48 Hours: Drawn To Murder

This episode was originally broadcast on Nov. 29, 2008. It was updated on Dec. 27, 2009.

In February 1987, people in Fort Collins, Colo., were on edge after a woman, Peggy Hettrick, was found murdered and sexually mutilated.

Police almost immediately zeroed in on a local teenager named Tim Masters, even though there was no physical evidence to tie him to the crime. But investigators kept revisiting the case, and years after the murder arrested Tim, tried him, and won a conviction.

But as correspondent Susan Spencer reports, this case is anything but open and shut. Is Tim really a crazed killer, as the lead investigator insists, or is he just a victim of circumstance?

"I'd be laying in my bunk… and it still astounded me that I was there. I couldn't believe it," he says.

His latest court hearing didn't seem real either, because after years of hearings and petitions and unsuccessful appeals, a judge at last was about to make a ruling that could set him free.

If he does walk free, he'll have a small army of unlikely supporters to thank - not just his gigantic extended family, but also lawyers and even former cops, all of them claiming they've been sure for years that Tim didn't do it.

Tim has walked in the shadow of this murder since he was 15 years old. On the morning of Feb. 11, 1987, the half-naked body of a 37-year-ols woman named Peggy Hettrick was found in a field in Fort Collins, Colo. - a stone's throw from Tim's house.

There were a lot of people who felt Tim was a viable suspect, including veteran cop Linda Wheeler.

"I think it was like 7:13 in the morning. The body has just been discovered… The body was very clean to look at; there was no blood on the body," Wheeler explains.

The passerby who spotted the body first mistook it for a mannequin.

There was a deep stab wound to Peggy's upper back. "You could see a bloody drag trail in the furrows," remembers Officer Jim Broderick. "It was pretty apparent that the victim was dragged out to the final resting point."

When Broderick arrived at the scene, he was struck by footprints along that trail, leading back to a pool of blood by the curb and he was struck by the body itself. Peggy's pants were pulled down to her knees, her shirt pushed up to her chin. Part of one of her breasts had been removed.

The prospect of a madman sexually mutilating his victims created near panic and Broderick and the Fort Collins police went into overdrive.

Among the early "persons of interest" was Peggy's one-time boyfriend, Matt Zoellner. He was questioned for hours, even took a polygraph, and was then released.

Police meanwhile were canvassing every house near the crime scene, talking with businessmen, housewives and even with prominent eye surgeon Dr. Richard Hammond. Years later, Hammond would figure in this case, but back then, he was just another neighbor who had seen nothing suspicious.

But Linda Wheeler was sure someone must have seen something. She says the first house she went to was the Masters home, where Clyde and his 15-year-old son Tim lived. Tim had few friends, but no history of trouble.

His mother had died four years earlier, when he was only 11.

Usually, Tim cut straight through the field to catch the school bus, but his father told police that on that morning, he'd seen his son hesitate. "And had veered to the left as he was walking through the field, and had stopped for a few moments," Wheeler says. "It became very obvious to me that his son 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, as Broderick recalled in an interview in 2000.

Tim's explanation for not reporting it was that he thought it was just a mannequin and that somebody was playing a trick. "I didn't believe it was real...a 15-year-old kid," he says. "But all morning long, as I'm at school I'm thinking about it, 'What if it was really a body?'"

The passerby who called in the crime also thought he'd seen a mannequin, but police weren't buying that story from Tim.

Broderick searched the Masters' trailer, and hit pay dirt. "And there on his dresser he's got seven knives, six, seven survival knives, all sequentially displayed," he remembers.

And one of them, Broderick assumed, could be the murder weapon. With Tim's father's permission, Broderick and a team of cops interrogated the teen for more than 10 hours without a lawyer.

Watch excerpts of Tim Masters' interrogation

Tim insisted that he didn't know what had happened and that he was innocent. Police also gave him a lie detector test. The official report of the test results is lost today, but Broderick says Tim failed.

"He definitely needed to be looked at, yes. Definitely he did, and it was very easy for everybody a kind of pack mentality to start focusing on him," Wheeler says.

And leading the pack was Jim Broderick, who was about to find evidence that for him erased all doubt Tim had killed Peggy.

Fort Collins police began their intense interrogation of Tim the very day Peggy's body was found. That evening, miles away in Florida, another officer quietly made his way to the Hettrick family home to break the news to her father and brother Tom.

The gruesome details were doubly hard to grasp, Tom says, because his older sister had been such a force of nature. The Hettricks had lived all over the world, moving as Mr. Hettrick's job in the oil business required.

Peggy was red-haired, independent, and, Tom says, delightfully eccentric. Out West, she developed a keen interest in Native American culture - especially the Hopi Indians. What she was not interested in, he says, was getting married, although she'd had boyfriends, among them her ex, Matt Zoellner.

Zoellner's on-again, off-again relationship with Peggy had been stormy at times.

Police did question Zoellner. His date confirmed his story that he'd been with her until around 3 a.m.; However, he was among the last people to see Peggy alive.
He had run into her in a bar parking lot around 12:30, he said, the first time he'd seen her since they'd broken up a week before and she had not been happy to see him on a date.

"Then I offered to give her a ride home, because I knew she was on foot," Zoellner told police. "She goes 'No, I'm just gonna walk.'"

Police believe it was on that walk, in the early morning hours that Peggy's murderer struck. And despite hours of denials from Tim, Det. Broderick was growing more certain he did it.

Police were shocked to learn at autopsy that the mutilation also included what amounted to a female circumcision, all part of Tim's deliberate plan, Broderick thought. "You can actually see the body laying out there in the field by viewing through his window. And I think he positioned the body so he could then see it from his bedroom window," he says.

The knives police found lay on the dresser; one had a scalpel inside the handle, and there was another scalpel on a table nearby. But there was no trace of Peggy's blood on any of them. Nor did they find her blood on any of Tim's clothes or shoes. They even searched the drains but found nothing.

"There is a misconception by a lot of people that because there's a lot of blood at a scene, it means the suspect's gonna get a lot of blood on him…and that just isn't the case," Broderick says.

By contrast, there was no lack of blood in ghoulish drawings in Tim's high school notebooks found in his room, backpack and school locker. "He had all kinds of graphic drawings and narratives about murders, violence against women," Broderick says. "And we find a drawing where a body is being dragged from under the arms …with blood dripping from the back."

Much as Peggy had been dragged, Broderick thought. But as incriminating as the drawings seemed, the case was completely circumstantial. Weeks, then months passed, with no arrest.

Police finally ginned up a plan to get the evidence they lacked. Peggy had been murdered almost exactly four years after Tim's mother died. The theory was that Tim had killed out of rage at losing his mother, and so, the cops thought, when that day rolls around again, maybe he could be goaded into doing something incriminating.

Then-patrolman Troy Krenning was among the dozen or so officers on the
92-member force assigned to watch Tim. He was not pleased. "It was a 24/7 operation that lasted for about a week. We're out chasing these goofball theories that a 15-year-old kid's gonna go berserk and start killing people."

They first scouted out vantage points at neighboring houses, including that of the eye surgeon whose home overlooked the crime scene.

Krenning watched Tim's house from a construction trailer, while others staked out Peggy's grave. "I remember at this briefing one of the things that was talked about was that he might go down to the grave and revisit Peggy Hettrick's grave and maybe even lay on the grave. What? Lay on the grave? You know, what kind of silliness is that?" Krenning remembers.

But the plan went still further: at one point, police duped a newspaper reporter into writing a phony story saying an arrest was imminent. They even left a copy of Tim's mother's obituary on the windshield of a friend's truck.

"That's torture," says Tim's former attorney, Erik Fischer. "They're trying to get this poor kid to relive his mother's death. They're trying to make him snap! It's a psychological experiment to try to make him snap!"

And what did this elaborate psychological experiment produce? Zero.

"I still remember to this day them planting the newspaper articles on my friend's truck and in my drive way, but I didn't know they were watching me when they did it," Tim says.

At that point it wouldn't have mattered, he says: the investigation already had wrecked his life. "So now everyone in the school thinks I'm a murderer. I only had one friend that stuck with me the whole time. I mean I had lots of people come up to me and say, 'I don't think you did it,' but they still weren't going to go to the prom with me."

He remembers thinking that some day, surely, everyone would understand that this had been a terrible mistake, but he'd not counted on one very determined cop.

Four years after Peggy Hettrick's murder, Tim Masters thought he'd finally rescued his reputation. "When I joined the Navy, I figured it was all behind me," he says. "I was going on with my career… I thought my life was going well… I'd just gotten a promotion. I thought it was all over."

But back in Fort Collins, Linda Wheeler learned she had been picked to reopen the case, and her marching orders were clear. "See if you can't put enough of the puzzle together to arrest Tim Masters," she says.

She worked for a year - with Tim in her sights - before she stumbled on that apparent missing piece of the puzzle: something Tim had mentioned to a friend. "Tim Masters had told him that he knew that Peggy Hettrick's nipple had been either cut off or bitten off," Wheeler says.

She was sure it was a detail police never had made public. In July 1992, armed with an arrest warrant, Broderick and Wheeler flew to Philadelphia, where Tim's ship was in port. They questioned him again for a day and a half.

He told them that their "big secret" was in fact common knowledge at the high school, because, incredibly, police had enlisted the help of students - Explorer Scouts - to search the field for body parts. "And one of those scouts just happened to sit at my table in art class and one day she says, they've been looking for Peggy Hettrick's nipple," Tim says.

To the detectives' complete shock, the former scout confirmed Tim's story. For Wheeler that was it. The cop who'd been first to tie Tim to the crime now was the first to think she had been wrong.

Wheeler wanted to reinvestigate and enlist the help of the FBI. "I was told I could not take it to the FBI. I was not able to look at other alternate suspects. By the end of 1993, I was back on patrol."

She says she was fed up and ostracized. She quit the Fort Collins police in 1995. Broderick, meanwhile, freshly promoted to supervisor, soon re-opened the case, focusing again on Tim.

He had no new evidence, but in 1997, he found an ally who put a new spin on the best evidence he did have: Tim's eerie drawings, and what they meant.

"He was preoccupied with violence, with sexually sadistic images…with images of domination and degradation of women," says Dr. Reid Meloy, an internationally known expert on sexual homicide, interviewed by "48 Hours" in 2000. "In 18 years of doing this kind of work, I have never seen such voluminous productions by a suspect."

Tim says his drawings were a way for a nerdy kid to get attention. "My peers seemed to approve of 'em. They liked those drawings...they would offer suggestions so that encouraged me to draw even more," he says. "We would draw horrible gruesome scenes and share it with a guy.'Oh, that's cool,' and pass it back."

But Dr. Meloy saw much more. "I looked for specificity of links between Tim Masters and the facts of the homicide itself."

He says he found hundreds of links, but two drawings stood out: one shows how he believes Tim moved Peggy's body. "In this particular drawing, we have what appears to be a person dragging another person under their arms from behind. We also have what appears to be blood dripping down from that person."

And the other drawing graphically depicts what Meloy thinks Tim did to her. "Immediately, I thought that it was an image of a vagina being cut. The knife appears to be like the one that was used in the crime."

Meloy concluded this was a textbook sexual homicide, an outgrowth of Tim's fury at being abandoned at 11 when his mother died.

Broderick felt that he finally had his man. He headed to California, where Tim was working, honorably discharged from the Navy and now 27 years old. "I get a pounding on my door early in the morning on a Monday morning. A guy shows up there with a suit and tie and says 'Tim Masters you're under arrest for the murder of Peggy Hettrick.' This is unreal, unbelievable," Tim remembers.

When Broderick searched the house, he found guns, knives and drawings similar to what he'd found in 1987. A few months later, police brought Tim back to Colorado.

He went on trial for Peggy's murder in March 1999.

There were lots of theories, but no physical evidence. Prosecutors Terry Gilmore and Jolene Blair admitted soon after the trial they thought their case was pretty thin. "There were times when Terry and I were looking at each other like, 'Oh, what are we doing? There's no way we're gonna prove this crime! We got nothing,'" Blair remembers. "And that's when Broderick would say 'Wait a minute…come on guys.' This is what we needed to do and it was the right thing. And there was never any doubt in his mind."

Tim's changed appearance helped their cause: he had grown into an imposing figure, and looked fully capable of the crime.

Erik Fischer defended Tim at trial. "I really did not think Tim Masters could pull this off and leave not a single shred of physical evidence."

The prosecution's best evidence was the incriminating drawings and Dr. Meloy's interpretation of what they meant.

As for that one incriminating "drag" drawing, Tim has always said he made it after seeing the body.

David Wymore, who represents Tim today, says the state built its case not around evidence, but around fear. "You bring in the psychologist to basically just scare them to death with these drawings that Tim did. You know, 'Oh, this is evidence of a sexual homicide. Be scared!' And they were scared."

More than a decade after the crime, it took a jury just a day-and-a-half to convict Tim of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to life behind bars, without parole. But many years would go by before a startling revelation that would challenge Tim's conviction: was there a much more likely suspect?

Prosecutors were delighted with the guilty verdict in the case. Who else could it possibly be?

Four years before Tim's arrest, Fort Collins police were summoned to another mind-boggling crime scene, according to Tim's lawyers, at a house in Tim's old neighborhood, also bordering the field where Peggy's body was found.

Then-patrol officer Linda Wheeler helped search the home of prominent eye surgeon Dr. Richard Hammond. "Highly educated man with a very sick perversion that I just don't understand," she says.

A perversion with some eerie similarities to Peggy's case secretly played out in the guest bathroom of the Hammond house. "There was a young college student who was house sitting and as she's sitting on the potty, she thought it was strange that there were a lot of lights in there," Wheeler says. "And she thought she could see something in the vent right in front of the toilet."

She was right: behind that vent, and two others, Hammond's bathroom video cameras were whirring away. Each of them, says Tim's lawyer David Wymore, positioned with loving care.

Apparently auto focus was the doctor's undoing. Policeman David Mickelson says that when the puzzled house sitter heard an unmistakable sound, she started investigating.

Aghast, she called police. In a locked room next to the bathroom, they found an elaborate taping system; in a nearby storage locker, they found an estimated $13,000 worth of pornographic material.

And everywhere, there were detailed files and stacks of video tapes. There was a file for each victim, including house sitters and family and friends, says attorney David Wymore.

Wymore says there were 78 victims in all. After his arrest, Hammond spent a short time in a psychiatric unit and then was released on bond. Days later, he checked into a Denver motel, hooked himself up to an IV filled with cyanide and committed suicide.

But the most astonishing thing, Tim's lawyers say, is that police never investigated Hammond in connection with Peggy's murder.

Special prosecutor Don Quick, who years later would review this entire case, says that camera receipts provided by Hammond's wife show he'd started the taping years after the Hettrick murder - no reason police should have linked the two. "There is no physical evidence tying Dr. Hammond to the crime," Quick says.

The same could be said about Tim Masters, but when it came to circumstantial evidence, Quick says, "Dr. Hammond wasn't standing next to the body the morning that she was killed. Dr. Hammond didn't then go to work and not call the authorities. Dr. Hammond's briefcase wasn't opened up and a picture of a person being dragged with blood coming from their back and heels on the ground much like the victim was dragged. Dr. Hammond, when you go back to his house, they didn't find grisly drawings of people being stabbed and slashed."

"You have a full blown sex offender lived right across the street from where her body is found who has an obsession with the most intimate parts of the vagina and breasts. And you have a body in the field missing those parts. And he's an eye surgeon. And you're acting like it doesn't connect," Wymore comments.

Whether or not Hammond really had anything to do with Peggy's murder will probably never be known, in part because of what police did at the Larimer County landfill just six months after the doctor's suicide: they destroyed all the tapes and evidence.

"They were destroyed," Broderick says. "And we should talk about why they were destroyed. You've got all these victims that are on those tapes that were calling us and had legitimate concerns about the transfer of those images, which is a real issue in today's digital world."

"It had nothing to do with the Masters case or the murder of Peggy Hettrick. There is no connection between the two of them," he adds.

Det. Mickelson says he "just lost it" when he found out they were going to destroy the tapes. Because he wondered - what if Hammond had been secretly videotaping years earlier than police thought? What if, in all those hours of stored videotapes, Peggy was on those tapes?

"I wanted to watch every one of those tapes seized because I thought she could've been there," Mickelson says. But he says that wasn't done.

But at the time of Tim's trial, his lawyers had never even heard of Hammond. Erik Fischer isn't surprised prosecutors didn't enlighten him. "If we have a pervert living across the street, their complete argument that nobody else could have done this, which is their whole closing argument, goes away. They cannot make that argument and their case falls apart."

Fore Collins police kept the specifics of Hammond's activities from the public. His name was never brought up in court; that alone, Tim's outraged attorneys say, justifies a new trial. "Comparing Tim Masters to Dr. Richard Hammond, Dr. Richard Hammond would be a super suspect. Tim Masters would be a ridiculous suspect," Wymore says.

Convincing a judge of that is Tim's only hope for freedom.

Tim had appealed his conviction but he lost. He appealed that, and lost again. Finally, in a last-ditch effort, he appealed again, this time claiming ineffective counsel. "Everyday, I'd work on it a couple hours a day. People would be walking past my cell on the way to chow and there'd be papers and books spread all over my bed," Tim says. "But I didn't expect anything to come from it, but then Maria got appointed."

Court-appointed attorney Maria Liu, then 36, says that when the gigantic Masters file landed on her desk in 2003, she had no idea what to think.

She hunkered down and started reading. Then she watched the police interrogation tapes. "I believe it was five different police officers tag-teaming him, doing everything. Good cop, bad cop, military cop, nice cop," she says. "That's when I was like, 'Oh my God, he's innocent!'"

With so much at stake, and little trial experience, Liu called in veteran defense attorney Wymore. "Usually, there is some evidence that indicates somebody, right? There was no evidence in this case," he says.

Even so, he knew that requests for new trials almost never are granted. Nevertheless, Wymore joined Liu in digging through 10,000 pages of police and court files, some 20 years old.

To their amazement, they soon realized that there were important items of evidence never given to Tim's original lawyers, although, by law, they were entitled to them.

By November 2007, hearings were well underway. It was Tim's best shot at winning a new trial.

Special prosecutor Don Quick and his team representing the state of Colorado were new faces in court, but original investigator Jim Broderick was there as well to advise. He told a local interviewer at the time he had an open mind. "Hey, if there's evidence out there, let's see it. But, there's nobody that's come to me and I haven't seen yet anybody that can controvert all these facts that point to his guilt," he said.

On the stand, Tim's original lawyers, Nathan Chambers and Erik Fischer, who lost the case, defended the job they'd done - given all they didn't know, especially about the existence of Dr. Hammond.

"This guy set up a studio to get close ups of vaginas and nipples. And you have a body in the field, missing those parts," Wymore points out.

He's a great alternate suspect, the defense says, but his name was never mentioned to the defense in the original trial. "You gotta give me the biggest sexual pervert in the history of south Fort Collins!" Fischer said.

And Wymore argues that Hammond's very existence, so close to the crime scene, defines reasonable doubt. "They have the same alibi. Tim Masters' dad says that he's home all night in his trailer. Dr. Hammond's wife says he's home all night in the house, okay. The difference is that Tim Masters doesn't have 300 videotapes of people's vagina's and nipples at his house and he's also not an eye surgeon."

In court, Wymore presents a long list of other crucial evidence he says was withheld from the defense and, as it turns out, from prosecutors as well. It includes Broderick's notes on conversations with former FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood.

Hazelwood, according to the defense, questioned the very meaning of Tim's drawings. "Hazelwood looked at these drawings and said, 'No these are just doodles and they don't reflect what happened to Peggy Hettrick,'" Wymore says.

Then there was the testimony of the state's star witness, Dr. Meloy, who analyzed the drawings. "I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that Tim Masters was the killer," Meloy had said.

But Meloy also had written that Peggy's wounds appeared to be "surgical," an opinion the jury never heard because Broderick didn't turn over the doctor's full 300-page report.

And that big question of surgical skill came up with yet another expert police consulted. "Dr. Tsoi said it would be a hard cut for him to make. And he was a plastic surgeon!" Liu points out.

But the views of Dr. Richard Tsoi never surfaced in court either. Not, says former cop David Mickelson, that it takes all these experts to see the obvious. "It wasn't done by a boy with a d-cell flashlight in his mouth and a pocketknife….crawl out his window, stab a lady, circumcised her. Didn't happen. Impossible!"

On the stand, former officer Troy Krenning blasts his own department for its surveillance of Tim on the anniversary of the crime. "I'm sitting out in this stupid trailer watching to see if this young man is going to revisit the death scene," he said.

The defense says police never revealed - to either side - exactly how far they went to get Tim to incriminate himself.

But it was equal opportunity withholding: material wasn't turned over to the defense, but not to prosecutors either.

Broderick concedes it may not look very good. He says that while he may not have turned over all his notes, the defense had the same information in reports he did turn over. "I made detailed, thorough notes, detailed, thorough police reports. My notes were represented inside those police reports."

One special prosecutor called aspects of the police investigation "disturbing." But Don Quick insists that not only was it not a frame-up, the work of Broderick, a 29-year veteran cop, was meticulous and detailed.

"The question is, why was just exculpatory stuff withheld?" Spencer asks.

"Well, I mean obviously, the defense is free to make that argument," Broderick says.

"So any mistakes you made were honest mistakes?" Spencer asks.

"Sure," he replies.

Toward the end of the hearing, the sheer volume of Broderick's material became an issue itself. "David Wymore and Maria Liu, they would be questioning a witness and they would see Lt. Broderick go over to a box and David Wymore asked one day, 'What is that box, and why is he pulling stuff out of that box and why don't I have it?'" Fischer remembers.

He says they were Broderick's personal files, just sitting there in court. Frustrated the judge decides it all should be turned over immediately.

But Broderick says the irony is that it's because he kept everything that the defense is able to produce what it says is the most convincing argument yet that he and the prosecutors had this murder all wrong.

Veteran crime scene investigator Barie Goetz, now working for Tim Masters' defense, says he realized the extent of Jim Broderick's tunnel vision only as the hearings to win a new trial for Tim neared an end.

The showstopper emerges from Broderick's box of personal files: an envelope with enhanced photographs of footprints from the crime scene, two of which, the defense says are consistent with a Thom McCann dress shoe.

Tim never owned a pair of Thom McCanns.

"We didn't have a photograph of number 3 or 4 where you can see horizontal lines…but the FBI did…and Lt. Broderick did and had they given it to us, it might have made a huge difference at the trial," Tim's former defense attorney, Erik Fischer, says.

But Broderick says, "They got all of that. Everything was turned over to them." On this point, he is adamant: Fischer, under oath or not, is flat-out wrong.

The problem, he says, is that the prints aren't clearly identifiable as Thom McAns. To this, the defense pulls out another note from that treasure trove of documents. "He writes…number 105 is messed up…brand pattern looks like a Tom McCann shoe," says Maria Liu, pointing out a note Broderick had written to himself.

Now, armed with all this new evidence, Tim's lawyers have come up with their own scenario of what they think really happened to Peggy. Wymore thinks it all began in a car. "She's being abducted. Somebody's got a knife to her cheek, arm around her like that… she knows the gig's up. She opens the car door… starts getting her right foot out. He grabs her and stabs her."

Key to his theory are Peggy's boots. "If you look at these two boots, you'll see that this boot has normal wear," he points out.

But in a police photo, abrasions are clearly visible on the sole of the right boot. "What the right boot shows us is that she stuck her foot out of a car," Wymore says.

In tests, Tim's defense team was able to reproduce these abrasions.

And they believe Peggy was stabbed being pulled back into the car, because Barie Goetz says the holes in her clothing prove it. "The cut in the coat, the cut in the blouse and the cut on her body do not line up. You have to move the blouse one inch to her left. You have to move the coat two inches to her left in order for that wound to line up."

Wymore theorizes that her killer - or killers - next took her somewhere that gave them privacy, light, and room to work. "They lay her on a table, they wash her, they excise her, then they carry her and dump her in the field."

Back at the field, Goetz says the evidence leads him to conclude that the body was dragged only a short distance down the embankment. Goetz says two people carried Peggy's body to its resting place, her bloody coat painting a trail. "She is carried. Her heels are not in contact with the ground except for that run down the slope," he says.

If true, that makes Tim's "drag" drawing - a lynchpin of the prosecution's case - a lot less relevant.

"I think the footprints alone deserved to give him a new trial. I thought Dr. Hammond alone deserved to give him a new trial. The psychological experiment alone deserved to give him a new trial, the non-disclosure of all these things…But I never count my chickens before they hatch… you know, I've got to hear it from the court," Wymore says.

Because as damning as that list sounds, these hearings are far from over. The prosecution has yet to present its answers to the defense's many charges.

The bar for granting a new trial is very high. Wymore and Liu would love some new evidence to lower that bar a bit and modern science could provide it.

"The two individuals that carried her would have transferred their DNA onto her clothing as they carried her into the field," Goetz says.

But can investigators retrieve DNA after all this time?

With Tim's future hanging in the balance, the defense team would head half way around the world and risk everything to find out.

It wasn't their job to solve it, but Wymore and Liu knew that new evidence of another killer might be the only way to get their client out of prison.

In the winter of 2007, they took a huge gamble, betting that there would
be DNA on the clothes Peggy wore when she was killed, and that it would help identify her murderer.

DNA was such an infant science back then that, although investigators did analyze hair, blood and fibers, no DNA tests ever had been done on the clothing. But now that testing was possible, was it also smart? Would it help Tim Masters?

Former Ft. Collins cop Linda Wheeler, by now a firm believer in Tim's innocence, was all for it. Plus, she knew just the man to do it: Richard Eikelenboom, a DNA expert who, with his wife Selma, a forensic medical examiner, loves nothing more than a chance to use hard science to ferret out the sordid secrets of crime.

The only problem for the defense was that they had to travel thousands of miles to the Netherlands, to a tiny lab in a quaint farmhouse some 60 miles from Amsterdam. The Eikelenbooms jokingly call it the "crime farm."

Wymore says the biggest challenge was to get this evidence to Holland. "I think this was quite unique. I believe never happened that a case in the States went out of the States."

"David Wymore and Maria Liu said 'Linda, they'll never let that evidence out of the United States.' It never happened before," Wheeler remembers.

The prosecution fought hard to prevent it happening this time, but in the end, the judge did insist that someone had to escort the clothes to Holland.

Goetz, who had been with the Colorado state crime lab for 22 years, volunteered. In January 2007, clutching his priceless suitcase of evidence, he flew to Amsterdam, and made the hour-long drive to the Eikelenboom's "crime farm."

They carefully unpacked Peggy's clothes - jeans, a blouse, underwear -
readying the individual pieces for testing.

As usual, Richard would use a most unusual approach. "What he's looking for is not the blood stains. Not the saliva stains. Not the semen stains. He's looking for skin cells that are transferred onto clothing when someone uses a lot of force," Goetz explains.

Skin cells and so-called "touch DNA" are Richard's specialty. He's a pioneer in this approach, the same that finally cleared the parents of Jon Benet Ramsey of her murder.

The technique, which they've used in dozens of cases, involves not just being able to retrieve the skin cells, but in knowing exactly where to look.

"The upper skin, those cells are dead. The DNA there is not very good. And by using force, you shed those cell layers. And then you come to the good layers where the DNA is better. And by using force on something, you leave those cells behind. And those are the cells is where we get the DNA from," Selma explains.

Before he even looks for the DNA, Richard tries to reconstruct the murder, step by step. Richard and Selma often even will re-enact the crime, as they did in this case with the help of Goetz.

In the Peggy Hettrick case, that meant answering a series of questions.

Remarkably, more than 20 years after the murder, all this testing and re-enacting paid off. Wheeler says they found a full profile of a male on the inside of Peggy's underpants. "Right where he had hypothesized where somebody would, with force, pull down the underwear."

Not only was there DNA, there was enough to analyze. And it wasn't Tim's, just as his supporters expected. But they also knew that not finding Tim's DNA wasn't by itself going to set him free.

Was it perhaps from Tim's neighbor, Dr. Hammond, who eight years after Peggy's murder was arrested for videotaping women in his bathroom? "Everybody was thinking, I think on the defense side that Dr. Hammond was involved in this. And we thought the same," Richard Eikelenboom says.

But they didn't have a sample of Hammond's DNA for comparison, and without it, the Eikelenbooms couldn't rule him in or out. That was just fine with Tim's defense because they needed to keep suspicion of Hammond alive. If DNA cleared him, then the spotlight would be right back on Tim.

Putting Hammond aside then, the Dutch ran more tests on DNA samples from cops, investigators, and even from Matt Zoellner, Peggy's ex, whose date gave him an alibi for the night Peggy was killed.

But the DNA didn't exclude him. Not only was Zoellner's DNA on the inside waistband of Peggy's underpants, it also turned up on the cuffs of her blouse, where one might grab if picking up a body.

Clearly, Zoellner has many questions to answer, but what, if anything, does this bombshell mean to Tim, in prison for the last nine years?

For Tim Masters, that old cliché finally is true: this really could be the first day of the rest of his life. He is waiting for word on whether the Dutch DNA findings will persuade the judge to grant him a new trial. Certainly his excited lawyer thinks they should. "What they didn't have in 1999 was the DNA evidence," Wymore says. "The person who killed her touched her."

Tim's gigantic family packs the courtroom, joining legions of other supporters.

Not on hand is Jim Broderick, called out of town on a family emergency. But from their crime farm in Holland, Selma and Richard Eikelenboom traveled to Colorado.

The state confirmed the Dutch DNA results, and with that, the prosecutor takes bold action, instructing his deputy to move for Tim's immediate release. With that, the hearing abruptly ends. The states' witnesses never even testify. And, after more than nine years, Tim is suddenly a free man.

"How would you describe what this feeling is like?" Spencer asks.

"Just imagine, well I don't even know if you can imaging spending all that time up there in prison and finally being free after all these years. I don't even know how to answer that question," Tim says.

But he is determined to try. Three days after his release, the state drops all charges against Tim, but prosecutors still won't officially clear him of Peggy's murder. "They still have him on a leash, I mean even though - just because your case is dismissed nobody's ever come out and said, 'Tim Masters did not commit this crime,'" Liu says.

The DNA that freed Tim leaves lingering questions about Peggy's ex-boyfriend. He today lives in Fort Collins, keeping a low profile. Zoellner didn't respond to repeated attempts to contact him.

The Colorado attorney general now has the Hettrick case, but won't comment on it.

Asked if absent of a confession, anyone will be convicted for this crime, Liu says, "No, I really don't. Since Richard Hammond is deceased, their defense attorney is gonna say, 'Look at this guy, he's the one that did this.' There's no way."

He still may be the defense's favorite suspect, but using a sample of Hammond's DNA provided by his wife, the state says he has been ruled out as the killer. "There is no evidence tying to Dr. Richard Hammond. He just happened to live in the neighborhood," says Don Quick.

The court never ruled on whether the original defense lawyers did their jobs, but Erik Fischer accepts some blame. "Great day for Tim Masters, not really a great day for me. I am upset that this happened and happened on my watch."

If the original prosecutors are upset, they're not talking. Both were publicly reprimanded and fined for failing to disclose information to the defense.

By then, they had been promoted to judges. But Tim doesn't blame them for what happened. "It's pretty obvious who did this to me. It was one detective, Jim Broderick."

Asked what he would say to Broderick if he sat across from him, Tim says, "I wouldn't talk to Jim Broderick at this point. I'm not gonna say it on camera."

Broderick, the man who pursued Tim over the decades, is under investigation. Looking back, he makes no apology for his actions. "I believe that I followed the evidence, OK? And the evidence pointed to Tim Masters."

"They find the ex-boyfriend's DNA inside her underpants, on the cuffs of her blouse," Spencer points out. "Does that not give you any pause?"

"Well, you can find DNA evidence and it may have an innocent explanation," Broderick says.

Ironically, Broderick says Tim's lawyers only had that crucial information because of him and his passion for saving everything. "That characterological trait of mine, of wanting to hang onto the information, not knowing its future use has helped Tim Masters because had I not done that, it wouldn't have been available to be tested."

He says everything, including Peggy's clothes, would have been destroyed.

That may not mean much for Tim, struggling to put together a new life. He's got some unlikely new friends, like Linda Wheeler, the first cop to ever suspect he was guilty, Maria Liu, whose office he still regularly visits, and Barie Goetz, who traveled to Amsterdam with Tim to appear on Dutch TV with Richard and Selma Eikelenboom.

He has a new apartment with no guards, no orders, and no rules. "For the last two years I was in a six-by-eight cell, which was about from this wall to that wall and about to here," he says, standing in his bedroom.

Not surprising then that he relishes walks in the great outdoors.

"I'm glad for him. I'm glad for him that he has his freedom," says Peggy's brother Tom Hettrick, who long has long doubted Tim was his sister's killer.

He greeted the news of Tim's release with mixed feelings. "But I'm also measured because I want people to realize this is not over yet."

"Peggy is the ultimate victim in this. Tim Masters got to go home. Peggy's not coming home. She's never coming home. She comes home in your heart and in your mind," he adds.

And the murder that so shocked the peaceful town of Fort Collins more than 20 years ago seems as big a mystery now, as it was back then.

Tim Masters is suing Jim Broderick, the city of Fort Collins and four prosecutors involved in his case.

Star prosecution witness Reid Meloy says authorities withheld crucial information from him and he now plans to testify for Tim Masters in the lawsuit.
Produced by Joshua Yager, Taigi Smith and Marc Goldbaum