When Peggy Hettrick’s body was found in an open field in Fort Collins, Colorado, police rushed to the nearest suspect. But clues left behind on Peggy’s body later turn the case upside down, leaving justice undone and multiple victims in the wake of a sloppy investigation. Join us in asking the Colorado Attorney General to reopen Peggy’s case, assign a new investigator and explore new DNA testing by following this link. Source materials for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit: crimejunkiepodcast.com/murdered-peggy-hettrick-part-1/Did you know you can listen to this episode ad-free? Join the Fan Club! Visit crimejunkie.app/library/ to view the current membership options and policies.The Crime Junkie Merch Store is NOW OPEN! Shop the exclusive Life Rule #10 Tour collection before it’s gone for good! Don’t miss your chance - visit the store now! Don’t miss out on all things Crime Junkie!Instagram: @crimejunkiepodcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @CrimeJunkiePod | @audiochuckTikTok: @crimejunkiepodcastFacebook: /CrimeJunkiePodcast | /audiochuckllcCrime Junkie is hosted by Ashley Flowers and Brit Prawat. Instagram: @ashleyflowers | @britprawatTwitter: @Ash_Flowers | @britprawatTikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkieFacebook: /AshleyFlowers.AF Text Ashley at 317-733-7485 to talk all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, and more!
Chapter 1: What happened to Peggy Hetrick?
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Hi, Crime Junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers.
And I'm Britt.
And we are officially back from tour. It has been a long couple of months on the road. But so much fun. So much fun to see all of you guys. And if you were one of the, you know, 75,000 of our closest friends who came out to see us, you'll know that the story we covered is super important and super timely and has like one of like
the most active call to actions that we've had in a long time, which is why if you went on tour, you're going to recognize this story. We are bringing everyone this story because we need everyone's ears. And because we're bringing everyone the story, I also wanted to give everyone who couldn't make it on tour the opportunity to get some merch from our tour. Like,
That line every time was like out the door. We started late sometimes because of it. Hours long line. You guys are amazing. But you guys can have your chance for like another week or so to go to CrimeJunkiePodcast.com and snag your tour merch as well.
And don't wait too long because once it's gone, it is gone.
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Chapter 2: Who was the first to find Peggy's body?
And if you don't know, this is also like a quick PSA to my crime junkies. I am trying to put together an episode for the near future about the Explorer program. I'm not saying like pull your kids out if you have kids in it. I'm just saying pay attention. Get involved. Ask some questions. I have found there is a lot of abuse that happens in that program. So quick PSA, future episode to come.
Hit me up if you have a story. But anyways, kids are out there looking for nipples, which they don't find. And the police are looking for a perp. And they decide that to find this person, the first thing they need to do is they need to get to know Peggy. They need to understand her last movements. So they start by going to her apartment.
And they learn that she had a temporary roommate at the time named Sharon. And temporary is important because that night when Peggy got off work at around 9 p.m. from the fashion bar and she walked home, it wasn't far away, she found herself locked out of the apartment because they were sharing keys. And she's like banging on the door.
And Sharon is either out drinking and forgot to get home in time to let her in or she got home. But because she'd been out drinking, she was like home passed out. Either way, Peggy's banging, banging, banging, can't get inside. So making the best of like a mess situation, she decides to go kind of bop around to a couple local bars. She has a drink.
She's using the pay phone trying to like call home and wake Sharon up. By around midnight, she decides to head back. Again, banging on the door. And this time Sharon is there. She lets her in. But Peggy is not staying in for the night. She's there to do a little change of clothes, get out of her work clothes, change into jeans and a blouse or like jeans and a going out top for my millennials.
And she goes back out. She goes to this place called the Prime Minister, also within walking distance. And this was a regular haunt for Peggy. So it's not surprising that she runs into somebody she knows. Her on-again, off-again, currently off boyfriend, Matt Zollner.
Now, Matt was actually there at the bar that night with another woman, someone he had just met that evening, like didn't even remember her name. It was like maybe Sean. He said, though, he saw Peggy and they chatted for a little bit. He even offered her a ride when he realized that she'd walked and she originally accepted. But he like went to the bathroom when he came out. She was leaving alone.
And so he figured maybe she has changed her mind or whatever. And so he said him and maybe Sean, they stayed till last call. Then maybe Sean went home with him. She stayed with him till like 3 or 3.30. And other people back this up. The bartender at Prime Minister saw Peggy leaving alone at 1.15 in the morning.
And maybe Sean backs up that she was with Matt till last call, then back at his place till 3, 3.30. So this is the last time Peggy is seen. 1.15 in the morning, leaving the Prime Minister alone. And this does kind of work with their theory, because if you were to look at a map, which we'll have on the website, if you're watching this on YouTube, I'm sure it's popped up.
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Chapter 3: What were the details of Peggy's murder?
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Now, this is where you will want to be watching on YouTube. If you're not watching this episode on YouTube, we're going to post the pictures on the website and in the app for those listening there. The drawings become central to this case.
And, like, I've seen these drawings so many times, Ashley. And... They're violent. They're violent.
Like, there's one with, like, it looks like a... They're all hand-drawn. One's, like, holding a head with, like, a gun behind it.
Some of them have, like, machete, like, knives. Yes. And, like, stabs. There's also things that are, like, military patches. Yeah. And there's homework in the middle of one of the drawings.
Yes. Like... I don't know. When we went on tour, we would show the drawings. And, like, I don't want to downplay it. People would do this, like, collective gasp. More than we even thought they would. Yeah. They were, like, shocked by them. What I kept saying on tour is, like, I remember, like, middle school does not feel that far away. I don't want to do the math because it is that far away.
But... I remember like the boys in my class doing these like weird drawings.
And I told you like my son's in high school now. He was in middle school and he also drew weird things. Like I showed you some of his drawings. It was like a cat god and a scepter. But it's also like on algebra homework. It all felt very benign to me.
Right. But it did not feel benign to these investigators. So as they're finding this stuff, they're sharing it with the cops interrogating Tim. And they take turns interrogating him alone over the course of nine hours.
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Chapter 4: What evidence was found at the crime scene?
The takeaway is clear that this kid is dangerous and it is his job, nay his duty, to get him off the streets of Fort Collins. So the police don't let up. They are pulling him out of class. They're telling his teachers that he is a dangerous individual suspected of murder, which obviously doesn't stay with just the teachers.
Tim said that at one point, I mean, he would be walking down the hall and kids would go to the other side because they didn't want to walk next to the kids suspected of murder. And he wasn't just getting it at school. It was coming at him from all angles.
I mean, every day for the first month of the investigation, the newspaper would show up at their house and the front page was about Peggy's case, how they had one singular suspect that they were honing in on. But Tim wouldn't break in all that time. And he had answers for a lot of things. So yes, his shoe prints were in the field, but he walks through that field.
And his prints were not the critical ones, those Tom McCann dress shoes. His, the closest it came was like five to seven feet away from Peggy, which is like where he said he was walking and saw her. And he said, yeah, I knew her nipple had been removed, but not because I saw it or did it. A girl in my art class told me about it. Well, And the police had kids out looking for the nipple. Kids talk.
Yes. The blood that they found on his pants turned out to be his own blood. The knives that they collected from his room, his whole knife collection, none of them could be connected to be the murder weapon. And there were unidentified prints found on Peggy's purse and unidentified hairs found on her, none of which belonged to Timb.
So they had no choice but at some point to cast a wider net and they would look at some other people but quickly rule them out. So it's not surprising that this case cooled off pretty quickly, which was so frustrating for Peggy's family. And, you know, it's so, like, what I found so, like, revealing, and I see this in a lot of cases, but it was just so clear in this one to me.
When someone dies, there's, like, this 2D version of them that gets left behind, especially when it's, you know, back in the 80s or whatever. It's like you get a couple of lines in a newspaper about who Peggy was, and that's all I had to go off of when I first started looking into this case. And I want to give our listeners a sense of it. So if you would read what was published about her. Mm-hmm.
Police identified her as Peggy Hetrick, 37, college dropout, bar hopper and aspiring writer who worked at the Fashion Bar, a nearby clothing store. Her friends privately worried something horrible would happen to her, given her late night impulses, her jealousies, her appetite for adventure.
Sometimes she would head out into the night just to collect details for the book she was writing or to spy on her boyfriend.
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Chapter 5: Who was Tim Masters and what was his involvement?
And it's not always this obvious as it is in Tim's case. Right. But it is happening and we have to fix it. And I don't mean you and me sitting here on this couch, like in our studio. I mean, we as in the crime junkie community, you guys listening, you are the jurors. You are the voters. You are the ones in your community making change, making decisions, making things happen.
And I know that it can feel painful. So overwhelming. Like anytime there is a big problem and you realize a system is broken, it's like, how am I as one person going to fix this? But it takes one person and you don't have to fix it like overnight. Like that's not how stuff happens, right? Like you have to find the one thing that you care about and just take the one next step.
And in this one, I mean, to figure out who killed Peggy Hetrick, the thing is Tim's wrongful conviction. And in a weird twist that we don't see very often is. Even Peggy's family wasn't super sold on the idea that Tim did it.
I mean, they sat through the trial and at the end, they like didn't understand a conviction just based on drawings, but they had this mentality of something that we've said on the show before. Like, well, there must be something the police know that we don't know.
They couldn't have taken him to trial, convicted him on just this. They wouldn't have arrested him just on that.
But they could, they would, and they did. And so Tim gets carted off to Buena Vista Correctional Complex, where every day he wakes up in a cage for a crime he didn't commit. He takes classes. He works out. He gets a job in prison. All the while, his defense team is filing appeal after appeal. Appeals that are getting denied by the Court of Appeals.
Appeals that get denied by the Supreme Court of Colorado.
Which we talk about appeals a lot in our episodes, but I think it's easy to forget how expensive it is. It costs money to fight for your life like this.
Exactly. Which is why at some point, Tim no longer even has lawyers and he's doing more appeals on his own, which if he wasn't optimistic before, I mean, the system like took any optimism out of him. But lawyers couldn't get these things through the court system. Like he's learning how to file an appeal for the first time at the same time he's trying to learn how to use Microsoft Word.
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Chapter 6: How did the police investigate Tim Masters?
And he said that as he's watching, he kept waiting for that moment for them to like show the thing that makes him guilty, makes him guilty. Like, what's the piece of evidence? And he's like, I'm waiting. I'm waiting. And then the show ends. And after it ends, he's like, oh, my God, like someone should do something. I should do something. And so he takes just that one next step.
He didn't know what to do. But his one next step is he wrote to Tim in prison. And he's like, listen, I see it. Like, how can I help? And Tim's like, man, I don't know. But if there is someone that can help, you have to get Linda Wheeler. Go talk to Linda Wheeler. So Taylor takes the next step and he writes to Linda.
He said, you know, you don't know me, but do you remember Tim Masters? I said, sure. He goes, well, do you think he's possibly innocent? And I said, yeah, I really do. But what can I do? I'm done. I'm not even a cop anymore. And he said, well, he said, I talked with him. I just communicated with him by phone. and he said, I bought all the transcripts of the trial, $900 worth.
But he said, they don't mean anything to me because I don't read legalese. He said, can I send them to you? And for the first time, I sat there and read what happened at the trial, and I was infuriated because I knew this case, and I knew the jury had not heard the truth. And at that point, I went... Okay, so I contacted Maria Liu, who was Tim's attorney, and I said, you want my help?
They said, yeah. I said, okay. But I know what I had to do is I had to put back on a badge because I knew I wouldn't have any credibility as a civilian.
Now, as you can imagine... Fort Collins PD is not like welcoming Linda back with open arms.
She's telling them they're wrong.
Yeah, she's trying to like upend a case that they're like overdone with. It's solved.
Yeah.
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