Nearly four decades after a 37-year-old woman was found stabbed to death and mutilated in a Colorado field, the case remains unsolved—and a web of police misconduct, suppressed evidence, and a wrongful conviction has turned it into one of the state’s most disturbing mysteries.
Peggy Hettrick was last seen alive walking home from a Fort Collins bar in the early hours of February 11, 1987. Her body was discovered the next morning in a field near her home, not far from the bar. The single stab wound to her back was fatal, but what investigators found next sent chills through the community.
The killer had not only taken her life—they had stayed with her body in the freezing cold, removed one of her nipples with surgical precision, and posed her carefully. The cut was clean, controlled, requiring anatomical knowledge that few possess. Detectives immediately suspected a surgeon or someone with medical training.
For more than a decade, however, law enforcement focused on a 15-year-old boy named Tim Masters, who lived in a trailer bordering the field and had walked past the body that morning, thinking it was a mannequin. He never reported it. That mistake cost him nearly a decade of his life.
Lead detective Jim Broderick became fixated on Masters, seizing over 2,000 pages of the teenager’s dark drawings and writings. He used these as the foundation for a psychological profile that ultimately led to Masters’ conviction in 1999. Masters was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
But the investigation had taken a dark turn long before the trial. In 1995, Dr. Richard Hammond, an eye surgeon living just 100 yards from the murder field, was arrested for installing hidden cameras in his bathroom and amassing hundreds of tapes and explicit images of women.
He committed suicide two days later.
Hammond had the exact skills the coroner described—steady hands, anatomical knowledge, and a documented obsession with the female body. Yet Broderick ordered all of Hammond’s evidence destroyed, never sharing it with Masters’ defense or the FBI profiler who had built the case against the teenager.
The destruction of that evidence was only part of the 𝒔𝒄𝒂𝓃𝒹𝒶𝓁. Hairs found on Hettrick’s body that did not match Masters, photographs of unidentified fingerprints from her purse, and other exculpatory material all mysteriously vanished from the case file.
In 2008, after Masters had served nine years, new DNA testing on Hettrick’s clothing revealed a full match to Matt Zoellner, her on-again, off-again boyfriend who had been with her at the bar the night she died. His DNA was on evidence from the scene, though he had been cleared years earlier.
A Colorado judge vacated Masters’ conviction, and he was released that same day. The city of Fort Collins and Larimer County eventually paid him $10 million in settlements. Broderick was indicted for perjury but charges were dropped due to the statute of limitations.
He resigned in 2013.
The two prosecutors who hid evidence from the defense, Terry Gilmore and Jolene Blair, were later disciplined by the Colorado Supreme Court and voted off the bench. Yet no one has ever been charged with Peggy Hettrick’s murder.
Matt Zoellner was re-examined after Masters’ release, but without additional evidence, no charges could be filed. Dr. Hammond’s DNA did not match what was found on Hettrick’s clothing, but his wife provided a sample after his death.
That does not clear him, because the evidence that might have linked him was destroyed.
The case remains open, but the trail has grown cold. What haunts investigators and the public is the possibility that the real killer, whether Hammond or someone else, watched from a nearby window as police focused on a dead woman and then on a boy who simply lived too close.
Fort Collins has never fully recovered from the betrayal of trust. A community that once believed justice was served now knows that the system’s failures allowed a murderer to walk free for nearly 40 years.
The question that lingers: Did anyone ever really want the truth to come out? The evidence that could have answered that question was burned and dumped in a landfill on a detective’s orders.
Peggy Hettrick’s killer still walks among us, and the only person ever convicted was a teenager whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time—and whose drawings were twisted into a false confession.
This case stands as a grim reminder that the justice system can be as dangerous as any criminal. When police become convinced of a suspect’s guilt, they may stop looking for the truth. And some secrets, it seems, are buried so deep they may never be unearthed.
The murder of Peggy Hettrick remains one of Colorado’s most disturbing unsolved cases—not just because of the brutality of the crime, but because of the profound failures that followed.
Nearly four decades later, her family still waits for closure. The town of Fort Collins still waits for answers. And the person who ended Peggy’s life with a single, precise stab wound remains free.
