never seen such voluminous production of such material in my 15 years of experience with sexual homicide cases. This is circular reasoning. campers made with the assumption that Tim masters is guilty. If Tim was drawing cats and flowers, would it still be voluminous? Or would it just be an artistic kid? The more specific the fantasy production is, such as stabbing from behind, maiming and dismemberment, to the facts of the crime, the greater the likelihood that the person who created the productions committed the crime.

Now, this is true, but it seems that Malloy had half the story. Peggy wasn't dismembered. She was stabbed from behind, and by all accounts, that photo, that drawing, was done after the crime, not before. There were also no drawings of sexual mutilation. Sexual homicide perpetrators will often revisit the scene of the crime to consolidate memory and stimulate fantasy, usually for masturbatory purposes subsequent to the killing. In this case, Tim Masters visited the body of Hetrick on the morning of February 11, 1987 at 7 a.m. Tim just lived there. He didn't revisit the body. He stumbled upon it.

It is likely that Tim Masters selected Peggy Hedrick not on the basis of impulse, but on the basis of opportunity, choice, circumstance, and repetitive viewing. This is the kicker for me. Peggy Hedrick never would have taken the route home that would have taken her by Tim Masters' trailer. There is a much more direct, well-lit, and safer route that she usually took home from the bar. I completely agree with that. I can't imagine any woman choosing that particular route. It looks creepy, and at night it would be especially creepy, plus it was 38 degrees.

Yeah, no, she would walk directly home. Now, if the assumption was that Timothy overpowered her, there are several issues with that. He was so skinny that his bullies called him toothpick. He was 115 pounds, while Peggy was 110 pounds of post-mortem with most of her blood drained. Now, if he used a weapon to threaten her, where did he meet her? Why were there no witnesses placing Tim outside his home at all? If he had seen her multiple times, where? There was no evidence that Peggy and Tim had ever, ever crossed paths.

Ever. He'd never been to the store where she worked. They were in very different social circles. If this wasn't an impulsive crime, that would indicate that Tim planned this, which is something there is no evidence of at all, aside from some creepy child's drawings. Yeah. But Maloy also wrote, she also resembled his deceased mother, which is of enormous psychological significance. Is it? Is it, Maloy? Because that's absolute horseshit. They looked nothing alike, aside from the fact they were both white women. Now, it may seem like I'm being critical of Maloy here, but Maloy just did his job.

Now, I have seen the good work that this guy has done, and there are definitely scary people off the streets because of Malloy's work. Yeah, I think he was sent into this case half-cocked, basically. He used the resources that Broderick gave him, and I don't believe that if he had interviewed him at all, he would have come to the same conclusion. Or even if he had just had all the facts of the case. I think he got a cherry-picked description, and whether Broderick did that intentionally or subconsciously, I don't know. but many, many experts on this case would later testify that they were not given all of the information. Now, unfortunately, this new expert gave Broderick exactly what he needed. And with a brand new arrest warrant in hand, Jimmy B. was walking on air all the way to California,

where Tim Masters now worked as an airline mechanic. Now, there's this really great moment in the 48 hours episode that serves as kind of a microcosm of this entire case. Now, you have like a side-by-side Jim Broderick says, I think he was shocked. He seemed angry. I think he recognized who I was. Meanwhile, Tim was like, I didn't recognize him at the time, but it was Jim Broderick. To Broderick, Tim Masters, was the whole world. And to Tim, Jim was just a scrap of a bad memory. Yeah, Tim was his white whale. So Tim was brought back to Colorado in March of 1999, over 12 years after Peggy Hedrick was murdered to stand trial. The trial itself lasted seven days, and it was a brutal one for prosecutors Jolene Blair and Terry Gilmore. Both of them even admitted after the fact that their case was incredibly weak.

But in a 48 hours interview, Jolene Blair said that any time they had any doubts, they were rallied by Broderick, who she said never had any doubt in his mind that Tim was guilty. Great, so glad they had him there tearing them on. Even though they knew their case was, quote, incredibly weak. That's what you love to see, right? Their case was bolstered by the fact that now Tim was a grown man, not a skinny kid, and there's a huge difference in physique from when they were first interrogating him at 15 to when he went to trial, because he'd been in the military sense and everything.

It was easy to imagine him committing the crime now. Of course, their star witness was Dr. J. Reed Malloy, who gave the same report that he gave to Broderick. The prosecution's theory of the crime basically went like this. Tim Masters somehow came across Peggy Hedrick walking past the vacant law, and ambushed her. He stabbed her in the back with one of his knives, leaving blood dripping down from the curb, and then he grabbed underneath her arms and dragged her to the center of the field where he partially undressed her. He wore the red headlamp on his head

so he could see what he was doing as he mutilated the body. Tim then went home and then, quote unquote, stumbled across the body the next day. He did all this without leaving a single shred of physical evidence. At 15. After a day and a half of deliberation, the jury found Timothy Lee Masters guilty of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Jolene Blair, the prosecutor, pumped her fist in front of a dozen of Tim Masters crying family members as she walked by them. This is a woman who just said she knew they had an incredibly weak case. This case benefited the prosecutors and Jim Broderick greatly. Jolene Blair and Terry Gilmore received judicial appointments from the governor, and Broderick got

praise and acclaim. I believe you can still see him on cold case files about this case. It's really upsetting. He acts like an insufferable cocky pants. That might be hindsight talking, but I still want to smack the taste out of his mouth. He also got put on some of the department's best teams like the crimes against persons, a countywide drug task force, and investigations, as well as being promoted to lead the department's professional standards division. That is a fucking irony right there. Ooh, I just got a flush in my face reading that.

I just got, like I couldn't even talk. Professional standards division. Oh, you just wait to what's going to come out later. You're going to be super pissed about that. Gross. So Tim Masters filed for appeal in 2001, but both the Colorado Court of Appeals and the Colorado Supreme Court upheld his conviction. It is so hard to get a conviction over her overturn. I mean, you just don't even know. The Court of Appeals decision was unanimous, but the Supreme Court vote was four to three. In a dissenting opinion, one judge wrote, the sheer volume of inadmissible evidence so overwhelmed the admissible evidence that the defendant could not have got a fair trial. There exists a substantial risk that the defendant was convicted, not for what he did, but for who he was. This didn't change anything. Tim and his family worked around the clock to get help.

Tim applied to the Innocence Project, but was denied because his case wasn't appropriate. His sister wrote pleas for help to 150 law schools, half of which responded and they were all declinations. He was running out of time. Tim's time in prison is covered in his extensive journals, and you can really see as his time in prison erodes his personhood. He ruminates on how he's. survived by spending time working out, avoiding the gangs, serving his time. He wrote,

I've tried really hard not to let all this injustice change me. On one hand, I've succeeded because I will never be a criminal and I'll never be the person Broderick claimed I was. But I've also become very distant and unemotional. I guess you can't endure this kind of bullshit without it changing you in some way. Tim Masters was losing hope. Then, In 2003, as a Hail Mary pass, Masters filed a petition for post-conviction relief, citing ineffective counsel and prosecutorial misconduct. He didn't actually believe it would help, but it was his last hope. That hope took the form of an attorney named Maria Liu, who had been assigned to the case.

This was one of the first post-conviction cases she'd ever gotten, and as she started to delve into the case, she started to get a sneaking suspicion that Timothy Masters might actually be innocent. With each new file report and interrogation video, her belief solidified. When she met him, she said, he was more focused on us proving his innocence than he was on getting out, which to me says a lot. She knew that she was Tim's only hope.

Like, help me, Maria Lou, you're my only hope. And she didn't want to fuck it up. So she brought in a trial lawyer with more experience, a complete badass named David Weymour. Wymore, described as a flamboyant lawyer, certainly lives up to the title. If I were a lawyer, I would definitely be a flamboyant one. Right. Just yelling at people all day. Yeah, and probably I'd also wear, like, I don't know, a feather boa around my neck or something like that.

I don't know. I would come up with some kind of a gimmick. Would you be the misfrizzle of the courts? Exactly. I'd want to stand out. Maybe like spike heels and a feather boa. Oh, yes. Plamboyant. I love that. By the time he was contacted by Maria, he had actually already retired from a life of budding heads with the Larimer County court system to spend time with his family. But Maria told him, David, this guy's innocent. We've got to get him out.

His response? I'm in. And if we're going to do movie references, he's like, just when I think. I'm out. They keep pulling me back in. In 2005, Broderick's office got the call that they'd, according to them, been dreading. Maria Lou's office requested the files on the Hedric case. And it would soon become clear why they were dreading such a call.

But the state wouldn't go down without a fight. Yeah, you were dreading it because you know damn well that kid should never have been brought to trial in the first place. And shame on all of y'all. But they were determined, man. God forbid, should ever just admit you fucked up and take a fresh look at the evidence, or lack thereof. But nope, of course not. We got to dig our heels in. So they squabbled over every spare scrap of paper, every report, every box of evidence, dragging out the process for Lou and

Wymore for years. And as they started getting the evidence, though, a clear picture started to form. There were shelves of evidence that had been withheld from the defense. That evidence included. Shoe prints belonging to Thomas McCann dress shoes along the path that Peggy was dragged that didn't match any of Timothy's shoes or shoe size. In fact, there were two sets of footprints along the drag trail, neither of which matched Tim's shoes. No big deal, right? No.

Notes from two separate experts that disagreed with Malloy's findings on Tim and his drawings. They were, of course, not asked to testify, nor was their existence revealed to the defense. Notes on the surveillance. This was the first time Tim or his previous lawyers had even heard anything about the surveillance mission at all, which, of course, showed that, you know, the kid went to school and came home, and that was it. And, like, one time he skipped school to go to the arcade. A consulting plastic surgeon that indicated that even he would have had a hard time performing the incisions on Peggy's body under surgical conditions, let alone at night in the dark and the cold. Evidence that there'd

been a struggle. See, Peggy's size versus Tim's size. The puncture marks on Peggy's coat, shirt, and undershirt didn't line up, showing that her clothes had been grabbed and she had been turned as she'd been stabbed. Evidence that there was another crime scene because of the lack of blood on Peggy's body. Now, that's all stuff that I think most of us would agree is kind of important that his defense was never given access to. What the fuck? So the defense team went back to the expert witnesses from the trial. One was a blood spatter analyst named Tom Bevel who analyzed the blood that was dripping from the curb.

He told the defense team that he had only seen 15. photos to get to his conclusion. When the defense team told him that there were 75 other photos, he was just bowled over. So he looked at the rest of the photos and realized that if he had seen all of those, he would have come to a completely different conclusion. And when that kind of shit happens, you really got to wonder if it's on purpose. Yeah. You know, maybe not, but you got to wonder at least.

Then the defense said about recreating what they believed happened. Using Maria as a stand-in for Peggy, they tried dragging her across David's office as Tim's drawing showed. And they quickly discovered that this wasn't possible with the way that Maria's coat was dragging on the ground. Peggy's coat tail would have been dragged along the bloody ground. So did this mean that there were two perpetrators? Like did somebody get her under the arms and somebody grab her legs? What happened?

Either way, Tim's drawing, once a damning piece of evidence was just a useless piece of childlike art. And honestly, y'all, I've seen at least some of these drawings and they look like the kind of shit that Beavis and Butthead would have drawn on their notebooks. Like any teenage kid who listened to Slayer probably drew stuff like that. BFD. I probably drew stuff like that. I mean, it literally seems like he was just a suspect because he was a weird kid. Yeah. I was a weird kid.

Katie, you were a weird kid. I bet a lot of y'all listening right now were weird kids. So I find that offensive. I like weird. Weird's all I got. Anyway. So now Wymore was getting pissed. With each piece of evidence that he and his team rested from the prosecution's vice-like hold,

it became clear that the prosecution, along with the Fort Collins Police Department, pretty much just steamrolled through this investigation. And he would get so mad that he would often rant at anybody who would listen about how ridiculous their theory of the crime was. Like, okay, it was 38 degrees that night. It was dark in the field. Tim would have had no light besides the red light from that headlamp that they'd found in his room. He'd have to drag Peggy into the field, layer down,

and precisely mutilate her with perfect surgical incisions, leaving no trace of blood on his clothes or shoes, leaving no fibers, no fingerprints, no nothing. The red head lamp would be shining out like a beacon for anybody who happened to pass by. It just did not make sense. So, as you might be able to tell, the defense was starting to build up ahead of steam.

But they needed a real nail in the prosecution's coffin. And then, like a beam of light shining down from heaven, Linda Wheeler presented. herself to them. You see, this case had haunted her. She felt immense guilt for turning the investigation on to Timothy way back in 87, and she wanted to make it right. But she wasn't sure how, until she attended a lecture put on by Netherland scientists Selma and Richard Eichelan Bloom, who actually have consulted on high-profile cases like Casey Anthony and Chris Watts. The Eichelan Blooms had discovered a new way to extract epithelial DNA or touch DNA from clothing and bodies.

Wheeler realized that this might be a way to prove Tim's innocence. The next obstacle that the defense had to overcome was the fact that the police did not want to give them the jacket. But after some legal maneuvering, the jacket was in their possession and the defense's lead investigator, Barry Getz, got on a plane to Holland with the evidence in his carry on. By jacket, you mean her coat, I assume, right? Yeah, yeah, her winter coat. Now, the coat was analyzed, and the Akellen blooms discovered two things. One, Timothy's DNA was not present.

And two, her ex-boyfriend Matthew Zellner's was, as well as being present on her waistband and the cuffs of her blouse. Roro. Yeah. Now, this did a whole number on the prosecution's case. It didn't prove that Zellner was involved, like the DNA could have been from her seeing him earlier that night, you know? But it definitely proved that Timothy Masters was not. But meanwhile, during Timothy's trial, you have prosecutor Jolene Blair saying, The most compelling evidence for me was who else could it possibly be?

Nobody else had motive. Nobody else had the opportunity. Nobody else had the weapons. Bitch y'all didn't look at anybody else. Oh, my God. Oh, this is just chapping my ass like you wouldn't believe. Yeah, it's just. just infuriating. And I do want to say that this

whole investigation that the defense team did, this is not a hit on his previous defense team. They did the best they could with what they had. But let's take a look at Jolene Blair's dumbass statement, shall we? Who else could have done this? Who had the motive? Who had the means? The opportunity and the skills to pull this off? What the fuck was Tim's motive supposed to be? They weren't even able to establish that they knew each eye. I can't even stand it. Matt? Matt at Mommy? Matt at Mommy, Whitney.

Matt at Mommy. For God's sake. Oh, it's just amateur hour over here. This was right around the time, like the height of serial killer, so I'm just sure they were just stoked to have one. They just had a huge boner at the thought of, like, getting a nab of potential blooming Ted Bundy. Yeah. Matt at Mommy was his motive. So first, we have someone with an obvious motive, Matthew Zellner, Peggy's ex. He was the last person to see her alive, which is already not.

good for him. And his DNA was all over her clothes. And they had a tumultuous relationship by all accounts as well. Yeah. Now, I haven't been able to find any record of Peggy's time of death. And it's probably because it was so cold the night she was killed and temperature can really affect the accuracy of such tests. But we know that she left the bar between 1 and 1.30. According to him, he was occupied until 3. But after that, who knows? How hard did they really look? for that alibi. A patron at the bar did say that she left on her own, but no one saw Peggy walking down the road after that. Did Zellner catch up with her? Did she accept a ride home? We have no idea, of course. Now, the main reason that the prosecution put her on foot

at the time of death was because that was the only way to put her in contact with Tim Masters. But Tim's defense team was starting to believe that maybe she'd been murdered in a car. So our second and we think a pretty solid bed is our old friend Dr. Richard Hammond. So if you recall, if you recall campers, Dr. Hammond was a local eye surgeon that lived on the same block as Tim Masters. And his home had that great vantage point of the master's home so that when they were surveilling Tim,

they actually posted up in his house. I mean, that would just be a hilarious and awful irony if he actually was the killer, wouldn't it? So, all right, so buckle up because this is super fun, by which I mean super fucking awful. In 1995, the good doctor got himself into a spot of bother. Specifically, he was arrested for filming women's genitals in the guest bathroom of his house through fake vents. Yeah. He had a

precisely positioned setup rigged to film female guest's breasts as they were in the shower and their genitals while they were on the toilet. Gross. The cameras automatically turned on when the light switch was hit and one guest noted how many lights were in the bathroom. Like it was this little bathroom, but there was just lights everywhere. Yeah. He even had a reel-to-reel setup that would run while he wasn't home, so he wouldn't run out of tapes. The cameras themselves were of such high quality that they could, on a close-up, focus on the writing on a Lysol can. So he invested in this, because this is like late 80s, early 90s. Like, the cameras weren't that great back then. That would have cost some scratch.

Hammond had placed the toilet paper holder far enough out that the guests would have to reach far out in front of them bringing their faces into the view of his camera. This charming prince among men even had the cameras set up with autofocus that could track someone no matter how close they were. He was found out when a college student that was house-sitting for him heard the whoring of the autofocus and was immediately freaked. She got down to look into the vent and was, of course, horrified to find a flippant camera in there. So she called the police and what they found in that house

should have set off every alarm in the town of Fort Collins. They found a locked room with the cameras along with hundreds of tapes labeled with various women's names. He had videos of 78 separate victims.

78 women. Holy shit. So investigators determined that this had been going on since at least 1992, but it could have been happening before that as well. They also found a storage unit containing thousands of dollars of porn, specifically, porn that focused on women's genitals.

Women's, hecken, genitals, campers. Why, in God's name, this man wasn't looked at hard as a suspect in Peggy's murder at this point? I literally cannot imagine. Huh? Broderick? You listen, bud? Why the fuck? Oh, my God.

So, anyway, he was arrested in 1995 and was able to postpone really quickly after, because you know, doctor. And a day or so after his release, he checked into a hotel room in Denver, set up an IV drip with a massive amount of cyanide and committed suicide. So frustrating. And his wife later described him on the stand as gentle and a wimp. I'm sorry, that description just gets me every. He was a wimp, you know, just a wimp that liked filming women's genitals.

Also, he has a wife who calls him a wimp that might create some resentment against women. I mean, we've seen that before in serial killer cases, haven't we? Yeah, and I'd like to point out that just. because they could only track to 1992 doesn't mean shit. I mean, Ted Bundy regularly. Yeah. Yeah, Ted Bundy threw away the implements of his trickery all the time. He threw away, he threw away his crutches and then be pissed. He threw away his crutches because he had to go buy new ones when he wanted to murder somebody new. So anyway, that doesn't mean anything. No, of course not. I'm worked up. Yeah. So, you know, the wimp story doesn't necessarily go

against what we know about psychopaths. What we have here, campers, is an individual who is obsessed with women's bodies to the point of setting up a rig, spending money to film them. He was careful to keep his homewife and his inner fantasy separate, and when he was caught, he committed suicide, leaving a note that said, my death should satisfy the media's thirst for blood. Heck off. That to me just seems like a grandiose reaction to the facts of this case. Like, he was caught with, like, filming, like, a creep, and he was like, I'm going to kill

myself, they want blood. What? The police had briefly questioned him at the time of Peggy's murder, but it quickly ruled him out based on the word of his wife. Tim's defense team says that the fact that he was questioned should have been enough to include him in the documents provided to the first defense attorney, but they weren't given anything that could be potentially exculpatory. Yeah, that's just great. That's just exactly what you want to see, right? Prosecutors behaving ethically. I just, I'm speechless. Jesus, Murph. Brown. I'm so disgusted with these people. If you're not internally screaming at this point, I don't know what to tell you.

This is why we can't have nice things. This is why nobody trusts a justice system. Because it's shit like this. Shame on you people. And they shouldn't. Frankly, after this, they fucking shouldn't. After his arrest, by the way, someone had noted in Dr. Hammond's file to go check into Hetrick. But nothing ever came of that note. Now, Tim Masters knew, defense team wanted to get their hands on the Hammond evidence to check if there was any connection at all with Peggy Hetrick, but they couldn't. Why? Well, of course, Jim Broderick had the evidence destroyed to protect the women involved, since there wouldn't be a court case anyway. This is unbelievably frustrating to me. You have a note in this man's file to check for

any connections to an unsolved fucking murder, and Jim Broderick has the evidence literally burned. Burned. That's not a standard of procedure that I have ever heard of. Yeah, I think it's just as likely he was protecting his case because, you know, you don't generally burn evidence, do you? No, no, you do not.

Now, Tim's defense had a couple theories of the crime. We've told you about Dr. Creepo, but they also believe that there may have been two culprits involved, that they picked Peggy up in a vehicle and offered to drive her home. During the drive, there was a struggle, and one accomplice stopped the car while the other fought with Peggy. Then, as Peggy tried to flee the car, one accomplice grabbed her coat and stabbed her, resulting in the blood dripping from the vehicle to the pavement. And they mutilated her and carried her into the field.

What do we think happened? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I've seen some crime scene photos of that curb, and once you actually see the pictures, that actually does seem very plausible that it might have been, you know, that she was stabbed to. in a car, because it's right there on the curb, it's dripping down, and it looks like it might have dripped from a bit of a height, you know? So I think that's very plausible. And there are certainly murder partners out there. I mean, Lawrence and Biddecker come to mind, you know, Leonard Lake and Charles Eng, come to mind. So it definitely could be more than one person, or it could just be one guy in a car. Although mutilation like that, especially done so precisely,

makes me think it was probably Dr. Creep rather than too random, you know, or somebody like it anyway. Because not everybody. I mean, this plastic surgeon is saying I couldn't have even done that mutilation that well, especially not in the dark. So it's somebody with some skill, right? And you have to be precise to be an eye surgeon. Yes, very much so. So anywho, now, with two very plausible suspects in their pockets, as well as all this mountain of withheld evidence, the defense team was ready to go into battle. And battle, they did. And finally, on January 22nd, 2008, nearly nine and a half years after his conviction, the new special prosecutor, the new special prosecutor moved to vacate Tim's conviction. Tim Masters, after nine and a half years behind bars,

was a free man. Just digest for a second how long that is. That's almost 10 years of your life. And have a really good chunk of your life, too. You know, where you're young and strong and you should be getting your career set up and everything like that. Really shitty. As he walked out of the trial, unchackled for the first time in a decade, his family cheered and cried and did celebratory fist pumps in the air and kind of a call back to Jolene Blair's little courtroom self-congratulation years earlier. The first thing Tim did upon his release was eat two pieces of grocery store fried chicken. Bless his heart, he's probably been dreaming about that for years. His family held a party for him where everybody's spirits were high,

and for the first time in a decade, he slept on a real mattress, he got to hug his sister, meet his nieces and nephews. Tim Masters, after being caged by injustice, could finally leave the past in his rearview mirror, or at least kind of. Tim Masters filed a civil suit against the city of Fort Collins and the state of Colorado and was able to settle to the tune of $10 million. I think that's a pretty low price for 10 years of your life, but there you go. Now he's what he calls semi-retired and trying to make up for lost time. We hope Tim is living his life to the fullest and that he can find peace after all this.

Three years after his release, I can't believe it took three years, but he was finally fully exonerated by the state of Colorado. As for Jolene Blair and Terry Gilmore, I know you'll be heartbroken to hear that they both got voted out of the judge's chair during their next election. And if you don't know much about how the American election system works, it's actually really hard to get voted out of a judicial position, unless, of course, you falsely convict someone of murder, in which case you are overwhelmingly voted out. So there's at least that, right? So Weld County District Attorney Ken Buck, who was about to start a run for United States Senate, investigated the Fort Collins PD, and he did find that some, quote, disturbing things had happened in

the case, but he didn't believe that the department had done anything illegal. Until. He discovered that Jim Broderick, bless his little old heart, had lied to him. You see, Jim had told him, both in an email and under oath, that he wasn't involved in setting up the surveillance on Tim for the second anniversary of Peggy Hedrick's murder. This was an outright lie. There was a memo written by Jim in 1989 that indicated that he actually set up the logistics for the surveillance. Oh, Jimbo, you scamp.

I don't even know why he would lie about that. It seems like a stupid thing to lie about, but whatever. He lied. Well, you see, Ken Buck really, really did not like being lied to, especially by his own people. So he reopened the inquiry on Broderick and convened a grand jury. Broderick was indicted on eight counts of perjury, including allegations that he misrepresented eyewitness testimony that put Hedrick near Master's trailer before her death, and that he concealed the evidence of footprints that didn't belong to Tim.

Well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of our own actions. He faced $4 million in fines and up to 40 years in jail. But luckily for him and unluckily for Justin. there were issues with the statute of limitations on his charges because it wasn't clear when his lies were quote unquote discovered. So the charges were dropped. Oh, for God's sake. Yeah. And I think we should talk a minute about Jim Broderick because we've been pretty critical of him. Now, I'm not sure that's unfair. Oh, it's not. Not unfair at all. Not at all. But he's a person and sometimes people make mistakes.

Please keep in mind that these are our opinions, our opinions. I don't believe that Broderick or Blair or Gilmore acted out of malice. But I do believe they acted out of pride. Pride also known as arrogance, that special kind of blindness that comes from being just so, so sure you're right. It's the kiss of death for a homicide detective, and this case is a perfect example of why detectives and prosecutors, for God's sake, have to fight so hard against that it. makes me really angry to hear a prosecutor say after the fact, we knew our case was incredibly weak. Well, then why did you bring it? Shame on you. Ugh. So, you know, I think Tim Masters knew Jim Broderick pretty well. In one of his journals, Tim wrote, Jim Broderick is my arch enemy, my nemesis,

the man who destroyed my life for a murder I didn't commit. At first, I thought that Broderick knew I was innocent, but arrested me because I was the easiest conviction. That was before I read his police reports and began to understand his mental state. He was convinced that I'd done it from the very first day, and he never changed his mind. The only reasons I care whether I live or die is that people out there care about me, and I've got to live long enough to have these lies told by Broderick set straight, and to make sure the Fort Collins Police Department do their job and put the real killer of Peggy Hedrick behind bars. Tim, the whole time he was in prison for a crime he didn't commit was, of course, angry, but he didn't wish ill on Jim. More than anything, he wanted the truth to

known in the injustice that was done to him and Peggy Hedrick to be uncovered. And the shitty part is, we still don't know for sure who killed Peggy. But we hope her family has managed to find some peace. So, that was a wild one, huh, campers? And incidentally, it was the first case that got Katie interested in true crime. Yeah. Yeah, it's also the first case that I was able to, like, I wrote a paper on it in high school and I also.

That's adorable. Oh, my God. At least once a year discuss this case with my father. father. He's the one that actually brought it to my attention. So shout out to my dad. Hey, Katie's dad. Thank you for giving us an interesting case. So, you know, we're going to have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And we want to send a shout out to our newest patrons. Thank you so much to Michelle, Rebecca, Amanda, and Jill. We appreciate you to the moon and back.

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