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This gold bracelet, which was worn by Peggy Hettrick when she was murdered in 1987 and which may still contain her killer’s DNA, was presumed missing for years. In fact, it’s been in her brother’s possession all along.
“The bracelet is of extreme evidentiary value to us, and its whereabouts are unknown.”
—Defense attorney David Wymore, Nov. 6, 2006
Until just days ago, Tom Hettrick had no idea how important his sister’s bracelet truly was.
A family heirloom, the wide solid-gold band with intricate etched designs was bought in North Africa by their mother and passed down after her death to Tom’s sister, Peggy. Peggy Hettrick was wearing it on her left wrist when she was brutally murdered and mutilated on Feb. 11, 1987.
It’s one of the few tangible mementos Tom Hettrick has of his sister. It could also be one of the few remaining clues that could identify her killer.
Tom Hettrick said he had no idea until last week that the bracelet, carefully locked away in his home with other family treasures, has been sought since 2006 by lawyers and DNA experts who believe it may hold the key to solving his sister’s 21-year-old murder.
In a hearing on Nov. 6, 2006, defense lawyers argued that potential DNA on the bracelet could prove that Tim Masters, the man convicted of Peggy Hettrick’s murder in 1999 and sentenced to life in prison, was innocent. During the hearing, Masters’ lawyers argued for the release of the victim’s clothing and personal items so that they could be tested for microscopic skin-cell evidence left behind by her killer.
The bracelet—which Masters’ lawyer David Wymore once called a “DNA magnet” that was more likely than any other piece of evidence to have scraped off skin-cell DNA from the murderer—posed a special problem, however. It had been returned to the Hettrick family along with several other personal items, even though the case was still open at the time and no suspects had been arrested. Most of the other items that had been returned were retrieved by the police before Masters’ trial, but the bracelet was missing.
Or so it was believed.
In fact, it was in Tom Hettrick’s Fort Collins home the entire time, locked in his late father’s steel briefcase along with other valuables and keepsakes. And, he said, the case’s lead investigator and the chief prosecutor at Masters’ trial knew he had it.
Tom Hettrick said he has always been willing to surrender the bracelet to investigators if it could help identify his sister’s killer. But he said no one has asked about its whereabouts since at least early 1999, even though the bracelet’s location was supposedly the subject of an investigation by Fort Collins Police and the Larimer County District Attorney’s Office in November 2006.
However, there are conflicting accounts about that investigation that raise questions as to how thoroughly it was conducted, if at all.
According to a status report on the investigation into the bracelet’s whereabouts filed Nov. 14, 2006 by Assistant DA Cliff Riedel, the victim’s uncle, John Hettrick, was contacted “in an attempt to locate the bracelet which Peggy Hettrick was wearing at the time of her murder.”
The report also stated that “according to John Hettrick, the whereabouts of the bracelet is currently unknown.”
John Hettrick, in an interview with Fort Collins Now, said it’s true that he didn’t know Tom Hettrick had the bracelet, but said he doesn’t recall anyone from Fort Collins Police or the DA’s office contacting him in November 2006 asking about it.
“I’ve never gotten any calls from anyone regarding that bracelet,” he said.
Riedel did not return phone calls seeking comment. The District Attorney’s spokeswoman, Linda Jensen, wrote in an email to FC Now that Lt. Jim Broderick, the police detective who built the case against Masters, spoke with John Hettrick to determine that the bracelet couldn’t be located.
John Hettrick has consistently refused to speak to the media about the case, but agreed to talk to FC Now after the newspaper provided him with a copy of Riedel’s Nov. 14, 2006 report, which, according to Jensen’s email, was based on information from Broderick.
“What I’m concerned about is it’s full of errors,” John Hettrick said; one error was a statement that he was executor of Peggy Hettrick’s estate, which he wasn’t. He also said that although he spoke to Broderick from time to time, he doesn’t recall a conversation about the bracelet.
“I was not contacted, to my knowledge, in the November (2006) time-frame regarding this bracelet,” he said.
The only conversation he recalls having about the bracelet in Broderick’s presence was with Wymore and Adams County prosecutors Mike Goodbee and Tom Quammen—but Goodbee and Quammen took over the case from Larimer County in April 2007, six months after the report was filed indicating John Hettrick knew nothing of the bracelet’s whereabouts.
Tom Hettrick said there should have been little mystery as to where the bracelet was located: Nearly 10 years ago, he told two key people involved in Masters’ prosecution that he had the bracelet and that he planned to keep it unless it was needed to help solve the case: Broderick and then-Assistant DA Terry Gilmore, the chief prosecutor. In fact, he said Gilmore handled the bracelet with his bare hands not long before the trial started, but handed it back to Tom Hettrick and told him to keep it.
“He said ‘I think I’ve got enough for this case,’” Tom Hettrick recalls Gilmore saying. “‘You might want to keep this.’”
Although Broderick was in the courtroom when Wymore and his witnesses discussed the importance of locating the “missing” bracelet—and despite the court-ordered investigation into its whereabouts—Tom Hettrick said he was never contacted about it and that he had no idea anyone was looking for it until a Fort Collins Now reporter asked him if he has it.
“Of course I have it,” he said, adding that he would have gladly handed it over for DNA testing had anyone asked.
“I don’t want this in my hands if it means solving something.”
***
Tom Hettrick doesn’t remember the exact date, but he said the bracelet was returned to the family within a few years after Peggy Hettrick’s murder, while it was still an open homicide and well before Tim Masters was arrested. Tom Hettrick and some friends and co-workers went to the Fort Collins Police department and were given two large clear evidence bags filled with smaller paper bags that contained individual items. That the police were willing to part with potential evidence didn’t strike him as odd until later.
“I just thought the police knew what they were doing,” Tom Hettrick said. “You know, you just trust them.”
He said he took the items to his grandmother’s house in Loveland and the two of them opened the individual bags.
“It was pretty emotional,” he said. The items included scarves, belts, a rust-colored jacket, some costume jewelry, a French beret Peggy was fond of wearing and other clothing items. There was also an unfinished book manuscript Peggy was writing and a large purse Peggy carried the night she was murdered.
“I do remember these little circles drawn around these little droplets,” Tom Hettrick said of the purse. “We thought that was unusual. We thought, ‘we hope it’s not what we think it is.’”
One small paper bag contained the gold bracelet. Years later, Wymore would theorize that two people carried Peggy into the field where her body was discovered. The killer or his accomplice may have pushed the bracelet up on Peggy’s forearm so that he could grab her wrists while the other person grabbed her legs.
“If somebody grabbed the arms or the wrists and is grabbing the bracelet at the same time, you can assume that he's leaving his skin epithelial cells on the bracelet,” Dutch DNA expert Richard Eikelenboom testified on Nov. 6, 2006.
Tom Hettrick guessed—correctly—that the material returned to the family could be important in the case.
“We decided we better save this stuff,” he said.
After he and his grandmother looked at everything, he returned all the items to the bags and then put the bags in five or six layers of large Hefty-style trashbags and stored them in his grandmother’s crawlspace for safekeeping. Later, he removed three items he wanted to keep for himself as reminders of his sister: the manuscript, the beret—he said he could still smell Peggy’s scent on the hat—and the gold bracelet.
The bracelet was wrapped in a blue and white handkerchief and locked in his father’s briefcase.
It remained there until shortly before Tim Masters’ 1999 trial, when he said Broderick—whom he’d never met before—called him to see if he still had all the items that had been returned to the family. Broderick met Tom Hettrick at the grandmother’s house and gave him his business card, which he still has in his billfold.
“It’s almost like I have a photograph in my mind,” Tom Hettrick said of the meeting. “I know exactly where he was sitting in the living room, I know exactly where my grandmother was sitting. ... I put all those bags down in front of him and he said, ‘I can’t believe you kept all this stuff, this is going to be such a big help.’”
They discussed the bracelet, Tom Hettrick said, since it wasn’t among the items at the grandmother’s house. He told Broderick how important it was to him as a family heirloom, but said he’d gladly part with it if the prosecutors needed it. He said Broderick told him that he would never see it again if that were the case; it would be state’s evidence and therefore unreturnable. He said Broderick told him to take the bracelet to Terry Gilmore’s office and that Gilmore would decide if he needed it in the case against Masters. Tom Hettrick took the bracelet to Gilmore that day.
He said the meeting in Gilmore’s office didn’t last long. He took the handkerchief out of his pocket, unwrapped the bracelet and handed it to Gilmore. Again, they discussed its sentimental value. Gilmore handed it back to him and said he didn’t need it to prosecute Masters.
Gilmore, who is now a judge in the Eighth Judicial District, declined comment through his assistant, citing an ongoing investigation into his actions—and those of Judge Jolene Blair, another former prosecutor—in the Masters case. Broderick did not return a phone call seeking comment.
Tom Hettrick said he never heard from anyone in law enforcement about the case again, with one exception: In March 1999, Broderick called to tell him Masters had been convicted of Peggy’s murder.
***
Although Masters was eventually released from prison based on DNA taken from Peggy Hettrick’s clothing—DNA that pointed not to Masters, but to another suspect—there’s no question his lawyers considered the bracelet a critical piece of evidence in proving Masters’ case.
“The bracelet is very important to us,” Wymore told the court Nov. 6, 2006, “because we believe there's DNA in the bracelet from the person who grabbed her wrists and hauled her out there, and we believe that DNA is going to be exculpatory, but the bracelet has never been returned.”
Wymore asked the court to order the bracelet’s return.
“The bracelet is of extreme evidentiary value to us, and its whereabouts are unknown,” he said. “I need a court order directing Detective Broderick or the prosecution to go and retrieve that bracelet.”
Wymore did not know at the time that Broderick discussed the bracelet with Tom Hettrick or that he told him to take it to Terry Gilmore, only that Broderick retrieved the other evidence that had been returned to the family.
Judge Joseph Weatherby gave the prosecutors 10 days to at least locate the bracelet.
Considering how clear he’d been with both Broderick and Gilmore about the bracelet’s sentimental value and his plan to keep it, Tom Hettrick said he doesn’t know why he wasn’t contacted by Broderick or anyone from the DA’s office when the court ordered the investigation of the bracelet’s whereabouts. He has lived and worked in Northern Colorado since shortly after his sister was murdered, and would not likely be hard for police detectives to locate.
“Not a soul” contacted him, he said. Had he been contacted, he would gladly have surrendered the bracelet.
“I already tried to give it to them once,” he said.
Of course, there’s no telling what evidentiary value the bracelet has after all this time, a point Riedel raised during the Nov. 6, 2006 hearing. Since it’s been released to the family, there’s no telling how many people have touched it, whose DNA it contains, or if others’ DNA masks the DNA of the killer if, in fact, the killer touched it at all.
Barie Goetz, the defense team’s crime scene expert and the former head of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation lab in Pueblo, believes it still holds great value as evidence in Peggy Hettrick’s murder.
“Because it is a rough, non-porous surface that is not regularly laundered, it would be the perfect surface to collect the kind of cells that can be analyzed for DNA, the specific cells that the killers would have left behind when they carried her into the field,” Goetz wrote in an email to Fort Collins Now. “Richard Eikelenboom testified in front of Broderick that the bracelet would be of great value for DNA. The (Attorney General’s) investigators should act immediately to secure the bracelet!”
Tom Hettrick said he would be happy to get the bracelet into the hands of investigators from the Attorney General’s office, which took over the murder investigation from the Fort Collins Police after Masters was released from prison.
Phone calls by Fort Collins Now to the AG’s office were not returned by press time.
—Defense attorney David Wymore, Nov. 6, 2006
Until just days ago, Tom Hettrick had no idea how important his sister’s bracelet truly was.
A family heirloom, the wide solid-gold band with intricate etched designs was bought in North Africa by their mother and passed down after her death to Tom’s sister, Peggy. Peggy Hettrick was wearing it on her left wrist when she was brutally murdered and mutilated on Feb. 11, 1987.
It’s one of the few tangible mementos Tom Hettrick has of his sister. It could also be one of the few remaining clues that could identify her killer.
Tom Hettrick said he had no idea until last week that the bracelet, carefully locked away in his home with other family treasures, has been sought since 2006 by lawyers and DNA experts who believe it may hold the key to solving his sister’s 21-year-old murder.
In a hearing on Nov. 6, 2006, defense lawyers argued that potential DNA on the bracelet could prove that Tim Masters, the man convicted of Peggy Hettrick’s murder in 1999 and sentenced to life in prison, was innocent. During the hearing, Masters’ lawyers argued for the release of the victim’s clothing and personal items so that they could be tested for microscopic skin-cell evidence left behind by her killer.
The bracelet—which Masters’ lawyer David Wymore once called a “DNA magnet” that was more likely than any other piece of evidence to have scraped off skin-cell DNA from the murderer—posed a special problem, however. It had been returned to the Hettrick family along with several other personal items, even though the case was still open at the time and no suspects had been arrested. Most of the other items that had been returned were retrieved by the police before Masters’ trial, but the bracelet was missing.
Or so it was believed.
In fact, it was in Tom Hettrick’s Fort Collins home the entire time, locked in his late father’s steel briefcase along with other valuables and keepsakes. And, he said, the case’s lead investigator and the chief prosecutor at Masters’ trial knew he had it.
Tom Hettrick said he has always been willing to surrender the bracelet to investigators if it could help identify his sister’s killer. But he said no one has asked about its whereabouts since at least early 1999, even though the bracelet’s location was supposedly the subject of an investigation by Fort Collins Police and the Larimer County District Attorney’s Office in November 2006.
However, there are conflicting accounts about that investigation that raise questions as to how thoroughly it was conducted, if at all.
According to a status report on the investigation into the bracelet’s whereabouts filed Nov. 14, 2006 by Assistant DA Cliff Riedel, the victim’s uncle, John Hettrick, was contacted “in an attempt to locate the bracelet which Peggy Hettrick was wearing at the time of her murder.”
The report also stated that “according to John Hettrick, the whereabouts of the bracelet is currently unknown.”
John Hettrick, in an interview with Fort Collins Now, said it’s true that he didn’t know Tom Hettrick had the bracelet, but said he doesn’t recall anyone from Fort Collins Police or the DA’s office contacting him in November 2006 asking about it.
“I’ve never gotten any calls from anyone regarding that bracelet,” he said.
Riedel did not return phone calls seeking comment. The District Attorney’s spokeswoman, Linda Jensen, wrote in an email to FC Now that Lt. Jim Broderick, the police detective who built the case against Masters, spoke with John Hettrick to determine that the bracelet couldn’t be located.
John Hettrick has consistently refused to speak to the media about the case, but agreed to talk to FC Now after the newspaper provided him with a copy of Riedel’s Nov. 14, 2006 report, which, according to Jensen’s email, was based on information from Broderick.
“What I’m concerned about is it’s full of errors,” John Hettrick said; one error was a statement that he was executor of Peggy Hettrick’s estate, which he wasn’t. He also said that although he spoke to Broderick from time to time, he doesn’t recall a conversation about the bracelet.
“I was not contacted, to my knowledge, in the November (2006) time-frame regarding this bracelet,” he said.
The only conversation he recalls having about the bracelet in Broderick’s presence was with Wymore and Adams County prosecutors Mike Goodbee and Tom Quammen—but Goodbee and Quammen took over the case from Larimer County in April 2007, six months after the report was filed indicating John Hettrick knew nothing of the bracelet’s whereabouts.
Tom Hettrick said there should have been little mystery as to where the bracelet was located: Nearly 10 years ago, he told two key people involved in Masters’ prosecution that he had the bracelet and that he planned to keep it unless it was needed to help solve the case: Broderick and then-Assistant DA Terry Gilmore, the chief prosecutor. In fact, he said Gilmore handled the bracelet with his bare hands not long before the trial started, but handed it back to Tom Hettrick and told him to keep it.
“He said ‘I think I’ve got enough for this case,’” Tom Hettrick recalls Gilmore saying. “‘You might want to keep this.’”
Although Broderick was in the courtroom when Wymore and his witnesses discussed the importance of locating the “missing” bracelet—and despite the court-ordered investigation into its whereabouts—Tom Hettrick said he was never contacted about it and that he had no idea anyone was looking for it until a Fort Collins Now reporter asked him if he has it.
“Of course I have it,” he said, adding that he would have gladly handed it over for DNA testing had anyone asked.
“I don’t want this in my hands if it means solving something.”
***
Tom Hettrick doesn’t remember the exact date, but he said the bracelet was returned to the family within a few years after Peggy Hettrick’s murder, while it was still an open homicide and well before Tim Masters was arrested. Tom Hettrick and some friends and co-workers went to the Fort Collins Police department and were given two large clear evidence bags filled with smaller paper bags that contained individual items. That the police were willing to part with potential evidence didn’t strike him as odd until later.
“I just thought the police knew what they were doing,” Tom Hettrick said. “You know, you just trust them.”
He said he took the items to his grandmother’s house in Loveland and the two of them opened the individual bags.
“It was pretty emotional,” he said. The items included scarves, belts, a rust-colored jacket, some costume jewelry, a French beret Peggy was fond of wearing and other clothing items. There was also an unfinished book manuscript Peggy was writing and a large purse Peggy carried the night she was murdered.
“I do remember these little circles drawn around these little droplets,” Tom Hettrick said of the purse. “We thought that was unusual. We thought, ‘we hope it’s not what we think it is.’”
One small paper bag contained the gold bracelet. Years later, Wymore would theorize that two people carried Peggy into the field where her body was discovered. The killer or his accomplice may have pushed the bracelet up on Peggy’s forearm so that he could grab her wrists while the other person grabbed her legs.
“If somebody grabbed the arms or the wrists and is grabbing the bracelet at the same time, you can assume that he's leaving his skin epithelial cells on the bracelet,” Dutch DNA expert Richard Eikelenboom testified on Nov. 6, 2006.
Tom Hettrick guessed—correctly—that the material returned to the family could be important in the case.
“We decided we better save this stuff,” he said.
After he and his grandmother looked at everything, he returned all the items to the bags and then put the bags in five or six layers of large Hefty-style trashbags and stored them in his grandmother’s crawlspace for safekeeping. Later, he removed three items he wanted to keep for himself as reminders of his sister: the manuscript, the beret—he said he could still smell Peggy’s scent on the hat—and the gold bracelet.
The bracelet was wrapped in a blue and white handkerchief and locked in his father’s briefcase.
It remained there until shortly before Tim Masters’ 1999 trial, when he said Broderick—whom he’d never met before—called him to see if he still had all the items that had been returned to the family. Broderick met Tom Hettrick at the grandmother’s house and gave him his business card, which he still has in his billfold.
“It’s almost like I have a photograph in my mind,” Tom Hettrick said of the meeting. “I know exactly where he was sitting in the living room, I know exactly where my grandmother was sitting. ... I put all those bags down in front of him and he said, ‘I can’t believe you kept all this stuff, this is going to be such a big help.’”
They discussed the bracelet, Tom Hettrick said, since it wasn’t among the items at the grandmother’s house. He told Broderick how important it was to him as a family heirloom, but said he’d gladly part with it if the prosecutors needed it. He said Broderick told him that he would never see it again if that were the case; it would be state’s evidence and therefore unreturnable. He said Broderick told him to take the bracelet to Terry Gilmore’s office and that Gilmore would decide if he needed it in the case against Masters. Tom Hettrick took the bracelet to Gilmore that day.
He said the meeting in Gilmore’s office didn’t last long. He took the handkerchief out of his pocket, unwrapped the bracelet and handed it to Gilmore. Again, they discussed its sentimental value. Gilmore handed it back to him and said he didn’t need it to prosecute Masters.
Gilmore, who is now a judge in the Eighth Judicial District, declined comment through his assistant, citing an ongoing investigation into his actions—and those of Judge Jolene Blair, another former prosecutor—in the Masters case. Broderick did not return a phone call seeking comment.
Tom Hettrick said he never heard from anyone in law enforcement about the case again, with one exception: In March 1999, Broderick called to tell him Masters had been convicted of Peggy’s murder.
***
Although Masters was eventually released from prison based on DNA taken from Peggy Hettrick’s clothing—DNA that pointed not to Masters, but to another suspect—there’s no question his lawyers considered the bracelet a critical piece of evidence in proving Masters’ case.
“The bracelet is very important to us,” Wymore told the court Nov. 6, 2006, “because we believe there's DNA in the bracelet from the person who grabbed her wrists and hauled her out there, and we believe that DNA is going to be exculpatory, but the bracelet has never been returned.”
Wymore asked the court to order the bracelet’s return.
“The bracelet is of extreme evidentiary value to us, and its whereabouts are unknown,” he said. “I need a court order directing Detective Broderick or the prosecution to go and retrieve that bracelet.”
Wymore did not know at the time that Broderick discussed the bracelet with Tom Hettrick or that he told him to take it to Terry Gilmore, only that Broderick retrieved the other evidence that had been returned to the family.
Judge Joseph Weatherby gave the prosecutors 10 days to at least locate the bracelet.
Considering how clear he’d been with both Broderick and Gilmore about the bracelet’s sentimental value and his plan to keep it, Tom Hettrick said he doesn’t know why he wasn’t contacted by Broderick or anyone from the DA’s office when the court ordered the investigation of the bracelet’s whereabouts. He has lived and worked in Northern Colorado since shortly after his sister was murdered, and would not likely be hard for police detectives to locate.
“Not a soul” contacted him, he said. Had he been contacted, he would gladly have surrendered the bracelet.
“I already tried to give it to them once,” he said.
Of course, there’s no telling what evidentiary value the bracelet has after all this time, a point Riedel raised during the Nov. 6, 2006 hearing. Since it’s been released to the family, there’s no telling how many people have touched it, whose DNA it contains, or if others’ DNA masks the DNA of the killer if, in fact, the killer touched it at all.
Barie Goetz, the defense team’s crime scene expert and the former head of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation lab in Pueblo, believes it still holds great value as evidence in Peggy Hettrick’s murder.
“Because it is a rough, non-porous surface that is not regularly laundered, it would be the perfect surface to collect the kind of cells that can be analyzed for DNA, the specific cells that the killers would have left behind when they carried her into the field,” Goetz wrote in an email to Fort Collins Now. “Richard Eikelenboom testified in front of Broderick that the bracelet would be of great value for DNA. The (Attorney General’s) investigators should act immediately to secure the bracelet!”
Tom Hettrick said he would be happy to get the bracelet into the hands of investigators from the Attorney General’s office, which took over the murder investigation from the Fort Collins Police after Masters was released from prison.
Phone calls by Fort Collins Now to the AG’s office were not returned by press time.
