The Disturbing Small Town Murder That Came Out Of Colorado

Our horrifying story begins in 1982 in Breckenridge, when 21-year-old Mary Brown took a ride from Thomas "Tom" Edward Luther, who proceeded to both sexually assault and beat her with a claw hammer. It didn’t take long before Luther and his vehicle were traced, which lead to his first trial, conviction, and sentence of 9 years in prison. (Around this same time, Breckenridge residents Bobbi Oberholtzer and Annette Schnee’s bodies had been found near Hoosier Pass, a murder — thought to also be by Tom Luther — that remains unsolved decades later.) Shortly after his release in 1993, Luther shot and killed 20-year-old Cher Elder near Central City and brutally attacked another woman before fleeing the state. Pictured above: Tom Luther.

While hiding out along the east coast (West Virginia, to be exact), Luther assaulted and beat another hitchhiker before being caught, convicted, and extradited back to Colorado. During the Cher Elder trial (whose body, by the way, was not even recovered until 1995), the judge did not allow Luther’s previous convictions to be taken into consideration by the jury, leading to only a 48-year sentence for second-degree murder. (It was because of one juror’s issue with the first-degree murder charges that Luther was only convicted of second-degree, leading to both Elder’s family and the other 11 jurors to lobby to change the unanimous verdict.) Pictured above: A map depicting the Bobbie Jo Oberholtzer and Annette Schnee murders.