FORT COLLINS - A judge is set to take another step today toward sorting out one of the city's most notorious murders - a 1987 stabbing that went unsolved for a decade and has spawned a long-running effort to win a new trial for the man ultimately convicted in the killing.

On Wednesday, a special prosecutor opened a new front in the complex, confusing and contentious case, challenging repeated assertions that a now-deceased doctor should have been considered a prime suspect in grisly killing of Peggy Hettrick.

The filing came in the wake of a series of motions over the past two years by lawyers for Tim Masters accusing police and prosecutors of losing and destroying evidence and hiding information about an alternative suspect.

Masters, who was a skinny 15-year-old the day Hettrick was murdered, has spent more than nine years behind bars for a crime he insists he did not commit.

Morgan County District Judge Joseph Weatherby will hear testimony today to help him decide whether Masters deserves a new trial - and whether police investigators and prosecutors acted improperly.

Stabbed, mutilated

The discovery of Hettrick's body the morning of Feb. 11, 1987, was shocking in Fort Collins, a college town that in those days rarely saw big-city crime.

It wasn't just that the 36-year-old Fashion Bar manager apparently was stabbed in the back as she walked alone, but that her killer sexually mutilated her, cutting tissue from her left breast and vagina with almost surgical precision.

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

Masters admitted that he walked up and looked at the body on his way to school - he said he didn't call police because he thought it was a mannequin - but he insisted repeatedly that he did not kill Hettrick.

And despite extensive searches of his home, investigators never found any physical evidence linking him to the killing - no blood, no hair, no DNA. They also never found the murder weapon.

Prosecutors finally filed formal charges against Masters in 1998 after a forensic psychologist examined scores of violent drawings done by Masters and concluded that some of them represented his fantasies about the murder.

But in the past few years, attorneys for Masters, working with one of the police officers who helped put him in prison, have accused prosecutors of hiding evidence that could have exonerated him.

Case for alternate suspect

The dispute surrounds Dr. Richard Hammond, who committed suicide in 1995 shortly after he was arrested following the discovery of an elaborate videotaping system in a bathroom at his home.

Detectives found hundreds of videotapes in his home, many of them containing close-ups of women's genitals.

In a series of motions aimed at winning a new trial for Masters, attorneys Maria Liu and David Wymore 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 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.

No fit, prosecutors say

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 Judge 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.

What's next

Judge Joseph Weatherby is expected to hear testimony today on a series of assertions by attorneys for Tim Masters:

• That Dr. Richard Hammond, arrested in 1995 in a sexual exploitation case, should have been investigated as a suspect in Peggy Hettrick's murder and that investigators "burned" all the evidence in that case.

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

• That prosecutors and police deliberately tried to destroy evidence in 2006 by swabbing Hettrick's clothes in an effort to collect new DNA samples.

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

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