48 Hours: Drawn To Murder

(CBS)  This episode was originally broadcast on Nov. 29, 2008. It was updated on Dec. 27, 2009.

In February 1987, people in Fort Collins, Colo., were on edge after a woman, Peggy Hettrick, was found murdered and sexually mutilated.

Police almost immediately zeroed in on a local teenager named Tim Masters, even though there was no physical evidence to tie him to the crime. But investigators kept revisiting the case, and years after the murder arrested Tim, tried him, and won a conviction.

But as correspondent Susan Spencer reports, this case is anything but open and shut. Is Tim really a crazed killer, as the lead investigator insists, or is he just a victim of circumstance?

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Tim went to prison in 1999, and for much of that time, lived in a cramped, dreary cell, sentenced to life for a grisly murder he swears he did not commit.

"I'd be laying in my bunk… and it still astounded me that I was there. I couldn't believe it," he says.

His latest court hearing didn't seem real either, because after years of hearings and petitions and unsuccessful appeals, a judge at last was about to make a ruling that could set him free.

If he does walk free, he'll have a small army of unlikely supporters to thank - not just his gigantic extended family, but also lawyers and even former cops, all of them claiming they've been sure for years that Tim didn't do it.

Tim has walked in the shadow of this murder since he was 15 years old. On the morning of Feb. 11, 1987, the half-naked body of a 37-year-ols woman named Peggy Hettrick was found in a field in Fort Collins, Colo. - a stone's throw from Tim's house.

There were a lot of people who felt Tim was a viable suspect, including veteran cop Linda Wheeler.

"I think it was like 7:13 in the morning. The body has just been discovered… The body was very clean to look at; there was no blood on the body," Wheeler explains.

The passerby who spotted the body first mistook it for a mannequin.

There was a deep stab wound to Peggy's upper back. "You could see a bloody drag trail in the furrows," remembers Officer Jim Broderick. "It was pretty apparent that the victim was dragged out to the final resting point."

When Broderick arrived at the scene, he was struck by footprints along that trail, leading back to a pool of blood by the curb and he was struck by the body itself. Peggy's pants were pulled down to her knees, her shirt pushed up to her chin. Part of one of her breasts had been removed.

The prospect of a madman sexually mutilating his victims created near panic and Broderick and the Fort Collins police went into overdrive.

Among the early "persons of interest" was Peggy's one-time boyfriend, Matt Zoellner. He was questioned for hours, even took a polygraph, and was then released.

Police meanwhile were canvassing every house near the crime scene, talking with businessmen, housewives and even with prominent eye surgeon Dr. Richard Hammond. Years later, Hammond would figure in this case, but back then, he was just another neighbor who had seen nothing suspicious.

But Linda Wheeler was sure someone must have seen something. She says the first house she went to was the Masters home, where Clyde and his 15-year-old son Tim lived. Tim had few friends, but no history of trouble.

His mother had died four years earlier, when he was only 11.

Usually, Tim cut straight through the field to catch the school bus, but his father told police that on that morning, he'd seen his son hesitate. "And had veered to the left as he was walking through the field, and had stopped for a few moments," Wheeler says. "It became very obvious to me that his son must have seen the body."

Tim's footprints were in the field, but he hadn't reported a thing. A few hours later, police appeared at Tim's high school and yanked him out of class for questioning, as Broderick recalled in an interview in 2000.

Tim's explanation for not reporting it was that he thought it was just a mannequin and that somebody was playing a trick. "I didn't believe it was real...a 15-year-old kid," he says. "But all morning long, as I'm at school I'm thinking about it, 'What if it was really a body?'"

The passerby who called in the crime also thought he'd seen a mannequin, but police weren't buying that story from Tim.

Broderick searched the Masters' trailer, and hit pay dirt. "And there on his dresser he's got seven knives, six, seven survival knives, all sequentially displayed," he remembers.

And one of them, Broderick assumed, could be the murder weapon. With Tim's father's permission, Broderick and a team of cops interrogated the teen for more than 10 hours without a lawyer.

Watch excerpts of Tim Masters' interrogation

Tim insisted that he didn't know what had happened and that he was innocent. Police also gave him a lie detector test. The official report of the test results is lost today, but Broderick says Tim failed.

"He definitely needed to be looked at, yes. Definitely he did, and it was very easy for everybody a kind of pack mentality to start focusing on him," Wheeler says.

And leading the pack was Jim Broderick, who was about to find evidence that for him erased all doubt Tim had killed Peggy.

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[MDViewer10]

It's not VAGINA, it's VULVA. David Wymore needs to learn female anatomy. You don't see a woman's vagina from that camera angle. You are unlikely to see one unless you are a gynecologist. You'd think someone would have corrected him before he said it 40 times on national television. And in a "female circumcision," it's the ******** that is removed. That's not the vagina.

[xcel58]

I think at last count 284 innocent people have been released from prison since DNA testing. I know everybody thinks that if they are in prison they must be guilty, but so often that is not the case. I have worked with prisoners for quite a few years. Most admit they are guilty. The ones that keep saying over and over that they are innocent just might be. I am helping one guy now to try to get a new trial.

[jubileepug]

I remember Peggy from when she worked as a sales clerk at the Fashion Bar Store in the Square at Horsetooth and College in South Ft Collins, near where the murder occurred. She had been at a party at the then Winston's Bar and Grill which was where the Olive Garden Restaurant is now. She had been offered a ride home but she refused and chose to walk. She was found in that field which was then near the lumber company and is now developed into office buildings.

[pnut134]

When prosecutors withhold evidence just so they can win a case, and it is later proved they did so, then they should be sentenced to the same number of years in prison they caused the innocent person to suffer.

[xcel58]

I agree, but sadly they get a slap on the wrist and do nothing to them. That is why they keep doing it. Prosecutorial misconduct is rarely filed against any of them. They are trying to close cases so they can get promoted to judges someday. They really don't care about the people they hurt.

[peggygorley]

This is the 2nd time I have watched this episode and it is tragic in many ways, but I have come away with the question of: How do investigators know for sure that the dna help given them by the deceased Dr.'s wife is actually his? Why would she want to help investigators find that it was her husband; too again be shamed by his sick actions?

To me so much points to him. No he wasn't the person to find her, because he wasn't walking to school in the morning, he was probably driving his mercedes to work, and on and on and on.......He had years to get rid of evidence. His wife gave receipts for the video equipment that was purchased after the death of Peggy, well, who is to say that the equipment he purchased at that time wasn't to update his old equipment? Let's face it, many many tapes were never watched to know how long her had been doing this. I feel because he killed himself, he just is being shoved aside as the criminal, and I think there needs to be a lot more looked at when it comes to him. Thanks for listening.

[Heartlight]

Where do you go to get your life back? What a tragedy on so many levels.

[xcel58]

He gets absolutely nothing from Colorado. Other states compensate people when they have been falsely accused, but the only way he will get anything is if he files a civil suit and wins.

[sean71z]

Tim's original polygraph does not exist. Why not take a polygraph now and verify his innocence?

[carrieward]

I was especially upset over the only evidence the Prosecutors had was stupid drawings done by Tim.. SO WHAT??? !! When I was in Jr. High/High School I had a lot of dark Goth friends that drew stuff like that. They didn't go on to murder anybody. Don't they remember what kind of TV shows our generation watched growing up? They were totally violent. That makes no sense. I'd sue the Psychologist too. What a moron! Most psychologists are morons.

[carrieward]

Wow. I would like to shake all the people that served on the jury in this case for the Guilty verdict in the first place. It's a good thing I don't own a gun or live in CO. because after watching this I feel like shooting the Male Cop/Detective who so wrongly pursued the kid in the first place. Tim, I'm glad Justice was finally truly served. I'm so sorry you lost your life for so long. I pray that God will bless you the rest of your life now. ~ Carrie

[xcel58]

The problem is that the jury never hears all of the evidence. They only hear what the prosecution wants them to hear. The judge is also in the dark as to all of the evidence. It's easy to manipulate a trial when they don't have to present everything.

[apollonias]

A good story, with a happy ending. What stuck me as a glaring omission, however, was any coverage whatsoever of the judge in the original trial. The show has us booing the prosecution and the over-zealous cop but not even the name of the judge is given. That person could have put a stop to the original flimsy trial in the first place. Why was this not included in your program?

The fact that the two original prosecutors have *now become judges* themselves, and they are being censured for their behavior in the first trial, speaks volumes. It seems the selection and election of judges is one of the weakest points in the system. We are instructed to vote for them, but on what basis? What does any average voter know about any candidate for the judiciary? They should receive more scrutiny before they have the chance to wield the sword of justice over all of us, often for life.