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Tim Masters was convicted in 1999 of the 1987 murder of Peggy Hettrick.  Hettrick's body had been found in a south Fort Collins field just hours after she was last seen leaving a nearby restaurant.  This location was 100 feet north of the mobile home of Tim Masters.  Masters' father told police that his 15-year-old son had walked through the field as he did every day to take a bus to school.

When police contacted Masters, he admitted seeing the body.  He thought it might be a mannequin or that someone might have played a prank on him.  However, he did not report the body and police were skeptical of the reasons he gave.  In the margins of Masters' notebooks, police found sketches of dinosaurs with arrows through them, gruesome war scenes described by his Vietnam veteran dad, and horror flicks such as "Nightmare on Elm Street."  Masters loved to write, and his goal was to be another Stephen King.  Masters' special-ed teacher said she was not at all concerned about his drawings as most of her kids scrawled horrific images.

In 1995, a prominent eye surgeon, Dr. Richard Hammond, briefly became a suspect in the crime after he was caught with numerous voyeuristic videotapes.  Hammond, however, soon committed suicide.  Noticing that Hammond lived across the street from the crime scene and that his tapes focused on female genitalia, some investigators wanted to review all of Hammond's tapes to see if Hettrick appeared in any of the videos.  However, the lead investigator in the Hettrick case and his supervisor had the tapes destroyed.  They were focused on Masters.

In 1998, eleven years after the crime, Masters was arrested for Hettrick's murder and brought to trial in 1999.  An "expert" interpreted Masters' drawings and what they said about his psychological motives.  The prosecution presented footprint evidence that Masters detoured from his usual path to his bus stop to walk within 6 feet of the body.  This detour allegedly satisfied a psychological need of Masters to revisit the scene of his crime.  Masters' attorneys were convinced of their client's innocence, but they saw fear in the jury's eyes.  Masters had grown into a muscular man and was no longer the 110 lb. adolescent who doodled in his notebook.

A later examination of evidence showed that Hettrick's murderer had performed a partial vulvectomy on her.  This procedure required good lighting, so it moved the crime scene away the darkened field where her body was found.  It also required a surgical instrument and a high degree of surgical skill.  It is very doubtful that Masters could have performed this procedure as he had no surgical training.  A plastic surgeon who reviewed the evidence noted that even he would have difficulty inflicting the wounds found on Hettrick.

In Jan. 2008, Masters' conviction was overturned after advanced DNA tests exonerated him. He was released on bond.   (Denver Post) (Update) (Exoneration) [3/08]

On Aug. 15, 1936, Dorothy Drain, 15, and her sister Barbara, 12, were hit in the head with the blunt edge of a hatchet in their Pueblo home at 1536 Stone Ave.  Their parents, Riley and Peggy Drain, returned after a night out to find Dorothy dying and Barbara in a coma.  Dorothy had also been raped.  The hatchet was found in the home of Frank Aguilar and he was arrested on Aug 20.  Riley Drain had fired Aguilar from his job at a WPA project.  Pueblo Police Chief J. Arthur Grady believed all evidence clearly revealed Aguilar was the murderer.

On Aug. 26, Joe Arridy was arrested for vagrancy in Cheyenne, Wyoming.  Deputies there thought he was an Army deserter because of the khaki shirt he wore.  Arridy, 21, had spent most of his life in Grand Junction, Colorado at the Colorado State Home and Training School for Mental Defectives. When he was 11, his father, Henry Arridy, an illiterate Syrian immigrant, got Joe out of the institution to live with him in Pueblo.  But officials returned him when he was 14.  A few days before the Drain murder, Arridy left the institution, hopped a train and visited several Front Range cities including Pueblo.  While in Pueblo, he could not find his family, who had moved to another house in town.  He then hopped a train to Cheyenne.

In Cheyenne, Sheriff George J. Carroll got interested in Arridy when he discovered that he was from Pueblo.  The Drain murder had made Pueblo the talk of the region.  Carroll had a part in breaking up and arresting members of the Ma Barker gang.  He had rescued a rich young Denver man who had been kidnapped.  Carroll was famous, but had not had his name in the papers in a while.  Carroll said he spent “seven or eight” hours with Arridy, and reported that Arridy gave him details of the Drain murder and expressed remorse for his part.

Aguiler was tried in Dec. 1936.  At trial Barbara Drain walked up to the defense table and pointed out Aguiler as the man who killed her sister.  Despite being questioned by the prosecution and the defense, she never mentioned Arridy.  Riley Drain, the girls’ father, testified that he had visited Aguilar in prison where he said Aguilar told him Joe Arridy accompanied him on the night of the murder.  Although that testimony was admitted, Aguilar's written confession, signed with an "X," was not allowed at either his trial or later at Arridy's trials.  Aguiler was executed in Aug. 1937.

Arridy had a sanity trial and was found to be sane.  But the judge reversed his ruling and granted a new trial that would include the sanity question as well as guilt or innocence.  During Arridy's second trial in April 1937, two Colorado State Hospital doctors and Dr. Benjamin Jefferson, who ran the Grand Junction home where Arridy stayed, testified that Arridy would have a hard time ever giving detailed statements such as Sheriff Carroll had described.  But, since Arridy was a “mental defective,” the doctors said, technically he was not insane.  The jury found Arridy guilty of the Drain murder and he was sentenced to death.

After the verdict, Arridy was returned to prison in Cañon City.  Warden Best took a liking to Arridy, visited him every day, and gave him a red wind-up train.  Arridy happily played with the train during his time on death row.  Arridy reportedly had an IQ of 46 and the mental age of a five-year-old.  The following discussion was recorded on Dec. 1, 1938:  “Don't you [Arridy] want to be killed?”  “No, I want to live, I want to live here with Warden Best.”  “Don't you want to go back to the home in Grand Junction?”  “No, I want to get a life sentence and stay here with Warden Best.  At the home the kids used to beat me.”  “Would you rather be here Joe?”  “Yes I want to stay here, I can't get in trouble here....”  “Do you remember after the little girls were killed, you ran to the train, and they arrested you in Cheyenne, Wyoming?”  “No, I don't remember that.  But I remember the judge wanted to kill me.”  “You know what it means to go to the gas house, don't you Joe?”  “Yes, they kill you there. But I don't want to be killed.  I want a life sentence and stay here all the time.”

Prison officials and the Cañon City community fought to overturn Arridy’s death sentence, but the citizens of Pueblo were outraged.  Arridy was granted a stay of execution in 1938, but the Colorado Supreme Court voted four to three to continue with the execution.  Arridy was executed by lethal gas on Jan 6, 1939.  Arridy is subject of a 1995 book Deadly Innocence by Robert Perske (1995).  (CCPL) (Pueblo Chieftain)  [5/07]