Mending Tim's Broken Life

The Denver Post

There's no telling how long it will take before Tim starts to really feel free. There is no way to remove the ten years of imprisonment from his memories and at the very least he should be paid in some way for the years he has lost.

He's barely unwrapped his taco before the $100 bill tumbles onto the restaurant table, dropped from the hand of a total stranger.

"I want you to have this," the smiling, middle-age woman says without stopping on her way out of a Fort Collins Taco Bell.

Tim Masters offers a quick "thank you" in the same half-astonished way he's responded to hundreds of such gestures in the year since a judge threw out his murder conviction and set him free.

People recognize Masters — tall, tight- shouldered, now balding — from newspapers and TV, the man who traded shackles and a tight orange jumpsuit for a proper shirt and bright yellow tie and strode quickly down the back courthouse steps.

Fresh out of a decade in prison, the world

New Life

• Watch Tim Masters describe rebuilding his life.
• Read the full Post archive on Tim Masters' conviction and exoneration.

is his cheerleader. The applause, the tooting car horns, the clicking cameras, the gifts — they follow him everywhere.

One day, an '88 BMW, the four-wheel drive he's always wanted, shows up at his Greeley attorneys' office. Another day, he's undergoing a free, $4,000 operation to fix his nearsighted vision.

Then he's on a plane, tickets paid, to Europe for an appearance on an Amsterdam TV talk show.

The first man in Colorado history freed from a life sentence by DNA evidence is famous. But it's a fame he would gladly trade to get back the lost years of his life.

The case that put him in prison was always circumstantial: Peggy Hettrick's naked, mutilated body was found in 1987 in a field near Masters' childhood home in Fort Collins.

Police quickly zeroed in on the stoic- faced, shaggy-haired 15-year-old as the killer — and for the next 11 years, did not let go. Masters had passed within several feet of the body on his way to school. His notebooks were filled with violent writings and drawings. Surely, authorities speculated, they were the musings of a killer.

He tried to live a normal life, through high school, a stint in the Navy, a house in California near his sister, a job as an aircraft

mechanic for Learjet.

Then early one morning in August 1998, the knock came. It was Lt. Jim Broderick. A psychologist had declared that the drawings and writings were the fantasies of a killer. Finally, the evidence Broderick needed.

Even without any physical evidence, it took just 10 hours for jurors to convict Masters of murder.

Cars, money and good wishes can't make up for that or do what Masters wants most — to bring the real killer to justice.

"How do you give me back my reputation?" says Masters, now 37. "How do you give me back 10 years of my life?"