At one point during Timothy Masters’ continuing hearing in Larimer County court last week, Masters’ lead attorney David Wymore entered the courtroom after a short break in presenting his case and asked a group of onlookers in the audience, “Is everyone getting the picture?”

It was, of course, a joke.

As it has for much of these proceedings, the courtroom looked like it had been hit by a cannonball, the evidence piled helter-skelter on, under and around every table surrounding the judge’s bench. Much of it was new to Wymore, and his efforts to elicit testimony from a witness while his assistants scrambled through it on hands and knees bordered at times on theater of the absurd.

Last week was particularly confusing since the amount of paperwork involved in the case at least doubled after the prosecutors emptied the police department of what they hoped was every record, including a box of documents on microfilm, related to the Peggy Hettrick homicide. Since the case has been plagued with repeated instances of relevant documents appearing as if out of thin air, the tidal wave of additional documentation was an effort to account for every sheet of paper related to the 20-year-old murder.

When hearings resumed Monday after a two-week recess, Judge Joseph Weatherby described all of the documentation in the case as occupying “10 square feet” of floor space in front of his bench, but at least some courtroom observers thought he underestimated. The amount of paperwork, binders, folders, legal pads, bankers boxes, photographs and poster boards seemed more likely to take up 10 cubic feet. Each day, the lawyers, investigators and advisory witnesses for each side lined up to wheel their crates of material into court on dollies, like well-dressed porters stocking food on the Pinta, Nina and Santa Maria.

At the beginning of hearings last week, lawyers attempted to tally it all and explain to the judge where the documents were being produced from. Special prosecutor Tom Quammen began with what he warned at the outset might be an “extremely boring” history of Fort Collins police records management practices, but which was important in that it explained that some documents might have been destroyed when the department switched documentation systems in 2004.

Wymore categorized the material’s origins into five main sources. Generally, both the prosecution and the defense have a full copy of each:

»» There was the original discovery file containing all the documents given to Masters’ original defense team, about 2,500 pages of information. This is the file that Wymore has said was sanitized of information that was exculpatory to Masters.

»» There was the material in the so-called McClellan binders that the defense obtained in October containing hundreds of pages of documents, most of them never before seen by either Masters’ former or current legal team. Much of it, Wymore has argued, was highly relevant and exculpatory to Masters’ case and should have been turned over as part of discovery.

»» There was a box of files from the Fort Collins police station referred to as the “Neimann box,” christened after Susan Neimann, the head of the records department. This contained thousands of pages of material, much of it duplications of things found in either the original discovery file or the McClellan binders, but a lot of it new to Masters’ attorneys.

»» There is a box of microfilmed documents that has yet to be given a nickname—or by midweek a deep analysis by either the defense or the prosecution of what it contains. Already, it has produced at least one document that both sides agree should have been provided to Masters’ original legal team, but which wasn’t: the transcript of a tape-recorded conversation between Masters and his father that qualified for discovery because it constituted a statement by the defendant.

»» And then there’s what’s called the “Broderick box”—formerly referred to by Wymore as Broderick’s “squirrel hole”—a collection of binders, notepads, physical evidence, crime scene photographs and other documents. The box is named after Fort Collins Police Lt. Jim Broderick, the investigator who built the case against Masters and who kept a cache of information related to the case that he wasn’t sure needed to be turned over to Masters’ lawyers.

On Monday, Weatherby ruled that most of what was in the Broderick box should be released; Wymore only got the copies of that material Wednesday morning.

Most of the other documentation—equalling thousands of pages that have to be culled by lawyers to know what was a duplication and what wasn’t—hit Masters’ defense team within the last two weeks. On Monday, Wymore asked that Weatherby take possession of the evidence, catalog it, and initiate an investigation to certify the history and chain of custody of it all.

With an expression best described as bemused incredulity, Weatherby peered over his bench at a courtroom littered with paper on practically every flat surface and denied the motion.

Compounding the complexity of where material being discussed originated—which is important both in establishing whether it was given to Masters’ original defense team, and in whose possession the material was in the first place—is in how the lawyers refer to each document. At each step, from the time when it was discovered or produced as evidence to when it was filed to when it was introduced in court, it’s been given a new reference label.

For example, one of the footprints found at the scene of the crime in 1987 was labeled by the police as footprint No. 6. When the cast of that footprint was photographed by the FBI’s crime lab, the photograph was labeled Q-104. When Masters’ original defense team entered a different photo of the same footprint as evidence, it became Defense Exhibit F. Since footprint No.6 has been introduced as evidence in the current court proceeding it needed a new identifier, which is—if this reporter was paying close enough attention—OOOO-16.

There were times last week when court proceedings stayed only a few degrees on the sane side of an Abbot and Costello routine as everyone struggled to understand what piece of evidence was being referring to.

Was it Q-104, footprint 6 or Exhibit F?

Yes, Your Honor.

While it might be confusing, there’s nothing out of the ordinary about it since the case will have been ongoing in one fashion or another for 21 years come February. But the sheer volume of information—and the grave reality that the defendant’s future as either a lifelong prisoner or a free man may well hinge on how well his lawyer can interpret it and present it in court—led Wymore to ask for a short continuance on Wednesday so that he could come up to speed on the new material. With no objection from the prosecutors, Weatherby granted the request.

The hearing took 10 minutes; carting away the evidence probably took twice that.