Of course, the book jacket uses "includes 12 pages of shocking photos!" as a selling point. I nearly put it back on the shelf; I hate that. (Were the photos shocking? Nah.) I doubt that's Jackson's fault, though, so I won't hold it against him.
The story begins in the middle. It's 1993 and the bright future of 20-year-old Cher Elder has been extinguished somewhere in the mountains of Colorado. Lakewood Detective Scott Richardson is on the trail of a suspect, an ex-con named Tom Luther. Chapter two jumps back to Breckenridge 1982, when two young women disappeared within hours of each other. Annette Kay Schnee was last seen alive hitchhiking along Highway 9, trying to get back to her cabin in Breckenridge. Bobbi Jo Oberholtzer was also last seen hitchhiking on Highway 9, later that evening.
Bobbi Jo's body was discovered the next afternoon. She'd died of exposure and blood loss. The cheery 29-year-old had a flex-cuff (those plastic cuffs cops use) on one wrist and had been shot once.
Annette's body was not found until 1982, when an 11-year-old boy discovered her deep in the woods, facedown in a stream. She had been shot once, in the back.
No one has ever been charged with the murder Bobbi Jo and Annette, but Jackson leans heavily towards Tom Luther. And he supports that with some good evidence: Luther was in the area, and Luther had a history of vicious attacks against women.
Back to Cher Elder. Detective Richardson spent two years tracking down evidence against Luther and trying to get the players in this drama to reveal where Luther had buried her.
He finally succeeded and in January 1995, Cher's body was recovered from a shallow grave in the Arapaho National Forest.
Luther was indicted in March 1995 by a Jefferson County grand jury. Jackson follows the trial and while the investigation was interesting, the dynamics of the trial really opened my eyes to how The System works.
District Attorney Dave Thomas sought a death penalty conviction for Luther. But while 11 jurors voted to convict Luther of first-degree murder, a 12th evidently refused to even discuss it and held out for second-degree murder.
