Peggy Hettrick Case: Misconduct, DNA Exoneration, and Settlement

The Peggy Hettrick murder case is the 1987 Fort Collins, Colorado killing of a 37-year-old woman whose body was found stabbed and sexually mutilated in an open field, a case that produced one of the state’s most notorious wrongful convictions when a 15-year-old neighbor, Timothy Masters, was imprisoned for nearly a decade before DNA evidence and hidden exculpatory material forced his exoneration. No one else has ever been charged, and the murder is officially unsolved.

Who Peggy Hettrick Was

Peggy Hettrick was born on March 1, 1949. She stood five feet two inches, had red-auburn hair and blue eyes, and worked at the Fashion Bar clothing store in Fort Collins.¹ Friends described her as artistic and intelligent. Between shifts at the store, she was writing a novel.

The Night of February 10–11, 1987

Hettrick left work around 9 p.m. on February 10, 1987 and found herself locked out of her apartment because she had loaned her keys to a woman staying with her. She spent several hours moving between bars and calling home before finally getting inside around midnight.² She changed clothes and went back out on foot. Between roughly 12:30 and 1:15 a.m. she was at the Prime Minister Pub and Grill, where witnesses saw her hugging and kissing her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Matt Zoellner, who was there with another woman. Hettrick left around 1:15 a.m. Zoellner later said he ran into her in the parking lot and offered a ride, but she declined and walked.³

At 7:13 a.m. a bicyclist discovered her body in an open field on the west side of the 3800 block of Landings Drive. She had been killed by a single deep stab wound to the upper back. One nipple and parts of her genitalia had been neatly cut away.⁴ Investigators concluded she had been killed in the early morning hours while walking home.

How Police Fixed on Timothy Masters

Timothy Masters was 15 and lived in a trailer near the field. His father told police that on the morning of the discovery he watched his son pause near a berm where the body lay before continuing on to school. Masters never reported seeing anything. He later said he thought the body was a mannequin left as a prank.⁴

Investigators searched his bedroom and backpack and recovered more than 2,200 pages of drawings and writings depicting violence, stabbing, and death.⁵ They also found six survival knives, a Mother’s Day card, and a copy of his deceased mother’s death certificate; his mother had died four years earlier. One drawing recovered the day after the murder showed a person dragging a body by the armpits and leaving a bloody trail, which loosely matched the forensic theory of how Hettrick had been moved. No physical evidence, no blood, no hair, and no skin cells connected Masters to Hettrick or the scene.⁴

Police kept the focus on him for years. In 1988 they conducted anniversary-date surveillance that produced nothing, and, according to his later civil filings, planted fake newspaper stories about his imminent arrest to try to provoke a reaction.⁶ Other leads went cold while he stayed the target.

The 1999 Trial

Masters was arrested in August 1998, more than eleven years after the murder, and tried in March 1999 on a charge of first-degree murder.⁷ The prosecution’s case rested almost entirely on his drawings and the opinion of a California forensic psychologist, Dr. Reid Meloy. Without ever interviewing Masters, who had invoked his Fifth Amendment rights, Meloy reviewed the artwork and told jurors the defendant had been “reliving the crime” through it and that the fantasies served as “motive and rehearsal” for the killing.⁵ The trial judge barred Meloy from directly saying Masters committed the crime but let the testimony in as context for motive.

The jury convicted him. He received a mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. The Colorado Court of Appeals upheld the conviction in 2001, and in 2002 the Colorado Supreme Court acknowledged some evidence should have been suppressed but called the error harmless.⁸

What Prosecutors and Police Hid

A new defense team appointed in 2004 began discovering that critical physical evidence from Hettrick and her purse had gone missing. By 2007, court hearings had exposed a wide pattern of misconduct in the original case.⁸

Prosecutors Terence Gilmore and Jolene Blair, who had both become Larimer County judges by then, failed to disclose several pieces of exculpatory material. That included enhanced photographs of shoe prints at the scene that did not match Masters’ shoes, notes from FBI profiler Roy Hazelwood questioning the significance of the drawings, the full 300-page Meloy report noting that the wounds appeared “surgical,” and the opinion of plastic surgeon Dr. Richard Tsoi that the precise cuts would be difficult to perform.⁹

Prosecutors also concealed information about other suspects, including their awareness of Dr. Richard Hammond, an eye surgeon who lived within sight of the field, and Donald Long, a man who had admitted to killing two other women in the Fort Collins-Greeley area around the same time.⁷ According to Masters’ civil rights lawsuit, they manipulated expert witnesses by feeding them a narrow slice of the evidence, both with Meloy and with blood-spatter expert Tom Bevel, who was given “carefully selected pieces of evidence.”

Fingerprints and hair from the scene and from Hettrick’s belongings that did not belong to Masters were reportedly lost by the Fort Collins Police Department, which foreclosed later comparison with other suspects. Gilmore authorized the destruction of all evidence from the Hammond investigation after Hammond’s 1995 suicide, and Donald Long’s evidence was destroyed in 1993. Neither Gilmore nor Blair disclosed personal ties to Hammond: Gilmore knew him socially and through church, and Blair was a patient at his eye clinic.

The DNA Evidence That Freed Him

Forensic testing performed in the Netherlands by Richard and Selma Eikelenboom identified a full male DNA profile on the waistband of Hettrick’s underpants and on the cuffs of her blouse. The profile belonged to Matt Zoellner, her ex-boyfriend. Testing on those same items did not match Masters.⁹

In January 2008 a visiting judge vacated the conviction and released Masters, finding the DNA did not implicate him and that prosecutors had withheld exculpatory material. All charges were dropped. He became the first person in Colorado freed from prison based on DNA evidence.¹⁰ In 2011, then-Attorney General John Suthers formally concluded that Masters was not involved in the murder, completing his exoneration.⁸

What Happened to the Officials

Discipline was limited. In September 2008, the Colorado Supreme Court’s Office of Attorney Regulation publicly censured Gilmore and Blair for failing to ensure the defense received key information that undermined the prosecution’s case.¹¹ Both acknowledged the failure. Neither was removed from the bench and neither was fined. The sanction was believed to be the first time sitting Colorado judges were disciplined for conduct predating their judgeships.¹² Gilmore had also been censured in 1994 in a separate case for failing to disclose that a prosecution witness was under investigation.

Lt. Jim Broderick, the lead Fort Collins detective who had driven the case for years, was indicted on eight felony perjury counts for allegedly making false statements in the arrest warrant application, at the preliminary hearing, and at trial. The charges alleged he lied about an FBI profile, shoe prints, a fellow investigator’s observations, and his own involvement.¹³ The charges were later dropped after District Attorney Ken Buck said he did not believe there was enough evidence for a conviction.¹⁴

The $10 Million Settlement

Masters filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city of Fort Collins, Larimer County, Gilmore, Blair, Broderick, and other officials. In February 2010, Larimer County settled for $4.1 million.¹⁵ Fort Collins later settled for $5.9 million, bringing the total to $10 million.¹⁶

Who Else Has Been Investigated

With Masters cleared, the question of who killed Hettrick has never been answered.

Matt Zoellner

Zoellner, the ex-boyfriend, was a suspect from the day the body was found. Police interrogated him, searched his apartment, took knives, and gave him a polygraph, which he passed. Original lead investigator Jack Taylor cleared him based on his alibi and the absence of physical evidence at the time. Zoellner said he stayed at the Prime Minister with another date, Dawn Gilbreath, until closing and then went to his apartment; Gilbreath signed an affidavit saying she was there until 3:30 a.m.¹⁷ Later DNA testing identified his full profile on Hettrick’s underwear, blouse cuffs, and coat. Investigators noted the profile could have come from the hugging and kissing witnesses described at the pub shortly before her death.⁹ He has never been charged.

Dr. Richard Hammond

Hammond was an eye surgeon who lived within sight of the field. Fort Collins detectives urged Gilmore to pursue him rather than Masters, calling him “likely the culprit” given his surgical skill, proximity, and criminal history.⁷ Defense attorneys later argued he had the specialized ability needed for the precise wounds on Hettrick’s body.¹⁸ In 1995, Hammond was arrested for secretly videotaping women and girls in his home’s downstairs bathroom, an operation he had been running since at least 1992. Days after the arrest, he killed himself in a Denver hotel room with a self-administered IV drip of cyanide. Gilmore then authorized the destruction of all evidence from the Hammond case, including hundreds of videotapes, before it could be reviewed against the Hettrick murder. State DNA testing eventually ruled Hammond out.⁹

Other Names

Donald Long, who admitted to killing two other women in the Fort Collins-Greeley area within a year of Hettrick’s murder, was identified as a potential suspect, but evidence in his case was destroyed in 1993.⁷ Convicted serial killer Scott Kimball was in the Fort Collins area in 1987 and a later victim of his had similar mutilation, but DNA evidence cleared him.¹⁹ A younger man identified in original files by names including “Derrick” or “Derek,” who had briefly dated Hettrick and was seen at the Laughing Dog Saloon, was also never resolved; multiple witnesses described him showing up uninvited at her apartment before her death.²

Where the Case Stands Now

The Colorado Attorney General’s Office took over the investigation after Masters’ conviction was vacated. The killing remains officially unsolved and is listed in the state’s cold case database.²⁰ Peggy’s brother, Tom Hettrick, has said the Attorney General’s Office told him the case is considered closed and would require a “full confession from the perpetrator” to reopen.

In May 2025, Tom Hettrick appeared on two episodes of the Crime Junkie podcast to push for renewed attention. Diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer, he told the podcast, “I may not be around before this comes to a conclusion, but I’d like to see it start.” Linda Wheeler-Holloway, the former Fort Collins detective who investigated the case and became one of the earliest voices questioning Masters’ guilt, backed the effort. “There’s a murderer out there,” she said. “He’s not been held accountable.”²¹

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Coloradoan. Murder in Fort Collins: Who Was Peggy Hettrick
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Denver Post. Key Questions Linger in Prominent Cold Case: The Killing of Peggy Hettrick
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CBS News. Drawn to Murder
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5280. Update: DNA Has Cleared Scott Kimball as a Possible Suspect
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Colorado Cold Case. Case Detail: Peggy Hettrick
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Coloradoan. Fort Collins Murder Victim Peggy Hettrick Brother Makes Plea