Adams County Takes Up Tim Masters Case

The Adams County district attorney pledged Tuesday to re-examine evidence in the Peggy Hettrick murder case as well as a possible suspect who was never investigated by Fort Collins police, saying, "We will go where the truth leads us."

Don Quick's move marks the first time a prosecutorial team has acknowledged that another explanation may exist for Hettrick's slaying, aside from the theory that Tim Masters, then 15, ambushed her in 1987.

As The Denver Post reported on Sunday, Masters was convicted in 1999 in a case based largely on his violent drawings, without physical evidence tying him to the crime. He lived 100 feet from where her body was found.

In another new development in the case, two recent analyses of the crime scene

commissioned by Masters' legal team cast further doubt on evidence used against him at trial.

A Pueblo lab says knives that Masters owned are not consistent with the victim's wounds or the cuts to her clothing. A former FBI forensic analyst says that a dozen Thom McAn shoe prints fitting a grown man's foot size appeared in the south Fort Collins field next to the blood trail leading to her body. The prints were not introduced at trial.