Free Monster by Steve Jackson Page A

But as the undersheriff told an investigator many years later, following his retirement, “there wasn’t time” to pursue the matter and the notes ended up in the Oberholtzer/Schnee file. Disregarded.
    When Martin returned to the penitentiary in Canon City, he was locked up in segregation away from the general prison population for his own protection. The Corrections Department had received information that Luther was trying to get him killed by another inmate.
    In the meantime, rumors were circulating that Luther had bragged to still others about shooting two girls near Breckenridge. In October, a detective was sent to interview a convicted sex offender named Ronald Montoya, who had approached officials at the Adams County Jail, one of many where Luther was held for a period of time as he awaited trial.
    Luther had told him that he was being investigated for murdering two girls. Now, according to Montoya, he wanted three more people killed: Mary Brown, Sue Potter, and John Martin.
    Luther told him he’d pay Montoya an ounce of cocaine—worth about $2,000—to arrange the death of Brown to prevent her from testifying against him. He knew from his friends that she was working at a restaurant in Denver; he had the restaurant address and her home address—both of which checked out.
    “He said he picked her up and tried to rape her, but he couldn’t get it up, so he used the hammer,” Montoya said. “He said he was going to kill her by shooting her when she got out of the truck, but there were houses nearby, and he was afraid the shot would be heard.”
    Montoya said that Luther had laughed about the cops “screwing up” when they arrested him because they hadn’t located two other pistols, a .45 and a .38-caliber, two sawed-off shotguns, 25 pounds of pot, and four ounces of cocaine. His girlfriend, whom Luther called “Lips,” had gotten rid of everything. But now Luther wanted “Lips” dead, too.
    According to Montoya, Potter had dumped Luther for another man and removed $500 from his bank account. “He said he would like to be the one to kill her himself, if he could get out. He wanted her face blown off.
    “Lips is scared to death of Luther because she knows something.... Every time he talks about her, he gets real wild and crazy-acting.”
    As for Martin, Montoya said, Luther told him that the older convict “knows too much and talked too much.... Martin could be a witness against him because of what he told him about the rape and death of a girl.” Luther wanted Montoya to contact the Mexican Mafia at the penitentiary to have Martin killed. He was willing to pay $500.
    Montoya said he also had his own, firsthand information incriminating Luther. Three months earlier, he said, he was watching television with Luther when there was a newscast about a missing girl. “He said, ‘They’ll never find the bitch,’ ” Montoya recalled. “After that he got real quiet and wouldn’t talk for three days.”
    But Luther had approached him again. He said he’d met a girl at a bar in Breckenridge. They’d left to snort cocaine; afterwards he’d asked her to perform an apparently indecent sexual act. “But she said ‘No,’ and called him a pervert. He flipped out and started choking her.”
    Montoya said that Luther had killed the girl—he had only guessed that it was by strangulation because Luther hadn’t mentioned anything else. “He dumped her body up in the mountains, under some brush.”
    From what police could ascertain, Martin and Montoya had never met. Yet their stories were amazingly similar. Luther had supposedly told both of them that he had killed other women and dumped their bodies in the woods, which was also close to what Dillon John Curtis had said in his interview. Martin and Montoya also claimed that Luther admitted raping Mary Brown with the hammer handle and said he had considered shooting her before deciding against it.
    If Montoya was telling the truth, Luther now wanted Mary Brown,