By now the details are familiar—36-year-old fashion store department manager Peggy Hettrick was killed with one stab wound to the back. Her genitals and a breast were mutilated. Her partially-disrobed body was found in a field in south Fort Collins.

With Monday, Feb. 11, marking the ignominious 21st anniversary of the murder, police are no closer to solving this crime than they were the day it happened.

In fact, because of recent revelations about the original investigation, finding Hettrick’s killer may be trickier than ever.

“We’re back to square one with an active homicide investigation,” said Linda Wheeler-Holloway, a former Fort Collins Police detective who has gone full circle with the Hettrick case and may continue to investigate it.

If the details of Hettrick’s murder are commonly known, so too are those of Timothy Masters, who served nine and a half years of a life sentence after he was convicted of Hettrick’s murder in 1999.

Fifteen years old at the time Hettrick was killed, Masters was the target of the investigation from day one, when it was discovered that he was the first person to see the body in a field behind his house, but failed to report it.

Twelve years later, police and prosecutors wove a fragile circumstantial case around Masters based on a lone psychologist’s interpretation of Masters’ boyhood doodles as evidence of his guilt. Between the time of the murder and its 21st anniversary, not a shred of physical evidence was found to connect Masters to the crime. He has never wavered in maintaining his innocence.

It was long after Masters was convicted and sentenced to life that the original prosecutors’ case collapsed. Masters’ new lawyers uncovered voluminous material that the District Attorney’s office never provided to the trial defense that could have been used to argue his innocence. The capstone was DNA found on Hettrick’s clothing that pointed to another person who was once a suspect.

Masters was freed from prison last month and the charges against him dismissed.

Wheeler-Holloway was involved in the case from the beginning. She investigated the original crime and reopened the case in 1992 after it had gone cold. She and then-Det. Jim Broderick interrogated Masters in Philadelphia, where they planned to—but didn’t—arrest him and charge him with murder.

But after the interrogation, Wheeler-Holloway doubted Masters’ guilt. She joined the defense team seeking to win him a new trial and was instrumental in tracking down documents that were never turned over to Masters’ original attorneys, but which should have been.

And now that Masters is free and the case open once again, Wheeler-Holloway hopes to play a role in bringing her killer to justice.

Since the Fort Collins Police turned the case over to the attorney general due to a conflict of interest, she’ll be the only one with a local law enforcement connection still investigating the murder. Broderick, who built the case against Masters and is now a Fort Collins lieutenant, is under investigation for allegations of perjury and eavesdropping. In a message to Fort Collins Now, he declined to comment, citing the newly opened investigation.

Wheeler-Holloway admits building a new case against someone else might not be easy—the voluminous material she and Masters’ lawyers uncovered revealing the existence of alternate suspects who weren’t properly investigated in the first place, or revealed to Masters’ defense team, can also be used to create reasonable doubt for any other suspects who may be arrested in the future.

For example, it’s been shown that Fort Collins Police did not adequately investigate Dr. Richard Hammond, a person some detectives believed was a strong suspect in Hettrick’s murder. Hammond was a prominent eye surgeon who was chronically obsessed with female genitalia. In his home, located within 200 yards of the field where Hettrick’s body was found, he secretly filmed girls and women who used the downstairs bathroom. In addition to some 300 homemade videotapes, Hammond spent more than $13,000 on commercial pornography and sex toys. Masters’ lawyers have said Hammond’s surgical skill and obvious addiction to images of vaginas made him a clear suspect.

But prosecutors apparently thought differently. Hammond committed suicide shortly after his arrest on charges of sexual exploitation. Despite the fact that no one in the police department had reviewed all the videotapes for a link to Hettrick’s homicide, the Larimer County DA’s Office ordered all the Hammond evidence to be burned. It was a controversial move in more than one respect: At the time it ordered the evidence destruction, the DA’s Office had conflicted off the case because then-Assistant DA Terry Gilmore was at least an acquaintance of Hammond’s and had been to his house for cocktails and a light dinner prior to Hammond’s arrest.

Gilmore prosecuted Masters, but did not disclose to his lawyers any information about Hammond as an alternate suspect in the murder.

Today, Gilmore is a judge and is under investigation by the state Supreme Court’s Office of Attorney Regulation.

Any future suspect in the crime can invoke Hammond as a likely alternate suspect; future prosecutors will find it difficult to dispute since the evidence in Hammond’s case has been destroyed.

“Will it make it harder? You bet,” Wheeler-Holloway said. “This case is not normal, it’s one of a kind.”

Everything that was revealed during Masters’ post-conviction hearings, from information about Hammond to the new DNA results, will have to be considered when building a case against any future suspects, she said.

“You’ve got to think about the (future) trial,” she said. “You’ve got to troubleshoot, particularly knowing that we’ve already built in some alternate suspects like Dr. Hammond.”

Investigators from the attorney general’s office declined to comment about the case. Wheeler-Holloway has offered to continue to work on the case, but hasn’t officially been assigned to it.

“Of course I want to,” she said. “I’ve got a background on the case to help narrow leads that would need to be handled first.”

Regardless of any future involvement in the case, she said she has confidence the AG’s office will conduct a thorough investigation, particularly given the level of public scrutiny the case has gotten in recent months.

“We have to hold accountable the real murderer,” she said. “They will do it carefully and methodically because that’s what needs to be done.

“Is this case solvable?” she asked. “I have high hopes that it is.”