FORT COLLINS — A judge said today he would look for a "nexus" between a deceased doctor and the 1987 murder of Peggy Hettrick as he considers whether the man should have been considered a potential suspect in the killing.

Attorneys are trying to win a new trial for Tim Masters, who is serving a life sentence for Hettrick's murder. They have said authorities should have looked at Dr. Richard Hammond, who committed suicide in 1995 after he was arrested in a sexual exploitation case.

Masters' attorneys have accused police and prosecutors of colluding to hide information about Hammond, while focusing their investigation solely and mistakenly on Masters.

Judge Joseph Weatherby made it clear in a hearing today that he will look at potential links between Hammond and Hettrick as he considers various motions aimed at winning a new trial for Masters.

"He has to have some relationship to the case," Weatherby said. "It can't be just argument. He has to have some nexus to this case."

David Wymore, one of Masters' attorneys, spent much of the morning session trying to establish one.

Hettrick was apparently walking alone when she was stabbed in the back early on the morning of Feb. 11, 1987. After she died, her killer sexually mutilated her, cutting tissue from her left breast and vagina.

Within hours, the investigation focused on Masters, a skinny 15-year-old who lived with his father in a mobile home overlooking the field where Hettrick's body was found.

In March 1995, Fort Collins police discovered an elaborate hidden videotaping system in a bathroom in the basement of Hammond's house. The system had been discovered by a housesitter who was suspicious of a strange noise she heard in the wall.

In questioning Fort Collins police officer Tony Sanchez this morning, Wymore established that Hammond also had a "secret office" where he kept hundreds of videotapes. Inside, police found a package of Exacto knives. They also found knives in Hammond's kitchen, Sanchez testified.

Wymore also elicited testimony showing that Hammond had cut a vent into the wall in a bathroom where he secreted a video camera focused on the toilet.

That camera captured images of women's genitals, which Hammond kept on the tapes.

Hammond killed himself less than a week after he was arrested. Police later obtained a court order allowing them to destroy all the evidence in his case.

Today's hearing is part of an attempt to get a new trial for Masters, who maintains his innocence.

Despite finding no physical evidence linking him to the killing and no murder weapon, prosecutors filed charges against Masters in 1998. The charges came after a forensic psychologist examined scores of violent drawings done by Masters and concluded that some of them represented his fantasies about the murder.

In a series of motions, Wymore and attorney Maria Liu have argued that Hammond should have been investigated as a possible alternate suspect — and that information about him should have been turned over to defense attorneys.

"Unlike Tim Masters," the attorneys wrote in one motion, "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."

In addition, Wymore has asserted in court filings that the prosecutors who 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 opthalmic 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.

On Wednesday, Adams County District Attorney Don Quick, the special prosecutor in the case, argued in a new motion that Hammond did not meet the legal criteria to be considered a suspect. He asked Weatherby 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 fact, the weight of the evidence concludes otherwise."

Liu declined to comment on the filing.

Quick's motion also asserted 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, Becky, he did not purchase video equipment until 1992, around the same time that he began to act secretively, the motion said.

Finally Quick argued there was no DNA, fingerprint, hair, fiber "or other trace evidence connecting Hammond in any way in Peggy's death."

Quick's motion, however, also included transcripts of interviews with Becky Hammond and Gilmore and Blair that show at least tangential connections between the prosecutors and the doctor. Becky Hammond, for example, said she attended church with Gilmore's wife and knew him "very casually."

Gilmore acknowledged that he was among a group of people who ate dinner at Hammond's home before they all went to a concert together.

And Blair and her sons were patients of doctors who were partners of Hammond's, although she said she had never met him and never knew him.

The hearing will continue this afternoon.

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