FORT COLLINS — The fight to win a new trial for a man convicted in one of the city's most notorious murders took a new turn today when a special prosecutor challenged repeated assertions that a now-deceased doctor should have been considered a prime suspect in the case.

The dispute surrounding Dr. Richard Hammond, who committed suicide in 1995, is at the heart of an effort by attorneys trying to win a new trial for Tim Masters, who is serving a life sentence for the 1987 murder of 36-year-old Peggy Hettrick.

Masters' attorneys have argued that Hammond should have been investigated as a possible suspect in Hettrick's grisly killing and have accused prosecutors of deliberately hiding information about the doctor.

But this morning, special prosecutor Don Quick answered that charge, arguing that Hammond may not have met the legal criteria to be considered a suspect.

In a motion filed in Larimer District Court, Quick asked a judge to rule whether Hammond "would have qualified as a matter of law as an 'alternative suspect.'"

"The defense cannot prove that Richard Hammond 'committed some act directly connecting' him with the crime charged," the motion said in part. "In fact, the weight of the evidence concludes otherwise."

Quick, the Adams County district attorney, was appointed a special prosecutor in the case after Masters' attorneys argued that the Larimer County District Attorney's office, which originally handled the case, had a conflict of interest.

Hammond came to the attention of authorities in 1995 after an elaborate videotaping system was discovered in his home, where investigators found hundreds of videotapes of women using his bathroom, some showing extreme close-ups of their genitals.

Today's filing came a little more than 24 hours before what is expected to be a marathon court hearing covering a series of issues raised by attorneys for Masters.

"I'm not in a position to comment," Maria Liu, one of the attorneys working for Masters, said this morning. She said she had not yet read the motion.

Hettrick, a manager at a Fort Collins Fashion Bar, was stabbed to death early the morning of Feb. 11, 1987. Investigators later theorized that she was surprised from behind by a killer who jabbed a knife into her lower back, then dragged her out into a field. After killing her, Hettrick's attacker sexually mutilated her with a very sharp knife, possibly a scalpel.

The wounds were later described as almost "surgical" in nature.

Early the next morning, a bicyclist saw a pool of blood along the curb and Hettrick's body out in the field, at the end of a long "drag" trail that looked like a backward question mark. She lay on her back, with her hands over her head, her black sweater pushed up over her breasts, and her blue jeans pulled down around her knees.

The investigation quickly focused on a mobile home overlooking the field, where a former Navy man, Clyde Masters, lived with his then 15-year-old son, Tim. And though Clyde Masters said he hadn't seen or heard anything unusual during the night, he told the officers that Tim had taken an unusual route through the field on his way to school and had even paused to look at something in the field.

Less than 3 1/2 hours after Hettrick's body was discovered, a detective was at Fort Collins High School, questioning Masters. Masters acknowledged that he'd seen the body, but told officers he thought it was a mannequin left in the field as a prank.

Over the next two days, detectives questioned Masters for hours and searched his home, backpack and school locker. They found nothing that physically tied the teenager to the crime, none of his hair on Hettrick's body, none of her blood in his home.

And though Masters was the prime suspect in Hettrick's killing, it would be more than a decade before investigators assembled a circumstantial case and filed charges.

When they took the case to a jury in 1999, prosecutors did not have a single piece of physical evidence tying him to the killing — no murder weapon, no blood, no hair, no fingerprints, no DNA. What they had was circumstantial evidence — he owned knives like the one that killed her, he talked about the difficulty of stabbing someone and he produced hundreds of pages of writings, drawings and doodles, many of them containing disturbing images.

Prosecutors relied heavily on a forensic psychologist who testified extensively about his interpretation of Masters' drawings — and his conclusion that some of them represented Masters' reliving the crime.

After the trial, one of the officers who helped build the case against him came to believe that she might have sent an innocent man to prison and began work to get Masters a new trial. That effort has led to a flurry of court filings by attorneys working for Masters.

As far back as 2005, one of Masters' attorneys, Maria Liu, asserted that Hammond should have been investigated as a possible suspect in Hettrick's killing.

Hammond, a Fort Collins ophthalmologist, was arrested in 1995 after a woman staying at his home discovered an elaborate, secret videotaping system in his bathroom. When police officers searched the home, they found hundreds of videotapes of women using the bathroom in Hammond's home. Hammond killed himself shortly after he was arrested in the case.

Hammond also lived just a few hundred yards from the field where Hettrick's body was found.

In an affidavit files in 2005, Lui argued that former Fort Collins police Detective Linda Wheeler-Holloway and another officer "believed Dr. Hammond may have been the perpetrator who killed Hettrick based on the surgical precision of Hettrick's wounds, Dr. Hammond's known fascination with vaginas, his close residential proximity to Hettrick's dumpsite, and his sexually deviant behavior."

More recently, another of Masters' attorneys, David Wymore, argued that Hammond was a better suspect than Masters himself.

"Unlike Tim Masters, surgeon Hammond had both the rare, highly specialized technical knowledge and ability to perform the surgical dissections which occurred, and a demonstrated extraordinary obsession with vaginas and sexual matters in general," Wymore wrote in one motion.

In addition, Wymore has asserted in court filing that the two prosecutors to took the Masters case to a jury, Terry Gilmore and Jolene Blair, failed to "disclose to the defense before trial exculpatory information concerning Dr. Richard Hammond, an opthamalic surgeon whose house was across the street from the site where the victim's body was found, so that it appears in several police photos taken at the time."

Gilmore and Blair, both now district court judges, have repeatedly declined to comment.

In today's filing, Quick noted that Fort Collins police officers interviewed Hammond and his wife the morning after Hettrick's body was found, and that both said they had been home together all night.

In addition, Quick wrote that Hammond "was an eye surgeon specializing in lasers, not scalpel surgery," that the doctor was an "average sort of guy" at the time of Hettrick's killing, and that the doctor's personality and conduct did not begin to change until 1991.

According to an interview with Hammond's widow, he did not purchase video equipment until 1992, around the same time that he began to act secretly, the motion said.

Finally, Quick argued there was not DNA, fingerprint, hair, fiber "or other trace evidence connecting Hammond in any way in Peggy's death."

In addition, Quick's office interviewed Dr. Patrick Allen, the forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy on Hettrick's body.

According to the motion, Allen described the cuts made to Hettrick's body as "like a mutilation" and not a medical procedure and that "anybody with a sharp knife and desire to do this could."

A key argument by Masters' attorneys has been that the wounds to Hettrick's breast and vagina were surgical in nature, and that a 15-year-old boy with no medical training could not have carried them out.

The question of whether Hammond could be considered an alternative suspect is an important one. Masters' attorneys have repeatedly accused prosecutors of failing to disclose information about Hammond to the young man's attorneys.

In the motion filed today, Quick argued that "because Hammond cannot be proven by the defense to qualify as an alternate suspect, as a matter of law, that the failure to disclose information relating to his matters does not warrant" granting a new trial.

Thursday's hearing is expected to include testimony and possibly rulings on a number of assertions made by Wymore and Liu:

• That prosecutors and police deliberately tried to destroy evidence in 2006 so that it would be useless for highly specialized DNA testing.

• That investigators ignored evidence Hammond could be a potential suspect in Hettrick's death and "burned" all the evidence in that case.

• That prosecutors at Masters' trial committed professional misconduct by failing to disclose information about the doctor to the defense.

• That prosecutors and police lost evidence, including two hairs found at the crime scene and a bracelet Hettrick was wearing when she was killed.

Already in the case, attorneys for Masters have succeeded in having a new judge appointed and in having the Larimer County district attorney's office removed from the proceedings.

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