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You have a lot of u pictures of of killing women, don't you? Pictures you've drawn.
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I do. Not just women. Huh? Not just women. Peggy Patrick is murdered. She had genital mutilation and one of her
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nipples has been removed. How could this happened to us? A stab wound done with surgical
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precision and the people who are in charge aren't doing what needs to be done. This is the story of Peggy
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Hedrick. Hi, crime junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And I'm Brit. And we are officially back from tour.
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It's been a long couple of months, but so so much fun. We got to see 75,000 of our closest
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friends. Thanks to State Farm and Pluto TV, who were the sponsors for the tour, let us get on the road, get to meet the
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fans, but this was such an incredible story. I mean, collective gas and it's one that
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has a very strong call to action that we need your help with. So, for those of you who couldn't make it on the road, we
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wanted to bring this story to you as well. How could this have happened to us? But
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you know over the years I see so many people losing loved ones. But um and I and the one question that keeps coming
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back to me is um if we had done something different if we'd stayed in Hawaii, if we'd stayed in Spain, this
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would have never happened. You know, why did this this happen? What what what brought us here to this place, you know,
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for this to happen? Um there there's so many multiple universes, you know, we could have
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stayed here, stayed there, moved to Florida earlier, um and and she would have been alive today. But she But
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it it didn't happen that way. Why? Um I don't know. I don't know. But I wish we would have I wish we would have
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done some things differently. Yeah. Uh, in my lifetime now, it's been 30ome years since Peggy's gone and and still
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nothing has been done about it. And it's like everybody just wants to turn a blind eye to it and move on.
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What? What? Move on. I've got stage 4 colon cancer. I'm doing all right right now, but I my doctor has told me and she
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was very blunt about it. She said, "You know that this is going to kill you." And I said, "Yeah, I know that. I
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understand that." So that's why I agreed to do this interview because I may not be around before this comes to a
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conclusion, you know, but I'd like to see it start. I'd like to see him uh get busy and do their job and and make uh
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give Peggy a resolution. you know, maybe me, maybe I'll still be around. I don't know, but I'll try try
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to be around. I'm not afraid. Uh, I I'm not afraid of anything anymore. I can't be. I have to
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be strong and and um and I want if we can do something for Peg and her memory, then let's get it done now.
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All right. The man you just heard speaking was Tom Hedrickk and his sister Peggy Hedrickk was murdered in Fort
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Collins, Colorado back in 1987. And the thing is, there is still plenty that can be done to solve this case. The
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problem is the people who are in charge right now who have the case aren't doing
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what needs to be done to solve it. But our crime junkies know what helps with that, right?
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A little bit of pressure and a lot of noise. And so the reason we went on tour, the reason we're bringing
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this story again is we want to tell people why they should be making noise, why they should be straight up mad. Not
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just on behalf of Tom and Peggy, but so many people in our story. And it's a story that starts on February 11th,
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1987. That's when a guy named Woody is bicycling to work. It's like 700 a.m. and even though it's February in Fort
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Collins, Colorado, like there's no snow on the ground, but it's cold. So, I imagine he's just like head down like
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pedaling kind of in the zone where you like, you know, zone out a little bit. But then something catches his attention
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like in this field. And when he looks down, he sees this splash of red, but he realizes it's not just red. This is
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blood. And so, forget work. like he has to call police. And when they show up, there is
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this 100 foot long trail of blood. From that splash of blood by the curb all the
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way to the middle of the field, and that's where they find the body of a woman. Now, she's laying face up. Her
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arms are over her head. Her bra and her shirt have been pulled up. Her pants and
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her underwear have been pulled down. And they can't see like what's causing the blood. They suspect that she has some
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kind of wound to her back, but they won't know at the moment. But what they can see is that one of her nipples has
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been removed, but everything else is still on her. I mean, her clothes, she's still got her purse like slung over her
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shoulder, and everything is inside it, including her checkbook, which is how they realize she's 37year-old Peggy
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Hedrickk. Now, by 9:00 a.m., this field is a frenzy with officers. One of the people on the scene that day, Sergeant
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Ray Martinez, he said when he showed up, he was surprised to see basically all of
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Fort Collins Police Department there on the scene. He's like this was an all hands-on deck situation. The problem is
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in 1987, not all of those hands were gloved. But when they actually touch her and turn
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her over, they see that they were correct. There was a wound to her back, a stab wound on her upper back that was
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causing the bleeding. And they also see that she has like grass and debris on her butt, which they start forming this
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kind of theory based around what they're seeing. Cuz if you follow that blood trail, all the way back to the curb,
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what they see are some critical things. So they see a set of footprints, not Peggy's footprints, by this pool. And
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then they also see a cigarette butt in the pool of blood. And Peggy was a known smoker. So they start to wonder maybe
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she was like walking got surprise attacked from behind like she's walking and smoking. She drops the cigarette and
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her attacker like pulled down her pants and then drug her. And they're thinking that because of the grass and stuff
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found on her butt. They're also thinking that because there was not just the bloody drag mark, but there was also
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this trail um where you could tell that something was like drug in the dirt and they suspected that it was her shoes.
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And I like I was literally like at one point you saw me dragging people across the audio check office. And the only way
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that makes sense is like cuz normally if you drag someone your feet kind of spllay out into a V.
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Exactly. So, I think the reason they're thinking this is like she had to have had her pants down first, not because of
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the grass, but also because to make these marks. The shoes were like together, right? The problem I have with this is
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is there's something that doesn't make sense to me. If they're dragging her and she's bleeding and her shoes are making
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this trail, those should line up. But the drag marks and the blood trail are actually very different. And at one
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point they even cross each other which nobody can seem to really make sense of. I mean I've heard some people theorize,
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well maybe there's two people and what if one of them had her coat and the coat was bloody and
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but my problem with that is like her coat isn't just on her. It's on her with her purse still over her shoulder. Like
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no one like undressed her and then redressed her that much. And it's also not the coat that's
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actively bleeding. You know what I mean? Like the blood is coming from her. and for for it to make a 100 ft long trail,
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it just doesn't add up. And maybe it's a red herring or we're not understanding what those are. Because the other thing
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I noticed is that Peggy's shoes don't seem really dirty in the photos that I have. And not that it was muddy or
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anything like that, but there should still be like dust and pieces of grass. I mean, there's debris
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on her body, on her butt, right? So, the question is, how did she get out there in the middle of that
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field? And the other critical question is who wore men's Tom McCann dress shoes size eight and a half or nine because
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that's what they determined those like critical footprints by the blood pool were.
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And the blood there by the curb and the trail that's from like the stab wound, not the mutilation, right? Like active
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bleeding. Yes. So when they do an autopsy, they realize that her nipple being removed
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that was done postmortem. So after she was already deceased, that wouldn't have been bleeding. The other thing they
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determined at at the autopsy is she was also mutilated elsewhere. So she had genital mutilation as well. And her
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nipple being removed, the Emmy notes that that was done with surgical precision. And they said it was done
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with a small sharp instrument, something like a like scalpel almost, which was different than what was used to stab her
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because they determined that that was a knife that had a 5 in serrated blade. But they don't find either of those
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weapons in the field. And you know what else? They don't find her nipple. But they're like, "Don't worry, we know
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exactly who to call to find it." The scouts. So kids like fully children and Brit when I first heard this my initial
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reaction when I read this was like you mean to tell me that in my childhood they had me out there selling freaking
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thin mints when I could have been like looking for evidence like I would have been an Eagle Scout
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100%. Yeah, that was not a badge I could have. But this is where I'm introducing a new
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crime junkie life rule. always go a layer deeper because once I dug, it wasn't the Girl Scouts or the Boy Scouts
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that were out there looking for body parts. It was actually something called the Explorer Scouts,
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but still kids. Oh, that's still fully like high school kids. And if you don't know, this is
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also like a quick PSA to my crime junkies. I am trying to put together an episode for the near future about the
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Explorer program. I'm not saying like pull your kids out if you have kids in it. Mh.
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I'm just saying pay attention, get involved, ask some questions. I have found there is a lot of abuse
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that happens in that program. So, quick PSA, future episode to come. Hit me up if you have a story. But anyways, kids
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are out there looking for nipples, which they don't find, and the police are looking for a per. And they decide that
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to find this person, the first thing they need to do is they need to get to know Peggy. They need to understand her
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last movements. So, they start by going to her apartment. And they learned that she had a temporary roommate at the time
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named Sharon. And temporary is important because that night when Peggy got off work at around 9:00 p.m. from the
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fashion bar and she walked home. It wasn't far away. She found herself locked out of the apartment because they
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were sharing keys. And she's like banging on the door. And Sharon is either out drinking and forgot
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to get home in time to let her in, or she got home, but because she'd been out drinking, she was like home passed out.
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Either way, Peggy's banging, banging, banging, can't get inside. So, making the best of like a mess situation, she
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decides to go kind of bop around to a couple local bars. She has a drink. She's using the pay phone trying to like
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call home and wake Sharon up. By around midnight, she decides to head back again, banging on the door. And this
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time, Sharon is there. She lets her in. But Peggy is not staying in for the night. She's there to do a little change
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of clothes, get out of her work clothes, change into jeans and a blouse or like jeans and a going out top for my
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millennials. And she goes back out. She goes to this place called the prime minister, also within walking distance.
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And this was a regular haunt for Peggy. So, it's not surprising that she runs into somebody she knows, her on again,
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offagain, currently off boyfriend, Matt Zner. Now, Matt was actually there at the bar that night with another woman,
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someone he had just met that evening, like didn't even remember her name. It was like maybe Shawn. He said though he
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saw Peggy and they chatted for a little bit. He even offered her a ride when he realized that she had walked and she
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originally accepted, but he like went to the bathroom and when he came out, she was leaving alone. And so he figured
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maybe she just changed her mind or whatever. And so he said him and maybe Shawn, they stayed till last call. Then
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maybe Shawn went home with him. She stayed with him till like 3:00 or 3:30. And other people back this up. So the
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bartender at Prime Minister saw Peggy leaving alone at 1:15 in the morning. And maybe Shawn backs up that she was
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with Matt till last call, then back at his place till 3:00, 3:30. So, this is the last time Peggy is seen. 1:15 in the
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morning, leaving the prime minister alone. And this does kind of work with their theory because if you were to look
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at a map, the field where Peggy's body was found is kind of in between the prime minister and her apartment. So,
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this So, she was walking home. Yeah. Smoking a cigarette, surprise. Like, everything's still kind of
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fitting. So the question is who would be in this field, this like empty field in
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the early morning hours. Now they had done an initial canvas and nobody in the area had seen or heard anything. But one
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detective, Linda Wheeler, she decides she wants to just go knocking on doors again, starting with the people like
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absolutely closest to the crime scene. And the closest trailer is like 200 yards away and it belongs to a guy named
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Clyde Masters. So, they go knocking on his door and Clyde says the same thing. Didn't see or hear anything, but he
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says, "You know, come to think of it, my son, 15-year-old Tim, he lives with him
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in the trailer and he cuts through that field every morning to get to the school
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bus." And he says, you know, on that morning that you found that woman, he hesitated in the field a little bit,
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like didn't do anything. Wasn't there long. I mean, he still made it to the school bus on time, but he says, you
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know, knowing what you found, you know, maybe it's just kind of weird. And police think it's weird, too, because
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they find out that Tim would have been going through that field at about 7 a.m., which is almost the same time that
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Woody ends up finding Peggy. Woody's the guy on the bicycle. So, they're like, "We know Peggy's
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there. If you saw her there, why wouldn't you say something? Why would you go into school like nothing happened
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unless you were involved? So they go right to the school. They pull Tim out of class. And right away before they say
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a word, he knows exactly why they're there. But he told investigators then the same thing that he told us when we
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interviewed him so many years later. So February 11th, 1987, I woke up at a normal time. I think it was somewhere
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around six o'clock. Uh I remember I still remember my father had fixed sausage and eggs for breakfast
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that day. So I had sausage and eggs for breakfast. Took a shower, got dressed. I
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typically wore a t-shirt, jeans, and the jean jacket. And uh about 6:55, I walked out the back
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door to head through through the field to go catch my bus. And I remember I still remember to this day when I was
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getting close. We had a little fence halfway across the property line like not at the edge of my property but about
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halfway between the trailer and the edge of the property. And I remember seeing at that time of day it looked like there
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was trash out in the field. I thought somebody had dumped some trash out in the field. That's what it looked like.
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And I remember thinking, man, this kind of crap never used to happen before these roads went in. Now people are
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dumping trash in the fields. And I walked on and uh went through the fence onto the field north of my house.
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And I remember seeing it. It started to look more like a a body out there. And I remember
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seeing it looked like someone had spray painted brown paint on the ground, reddish reddish brown paint, like a rust
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color along the field going out to it. And I remember walking my normal path and then I veered veered over to go look
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and see what the hell was in the field. And I I walked over towards it, stood there and looked at and to 15-year-old
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me, I think I was in such a state of shock that I couldn't believe that was a body. I thought it was a mannequin,
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specifically a recessa Annie doll that someone had stolen from the school and dropped out in the field as a prank. And
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I remember walking away kind of confused about it, thinking, "No, there's no way it's a body. It's
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somebody dropped a mannequin out there." And I walked on, caught my school bus, and I didn't say anything to anybody
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about it. All right. First of all, we called it the life rule number 10 tour for a
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reason. Everyone knows it. It's never a mannequin. It's never a mannequin. But there are a
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couple of things to keep in mind. So number one, this is 1987, right? This is the year before you and I were even
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born. No crime junkie. No crime junkie life rules. Exactly. And he didn't just say it was a
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mannequin. He specifically said he thought it was a recessa Annie doll like he has in his school. Now, I don't know
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if anyone listening knows what a recessa Annie doll is. They probably know. They
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definitely know if they came to tour. You probably know if you follow me on Instagram. I didn't know when this whole
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thing started. So, I ordered one on eBay. Yes, you did. She has been living in the
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office. I She's like become my friend and she's been on the road with us. She has. She's been everywhere. Annie's
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like my emotional support like through tour. They're basically like these like like
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the body blows up but like the head, the feet, and the arms are like solid. It's
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very strange. Very lifelike. And not just lifelike, but like deceased. Well, it's a CPR doll. Yeah. And what's so
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wild is I have this picture that I'm I'm not going to share of Peggy's face as she's lying in the field and this
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recessa Annie doll side by side. The way Peggy is pale, the way that her mouth is
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a gap. Her hair cut, color, style, everything is identical. And I've showed a couple of people on the production
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team and and I'll try I explain it the same way I'm explaining it now and people are like, "Okay, yeah, sure. kind
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of I maybe understand it. And if I show people the picture, it's always just I showed you. It's just a gas.
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Yeah. It's shocking. It's uncanny. It is. So, if you're 15 and you're used to seeing that at your school all the
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time, you you don't believe that you're walking to school and going to find a dead body. Like, that's just not your
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reality. Your body just your mind just like fills in the blanks. Exactly. So, you have that. And then the
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other thing is, again, a grown man told us the story when we went to go speak with him, but like I said, he was a
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15-year-old kid when this happened, but it doesn't matter. None of that stuff matters. Police do not believe that he
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could have seen Peggy and thought she was a recessive Annie doll, a mannequin, whatever. So, they bring him in for
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questioning, which his dad okays. He's I mean Tim's by himself during this and the whole time he is insistent he had
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nothing to do with this. But when they give him a polygraph that says otherwise,
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which that's another life rule, never take a polygraph. And we have another one, always get a
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lawyer. But Tim said that he and his dad didn't know that they could get a lawyer
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or should get a lawyer at the time. And Tim also didn't realize that they were searching his trailer, paying specific
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attention to his room where they were finding things like toy guns, a knife collection, and they're still looking
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for a murder weapon at this time. They also found a pair of pants with a spot of blood on them. And they found this
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next thing that they think is the clincher, like their proof that they're on to a dangerous individual.
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They find a bunch of Tim's drawings. [Music] Two branches of the same tree, two pieces of a soul.
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Where one sister goes, the other will be. For she is but half of the whole. The drawings become central to this
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case. And like I've seen these drawings so many times, Ashley. They're violent. Like there's one with
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like it looks like a They're all handdrawn. One's like holding a head with like a gun behind it.
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Some of them have like machete like knives and like stabs. There's also things that are like military patches
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and there's homework in the middle of one of the drawings like Yes. And this was when we went on tour, this
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was we would show the drawings and and like I don't want to downplay it. People would do this like collective gasp where
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they were like more than we even thought they would. Yeah. Like they were like shocked by
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them. But what I kept saying on tour is like I remember like middle school does not feel that far away. I don't want to
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do the math because it is that far away. But I remember like the boys in my class
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doing these like weird drawings. Well, and I told you like my son's in high school now. He was in middle school
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and he also drew weird things. Like I showed you some of his drawings. There's like a cat god and a scepter. Like but
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it's also like on algebra homework. Like it all felt very benign to me, right? But it did not feel benign to
00:22:47
these investigators. So, as they're finding this stuff, they're sharing it with the cops interrogating him, and
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they take turns interrogating him alone over the course of 9 hours. What you think about all this? What you
00:23:03
think about the people that tell me what's going on in here all day since I haven't been here?
00:23:09
Well, they pretty much sure that I did it. Why are they sure you did it? Because all the evidence points towards
00:23:16
me, I guess. You have a lot of um pictures of of killing women, don't you? Pictures you've drawn.
00:23:22
I do. Not just women, huh? Not just women. Not just women, but you do have pictures
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of women being killed, don't you? Yeah, I guess I do some. But you know, you have all those knives
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and stuff. Don't you do anything with your knives anymore? I like to collect knives.
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And what else do you do? You don't do much anything. You just block them. I use them in a
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real hiking stuff. What are you using for like a cut and wind stuff? I want to clear this up in your mind.
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It's important you tell the truth. I have told the truth. Can you dig what I'm saying?
00:24:01
Yeah. She has lost her life. She has no more freedom. She can't do a thing. Her life has ended. You scared a lot of
00:24:12
people. You scared me. I didn't sleep last night. I slept about two hours. You scared the hell out of me. Thank God we
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found you. Half the detective. Half my people lost all their sleep last night. Were trying
00:24:29
to find you. Now, in all that time, Tim never confessed, never admitted anything, which in and of itself, I
00:24:38
think, is kind of a miracle. Like, we've seen people crumble under less pressure
00:24:42
who are grown adults, right? But Tim never caves. He swears he had nothing to do with this. And all
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they have are these drawings which make them like sure that something is up, but
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they can't arrest him for drawing. So they have to release him, but they are convinced that he is still their guy.
00:25:02
None more than a man named Detective Jim Brick. And really, he's looking at a couple of things when he is thinking
00:25:10
that Tim is guilty. I mean, first and foremost, the drawings. At some point when Tim had been interviewed, it comes
00:25:16
out that he knew that Peggy's nipple had been removed, which to Jim, it's like if
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you, you know, stayed far away, which is always his story, and thought it was a mannequin.
00:25:26
Yeah. How would you know that? The other thing he points to is that Tim's shoe prints were found in the field near
00:25:34
Peggy's body. So, he knows if he's going to build a case against him, he has to get more. And so what he does is he has
00:25:41
the FBI do a profile. Sends them everything about their case, all the stuff they have on Tim, drawings, all of
00:25:47
it. Please do a profile. So they send back their official profile and they're like, "No, like this this kid is not
00:25:55
your guy. You can't say that this kid killed this woman based on some drawings." Now, instead of hearing that
00:26:03
and then like, you know, casting a wider net or thinking like who should we be looking at, right?
00:26:10
It's kind of like they go profiler shopping like and they don't do another official profile. I don't know if the
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the FBI probably just is like a one and done kind of thing. I'm sure they're not
00:26:20
like, "Yeah, we'll just redo that for you." The police basically like do a phone a friend and call up this guy in
00:26:25
Washington to do like an unofficial thing and they get this memo back and the guy's like listen I don't know about
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all the drawings and stuff whatever maybe if a lot of if ands buts may whatever but he's like listen what I
00:26:40
have seen before I are cases where a suspect will position their victim in a way so that they can see them after the
00:26:48
crime or maybe even see the crime scene unfold whatever and where the master's trailer was did have a direct line of
00:26:55
sight to where Peggy was found. So, that's enough for Jim Broadick. The takeaway is clear that this kid is
00:27:01
dangerous and it is his job, nay his duty, to get him off the streets of Fort Collins. So, the police don't let up.
00:27:10
They are pulling him out of class. They're telling his teachers that he is a dangerous individual suspected of
00:27:18
murder, which obviously doesn't stay with just the teachers. Tim said that at one point, I mean, he would be walking
00:27:23
down the hall and kids would go to the other side because they didn't want to walk next to the kids suspected of
00:27:29
murder. And he wasn't just getting it at school. It was coming at him from all angles. I mean, every day for the first
00:27:38
month of the investigation, the newspaper would show up at their house and the front page was about Peggy's
00:27:43
case, how they had one singular suspect that they were honing in on, but Tim wouldn't break in all that time. And he
00:27:53
had answers for a lot of things. So, yes, his shoe prints were in the field, but he walks through that field. And his
00:28:01
prints were not the critical ones, those Tom Macccan dress shoes. his the closest
00:28:05
it came was like 5 to 7 feet away from Peggy, which is like where he said he was walking, and saw her.
00:28:11
And he said, "Yeah, I knew her nipple had been removed, but not because I saw it or did it. A girl in my art class
00:28:18
told me about it." Well, and the police had kids out looking for the nipple. Kids talk.
00:28:24
Yes. The blood that they found on his pants turned out to be his own blood. the knives that they collected from his
00:28:31
room, the his whole knife collection, none of them could be connected to be the murder weapon. And there were
00:28:36
unidentified prints found on Peggy's purse and unidentified hairs found on her, none of which belonged to Tim.
00:28:46
So, they had no choice but at some point to cast a wider net and they would look
00:28:53
at some other people but quickly rule them out. And so it's not surprising that this case cooled off pretty
00:29:01
quickly, which was so frustrating for Peggy's family. And you know, it's so like what I found so like revealing, and
00:29:10
I see this in a lot of cases, but it was just so clear in this one to me. When someone dies, there's like this 2D
00:29:17
version of them that gets left behind, especially when it's it's, you know, back in the 80s or whatever. It's like
00:29:22
you get a couple of lines in a newspaper about who Peggy was. And that's all I had to go off of when I first started
00:29:28
looking into this case. And I want to give our listeners a sense of it. So, if you would read what was published about
00:29:34
her. Police identified her as Peggy Hetch, 37, college dropout, bar hopper, and aspiring writer who worked at the
00:29:42
fashion bar, a nearby clothing store. Her friends privately worried something horrible would happen to her given her
00:29:48
late night impulses, her jealousies, her appetite for adventure. Sometimes she would head out into the night just to
00:29:55
collect details for the book she was writing or to spy on her boyfriend. And that is so far from the Peggy that
00:30:03
I've come to know through her brother Tom over the last year and a half because that like college dropout who
00:30:11
worked at a clothing store, she was brilliant. She had this like college sweetheart named Frank who she was madly
00:30:19
in love with. They were planning a future. They were going to get married and have kids. It was going to be a
00:30:24
bright future. When I say she's brilliant, I mean this woman spoke four different languages. She traveled all
00:30:30
over the world. Her family and her lived in other countries. She was writing this
00:30:34
novel. But then her life took this hard left turn when Frank, her fiance, like died suddenly and unexpectedly. And then
00:30:45
a couple of years later, her mom died. And I think she was probably trying to figure out what this new version of her
00:30:52
future looked like. M and so her and her dad and her brother, they moved around a
00:30:57
little and kind of bopped all over. They ended up in Hawaii at one point. They all kind of got island fever and
00:31:02
eventually decided to come back to the States. And when they did come back, they split up. So her brother and her
00:31:07
dad went to Florida and Peggy went to Colorado. And I probably because like they'd lived there before, it felt
00:31:13
familiar to her. And I know that no one sees something like this coming, but there's something about the timing of
00:31:20
this that feels especially cruel because just 2 days before Peggy was murdered, she called her dad and she told him,
00:31:31
"Dad, I had this dream that I moved to Florida to be with you. Like, I was so happy. I feel like that's where I'm
00:31:38
supposed to be. Can I move there to Florida?" And her dad said, "Of course." like wherever we are, you are welcome.
00:31:45
Like that is your home. But like Peggy couldn't just drop the phone and go. Like that's not real life.
00:31:52
She had a job. She had an apartment. She had all these things that she would have
00:31:57
to wrap up. But fast forward 2 days and instead of helping her plan a move, her dad and her
00:32:04
brother were now planning her funeral. You feel like you've fallen into an abyss.
00:32:10
One day you have sure footing and things are stable and she's going to be down there and and her friends down there
00:32:18
were going to find her a job to help her find a job and she was going to live with us and be a bright spot in the
00:32:25
house and we be a family to an abyss like going into the ocean. you can't breathe and you just sink a way
00:32:37
far away uh without stopping. And so now your life is changed forever. What do you do? You know,
00:32:49
um yeah, hopes and desires are they go out the window. Now you have to start a new life. And then after that, you know,
00:32:57
my dad started to get sick. Now I'm dealing with my dad that is is dying because the doctor pulled me in. He
00:33:04
said, "Your dad maybe has six months." And I just looked at I said, "What?" So Tom and his dad, they end up moving
00:33:14
to Colorado so Tom could take care of his dad, also so they could be close to the investigation. But they weren't
00:33:20
really getting a ton of updates. I mean, they kind of just got the party line, like this is active and ongoing. But
00:33:26
that became harder and harder to believe as a lot of time went on and really hard
00:33:33
to believe when out of nowhere Tom gets this call from someone at the police department who's like hey we have a
00:33:39
bunch of your sister's stuff like if you want to come get it like we'll probably
00:33:42
just get rid of it like up to you. Which the only thing police would have that's belong to Peggy is evidence
00:33:49
fully evidence. But he's like yeah I mean we'll take anything you have. So he goes down to the police station. and
00:33:55
they take him to this like garage across the street where they pull up the doors
00:33:58
and they pull out two plastic bags with two paper bags inside and just hand it to him. And when he gets home, him and
00:34:04
his family start to like open it up and go through it. But they realize, I mean,
00:34:08
this stuff still has blood spatter on it. So, they have this moment where they're
00:34:13
like, I'm pretty sure we shouldn't have this. And they kind of try their best they can to package it back up and store
00:34:20
it in case, but in case of what? because nobody comes asking about the evidence.
00:34:27
Nobody comes asking about Peggy and most of the updates that they're getting are
00:34:33
from the media. When those even happen, few and far between. So, it seems like nothing on the surface is happening. And
00:34:40
behind the scenes, it's really a lot of the same. Jim Brick is still convinced that Tim Masters killed Peggy. And in
00:34:48
all that time, or it's years now, Tim had been busy growing up. When he was 18, he joined the Navy just like his
00:34:56
dad. And for him, this was his chance to start over, to like have a clean slate,
00:35:01
to not be the kid suspected of murder. Like he could go put his head down, do the work.
00:35:09
And that's what he did day in day out, month after month, year after year, all the way up until 1992.
00:35:18
I'm told to report to the master at arms first thing in the morning the next day.
00:35:22
like, "Well, this is weird." I report to the master at arms master at arms office the next day and uh the the
00:35:31
E4 that that's assigned to to escort me somewhere is like, "Should I put him in handcuffs?" They're like, "No, no,
00:35:37
that's not necessary." And I'm going, "What the hell? Handcuffs?" He takes me over to the Navy
00:35:43
Intelligence Office in Philadelphia. And there I'm met by three detectives from Fort Collins Police. Howal Dean, Jim
00:35:51
Brick, and Linda Wheeler. And I I proceeded to endure about a day and a half of interrogations.
00:36:00
I didn't recognize them, right? I didn't know Lind Linda Wheeler. Um I didn't recognize him until So, so
00:36:08
Jim Broadick had this habit of wearing like reddish color deodorant and he had pit stains. And when I saw the pit
00:36:16
stains, I recognized him. And so I remember my thought was, "What the hell? I can't believe 5 years later I'm still
00:36:25
being harassed over this. I didn't have anything to do with this." And then but I was still under the
00:36:31
mindset of uh especially I'm just an E4 in the Navy. I I really respect I really
00:36:40
treated authority with respect and Lind Linda Holloway. Well, she's Linda Willer
00:36:44
at the time. Jim Barrick, they were still authority. I still treated with them with respect and I kept telling
00:36:49
myself they're just doing their job. After the interview with with uh Linda Wheeler, I had put it all behind me. I
00:36:56
thought it was over and I thought the Four Collins police knew I didn't do it. So, I didn't even think about it.
00:37:03
When investigators came out of that meeting with Tim, they were split in their thinking. I don't know what Hal
00:37:10
thought, but Linda left thinking, "No, like this isn't our guy. We've got this all wrong.
00:37:17
Jim Brick though was more convinced than ever. So in 1996 he reopens the investigation and after some time by
00:37:28
golly he's got it. And so on August 10th, 1998, 27year-old Tim is at home in California. He's out of the Navy by this
00:37:38
point. And he gets this knock on his door and he gets up to get it. before he even reached the door, the door is open
00:37:44
and there is this police officer standing right in front of him and he said, "Are you Tim Masters?" I
00:37:50
said, "Yeah." He said, "You're under arrest." I said, "What? What for?" And he wouldn't tell me. And uh he
00:37:59
handcuffed me and as as he's taking me out the door, Jim Brick meets me there and he goes, "You're under arrest for
00:38:05
the murder of Peggy Hedrickk." And I went, "Yeah, what the hell? You've got to be kidding me. It was a complete
00:38:13
shock. It was a shock to everyone. I mean, like I think people were looking like side to
00:38:19
side like, "Wait, what did we miss? What do they have that they didn't have before?"
00:38:22
That's new. Yeah. Well, Tim goes to County to talk to his lawyer and he realizes
00:38:29
nothing. What they have are his drawings and a star witness to talk about the drawings. Lieutenant Brick provided me
00:38:41
with um approximately 2,200 pages of drawings and narratives produced by this young man uh before and immediately
00:38:53
after the sexual homicide. This is a voluminous amount of material. In my uh 18 years of doing this kind of work, I
00:39:01
have never seen uh such voluminous productions by a suspect in a sexual homicide. And that tells us that he was
00:39:11
preoccupied with sexual violence, with violence, with sexually sadistic images, with images of domination and
00:39:20
degradation of women. And he was also fascinated by knives. After spending 6 months on the case, I felt I understood
00:39:29
the motivations for this homicide and that I had become convinced uh that Timothy Masters was the individual that
00:39:36
had committed uh this homicide. Reed Malloy, without ever having spoken to Tim in those six months, decided that
00:39:44
Tim killed Peggy and specifically that it was a case of displaced mattress, which mattress is killing your mom and
00:39:53
displaced in this case would mean like Peggy equals Tim's mom. Yes. And it's not like Tim hated his he
00:40:01
loved his mom, right? Like we haven't talked about his mom though because by the time Peggy was murdered his mom had
00:40:07
been dead for 4 years and it was really unexpected. Like his mom got sick. His dad was like I'm going to take her to
00:40:15
the hospital and then she just never came home. I mean I think they thought she had the flu or something which as
00:40:20
you can imagine is super traumatic for a young kid. Super formative. And it did happen. Her death happened almost like 4
00:40:28
years to the day of Peggy's murder. So, their theory becomes that he's out there
00:40:33
in this field for some reason in the early morning hours and he sees Peggy walking home and he sees specifically
00:40:41
Peggy's red hair and it triggers him. It reminds him of his mom's red hair and he
00:40:46
lashes out and kills her, which like is a theory, but his mom doesn't have red hair, Ashley.
00:40:53
But she does not even have red hair. Like this is what's wild. Her hair looks brown in this picture and no one cares.
00:41:00
This is what they go to trial with. They go to trial with the drawings. This expert witness to talk about the
00:41:07
drawings. And the defense in all of this, like throughout the trial, only calls one expert witness, but not
00:41:14
because they're doing a bad job because there's nothing else to like, right? Refute.
00:41:18
Their one expert witness is just to refute the drawing stuff. So, it feels like there's no case here. and it feels
00:41:25
like everyone can see where this is going. As I was standing there, I was thinking,
00:41:30
I'm going home. I'll be going home after today. And then the the jury came out and I
00:41:36
kind of knew something was off. They would none of the jury would make eye contact with me. I'm like, "Oh god." And
00:41:42
then the judge asked, "Have you reached reached a verdict?" And the the four person on the jury says, "We have." And
00:41:50
they hand it to the judge and the judge reads it. Tim Masters, you have been found guilty. And so the media at the
00:41:57
time described me as being completely emotionless as the verdict is read. It it it wasn't a lack of emotion. It was
00:42:05
complete shock. Like, oh my god, I can't believe this. I just got convicted of murder
00:42:14
that they cuffed me. They took me to the county jail. And now I know I'm going to
00:42:18
prison. So the judge sentenced me to life in prison with possibility of parole after
00:42:25
40 years. Oh, it was awful. It's like a world ending event. Like your life is over.
00:42:37
Over the past year, Brett, we've covered more potential and confirmed wrongful convictions than I think ever before.
00:42:45
And we've been really fortunate to like play some roles in I mean like James Ryos's exoneration. We just this last
00:42:51
year did a $1 million endowment to help start the Indiana branch of the Innocence Project because we're
00:42:58
realizing that this is happening all the time. And it's not always this obvious as it
00:43:06
is in Tim's case, but it is happening and we have to fix it. And I don't mean you and me sitting
00:43:13
here on this couch like in our studio. I mean we as in the crime junkie community.
00:43:19
You guys listening, you are the jurors. You are the voters. You are the ones in your community making change, making
00:43:27
decisions, making things happen. And I know that it can feel so overwhelming. Like anytime there is a big problem and
00:43:36
you realize a system is broken, it's like how am I as one person going to fix this, but it takes one person and you
00:43:44
don't have to fix it like overnight. Like that's not how stuff happens, right? Like you have to find the one
00:43:50
thing that you care about and just take the one next step. And in this one, I mean to figure out who killed Peggy
00:43:58
Hetrick, the thing is Tim's wrongful conviction. And in a weird twist that we don't see very often, even Peggy's
00:44:07
family wasn't super sold on the idea that Tim did it. I mean, they sat through the trial and at the end they
00:44:16
like didn't understand a conviction just based on drawings, but they had this mentality of something that we've said
00:44:20
on the show before, like, well, there must be something the police know that we don't know.
00:44:24
They couldn't have taken him to trial, convicted him on. They wouldn't have arrested him just on that. But they
00:44:31
could, they would, and they did. And so Tim gets carded off to Buenav Vista Correctional Complex where every
00:44:39
day he wakes up in a cage for a crime he didn't commit. He takes classes, he works out, he gets
00:44:45
a job in prison. All the while, his defense team is filing appeal after appeal. Appeals that are getting denied by the
00:44:54
Court of Appeals, appeals that get denied by the Supreme Court of Colorado, which we talk about appeals a lot in our
00:45:00
episodes, but I think it's easy to forget how expensive it is. It costs money to fight for your life like this.
00:45:06
Exactly. Which is why at some point Tim no longer even has lawyers and he's doing more appeals on his own, which if
00:45:14
he wasn't optimistic before, I mean, the system like took any optimism out of him, but lawyers couldn't get these
00:45:21
things through the court system. like he's learning how to file an appeal for the first time at the same time he's
00:45:26
trying to learn how to use Microsoft Word. He is less optimistic than ever. And what happened to Tim and what
00:45:35
happened to Peggy? I mean, it not only changed Tim's life and Tim's outlook, it changed the lives and outlook of so many
00:45:43
people, including Linda Wheeler, one of the early detectives. She saw what happened and she was so upset by it
00:45:53
because I mean not only did she believe he shouldn't have been convicted in the first place, but then to watch these
00:46:00
appeals, these systems we have in place for checks and balances to not work, she
00:46:05
said she did get that feeling I was talking about earlier where it's like the system is so broken. What am I as
00:46:10
one person going to do to help it even even on the inside? and she got so discouraged that she ended up
00:46:19
turning in her badge. She had a complete career change cuz she just felt so overwhelmed by it. But it is just one
00:46:27
person that changes everything in this case. And this is my like shout to crime junkies cuz it's not an FBI agent. It's
00:46:34
not a detective. It's not anyone with a badge or a lawyer. It is a random CPA named Taylor Maris who is just like you
00:46:46
and me and everyone listening. One day he was watching this crime show, one of those crime shows we all grew up on. And
00:46:54
as he's watching it, he's like he sees the drawings, right? And he has this moment where he's like like I too made
00:47:01
drawings I wouldn't want the world to see, but like I'm not a killer. And he said that as he's watching, he kept
00:47:07
waiting for that moment for them to like show the thing that makes him guilty, makes him guilty. Like what's the piece
00:47:13
of evidence? And he's like, "I'm waiting. I'm waiting." And then the show ends. And after it ends, he's like, "Oh
00:47:19
my god, like someone should do something. I should do something." And so he takes just that one next step. He
00:47:27
didn't know what to do, but his one next step is he wrote to Tim in prison and he's like, "Listen, I see it. like, "How
00:47:34
can I help?" And Tim's like, "Man, I don't know, but if there is someone that can help, you have to get Linda Wheeler.
00:47:41
Go talk to Linda Wheeler." So, Taylor takes the next step and he writes to Linda.
00:47:47
He said, "You know, you don't know me, but do you remember Tim Masters?" I said, "Sure." He goes, "Well, do you
00:47:51
think he's possibly innocent?" And I said, "Yeah, I really do, but what can I do? You know, I'm done. I'm not even a
00:47:57
cop anymore." And he said, "I uh well," he said, "I I've talked with him. I or I
00:48:03
just communicated with him by uh a letter and he said, "I bought all the transcripts of the trial, $900 worth,
00:48:12
but he said, "They don't mean anything to me cuz I don't read legal ease." He said, "Can I send them to you?" And for
00:48:18
the first time, I sat there and read what happened at the trial. And I was infuriated because I knew this case and
00:48:26
I knew the jury had not heard the truth. And at that point, I went, "Okay." So, I
00:48:33
contacted um uh Maria Lou, who was Tim's attorney, and uh I said, "You want my help?" They said, "Yeah." I said,
00:48:42
"Okay." But I know what I had to do is I had to put back on a badge cuz I knew I
00:48:46
wouldn't have any credibility as a civilian. Now, as you can imagine, Fort Collins PD
00:48:52
is not like welcoming Linda back with open arms. She's telling them they're wrong.
00:48:57
Yeah. She's trying to like upend a case that they're like overdone with. It's solved.
00:49:00
Yeah. So, she ends up going to work for a DA's office with the understanding that she's
00:49:04
going to work on Tim's case part time. Now, she knows by now a lot of time has passed. And if they're going to point
00:49:12
the finger at someone else or even just prove Tim didn't do it, the best way to do that is DNA, something they didn't
00:49:17
have access to in 1987, but they do now. And she remembers meeting this woman named Selma at a conference before. And
00:49:26
Selma and her husband Richard have this independent lab out in Holland. And independent is key because at this point
00:49:34
they trust freaking nobody. And so now the wild part is like they can't just go testing stuff. Like most
00:49:41
crime junkies will know this, but if you were wrongfully convicted and you think
00:49:44
there's DNA evidence, you do not have the right to just test it on your own. The prosecution essentially owns the
00:49:50
rights to the evidence against you. Yeah. The people who put you there. Now, luckily, there's been enough like sus
00:49:56
stuff happening that Fort Collins PD has recused themselves. Lammer County, which
00:50:00
is the DA's office, has recused themselves. So, there is a new DA that they're going to have to appeal to, a
00:50:07
guy named Don Quick, and they're hoping like this guy has no dog in the fight other than just wanting justice. So,
00:50:14
Selman Richard come to the US. They do this like 4hour presentation in front of Don Quick. And by the end of it, Don's
00:50:21
like, "Yes, I love you. love the lab, love what you're doing. Like, go justice. But guess what happens next? That DNA
00:50:30
evidence they were going to send off gets destroyed. And I just want to point out exactly
00:50:36
what you said. This happens next. So, this evidence destruction happens after they get permission to test it. It's not
00:50:45
like, "Oops, we don't have the evidence anymore. It's gone." It's, "Oh, you want
00:50:49
it? We're getting rid of it." which is like they were already Tim and his team were already suspicious that something
00:50:55
sus was going on and now they're more sure of it than ever. So they do end up finding some stuff
00:51:02
that they can send off. At some point they had gone back to Tom and gotten the stuff that they gave back to him like
00:51:08
stuff the evidence. They're like you shouldn't have this. He's like I know. So they like at least
00:51:12
collect that. Thank god he saved it. and they end up sending some stuff off for testing. And at the same time, because
00:51:18
they're convinced something like very fishy is going on, his lawyers make a request for a new trial based on the
00:51:26
accusation that Tim's rights were violated. And they make four important points in this filing. Number one, they
00:51:33
say crucial evidence was withheld from Tim's defense team. And they point to two things. They say specifically the
00:51:41
prints and I think they're talking about the shoe prints in the field, the Tom McCann ones by the pool of blood on the
00:51:46
curb. Apparently they never knew like his defense team never knew that those existed. The second thing that they
00:51:53
didn't know existed was that first FBI profile that the police had done that said Tim is not your guy. Didn't know
00:52:00
that that was a thing. That kind of just went away, which would have been really
00:52:03
helpful in a trial. Their second point in this filing was the whole DNA destruction thing. Like there's that.
00:52:10
There's that. And then the third is apparently there was like a mishandling of some skin cell
00:52:15
DNA that they had. So some evidence that they had, but you know, not only you destroying things, then you're
00:52:19
mishandling things. Like so much is useless. The fourth is that they ignored viable suspects, other viable suspects
00:52:29
who were not Tim. Because make no mistake, they did not just pick Tim out of a void. There were other people that
00:52:37
looked a lot more promising than Tim that his defense team never knew about. And I'm going to be getting into those
00:52:44
people in a moment. But those are their four points. And as they're uncovering all this and filing this, I mean, they
00:52:51
found out other things as well. Like the police were basically waging psychological warfare on this kid. So,
00:53:00
remember how I told you that um in the like first month of the investigation, you know, the newspaper showing up every
00:53:05
day. It's like, "We've got our guy. We're honing in." Turns out that was not real. The Fort Collins
00:53:13
police was making a fake front page of the newspaper, just one, putting it on the newspaper and delivering that
00:53:20
newspaper to Tim's house. Literal fake news on his doorstep. Mhm. And their whole theory about
00:53:26
mattress side, right, is Tim's like so upset about his mother's death that it caused all of this.
00:53:31
So clearly they like know that he would be upset. They had like his mother's obituary reprinted like over and over.
00:53:40
They would cut it out, put it in envelopes, and then like leave those envelopes around for Tim to find. And
00:53:45
then when that didn't work in like the very like first early days or whatever, come the one-year anniversary of Peggy's
00:53:52
murder, they concocted this scheme. Some might call it an operation, I say no. It's a scheme.
00:54:01
And a lot of the paper trail of this has been lost along the way. Like so much in
00:54:06
this case. But what is left behind is just it's bizarre. So, Fort Collins authorities
00:54:14
basically reached out to the FBI around the 1-year anniversary and was like, "Hey, we feel like we have this guy. We
00:54:22
can't prove that he's violent, but we feel like if we put him in the right situation, we can push him to be and
00:54:27
other people will see what we see, but we're afraid that if we push him too far, like like he might kill someone
00:54:37
again." M. So, we need you watching him, but if it goes too far, you have to pretend like
00:54:44
this didn't happen. We didn't do this. You didn't do this. Like, we all had nothing to do with whatever it is he
00:54:49
does. And the FBI is like, "Got it." And they're like, "Yeah, but also if he does
00:54:54
nothing and we look dumb. Can't have that happen." Yeah. Like, pretend it didn't happen.
00:54:59
And they're like, "Got it." And obviously nothing happened. But it just shows you like the mind games they were
00:55:06
playing with this at the time kid child. Yes. So this request for a new trial gets
00:55:13
filed. The DNA stuff gets sent off. And even now Tim is still not optimistic. Like everything that can go wrong for
00:55:22
him has. Why would this be any different? Even when everyone around him is telling him they think it will be.
00:55:29
So I'm in the unit. All of a sudden, the whole facility locks down for some reason. And they lock down a lot. You
00:55:36
just assume a fight broke out somewhere. Somebody got hurt, whatever. So, I'm sitting in my cell and my case manager
00:55:43
comes up while everybody's locked down and he says, "Tim, your lawyer just called. She wants you to call her back."
00:55:51
Okay, I'm locked down. What am I going to do? He says, "I'll try and get you out here in a minute." So, he So, he
00:55:58
goes down. Then, he comes back a little bit later. Do they take me out? Oh, no. He He goes back down to talk about it.
00:56:03
Then the news comes on and there's an announcement from the special prosecutors in my case and they announce
00:56:11
that uh they're going to dismiss the case against me and I'll be released on a PR bond. And I'm like and everybody in
00:56:18
the unit was cheering. Yeah, you're going home, masters. You're out of here. I'm like, wait a minute. Wait a minute.
00:56:23
I'm going to talk to the lawyer later today. We'll find out for sure. Because at this point, I'm so pessimistic. I
00:56:27
don't even believe what I just saw on the news. And then I go I go down to the case
00:56:32
manager's office. He calls my lawyer, Maria Lou, and she says, "You're out of there. They're letting you go."
00:56:43
So, ironically, I made it. I wasn't in prison for quite 10 years, but I was in there almost 10 years. And uh Oh, man.
00:56:52
It was It was weird. They they had uh my lawyers bought me a suit out of their own pocket and uh I got to wear a suit.
00:57:02
They talked the sheriff into letting letting them release me from the courthouse rather than coming back to
00:57:08
the county jail to be processed. So I went in there and they released me out of the courthouse. That never
00:57:14
happens in Colorado. If you get released, you got to go back to the county jail and wait around while they
00:57:19
process you. And they they let them release me from the courthouse. and my entire family was there. My
00:57:26
family was so big that they they couldn't fit in the courtroom and the courtroom was packed anyway with people.
00:57:32
So, they had my family go back in the judge's chambers. And when the hearing started to release me, all my family
00:57:38
started walking out and there was my sister. I almost broke out in tears when I saw
00:57:43
my sister. It was a good day. That good day was January 22nd, 2008. He was let out of prison. Charges were
00:57:57
dropped. But crime junkies know that doesn't mean he's considered to be innocent. And the DA can refile charges
00:58:03
if they want to. Well, they definitely don't want to. At some point, the DNA stuff that they had sent off comes back
00:58:11
with a couple of like partial profiles. None of it matches Tim. And the case that they had built, even the little bit
00:58:17
of one they had, is like falling apart, right? Like the people people were hiding things, they were lying. Like his
00:58:23
rights were violated. So by June of 2011, Tim is fully exonerated. And he goes on to sue a lot of the people who
00:58:36
helped put him in prison for so long, including Jim Brick and Jolene Blair and Terry Gilmore. Terry and Jolene were the
00:58:44
prosecutors at the time, but by the time Tim is suing them, they were judges. And what I find so interesting is that
00:58:52
in this time when Jim is being sued or even looked into, he's on paid leave. After 2 years, he ends up resigning. And
00:59:01
even though two grand juries find him guilty of perjury, the charges get dropped.
00:59:08
and the judges, at least this is happening during an election year, they don't get reelected, but they don't get
00:59:16
so much as a slap on the wrist. The other big win is for Tim is he gets to settle for about $10 million, which is
00:59:25
great for him. And I keep wondering like why is no one asking who else, right? Like they're not looking in to the
00:59:34
prosecutors at the time. And and just so you know, like those three weren't the only ones. Tim suit. He sued like the
00:59:38
city. He sued a lot of people. Those are just like the three main people. But no
00:59:42
one is asking if this happened to anyone else. It's like they, you know, they had
00:59:46
they paid him out and they just wanted this to go away. Now, obviously, we reached out to Jim
00:59:53
Brick, Jolene Blair, Terry Gilmore for a statement. Didn't hear back from Jim Brick. Jolene Blair said she didn't want
01:00:00
to talk about the case. Um Terry Gilmore actually for the longest time we didn't
01:00:04
hear back from until like midway through the tour. And what he said was basically
01:00:10
that he really believed in Tim's guilt at the time. He said that the way the system worked and the way that like
01:00:17
evidence was numbered or copied or whatever, it should have been really obvious if something was missing. And
01:00:23
when we asked him what he thought about Tim's guilt or innocence now, he wouldn't tell us. So that's what he has
01:00:30
to say. And in an interesting piece of gossip that has nothing to do with this, uh, obviously when we were like when we
01:00:38
look up people to like try and figure out where they are, we like try phone numbers, we try emails. Facebook is like
01:00:43
a great way to like reach people for comment. Um, it turns out now Jim Brick and Jolene Blair are dating and went to
01:00:51
Italy. Like it's wild. It has nothing to do with this case, but it's something that we know. We do know.
01:00:56
I know it. And and and I was like maybe I'm being like like a petty Betty, but when I told people on tour, the
01:01:02
collective like gasp, I was like, "Oh, no. Yeah, they're here for the Goss, too." So So they they're living their
01:01:08
lives again. No repercussions there. And Tim, all he wanted was to move on and live his life as well. So
01:01:18
when he settled his lawsuit, he moved to have the records in his case sealed. like he didn't want people bringing this
01:01:26
up over and over. She deserves that. Absolutely. It does make it really hard when I want to bring it up. Even with
01:01:34
like Tim's blessing and Tom's blessing and everyone who participated. Luckily, we were able to get some of the
01:01:42
investigative files, though, and those revealed some really interesting things because like I said earlier, there were
01:01:52
other very viable suspects in this case, far more viable than Tim. When talking about people we should be
01:02:04
looking at, viable potential suspects, the first that comes up is Peggy's on again, off-again boyfriend, Matt Zner,
01:02:15
who was 29 in 1987. And every detective, I think, has their like person, right, that they look into
01:02:24
the most. And for Linda Wheeler, it is Matt. Now, Ray Martinez, one of the detectives we talked about who was like
01:02:31
first on the scene for Peggy's case last time, he said a lot of people were quick
01:02:35
to write Matt off. Maybe because of his behavior, like he was acting how they expected, maybe because he had an alibi.
01:02:44
If you remember, Matt said that he had met that woman, maybe Sean. Again, just met her, didn't even remember her name,
01:02:51
but he was with her till last call. Then she's at his place till like 3:00, 3:30
01:02:56
in the morning. And a lot of what you'll see about Peggy's death is that she died
01:03:01
between 1 and 3:00 a.m. which yes, Matt would have an alibi. Except when we got access to a lot of the investigative
01:03:10
files, what we realized is in the report, it's actually a wider range. I mean, they settle on 1 to 3, but the
01:03:17
true range of time is between 1:00 a.m. and 5 a.m., meaning that there's potentially an hour and a half, 2 hours
01:03:26
that Matt is unaccounted for if she died like in those like later time frame. The
01:03:31
other thing, which I haven't told anyone yet, been saving this up my sleeve, is that when Peggy was found, in her purse
01:03:40
was a note that she had written to Matt. Seemingly that very evening, she died. And so, Brit, I'm going to have you read
01:03:48
the note. Matt, I need your help. Sharon has got my keys and isn't home. No answer. If I have to knock on your door
01:03:57
at 2, please don't be a grump. I don't want to spend the night sleeping in the hall. Peg, but this note is in Peggy's
01:04:07
bag. Like, Matt doesn't have it. No, no, this is in her bag. And so there are a couple of lines of thinking around
01:04:13
this. So we know she gets locked out, right? So I think everyone's thinking she gets locked out. She writes this
01:04:18
note and then one of two things happens. Either she goes and like puts this on Matt's door and then she goes out, she
01:04:25
ends up getting back into her place and then goes back to Matt's and collects the note because she no longer needs to
01:04:30
show up at his place at 2:00 a.m. Or she writes the note, goes out, ends up getting back into her place before she
01:04:38
ever drops the note off. Doesn't need the note at all. she's in. It doesn't even matter anymore and it's
01:04:42
like a moot point. It's like living in her purse and maybe she forgot about it. I don't know.
01:04:46
And did Matt see the note? Like what did he say about it? That's well that's the thing. So based
01:04:51
on the files that I've seen, it doesn't appear like they ask him about it, which
01:04:56
like maybe they're just writing it off, but to me it feels like it feels really interesting. Like did did she plan on
01:05:02
coming to your place? Did you know she was planning on coming? Did she mention it to you? Like
01:05:05
something. Yeah. Right. And we know they spoke and that like him her coming to his house was
01:05:09
never a part of the story he told when they spoke. So just a reminder of his story. So Matt actually lived even
01:05:14
closer to the prime minister than Peggy did. So there are like you know two possibilities here. So Matt drove that
01:05:22
night cuz he was kind of boopping around to different places. And he said that when he got to the prime minister, Peggy
01:05:28
was arriving at the same time. They are like at the bar. They're chatting for a little bit like everything's normal. And
01:05:34
then his date, this girl he's supposed to meet up with comes again. Maybe Shawn is her, he thinks is her name. They just
01:05:39
met that night. And he says that he offered Peggy a ride. She said yes originally, but then like at some point
01:05:46
in the evening, he went to the bathroom. He's coming out. Peggy's leaving. So he's like, "Oh, she must have changed
01:05:52
her mind." Whatever. He stays till last call with maybe Shawn. And then they go back to his place till 3:00 or 3:30.
01:05:58
Now, he does tell police though that even though their conversation was normal, it was great. She made mention
01:06:03
Peggy did that she was seeing someone new during this time which he thought police should know
01:06:10
which you haven't mentioned that at all. So my question is like was she actually
01:06:14
seeing someone or was she seeing her on again off-again boyfriend Matt with someone new? She's like
01:06:22
oh I too am newly in love. He's so hot and so rich, so tall, better looking than you.
01:06:29
Don't even worry about me. like was she bluffing? I don't know. I don't know. So, there's
01:06:33
like some indications that maybe she was seeing someone like casually. I think it's also important to know that like
01:06:40
Matt is that guy she would always go back to there in Colorado. And so much so that I found out that earlier in that
01:06:47
week, I mean, they had had dinner together. Also, apparently though, as far as I can tell, not something that
01:06:53
police asked him about, which is like seems like a miss to me because like like they're very much in each other's
01:06:59
lives and like what did you talk about? What were the days leading up to it? I don't know.
01:07:02
Well, and the police don't ask about the note. They don't ask about this dinner within like the week before she died.
01:07:09
Did they even ask about his alibi? They did. They did check his alibi. They found Maybe Shawn and our reporter Emily
01:07:18
actually found her all these years later and spoke to her. Turns out maybe Shawn,
01:07:25
her name is actually Dawn. Matt, you were so close. So close. Um, and her story is interesting. It
01:07:31
adds a little bit of context, a little bit of color. She says that they really did just meet earlier that night. They
01:07:38
had saw each other in another bar. And she said they recognized each other because Matt like a while ago had sold
01:07:43
her a car. So, like they'd been in the same orbit before, but didn't even know each other's names clearly.
01:07:47
Yeah. She said Matt came over to her and was like, "Hey, you know, when you're done
01:07:50
with your friend, you should come to Prime Minister and hang out with me." Which is what she did. She says she
01:07:54
shows up later in the evening and when she walks in, Matt is talking to this other woman who she figures out later is
01:08:01
Peggy. Didn't know Peggy at the time. And she says she kind of hangs back for a little while and waits. But a couple
01:08:07
minutes go by, he's still talking. So, she decides to approach him. As soon as she approaches, Peggy like turns at the
01:08:14
bar and starts talking to the guy next to her. And so Don just made the assumption that Peggy was with that
01:08:18
other guy. And Matt doesn't introduce Dawn or anything. He just is like, "Hey, go get a table." So Don goes to get a
01:08:24
table for four, thinking that maybe the other couple is going to join them. But just Matt comes back and she says she
01:08:30
didn't ask him about it. She didn't even ask him about the woman when she realized Matt's like kind of keeping an
01:08:36
eye on her all night. Like they just met. She doesn't know the history, but like she's not going to dig too deep.
01:08:40
They're like having a decent time. And they do they stay till last call. She goes home with Matt. They talk, they
01:08:48
kiss a little. She says the night ends for like a combination of reasons like, you know, he's doing the like, oh, like
01:08:54
I got to work in the morning. And then he also makes this comment about how he hates kids. Like not like dislikes kids,
01:09:00
like hates them. And Don is like, well, I have one of those, so this probably isn't going to work out. And so she ends
01:09:08
up leaving. But when she talked to us, there was something else that she told us that really stood out to her. She
01:09:16
said that when she was in his apartment that night, it felt strange because she said it was so clean. Like not just
01:09:25
clean for a boy kind of apartment, but like she's like, "I couldn't find, you know, a piece of clothing on the closet
01:09:31
floor. I there was not a fork to be found in the sink." like it felt like no one lived there,
01:09:37
which was weird at the time, whatever. But she said what was really strange for her was that police brought her back at
01:09:45
some point years later and they were asking her questions about Matt's apartment specifically,
01:09:52
and they were asking her like, "Had you seen a broken coffee table? Had you seen
01:09:57
some spots on the floor?" And they're like showing her pictures of the apartment. I I think like you, we talked
01:10:03
about this. were like originally imagining like a shattered coffee table. Yeah. When I hear broken table, it is a
01:10:08
broken table. Very obviously. It's like this like piece of wood propping up one of the legs.
01:10:13
Like one of the legs is broken and now it has a piece of wood. Fully something my husband would like do
01:10:18
and then be like it's fine for years if it was his apartment. Yes. So, and then the spots like they're not
01:10:25
like overtly blood or anything. There's just a couple of them. I don't know if they ever get those tested. And again,
01:10:31
Don is saying, "No, I never saw any of that." because again it's so clean. But she said that wasn't even really the
01:10:36
takeaway for her. As they're showing her these pictures, the takeaway for her is
01:10:40
like that's not the apartment I was in, which it was like full body chills when she was telling us that. And it's not
01:10:50
like it was a completely different. She said it looked the same. The layout was the same, but this one looked lived in.
01:10:55
So lived in. I mean, if you see the pictures, there's like laundry everywhere. There's like stuff on the
01:10:59
counters. Like make no mistake, this dude lives here. Which I don't want to discredit Don's memory at all, but like
01:11:05
we know human memory is incredibly flawed. There's a million statistics on it. I won't go through all of them, but
01:11:11
there's one from the Innocence Project that's something like 70% of wrongful convictions are like come down to
01:11:17
witness misidentification or misremembering. And that's like in the most perfect of
01:11:22
circumstances, right? Like in this case, like it's in the middle of the night, it's dark.
01:11:28
they'd been drinking like this. And when they're showing her these pictures, I mean, this is like years later, too.
01:11:35
So, yes. I mean, there could be like I I don't even know what to like make of this memory other than it's just so
01:11:41
strange. But there were other strange things about Matt as well. Like when they went to talk to him the first like
01:11:47
day or two after they found Peggy, they did search his car in his place and apparently they seized some wet clothes
01:11:54
and shoes from his car and wet clothes from his apartment and not like damp. I mean, they said it looked like he had
01:11:59
gone swimming in these things. But strangely, like a couple of days later, Matt comes asking for those
01:12:05
things back and they just give them back. Like, sorry we didn't like wash and fold them for you. I mean, you say
01:12:11
strangely, but a couple days later, they were all in on Tim. I know. I know. But when you think about
01:12:17
like at some point, I don't know what was happening years later. I think it was like the probably the grand jury.
01:12:21
They're looking at these pictures, they're asking Dawn about them. I think the implication
01:12:28
was, did something happen in Matt's apartment after Dawn left? Right? Like, we got this maybe one and a half to two
01:12:33
hours. Did a table break? Did these spots come after you left the house? I point that out specifically because
01:12:40
there's one other thing that they collected early on that I think is important. Outside of Matt's apartment,
01:12:47
they also found some footprints that matched the shoes Peggy was found in when she was killed and a pile of like
01:12:56
11 cigarette butts in the brand that Peggy was known to smoke, which outside of his place,
01:13:00
which the shoe prints I can kind of like excuse, right? Like she has this note. She might have been there to drop it off
01:13:07
to then to pick it up. So, she was in her purse like, okay, but the cigarette butts like that is
01:13:13
a stakeout amount of cigarette butts. I know. I know. And when they talk to her friends, and this is like the little
01:13:20
piece that comes out in that like when I talk about the 2D image of her in the newspaper, when they talk to her
01:13:24
friends, her friends did say, you know, it wouldn't have been that unusual. She gets jealous of like when it comes to
01:13:30
Matt. It wouldn't have been weird if she saw him with another woman that night and then she went to his place to we
01:13:36
know she left ahead of them. Did she stake it out to see if he brought Dawn home? Did she stay and see if Dawn
01:13:42
stayed or or if Dawn left? And if she was still there when Dawn left, then did something happen? Was there a
01:13:51
confrontation at Matt's apartment? The problem with that is it doesn't fit the theory that the
01:13:57
attack happens in the field. I know like there's there's pieces that are missing because in my mind like if
01:14:03
something happens with Matt like it is a heat of the moment like passion thing. It's hard for me to imagine a world
01:14:11
where either something happens in his apartment or even he like gets her in the car and then takes her to this place
01:14:16
where someone could see something, takes her out of the car, stabs her, drags her
01:14:22
like it like I can't I can't make it up. It doesn't make sense. And I guess my question too is was Matt a violent
01:14:31
person? Was their relationship volatile? Cuz they've been on and off for a while.
01:14:35
Like was there a history of that? There's nothing like reported that I can find in Matt's like criminal history. He
01:14:42
doesn't have anything violent. I mean, there's like some DUIs and stuff like that, but no like domestic charges,
01:14:47
nothing like that. So, which is why I go back to I think if something happened between them, it was heat of the moment,
01:14:54
but like it's just it's hard for me to imagine it happening at Matt's. And then if not, it's hard for me to imagine how
01:14:59
Matt gets her in the middle of that field. I mean, the biggest question, does Matt
01:15:04
have Tom McCann shoes? No. So, they didn't find any Tom Macccan dress shoes. They they did take note of like a pair
01:15:11
of boots that were like propped up against his couch, but Don says those were the boots he was wearing the night
01:15:17
Peggy died. They're not the prints that match anything in the field. And I get the sense that like those were his nice
01:15:22
shoes. Like he he didn't have a dress shoe guy, right? And so maybe for all of those
01:15:29
reasons, he didn't have Tom McCann's. He maybe had an alibi. He was acting how they expected him to act. Early on,
01:15:36
people wrote him off. Even though he too, like Tim, failed a polygraph. And he failed the question, "Do you know who
01:15:46
killed Peggy Hetrick?" Like the question. Yeah. But the polygrapher decided that
01:15:52
he was probably telling the truth. And so that's Matt. Now, the other person we came across in the case file was a guy
01:16:01
named Donnie Long. So, the same year that Peggy was murdered, there were two more murders. 39-year-old Linda Hol was
01:16:12
stabbed nine times, bound, gagged, tied to a tree. Now, like Peggy's case, there
01:16:18
was no sexual assault, but unlike Peggy's case, there was no mutilation to Linda. Then a couple of months after
01:16:25
her, 30-year-old Mana Hughes is murdered. She's stabbed 14 times. No sexual assault. Again, though, no
01:16:32
mutilation. Now, pretty quickly, police kind of pull Peggy out of this, even though you've
01:16:38
got three cases that happen within 9 months of each other, within 30 m in an area that doesn't really see violent
01:16:46
crime. Well, and all the victims are like kind of in the same age range, 37, 39, 30. My
01:16:52
crime junkie brain goes their last names all start with H. Hedrick accuse Holt. That's Deck investigates frame.
01:16:59
I know. But like I I think it's the about the mutilation. I think that's the why very early on they were like Peggy
01:17:05
doesn't fit in this pattern and they end up finding the guy responsible for Linda
01:17:10
and Mana. They end up getting this Donnie Long guy. Donnie ends up confessing to Linda and Mana's murders.
01:17:17
So they at least do the bare minimum though and like when he confesses to these they like circle back and they're
01:17:21
like, "Hey, you're saying you did these two things. Did you do this other thing?" He's like, "No, I didn't." And
01:17:27
they're like, "Okay, thank you. Bye." Like truly the bare minimum. And we're just out here like believing
01:17:33
serial killers like that. This is not the first time we've seen this happen, but it always
01:17:38
confuses me, shocks me. This happened recently where I'm like working on this case out of Washington that I've been
01:17:44
working on for like 2 years and me and one of our reporters, Emily, we had a call with the FBI cuz we're like,
01:17:51
"Listen, we're not saying it's Israel Keys, but here's like 20 things we find very odd that we like feel like someone
01:17:57
other than us should know." And the the agent was like, "Yeah, like okay, we'll talk to you, but like we
01:18:03
don't need to hear it. He only killed four people in the state." And I'm like, "Wait, how do you know he only killed
01:18:08
four people in Washington? I feel like that's like news. And he's like that he told us that.
01:18:12
And I was like, Israel Keys told So of all the bad guys to believe, we're believing
01:18:17
Israel Keys. Israel Keys. Okay. So he said he didn't do it. So they think he didn't do it. We tried to write
01:18:23
to him when he was in prison just to see if he would talk to us. We haven't heard
01:18:26
back from him. Which brings me to the third person I want to go deep into. And I told you everyone has like their
01:18:35
person like detectives. And for Ray Martinez, this next one is his. And for me, he's the person whether or not he
01:18:43
had anything to do with Peggy's case, I am very interested in cuz I think there is a much bigger story behind him. And
01:18:51
that is local opthalmologist Dr. Richard Hammond. Now, in 1987, this dude is raising no
01:19:01
red flags. He has a thriving practice. He has a wife, two teenage kids, like living the American dream. Except for,
01:19:09
you know, the one red flag they raised about Tim in that he lived really close to the crime scene. In fact, you could
01:19:15
see the crime scene from his primary bedroom window, but he wasn't doodling. No, God forbid. So, I mean, he was a
01:19:24
part of the initial canvas where they like came around. Did you see anything? Hear anything? Him and his wife were
01:19:29
home that night, but they didn't see or hear anything. And so, they moved on. Again, no red flags.
01:19:35
Plenty of red flags, though, come March of 1995. That's when a young woman at Colorado
01:19:42
State University found this note card on their like job board for someone who needed a housesitter. The Hammonds were
01:19:49
going out of town. She was going to come housesit. She brought her friend with her and, you know, she's getting the
01:19:53
tour of the house. Your room will be in the basement. You can use this bathroom,
01:19:56
but you know, make yourself at home. Use the house, whatever. So, her and her friend are there. They're hanging out.
01:20:05
There's something weird about the basement bathroom. Like, they keep hearing something.
01:20:12
Now, I imagine if it were me and I was by myself, I would be like, I'll just use the
01:20:20
upstairs bathroom. But she's not alone. She has a friend with her, right? You got your crime junkie BFF
01:20:26
with you and you're like, "Today's the day. We're going to solve the mystery." Absolutely.
01:20:30
So, they start snooping around, right? Like they get a flashlight, they're going all around the bathroom and it's
01:20:36
like they turn the light on, they hear the sound, they turn the light off, there's no sound. On, off, on, off. And
01:20:41
I imagine that like one of them is like at the light and the other one's like, "Okay, sh." And like kind of darting
01:20:45
around the room trying to hear the sound from like where it's coming from. Well,
01:20:48
they end up getting a flashlight and they realize that there are cameras in the vents. Plural cameras.
01:20:58
Cameras. But the cameras aren't set up like in the bathroom. They're set up from the room next door. So, they go out
01:21:06
the hall and go to that room, but the door the knob is like won't turn. It's locked. And again, if I were alone, I'd
01:21:14
be like, "Is this where I stop?" But you have your BFF with you. I don't know how
01:21:18
to pick a lock, but I'm about to find out. So, they get their paper clips, whatever. And as they're like getting
01:21:24
ready to pick this lock, what they realize is that even though it was locked, the knob wouldn't turn. When it
01:21:31
was pulled shut, it didn't latch all the way. So, all they have to do is push it
01:21:36
open. And when they go inside, they see cameras, they see recording equipment, they see filing cabinets and a quote
01:21:47
uncountable amount of videotapes. And that's when the one girl freezes and she's like, I think we need to phone a
01:21:56
friend. Yeah. Like I think they're hoping that this isn't as bad as they think it is.
01:22:00
But when they phone this friend and they call somebody who used to be a cop, he quote knows a lot about videotapes. very
01:22:06
1995. But he gets here and he's like, "No, this is worse. Um, we need to call the
01:22:13
real police." Quickly, the real police descend on this place. And it's just worse than you could have imagined. I
01:22:22
mean, they they even find this index on top one of the filing cabinets, and it's
01:22:26
like got ages, names, dates. Is it a shower shot? Is it a toilet shot? Is it a close-up shot? And when I say
01:22:34
close-up, this isn't just someone sitting on the toilet. I mean, this is zoomed into their genitals.
01:22:41
And many of these names on the list are minors, like kids his kids go to school with. Well, and with the close-ups, it
01:22:50
it makes me think of like Peggy. I mean, she was she had genital mutilation. I know. And that's not the only like
01:22:59
thing they're piecing together. So, like because this is happening in the same place, it's a lot of the same people who
01:23:03
were called for Peggy's case, one of them being Sergeant Ray Martinez. And he says when he first gets this call to
01:23:09
respond, he's like, "Hammond?" Like, "Why do I know the name Hammond?" And then it hits him. He's like, "During our
01:23:16
canvasing, we went to his house." And then all of a sudden, he's like putting the pieces together.
01:23:24
So, I'm tying this together. Weird cameras. uh crime scene near the crime scene back
01:23:32
then and he's a doctor and guess what we find in his closet. We start looking through his closet and we find Tom
01:23:40
McCann's shoes. Boy, does that ever ring a bell. And so we called up Brick, this
01:23:48
other detective did, and he refused to come out. He wouldn't come to the scene. He said, "No, we
01:23:55
already know who done it. That's a moot point. Basically, when Jim Rodri said that and the officer told me
01:24:04
about it, I I was angry about it because me as a past detective, you don't overlook anything. You know, you flip
01:24:13
over every stone that you can. You might be wrong where your lead was. Maybe this
01:24:17
is something different. Why not look at what's it going to hurt? Right? But he refused to come out. So I told the
01:24:25
officer there, I said, "Let's just seize everything. Let's seize the tapes, seize
01:24:29
the camera, seize those Tom Macccan shoes, you know." So we did. We collect our own evidence and turned everything
01:24:37
in and it never went anywhere. And I think a day or two days later, he's found dead in a hotel in in Denver. They
01:24:46
said, from what I've learned that when they found him, his whole body was shaved. He shaved all the hair off his
01:24:53
head and his body, complete body, and disposed of it. So that to me is weird other than he didn't want any trace
01:25:01
evidence linked to him. Why would you do that if you didn't think you might have
01:25:06
left something behind at a scene? That to me is also weird. Mhm. Full-on naked mole rat in a hotel room.
01:25:18
Dude, I don't know what to think of this. I if you like look at what the people around him said who were like
01:25:26
supportive of him in a way saying like he couldn't do anything violent they would say that he was very into
01:25:33
bodybuilding I you know I still try and find like old archives of like were there competitions
01:25:39
like was this something he was actively doing for how long cuz like I want to know is this guy nar smooth all the time
01:25:44
or just on this day that he died feels important I don't know but the people who
01:25:50
supported him and support's the wrong word because nobody was like well we'll get there but his wife basically was
01:25:56
like I didn't know like any of the videotape stuff was happening but he's not capable of something violent
01:26:03
but how would she even know like she didn't know about the tapes like how would she even have any idea of what
01:26:09
he's capable of and that's the thing I like I have such a hard time understanding like we tried
01:26:13
reaching out to her we we weren't able to get in touch but I I don't know how like she was because she said she was
01:26:20
totally blindsided. She like didn't have any idea what was happening in her home,
01:26:24
which is just like quick PSA to people like if your husband has a locked room in the basement.
01:26:29
Maybe go in it of Yeah. of the home you share, you're allowed to ask questions. But I don't
01:26:33
know what their dynamic was. I don't know. But but though she paints like, you know, when they gave her immunity
01:26:38
deal to talk, she paints like a very vanilla picture of their life. She says that like she would make dinner from
01:26:43
scratch. He'd come home at 7:00 p.m. They'd eat dinner together as a family. their kids would do homework and then
01:26:48
like they wouldn't even watch TV like they were, you know, all American family. I don't think PBS was showing what
01:26:53
Hammond was into. I don't think so either. But anyways, it see like again, she didn't, at least
01:26:59
from what I've seen, didn't give any indication that there was like dark parts of her marriage. It she was
01:27:04
surprised by this. So, he gets arrested. He gets released on a $5,000 bond. And it's when he's released that he goes to
01:27:12
that Denver hotel and he dies by suicide. He has a cyanide drip to his leg that I mean is so corrosive it gets
01:27:18
like down to the bone. And it's interesting the way that things play out after he dies because when I say like
01:27:28
people like supported him, there were people who kind of came out of the woodwork and there was like this battle
01:27:33
when you look at the newspapers of like reporters reporting on what happened and
01:27:38
then people saying that they shouldn't because it's just making things worse. And it kind of all starts with Richard's
01:27:45
suicide notes. I'm going to have you read that. The media frenzy surrounding my arrest
01:27:49
has caused immeasurable harm to many people, especially my family. I have lost everything, but I cannot survive
01:27:55
the loss of my wife and son and daughter. My death should satisfy the media's thirst for blood so that
01:28:02
hopefully everyone else who has been affected by this case can truly begin the process of healing.
01:28:08
I love redacted family names very much. I am truly sorry for hurting you so deeply. Rich Hammond. So he puts it on
01:28:19
the media that yes, I did this thing but like I have to die because they're so bloodthirsty. They like they're making
01:28:26
this bigger than it has to be and they're hurting people and like I'm just going to go away because of what they
01:28:29
are doing. Well, and not even what he did. He says like who has been affected by this case,
01:28:34
not by what he did. True. That's true. So then this is when the back and forth comes and there are
01:28:41
people who come out in support of what he said and like the media should just stop. We should drop it. Like there's
01:28:47
this active campaign to just make this go away. And just to prove the point, I want you to read something. Not the
01:28:53
whole thing, but part of what was written by a woman named Pam Hurley Nagel in in the paper. It saddens me
01:28:59
that the Colorado and other media flits chose to feast on Richard Hammond's tragic plight. I don't condone his
01:29:06
alleged behavior which was limited to the privacy of his own home. Collective gasp. That is like the craziest part to
01:29:14
me. Yeah. But the media exploited a man and his family's vulnerability. Don't think anybody else's vulnerability
01:29:22
was Rich Hammond was a man and doctor who took time to replenish his society with
01:29:29
quality medical care. What he allegedly did was wrong, but in the scheme of things, the hurt he caused
01:29:37
was exaggerated after the media got its predatory clause in it. Was it? Here's the thing. I don't think that's a
01:29:46
question we can answer because of how things unfold next. So, after his arrest and his death, they
01:29:54
continue to find more things. They find a secret storage unit no one knew about with Rubbermaid tub after Rubbermaid tub
01:30:02
of more videotapes, pornographic materials, receipts, sex toys. They find out he had a secret bank account that
01:30:11
people didn't know about. He they find this like waist belt contraption that like hooked onto his belt and had all
01:30:17
these little like sharp instruments that came out of it. Like what do you need that for? But the reason I say we don't
01:30:23
know the extent is because after all this is collected everything from his home from this storage unit
01:30:29
it is all taken and over the course of like 8 hours burned like completely destroyed
01:30:40
and Jim Brick like like some people were at least asking questions about this and
01:30:46
our guy Jim Brick is back to give a quote to the Denver Post about why they destroyed all of this evidence in this
01:30:54
case and he said quote should we revictimize all these women by telling them they are victims.
01:31:02
So really it's an effort to protect them to preserve these victims rights. Oh Ashley words are important to me they're
01:31:12
important to you. They're important to our crime junkies. What he's saying here like I cannot make sense of it.
01:31:20
revictimizing them by telling them they're victing. And the thing I have the biggest problem
01:31:29
with is this idea, the last line to preserve these victim's rights. That's why we destroyed this
01:31:35
by destroying it and not like with their permission or anything. I say like I get as a victim like
01:31:42
wanting those tapes to be destroyed. If that existed of me, I wouldn't feel safe
01:31:46
even with a tape like that locked in an evidence locker. But I'd want the choice.
01:31:51
Yeah, they didn't have it. They made the choice for them to preserve their rights. But by destroying it, what they
01:31:56
did was actually take away any future right they might have for repercussions. They can no longer go after Hammond's
01:32:03
estate. Were there other people on those tapes? We'll never know that they could
01:32:08
go after because by the way when they destroyed everything. They had not viewed most of it. Like they just took
01:32:17
it all away without knowing what was on the majority of those tapes, which is bananas to me. And the whole way that
01:32:26
these were destroyed. When they looked into this, this went against every policy and procedure they had in place
01:32:32
about how to deal with evidence. It just all goes up in smoke. Literally, they burned it. Yes. And listen,
01:32:40
Jim Brick would have you believe that they did this for a noble reason. And I do think there are people out there
01:32:45
doing noble things for noble reasons. I haven't seen a whole lot of them. Love to me more.
01:32:50
Yes. But in the theme of always going a layer deeper, which is our new crime junkie
01:32:55
life rule, I like to ask not just what happened, but why do we think it happened?
01:33:02
Well, here's a fun fact. In the couple of days between when Hammond was arrested, but before he died, they were
01:33:11
having to think about like taking this to a trial. Like, there could be a case around this.
01:33:16
And they were going to have to appoint a special prosecutor because they quickly
01:33:21
found out that members of the DA's office, quote, had been guests at Hammond's home and may have been
01:33:29
videotaped. Oh, I think we have our reason for why all of that evidence was destroyed.
01:33:36
But they are quick to write this off. Like same way when like when Tim, right, when he gets exonerated, they're like,
01:33:42
"Let's just make this go away." And when this happened, they wanted this to go away. So much so that they were even
01:33:48
writing off stories that made no sense. Like people were like, "Oh, he he wouldn't have hurt Peggy because like he
01:33:54
didn't even use a scalpel." Yes, he was a doctor in surgical precision, all that, but he didn't even use scalpels.
01:33:59
But like a guy who he ran the practice with was like, "Yeah, we absolutely do." And there's an affidavit from a woman
01:34:04
who's like, "He literally use a scalpel on me." And just to show you how far under the rug they were pushing this
01:34:12
thing, everything in the paper like at the time was about the videootapes or whatever.
01:34:18
Nobody publicly was connecting this guy to Peggy Hatrick in 1995. And nobody was
01:34:24
telling Peggy's family about him, even behind the scenes. Tom didn't find out about Dr. Hammond until years later and
01:34:31
the way he found out was bananas. I remember a few years ago they talked about a doctor. I was coming out of the
01:34:39
village in with my friend and he looked at the news box, Rocky Mountain News and
01:34:44
had Peggy's picture on the front cover of the newspaper and he said, "Hey Tom, that's your sister." And so he got the
01:34:51
newspaper. We went back into the village and I read it. I skimmed over it. I went, "What? Who is this doctor? You
01:34:59
know, nobody's ever told me about this guy. So, the defense never knew about any of
01:35:08
that. Not just the Hammond stuff, but like so much of what we've talked about. And in looking at the file, when I say
01:35:14
there's more to be done, I mean, I also was coming across names of people it doesn't seem like they really dug into.
01:35:19
A guy named Greg Casease, who she was like dating at the time. Derek Cordova, who had she had gone out with in the
01:35:25
past, a guy named Tim Matthews, who apparently liked Peggy and was jealous of Matt. And I'm not saying those guys
01:35:31
had anything to do with anything, but to me, those are people who were clearly close to her, who hung out with her, who
01:35:38
maybe were with her in like times leading up to her death. They were in her circle.
01:35:42
I know. And so, when I say that more can be done, like I don't think we can just
01:35:47
rely on DNA and like call it quits. I think there's going to have to be leg work. And I think there's still a lot of
01:35:52
leg work that can be done even decades later, right? But we know that Tim was exonerated in part by the DNA evidence.
01:35:58
So like whatever happened to those partial matches? So that we did get some partial profiles
01:36:05
and none of those matched him. So there were some important ones. There was one on the front waistband of Peggy's
01:36:12
underwear. And everything we have comes from touch DNA, right? There's there was
01:36:16
no like semen or bodily fluids. And I think their thinking was that the killer likely was the one who pulled her pants
01:36:22
down. So maybe they'd get touch DNA. Then they got some samples from under her arms, coat, boots, pants. There was
01:36:31
a single full profile on her sleeve, but like guess what? It turned out to be the
01:36:35
police who weren't wearing gloves. Cross that one out. And while it hasn't been on record that they've gotten DNA from
01:36:41
like all three of the people I've talked about, right? Matt Zolner, Donnie Long,
01:36:46
Richard Hammond. I do know that they got one person's DNA for comparison, and it
01:36:52
is comparison, right? There's no full profile to put into Cotus. And one of those three people did match
01:36:59
the touch DNA on the underwear. Not all the places, but the touch DNA on the underwear. And that was Matt Zulner. So,
01:37:09
we have this partial match on one of the samples. Why isn't that DNA alone enough
01:37:17
to charge him? Right? Like, if it was Tim's, right, it totally would have been. That's the
01:37:21
question a lot of people are asking. And for Linda, she thinks it should be enough.
01:37:27
I want Matt Zer to know that I'm still after him. I want him to know to make up some little hiccup or something that in
01:37:34
his life that he'll make a mistake that we can catch him on. But it's like I just when I when I I I know who did it
01:37:42
and he's not held accountable and he's been free for 30ome years that uh the attorney general did all they could and
01:37:49
I really felt that they did. But it's like but I'm not done and I I don't I don't want to be silenced. there's still
01:37:57
a wrong that was done and I still feel like something might good might come out of of this case getting reopened and and
01:38:05
refocused on that there's somebody might come up with something that's said or done that we didn't know about that
01:38:10
allows us to take this case further and keep it open. Now, I think it's important to note I I
01:38:18
don't think that at this point you can take a case to trial just based on that one piece of DNA. There's a lot that has
01:38:23
to be explained at this point. I mean, and again, it's touch DNA. You don't know how it got there, when it got
01:38:29
there, and it's only one of the profiles that was found on her. Yes. And we know that they had contact,
01:38:35
right? Like they're going to dinner. They like they saw each other that night. I think it is important. I think it is
01:38:41
meaningful and I think that is like when you talk about a lead that tells you where to focus. I I think that's telling
01:38:46
you where to focus. However, there is other DNA that's going to have to be explained away. There is you're
01:38:53
going to have to prove it in a court of law and there's leg work that can be done. You also have when you when I
01:39:00
think about DNA, the Missy Woods of it all. If anyone remembers our John Bane Ramsay episode, there is a a DNA tech in
01:39:07
Colorado who from like was there from '90s to 2023. Her name's Missy Woods. And she was like
01:39:16
there was like like not following protocol, mishandling evidence, not storing things correctly,
01:39:20
like not necessarily falsifying things, but really mucking up the system. So all of her cases are getting called
01:39:26
into question. I don't know if she touched this. And I know we sent some stuff to Holland, but stuff was stored
01:39:31
in Colorado. Some of it was tested in Colorado. Again, I'm only saying all of this because while I think this DNA is
01:39:37
important, you are going to have to back it up with leg work. Well, and for me, like Matt doesn't have
01:39:43
this history of violence, even if it was something that happened in the heat of the moment, she was mutilated with like
01:39:50
surgical precision. I know that doesn't like you don't learn that in like a heat of the moment situation.
01:39:58
We asked about that and and people who believe that um Matt did this, they think that maybe he was trying to like
01:40:04
throw people off his trail by doing that. But the precision of it. I know. I know. And listen, who's to say
01:40:11
there isn't a world where someone killed Peggy and then someone else came along and did something, right? Like
01:40:19
Richard Hammond had insomnia and could see that field from his bedroom window. I don't think he wants to call police
01:40:23
and alert them to what he's like doing in his you know what I mean? And I'm not saying I don't know. I don't know. But
01:40:29
it might not be the reason that a lot of things might not fit is because maybe there isn't just one answer. And another
01:40:36
problem that we're going to face when it comes to like making a case is that like
01:40:41
you will have this Richard Hammond thing that is like very open-ended and it can never be buttoned up,
01:40:46
right? We don't know if Peggy was on one of those tapes because some powerful people made sure we would never know
01:40:54
what was on those tapes, who was on those tapes. And if you came to the live show, this is where we started to wrap
01:41:01
things up. But I mean, as a lot of people might have noticed by now, like the theme of these stories is going a
01:41:07
layer deeper. So, while Brit and I were on tour, I sent some of our reporters back to Colorado to do some more
01:41:12
digging, some more door knocking, and like boots on the ground work. Mostly because I couldn't shake the feeling
01:41:18
that there is more to this Dr. Hammond story, like as it relates to Peggy or like something else.
01:41:25
I don't know. the way that everyone made it go away so fast and like the operation we learned he had set up feels
01:41:31
so much bigger. So, we got our hands on some investigative reports from Hammond's case and I was disappointed to
01:41:38
see that police just straight up stopped investigating after he died. I mean, not surprised, but
01:41:44
disappointed. Again, they at the time they said it was all to protect the victims, blah blah
01:41:48
blah. But the question I have is like no one can say for sure that Hammond didn't
01:41:53
sell or share the tapes. What we learned is that his video setup was professional. It was elaborate and
01:42:01
his tape cataloges were organized like a library. And Hammond would even label the tapes by like date, by victim's
01:42:08
initials. But some of the tapes were also labeled ready. Ready for what? I don't know.
01:42:19
Distribution to go somewhere. Our reporting team tracked down one of Hammond's victims and she filled in some
01:42:28
blanks for us. And prepare to be disappointed yet again because she told us that not only did police never ask
01:42:36
their opinions on destroying the evidence, which we assumed, but when detectives were interviewing the
01:42:41
victims, they were asking these victims if they were in on it. like in on it. How exactly? The cops
01:42:52
were asking these teenage girls if they were performing for the cameras. Like, did anyone tell you where to stand and
01:42:58
like what to do? And on top of that, she said that Fort Collins PD never once offered to let these teen girls have a
01:43:06
parent or trusted adult in the room with them during their interviews. So, it just feels like the victims have never
01:43:12
once had a voice in that case. Like every decision was made for them, even after the cops basically treated them
01:43:20
like suspects. Oh, and remember how I told you like we found out that like there was a file that said some of the
01:43:24
DA's office had socialized at Hammonds, might be on the tapes, whatever. Well, when we finally got to track down
01:43:30
Judge Terry Gilmore, that was obviously one of the things we asked him specifically about. We weren't able to
01:43:36
talk to anyone else. And he confirmed that the destruction of the tapes did go against regular policy and he admitted
01:43:42
to knowing Dr. Hammond personally before his arrest, but he says that he only socialized with him one time and that he
01:43:49
was never at the doctor's home. And that's kind of where that ended. Okay. And then there's one more thing that I
01:43:54
want to mention before we wrap things up on Hammond. So, we got a hold of a woman
01:43:58
who in 1988ish went to the eye clinic where Hammond worked for an emergency. Like her son got like Sandy Snowball
01:44:05
lodged in his eye or whatever. Now, Hammond is not their regular doctor, but he was the one on call that weekend. So
01:44:11
they're alone in the eye clinic with him and Dr. Hammond was treating the boy. He's like 9 or 10. And his mom had to
01:44:17
use the restroom. So she went to the closest one that she could find, which was the men's stall, but Dr. Hammond
01:44:23
came and like physically blocked her from using the men's restroom, and he insisted that she had to use the women's
01:44:30
restroom. And she's like, "Okay, like whatever, dude." Yeah. And when she got inside and flipped the
01:44:36
light switch on, she heard this like worring. So, this is an 88. No one knows and
01:44:44
won't know for years about Hammond's secret taping hobby. And what they ended up determining at
01:44:50
his house is like it's the light switch. So, he like when you turn it on that triggered it to start recording. So, he
01:44:54
didn't even have to be there. And she's hearing this at his office. Now, she says in the moment she was certain it
01:45:01
was a camera. not even like years later, but in that moment, like specifically one of those big cameras from the 80s
01:45:06
that had that distinct sound when it turned on, specifically when it focused. And she even flipped the light switch
01:45:12
off because she was like so freaked out. She was like looking for a red light or
01:45:16
any sign that she was being recorded. Wait, did police find cameras at his practice? Or I mean, did they even
01:45:23
search it? So, it depends on who you ask. Ray Martinez told us that they didn't. Uh,
01:45:28
but our reporters found an old article at the CSU archives that said they did search the doctor's office, but that
01:45:35
article also had some other wrong information in it. So, I don't really know for sure
01:45:40
if we even know. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Ray Martinez worked the case. So, like I want to trust him, but
01:45:44
like it's also been so many years. You never know. So, anyways, fast forward 7 years and this woman is like seeing the
01:45:50
headlines about Dr. Hammond's cameras in his basement and she's like she has this
01:45:55
like oh my god moment like it what what I thought was real. Did she tell the police about her
01:46:00
encounter? No, not right away. She said that once she realized Dr. Hammond had died, she
01:46:04
wasn't sure what could even be done. But as years went by, she kind of got curious as to whether she was on any of
01:46:11
the tapes. Then obviously she found out forcon speed had destroyed them and that there
01:46:16
was no way of knowing which tells me again that they burned all those tapes. Like it's more proof to me that they did
01:46:21
that before identifying all of the victims that they didn't want to revictimize by telling them they were
01:46:25
victims. Now, the only thing she was told by police was that there was some tapes
01:46:31
that looked to be in a different room than the bathroom. So, clearly somewhere else was being filmed. They never
01:46:40
followed up with her after that. So, who knows how many victims there were. And when Dr. Hammond died, the case just got
01:46:47
tossed. And even though he had been arrested and charged, when you go to the Justice Center in Fort Collins in
01:46:53
District Court, it basically looks like Richard Hammond never even committed a crime, which is like one of the most
01:46:59
bananas part I think about the whole thing. Yeah, it just went away. Literally disappeared. And I think it
01:47:06
might take friends in high places to make that happen. So still looking into Hammond. I will forever be looking into
01:47:13
Hammond. But there was one other thing that came up as we were touring. So, another man named Randy Angland, his
01:47:22
name popped up because there was a note on one of Tim's lawyers like papers or something that just said Angland cut off
01:47:31
nipples too, which feels like an important note in this case, especially is what we're looking for,
01:47:38
right? So, we're looking into him still kind of actively. We found out that he was on this crime spree from 77 to 87 in
01:47:46
northern Colorado, specifically really active in ' 87 for burglaries, sexual assaults. I haven't found any cases
01:47:52
where a nipple was removed yet, but we did get some records and those he's like clearly escalating. And there is a tip
01:47:59
in Peggy's case about a car with Wyoming license plates like near the area at the
01:48:04
time she died and he had a car with Wyoming license plates. So again, more to be done on him, more to be done on
01:48:12
everything, which is the whole point of this story is to tell people that I think it'd be really easy for for police
01:48:20
to say like, oh, or the DA's office, whatever. Like, it's a we we tried everything we can. It's a closed case.
01:48:26
There's still more that can be done and it's so obvious. But for some reason after Tim was released, after he won his
01:48:34
like settlement, it just stopped. Now Tim did go on to write a book about his case that he self-published. And I
01:48:44
mean, in all these years, he's been trying to make up for lost time. He likes to work on cars. He works with
01:48:49
horses. He's spending time with people he loves. He's making up for lost time with them. and he even has an unexpected
01:48:57
confidant these days. I think it is really ironic that the the former lead investigator in the case who
01:49:03
came to arrest me in 1992 is actually one of my dearest friends now, Linda Holloway.
01:49:11
Turns out she's a really good person. She put herself out there so much. Linda Holloway put herself out there so much
01:49:16
to do the right thing. It just for one and she it greatly endear me to her. I'm not good with good at words,
01:49:27
but it's very endearing that she did that. She put herself out there for me and it just speaks volumes to her
01:49:33
integrity. She's she's just one of those people that will do she'll do the right
01:49:39
thing regardless. She just has she does the right thing. That's a rare person in
01:49:44
this world. I mean, a lot of people wouldn't go out on a limb like she did. They would just
01:49:52
go with the grain. Life would have been a lot easier for her if she had just gone with the grain and not not gone
01:49:58
gone against everybody else. As for Peggy's brother, Tom, he was diagnosed 2 and 1/2 years ago with stage
01:50:06
4 colon cancer, which he said is what has made him so vocal. He is one of Peggy's only remaining family members
01:50:13
fighting for her and now he needs us to like take up that torch and fight for her.
01:50:20
I said, "You guys have had 30ome years to do your job." And I said, "Obviously at this point you're telling me the case
01:50:28
is closed." And I said, "But the fella upstairs is going to they're not getting by him. He
01:50:35
already knows who it is and he'll take care of this problem." and they just all their all their faces just turned white.
01:50:43
And I said, "He'll he will get the final say. You've had your chance." And uh and I said, "What's it going to
01:50:52
take to reopen this?" Cuz they told me it was closed. And they said, "Short of a full confession, nothing."
01:51:02
I said, "You what?" and they said unless somebody actually comes forward and admits to it completely
01:51:10
and and fully uh we can't reopen this case. And I just I was as far as I was concerned with that meeting I was done.
01:51:22
I wanted to get out of there because for over 30ome years we I've waited around for something to to take place for this
01:51:33
and then they take somebody and they put him in prison for 9 years and he's innocent as the driven white snow and
01:51:41
they ruin his life to a certain extent and then he gets out and and rightfully so and and here we are. Here we are
01:51:52
today, right now, doing this interview, and still nothing has been done about it. And it's like everybody just wants
01:52:00
to turn a blind eye to it and move on. What? What? Move on. Well, you're I don't have much longer to
01:52:11
go because I have a disease that'll take my life soon and I want something done about I want the people that have the
01:52:19
ability to do their job to get busy and do their job. That's what they need to do instead of just turning a blind eye.
01:52:26
Well, you know, it is what it is. Case closed. There have been a lot of mistakes in
01:52:32
this case that I've learned through media, through the newspaper, from Linda, quite a bit from Linda. And uh
01:52:39
I'm not happy. I'm very upset about this. So, I don't have longer to go. So, I want something done about it
01:52:47
immediately. So, Crime Junkies, this is where you come in. Our team has spent months reporting on this case, producing
01:52:56
this live show. We've taken it to 17 different cities with a shared goal in mind, justice for Peggy Hedrickk. So,
01:53:04
we're asking you to join us in asking the Colorado Attorney General's office to reopen Peggy's case, assign a new
01:53:11
investigator, and explore new DNA testing. And we've made it super easy for you. All you have to do is click the
01:53:17
link below, fill out your information, and we're going to send an email on your behalf. Literally, it could not be more
01:53:25
simple. This is why we do this show and we know this is why you guys listen. So,
01:53:30
please take a moment. I know a lot of you who went to the show were experiencing technical difficulties. We
01:53:35
have um crashed the the attorney general's website more than once. So, this is your reminder. If you were at
01:53:42
the show and didn't get an email through, please do that now. And if you're listening, please either stop
01:53:47
what you're doing and do it now. Set a reminder. This is so important and Tom is really looking for your help. You can
01:53:53
find all the source material for this episode on our website crimejunkkeyodcast.com
01:53:58
and you can follow us on Instagram at crimejunkkeyodcast. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode.
01:54:05
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