Fight For The Truth

They think he had seen her quite a bit before this night. It was late at night, probably after 1:00 AM when she was walking down the curb. She had no clue that the attack was coming. He circled around her and came up behind her and stabbed her with one deep stab into her back with a long knife which killed her very quickly. You could see a bloody drag trail into the furrows. The body had been displayed and there had been sexual mutilation. such was the murder scene of Peggy Hettrick. And the authorities soon had a suspect in their sights. But this case would turn into one of Colorado's most haunting mysteries.

Fort Collins Colorado back in the '80s had very much a small town feel to it. So when the murder of Peggy Hettrick became known publicly it came as quite a shock. Peggy was a highly intelligent person and a very artistic one. She had traveled all over the world. By all accounts she was an amazing person. A bicyclist spotted the body early in the morning on the south side of Fort Collins. Tim Masters was a 15 year old kid who happened to live right next door to the crime scene. He had discovered the body first but never reported it. From the onset the investigation centered around Tim Masters. When the police searched his residence they found all kinds of graphic drawings of mutilation and dismemberment. He always, however, maintained his innocence.

Everyone was sure they had found the guy who killed Peggy Hettrick. To the authorities the drawings represented something more than just a passing fancy. To them it was more of a window into his mind. But for a while there was not enough evidence to arrest Tim and the case went cold. Then Lt. Brodrick reopened the case. For years, however, the case only focused on Tim Masters. It was, in fact, a single minded investigation. And although Tim was eventually arrested and convicted of the crime, serious questions arose after that conviction. There was, in fact, evidence at the crime scene that eliminated Tim Masters that was not taken into account. Every single piece of exculpatory evidence was withheld from the defense. Everyone now realizes that the system failed and failed badly but that comes too late for Peggy Hettrick.

Tim Masters went to prison in 1999. He was sentenced to life for a crime he swears he didn't commit. After years of hearings and unsuccessful appeals the debate over Tim Master's guilt or innocence continues. But a Judge is at last about to make a ruling that could set Tim Masters free. If he does walk free he will have a small army of unlikely supporters to thank. Not only his large extended family but also lawyers and even former cops claiming for years now that they are sure Tim Masters didn't do it. Masters who was 37 at the time of the hearing has been under this cloud of suspicion since he was 15 years old. On the morning of February 11th, 1987 the half naked body of 37 year old Peggy Hettrick was found in a field adjacent to where Tim Masters lived. Back then there were a lot of people who thought Tim was a viable suspect.

Among the believers was a veteran Homicide Detective named Linda Wheeler. The passerby who spotted it at first mistook it for a mannequin. There was a deep stab wound to Peggy Hettrick's upper back. There was a bloody drag trail that led to her final resting place. When Officer Jim Brodrick arrived at the scene he was struck by the footprints along that trail leading back to a pool of blood by the curb. Her pants were pulled down to her knees. Her shirt pushed up to her chin and part of one of her breasts had been removed. The prospect of a madman sexually mutilating his victim created near panic. Jim Brodrick and the Fort Collins police went into overdrive. Among the persons of interest was Peggy's one time boyfriend Matt Zolner. Zolner was questioned for hours and even took a polygraph test. He was then released.

Police meanwhile were canvassing every house near the crime scene. They were talking with businessmen and housewives, even a prominent eye surgeon, Dr. Richard Hammond. Years later Dr. Hammond would figure into this case but back then he was just another neighbor. But Linda Wheeler was sure someone must have seen something. The first house she went to was Clyde Masters which is where Tim lived. Tim had few friends but had no history of trouble. He was a very quiet kid and seemed almost introverted. Tim's Mother had died four years earlier when he was 11. Usually Tim cut straight through the fields to catch the school bus. His Father told police that on that morning he had veered around the field. It became very obvious to Linda that he must have seen the body. Tim's footprints were in the field but he hadn't reported a thing.

A few hours later police appeared at Tim's high school and yanked him out of class for questioning. His explanation for not reporting it was that he thought it was just a mannequin and he thought someone was playing a trick on him. And although the passerby who eventually reported the body also thought the body was a mannequin but police weren't buying that story from Tim. Lt. Brodrick searched the Master's trailer and hit what he thought was pay dirt. On his dresser they found seven survival knives all sequentially displayed. One of them, Brodrick assumed, could be the murder weapon. With his Fathers permission Brodrick and a team of cops interrogated the 15 year old for more than 10 hours without a lawyer on the very day Peggy's body was found. To his credit Tim never faltered and repeatedly denied everything.

They gave him a lie detector test. The official report of that test is lost today but Brodrick says Tim failed. Although Linda says he definitely needed to be looked at but says it became a pack mentality and leading that pack was Jim Brodrick. And Brodrick was about to find evidence that for him would erase all doubt that Tim Masters killed Peggy Hettrick. In Tim's notebooks were drawings of murder and dismemberment. That evening another officer miles away in Florida was quietly heading to the Hettrick home. He was there to break the terrible news to Peggy's Father and brother Tom. The gruesome news was doubly hard to grasp because Peggy had been such a force of nature. The Hettricks had lived all over the world, moving as Mr. Hettrick's job in the oil industry required. Peggy was red haired and delightfully eccentric.

She was interested in Native American History. What she was not interested in was getting married, although she had had boyfriends. Among them was Zolner. His on again off again relationship had been stormy at times. He was questioned by police but his date that night confirmed his story that he was with her until around 3:00 AM, however he was one of the last people to see Peggy alive. He said he ran into her in a bar parking lot at around 12:30 AM that night and that was the first time he had seen her since they had broken up a week before and she had not been happy to see him on a date. He said he offered her a ride home but that she decided to walk home. Police believe that it was on that walk home that Peggy's murderer struck. And despite hours of denials Detective Brodrick was growing more certain that Tim Masters did it.

Police were also shocked to learn during autopsy that the sexual mutilation also included what amounted to a female circumcision, which according to Brodrick was part of Master's deliberate plan. He also thinks that he positioned the body so he could see it from his bedroom window. The knives found in Master's trailer had a scalpel and there was another scalpel on the dresser where the knives were found. But there was no trace of Peggy's blood on any of the knives. Nor did they find blood on any of Tim's clothes and they even searched the drains but found nothing. By contrast there was no lack of blood in the macabre drawings found in Tim's high school notebooks. They find one drawing where he is dragging a body with blood dripping from it much as Peggy had been dragged Brodrick thought.

But as incriminating as the drawings seemed the case was purely circumstantial. Weeks then months passed with no arrest. Essentially the only evidence that pointed to Tim was the drawings and the fact that he hadn't reported the body. No hairs, fibers, fingerprints, nothing. The police ginned up a theory that since Peggy had been killed almost exactly four years after his Mother died Tim killed Peggy out of revenge for his Mother dying. So the cops thought that when that anniversary rolled around again maybe he can be goaded into doing something incriminating. Then Patrolman Roy Crening was among the 92 members of the police force was assigned to watch Tim Masters. The expectation was that when the anniversary of his Mother's death came around again Tim Masters would do something crazy. It was 1 24/7 operation that lasted about a week.

He was not pleased. He considered it a goofball theory that 15 year old Tim would start killing people. But as directed he scouted out vantage points at neighborhood houses. One spot he found was the eye surgeon's, Dr. Richard Hammond, house which overlooked the crime scene. Crening watched Tim's house from a construction trailer. But all Tim did was get up, go to school, come home and go to bed. Other's staked out Peggy's grave thinking maybe Tim would come and visit the grave and maybe even lay on it. All of this seemed ridiculous to Crening. But the plan went even further. At one point the police even duped a newspaper reporter into writing a phony story saying that an arrest was imminent. They even left a copy of an Tim's Mother obituary on the windshield of a truck of one of Tim's friends.

Tim's former attorney Eric Fisher says these tactics are nothing short of torture and that by making Tim relive his Mother's death they are trying to get him to snap. And what did this elaborate experiment produce? Zero, absolutely nothing. At that point it didn't matter Tim said, the investigation had already wrecked his life. He remembers thinking that someday surely everyone would understand that this had been a terrible mistake. But he had not counted on one very determined Lt. Brodrick. Four years after Peggy Hettrick's murder Tim Master's thought he had finally rescued his reputation. He joined the Navy and thought it was all behind him. But back in Fort Collins the case had gone cold. It had sat there until 1991. Linda Wheeler learned that she had been picked to reopen the case. Her marching orders were clear.

See if she couldn't put enough of he puzzle pieces to arrest Tim Masters. She worked for a year with Masters in her sights before she stumbled on that apparent missing piece of the puzzle, something Tim had mentioned to a friend. He had told a friend that he knew that Peggy Hettrick's nipple had been cut off or bitten off. But that was something known only to the police or so they thought. In July of 1992, armed with an arrest warrant Lt. Brodrick and Linda Wheeler hopped a flight to Philadelphia where Tim's ship was in port. They grilled him again for a day and a half. He told them that there big secret was in fact common knowledge at the high school where he attended because the police had enlisted the help of high school students to search the field for body parts. To the detectives complete shock a former student confirmed Tim's story.

For Linda Wheeler, that was it. The cop who was the first to tie Tim Masters to the crime now was just as sure she had been wrong. Although she expressed her opinion to her superiors it was a very unpopular one. Linda wanted to re investigate, start from square one and enlist the help of the FBI. She was told that wouldn't happen and by the end of 1993 she was back on patrol duty, a direct result, she believes, of expressing such an unpopular opinion. She said she was fed up and ostracised and she quit the Fort Collins police in 1995. Jim Brodrick meanwhile had been freshly promoted to supervisor and he soon reopened the case focusing on Tim Masters once again. He had no new evidence but in 1997 he found a new ally. Some who put a new spin on the best evidence he did have, Tim's graphic drawings.

Dr. Reed Malloy is an internationally recognized expert on sexual homicide. He says that Tim was consumed with degradation of women and the sexual exploitation of them. This is all based on a 15 year old's twisted musings about violence and death. Disturbing, sure, but Tim says for a 15 year old nerdy kid trying to get attention that was the point. He said his peers approved of them and wanted him to draw even more. But Dr. Malloy saw much more. He says he looked for specificity between Tim's drawings and the facts of the homicide itself. He says he found hundreds of links especially in two particular drawings. One shows how he believes Tim moved Peggy's body. In another he says he saw an image of a vagina being cut. Dr. Malloy concluded that this was a textbook sexual homicide and an outgrowth of Tim's fury at being abandoned by his Mother at age 11.

He suggests that Tim Masters is symbolically killing his mother and he is absolutely sure of that. Jim Brodrick felt that finally he had his man. He headed for California where Tim Masters was working after being honorably discharged from the Navy and was now 27 years old. He arrested Tim Masters for the murder of Peggy Hettrick. When Brodrick searched Tim's house he found guns, knives and drawings similar to what he had found in 1987. A few months later Tim was brought back to Colorado. He went on trial for the murder of Peggy Hettrick in March 1999. The prosecutors had all sorts of theories but no physical evidence, save those drawings. Prosecutors Terry Gilmore and Joleen Blair admitted soon after the trial that they thought their case was pretty thin. Although they doubted their case they were convinced by Jim Brodrick that this was the right thing to do.

There was never any doubt in Brodrick's mind. Tim's changed appearance helped their cause. The Jurors didn't see the skinny little kid anymore. He'd grown into an imposing figure looking fully capable of the crime. Eric Fisher defended Tim at trial and has never had any doubt of his innocence. After all how could Tim, an unassuming rather naive 15 year old, have pulled off such a crime without leaving a shred of evidence behind. The most compelling argument for the prosecutors was if not Tim then who as no one else had the motive nor the opportunity. There best evidence was Tim's drawings and the expert testimony of Dr. Malloy of what they meant. As for the one drawing of someone dragging the body, Tim has always said he made it after seeing the body. David Wienwork who represents Tim today says the state built it's case not around evidence but around fear.

He says that the psychcologist basically scared the Jurors to death by stating that the drawings were evidence of a sexual homicide. And they were scared, scared enough to convict Tim Masters. One of the tactics the prosecutors used was to show a picture of Peggy Hettricks body and then show a blown up picture of the drawing of what appeared to be of a cut vagina next to it. It was most effective and worked to the desired effect. More than a decade after the crime it took the Jurors just a day and a half to convict Tim Masters of the murder of Peggy Hettrick of first degree murder. He was sentenced to life behind bars without parole. Prosecutors were delighted. But many birthdays would go by before a startling revelation would challenge Tim's conviction. First, there is a full blown sex offender that lives 200 yards from the crime scene.

During Tim's trial prosecutors asked who else could it have been? The answer to that question was right under their noses, if you believe Tim's lawyers, at a house in Tim's old neighborhood bordering the field where Peggy Hettrick's body was found. Four years before Tim's arrest, police were summoned there to another mind boggling crime scene. The then patrol officer Linda Wheeler searched the home of a prominent eye surgeon, Dr. Richard Hammond. It seems the good Doctor had a perversion with some eerie similarities to the Hettrick case. These perversions were played out in the guest bathroom of the Hammond house. There was a young college student who was house sitting and as she was sitting on the commode she thought it was strange that the bathroom was so well light and thought she saw something in one of the vents.

She was right. Behind that vent and two others Dr. Hammond's video cameras were whirring away. When you walk into the bathroom and turn on the light a bank of video cameras, each placed with loving care, click into action. Not only is there a toilet cam but also a shower cam. Apparently auto focus was the Doctors undoing. Davis Michaels, a Fort Collins police officer, says that when the puzzled house sitter heard an unmistakable sound of a camera adjusting the lens position she became curious and then discovered the entire system. Aghast, she called the police. In a locked room next to the bathroom they found an elaborate taping system. And in a nearby locker they found an estimated $13,000 worth of pornographic material. And everywhere were detailed files and stacks of video tapes. He kept a file for each victim so he could watch as they grew.

He had also configured the tape system so that when one tape system ran out, another tape system would kick in so that he could be gone for a long time and not miss anything that went on in the bathroom. In all there were 78 victims. After his arrest, Dr. Hammond spent several days in a psychiatric unit and then was released on bond. Days later he checked into a motel, hooked himself up to an IV filled with cyanide and committed suicide. But the most astonishing thing Masters lawyers say is that the police never even questioned Dr. Hammond even though he could see the crime scene from his house. Dr. Hammond, a voyeur, obsessed with female body parts, lived as close to the crime scene as Masters did, and with surgical skills was never even a suspect in Peggy Hettrick's murder despite the hand written note in Dr. Hammond's file which said "look into Hettrick, Brodrick is running the show".

When confronted with these facts Lt. Brodrick had nothing to say. The lead prosecutor in the Peggy Hettrick case says that the camera receipts provided by Dr. Hammond's wife show that the cameras were bought years after the Hettrick murder. And although there is no physical evidence linking Dr. Hammond to the crime scene the same could be said about Tim Masters. However, Dr Hammond didn't have grisly drawings of women being tortured and Tim did and to the prosecutor that makes a difference. For now at least. But Tim's lawyers are quick to point out that you have a man in Dr. Hammond that has a perversion for women's body parts who just happens to be a surgeon and you act like it doesn't connect? Probably no one will ever know if Dr. Hammond had anything to do with Peggy Hettrick's murder in part because of what police did at the local landfill just six months after Dr. Hammond's suicide.

The police destroyed all of Dr. Hammond's tapes at the order of Lt. Brodrick. Perhaps an image of Peggy Hettrick was on one of those tapes but we will never know now. His explanation was that the victims were concerned that the tapes would somehow wind up on the Internet so he decided to destroy them. Detective Michelson wondered if Dr. Hammond had been video taping years earlier than police thought. The receipts only proved that he bought new camera equipment after Peggy was murdered, suppose he had already traded for some earlier or the receipts were lost? Now, no one will ever know for sure. But at the time of Tim's trial his lawyers had never even heard of Dr. Hammond. Tim's lawyer from the original trial says that if they knew they had a pervert living right across the street the prosecutors entire closing argument about who else could have done it goes away.

For Collins police kept the specifics of Dr. Hammond's activities from the public and Tim's attorneys say they were never told about those activities and that alone justifies a new trial. After two failed appeal attempts, convincing a Judge of that is Tim Masters only hope of freedom. In a last ditch effort he appealed again this time claiming ineffective counsel. Court appointed attorney Maria Loo says this his one of her first post conviction appeal cases. When the gigantic file landed on her desk in 2003 she had no idea what to think. She hunkered down and began reading not knowing whether Tim was guilty or not. Then she watched those police interrogation tapes. She then realized that Tim was in fact innocent. With so much at stake and with so little trial experience Maria called in flamboyant defense attorney David Wymore. He knew however that requests for a new trial are almost never granted.

He admits that his first thoughts about him prevailing were about 100 to 1 that he would lose. He did however begin reading some 10,000 pages of police and court files. To their amazement they began to realize that their were important items of evidence that were never given to Tim's original lawyers though by law they were entitled to them. By November 2007 hearings were well under way. Special prosecutor Don Quick and his team representing the state of Colorado were new faces in court and original investigator Lt. Brodrick was there as well to act in an advisory capacity. He told a local reporter at the time that he had an open mind. ON the stand Tim's original Lawyers, Nathan Chambers and Eric Fisher who lost the first and only trial defended the job they had done given all they didn't know at the time, especially about the existence of Dr. Richard Hammond.

Dr. Hammond a neighbor of Tim's was arrested some years after the murder of Peggy Hettrick for sex crimes involving secretly video taping women in his bathroom and later committed suicide. A great alternate suspect the defense says but his name was never mentioned in the original trial. And David Wymore argued that Dr. Hammond's very existence so close to the crime scene defines reasonable doubt. Although both men have alibis the difference is Tim Masters doesn't have a library of video taped vagina's and nipples, the exact parts that were mutilated on Peggy Hettrick and he is also not an eye surgeon. In court Wymore presents a long list of evidence that was withheld from the defense and as it turns out from prosecutors as well which were withheld by the police during Tim's trial. The list includes Brodrick's notes on conversations he had with an FBI profiler.

Roy Hazelwood, according to the defense, questioned the very meanings of Tim's drawings. He is in fact raising the same questions the defense is. Roy Hazelwood said the drawings were mere doodles and they don't reflect what happened to Peggy Hettrick at all. Then there was the testimony of the states star witness, Dr. Malloy who analyzed the drawings. He had also written that Peggy Hettrick's wounds appeared to be surgical which is an opinion that the Jury never heard because Jim Brodrick didn't turn over Dr. Malloy's full 300 page report. And that same question about surgical skill came up with another expert the police consulted. Dr. Richard Choy, a local plastic surgeon said the incisions on Peggy's vagina would have been difficult for him to make and that certainly someone with a great deal of surgical skill had made them. But Dr. Choy's views were never heard in court either.

Not, says Detective Michelson, that it takes all these experts to see the obvious. The wounds to Peggy simply couldn't have been done by a 15 year old boy with a D cell flashlight in his mouth and a pocketknife. On the stand former officer Troy Crenning blasts his department's own surveillance of Tim Masters on the anniversary of the crime. And none of the surveillance documents were given to the defense either. Tim's defense said the Fort Collins police never disclosed to either the prosecutor or the defense just how far they went to get Masters to incriminate himself. On top of that their plan backfired when their psychcological ploy didn't work. But this was equal opportunity withholding. Material wasn't turned over to the defense or the prosecutors either, all as a result of the actions of the Fort Collins police.

Brodrick says while he may not have turned over all his notes the defense had all the information in the notes he did turn over. One of the special prosecutors reports says aspects of the police investigation "disturbing". But Don Quick says that not only was it not only not a frame up but that the work of Brodrick, a 29 year veteran of the force was meticulous and detailed. And although Brodrick says anything that was not turned over was a simple mistake, Tim's lawyers say that anytime exculpatory evidence is withheld from the defense you don't get the benefit of the doubt that it is simply a mistake. Toward the end of the hearing the sheer volume of Brodrick's material became an issue itself. At this time the defense notices Lt. Brodrick pulling files out of a personal box of his and they want to know what is in it. The Judge decides it all should be turned over immediately.

But ironically, because Brodrick kept everything the defense is able to produce the most convincing argument yet. First they claim the prosecutors had this murder all wrong from the get go. Veteran crime scene investigator Barry Getz, now working for the defense, says he realized Jim Brodrick's tunnel vision on Tim Masters only as the hearing neared it's end. The showstopper emerges from Brodrick's box of personal files. In an envelope are photographs of footprints from the crime scene, two of which are consistent with a Tom McCann dress shoe. Tim Masters never owned a pair of Tom McCann shoes. On this point Brodrick is adamant. He says Fisher, whether under oath or not is flat out wrong and that he did turn over the shoe prints. Not that it matters where the error occurred it wasn't used at trial. The problem he says are that the photographs aren't clear enough to accurately depict a Tom McCann shoe.

To this the defense pulls out another note from Brodrick's file which states "The brand pattern looks like a Tom McCann shoe". Now armed with all this new evidence. Master's lawyers have come up with their own scenario as to what they think really happened to Peggy Hettrick. Davis Wymore thinks it all began in a car. He thinks Peggy was stabbed as he was getting out of the car. One of the reasons he thinks that is that one of Peggy's boots has clear abrasions on the sole of her boot. In tests the Master's defense team was able to reproduce these abrasions. They also believe that she was stabbed as she was being pulled back in the car because, Barry Getz says, the holes in her clothing prove it. The holes in her coat and her blouse don't line up which show movement to one side as she was being stabbed. Hr then theorizes that the killer or killers next took Peggy where they had privacy and light to work.

They think she was mutilated somewhere they could have put her on a table where they could wash her and perform the mutilation and then took her to the field and dumped her. He also thinks that she was not dragged as far as the drag marks would lead on to believe because there is no dirt or grass stains on the back of her jeans. Getz says two people carried Peggy to her resting place, her coat leaving a bloody trail. If true, that makes Tim Master's drag drawing, a lynch pin of the prosecutors case a lot less relevant. But it isn't over yet. The prosecution has yet to answer the defenses many charges. The bar for granting a new trial is very high. Wymore and Loo would love some new evidence to lower that bar a bit and modern science may just be what they need. With Tim master's future in the balance the defense team is about to go half way around the world to see if DNA evidence can be obtained from 20 year old evidence.

Lawyer Wymore and Loo knew that evidence of another killer might be the only way to get their client out of prison. So last winter they took a huge gamble. Betting that there would be DNA on the clothes Peggy Hettrick wore when she was killed. And although hairs and fibers had been analyzed, no DNA tests had ever been done on the clothing as it was such a new science. Former cop Linda Wheeler who was now firmly convinced of Tim Master's innocence was all for it plus she knew just the man to do it. Richard Ikelinbalm is a DNA expert who with his wife Selma, a medical expert, loves nothing more than to use hard science to ferret the sorted secrets of crime. The only problem for the defense was that they had to travel thousands of mile to of all places the Netherlands which is where Richard and Selma live. They have a tiny lab in a quaint farmhouse some 60 miles from Amsterdam.

The Ikelinbalm's jokingly call it the crime farm. The prosecution fought hard to prevent the moving of the evidence out of the US but the Judge ruled that as long as someone escorted the clothes to Holland it was fine with him. Barry Getz volunteered. Getz had been with the Colorado State crime lab for 22 years. In January 2007 flew to Amsterdam clutching his priceless suitcase of evidence. He then took an hour long drive out to the Ikelinbalm crime farm and began helping Richard carefully unpack Peggy Hettrick's clothes including jeans, a blouse, and underwear. As usual Richard would use a most unusual approach. He wasn't looking for blood or saliva stains but for skin cells that are transferred when someone uses force to move something. It is a relatively new science called touch DNA which is Richard's speciality as he is a pioneer in this science.

It is the same science that finally cleared John and Patsy Ramsey of their daughters murder. The trick is not only analyzing what cells are left but in knowing where to look. Before he even looks for the DNA, Richard tries to reconstruct the murder. He looks where it is most likely where a perpetrator has grabbed a person or a piece of clothing using force. In fact, they will often reenact the crime as they did in this case with the help of Barry Getz. Remarkably more than 20 years after the murder it all paid off. He finds a full profile of a male on the inside of the underpants right where he hypothesized someone would use force to pull Peggy's underwear down. Not only was there DNA but there was enough to analyze. And the results were that it was not, in fact, Tim Masters just as they had expected. But they also knew that not finding Tim's DNA by itself was not enough to set him free.

But whose DNA was it? Perhaps Dr Hammond? But they didn't have a sample of Dr. Hammond's DNA for comparison and without it the Dutch couldn't rule him in or out, which was fine with Master's defense team because they needed to keep the suspicion alive. If the DNA cleared him then the spotlight would be right back on Tim. Putting Dr. Hammond aside then, the Dutch ran more tests and compared samples from cops, investigators, even from Matt Zolner, Peggy's old boyfriend who had said he left Peggy in a bar parking lot. They were shocked when the DNA didn't exclude him. Not only was Zolner's DNA on the inside of her underpants but it also turned up on the cuffs of her blouse. Clearly Zolner had many questions to answer. But what, if anything does this bombshell mean to Tim Masters who has been in prison for the last nine years?

He is now waiting on word on whether the Dutch DNA findings will persuade the Judge to grant him a new trial. Certainly his excited lawyers thinks he should. Tim's gigantic family packs the courtroom joining legions of other supporters. Not on hand is Jim Brodrick called out of town on a family emergency. But from the crime farm in Holland Richard and Selma Ikelinbalm are here. The state confirms the Dutch DNA findings and with that the prosecutor takes bold action instructing his deputy to move for Tim Masters immediate release. The Judge grants the motion and with that the hearing abruptly ends without anyone testifying. And with that Tim Masters is suddenly a free man. He is almost speechless. Not so his deliriously happy family. They have always stuck by him and continue to do so to this day. Tim doesn't know how to put a price tag on the nearly ten year of his life he has lost.

Three days after his release, the state drops all charges against Tim Masters but prosecutors still won't officially clear him of Peggy Hettrick's murder. The DNA that cleared Tim Masters leaves lingering questions about Matt Zolner. The Colorado Attorney General now has the Hettrick case. In all likelihood, short of a confession no one will ever be convicted of the Peggy Hettrick murder. But using a sample of Dr. Hammond's DNA provided by his wife he has been ruled out as a suspect. The court never ruled on whether Tim's original defense lawyers did their job but Eric Fisher accepts some blame. Both of the original prosecutors were publicly reprimanded and fined for their part in Tim Masters prosecution specifically for failing to disclose exonerating information to the defense but by then they had been promoted to Judges. But Tim doesn't blame them. He blames Lt. Brodrick.

Jim Brodrick, the man who chased Tim Masters was cleared of any wrongdoing both by the State of Colorado and by the Fort Collins police department. Looking back he makes absolutely no apologies for his actions. Ironically, Jim says, Tim's lawyers only had the information about the touch DNA because of him and his passion for saving everything. That, however, may not mean much to Tim Masters who is struggling to put together a new life. He has some unlikely new friends like Linda Wheeler who was the first cop on Peggy Hettrick's murder scene. Also among his new friends are Barry Getz and his lawyer Maria Loo whose office he still visits regularly. Tim Masters has a new apartment without guards and without all the orders he was required to abide by while in prison. It is not surprising then that he relishes walks in the great outdoors.

Peggy's Brother Tom Hettrick who has long doubted Tim's guilt greeted the news of his release with mixed feelings. Tim Masters is suing the City of Fort Collins and Lt. Brodrick. Further tests on Peggy Hettrick's clothing yielded DNA from two other unknown males. And the murder that so shocked the town of Fort Collins seems as big a mystery now as it was back then.